Several times Loyd stopped to point out ancient pictures cut in the rock. They tended to be in clusters, as if seeking refuge from loneliness in that great mineral expanse. There were antelope, snakes, and ducks in a line like a carnival shooting gallery. And humans: oddly turtle-shaped, with their arms out and fingers splayed as if in surrender or utter surprise. The petroglyphs added in recent centuries showed more svelte, self-assured men riding horses. The march of human progress seemed mainly a matter of getting over that initial shock of being here.

Eventually we stopped in a protected alcove of rock, where no snow had fallen. The walls sloped inward over our heads, and long dark marks like rust stains ran parallel down the cliff face at crazy angles. When I looked straight up I lost my sense of gravity. The ground under my boots was dry red sand, soft and fine, weathered down from the stone. If the river rose to here, the mud would be red. Loyd held my shoulders and directed my eyes to the opposite wall, a third of the way up. Facing the morning sun was a village built into the cliff. It was like Kinishba, the same multistory apartments and unbelievably careful masonry. The walls were shaped to fit the curved hole in the cliff, and the building blocks were cut from the same red rock that served as their foundation. I thought of what Loyd had told me about Pueblo architecture, whose object was to build a structure the earth could embrace. This looked more than embraced. It reminded me of cliff-swallow nests, or mud-dauber nests, or crystal gardens sprung from their own matrix: the perfect constructions of nature.

“Prehistoric condos,” I said.

Loyd nodded. “Same people, but a lot older. They were here when Columbus’s folks were still rubbing two sticks together.”

“How in the world did they get up there?”

Loyd pointed out a crack that zigzagged up from the talus slope to the ledge where the village perched. In places the crevice wasn’t more than two inches deep. “They were pretty good rock climbers,” he said. Loyd’s forte was understatement.

There wasn’t a sound except for the occasional, echoing pop of a small falling rock. “What were they scared of?” I asked quietly.

“I don’t know. Maybe they weren’t scared. Maybe they liked the view.”

The doors were built so you’d have to step high to get out. Obviously, for the sake of the children. “Gives you the willies, doesn’t it? The thought of raising kids in a place where the front yard ends in a two-hundred-foot drop?”

“No worse than raising up kids where the frontyard ends in a freeway.”

“You’re right,” I said. “No worse than that. And quieter. Less carbon monoxide.”

“So you do think about that sometimes,” Loyd said.

“About what?”

“Being a mother.”

I glanced at him and considered several possible answers. “All the time,” and “never” seemed equally true. Sometimes I wanted to say, “You had your chance, Loyd, we had our baby and it’s dead.” But I didn’t. That was my past, not his.

“Sure, I think about it,” I said, needing to relieve the pressure in my chest. “I think about hotwiring a Porsche and driving to Mexico, too.”

He laughed. “Only one of the two is legal, I’m told.”

I wanted to try and climb up into the cliff village, but Loyd explained that we’d crack our skulls, plus you weren’t supposed to mess with the antiquities.

“I thought you broke all the rules,” I said, as we climbed back into the truck and headed farther up the canyon.

He looked surprised. “What rules have I broken?”

“Authorized Navajo personnel only, for starters. We’re not even supposed to be down here.”

“We’re authorized guests of Maxine Shorty of the Streams Come Together clan.”

“Does she live here?”

“Not now. Almost everybody drives their sheep out and spends the winter up top, but the farms are down here. Leander and I spent almost every summer here till we were thirteen.”

“You did? Doing what?”

“Working. I’ll show you.”

“Who’s Maxine Shorty?”

“My aunt. I’d like you to meet her but she’s down visiting at Window Rock for the holiday.”

Loyd was full of surprises. “I’ll never get your family straight. How’d you get a Navajo aunt? Are Navajos and Pueblos all one big tribe or something?”

Loyd laughed rather hysterically. It occurred to me that this redneck Apache former cockfighter must find me, at times, an outstanding bonehead. “The Pueblo people were always here,” he explained patiently. “They’re still building houses just like this-the Rio Grande Pueblos, Zuñi, Hopi Mesa. Not in the cliffs anymore, but otherwise just the same. They’re about the only Indians that haven’t been moved off their own place into somebody else’s.”

“And the Navajo?”

“Navajos and Apaches are a bunch that came down from Canada, not that long ago. A few hundred years, maybe. Looking for someplace warmer.”

“And this is now Navajo tribal land, because?”

“Because the U.S. Government officially gave it to them. Wasn’t that nice? Too bad they didn’t give them the Golden Gate Bridge, too.”

The truck crunched over frozen sand. “So the Pueblo are homebodies, and the Navajo and Apache are wanderers.”

“You could look at it that way, I guess.”

“What are you?”

“Pueblo.” There was no hesitation. “What are you?”

“I have no idea. My mother came from someplace in Illinois, and Doc Homer won’t own up to being from anywhere. I can’t remember half of what happened to me before I was fifteen. I guess I’m nothing. The nothing Tribe.”

“Homebody tribe or wanderer tribe?”

I laughed. “Emelina called me a ‘homewrecker’ one time. Or no, what did she say? A ‘home ignorer.’”

He didn’t respond to that.

“So how’d you get a Navajo aunt?” I asked again.

“The usual way. My mother’s brother married her. Pueblo men have to marry out of the clan, and sometimes they go off the pueblo. The land down here stays with the women. So my uncle came here.”

Maxine Shorty’s farm, which she inherited from her mother and would pass on to her daughters, was a triangle bordered by the river and the walls of a short side canyon. We parked by the line of cottonwoods near the river and walked over the icy stubble of a cornfield. A sad scarecrow stood guard. It occurred to me that the barrenness of a winter farm was deceptive; everything was there, it was still fertile, just as surely as trees held their identity in the shape and swell of their bare winter twigs.

“Has it changed much?”

I meant it as a joke, I saw nothing that could have changed, but Loyd looked around carefully. “Those little weedy cottonwoods have grown up along the stream. And there’s a big boulder on that slope, you see the one with dark stripes? That used to be up there.” He pointed to a place in the canyon wall, visible only to himself, from which the boulder had fallen. Most men, I thought, aren’t this familiar with the furniture in their homes.

“So what did you do here?”

“Worked our butts off. Weeded, picked corn, grew beans and watermelons. And had to carry a lot of water in the bad years.”

“Were those peach trees here?” I asked. A weathered orchard occupied the steep upper section of land.

“They’re older than my aunt. The peach trees go way back. They were planting orchards down here three hundred years ago.”

“A canyon of fruit. Like Grace.”

He inspected the trees carefully, one at a time: the bases of the branches, the trunks, the ends of twigs. I didn’t know what he was looking for, and didn’t ask. It seemed like family business. On this land Loyd seemed like a family man.

“And did the people that lived up in the cliffs grow corn and beans too?”

“That’s right.”

“So how come this canyon’s stayed productive for a thousand and some-odd years, and we can’t even live in Grace for one century without screwing it up?”