In the Sun's House

by Kurt Caswell

  “I’m going to see if I can climb up in there,” Mary said, at last. “You want to come too?”

  We approached the steep sandstone face together and stood there looking up.

  “Man,” Mary said. “How’d they get up there? I mean, we could get up there, now, this one time, maybe, but they lived up there. Went up and down all the time. Looks treacherous to me.”

  “It does,” I said. “Where’d they put their feet? I hardly see any place to put your feet.” Then I asked, “You count nineteen rooms up there? Doesn’t look like that many.”

  “Nope,” Mary said. “Doesn’t look like that many at all.”

  “There’s supposed to be nineteen. Maybe this isn’t Three Turkey.”

  “I think it is,” Mary said. “I was here last year, and this is where we came.”

  “Yeah, you were here, but maybe here is somewhere else.”

  “Good point,” Mary said.

  “Maybe this is One Turkey Ruin,” I said, trying for a laugh.

  “Three Turkey, One Turkey, whatever,” Mary said, not much amused. “We’re here. Let’s climb this thing.”

  And up she went, her right foot leading, her left hand finding a hold to pull up on, her left foot going out to the side and a bit above her right. She paused there, seemingly stuck, unsure about what to put where, next. I came up under her and offered my hand. She put her right foot into my hand and I pressed up until, at my arm’s length, she took hold of the lip of the ledge and scrambled into the ruin.

  “All right!” I said.

  “Kinda cool,” Mary said. “Kinda nifty.”

  “Is it worth my trying to get up there?”

  “Hmm. Not really. It’s not that impressive. Plus I don’t know if I can pull you up. Maybe this is One Turkey Ruin.”

  From below I watched Mary roam a bit through the little ledge house, bending to inspect this, pausing to look at that. Ranger joined me there, and whined and paced and scratched at the rock. Kuma whined too, put his front feet on the rock, peered up, whimpered and cried, and barked out loud. I wanted to try to climb it, to scramble up and see the canyon from the dwelling, see the dwelling, but with Kuma acting that way I couldn’t bear to leave him. Is this what parenting feels like, I wondered, when your attachment is so great you cannot imagine leaving home?

  “The dogs want to come up,” I said. “Or you to come down.”

  “I’m comin’ down,” Mary said.

  I put my hand up again as she stepped into it, the other foot fixing friction against the wall, her hands with good holds, as she down-climbed back to the canyon floor.

  Soon we were sitting in the sun at the bottom of Three Turkey Canyon, sunlight filling the air around us, the canyon walls warming, the day breaking just so. Mary opened the oysters and we put out the crackers and cheese, all of it, for our lunch. The dogs came in close to pick up the scraps, and, getting nothing for a time, they lay down, Kuma curled next to my leg into a little ball in the dirt, then stretching his head up and across my knee where the cheese hovered over him in my hand. He had so far not been corrupted, and now in his goodness, I wanted to corrupt him. I handed him a little cheese, and up he sprang, seated now, staring at my hand, hoping for it all. I had that troubled, happy feeling that comes when you know the perfection of the moment cannot last, and what will come later is going to be hard, painful even, perhaps a kind of trial you might just fail. I didn’t want to go back to Borrego. I didn’t want to go back and stand there in front of my classes. Yet I knew I would. And it was this moment, this quiet rest out here on the land, this friendship with Mary and with the dogs, that made it possible, that makes everything possible. I felt grateful as we shared the lunch between us, and the best thing about gratitude is that you don’t have to do anything with it.

  Like me, Kuma was more at home in the truck than in the trailer at Borrego. We almost lived in it together, lived in the truck out on the road. I was happiest at the end of each week when I packed the truck with a few basic necessities and then drove out the dirt road into the outer world. I had bought myself a three-watt bag phone in Gallup, like the one Bob King kept in his office, and that always came along too. That little piece of technology gave me a renewed sense of safety and peace, if a false one. From I-40 in my truck, the phone worked great. I set it on the dash and made calls to friends and family back home, to Mary when I made the journey from my place to hers, to anyone I could think of. Out roaming around, I felt in touch with the wider world, not so isolated, not so alone. Up in the trailer, however, I got a signal maybe half the time. In all my months at Borrego, I would only once receive a phone call coming in. The rest was silence.

