by John Masters
John said, ‘Let me see it then, friend.’
The man unbuckled the wide belt with six great ovals of worked silver on it. It was good, John thought, very good, and the silver was studded with turquoise … it looked like high-grade Nevada turquoise, as Reinhart had taught him. He could send for Reinhart now, but damn it, he had to learn to make these decisions for himself. He thought, silver’s about $1.35 an ounce now, and there must be a couple of pounds of it in the belt, plus the turquoise, and of course, the man’s time and labour. He said, ‘A hundred and fifty dollars … for a year.’
The man said, ‘Benally Bekis, look at it. A hundred and seventy-five.’
‘A hundred and fifty,’ John said. He smiled – ‘And a cup of coffee.’
The Indian said, ‘It is done.’ They shook hands and John wrote out the pawn slip, calling, ‘Mary, bring coffee.’
Half an hour later, the coffee drunk, the Navajo, whose name was Chischilly Nez, walked out, climbed on to his pony and rode away at a walk, into the north-west wind. A few minutes later Reinhart came in, rubbing his eyes, ‘Overslept a bit, John … What did Chischilly Nez want?’
‘You know him?’
‘Sure. He usually works the Grand Canyon, selling fakes to tourists at Williams as they get off the train … Ah, he pawned that?’ He picked up the concho belt, lying on the countertop, and examined it carefully. His breath smelled sour, John thought, and his hands were shaking. Reinhart said, ‘This is not handmade … the silver’s not pure, either. It was probably made in one of those factories in Phoenix or Fort Worth … Chischilly roughed it about a bit to make it look older, and handmade.’
‘What’s it worth?’
‘What you can sell it for,’ Reinhart said, grinning. ‘The tourists aren’t going to know any better.’
‘They will, sooner or later,’ John said grimly. ‘Especially after we publish the book we are planning on Navajo arts and crafts. It’s probably worth about sixty dollars then – the turquoise is good?’
Reinhart nodded – ‘That’s about it. But sell it for what you can get, and before the pawn date. Every Navajo on the reservation will know in a day or two that you’ve been had, and will respect you for getting back at Chischilly.’
John said, ‘Sorry, we’re not going to do business that way. I’ll hold it for the full year and then try to sell it for sixty dollars, and tell the buyer why he’s getting it at that price.’ He looked directly at Reinhart, ‘And I think it’s time you left. Thank you for all you’ve taught me, but … let’s part friends.’
Reinhard said, ‘Dropping the pilot, eh? … Well, it had to come sooner or later. I’ll be moseying along.’
‘Goodbye.’ John watched him go. Now they were alone – he and Stella, and Peace: and the Navajos, their canyons, mesas and deserts, their impassive faces, their secret thoughts.
The twenty or so hogans constituting Toh Natsi were not grouped together in a single settlement. The Navajo people did not like crowding, and they did like privacy; so the hogans were scattered over an area of three or four square miles along the banks of a sandy wash, which carried no water for most of the year. The people took their water – and the settlement its name – from a perpetual spring that trickled out from under the base of the red cliffs that bordered the wash on the south: Toh means water.
Stella Merritt, wearing a pleated Navajo skirt of deep blue taffeta, and a concho belt, a pink blouse, and a blanket thrown over her shoulders, reined in her pony and looked down from the top of the cliffs. Smoke rose from the nearest hogan … that was Hostin Yazzie’s, Mary had said. She should go there, Mary said, though she would be given shelter at any hogan, as a stranger … even though they knew her. Hostin Yazzie had lost a son to the war, like the Benallys from Sanostee to the north; the Yazzie boy had not been killed: he had done worse – married an American girl from the East and settled in New York.
Peace was asleep in his blankets, looped and fastened in front of her. When they were at Fort Defiance in the Indian Service she had watched the Navajo women, herding the sheep, carrying their babies with them so, or in their arms, tied to cradle boards. The children were always calm and quiet, staring at her with big, round black eyes. And she had watched the white women, keeping their babies indoors from the sun, guarding them from the desert winds, the snakes and scorpions and unknowable germs; and in the same act, guarding from them the tremendous sunsets, the sense of height and space, the great sky, the sand, the wind. Now they were free, and she meant to go out among the people, all through the land, doing her husband’s work, and she would take Peace with her, that he who had a birth of shame, and had no soil to call his own, might find it here. She carried no heroin, only three or four buttons of peyote; but she did not think she would need even them.
