Stealing Fire (12 page)

“She's beautiful. Her name?”

“Ch'ilátah Hózhóón.”

“Difficult to say!”

“Not when you're used to it. It means ‘flowers.' She was born in the spring after a rainy winter that brought more wildflowers than anyone could remember.”

“What did you call her for short?”

“Chil-a-ta-
oh
-shon. Emphasis on ‘oh.' Flowers. No way to shorten it, no reason to want to.”

“And you never married again.”

“I was a goner the first time I saw her—she was it. And then I lost her. I was mom and dad to our daughter. A few decades down the line, my grandson here arrived, and Yazzie needed a dad,” he said. “During that time, I never met a woman who could have fit in here comfortably. And never really looked for one.”

Strange to hear my grandfather talk on about his early life, and about my grandmother, so openly. When the door to that part of his life opened, or when talk of my grandmother came up, he usually ran in the other direction and slammed the conversation shut.

“I was married,” Wright said, “this was a very long time ago, to a woman who gave me a large family. We outgrew each other, I abandoned her, betrayed her, abandoned the children. It sounds shameful, I know. But I'd fallen in love with another woman. Mamah. She had children, too. As you said about your wife, Mose, Mamah was my other half. We fit.

“We shared our deepest beliefs. Together, we were bliss. Our friends weren't happy about it, our families were angry, my wife—well, you can imagine. Plus, the government had inane laws concerning divorce. We broke all the rules to be together. Europe seemed the only option for us to make a clean slate. We left the States, both of us leaving our children behind.”

“And when you were in a different place, it stopped working?”

“No. We came back, and disaster, a horror of the sort seen in battle, happened.”

Wright sat straight and stared at the woodstove as he spoke. His words echoed to us from a hidden corner. Grandfather covered Wright's delicate fingers with his large, rough hand.

“Life in Wisconsin had settled down to a simmer, and we were homesick. Mamah missed her children, as I missed mine—that's when we returned. Life seemed to be on an even keel.

“One day, a day just like any other, I'd gone to Chicago with my son John—just a short trip. He was painting a mural, I was eating a sandwich. Two ordinary men with nothing on our minds except getting a job done well. The owner told me I was wanted on the phone. I hung up, and we caught the first train back to Wisconsin.

“You see, we'd hired a couple from Barbados to help around the house—a handyman and a maid. Julian and Gertrude Carlton. Nice people. Mamah had guests over, children and adults. She noticed it first—I'd just received a hurried wire from her telling me to come home as soon as possible. Things weren't right, and she'd given the couple their two-week notice. Mamah was an intuitive. Carlton snapped.

“According to Carlton's wife, he had been acting strange for several days, sleeping with an ax. But that final day, he served dinner, elegantly dressed in his whites, to Mamah, her children, our friends, and their children. Then he got some gasoline to clean a spot off the carpet. Once outside, he bolted the windows and doors. Told his wife to leave. She did.”

I'd seen men come back from war. Wright was reliving it, seeing the scene, like it was happening in the present. There was no way to fix it. The stories you hear about how time heals? They're baloney. Time puts on a Band-Aid so you can move forward. The wound is still there. The most we could do was give him the peace of sympathetic ears and let him know, without words, that we honored his grief.

“Apparently, Mamah was the first victim. Carlton killed her with an ax to her head. He killed her children. He set the house on fire. Guests were bludgeoned and burned. Of the nine who were gathered that evening for supper, only two survived. Sheer luck and heroics on their part—they crawled to a neighbor's and used their phone. Taliesin burned to the ground.”

“Did they catch Carlton?” I said.

“Yes. Tossed him in jail. He had drunk hydrochloric acid, so he couldn't talk, couldn't tell us why. He also couldn't eat. It took sixty days, but he starved himself to death.”

Slow tears ran down his face. “I am haunted by fire, and yet it's the focus of the homes I design. Haunted by flames. Flames of my imagination. Immolated by my self-absorption, and yet it probably fuels my creativity.”

Coyote.

