Church of the Graveyard Saints. C. Joseph Greaves
hippocampus and an infant’s inability to bundle memories in the absence of a functional vocabulary. Not, as Freud would have it, because of some repressed infantile sexuality. That was the thing Addie had learned about Freud—that practically everything he’d written was about sex and yet what he’d actually known about sex you could fit on the back of an envelope.
Which was not to say forgotten wounds couldn’t leave a permanent scar.
Attachment Theory, a post-Freudian model, holds that children’s earliest interactions forge the die from which their later relationships are cast. So at one end of the spectrum, secure infants—those that in a clinical setting become upset when left by their mothers and embrace them when they return—grow into emotionally healthy adults who will trust and find comfort in their later life partners. At the other end of the spectrum, so-called insecure avoidants—infants that demonstrate indifference to maternal absence—grow up to have intimacy issues and are much more likely to distrust even good and supportive relationships.
So went the theory. But unlike Freud’s speculative musings, Attachment Theory had been tested and validated and found to be highly accurate. And yet to Addie’s way of thinking, its predictive value still suffered from two major shortcomings.
The first was that without childhood memories of our own, we’re forced to rely on those very same parents—be they nurturing or neglectful, truthful or treacherous—to fill in our early-life blanks.
The second problem with Attachment Theory was that it failed to answer the basic question: What happens when your mother leaves you and never returns?
PART ONE
1
“Hey. Are you asleep?”
Addie blinked her eyes open. They were approaching Kayenta and the cutoff that would take them northbound through the iconic buttes of Monument Valley into the vast and rugged canyonlands of southeastern Utah. The part of the drive, she’d promised Bradley, where things would finally get interesting after nine bleary hours of scrolling blacktop and sere desert scrubland.
Except that the long fingers of dusk were closing around them like a fist.
“We’ll want to take a left at the light.”
“Which light?”
She yawned as she stretched in the passenger seat. “The only light.”
“Are you sure? There’s a map there in the door pocket.”
Addie couldn’t suppress a smile. Raised in Southern California, Bradley’s concept of directions involved a series of freeway numbers followed by a street name. Like taking the 110 to the 10 to the 405 and getting off at Sepulveda. Those incantations still challenged Addie in a way she imagined the Navajo Code Talkers’ rhythmic grunts and mumbles must have befuddled the Imperial Japanese Navy.
“Trust me. Besides, I thought real men didn’t need maps.”
“Naps.” Bradley passed his cell phone over the dashboard like a Ouija plank. “Real men don’t—” He sat upright, squinting over the wheel. “Now there’s something you don’t see every day.”
What Addie saw through the bug-flecked windshield was a horse—a scrawny bay mare with an unkempt mane wearing neither halter nor tack as it ambled through the crossroads, pausing midway to rub its dirty muzzle on a foreleg. It brought them to a stop before clopping over the sidewalk onto the weedy macadam of a shuttered gas station.
This maddening indifference to animal welfare was one of the things that infuriated Addie about the Diné, the Navajo people. She’d had friends in high school that wouldn’t even enter the reservation without first packing a leash and a bagful of dog treats. She herself had once rescued a starving rez bitch and driven it to Cortez where the veterinarian’s x-rays had revealed over a hundred BB pellets embedded under the poor animal’s skin.
In Los Angeles, that CinemaScope womb of Technicolor fantasy, her classmates thought Native Americans great stewards of the land and its resources—noble aboriginals living in simple harmony with earth’s flora and fauna. Addie had long since given up on explaining the more nuanced reality.
Or take the Navajo Generating Station, the largest and dirtiest coal-fired power plant west of the Mississippi, and one of Bradley’s personal bugaboos. While girls she knew from college were tying feathers in their hair and driving to North Dakota to join with the Standing Rock Sioux to protest a pipeline, the Navajo plant was quietly burning twenty-four thousand tons of coal from its nearby Kayenta strip mine each and every day.
Not that Addie blamed the Diné for that one, or the Hopi people for that matter, who shared in the mining royalties. With a majority of their households still lacking electricity or running water, the tribes were in desperate straits when the mine’s promoters showed up in their shiny new pickups promising economic opportunity. It was only after the paperwork had been signed that the tribal elders discovered their lawyer had been on the promoters’ payroll, which explained the paltry 3.3 percent royalty rate they’d contracted to accept. Still they’d come to depend on those royalties—and even more on the jobs that the plant and mine created—for their economic survival.
“Hey.” Bradley brushed at her hair with his fingers. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine. Remembering, that’s all.”
“You’ve been unusually quiet.”
“I’ve been thoughtful. Pensive.”
“Brooding.”
“Not brooding. Contemplative.”
“Wistful.”
“Preoccupied.”
“Melancholy.”
“Let’s settle on abstracted. But only by outward appearances. Inside I’m turning cartwheels.”
They both knew that was a joke.
“We could still turn back.” He glanced at the thermonuclear sunset filling his rearview mirror. “Plus there’s an airport out by the tribal park.”
“Do they have a time machine? You’ll recall that my father’s expecting us.”
“Hence your anxiety.”
“Hence we can’t just turn around.”
“My point is we don’t have to do this. Or at least you don’t.”
“Hah. You think I’m a coward, is that it?”
“I think you’re a force of nature.”
“Right. Like gravity, pulling everything downward.”
“I was thinking more of a tornado, standing everything on its head.”
They’d turned into a Martian landscape; a volcanic wasteland sculpted by eons of pebbling wind whose dust cloud yet darkened the far horizon, shrouding the land of her forebears—land that six generations of Olsens and Deckers had claimed and defended, cleared and plowed, watered and seeded, transforming barren tracts of sage and saltbrush into settlements that had grown into towns and that might someday grow into cities.
Moths flared in the Prius’s headlights. Plastic grocery bags raced ghostlike across the blacktop, swirling and snagging on the roadside wire to flutter there like pennants heralding Adelaide Decker’s return.
For a school genealogy project Addie once had interviewed Jess and Vivian Olsen, her maternal grandparents, about their family’s history. She’d learned how Dag Olsen, her great-great-great-grandfather, had answered the prophet John Taylor’s call for Mormon pioneers to settle the Utah Territory’s southeast quadrant, the contours of which, since beyond the diagonal gash of the Colorado River, were as unknowable in the parlors of Salt Lake as the dark side of the moon. In the company of eleven-score colonists that included his