She stirred, and rode the pony down the steep trail from the mesa into Toh Natsi.
Outside the first hogan, by an unguarded loom, she reined in and waited. A woman came out and said, ‘They are away. They will be back by night.’
Stella knew that the woman was speaking of the men of the hogan. She said, ‘I am Benally’s Friend’s Woman.’
‘We know. I am Nahilhabah Ashkey.’
That was old man Yazzie’s second wife. She was young, Mary had said; but that could mean anything. She was probably thirty-five, and looked fifty.
Stella swung carefully down from the pony’s back and leading it a little distance off, hobbled it. The wind was blowing colder every day, but it would not snow tonight. The pony was a Navajo pony and would not freeze; Navajo ponies were never stabled.
She returned to the hogan and the woman said, ‘Come,’ and went in, stooping through the tunnel-like east-facing entrance.
There was another woman in there, much younger – one of the sons’ wives, probably, stooped over the small fire, a pot on it. Like most hogans, the structure was hexagonal, about twenty feet in diameter, the walls of mud-chinked logs cantilevered in as they climbed higher to form a low domed roof, plastered with mud, leaving a hole in the centre as a chimney. The beaten earth of the floor was bare, except where sheep pelts and blankets had been laid along the outer wall, to sit on by day, to sleep in at night. Stella unfastened Peace and set him on the floor, noticing that the blankets along the wall were well-designed, well and carefully made. Mary was right; the Yazzie women were excellent weavers. Peace crawled away from her towards two other children, nearly naked, playing beyond the fire. For a moment Stella watched the baby, then remembered; she was in a Navajo house. If there was need, the babies would be tended to. Meantime, leave them alone.
She said, ‘Benally Bekis hopes you will bring in more rugs.’ She spoke in Navajo, not fluent, but it could be understood, unless she mismanaged the inflections that changed, say, ‘food’ to ‘star’.
The woman at the fire said, ‘He has taken over the Trading Post from Narrow Nose, they say. I have not seen it myself.’
‘It is true. We want the Dinneh to get more money for their goods. Benally Bekis’s father is coming, in the Big Snow month, and we hope will come also one who writes … writes about such work as yours, in the big cities … that they might know how good it is, and pay more, for more we will then ask.’
The senior woman said, ‘We can not make more, unless we make badly. We will not make badly.’
Stella said, ‘We do not want to buy or sell bad work.’
One of the children wailed. Stella thought Peace was chewing on something he had picked up off the dusty rug – perhaps a bone, or a crust of bread dipped in mutton fat. She said, ‘It is the same with the turquoise and silver’ – she touched her concho belt and the heavy bracelet on one wrist – ‘The man who writes, will write that that work too is of value. Let the men, the hastoi, also know this.’
‘They will return before dark,’ the senior woman said. ‘You are not afraid to leave Benally Bekis alone with Mary Begay? She is young and pretty, and she has lived among Americans.’
Stella smiled, ‘I am not afraid. Bena
lly Bekis is my friend, as well as my husband. We have seen much together. We have seen pain together … That design has a name, sister?’
‘Red Mountain Turtle, sister.’
‘I have not seen it at any trading post.’
‘It is not taken there. It is from the time of the Long Walk … It was made for a sing for deliverance from that place where the Americans took us … My father was taken, he saw the first carpet of this Red Mountain Turtle, made there by a woman of the Tshectalaini clan … We do not sell it, because it belongs to us, alone. No one who is not of the Dinneh could feel, seeing it, lying on it, what should be felt, and seen … and suffered.’
Stella said nothing. It was proper. She would not try to persuade them to sell Red Mountain Turtle rugs, though they were very beautiful. She would not even mention the design to John. In time, he would learn about it, in his own way, and in the Dinneh’s own time.
The hours passed; the women took the pot off the fire, and all ate out of it with their fingers. She, and the other women, found pieces of mutton and bread and beans and gave them to Peace. The men of the hogan came in, glanced at her, said nothing, ate, talked among themselves, curled up in their blankets, and went to sleep. Stella followed their example, lying beyond the fire, smelling the night, cold seeping down through the smokehole and gradually spreading across the floor as the ashes turned from red to pink to grey.
