She was ninety-four years old, but
she would sit eating fresh, crisp carrots with her own strong, white teeth, and
when she looked at you it with eyes that seemed to know everything, or at least
something about everything. She seemed to be looking straight through you at
times, and at other times reading your mind, or your soul.
Maybelle Dohi was a full-blood
Navajo Indian who when my wife and I met her was living in Cameron,
Arizona, on the Navajo reservation. She was
living within the city limits—if I can use that term loosely—for the first time
in her entire life.
Maybelle’s hair was still more
black than gray, even at her advanced age. Although her face was craggy with
wrinkles, her eyes and the impish smile on her face held a hint of youth that
time could never take away. Turquoise jewelry adorned her almost all the time,
and in spite of its beauty it seemed to weigh her down when we met, for she
walked with a series bend at her waist. I think her back was bothering her, but
she was never going to complain.
Maybelle was quiet when I first met
her. She sat at the dinner table eating carrot sticks, staring off into space
as if somewhere out there she could see the ghost of her husband, or the goats
and sheep she used to raise on their ranch thirty miles outside of town. But at
other times she would watch you with this knowing look, this look like she
somehow knew every minor detail of your life, and somehow it struck her as
mildly humorous that you should be so bold as to dare sitting in her company.
But Maybelle warmed up, and when
she did she began to tell this story of an elk she had killed, only the year
before. Some friends had taken her out hunting, and she stood waiting with her .30/30
Winchester, and at last, when the
big bull came in sight, she shot him. In the head. She was very matter of fact
about this harvest of a majestic animal, yet in her eyes was mighty big pride,
for this woman, who covered in clay mud couldn’t have weighed more than 110 pounds and who stood no more
than four foot nine inches tall, had taken down an animal with a shot that would put most
hunters to shame. That was Maybelle Dohi.
We wanted to see her house, which
her children had built for her when she moved to town. Mind you, Cameron is not
any kind of town in most people’s estimation. It is a wide spot in the road
with a trading post, a hotel and a gas station, not much more. Houses surround
these businesses, standing stark and lonely against the pink desert sand and
the scattered rocks. Yet to Maybelle this was a real town, for that thirty
miles out to her ranch was not thirty miles as a modern traveler might think of
it. This thirty miles went across rutted road, sandy road, rocky road, road so
bad at times that a traveler might feel himself lucky to get back out alive. This
was no twenty or thirty minute drive. This was an hour long drive, on a good
day, and any water she and her husband had to drink out there had to be hauled
out from town.
Out there in that inhospitable
land, where the wind blew mercilessly and the sun shone fiercely down almost
every day of the year, that was where Maybelle and her husband lived their
lives, raised their goats and sheep, and were happy.
But at last, over the crest of the ninety
year mark, Maybelle had lost her husband and was finally forced to move into
town. There, she would sit at her window in the mornings and gaze out at the
cars going by on the street. Or sometimes, when she would take the notion, she
would drive her old pickup into Flagstaff,
and she had no fear of the traffic there. She was very proud to announce it,
with that twinkle in her eyes and that smile that was always almost, but never
quite, on her lips.
She proudly showed us her house,
her wood box, her faucet. I am not joking when I say that Maybelle walked to
her kitchen faucet and told us very seriously that here (she pointed at the
faucet handle) all she had to do was lift this, and water would come right out
of it. She turned it on to prove it, and sure enough, water came out. A
convenience my wife and I have been enjoying since we were old enough to
remember, Maybelle first experienced in her own home in her nineties. To her,
it might have been one of the world’s seven wonders.
She took us through every single
room in the house, showed us her water heater, which, honest to goodness,
heated water right there in her house and made it come warm—or hot—right out of
that same tap she had shown us. Maybelle’s excitement over the wonders of her
new home sure made a person ponder on how spoiled we have become in mainstream America.
I had my photo taken with Maybelle
Dohi. Standing there with this woman who, in spite of her frailty, had so
easily climbed into my heart to stay. I treasure that photo. The last I saw of
Maybelle was her face peering out the window as she sat at her perch. The next
morning, as I drove away, Maybelle wasn’t there. Probably out shooting
jackrabbits or something.
I heard that Maybelle Dohi had a
stroke a while ago, and at ninety-four years she left this world alone. And
when I say alone, I am referring to the world, not to Maybelle, and I do not
use that term “alone” lightly. I can feel the solitary sadness of Cameron,
Arizona now. I can feel the sadness in the
entire world, or perhaps it is just a sadness in my heart. The world is a less
colorful place now that Maybelle is no longer with us, but heaven has gained a
great asset. I hope she is now making friends with that elk she harvested, that
she is joined once again with her long lost man who loved her. I will miss
Maybelle, and each time I drive through Cameron now I fear I will shed a tear
as I look to see that dark, empty window staring back at me.
