Between Earth & Sky

by Karen Osborn

  At first I tried to retrieve the farmland, planting a field of alfalfa, irrigating the orchard and transplanting more saplings. I carefully designed a large vegetable garden. But I knew little about farming, and even with Anita’s advice, I let in too much water from the acequia or planted the seeds too close to the soil’s surface or forgot to account for the long dry months of June and July. I now work part time as a substitute teacher at the high school. I have given up cultivation, except for tending a small vegetable and flower garden next to the house, but I still spend much of my time outside, walking along the river or climbing up into the desert or chasing Julia across the yard. In the evenings I often meet with my neighbors to work on saving the valley.

  Anita must have already suffered several small strokes before I came that first time to see her. The morning I drove her to a nearby hospital after finding her semiconscious on the kitchen floor, she warned me to be careful that I didn’t drive over any small animals. She was especially worried about the tiny lizards that she kept seeing dart out between shadows or from the mirages of pooled water. “Slower,” she kept insisting, until I was afraid she would try to make me pull over and let her out to walk the long way through the desert heat.

  There was not much they could do for her at the hospital, and she refused to take the medicines they prescribed, boiling roots for herself instead. As the year went on, she had more difficulty walking and began mistaking me for her daughter. Some days she did not speak at all, and one winter evening she flung open the door, calling to her mother, whom she was sure she had seen bent over on a horse, riding across the field. “Her hair was still dark,” she marveled later. “All undone in the wind.”

  She seldom talked about Abigail. Once she told me her grandmother had continued to sew a dress for her each year, even after she was married and had children of her own. The stitches Abigail made by hand were as tiny and even as those made on a machine. Another story she told about her grandmother was how she had carried her up into the mountains in a wagon when her grandmother could no longer walk. “My grandmother begged me, and so I made a bed of quilts and pillows, and all morning we rode until we reached the top of the mesa. Then I had to wake her so that she could look out across the sky at the valley below.”

  Anita’s sons had both moved to the city some years before with their families. They came to visit on occasional weekends, clearly puzzled by my presence, the crazy easterner with some exaggerated claim of being a relative. At first they wanted me to leave, but later, confused and then relieved by Anita’s and Julia’s growing dependence on me, they seemed to accept that I had come to stay.

  That second spring after I came to New Mexico, Anita took me up into the mountains to see the place where the river separated to create the valley below. She had learned from her neighbors of the plan to build a dam there and wanted to show me the source of the valley’s water, the place where the dam would be constructed.

  It was a spot high up in the mountains, along the same ridgeline that cut into the mesa. Abigail, I knew, would have ridden to this spot on a horse, but we drove as far as the roads would allow and then got out and began to hike, following the dried ditches and old stream beds that led to the river.

  We were silent while hiking. I could not picture the land we walked on under a reservoir of water. Part of the valley also would be flooded, and the rest would become a desert. Anita slid down the deeply grooved path and waited for me to follow with Julia. “They take what they want,” she said. I was also afraid that somehow the government would be able to take away the valley.

  That afternoon we had walked the two-mile trail that led to the river, when clouds began to blossom across the wide sky, thick cottony white clouds followed by long strings of darker ones. “We should climb back to the car,” I yelled down to Anita as I stood with her granddaughter above the wide, swift river, which was the color of iron, a darker gray than the color the sky had turned. Anita slid precariously close to the water’s edge in her thick, dark skirts as I yelled again: “A storm’s coming.”

  Finally, I convinced her to climb back up the path to the road where we’d left my car. But the dried-up streams were steeper than I had realized when we’d slid down them and hard to negotiate with a child and an old woman. Anita kept sitting down to rest, her skirts spread out around her, telling me to go on ahead, and Julia was tired by now and crying to be carried. The dried streams were full of stones, and they slid out from under my shoes so that I was pulled back down towards the river. My foot turned in the deep crevices, and twice I painfully twisted my ankle.

  When lightning began to streak across the sky above us, I tried to get Anita to climb up out of the dried stream and walk on the higher ground, which was thick with brush, but there were so many cacti, with their long thorns, that we turned back. The rain hit all at once. I remember gripping Julia’s hand and pulling her with all my strength from the sudden water. When I held her beside me, high up on the crumbling bank as I could manage to climb, I looked down through the heavy rain and saw Anita, standing already knee deep in foaming water, her face turned into it as if she could see past the pounding torrent to what somewhere must have been the same turquoise sky that had stretched over the world most of her life.

  I nearly looked myself to see what was there beyond water, what light, what luminous rim of sky. “Anita,” I called to her, and “Anita, Anita, Anita,” until she twisted her body slowly towards the bank, her body bent, face full of confusion. “Come towards me and I’ll pull you up.”

  The clay bank was slick by now, partly washed away. After pushing Julia to higher ground, I slid down, hoping Anita would not turn from me in all that water, that she would know to move towards the bank.

  But she was already wading back down the dried stream, the way we had come. “Anita.” I tried the name over and over. I thought I saw her pause for a moment, hesitating before leaning back into the rain. And then I couldn’t find her in all that wilderness of water.

  Julia was where I had left her, curled beside the small tree, and I took her higher to wait under what shelter we could find among the rocks. When the storm ended, I would carry her along the top of the river, searching for her grandmother. But it would be three days before they would find Anita’s body downstream, washed to the bank of the river that eventually ran through her land.

