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, just as surely as trees held their identity in the shape and swell of their bare winter twigs.
“Has it changed much?”
I meant it as a joke, I saw nothing that could have changed, but Loyd looked around carefully. “Those little weedy cottonwoods have grown up along the stream. And there’s a big boulder on that slope, you see the one with dark stripes? That used to be up there.” He pointed to a place in the canyon wall, visible only to himself, from which the boulder had fallen. Most men, I thought, aren’t this familiar with the furniture in their homes.
“So what did you do here?”
“Worked our butts off. Weeded, picked corn, grew beans and watermelons. And had to carry a lot of water in the bad years.”
“Were those peach trees here?” I asked. A weathered orchard occupied the steep upper section of land.
“They’re older than my aunt. The peach trees go way back. They were planting orchards down here three hundred years ago.”
“A canyon of fruit. Like Grace.”
He inspected the trees carefully, one at a time: the bases of the branches, the trunks, the ends of twigs. I didn’t know what he was looking for, and didn’t ask. It seemed like family business. On this land Loyd seemed like a family man.
“And did the people that lived up in the cliffs grow corn and beans too?”
“That’s right.”
“So how come this canyon’s stayed productive for a thousand and some-odd years, and we can’t even live in Grace for one century without screwing it up?”
It was mostly a rhetorical question but Loyd considered it for a long time as he led me along a path up the talus slope to the back of the box canyon.
“I know the answer to that,” he said finally. “But I can’t put it in words. I’ll have to show you. Not here. Later on.”
I felt sadly let down, though it was closer to an actual promise of revelation than I’d gotten in nine years of watching Carlo’s eyebrows. I could wait for “later on.”
At the top of the slope was another ancient dwelling, this one mainly just ruined walls. The floor plan was clear. It interested me that the doors all lined up, I suppose to admit light to the interior.
“I found a whole clay pot in here one time,” Loyd said. “It’s in my mother’s house.” He lowered his voice. “Don’t tell any Navajos, they’ll throw Mama in jail.”
“You brought it back to her at the end of one summer, right? As a present. And she still treasures it.”
He smiled a little shyly. The image of a ten-year-old Loyd brought the threat of tears to my eyes. I’d spent my life watching mother-child rituals from outside the window.
“So you played in here when you were little?”
“Oh, yeah. This used to be me and Leander’s fort.”
“Cowboys and Indians?”
He laughed. “Good Indians and bad Indians.”
“Which were you?”
“Nobody can be good all the time. Or bad all the time. We took turns.”
He led me over a couple of tumbledown walls to the base of the cliff, and knelt down. I looked where he pointed. Set carefully among an assortment of old petroglyphs were two modern ones: the outlined left hands of two small boys, just touching, perfectly matched.
We crossed the high desert from Chinle to Ship Rock, New Mexico, and on to the Jemez Mountains. Wind battered the windows and we warmed our hands at the heater vents and talked about everything under the sun. Loyd talked about his marriage to Cissie Ramon, which he said was noisy and short. Cissie was crazy about rooster fighting, men, and unusual colors of nail polish, like green. He’d thought she was exotic, but she was just wild; there was a difference. She ran out on him.
He was a good deal more interested in talking about working in his aunt’s pecan orchards, in Grace. This aunt was his mother’s sister, Sonia. She married a Pueblo man from her village but moved with him to Grace when Black Mountain drafted Native American men into the mines during World War II. Sonia and her husband planted fruit trees there, thinking the war would last at least twenty years, and when it didn’t they felt they ought to stay on in Grace anyway, for the sake of the orchards.
It was a different story from farming in Canyon de Chelly, Loyd said. Sonia had started out as a tenant picker, before buying her own pecan orchard, and she learned harvesting the modern way. Usually the harvest started in October and ran till Thanksgiving. To get the nuts off the trees, they used a machine called a tree shaker.
“I remember guys hitting the branches with sticks, when I was a kid,” I said.
“Nah, we were high-tech. After the tree shaker comes the harvester, which is this big thing with a vacuum-scooper that you drive along between the rows. It scoops up everything and blows the sticks and leaves out the back, and the pecans and rocks fall down into this cage at the bottom. More junk falls out the slots as it rolls around, and the hulls fall off, and the idea is you end up with mostly pecans. But really you end up with pecans and pecan-sized dirt clods and pecan-sized rocks.”
“So did you get to drive the big machines?”
“Nope. Mostly I got to pick rocks and dirt clods off the conveyor. I think that was the best job I ever had. The hardest, but the best, because I grew up on it. Stopped thinking about myself all the time and started thinking about something else, even if it was just damn pecans.”
I took it from Loyd’s use of the singular pronoun that Leander was dead by this time. Slowly I was patching together Loyd’s life, and it was not the poor little gypsy story I’d imagined. I suppose I’d wanted to see him as a fellow orphan. But everywhere he’d been, he’d been with family.
“How long will Grace last without the river?” I asked.
“Two or three years, maybe. The old orchards will go longer because their roots are deeper.” He glanced at me. “You know I have an orchard?”