Animal Dreams

21 The Tissue of Hearts

Hallie was somebody’s prisoner. Whether my eyes were open or closed, I saw her with a white cloth tied tightly over her mouth. That’s the only image that would ever come.

If she couldn’t scream, I did. I was in every way unreasonable, especially with the kids at school. Even at the time, I was lucid enough to be thankful that Rita had dropped out. One member of my family had already yelled at her; she didn’t have to know that neither one of us had all our tires on the road.

The students had tried to be cooperative. They went to Tucson to assist the Stitch and Bitch Club, as I’d requested, and found the city to be a superb adventure. They discovered a video arcade; Raymo sweet-talked more than ten young women into buying piñatas; there were rumors that Connie Muñoz gave Hector Jones a hand job in the back seat of the bus on the way home. What did I expect? They were teenagers. I knew that, but still I screamed at them because Black Mountain was poisoning their mother’s milk and all they cared about was sex and a passing grade.

I had rational intentions. I talked about evapotranspiration and rain forests and oxygen in the biosphere, how everything was connected. The last virgin timber cleared and milled to make way for a continent of landfills choking on old newspapers. It was a poetic lecture. Marta made the mistake of asking me how much of this poetry was going to be on the test.

I glowered. “Your life is the test. If you flunk this one, you die.”

The whole front row looked stunned. Their pens stopped moving.

“What you people learn for a test you forget the next day. That’s bullshit. That’s a waste of your brains and my time. If I can’t teach you something you’ll remember, then I haven’t even been here this year.” I crossed my arms and glared at them. “You kids think this pollution shit is not your problem, right? Somebody will clean up the mess. It’s not your fault. Well, your attitude stinks. You’re as guilty as anybody. Do you, or do you not, think the world was put here for you to use?”

Nobody was fool enough to answer. I observed during the long silence that half the kids in the room were wearing stone-washed jeans. I yanked up Hector Jones by the arm and made an example of him. I have to admit I disliked Hector partially for unfair reasons: his father was a former hoodlum named Simon Bolivar Jones who’d been noticeably unkind to me in school.

“Stand up here,” I said. “Show everybody your jeans. Nice, right? Turn around. Nice ass, Hector. Wonderful jeans. They were half worn out before you bought them, right?” I smacked Hector lightly on the butt and let him sit down.

“You know how they make those? They wash them in a big machine with this special kind of gravel they get out of volcanic mountains. The prettiest mountains you ever saw in your life. But they’re fragile, like a big pile of sugar. Levi Strauss or whoever goes in there with bulldozers and chainsaws and cuts down the trees and rips the mountainside to hell, so that all us lucky Americans can wear jeans that look like somebody threw them in the garbage before we got them.”

“Trees grow back,” Raymo said. Raymo was a brave young man.

“Excuse me?”

He cupped his hands around his mouth and spoke as if I were his deaf grandmother: “Trees…grow…back.”

I cupped my hands around my mouth and said, just as loudly, “Not if the whole…damn…mountain is gone, they don’t.”

“Well, there’s other mountains.”

“Sure, there’s some other mountains,” I said, feeling that I might explode if I weren’t careful. “If you got hit by a truck, Raymo, I guess your ma would say, ‘Well, I have some other kids.’”

About half the class thought that was funny. The other half was probably trying to figure out how to get out of my classroom alive.

I stared them down, ticking like a bomb. “Sure. Trees grow back. Even a whole rain forest could grow back, in a couple hundred years, maybe. But who’s going to make it happen? If you had to pay the real price for those jeans-the cost and the time and the work of bringing that mountain back to life instead of leaving it dead-those pretty jeans would have cost you a hundred dollars.”

I felt strangely high. Furious and articulate. “Think about the gas you put in a car,” I said. “The real cost. Not just pumping it out of the ground and refining it and shipping it, but also cleaning up the oil spills and all the junk that goes into the air when it gets burned. That’s part of what it costs, but you’re not paying it. Gas ought to be twenty dollars a gallon so you’re getting a real good deal. But soon the bill comes due, and we pay it, or we eat dirt. The ultimate MasterCharge.”

I can’t swear they were listening, but they were watching me carefully. Thirty-six blue eyes ticked back and forth as I paced the floor in front of my desk.

“If Grace gets poisoned, if all these trees die and this land goes to hell, you’ll just go somewhere else, right? Like the great pioneers, Lewis and Clark. Well, guess what, kiddos, the wilderness is used up.” I walked around my little square of floor like a trapped cat. “People can forget, and forget, and forget, but the land has a memory. The lakes and the rivers are still hanging on to the DDT and every other insult we ever gave them. Lake Superior is a superior cesspool. The fish have cancer. The ocean is getting used up. The damn air is getting used up.” I pointed at the ceiling, meaning to indicate the sky. “You know what’s up there? Ozone. It’s this stuff in the atmosphere that acts like an umbrella.”

I stopped and reconsidered this effete analogy. Teenagers who won’t use condoms aren’t impressed by the need for an umbrella. I surveyed the class thoughtfully and demanded, “Whose Dad or Mom ever worked in the smelter?”

About half the hands went up, reluctantly.

“You know what they did up there, right? One way or another they were around thousand-degree hot metal. You ever see them dressed for work? They wore coveralls like Mr. Neil Armstrong walking on the moon, and a big shield over their faces, right?”

They nodded, relieved, I suppose, that I wasn’t going to single them out for humiliation. I sat on the desk and crossed my arms. “Imagine that’s you, working up there with that hot metal in your face. Now, somebody rips that mask off you while you’re working. Goodbye face. Goodbye nose and eyelids, beauty queens. You’re dead.”

They might well have been dead, for all the sound they made.

“That’s what the ozone layer does for us, boys and girls, it’s a big face shield in the sky.” I was skipping a few steps here, but not really exaggerating the consequences. Not at all. I attempted to lower my voice and sound faintly reasonable. “And it’s slipping away from us. There’s a big hole in it over the South Pole. When you use a spray can you make that hole bigger. There’s something in most aerosol cans and refrigerators and air conditioners, called chlorofluorocarbons, that neutralizes the ozone. Factories are still making tons of it, right now.”

I suspect “chlorofluorocarbons” was the largest word ever spoken within the walls of Grace High, and I’m fairly sure also that nobody forgot it for at least the rest of the day.

After the bell rang, Connie Muñoz eyed me and said, “Miss, I seen you wear stone-washed jeans to school sometimes.” The other kids were already out of there like bats out of hell.

“You’re right,” I said. “I didn’t know about the mountains when I bought them. Just like Hector didn’t, and you didn’t.”

“Yeah?” She chewed her gum and held me under a neutral, military sort of gaze. I’d publicly humiliated her new boyfriend; this would require some diplomacy.

“I’ve been learning a lot of this stuff just lately,” I told her. “I’m not saying I’m not part of the problem.”

“So how come you’re so mad at us, Miss?”

I felt conscious of my height, and embarrassed. “Connie, I don’t really know. Because I’m guilty too, I guess. And now I’m trying to fix it all at once.”

A hint of life came into her eyes. “Don’t sweat it,” she said. “I think it’s cool that you cuss and stuff when you’re mad. Everybody was paying attention. What you said was right, these guys just think when they use something up there’s always going to be more.”

“I shouldn’t have cussed,” I said. “I’m supposed to be setting an example. And I shouldn’t have picked on Hector the way I did.”

She laughed and cracked her gum. “Hector Jones is a dickhead.”

I had dinner at Doc Homer’s house. I’d done so every night since I got back from Santa Rosalia and found out Hallie had been kidnapped. If I badgered him enough, I kept thinking, he would have something more to tell me. But he couldn’t remember anything. If I’d ever doubted Hallie was his favorite, there was no question about it now-I’d never seen him so affected by any event in our lives. He still functioned, cooked for himself and went to work, but it was only an obstinate ritual; he was a mess. I’d found some of his medication bottles in a cache in the living room, inside an old iron coal bucket. There was no way to know whether he was taking them. Half the time he talked to me as if I were six years old.

“Who was the person you spoke with on the phone?” I asked again. “Was she somebody in the government? There’s got to be somebody we can call.” I cautiously eyed the plate he set down in front of me. Doc Homer had prepared liver with steamed apples and yellow squash. In certain restaurants things like this passed for haute cuisine, I knew, but here it passed for weird. It was getting to where he’d combine anything he found in his refrigerator. I’d started shopping for him, lest he get down to refried beans and ice cream.

“She suggested that we call the President of the United States,” he said.

I set my fork down on the table. He’d said this quite a number of times before. “I think I will call the President.” I moved my chair back from the table. It was an idle threat; I’d probably just get a polite recording. But I knew Doc Homer wouldn’t want what he would consider an absurd long-distance call on his bill.

“I understand you have a boyfriend,” he said, cutting his liver and apples into small pieces.

“What do they think will happen? Did this person you talked to sound real worried? Or did she say this was a routine kind of thing? Sometimes they’ll just take a foreign hostage to get attention and then they’ll let them go the next day. She’s probably back at her house already.” I knew this was unlikely. The contras, as I understood it, didn’t need attention. They were fully supported by the richest sugar daddy in the modern world.

“He drinks, Codi. He will take advantage of you.”

I stared at Doc Homer for a long time. “Not anymore,” I said. “He doesn’t drink anymore. And he couldn’t take advantage of me if he wanted to. I’m as sweet and innocent as the Berlin Wall. Your concern is approximately two decades too late.”

“My concern is for your welfare.”

“Your concern.” I picked up slices of apple and ate them with my fingers, to annoy him. “I’m going to have to go down there. I can get a bus to Tucson tonight and a plane to Managua and be there tomorrow.” I doubted it was this easy.

The teakettle boiled and he jumped up. He seemed edgy. He got out the filter paper and slowly set up the drip machine for coffee, carefully positioning each part of the apparatus as if it were some important experiment in organic chemistry.

“I told you it wasn’t a good idea,” he said, pouring boiling water into the funnel. I waited for some further clue. He could he evaluating any mistake I’d made since age three.

“What idea is that?” I prompted, since he didn’t go on.

“Loyd Peregrina.”

We both watched the water pass through the dark grounds, absorbing their color and substance. He’d never mentioned Loyd’s name before; I was surprised he knew it. I wondered whether Doc Homer had a whole other life in his head, in which he dispensed kind, fatherly advice. This gulf-between what Doc Homer believed himself to be and what he was-brought out the worst in me, or the most blunt. “Don’t worry about Loyd Peregrina,” I said. “I can’t get hurt now. I’m leaving him this time. It’s just a short-term thing.”

“He won’t elevate your life.”

“Damn it, you don’t know the first thing about my life. What’s to elevate? I’m a medical-school dropout who works graveyard shifts in quick-marts.”

“You left the profession by choice. We’ve established that.”

“Okay, so I walked out the door with my eyes open. What did I choose instead? What am I good at? Name one thing.”

He balked. I knew he would. Doc Homer wasn’t fluent in the language of compliments.

“I have no career, no kids, not even a place I consider home. Basically I’m a bag lady with an education.”

“That’s a preposterous assessment.”

“How would you know? You don’t really see me, you just see what you want. You take pictures of people and turn them into rock walls.”

“That is not what I do. I begin with a picture in my head, from the past. I try to duplicate it from the images I have at hand.”

This was a new one. “I don’t believe I give a damn about the images you have at hand.” I lowered my voice. The quickest way to lose points with Doc Homer was to lose control. I said, “You always just wanted Hallie and me to be above everybody in Grace.”

“You were above your peers.”

I snorted at that. “I was as trashy as Connie Muñoz and Rita Cardenal, without half their guts or one-tenth of their sex appeal. I was ugly and embarrassed to be alive.”

Doc Homer had a strange way of actually getting quieter when he raised his voice. “My daughters were not trash,” he said.

I looked him square in the eye. “I got pregnant when I was fifteen.”

“I know. I watched you bury the baby in the riverbed.”

I felt an odd flush in my neck and face. For about a minute we both listened to the dripping of the coffeepot. Then I said, “Why do you lie about everything?”

“I’ve never told you anything but the truth.”

“You’ve never told me anything, period. You said you and mother came from Illinois. But you came from here. You’ve got a whole family lying up there in the damn graveyard.”

“We did come here from Illinois. I was stationed there, and went to medical school there. We moved back here after the war.”

“What kind of war had people stationed in Illinois?” I asked absurdly, close to tears. “I’m sorry, but in history class they never told us about the Midwestern Front.”

“Alice’s family despised me.”

I stopped, remembering how Viola had averted her eyes and said, “that family went downhill,” the day. I discovered Homero Nolina up in the cemetery. The red-haired Gracela sister with the temper, who married Conrado Nolina and produced a legacy of trash-that was my father’s family. What he believed he came from, and what we still were. Auburn-haired and angry, living in exile in our own town. There wasn’t enough air in the kitchen for me to breathe, and get all this in.

“So you, what, ran off to the army. Got yourself educated on the G.I. Bill, and then came back here as the mighty prodigal doctor with his beautiful new wife, and acted like nobody could touch you.”

I watched him closely, but could read nothing. I couldn’t even see him, really; I had no idea how he’d look to a stranger. Old? Sick? Mean-spirited? He poured coffee into two mugs and gave the larger one to me.

“Thank you,” I said.

“You’re welcome.”

“Why did you come back here? If it was so important to you to start over, you could have gone anywhere. You could have stayed back there in Illinois.”

Doc Homer sat down opposite me. He clenched and unclenched his left hand, then spread it flat on the table and examined it abstractly, as if it were a patient. I looked at the framed photograph on the wall over his head: his portrait of a hand that wasn’t a hand, but five cacti with invisible spines.

“Why do you suppose the poets talk about hearts?” he asked me suddenly. “When they discuss emotional damage? The tissue of hearts is tough as a shoe. Did you ever sew up a heart?”

I shook my head. “No, but I’ve watched. I know what you mean.” The walls of a heart are thick and strong, and the surgeons use heavy needles. It takes a good bit of strength, but it pulls together neatly. As much as anything it’s like binding a book.

“The seat of human emotion should be the liver,” Doc Homer said. “That would be an appropriate metaphor: we don’t hold love in our hearts, we hold it in our livers.”

I understand exactly. Once in ER I saw a woman who’d been stabbed everywhere, most severely in the liver. It’s an organ with the consistency of layer upon layer of wet Kleenex. Every attempt at repair just opens new holes that tear and bleed. You try to close the wound with fresh wounds, and you try and you try and you don’t give up until there’s nothing left.

For Christmas, Loyd had given me an Apache burden basket. It was exquisitely woven, striped with the colors of dried grass, and around its open mouth hung tin bells on leather thongs that made whispery, tinkling sounds. It wasn’t much bigger than a teacup. The night he gave it to me in Santa Rosalia I felt it would easily hold all my burdens, forever. Now it hung on the wall over my bed, and at night I looked at it and wept for my own stupidity in trusting that life could be kind.

I apologized to my classes. I couldn’t see trying to maintain the recommended authoritative distance; I told them my sister had been kidnapped and that I was scared to death. I told them everything seemed very serious to me now, including things like the ozone layer. The kids were extremely quiet. I don’t think any adult had ever apologized to them before. From the storeroom we got down a pre-World War II map that showed all the world’s climatic zones, and we found Nicaragua, Honduras, Costa Rica, El Salvador. The shapes and names of many nations had changed during the lifetime of that map, but not the climatic zones. We talked more calmly about the rain forest and the manner in which fast-food chains were cutting it down to make hamburger farms. We talked about poor countries and rich countries and DDT in the food chain, and the various ways our garbage comes home to us. The memory of the land. My students understood these things perfectly well. There is nothing boring about the prospect of extinction.

