The Bean Trees

by Barbara Kingsolver

  In June a package came from Montana, all cheery and colorful with stamps and purple postage marks. It contained, among other things, a pair of child-sized cowboy boots--still years too big for Dwayne Ray--and a beautiful calfskin belt for Lou Ann. It was carved or stamped somehow with acorns, oak leaves, and her name. There was also a red-and-black Indian-beaded hair clip, which was of course no use to Lou Ann at this particular point in the life of her hair.

  Angel had changed his mind about the divorce. He missed her. He wanted her to come up and live in Montana in something called a yurt. If that was not an acceptable option, then he would come back to Tucson to live with her.

  "What in the heck is a yurt anyway?" Lou Ann asked. "It sounds like dirt."

  "Beats me," I said. "Look it up."

  She did. "A circular domed tent of skins stretched over a lattice framework," she read, pronouncing each word slowly without a Kentucky accent. She pronounced "a" like the letter "A." "Used by the Mongol nomads of Siberia."

  As they say in the papers, I withheld comment.

  "So what do you think, Taylor? Do you think it would have a floor, or plaster walls inside, anything like that? Think the bugs would get in?"

  What popped into my head was: George eats old gray rutabagas and plasters his yurt.

  "The part I can't get over is that he asked for me," she said. "He actually says here that he misses me." She mulled it over and over, twisting her gold wedding band around her finger. She had stopped wearing it about the time she started working at the salsa factory, but now had put it on again, almost guiltily, as though Angel might have packed a spy into the box along with the belt and the boots.

  "But I've got responsibilities now," she argued, with herself certainly because I was giving no advice one way or the other. "At Red Hot Mama's."

  This was surely true. In just three weeks' time she had been promoted to floor manager, setting some kind of company record, but she refused to see this as proof that she was a good worker. "They just didn't have anybody else to do it," she insisted. "Practically everybody there's fifteen years old, or worse. Sometimes they send over retardeds from that Helpless program, or whatever the heck it's called."

  "It's called the Help-Yourself program, and you know it, so don't try to change the subject. The word is handicapped, not retardeds."

  "Right, that's what I meant."

  "What about that woman you told me about that breeds Pekingeses and drives a baby-blue Trans Am? What's-her-name, that gave you the I Heart My Cat bumper stickers? And what about the guy that's building a hot-air blimp in his backyard? Are they fifteen?"

  "No." She was flipping the dictionary open and closed, staring out the window.

  "And Sal Monelli, how old's he?"

  Lou Ann rolled her eyes. Sal Monelli was an unfortunate fellow whose name had struck such terror in her heart she forbade him to touch any food item that wasn't sealed and crated. Lou Ann's life was ruled by the fear of salmonella, to the extent that she claimed the only safe way to eat potato salad was to stick your head in the refrigerator and eat it in there.

  "He actually wants me to go," she kept repeating, and even though she said she wasn't going to make up her mind right away, I felt in my bones that sooner or later she'd go. If I knew Lou Ann, she would go.

  It seemed like the world was coming apart at the gussets. Mattie was gone more than she was home these days, "bird-watching." Terry, the red-haired doctor, had moved to the Navajo reservation up north (to work, not because he had head rights). Father William looked like he had what people in Pittman call a case of the nerves.

  The last time I'd really had a chance to talk with Mattie, she'd said there was trouble in the air. Esperanza and Estevan were going to have to be moved to a safe house farther from the border. The two best possibilities were Oregon and Oklahoma.

  Flat, hopeless Oklahoma. "What would happen if they stayed here?" I asked.

  "Immigration is making noises. They could come in and arrest them, and they'd be deported before you even had time to sit down and think about it."

  "Here?" I asked. "They would come into your house?"

  Mattie said yes. She also said, as I knew very well, that in that case Estevan's and Esperanza's lives wouldn't be worth a plugged nickel.

  "That just can't be right," I said, "that they would do that to a person, knowing they'd be killed. There's got to be some other way."

  "The only legal way a person from Guatemala can stay here is if they can prove in court that their life was in danger when they left."

