The Turquoise Ledge (7 page)

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.

O
n 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 straight 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.

Eleanor and Carl Chapman, Dick's parents, were staunch allies of mine; in a way they were my parents too. I was eighteen and my parents had just gotten divorced and there was no money for school. Eleanor and Carl helped out financially and encouraged me to stay in college after Robert was born. They helped us pay off the hospital bills because we hadn't counted on the expenses of a premature birth. Eleanor gave me all the baby clothes she saved when she had Dick and his brother, Steve. Beautiful embroidered gowns and hand-knit booties and sweaters and appliquéd blankets and quilts which Eleanor made. She was a wonderful artist who could draw or paint or make stuffed animals like the Cheshire Cat and Eeyore and Piglet which she sewed for Robert.

Eleanor made all the drawings and diagrams used in Carl Chapman's scholarly publications on the archeology and pre-history of the Missouri River Valley, including the Spiro mounds where Eleanor worked on the fragments of copper plates with the wonderful bird men figures. As she did the drawings and helped to reconstruct the missing parts of the plates, she theorized that the figures had been embossed on the copper with deer horn. Eleanor got herself a plate of thin copper and a deer horn and made replicas of the Spiro copper plates to show that this was how the images on the plates had originally been embossed.

Years after Dick and I were divorced, Eleanor and Carl and I remained close. Every Christmas Eleanor sent wonderful boxes of little thoughtful gifts, mostly handmade, not just for Robert and me, but for my younger son, Cazimir, and for his father, my second husband. Eleanor and Carl died in a car crash in 1987. I miss them very much.

G
randma Lillie used to take me and my sisters for walks by the river to the ruins of the old water pump house by the artesian springs where Laguna got its water and where the railroad got water for the locomotive engines. I remember a small pool wreathed with watercress where the water bubbled up through the sand. When I knelt down and drank, it was delicious and so cool.

She used to tell us stories about things that happened in the places we hiked and about the times she took our dad and uncle hiking in the hills when they were our age. She used to tell us the adventures she had when she was a girl in Los Lunas.

Grandma Lillie liked to say she was a tomboy when she was growing up. One time she and her sister Marie found a nest of baby prairie dogs and they managed to get them into a gunny sack and home but their dad refused to let them keep them. As it was, one of the prairie dogs bit through the end of Marie's finger.

She'd ridden horses with Marie, and had fallen from a horse and cut her scalp on a rail of the tracks in Los Lunas. She always preferred to wear pants and only wore skirts when she went to Mass which was only twice a year on Christmas Eve and Palm Sunday. She was excommunicated when she married Grandpa Hank because he wasn't a Christian. She could fix motors, lamps and leaking pipes. She preferred mechanics to cooking. She knew how to work on the Model A Ford to keep it running. She was always busy. She liked nothing better than to clean and completely rearrange the tool shed, down to sorting the bolts, washers and nuts into coffee cans she saved for just such purposes.

Grandma Lillie always had a pile of old used lumber and posts, and scraps of tin roofing and wire; I have piles here at the ranch of just such items that someday I am sure to need for some important task.

Poor Grandma Lillie. She always feared I'd be killed in a horse accident. She'd grown up in the days when most people still used horses and wagons because only the wealthy had cars, so she knew bad accidents could happen with horses. She'd been thrown plenty of times herself when she was a girl.

From the time I can remember, I've been crazy about horses. I used to ride my mother's brooms. When I was eight, my father drove me to the big tribal corrals by the railroad tracks at Quirk, south of Paguate where the wild horses on Laguna Pueblo land were gathered and sold every two years. The Government Extension agent picked out a bay weanling colt and my father bought him for twelve dollars. The colt had a pretty head, big eyes and small ears, and the narrow chest and shoulders of the North African horses. I named him Joey because he jumped the fence around our yard like a kangaroo.

Once the excitement was over, I was a little disappointed because it would be at least eighteen months before he was old enough to ride. We kept him in the yard around the house for the first year and my sisters and I played with him and made him carry our dolls on his back so by the time he was old enough to ride, he didn't mind having blankets or a saddle on his back.

For a long time I rode him bareback because I didn't own a saddle but also because it was less weight for the colt to carry. The Montgomery Ward farm and ranch catalog sold saddles and I found the one I wanted. It cost sixty-five dollars. So I delivered Sunday papers until I had saved up the money. I can still remember the big box that came to the post office and the smell of new leather that filled the room when we opened it; the leather was stiff and shiny, a light tan color and embossed with rosettes; it squeaked whenever the saddle stirrups moved. I was accustomed to old saddles that were well-worn and the leather supple. I used saddle soap to soften the leather and to get rid of the squeaks. On Western saddles the stirrup leathers have to be broken in so the rider's foot and leg fit correctly.

