by Kurt Caswell
I knew I was guessing, but I came to think of the abandoned hogan as a place where an old Navajo man had died.
That winter, I walked with Kuma among the derelict things, and out to the far reaches around the hogan, where under a collection of juniper trees was a great mound of rusted steel cans, not one of them with a label. I inspected an outdoor charcoal grill, a doll’s head half buried in the earth, the seat and handlebars of a bicycle. A kitchen stove with an oven still clean and a refrigerator with the doors torn off and lying over there. Empty gas cans, and brittle plastic bottles that once stored motor oil. Out at the edge of the mesa top, where I could see north into the wide world, I found tires stacked in some places and scattered in others, heavy spikes driven into trees on which things had once been hung, coils of brittle wire and rusted chain, and a red flannel shirt tangled in a juniper, flying like a war-wounded flag in the breeze.
I did not know if everything in the junkyard around the hogan belonged to the man I had conjured in my mind, or if over the years people had come by and dumped their garbage here. Either way, I felt sad wandering about the place. I felt that something had been lost here, some issue of respect or reverence for the dead. Not that any Navajo would come by and feel this way. Not that the old man’s spirit felt this way. But I did. Standing here in the presence of the hogan, I felt a deep emptiness haunting the place. I heard the wind in the pinyon like a voice that was weeping. I was sharply aware of some great gap in myself that rose up from I did not know where. Walking here near the hogan, where the memory of this dead man was interred forever, the thought struck me without warning: what if I died in a place that was not my own? It seemed that I had to make a choice. I had to choose a life and a place, or to go the way of smoke, which is whatever way the wind blows it, as the poet William Stafford said. Although I felt grateful for the experiences I’d had out there in the world, the many places I’d lived, the wild lands over which I had roamed, I also felt that choices were making me, that I was who I was by accident, and that I had no control over it. Was I ever going to stop wandering and choose a home? Did I even want to?
I wandered without direction or purpose through the maze of the remnants of this old man’s life as if they were my own, as if I was looking back at the broken history of myself through someone else’s eyes. Was this a life lived well? Was this a life worth remembering? Would mine be? I returned to these questions and to this loneliness each time I went to the hogan. And though I feared and hated them, I kept coming back.
A grass hut less than five by five—I regret living even in it: if only there were no rainfalls.
—Bashō
That winter I read Bashō and The Tale of Genji by Lady Murasaki Shikibu. Entering those pages returned me to Hokkaido, the deep green trees and dwarf bamboo on Chitose River, and the evenings in the quiet dark of my apartment with Sakura. She was living at home at that time, and we hid our love from her parents. She worked in graphic design for an advertising agency in Sapporo, around which we easily constructed stories of her staying in the city with a coworker so that we could spend some nights together. Her father was a colonel in the Japanese Self-Defense Force and highly respected in Chitose. He had spent several years stationed in the U.S., in Georgia, on a diplomatic visa. Sakura finished high school there, then earned a bachelor’s degree at the Savannah College of Art and Design. In Hokkaido, I once introduced Sakura to Saito, the man I worked for at the school, and later he said to me, accusingly, “She is daughter of Colonel Haga. How did you manage to meet such person of good family?”
Sakura would park her car up a side street some blocks from my apartment and arrive at my door, her hair wet and glistening black from the rain and sometimes from white snow, which settled on it and melted as she stepped out of her shoes in the doorway. She hung her coat on the peg over mine, leaned into the room and giggled a little before entering. Her shoes were so small, and she was beautiful in my hands. I would turn up the heater to temper the damp air, and soon we would be naked and fully involved like a house on fire, pressing into each other on the cool tatami mat. She told me that it didn’t matter to her if we lasted, that she wanted this one chance, that maybe I would go home to America and leave her behind, that she was of very little consequence—what was she but a Japanese girl who spoke a little English?—and so if we could be this way for now, that was enough, she said, for her. She told me that it was a common thing for a Japanese to have a “sex friend,” not someone to marry, but someone to laugh with, cook with, make love with, and find a simple freedom that could exist nowhere else, because marriage was often an arrangement made on other principles. Often marriage had nothing to do with love, and we were too in love for marriage. Maybe that is what we are, she said, lovers only. And lovers find an end, while marriages stagnate and go on forever. I told her no, that we were not just lovers, that we were more than that, though I questioned the merit of what that “more” would mean. Lying entwined on the floor in the warm room, she would look up at me through the darkness of her oriental eye and nod her head sharply, and close her eyes and soften her mouth to say that she was ready, that it would hurt what we were doing, this kind of love, but that she was ready, as small and fragile as she was, because “the day was a woman who loved you. Open.”