On Friday I took the day off to make phone calls. Hallie had left me a list of emergency telephone numbers, mostly speculative, and I called them all. It took the whole morning. I got nowhere with the State Department and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and ended up with the Nicaraguan Ministry of Agriculture. Viola helped me contend with the impenetrable Spanish of international operators. Emelina sat on my other side holding my hand, wringing the fingers, apparently forgetting that it wasn’t hers. Mason and the baby sat on the floor in front of us, silent, wondering as children always must wonder in a crisis what terrible thing they had done to wreck the world.

We learned nothing useful. They were sure now that Hallie had been taken across the border into Honduras, probably to a camp where many other prisoners were held. It was a well-outfitted camp; they had Sony radios and high-quality C-rations. It made me smile, a little, to think Hallie might be eating C-rations I’d dutifully paid for with my taxes. Dinner was on me. So were the land mines.

I spoke with a dozen secretaries of this and that and finally with the Minister of Agriculture himself. He knew Hallie. He talked for a long time about what an extraordinary person she was; it made me suspicious that she was dead, and I started crying. Viola took the phone and translated until I was fit to talk again. The Minister promised me she wasn’t dead. He would call me the minute they knew anything at all. He was fairly sure the contras took her by mistake, not knowing she was an American citizen, and now were probably confused as to how to release her without generating too much bad publicity. He asked, had I called the President of the United States?

In the meantime, Hallie’s letters still came to the Post Office box. I knew she had mailed them before she was kidnapped, but their appearance frightened me. They looked postmarked and cheerful and real, but they were ghosts, mocking what I’d believed was a solid connection between us. I’d staked my heart on that connection. If I could still get letters like this when Hallie was gone or in trouble, what had I ever really had?

I didn’t read them. I saved them. I would open them all once I’d heard her voice on the phone. I wouldn’t be fooled again.

At some point between Christmas and mid-January, Grace became famous. The several hundred piñatas planted in Tucson had grown into great, branching trees of human interest, which bore fruit in the form of articles with names like “This Art’s Not for Breaking” and “What Piñatas!” in slick magazines all over the Southwest. The Stitch and Bitch Club’s efforts in papier-mâché became a hot decorator item in gentrified adobe neighborhoods like the one in Tucson that Hallie used to call Barrio Volvo.

It was the birds that caused the stir, but because it was there, people were also reading my urgent one-page plea for the life of Grace. Where Mayor Jimmy Soltovedas’s repeated calls to the press had failed, Stitch and Bitch succeeded: our story became known. Hardly a day passed without some earnest reporter calling up to get a statement from Norma Galvez. The club designated her the media spokeswoman; Doña Althea was more colorful, but given to unprintable remarks. Ditto for Viola, who was even more unprintable because she spoke English.

But when a scout crew from CBS News came to town, they wanted the Donñ. They sat in on a meeting at the American Legion hall and zeroed in on the Stitch and Bitch figurehead with her authority and charm and all she represented in the way of local color. They got some of the meeting on tape, but made an appointment to come back on Saturday with a crew to interview the Doña in her home. Norma Galvez would be (for safety’s sake) her interpreter. By the time Saturday morning came, when CBS rolled into town in their equipment Jeeps like Jesus into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, the whole town was anticipating the visit of what Viola had been calling “the B.S. News.”

There were about fifty of us packed into Doña Althea’s living room, just there to watch. The Doña looked as she always looked: tiny, imperious, dressed in black, with her long white braid pinned around her head like a crown. As a concession to the cameras she clutched an embroidered shawl around her shoulders.

She refused to close the restaurant, though, and it was lunchtime, so there were still comings and goings and much banging of pots. Cecil, the sound man, had to run his equipment off the outlet in the kitchen, since it was the only part of the house that had been wired in the twentieth century. “Ladies, we’re just going to have to be cozy in here,” he said, turning sideways and scooting between two Althea sisters to reach the plug.

“Son of a,” he said, when one of the sisters tripped over his cord and unplugged it for the third or fourth time. The Althea in question stopped in her tracks and looked for a minute as if she might deck him, but decided to serve her customers instead. She was so burdened with plates it’s lucky Cecil didn’t get menudo in his amps.

The director of the crew had the Doña sit in a carved chair that normally stood in her bedroom and held the TV. Two men carried it out, sat her down in it, and arranged vases of peacock feathers at her feet. “Just cross your ankles,” the director told her. Norma translated, and the Doña complied, scowling fiercely. She looked like a Frida Kahlo painting. “Okay,” he said, wiping sweat off his forehead. He was a heavy man, dressed in Italian shoes and a Mexican wedding shirt, though his mood was not remotely festive. “Okay,” he repeated. “Let’s go.”

There was a camera on the interviewer and two cameras were on Doña Althea: bright, hot lights everywhere. A crew member dabbed the interviewer’s nose and forehead with a powder puff, eyed the Doña once, and backed off. The interviewer introduced himself as Malcolm Hunt. He seemed young and wore an outfit that suggested designer-label big-game hunting or possibly Central American revolutions. He probably meant well. He carefully explained to Doña Althea that they would edit the tape later, using only the best parts. If she wanted to go back and repeat anything, she could do that. He suggested that she ignore the cameras and just speak naturally to him. Norma Galvez translated all this. The Doña squinted at the lights, fixed her scornful gaze on a point just above the kitchen door, and shouted all her answers in that direction. Cecil took it personally and slinked around behind the steam table.

Mr. Hunt began. “Doña Althea, how long have you lived in this canyon?”

“Desde antes que tú cagabas en tus pañales!”

Norma Galvez shifted a little in her chair and said, “Ah, since before your mother was changing your diapers.” The Doña scowled at Norma briefly, and one of the Altheas laughed from the kitchen.

Mr. Hunt smiled and looked concerned. “When did your family come to this country?”

The Doña said something to the effect that her family had been on this land before the Gringos took over and started calling it America. The prospectors came and mined out the damn gold, and the Black Mountain company mined out the damn copper, and then they fired all the men and sent them home to plant trees, and now, naturally, they were pissing in the river and poisoning the orchards.

Mrs. Galvez paused. “A long time ago,” she said.

Mr. Hunt lost his composure for the first time. He made an odd, guttural noise and looked at Mrs. Galvez, who spread her hands.

“You want an exact translation?”

“Please.”

She gave it to him.

It wasn’t the afternoon anybody had expected. Malcolm Hunt kept adjusting his posture and his eyebrows and appearing to start the whole interview over, framing new questions that sounded like opening lines.

“The Black Mountain Mining Company is polluting-and now actually diverting-the river that has been the lifeblood of this town for centuries. Why is this happening?”

“Because they’re a greedy bunch of goat fuckers” (Mrs. Galvez said “so-and-sos”) “and they got what they wanted from this canyon and now they have to squeeze it by the balls before they let go.”

“They’re actually damming the river to avoid paying fines to the Environmental Protection Agency, isn’t that right? Because the river is so polluted with acid?”

The Doña waited for Norma’s translation, then nodded sharply.

“What do you think could stop the dam from being built, at this point?”

“Dinamita.”

Mr. Hunt appeared reluctant to follow this line of questioning to its conclusion. “In a desperate attempt to save your town,” he said, trying another new tack, “you and the other ladies of Grace have made hundreds of piñatas. Do you really think a piñata can stop a multinational corporation?”

“Probably not.”

“Then why go to all the trouble?”

“What do you think we should do?”

She had him there; Malcolm Hunt looked stumped. He looked from Norma to the Doña and back to Norma. “Well,” he said, “most people write their congressmen.”

“No sé. We don’t write such good letters. I don’t think we have any congressman out here anyway, do we? We have a mayor, Jimmy Soltovedas. But I don’t think we have any congressman.” She pronounced the word in English, making it stand out from the rest of her speech like a curse or a totally new concept. “Si hay,” she went on, “If we do, I haven’t seen him. Probably he doesn’t give a shit. And also we don’t know how to use dynamite. What we know how to do is make nice things out of paper. Flowers, piñatas, cascarones. And we sew things. That’s what we ladies here do.”

I smiled, thinking of Jack following old habits, turning around three times on the kitchen floor and lying down to dream of a nest in the grass.

“But why peacocks, what’s the history?” Malcolm persisted, after hearing the fully translated explanation. “Tell me about the peacocks.”

“What do you want to know about peacocks?” the Doña asked, giving him a blank look. The full Spanish name for peacock is pavo real, “royal turkey,” but Mrs. Galvez let that one slip by.

“How did they get here?”

Doña Althea lifted her head, adjusted her shawl, leaned back and put her hands on her knees, which were spread wide apart under her black skirt. “Hace cien años,” she began. “More than one hundred years ago, my mother and her eight sisters came to this valley from Spain to bring light and happiness to the poor miners, who had no wives. They were the nine Gracela sisters: Althea, Renata, Hilaria, Carina, Julietta, Ursolina, Violetta, Camila, and Estrella.”

She pronounced the names musically and slowly, drawing out the syllables and rolling the r’s. They were the names of fairy princesses, but the story, in her high, sustained voice, was Biblical. It was the Genesis of Grace. And of Hallie and me. Our father’s own grandmother-mother of Homero Nolina up in the graveyard-was one of those princesses: the red-haired, feisty one. I could picture her barefoot, her hair curly like Hallie’s and coming loose from its knot. I saw her standing in the open front door of her house, shaking a soup spoon at her sisters’ arrogant children who came to tease her own. Perhaps she was Ursolina, the little bear.

When Hallie and I were little I used to make up endless stories of where we came from, to lull her to sleep. She would steal into my bed after Doc Homer was asleep, and I would hold her, trying to protect her from the wind that blows on the heads of orphans and isolates them from the living, shouting children who have inherited the earth. “We came from Zanzibar,” I would whisper with my mouth against her hair. “We came from Ireland. Our mother was a queen. The Queen of Potatoes.”

I could never know the truth of my mother, but there was another story now. Another side. I closed my eyes and listened to Doña Althea with the joy of a child. I don’t know what they heard on the CBS news. I heard a bedtime story thirty years late.

22 Endangered Places

It rained and rained in Gracela Canyon. February passed behind a mask of clouds. It seemed like either the end of the world or the beginning.

The orchards, whose black branch tips had been inspected throughout the winter for latent signs of life, suddenly bloomed, all at once: pears, plums, apples, quince, their normal staggered cycle compressed by the odd weather into a single nuptial burst. Through my classroom window I watched drenched blossoms falling like wet snow.

Water, in Grace, is an all-or-nothing proposition, like happiness. When you have rain you have more than enough, just as when you’re happy and in love and content with your life you can’t remember how you ever could have felt cheated by fate. And vice versa. I knew, abstractly, that I’d been happy, but now that I was in pain again, that happiness was untouchable. It was a garish color picture of a place I had not been. Memory runs along deep, fixed channels in the brain, like electricity along its conduits; only a cataclysm can make the electrons rear up in shock and slide over into another channel. The human mind seems doomed to believe, as simply as a rooster believes, that where we are now is the only possibility.

But it isn’t. In spite of the promise of plenty that dripped from the rooftops and gushed down Gracela Canyon’s ravines throughout February, the winter rains would soon dry up. Then there would not be another drop until July. During those brittle months the taste and smell of rain would be lost to us, beyond the recollection even of children and the deepest root tips of trees. That is the way of the seasons in a desert place. Only the river ran continuously. The river was Grace’s memory of water.

We heard nothing from Hallie. First I tried to tell myself she was already out of danger. In the past, the two-week delay of her letters had caused me to keep a distrustful eye on Hallie, like a star so many light years away it could have exploded long ago while we still watched its false shine. Now I tried the reverse psychology: we would hear, soon, that she’d been safe while we worried.

But we didn’t, and I gave over to panic. I began to call Managua every week. The Minister of Agriculture, whose secretary now knew me by voice, said there wasn’t any reason for me to fly down to Nicaragua; there was nothing I could do there but wait, which-he implied-I was doing badly enough where I was. He really was not unkind, just frustrated, like any of us. He pointed out that Hallie was an exceptional person, to those of us who loved her, but not an exceptional case-the contras made daily forays across the border to attack workers in their fields, sometimes even schoolchildren. Thousands of civilians had died. “If you came here,” he said, “you would see.” Every home had a framed photograph on a table that stood for a fresh empty space in the family, he said. Teachers and community workers were particularly at risk.

He said I might try making Hallie’s status known to the general public in the United States. It could pressure her captors to show restraint; or, he warned me frankly, it could do the opposite.

I knew nothing else to do, so I wrote letters. Emelina helped. We papered her kitchen table with letters in progress. I drafted mine on stationery from the Grace High School principal’s office, but the letterhead intimidated Emelina, who preferred lined paper from her kids’ loose-leaf notebooks. Viola put a request to the Stitch and Bitch Club, and after that we had volunteers in Emelina’s kitchen for nightly letter-writing sessions. I dictated the main ideas and then they all got the hang of it. I looked up who had voted for sending the guns, and who had voted against, and either way we tried to work it in. I expect we sent out more than a thousand letters. When we lost track of which congressmen we’d written, we wrote them again. We wrote radio stations and any other public entity we believed might be reading its mail. Sometimes I stopped and laid my head on my arms. Emelina would massage the back of my neck and say nothing, because we both suspected words were beside the point.

There may have been publicity we never knew about. We didn’t get the New York Times in Grace. I do know there was a short piece in the Tucson morning paper, in the “Money” section, of all things, right next to an article about how to reduce your mortgage with twice-monthly payments. There was a small, smiling photo of Hallie, who was identified as a former employee of the University Extension Service. The reporter had called up the Minister of Agriculture as I’d suggested, and said that he “alleged” she had been kidnapped by agitators based in Honduras. This was followed by a much longer quote from a state senator who said the Nicaraguan civil war was a tragedy, and that the United States was doing its best to bring democracy to the region, and that no U.S. citizen could go there without expecting to be caught in crossfire.

The reporter, believing I would be pleased, sent me the clipping along with a note wishing my family all the best. The breadth of his ignorance made me feel hopeless, as I’ve sometimes felt in dreams, when the muscles dissolve and escape is impossible. I wept uncontrollably all day. At school I asked my students to read Silent Spring for an hour while I put my head down on my desk and cried. They were subdued. I suspected people in Grace of walking around me on tiptoe now, the way a town might avert its eyes when its resident crazy lady hikes up her skirt and scratches an itch and swears at the blackbirds watching from a telephone wire.

I stopped going to Doc Homer’s for dinner. We were in the worst position to comfort one another. I guessed he could go on about his routine-that had always been the core of his resilience-but I don’t think I’d slept a single night since she’d been taken, and I was reaching an abnormal state of exhaustion. I fought off hallucinations. Late one night Hallie appeared in my bedroom doorway, very small, looking up at me. With those same eyes she used to ask without words to crawl into my bed.

“Hallie, I’m trying so hard. But I don’t know how to save you.”

She turned on stocking feet and walked back into the dark.

