by Kurt Caswell
Mary came to visit the night of the Christmas Bazaar. Always the inveterate teacher, Mary frequently asked me questions about working with kids who spoke fluent Navajo. What was it like? What were the differences? How did I plan my lessons to account for this? What kind of success was I having? The trip to Mission: Wolf did not answer these questions, so I suggested she come see for herself. The bazaar was not the classroom, but she would be able to meet my students, along with kids in the elementary grades, all the administrators, teachers, and staff, and the parents and local community members. Mary had also been studying the Navajo language and was eager to try out her skills with the people at Borrego.
I introduced Mary to Maria, Jolanda, and Samuel, who all showed up to run the seventh-grade cake walk. Jolanda knew Mary from our trip to Mission: Wolf, and she whispered something in Maria’s ear. Samuel stuck his hand out and Mary shook it.
“Are you Mr. Caswell’s girlfriend?” Samuel asked, smiling.
“No. His friend. I teach at a school over in Ganado,” Mary said.
“Oh,” Samuel said. “Okay. Why’d you come here then?”
“I’m just visiting,” Mary said. “I came to help you tonight.”
“Oh, okay,” Samuel said. “Why don’t you help us, then. Let’s start it, Mr. Caswell.”
We set to work. Samuel stood in front of the booth calling in contestants, while Jolanda and Maria arranged the cakes on a table. They arranged the numbered paper disks on the floor and set up the boom box for the music. When we had a full load of kids ready to walk, Maria played a rousing rendition of “O Come, All Ye Faithful” on cassette, and a little boy who did not go to school at Borrego won an angel food cake.
“Mr. Cas-well,” I heard in a kind of loud whisper from somewhere behind me.
I turned around, but I couldn’t see who had called me.
“Mr. Cas-well,” I heard again.
I noticed that the side doors of the gym were open, slightly, and through it the voice came once more.
“Hey, Mr. Cas-well! I’m calling you.”
I went to the double doors and peered out the crack into the night. Clemson and Caleb sat on their bikes in the dark. I pushed the door open wider.
“Mr. Cas-well. Who’s that?” Clemson said, pointing with his lips at Mary.
“That’s a friend of mine from Ganado,” I said.
“What’s she doing here?”
“She’s visiting. Helping with the cakewalk. Why don’t you guys come in and help us?”
“Uh-uh,” Clemson said. “We got our bikes. They won’t let us bring ’em in.”
“You like low-rider bikes?” Caleb asked.
I was surprised that he spoke to me at all. “What’s that, Caleb?” I said.
“You never seen one? I’ll show you,” Caleb said. He got off his bike and pushed it up close to the doors into the light. “Have a look,” he said. “See, it’s a low-rider bike. I built it myself.”
The bike sat low to the ground, much too low for Caleb’s long legs. The wheels seemed too small, like they wouldn’t hold his weight, and the frame, all tricked out in chrome and painted in fiery symbols, looked more suited to training wheels.
“So what do you do with it?” I asked.
“So you know a low-rider car, right?” Caleb said. “Well, this is a low-rider bike. I’ll show you.”
He got on and rode out in a little circle into the parking lot, came back to the doors and went around again like he was winding up for something. When he had the speed he wanted, he hopped up off the pedals and landed on the seat with his feet, the pedals spinning empty now like ghosts were riding them, and rode the circle out and then back, and then dropped down now onto the seat again, popped the front wheel up, stood on the pins on the back of the frame, and hopped the bike like a pogo stick. Then, balanced on the rear wheel, he turned the whole bike around in a pirouette; then he dropped down and rode back.
“See,” he said. “That’s a low-rider bike.”
“Jesus, that’s good,” I said. Caleb smiled. Maybe it was that simple. Maybe all I needed to do to communicate with Caleb was take an interest in his love for this bike, in his talent, in him. “That’s really great, Caleb,” I said. “How’d you learn to do all that?”
He beamed. “Just playin’ around,” he said. “Some tricks I learned from other people. People who’re real good. Better than me. Some stuff just by playin’ around.”