  "But they were, Mattie, and you know it. You know what happened to them. To Esperanza's brother, and all." I didn't say, To their daughter. I wondered if Mattie knew, but of course she would have to.

  "Their own say-so is no good; they have to have hard proof. Pictures and documents." She picked up a whitewall and I thought she was going to throw it across the lot, but she only hoisted it onto the top of a pile beside me. "When people run for their lives they frequently neglect to bring along their file cabinets of evidence," she said. Mattie wasn't often bitter but when she was, she was.

  I didn't want to believe the world could be so unjust. But of course it was right there in front of my nose. If the truth was a snake it would have bitten me a long time ago. It would have had me for dinner.

  TWELVE

  Into the Terrible Night

  At three o'clock in the afternoon all the cicadas stopped buzzing at once. They left such an emptiness in the air it hurt your ears. Around four o'clock we heard thunder. Mattie turned over the "Closed" sign in the window and said, "Come on. I want you to smell this."

  She wanted Esperanza to come too, and surprisingly she agreed. I went upstairs to phone Edna and Mrs. Parsons, though I practically could have yelled to them across the park, to say I'd be home later than usual. Edna said that was fine, just fine, the kids were no trouble, and we prepared to leave. At the last minute it turned out that Estevan could come too; he had the night off. The restaurant was closed for some unexpected family celebration. We all piled into the cab of Mattie's truck with Esperanza on Estevan's lap and me straddling the stick shift. The three of us had no idea where we were headed, or why, but the air had sparks in it. I felt as though I had a blind date with destiny, and someone had heard a rumor that destiny looked like Christopher Reeve.

  Mattie said that for the Indians who lived in this desert, who had lived here long before Tucson ever came along, today was New Year's Day.

  "What, July the twelfth?" I asked, because that's what day it was, but Mattie said not necessarily. They celebrated it on whatever day the summer's first rain fell. That began the new year. Everything started over then, she said: they planted their crops, the kids ran naked through the puddles while their mothers washed their clothes and blankets and everything else they owned, and they all drank cactus-fruit wine until they fell over from happiness. Even the animals and plants came alive again when the drought finally broke.

  "You'll see," Mattie said. "You'll feel the same way."

  Mattie turned onto a gravel road. We bounced through several stream beds with dry, pebbled bottoms scorched white, and eventually pulled over on high ground about a mile or so out of town. We picked our way on foot through the brush to a spot near a grove of black-trunked mesquite trees on the very top of the hill.

  The whole Tucson Valley lay in front of us, resting in its cradle of mountains. The sloped desert plain that lay between us and the city was like a palm stretched out for a fortuneteller to read, with its mounds and hillocks, its life lines and heart lines of dry stream beds.

  A storm was coming up from the south, moving slowly. It looked something like a huge blue-gray shower curtain being drawn along by the hand of God. You could just barely see through it, enough to make out the silhouette of the mountains on the other side. From time to time nervous white ribbons of lightning jumped between the mountaintops and the clouds. A cool breeze came up behind us, sending shivers along the spines of the mesquite trees.r />
  The birds were excited, flitting along the ground and perching on thin, wildly waving weed stalks.

  What still amazed me about the desert was all the life it had in it. Hillbilly that I was, I had come to Arizona expecting an endless sea of sand dunes. I'd learned of deserts from old Westerns and Quickdraw McGraw cartoons. But this desert was nothing like that. There were bushes and trees and weeds here, exactly the same as anywhere else, except that the colors were different, and everything alive had thorns.

  Mattie told us the names of things, but the foreign words rolled right back out of my ears. I only remembered a few. The saguaros were the great big spiny ones, as tall as normal trees but so skinny and personlike that you always had the feeling they were looking over your shoulder. Around their heads, at this time of year, they wore crowns of bright red fruits split open like mouths. And the ocotillos were the dead-looking thorny sticks that stuck up out of the ground in clusters, each one with a flaming orange spike of flower buds at its top. These looked to me like candles from hell.

  Mattie said all the things that looked dead were just dormant. As soon as the rains came they would sprout leaves and grow. It happened so fast, she said, you could practically watch it.

