It was a good stable, kept clean, and it was run by a man named Tomas, who had gotten tomato seeds from Grandma Harken on three separate occasions. This was a rare benediction, and he was careful not to take it for granted.
“I need your old mule,” Grandma Harken told him. “The one I like to ride.”
Tomas looked at her, gazed briefly heavenward, and said, “That mule died five years ago, Abuela Harken.”
Grandma blinked. “What’d he die of?”
“Old age,” said Tomas, who was always extremely respectful but had a sense of humor anyway.
“Huh!”
After a minute she said, “What’s the next oldest mule you got?”
“I’ve got a young mule,” said Tomas, “who’s as polite a girl as you’ll ever meet. And you are welcome to ride her, Abuela.”
“I like the old ones,” said Grandma, disgruntled.
“She’ll get old in due time.”
Grandma glared at him. Tomas contrived to look innocent.
“Fine,” said Grandma. “But she better have good manners.”
“She has better manners than my sons, Abuela.”
Grandma muttered to herself. Tomas had two sons, who were polite and respectful and built like bulls and who would spend hours splitting firewood for an old lady. These were things you learned to appreciate when you were Grandma Harken’s age.
The mule was indeed very well-mannered. She pricked her ears up and lipped delicately at Grandma’s sleeve.
“Good girl,” said Grandma, petting her nose. “Is she smart?” she asked Tomas.
“She’s a mule.”
“I’ve known some stupid mules.”
“A stupid mule is still smarter than a good horse or a bad man.”
Grandma sighed. It can be annoying when other people are right.
She loaded water bottles onto the mule and climbed on.
The mule waited politely—Is this everything? That’s all?—then set out. Grandma clicked her tongue and flipped the reins, setting her on the road to the next town over.
The one that had a train station.
The desert was full of strange things, but the trains were some of the strangest.
When white men came to lay iron rails across the land, the land didn’t take kindly to it. The train tracks looked too much like chains. The land brought heat and death and disease, and work on the rails slowed to a crawl.
“So they brought us to die instead,” said Grandma’s friend Anna. “From Canton to San Francisco and out to here.” She swept her hands when she said it, taking in the province across the ocean that she had never seen, and the desert where she had lived all her life.
That was the truth of history. Hundreds came and thousands died and hundreds more came to replace them. The blood of Anna’s people had bathed every inch of the rails.
When the train-gods woke, it was no wonder who they chose to be their priests. Chinese, black, Irish—even a Cornish woman way up north, where the snow piled up everywhere but on the tracks. People who had, with toil and tears, earned the gods’ regard.
It had made a lot of big money men back east furious. They thought they’d owned the railroads. They had the pull to get the army brought out to try and bring the machines back under their control.
The train-gods only had to eat a couple of regiments before they realized their mistake.
Lotta damn foolishness, Grandma Harken thought. People ought to be a lot quicker to listen to each other and a little slower to listen to something that calls itself a god.
She wouldn’t have said that out loud, though. She didn’t want it getting back to a train, or worse yet, to Anna.
Anyway, the system worked. You could get a train from one side of the country to the other, though it wasn’t always the same train or even the same country out the windows. Freight got moved, more or less. Sometimes it wound up in the wrong place or was summarily dumped in the middle of nowhere. The machines were capricious gods. (This was part of the reason for the price of coffee.)
They were very good about letters, though. Anna’s grandson was the current train-priest, and he said that his god thought letters were prayers and moved them as a kind of professional courtesy.
You appreciated that sort of thing in a god.
Grandma Harken could afford to be a little detached. Her people hadn’t been involved one way or the other. It had all been long, long before her time.
It’d been a good bit before Anna’s time too, truth be told, but Anna had an image to maintain.
Neither Anna nor any of her grandchildren could have said what bargain the train-gods struck with the desert, though.
That there was a bargain was undeniable. Grandma Harken herself had noticed that the tracks took some odd turns sometimes, to avoid a wash or a particular stone—turns that no human would have introduced to the line. And it was true that you could walk the rails until you died of thirst, and you’d never see the shadow of a saguaro lying over the tracks.
What it all meant, though, Grandma left for others to decide. The bargain was between the desert and the trains, and no business of any mortal creature at all.
Anna looked old. She was younger than Grandma Harken—probably—but neither of them were quick to compare.
She lived in a house alongside the train station. It was an old adobe, same as all the other houses in town, but it had a brightly painted balcony on the second floor and faded lanterns hung from the ends of the corner beams.
One of her grandchildren—or great-grandchildren, Grandma wasn’t sure, and after the bit with the mule, she’d rather not find out—opened the carved wooden door and let Grandma Harken inside. Anna was sitting in a chair in one corner of the room, her feet up on a stool.
“Harken?” she said. “Is that you, you old jackrabbit?”
“Last I looked,” said Grandma Harken. “You still alive?”
“Looks that way. Come in.” She waved to the grandchild and a chair was produced. “What brings you here?”
“Need an answer, and maybe a favor.”
Anna raised an eyebrow. She had very little left in the way of eyebrows, but her face was so wrinkled that the gesture remained effective. “If you’ve come to ask for a train to fetch your grandson home, I’d advise against it.”