“Well, it looks like it takes a lot of skill and practice,” I said.
“It does,” he said. “It’s real hard to learn.” He sat back on his bike, proud of himself.
It felt good to be talking with him instead of against him, and I wanted to press it further, but I didn’t want Caleb to think I was baiting him, that I wasn’t sincere. I was sincere.
I said, “Can you do that, Clemson?”
“Uh-uh,” Clemson said. “I’m not very good. Not that good.”
“Well, let’s see it,” I said.
“Uh-uh,” Clemson said. “Not while she’s watching.” He motioned with his lips again.
Mary had come up behind us and was looking over my shoulder. I took her arm and pulled her outside and we let the gym doors close behind us. Now we had the light of the moon and the lights in the parking lot.
“Watch this,” I said to Mary. “Clemson, do it.”
“Uh-uh,” he said.
“C’mon, man,” Caleb said. “Do it.”
“Uh-uh,” Clemson said.
So Caleb pushed off then and went through the same routine as before, out into his circle, popping up on the seat, then down, then into a wheelie, then the pogo thing and the pirouette.
“Wow,” Mary said, clapping her hands. Then she looked at Clemson. “Now you.”
“Really?” he said. “I’m not very good.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Mary said. “Do something easy.”
“Okay,” he said. He got on, pushed off, and started out into a circle as Caleb had, rounded it a couple of times, said “Wait,” and then stood on the seat, turned the circle, came down, jackknifed his handlebars, and stalled and fell off.
“Oh,” Mary said. “You okay?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I’m okay. My bike’s all somehow though. Hey, watch this.”
Clemson turned around backward on his seat and started pushing with his feet on the ground. He made the circle around holding onto the handlebars behind him, craning his neck back so he could see forward as Caleb joined him, popping up into a wheelie, and they went around the circle in opposite directions, around and around, giggling and laughing. Mary and I started clapping and cheering as they circled, shouting cheers of their own now, and we forgot about the Christmas Bazaar inside, forgot about the Christmas carols, the people inside winning cakes and buying cookies and fry bread, buying little dangling Santas for Christmas trees, and pledging their love to Jesus Christ and the American economic holiday revival because in front of us Clemson and Caleb rode low-rider bikes like they were things made for wheels, like they were a circus act of unicycles on a high wire, like they were birds tucking and pulling together on the wind.
“Woo-hooo!” Mary shouted, and we both cheered for them.
Watching those boys ride around together, I felt something shift between me and them. I didn’t expect Caleb and Clemson to be my pals, or expect them to become stars in the classroom, but I thought that maybe after this night we wouldn’t weigh on each other so heavily. I would let Caleb be, not corner him again so that he had to defend himself before his peers. I would expect him to offer me that same freedom, somewhat, expect him to perhaps mind himself more and seek to rule the class less. I let the tension we had built between us dissolve as Mary and I clapped and cheered for Caleb and Clemson in their grace on their low-rider bikes.
“We’re riding off now, Mr. Caswell,” Clemson said. “C’mon, Caleb.”
Clemson straightened his wheel and headed out across the parking lot as Caleb waved and pulled up on his handlebars to hop
a Coke can lying there, charged up his legs and zipped by Clemson, and they both disappeared into the night.
EIGHT
THE HOGAN
Sand borne aloft on the wind came into the trailer through the walls. It would thread its way through the corners of the place so that every closet shelf was paved with it, swirled and patterned like a sand painting in the strange currents caught in there. In the bedroom where I slept, the back wall bowed and shivered with the strong arm of the wind, rattling the mirror on the wall in the bathroom and covering the linoleum floor in fine dust. The roof rattled too, shivering in waves as the wind coursed over it, drawing my attention upward: I fully expected the whole thing to go flying off. I tried to go walking, but out beyond the berm along my usual route, blowing sand stung my face and eyes and caught in my hair, settling down at the roots in the sweat breaking over my skull. Truly there was no place to go, but it was almost more unpleasant to stay inside on a windy day because the wind seeped in and swirled around me like a gnat, or a headache from too little coffee.