My father's cousins Fred Marmon and Harry Marmon and their cowboy, Jack Kooka, teased me and said I should break in my new saddle the way the cowboys did it: they tossed the new saddle into the water trough then cinched the soggy saddle to their horse and rode on it all day.

I think the cowboys were probably right but I couldn't bear to throw my beautiful new saddle into the stock tank so I broke it in over months, the hard way.

I was eleven and had only been riding Joey about a year when something happened. Our cousin old Bill Pratt found me on the ground unconscious in the salt bushes not far from the pen where I kept Joey. Joey was very gentle and Bill found him nearby, so it didn't seem as if Joey had bolted or bucked. I landed on my head. I have no memory of what happened. I woke up on the couch at Bill's house. He sent one of his sisters to tell my parents. For the next three days I was barely conscious; I don't remember much—only how badly the muscles in my shoulders and neck hurt. I have no memory of what happened that day, of what went wrong. I remember St. Josephs Hospital and an x-ray of my skull. It was during summer vacation so I didn't miss any school.

This might be the reason that later on when I kept horses, Grandma Lillie was always worried about me getting killed on a horse.

In 1971 I was in law school and commuting to Albuquerque from New Laguna where my son Robert and I lived with John Silko. Back then at Laguna very few people had telephones and there were no private phone lines, only party lines. We were renting the old Gunn house at New Laguna where we had goats, many cats and dogs, and of course, horses.

One morning we were eating breakfast at New Laguna (having decided to ditch law school that day) when the door burst open and Grandma Lillie rushed in; when she saw me she said, “Leslie! They told me you were dead! Killed on your horse!” I was so surprised—all I could say was that I hadn't even ridden my horse for the past three days.

Grandma Lillie had been at my uncle's coin-operated laundry at Laguna when some women from Paguate village came rushing over to Grandma in tears at the news of my death. A moment later Fred Marmon, our cousin, who had always helped me with my horses, arrived because he'd heard the same rumor.

Later we figured out what had happened. Grandma Lillie had a party line. About two weeks before the rumor about me, Grandma received phone calls about one of her nieces in Albuquerque whose young daughter was dragged to death by her horse after she became entangled in the lead rope. Someone must have picked up the party line and overheard them talking about it. So the rumor spread from this misunderstood overheard phone conversation.

Years later when I was teaching at Diné College (known as Navajo Community College then) I ran into Robert Fernando from Mesita village near Laguna. He worked for the BIA at the Many Farms boarding school. He couldn't believe it was me because he'd heard that I had been killed; no one had bothered to tell him the rumor was false.

T
he old folks used to admonish us to leave things as they are, not to disturb the natural world or her creatures because this would disrupt and endanger everything, including us humans. The hummah-hah stories from long ago related what was done the wrong way and what calamity to the humans followed.

The U.S. Federal Government by way of the Department of the Interior/Bureau of Indian Affairs forced the Laguna Pueblo people to allow Anaconda to blast open the Earth near Paguate for an open-pit uranium mine. The tribe tried to resist but the Cold War politics fed the frenzy for uranium for atomic bombs. In the early 1950s the aboveground testing at Jackass Flats in Nevada began.

The frontispiece of Carole Gallagher's book
American Ground Zero
is an Atomic Energy Commission map of the locations that got dusted with radioactive fallout during the U.S. nuclear tests in Nevada. From the map, which indicates heavier fallout with darker shading, it is clear the U.S. Government managed to nuke this country more completely than the USSR ever dreamed. All (lower) forty-eight states have locations where radioactive fallout from these tests was detected more than once, although Nevada, Utah, Colorado, northern Arizona and New Mexico got the heaviest contamination.

On this map, I found the Rio San Jose Valley where Laguna and Acoma Pueblos are located; it was clear the prevailing west winds followed the San Jose Valley so the clouds of radioactive particles from the Nevada atomic test site passed over us every time they “tested” a bomb. We were “down-winders” with all the other “expendable” people who became human guinea pigs.

Because I was born in 1948 I had a few years to grow before my body was subjected to the radioactive fallout. I've been blessed with good health thus far, but my younger sisters have not been as fortunate. They were two and four years younger than I was the first time the radioactive clouds from Nevada followed the San Jose River Valley east right over Laguna.

To add to the exposure from this radioactive fallout, once a year the Federal Government sent chest x-ray vans to Laguna to check for tuberculosis; to save a few pennies, we small children at the Bureau of Indian Affairs day school were given chest x-rays at a strength meant for adult body weight, not young children.

The Anaconda Company was not required to dispose of the radioactive tailings or store them safely to prevent contamination of the air or groundwater. For years the mountain-like piles of radioactive tailings remained there, blowing east toward Albuquerque, percolating radiation into the water table with every rain-and snowstorm. No plants ever grew on the tailings though sometimes around the base of the piles, a few hardy tumbleweeds appeared. A few years ago the tailings were finally buried beneath piles of clean dirt, and now the weeds grow there profusely.