I got up and rifled my desk drawers till I found the newspaper clipping with her picture. I looked at it hard, trying to convince myself that Hallie wasn’t a child. I had the black-and-red afghan bundled around me but I felt chilled and hard as a frozen branch. My hands shook. I tucked the clipping into an envelope and wrote a note to the President of the United States, begging him please just to look at her. “This is my only sister,” I told him. “I’m coming to understand responsibility. You gave those men a righteous flag to wave and you gave them guns. If she dies, what will you tell me?” I licked the envelope and sealed it. I knew the address by heart.

We began to get letters back, to the effect that the matter would certainly bear investigation. They weren’t form letters, each one was typed by a different secretary, but they all said the same thing. It surprised me to see how a meaningless phrase repeated again and again begins to resemble truth.

In the middle of that gray month Emelina’s youngest son learned to walk. I was alone with him when it happened. The sun had come out briefly as I walked home from school, and the baby and I were both anxious to be outdoors. Emelina asked if I could just not let him eat any real big bugs, and I promised to keep an eye out. I settled with a book in the courtyard, which was radiant with sudden sunlight. The flowers were beaten down, their bent-over heads bejeweled with diamond droplets like earrings on sad, rich widows.

For quite a while now Nicholas had been cruising the perimeters of his world, walking confidently from house to tree to lawn chair to wall, so long as he had something to hold on to. Sometimes what he touched was nothing more than apparent security. Today I watched the back of his red overalls with interest as he cruised along a patch of damp, tall four-o’clocks, lightly touching their leaves. He had no idea how little support they offered.

He spotted a hummingbird. It buzzed around the red tubes of a potted penstemon that stood by itself in the center of the courtyard. His eyes followed the bird as it darted up and down, a high-strung gem; Nicholas wanted it. For a long time he frowned at the brick path that lay between himself and the bird, and then he let go of the wall. He took one step and then more, buoyed up by some impossible antigravity. After two steps the hummingbird was gone, but Nicholas still headed for the air it had occupied, his hands grasping at vapor. It was as if an invisible balloon floated above him, tied to his overall strap, dragging him along from above. He swayed and swaggered, stabbing one toe at a time down at the ground, pivoting on the ball of one foot, and then suddenly the string was cut and down he bumped on his well-padded bottom. He looked at me and screamed.

“You’re walking,” I told Nicholas. “I promise you it gets easier. The rest of life doesn’t, but this really does.”

I stayed out there with my book for the rest of the afternoon, surreptitiously watching as he tried it over and over. He was completely undeterred by failure. The motivation packed in that small body was a miracle to see. I wished I could bottle that passion for accomplishment and squeeze out some of the elixir, a drop at a time, on my high-school students. They would move mountains.

The Stitch and Bitch Club was now wealthy beyond historic measure. On the heels of the blockbuster piñata sale came a steady flow of donations from the outside. Loulou Campbell, the treasurer, had always kept the club’s funds in a coffee can in the back of the Baptist Grocery where she worked. But when the volume of cash filled twelve baby-formula cans she grew nervous. Loulou opened an account at the bank and turned the passbook over to Doña Althea, whose years as a top-notch restaurateur had made her somewhat more comfortable with affluence.

The cash languished in its vault while the women pondered its meaning. Having sent their peacocks out into the world like Noah’s dove over the flood, they waited for the world to inspire their next move.

Inspiration came in the guise of an art dealer from Tucson. His name was Sean Rideheart, and he was a funny, charming little man who understood people as well as he understood beauty. The spectacular popularity of the Grace piñatas (some had been resold for as much as five hundred dollars) moved him to make a pilgrimage to the source. Mr. Rideheart was already an expert and he became a connoisseur; before he ever set foot in Grace he could already recognize the works of several individual piñata makers. Of particular value were those made by Mrs. Nuñez, who had been so resourceful with her Compton’s Children’s Encyclopedia. He wanted to know this town better.

I met him on his third visit, when he came to meet Viola. There was no school that day-I believe it was the birthday of a President-and I was staring at clouds. Emelina didn’t bother me on my bad days; I was allowed to do nothing, not even pretend to feel better, which I recognized as a rare act of human kindness and I appreciated. I spent the morning sitting on Emelina’s front porch, watching our neighbor, whose roof was on the same level with our floorboards. We were having another brief break in the rain, as if the clouds had called a time-out to muster their resources. Our neighbor Mr. Pye was taking advantage of the moment to climb up and inspect his roof.

“Got a few leaks,” he called out in a friendly way. I waved back, unsure of how to answer. I watched the top of his engineer’s cap bob down the ladder out of sight, and shortly thereafter, appear again. Mr. Pye negotiated the ladder with one hand while balancing a small, old-looking cardboard box against his hip. It made me think of the surprises coming out of the kiva at Santa Rosalia Pueblo. Mr. Pye knelt near his chimney pipe and opened the box like a birthday present, carefully lifting out some shingles. They were green, and shaped like the ace of spades-an exact match to the ones on his roof, only a little brighter. Grass-green rather than the green of old bronze. I remembered once, months ago, looking at that roof of antique shingles and assuming them to be irreplaceable.

Curiosity overcame my lassitude. “How’d you match those shingles?” I called out.

He looked at me, puzzled.

“Where’d you get the new shingles? They’re a perfect match.”

He examined the shingles in his hands, as if noticing this for the first time, and then called back, “Well, they ought to be, they’re all from the same lot. I bought two hundred extras when I put this roof on.”

“When was that?” I asked.

He looked up at the clouds. I don’t know whether he was divining the weather or the past. “Right after the war,” he said. “That would have been forty-six.”

Just then Mr. Rideheart came walking up the road under a navy blue umbrella. Maybe it was still raining down the way, where he’d just come from. He walked directly to the front porch where I sat, jauntily hopped up the steps, stomped his feet delicately a few times as if to knock off mud (though his shoes were immaculate), and extended his hand to me. I’d expected to spend the day in numb, depressed solitude, and now I felt uncomfortably honored to sit at the end of Mr. Rideheart’s long line of effort-like a princess in a tale of impossible tasks. Although I was fairly sure he hadn’t come all this way looking for me.

“Sean Rideheart,” he said. He had white eyebrows and bright green eyes; an appealing face.

“Codi Noline.” I shook his hand. “I’ve heard about you. You’re the piñata collector.”

He laughed. “I’ve been called many things in my time, but that’s a first. I’m looking for Viola Domingos.” At my invitation he sat down in the only other chair on the porch, wicker, of doubtful character.

“She’s not here,” I said. “Nobody’s home today. Viola and the kids have gone down to the church. They’re having some kind of a big party down there today, painting the saints.”

“Painting the saints?” Mr. Rideheart extracted a largish blue handkerchief from the pocket of his tweed jacket and cleaned his wire-rimmed glasses with extraordinary care. I watched for a long time, mesmerized, until he glanced up at me.

“The statues of saints, in the church,” I explained. “I guess they have to get freshened up every so often, like anybody else. The women paint the saints and the kids paint each other.”

He replaced his glasses and observed the rooftops and treetops that led stepwise down the hill. Mr. Pye had his back to us now. He was industriously tacking down shingles he’d secured for this purpose ten years before Hallie was born.

“Quite a place,” Mr. Rideheart said, finally. “How long have you lived here?”

It wasn’t an easy question to answer. “I was born here,” I said slowly. “But right now I’m just on an extended visit. My time’s up soon.”

He sighed, looking out over the white path of blossoming treetops that led up toward the dam. “Ah, well, yes,” he said, “isn’t everybody’s. More’s the pity.”

At first the Stitch and Bitch was divided in its opinion of Mr. Rideheart. While he was graciously received into the kitchens of half the club members, where he drank tea and stroked his white mustache and listened in earnest while the piñata artists discussed their methodologies, the other half (led by Doña Althea) suspected him of being the southwestern equivalent of a carpetbagger.

But for once the Doña judged wrong. His intentions were noble, and ultimately providential. When the club assembled in March for its monthly meeting in the American Legion hall, Mr. Rideheart was the guest speaker. He was supposed to lecture on folk art, which he did, but mostly he talked about Grace. He told these women what they had always known: that their town had a spirit and disposition completely apart from its economic identity as an outpost of the Black Mountain Mining Company. During the last century while men labored underground to rob the canyon of its wealth, the women up above had been paying it back in kind. They’d paid with embroidery and peacocks and fruit trees and piñatas and children. Mr. Rideheart suggested that he had never known of a place quite like Gracela Canyon, and that it could, and should, be declared a historic preserve. There existed a thing called the National Register of Historic Places. The landmarks on this list, he said, were protected from the onslaught of industry, as if they were endangered species. He allowed that it wasn’t perfect; listing on the register would provide “a measure of protection from demolition or other negative impact,” he said. “In other words, a man can still shoot an elephant, even though it has been declared endangered, and the elephant will still be dead. But the man will come out looking like a very nasty guy.”

“But really it’s not our houses that are going to get endangered by the poison and the dam,” Norma Galvez pointed out. “It’s the trees.”

Mr. Rideheart replied, “Your trees are also historic.”

He knew all the ins and outs of becoming a historic place. He explained where to begin, and where to go after that, to see that the river would run clean and unobstructed. There was a fair amount of bureaucracy involved, but the process was reasonably speedy. “Considering the amount of publicity that has already been brought to bear,” he said, gesturing toward the window, or possibly the invisible airwaves of CBS, “I think it could be done in less than two years.”

He said we would need to document everything, to prove the age and architectural character of the community. “All the photocopying, photography, and so forth can be expensive. Sometimes communities apply for block grants.”

After a brief silence Viola said, succinctly, “We don’t need any block grants. We’re rich.” And that was that.

At some point during the spring I got a letter from Carlo. He’d finally made plans: he was going to Telluride. The clutch had gone out on our old Renault and he’d junked it-he hoped I wasn’t attached. He was thinking of getting a motorcycle, unless I was coming to Telluride, in which case we’d get another car.

I was in such a state, running on so little sleep and such dead nerve endings, I didn’t know what to think. I knew I’d have to make plans soon. And I was touched that he still took me into account when he made his move, as if we were family. But I felt nothing when I read his words; maybe it was just the same nothing there had always been between us. The words seemed to be coming from a very great distance, with the same strange, compressed tone as a satellite phone call. I looked carefully at each sentence and then waited for it to register. All I could really get clearly was the name of the town, with its resonant syllables: Telluride. It sounded like a command.

I’d become estranged from Loyd after our trip. Of course, because of Hallie. I felt guilty for being away when the call came. Loyd and I had been laughing and making love for all those days while the news was laid out like a corpse in Doc Homer’s house. I didn’t even call him the night we got back into town. We hadn’t wanted the vacation to end, so we just went straight to Loyd’s house and spent the night: Surprisingly, I’d never slept in his bed. Loyd’s house was entirely his own: a mobile home set up against the cliff of upper Gracela Canyon on a masonry foundation he’d built slowly himself, over the years. Through his efforts the stonework had gradually grown up over the metal shell, so that now it was pretty much a rectangular stone house, overgrown with honeysuckle vines.

Leafless for winter, the honeysuckles made a lace curtain over the bedroom window. Their shadows left faint tracings on the walls, which I watched all through the bright, moonlit hours of that first night home. Loyd held on to me tightly in his sleep. I couldn’t find sleep myself, but I was happy.

The next morning he left at dawn for a seven-day stand in Yuma, and I walked down to have breakfast at Emelina’s. But of course as things turned out I didn’t eat-not that day or the next. By the time Loyd got back from Yuma I was too far gone to be touched.

It was Uda Dell on the phone, telling me Doc Homer had gone to Tucson for a CAT scan. She called it a “skin the cat.”

I sat up in bed, cradling the phone and pulling the red-and-black afghan around me; school was out for the spring break, so my life had lost what little sense of order daily work could still impose. “When did he go?” I asked. “Just this morning?” What I wanted to ask her was “Why did he tell you, and not me?” But I guess I knew the answer to that.

“No, honey, he went yesterday. He took the bus.” Uda seemed industrious on her end of the phone, even as she spoke. Every few seconds she paused and I could hear a high ascending sound like cloth ripping.

“Did he tell you how long he’d be gone?”

There was another rip, then Uda’s voice. “Honey, he didn’t tell me a thing about it. I don’t think he wanted anybody to know. You know Doc. He don’t want anybody to make a fuss. [Rip…] But he come over and asked me to look after the house. If you or anybody was to come looking for him, he said just tell them he’d gone to Tucson for the weekend to get some medical supplies. [Rip…] Now, I knew that didn’t sound right. I never heard of him doing that before, and you’d think whatever we all got along without for forty years we could get along without till the Judgment, don’t you think? [Rip…] So I said, ‘Doc, are you pulling my sleeve, there’s something up, ain’t it,’ and he said there was more to it, he was going to get tested for his Alsizer’s and get a Cat Skin Test done on him.”

“Oh, well, that’s good,” I said. It was a challenge to follow this trail of reason. I could perfectly picture Uda: her large face, the cheeks tightly packed and shiny like a plum. I rubbed the top of my head and looked at the clock, with astonishment. I’d fallen asleep around 4 A.M. and slept an unprecedented seven hours.

“So, honey, what I’m calling you for is [Rip…] I’ve been itching to get into that house and clean. I know he hasn’t been up to it, and I don’t mean any offense, Lord knows I think the world of Doc, but I expect he needs somebody to get up there and clean. And I was thinking now’d be a good time but I didn’t feel right about just going in. I’ve had the key all this time, ever since I used to keep you girls. He never did want the key back.” She paused. “But I thought I better call and see what you said.”

The key was more or less a symbolic matter. He didn’t lock his front door. Nobody in Grace did. “I think the cleaning’s a good idea. But I also think he’d be mad.” I hesitated, uncertain of my loyalties. Outside my window I could see John Tucker in the courtyard with a tape measure. He appeared to be measuring the hundred-year-old beams that supported the roof of the back porch. I knew what it was about-the Historic Register. I had a brainstorm.

“Uda, let me go up there with you. I’ve got to go through the attic and dig up some old documents on the house and the land for the historic preserve thing. I’ve been meaning to do it, and you could help me. We could tell him you were helping me look through stuff, and that we just got carried away and beat the rugs and mopped the bathroom while we were at it. If he even notices.”

Uda undertook the conspiracy with the relish of a criminal. I agreed to meet her at Doc Homer’s in half an hour.

The attic was pleasantly chilly and smelled of pine. Decades of summer heat had forced droplets of resin out of the rough floorboards, which in cooler weather hardened to little amber marbles that scattered in all directions as we shifted trunks and cardboard boxes. The afternoon is fixed in my memory with the sharp smell of resin and that particular amber rattle, like the sound of ball bearings rolling around in a box. It’s surprising how much of memory is built around things unnoticed at the time.

I was amazed by what we found. Doc Homer’s disease had manifested itself mostly downstairs; up here, our past was untouched by chaos. Stacked boxes of Hallie’s and my old clothes, school papers, photo albums, and all kinds of other detritus stood in neat rows, labeled chronologically and by content. I felt overwhelmed by so much material evidence of our family’s past. I couldn’t think why he’d kept it. He was so practical. What conceivable use did he foresee for a box marked “ALICE, MATERNITY,” for example? But you don’t ask questions of an attic. Museums are their own justification.

