If we were to analyze the arc of the story via traditional means, we could say, right now, that the story itself--the conflict that pushes it--is over. The story is finished because Bea has changed. She isn't who she was when the story began. For the first time in years, this Christmas Eve, Bea is allowing herself the space to think that maybe, just maybe, she had judged her mother and her mother's life too rigidly. Maybe her mother wasn't the pariah she'd built her to be in her mind, her memory, and her imagination.
But there needs to be more--the bit of story structure English teachers call the denouement, the untying or the "un-knot" of the story. Stories begin with knots, with tangled lines or messed-up conflicts. When those conflicts unravel, things get straightened out.
Now, the writer--me--has to figure out how to artfully untie the knot--the major conflicts present in the story.
The first paragraph of this last section is rife with possibilities--she's pregnant, her parents don't know yet, and she's met at the door by a woman who brings a dead baby.
Such things happened frequently in the early days of the mission. Navajos had long nursed a deep fear of the dead, so much trauma, in fact, that they would bring dead bodies to the missionaries to take care of things; they knew that, for whatever reason, white people didn't harbor that fear.
That's what's happening in the flashback Bea now explains.
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The last prayer she'd spoken aloud she'd delivered over a dead baby brought by a Navajo woman to the mission house on a night both her parents were doing camp visits somewhere beneath the open desert sky. She'd come home herself earlier that afternoon without telling them she was on her way because she was pregnant with Frank, by Shorty Toledo. They knew about him-and she'd come home to tell them she was leaving with him, quitting the boarding school.
It was 1946 and Shorty had come back from the war in his uniform, wild. She was seventeen, and when she'd come in the back door, bold and rebellious, she'd found the countertop stacked with empty cake pans and cookie sheets, and the Bible in its place on the table, its black covers worn away from the pages. She'd run through the house when no one answered her calls, thrown open the closet doors upstairs as if she would find her parents hiding from her, then slammed them shut behind her.
She'd been home for an hour, maybe more, sitting on the steps, crying in anger, when the bell rang. Some Navajos were afraid of evil spirits still inhabiting the dead. It had happened before. The front bell would ring and some woman would be standing there in silence, her long, pleated dress tossing softly in the breeze. If she would ask her father to come out to bury the dead, sometimes he would build a coffin in the horse barn while her mother packed extra clothes, baby clothes.
"If Mother Van is not here," the woman had said, "then you will take him?" She nodded toward the bundle in her arms and held it out to her. "Pray now, please," the woman said. "Pray for my child. So Bea had taken the body, stiff beneath the blankets, and prayed then and there on the front steps, some chanted memory prayer that came to her in anger and remorse, pagan too, her father would have said-a prayer for the dead. She spoke only a few repeated words because she knew the woman needed only to hear supplication from the Anglo girl on the porch, Mother Van's own daughter. When she opened her eyes, the woman smiled, then started back up the road, leaving the body.
[Bea's prayer was hardly that; yet, it's clear to her that it was just what this mourning young mother needed.]
She was seventeen, pregnant, full of silly plans. She came down off the steps and walked to the gate at the front of the yard, the weight of death in her arms, then ran a ways up the road. But the Indian woman set herself resolutely into the night, her agony gone. It would be useless to try to give the baby back, a betrayal.
It was spring and the night's mellow warmth promised the summer that was surely to come, the dark skies embedded with stars. The wail of coyotes broke the desert darkness, and amid the snarls of Indian dogs shivering through the stillness, she stood there hoping to see her parents' headlights emerge from the horizon of darkness, still holding a dead baby. A baby-and not a baby. The child, stiff and heavy in her arms, was nothing but cold weight, host to legions of evil spirits. She opened the blankets to a face that paled even in the darkness, its eyes closed, a shock of dark hair clumped over its pointed gray forehead.
Her parents would want to know who: maybe Eloise, or Christine, or Francy? "Did you see her face-maybe the way she wore her hair?" her mother would say. "Who was in the family way?" her father would ask, frantically. "What do you remember-something to distinguish her clothing-some jewelry maybe?-a sash?" her mother would wonder, and the moment they would hazard a guess, they would leave to find the woman, to comfort the pain.
The night was moonless, she remembered, as dark as night can be on the desert, the cottonwoods behind the mission house full of mournful owls. She'd held the body with her left arm and gone into the house, pushed the light switches with her right hand until she got to the kitchen, where she laid it down, the blankets closed up tight around its face. When she looked out the window, she saw lights finally coming up the road. She glanced at the clock and knew it would be Shorty.
She took a pencil from the kitchen drawer and some envelopes from between the pages of the Bible. "Mother," she scribbled in the margin, but even the word sounded wrong. She glanced again out toward the road. It had to be Shorty--he was coming too fast. How could she say what she had to? How could she explain why she was home? How could she tell them everything? "Mother," she wrote. "I was here and you two were gone." That was all.
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One more bit to go, not much.
"I was here and you two were gone" is a summary of what Bea believes her childhood to have been. This time, however, it's not a metaphor. She had so much to say and no one to say it to.
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