  Loaded and ready for the road, Kuma would sit next to me in the passenger seat, or he’d sit just behind me in the extra cab with his head and front feet thrust forward on the armrest, his butt on the seat back there, his back legs down in the well like a little man. He seemed to like that position best because he had a space all his own, and yet he was next to me too, and he could see the sky out the front window. He’d force his nose under my arm until I slung my arm around him and we’d go shooting down the highway the best of pals, feeling like the great southwestern desert was a blossom that would never fold. I could leave him inside the truck in cool weather for any length of time and he seemed mostly content. Sometimes I’d buy him a few dried pig ears at the feed store in Gallup. When I left one for him in the cab, say, when I went in grocery shopping at Smith’s, he wouldn’t touch it until I returned. My cart loaded with groceries, I’d put the key into the truck door and open it, and there Kuma would be with the pig ear between his front legs. He’d cock his head as if to ask if it was all right, and I’d tell him, “Okay. Go ahead.” And only then would he begin to gnaw. I admired his good manners.

  He had some bad manners too, some of which had to do with two dogs at Borrego chained to a clothesline pole behind one of the cinder block duplexes. It happened one evening when Kuma was still very small and he was roaming out around the trailer. I was inside cooking. I had the back door propped open to let the sun in, and Kuma burst through and hauled himself into a corner and curled up so small he almost disappeared. I called him to me and he came reluctantly, hunched up and slinking and shaking. I found a deep puncture wound on his soft belly and knew he’d gotten into something out there. Alice, who managed the school supply trailer on campus, came to the door then and said, “Those dogs got loose and they was chasin’ your puppy.” I dabbed the wound with Bag Balm against infection, and gave him a good taste of bacon grease over his dry kibble.

  After that, every Friday afternoon when we drove out of Borrego, we passed by those two dogs chained to the end of their lives, and Kuma would leap at the passenger-side window and bark and snarl and tear at the glass with his front feet, which I took to mean: “FUCK YOU! FUCK YOU! FUCK YOU!”

  I thought of Kuma as kindred to both coyotes and bears. In Navajo mythology, Bear is one of the guardians of Sun’s house, the father of the world. It is also said that Bear was given to the people by Changing Woman to protect them on journeys. In the myth-time, Shash, the Fearless Bear, was one of the five pets who traveled with the people during the gathering of the clans. He was revered for providing protection, food, and good company. But the people knew that Shash was wild and would not be happy among them forever. They decided they had to let him go. Grateful for his freedom, Shash wandered off to live with his own kind. Despite this story, Navajo people fear bears, and they are more commonly a symbol of evil. Changing-bear-maiden exemplifies evil: she was the perfect Navajo woman who became a bear when she was corrupted by Coyote’s deception and lust. Her snout grew long, and her nails changed into claws. She grew thick hair all over her body, except on her breasts. The beautiful maiden transformed into the most horrible part of herself—a bear, the beast within—and Coyote was to blame. The stories of Yellow Woman from Laguna Pueblo, just east of Grants, echo those of Changing-bear-maiden, only the transformation into a bear is effected in marr
iage and centers on sexual and personal liberty for Yellow Woman. For her husband back home, who says something like, “Where have you been these past months, and how do you explain these two children,” Yellow Woman fell prey to some evil. But in her own mind she seeks out such an experience, an encounter with Bear-man, to free her from the bondage of tradition. Navajo people also say that Bear has a sheen over his hair that is akin to the sheen in pollen, that sacred symbol of life and light and regeneration, also of peace and happiness.

  Coyote does not get as much respect as Bear. His name in Navajo can be translated as “First-to-get-angry” or “First-one-to-use-wordsfor-force.” Coyote’s anger is an essential force in war. Indeed, Coyote is force, combined with the elements of deception and knavery. Coyote’s lust began in the lower worlds, where it went uncontrolled. It is said that he lay with the women constantly and licked them between their legs, and this is why coyotes and dogs lick each other there to this day. Dogs are considered dirty, sly animals too. They are little more than property to most Navajos. Adults do not stop children from torturing or abusing them. They laugh at the dogs’ misery and misfortune. Traditional Navajos do not allow dogs into their homes because they are seen as dirty, vile, dishonorable. When Vanessa Angel, an eighth-grade student in my language arts class, learned that I had a puppy, she said, “I bet you sleep with that dog like other white people. That’s sick. It has ticks and things.”