Far more egregious abuses of the people by the U.S. Government during these years came to light during the Carter administration and in the 1990s when U.S. Energy Secretary Hazel O'Leary declassified millions of pages of “Top Secret” documents. A number of disturbing books were written based on the contents of the declassified papers. Handicapped children in boarding schools were secretly fed plutonium in their oatmeal, and poor black men in Alabama were secretly injected with plutonium “to see what would happen.” The aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had already showed us what would happen; these demented secret experiments of the 1950s and 1960s are more evidence that anything may be done by U.S. Government agents as long as the two words “national security” are invoked.

While nothing like a true “gold rush,” at first the search for uranium was big business in the early 1950s; the Cold War and the U.S. atomic bomb production needed more uranium. For a few years prospectors descended on the Southwest with their Geiger counters over one shoulder like a purse. As a child I remember my father calling me over to look at a box full of rocks a uranium prospector had in his jeep. They were beautiful—bright glowing colors of lemon yellow and lime green on yellow sandstone.

My father showed a prospector the rock collection he and his brothers and Grandma Lillie made from their hikes in the hills, and sure enough, one rock they'd carried home made the Geiger counter buzz. They picked up the piece of uranium so long ago no one remembered where they'd found it.

Carnotite is the vivid yellow or green powdery mineral that coats the sandstone where uranium chiefly occurs. It is a secondary mineral formed by the change of primary uranium-vanadium minerals through intense heat and exposure to water, possibly during volcanic activity. Pure carnotite contains about 53 percent uranium and 12 percent vanadium minerals. Carnotite is radioactive and easily soluble in acid and in acid rain.

My father took me along with him when I was in junior high school to one of the Kerr-McGee yellowcake mills at Ambrosia Lake, near Grants. He'd photographed the facility previously and was bringing the proof sheets to the mill manager. He thought it would be “educational” for me to go. I liked to see how things worked so I went.

We got a mini tour of the facility by the mill manager who took us to the shipping room where the fifty-five-gallon drums were weighed and sealed prior to shipment by truck or by train. The shipping drums were ordinary steel drums. The manager lifted the lid on one of the barrels to show us the pure yellowcake refined at the mill. Another open drum contained pitch-blende which occurs as small grains of black or brownish black or dark gray nodules of uraninite, uranium oxide in sandstones which often weathers into secondary uranium materials.

The yellowcake and pitch-blende were powdered so finely they resembled velvet; the yellow was so bright and the black so intense I had the impulse to touch them; of course I didn't. We stood eighteen inches away from the open drums but none of us wore a mask. Of course the U.S. Government kept secret the reports that proved the dangers of these materials, but they and Kerr-McGee didn't want the workers and people who lived around the mills and mines to become alarmed.

As it was, the Laguna and Acoma people refused to work underground. Whites and others from the Spanish-speaking villages in the area were hired to go underground in the shafts to mine. The Laguna and Acoma people refused to desecrate the Earth by entering her. Work in the open-pit mine was permitted, and for twenty years the Pueblo miners worked in the dust of the rich carnotite but wore no protective gear for their lungs or skin.

In the early 1960s, Anaconda discovered that Paguate village sat on top of sandstone with very rich deposits of uranium. The company proposed to relocate the entire village, to move every household into a brand new settlement with new modern houses and modern conveniences. The Tribal Council discussed the proposal for weeks, and many at Paguate are still angered that a number of Council members from other villages argued for the relocation of Paguate village. In the end sanity prevailed, and Paguate was not destroyed.

Instead the mining company sank deep shafts under the village to reach the rich ore. The huge open pit continued to grow, swallowing entire sandstone mesas in a few years' time, and the pit moved ever closer to Paguate village. The sounds of the mine resounded in the village night and day, three shifts of workers, seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year.

During this time, in the early 1970s, seven young people, high school students at Paguate, apparently made a suicide pact. The students were in their junior year and were among the brightest and most popular at Laguna-Acoma High School. Their families were financially secure. They seemed to have a great deal to live for, but they chose otherwise. I always wondered if it might have been the presence of the mine—I could hardly stand the sound for the hour or two I visited my cousins Rachel Anaya and Esther Johnson at Paguate in the seventies while the Jackpile Mine was in operation. These young people heard that terrible mechanical roar of compressors and generators without cease, around the clock, every day of the year; they heard their elders rant about the destruction the mine wrought, they heard the old ones cry whenever they recalled the lovely orchards of apples and apricots that once grew where the open-pit mine left nothing.