“Look,” I said to Uda, tipping up a cardboard box so she could see inside: some thirty pairs of black orthopedic shoes stacked from small to large, toes up, neat as eggs in a crate. There was a little more variety than I’d remembered. Two pairs were rather dapper little saddle oxfords, black and maroon. Another year-I vaguely did remember this-we’d been allowed to order them in charcoal suède.

Uda had a full-front apron over her old trousers and a print blouse, and she looked prepared for anything. Her lavender hoop earrings matched her wedgies, and she’d tied a red handkerchief over her hair. I was tempted to ask what she’d been ripping up this morning. She bent over beside me and picked out one of the smallest shoes, cradling it like an orphaned bird. “Law, he was so careful about you girls and your feet. I remember thinking, Oh, mercy, when those girls get big enough to want heels there’s going to be the Devil to pay.”

I laughed. “He wasn’t just careful. He was obsessed.”

Uda looked down at me. “He just wanted awful bad for you kids to be good girls,” she said. “It’s hard for a man by himself, honey. You don’t know how hard. He worried himself to death. A lot of people, you know, would just let their kids run ever which way.”

She stopped, cocking her head a little, staring at the shoe in her hand. “One year for Christmas I gave the two of you little cowboy outfits, with guns, and you just loved them, but he had to take away the guns. He didn’t want you killing, even pretend. I felt awful that I’d done that, once I thought about it. He was right.”

As she talked, I remembered the whole story: the cowboy outfits and the guns. Hallie and I had tried to claim moral high ground, saying he was taking away what belonged to us. He stood in front of the window, his thin face turned to the light, speaking to the world outside: “I will not have the neighbors arming my children like mercenaries.” I’d looked up “mercenaries” in the dictionary, later, and felt ashamed. I explained the ethics of armament to Hallie.

“How long did you take care of us?” I asked Uda.

“Oh, I expect close to ten years all in all. Till you was about fourteen and Hallie was eleven. You remember that. You’d come up after school and we’d play Old Maid or you’d play swinging statues out in the yard. We had us a time. And I’d come up here at night when he had to go tend a baby or something. Sometimes of an evening you’d run off with the Domingos kids without telling me where you’d gone to.” She laughed. “I liked to skinned you alive a couple of times. You girls was a couple of live potatoes. She was bad and you was worse.”

I remembered her arms when they were thinner; a younger Uda. And I remembered standing at a kitchen counter, on a stool, patting out my own handprints in floured dough while she wove strips of piecrust, pale and thin as flayed skin, over and under to make a perfect pie top. I was experiencing a flash flood of memories. I feared I might drown in them. My skull was so crowded with images it hurt.

“He raised you to be good girls,” she said again. She reached over and squeezed my upper arm before returning the shoe to its box.

I didn’t know what to tell her we were looking for, for the historical project-anything documenting the age of the house would be helpful, and more generally, old photographs of any kind. Uda seemed content to poke into boxes at random, but I tried to ground myself by reading labels: “CROCKERY AND FLATWARE.” “GARDEN RECORDS.” One bore the mystic title “ELECTRICITY.” I looked inside: socket hardware, lamp cord, the reflector from a heat lamp, a pair of rubber gloves.

I couldn’t resist getting sidetracked by one marked, “ARTWORK, H., AGE 3-6.” The subjects of Hallie’s crayon drawings were mainly the two of us, stick sisters holding hands, or else just me, my orangeish hair radiating from my head like a storm of solar flares. There was not one figure anywhere representing Doc Homer. I wondered if he’d noticed. But he must have. He was the one who’d picked up each drawing, rescued it from destruction, and finally labeled the box. The invisible archivist of our lives.

Out of curiosity I tracked down the corresponding box called “ARTWORK, C.” As I’d expected, it was full of family portraits. Big sister, little sister, father, mother, a cockeyed roof over our heads and above that an omnipresent yellow sun. It didn’t resemble anyone’s reality but mine, but there it was. Or maybe it wasn’t so much a matter of reality as of expectation-what I felt the world owed me. I held two of our drawings side by side and concluded that there was no puzzle as to why we were different. Hallie and I had grown up in different families.

“Here’s pictures,” Uda reported suddenly. There was a whole aisle of boxes marked “PHOTOGRAPHS,” with inscrutable suffixes. I picked up one marked “PHOTOGRAPHS, AM JOUR GEN” and found it surprisingly light, so I carried it over to the east window and sat down on a steamer trunk, settling the box on my lap before opening it. Inside were stacks of ancient eight-by-tens, their brown edges curled like autumn leaves. Each one was a photograph of a newborn baby with a startled-looking face and marble-white eyes. I leafed through them, one after another, awestruck by the oddity of these children. Of course I knew about the eyes, an anomaly of pigmentation that was genetic proof of Gracela heritage on both sides. But I’d never seen them. They tended to darken just hours after birth, and in modern times a person can easily go through life, in Grace or anywhere, without seeing a newborn.

On top of the stack of photos was a handwritten page with the heading: “Notes on Methodology.” The ink had faded to brown. This would all be for his genetics paper: Doc Homer’s careful notations on how he’d set up the camera, the distance, the amount of light. Apparently he’d rigged some set-up that used powerful flashbulbs, the old-fashioned kind that popped once and then were used up. It was before the days of modern electronics.

All those babies. How they must have screamed, one second after he shot them in the name of science. Or in the name of his own desire to set himself apart. What could be more arrogant than to come back and do a scientific study of your own townspeople, like so many natives in Borneo? I looked through the photos again and kept coming back to one that had an arresting familiarity. The eyes looked back as if they knew me. I stared at the baby for a long time.

It was me.

“You were a doll baby,” Uda said. She was looking down over my shoulder.

“That’s me? Are you sure?”

She took the stack and shuffled through it like a card trick. She produced another photo. “There’s Hallie. You didn’t look a thing alike when you were born.” To her the eyes were commonplace, not a feature to connect us, but they were the only feature I could see. To me, we looked identical.

I held the two photographs up to the light, mystified. The eyes were unearthly. We were two babies not of this world. Just like every other one in the stack of photos; two more babies of Grace. He was doing exactly the opposite of setting himself apart. He was proving we belonged here, were as pure as anybody in Grace. Both sides. Our mother’s name was Althea. Her family despised him.

“We’re puro,” I said out loud. And then I dropped the photographs because I heard the broken-glass pop of the flash and went blind. I heard myself make an odd little whimper.

Then Uda appeared in my field of vision, moving away. “Codi, hon, I’m going on downstairs and beat the rugs or something. I’ll try not to scare up too much dust.”

23 The Souls of Beasts

“Hallie, I’m going to die.”

“I’m Codi.”

“I’m dying.”

“Well, I know. We all are, more or less.” After a lifetime on the emotional austerity plan, my father and I were caving in to melodrama. When I put my hand on his hand it lay dead on the sheet. It was the diagnosis that killed him. Sometimes that’s how it happens.

“Where is Hallie?”

“Please don’t ask me that again. We don’t know where she is. Don’t worry about her right now, okay? We can’t do anything.”

He looked at me accusingly. “You shouldn’t have stood on the slide. I defended you on principle, but it was dangerous.”

How do people live with loved ones after their minds have fallen into anarchy? I rejected his ruined monologues every day, still expecting order to emerge victorious in Doc Homer’s universe. I can remember once seeing a monument somewhere in the desert north of Tucson, commemorating a dedicated but ill-informed platoon of men who died in a Civil War battle six months after Lee had surrendered at Appomattox. That’s exactly who I was-a soldier of the lost cause, still rooting for my father’s recovery. Pain reaches the heart with electrical speed, but truth moves to the heart as slowly as a glacier.

He’d gone off the Tacrine, his experimental drug; the doctors in Tucson found his liver was wrecked from it. Now his mind scuttled around like a crab, heading always for the dark corners. People with this disease can linger on for six or seven years, I’d read, and on average they do. But Doc Homer wouldn’t.

“Do you want something to eat? Uda brought over this thing made out of crackers and walnuts and apples. It looks like one of your concoctions.”

“No, thank you.”

His bedroom was the largest upstairs room, with dark green walls and a high white ceiling and dormer windows across the west side. As children, Hallie and I rarely came into this room; it held an aura of importance and secrecy, the two things that most attract and frighten children. But for two days now I’d been taking care of Doc Homer here, and when I stopped to notice, I found myself the most commanding presence in the room. I felt long-legged and entitled, and strode around in my boots, adjusting curtains and moving furniture to suit myself. I’d tried to close the blinds, but he wanted them open. He insisted on the light, so I let it be.

I’d been keeping a restless vigil by his bed throughout the late afternoon, watching for signs of a lucid moment. I’d about decided it wasn’t coming. I pulled my chair closer and squeezed his hand hard in an effort to make him pay attention. “Pop, I want to talk to you about Mother.”

“Her kidneys were weak, and we knew it was a possibility. She had already had one episode of renal failure with the first pregnancy. She knew the risk.”

I didn’t really try to absorb this information. “Her name was Althea. How was she related to Doña Althea?”

“No relation.” The answer, quick and firm.

“What relation? I know she came from here. I found some things in the attic. What was she, a great-niece?”

“What things in the attic?”

“Cousin?” I crossed my arms like the obstinate child I was.

No answer.

“Granddaughter?”

His face changed. “Malcriado.”

“Doña Althea’s family didn’t want you to marry her, right?”

He let out a short, bitter little laugh unlike any sound I’d ever heard him make. “We were Nolinas.” Just the way he said it told me plenty.

“And you married her anyway. You eloped.” I leaned forward and touched his forehead, something I’d never done. It felt cool and thin-skinned, like a vegetable. “That’s so romantic. Don’t you know that’s what all of us would like to think our parents did? You didn’t have to hide something like that from us.”

“You understand nothing.” He seemed very lucid. At times I suspected him of feigning his confusion, or at least using it to his advantage.

“That’s probably true,” I said, withdrawing my hand.

“We were a bad family. Try to understand. We learned it in school along with the multiplication tables and the fact that beasts have no souls. I could accept the verdict, or I could prove it wrong.”

“You did that. You proved it wrong.”

In the slanted afternoon light his eyes were a cloudy blue and his skin was translucent. He looked up at the ceiling and I had a disturbing view of his eyes in profile. “I proved nothing,” he said. “I became a man with no history. No guardian angels. I turned out to be a brute beast after all. I didn’t redeem my family, I buried it and then I built my grand house on top of the grave. I changed my name.”

“You still have plenty of guardian angels.”

“I don’t think anybody in this town remembers that I’m a Nolina.”

“No, you’re wrong about that, they do remember. I think people are sorry. And they love you. Look at your refrigerator.”

He gave me an odd, embittered look. How could he not know this was true? “Refrigerators don’t preserve love,” he said.

“The hell they don’t. Yours does. The women in this town bake you casseroles and pies like the world was going to end.”

He made a slight sound by breathing out of his nose. He seemed strangely like a child.

“They probably can’t forgive themselves for the past,” I said. “Mother died before they could get everything straightened out. And then you kind of took your phone off the hook, emotionwise.”

He looked away from me again. “We aren’t from here, we came from the outside. That is our myth and every person in Grace believes it, because they want to. They don’t want to see a Nolina when they look at me. They want a man they can trust with their children’s ear infections. And I am that man. If you change the present enough, history will bend to accommodate it.”

“No. I’m pretty sure you’re wrong about that. What’s true is true, no matter how many ways you deny it.”

He closed his eyes for a while. I’d never seen him frail or impaired. All the time I’d been his daughter, he’d never been sick.

“How long are you going to stay in bed?” I asked softly, in case he was falling asleep.

“I’m exhausted.”

“I know. But after you rest, you might want to get up for a while. I can warm up some soup.”

He didn’t open his eyes. “Do you think Hallie is coming back?”

“I don’t know what to think. We have to think yes, don’t we?”

“You’re the advocate of ordained truth. Are you telling me now that we can will Hallie back to safety?”

“No. I don’t guess we can. We just have to wait.”

It was the first honest conversation we’d had about Hallie. It took us both by surprise. We were quiet for a long time then, but I knew he wasn’t sleeping. I could see his eyes working back and forth under his eyelids, as if he were reading his own thoughts. I wondered what his thoughts looked like, in his clear moments and in his confusion. I very much wished to know him.

“Pop?”

He slowly opened his eyes and looked at the ceiling.

“Did you really see me bury the baby?”

He looked at me.

“Why didn’t we ever talk?”

He sighed. “You get beyond a point.”

“You could have just given me a hug or something.”

He turned away from me. His short, gray hair stood up in whorls on the back of his head. He said, “It’s Friday, isn’t it? Mrs. Nuñez’s lab work is due back today. Can you pull her chart?”

“Okay, sleep now,” I said, reaching over to pat his shoulder. “But after a while I want you to get up and get dressed. Today or tomorrow, whenever you’re feeling up to it.”

“I feel fine.”

“Okay. When you’re feeling better, I want you to take me to the place where I buried it. I can remember a lot of that night. Cleaning up the bathroom, and that old black sweater of Mother’s, some things like that. But I can’t remember the place.”

He didn’t promise. I think he’d forgotten again who I was. We were comically out of synchrony-a family vaudeville routine. Whatever one of us found, the other lost.

I received a letter from the school board. It was early April, a long time after I’d stopped my hopeful excursions to the Post Office box and had given the key back to Emelina, so this letter appeared on my table among the breakfast dishes while I was at school. I saw it the minute I walked in, but tried to ignore it for the longest time. I carefully went around to the other side of the table and dropped a heavy pile of tests and began to grade them, trying not to see it. “A predator is a big guy that eats little guys,” wrote Raymo. “A herbivore is your wussy vegetarian. In other words, lunch meat.” She’d wedged it between the coffee cup and a bottle of aspirin. Did she think it would be bad news? I gave in and tore it open.

I can’t really say what sort of news it was. Surprising news. It was notification that my contract was going to be renewed for the next year. The term wasn’t over, but the school board recognized my circumstances as unusual and wanted to give me ample notice; they were eager for me to return in the fall. My temporary teaching certificate could easily be extended, especially if I had intentions of working toward certification. It was a personal letter written on behalf of the entire board and signed by someone I knew of but had never met, a Mr. Leacock. His letter cited my popularity with the students and commended me for my “innovative presentation” and “spirited development of a relevant curriculum.” It didn’t mention contraception or Mrs. Josephine Nash or the ozone layer. I wondered how much they really knew; it made me nervous. I kept looking sideways at that word “spirited.” After knocking myself out to be accepted, I’d finally flown off the handle in a seditious direction, and won a gold star. “We are all aware of the difficulties of engaging teenagers in a vital course of academic instruction,” wrote Mr. Leacock. Someone apparently felt I’d succeeded in this endeavor. I was going to be named something like teacher of the year. Teachers and kids all voted, secret ballot.

I was stunned. I stuck the letter into the pocket of my corduroy jumper and went out for a walk. I tramped quickly down the hill past Mr. Pye’s green roof and Mrs. Nuñez, who sat in a rocker on her front porch, leaning precariously forward out of her chair, trying to nail a fast-moving spider with the rubber tip of her cane. She lifted the cane and stabbed the air sociably as I passed by; I waved back. I wondered about the lab work Doc Homer had mentioned in his delirium. Was she really waiting for someone far away to examine her cells or her blood and pronounce a verdict? Or was this history, a sentence she was already serving?

