House Made of Dawn [50th Anniversary Ed]: A Novel

Dedication

FOR GAYE

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Preface

Prologue

1. The Longhair

July 20

July 21

July 24

July 25

July 28

August 1

August 2

2. The Priest of the Sun

January 26

January 27

3. The Night Chanter

February 20

4. The Dawn Runner

February 27

February 28

About the Author

P.S. Insights, Interviews & More . . .*

About the Author

About the Book

Read On

Also by N. Scott Momaday

Copyright

About the Publisher

Preface

The title House Made of Dawn is the opening of a prayer from the Navajo Night Chant, a winter healing ceremony translated into English by Washington Matthews in the late nineteenth century. The prayer is a profound evocation of the sacred in a culture that is ancient, noble, and deeply informed with aesthetic and spiritual principles. The prayer is one of the most beautiful that I know, and I have kept it in my mind and heart for many years.

When I was an infant my parents and I moved from my first home in Oklahoma to New Mexico. It was during the Great Depression, and my parents were looking for work. They found it on the Navajo reservation, and I spent my early childhood in the native communities of Shiprock, New Mexico and Tuba City and Chinle, Arizona. To me, the landscape of the Navajo reservation is a definition of the Wild West. It is vast and incomparable, beautiful and sacred. Above all, it seems the oldest place on earth, the place where Creation was begun. And the character of the native people reflect this originality, this ageless spirit. When I set out to write House Made of Dawn, this is one of the landscapes I had in mind, the landscape of the prayer from the Night Chant, and the Navajo character in the novel, Benally, is its personification.

East of Navajo country are the Indian pueblos of the Rio Grande valley. One of these, Jemez Pueblo, called in the novel by its ancient name, Walatowa, is the centerpiece of House Made of Dawn. It is the home of Abel, the main character, and it is where the story begins and ends. Something of the Southwestern landscape is contained in my poem, La Tierra del Encanto.

Clouds build on the northern ridge

Where the shades of night grow pale

And there comes a slow, smoky rain.

The mountains loom and recede. And

Below, the umber plain is a pitted hide.

There the distance of time runs out,

And the mind extends beyond itself.

I have seen in the twist of wind

The landscape severed and heard

The brazen cries of streaming hawks.

First light is a tapestry on canyon walls,

And shadows are pools of illusion.

I am a man of the ancient earth

For I have known the desert at dawn.

I was twelve years old when my parents and I moved to Jemez Pueblo in 1946. It was the place where I would spend my most impressionable years. It was, just like many parts of the Navajo reservation, canyon country, and I gloried in it. It was indeed a world in itself, exotic, compact, and entirely self-contained. The pueblo numbered about a thousand people. Mountains rose up in the north, containing the Santa Fe National Forest. On the east and west were red and blue mesas, and to the south the land opened upon a wide, sandy plain. The pueblo lay at an elevation of 6,000 feet.

I experienced a kind of freedom at Jemez that I have not known before or since. There were no physical boundaries to speak of. My parents gave me a horse, a strawberry roan gelding I named Pecos, and for the next several years I rode over every part of that magical landscape on horseback. I came to know that world as one knows the rooms of one’s house. It was for me a house made of dawn, pollen, rain, and wonder. Having the curiosity, the fearlessness, and the expectation of the unexpected—qualities that belong especially to the young—I had little difficulty in entering into the rhythm of life there. It was where my imagination took flight.

My parents and I were a camp within a camp, and we supported each other in many ways. My mother was a writer, and she was securely grounded in the English language and literature. She gave to me a love of words and books. My father was a visual artist and a Native American whose first language was Kiowa. From him I learned a good deal about painting and would become a painter myself. Moreover he told me stories from Kiowa oral tradition when I could first find my way among words. Later my interest in and knowledge of the oral tradition would shape my work as a writer and a professor of literature. From both my parents I received the gift of inspiration.

