I
Time passing and corn growing cannot be seen; one can notice only that the moon has become so much older, the corn so much higher. With a new life almost more regular than the old, yet far more thrilling, with a rich supply of silver and choice turquoise, with horses to trade and a cornfield to care for, and all the world made over new, time for Laughing Boy went like a swift, quiet river under cottonwood trees. For him, life—which had never been a problem—was solved and perfected, with none of Slim Girl’s complication of feeling that such happiness was too good to last. Had he sat down at T’o Tlakai to compose a song of perfection, he could not have imagined anything approaching this.
It had always been a pleasure to him to work in the corn, to help make the green shafts shoot up, to watch them dance, and contrast their deep, full green with the harsh, faded desert. Among his people corn was a living thing; to make a field beautiful was not so far from making a fine bracelet, and far more useful. He drew the precious water into his field thriftily. At its corners he planted the four sacred plants.
Slim Girl did not understand it at first; she had rather wanted to bar it as entailing unnecessary labour, but decided not to say anything. He saw that she thought it dull, drudging work. He did not try to explain it to her directly, but told her the story of Natinesthani and the origin of corn, and taught her the songs about the tall plant growing. When the stalks were past waist-high, he took her to the field at evening, while sunset brought the drab clay bluffs to life with red, and a soft breeze made the leaves swing and whisper. He made her see the whole field in contrast, and the individual hills, the slender plants and their promise, talking to her of Corn Maiden and Pollen Boy, and of how First Man and First Woman were made from corn. Her eyes were opened to it then, as much through understanding how he felt as through what she objectively beheld. After that she worked with him a little, to please him, although she never cared for the backbreaking toil in itself.
His silver sold well. His craftsmanship was fine, his invention lively, and his taste in turquoise most exacting. It was strong, pure stuff, real Northern Navajo work, untouched by European influence. Other Indians would buy it in the store, and its barbaric quality caught the tourist’s eye. Slim Girl got in touch with the Harvey agent, finding him a ready buyer at good prices. She liked to think, then, of the many places along the railroad in which strangers were paying for her husband’s work.
She had learned not to care much for general opinion of herself, and was surprised to find that this tangible evidence of her mythical husband’s existence, this visible means of support, made a pleasant difference in the trader’s attitude towards her, and eventually in the looks she received from men throughout the town. There was a surprised feeling that she must have been telling the truth about herself, and a grateful decrease in attempts to scrape unwelcome acquaintance with her. As for George Hartshorn, her American, he developed an increased jealousy that she knew how to use.
To complete her idyll, she wanted to weave, and she found it harder than she had expected. She had been taken to school young, before she had become skilled, and now it was almost all forgotten. Laughing Boy even had to teach her the names of her tools. She wondered, as he watched her struggling with the stubborn warp, if he were laughing at her inside himself, if she seemed ridiculous to him. Many times she would have given up had it not been for her natural determination of character, and for knowing how anomalous and incomplete to him was the house in which the woman could not make a blanket. She dearly longed to reconstruct that scene, but after just a little her back would ache, her forearms grow heavy, and in the backs of her hands would be sharp pains, while the threads were like demons to outwit her. The patient, monotonous spinning was pure torture, and she knew little or nothing of dyes.
Of course, her first blanket was an ambitious one, elaborately designed. The conception was simplified in the making, and the finished product was a quarter of the originally intended size. When she cut the sorry object from the loom, and looked at it, all crooked, irregular, and full of holes, she could have cried. She hid it from him. Many of her later attempts, not fit to go under a saddle or be sold, she destroyed, but this was the first thing she had made. It was a sad failure, but she could see what it was meant to be, and she kept it.
She wove perfectly plain strips that might serve to be sat on, and even many of these were hopeless. At times, despite her husband’s encouragement, in his absence she would curse fluently in English and yank at the strings. Few things could make her lose control of herself thus; she wondered at herself for continuing. It was an offering to her beloved and, unconsciously, an expiation for a guilt she had not admitted.