From the Improvement Era, August 1935 –

The Shattered Mirror

By Blanche Stockdale Burr

The beads on Mrs. Moore’s dressing table were as red and as round as the sun when it set out in the painted desert, Hozo, the Navajo girl, thought. She wanted them immensely. Her first impulse was to snatch them and hide them quickly in her pocket. But she knew that would be stealing, for they were Mrs. Moore’s beads.

Then there was something else that stood between her and the beads — a picture that was an ideal painted deeply in her memory — the vision of a beautiful building with walls tall and white as the sandstone cliffs of the painted desert. For the past year Hozo had been trying to live so that she would be worthy to enter inside this house and she knew that the theft of the beads would render her ineligible.

Nearly every afternoon she would climb into her father’s rattly old cart when he hauled boxes of oranges and grapefruit from Mr. Moore’s ranch east of Mesa, Arizona, to a dealer south of town and would ride past this building, which was the Mesa temple. She always gazed at it wonderingly, worship in her eyes, and longed for the time when she and her family would have the privilege of going through to be sealed to each other. Always when she saw it her beauty-loving soul craved for the skill of her grandmother who wove rugs of exquisite design outside her hogan in the painted desert. Hozo wanted to weave a blanket with the temple as a design. She could vision the completed rug to the minutest detail, the temple motif repeated again and again throughout the blanket, its tall marble walls dead white against the red and blue background of sunset skies, the tall, Italian cypress trees which surrounded it pointing like slim green fingers high into the heavens.

Hozo’s whole family were employed by the Moores to do the work on the ranch. Mrs. Moore had been laboring with them, trying to make them understand the principles of the gospel. Every morning and evening they came into her home to join in the family prayers and at that time Mrs. Moore would explain to them some part of her religion.

The Indian family were already eager to join the Church, but Mrs. Moore could see that their primitive minds had not yet comprehended its full meaning. She knew that the faith they gave the elders who came to administer to Hozo’s mother when she was sick would be as willingly given to the medicine man who performed magic out in the painted desert. She could see in Hozo’s worship of the temple the pantheistic or nature-worshiping religion of her forefathers and realized that were Hozo in the desert she would manifest equally as much reverence for the sandstone cliffs. So she was leading them by slow degrees from the worship of their ancestors to this new religion which held such great promises for their race.

But Hozo, much as she wanted to go inside the chaste white temple, still felt the lure of the beads. Each one was like a glowing sun and seemed to burn itself deep into her desire. Almost before she knew it she had grabbed them, put them into her pocket and had run out to the hut where they lived on the edge of the ranch.

Her father had the cart packed with fruit and the ponies hitched to it ready for immediate departure. Without a word she climbed into the cart and sat on the floor beside the boxes of fruit. Her father took the driver’s seat and started the ponies. A few moments later Hozo was riding creakily into Mesa, a silent, stolid little figure bumping along in a rattly old cart, her fingers clutching the big round beads in her pocket.

She hoped her father would not drive by the temple that day, for she knew that she would not dare even gaze upon it, unworthy as she was, but unerringly he headed for it. Though she sat with head bowed, eyes cast on the floor of the cart, she knew just when they were passing it. Through the corner of her lowered lids she saw dimly each white pillar with its Grecian urn at the top and each iron picket of the tall fence that enclosed the grounds. She knew just when they had come to the rectangular lake that lay in front of the temple, and though she did not have the courage to look up at the building itself she felt as though she must at least see its reflection in the lake, which usually was a perfect mirror. Always placid, one could see the glorious image inverted in the blue, blue water, the tall cypress trees which overtowered the temple outlined clear-cut as pencils. Always in the lake the sky looked much bluer than the real sky overhead.

But today when Hozo peered into the lake she was filled with horror. Her mirror had been shattered. Instead of the perfect reflection she had expected to see, the waters were gray and sullied and showed nothing of the temple towering above it. Even now she dared not look back at it as they jolted past and her mind filled with a thousand superstitious fears. What if the temple had disappeared too!

It was all on account of the beads. They seemed to burn in her pocket like balls of fire. She could hardly wait to return them to Mrs. Moore. Never, never would she steal again.

Her father drove her home by a different road, so she had no chance of finding out whether or not the temple had really vanished. But she would know tomorrow, for they would be by with more fruit. All that Hozo could do about it was to plan how she was to give back the beads and hope that on the following day she would find the temple where it belonged.

That night Jerry, one of the gardeners at the temple, arose from his bed where he had been sick all day and journeyed shakily over to the temple grounds to see what had happened there during his enforced neglect of duty. All was well except that the sweet-peas needed wiring — and something was wrong with the lake. Someone had muddied up the water.

Tomorrow afternoon a busload of people were coming over from Los Angeles to spend a week working in the temple. The grounds must look their best for the visitors. He would feel able to work by morning. He would clean out the lake and put some bluing in it to emphasize the reflections of the temple. A touch of color in the water certainly did transform that lake into a mirror.