Sunflowers

Sunflowers are thought to bring joy, but to Alice the nascent sunflowers signaled budding loneliness and later full sunflowers, with their yellow petals and large round faces, were a symbol of loneliness in full bloom. Any day now a yellow sun faded 1948 Bureau of Indian Affairs school bus would show up at her traditional Navajo dwelling to pick her two boys up and take them to the boarding school across the mountains and into the plains to of the Midwest.

Herding sheep on summer days that grew shorter, Alice often looked to where the dirt road meandered across flatlands and to the highway for the telltale sign of dust rising from the road, slowly making its way to where Alice’s summer camp was. Days past and her heart grew heavier when she watched her boys play and run and tease each another, and soon they too grew quieter and played less. The school bus would come eventually.

When they could not bear the feeling any longer Alice asked the boys to unlock an old blue trunk and to take out their school clothes. Three sets of white cotton dress shirts and three small blue jeans each and two pairs of brown leather shoes with hard rubber soles. The boy set out almost immediately on polishing their shoes with sheep tally to a nice dark brown. The holes in their socks were darned and, as best she could, Alice cut the boys’ hair and threw the clipped hair into the fire. After dinner of tortillas and mutton, Alice made the boys recite their alphabets and count to ten, even though she didn’t understand English. Satisfied that they were ready, Alice blew out the kerosene lamp and told the boys to sleep.

Five days later Alice spotted a dust trail rising slowly across the plains. The bus was finally coming. She turned the sheep and started for home. The bell on the only goat in the herd rang now and again and sheep dogs out front of the herd zigzagged between bushes looking for rabbits. Watching the dust trail making its way across the flat lands Alice felt the loneliness of not having her boys, Peter and Thomas, near her and she cried and stopped several times to regain her composure. She thought about the silence that arrives after the boys leave for boarding school. No laughter. No footsteps. No questions about new things they learned about the earth or plant and animals while out herding sheep. Silence, the kerosene lamp and loneliness, would soon take the boys places at the dinner table.

When she got home, the bus driver was standing near the bus with one foot on the bumper and his elbow resting on a raised knee. Kids of different ages and sizes were looking out from the bus and watching, their eyes wide open, some still crying for home and their families.

The bus driver greeted Alice in the traditional way and made small talk. Looking down, Alice asked when the boys would be back again. The bus driver said for Christmas and with his fingers he counted one, two, three, four months. With that Alice called for the boys to come out of the house. One by one the boys came out holding sacks with their clothes. The bus Driver got back on the bus and ordered the children to stop looking and chattering. The bus quieted down and Alice could hear the leaves in the trees rustle a little in the wind.

Standing at the front of the bus, Alice fidgeted with the bottom button of her faded velveteen blouse and looked off into the distance. The boys looked down trying not to cry. Finally Alice told the boys not to forget their morning offerings of corn pollen to the dawn, to learn as much as they can and to pay attention to their teachers. She looked across the way passed the grazing pastures to the mountain. Now, looking at the boys, she gently cupped their small heads with her hands and pulled them in for a hug and they began to cry. It was finally time to go.

The bus started, turned and left. Half an hour later it was across the valley. Alice returned to the sheep corral and felt comforted in softly whispering a Navajo Blessing Way chant. Walking in the land of the holy, holding the hands and being led by the holy, walking a path of corn pollen to a land where all is beautiful and all peaceful. Now she cried, long soft crying sounds with deep breaths. The wind picked up and she let the sadness go with the wind.

Now, at the corral, the sheep moved closer together anticipating the opening of the gate. Alice threw the gate and the sheep rushed out and into the hills passing a patch of sunflowers and not stopping to eat its green leaves, thick stock, or even the beautiful bright yellow flowers and large round face full of seeds.