The Turquoise Ledge: A Memoir Read online

  I was six years old the first time my father allowed me to walk with him on the deer hunt. I look back now in wonder: because my father was very serious about hunting and liked to bring home the biggest buck. My father and uncles and their friends were in a competition over that. To take along a six year old child to hunt deer seems to me now a bit unusual for a serious deer hunter like my father was. Yet my parents took me along on the hunt that November.

  I was warned again and again about the rigors of deer hunting. My parents told me if I went, there was no turning back. I could not cry if I got tired of walking and I knew my father walked fast. I could not complain if I got cold or hungry. If I did not do everything they told me to do then at lunch break I would be left in the jeep back at camp. Yes, I promised, I would not be any trouble.

  It had snowed on Mount Taylor and in the high mountains above Laguna the week before and the snowfall had only partially melted. I will always remember: I wore my black cowboy boots. I hated any shoes with laces and because the decision to allow me to go along came at the last minute, I had no other boots to wear except my black cowboy boots with thin cotton socks. The sky was bright blue and the sun was shining and melting the snow. I had walked only a short distance with my father that morning before my black cowboy boots were soaked with icy snow melt.

  The first thing my father taught me that morning is how a hunter walks. Not too fast. Stop frequently to listen. Stop and listen the way a deer listens; then the deer will think he hears another deer or animal moving through the brush, not a human. He showed me how to step from rock to rock to avoid dry twigs or leaves that make noise.

  I never told my father how wet and cold my feet were, but when we all met back at camp two hours later, my mother saw the soaking wet cowboy boots and realized my feet must have been cold all morning. Cowboy boots are for horseback riding, not hiking. The adults wore waterproof hiking boots.

  During the lunch break I sat near the campfire to dry my cowboy boots and warm my feet. At noon the sun was so warm we had to remove a layer of sweatshirts we wore under our jackets. Afterwards my mother asked if I was sure I wanted to walk again with my father while he hunted that afternoon. By then the sun had warmed the scrub-oak hills and much of the snow melted; it was a beautiful clear day. I told my mother I wanted to hunt.

  After lunch my father and I made our way up the east side of a dome shaped lava hill, called a “cerro,” that was fringed with scrub-oak thickets. At the top of the hill we stopped to rest; we still only whispered. My father sat on a big rock in the sun while I went off to the bushes to urinate. As I returned, my father stood up on the rock ledge with his back to me; he raised his rifle and aimed downhill and fired one shot.

  When I reached my father he pointed down to some big flat boulders about fifty yards below; at first I couldn’t see anything but my father kept saying he’d shot a big buck that was bedded down on a sunny ledge. Finally I located the wide rack of antlers; the buck’s gray coat blended perfectly with the basalt ledge where he appeared to be sleeping, not dead. It seemed unbelievable that the big mule deer buck basked and dozed so close by but did not smell or hear us when we came up the hill behind him. The wind had blown in our favor that day, and carried our sounds and scents away from the buck.

  My father approached cautiously because we still saw no blood or entry wound. Finally my father got close enough to see the buck was dead, but it still took us awhile to find the tiny entry hole between the deer’s shoulder blades where the bullet entered and killed the buck instantly. My father loved animals and hated their suffering, so this one-shot kill made the occasion even better.

  For a six year old on her first hunting trip with her father, this was a completely wonderful and amazing afternoon. It was my first visit to the high plateau country below the volcanic craters of Mount Taylor in the Cebolleta Mountains.

  As I got older, I visited Mount Taylor many times to work on the L Bar Ranch at branding time to gather cattle on horseback. I recalled that mountain terrain vividly as I wrote my first novel, Ceremony, and my protagonist, Tayo, rode his horse up to Mount Taylor to find the spotted cattle.

  Later my father traded our cousin Bill Pratt a pistol for a child-size .22 single shot rifle for me and my sisters. He taught us gun safety from the time we could crawl, and he went over the rules again and again. He took me to the dump down by the river and taught me to line up the sights on the rifle and to squeeze, not jerk, the trigger as we fired. After a few lessons I was allowed to take the rifle and a box of .22 shells to go shoot bottles or targets at the dump by myself.

  My father and his brother got their .22 rifles when they were seven, so he felt I should have a .22 rifle when I was seven. There was never any question that I would do anything improper with the .22. He believed toy guns were bad because they led children to think guns were toys. He didn’t like BB guns because they led children to think a gun shot wasn’t lethal and this caused children to use BB guns carelessly and injure one another.

  He allowed us to light firecrackers for the same reason, so we would know how to do it safely. We always were extremely cautious with the firecrackers because they might start a brush fire. Every Fourth of July my father ordered great quantities of them—Black Cats, lady fingers, cherry bombs, M-80s, sky rockets, aerial bombs, Roman candles, fountains, pop bottle rockets, “snakes,” cracker balls and sparklers, of course.

  My father regarded sparklers as a greater hazard than firecrackers because sparklers were said to be “safe,” even for preschool children, despite the fact that they burn at very high temperatures and might easily blind a child.