  Coyote is the great trickster figure in Navajo mythology, and seeing a coyote usually means bad luck. A Navajo warrior on his way into battle might turn back if he sees a coyote cross his path. Coyote is both good and evil, in that he aligns himself with whichever side suits his fancy. In the assembly of Navajo gods, there are two options: the gods representing good on the south side, and the gods representing evil on the north side. Coyote sits between them near the door so that he is at once on both sides and on no side. It is said that he buries his vitals in the ground to protect them, his heart and blood, his breath and lungs, so that the rest of him can wander the earth doing foul deeds without fear of vulnerability. It is also said that Coyote keeps his life force safe in his nose and tail so that when the rest of his body is killed, he can come to life again. In her book Navaho Religion, Gladys Reichard writes of Coyote: “He is sneaking, skulking, wary, shrewd, tricky, mischievous, provoking, exasperating, contrary, undependable, amusing, disarming, persuasive, flattering, smug, undisciplined, cowardly, foolhardy, obstinate, disloyal, dishonest, licentious, lascivious, amoral, deceptive, sacrilegious, and, in a sense, persistent.” All this ill news is counter to Coyote’s poetic beginning: in the myth-time, the sky bent down as the earth rose up to meet it. At the moment and the point of contact, sky and earth, Coyote sprang out.

  Walking in the desert with Kuma, I remember a day watching the light find its way into the horizon. A coyote appeared on the edge of the next rise. Kuma took flight. He became a whirr of speed and motion, and I heard his high-pitched barks rising and falling with the shape of the land. He went far, far away, out into the place where the sky squatted on the desert. I stopped and scanned the distance for him, and called to him, and called again. I wondered if he was ever coming back. He did, after a long time, and I thought then that Kuma wasn’t like a coyote, he was a coyote.

  One day in the spring at Borrego, Kuma and I traveled out into the open country, walking softly and surely among the scattered cows. Several miles of desert lay between us and our trailer home. A light wind blew crosswise, delivering the scent of fresh manure as we walked. We might have gone on around the foot of the entire mesa, a long walk that would take us behind the Trading Post and over the hill that Merle claimed was the site of some not-so-ancient massacre. On days of exceptional rain, he said, the bones of Navajo children washed into his garden. I loved long walks, but this walk had gone on long enough. The sun was falling into the western lands and I felt hungry, thirsty, weathered, and ready for something else. So we turned up a little wash that seemed to promise a shorter path over the mesa again and back home.

  The wash steepened as we went, the slope on either side coming up around us like ribs over the belly of a great animal. I had never been through this little slot before, and even here at the end of the walk, the landscape promised something new. We skirted boulders and roots of pine perched on the edge of life in this rocky, scorpiontail country, pulling ourselves up by tooth and claw. At one point I hefted first the dog and then myself onto a ledge and crawled across a fallen tree as a bridge between us and the crack of doom.

  I wondered if we wouldn’t get caught inside this little canyon and have to go back the long way around, which meant perhaps walking part of it in the dark. But I could see the top now and thought we would make it.

  Kuma stopped. The hair on his back and tail rose up, and he growled low in his throat. I stopped too, and crept up cautiously behind him. He nosed the air, pumping his body forward and back in hesitation like a snake, which is what I thought he’d found. Deep in the chasm between two great stones, the wreckage of a horse lay wasting in the sun.

  The lips were laid back from the teeth and the eyes were empty hollows. The neck was twisted up at too sharp an angle, and the legs, broken and bent under the body, seemed to be coming from every direction. The ribs curved up and around where the insides were supposed to be, but the cavity was empty. The hide, tanned by the sun, looked stiff like wood. There was nothing wet about this death.

