During Russ’s forty days in Diné Bikéyah, Keith advised him not to point at shooting stars, not to whistle at night, not to look a stranger in the eye, and not to ask a man his name before it was offered. When a Diné man died in his hogan, his family had to burn it and destroy whatever had touched him. Out on the open mesa, Keith nodded at a sun-bleached horse skeleton, still saddled a decade after the horse’s rider had been struck by lightning, and told Russ to stay away from it. Keith said the man’s bad luck adhered to the spot, and Russ, in the shimmering heat, the rarefied air, found that this made sense to him. While man experienced time as a progression, from unknown past to unknowable future, to God the entire course of history was eternally present. To God, the site of the lightning strike wasn’t just the spot where a man had died but the spot where he would later die and the spot where, in God’s perfect knowledge, he was forever dying. Being in the desert made a mystery like this accessible.
Because he was working hard, for people who could use the help, he didn’t feel guilty about his official mission, but George Ginchy had told him that if he wasn’t back by August he would send a search party. Accordingly, at first light on the thirty-first of July, he packed and fueled the Willys and took his leave of Keith and Stella, who were the only others awake. Stella ran up to him and wrapped her arms around his leg. He picked her up and stroked her head.
“I’ll come back,” he said. “I don’t know when, but I will.”
“Careful what you promise, Long Wrench.”
“I wasn’t talking to you. Was I, Stella?”
She squirmed bashfully. He set her down, and she went to her father. Ever unsentimental, Keith was already walking away.
Russ still knew hardly anything about the Diné, but at least he knew how much he didn’t know. The desert had only strengthened his belief in God, but he was no longer certain that his ancestral faith was the truest version of the one true faith. After he returned to the service camp, where Ginchy, not punitively, simply out of practicality, had found another worker to be his aide-de-camp, Russ began to investigate the many ways there were to skin a cat. He now worked for the quartermaster and could safely take an extra hour, on a Flagstaff supply run, to stop at the library and read books shelved in the Dewey decimal 290s, world religions. At the camp, on Sunday mornings, he tried worshiping with Ginchy and the Quakers. Their silences, though agreeable to him, seemed shallower than Navajo silences, less embedded in a comprehensive way of being. But he could never be a Navajo; their coffee wasn’t for him to drink.
One Sunday morning in November, continuing his investigation, he drove the old Willys to the Catholic church in Flagstaff. He’d detected, in a book about Saint Francis, an appealingly uncompromising spirit. From a pew at the rear of the church, amid the fragrance of burning tapers and the feeble light from colored windows, he could see the mantillas and gray braids of old Mexican women, the more modern American dress of middle-aged couples, and the pale nape of a woman whose head was deeply bowed. The priest, who was elderly, with a serious tremor, spoke a language as unintelligible as Navajo, and the service wasn’t short. Russ’s eyes kept returning to the pale neck in front of him. It aroused a sensation he’d formerly misapprehended as queasiness and now associated with pleasure in secrecy. The woman was small and delicate, her hair cut in a bob.
In Lesser Hebron, Communion was a major semiannual event taken in full fellowship, using bread that the women had communally kneaded and baked. Catholic Communion seemed almost as alien to Russ as a Navajo sing. The priest invited sacrilegious comparison to a doctor with a tongue depressor, the congregants to children queuing up for lunch. Only the woman with the pretty neck received her wafer with visible feeling. She kneeled with a quaking vulnerability, reminiscent of his mother’s intensity of faith. As she returned to her pew, he saw that she was full-mouthed and dark-eyed, possibly no older than he was.
After the service, he asked the priest if he could come again and receive Communion as a visitor. The priest explained why he couldn’t, but he said that Russ was welcome to observe and worship. Russ duly revisited Nativity the following Sunday, but this time he was defeated by the Latin of it all. The church’s thick walls, which a week earlier had felt sheltering, now struck him as a monument to a living faith gone dead, a once-molten spirit congealed into cold stone by the passing of centuries. The dark-eyed young woman was there again, alone again, but the fervor of her faith now seemed to exclude him.