by Kurt Caswell
That sounded kinda Zen, kinda New Age, kinda canned. But he said it and I couldn’t help but agree.
“That’s right,” I said. “So what do you study in Durango?”
“I don’t know. I’m a communications major. But I don’t know. Maybe I’ll change that next year.”
“To what?” I asked. “What do you want to study?”
“I don’t know. Whatever will take me all around.”
“Sounds good. At least you’re flexible. You don’t have to decide just yet.”
“That’s right,” he said. Then he looked behind him. It was getting darker. “I’m gettin’ home now. Go on and look at that ruins.”
“You going to be around for a few days?” I asked. I thought he was someone I might be able to get to know. He could be a friend, I thought.
“Yeah. A few days,” he said. “I’ll knock on your door, maybe. I know which one is yours.”
“All right,” I said.
He raised his hand and waved goodbye. Then he walked back away from the edge, a dark figure against the sky. I heard his footsteps trailing away. I never saw him again.
I pushed the branches of the little tree aside. Just as he had said, the pathway led on. I followed it and Kuma followed me. Brushing by the tree, and moving over and around a few big rocks, another little room opened up, a bit like the one I’d come out of. There on the southern-facing wall I found the corn cache tucked up under the protection of an overhang. Constructed of stone and mortar, it was about four feet high and three feet in diameter. Not a perfect circle, it bowed in on one side, pressing against the alcove wall that formed the backside of the cache. Looking down into it, I saw the remains of a roof structure, a number of small branches laid out in a crisscrossing pattern, perhaps cottonwood or willow, maybe juniper. Through the roof, scattered on the floor of the cache, I could see pieces of dry corncob, eight hundred years old, maybe older. I scanned the rock face for pictographs and found none. I searched the alcove for anything else I could find. Nothing. Just the corn cache, a simple stone storage bin constructed by a few travelers who had passed this way a long time ago.
I sat down near the cliff edge, the cache behind me now and the whole wide tableland sweeping out in front with the roads running through it. Kuma came nosing under my arm. I held onto his collar and sat him down beside me, fearful that he might approach the edge. I felt the warmth of him alongside my leg. I ruffed his neck and shoulders with my hand, looking out at the desert. It was good hanging out with my dog. Darkness was closing in. I heard the sounds of chirping insects and watched bats slipping and diving in the air against the sky. I felt a presence behind me, maybe the spirits of those ancient travelers who had camped here. Or was it him, the man I had just spoken with, watching me? Or perhaps I imagined something there, a presence that came from inside me, a presence that was my sudden contentment with who and where I was and what I was doing. Whatever, it filled the air around me like moisture, like smoke, like stars. I realized then that I had come to find the desert beautiful. I didn’t know when this had happened. I didn’t arrive here feeling that way. I had yearned daily for water and green trees. But something about this place had taken hold of me and would not let me go. I felt strangely unafraid, like I was in the company of a good friend. I felt like I was in the presence of the ancients themselves. I felt full and warm, alive and happy.
ELEVEN
ROMEO AND JULIET
In March, I had my seventh- and eighth-grade classes reading The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet. I wanted to teach literature, and I wanted to tackle something my students would remember beyond Borrego. At first I thought it was selfish to attempt Shakespeare with kids who spoke Navajo as their first language, English as their second. They would struggle with Shakespeare’s language, I knew, but certainly they could handle a story of misadventured love. In fact, I thought, they would thrive on it. Most of them lived far beyond their age, and some of them, boys and girls both, would have children of their own a year after graduating the eighth grade at Borrego Pass. Not because they were Navajos, but because they lived under conditions that made having children one of their better career options. Having children, they told me, meant they could collect a government assistance check. I imagined them in a few years waiting in line at Smith’s or Wal-Mart in Gallup with a cart full of flour and sugar and babies. Even the sixth graders, as young as they were, enjoyed a daily relationship with the systems of government assistance and knew it would soon be an option for their own livelihood. There was so little time to be a kid in Navajoland.