  In the land I read the story of where the horse had broken down, the hoofprints marked its turning point in the sand. A juniper tree showed the dramatic plunge where it fell and tore some branches away and dragged them down. I saw them now jutting from beneath the animal’s cavernous belly. And there I saw more markings of horse feet, probably before the fall, the horse coming up the trail out of the wash, stumbling where the marks were many, here dropping its panicked shit, dark and ill, then stumbling again, shuffling across the dirt, skidding here, tripping up there, whirling in an unbalanced dance, sick maybe, or old and blind, lost and dehydrated into delirium. All of it came to the edge of these rocks, the edge of its life, and in a final effortless grace, the horse fell in and out of this world.

  I thought something needed blessing, so I said, “Amen,” and then, with Kuma, scrambled up and over the mesa to the other side. We walked on home in the failing light.

  Back at the trailer, I discovered that absolutely nothing had happened in my absence. Everything was as I had left it. Did I expect something more? I let Kuma in, bent to remove my boots, then went in, and shut the door.

  FIVE

  THE TRADING POST

  The Navajo children at Borrego said that a great horned owl lived in a juniper tree behind Mr. Wiseman’s house. Owls, they told me, can perform strange magic. Sometimes this magic is good, but most of the time it’s bad. Owls can make people go to sleep, and they are harbingers of evil and death. When you see an owl, especially a big owl, bad luck is on its way. The word was not that Mr. Wiseman was in danger because the owl lived behind his house, but that he himself was danger—that he was a witch, a skinwalker, or possessed by a devil.

  Raymond Wiseman was a tall man with a soft pear shape. His narrow shoulders sloped into his round, gentle middle, and he wore his gray hair buzzed like a soldier. He laughed a lot. He wasn’t a teacher at Borrego, but his wife, Jane, taught the third grade. She had a son, Miles, by another marriage, who was in the fifth grade. Miles was the only white kid at Borrego and, with the exception of Manny from Zuni, the only non-Navajo. Mr. Wiseman (only Jane seemed to call him Raymond) said he had been a professor at the University of Indiana, but I never clearly understood what it was he professed. Sociology, maybe, or political science, or anthropology, or something. When I asked him about it, he somehow got all those words in there together, so that I was never sure if he taught all of it or nothing. Jane had been one of his graduate students. At least that was the story going around. She was younger than he, but not that much younger. They made a fine couple, and I rather li
ked them.

  I wondered why they lived at Borrego. With all the choices in the world, why Borrego? When Mr. Wiseman and Jane fell in love in Indiana, I mused, maybe they had broken something else up, Jane’s marriage, for example, or Mr. Wiseman’s. Or perhaps their union violated some ethical code in Mr. Wiseman’s department and now they were on the run? Or did one of the families reject their union, and so they lived in exile in New Mexico? When I asked Mr. Wiseman about it, he pointed out the front window of his house to the wide, wild country opening before us. “We got tired of the Midwest,” he said. “We want to be living here, inside of that.”

  Because Mr. Wiseman claimed to be a seasoned teacher, he sometimes filled in for teachers when they were gone, like the time the art teacher, John Yazzie, went turkey hunting and didn’t bother to tell anyone. A few of his students wandered out to my classroom to see what I was doing. “John’s not here,” they said. “And we have nothin’ to do.” So I called the front office, and they called Mr. Wiseman.

  Perhaps his retirement gave Mr. Wiseman greater freedom from the stress and sometime-chaos of teaching at Borrego Pass. He’d already put in his time, and so any teaching he did at Borrego was just fun and games. Like me, he rarely had control of his classroom, but unlike me, it didn’t seem to bother him. As a substitute, he could leave bad behavior for the regular teacher to deal with; the substitute’s mantra is the eternal “Just wait until your teacher gets back!” Mr. Wiseman floated through classes, day after day, seemingly unaffected by the hardness of his students, the sometimes disturbing and tragic stories of their lives, the pervading sense that the great hope that education would heal all social ills was an illusion, that book learning would take these kids nowhere except to a monthly government check. I was plagued by my failure in the classroom, while Mr. Wiseman seemed unaffected by his. “I don’t mind a loud classroom,” Mr. Wiseman told me once. “As long as everyone is in the room and no one gets hurt.”