  As the storm moved closer it broke into hundreds of pieces so that the rain fell here and there from the high clouds in long, curving gray plumes. It looked like maybe fifty or sixty fires scattered over the city, except that the tall, smoky columns were flowing in reverse. And if you looked closely you could see that in some places the rain didn't make it all the way to the ground. Three-quarters of the way down from the sky it just vanished into the dry air.

  Rays of sunlight streamed from between the clouds, like the Holy Ghost on the cover of one of Mattie's dead husband's magazines. Lightning hit somewhere nearby and the thunder made Esperanza and me jump. It wasn't all that close, really, about two miles according to Mattie. She counted the seconds between the lightning strike and the thunder. Five seconds equaled one mile, she told us.

  One of the plumes of rain was moving toward us. We could see big drops spattering on the ground, and when it came closer we could hear them, as loud as pebbles on a window. Coming fast. One minute we were dry, then we were being pelted with cold raindrops, then our wet shirts were clinging to our shoulders and the rain was already on the other side of us. All four of us were jumping and gasping because of the way the sudden cold took our breath away. Mattie was counting out loud between the lightning and thunderclaps: six, seven, boom!...four, five, six, boom! Estevan danced with Esperanza, then with me, holding his handkerchief under his arm and then twirling it high in the air--it was a flirtatious, marvelous dance with thunder for music. I remembered how he and I had once jumped almost naked into an icy stream together, how long ago that seemed, and how innocent, and now I was madly in love with him, among other people. I couldn't stop laughing. I had never felt so happy.

  That was when we smelled the rain. It was so strong it seemed like more than just a smell. When we stretched out our hands we could practically feel it rising up from the ground. I don't know how a person could ever describe that scent. It certainly wasn't sour, but it wasn't sweet either, not like a flower. "Pungent" is the word Estevan used. I would have said "clean." To my mind it was like nothing so much as a wonderfully clean, scrubbed pine floor.

  Mattie explained that it was caused by the greasewood bushes, which she said produced a certain chemical when it rained. I asked her if anybody had ever thought to bottle it, it was so wonderful. She said no, but that if you paid attention you could even smell it in town. That you could always tell if it was raining in any part of the city.

  I wondered if the smell was really so great, or if it just seemed that way to us. Because of what it meant.

  It was after sunset when we made our way back to the truck. The clouds had turned pink, then blood red, and then suddenly it was dark. Fortunately Mattie, who was troubled by night-blindness, had thought to bring a flashlight. The night was full of sounds--bird calls, a high, quivery owl hoot, and something that sounded like sheep's baahs, only a hundred times louder. These would ring out from the distance and then startle us by answering right from under our feet. Mattie said they were spadefoot toads. All that noise came from something no bigger than a quarter. I would never have believed it, except that I had seen cicadas.

  "So how does a toad get into the middle of the desert?" I wanted to know. "Does it rain toad frogs in Arizona?"

  "They're here all along, smarty. Burrowed in the ground. They wait out the dry months kind of dead-like, just like everything else, and when the rain comes they wake up and crawl out of the ground and start to holler."

  I was amazed. There seemed to be no end to the things that could be hiding, waiting it out, right where you thought you could see it all.

  "Jeez," I said, as one of them let out a squall next to my sneaker.

  "Only two things are worth making so much noise about: death and sex," Estevan said. He had the devil in him tonight. I remembered a dream about him from a few nights before, one that I had not until that minute known I'd had. A very detailed dream. I felt a flush crawling up my neck and was glad for the dusk. We were following Mattie's voice to keep to the trail, concentrating on avoiding the embrace of spiny arms in the darkness.

  "It's all one to a toad," Mattie said. "If it's not the one, it's the other. They don't have long to make hay in weather like this. We might not get another good rain for weeks. By morning there'll be eggs in every one of these puddles. In two days' time, even less, you can see tadpoles. Before the puddles dry up they've sprouted legs and hit the high road."

  We were following behind Mattie in single file now, holding to one another's damp sleeves and arms in the darkness. All at once Esperanza's fingers closed hard around my wrist. The flashlight beam had found a snake, just at eye level, its muscular coils looped around a smooth tree trunk.