Mose leaned over and put his hand on Wright's neck. “When you live a long life, tragedy is part of the deck. We don't get over it. But what you've done, and what I have done? We've built on it. It's part of our foundation. Sometimes it's mangled, but it is authentically us.”

“True. Yes.”

“And we don't blame ourselves. It didn't matter that you were eating a sandwich in Chicago. If you'd been home, you would have died, too. The sandwich, the ordinariness of the day for you, didn't bring about the disaster.”

“No. It's just that—”

“I used to wonder,” Mose said, “if I'd gotten a nurse from the nearby Mormon town, would my wife have lived? She wouldn't let me leave her. I could have insisted. But I didn't insist, and she died. She might have died anyway, and I wouldn't have been with her, wouldn't have gotten to hold her as she was crossing over. There are so many things we don't know. So many different should-haves, could-haves.”

“We have to let them go.”

“Yes.”

“Have you been able to?” Wright said.

“Entirely? No.”

“Neither have I. Obviously.”

“And so we do our work.”

“We do.”

Wright was weary but lighter. More real, almost transparent. I felt transparent myself. I'd never heard the details of my grandmother's death and my grandfather's struggle. I doubted my mother had heard the story. It's one thing to know your grandmother died in childbirth. It's another to hear the story from the man who was struggling to keep her and himself afloat while she was rolling on the tides between life and death.

In tones of too much memory and too much feeling, Wright said, “I think my energy is giving out for tonight.”

Wright would sleep in my mother's old room—he wasn't aware of the calamity that had happened there the year before. We'd had the room, the entire house, blessed and cleansed with cedar. It was safe—no reason to tell him about another disaster.

Grandpa Mose said, “Good night, Frank. Don't let the skin-walkers get you!” They had a good laugh about that. Grandfather went into his old room and closed the door.

I cleaned up the kitchen and scrubbed down the counters extra good. I felt a tremendous need for order. For the routines that clean our lives and bring us the illusion of a sensible world.

Climbing into my old bed on the heels of that story, I half expected nightmares and skin-walkers to crawl out of the earth and right through the floorboards. Too much death, no harmony. You never call upon these death-forces by speaking about them out loud. You push them out of your mind.

Wright and Grandpa, they weren't Navajo, so those concerns didn't apply to them. They did apply to me. It's hard to shake your roots. I don't care whether you're brought up in a religion or with a belief, doesn't matter if you decide to sweep it all under the rug when you hit the age of eighteen. It has become part of your blood and bones. I saw the wounded brought to hospitals in San Diego. I sat with them, told them stories, just a voice humming through them. Here's what I learned: When a person feels their journey here is ending, they usually call upon whatever belief they learned in the lap of their family.

I tossed and turned, but just before dawn, the best time for sweet dreams, sleep found me, covering me in a rosy blanket of peace and forgetfulness. Whatever darkness had happened in this house was past. It didn't destroy a lifetime of tenderhearted, growing-up memories. It was a lifetime that had come, and it had gone. The war had changed everyone, and it had changed the country. The shattered innocence even changed the reservation, a place that seemed like nothing could touch it. People wanted things. Navajo men had seen a bigger world. There was good in that and there was bad. But for right then, regardless of those big changes, I knew that my roots, my childhood, were bundled safe inside me.

After dreams of being a kid again, of being loved and safe, I came back to the present world so relaxed that even my bones felt loose. When I woke up fully, it was to the rich smell of coffee brewing in our kitchen. I pulled on my jeans and slipped into a fresh shirt, still hanging in my old closet.

 

Nineteen

“I'm Fine, Jake Fine. Join me in some coffee?”

There he was, a man whose name I'd heard many times, the man who'd sent a thug to scare Wright in Chicago, a man who floated around the country like mist over grass, sitting at our plank table.

Life was even wackier than I thought, and that's saying something.

“Go on, sit down,” he said. “I'll pour you a cup.”

I sat across the table from him, a guest in my own house, while he rattled mugs around the cabinet. My skin prickled, but I'd be damned if I'd let him see the least reaction.

