The Graveyard
“I think that’s it.”
“I don’t know,” my brother says.
“But see all those white things.” I say pointing at the boney objects sticking up along the small ridge a mile or so away. “I think they’re crosses.”
“I told you, Kat. Nothing grows out here,” my mom says. She is walking with her palms flat against her thighs and sounds out of casually out of breath. My mother’s body language gives the appearance that she is always walking up hill.
“What? I said ‘cross’?” I say. My brother loops ahead with the dog, who jumps into some bushes.
“Thought you said grass,” is her reply.
I am up here on my first visit. I am intimidated by my old schools, my old teachers and my peers that might be still be around. My old haunts aren’t mine anymore, I have to look for new ones. When I arrived Thursday night, I asked my mother if I could see the Kayenta graveyard.
“Do we even have a cemetery?” I asked her, in macabre glee.
“Sure we do.” She tells me. “That bone yard? That’s what it is. It’s the most barren and depressing piece of earth I have ever seen. Promise me you won’t bury me there? I want to be cremated.”
“Alright,” I say, “but can we go Saturday?”
We’ve walked about a mile to get here. There is no real trail, but on the outskirts
of town where you can see everything, the landing strip, the sewer ponds, and the housing, you don’t need trails. The ground is pounded flat by drought and joy riders. If you emptied glass of water out here, I imagine it would roll over the ground for yards before sinking in to nourish the budding tumble weeds.
About a half a mile before I see white crosses on the horizon we came to two
roads and a sign. “No Dumping,” it said in crooked black spray paint and “Show Respect.”
“We’re must be getting close,” I say.
My mother and Charlie, on his first visit home from college, runs ahead of me. I look down and see a bright green grasshopper anchored to the road. He is the greenest thing I’ve seen. His transparent wings, pulled away from his body by the wind, mild today, are also a transparent green. So are his eyes, I think I can see tiny black pupils, but I’m also not that versed in insect anatomy. Maybe his pupils are as green as the rest of him. Green like a rainforest frog. Green like pictures of New Zealand.
I look up and in this distance, coming from Snake Rock, I see a red pick-up coming down the road. Two or three people sit in its bed, and a dog runs, opened mouthed, behind the vehicle.
“Hey,” I shout, moving towards the graveyard. “There’s a truck.” Neither my Charlie or my mother look at the truck. “They have a dog.”
“Leash him,” my mother tells Charlie, who removes his leather belt from his jeans, and moves to attach it to Max’s collar. “We shouldn’t go in there, with them passing by.”
I pull the hood of my black jacket over my conspicuous blonde hair. I don’t want them to see me. I am pretty sure there are no Anglos are buried in that cemetery and what right have I to grace their grave yard with my straw-colored hair? I try to ignore the passing truck and walk the final, slightly uphill, yards to the graveyard. I don’t look at the passing truck but I hear it getting closer, and finally pass us by. I turn, holding my hood to my head and try to look into the faces of the people in the truck. I wonder what they think of us.
Charlie is being yanked around by Max, who has a small triangular object in his mouth.
“Is that a hoof?” I ask Charlie.
“No, it’s a fish head,” he says. “Attached to a some wire.” He jerks the fish head out of Max’s mouth. The fish looks gray and deflated. I can’t tell if it has eyes or if they have just sunken into its head.
“It’s bait.” Says my mom, who has reached the entrance of the cemetery first. “Figures we’d find the one fish in the entire desert.”
“People don’t fish here,” I say.
There is no discernable entrance to the graveyard. The fence that outlines the property is made of a variety of decaying materials. Twisted chain-link in some places, bleached and cracked wood in others. My family and I step into the cemetery.
“Look,” my mother says, “And people use it as a dump.”
She is pointing to a pile of trash, just inside the graveyard. We look closer; the mess is a mix of plastic bags, broken glass, and fake flowers. I see a small metal grave marker inscribed with a faded name. I squint but can’t read it. When I look up I am greeted by the most uneven landscape I have ever seen. Hundreds of dirt mounds extend unevenly for a quarter of a mile. They remind me of the hills kids make to jump their bikes, but these tiny hills are flatter and decorated. The mounds are covered with old fake flowers bleached out by the sun, glass vases and coffee mugs, things you might find in a kitchen.
