The Pot Thief Who Studied Edward Abbey

by Orenduff, J. Michael;

  “How did you manage to get kicked out of new-faculty orientation?” Susannah asked.

  “It was a session on language and inclusion. The first presentation was fascinating, a Navajo guy who’d been a code-talker in the Second World War. He was over ninety but looked a lot younger, and he told us some great stories. Then the trouble started. The second speaker was a woman who signed her ten-minute presentation.”

  “She handed out signed copies of it?”

  “No. She signed it rather than speaking it.” I mimicked sign language by holding my hands out and moving my fingers into different configurations.

  Susannah laughed. “You look like that guy at Nelson Mandela’s memorial service who was pretending to be the sign-language interpreter but was really just faking it.”

  “At least the hearing portion of the audience at the Mandela service could listen to the speeches. In my case we just sat there staring at the signer.”

  “She didn’t speak as she signed?”

  “She did not.”

  “She didn’t have someone else speaking as she signed?”

  I shook my head.

  “She had the presentation displayed on PowerPoint slides?”

  “Nope.”

  Susannah plopped her margarita down on the mosaic tile-topped table where it landed, appropriately, on an image of an agave. “So she just stood there and signed for ten minutes to an audience that probably didn’t have one person who could understand the signs?”

  “Exactly.”

  She retrieved her margarita and took a sip while thinking it over. “Maybe she can’t speak.”

  “You might be right. After she finished signing, she just stood there. It was like when Sharice takes me to the symphony. The orchestra stops playing, and there’s an awkward pause before the applause begins because most of us don’t know if the piece is over or if it’s just a pause between movements. I didn’t know if she had finished signing or was just pausing to catch her breath.”

  “You don’t have to catch your breath when you’re signing, Hubie.”

  “That was a joke, Suze. I guess the equivalent phrase in signing might be ‘give her fingers a break’? Anyway, the pause lasted long enough that someone started clapping, and of course the rest of us joined in. When the applause stopped, she held up a placard that read ‘Now you know what it’s like when a deaf person attends a spoken event.’”

  She frowned. “Like hearing people don’t know that deaf people can’t hear? After all, that’s what deaf means.”

  “Not according to the speaker … er, signer. She distributed a leaflet explaining that deaf is a culture and signing is their native language.”

  “That’s ridiculous. Signing is not a language any more than Twitter is a language. It’s just a means of conveying a language.”

  “That’s what I said. Except my example was typing. And that sent the deaf lady into a tirade.”

  “A tirade?”

  “It seemed like a tirade. She was moving her fingers really fast and had a hell-bent-for-leather look on her face. When I tried to question her use of the word culture, the moderator said I was being hostile and asked me to leave.”

  “Was the deaf woman short with bobbed hair and a nose so big it deserves its own zip code?”

  “You know her?”

  “No, but I saw her in a class last semester. There was a deaf guy in the class. Ms. Nose was his signer.”

  I said, “I’ve heard some theory about when you lack one sense, the others become more acute to compensate for it.”

  “Yeah, like blind people can hear better than we can.”

  “Right. So maybe her nose is so big in order for her sense of smell to make up for her being deaf.”

  “That’s funny. And not very nice. But that woman doesn’t deserve nice. We had a guest lecturer on Raymond Jonson. She stood to the side and a bit behind him. I think she was reading his notes and signing from those.”

  “So she was probably deaf and couldn’t hear the lecture?”

  “That would be my guess. But she didn’t stick to his notes. She made snide remarks about him. Like he didn’t know what he was talking about and he was a spoiled brat.”

  “How could you know she was signing that?”

  She loaded a tortilla chip with salsa. While she chewed it, she signed to me.

  When she finished, I said, “So now it’s your turn to imitate the guy at the Mandela memorial service?”

  “No, I just signed that I knew she signed snide remarks because I watched what she signed.”

  “You know sign language?”

  She smiled. “My whole family knows it.”

  Susannah has a variety of smiles. This was the closed-lips one that seems to say My mouth is full of happiness, and I don’t want to open it for fear that it will dribble down my chin.

  “Someone in your family is deaf?”

  She opened her mouth and let the happiness out. “Can you guess which one of us?”

  I knew it wasn’t her. I let my mind drift among random memories of my conversations with her mother, Hillary; her father, Gus; and her two brothers, Matthew and Mark.

  “Is it Mark?”

  The smile returned. “How did you figure it out?”

  “He sometimes sounds like he has a slightly stuffy nose.”

  “I am so proud of him, Hubie. We knew he was deaf almost immediately because he didn’t turn toward sounds. Mom spent the year after he was born learning oral training techniques. I remember her holding him when he was still a toddler. She would put her face close to him and move her lips in some way until he began to copy her. She would stick out her tongue and he would do that too. Matt was enough older to think it was hilarious. Eventually, Mom would hold an object like a ball and coax Mark into saying ‘ball.’ Or something that sort of sounded like ‘ball.’ When he was about three, they hired a professional oral trainer. She lived with us until Mark started high school. Eleven years, Hubie. Four hours a day, seven days a week. That’s how long Matt had oral training. And now he speaks so clearly that you didn’t even know he’s deaf.”