“Lord, no!”
Anna relaxed. “Glad to hear it. I’m still surprised we didn’t have some broody little babies around here nine months later.”
“He didn’t brood as a baby.” Grandma paused, remembering. “Well. Much.”
Anna laughed.
“Sit, sit. Have you eaten? Are you thirsty?”
The answers to these questions were completely immaterial—food and tea would be forthcoming anyway. Grandma Harken let herself sink into the comfort of Anna’s hospitality.
She’d brought along a half-dozen nearly ripe tomatoes. Now that she’d finally eaten one, they weren’t so precious to her.
The tomatoes were duly admired and whisked away into the kitchen. Tea was drunk, then more tea, and then Grandma Harken held up her hands and said, “No more, Anna, I’m begging you. I’ll explode.”
Anna laughed. “All right. You came for an answer, then.”
Grandma nodded.
“A woman,” she said. “Turned into a mockingbird, from up past Gila way.”
Anna tilted her head. “Not one of mine.”
“Wouldn’t think so. But some kind of enchanter’s got her bound up with a silver cuff through her tongue, and I aim to break her loose if I can. She called it a ‘he’ but that’s all I know.”
She sat back, and glanced at the windows out of habit.
“Nothing out there can hear you,” said Anna. “Or if it could, it’s so big that you shouldn’t be tangling with it anyhow.” She flicked her fingers. “Sounds interesting, but what do you need with the Mother of Trains?”
Grandma told her about the tracks.
“I could go over every inch of the desert and miss it if somebody
folded the world up the wrong way,” she said. “Trains don’t care about folds.”
“They run in three worlds,” said Anna distantly. “We will not talk about the fourth. If there is anything to be seen, the train-gods will see it.”
She gestured, and the grandchild appeared. Grandma Harken took the time to finally look at the child—a girl, delicate as a quail, probably older than she looked. “Go and get your uncle,” Anna said. “Tell him we will be at the station shortly, with a question.”
The girl nodded and padded away.
Anna watched her go. Someone would have to have known her as long as Grandma Harken to notice the sudden smoothing of a line between her eyes, as if she had found an answer that eluded her.
“The next priest?” asked Grandma.
“I wouldn’t wish it on her,” said Anna wearily. “She’s got desert in her, not steel.”
Grandma nodded. She was something of an authority on the subject.
“I’ll send her to you,” said Anna.
“Like hell you will!” Grandma scowled over her tea. “I don’t need a girl and I’m hard to live with. And I’ll probably die running after mockingbirds.”
“Then you’ll want somebody to point to where the body fell,” said Anna. She waved a hand. “Not now. Later. Soon, I think, but not yet. After you’ve dealt with this foolishness, perhaps.”
“I said—”
“You get your answer and she gets a teacher,” said Anna. “Fair trade.”
Grandma Harken glowered, but she knew that Anna had her in a hard place. And the girl like a quail needed … something.
“She broke her arm when she was small,” said Anna quietly. “She’s got cholla ribs for bones. We didn’t let the doctor see. I set it myself.”
Grandma sucked the air in between her teeth. That was immense power and vulnerability, all at once. That was a child that should never be taken out of the desert.
That was someone a little more like Grandma Harken than either of them were like fully human folk.
“Dammit, Anna …”
“Dammit, yourself.”
Anna’s grandson Jun was a slender man with apologetic eyes. He clasped his hands together and bowed over them to Grandma Harken. “How may I assist you, Grandmother?”
It felt awkward to be formal with a man you’d seen in diapers, but Grandma Harken had come to speak to a train-priest, not talk about how much he’d grown in the last forty years. She nodded to him. “Appreciate it, Jun. Looking to see if the train’s gone past anything strange.”
They stood in the station itself, not the main platform, but the small room before it where the train priest spoke to the engines.
There was no train there now, which was a relief. A train was like having a thunderstorm in the room with you, and having a priest around made it worse.
Jun smiled ruefully. “The trains go past many strange things, Grandmother.”
“One in particular, then,” said Grandma, and set out to describe the place where the world was folded and the train tracks ran through it.
Jun listened. He listened intently, with his eyes closed, and Grandma had to fight to keep from shivering.
Passing right through him to something else. It ain’t natural.
And then, because she had to be fair: Lot of good things ain’t natural. Most of ‘em just don’t rub your face in it.
She finished describing it and waited.
“Yesssss …” said Jun, and there was a hiss of brake lines in it. “Yessss, I ssee.”
He opened his eyes. Grandma’d seen it once before, so she didn’t take a step back, even if a good chunk of her skin wanted to.
It was nothing so dramatic as the color changing. It was only that there was something else in his eyes, something that wasn’t human or even close to it. When he blinked, his eyelids came down like the door to the firebox slamming shut.
“Along the line,” he said. “North and west and north again. There are five saguaros together. There is a hill of stones. There is a dwelling of the used-up people. There is a person there.” He nodded twice, with his eyes still closed. “There is nothing else for many miles.”
“This person,” said Grandma Harken, “he’s folding the world?”
