Laughing Boy quotes

“A-a-a-iné, a-a-a-iné, Ya-a-iné-ainé, ko-ya-ainé …”

He was lean, slender, tall, and handsome, Laughing Boy, with a new cheap headband and a borrowed silver belt to make ragged clothes look fine.

At noon, having no money, he begged coffee from a trader at Chinlee and went on, treasuring his hunger because of the feasting to come. Now he began to meet Navajos of all ages, riding to the dance.

Some of them were heavy with jewelry; Horse Giver’s Son wore over four hundred dollars in silver alone; most of them had more than Laughing Boy. They stopped to look at his bow-guard, which he himself had made.

“I am a good jeweller,” he said, elated; “I make silver run like a song.”

“You should make a song about yourself,” they told him, “and teach the burros to sing it.”

“I am a good jeweller,” he said, elated; “I make silver run like a song.”

“You should make a song about yourself,” they told him, “and teach the burros to sing it.”

“Have you had any rain up by T’o Tlakai?”

Now they all lined up, with the dull, red sunset behind their black figures. They started going like getting off to a race, right into a gallop, yelling. Over by the fire was shouting, and another line tearing towards them.

The world was full of a roar of hooves and two walls of noise rushing together, the men leaning forward over their horses’ necks, mouths wide.

“E-e-e-e-e!”

Girls didn’t usually say these things. He was shocked.

Her clear, low voice turned the insults into music, bringing out to the full the rise and fall of a Navajo woman’s intonation.

All the time they tugged against each other, her long eyes were talking. He had seen girls’ eyes talk before as they pulled at the blanket, but these were clear as words. He wanted desperately to be back among the men.

The solemn turning of the couples contrasted with the free release of the singers: this was a religious ceremony and a rustic, simple pleasure, the happiness of a natural people to whom but few things happen.

They were traditional and grave in their revelry.

According to the etiquette, whenever there is a rest, the man asks what forfeit he must pay; by the length of time taken by the girl to get down to a reasonable figure, he gages her liking for his company.

They brought another tree up to the bonfire, standing it on end a moment so that the hot light played on its dead branches; then they let it topple over and fall, sending up in its place a tree of moving sparks into the blackness.

Night passed its middle and stood towards day.

The girls moved off together in single file, blankets drawn over heads, worn out by the night of unremitting dancing. The older people fell rapidly away. Inert forms like mummies stretched out in their blankets by the embers of the feast fires.

She seemed to be hours descending. She was businesslike about filling the basket, but she turned utilitarian motions into part of a dance. Now she knelt, not two feet from him, taking him in with the long, mischievous eyes that talked and laughed.

She is a butterfly, he thought, or a hummingbird.

Why does she not go away? I will not go—run away from her. He thought, as he tried to read her face, that her slimness was deceptive; strength came forth from her.

He grunted astonishment. She smiled. “You are a good jeweler, they say. You made that bow-guard. You sold Red Man’s belt to the American, they say, for sixty-five dollars.”

“You are like an old wife, trying to find out about everything a man is doing.”

“No, I am not like an old wife.”

“We shall see then. Goodbye.”

She rose like smoke.

He called a startled “Goodbye,” then began to follow at a distance.

The deep resonance of the prayer carried his exaltation through the land.

Then he began to analyse her words, finding in them nothing save unconventionality, no promise, and his own he found laggard and dull.

Was she playing with him, or did she mean all he read into her brevity? Was she thus with other men?

“What my uncle said will stay with him. He has made a bad thing, it will follow him.

The track of an evil thought is crooked and has no end; I do not want it around me; I do not keep it going.

I have only good thoughts about you.”

The Tewa policeman shifted from foot to foot and grinned. The situation might become serious, but he thought it would work out all right, and he devoutly hoped for an arrest involving a fistfight with a Navajo.

Tewas punch; Navajos kick, scratch, and pull hair.

For several centuries the Tewas’ official profession was fighting Navajos.

“Some day, perhaps, we arrest an American, unwounded.”

They looked at their knuckles.

The two friends returned to the pony.

He dismounted clumsily, taking a walking-stick from behind the saddle. Laughing Boy felt his eyes sting.

Navajos almost never say thank you, save in return for very great favours; ordinary gifts and kindnesses are offered and accepted in silence.

They regard our custom as obsequious. The word was startled out of Laughing Boy by the occasion. Half Man understood, and avoided his nephew’s gaze as he limped away, the fingers of his useless arm hooked into the front of his silver belt.