In town, the 4-H Club had set up a display of rabbits and fancy chickens in cages in front of the courthouse. A little county fair was planned for Easter weekend. The rabbits were of an odd-looking breed but all exactly alike, fancily marked with black-tipped ears and paws and a gorget under the throat, and it occurred to me how much simpler life would be if people were like that, all identically marked. If I were not the wrong breed. I corrected an old habit of thought: both my parents were born in Grace, and their parents before them. Possibly Doc Homer was right-I’d believed otherwise for so long it had become true; I was an outsider not only by belief but by flesh and bone.

Children knelt by the cages and talked to the rabbits in high voices, poking in sprigs of new grass from the courthouse lawn. Some shoppers had strayed over from their errands across the street. Mary Lopez, a middle-aged woman I knew from Stitch and Bitch, waved at me. She was there with her mother, a very short, broad woman with a long black braid down her back. The old woman leaned over the rabbit cages like a child. Mary rested a hand on the back of her mother’s neck, a slight gesture that twisted my heart. I turned up the road toward Loyd’s house. I knew he was home, or would be shortly. He was on a fairly regular schedule these days, running the Amtrak to Tucson and back. We stayed in touch.

The air had a fresh muddy edge, the smell of spring. I had several choices of route, and on a whim I took a less familiar road. I found myself walking through a neighborhood that wanted to pull me into it: the dirt shade of salt cedars, the dogs that barked without getting up. A woman and her husband argued congenially while they picked grapefruits off the tree in their backyard. The fruits rustled solidly into grocery bags while the woman talked in a low, steady voice and the man answered, on and on, a cycle of gentle irritation and love that would never be finished.

“Gee, you’re pretty. Are you the new schoolteacher?”

I turned around, startled by a man on a moped. I’d never laid eyes on him before, but I was completely charmed by his line. I felt like Miss Kitty in Gunsmoke.

“Well, yes,” I said.

“You want a ride? There’s a wicked pair of brindle bulldogs up at the corner.”

“Okay.” I gathered my skirt and straddled the back of his bike. We buzzed smoothly uphill past the putative wicked bulldogs, who lay with their manifold chins on their paws.

“My son Ricky’s in one of your classes. He says you give them a pretty good round.”

“They give me one, too,” I said.

He laughed. “You’re Doc Homer’s girl, aren’t you?”

“That’s right. Homer Nolina of the white trash Nolinas. He married his second cousin for mad love.” I’d been lying to strangers all my life, and no wonder. Here was the truth and it sounded like a B-grade fairy tale. But I wanted to know if Doc Homer was right-if everyone had forgotten.

“I never heard that,” my driver said. “I just heard she was dead.”

“She’s dead all right. But she was born and grew up right here. You’re around the same age I am, you wouldn’t remember her, but it’s the truth. Her family thought unkindly of my daddy, so they ran off for a while and he put on an attitude.”

He laughed at that, but said, “You oughtn’t to talk bad about a man like him.”

“Oh, I know. Doc Homer’s inclined to be useful. But I swear it looks to me like he’s been running his whole lite on vengeful spite.”

“I got me an old Ford that runs on something like that.”

Ten seconds later he let me off at the base of the path up to Loyd’s house. Loyd was sitting outside, drinking coffee under the huge mesquite that shaded his front yard. He was just out of the shower, wearing only a pair of soft gray sweatpants. His damp hair lay loose on his shoulders. He looked very happy to see me but also unsurprised; typical, maddening Loyd. Jack betrayed excitement in his thumping tail, but Loyd made no sudden movements. He let me come to him, bend over to kiss him, sit down in the chair beside him. I was oddly conscious of his skill with animals.

“You want coffee?”

“No thanks.”

He sat looking at me, smiling, waiting.

“Guess what,” I said finally, handing him the letter. He read it, grinning broadly.

“It doesn’t mean anything,” I said. “I still can’t stay.”

“It does mean something. It means they want you, whether you stay or not. It means you’re real good at what you do.”

I took the letter back and looked at it, not at the words but the object itself. “I guess you’re right,” I said. “I don’t think anybody ever told me that before. Not in a letter. I guess that’s something.”

“Sure it is.”

“I was thinking of it as just one more choice I’d have to make. A complication.”

“Life’s a complication.”

“Sure,” I said. “Death is probably a piece of cake by comparison.”

We looked at each other for a while. “So tell me about your day, honey,” I finally said. We both laughed at that.

“Another buck in the bank, doll.”

“Is that it? Do you like driving trains? You never talk about it.”

“You really want to hear about it?”

“I think so.”

“Okay. Yeah, I like driving trains. Today I went out on a dog catch.”

“Not the Amtrak?”

“No. A special mission.”

“You had to catch a dog?”

“A dog catch is when you go out to bring in a train after the crew’s died on the main line.”

“The whole crew died?” I was visited by the unwelcome thought of Fenton Lee in his sheared-off engine, after the head-on collision. I knew this couldn’t be what Loyd meant.

He smiled. “Died on the hours-of-service law. They’d worked a full twelve hours but there were holdups somewhere and they still hadn’t gotten to a tie-up point. You can’t work more than twelve hours straight because you’d be tired and it would be dangerous; it’s federal law. So you just stop where you are, and wait for a relief crew.”

“Good thing airline pilots don’t do that,” I said.

“I bet they go to sleep at the wheel more than we do, too.” Loyd said.

“So you went out and caught the dog.”

“Me and another engineer and a conductor and a brakeman all deadheaded out to Dragoon to pick up the train. The dead crew came back to Grace in a car.”

“And you, what, took the train on into Tucson?”

“Yep.”

“So what does that mean, what do you do exactly? Is there a steering wheel?”

He laughed. “No. You adjust throttles, you set brakes, you watch signals. You use your head. Today I had to use my head. I was the lead engineer and it was a real heavy train, over ten thousand tons. There were two helper engines coupled at the rear of the train.”

“Ten thousand tons?”

He nodded. “A little better than a mile and a half long.”

“And you’re in the front engine, and there’s two engines pushing on the back?”

“Yep. The hard part was topping over Dragoon. That’s a real long hill, a long descending grade from Dragoon to the Benson bridge, and there’s a siding you sometimes have to pull into there, at twenty-five miles an hour. But the train is so damn heavy it wants to take off on you down that hill. I’ve messed up on that hill a bunch of times before. Just between you and me, one time I went flying through there at sixty, hoping to God there was nobody coming on the main line. I never could have gotten into the siding track.”

“I guess there was nobody coming.”

“No. But today there was, and I got us in safe and sound. Today I did it exactly right.” He smiled at me over his coffee cup.

“So tell me about it.”

“Well, we topped over the hill way below the speed limit, and when I got about half the train over the hill I set a minimum amount of air brakes. Then I waited for it to take hold. The brakes take hold all along the train, in every car, front to back. And then I just watched the speedometer keep coming up.”

“You’re still speeding up? Even after you’ve set the brake?”

“You’ve got six thousand tons and a mile of train coming down the hill behind you. What do you think it’s going to do?”

Doc Homer used to pose puzzles like this to Hallie and me, to develop our cognitive skills. “But you’ve also got some-odd thousand tons still coming up the hill behind you.”

“That’s right. A little less coming up, and a little more coming down, every minute. That’s the tricky part. That’s the Zen of Southern Pacific.”

I was extremely impressed.

“On a normal train you’d be real leery of setting the brake while half your train’s still coming up the hill. The rear would start pulling backward and you’d break in two.”

“Oh,” I said. “So then you’d have two trains.”

“Then you’d have a nice long vacation without a paycheck.”

“Oh.”

“But I had helper engines that could push on me from the back, so I was pretty sure we wouldn’t break in two. I radioed my helper engineer back there to keep pushing up the hill at full throttle, that’s throttle eight, and then cut it back to throttle one when he topped over.”

“So he was pushing and you were braking at the same time.”

“Yep. Setting the brake early enough, that was the part I never got before. It kind of goes against what you think’s right.”

“Nobody can just tell you how to do that hill?”

“No, because every train’s different on every hill. Every single run is a brand-new job. You have to learn the feel of it.”

“So you can’t necessarily do the same thing next time?”

“Not exactly the same thing, no. But on this train the minimum set worked perfect. And then I worked the throttle to maintain forty miles an hour. I came down the hill through Sybil and Fenner, the last siding before the Benson bridge. I got a flashing yellow after Sybil so I knew we’d probably have to go into Fenner. Then we went by a yellow, and the next signal was a diverging approach, a red over yellow, and I had to be down to twenty-five at that signal so we could get into the siding. Sure enough, there was a train on the main line headed east.”

“What if you’d been going sixty, like last time?”

He winked. “I wouldn’t be getting any nice letters telling me how good I am at my job.”

“Seriously. What if you saw a headlight coming at you in the dark?”

“You heard about Fenton Lee, then, did you?”

“What would you do?”

Loyd looked at me. “Jump off.”

“Yeah?”

“Oh, yeah. I did it one time already, when I was a fireman. The engineer hit a siding too fast and that sucker looked like it was going off the track. I was out of there like buckshot. I got a big old bruise on my butt, and the guys laughed at me because they didn’t derail. I don’t care. There’s things worth risking your life for, but a hunk of metal’s not one of them.”

I watched him drink his coffee. In the hot sun his hair had dried to its normal glossy, animal black. The mesquite leaves cast feathery shadows all over his face and the muscular slope of his chest. The sight of his bare feet stirred me oddly. I badly wanted to take him inside to bed.

“Well. But you are real good at your job,” I said.

“I’m getting there.”

“I guess I never knew there was so much to it.”

He set down his cup and crossed his arms. “Pretty good for an Injun boy, huh?”

“You could have told me more about it.”

He smiled. “Codi, did anybody ever tell you a damn thing you didn’t want to know?”

I stalled, avoiding the question. “If I told you I wanted to go to bed with you right now, would you think I only loved you for your mind?”

His eyes sparkled. “I think I could overlook it.”

That night I lay in Loyd’s arms and cried. Since the day I spent with Uda in the attic, wishes and anger had backed up in me, and now they rushed out, rocketing my mind around on a wild track toward emptiness. I told Loyd about the photographs and unrelated things, old things, like making pies with Uda Dell. “I have all these memories I couldn’t get hold of before, but it doesn’t make me feel any better,” I said.

“What kind of memories?”

“Everything. Really, my whole childhood. Most of it I had no idea was there. And most of it’s happy. But Loyd, it’s like the tape broke when I was fifteen, and my life started over then. The life I’d been living before that was so different-I don’t know how to say this, but I just couldn’t touch that happiness anymore, I’d changed so much. That was some other little bright-eyed, righteous girl parading around trying to rescue drowning coyotes and save chickens from the stewpot. A dumb little kid who thought the sun had a smiley face on it.”

“And what happened when she was fifteen?”

I withdrew from Loyd’s arms. Had I set him up to ask? I lay looking at the wall, considering whether I could tell him. If I only had two more months in Grace, it wasn’t long enough. “I can’t explain it,” I said. “I guess it finally hit me that nobody was going to take care of me.”

“In high school you were doing a pretty good job of taking care of yourself.”

“That’s what it looked like. It probably looks like that now, too.”

Loyd took me back onto his shoulder, which felt hard like a cradleboard under my head. He stroked my cheek. “You still have all the family you grew up with. Hallie’s somewhere out there. She’ll come back. And Doc’s still here.”

“Neither one of them is here.”

“Codi, for everybody that’s gone away, there’s somebody that’s come to you. Emelina thinks you’re her long-lost sister. You know what she told me? She wants you there in that little house forever. She said if I let you leave Grace she’ll bust my butt. She loves you to death.”

“So this is all a conspiracy, I said.”

“Yeah. Emelina bribed me to fall in love with you.” He laughed and kissed my hair. “Honey, there’s not that much money in the world.”

I didn’t wish to be comforted. “You can’t replace people you love with other people,” I said. “They’re not like old shoes or something.”

“No. But you can trust that you’re not going to run out of people to love.”

“I don’t think I can trust life that far. I lost my mother. You don’t know what that’s like.”

“No, I don’t.”

“You don’t have any idea what the whole story is, Loyd. You don’t know everybody I’ve lost.”

He gathered me into his arms and we didn’t talk anymore, but in my chest I could still feel a small, hard knot of anger and I held on to it. It was my wings. My exit to safety.

Finally I read all of Hallie’s letters. There were half a dozen I’d never opened, the ones that came after. I knew she’d mailed them before she was kidnapped-I could read the postmarks-but I still held the hope that there might be some clue in there that would help bring her back. Once I opened the letters that hope would be gone.

But I was past a certain point now, like Loyd’s train going over the hill. The momentum of wanting to hear Hallie, even for a few minutes, was growing heavier than anything I might have had to lose. More than ever in my life I needed to ask her what to do, how to live without guarantees, without safety.

So I read the letters, and there were no clues. Only the ordinary, heartbreaking details of war and rural life and the slow progress of hope.

I’d forgotten that her last letter, which I’d read on the trip to Santa Rosalia, was a tirade. I had to get it out and read it again to remember, and the sting was gone. “If I get another letter that mentions SAVING THE WORLD, I am sending you, by return mail, a letter bomb.” (Had I really used those words? But I knew I had, more than once.) “I don’t expect to see perfection before I die. What keeps you going isn’t some fine destination but just the road you’re on, and the fact that you know how to drive.” Two hours after she’d mailed that, she had written a pained apology that reached me now, a lifetime later. Any one moment could be like this, I thought. A continental divide.

Codi [she wrote], I’m sorry, I didn’t say it right. I’m touchy about being worshiped. I’m afraid of becoming Doc Homer Junior, standing on a monument of charity and handing down my blessings, making sure everybody knows where we all stand. I don’t feel like I’m doing that, but it’s the thing you fear most that walks beside you all the time. I don’t want you of all people to see me that way. I’m not Saving Nicaragua, I’m doing the only thing I can live with under the circumstances. The circumstances being that in Tucson I was dying among the garden pests. Working with refugees, and also subsidizing the war that was killing them. I had to get out.

By virtue of our citizenship we’re on one side of this war or the other. I chose sides. And I know that we could lose. I’ve never seen people suffer so much for an ideal. They’re sick to death of the embargo and the war. They could say Uncle, vote for something else, just to stop this bludgeoning. And you know what? I don’t even consider that, it’s not the point.

You’re thinking of revolution as a great all-or-nothing. I think of it as one more morning in a muggy cotton field, checking the undersides of leaves to see what’s been there, figuring out what to do that won’t clear a path for worse problems next week. Right now that’s what I do. You ask why I’m not afraid of loving and losing, and that’s my answer. Wars and elections are both too big and too small to matter in the long run. The daily work-that goes on, it adds up. It goes into the ground, into crops, into children’s bellies and their bright eyes. Good things don’t get lost.

Codi, here’s what I’ve decided: the very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof. What I want is so simple I almost can’t say it: elementary kindness. Enough to eat, enough to go around. The possibility that kids might one day grow up to be neither the destroyers nor the destroyed. That’s about it. Right now I’m living in that hope, running down its hallway and touching the walls on both sides.

I can’t tell you how good it feels. I wish you knew. I wish you’d stop beating yourself up for being selfish, and really be selfish, Codi. You’re like a mother or something. I wish you knew how to squander yourself.

I sat with this letter for a long time trying to understand what peace she was asking me to make.