  There was something of the child still in my father. At Christmas he bought us girls rockets that flew on a fuel of baking soda and vinegar, sling shots, and flying saucers that launched with the pull of a string—all toys he wanted to play with too, though we girls found them exciting and interesting and great fun outdoors.

  Some of my earliest memories are of my sisters and me posing for our picture under the hot lights of my father’s photography studio. In the big empty room next to his darkroom and the bedroom which my two sisters and I shared, my father hung a roll of background paper and set up his reflectors and lights and made it his studio to take formal portraits.

  He was serious about every photography assignment he took. Before a wedding or portrait session with an elder, he always did a test run of his equipment, the cameras and the film, to make sure nothing would go wrong, so he’d get the best possible results the first time. My father was meticulous about the light and the image of the person in the portrait; it took awhile the way he did it, so he didn’t want to ask the older folks to go through all that more than once. He tried always to use natural light, especially with the elders, and if they couldn’t go outdoors, my father seated them near a window or in a doorway.

  But indoors in his studio there were floodlights so bright we girls could barely open our eyes without being blinded. We’d complain but he’d say “oh just a few more” and he wouldn’t be deterred, he’d get completely lost in the process of working with the light. My father knew how he wanted the light and what he wanted to see through the lens. It wasn’t too bad if we were dressed in our play clothes but sometimes for Christmas or Easter my mother sewed us beautiful dresses that took her weeks to make. We posed in our new dresses and shoes but they were stiff, the fabric chafed and the lights seemed even hotter then.

  By the ways he dressed us and posed us for the annual Christmas card, you can see my father was intrigued by the 1950s style of black and white photography used in fashion and advertising, as well as the images featured in Modern Photography and other photography magazines he bought.

  One time he had my mother dress us as gangsters in fedoras and trench coats much too big for us and he posed us around his circular poker table that had a pile of chips and cards. There were beer bottles on the table and my sister Gigi held a real cigar. I was about eight, my sister Wendy was six and Gigi was four years old.
One year he managed to superimpose our images onto Christmas tree ornaments, and one of the older folks who saw the Christmas card was amazed by the image and asked my dad, “Wasn’t it difficult to get the girls in there without them getting all scratched up?”

  The best Christmas card was the one my father made from the portrait of my two sisters and me dressed in our “Indian clothes” at the old water hole near the original tribal council building. Our cousins Esther Johnson and Rachel Anaya at Paguate loaned us the mantas and my mother sewed us the gingham underdress the Laguna women wore with the mantas. As they helped us get dressed Esther and Rachel explained each article of clothing and how it was to be worn; they wrapped the sashes around us and the white buckskin leggings around our legs. In the old days the women helped dress one another every day; they were always in the company of other women so they thought nothing of it. They loaned us all the silver and turquoise bracelets and rings and necklaces. To be so carefully dressed in the old-time way was very special for the three of us.

  The dressing and posing happened on Sunday afternoons or in the early evening because my father worked at my grandpa Hank’s store six and a half days a week. But almost every night after supper, my father also worked in the darkroom from eight to eleven, sometimes later. My mother worked on her sewing in the front room.

  I often sat in the darkroom watching my father make prints until bedtime at nine. I remember his delight in showing me the exposed paper in the red safe light, apparently blank paper until he slid it into the first tray of chemicals in the long shallow sink. He’d tell me to watch, and at first I couldn’t see anything; again he’d tell me “Look! See!” He was as excited as I was as the images began to appear.

  During the day when my father made grocery deliveries to homes in the village or when he went to the depot to pick up packages for the store, he always took a camera along. He once told me a true photographer is never without a camera. Sometimes he’d be asked to take a photograph of kids or an elder and right on the spot he did it because he always had cameras with him. He was very disciplined about his cameras. We kids had to ride in the back seat with all the bags of camera equipment. In this way even as children we saw how absolutely serious my father was about photography.

  My mother was the more dependable and practical of my parents, even if she kept her coffee cup full of whiskey all morning. She graduated from the University of New Mexico and always made more money than my father; she taught at Grants High School for some years before my youngest sister, Gigi, was born. Later she was appointed postmaster at Laguna in the middle 1950s. The post office was located in a corner of my grandpa Hank’s small general merchandise store across the road from our house. My mother paid the bills, and my father spent the money she earned on cameras and darkroom equipment and supplies; so there were tensions in the house over money. My grandfather paid my father in groceries and a little cash each month, with generous time-off to go take photographs nearly any time my father needed.

  From the time we could walk she taught my sisters and me not to fear or harm snakes. Her respect for snakes was part of her strength. My mother was the one who taught me to appreciate all snakes, even rattlesnakes; she married my father who was a snake-killer, but she stubbornly persisted in her appreciation of snakes. She handled live snakes but the sight of a mouse sent my mother up on the table in hysteria. No wonder snakes were her friends.

  She had learned the mouse phobia from her grandma Goddard the old Cherokee who kept a black snake in the cellar to protect them from mice that Grandma Goddard believed would run up their skirts and attack them. My mother and her brother spent summers in Kansas with Grandma Goddard. Grandma’s father, Grandpa Wood, was born on one of the forced marches of the Cherokee Removal or the Trail of Tears, somewhere in Kentucky.

