Animal Dreams

27 Human Remains

There are women in every room of this house, he thinks: Mrs. Quintana upstairs, and now there is Codi, standing in the kitchen with her baby. Her arms and chest clutch the black wool bundle and it weighs her down like something old, made of stone. The weight makes him want to turn away. He thinks, This is the fossil record of our lives.

“I’m going to bury this. Do you want to help me?” She looks up at him and tears stream down. The grief on her face is fresh as pollen.

“You already buried it.”

“No, no, no!” she screams, and slams the screen door behind her. He follows her down the path but she doesn’t go down to the riverbed this time, she turns and goes right around the house into the backyard. When he catches up, a little breathless, she is standing with her boots on the ground like rooted stalks. Standing beside the old plot where Hallie used to grow a garden. A few old artichoke bushes have gone thistly and wild around its perimeter. Codi drops the knotted bundle and goes to the tool shed to retrieve a shovel. She comes back and digs hard into the ground. It hasn’t been disturbed for many years.

“Are you sure this is a good place?” he asks.

Without speaking, she steps on the shovel and its tip bites into the sandy soil again and again, lifting, digging, and lifting out a deep, square hole.

“You might want to have a garden here again someday. When this house is yours.”

The shovel stops suddenly. “Did you know I’m staying?” She looks at him.

He looks back, waiting.

“I told Loyd about the baby. Yesterday I took him down there to the riverbed where you showed me. I can remember every minute of that night. You gave me some pills, didn’t you? You really did want to help.” She looks up at the sky, using gravity and the small, twin dams of her eyelids to hold in tears. “So Loyd knows about that now. He’s sad. I didn’t think about that part-that he would be sad. I was thinking the baby was just mine.”

“It wasn’t just yours.”

“I know.” She wipes her cheeks with the back of her hand, leaving a faint dark smudge under each eye. She looks at him very oddly. “We might have another one. Loyd and I. I don’t know. There’s time to see.”

“Yes.”

“Did you know I’m a good science teacher? The kids and the teachers all voted. They say I’m spirited. How do you like that?”

“It’s what I would expect.”

“I’m teaching them how to have a cultural memory.” She looks at her hands, and laughs, but looks sad. “I want them to be custodians of the earth,” she says.

He also looks at her hands. They remind him of something. Whose hands?

“You really can’t approve of me staying, can you?” she demands, suddenly angry. “You raised me to turn my back on this place. That worked for you, but the difference is you knew it was really your home. You knew you had one. So you had a choice.”

“That’s all very well and good,” he says, “but you still might want a garden. These artichoke bushes still produce. Every summer they bloom as if their hearts depended on it. Never mind that there was nobody taking in the harvest.” He takes the tip of a silvery leaf between his fingers. It looks knifelike, but is yielding and soft.

She looks at him for quite a long time, smiling, and then she looks down at the bundle. “It’s all right to bury this here,” she says. “There are no human remains.”

No human remains. No. Human. Remains. The three words chime in his head like large, old bells, three descending notes that ring and ring, speeding up in tempo until they clang against one another.

“How true,” he says finally.

She shaves out the edges of the hole so it is neat and square, and then drops the bundle in. She throws a handful of dirt on top of it and stands there looking down.

“We’re a pair of scarred old souls, aren’t we, Codi?”

“I don’t know what we are. I’m trying to figure out what I hope for.”

“It’s a most dangerous thing, hope.”

Her eyes flash with something bright. Love or anger. But she doesn’t speak.

“Hope involves giving a great deal of yourself away,” he tells her.

“That’s a pitiful excuse.”

“Oh, it’s pitiful all right, but there you have it. It’s hard to give much away when you’re the subject of widespread disapproval and your heart is leaking from puncture wounds.”

“That’s true. We got punctured pretty bad. But we still gave the world a lot, Pop. We gave it Hallie.”

“We did. We surely did.”

She begins shoveling dirt back into the grave. He thinks about the fact that all these particles of dirt have now been rearranged. No fixed strata. Alice was the gardener. When she has finished she moves to his side and he takes her elbow. They stand side by side in their small garden of sand and buried children. The bones in his wife’s arm are as thin as whistles. “Do you have any idea how much I love you?” he asks her.

She stares at him, then squeezes his hand. “Hallie was a protagonist of history,” she says.

“She wanted to save the world.”

“No, Pop, that’s not true. She wanted to save herself. Just like we all do.”

He looks at the tall, living daughter his wife has suddenly become. He is no longer angry about these changes. “Save herself from what?”

“From despair. From the feeling of being useless. I’ve about decided that’s the main thing that separates happy people from the other people: the feeling that you’re a practical item, with a use, like a sweater or a socket wrench.”

He asks, “Are we the other people?” He is curious.

“You’re not useless. You gave yourself to this town for forty years. Scarred soul or not.”

“Yes. But I gave for the wrong reasons. As you have pointed out.”

She laughs. “I did, didn’t I? Damn!” She pulls at the end of a silver artichoke leaf. “I was scared to death I was going to grow up to be just like you.” She looks at him, and laughs again. She says: “God, I could never be just like you.”

They are standing in the garden, in a dwarf forest of artichokes. She has just dug a hole and buried God knows what and now has made a confession of either contempt or admiration. He waits to see what will happen next.

“Maybe the reason you gave yourself to this town doesn’t matter that much. Maybe what matters is just that you did it. Maybe that makes you a good man. You know what Loyd told me one time?”

“No.”

“He thinks people’s dreams are made out of what they do all day. The same way a dog that runs after rabbits will dream of rabbits. It’s what you do that makes your soul, not the other way around.”

It’s what you do that makes your soul. Standing opposite him, staring down into the grave, he sees two sad little girls in cowboy hats. Is this what he has done? “I don’t think you should be here,” he says to them.

The elder daughter looks up, her pale eyes steady. “But we are here, Papa.”

“Yes, you are.”

“Why don’t you want us?”

“Oh, God, I do.” He kneels down and takes them both in his arms and pulls them against his chest. He understands for the first time in his life that love weighs nothing. Oh God, his girls are as light as birds.