For example: one day in my sixth-grade class, the boys were laughing and giggling uncontrollably. I didn’t know what they were up to, but it was obvious they had something hidden that amused them. I tried to catch them with it, whatever it was, and then refocus them on our lesson. But in that covert way that kids always outsmart adults, they outsmarted me. I asked again and again to quiet down, quiet down, quiet down! They never did. At the end of class, I learned what had been so funny. They presented me with a stack of little papers, a stack of government assistance checks they had made for me during class. Each had been drawn a little different and issued in my name. One read: “General Assistance Check,” issued to “Kirk Caswell; Age: 21; Height: 6.4; Weight: 64 pounds,” who “works at chapter house,” made out for “12,000” somethings, and stating that the check “goes to the first day of the month.” Another read: “No job for peoples check” and, next to that, “SSI Check,” written in the amount of “one hundred thousand” dollars from “Shane Y.” They issued me an “EBT Card Foodstamp” reporting a purchase of “Cheese 1 pound; orange juice case; milk 2 gallon; candy 14 bars; beans 2 bag” under WIC, the federal supplemental food program for women, infants, and children. At the bottom, my name had been scratched out. Another name appeared there: “Marcella.”
On several occasions, I asked these kids what they were going to do when they finished the eighth grade and graduated from Borrego Pass School. Except for a few, like Renee Benally, the answer I heard most often was “stay home.” Staying home meant having babies and standing in line at the post office on the first day of every month to collect their government check. I had no moral position against staying home and having babies, raising a family, but most of the kids who opted for this life did so as a means of survival; they knew of few other choices. A few easy years might pass before the union of young father and mother grew stale, the family broke up, and the children were shipped off to school to be fed and cared for. Some of these young parents would end up moping around Borrego or Crownpoint or Prewitt for their whole lives, lost and destitute, empty and alone, feeding off the chaff from the Pink Tomahawk bar. Surely it didn’t have to go that way—there had to be people out here who “stayed home” and lived prosperous, rich family lives, prosperous, rich Navajo lives. But I never saw it.
That world, those choices, however, were a few years away, and for now we’d read Shakespeare. I found the text of Romeo and Juliet on CD-ROM in the library, printed it off, copied it however many times, and bound a classroom set of little Shakespeare books.
We read Shakespeare aloud in class, every gorgeous word of Romeo and Juliet. I posted passages from the play on the wall under a banner that read: “Our Pal Mr. Shakespeare.” We talked about tragedy, about romantic relationships, about the difference between young love and mature love; we talked about how choices you make now affect who you are and what happens to you later. We talked about how parents influence their children. How governments influence their people. We talked about making big mistakes that can never be undone. I prepared them for the end of the play, for the end of Juliet and her Romeo. I asked them to memorize lines. They memorized Juliet:O Romeo, Romeo! wherefore art thou Romeo?
Deny thy father and refuse thy name!
And Romeo:Come, bitter conduct; come, unsavoury guide!
Thy drugs are quick. Thus with a kiss I die.
And Juliet:O happy dagger!
This is thy sheath;<
br />
there rust, and let me die.
And the Prince, too:For never was a story of more woe
Than this of Juliet and her Romeo.
As they worked on their lines, I heard Shakespeare reverberating through the hallways of Borrego Pass School, splintered and butchered, and spoken just right. I wondered if this wasn’t the first time that Shakespeare had ever been spoken here.
On those perfect spring days, the clear sky and warm sun seemed to work the kids into a fever, especially the sixth graders, and I found no good reason to hold them indoors. We went out into the world and held classes near the shade tree next to the Special Ed trailer. The seventh and eighth grades could read their Shakespeare, and the sixth grade read aloud from their textbook and wrote in the journals we had made in class. We used blank white paper from the copy machine for the pages and colored construction paper for the covers. Some of the kids left the cover blank. Some of them took great care to decorate the cover by gluing shapes of flowers and butterflies and yellow circles that looked like the Navajo sun. Some days when we were outside I read picture books aloud to the sixth-grade class. After I finished one story, they would pause a little and look at me and someone would say, “One more,” to which everyone would agree.
