Barbara Kingsolver (30 page)

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.

T
he 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.

G
etting 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.