The Darkness Rolling (5 page)

“Who is my father? What I carry of him is that question.… He died before I was born, I know that. You and Grandpa never utter one word about him. I don’t even know his name.”

She stood up in front of me and put both hands on my chest.

“You are several tribes, and there is no split. If you were being introduced to a Navajo family you didn’t know—believe it or not, that might happen one day—then you will say who you are. Tell me. Say it.”

I felt ridiculous, but I said it. Long time since I did that, in the Navajo way of introductions. “My Grandfather is born to Jew and born for Jew, no Navajo. My mother is born to the Bitter Water people and born for Jew. I am the same, my mother’s clan and my grandfather’s.” Here I got stuck, but just a little. “I do not use my father, because I don’t know his name or his clan. And, in our way, the father is the man who stays to raise the child. So my clan is my grandfather’s.”

She looked up at me. “And that is everything you need to know.”

My father stayed where he had always been with my mother.
Don’t know, don’t care.
“Your son, Yazzie Goldman,” I said to her, “born to the Bitter Water people, born for Jew.”

Her eyes smiled and her back was straight. “You’ve got to get used to being who you are, Yazzie. It’s time.”

And then there was something. A noise, a feeling? Something.

“What is that?” I said.

“What?”

“That sound outside the window. A rustling.”

She sat still and straight, shook her head. “Nothing. You’ve been living around so much noise that country silence sounds like a roar.”

She stood and walked into the kitchen, the heart of our home, to finish cooking dinner for the family. I moved the curtain to the side, looking and listening. Probably just a passing wind tossing the squawberry branches. I closed the curtains, sat back down, and buried myself in Cervantes.

*   *   *

Twenty-five years ago, when Zopilote came back from that last long ride on the whiskey—for three moons he had been gone—he found his boots and a worn-out saddle on the front porch. That was the time-polished way for a Navajo woman to say, “You’re no longer my husband. Take your belongings, get going, and don’t come back.”

In that moment on the porch he stood transfixed, rigid with a desire to have words with her. Mose Goldman opened the door and stood behind the latched screen, glaring at him. Then, without making a sound, he slowly closed the heavy door in the face of the discarded husband.

Zopilote had left his belongings, rode over a low rise, tied the pony, and walked back. Though he was sober, he wove and stumbled like a drunk, feeling for the first time the stirring of the Darkness Rolling that Holy Wind had breathed into him.

He hid in some rocks and watched the post. Not that he damn well couldn’t guess what had already happened. What was going to happen.

It didn’t take long. A Mexican was hovering around his wife, a friend of the big Jew from Santa Fe. This man had come out the previous autumn with some rich white men who brought big cameras and wanted to be packed into Rainbow Bridge for an exploration. Mose had accommodated them as packer and guide.

And now his wife, Nizhoni, had surely accommodated the Mexican in bed. Their bed.

When the three went to the dinner table that night, Zopilote crept to a window and listened. Everything he needed to hear was in one word. The Mexican called Zopilote’s wife by the fond name Novia. Betrothed. Zopilote knew the odd Mexican custom of a couple’s declaration of plans to wed—becoming
novia
and
novio
to each other—and then a ceremony in one of their fancy churches.
Very holy, getting permission from the gods to bed another man’s woman. My woman.

That evening the Mexican did not even come out and pretend to go to his sleeping place in the barn loft. The lanterns went dark in the main part of the house, but not in the bedrooms. Zopilote flew like a raptor outside the bedroom he’d shared with his wife, screwed his eyes into a corner of the window, and saw what he trembled to see. The
novia
and
novio
stripped off every stitch and got into bed together. Then, madly, she straddled him.

Rage exploded inside Zopilote. He crept to one side of the outhouse and waited. By chance, they walked out of the house together, carrying a single lantern. The Mexican waited while his wife—
wife!
—went inside. As the door closed, Zopilote struck.

His blade dug deep and hard into the chest. The Mexican roared with pain. So did Zopilote. That rage and agony, bullhorned, was the most satisfying moment of his life.

His wife burst out of the outhouse screaming. While she watched—he
wanted
her to see him, he wanted her to know who had burned her new life to ashes—he grabbed the Mexican’s head from behind and pulled it back. Fixing his eyes on his wife’s face, he slit the Mexican’s throat.