“Well, then, go pick one out,” I would say.
Someone would run back to the classroom and bring out three more while we loafed in the warm sun. On a number of occasions, I read books like this for the entire class period. Maybe the kids thought they were tricking me, that they were stringing out the fun so they didn’t have to spell any words or take any tests. But I didn’t want to spell words or take tests either. It felt good to be outside in the desert listening to stories. Education, I decided, while I lived on the reservation, had to be defined as much by practice and experience as it was by memorization and exams.
So classes were going well for me that spring, and I thought it had something to do with the way I refocused my teaching. Perhaps, too, I had passed some kind of endurance test with the kids (most of them, anyway) and they came to accept that I was going to make it, at least until the end of the school year. Or maybe the fact that I had begun searching for a new teaching job for the fall allowed me the freedom and relief of knowing my time at Borrego was drawing to a close. Or perhaps something else had changed in me, shifted, so that I was less concerned when things didn’t go as planned. Which was often. Which was almost every day. I felt lighter anyway, more at ease in and out of the classroom, able to take a joke, and sometimes to give one. I got on well with the kids.
I began to think more and more about my students. They would benefit from the stability of my staying another year. They didn’t have to like me, or even like studying language arts. In the classroom they needed structure, consistency, and routine. They needed a predictable, safe environment to learn to read and write English. Borrego offered such a learning environment in the self-contained classrooms of the first through fifth grades. Many of those teachers were Navajo and intended to stay for a long time, for their entire career maybe, because Borrego was home. But in the three upper grades, where the kids moved from teacher to teacher, classroom to classroom, they encountered several white teachers like me and Lauren, youngish white teachers in the early stages of their careers who intended to stay one year, two at the most. Some didn’t make it that long.
I felt like I had achieved a modest level of respect and order in my classroom that spring. For the most part, my students were coming in and doing their work. If I left now, they would start over with a new teacher in the fall, subjecting him or her to the same kinds of trials I had endured, which would once again result in a classroom focused on discipline rather than learning. It would be rough for the new teacher, to be sure, but the real tragedy was that these kids were getting half the education they needed and deserved. In a typical year, the kids devoted the first semester to frying the new teacher. If that teacher endured, they devoted the second semester to learning. I didn’t think that Navajos should learn how to be little white kids in school—indeed, I believed they should guard against it—but education opened doors. The English language opened doors. I wanted to offer these kids a world of choices, so that they might be able to choose a suitable life and a life’s work. Not for my sake. Not so that I could better the future of the Navajo Nation—I didn’t believe I was saving the Indians from the white man, or from themselves—or for the advancement of society and culture, but just for them. Just for these individual kids. Just to offer the kids I had come to know a few more life options.
I also heard warnings about staying on another year. Mary was looking to move on. I wondered how I would do without her friendship and support. I lived alone at Borrego, but I always felt Mary’s steadiness and experience backing me up. Lauren would still be living in Grants with Phil, but she wasn’t planning to teach at Borrego that next fall either. She’d had enough, she said. Things were much rosier at Laguna Middle School, where Phil worked for a progressive, intelligent, fair principal and school board. Lauren thought she would soon have a job offer there. Mr. Wiseman and Jane talked about leaving, about returning to Indiana. They said that when Miles left the self-contained classroom and entered the sixth grade next year, he would have a rough time of it in the hallways and on the playground. Already the older boys threatened him whenever they could. Miles had taken up karate lessons in Gallup. Regardless, Mr. Wiseman said, it was simply a matter of time before Miles got the shit beat out of him, and maybe he shouldn’t have to endure that just to go to school.
So. Most of my friends were leaving.
