The verb to have, the very name Estelle, the carnality they evoked, made Russ queasy.
“If God can’t forgive me,” Clement said, “so be it. But who’s to say if your father knows what God forgives? I’ve been to the Lutheran church, over to Dobbsville, with Estelle. Good people, plenty Christian—there are many ways to skin a cat. I can’t say as I’ve tried any of them, but I’ve skinned a raccoon, and the adage has it right. There are different ways of doing it.”
Leaving the beautiful chest safe with Clement, Russ went home and confessed to his mother what he’d done. She kissed him and forgave him, but his father never really did, because Russ had made his choice. When he went to Arizona and discovered for himself the different ways a cat could be skinned, the only disclosive letters he wrote were to his grandfather.
The alternative service camp was in the national forest outside Flagstaff, on the site of a former CCC camp. It was administered by the American Friends Service Committee, but a good third of the workers shared Russ’s faith. After he’d shoveled dirt for some months, painted picnic tables, planted trees, the camp director asked him if he could use a typewriter. Though still only twenty, Russ was among the older workers, and he’d had five semesters of college. The director, George Ginchy, set him up with a foot-tall Remington, its keys yellowed to the color of custard, in the antechamber of his office. Although Ginchy was a Quaker, from Pennsylvania, he was also a longtime college football coach and Boy Scout leader. His camp had a bugler who began the day with reveille and ended it with taps, a cook whose job title was quartermaster, and now, in Russ, an aide-de-camp. Ginchy liked everything about military life except the killing part.
One morning in the spring of 1945, the sun rose on a dusty black relic of a truck parked outside headquarters. Inside it, upright and silent, since sometime in the night, had been sitting four Navajo men in black felt hats. They were elders from Tuba City and had come to petition the camp director. George Ginchy welcomed them, widened his eyes at Russ, and asked him to bring coffee. Taking a pot into the office, Russ found three of the Navajo men standing against a wall with their arms crossed, the fourth studying a framed topo map in the corner, all of them silent.
Russ had never seen an Indian before, and he had so little worldly experience that he didn’t recognize the sensation in his heart as love at first sight. He thought the Navajos’ faces moved him because they were old. And yet, if he’d been asked to describe their leader, who wore a turquoise-clasped string tie beneath a fleece-collared coat, stiff with dirt, he might have used the word beautiful.
Ginchy uncomfortably said, “How can I help you gentlemen?”
One of them murmured in a strange tongue. The leader addressed Ginchy. “What are you doing here?”
“We, ah—this is a service camp for men with a conscientious objection to war.”
“Yes. What are you doing?”
“Specifically? It’s a bit of a hodgepodge. We’re improving the national forest.”
This seemed to amuse the Navajos. There were chuckles, an exchange of glances. The leader nodded at the pine trees outside and explained, “It’s a forest.”
“Land of many uses,” Ginchy said. “I believe that is the Forest Service motto. You’ve got your logging, your hunting, your fishing, your watershed protection. We’re improving the basis for all that. My guess is, somebody knew the right people in Washington.”
A silence fell. Russ offered a mug of coffee to the leader, who wore a wide silver ring on his thumb, and asked if he wanted sugar.
“Yes. Five spoons.”
When Russ returned from the antechamber, the leader was explaining to Ginchy what he wanted. The federal government, through its agents, had impoverished the Navajos by requiring severe reductions of their stock of cattle, sheep, and horses, and by unfairly siding with the Hopis in their land disputes. Now the country was fighting a war in which the Navajos sent their young men to fight, and conditions were bad on the reservation—fertile land eroding, the remaining stock fenced out of good pasture, too few able hands available for restoration work.
“War is bad for everyone,” Ginchy agreed.
“You are the federal government. You have strong young men who won’t fight. Why help a forest that doesn’t need helping?”
“I’m sympathetic, but I’m not actually the federal government.”
“Send us fifty men. You feed them, we’ll shelter them.”
“Yeah, that’s … We have procedures here, roll calls and so forth. If I sent people to your reservation, they’d be off my reservation, if you take my meaning.”