The others were impersonal, full of description and the usual manic-depressive mélange of experience. The weather had been too dry. A shipment of Yugoslav tractors had come in and they were working out well. “The Deeres were better,” she lamented, “but you have to run them like glass hammers, they can be drydocked for lack of a bolt. The U.S. refuses to trade with us and then makes secret, niggling lists of what we get from the Eastern bloc. The embargo having slipped their minds, apparently.”

In another letter she said they heard gunfire almost every night. “People talk about the second reconstruction. They mean after the U.S. invades. We get up every day and scan the horizon for holocaust.” In this same letter she talked about her young trainees and the joy of seeing a new idea take root in a mind; I knew the moment. When Raymo grasped DNA, his countenance was touched with light. We’d shared something.

I stayed up most of the night rereading letters, all the way back to the first one from the Guatemalan border, where she saw women running from the army carrying babies and backstrap looms. And earlier, on the beach, where she’d watched a man sell shrimp from a bucket that was counterweighted with a plastic jug of drinking water. He drank as he went along, to keep the load balanced. The purity of direct necessity.

But the letters ended, finite as a book or a life, and I had no choice but to keep coming back to the last one, scrutinizing it for a sign of goodbye. It wasn’t there. It was a description of the children’s Christmas Eve pageant, three or four words about Julio, and a self-effacing story of how she’d broken her plate that morning at breakfast. Of course it was a disaster; there was only one anything per person in the house. She was mad at herself for being careless, but the neighbor women rounded up a new plate. They made a joke of its being tin, unbreakable.

Nothing else. The closest thing to prescience had come a few days earlier, in a pensive pared-down note that said: “Sometimes I still have American dreams. I mean literally. I see microwave ovens and exercise machines and grocery-store shelves with thirty brands of shampoo, and I look at these things oddly, in my dream. I stand and I think, ‘What is all this for? What is the hunger that drives this need?’ I think it’s fear. Codi, I hope you won’t be hurt by this but I don’t think I’ll ever be going back. I don’t think I can.”

I had my own nightmare again, but this time I understood that it wasn’t blindness. It was a flashbulb in my father’s camera. Even from inside the dream I knew that, and I didn’t wake myself when I heard the glass pop. I took the risk of staying where I was, and went on dreaming. What I saw next was an infant face that wasn’t my own but my child’s, lit in the flash. Then I saw her whole body in moonlight. She was a seventeen-year-old girl, naked and long-limbed, walking up the path toward our house. I stood in the kitchen and watched her through the screen door as she came up the path from the river. For a second she disappeared in the inky shadows under the cottonwoods and I felt completely afraid, but then she emerged again in the light. Her skin glowed white.

I thought: “If she tries to walk through this screen door into Doc Homer’s kitchen, she’ll evaporate. She can’t come in here.” So I ran outside and gathered her up, a ridiculous bundle of long arms and legs. I carried her back through the cottonwood grove and down the path, away from the house. Over our heads was a chalky full moon with cloud rubbed across it, like something incompletely erased. I was hunched over and stumbling and I started to run along the dry riverbed, absurdly burdened with this long-legged child as big as myself. I didn’t talk or look at her, I just carried her along.

Hallie followed me down the path. I didn’t see her come, but I heard her voice right behind me.

“Codi, stop. She’s too heavy. You can put her down now.”

I clamped her weight against my chest. “No I can’t, she’ll fall.”

“Let her go. She won’t fall.”

“I can’t.”

Hallie urged gently, “Let her go. Let go. She’ll rise.”

And then I woke up with empty arms.

24 The Luckiest Person Alive

The call came sometime before dawn.

While I brushed my teeth I watched the mirror closely and became aware of my skull: of the fact that my teeth were rooted in bone, and that my jawbones and all the other bones lay just under the surface of what I could see. I wondered how I could have missed noticing, before, all those bones. I was a skeleton with flesh and clothes and thoughts. We believe there is such a safe distance between the living and the dead. I recalled how I’d used Mrs. Josephine Nash to shock my students into paying attention, on the first day of school. I’d thought I understood something they didn’t, about death. That it was understandable.

I was still at the mirror when Loyd came. I saw him appear behind me. First he wasn’t there, and then he was. He was going to drive me to Tucson. I had to go to the Mexican consulate to get a registered letter and some papers, and then I would sign some other papers from the Nicaraguan government. Of course, there was no Nicaraguan consulate. It was the Minister of Agriculture who called. We had become something like friends, though we would probably not speak again now. Or perhaps we would. I’d heard of people united by disaster keeping track for years afterward, holding reunions. I thought of boat people. Business executives stranded overnight in elevators. How would they celebrate? What specific moments would they recall for each other? My thoughts kept straying onto random paths like these, hoping to get lost in a thicket.

The Minister said there would be a package coming later. Not her body, but a parcel of personal things, some books and journals. Her plate and cup, her clothes, those items were distributed to neighbors. The body would stay there. She had requested of somebody, at some point, that she be buried in Nicaragua if that ever had to happen. She said Nicaragua could use the fertilizer.

What was the last thing she said to me in person? How did she look? Why can’t I remember?

“Loyd,” the face in the mirror said. “What do I do now?”

“Put on your shoes.”

“Okay.”

The sun was just coming up as we drove away from Grace. The world looked inhospitable.

“I should have gone down there,” I said.

“And done what?”

We drove past an old junkyard outside of town. I’d never noticed it before, though it must have been there since before I was born. A man stood on the bonnet of a rusted car, shading his eyes, looking down into the ravine.

“On the phone they said her hands were tied,” I told Loyd. “He said they found her that way. But I can’t believe that. It doesn’t sound right to me that she would let anybody just tie her up and then shoot her in the head.”

“Maybe they made a mistake,” he said. “Maybe it didn’t happen exactly that way.”

“I know my sister. I think she would get away somehow,” I said.

“Wait for the letter. That’ll tell everything.”

“Maybe they made a mistake,” I repeated. “Maybe so.”

Within an hour the daylight had overcome its early bleakness. Now it looked like any normal, slightly overcast day. The normalcy made me angry, but it was a weak kind of anger that held no pleasure.

“If I’d told her about Doc Homer back in December, how bad he was, she would have come home.”

“You can’t make this your fault.”

“But she would have come home.”

“Codi,” Loyd said, looking at me and not finishing. His face held such pain I didn’t want to see it. Finally he said, “You could probably think of a hundred little things that would have made this turn out different. But you’d be wrong. A life like your sister’s isn’t some little pony you can turn around any way you want. It’s a train. Once it gets going it’s heavier than heaven and hell put together and it runs on its own track.”

I didn’t say anything to that. Loyd barely even remembered meeting my sister. How could he know what her life meant?

On the interstate we passed the site of a bad accident. You could see it coming: the cop cars and ambulances all huddled around, lights flashing importantly, making their scene. As we came closer we had to slow down; one lane was blocked by a trailer rig with a smashed front end. Out in the median, at an angle that bore no relation to the direction of traffic, sat a white convertible with its frame bent violently into a V-shape.

When we passed it I saw that it wasn’t a convertible after all; the top had been sheared off, and lay on the other side of the road. An are of glass and chrome crossed the highway like a glittering river littered with flotsam and jetsam: a pair of sunglasses, a bright vinyl bag, a paperback book. At the trail’s end was the pile of steel. I’d never seen such a badly wrecked car.

“Doesn’t look like anybody walked away from that one,” Loyd said.

I thought of Hallie walking out of the library that time, years ago, then remembering her sunglasses and turning back just before the marble façade fell down. She could just as well have died then. It made no difference now.

The luckiest person alive.

The ambulance pulled out right behind us, its warning lights alternating like crazy winking eyes. We quickly left it behind, though, and we weren’t speeding by any means. Loyd saw me watching the ambulance and glanced up at the rear-view mirror. “They’re not in much of a rush, are they?”

Just then, while we watched, the lights stopped flashing. I understood that I had just seen someone die. No reason to hurry anymore. My limbs flooded with despair and I didn’t see how I was going to survive. I kept imagining what that little white car must have looked like half an hour ago, and the driver, some young woman listening to the radio, checking her hair in the mirror, preoccupied with this afternoon or tonight or whatever small errand had taken her out.

“Why does a person even get up in the morning?” I asked Loyd. “You have breakfast, you floss your teeth so you’ll have healthy gums in your old age, and then you get in your car and drive down 1-10 and die. Life is so stupid I can’t stand it.”

“Hallie knew exactly what she was doing. There wasn’t anything stupid about her life.”

I practically shouted at Loyd, “I’m not crying about Hallie right now. I’m crying about that person that just died in the ambulance.”

He was quiet.

“Loyd, I don’t know what I’m going to do.” I was afraid the muscles in my chest might tear themselves apart. I thought senselessly of Doc Homer’s discussion of liver tissue and heart tissue. As if it mattered what part of your body was the seat of emotion, all of it could be torn up, it was just flesh. Doc Homer didn’t even know about this yet. I’d called, and we talked, and it was clear he didn’t know what I was telling him. He talked about Hallie being kept after school. Maybe he never would understand, maybe his mind would just keep wandering down other happy trails. Loyd handed me his handkerchief and I tried to blow my nose.

“What would she want you to do?”

“She would be crying for a person in a damn ambulance that she didn’t even know. Not me.”

I saw lightning erupt in the dark clouds behind the Catalina Mountains. It was an impossible time of year for a lightning storm. I’d seen photographs of lightning frozen in its terrible splendor, ripping like a knife down the curtains of the sky. They say that to take those pictures you just open your camera on a dark night, in a storm, and if you’re lucky you get a wonderful picture. You have no control.

“Hallie isn’t dead,” I said. “This is a dream.” I laid my head back against the headrest and cried with my knucklebones against my mouth. Tears ran down to my collarbone and soaked my shirt and still I didn’t wake up.

25 Flight

Getting on the bus was the easiest thing in the world. I only took what I could carry. Emelina would send my trunk to Telluride.

I noticed the junkyard again on the way out of town. They should have had a sign there: Welcome to Grace. Farewell to Grace. Dead grass poked up through the rusted husks of big old cars that hunched on the ground like elephants, the great dying beasts of the African plain. It was early June, soon after the end of school. The land was matchstick-dry and I felt the same way, just that brittle, as if no amount of rain could saturate my outer layers and touch my core. I was a hard seed beyond germination. I would do fine in Telluride. Carlo had lined up a job for me as a model in a summer fine-arts school. I would sit still for solid hours while people tried for my skin tones.

Uda Dell and Mrs. Quintana, Doc’s assistant for twenty-one years, were going to take shifts with Doc Homer. His office was closed for good, and everybody now drove over to New Mexico to be healed. There were no thunderclaps when it happened; all this time we’d thought he was indispensable. Uda and Mrs. Quintana revered him. I couldn’t picture them feeding him, buttoning up his shirt, but I knew they would do those things. Somehow reverence can fashion itself into kindness, in a way that love sometimes can’t. When I went up there to tell him goodbye, he was eating a soft-boiled egg and said he couldn’t tarry, he was in a hurry to get to the hospital.

I bobbed along with the motion of the Greyhound bus, leaning with the curves. When I relaxed enough I could feel like a small chunk of rock in outer space, perceiving no gravitational pull from any direction: not from where I was going, nor where I had been. Not Carlo, not Loyd, not Doc Homer. Not Hallie, who did not exist.

“Where do you think people go when they die?” Loyd asked, the day before I left. He was on his way out to take a westbound into Tucson; the next day he would fetch home the Amtrak. We stood in my front door, unwilling to go in or out, like awkward beginners trying to end a date. Except it wasn’t a beginners’s conversation.

“Nowhere,” I said. “I think when people die they’re just dead.”

“Not heaven?”

I looked up at the sky. It looked quite empty. “No.”

“The Pueblo story is that everybody started out underground. People and animals, everything. And then the badger dug a hole and let everybody out. They climbed out the hole and from then on they lived on top of the ground. When they die they go back under.”

I thought of the kivas, the ladders, and the thousand mud walls of Santa Rosalia. I could hear the dry rattle of the corn dancers’ shell bells: the exact sound of locusts rising up from the grass. I understood that Loyd was one of the most blessed people I knew.

“I always try to think of it that way,” he said, after a minute. “He had a big adventure up here, and then went home.”

Leander, he would mean. My spleen started to ache when I thought of Hallie fertilizing the tropics. Thinking about how much she loved stupid banana trees and orchids. I said, “I have this idea that if I don’t stay here and cry for Hallie, then there’s no family to absorb the loss. Nobody that remembers.”

“And that’s what you want? For Hallie to be forgotten?”

I couldn’t have said what I meant. “No. I just don’t want to be the one that’s left behind to hurt this much. I want to be gone already. If you’re dead when somebody stabs you, you don’t feel it.”

“Leaving won’t make you dead. You’ll just be alive in a different place.”

“This place has Hallie in it. When I lived here, I was half her and half me.”

“Going away won’t change how you feel.”

“I won’t know that till I’m gone, will I?”

He picked up my hand and examined it as if it were a foreign object, which was just how it looked to me. He was wearing a green corduroy shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbows, and I felt I could look at that shirt for as long as Loyd might choose to stand in my door. There were all those small ridges, the greenness, the nap of the cloth. If I kept my focus minute enough I could remain in the world, knowledgeable and serene.

“Anyway you’re wrong,” he said. “There’s family here to absorb the loss.”

“Doc Homer, Loyd, he’s…I don’t think he understands she’s gone.”

“I wasn’t talking about Doc Homer.”

I shifted my field of vision to include the lower part of Loyd’s face and the blunt dark ends of his hair. A whole person seemed an impossible thing to take in all at once. How had I lived so long and presumed so much?

“I’m sorry about everything, Loyd.”

“Listen, I know how this is. You don’t think you’ll live past it. And you don’t, really. The person you were is gone. But the half of you that’s still alive wakes up one day and takes over again.”

“Why should I look forward to that?”

He turned my hand over. “I can’t answer that.”

“Well, I’m sorry, Loyd.”

“I’m sorry too.”

“Well. You’ve got to go to work.” I avoided his eyes.

Loyd took my face in one hand and put the other hand on the small of my back and he kissed me for a long time. His mouth felt cool as green corduroy, a simple thing I could understand. We began the kiss standing up, and when we finished we were sitting on the step.

“You have to go,” I said again. That was the last thing, my last words for Loyd.

When he and Jack were gone I stood for a long time looking out at the rambling jungle of the courtyard. A hummingbird, possibly the same one that had inspired Nicholas to learn to walk, was hovering at the red funnels of the trumpet vine climbing my wall. I watched the bird move stiffly up and down over an invisible path, pausing, then moving left, then up again and back, covering the vertical plane with such purpose it might have been following a map.

I felt Emelina’s presence. She stood in her kitchen door, shading her eyes, watching me. I waved, but she didn’t wave back. Her face was drawn tight with mute, unarmed rage; it must have been the worst thing she was capable of aiming at a friend. She didn’t know my tricks, that you could just buckle up your tough old heart and hit the road. My course must have been as indecipherable to her as the hummingbird’s. We are all just here, Emelina, I wanted to say. Following our maps, surviving as we know how.

The kitchen door closed quietly and I understood that it was her kindest goodbye. The sun was strangely bright on the whitewashed wall and the hummingbird hung in the air, frozen inside its moment. A photograph of the present tense.

