In the Sun's House

by Kurt Caswell

  So it was that lazy afternoon with Mary in Ganado, after a long walk up and over the red mesas, that the fight broke out. Mary and I had gone inside her place with Kuma for something cold to drink, while Ranger and Sidecar found shady places to rest against the brick wall in the shade, happily tired from the day’s action. All was well, and nothing portended of any ill will between them.

  From the kitchen, Mary and I heard the rattle of the low chain-link fence as Ranger charged and slammed Sidecar against it. Then the howling screeches brought us outside fast. Ranger had Sidecar down on his side, and his jaws clamped around his bull-like neck. Sidecar howled in fear and amazement, his grotesque leg wildly kicking. What had he done, a poor, wretched three-legged thing, to shatter their friendship? I held Kuma back and then shut him inside, knowing how he loved to fight. Mary ran up on the tangle of dogs, shouting and cursing and kicking up dirt with her boot, as I picked up a handful of gravel and hurled it into them, into both of them, pelting them with little pricks, which amounted to nothing. Realizing that her efforts and mine were futile, Mary ran back inside. I had thrown another handful of gravel by the time she returned with a pitcher of cold water. She cast it over them, a violent baptism, and that broke it up, for a moment, while Ranger prepared to charge again. But Mary had him now by the collar, giving Sidecar a chance to retreat around to the back of the building.

  What a pitiful sight. Nothing wounds my heart more than an injured dog in sad retreat.

  Mary led Ranger into her apartment and closed the door, and then together we went to check on Sidecar. He stood off at the edge of the brush, and slunk away as we came. We called for him, but he loped out and away as if he was never coming back.

  He did come back however, later that evening, when Mary and I were cooking supper and drinking beer. We heard his whines at the door, and Kuma rushed over to lick at him through the metal screen. We went out to welcome him. He lay down in submission on the concrete walk, turning over to expose his soft belly, and we knelt and checked him over with our hands, finding the places where Ranger’s teeth had broken the skin. Puncture wounds only. Nothing too serious. We slathered the places with Bag Balm against infection, then let Kuma out to say hello. And then a bit later, Ranger, and the three joined together again like a happy pack, romping in the cool spring night. It was as if nothing at all had happened between them, or, better, as if the anger or insult had been released and no remnant, no guilt or grudge at all remained. I thought then: if only people could behave like that.

  Kuma standing in the doorway looking at me, whining, then barking a little, then barking a lot, brought me back from my meditation, from that distant land I’d gone to in my mind with Sakura, to the dreams and fantasies we had yet to fulfill. All right, I thought, indeed, time for a walk.

  I sat down on the kitchen floor to lace up my boots. Kuma circled me and pressed his nose up under my arm. He knew we were headed out, and he never tired of roaming. Indeed, his enthusiasm always roused me from dark thoughts, and for that I was grateful. But there was nothing exceptional about this preparation. We performed the ritual almost every day. Despite the many walks that merged into one long memory of walking, despite the long monotony of the unchanging land, each time I put on my boots and took up my walking stick, I felt the promise of something new. How often I shrugged off loneliness by walking. How often I sorted out every kind of question by walking. I held on to this ritual, this monkish routine, as I held on to memories and old guilt:From this day forth

  I shall be called a wanderer,

  Leaving on a journey

  Thus among the early showers

  —Bashō

  I led Kuma out through the school parking lot and through the big gate, down to the baseball field below the sandstone cliffs. Kuma was at home walking the open country around Borrego, ranging out in front of me as fast and far as he could go, me trailing behind, walking a slow and steady rhythm out through the rolling desert. From where we were now, I could see the Christian revival cemetery, doing its revival work so well that no one had been buried there for a very long time. The cemetery was without an entrance or a perimeter, a collection of gravestones near a little tree, only some still standing. I intended to wander straight through, but I lingered a few moments, walking among the markers, the plots that rounded each little life, passing over the bones laid to rest so close to the soles of my feet. I moved in and out, back and forth, reading a few names and dates. And so they went, dry and forgotten, these stones and the bones buried under them.

  Against the little pine tree on the southern edge of the cemetery, I discovered a rusted shovel. I hadn’t seen it here before on any of my wanderings, but perhaps I hadn’t looked closely enough. The handle, too, was steel, the end of it split, with a handhold welded in crosswise. It looked like it had been here a long time, a forgotten relic free for the taking. I wanted to keep it. Since the shovel I bought at Bashas’ I used mostly for cleaning up poop, I thought this one might be handy for storing in my truck to dig myself out when it rained. I shouldered it and carried it off, worrying that it may have been used to bury—or unbury—the dead. I wondered if, driving around with that shovel in my truck, my dreams might not be visited by ghosts. But no matter. If a ghost was to visit me, so be it. I wasn’t through with my walk yet and didn’t have time for that kind of worry. I unburdened myself, leaving the shovel propped in the crook of another tree closer to the sandstone cliff. In moving it, I thought, I had claimed it as my own. I would come back for it later.