If I did stay indoors, I found myself moving from room to room, window to window, book to book, slightly agitated, always yearning. I watched through the window how the sad branches of the little trees along the fence bowed down to the wind and scraped at the hard earth. Then the wind gusted and pushed the branches back into themselves, turning them wrong side out. I couldn’t escape the wind. It was like a bully, always waiting for me in the gaps, pressing at me, pushing me around.
Pretty much every derelict tire in Navajoland ended up on somebody’s trailer roof to keep it steady in the wind. But not my roof. Dean West, the maintenance supervisor, thought them unsightly and would not allow anyone on campus to place tires on roofs against the weather. I drove out the long desert dirt roads passing trailer after trailer, the roofs dotted with black tires like chocolate donuts, and I was envious. Not because of the rattling so much—I thought I was getting used to it—but because those roofs looked more concrete, more stable, more at home in the wind. If only it were that easy—if only placing a few old tires on my roof would bring me a sense of home, a fitting into the land—but I suffered from a far deeper malaise under that roof. I was in love with living at Borrego, with working out here on the edge of the world and wandering the empty trails through the broken rock, and at the same time I detested it. Every time the wind blew, it threatened to peel away the already thin membrane of my patience, my tolerance, my sanity, and blow me to the moon.
I made morning phone calls to Sakura in Hokkaido from the pay phone inside the school. I loved her, I thought, or was she just a distraction, a beautiful imagining to keep my loneliness at bay? I wanted to marry her, I told myself, but I wasn’t sure. I feared that I would only be asking her to come and live with me to comfort me, for around her she made an atmosphere of life, and I feared that my desire for her company wasn’t love, but merely an antidote to loneliness. I resisted asking her—for her sake, I told myself—but I had grown too close to the idea to keep it from her. She could sense it with a woman’s sensing, through our conversations and in my letters that forever worked the edges of the question (could we be married?), and she began to hang on the idea of it, to hang on my every word in expectation of a proposal that would never come. Inside the gaps, the long silences over the telephone across the thousands of miles of ocean, the ocean that was water and the ocean that was land, she would wait for me to ask her. I knew she was waiting; my senses went that far, at least. To divert this awkward instance, I might interject some petty detail about my day, or about the Navajos and life on the rez, or about a memory I had from Hokkaido. She was in love with me, she said, or maybe with the idea of me, the idea of marrying a foreigner, and yet I believed her, that it was love. I knew she wouldn’t confront me about what we were together, about what we were both thinking, about what we wouldn’t say. She regarded herself as meek: “It’s hard to speak up for a person like me,” she had said. But she was not meek. She held tight to her vision of a beautiful courtship and a marriage proposal that would sweep her away from her native land. She would then find herself in a foreign landscape—the Navajo reservation—and she would yearn for home, for the green trees and blue rivers of Hokkaido, while simultaneously in love with the notion that my love completed her. A Japanese woman suffers quietly for love, for longing, without complaint, and she is rewarded by the great beauty of her own tragic endurance. Such grace is exemplified in the image of spring cherry blossoms, their brilliant and full life met by a sudden, beautiful death, a wind that takes them from tree to earth. I knew that Sakura would wait for me as long as I asked her to, as long as I hedged and drew near her from so far away. If I asked her to wait, and she believed that the waiting would end, we would remain caught in a timeless sorrow: safe from commitment to a real life, and victims of a desire for it. How could I be so cruel?
Will you turn towards me?
I am lonely too,
this Autumn evening.