All morning on my last day people came pecking softly at my door like mice. A legion of mice bearing gifts. It was mostly women from the Stitch and Bitch. No one else was as succinct as Emelina. They wanted to know what I would be doing, where I would live. I mentioned the art school, but wasn’t specific.

“We sure do love you, hon,” said Uda Dell. “I packed you a lunch. There’s yellow banana peppers in there from the garden. They’re not as big as some years but they’ve got a right smart bite. Stay another year,” she added.

“Do you have a good winter coat?” Norma Galvez asked me. “It snows up there. You’d just as well stay here.”

In their eyes my life should have been simple, purely a matter of love and the right wardrobe. It was as if I had fifty mothers.

In the last hour before I left I had to go through Emelina’s kitchen to retrieve a pair of jeans from the laundry room. John Tucker was folding laundry. He told me Emelina was lying down upstairs with a bad headache.

“You got a baseball game today?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

“Sorry I won’t be around to see you win.”

He smiled. In a year I’d watched him grow into his elbows and lose the better part of his shyness. His voice was beginning to crack. “Mom’s really going to miss you. She’ll be a witch for the next month. She’ll make us clean out the chicken pens and stuff.”

“It’s all my fault,” I said, grabbing a runaway corner of a sheet and helping him fold it. “You guys can send me hate mail in Telluride.”

He laughed. “Okay.”

“If it gets too bad you can run away from home. Come up and see me. We’ll go skiing.”

He hoisted his laundry basket and headed for the stairs.

When I came back out through the kitchen Viola was there at the table, lying in wait like a predator.

“Sit down,” she said. “Save your shoes.”

I was lunch meat. I sat down.

“Boy oh boy, kiddo,” she said.

“What does that mean? That I should stay here?”

“Sure you should.”

“Well,” I said.

“But nobody ever could tell you a darn thing.”

“That’s what I hear.”

“I been wanting to tell you something.”

“I know Emelina’s pissed off at me.”

She snorted. “If you don’t know that already you’re not going to hear it from me.”

“Oh.” I thought about what else she might have to reveal to me. “I know about my mother,” I said. “I know she came from here, that she was a cousin or something to Doña Althea. And that she and Doc Homer ran off.”

Viola smiled a little. “Son of a gun. He told you?”

“More or less.”

She adjusted the coil of hair on the back of her head, reclaiming its territory with the planting of a few long bobby pins. “Well, that’s not what I was wanting to tell you.”

We sat looking at each other for a good while. Her T-shirt said I WAS DEEP DISHED AT MAMA LENARDA’S. I had no idea where it might have come from.

“I’m not supposed to tell you,” she added.

“Says who?”

“Says me. Doc Homer would shoot me if he found out.”

“I don’t think there’s much danger, Viola.”

“Well, but it’s the principles.”

Now I was curious. “So, did you sit me down here to tell me something or not?”

She hesitated, shifting her weight forward onto her elbows on the table. “I was looking after you girls the day your mama died.”

“You kept us at home?”

She nodded. “I was supposed to.”

“But you didn’t.”

“I thought you had the right to say bye to your mama, like anybody else. To tell her, ‘Vaya con Dios.’ Anybody else had no business up there, they just went to watch the show, but you had business and you was not allowed to go. Hallie was just born, she didn’t know anything anyway so I left her with Uda Dell.”

“And you took me up to the field to see the helicopter come down.”

Viola leaned back in her chair. “I’m not saying I did, and I’m not saying I didn’t.”

“What are you saying?”

“Just that you had a right. That’s all. Now, skedaddle. Que le vaya bien.”

The Greyhound was mostly empty, a dry gourd rolling across the desert, occasionally spilling out a seed or two in an inhospitable outpost: Bowie, Willcox, Benson. It was 110 degrees down there, not something people would travel through unless they were desperate to be elsewhere.

As things had turned out, Grace was not going to dry up. The women of the Stitch and Bitch had won back the river. A vice-president of the Black Mountain Mining Company called a press conference in Phoenix to announce that after seventy years of productive and congenial relations with the people of Gracela Canyon, the mine operation there was closing up shop. It was a matter of the leaching operation’s being no longer profitable, he said. The dam would be deconstructed. Naturally, if any harm had been incurred, all necessary reparations would be made to the people of Grace. He made no mention of the historic registry petition that had been filed one week earlier. So mountains could be moved. Now I knew.

When my bus paused in Willcox a woman climbed aboard and chose to sit by me, rather than take her chances on something worse that might come along, I guess. She wore an ample white jogging suit and had an odd, metallic hair color. I spent the next fifty miles in fear of a conversation I wasn’t in the mood for, but she just kept scowling at a gardening magazine.

Then suddenly she held out her magazine as if it had offended her. “That kills me, how people can grow four o’clocks like that,” she said, whacking the page with the back of her plump hand.

I glanced over at the unbelievable floral displays in her magazine. I could relate to her frustration. You just knew they trucked in those flowers from a climate-controlled greenhouse somewhere and arranged them on the lawn, right before snapping the photo.

“I’m Alice Kimball,” the woman explained. “I get the worst slugs.”

Alice. Would my mother be wearing tepid jogging suits now, if her organs had not failed her? I tried to smile. “Where do you get them?”

“In my four o’clocks. That’s what I’m trying to tell you, I can’t grow a four o’clock to save my life. The leaves get so full of holes they just look pitiful. And they get in the lawn, too. My husband says he hears them out there eating up his grass. What can you do?”

“I’m not the right person to ask,” I said. “My sister could sure tell you, though. She got a degree in Integrated Pest Management. She used to answer the Garden Hotline in Tucson, 626-BUGS.”

Mrs. Kimball brightened as if I’d offered her a peppermint. “I’ve called that before. They have the nicest little girl on that line, she’ll tell you anything you want to know.”

“That was my sister you talked to. Hallie Noline.” I was amazed by the coincidence, but then again probably half of Tucson had turned to Hallie for advice. And half of Nicaragua. “That was part of her job,” I said. “She did that for six years.”

Mrs. Kimball looked around at the neighboring seats as if Hallie might turn up for consultation. “Well, do you mean she’s quit? I just thought the world of her.”

“Yep, she quit. She left the country.”

“Left the country?”

“She went to Nicaragua.” Everybody in this country should know her name, I thought. During the Iran hostage crisis they had a special symbol on the newscasts: a blindfolded man, and the number of days. A schoolchild glancing up from a comic book would know that this story was about them. But a nation gloats on the hostility of its enemies, whereas Hallie had proved the malevolence of some men we supplied with machine guns. Hallie was a skeleton in the civic closet.

Some people knew. I’d gotten a card from a nun in Minneapolis who had known Hallie. She was one of several thousand people who had gone down to Nicaragua for just a week or two, she said. They helped pick coffee, or if they had training they did other helpful things. The idea was just to be there in the danger zone, so that if the U.S. should attack, it would have to attack some of its own citizens. This nun, Sister Sabina Martin, had helped give vaccinations. She met Hallie at the clinic in Chinandega the day Hallie brought in a child who’d drunk paraquat from a Coke bottle. Sister Martin and Hallie sat with the child the whole day, and she said that although I might not think it possible, she felt she’d come to know Hallie well during that time. In some circumstances, she said, an afternoon can be a whole life.

“Oh, well,” Mrs. Kimball said, after quite a while. “You must miss her.”

“I will, when it really sinks in. She hasn’t been gone that long.”

“I know what you’re going through,” said Mrs. Kimball. “I lost my sister in 1965.”

I hadn’t told her Hallie was dead. Mrs. Kimball had seized the subject of death all on her own. “I’m sorry,” I said, not really wanting to be encouraging, but you couldn’t just ignore it, either.

“She’s been dead all this time of an aneurysm and there are still days when I think, ‘Oh, wait till I tell Phoebe about that!’ Before I realize. I always think it’s harder to believe they’re gone when it’s sudden.”

“My sister,” I said, and then stopped, afraid of the lie I was about to tell. I was going to say, “isn’t dead.” I heard an old voice in my head, the teller of tales: I am a cello player running away from home. We are from Zanzibar, we’re from Ireland, our mother is the Queen of Potatoes. I was through constructing myself for other people. I didn’t say anything.

Several seats ahead of us, a teenage couple had begun necking enthusiastically. You couldn’t blame these kids, the scenery was boring and would drive you to anything, but they made me feel hopelessly alone.

“Well,” Alice said, apparently remembering it was garden pests we’d agreed to talk about. “What would you do for the slugs?”

“I really don’t know, I’m not that good with plants.” I considered the problem for a while. “I think what Hallie used to do was put out beer for them, in little tin cans. The slugs are attracted to it and they fall in, or something. I know that sounds crazy but I’m pretty sure it’s right.”

“Well.” She stared at me thoughtfully. “My husband and I aren’t drinkers, but I guess I could go out and get some beer for the slugs. Do you know what brand?”

“I don’t think it matters. I’d get whatever’s on sale.”

“All right, I’ll do that,” said Mrs. Kimball. She opened her magazine again to the incendiary four o’clocks, but then closed it right back up, holding the place with her finger. “You ought to try to keep in touch with your sister,” she told me. “Young people think nothing will ever happen. You should treasure your family while you have it.”

“Well, really I don’t have it,” I said, resentful of her assumptions. “It’s gone. My mother died when I was little and my father will probably be dead before the year’s out, and my baby died, and now my sister is dead too. Maybe I’m not as young as you think.”

Mrs. Kimball looked stunned. “Your sister? The one on the phone?”

“She got killed by the contras. The ones down there that we send all the money to. I think you probably heard about it.”

She looked uneasy. “I don’t know. I might have.”

“It made the news in Tucson, at least for a day. You just forgot. That’s the great American disease, we forget. We watch the disasters parade by on TV, and every time we say: ‘Forget it. This is somebody else’s problem.’”

I suppose I was going, as Rita Cardenal would say, mental. I didn’t look at Mrs. Kimball but I could see her magazine drift slowly to her lap. I looked at the bright garden on the magazine cover and felt strangely calm. “They kidnapped her one morning in a cotton field,” I said. “They kept her as a prisoner for weeks and weeks, and we kept hoping, but then they moved everybody to another camp and some of the prisoners they shot. Eight of them. Hallie and seven men. All of the men were teachers. They tied their hands behind them and shot them in the head and left their bodies all sitting in a line at the side of a road, in a forest, right near the border. All facing south.”

I felt a hard knot in my chest because this was the one image I saw most clearly. I still do. My voice sounded like a voice that would come from some other person’s throat, someone who had a dead sister and could speak of such things. “The man that found them was driving up from Estelí, coming along the road, and at first when he saw them all sitting there he thought, ‘Oh, that’s too many. I can’t give them all a ride, they won’t fit in my truck.’”

Mrs. Kimball and I didn’t speak again after that. I looked out the window. Far to the south, low cone shapes pushed up against the flat, bright sky. Those distant mountains were probably in Mexico, I knew, though borders in this barren land seemed beside the point. I heard Mrs. Kimball turn a page of her magazine. We’d been silent for over an hour before she first spoke up about the four o’clocks, but the silence was much more noticeable now, after we’d broken it with our little conversation. Awareness is everything. Hallie once pointed out to me that people worry a lot more about the eternity after their deaths than the eternity that happened before they were born. But it’s the same amount of infinity, rolling out in all directions from where we stand.

My airplane was said to be bound for Denver, but it sat on the runway for a very long time. I had a window seat and could watch other planes lift their noses one after another and plow their way up an invisible road into the sky. I wasn’t impatient. Normally at this point in a flight my heart would pound and my mouth would go to cotton, but today my viscera were still. It didn’t matter especially if we burned in a fiery crash.

I thought maybe the air traffic controllers were trying to decide whether we were worth the trouble; we were only a small, twin-engine plane, incompletely filled. A few seats ahead of me a mother coached her preschooler, who was already crying because he knew his ears would hurt when we went up. This was not the first leg of their trip.

“You swallow, honey. Just remember to swallow, that makes your ears feel better. And yawn.”

“I can’t yawn.”

“Sure you can.” She demonstrated, her voice stretching wide over the yawn: “Think about being real, real sleepy.” People yawned all the way back to the smoking section, so strong was the power of motherly suggestion. I felt overcome with sadness.

The aisle seat of my row was occupied by a teenager, and the empty seat between us was filling up with her overflow paraphernalia. She threw down a hairbrush and a curling iron-whack! whack!-and pulled a substantial mirror out of a makeup case the size of my carry-on luggage. She began applying careful stripes of pastel eye shadow. When she blinked, her eyelids waved like a pair of foreign flags.

“Give it a rest, Brenda,” said the man sitting across the aisle. “You’re not going to see your boyfriend for ten whole days. Why not take this wonderful opportunity to let your face get some fresh air?”

Brenda ignored this advice, staring with deep absorption into her makeup mirror while her parents in B and C beamed her the Evil Eye. The mother was wearing a polka-dot jumpsuit with coordinated polka-dot earrings, all a little too eager-looking even for the first day of vacation. The man had on sunny golf pants that clashed with his disposition. It was hard to ignore them, but Brenda was practiced. She glanced serenely at her left wrist, which bore three separate watches with plastic bands in the same three shades as her eye shadow. Her hair looked as if each strand had been individually lacquered and tortured into position. No matter how you might feel about the aesthetic, you had to admire the effort. Most people put less into their jobs.

“Brenda, honey, please pay attention when your father is talking to you,” said the woman in the polka dots. “Could you please just try? Listening to you and your father bicker for a week and a half is not my idea of a vacation.”

“You should have left me at home,” Brenda said quietly, staring directly ahead. “‘Honey, I think we forgot something. Did I leave the iron on? No, we forgot Brenda.’” She shot me a glance, and I think I smiled a little. I couldn’t help being on Brenda’s side here. In my term as a schoolteacher I’d gained sympathy for adolescence. If I had to take a trip with those two I’d probably paint my face blue for spite.

The plane jerked a little and then began to roll creakily down the runway, gathering speed. We were taking off without a warning announcement of any kind. “Flight attendants prepare for takeoff” came out in a single scrambled burst over the intercom, and the women in pumps and dark suits ran as if from an air-raid siren. I closed my eyes and laid my head back, trying to hold on to my visceral indifference, but it fell right away. My heart had caught up with me. I heard the little boy chattering to his mother and I yawned nervously. So much of life is animal instinct: desire and yawning and fear and the will to live. We left the earth and climbed steeply into the void.

My habit was to count seconds during the lift-off, with my mind on news stories that ran along the lines of “crashed into a meadow only seconds after takeoff…” Somewhere I’d gotten the idea it took seven minutes to get past imminent peril. I counted to sixty, and started over. We’d been airborne for maybe three or four minutes when our pilot’s deep Texan voice came over the intercom. “Folks, I apologize for the delay in taking off today. We had trouble getting one of these cantankerous old engines started up.”

The announcement startled my eyes open. I looked at Brenda, who widened her eyes comically. “Great,” she said.

“It’s nice to know you’re riding the friendly skies in a bucket of bolts.”

Brenda laughed. “Like my boyfriend’s car.”

“I think we’d be safer in your boyfriend’s car.”

“Not in their opinion,” she said, inclining her head across the aisle.

I closed my eyes again. I tried to relax, but couldn’t help listening to every change of pitch in the engine noise. They sounded wrong. Suddenly I confided in Brenda, “I hate to fly. You know? It scares me to death.”

