The Night Watchman(97)
Checks
There was a problem. Millie was running out of patterns. She went to the mission bundles with Grace, but found only florals. Millie detested flowers on fabric.
“Picky,” said Grace.
“I know what I like to wear.”
“How about this?”
Grace held up a circle skirt with broken lines, but they were broken in a random sort of way that made Millie faintly ill when Grace whirled it around with an inviting smile.
“It’s got your name on it, Checks.”
“I don’t like it.”
“Picky!”
Millie was having that feeling that came over her when she was around too many old things—a kind of panic. She’d diagnosed herself with several forms of claustrophobia. Also, she was pretty sure she could not testify in Washington, not in any clothing she possessed.
“Let’s get out of here.”
“Wait!”
Grace held up a black and yellow checked shirt, the perfect size for her. It had a pointed collar, three-quarter sleeves, and darts. Then, while Millie was admiring the shirt, Grace reached deep into a pile and teased out a remarkable garment. It was a long heavy dress made of six different fabrics, and each of the fabrics was a different geometric pattern. The colors were the same—blue, green, gold—but each combination differed in an intricate way. It was made of twill and the patterns were woven into, not stamped onto, the fabric. Millie held her arms out. Her heart swelled. She paid the nun for the blouse and the dress, then walked out to the entryway, where she sat looking at each panel of the print. Each was intricate and mysterious as the manifold signs on Persian rugs. When she stared at the patterns they took her inward and down, beyond the store and the town, into the foundations of meaning, and then beyond meaning, into a place where the structure of the world had nothing to do with the human mind and nothing to do with the patterns on a dress. A place simple, savage, ineffable, and exquisite. It was the place she went to every night.
The Lamanites
“Their hatred was fixed, and they were led by their evil nature that they became wild and ferocious, and a blood-thirsty people, full of idolatry and filthiness, feeding upon beasts of prey, dwelling in tents, and wandering about in the wilderness with a short skin girdle about their loins.”
“What do you think, Rosey?” said Thomas. “It’s us.”
He read the description again.
“No,” said Rose, “that’s more like Eddy Mink.”
Thomas closed The Book of Mormon and went back to studying the text of the bill. He had also written to Joe Garry, president of the National Congress of American Indians, for more information about Watkins.
“The fact of it is,” Garry had replied, “Watkins has no sense of humor.”
That was even more frightening than the Mormon bible.
Watkins had also refused to appropriate sufficient money to relieve the Navajo, who were in a desperate situation down there in the desert. Watkins said that the Navajo “were used to poverty.” But his remark was widely circulated and perhaps he felt the sting. Thomas decided to hit the economic plight hard. It seemed that Watkins wanted Indians both to disappear and to love him for making them disappear. And now that Thomas had read as much of The Book of Mormon as he could stay awake for, he understood why this man was completely dismissive of treaty law. In Watkins’s religion, the Mormon people had been divinely gifted all of the land they wanted. Indians weren’t white and delightsome, but cursed with dark skin, so they had no right to live on the land. That they had signed legal treaties with the highest governmental bodies in the United States was also nothing to Watkins. Legality was second to personal revelation. Everything was second to personal revelation. And Joseph Smith’s personal revelation, all written down in The Book of Mormon, was that his people alone were the best and should possess the earth.
“Who would ever believe that cockeyed story about the peep stone, the vision in the bottom of the hat, the golden tablets? This whole book was an excuse to get rid of Indians,” said Thomas.
Rose heard him and started to laugh.
“All the stories are crazy, if you think about it,” she said.
Which got Thomas thinking. What religious book was any better? The Holy Bible, full of power and poetry, was also filled with tall tales. Thomas had found them enthralling, but in the end they were all just stories, less important than the Sky Woman story, the manidoog at creation, the Nanabozho stories. To them all, especially the humorless book Elnath and Vernon had left, Thomas preferred their supernatural figure Nanabozho, who fooled ducks, got angry at his own butt and burnt it off, created a shit mountain to climb down when stuck high in a tree, had a wolf for his nephew, and no conscience at any time, who painted the kingfisher lovely colors and by trickery fed his children when they starved, who threw his penis over his shoulder and his balls to the west, who changed himself to a stump and made his penis look like a branch where the kingfisher perched, who killed a god by shooting its shadow, and created everything useful and much that was essential, like laughter.
The Lord’s Plan
It was getting so Norbert stopped pretending that they were going to do anything else. He didn’t warm her up. No candy for Betty. No love talk, no pretense. They didn’t go to the soda fountain or for a scenic drive or to a movie on the days it changed and they didn’t even listen to the radio once he stopped the car. He just got down to business. And this was not all right with Betty, although she was fine about jumping into the backseat with him. One night, she managed to slow him down, it was going well, and in fact she was becoming very hot and happy, when the car door opened and Norbert shot right out. He had been squeezed up against the door, his head pressed to the window as he labored away above. The door had unfortunately opened as he withdrew from her and thrust himself up between her breasts. He skidded off her body and flailed his way belly down onto the slick road. Betty thought the latch had popped by itself until someone outside said, “Could I have a minute of your time to tell you about the Lord’s plan for your soul?”