Anna Redsand

***

 

In April of 2008, my mother called early in the morning before I could leave for work. "Your daddy's gone to Glory," she said. She had never before called him your daddy. Not to me. It felt odd. Later I remembered that she and her sisters never stopped calling my grandfather Daddy. But I had stopped calling my father Daddy years earlier. People do and say things they otherwise wouldn't when someone has just died. It was like my mother to say he'd "gone to Glory," in a rare moment of allowing herself to be dramatic.

I called in to work after talking with my mother and drove to Gallup, 136 miles from where I lived. I needed to see my father before the morticians got their hands on him. I went straight to the mortuary, and they told me they wouldn't let me see him, that I wouldn't want to, until they fixed him up. I went outside, sat on a bench in the sun and cried. Not from grief, probably not even so much because I needed that time with him, but from a feeling of powerlessness. The funeral director saw me and had a change of heart. She took me to a small room where my father lay on a gurney, zipped up to his hands and chest in a plastic, navy blue body bag. His mouth gaped, I suppose in his last gasp for air, but his eyes were closed.

 

I touched my father's bony hands. They were cold. I sat by his side and told him things I hadn't been able to tell him when his mind had left him or before that when he was so angry with me for not following his path. I told him, "Thank you for taking care of me. Thank you for teaching me that there is a life of the spirit. Thank you for teaching me to read the Diné language when I was starting to read English. Thank you for telling me about Diné life as you believed it was. I'm sorry we couldn't talk better with each other at the end. I love you, Dad." I cried a little but not a lot, and then I left and went to see my mother.

She was baffled when I told her I'd been to see my dad and how difficult it had been just to be allowed to see him. "Why did you think you needed to see him that way anyway? And why did you need to go by yourself?" I thought if I had to explain it, she probably wouldn't understand, so I let her questions lie between us.

Three days later, we all went to the funeral home and had family time with my dad in the pine coffin my brothers had built. The mortician had sewn Dad's lips shut. He couldn't yell at me anymore to tell me that on Judgment Day I would pray for the rocks and the mountains to fall on me. He didn't look like himself, either, with his lips that way.

That evening, in my mother's living room we gathered—children, grandchildren, nieces, and nephews—and told stories about my dad. We talked about how he always pulled a comb out of his back pocket to slick back his hair when he was walking from the car to a store or church; how he would spin a car full of us kids on ice; how he loved to take a handful of sage leaves, rub them and hold them out to us and say, "Smell!" We laughed and ate sweets and talked about the sweetness of the man and the traits we had inherited from him.

Many Diné came to my father's funeral. John Tsosie, who comforted me at Trudy's funeral, drove five hours each way to be present. Christian converts came to Gallup from as far away as Teec Nos Pos and Albuquerque. In the graveyard a hole had been dug in what is known as Missionary Row. Old missionaries, dating back to a death date of 1936, lie next to each other. My brothers and I lowered the coffin on ropes. One of my brothers pointed out that I seemed to be in a rush because my end was dropping too fast. Maybe I just wasn't as strong as them. And maybe I was in a rush.

Sharla, the daughter of one of the converts from Teec Nos Pos was someone I knew pretty well, a PhD psychologist. Several shovels stood in the pile of earth beside the grave, and we were told that anyone could scoop in some dirt. Sharla grabbed a spade before anyone else and energetically tossed in several shovelfuls. She is generally a vigorous woman, but one of my brothers and I both noticed that she seemed eager. We wondered if she were getting some kind of closure. We didn't think she'd known Dad that well. Maybe it was closure with all the Bilagáana missionaries she'd known.

It is a cliché that your life changes in unforeseen ways when a parent dies because a generation no longer stands between you and death as a sort of buffer. I didn't believe my dad's death would affect me that way, but for a long time after that, hardly a day went by that I didn't think about my own mortality. For one thing, I am closer now to my death than to my birth. I think to myself, "I'm going to die someday. How can that be? How will it happen? When? Fast or slow? What will the days before it be like?"

Fear of the dead, which later became fear of dying, rarely accompanies my thoughts. It does visit now and then, though only briefly. Most of the time I am struck with a sense of wonder, of incomprehension. I cannot imagine a world where I am not. This is not because I think I am indispensable but because this is the only place I have known myself to be. Even the certainty of death is incomprehensible. It will happen.

 

Death has changed, or I have changed in relationship to it. At times I wonder how my thoughts about death may morph yet again, whether I might be granted some understanding of it before it happens to this body I call me. Mostly I am simply in awe of the mystery of it, which I suppose is what that fear disguised all along.

 

©Anna Redsand, 2024. All Rights Reserved.

 

This is the final installment of "Some Things Were True."

Installment 1 of Chapter IV of Fissure, "In the Girls Room" will post on Friday, 2/23/24

Rick and I kept walking, heading toward the mission. Like everything else, it had changed. The sprawling, cobbled-together adobe we had lived in burned only a few months after we moved away. A modern frame house took its spot. The little white clapboard chapel had been replaced by a large, cinderblock affair. Two things about the mission were the same: the interpreter's modest bungalow was still there, and the oak tree stood halfway up the hill. But it had grown so small, shrunken like an old woman.

