Animal Dreams

28 Day of All Souls

Gracela Canyon, if you strip it down to the enduring things, is a great, granite bowl of air. It’s a wonderful echo chamber. Voices of women and children in the cemetery reached Viola and me from all the way across the canyon, rising on invisible air currents with the ravens and the spirits of all those old bones being tended by their children. It was getting on toward late afternoon, and we walked slowly. Viola had spent the morning supervising family operations, and said she was tired. But she’d promised that any day I asked her she would take me to the place where we watched my mother go. I chose that particular day in 1989, the end of a decade, the Day of All Souls, when we were all up decorating the graves. I don’t know why.

I’d finished sweeping off my father and the other Nolinas and had decked them out with little bunches of marigolds at their heads and feet. It was something like tucking children into bed. I was their historian and their guardian angel. I never found Ursolina, the little bear. I imagine she’s somewhere closer to the mine, where the earth has been shifted too many times to bear witness to what it has buried in it. The rest of the family, for all the times they’d had to be exhumed, had stayed together surprisingly well.

I knelt all morning in the dirt, laying out a border of creek rocks around Doc Homer. He’d been gone more than two years, but it took me awhile to decide on this. Emelina’s boys had hauled the rocks up there for me. When we took them out of the water and piled them into the wheelbarrow they lost their luster, all drying to the same whitish color of dust, and I was afraid after all that work they would be the wrong thing, but they were fine. Uniform and shipshape, washed smooth by the abrasion of natural forces. I laid them end to end around the dirt mound, knocking them together and working them back and forth a little to find a natural fit. As I worked I thought of the masonry walls of Kinishba, with the bones of children inside.

When I stood back finally and dusted my chapped hands against my jeans, I saw I’d achieved nothing so fine as Kinishba, but had marked out a clear boundary, anyway. He would like it. I’d brought some order to his cosmos finally.

I squinted into the sun. Across the tops of about a hundred gravestones and many people I saw Viola in her black dress, standing on a little rise, her gray hair wandering from its knot. She pressed one hand to the small of her back while Mason and Nicholas danced in front of her with their hands full of candy, begging for something, wearing her out. Nicholas was three and a half; John Tucker was talking about quitting school to be a hoghead for Southern Pacific. I thought: “I can’t wait forever.” So I went and asked her right then and she said fine, after lunch we would go. “I’m about done here,” she’d said, cracking the sugar skull of a calavera between her molars. “They can figure out which end of the flowers to put in water without me.”

We took the quickest road down into town, then cut across the hill behind the high school and through the splendid canopies hung with fruit that the Stitch and Bitch Club had won back from Black Mountain Mining. From there we headed up the Old Pony Road toward the abandoned mine. The tops of the flat tailing mounds were dimpled with rain-catching basins and I’d noticed that sprigs of rabbitbrush were starting to grow up there.

The road was steep. No route out of Grace was an easy climb. Twice I had to ask Viola to let me catch my breath. I held a fist to my breastbone, panting hard, a little embarrassed by my infirmity but also a little pleased by the external proof of what was still mostly an internal condition. I was pregnant.

“I feel like I don’t have any energy. I come home from school and sleep till Loyd wakes me up for dinner, and then I go back to bed.” This new relationship with sleep was a miracle to me.

“Oh, yeah,” she said. “All your get-up-and-do-it goes to the baby. Right from the start you know who’s gonna be the boss.”

Those first few weeks are an unearthly season. From the outside you remain so ordinary, no one can tell from looking that you have experienced an earthquake of the soul. You’ve been torn asunder, invested with an ancient, incomprehensible magic. It’s the one thing we never quite get over: that we contain our own future.

I’d written this to Hallie in the pages of a bound notebook that would never be torn out or mailed. These letters stayed with me. I told her: it feels like somebody’s moved in. It’s a shock. You find you’re not the center of the universe, suddenly it’s all flipped over, you have it in you to be a parent. You’re not all that concerned any more with being someone’s child. It helps you forgive things.

We reached the crest of the canyon where the white salt crust of the old alfalfa fields began. Dead for two decades, the earth was long and white and cracked, like a huge porcelain platter dropped from the heavens. But now the rabbitbrush was beginning to grow here too, topped with brushy gold flowers, growing like a renegade crop in the long, straight troughs of the old irrigation ditches.

A wind was picking up from the south, and Viola and I could smell rain. High storm clouds with full sails and a cargo of hail made their way in a hurry across the sky. Viola’s hair blew around her face as she walked. I asked, “Did you know her kidneys had failed her once before, when she was pregnant with me?”

“Sure,” Viola said. “She was real sick both times.”

“But she went ahead and had Hallie anyway.”

“You don’t think about it that much. You just go on and have your kids.”

I wanted to believe my mother had thought about it. That Hallie was her last considered act of love-an act with unforeseen consequences, some of them just now coming into flower in the soil of another country. I said, “I always knew I was up here that day. I can remember seeing the helicopter.”

“You remember that?”

“I thought I did. But people told me I hadn’t, so I’d about decided I’d made it up.”

Viola took my hand. I could feel the soft flesh and the hard wedding band in her grip. “No, if you remember something, then it’s true,” she said. “In the long run, that’s what you’ve got.”

I knew the place when we came to it. We were right there already.

This is what I remember: Viola is holding my hand. We’re at the edge of the field, far from other people. We stand looking out into the middle of that ocean of alfalfa. I can see my mother there, a small white bundle with nothing left, and I can see that it isn’t a tragedy we’re watching, really. Just a finished life. The helicopter is already in the air and it stays where it is, a clear round bubble with no destination, sending out circular waves of wind that beat down the alfalfa. People duck down, afraid, as if they’re being visited by a plague or a god. Their hair is blowing. Then the helicopter tilts a little and the glass body catches the sun. For an instant it hangs above us, empty and bright, and then it rises like a soul.