“Then you come, too. Move your camp. There isn’t any work to do here.”
“I don’t have authority for that. If I asked for authority, the government would remember I’m here. I’d rather they not remember.”
“They’ll forget again,” the leader said.
Already, in his first minutes of acquaintance, because he instinctively loved them, Russ grasped that the Navajos weren’t lesser than white men but simply very different. In his later experience, they were unfailingly blunt about what they wanted. They didn’t say please, didn’t bow to convention or authority. Disqualifications self-evident to white men were meaningless to them. White men chalked up the frustrations of dealing with them to orneriness and stupidity, but Russ, that morning, saw nothing stupid in them. It hurt to think that they’d come all the way from Tuba City, a drive of several hours, and sat for further hours in a freezing truck, with an idea that made sense to them. It hurt to think of them returning empty-handed, in some unguessable state of mind—disappointment? Anger at the government? Embarrassment for having been na?ve? Or just mute perplexity? Russ had been thirteen when his beloved farm dog, Skipper, fell sick with what his mother said was cancer. The dog’s pain and infirmity soon reached the point where she made Russ ask a neighbor to shoot him and bury him. For Russ the hardest part of saying good-bye had been that Skipper couldn’t understand what he was doing to him, or why. The Navajo elders were the opposite of dumb beasts, but this only made imagining their perplexity more painful.
When the sugared coffee had been drunk, Ginchy took down the elders’ names and offered to send them a truckload of food and clothes. The leader, whose name was Charlie Durochie, was unmoved and didn’t thank him.
“That was a strange one,” Ginchy said when they were gone.
“They’re right, though,” Russ said. “The work here seems like make-work.”
“That’s some other fellow’s decision. I have to tread carefully, you know. Roosevelt wanted the army in charge of these camps.”
“But we’re supposed to be here serving, not building picnic tables.”
“The service I perform is keeping men out of the war. If that means building picnic tables…”
Russ asked him for permission to deliver the supplies to Tuba City.
“They didn’t seem much interested in charity,” Ginchy said.
“They didn’t say no.”
“You have a tender heart.”
“You do, too, sir.”
The next morning, in a truck driven by the quartermaster’s assistant and loaded with flour, rice, beans, and some work clothes left behind in the Depression, Russ rode north to Tuba City. In his innocence, he’d pictured tepees or log cabins in Indian country, tall trees with horses tied to them, clear streams running past mossy stones; he’d actually pictured mossy stones. The arid bleakness of the landscape he entered, after crossing Route 66, had not been imaginable. Dust hung in the air and coated every rock along the road. Lifeless buttes shimmered in the distance. Out on the parched plain were hogans more like piles of refuse than dwellings. In the settlements were houses of unpainted gray wood, roofless adobe ruins with holes in their walls, expanses of ash-darkened sand littered with rusted cans and broken roof tiles. Some of the smaller children, black-haired and round-faced, waved tentatively at the truck. Everyone else—old women wearing leggings beneath their skirts, old men with caved-in mouths, younger women who looked like they’d been born brokenhearted—averted their eyes.
Tuba City was a proper town, better shaded by cottonwoods, but scarcely less bleak. Russ now saw how comparatively much like Lesser Hebron the high forest was; how comparatively paradisal. The streams there were full, the forest double-carpeted with snow and pine needles, everything wet and white and fresh-smelling, and the men there, too—every last one of them—were white. To enter the reservation was to become aware of whiteness. Until he took a train to Arizona, Russ had never been more than sixty miles from Lesser Hebron, and although some of the non-Mennonite farmers had been ruined by the Depression, he’d never seen true privation. The Navajos had been stuck with barren land, seldom rained on. Witnessing their endurance of it, he had a curious sense of inferiority. The Navajos seemed closer to something he hadn’t known he was so far from. He felt, from his white height, like a Pharisee.
“Jesus Christ, this place is depressing,” the assistant quartermaster said.
The house to which they were directed seemed unfittingly tiny for a tribal leader, but a familiar black truck was parked in the dirt outside it, its front end elevated on stacks of earthen bricks. Charlie Durochie was watching a younger man hammer on a wrench connected to the truck’s undercarriage. One of the tires lay next to an emaciated dog licking its penis. From the doorway of the house, which stood open to the cold, a little girl in a frilly, faded dress stared at the white men in their better truck. Russ hopped out and reintroduced himself to Durochie, who was dressed exactly as he’d been the day before.