They mounted. He felt the warm, silky hide between his knees, pushed her up to the reins and felt the play of muscles. Counting for the start; he leant forward, held his breath, raised his quirt. Go!

Arrows from the bow⁠—no other simile.

At the tearing gallop, flat-stretched, backs are level, the animals race in a straight line; all life is motion; there is no body, only an ecstasy;

“Look at me.” Her eyes were long and narrow, and deep enough to absorb a man. “I am rich. I shall give you silver and turquoise to work, horses to breed, till you too are rich. Must I tell you twice?”

Her eyes were more beautiful than springs among the rocks.

“You have spoken to your uncle; you know what he said. Your mother will give you no sheep, no horses for me. If you want to come with me, come now. I cannot wait until first cold moon.

“You have spoken to your uncle; you know what he said. Your mother will give you no sheep, no horses for me. If you want to come with me, come now. I cannot wait until first cold moon.

You cannot cache me in a tree until you are ready for me.

You have your manhood and your weapons; if you are not good enough with them, nothing can make you good enough. Come now.”

He was a long time answering, searching and searching her eyes. At last, “It is good. Get your horse.”

She thought she had stood for twenty years with a rifle pointed at her breast.

Her face did not change; she walked away slowly. He saw that full day lay golden along the tops of the cliffs, and the sky was brilliant;

She thought to herself, I shall complete him with my knowledge. I shall make a god of him.

The town of Los Palos shimmered in the heat.

A lot of adobe houses and frame shacks pushed carelessly together were beaten down by the sun. Behind them was a strip of irrigated green like a backdrop, alfalfa, corn, beans, cottonwoods, alfalfa, corn, cottonwoods, a mile long and a few hundred yards wide.

A lot of adobe houses and frame shacks pushed carelessly together were beaten down by the sun. Behind them was a strip of irrigated green like a backdrop, alfalfa, corn, beans, cottonwoods, alfalfa, corn, cottonwoods, a mile long and a few hundred yards wide.

Rich, deep, cool green was not part of the desert landscape; it was something apart that the sands held prisoner.

The mean little town was a parasite on the goodness of the water; here water and earth and man made beauty; there man and mud and boards created squalor.

Rich, deep, cool green was not part of the desert landscape; it was something apart that the sands held prisoner.

The mean little town was a parasite on the goodness of the water; here water and earth and man made beauty; there man and mud and boards created squalor.

A few yards of concrete and some blistered paint made a gesture of civic pride at the railroad’s edge. A two-story hotel, compounding Spanish mission with cubism, was a monument of the railroad’s profitable beneficence.

Sprawled out on his saddle-blanket, he watched as she brought food from the house and began to prepare it.

Her movements were like grass in the wind.

He eyed a banquet of luxury—canned goods, tomatoes, fruit.

He loomed above her, in the play of darkness and firelight. She saw all the strength of the Navajo people embodied, against the sky, and she felt ashamed before it.

“Four days is not long, Laughing Boy.”

I knew that man was watching me as I crept; that made me feel a little better. My father told me that the warpath was like stalking mountain sheep, only more exciting. I thought that there was more to it than that.

Mountain sheep do not shoot back at you: mountain sheep are not people who are thinking about you just as hard as you are thinking about them.

“Then I saw them. They must have made camp up in the middle of Yotatséyi; now they were coming to try to get out this way. There were nine of them, in single file, riding carefully and watching.

“It is good for you.” And she told herself,

“I shall tie you with it. It is another hobble around your feet, so that you will not go away from me.”

Time passing and corn growing cannot be seen; one can notice only that the moon has become so much older, the corn so much higher.

With a new life almost more regular than the old, yet far more thrilling, with a rich supply of silver and choice turquoise, with horses to trade and a cornfield to care for, and all the world made over new, time for Laughing Boy went …

He loosened the pegs and turned up the untouched side.

As he turned it, he jerked at the corners, throwing the uncertain weave out of shape. It looked like a child’s work.

“I am not telling you a lot of things. I am just letting you see something. I think you understand it.”

I shall make something perfect, that nobody else has made. If I stop now, I might as well stop work on this blanket, after all it cost me to learn to make it. I shall pay myself back for everything that has been.

A single weft strand has no thickness at all, and a blanket is long.

It needs patience to finish it, and to make it beautiful, one must not be afraid of the colours.

A single weft strand has no thickness at all, and a blanket is long.