Afterward she would cook for me. She would tell me to sit and talk to her while she cooked. She would take care of it all, she said, but I always wanted to help, to attend her like a chef’s apprentice and learn from her how to cook so many Japanese dishes. I would play the music of the Pat Metheny band, and she would dance in place at the counter cutting vegetables. She had a little niece, Satomi, whom she adored and often talked about. I knew that when she had a baby of her own, her quality would make it a girl. Sometimes she wanted to smoke cigarettes, but she knew that I did not smoke and thought I would not approve. She would say that she had to get something in her car. She would walk outside and hide around the end of the building and smoke a cigarette, or half of one. I could smell it on her, of course, when she came back in, and she would smile and giggle and act a little drunk. We would eat together sitting on the floor at the table and drink beer, sometimes wine, and go to bed together again and then sleep in the soft folds of the futon with the window partly open to the night sounds, the songs of crickets and the stray cat that walked the concrete wall in the spring with its kittens. I would wake in the morning to find her there beside me, and I would lie there and watch her in her beauty, and I thought I would die if I left her to go to my desk.
Look, so holy: green leaves young leaves in the light of the sun.
—Bashō
Sakura and I made plans for her to visit during the winter holiday. When school let out, I would drive north to Oregon to spend Christmas with my family. Sakura would fly into Eugene on December 26, meet my parents and sisters, my two brothers-in-law, my grandmother and uncles, and the next day we would drive the long road back to Borrego. During the weeks before her arrival, I so looked forward to seeing her that I felt a greater sense of purpose, perhaps an edge of that balance I so wished for. I found myself looking longingly at furniture and dishes, towels and bedding, and voluptuous foods like ice cream and feta cheese, red wine and a four-dollar loaf of bread, whatever exotics I could find at Smith’s in Gallup. Perhaps it was time to stop living like a monk on pilgrimage, I thought, and make as much of a home for myself at Borrego as I could. And then later, if it came time to leave that place, make a home somewhere else with Sakura. Still, I was reserved and thrifty, and couldn’t bring myself to invest in anything I would later feel obligated to take with me. I’d brought all my possessions down in the back of my truck, and I wanted to take all my possessions back in the back of my truck. I thought a lot about making such a home for myself, but never truly believed I would ever have one.
For the Navajos, a good life embodies hózhó, that proper balance between what happens to you and what you make happen. It is peace, beauty, good health and fortune, and harmony in your own life,
as well as the lives of your relatives and friends. One must seek hózhó at all times, especially during periods of great chaos and misfortune. Sakura brought into relief how much I desired this kind of balance, and how much, however oddly, I feared it.
It was about this time that I noticed a silver bracelet Jane Wiseman wore. She showed it to me when I asked about it. A story bracelet, she said, depicting the major icons of Navajo life. From left to right, in relief, a horse, a mesa, a stack of firewood, a dog, a hogan in the center, and then a wool rug on a loom, a pinyon tree, and a wagon. Marvin Tsosie, the husband of one of the teachers at Borrego, had made it. I asked Mrs. Tsosie that very day if Marvin had time to make two before Christmas—one that fit me, and one a bit smaller for Sakura. I felt on the edge of asking her to marry me and thought of the bracelet as an engagement gift. I never much cared for rings. I didn’t know whether I would do it, whether I wanted to get married at all, but I could decide in the moment, I thought. If by December I had made up my mind to ask her, I would ask her. If not, I knew Sakura loved silver. We had been together about a year. I would give her the bracelet to mark that length of time, or for Christmas, or for no reason at all. I thought ill of myself for wavering, and for imagining the way I might propose, for backing out on myself in my mind, for being uncertain about marriage and children, about her, about the source of my own loneliness. I couldn’t let her in on this unsteadiness, I thought; I couldn’t bear to hurt her by letting her know I was so unsure.