The years immediately following World War II were critical at Jemez and in the Indian world generally. A generation of young men and women were taken from their traditional world and placed in an alien world at war. There was profound psychic displacement for them, and many were wounded by the experience. Abel was one of these. The first time we see him, at the very beginning of the novel, he is a man disabled by his experience of warfare and disorientation. Throughout, he is partially and importantly defined by post-traumatic stress. I knew several men at Jemez who suffered from this condition. They struggled to re-enter the world in which they were born and raised and from which they had been suddenly severed. And this was a struggle waged across Indian country at large. For many, too many, the struggle was lost. They died of alcoholism, murder, suicide, and a kind of spiritual isolation. Indeed, some managed to survive, to regain their former security and sense of belonging. There is of course a story in this, and I was given the opportunity to tell it.

During their tenure as teachers at Jemez Pueblo, my parents bought a house at Jemez Springs, a village several miles north of the pueblo. It is a spectacular canyon place, with multicolored cliffs rising hundreds of feet high on either side and a sparkling river running through it. That house, a large stone and adobe structure built in 1870, is the Benevides house of my novel, and it was there that I began the writing of House Made of Dawn.

At first, I wrote merely as an exercise, not daring to imagine that my early efforts would result in a novel. I had begun my studies at the University of New Mexico, and I wanted to become a poet. I put the budding novel aside and immersed myself in the work of such poets as Dylan Thomas, Hart Crane, Wallace Stevens, and Emily Dickinson. I entered poetry writing contests with fair success and was encouraged. I published my first poem and announced to all who would listen that I was a professional writer. A year after my graduation I was awarded a Stegner Creative Writing Fellowship in poetry at Stanford University. In my four years as a graduate student at Stanford I studied under the distinguished poet and critic, Yvor Winters, who gave me excellent guidance and inspiration. In 1963 I graduated from Stanford with a PhD in English and American Literature.

I joined the faculty of the University of California, Santa Barbara as an assistant professor in the department of English. My work at Stanford had been highly concentrated. I had written poetry for four straight years, and I felt the need to write something else. At Santa Barbara I returned to the novel. It was a welcome change of direction, partly because it enabled me to recollect the landscape of the Southwest and the freedom and adventure of my boyhood.

I arranged my teaching schedule so that I kept my mornings free for writing. Every day I got up at 5 AM, drove to a restaurant nearby, breakfasted on coffee and crisp bacon, and read the Los Angeles Times. By 7 AM I was back home at my typewriter. I wrote until noon. That was my writing workday. It did not vary, and it was the most productive time of my life.

In 1966 I was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. I moved to Amherst, Massachusetts, where I spent the academic year 1966–1967 reading the poems of Emily Dickinson in manuscript and putting the finishing touches on House Made of Dawn. The Dickinson manuscripts—some 1,775 poems—are almost entirely preserved in the Frost Library at Amherst College and the Houghton Library at Harvard. I travelled back and forth between the two libraries, but it was at Amherst that I wrote the ending of my novel, looking out at the beauty of the swirling snow of a New England winter.

In 1968, back in Santa Barbara, I received word that I had won the Pulitzer Prize. It came as a complete surprise; I did not know that the book had been nominated. That my first novel should have received such an award is a wonderful thing in my life. I am supremely grateful, for I have been greatly blessed. When my Kiowa father was born the American Indian had not yet been granted citizenship. My Anglo and Cherokee mother also came from humble beginnings, but somehow she became a published writer and she passed on to me a love of literature and a sound knowledge of the English language. I have known and been inspired by men and women who believed in me and who encouraged me to believe in myself.

It has now been fifty years ago that House Made of Dawn was published. I wonder if it will be read in another fifty years. It is a possibility, I suppose, but certainly not an expectation. The life of a novel is generally not long, but consider that the spectrum of literature extends from Homer to the present day by way of the Beowulf scribes, Chaucer, Shakespeare, James Joyce, Hemmingway, etc. And the span of oral tradition is inestimably greater. In the tapestry of literature there is a thread of timelessness.

If language is the instrument of thought

And one relies on logic as one ought,

There is no compromise of seen and sought.

After a while I do not often re-read what I have written in prose. It is not so with my poems. I return to them constantly. I commit some of them to memory and recite them to myself, and always I listen to my writing. I must hear it or else I cannot appropriate it to my spirit.