  "Better step back easy, that's a rattler," Mattie said in a calm voice. With the flashlight she followed the coils to the end and pointed out the bulbs on the tail, as clear and fragile-looking as glass beads. The rattle was poised upright but did not shake.

  "I didn't know they could get up in trees," I said.

  "Sure, they'll climb. After birds' eggs."

  A little noise came from my throat. I wasn't really afraid, but there is something about seeing a snake that makes your stomach tighten, no matter how you make up your mind to feel about it.

  "Fair's fair," Mattie pointed out, as we skirted a wide path around the tree. "Everybody's got her own mouths to feed."

  I knew right away that something had gone wrong. Lou Ann was standing on the front porch waiting and she looked terrible, not just because she was under a yellow light bulb. She had been crying, possibly screaming--her mouth looked stretched. She wasn't even supposed to be home yet.

  I ran up the sidewalk, almost tripping twice on the steps. "What is it? Are you okay?"

  "It's not me. Taylor, I'm so sorry to have to tell you this. I'm so sorry, Taylor. It's Turtle."

  "Oh God, no." I went past her into the house.

  Edna Poppy was sitting on the sofa with Turtle in her lap, all in one piece as far as I could see, but Turtle was changed. All these months we had spent together were gone for her. I knew it from her eyes: two cups of black coffee. I remembered exactly, exactly, how the whites of her eyes had been thin slivers of moon around the dark centers, how they had glowed orange, on and off, with the blinking neon sign from that Godforsaken bar.

  I didn't go to her, because I couldn't. It is that simple. I didn't want any of this to be happening.

  Mrs. Parsons was standing in the kitchen door with a broom. "A bird has got into the house," she explained, and disappeared into the kitchen again, and for a confused second I thought she meant that this was the terrible thing that had happened.

  But Lou Ann was right behind me. "They were in the park, Edna and Turtle. It was so cool after the rain they thought they'd enjoy the air for
a little bit, and Virgie was to come tell them if it looked like another storm was coming. But Virgie didn't come, and Edna never realized it was getting dark."

  "So what happened." I was sick to my stomach.

  "We don't know, exactly. I've called the police and they're coming over with a medical examiner or a social worker or, Christ, I don't know, somebody that can talk to Turtle."

  "But what happened? How much do you know happened?"

  Edna's eyes looked more glassy than usual. I noticed, now that I looked at her, that her clothes were a little messed up. Just trances, the red sweater pulled down on one shoulder, a hole in her stocking.

  "I heard a peculiar sound," Edna said. She seemed almost in another world, a hypnotized person speaking out of a trance. "It sounded just like a bag of flour hitting the dirt. Turtle had been talking, or singing I suppose would be more like it, and then she was quiet, just didn't make a peep, but I heard struggling sounds. I called out, and then I swung my cane. Oh, I swung it high, so I wouldn't hit the baby. I know how tall she is." She held her hand just where Turtle's head would be, if she had been standing on the floor in front of Edna.

  "Did you hit anything?"

  "Oh, yes, dear. Yes. I don't know what, but something that had some--I'd say some give to it. Do you understand what I mean? Oh, and I shouted too, some terrible things. The next thing I knew, I felt a great heavy weight on the hem of my skirt, and that was Turtle."

  "It took us twenty minutes to get her to turn loose," Lou Ann said. Now she was holding on to Edna's sleeve instead of her hem.

  "Oh my dear, I feel terrible. If I had only thought to come in a little sooner."

  "It could have happened to anybody, Edna," Lou Ann said. "You couldn't have known what was going to happen, I might have done the exact same thing. You saved her, is what you did. Anybody else might have been scared to swing at him."

  Anybody else, I thought, might have seen he had a gun, or a knife.

  Someone knocked at the door and we all jumped. It was the police, of course, a small man who showed his detective badge and a woman who said she was a social worker, both of them dressed in ordinary clothes. Edna told what there was of her story again. The social worker was a prim-looking strawberry blonde who was carrying two rag dolls with yarn hair, a boy and a pigtail-girl. She asked if I was the mother. I nodded, a dumb animal, not really a mother, and she took me into the hallway.