Her screams brought her father running with a shotgun. Zopilote threw the knife at him. As the Jew dodged, Zopilote dashed behind the outhouse and sprinted into the darkness. He heard the bang of the weapon but felt not a single pellet touch him. He ran laughing into the darkness, his personal darkness.

On that terrible and magnificent night, Zopilote gloried in the thought of the Mexican’s death. If the Mexican’s spirit was still nearby, if the Mexican wanted him …
Come to me!
He shouted in his mind.
This is the beginning.

Now, at the climax of those years, stoking his fire of hatred in the heat of prison, he yearned to see them. He decided to sneak close. He wanted to taste a thin slice of the life stolen from him. He found a crack in the curtains and peered through.

His son sat on the familiar leather sofa, holding a book. His wife, the boy’s mother, Nizhoni, chattered at him like a bird. Women.

Zopilote’s eyes recorded the details of the room. Scores of photos, probably displays of all the happiness these three had enjoyed and taken from him, this family that should have been his, all of their doings. The old man’s shotgun, there where it had always been, a relic. Family smiles inside picture frames. Jokes. Remembrances. The sight of gold sunsets, turning to red and purple. The smell of dawn air. The feel of monsoon rains on parched skin. The rhythm of a good horse sprinting. The touch of a woman. The deep tang of whiskey. Hints of what could have been. Perhaps more children.

During those years his own spirit thirsted, and the Holy Wind parched his soul.

One day, after they had been punished, when her body lay violated nearby, Zopilote would walk around that room, study those photos at his leisure, and rejoice.

His soul reveled. He was home.

*   *   *

Mom interrupted my reading, sat down on the sofa close to me. “The stew needs just a few more minutes.”

She looked at me for a long while. Her mind turned to fretting, the other side of my mother’s coin. She rattled on about the problems of the trading post. We sold very little. We did trade, Navajo to Navajo, even when we knew we couldn’t resell the items for a decent price. The post was barely afloat. Then the worst: In the last few months, when Grandpa was sick and then in rehab, she had to close down and lose their customers to Goulding’s. Mike Goulding, Harry Goulding’s wife, had done everything possible to help them out, and sometimes she’d paid them more than their stock was worth.

“We were okay in Santa Fe,” Mom said. Though Grandpa’s relatives had mostly scattered, his sister Frieda still lived in the old family house, which was said to be grand at one time, and no one went hungry there. Mom had spent a fortune on Grandpa’s medical bills, sold off treasures at half of their value, and still she would have a hard time paying off the rest without my help.

“When we got back from Santa Fe, your Grandpa and I would have wasted away except that my family and our neighbors brought us quarters of deer meat.” Mom looked down at her hands, folded in her lap. “Very tough time.”

Her family’s tribute to their legendary benefactor, Mose Goldman.

From time to time she glanced out the window, probably watching for truck lights.

“But a new year came, and what a difference,” she said. “That call from you saying you were headed home? What a blessing.”

“Then,” I teased her, “the news about John Ford that you kept from me.”

“A giant boost for us. For the whole valley.”

My mother wrote to storekeepers and traders we knew in Flagstaff, promised them good discounts on our wool, our rugs, our everything. Our necks stuck out on the chopping block farther yet.

“We’ve never lived high on the hog, but we weren’t in debt. Now…?”

Lights flicked across the living room windows. YouKnowWho was turning the pickup toward the hitching post. The mystery woman.

Mom jumped up. “Good that Mr. Ford is back,” she said, her eyes dancing. “And you’ve come home just in time. Just in time.”

The back door scraped open a few inches and got stuck.

“Yazzie, help her with that.” Mom ran into the kitchen, and I followed after. Grandpa sat at the pine table, using his weak arm to lift a can of beans over his head. Back down on the table. Up over his head again. His barbell, a can of beans.

Looked like I would have to rehang that door. A lift up from inside and there stood …

Who’s this?

A young woman slipped by, olive-skinned, with crinkly black hair down to her waist. She could have been a Navajo, except that she was wearing pants and had a kitten on one shoulder.

“Hi, Grandpa,” she called. “Hi, Nizhoni, hi…” She noticed me standing behind the door. “You must be Yazzie.”