From Toh Natsi she rode to Lukachukai, and spent three days there, too; then to Dinnehuitso – three more days … then back to Merritt’s. Peace on her saddle bow. Now it was December, and Peace liked to sleep on the floor on a blanket, wrapped in another, not in his cot under sheets and blankets. He had spoken his first word – Toh: water.
This day, a week later, Stella awoke feeling that today she would come to some great decision, would make some great discovery; but she did not know what. Perhaps she would finally give up peyote in its turn, as the weed had supplanted heroin. Perhaps … she did not know. This feeling she had was not a Christian, or white, or ‘American’ feeling, and certainly not English. It was Navajo; like the Navajo, she would wait for it to express itself, not necessarily in her or for her …
Nothing happened, except that John seemed to be off his food, and by nightfall was wearing a drawn expression. At midnight, he was tossing and turning, she asked him what was the matter; and at last he told her his stomach hurt. An hour later he was up in a hurry, and out into the cold wind and whirling dust. When he returned, he told her that he had vomited. There was no more vomiting and no diarrhoea, and in the morning he went to work in the Post, but looking more drawn than ever. Stella badgered him until he admitted that his belly was hurting more than ever, the pain centred in the right lower section. Mary, squatting in the corner of the room teaching Stella to weave, looked worried, and whispered that they had a famous ‘medicine man’ in Toh Natsi who could perform a sing for Benally’s Friend, which would cure him. Perhaps, Stella thought, but what could she do now to alleviate his pain? She found the first-aid book they had bought in New York, and studied the various disease symptoms … Influenza – this wasn’t in the chest, so it wasn’t the Spanish flu that was still sweeping the world, and which he had already had, in Beighton … Beighton, dear God, did it exist, did England exist? … Typhoid? The symptoms were not the same at all … Appendicitis – discomfort in the mid-abdomen gradually radiating to the right lower abdomen … pain increasing in severity … cramping and increasing tenderness … generally no fever or febrile symptoms … This was it.
She went to him, where he was leaning over the counter doubled up in pain, and said, ‘I think you have appendicitis, John. I’m going to take you to Fort Defiance and let Dr Owings look at you.’
John muttered between clenched teeth – ‘Indian Service doctors are not allowed to treat anyone but Indians.’
‘Except in emergency!’ she said. She turned to Mary Begay – ‘I am going to the Fort with Benally Bekis. Stay here with Peace. Sell what you can if anyone comes. The prices are marked. Do not buy or take pawn.’ Mary would have loved to haggle, the Navajos’ chief pleasure in life; but she’d have to accept the boring routine of selling at the fixed price.
Together they dressed the patient in warm clothes, and helped him out to the Model T standing in front of the Trading Post. One of the men came out of the nearest hogan, watched for a few moments, and went back inside. They tucked John in the back, where he could lie curled up, and covered him with blankets. Then Mary wound the starting-handle crank, the engine fired, and Stella drove off carefully down the rutted track towards the main north-south cart trail from Shiprock to Gallup, near the eastern edge of the reservation. She should reach Fort Defiance in three or four hours.
It was then noon; an hour later, it began to snow. The snowflakes whirled in under the canvas roof of the tourer, covering the blankets under which her husband lay with snow. The windshield clotted so that she had to turn it down, and drive with the snow packing on her goggles: she always wore goggles driving in the reservation, if not against the dust, then the glare; and now, she was seeing her first real Navajo snowstorm. An hour later, going very slowly through the blinding storm, she missed the road, and the Ford dropped five feet off a culvert on to a big rock. It was a teeth-jarring crash, and she heard the sharp metallic crack at the front, and knew, before she climbed out into the snow, that the front axle was broken.
The snow was not very wet, and the temperature was dropping. It must be below freezing now; and would be near ten degrees by nightfall. She had travelled this road half a dozen times, and thought there was a hogan or two somewhere close by. Through the whirl of the snow she made out the loom of the reddish cliffs … to the right, the west … a notch, the hogans had been under there … She bent over John and shouted, ‘Front axle’s broken. I’m going for help. Don’t move.’
