Let's just assume this is maybe 1917--and the missionary who tells the story and who hasn't been on the field very long, is just now beginning to understand the people he's serving, people who happen to be Navajo. Because he's a white man, some Navajos believe he has significant powers, so they come to him in medical emergencies, when, perhaps, traditional healers haven't quite made the kind of difference they'd like to see.
So a Navajo man comes to see the missionary, not late, but quite excited because his wife, he says, is suffering greatly with some kind of ulcer--or two or three. The missionary, who is not a doctor but gets himself called on more often for medical purposes, more often than he'd like to be called on anyway, responds, leaves his home and, on horseback, heads out to Alvin's place (let's give him a name--the memoir I read didn't).
Once he arrives, the missionary realizes that the man's wife's medical condition requires more than he can deliver. and he suggests, plainly, that they all up-and-go to the hospital where Alvin's wife can receive the kind of care she needs.
Stoutly and unequivocally, the woman refuses. What's equally amazing, the missionary thinks, is how Alvin now seems vastly less frantic about her condition, even though he knows--after the missionary has looked at her--that his wife's condition is much worse than he originally thought it was.
Still, Alvin says they must go. But his wife says absolutely not. The pain continues. The husband backs down sheepishly. The two of them talk to each other in language the missionary occasionally understands, but in a heavy Navajo that Alvin uses--deliberately, the missionary thinks-- to conceal something from him. When Alvin speaks to the missionary, on the other hand, the language is plainly more understandable--and, the missionary thinks, far too broken and English-y for the wife to translate.
It all seems very strange.
Here's what he learns. Alvin's been having an affair, and his wife will not think of leaving the hogan because she knows darn well that if she does, her husband will go back to his paramour. That's why she won't go to the hospital. Still, she won't tell the missionary about all of that--not because he happens to be a missionary but because the whole wretched affair, something she'd much rather not talk about, is an affront to her dignity. And even though Alvin knows his wife's medical condition is worse than he'd guessed, he won't argue as he did when he wasn't in her presence because he's afraid that too much force and volume will only make his wife refuse more adamantly against hospitalization.
Now all of this is a true story, If an old missionary's memoir is to be believed. It happened out here, on the reservation, to the missionary at a church we visited just this afternoon, close to a hundred years later.
It's hard to imagine really, a distressed husband coming to the door of the preacher for aid the way Alvin did. Hard to imagine what life was like on the Navajo reservation, circa 1917. Hard to imagine the Navajo people themselves back then, the largest tribe in the North America on the largest chunk of reservation land in the West, a semi-nomadic people only recently introduced and harnassed to Anglo ways, an illiterate folk with a rich tradition of oral history and myth, a people only moderately interested in the Christian faith the American government mandated they learn, or the missionaries--Catholic, Presbyterian, and Christian Reformed--who bring it. It's all hard to imagine.
But what isn't is what goes on between the husband and wife, the deadly domestic dance they choreographed, the dedicated silence of their own denials, the half-truths they so willingly each employ for sheer self-preservation.
What's radically different about this story from something contemporary is setting--what's undeniably the same is character. I recognize the husband. I recognize the wife.
You don't have to be Navajo to understand. You don't have to be Ukranian or Bolivian or northwest Iowan. All you need to be to understand is human.
Somewhere beneath all of our rich and considerable differences, we're shockingly similar.
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