  My mother owned a .257 Roberts deer rifle with a scope. If she had not hunted deer with my father and the others, I would not have been able to go along as I did when I was six. One year she shot a doe, but seemed to enjoy the hiking more than the shooting. She taught home economics and loved to cook and sew for us when she had time which was seldom because often after a day of teaching she had to help out at the store.

  When I was in the third grade her aunt died and left her a piano. We girls loved to listen and watch her when she played, and I saw sadness in her eyes even when she played pop songs from World War Two. The Albuquerque airport had a good restaurant when I was a child and occasionally my parents took us girls along. One evening after dinner as we left the restaurant, boarding for a flight was called and inexplicably my mother became very emotional and choked back tears. I once saw her do that at a train station years later when I was in college.

  My sister Wendy loved my mother a great deal and as a little child, Wendy tried to comfort her. Wendy stayed in the house with my mother and made the house her realm too, so my mother wasn’t alone. As we got older, Wendy stayed home with her while Gigi and I went hiking with my father on Sunday afternoons.

  My sisters and I felt very protective of our mother because we sensed she was troubled. My mother didn’t scold us or whip us like my father did. She was afraid of him too just as we were when he was angry, although he never touched her. She always helped us with our homework and encouraged us at whatever we wanted to try. She was the one who said I should have a horse when I was eight years old. She helped me with the colt because my father was afraid of horses. The colt knew my father was afraid and kicked him the first day.

  My mother loved to dance and have a good time. She loved to repeat jokes she heard. She was the life of the party. She was devoted to our dogs and cats, and once had a canary she loved. She was also very attached to her goldfish and liked her tarantula so much she set it free. I come by my love for creatures wild and tame from my mother.

  I come by my knack for writing from my mother too. I only learned this in 2001 after she died. In one of her old albums I found a clipping from the Great Falls, Montana newspaper that announced that Mary Virginia Leslie, a sophomore at Stockett High School, had won first prize in the Montana State high school essay contest sponsored by the Montana Electric Power Company. The clipping makes no mention of the essay’s topic, and my mother never talked about it.

  For as long as my mother lived there, she was part of the Laguna Pueblo community and had a great many friends. One year she was invited to participate in the Corn Dance at Christmas time; her friend Louise Lucas loaned her the manta dress and moccasins and belt, and helped her get dressed. My mother didn’t talk about her Cherokee background but it was clearly part of her. Even after my parents were divorced my mother stayed on at Laguna because she felt so much a part of the community. At the post office she always helped people read and fill out Government forms and send letters to Government agencies. At income tax time she assisted people with the forms, and in gratitude they brought her all kinds of good food—mostly oven bread but sometimes big tamales or blue corn enchiladas.

  CHAPTER 11

  On April 2, 1966 I married Dick Chapman, who was in his first year of graduate school in archeology at the University of New Mexico. My mother and both my grandmothers encouraged me to go to school full time the fall semester of 1966 when I was pregnant with my elder son, Robert. She told me new babies slept a lot and I would have plenty of time to study. She was right.

  The pregnancy took an unforeseen turn. Early one morning I began to hemorrhage and both Robert and I nearly died. Robert was born six weeks early and weighed only four pounds nine ounces. He developed breathing difficulties soon after he was born, and there were seventy-two hours when we did not know if he would survive. But ten days later he weighed five pounds and was able to come home. All he wanted to do was sleep.

  My mother babysat for me when she wasn’t at work, and she enlisted her friend, our neighbor on Amherst Street, to help too. My sister Wendy babysat Robert when she wasn’t in class, and so did Dick Chapman. At night I held Robert in one arm and a textbook in the other, so I got nearly str
aight As that semester even with a husband in graduate school and a new baby. I was eighteen.

  My mother’s true calling was to teach, and for years she taught in the Gallup, New Mexico public schools. She first attempted retirement in 1983 when she left Gallup. She moved to Tucson to live with my sons and me but my mother missed the teaching and the contact with the students too much.

  When she was teaching she did not drink; retirement was a dangerous situation for her. My house in the Tucson Mountains was isolated, and my mother needed to be near more people. So in 1984 my mother moved to Ketchikan, Alaska; the local community college quickly called her out of retirement to teach at the resource and learning center where she gave special tutoring in algebra and geometry to older students who wanted to attend college. Going back to teaching had the best possible effect on her life until she retired in 1995. She died in Ketchikan on July 11, 2001.

  Dick Chapman, Robert’s father, had been an English major at UNM as an undergraduate and he tipped me off about Katherine Simons, Edith Buchanan, Mary Jane Powers, George Arms, Hamlin Hill and Ernest Baughman—the best teachers in the English Department. It was Dick Chapman who suggested I take a creative writing course the semester after Robert was born because he thought it would be “an easy A” for me. I was thinking about law school then, so I might not have reconnected with fiction writing without his suggestion. On my own I found the fine poet and teacher Gene Frumkin, who encouraged me to keep writing my way, and had great book lists for his poetry classes.