On the southwest side of the school, up against the rock, I found a small pile of four-by-six timbers. The surface of the wood was deeply grooved and weathered and scattered with bent and rusting nails. I bought a handsaw and a hammer in Crownpoint and decided I would use the timbers to build a little table, Japanese style, like the table I had in my apartment in Hokkaido. Out on my walks I would come home this way and hoist one or two of the big beams onto my shoulder and bring them along to the trailer. When four or five days had gone by, I had enough material to work with. I pulled the nails and straightened them. I sized the beams with the saw. I set five side by side and joined them with two beams across the underbelly, then hammered on the legs. The table was just under two feet off the ground. I would set it in the corner of the trailer and kneel at it like a Japanese to take my meals and sometimes read there or correct student papers, and sometimes write. The table was so heavy I couldn’t manage it by myself through the door. I removed the legs and carried it in in pieces, then nailed it together once more.
The table reminded me that I could have anything I needed for my place for free, if only I was patient enough and let the desert decide. Then when I moved on from the place, I would abandon these found objects to the next traveler who passed this way. This was a familiar rhythm, a knowledge of the wandering life that I had grown used to in Hokkaido. In most Japanese towns, one day each week is designated “big garbage day,” the day when people discard all manner of useful things by the side of the road to be picked up by a truck. Most Japanese people would never be caught rummaging through one another’s garbage, and this made the pickings safe for foreigners alone. On that good day, I would make sure to go out for a run or a walk before sunrise, and in that way I furnished my apartment. I had heard that in larger cities, big garbage day became a kind of social scene for young Westerners working in Japan. An honor system based on need was at work: people came together to agree on who got what. At Borrego, I competed only with the desert and the slow decay of time.
Out wandering with Mary one weekend near the head of Canyon del Muerto near Tsaile, we came upon a little treasure among the low trees, a weathered hutch good for storing books and things (just what I needed in the trailer), and a wooden crate full of tools and cooking utensils: a hammer with a broken handle; a few crescent wrenches of different sizes; screwdrivers; a wood plane with no guts and no blade. Maybe someone had stored these things here and would be coming back for them later. Or was this someone’s summer sheep camp? The tools were rusted, some of them beyond use, and the crate choked with sand. They had been here a long time, we figured, and if we left them they would remain even longer. The desert seemed to be offering them freely, so what harm would packing them off do? Besides, we reasoned, these things would not leave the desert. We would commit all that we gathered to the places we lived, leave them in my Borrego trailer and Mary’s Ganado apartment to the next fresh white teacher from suburbia. Of course, this was mere justification for the joys of treasure hunting, because the next tenant might as easily chuck everything back out into the desert as take it all home.
We hefted the raggedy hutch into the back of my truck and placed the crate in there too. Mary would use the crate as a coffee table. She kept most of the tools. I would place the hutch in my trailer under the window looking southeast. As we drove out the bumpy reservation road, I felt like I was stealing.
That first December night with Sakura at Borrego, she stood at the stove cooking the evening meal when Everett knocked at the door to repair the heater. It had coughed and died before I left Borrego for the holidays in Oregon. Although Everett planned to fix it while I was away, he hadn’t. I held Kuma back—he welcomed almost no one into his space—and Sakura went on with her work in the kitchen. I introduced her to Everett. He looked awkwardly at his feet and mumbled something that I couldn’t make out. As he worked, he kept peering around the heater to have a look at her. She looked very industrious at that moment, very good with her hands in the kitchen. Her tiny nose, rounded against her face and a bit flared, looked something like his. I could see that he wanted badly to ask about her. She wasn’t Navajo, or Hopi, or Zuni, was she—but he couldn’t place her. When he finished his work, he explained that the heater would run for awhile, he thought, but needed to be replaced. He would have to order one and come back to install it. Maybe it would take about two weeks.