Officials said that the house and trading post fires had both been intentional, and now I wonder if the arsonist or arsonists started the fires out of resentment because the White missionaries and White traders had introduced such an alteration to a way of life that once flourished here. When I look back, that possibility seems so obvious, but when I was a child, I felt welcome, that living in Teec Nos Pos was my life, just as it was the life of everyone else who lived there.

***

As we came to the old places on our walk, I got out my camera several times. I needed to photograph the curve of the road from the old trading post to the mission, the rosy Three Monkeys under the pinking sky, the shaved off hilltop where I once went to school. I needed to do this to assure myself, "This is still the same place. Some things are different, and some are the same, never changing. Yes, I really did live here once. Yes, this place, really is a part of who I am."

Even more than the present-day photos, I need to look at the old ones sometimes. At home I get out a cardboard box, softening with age. In it I find a picture of Rick and me standing in the mission yard, eating yellow slices of casaba melon from my father's garden, the Three Monkeys behind us. I'm wearing baggy shorts and a striped polo shirt, my brown hair skinned back into tight French braids. Rick, with his blond GI clip has on shorts, too, but his baby belly hangs bare over the elastic waist. The picture leaves no doubt that I was here. I am real in this place, not a ghost.

***

I first learned to call the immense rock formation Shiprock, the name Bilagáanas gave it because it resembles a clipper, a two-masted, tall-ship, rising out of the desert sea. Much later I would learn its Diné name, Tsé Bit'á'í, Rock with Wings, for the lava dikes that extend outward for miles from the plug. They make the rock appear, especially from above, like a winged bird in flight. Reigning over the land as it does, it is small wonder that the rock holds a prominent place in Diné lore.

Any time we drove up and out of the valley of Teec Nos Pos for provisions or doctor visits, we passed close by the great monolith. As soon as one of us sighted it, we began to chant, "I see-e Ship-a-rock. I see-e Ship-a-rock." The rest joined in and carried on in unison until we exhausted our parents' patience. Up close the Winged Rock resolved into mysterious vertical fissures and crenellations—feathers of the great bird. As with most features of the land called childhood, Shiprock was just there. When we are young, life just is; we do not know that it is perhaps remarkable. We do not know what deep impressions it is making on us. We live in the present.

A few years after Rick's and my nostalgic trip to Teec Nos Pos, I visited my friend Alice Whitegoat who lives near Shiprock. Alice is an accomplished poet and painter, my supervisor when I worked in a Native publishing house. I drove to her place, not from Teec Nos Pos, which would have put me up close to Shiprock (the rock), but from the east. I crested a rise, and off in the distance it rose—the most iconic element in the landscape of my childhood, now seldom seen. My heart leapt, its striations set to thrumming, "I am home. I am home."

 

Way over there, it looks small, as small as the nail on my little finger. But I know. I know the way it towers over the flats dotted with platinum grasses and a few clumps of gray-green salt weed. The rock dominates the terrain, as though nothing else can exist there—a colossal volcanic neck, its spikes piercing the brilliant blue.

 
"I am home. I am home." It rises from my throat as the rock itself rises from the depths of the Earth. I can't help it, as much as I try to tell myself it isn't true. "You are not home," I remonstrate. "You are here on sufferance." In childhood there were no questions. Then I thought Dinétah belonged to me as much as it did to Rudy and Bobby Yellowhair, to Sally and Carol Belone, to the children we played with in the Teec Nos Pos arroyo, on the branches of the stunted apple tree. Now I know that wasn't how it was.

When I got to Alice's, we sat out on her patio in the dying light. I told her about how I sang when I saw the rock.

"Really?" She said. I couldn't tell what she felt.

So I added the renunciation, "I know it's not really my home. I can't claim it."

She didn't say anything. I decided her silence was tacit agreement. I said nothing more about it. I pulled back on the strings of my heart.

Our first arrival in Shiprock began a long and endless fall into the fissure that lies between two cultures. Alice sometimes shares with me her poetry in progress, and in her songs I hear hints of her own in-between places. Most of the Diné I know have those cracks in their lives to one degree or another because Dinétah has been under occupation for so long. Alice has expressed this crevassed life with rare eloquence and humor. Once I wrote to her after reading one of her poems, "Even though you and I live in different in-between fissures, they could well be parallel arroyos."

Days after my visit, seeming to go back to our conversation on the patio, and apropos of nothing I had written recently, Alice wrote me. It was as though she'd been thinking about it all that time. "Shiprock.  Belongs to you. Your love of Shiprock is legitimate and is for anyone, and it doesn't matter what color you are so long as your blood is red."

Whatever prompted her words, they were a blessing, and with the blessing came tears. Shiprock and Teec Nos Pos, Dinétah, are places that shape the stories I tell about myself.

 

© Anna Redsand, 2024. All rights reserved.

 

This is the final installment of "Fissures and Crenellations," which was first published in Solstice, Winter 2019.

On Monday, 1/22/24, the first installment of "In and Out," first published in Isthmus, Special on Politics, 2016, will post. It's a White girl's experience of government and mission boarding schools in Dinétah, plus stories about boarding school from her Diné friends.

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