Our group was small. Beside myself, there were six girls. Miss Luptik had given them names. I became Blue Bear, according to the custom.
Miss Luptik taught her section in semidramatic form. We acted out brief dramas of Indian life. In our impromptu playlets, a kind of group therapy with moccasins, Miss Luptik’s names added scope and dimension.
I, for example, might be asked to describe a day hunting buffalo. As Oliver August, I would have been paralyzed. As Blue Bear, out of Shaking Cow by Great Grizzly, I felt right at home.
Pale Moon, a chubby girl to my left, might tell of her betrothal. Green Tree, a Bostonian, would hash out her weaving problems. Waterfall, Bending Willow, Sipping Deer and Wild Bud might sing a fertility song while beating their feet.
So the days went. On Monday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday I read the papers, listened to the radio, watched television, and did push-ups while waiting my call. Tuesdays and Thursdays I put on gaily colored clothes and concentrated on the antelope situation.
As the only eligible brave in know the navaho II, I became aware of the maidens who shared my hogan. The girls divided into note takers and knitters. I watched them note and knit with paternal tranquillity. In our dramas it was I who brought them fresh meat and supplied protection against everything but the flow of history. Even Miss Luptik spoke to me with special respect. I knew my responsibility and its rewards.
Which brings me to Marilyn Mayberry.
Of the knitters, Sipping Deer (Marilyn Mayberry) was the most chronic. She made mufflers—long roadlike mufflers with fringes at their beginnings and ends. She knitted like a sparrow pecks, in frantic flurries. While she knitted her foot tapped. Miss Mayberry was blessed with huge energy.
I noticed her the way I noticed the rest. No more. No less. She was pretty enough, a medium-sized girl, nicely built, short black hair, pleasant lips, nothing special except for fine breasts. She dressed well, much like the others, in thick sweaters and plaid skirts, long black stockings and Capezio sandals.
To comprehend the passion which developed between us it is necessary to understand Miss Luptik, a superb storyteller, a marvelous creator of mood, a lovely builder of climaxes, a born inciter to riot. Had Miss Luptik come along in the 1870’s there would be only red faces on the North American continent. General Custer would never have got past Jersey.
Miss Luptik introduced us to the ebb and flow of Navaho life in easy stages. As the term moved on, according to her master plan, she lifted us along the way like canoes in the Panama Canal.
From digging for roots and grubs, we came to the spring feast. From swatting flies, we progressed to the shrieking hunt. From hello in the woods, we copulated under cactus.
Together, in a group as tightly made as Sipping Deer’s mufflers, we achieved new levels of insight. Never suspecting, we traveled from fact to poetry.
With her wise face, her bouncy body and tinkly voice, Miss Luptik carried us. I, her enraptured papoose, went willingly. Strapped to her bony back, Blue Bear was happy.
The fluorescent sun and sprinkler-system rain bordered a terrific cosmos. Tender Tuesdays. Tremendous Thursdays.
Yet all this was only overture, a process of tenderizing. As it is with all instructors, Miss Luptik had her specialty. When she finished teasing us with trifles, when she reached the purple gut of her course, then know the navaho II ceased to be an experience and became a trauma.
Her specialty? Direct from life’s cellar, Myth and Magic, the elemental sisters.
Miss Luptik began her lectures on what she called “the creatures of the wind” on a fine May morning. A puddle of yellow lit her desk. Our room glowed like the inside of a brown egg.
A black cutout standing in the glare, Miss Luptik cleared her throat and found her start. From her purse she produced a wooden doll with a feather on its head.
The doll was a squarish fellow, something like a B-picture robot, but decorated in the Indian manner with slashes of white and red. Miss Luptik held him at arm’s length in total silence. Then, from the floor of her soul, she screamed, “Make rain.”
Until that moment, our instructor had talked of migrations across the Bering Strait during the Ice Ages. She had talked of Mongoloid traits, of longheads and roundheads, of layers of piled life, of seed gatherers and grinders, of modified basket-making peoples, of the anasazi—the ancient ones.
I listened, satisfied, studying the markings carved on the arm of my chair.
That day, Miss Luptik shed her skin. She added the dimension of horror. She connected up with eclipses, council fires, coyote howls, time itself. She burned like tobacco in long, thin pipes.
“Make rain.”
It did not rain immediately. There was a drought that month. But my skull flooded. I nearly drowned in joy.
There was no question but that Miss Luptik was about to give beyond the demands of tuition.
“The higher tribes,” Miss Luptik said, still holding her powerful didy doll, “believed deeply and devoutly in the Great Spirit, Father All Father, the Universe Man.”
Her voice, as she spoke, took on a singsong, like Carl Sandburg’s when he falls into his democratic trance. But it was not the shoes of industrial workers that sparked the instructor. It was bare feet on hot land.
“Say after me,” she semi-sang.
“Great Spirit, Father All Father, Universe Man.”
We made a good chorus. And we liked the tune. Trained in the monotheistic manner, we felt a kinship, knitters, note takers and Oliver A.
“Ambiguity,” Miss Luptik said. “Paradox. Along with their faith in a single moving power, the dynamo of creation, our Indian brothers took an animistic view of daily life. Wakonda—life energy—filled everything. Everything. People and rocks. Flowers and sky. Day and night. Wakonda.”
Nice, nice. Good, good. That was our reaction. For Wakonda, the life energy, had also visited the Bronx. Here was another idea that was familiar, therefore friendly.
“Say after me.”
“Wakonda.”
“Again once more.”
“Wakonda.”
“Wakonda was generally something to feel warm about. Why not? The smallest bug, the wee-est pebble had its chip of spirit. But the concept had its nasty side. Wakonda Good, Wakonda Evil. Mr. and Mrs. Navaho had their bogey men, too.”
A knitter laughed. Miss Luptik frowned.
“Wakonda Good. Love. Babies. Corn. Wakonda Evil. Dwarfs. Ogres. Underwater people. Thunder people. Maize blight. Sickness. Sterility. Death.”
A note taker coughed. And coughed again. Miss Luptik was patient. She wet her upper lip with her tongue. The doll had not moved from her hand. Like the carving on a bowsprit, it gave dignity to her prow.
When the coughing spasm subsided, Miss Luptik raised her second arm and held it suspended at an angle of roughly ninety degrees to its companion.
“What a treasury of lore sprang from this simple belief. Epic poems, Greek tragedies have nothing on the creations of the first Americans. Oh Red Man, how inspired you were in the naked days before we brought you smallpox, measles, syphilis and gold.”
Miss Luptik upped her voice an octave. There was something in her manner that made me twitch. I could feel her accelerating. A vessel in her neck swelled with pressure. My left eyelid jumped in response.
“Children of the land, what have we done to you? Today, the holy Shaman watches Ed Sullivan before conducting his rites. Our cancer culture presses in like fingers on a throat. Rice Krispies and insecticide stifle the Star Maker and the Animal Wife.”