“I like these metal mugs, myself,” he said, “the ones that are dark blue with white spots. Feels like good times. You?”

“I prefer crockery. What are you doing here?”

Grandpa's shotgun rested against the back door.

Fine lifted the pot off the cookstove and poured us coffee.

“Forget about it,” he said. “I'm not here to hurt anybody. I don't play in that particular league.”

“Maybe not, but you've got some pretty heavy hitters on your team.”

He laughed. “Nice. Look, I'm here to thank you for taking care of Helen. Her mother and I … What can I say? It hasn't worked for years. My son? A total disappointment—he's a loser. But my daughter, she means everything to me.”

I was buffaloed. Figured I'd better play along. I said, “You're welcome.”

“You'll be rewarded, don't worry about that,” he said, “and this is one hell of a good place to hide her out until things calm down.”

“It is.”

“I might give Wright's apprentice—you know that kid, Payton?—a break on his debt for setting Helen up with you.”

“He'd probably appreciate that.”

“Of course, the old man signed on it, so technically it's his debt. And realistically, he has means. Payton doesn't.”

“Few young people have means.”

“That's true. There's something about that kid Payton that doesn't go down right,” Fine said. “Old, classy family with no dough. You know the type.”

“Yep.”

“I knew Wright was going to end up getting squeezed for this. They wanted to work out a deal where what he owed was paid in work on the house, but I knew that was just a con job.”

“Mmmm.”

“Here's a question. If people think you make your living by ignoring this dumb law, or that dumb law, they think they have a right to steal from you.”

“Mmmm.”

“Irregardless, I didn't want Helen to know I was involved, in any way, with her getting a job with Wright. I had to play it careful,” he said. “Kids. They don't mind hitting you up for a snazzy car, but help them get a start in life and the hysterics kick in.”

“I guess.”

I fiddled with my coffee mug. The coffee was terrible, and it was getting cold.

“I hear her work is terrific,” I said.

He seemed surprised. As if anything he didn't supervise could be a success.

He pulled himself up out of his surprise. “Of course, she's very talented. She's beautiful, too. I don't need to tell you that.”

“Nope.”

“She's been sheltered. I'm proud that she's making her own way, although why a young woman with dough needs to work? I don't get it.”

All was silence except the clock on the wall, ticking down minutes. The sound could have filled a concert hall.

“Didn't you hate that fire?” Fine said.

A cold chill crawled down my back. I tossed a few more piñon logs into the woodstove. “Everyone likes a good fire,” I said, “especially on a cool morning.”

“Ha! Not the stove,” Fine said. “You're a real case!”

Oh, I knew he meant the fire in the shed at Taliesin West. Oh-oh-uh-uh. No. I just didn't want to hear anything else. The more I heard, the more he'd feel like we were buddies. Partners. He thought I was an amusing character. I wondered if he'd think I was a real character if I tossed him out physically. I hoped there'd be another option for me to get him back to … wherever he'd come from.

“Fires are for sissies. Nero? What did he do? Fiddled while his city burned, instead of fighting. Jeez.”

“Is this conversation going someplace?”

“I'm crossways with a pretty bad guy,” he said. “Probably started that rumor because he wanted me to think Helen was dead. Then I started thinking about why. How does it look to everyone else? What if it looks like I can't take care of my own kid? Man, that's bad, you know?”

“Makes sense,” I said. I was waiting for him to wind down and get to it.

“I killed that death-by-fire news story as soon as I found out she was with you.”

This was baloney, at least in part. I'd wired Taliesin West myself, right off, and told the group on the train that their colleague was fine. But I said, “Good idea.”

“Confusion works in my favor.”

I nodded in agreement, playing wise in the ways of his world.

“When I heard about Helen dying in the fire—she wasn't supposed to be at Taliesin—I panicked, you know, for about ten seconds. Didn't take long to get to the truth, but during those ten seconds I felt my whole life—business, family, everything—going right down the toilet.”