Shutter(46)

“Next, they cut our hair real short. The scissors would slide right beneath our tsiiyéel—right under our thick hair and cut through, just like that.” She snapped her fingers together like rusty scissors. “The rest of our hair would let go and fall around our faces. The boys had theirs cut even shorter, right up to their ear. The girls went through school with their hair short right above their shoulders, just as the scissors had left us. Then we went back to the room with Mr. Wilson and his camera, and they stood us all against the wall and took our pictures again. They did it so that they could make sure all the Navajo had been cut and shaved from all of us. They wanted all of it to be gone.”

Grandma stopped her story and looked toward the chest. “Pull those two boxes out, the ones right there.” I moved to the corner of the chest and grabbed two heavy boxes. Right below was an ancient Plaubel Makina in almost brand-new condition, with a leather bellows and flawless glass, lens, and surface. It was like it had been pulled from the 1930s. I took the camera out carefully. The viewfinder was a little bent, but I used it anyway to frame Grandma there on her rocking chair. She smiled.

“That is my camera.” She laughed. “I guess we all have the bug, don’t we?”

“How come I am just learning about this now, Grandma?” I held the bulky camera in my lap. It must have weighed at least twenty pounds. I tried to imagine my grandma, her arms young and strong, keeping this camera steady, holding her breath.

“Mr. Wilson could see that I was absorbed in what he was doing. I watched everything he did: loading the camera, focusing with his crooked fingers, and the painful pressing of the button. He called me over and pulled out a stool so that I could look through the viewfinder. I could see the two little boys who had traveled here with me in the frame. The image was backward, but showed their hair still long and tied, their skin still burned by the sun. Mr. Wilson would have to pull the lever down from the front of the camera to take a picture. It was hard on him. You could see the pain in his face every time he snapped the frame. When he saw me watching, he showed me how to work the lever. It was easy for my little fingers. From then on, I became his assistant.

“They took me from whichever class I was in every time a new trainload of Indians came to the school. After a while, I did all the work—loading the film, changing the lenses, moving the camera around campus. Even though I was a little girl, I knew my way around that big camera. Mr. Wilson died when I was twelve. I took all the pictures after that. But it became a chore.” Grandma handed me two framed photographs of a beautiful Navajo girl—her skin brown, her hair pulled back. She wore a nice rug dress and moccasins. In the second picture, her long hair was cut to her shoulders, her beautiful dress replaced with a symmetrical black-and-white dress—the same one they all wore.

“I got so tired of watching all the Indian being taken out of these kids, one after another, year after year. I felt like I was trapping their souls in a box. As they aged, they had no Indian in them left. Just like me. When I finally went home twelve years later, the land had become overgrown, the herd scattered in all different directions. My father had become a shell of the man I left behind. I think when my mom died, he died too, but he stayed here on earth to watch me because he knew I would one day return and would take care of what I needed to take care of.”

“Is that why you don’t take pictures anymore?”

“I took pictures for a long time after that, until your grandpa died. He liked to take pictures too. But when he passed, I didn’t want to do it anymore. I put that camera away along with all those memories and kept them locked up so that I wouldn’t cry after him. It made me sad to think of what could have been, of what should have been. The pictures always made me cry for him, and I knew that I had to let him go.”

I started to put all the boxes, books, and photographs away— back into that vault of pain that Grandma kept in her closet. I didn’t think I ever wanted to open it again. As I scooted the chest closer to the closet, Grandma stopped me.

“You missed a box. Up there on the bed.” There was one orange box by Grandma’s pillow. When I opened it, I saw her—my cousin Gloria. Gloria with her long, shiny hair and her infectious smile. I remembered that day. She was so happy. We sat on the roof until it was dark and the neighbor’s dogs began to howl. We took that picture with her friend’s Polaroid right before the sun set. It was two weeks before she died. This trunk was full of ghosts, full of reminiscences—brimming with the pain of loss. I stuffed Gloria’s picture into my pocket and closed the box. Grandpa’s picture stayed on the nightstand. It was a memory that she could probably enjoy, I thought. Grandpa could look after her.

After digging through the trunk, Grandma grew tired. I helped her to bed, brushing her long white hair and massaging her hands with her “magic rub,” as she called it. It was a Bengay rip-off that smelled terrible, but Grandma didn’t mind if it kept the pain in her hands away. She called the pain “Arthur Yazzie,” the Navajo personification of arthritis, and cursed him every night as she rubbed heat into her skin. “Damn him,” she’d say.

After I turned off her light, she was asleep within ten minutes. I sat outside on the porch beside her western door, the one that flooded with rainwater all the time, and watched the sun go down beneath the mountains.

Shame enveloped me. Seeing Grandma living alone in her outdated house made me feel sick and lonely. I wanted to bring her with me, but where? Albuquerque wouldn’t be safe for her.