One day down at the Trading Post, Merle offered me this advice: “You should leave that school, you know. The politics are bad. Real bad. And you can’t do nothing to fix it, or fix those kids. So think about what’s best for you. That’s what you should do.”
“All right,” I said, holding up my ice cream bar. “What’s the biggest city in the United States?”
“Albuquerque!” said Joseph Jones.
“China!” said John George.
“No, wait. Texas!” said Charlie Hunter.
And then George George said, “Borrego Pass!” and everyone laughed.
I rolled my eyes, holding the ice cream aloft.
This lunch ritual started one day that spring when Shane Yazzie eyed my chocolate cupcake and said, “Hey, Mr. Caswell. Can I have your dessert?” Since he asked, I gave it to him. The next day someone else asked for whatever dessert I had, and again I said yes. It wasn’t long before I was the most popular teacher at lunch, surrounded by kids, especially sixth-grade boys, who competed for the seats closest to me. Usually someone would pop the question just as I finished eating. As the competition stiffened, the question came earlier and earlier. It came just as I sat down, for example. Then as I waited in the lunch line. And one morning Shane accosted me in the hall as I made my way to my first class of the day.
“Can I have your dessert today, Mr. Caswell? I didn’t get it now for a looong time.”
Well, that got to be too much. I said, “How about we have a little contest at lunch. I’ll ask a question, and the first one to answer correctly gets my dessert.”
Shane thought about this a moment. “What kind of question?” he asked.
“Whatever question I think up,” I said.
“Will I ever know the answer?” he asked.
“I think so,” I said. “You go and tell everyone we’re having a contest.”
“Okay, I’ll do it,” Shane said, excited to be the bearer of the news. “Laters!”
That’s how it got started. After about one week, the novelty had mostly gone out of it for me, but I didn’t know how to stop it.
The ice cream bar was getting a little soft in my hand, but no one had the answer yet.
“Ah, c’mon, Mr. Cas-will,” William Brown said. “Give it to me. It looks real good. It looks like mines!”
“For what?” I said. “You have to answer the question.”
“We
ll, then, ask me one I know,” he said.
“What’s the biggest city in the United States?”
“Aw, shit,” he said.
“William!” said Bernadette, the eighth-grade class sponsor, from the table behind us. “Clean up your mouth.”
“Okay! Yes, ma’am, I will.” And then under his breath he said again, “Aw, shit.” And then to me, raising his voice now, “Now c’mon, give it to meee.”
“Only if you answer the question,” I said. “What’s the biggest city in the United States?”
“You mean people or size, like bigness?” Gay DeLuz asked. “ ’Cause it’s different, isn’t it?”
I hadn’t been aware of her sitting there. She rarely spoke to me now after the pie incident. “You’re right. It is different,” I said. “I mean people. What city has the most people?”
“New York,” she said.
“Bingo!” I said, and handed the ice cream to Gay.
She smiled big, not so much for the ice cream, I guessed, but because she had answered the question correctly and showed up all those boys.
“Ah, man!” William said, and the whole table cleared out, everyone running for the door to get outside into the sun.
To get a break from the contest now and again I sat with Vanessa Angel, Teresa Smith, and Renee Benally whenever they asked me to. And sometimes when they didn’t. They were not so interested in my dessert, and especially not my game, but they had invented another game and they loved for me to play it. The three of them talked to me in Navajo to see how I might answer or to test my pronunciation of hard-to-say words. They would ask if I knew what certain words meant. Sometimes they would tell me, and sometimes they would not. Like shash, I learned, means “bear,” and nizhóní means “good” or “beautiful,” and dibé means “sheep,” and chon means “shit.” They also wanted me to repeat certain words that were difficult to pronounce, like “horse,” which requires a force of air into the nose and so vibrates it and sounds funny, like you’re talking with your nose plugged. I’d try. They’d laugh. “Do it again,” they’d say, and so I would.