A good face. Never mind the almond shape, pert mouth, and bowed nose. She had eyes big as dinner plates and the blue-violet color of forget-me-nots.

She stuck out her hand. “I’m Iris.” I shook, and she gripped like a white man.

Then she smiled big and her face turned a funny corner. One of her two upper front teeth twisted half-sideways like a door ajar. I smiled, and I stared right at the open door in her mouth. Rude, but it caught me off guard. “I came out with your Grandma Frieda. Oh. I know. Very original teeth!” She touched the tooth with the tip of a finger. And then she laughed.

Perky beauty with a kitten friend.

I wondered how Grandma Frieda got into this picture. Then I remembered—she’d mentioned a daughter, her daughter, in some of her letters to us from New York. Those letters that came, regular as clockwork, even before she’d moved back to Santa Fe. Frieda was Grandpa’s baby sister.

Iris sat down next to Grandpa and kissed him on the cheek. He didn’t miss a beat with that can of beans.

“Wait,” I said, “you’re my aunt?” My head started to pound. This Navajo family relations business could give a person a headache.

She cocked her head.

I said, “I call you Aunt Iris?”

“You want a black eye? It’s Iris,” she said. “But I get it. Navajos call their mother’s sister ‘mother,’ and you call our grandmother’s sisters ‘grandmother.’”

She was kind of an exotic wise-ass. Good-looking, probably a couple of years older than me. Strange to think of her as my aunt.

I couldn’t take my eyes off the kitten.

“You want to hold him?” She reached the cat out to me, and I took it. Not bad—cuddly.

“His name is Cockeyed.”

I looked a question at her.

“Take a gander at his right eye.”

I held the kitten up in front of my face. Sure enough, while the left eye looked straight at me, the right one pointed out and up, seeing who knows what?

“I’m cockeyed in one tooth, and he’s the same in one eye.”

“Where’d you get him?” Definitely not from around here—he would have been coyote chow by now.

“When Mom and I drove Uncle Mose and Nizhoni out here, I brought him along for company. He was barely weaned, and he’s still just a kitty.”

“Don’t let him run around outside—you won’t have him long.”

My mother had ladled food into beautiful hand-beaten silver bowls and onto Pueblo pottery serving dishes. She took one last look around the kitchen and announced, “Dinner is ready!”

I walked into the dining room and flipped on the lights above the table, bulbs affixed to a wagon wheel, the local version of a chandelier.

Iris put Cockeyed on her shoulder and quick-footed it in the direction of food, carrying serving bowls to the dining table. She went back into the kitchen, her hands ever-moving. It seemed that was her way, hands never still, body in perpetual motion. It was like she was dancing to a tune only she could hear.

Grandpa wheeled himself to the head of the table. Mom slid a tray of hot fry bread next to him and plunked down a jar of honey. She sat at Grandpa’s left, Iris next to her, and I sat across from the women, still mystified.

Mom’s face was animated now. “How do you like our surprise?”

Grandpa grinned in his distorted way.

Mom jumped in. “Frieda knows what family is. Which is why she drove out, got Grandpa and me, and carted us right back with her to Santa Fe when we needed help. What a woman, sixty years old, more like twenty, and driving that dirt road from Flagstaff? Then your grandfather decided he’d had enough rehab”—she gave Grandpa a look of disapproval—“and Frieda drove us back here. Iris came along.…”

“And I fell in love with the place.”

“Now we can’t get rid of you.” Mom tried to grin.

“You’ve been herding sheep?” I said. Unbelievable.

“Am I enamored of that part of life here? I think not. Who would love camping out and watching sheep curl their wool and squirt shit five days a week? And what has Nizhoni sent me out to eat but canned Spam and biscuits? I mean, awright, I’m no observant Jew, but
Spam
? And the biscuits, cold and stale? Thank God I had Cockeyed to talk to.”

Iris’s accent was strong, and I’d heard women say cuss words before, although not many.

“Mom’s not really tough,” I said. “She’s just trying to promote you to Jake Charlie status.”

Iris stuck out her tongue at me.

My aunt had pizzazz.

“Why did you come from New York, which to me might as well be Paris, to this far end of the planet? And stay?” The whole family had visited us, but not since Great-Grandpa died, maybe eight years ago. Centuries ago, it felt like.