Shutter(6)

The hiss and smell of Samuels’s terrible coffee brought me back into reality. I could see myself reflected in the blackness of the screen—my dark hair and eyes accentuated by the deep, tan circles that cradled my lids. I was using my eyebrows to keep my eyes open. The hazy light of my migraine was returning.

The chair in the corner of my cubicle turned with a long creak. Erma Singleton—the poor woman who lay in pieces on the highway—rocked in it, one leg over the other, red nailpolished toes glinting. I just stared at her ghost, my skin prickly from her heat. I couldn’t do much else.

“What happened?” Erma whispered.

“I’m sorry,” I replied.

“Who are you talking to?” Samuels barked, walking up with his arms full of files. The empty chair spun next to me.

“No one,” I said.





CHAPTER FOUR

Paper and a Box

THE YEAR I turned five, Grandma taught me how to build a camera. It was also the first year that my grandpa began to visit me. At first, I didn’t know it was him. My grandma, so heartbroken over his death, never kept a picture of him in our house.

Grandma could make anything out of nothing, and that is how we lived together in her little house. We had running water and electricity, which was a lot out there on the reservation. My grandma had built her house with her own hands, with concrete and nails and tar paper shingles. Grandma loved to tell stories about how all those Navajo women in the community would stare at her like she was crazy as she hammered away on the shingles of her roof and brought stones for her fireplace when the light had fallen low in the sky. The women had watched as Grandma yelled at the young men from the hardware store who’d done work on the house one weekend while she was away. She recounted the events over and over because I begged her to.

“Those fools put my garage on the wrong side!” she’d say, making me roll around in laughter. “Who needs to look out of their kitchen window into their garage? Not me!”

In protest, my grandmother never put a permanent floor in the garage. It always sat there with the same dirt floor that it began with.

“One day, Rita, I’m moving my garage to the other side. You’ll see,” she would say. She would tickle my stomach, and I would run away, the fresh laughter still working through my body. I wanted that garage on the right side, too, just because that was what Grandma wanted, even though I knew she could never afford to move it.

On the reservation, nestled deep within the red canyons and forgotten communities, tattered trailers and the skeletons of long-abandoned hogans stood like teeth. Hot sand ran into every crack and hole when the winds blew. Now, only shells remained, tied together with thinly stretched chicken wire and bare logs. Grandma had picked a good spot for her home site, hidden to shelter her house from the relentless west-to-east winds. Her home was a beacon of modern living nestled between territories preserved in times gone by. The mountains were at her front door, which faced north, and a dry riverbed made up the backyard. She liked to grow corn and squash, lettuce, and radishes. She sat out in the summer sun with me and her saltshaker, and we would eat fresh radishes from the ground, washed free of dirt with the cool water from her green hose.

Grandma and I used to take long walks into the dry riverbeds behind her house, looking for the long, green Navajo tea stalks that peeked out of the sand. Before gathering the stalks, Grandma would pray in Navajo and sprinkle her yellow corn pollen on them—we had to thank the tea before we could use it.

“Don’t take the whole thing. Don’t take it from the root. If you do, they won’t be able to keep growing all summer,” she lectured. Her hands were full of the light-green stalks, their yellow flowers rising like unruly wires through her fingers.

I pulled gently at the plant, leaving a healthy six-inch stalk behind. Eventually, I rolled the stems inside my dirty T-shirt. We walked for a couple of hours before deciding to turn back, our legs sore from trudging in the deep sand. Grandma rolled her empty cloth flour bags around her neck to keep her cool. As we made our way up the final hills, our pockets and shirts filled with tea, I could see beads of sweat on Grandma’s face. Her face was red with labor.

“Never get old,” she said. “Do you hear?”

“Okay, Grandma.”

Once home, we bent the tea into bundles and wrapped them with string. Grandma left the bundles out on the table to dry for a couple of days, then moved them to her copper tea canister. When she finally let me drink tea with her in the evenings, she would stare at me with a smile and shake of her head as I filled my tea with sugar cubes and milk from the can. Eventually, I convinced her to let me have morning coffee with her, sharing the off-white milk, sugar, and coffee concoction at the kitchen table.

On the day before I turned five, Grandma and I drove deep into the woods toward the Chuska Mountains on the other side of Tohatchi, where the blue spruce and aspen trees hissed only feet above the trail road. Our pickup shook and rattled along the way. Grandma had loaded us up with a shovel, a shabby gunny sack, a tattered cotton sheet, and a black box. I knew the sheet and gunny sack meant we were going up to the pi?on trees to get nuts to roast and sell. A good gunny sack–full could make Grandma a little money here and there. I loved pi?on nuts freshly roasted from the oven. When Grandma roasted and salted the pi?on, the house filled with the smell of warmed pine sap.

We found a good spot near the creek and made our way up. When we came across a tall, stout pi?on tree, its cones full of brown berries, I worked myself up the branches and shook the tree with all the strength I had in my arms and legs. Grandma spread her white cotton sheet below and sat, quietly sorting through the pine needles to find the nuts.