“At the chapter house. Follow the wash.”
“What does the chapter house look like?”
The man cinched the saddle and didn’t answer.
A long way farther up the road, Russ came to a neat, unmarked structure of mud and split logs beside a wash. The track next to it looked passable, and he followed it up into a shallow canyon, past fallen rocks the size of haystacks, an encouraging sign. In a side canyon still shaded from the sun, he found a proper small house, a stock pen, a yard with chickens in it. Beyond the pen was a hogan outside which women were cooking on an open fire. In front of the house, a little girl, Stella, was watching her father chop wood. At the sight of Keith Durochie, the tension of Russ’s long drive drained out of him. He felt like he’d come home.
Keith approached the truck, trailed shyly by Stella. “What the hell?”
“I’m back,” Russ said.
“What for?”
“Forgot my wrench.”
There was a silence before Keith smiled. He led Russ into the house, which had two rooms, one with a bed in it, and gave him sweet coffee and a cold, unsweetened sort of doughnut. When Russ explained that he was on a fact-finding mission, Keith said it would have to wait—he was doing a sing. He left Russ alone, by no means for the last time. Life among the Navajos meant a lot of waiting and not much explanation.
What a sing was he learned later in the morning, when a dust cloud boiled up from the canyon. The people he’d passed on the road were now on horses adorned with brightly colored yarn, followed by trucks similarly adorned and tooting their horns. The entourage proceeded past the house to the hogan where the women had been cooking. Nervous but curious, Russ crossed the yard for a closer look.
The lead rider was a short-haired young man whose face was painted black and red; in his hand was a tasseled black stick. He waited in the saddle until others from his group could help him down. Moving with a bad limp, he took the black stick into the hogan. Children were piling from the trucks and running to a shed where the food was. Keith and his kinswomen quietly greeted the adults. No one paid any attention to Russ.
From inside the hogan, a male voice rose tremulously in off-key song. Russ didn’t understand the words, but they went to his heart. The voice was like his grandfather’s, singing hymns in Lesser Hebron; Clement, too, sang off-key. After the song had ended, the hogan erupted like a small volcano, boxes of Cracker Jack flying out through its smoke hole. While the children pounced on them, Keith’s people distributed blankets to the older guests, who’d taken up a different song.
he-ye ye ye ya ?a
’？？la do kwii-yi – na
k? gó di yá – ’e – hya ?a
he ye ye ye ya
Though the language was foreign, the voices of a congregation, raised in bright morning sun, deepened Russ’s sense of having come home. As the singing continued, Keith invited him to join the group for mutton and corn bread.
Only the children, Stella in particular, looked at him, and for a long time Keith was busy hosting. Russ might have grown bored if he hadn’t been so fascinated by the faces. When the party finally broke up, the entourage returning to their horses and trucks, Keith sat down and asked him where he was going next. Russ again mentioned his charge from George Ginchy.
“I told you not to bother,” Keith said.
“You said you’d talk to me after the sing.”
“It just started. We still have three days.”
“Three days?”
“That’s the new way. We don’t do the long sings anymore.”
“The thing is, the only people I know here are you and your uncle.”
“You won’t get to my uncle in your truck.”
“Well, so.”
Keith turned and, for the first time, looked at Russ directly. “What are you doing here?”
“Honestly, I want to know more about your people. The work is just an excuse.”
Keith nodded and said, “That’s better.”
He went to help his kinspeople, and Russ fell asleep on the ground. He was awakened by the smell of gasoline. Keith was filling the tank of a small truck through a funnel with a muslin filter. Already seated on the cargo bed were Stella and a slender young woman with a bundled baby. “You ride in front with me,” Keith said.
Making the woman sit in back didn’t seem right to Russ, but to Keith the matter was already settled. The little truck had a suspension well suited to the rutted canyon road. After a long while, as Keith drove, his silence became so trying that Russ asked him what a sing was.