  “Do you two still sign?”

  “Once Mark reached a certain level of oral competency, we were all forbidden to use signs. They wanted him to take off the training wheels, so to speak. But signing is so cool because it enables us to communicate when we don’t want anyone to know what we’re saying. Like when Mom served you that leg of lamb, I signed to Mark, ‘Look at Hubie’s face when he tastes the lamb.’”

  “There’s a sign for Hubie?”

  “No. Proper names usually don’t have a sign. You spell them out.” She spoke the letters H-U-B-I-E as she simultaneously demonstrated the sign for each one with her left hand.

  “A lot of ordinary words also don’t have signs. For example, here’s the sign for ‘love.’” She crossed her hands in front of her chest with all the fingers and thumb curled in like a fist. “But there is no sign for ‘affection.’ You have to finger spell it. So you normally just use ‘love’ because it’s easier to make one sign than to sign the nine letters of ‘affection.’ But if the context requires ‘affection’—say you’re reciting a poem that uses that word—then you have to spell it out. And that’s one of the reasons why sign language is not a language. Signing is a wonderful invention, but the signs are merely another way of referring to a word in a spoken language.”

  “But suppose your parents hadn’t made the effort to train Mark to speak. Couldn’t he have grown up just using sign language?”

  “How would he learn it? Mom might have been able to teach Mark what the sign for ‘love’ means by making that sign when she hugged him or when he saw two people kissing in a movie. But she could never get him to understand the difference between ‘love’ and ‘affection’ unless he could read.”

  “I don’t get it. If he
could learn the distinction between ‘love’ and ‘affection’ by reading, why couldn’t he learn it by someone signing to him?”

  “The next time you see a sign language interpreter doing her job, watch her hands and notice how often she spells out words. American Sign Language has about ten thousand signs for whole words or concepts.”

  “You can make that many signs with just two hands?”

  “I can’t. Almost no one can. Most signers use only a few hundred of the most common signs. The Gallaudet Survival Guide to Signing has five hundred signs. But when an interpreter has to sign what a hearing person is saying—like the speakers at Mandela’s memorial—they have to finger spell most of it.”

  “Because there are so many words that don’t have signs?”

  “Exactly. English has a million of them.”

  “Sure. But no one knows them all.”

  “You probably come close. You’re the only person I know who reads the dictionary.”

  “That’s because I’m probably the only person you know who owns one. Everyone else looks up words on their phone. But even if there were a sign for every word, that wouldn’t make it a language. It would just make it a different way of communicating a language.”

  “Exactly,” she agreed. “You can also communicate with Twitter, but that doesn’t make it a language.”

  “Okay, so you learned to sign because Mark is deaf. Why did you learn Basque?”

  “Good question. It would’ve made more sense to learn Spanish. And it would have been easier because we hear it all the time here. But learning Euskara was the best gift I ever gave my grandfather. He was so happy I wanted to learn it. And it gave him something to do after he got too old to help with the ranching chores.”

  “He was a good teacher?”

  “He was horrible. He was forgetful. He would explain how to conjugate a verb we had already gone over a week ago. He nagged me about my accent. He skipped around randomly from verbs to nouns to adjectives to pronouns. He taught me idioms without telling me what all the words meant. And he was only semiliterate, so I’m a terrible speller in Euskara.”

  “So I guess you didn’t enjoy the lessons.”

  “On the contrary. They are my fondest memories of him.” She ate another chip. “So you only had presentations from the Navajo guy and Ms. Nose? Usually, someone covers sexual harassment.”

  “Oh, they had that too. It was before the language session. A woman from Student Affairs lectured us about it. What I remember about it was all the acronyms. There’s SMART, which stand for Sexual Misconduct and Assault Response Team. There’s CAR, which is Counseling Assistance Resource, which provides free transportation for victims wanting to see the Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner, which of course is called SANE.”

  Susannah rolled her eyes. “Maybe they should spend less time thinking up acronyms and more time actually preventing sex crimes.”

  “Evidently, they’re doing a good job. There were only twenty-four reported sex crimes at UNM last year. Since they have about twenty-seven thousand students, that works out to less than one for every thousand students.”

  “That’s little solace to the victims. Each of them experienced a personal rate of a hundred percent.”

  “Hmm. I hadn’t thought of it that way.”

  “I think of it that way, because I’m the student representative for Student Programs Against Sexual Misconduct.”

  I resisted pointing out that the acronym of her group would be “SPASM.”

  The staffer from Student Affairs had urged us to be vigilant. Probably a good idea. It had never occurred to me that someone in my class might be a victim of sexual harassment. So I was alert when it happened.

  It also never occurred to me that someone in my class would be murdered. Unfortunately, I wasn’t alert when that happened.