  I’ve asked myself many times why I agreed to take an old woman and a child down a steep mountainside, why I didn’t realize that a storm could come with such speed. Sometimes I think that I was too much in awe of her, for I was so sure she knew the desert and the mountains and the valley, I believed she was strong and brave enough to keep us from any storm. But perhaps, I tell myself, she wanted to be taken that way, by the land and sky, instead of some sudden flash of light that would come from inside her.

  I have lived in New Mexico for three years now. Julia is six years old, a quiet child who knows how to roast chiles and bake bollitos and sing with the wind that comes across the desert. In the summer she likes to plant flowers and tomatoes and peppers. She likes to pick fruit with me, climbing up into trees thick with the sky that mixes with the green leaves. And she likes to draw with markers or paint with temperas on the large sheets of paper I lay out for her. When she is older, I will read Abigail’s letters to her and try to explain how they are tied to the story of how I became her mother.

  There are missing pieces to the story told in the letters. Before she died, Anita told me that her mother had returned in 1932, two years after Abigail’s death, and had stayed with Anita until she died. Margaret was underweight, with gray skin and sunken cheeks, older looking than her sixty-seven years, and no one could understand how she had been able to survive the trip to the valley. She had been living in Mexico for a number of years, but beyond this Anita knew nothing of where her mother had lived or whom she had lived with or how she had made her living.

  For nearly two years, Margaret wandered about the house, sometimes most of the night, in her sleep
. During the day, she slept or sat in a chair, talking, singing, laughing. She would become suddenly lucid, telling of a lover who had abused her or a dress that needed mending. Anita’s children feared her as if she were a ghost.

  When Margaret died, they buried her in the family burial plot near the river, under the tall cottonwoods. I have seen the plot with the markers for Clayton and Abigail, Patricia and Margaret. There is a small stone with no name, which I believe marks the grave of the baby Abigail lost. When Anita died she was buried beside her husband in the graveyard next to the Catholic church.

  I’ve asked my grandmother what happened to George. About the year 1920, George bought a small ranch in northern New Mexico. My grandmother believed he kept a small herd of cattle and had a couple of younger ranch hands that worked for him. Fifteen years later, my grandmother’s mother, Amy, learned that George had disappeared one summer afternoon. No one was sure where he had gone. A ranch hand said that George had ridden out during a drought to see that the herd had enough water and had never come back. There were rumors that he had ridden off into the hills, that he had been sick, that he had simply disappeared in the hot, dry air, become one with the dull, flesh-colored landscape.

  Not as much land exists around the house anymore, as Abigail sold some of it, and Anita gave away whatever her children or her husband’s brothers and sisters asked for. But there is still a garden behind the house, and I’ve replanted the bougainvillea and the verbena and hibiscus.

  In the mornings and evenings I like to walk with Julia along the river that runs close to our house, and often we climb up into the mountains and look out at the horizon, where the sky draws a darker line against the land. I remind myself that time is not like light that fills the wide sky. It is more like water, which can dwindle to a thin stream, then overflow, gushing madly, and it can be cut off now that we have the technology to try to control it.

  This many years after Abigail’s death, parts of the landscape still remain unchanged. From the house I can look out the window and see Abigail’s mesa. Some nights, at the edge of sleep, I tell myself that in the morning I will once more ride out to see it.

  Acknowledgments

  I would like to thank Jane Gelfman for her continuing support of my work and her sense of vision, and Claire Wachtel for her numerous readings, her accurate eye, and her belief in the book that this would become.

  Thank you also to the Kentucky Arts Council and the Kentucky Foundation for Women for their generuos grants; to Linda Osborn, Marcia Hurlow, Jeff Worley, Mike Jenkins, and Ken Osborn for their insight and encouragement; and to the following sources that helped me to learn about pioneer life and the Southwest:

  Far from Home: Families of the Westward Journey, by Lillian Schlissel, Byrd Gibbons, and Elizabeth Hampsten; The Lore of New Mexico, by Marta Weigle and Peter White; The Good Life: New Mexico Traditions and Food, by Fabiola Cabeza de Baca Gilbert; New Mexican Folklore of the Rio Abajo, by Tibo J. Chavez; Women and Indians on the Frontier, 1825—1915, by Glenda Riley; Mollie: The Journal of Mollie Dorsey Sanford in Nebraska and Colorado Territories, 1857—1866 (Introduction by Donald F. Danker); New Mexico: A History of Four Centuries, by Warren A. Beck.

  About the Author

  PHOTOGRAPH BY GAYE PISTEL

  Karen Osborn is the author of Patchwork, which was named a Notable Book of the Year by The New York Times Book Review. An award-winning poet whose work has appeared in numerous literary magazines, she lives with her husband and two daughters in Amherst, Massachusetts.

  Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.

  Praise

  De la tierra al cielo no hay nada oculto.

  Between earth and sky there are no secrets.

  Copyright

  Copyright © 1996 by Karen Osborn

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Osborn, Karen.

  Between earth and sky / Karen Osborn.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-688-I4I23-4

  EPub Edition © NOVEMBER 2012 ISBN: 9780062262523

  I. Title.

  PS3565.S385B47 1996

  813'.54—dc20

  95-10948

  CIP

  Printed in the United States of America

  First Edition

  2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

  BOOK DESIGN BY LINDA KOCUR

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