He drew her towards him, she sat on his knees, her hands on his shoulders. He bent her face back and stared into her eyes. They were deep, deep, and swimming. There was a look in them that thrilled him, a look that must be true. Now there was an imprint of real truth in her words and gestures, and the fierceness of her kiss.
She was not acting any longer, she did not have to pretend this. There was no more falseness in it than there is in an arrow leaving a bow. She hated him. On him she had concentrated all her feelings towards Americans in general, everything that she had ever suffered. In him she was revenging herself upon them all. Her kisses were weapons, her tendernesses were blows struck in the full heat of battle. She was revenging herself, and she was acquiring the means to her perfect life.
Bound by those hours of happiness, he could not break away. These days, he gave her more money than he ever had before, more than he could well afford, seeking to bind her to him, knowing that that was no way to arrive at truth, but craving, if she were lying to him, to be lied to so well he would be convinced. He made many efforts to improve her, feeling how remarkable a woman she was. He wanted her to read books, but her distaste for them was deep and sincere; he wanted to make a superior American out of her. He would have liked to raise her to a position in which he could respect himself if he married her.
She was afraid always that he would ask her that, but he was not quite so lost. She kept him at tension, administering happiness and unhappiness carefully, accepted his increased gifts, and in her mind shortened the time of waiting. But it did not make a smooth road to travel.
III
She was beset by difficulties and entanglements, but she was conquering them one by one, even turning them to her use, as though she were taking weapons from her enemies. She could shape and bend men, she could control her destinies in theirs. In her thoughts, she tasted in advance the happiness of the goal towards which she aimed, and she felt her power, power, power; and so, as far as she could tell, she was happy.
Her weaving was winning Laughing Boy’s unstinted praise, and, to her surprise and great satisfaction, becoming a source of income. The trading post in Los Palos would pass on to her occasional orders from tourists or people in the East. If she had been willing to weave the entirely un-Indian pictures of actual objects that so many tourists demand, she could have had all the work she could handle at fancy prices; but she refused to do anything, or use any colours not purely Navajo, and she strengthened her husband in his natural reluctance to stamp shapeless strings of swastikas, thunderbirds, and other curiosities on his silver. She was precious about it, as she was about all Navajo things. It was one piece with her eagerness to speak familiarly of everything familiar to them, to participate in every phase of their life, to acquire completely the Navajo gesture. When they were rich and lived in the North, she thought, she would make herself an influence for preserving all native ways; she would use any power they acquired in combating Christianity, short hair, shoes, ready-made trousers, and the creeping in of American-derived words. Already she had amused her husband by insisting on calling coffee by its old, cumbrous name of little-split-round-ones, instead of the much easier coghwé, that had been taken into the language.
Laughing Boy’s reputation was spreading. The Harvey agent had made her a tentative offer for them to come to Grand Canyon. In the beginning of spring, at planting time, they moved forge and loom outdoors again. At sunset, laying aside tools, or coming in, tired and at peace, from working in the soft earth, they sang together.
Now was the time when ponies began to grow fat, and the desert was all one mass of flowers. Remembering a good thing from her school days, Slim Girl brought in great bunches, Indian paint brush, fireweed, cactus blooms, and a hundred others, and stuck them in tin cans about the house. This puzzled Laughing Boy at first, but later he caught on, and enjoyed grouping them, with a good feeling for arrangements of masses of colour, but little interest in the blossoms as such.
There was movement in the desert. Horse-trading picked up again. The first sprouts of corn came through the ground, the peach trees began to put out leaves; one of them triumphantly produced a blossom. The days slipped by. Life was settled, serene, monotonous; there was no detail of it that one would wish to change.
XVI
I
Any married couple, no matter how perfect the match, will undergo a critical period of strain, and these two were no exception. For all the dances, winter was a hemmed-in time; repetitious days indoors were a searching test of companionship. Slim Girl went into town, Laughing Boy sallied forth to watch over the herd; but they moved out of the home atmosphere together only for those eight or nine ceremonies.
They were attempting a difficult thing. They needed not only to see occasional outsiders when they were apart, new faces made attractive by the mere fact that they break the sameness, but also the presence of a third person when they were together, that their solitude might retain its value, and their unity refresh itself from the sense of the outsider’s foreignness.
This same life, so closely together, will make people unusually sensitive to each other’s moods; sometimes, if they are fond of each other, almost morbidly so. He did not answer that
