Animal Dreams - Barbara Kingsolver [90]
“I don’t know. Maybe they weren’t scared. Maybe they liked the view.”
The doors were built so you’d have to step high to get out. Obviously, for the sake of the children. “Gives you the willies, doesn’t it? The thought of raising kids in a place where the front yard ends in a two-hundred-foot drop?”
“No worse than raising up kids where the frontyard ends in a freeway.”
“You’re right,” I said. “No worse than that. And quieter. Less carbon monoxide.”
“So you do think about that sometimes,” Loyd said.
“About what?”
“Being a mother.”
I glanced at him and considered several possible answers. “All the time,” and “never” seemed equally true. Sometimes I wanted to say, “You had your chance, Loyd, we had our baby and it’s dead.” But I didn’t. That was my past, not his.
“Sure, I think about it,” I said, needing to relieve the pressure in my chest. “I think about hotwiring a Porsche and driving to Mexico, too.”
He laughed. “Only one of the two is legal, I’m told.”
I wanted to try and climb up into the cliff village, but Loyd explained that we’d crack our skulls, plus you weren’t supposed to mess with the antiquities.
“I thought you broke all the rules,” I said, as we climbed back into the truck and headed farther up the canyon.
He looked surprised. “What rules have I broken?”
“Authorized Navajo personnel only, for starters. We’re not even supposed to be down here.”
“We’re authorized guests of Maxine Shorty of the Streams Come Together clan.”
“Does she live here?”
“Not now. Almost everybody drives their sheep out and spends the winter up top, but the farms are down here. Leander and I spent almost every summer here till we were thirteen.”
“You did? Doing what?”
“Working. I’ll show you.”
“Who’s Maxine Shorty?”
“My aunt. I’d like you to meet her but she’s down visiting at Window Rock for the holiday.”
Loyd was full of surprises. “I’ll never get your family straight. How’d you get a Navajo aunt? Are Navajos and Pueblos all one big tribe or something?”
Loyd laughed rather hysterically. It occurred to me that this redneck Apache former cockfighter must find me, at times, an outstanding bonehead. “The Pueblo people were always here,” he explained patiently. “They’re still building houses just like this—the Rio Grande Pueblos, Zuñi, Hopi Mesa. Not in the cliffs anymore, but otherwise just the same. They’re about the only Indians that haven’t been moved off their own place into somebody else’s.”
“And the Navajo?”
“Navajos and Apaches are a bunch that came down from Canada, not that long ago. A few hundred years, maybe. Looking for someplace warmer.”
“And this is now Navajo tribal land, because?”
“Because the U.S. Government officially gave it to them. Wasn’t that nice? Too bad they didn’t give them the Golden Gate Bridge, too.”
The truck crunched over frozen sand. “So the Pueblo are homebodies, and the Navajo and Apache are wanderers.”
“You could look at it that way, I guess.”
“What are you?”
“Pueblo.” There was no hesitation. “What are you?”
“I have no idea. My mother came from someplace in Illinois, and Doc Homer won’t own up to being from anywhere. I can’t remember half of what happened to me before I was fifteen. I guess I’m nothing. The nothing Tribe.”
“Homebody tribe or wanderer tribe?”
I laughed. “Emelina called me a ‘homewrecker’ one time. Or no, what did she say? A ‘home ignorer.’”
He didn’t respond to that.
“So how’d you get a Navajo aunt?” I asked again.
“The usual way. My mother’s brother married her. Pueblo men have to marry out of the clan, and sometimes they go off the pueblo. The land down here stays with the women. So my uncle came here.”
Maxine Shorty’s farm, which she inherited from her mother and would pass on to her daughters, was a triangle bordered by the river and the walls of a short side canyon. We parked by the line of cottonwoods near the river and walked over the icy stubble of a cornfield. A sad scarecrow stood guard. It occurred to me that the barrenness of a winter farm was deceptive; everything was there, it was still fertile,