—Bashō
Out wandering one winter day, I came upon an abandoned hogan east of the Trading Post. It was set back a little distance from the road. The area surrounding it was scattered with household goods and tools and tires rotting in the sun and car bodies and the crystal glint of glass broken on the rock. It didn’t look like anyone had been here in years. The hogan was built of timbers stacked up log cabin style, with six sides that formed a rough circle. The roof was also constructed of heavy timbers that rose up to the center and were covered over with thick tarry shingles that softened and crippled in the sun. Something was piled up inside in front of one of the windows, and the others were so dirty I could hardly see through. The door of the hogan had been chained shut, and a great padlock held it. Standing by the door, I was mostly hidden from the road. Anyone driving that road couldn’t see me until they had already passed by. I stood there in secret and pushed the door open an inch or two, to the length of the chain, to peer inside. Dust rose up where the bottom of the door disturbed the dirt floor. I could see a table where someone had left it, and a broken chair, a few pots and pans scattered about, and several garments slumped against the wall like people without bones. And directly facing me were two framed photographs, pictures of young girls in Borrego Pass School graduation gowns. The photos looked new, like someone had recently framed them. Along the edges of the walls were years of mouse droppings pushed into the shape of waves by slivers of the wind. I thought of hantavirus and pulled the door shut.
The shape of a hogan, the circle, symbolizes the sun, and the Sun god is one of the most honored gods of the Navajos. In fact, the hogan is considered a gift from the gods, not just a shelter or a place to live. The Navajos believe that the first hogans were built by the Holy People from white shell, jet, and abalone shell. Traditionally, the door faces east, the direction of birth and spring and the rising sun, so that the first thing a Navajo sees in the morning is the new day breaking over the world. The old-style hogans didn’t have windows. Inside, it was dark and cool in the summer, and in the winter a little cook fire kept the whole room warm as the smoke drew up through a hole in the roof.
Everything inside a traditional hogan is placed according to a prescription of the gods, so that housekeeping becomes a sacred occupation. Some accounts have the south side of the hogan belonging to the women, and the north side to the men. Others say just the opposite: that the women sit on the north side, and the men on the south. I imagine families worked those details out for themselves. By most accounts, the west side of the hogan is reserved for the male head of household and for distinguished guests, who, when seated there, face east toward the door. While a man might be the head of his family, in the old days, Navajo society was generally matriarchal. The wife owned and controlled the hogan and the land it was built on. She owned her children who dwelled inside, and they were considered part of her clan. The hogan itself is said to be female, so it is also a symbol of the womb, the mother who gave birth to the family, and the womb of the earth, big reed, thro
ugh which the Navajo people were born into this world in the myth-time. And there are male hogans too.
Most hogans are relatively small, perhaps twenty-five feet in diameter, but a family can get on well if they keep everything in its place. Seldom-used items are stored up in the rafters, like guns and winter clothes and dried spices and herbs used in cooking. Everyday clothes and food are stored in trunks that are either hung from or stacked up against the walls. The cooking pots and utensils are kept near the central fire pit. If it’s kept tidy, a hogan has plenty of space for a family to cook and eat and sleep and make love. What else is there? Out around the main hogan, Navajo people often build smaller hogans if they need additional storage, and sometimes even a studio hogan for the women to weave in. If a family owns sheep, it might maintain seasonal hogans in the mountains or in a valley where the sheep can graze and find water. In summer, people mostly live outside around their complex of hogans and build brush shelters for shade.
Traditionally, a hogan is abandoned if someone dies inside. The body is removed through a hole broken out in the north wall, the direction of evil and death. Then the place is boarded up and no one ever goes there again. A hogan might also be abandoned if struck by lightning because it is then said to be chindi, bewitched.
Things are quite different now, but traditional Navajos are notoriously fearful of the dead. They are not so afraid of dying, but of dead bodies. This fear rises out of the story of the first person who died. She was a hermaphrodite, but the story refers to her as “she.” When she died, the people searched everywhere for her breath. They did not know what had become of it. The inanimate body lay there, and the people decided that her breath had been lost somewhere and they needed to find it. Some people went out to look for it. After the people looked everywhere, far and wide, finally two men came to the Place of Emergence, where the Navajos came into this world. They looked back down through the hole, back into the former world, and they saw the dead woman sitting down there combing her hair. The men returned home and reported that the woman was not really dead, but that the place she was in was static. In that place, nothing ever changed, they said. They concluded that to die is to live on without change. After awhile, both of those men who looked on the woman, died. And since that time, so the story goes, Navajo people have feared looking at dead bodies. And they are terrified of ghosts.
