Shutter(26)

After a long day there in the hogan, I didn’t feel any different. I could feel the love and concern coming from the prayers, from the songs, but nothing had changed. I knew they still looked at me, wanting to know why I had this connection to dead things. For Mr. Bitsilly and Grandma, that connection was the most dangerous thing possible. They were scared of the sickness that death could bring.

After we left the hogan, we went back into Mr. Bitsilly’s house, where I sat at the table with an overly sweet vanilla cookie while they lectured me about my pictures.

“Death is something that you need to leave alone, Rita. Don’t touch dead things; don’t look at dead things.” Mr. Bitsilly glared at me out of the corner of his eye. “And don’t talk to dead things.”

“And don’t take pictures of dead things,” my grandmother added.

“You’ve been doing so good.” Mr. Bitsilly looked at Grandma. “All we’re saying is that if you keep inviting dead things into your life, it could open the door. You never know what path a spirit has taken until they are in your head. Don’t let them know that there is a door. Don’t let them know that you are the key.”

They talked to me about what death leaves behind—the spirit, the essence. They cautioned me about the evil that lives in that spirit, like a cancer, a presence of terminal energy. Mr. Bitsilly warned me over and over until it scared me. This must have been what Grandpa told me about.

After the conversation, I escaped to the living room, where the lone bulb lit up all of Mr. Bitsilly’s football posters. Grandma followed me. Mr. Bitsilly saw us look at the posters and the red-and-white frames decorating his walls and blushed.

“The Cardinals are my team,” he admitted. “But they never win.”

ON THE RIDE back home, I watched as my grandmother’s tádídíín bag—her medicine pouch filled with corn pollen—and her crucifix dangled in the light of the late afternoon. She sat quietly, her rough hands grasping the steering wheel. I loved my grandmother. She didn’t look or act like any grandmother I had ever met. When I went to friends’ homes or saw other grandparents at school, they were always what you would expect a Navajo grandmother to look like. Other grandmas dressed in velveteen and wore their hair in buns tied with wool, like in every book I’d seen about the Navajo people. They had sheep and lived in hogans. But not my grandmother.

My grandmother wore her hair short and curled. Later, when it became sprinkled with gray, she would sometimes dye it the shiniest jet black. Her hands were worn, but she took great care to keep them clean, her nails cut short and sanded perfectly. She made her own clothes from bolts of light cotton—dresses or nice pants and a blouse, closed with silver pins. She’d learned how to sew in boarding school in Phoenix. Both she and my grandfather had gone to boarding school. One day, while we were peeling potatoes at the kitchen table, she had told me all about it.

“The city was full of cars and people. Everything moved so fast. But in Phoenix, at the boarding school, they taught me how to cook, to sew, how to take care of children. I learned how to read and write. I learned to act like a white person. But I also learned about other things. Like how to build things, how to use a camera. I learned what it was like outside of the reservation. That is important. If you never leave, you never know how good your life can be. Sometimes, I think it was a good thing that they took me away to school. Otherwise, I would be living in a hogan in the middle of nowhere with my sheep. I would rather be here with you.”

Grandma had a way of explaining things. I never interrupted her. I just let her talk. She had lived through a lot, each line in her face giving us a map of years and experience. She was incredibly strong.

As we drove home from Mr. Bitsilly’s house in the rain that day, my grandmother said, “When my mother died, I was only a little girl. Maybe five or six years old. She had a terrible cough for months. When she was hot with fever, she coughed blood. My grandfather knew she was about to die. He explained to me in Navajo that she was going out to die, then two young men, covered in ash and smudged with pine sap, came in and carried my pale mother out of the hogan. She smiled at me as she left and held on to my braid, right up to the tip, then let it fall. I ran to the window and watched them take her to a fire they had lit in the distance. I stood there for hours. My little feet ached, but I didn’t care; I didn’t want my mother to leave. I cried after her. My father took me aside and scolded me. Crying after someone when they’re dead is the worst thing anyone could do because it keeps them here in this world. They wouldn’t want to pass on. My father feared death like he feared no other thing on this earth.

“But what always confused me was that death was so evil. It was as if when we died, we went to hell. I didn’t want my mom to go there, so I cried and cried to keep her here. I watched in the moonlight as my mom parted this world in the summer night. Every once in a while, the lightning from the storm lit up the canyon, and I could see the two strangers picked to guide my mother to death. As family, we were not allowed to be a part of her passing.

“I remember when she died, as the sunrise bled into our door, the two men came into the hogan and washed the ash from their bodies. My father told us we were not to ever speak my mother’s name again. But late at night, my sister and I would talk about her as our father, your great-grandfather, slept. All of this is just something we believe—that death is evil, that it carries despair . . . or at least, that’s what we were taught to believe. That sickness my mother had killed a lot of our people, and I think it made us scared of death forever. I don’t even know what to believe anymore.” Grandma shook her head.