Something I do not need to be told is that all the mounds are graves and that there is a person under each and every hardened hill. I recognize these kinds of graves from old photographs. I always assumed that these graves were shallower than most, because of the lack of construction equipment. But even the oldest graves I have seen, the ones back East around
“Keep Max out of here,” she tells Charlie, who stays outside the intangible border.
There are very few proper makers. There are a few crosses, a few praying angels, and a few names spelled out using small rocks. The biggest maker is a piece of red-orange sandstone. The word “Sweety” above a cascading rainbow has faded.
“Sweety,” my mother says as I step further into the graveyard. “Tasha, I didn’t know she was buried here.”
“There’s nothing Navajo here,” I say. I am weaving my way between the graves. The mounds, like something out of a spaghetti western, make me feel like the bodies aren’t buried very deep. Like they are they, just beneath the dirt that make up the mounds.
I’m not paying attention and step on one of the mounds. It’s small, about the size of a backpack. My foot leaves a slight impression. Do I reshape this space with my hands? Do I ignore it? Is it possible that anyone could track me based off my sneaker size. I am not supposed to be here.
“I can’t be here,” my mother says. She is still standing in front of the Sweety grave. “ I’m sorry, I’m going. I’m going home. I didn’t know they buried her here. What kind of person would do that to their daughter?”
“I’m sorry, Mom,” I say. “I shouldn’t have asked to come out here.”
“Didn’t I tell you it was the saddest and most awful place you would ever see?”
“It’s something else. Did you notice, there’s nothing Navajo here?”
“Of course not.”
My mom leaves the graveyard. Charlie removes the belt from the dog who starts running ahead of her, back towards the direction of Black Mesa. Charlie enters the graveyard.
“She’s upset,” he says. “That was one of her students, I think.”
“Yeah.”
We start to walk through the graves. The places feels as though it has no atmosphere. I can see the American flags and ribbons whip about and I can hear the only real roses we see scratch the insides of their plastic bouquets, but I don’t feel the wind. Usually the wind mixes the smells of the near-by sewer ponds with the rest of everyone’s life, but I can’t smell the ponds today, or the horses. It doesn’t even carry the voices of children playing in the near-by neighborhood, though I heard them before we entered the graveyard. The graveyard exists, I decide, in outer space. That’s why no one visits and I wonder if that bothers the dead here. Can all the bodies since the lack of grass above them. I wonder what the place looks like from space or from an airplane, if it is even distinguishable from the rest of the land here.
“We should catch up with Mom,” Charlie says. “This place is terrible.”
I don’t say anything to that. I am upset with his obvious observation and petty reaction. I am upset with my own reasons for coming here and what I was hoping to get. I am tempted to do something really bad. I am tempted to steal one of the coffee mugs or fake flowers that decorate the graveyard because I didn’t get what I wanted. I am tempted to tuck a small angel statue into my jacket pocket and am tempted to steal the pebble that might complete the spelling of someone’s name. The only reason I don’t is because I am scared of what I might be taking home with me. There is no such thing as a good spirit in Navajo culture. Furthermore, I should be careful about what I leave behind here, a piece of my hair, or a sneeze.
I shove my hands into my pockets, like a tempted teenager in a drug store.
“Come on,” I say to Charlie. “Let’s catch up with Mom.”
She is more the half a mile away when we leave the graveyard and I want to catch up with her very badly. The wind has picked up considerably, as it tends to do in the afternoon. There are no trees to lend it a sound, the entire landscape looks still, but it is harder and harder to hear myself when I talk to Charlie. I look behind myself and the sight of the graveyard unravels little by little becoming smaller with every step I take until it was the mirage it was before I had entered it. I can hear Max’s collar and I can see my mom’s maroon jacket. I would shout for her if I didn’t know the wind would throw my voice back into my face.