“The less you use it,” Everett said, “the longer it will last. It’s gonna get real cold soon, and if this thing breaks down, so will you.” As he talked, he stared past me at Sakura stirring something on the stove.
After supper, Sakura and I sat together at the little table I had made drinking hot sake, a bottle she brought from Hokkaido, while Kuma lay asleep on his bed. I had turned the heater down so as to extend its life a little, and the cold drove us into the bedroom and under the covers. We lay in bed together in each other’s arms, wearing only our T-shirts for warmth, a little drunk and whispering in the dark, and listening to Kuma breathing beside us in the quiet spaces. Sakura began to cry a little, and I asked her what was wrong.
“Nothing,” she said. “Just this feels like a home to me. That’s it.”
I held her closer then, and we made love in the cold dark and slept away the desert night.
In the morning, I found Sakura already up, drinking Earl Grey with cream and sugar, sketching the view from the window in her notebook. She wore her jeans, heavy socks, and a warm wool sweater of mine she’d pulled from the closet shelf. She had the sleeves rolled up by a third, and her hair tied up in the back so that little black wisps of it flowed down around her ears, her face, and the back of her neck. I watched her work with the pencil, making long smooth motions with her hand and the big mesa behind my trailer came up off the page like a miracle.
“Ohayo gozaimasu,” she said.
“Ohayo,” I said.
“Are you genki?” she said. “Did you sleep good?”
“Of course,” I said. “You?”
“Of course, yo.” She smiled. “I wanna make you a breakfast,” she said.
“You don’t have to.” I said. “I’ll do it.”
“I want to. That will be nice for me. Maybe nice for you?”
“Of course. But don’t hurry. Finish that. What you’re doing.”
“I’m done,” she said. “I’m done with this one. I’ll paint something again later.”
“Before we have breakfast,” I said, “I have something for you.” I handed her an envelope with the silver bracelet insid
e. “It’s a Christmas present, I guess.”
She took it out and held it up. “It’s beautiful,” she said. “It’s so beautiful for you to give me it.”
I put my arm out and jacked up my sleeve to show her mine. She drew in her breath a little and smiled and grinned and pursed her brow. “You have one,” she said.
“We both have one,” I said.
“That’s-a-beautiful for us,” she said.
I took it from her and she held out her arm. I slipped it on her wrist and pushed the opening together a little to make it fit.
I could see that she knew I meant to ask her to marry me, but that I hadn’t done it yet was a puzzle to her. She waited for it. She didn’t seem to know whether she should trust her intuition, whether she was making up in her heart what she thought she wanted and it wasn’t really there. She didn’t know. I felt awkward, strange, unsure about what to do next. I was possessed by the fear that she would find me out, that she would ask me, that she would take the opportunity from me before I could act, even as I was letting it slip by, and though I still had time to do it, I secretly wished she would rescue both of us from this terrible inertia, as we sat looking at each other and the bracelets as if we were watching a movie about us and we both knew what would happen; I was paralyzed by wonder. Silence went between us as we sized each other up. She looked a little downcast, waiting for something. I still couldn’t bring myself to do it. I thought I was in love with her, but I was also lonely living at Borrego and I wasn’t sure about the difference. I doubted whether I could live the life she wanted—a place, a home, a job, and beautiful children. I wanted to want it, but it existed as a fantasy for me, the way journeys to exotic lands are fantasies for others. I didn’t think I could stop roaming, I didn’t know why, as lonely as it was most of the time, as empty and desolate. Did I love loneliness and emptiness and desolation? I told myself that I loved Hokkaido but didn’t love her. I think it was the other way around. I felt tormented by my desire to marry her and my fear of it, by my desire to be with her and my fear of being alone. I did not know which way to turn.