  I continued on around the edge of the bluff to a draw where water ran when it rained. The ground was littered with pottery shards, large pieces ornamented with black lines, and pieces with patterns in relief. To my untrained eye the pot looked to be pinched together from a continuous coil of clay. Anasazi pottery, I knew, perhaps eight hundred to two thousand years old. It was everywhere, lying derelict like the hogan and its detritus out the Borrego Pass Road, like the trash collected along fences near the freeway in Thoreau. I crouched and examined piece after piece, noticing how some were still emerging from the powdery soil. An edge leaking out of the ground would burst forth on the occasion of the next good rain. Some I left as they lay—I would not touch them; they seemed too bright, too buried, too beautiful. Others I picked up, cleaning the dust from the pattern to eye them better, then I returned them to the small outline in the soil marking their former position. And still others I selected—knowing I should not, knowing I had no right to commandeer the past—and placed in my pocket. Later I would lay them out on the little hutch in my trailer; even the hutch I had stolen out of the desert.

  I heard Kuma whining somewhere out beyond the low pine trees. I made my way across the flatlands under the shadow of a red-tailed hawk that seemed to follow me but soon disappeared against the cirrus clouds. I found him stranded in the middle of a wide patch of cactus, where any direction he went was a painful teacher. I picked him up and carried him out. I turned him over on my legs in the shade of a little tree to pull the spines from his tender puppy feet. He whelped and whimpered against the barbs. As he struggled against me, something caught my eye. Just beside me, partially buried in the sandy soil, was the bottom of an Anasazi pot, the biggest piece of ancient pottery I had ever found.

  I kept on doing what I was doing, watching the potsherd out of the corner of my eye as if it were a rabbit and was bound to get away. When I had removed the harm from my dog’s feet, he righted himself and ran off, wiser, perhaps, about cactus, or more worldly, or more wary of the world, which can bite.

  I leaned over onto my elbow near the potsherd and brushed the sandy soil back. The piece kept going, deeper and deeper into the ground. Traditional Navajos do not generally disturb Anasazi relicts. Not out of respect for ancient people or wisdom so much, but because they fear retribution by the Anasazi dead. Later I would learn that many Navajos don’t believe in this anymore. For what that’s worth, I wasn’t really afraid of ghosts, at least that’s what I told myself, but perhaps to
dig deeper was to violate the spirit of the place? Or was this just some old chip of fired clay, a broken vessel cast aside in a forgotten corner of the desert that every day risked returning to dust beneath the hoof action of Merle’s cows? I brushed back more sand. Where the deeper ground was harder, I used my fingers pressed together like a spade to get down to the rooted edge. It came free. I brushed the dirt from my hands and paused to admire the beauty of the piece. It was as big as both my hands set side by side with my fingers spread wide, and roughly shaped like Australia. I inspected it closely for fractures. None. The piece was solid, the outside decorated with that intricate houndstooth pattern. The inside was smooth, curved, a little moist from the deeper sand.

  I wanted to keep it.

  I knew I should leave it.

  But there were thousands and thousands of potsherds like this one scattered all over Navajoland, all over Borrego. And what would any archaeologist desire to know from this barren spot of cow pasture?

  Kuma was gone again. Likely he had grown bored and followed his nose to some sun-mutilated skeleton on the desert. I called for him. I stood and walked a little way away, still calling. I was alone, and yet wandering off in search of the dog with the potsherd in my hand, I felt like someone was watching me. I kept walking, looking around me in all directions and then up at the blue, blue sky. I called for Kuma and kept walking, the hard flat shape of the clay cupped in my hand. When I had gone some distance, maybe I had been walking for five minutes, maybe ten, Kuma came up out of the shimmering distance. He met me there and we started on together. I slipped the potsherd into my wide vest pocket.

  I walked along the northwest side of the sandstone bluff, past the half-buried timbers of an old hogan and up the bouldered canyon beyond the dead horse, pausing only for a moment to inspect it once again. I stared into its empty eye sockets, its hollow belly, its fierce grimace. If I was to fear a visit from any ghost at all, perhaps it should be this horse. Kuma hardly noticed it now. We climbed up on top, up and up to the tableland on the great mesa. I looked down over the edge into a village of ponderosa. Having been down in those trees before, I knew a wealth of pottery shards lay scattered there as well, especially the rarer pieces burnished red, and a number of arrow points, some perfect and gleaming in the sun like gemstones.

  Everywhere I roamed I found the remnants of forgotten lives, forgotten families, forgotten peoples, mostly Anasazi and Navajo who roamed before me. Why forgotten? A trace of them is here—the timbers of an abandoned hogan alongside ancient and scattered potsherds and arrow points—but what could I know about them, really, but that they were here? Their individual stories are gone forever. And so would mine be, the traces of my passing through this country, over this land. My footprints. The ground that I disturbed. The conversation I was having with my dog, which, when released to the air, flew away from me like birds. Yet I could imagine much because at all times walking in the desert, I felt the presence of these peoples, these histories, these stories waiting to be picked up along the roads they traveled. They passed through this place, and now I was passing through it too.