The suicide pact ran its course, and then in 1980 something amazing appeared at the mine. Two Jackpile Mine employees whose job it was to inspect the tailings piles for instability or erosion had found a strange object only thirty feet away from one of the mountainous piles of tailings. The two employees made the same round of inspections of the tailings twice each week. Sometime between their last inspection of the southwest edge of tailings, a twenty foot long sandstone formation in the shape of a giant snake appeared only a few yards from the base of a tailings pile. The sandstone formation looked as if it had been there forever—but it hadn't.

For hundreds of generations, this area had been familiar ground to the Paguate people who farmed and hunted the area every day, yet no one had ever seen the giant sandstone snake before. Traditional medicine people came from all directions and all the tribes to see the giant stone snake. What a wonder it was to find something so sacred and prophetic; it was as if Ma'shra'true'ee, the sacred messenger snake, had returned, but not to some pristine untouched corner of the land, but instead to the uranium tailings of the Jackpile Mine.

That day I visited the stone snake, only three loose strands of barbed wire enclosed the sandstone formation. Some scraps of chain link from the mine were loosely strung up on one side. The effort at fencing off the sandstone was to protect the giant snake from damage by grazing cattle or horses in the area. I saw scattered bits of shell, and mother of pearl with small pieces of coral and turquoise, left with pollen and corn meal to provide ceremonial food for the spirit of the giant snake.

A few years later Laguna Pueblo got the state highway relocated away from this area. Paguate Hill was notorious for car wrecks; now the highway swings east and then continues north, closer to the remains of the open-pit mine that ceased operation with a world glut of uranium thirty years ago.

Aunt Susie told me that a spring flows out of the basalt ledge on the west side of Paguate village. In times past the medicine people used to send their patients to soak in the spring water because it cured certain maladies. In their natural undisturbed state, the uranium-bearing minerals in the earth beneath Paguate village were healing mediums, not killers.

Some years ago the U.S. Public Health Service tested a sample of the water the Paguate villagers drank for as long as the people lived there. The water was from a spring under the village and was slightly radioactive. As a “down-winder” exposed to fallout (and yellowcake), I pin my hopes for good health on my genetic inheritance from my Paguate ancestors who over the centuries might have acquired a resistance to radiation.

My great grandma A'mooh who was born and reared at Paguate, and drank the radioactive spring water much of her life, lived past her ninety-eighth birthday. She told my mother that as a young woman she had survived an appendicitis without Western medicine. That seemed impossible without penicillin or antibiotics, so I wondered about the story until a few years ago.

Then I became a patient of Dr. Roberto Zamudio Millán who immigrated to the United States from Mexico in the 1960s. On my first visit I wanted him to know that I wasn't impressed with Western European medicine so I told him that my great grandmother had survived an appendicitis without doctors, hospitals or penicillin.

To my delight, Dr. Zamudio Millán responded to my story with another story. While he was in medical school he found a book written by a doctor who worked in a small town in the mountains of the State of Chihuahua in 1920. The people traveled considerable distances on foot to obtain medical care in the town, and in emergencies family members came for the doctor to take him to their house where a loved one lay ill.

So a family brought the doctor to their modest home in an Indian village high in the mountains to take a look at their old granny who was feverish and quite ill. The doctor told the old woman's family they had to get her down to the clinic hospital in town at once for surgery or she would die of a burst appendix. The old woman refused to go to the hospital. So the doctor returned to the town, and a few days later they came again and said she was very ill now and again the doctor went and again she refused the hospital.

A week or two went by and the doctor heard no more from the family of the old woman, and the doctor thought she was dead by now. Then the following week, the doctor saw two of the old woman's sons and when he cautiously inquired about her, certain she must have died, her sons said, “Oh she's just fine; strong as ever.” They told the doctor that the fever went down and she asked for the bedpan. Then she told them she was hungry and wanted to eat.

A few weeks later the doctor went to the village. When the old woman saw the doctor she yelled at him, “You don't know anything! See, I'm still alive. I didn't need your hospital!”

Dr. Zamudio Millán said that in extremely rare cases, before the appendix ruptured, the body formed a membrane around the infected matter inside the appendix so it was encapsulated and then the large intestine passed it harmlessly. That was Dr. Zamudio Millán's explanation of how my great grandma survived appendicitis without doctors and antibiotics. He completely won me over with that story so I see him on those rare occasions when acupuncture and herbs don't work.

 

After John Silko and the boys and I returned to Laguna from Alaska in 1975, we lived with Grandma Lillie in her house with my father who'd moved back from Palm Springs. I needed a quiet place to write so I set up an office in my great grandma's old house. My great grandpa Marmon's work table with a drawer was there; he'd had it made out of the oak shipping crates he saved.

Only one room was habitable, Grandma A'mooh's old bedroom. There was electricity for my typewriter. I loved it because I'd spent my happiest hours as a child with Grandma A'mooh there. Out the window the old swing was still there; the morning glories and bridal bush were gone but I replanted the morning glories and hollyhocks the first chance I got.