It needs patience to finish it, and to make it beautiful, one must not be afraid of the colours.

Laughing Boy, having done his thinking and made up his mind, did not mull over his decision, any more than when he had started a bracelet; he worried whether it ought to have been a necklace.

She understood herself as she spoke; she was jealous of his people, of something they had in common which she could not share.

He looked at her inquiringly, catching a tone of earnestness in her voice.

She had no reasons, yet very much did not want to go. He saw that it mattered to her.

She relaxed, relieved of her fear.

I am a fool. I am a crazy damned fool. I am the centre of all that he is thinking.

He is all tied up in me. He cares for this and that, but I am the door through which it all comes. Listen to the way he is talking, see how he looks.

“

A man makes a design well because he feels it.

When he makes someone else’s design, you can tell. If he is to make someone else’s design, he must feel it in himself first.

The ground, where it had any dampness in it, had been frozen since the night before, and they had hurried under a threatening sky, having still a good day’s ride before them.

The storm came down like timber-wolves, rushing.

A mountaintop wind sent the dry flakes whirling past, stinging their ears and the sides of their faces; there was no sun, they could see only a few yards ahead of them.

there was no sun, they could see only a few yards ahead of them. Pulling their blankets up over their heads, they guided themselves by the wind at their backs.

An Indian takes the weather passively, accepting and enduring it without the European’s mental revolt or impatience.

Comfort and fat living had changed this to some degree in Laughing Boy; he was unusually aware of discomfort, and resentful, rating the blizzard as colder than it was. Slim Girl was simply miserable. They did not speak, but jogged on, punishing their horses.

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.

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.

There could be no doubt that he had done some unconscious wrong, deserting the Trail of Beauty. Forces of evil were preying upon him, he was no longer immune from bad thoughts.

Stated in the American idiom, he decided he must be sick.

It was the merest chance that he met Yellow Singer walking along the trail with a bundle over his shoulder. Laughing Boy debated consulting him, and decided against it: not that ugly man.

Two, three years, all like this, and Sings Before Spears, who was a warrior, will have ended, and there will just be that part of a man which worships a woman. Not the rest of him, just heat.

A bowstring without a bow. Only good for a woman to tie something with.

I need some more medicine.

What was this? Probably nothing.

When one walks on the sheer edge of a precipice, the meaningless fall of a stone over the side momentarily stops the heart.

She studied him while they ate. She began to talk with him gravely of the life they were to make together, of the happiness that was in store for them.

Having woven about a foot of blanket, the head-sticks of the loom are lowered, and the finished part is rolled around the foot-sticks, out of sight.

This is like time. Here, this little part showing, where I am weaving, is the present; the past is rolled up and gone; there are those empty warp cords above me.

The weft is like handling a nervous horse; I lead the blue strand gently to the green, or it will break; I hate to break a strand, the knot where it is mended will always show, a blemish.

No, it is a good pattern. Should I unravel all I have done, when it grows so slowly? When the blanket has been started, it is too late to change.

The man who is always coming back to where he started, to figure out another road, will never get far from home.

I wish I could just think my design and have it woven at an American mill. No, I don’t; it is because I toiled over them that I love them.

I looked at it and saw the setting for it. But much of the time now I cannot think well, I am not myself. I have no design for myself, I do not know the nature of my jewel.

I am hammering a piece of silver, and I cannot stop hammering, every day is another stroke; yet I do not know what it is to be.

In the end it may be just a piece of good metal pounded flat. I do not know my design.

That evening was blissful, so harmonious that in the middle of it Jesting Squaw’s Son excused himself, went down to the corral, and cried into the shoulder of the first available horse.

A horse, warm and silky, is very nice to cry into when it stands still.

The tears came readily. He had not cried before.

“Go your way, little brother.” He watched the animal as he rode past, then he contemplated the ears of his mount. “You are saddled and ridden, but you are better off than I.

This would be a good world if we were all geldings, I think.

”

“The People looked at me askance. I was a young woman living alone, they did not know how, so they made it up. They do that. Your uncle knows that talk. This went on for over a year. Then I saw you, and everything changed.

I had thought I was dead to men, and now I knew I loved you. With you I could live, without you I was already dead.

“I was right. Our way of life, to which you have led me, my weaving, our songs, everything, is better than the Americans’. You have made this.

“

Then I saw your face in the window, and the world turned to ashes, and I knew that there were things that were worse than death.

That is all, that is the truth. I have spoken.”