  The Navajos of old rode sturdy ponies and sometimes walked, following their sheep herds and sheepherding dogs. Though they were good farmers, much of Navajo life was about movement. It is still about movement. Indeed, their identity is bound to the way and the places through which they travel. Such a life of movement is not random or unstable; it is movement itself that creates stability, defines the Navajos’ place and affirms their identity. “The deep impulse to run and rove upon the wild earth cannot be given up easily,” writes N. Scott Momaday. “Perhaps it cannot be given up at all.”

  The thought of that comforted me, that perhaps my identity too arose from movement, and that my struggle with staying put, my reluctance to choose a life with Sakura, the place and home and job and children, was wrapped up not in some aberrant flaw in me, some undeveloped or atrophied part of my psyche, but from the indomitable truth of who I was and where I came from. Perhaps, as Momaday claimed, I was born with this deep impulse to range and rove upon the wild earth, and that impulse was not going to go away, even if I wanted it to. I didn’t want an excuse, but I did want to understand.

  Up around the mesa top, I followed Kuma into a field of stones along an edge I had not seen before. I took the lead now, showed him the way, dropping through a slot to a hidden pathway opening to us. It led around the side of the mesa as I walked it, like walking a window ledge around a tall building. Out before me I could see the campus and my trailer and the greening desert floor in the new spring. The air cooled me, and I felt the warm rock radiating the yellow sun. Kuma seemed unaffected by the closeness of the edge, but I pressed up against the cliffside, the long way down spinning out beyond me. We came around a curve in the shape of the mesa, and going back in, it opened into a kind of room with a few juniper and yucca, and scattered cacti near the walls. I thought I had gone as far as I could go.

  Kuma growled low in his throat, his head down, eyes directed up to the rim of the mesa encircling us. Something was up there. I thought of mountain lions. The sun was behind me now. I could see clearly back against the rock, but rock was all I could see. The heat of the day had passed on. The sharpness of the air and the shape of the rock inlet amplified Kuma’s growling. I thought I heard voices. Was it god talking to me, or just the wind? Kuma growled again. I could see nothing. Hear nothing. Maybe it was just the wind.

  “Hel-loo,” said a voice from above.

  The shape of a man appeared, bent over and looking in. In all my months of walking at Borrego, I had never seen another human soul, nor even a sign that anyone had passed my way, except me. The man’s face was sharp and clean, his black hair professionally cut. He wore blue jeans and a white T-shirt. He looked about my age.

  “What are you doin’ here?” he asked down at me.

  “Hello,” I called back, waving.

  “You the teacher here?” he said.

  “Yes,” I said. “I teach down at the school.”

  “Yeah, I know you,” he said. “I’ve seen you walking out here a lot.”

  “I’ve never seen you,” I said.

  “That’s right,” he said.

  “You live here?” I asked him.

  “Back from college,” he said. “In Durango. You know Alice? She’s my aunt.”

  “Yes, I know Alice.”

  “What’re you doin’ up here?”

  “Just walkin’ around.”

  “All right, then. Try going that way,” he said, pointing where I thought the pathway ended. I could see only the edge of the alcove and the long drop down.

  “Go right on around past that little tree,” he said, noticing my skepticism. “There’s some ol’ ruins in there.”

  “Really?” I said. Maybe he could see them from up where he was. He clearly had the advantage. We hadn’t exchanged names, and something told me he didn’t want to. Or maybe I didn’t want to. At that height, talking the way we were, he was hardly a person at all, just a dark figure, a shadow talking down at me.

  “Yeah. You wouldn’t think there was anything back there, but there is.”

  “What kinda ruins?” I asked.

  “It’s an ol’ corn cache. You know. They stored corn in there. There was a road between Chaco and Mexico in the old days. Those Chaco people ran back and forth, and they had to have food along the way. They probably camped here some nights.”

  “Is it all right to go back there?” I asked.

  “Why not?”

  “Just I thought . . .”

  “. . . that Navajos don’t go near places like that?” he said. “That’s just junk. Maybe it’s true, but it’s just junk. I go back there all the time.”

  “I’ll check it out,” I said.

  “Where you come from?” he said.

  “Idaho, but I grew up in Oregon,” I said. “I haven’t lived there in a long time, though. I was living in Japan last year, before I came here.”

  “Wow,
” he said. “Japan. Yeah.” He paused, thinking a moment. “I wanna travel all around like that. That’s what Alice told me. She told me to travel all around. See some places before I get married or something. Experience is better than any kind of money or big house or car or anything. You’re lucky to be able to do that.”

  “Where do you want to go?” I asked.

  “Oh, you know. Everywhere. Anywhere. All around,” he said. “Doesn’t matter so much about where, maybe. Just I want to go somewhere, make a journey somewhere.”

  “That sounds good to me.”

  “That’s right,” he said. “I don’t know where. Maybe I have to go somewhere to know where I’m going.”