The characters in the novel are inventions, though all but one are composites of people I have known or encountered elsewhere than in the writing. Of course this is to state the obvious, as it is obvious that the imagination is crucial to literary invention. It is fair to say that Abel, the protagonist, is in some way validated by each of the minor characters. They perceive him, and he is the sum of their perceptions. For purposes of the literary experience he does not exist outside of this definition.

Francisco, Abel’s grandfather, is an exception. Francisco Tosa was my close neighbor at Jemez. He was a weathered old man, altogether pleasant in his age and manner. I thought of him as the nearly perfect example of a Pueblo elder. He was proud and secure in his being. He had long white hair which he tied in a queue. His signature was a bright red headband, visible under a crumpled, wide-brimmed straw hat, and this he seemed to wear in all seasons. It was impossible to tell how old he was. He was slightly stooped, and he walked slowly, but I sensed that he could walk for miles. He kept a small flock of sheep, and every morning he herded them away from the village to graze. I passed by his sheep corral on my way to school, and when he saw me, he emitted a shout of greeting and good will, Muy bonita dia!—again in all seasons.

In all the years following my life at Jemez, I have not forgotten the village and its people, and the bright New Mexican mornings in which the world gleamed and I claimed it for my own. In The Names, an autobiographical narrative published in 1976, I wrote:

Now as I look back on that long landscape of the Jemez Valley, it seems to me that I have seen much of the world. And I have been glad to see it, glad beyond the telling. But what I see now is this. If I should hear at evening the wagons on the river road and the voices of children playing in the cornfields, or if in the sunrise I should see the long shadows running out to the west and the cliffs flaring up in the light ascending, or if riding out on an afternoon cool with rain I should see in the middle distance the old man Francisco with his flock, standing deep in the colors and patterns of the plain, it would again be all that I could hold in my heart.

The prayer of the Night Chant ends with these lines:

May it be beautiful before me,

May it be beautiful behind me,

May it be beautiful below me,

May it be beautiful above me,

May it be beautiful all around me.

In beauty it is finished.

Yes. House made of pollen, house made of dawn.

N. Scott Momaday

August 2018

Prologue

Dypaloh. There was a house made of dawn. It was made of pollen and of rain, and the land was very old and everlasting. There were many colors on the hills, and the plain was bright with different-colored clays and sands. Red and blue and spotted horses grazed in the plain, and there was a dark wilderness on the mountains beyond. The land was still and strong. It was beautiful all around.

Abel was running. He was alone and running, hard at first, heavily, but then easily and well. The road curved out in front of him and rose away in the distance. He could not see the town. The valley was gray with rain, and snow lay out upon the dunes. It was dawn. The first light had been deep and vague in the mist, and then the sun flashed and a great yellow glare fell under the cloud. The road verged upon clusters of juniper and mesquite, and he could see the black angles and twists of wood beneath the hard white crust; there was a shine and glitter on the ice. He was running, running. He could see the horses in the fields and the crooked line of the river below.

For a time the sun was whole beneath the cloud; then it rose into eclipse, and a dark and certain shadow came upon the land. And Abel was running. He was naked to the waist, and his arms and shoulders had been marked with burnt wood and ashes. The cold rain slanted down upon him and left his skin mottled and streaked. The road curved out and lay into the bank of rain beyond, and Abel was running. Against the winter sky and the long, light landscape of the valley at dawn, he seemed almost to be standing still, very little and alone.

1

The Longhair

Walatowa, Cañon de San Diego, 1945

July 20

The river lies in a valley of hills and fields. The north end of the valley is narrow, and the river runs down from the mountains through a canyon. The sun strikes the canyon floor only a few hours each day, and in winter the snow remains for a long time in the crevices of the walls. There is a town in the valley, and there are ruins of other towns in the canyon. In three directions from the town there are cultivated fields. Most of them lie to the west, across the river, on the slope of the plain. Now and then in winter, great angles of geese fly through the valley, and then the sky and the geese are the same color and the air is hard and damp and smoke rises from the houses of the town. The seasons lie hard upon the land. In summer the valley is hot, and birds come to the tamarack on the river. The feathers of blue and yellow birds are prized by the townsmen.