He moaned, through gritted teeth … ‘Don’t … get lost …’ She covered him again with the blankets, realising in that act that suddenly, without warning, they were both facing death. This, then, was what her yesterday’s ‘feeling’ had portended. It has taken its time in revealing itself, but now it was here. No one might come on this track now for a week. Fort Defiance was fifteen miles away over the Chuskas, or twenty-five by the track round the southern end of them. Their fate depended on whether she could find the hogans she remembered.
She set off, head bent against the snow, her blanket wrapped tight round her upper body, the deerskin Navajo moccasins sinking deep in the snow … four inches of it so far … She thrust on, snow crusting her goggles, stinging her cheeks, her hands biting cold … A corral … a score of sheep, huddled in it, beside a lone juniper, gnarled and twisted, its grey branches beginning to bend down under the weight of the snow on them. The hogans would be very close – but in which direction?
She moved on carefully. The cliffs disappeared for a minute, appeared again, vanished once more. She saw the notch once, then not again. Suddenly she stopped … smoke! She had smelled smoke. She turned this way and that. The wind was from the north-west. She moved into it, staring … there, half-right, something straight-sided … a hogan. She struggled towards it and entered. It was crowded – three men, four women, five children, a fire burning, a pot on it.
She said, ‘Shenaali! I am Benally Bekis Be’tsan … he is in the car – sick … The car is broken.’
The men rose, wrapped their blankets around them, and followed her out into the snowstorm. Twenty minutes later, following what she could of her footsteps, and walking with the wind over her left shoulder, as it had been on her right cheek coming out, she led them to the car. An inch of snow had drifted in over John by now. The Indians muttered among themselves, and at last two lifted John out and hoisted him on to the back of the third, a strong young man of about twenty-five. Thus loaded, they went slowly back to the hogan, and laid John down inside. The men stood over him, silent. One of the women said to Stella, ‘We have medicine for that.’
Stella had been thinking, all
the time they were coming back from the car. It was certainly appendicitis. She could not operate; and John’s treatment could not wait. She said, ‘Benally Bekis has’ – she said the word in English – ‘appendicitis’. She pointed to her lower belly on the right side. She didn’t know whether the men had understood or not; she continued – ‘He must go to the Fort Defiance medicine man – now’
The men said nothing for a while, then the elder said, ‘I am Peshlakai. It will take six, seven hours to the Fort. In the snow, perhaps longer. If it becomes colder, we may not reach there.’
She knew he meant, we may die, of cold, of exhaustion, buried under snow, in a pass of the Chuskas. She said, ‘I know, Hostin Peshlakai … It must be done if it can be.’
Peshlakai said, ‘It can be, if the gods help us.’ He turned and spoke rapidly. Stella did not understand much that was said, but saw that the women began to bustle, pulling meat out of the pot and wrapping it in corn leaves, bringing bread from a wooden box by the door. The men had all gone out into the snow. Stella waited.
The woman who had spoken before said, ‘Eat, sister. It may be many hours.’
She ate what was given to her. John, lying beside her on the rugs, was pale as the ashes, his face contorting with pain, his forehead wet with sweat, his teeth bared, as he grated them to suppress his cries. An hour passed. Stella became more and more fidgety … but there was nothing else to do, that was proper, except wait.
Eventually the men returned. And Peshlakai said, ‘We are ready.’ Two of them came and wrapped John like a mummy in blankets, even to his head, wrapping the blankets round him, then two rugs, then tying them all firm with rawhide cords. Struggling outside with them, Stella saw that they had made a travois, and it was harnessed now to a pony. Two other ponies stood beside the first, heads down. The men lifted John’s mummy-like shape on to the travois and tied it yet more firmly in place. Then Peshlakai pointed to the nearest pony, looking at Stella, and she swung up into the saddle. The older of the two other men followed suit on the second pony. One woman stood in the entrance to the hogan, watching. Without a word, Peshlakai struck the travois pony’s flank with the flat of his hand, and it set off, one hoof after another plodding into the snow, now seven inches deep. The trailing poles of the travois made deep tracks in the snow as John’s weight rode easily on them. The young Indian trotted briefly to get in front, to make trail. Stella followed in the rear. The snow continued to fall diagonally, the wind slowly shifting from north-west to north as the evening approached.