I hadn’t admitted this aloud before, and was surprised to hear it come out so naturally. The truth needs so little rehearsal. Brenda reached over and patted my hand.

“Folks, this is Captain Sampson. I’m sorry to report that we’ve lost that engine again.”

Against my will I glanced out at the wing to see if anything had actually fallen off. My heart beat hard and out of synch with itself and I felt I might die of fright. I let the fingertips of my right hand lie across my left wrist, tracking the off-rhythm of my aimless heart. If I were really dying, I wanted to be the first to know.

After another minute, during which I imagined Captain Sampson and his copilot trying everything, his paternal drawl crackled on again. “We could probably make it to Stapleton on one engine,” he said, “but we’ll play it safe. We’re going to turn around and head back into Tucson to see if they’ll let us have some new equipment.”

I hated the sound of the word “equipment.” I had visions of men in coveralls running out to strap a spare engine onto the wing. If we made it back to the airport at all. Suddenly we banked so steeply my stomach turned. I must have looked pale, because Brenda reached over and squeezed my hand again.

“Try to think about something relaxing,” she said. “Think about kissing your boyfriend.”

“That’s relaxing?”

She smiled. “No. But it takes your mind off.”

She was right; it did, for a second or two. I thought of Loyd’s last kiss on my doorstep in Grace. But it also made my chest ache, further distracting my heart from the task at hand. Nausea pressed on the back of my throat. I closed my eyes, but vertigo is an internal distress; shutting out the world does nothing to help. The plane took another steep bank.

We were in an unnatural position, vertical in the air and slipping down, with nothing to support us.

When we finally leveled out again I opened my eyes. We were skimming low over Tucson and I was comforted-irrationally I know-by the nearness of things. Clusters of houses huddled together as if for reassurance, and in between them lay broad spans of flesh-colored desert. The freckled ground was threaded with thin, branched lines of creeks, like veins in the back of a hand. It looked as if there were water in the creeks, although I knew better. At this time of year they were bone-dry rivers of sand.

The rush of adrenalin had rinsed me clean. I looked hard out the window and understood suddenly that what I saw was full of color. A watercolor wash of summer light lay on the Catalina Mountains. The end of a depression is that clear: it’s as if you have been living underwater, but never realized it until you came up for air. I hadn’t seen color since I lost Hallie. I thought hard, trying to remember; it seemed unbelievable, but there was none. Almost none. Loyd’s green corduroy shirt, and the red flowers and the hummingbird against the brightly lit wall, the moment Emelina said goodbye. And that was all. Before that, the last thing I clearly remembered in color was Santa Rosalia in its infinite shades of brown.

I laughed at myself for carrying my mother’s phobic blood in my veins. And for telling Alice Kimball how to cure slugs. Practicing all this family business without a license. It seemed extraordinary and accidental that I was alive. I felt crowded with all the sensory messages that make up life, as opposed to survival, and I recognized this as something close to joy. As we slipped down over the city every building and back lot was beautifully distinct. I forgot about my heart, left it to look after itself. We passed south of downtown, over the railyard, where the boxcars stood in line looking sweet and mismatched like a child’s toy put together with no eye for color coordination. Just past the railyard was a school where a double row of corn-colored school buses were parked in a ring, exactly like one of those cheap Indian necklaces made for tourists. Bright backyard swimming pools gleamed like turquoise nuggets. The land stretched out under me the way a lover would, hiding nothing, offering up every endearing southwestern cliché, and I wanted to get down there and kiss the dirt.

I made a bargain with my mother. If I got to the ground in one piece, I wasn’t leaving it again.

The Amtrak didn’t depart until three-thirty; I made it with time to spare. The station clerk wouldn’t sell me a ticket to my destination, saying it wasn’t a passenger stop. I argued. I knew the train stopped there for a crew change. Finally I realized he could sell me a ticket for anywhere at all on the eastbound line, it didn’t matter. I knew where I was getting off.

We pulled out of the station and I hugged myself, cradled in the wide reclining seat, letting the rails rock me like a baby. The car smelled like smoke and old leather. I lay sideways in the seat, facing the window, my legs curled under me. Tucson, Arizona, passed slowly enough to nod at, take notice of, and then let go. At a steady, measured pace these things were revealed to me: the backs of brickyards, the backs of barrios, a large outdoor factory where Mexican women painted tiles. We passed buildings whose high walls, empty of windows, were spray-painted with huge secrets seen by no one but the travelers of the Southern Pacific. And then came the broad, open desert-mile after mile of it. I understood the appeal of train travel. You couldn’t help knowing where you’d been.

At some point I fell asleep, and at some point I woke up again. I felt I’d been on that train for the whole of my life. We approached Grace from a direction that was new to me. We didn’t go by the junkyard. There was a tunnel through the granite cliffs and we entered it fast-the dark rock wall magnifying the rocketing clamor of tons of forward motion-and then, quiet and sudden, out into the bright light again. I blinked against the overexposed world. By the time my eyes adjusted we were right downtown behind the old jailhouse, pulling the sighing brakes, slowing down. We came gliding under the long wooden porch of the depot. The sun glinted on its pleated tin roof, and I noticed a carob tree there with a trunk the size of a rain barrel. It must be the male-the mate to the one up by the liquor store. The one I’d been looking for.

The conductor looked a little surprised when I pulled my bag off the rack and hopped down onto the concrete apron of the depot.

“This isn’t anywhere, sweetheart,” he said, looking down at me from the doorway. He was a very old, very dark-skinned man whose uniform looked as if it could hold up its shoulders without him.

“I know,” I said.

“You can’t get back on,” he warned. “Ten minutes for a crew change, and then we’re headed out for El Paso.”

“I know. I don’t want to get back on. I live here.”

“Well, how do you do,” he said. He stepped back into the car and waved at me through the window. His gloved hand fluttered like a dove.

A hundred yards up the line I saw the fireman climb down the ladder from the engine. It was someone I’d gone to school with-Roger Bristol. Loyd tossed down Roger’s grip and his own, one at a time, and then swung himself easily down the ladder as if he were born for this work. He talked briefly with two other men-the oncoming crew, I guessed. They would speak in their magical language of dog catchers and sun kinks and the ones that had died on the line, picking up trains from the dead and moving on. They parted ways and the new crew climbed into the engine. The other two men walked toward the depot carrying their grips and lunch buckets: one short and stocky, the other taller, broad-shouldered, with his hair in a ponytail. The people you love always look perfectly proportioned from a distance.

Shortly the train began to move again, very slowly, the speed of a living creature. You could still run and catch it. Loyd and Roger kept walking toward me without seeing me. Standing there watching him, knowing what he didn’t, I had so much power and none at all. I was on the outside, in a different dimension. I’d lived there always.

Then he stopped dead, just for a second. I’ll remember that. The train moved and Roger moved but Loyd stood still.

He caught up to me in an instant, with a twinkle in his eye and his bag slung over his shoulder like a ready traveler.

“Thanks for the ride,” I said.

He put one arm around my neck and gave me the kind of kiss no fool would walk away from twice.

26 The Fifty Mothers

For several days I kept coming back to this: we had no body. I wanted to have a funeral for Hallie, but I was at a loss. I knew the remains should not have been important, but in a funeral the body gives the grieving a place to focus their eyes. We sit facing it, bear it on our shoulders, follow it down the road in procession and finally long to follow it into the ground. The body would have provided an agenda and told me what to do, in lieu of Hallie, who was gone.

I went to look for something else that in my mind stood for her: the semilla besada, one of the supernaturally blessed trees that in the old days were festooned like Christmas trees with the symbols of people’s hopes. We could hold a funeral there, outside, under the leaves. I wanted to find the exact plum tree where we’d hidden a lock of our intertwined hair. I knew the orchard but couldn’t find the tree. Either it was gone, or it was no longer exceptional. Maybe the trees all around it had stretched their taproots and found the same nurturing vein.

It was June, a week before Hallie’s thirtieth birthday. The canopies were in full green, each one as brilliant as a halo. The blossoms had dropped and left behind incipient fruits swelling three and four to a cluster, not yet pruned by nature or by hand. Every tree in every orchard looked blessed. So we had the funeral there, in the old Domingos plum orchard.

I’d asked people to bring something that reminded them of Hallie. I spread the black-and-red afghan on the ground and we stood around that. Instead of decorating a tree with our hopes for the future, we decorated a blanket with icons from the past. All the women from Stitch and Bitch were there. And J.T. and Emelina, of course, and Loyd. All of my students, as well. Doc Homer didn’t make it. He didn’t go very far out of his house these days, or very far out of his head.

It was awkward getting started. I remembered the last time I’d hugged her, thinking I could hold on and stop our lives right there. I took some breaths. “Hallie asked to be buried in Nicaragua,” I said. “She wanted that. To enrich the soil of a jungle. But I wanted something here too.” I stopped, because it sounded to me like small talk. Words only cover the experience of living. I looked around at the unpretentious faces like slices of bread, all the black dresses, the dark shoes, and I looked up at the bright leaves lit from above. It was a brilliant, hot day and I didn’t feel at all like crying. The black dresses made me think of Greece. Nothing seemed quite real.

Several peacocks had gathered in the trees behind our heads, keeping their distance, but curious, probably hoping for food. A peacock wouldn’t know the difference between a picnic and a funeral. The outward signs were similar.

“Do you think we should sing?” I asked.

“Yes,” said Emelina. “We ought to sing.”

“What?” I couldn’t think of any particular song that Hallie liked, except some silly things from our teenage years. “Mother and Child Reunion” and “Maggie May.” I thought of Hallie moonwalking to “Thriller,” and then I thought abstractly about never seeing her again, what that really meant. In the back of my mind I was still wondering when she would come home. I couldn’t concentrate. Someone suggested “Let the Circle Be Unbroken,” so we sang that, and then we sang “De Colores” because everybody knew it. Norma Galvez’s husband Cassandro played the guitar.

Then it was quiet again. People shifted slightly on their feet, the same motion repeated many times throughout the crowd, like the dancers at Santa Rosalia. Except unconscious, and unrehearsed. I pulled some letters out of my pocket and read parts of them that Emelina had helped me pick out. I read what Hallie said about not wanting to save the world, that you didn’t choose your road for the reward at the end, but for the way it felt as you went along. And I read some things she’d said about nations forgetting. Refusing to sell tractor parts, then wondering why people would turn to Yugoslavia for tractors. I was aware that my reading might seem a little rambling, but I felt there was some logic to it, and people were tolerant. Truly, I think they would have listened to me all day. It occurred to me that such patience might be the better part of love.

I read a quote she’d written me that seemed important, a thing said by Father Fernando Cardenal, who was in charge of the literacy crusade: “You learn to read so you can identify the reality in which you live, so that you can become a protagonist of history rather than a spectator.” I waited a minute, while a peacock screamed. Then I read some words of Hallie’s: “The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most…”

Another peacock suddenly howled nearby. I saw Emelina’s twins craning their necks, trying to spot it. I went on:

“And the most you can do is live inside that hope. What I want is so simple I almost can’t say it: elementary kindness. Enough to eat, enough to go around. The possibility that kids might one day grow up to be neither the destroyers nor the destroyed.”

I finished by reading the letter from Sister Sabina Martin. She said thousands of people joined us in mourning Hallie. “I know that doesn’t make your grief any smaller,” she wrote. “But I believe it makes Hallie’s presence larger. Certainly, she won’t be forgotten.”

Several peafowl had hopped to the ground and were making insistent, guttural noises, impatient for food. I saw Glen and Curtis sneak off into the trees in pursuit of a peacock they’d never catch.

“This is what I brought.” I knelt by the afghan and set down a pair of Hallie’s small black shoes, about second-grade size. They could have been mine, it was impossible to tell, but I said they were Hallie’s. I put them in the center of the red-and-black crocheted blanket. “I brought these because they just reminded me of growing up with Hallie. We had to wear these ugly shoes. It was just one of the important things we did together. I don’t know. We felt kind of alone sometimes.” I stood up and looked at the trees through the curtain of water in my eyes.

Viola laid down some marigolds. She had on her polyester, the funeral dress for all seasons, and she was perspiring; broad damp spots underlined her bosom. “Whenever I think of you kids I think of the cempazuchiles and being up at the graveyard for All Souls’. You were always a very big help.”

I looked at Viola. She stared back, rubbing the bridge of her nose. There was the faintest light of a smile.

Several women had things they claimed we’d left in their houses when we played there as children: a doll with unpleasant glass eyes and a gruesomely pockmarked head where its hair had come out; a largish plastic horse; a metal hen that, when you pushed her down on her feet, made a metallic cluck and laid a small marble egg. Also a pink sweater, size 6X. Mrs. Nuñez swore it was Hallie’s. “It was behind the refrigerator. I didn’t find it till last year when the refrigerator give out and we had to call the man to move it out and get us a new one in there. The dust, I hate to tell you! And there was this little sweater of Halimeda Noline’s. She used to set up there on top of the refrigerator, because I told her she couldn’t drink beer till she was as tall as her daddy.”

This was the truth, dead center. I remembered her up there huddled among the Mason jars and bright cracker boxes. I stared at the freshly laundered pink sweater lying with outstretched arms and thought about how small Hallie had been at one time. Miss Colder and Miss Dann were just then displaying an ancient-looking picture book, but there was a roaring in my ears and I lost track of what they were saying. I believe it was the physical manifestation of unbearable grief. But you learn in these situations that all griefs are bearable. Loyd was standing on one side of me, and Emelina on the other, and whenever I thought I might fall or just cease to exist, the pressure of their shoulders held me there.

I could hear people’s words, but my vision was jarred by showers of blue sparks. Or the world went out of focus. And at other times I could see but couldn’t hear. Doña Althea clumped forward with her cane and set down a miniature, perfectly made peacock piñata. It perched there on the pile of childhood things, its small eyes glittering and its tail feathers perfectly trimmed. It was an exquisite piece of art that could have made it into Mr. Rideheart’s gallery, but it was for Hallie. I tried to listen to what she was saying. She said, “I made one like this for both of you girls, for your cumpleaños when you were ten.”

To my surprise, this was also true. I remembered every toy, every birthday party, each one of these fifty mothers who’d been standing at the edges of my childhood, ready to make whatever contribution was needed at the time.

“Gracias, Abuelita,” I said softly to Doña Althea as she clumped away.

She didn’t look at me, but she heard me say it and she didn’t deny that she was my relative. Her small head crowned with its great white braid nodded a little. No hugs or confessions of love. We were all a little stiff, I understood that. Family constellations are fixed things. They don’t change just because you’ve learned the names of the stars.

Uda Dell went last. “I brought this bouquet of zinnias because every spring Hallie helped me dig my zinnia bed.” She laid down the homely, particolored bouquet, and added, “I crocheted that afghan, too.”

“You did?”

She looked at me, surprised. “Right after your mommy died. Well, I don’t guess you’d remember.”

“This blanket got us through a lot of tough times,” I said. I was feeling a little more steady on my feet. I folded in the corners and drew it all up into a bundle against my chest. About everything Hallie and I had ever done was with us there in the Domingos orchard. Everything we’d been I was now.

“Thank you,” I said, to everybody.

I turned my back and headed alone with my bundle up the Old Pony Road to Doc Homer’s house.