The fields are small and irregular, and from the west mesa they seem an intricate patchwork of arbors and gardens, too numerous for the town. The townsmen work all summer in the fields. When the moon is full, they work at night with ancient, handmade plows and hoes, and if the weather is good and the water plentiful they take a good harvest from the fields. They grow the things that can be preserved easily: corn and chilies and alfalfa. On the town side of the river there are a few orchards and patches of melons and grapes and squash. Every six or seven years there is a great harvest of piñones far to the east of the town. That harvest, like the deer in the mountains, is the gift of God.

It is hot in the end of July. The old man Francisco drove a team of roan mares near the place where the river bends around a cottonwood. The sun shone on the sand and the river and the leaves of the tree, and waves of heat shimmered from the stones. The colored stones on the bank of the river were small and smooth, and they rubbed together and cracked under the wagon wheels. Once in a while one of the roan mares tossed its head, and the commotion of its dark mane sent a swarm of flies into the air. Downstream the brush grew thick on a bar in the river, and there the old man saw the reed. He turned the mares into the water and stepped down on the sand. A sparrow hung from the reed. It was upside down and its wings were partly open and the feathers at the back of its head lay spread in a tiny ruff. The eyes were neither open nor closed. Francisco was disappointed, for he had wished for a male mountain bluebird, breast feathers the pale color of April skies or of turquoise, lake water. Or a summer tanager: a prayer plume ought to be beautiful. He drew the reed from the sand and cut loose the horsehair from the sparrow’s feet. The bird fell into the water and was carried away in the current. He turned the reed in his hands; it was smooth and nearly translucent, like the spine of an eagle feather, and it was not yet burned and made brittle by the sun and wind. He had cut the hair too short, and he pulled another from the tail of the near roan and set the snare again. When the reed was curved and strung like a bow, he replaced it carefully in the sand. He laid his forefinger lightly on top of the reed and the reed sprang and the looped end of the hair snapped across his finger and made a white line above the nail. Sí, bien hecho, he said aloud, and without removing the reed from the sand he cocked it again.

The sun rose higher and the old man urged the mares away from the river. Then he was on the old road to San Ysidro. At times he sang and talked to himself above the noise of the wagon: "Yo heyana oh . . . heyana oh . . . heyana oh . . . Abelito . . . tarda mucho en venir. . . ." The mares pulled easily, with their heads low. He held a vague tension on the lines and settled into the ride by force of habit. A lizard ran across the road in front of the mares and crouched on a large flat rock, its tail curved over the edge. Far away a whirlwind moved toward the river, but it soon spun itself out and the air was again perfectly still.

He was alone on the wagon road. The pavement lay on a higher parallel at the base of the hills to the east. The trucks of the town—and those of the lumber camps at Paliza and Vallecitos—made an endless parade on the highway, but the wagon road was used now only by the herdsmen and planters whose fields lay to the south and west. When he came to the place called Seytokwa, Francisco remembered the race for good hunting and harvests. Once he had played a part; he had rubbed himself with soot, and he ran on the wagon road at dawn. He ran so hard that he could feel the sweat fly from his head and arms, though it was winter and the air was filled with snow. He ran until his breath burned in his throat and his feet rose and fell in a strange repetition that seemed apart from all his effort. At last he had overtaken Mariano, who was everywhere supposed to be the best of the long-race runners. For a long way Mariano kept just beyond his reach; then, as they drew near the corrals on the edge of the town, Francisco picked up the pace. He drew even and saw for an instant Mariano’s face, wet and contorted in defeat . . . "Se dió por vencido" . . . and he struck it with the back of his hand, leaving a black smear across the mouth and jaw. And Mariano fell and was exhausted. Francisco held his stride all the way to the Middle, and even then he could have gone on running, for no reason, for only the sake of running on. And that year he killed seven bucks and seven does.