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.
II
On a day when the corn was nearly ripe, she went to work in the field. Tiring, she sat down to rest where she could watch two stalks, with their silk just showing against the sky. Low on the horizon the beginnings of a storm darkened the blue. She called Laughing Boy.
“Show me how they draw the corn in the sand-pictures.”
“I do not think I should show you that. You are a woman, and you have never seen the true gods in the Night Chant.”
“Perhaps you are right.”
He was making a decision.
“I shall show you.” He drew in the sand. “We do it like this. Here is blue, here yellow. Here are the tassels, the silk.”
“Why do you show me?”
“You are not like ordinary people, you have a strength of your own. I do not think any harm will come to you.”
She looked from the conventionalization to the growing stalks; she divided the threatening sky into a design. Her first, elaborate blanket had been a built-up, borrowed idea, her later ones were uninteresting accidents. Now she saw her work complete, loving it and the task of making it. Now she really had something to tell her loom.
She was impatiently patient with the dyeing and spinning, needlessly afraid that she would lose her inspiration. When she was ready, she worked so steadily that Laughing Boy warned her of the fate of women who wove too much, and forced her to let a day go by. Her muscles were much tougher now, and her fingers had grown clever and hard among the strands.
She managed for him to be away with his horses during the last two days, when she finished it. He had not yet returned when, a little despondently, she locked in the selvage, unrolled it on the frame, and sat back on her heels to smoke and look. She did not see what she had conceived. She did not see a living design, balanced and simple, with mated colours. She saw thin, messy workmanship, irregular lines, blunders, coarsenesses. At one place she had forgotten to lock the blue into the green weft, sunlight showed through. The counting of stitches was uneven. The blanket was not even a rectangle.
She went quickly away from the house, walking hurriedly and smoking fiercely.
“I am not a Navajo; it is not given to me to do these things. Mother was happy when she wove, she was beautiful then. I cannot make anything, and he is gifted. He will despise me in the end. Being able to make something beautiful is important to him. He will feel his house empty without the sound of weaving. They said I was gifted, that man who came that time.