Sweat was beginning to trickle down Jun’s face. She could feel the heat radiating off him. “There is a person. There is a bend in the track. There is a bend in the track.”
“Does that mean—”
“There is a bend in the track.”
Anna put a hand on Grandma’s arm and shook her head.
Grandma bowed to her friend’s experience. “Thank you,” she said.
The train-god, through Jun, said “Yesssss …” and it trailed away into the distance as the god went away again.
Jun stood for a moment, trembling like a horse that has run a hard race, then let out his breath in a long sigh. When he opened his eyes, they were only human dark.
“Can you tell me what it meant by there is a bend in the track?” asked Grandma.
Jun took out a cloth and wiped his head. “It’s hard to say,” he said. “Probably there’s really a bend, but repeating it like that …” He shook his head. “They fixate on odd things. That was the Mariposa. It’s not the clearest of the trains. Leviathan was better, but Leviathan has stopped speaking. The other trains say that it’s waiting for something.”
This was alarming, but also nothing to do with Grandma Harken. She made a mental note to order more coffee, though, in case the trains were planning to run mad.
They left the station. Jun came with them, not sweating now, shivering as if it were midnight in the desert instead of noon. Anna sent another grandchild to get him tea and put a blanket around his shoulders herself.
“Worth it?” she asked Grandma.
“I hope so,” said Grandma. “Thank you, Jun.”
The girl with bones made of cholla ribs said, “Who are the used-up people?”
“Hohokam,” said Grandma, which was a thing she hadn’t known she knew until she said it. “The ones who built all the canals. That’s what their name means, the used-up ones. Our enchanter’s squatting in some ruins, I guess.”
“Do you think he’s Hohokam, then?” asked Anna.
“Not unless he’s a thousand years old,” said Grandma. “Which I can’t rule out entirely. I’ll be going. Jun, thank you, and you too, Anna.” Her eyes slid over the cholla-bone girl and she nodded once and took her leave.
She rode back to Tomas’s stable with her mind full of shards, like a shattered clay pot. The Hohokam were all jumbled up with the trains and the folded world and the girl and the mockingbird.
Well, no matter. Things would sort themselves out. She’d know what she had to know when she needed it.
“Or I’ll get caught with my pants around my ankles,” she said to the mule’s ears, “and I’ll die with a stupid expression on my face. I suppose that counts as getting sorted out, though.”
The mule flicked her ears, but did not comment.
“I suppose I better try not to die,” she said after a little while. “That girl of Anna’s is gonna need some teaching.”
She tried to think about what she could teach anyone, let alone a girl who was already part of the desert, and the thought was overwhelming. She hadn’t been all that good with her own baby, and Eva had been as good and placid and easy a child as any born.
It was late when she reached the stable. A light burned in the window, though, and after a moment the door slammed, and one of Tomas’s sons came out to meet her.
“You didn’t have to stay up,” she said. “I might’ve been gone days.”
“We would have stayed up for you, Abuela Harken,” said Tomas’s son. He looped the mule’s reins over his hand and led her into her stall.
There was nothing much to say to kindness, particularly when you suspect that it’s because you’re old. Grandma walked the rest of the way, to the house with its back like the desert.
“At least
I’ll get one more night in my own bed,” she said. “With my own Spook-cat on the pillow. Can’t ask for more than that.”
In the end she got two more nights. The garden was wreathed in beans and the little green husks of tomatillos were beginning to dangle from the sprawling plants. They needed staking. If Grandma Harken had known beyond a shadow of a doubt that she was going to die tomorrow, she would still have staked up the tomatillos and harvested the beans.
She had two ripe tomatoes and she ate them both, on bread with salt, and they were perfect.
On the morning of the second day, she got up before dawn. She petted Spook-cat, which first alarmed, and then delighted him. She strapped water bottles to herself like a bandolier and filled her pockets with sage and cigarettes; she put on her good boots and wrote a note for her daughter that said “I love you,” and then she closed the garden gate behind her and walked into the desert.
The pre-dawn air was sharp and gray and seamless. There were no mockingbirds to light her way. Still, here, she didn’t need them. This was a landscape she knew as well as she knew her own name.
The folds in the world that had gone out from the mockingbird’s wings had settled now, a paper ball crumpled and then smoothed out again. There were still small ridges here and there. Grandma Harken could see them if she looked—the shadow of a palo verde tree that fell a handspan too short, a place where, for an instant, there were two moons in the sky. But these were small things.
She reached the train tracks as the sun came up. It dyed the rails rose and chrome. Grandma Harken stood, thoughtful, and took a long drink of water.
“All right,” she muttered to herself. “All right. If I were a train …”
It was dangerous to walk on train tracks now. A train could appear out of nowhere, skipping from one world to the next, and give you only a bare moment of warning.
Still, it was no more dangerous than anything else. She cleared her throat and spoke to the rails: “The Mother of Trains knows my name.”
There was no overt acknowledgement. She hadn’t expected one. She stepped up onto the rails and began to walk between them. Her boots made a satisfying clomping sound on the railroad ties.
Jackalope Wives And Other Stories Page 16