Navajo Term Analysis

[Abel’s] father was a Navajo, they said, or a Sia, or an Isleta, an outsider anyway, which made him and his mother and Vidal somehow foreign and strange. Francisco was the man of the family, but even […] the boy could sense his grandfather’s age, just as he knew that his mother was going to die of her illness. It was nothing he was told, but he knew it anyway and without understanding, as he knew already the motion of the sun and the seasons.

It made him glad to be in the midst of talk and celebration, to savor the rich relief of the coming rain upon the rows of beans and chilies and corn, to see the return of weather, of trade and reunion upon the town. He tossed his head in greeting to the shy Navajo children who hid among the camps and peered, afraid of his age and affliction. For they, too, were a harvest, in some intractable sense the regeneration of his own bone and blood.

He was going home, and I wanted to pray. Look out for me, I said; look out each day and listen for me. And we were going together on horses to the hills. We were going to ride out in the first light to the hills. We were going to see how it was, and always was, how the sun came up with a little wind and the light ran out on the land. We were going to get drunk, I said. We were going to be all alone, and we were going to get drunk and sing. We were going to sing about the way it always was. And it was going to be right and beautiful. It was going to be the last time. And he was going home.