  3

  The door to the pottery studio could be opened only by a university ID with a magnetic strip on it like a credit card. I didn’t have one.

  A university ID, that is. I did have a credit card.

  It was maxed out.

  The students all had IDs and had let themselves in. They were looking down at their desks.

  The scene sent me back to my undergraduate days, the students arriving early for Professor Hillerman’s class in journalism in order to get a good seat. We had no idea he would later become famous for his books featuring tribal police officers Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee. To us, he was simply a learned and engaging teacher.

  Even if Leaphorn and Chee were real, they would never catch me digging up pots. Not because they aren’t crafty enough to do so, but because I never dig on reservations. Bureau of Land Management acreage belongs to you and me. So we should be free to dig on it, right?

  But the reservations belong to the people who inhabit them.

  Actually, that’s not technically true. The lands are held in trust for them by the federal government. So the good ol’ US of A has two categories of land—the 98 percent we stole from the Indians and the 2 percent we hold in trust for them.

  Students actually read books back when I was an undergraduate. Between classes (and sometimes during if you were bored and sat in the back) we’d pull out dog-eared paperbacks of the popular titles of the day—The Color Purple by Alice Walker, Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez or The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan.

  A black woman, a Venezuelan man and a Chinese American woman. But we didn’t choose them for their diversity. We read them for their insight into the human condition. Those were heady days, filled with arguments about the meaning of life. We never reached a conclusion, of course.

  And that sent us to Sartre.

  He didn’t reach a conclusion either, but he made not reaching a conclusion sound deeply meaningful.

  One popular book I did not read was The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris. Remember I mentioned how little nerve I have?

  I pulled myself out of my reverie and tapped on the window.

  A young black woman wearing turquoise earrings was the one who finally came to the door. She opened it slightly and raised her chin.

  “You need something?” she asked assertively through the narrow crack.

  “Yes. I need to get in.”

  She continued to hold the door semi-closed. “You a student?”

  “No, I’m the teacher.”

  She shrugged and returned to her potting station.

  I placed a box on the table at the front of the room and cleared my throat to get their attention. Not very original, and even less effective.

  They were all looking down intently. But not at books. At phones.

  Amy Tan and Gabriel García Márquez have been replaced by Facebook and Twitter.

  “Hello,” I said cheerfully.

  A blubbery kid with red hair and blue-framed glasses was the only one who looked up.

  “Hi,” he said, and looked back down.

  “Okay,” I said in what I hoped was a collegial tone, “turn off your cell phones.”

  “That sucks,” said the young lady with the turquoise earrings.

  No one ever said anything like that when I was an undergraduate, but I’d discussed my teaching assignment with both Susannah, who’s a part-time student in art history, and with my nephew, Tristan, who’s studying computer science. I was steeled for the new realities of acceptable behavior and language.

  “Sorry,” I said, “but I’m old-fashioned. We’re going to have class discussions. So no cell phones.”

  “There’s something else that sucks,” said a gawky young man with a snake slithering around his arm. “The lab fee for this course is a hundred dollars.”

  The snake wasn’t actually slithering. It was only a tattoo. But it was so well done that it appeared to move when he did.

  “What’s the lab fee for?” I asked.

/>   “Clay.”

  “The university doesn’t supply clay?”

  “They don’t supply any consumables for free. They make us pay for them.”

  The turquoise-earring girl said to the gawky kid, “You’re lucky you aren’t in the jewelry-making class. They’re charging us two hundred because we use silver.” I guess that explained why the turquoise pieces were set in silver. Must have been a studio assignment.

  Another student brought up the parking fee. They kicked that around for a few minutes, then switched to the athletics fee, which they quite reasonably objected to. When they left the topic of fees and started arguing about whether the vegan selections in the La Posada Dining Hall were really vegan (after all, the tomato plants were pollinated by insects), I realized their free-ranging conversation would consume the entire two hours of our initial session if I didn’t take control.

  I clapped my hands and said, rather loudly, “Quiet!”

  They looked at me as if I’d struck them.

  After a few moments of blissful silence, I said, “Don’t pay the lab fee.”

  They stared at me some more.

  The redheaded kid said, “They won’t give us any clay.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Alfred.”

  “You won’t need the university’s clay, Alfred. We’re going to dig our own.”

  A big, goofy smile appeared on his face. “Really?”

  “Sweeeet,” said the gawky kid.

  “They won’t let us do that,” said Earring Girl.

  “What’s your name?” I asked her.

  “Aleesha. What’s yours?”

  “Hubert Schuze.”

  “Do we have to call you Dr. Schuze?”

  “I’m not a doctor. I’m not even a professor. I’m an adjunct.”

  “What’s an adjunct?”

  “Adjuncts are local people with unique skills that qualify them to teach a course even though they aren’t normally teachers.”

  “What’s your skill?” asked Alfred.

  Aleesha said, “He makes pots, dummy.”