When Hallie and I were very small we used to be allowed to participate in this celebration, with J.T.’s family. I wondered if Viola remembered having us in tow. In my own mind it was all vague; what I remembered best was the marigolds. Cempazuchiles, the flowers of the dead. I asked Viola about them.
“They come on the truck,” she answered cryptically.
“Do you remember when Hallie and I used to come up here with you?”
“Sure I do. You always ran all over the graves and messed up everything.” Viola didn’t pull her punches.
“Well, we were little,” I said defensively. “Doc Homer made us quit coming after a while. I remember that. I remember him saying, ‘Those great-grandmothers aren’t any of your business.’”
“Well, he was the boss.”
“Right. He was the boss.”
Emelina and the four older boys were marching ahead, but I was pushing the stroller over gravel and Viola was over sixty, so we both had an excuse to lag. We were a harvester-ant clan ourselves, burdened not only with flowers but with food and beer and soft drinks and sundry paraphernalia. John Tucker was carrying a new, largish St. Joseph for Viola’s husband’s grave. J.T. was still in El Paso, and Loyd was on a switch engine in Yuma, but we didn’t seem to need them all that much. It looked like a female holiday, what with the egg-carton flowers. A festival of women and children and old people and dead ancestors.
Viola stopped for breath, holding the bosom of her shiny black dress and looking down at the canyon. I waited with her, adjusting the red handkerchief Emelina had tied over Nicholas’s bald head to shield it from sun. As he vibrated over the corduroy road the kerchief kept slipping down over his eyes, and he looked like a drunken pirate. I bent over and looked into his face, upside-down. He enlightened me with a wicked pirate smile.
It was a spectacular day. The roadside was lined with bright yellow plumes of rabbitbrush, apparently too common a flower for anyone to take to a grave, but I liked them. I would try to remember to pick some on my way back down, to stick into the clay ollas around my house; I was determined to prove to Emelina that I wasn’t completely bereft of domestic instincts.
From where we stood we could look down on the whole of Grace plus the many small settlements that lay a little apart from the town, strung out along the length of Gracela Canyon and its tributaries, often inhabited by just a few families, some with their own tiny graveyards. These settlements were mostly abandoned now. A lot of them had been torn right up when Black Mountain chased a vein of copper under their floors; others had been buried; the company had an old habit of digging and dumping where it pleased. Grace’s huge main cemetery was located on the opposite side of the canyon, as far as possible from the mine, for exactly that reason. Not even the graveyards were sacred.
At the upstream end of the canyon we could also see the beginnings of the dam that would divert the river out Tortoise Canyon. There had been a ridiculous photo in the local paper: the company president and a couple of managers at a ground-breaking ceremony, wearing ties, stepping delicately on shovels with their wing-tip shoes. These men had driven down from Phoenix for the morning, and would drive right back. They all had broad salesmen’s smiles. They pretended the dam was some kind of community-improvement project, but from where Viola and I stood it looked like exactly what it was—a huge grave. Marigold-orange earth movers hunched guiltily on one corner of the scarred plot of ground.
“So what’s going to happen?” I asked Viola.
“The Lord in heaven knows,” she said.
I prodded. “Well, there was a meeting last night. Have you talked to anybody?”
“Oh, sure. The men on the council had another one of their big meetings about it and decided to have a lawsuit. A lawyer came up from Tucson to meet with Jimmy Soltovedas.”
Jimmy was the mayor. The town council had nothing to do with Black Mountain anymore; Grace wasn’t a company town in the classical sense, except for the fact that the company owned everything we walked on.
“What did the lawyer say?” In a moment of vanity I wondered if anyone had mentioned my affidavit. My line about “the approximate pH of battery acid” seemed like something a lawyer could gleefully quote.
“The lawyer said we might have grandfather rights to the water, and so we could have a class-action lawsuit to make the company give us back our river.”
“How long will that take?”
She shrugged. “Maybe ten years.”
“Ten years?”
“Right. In ten years we can all come back and water our dead trees.”
“Did anybody go to the newspapers to get some publicity about this? It’s ridiculous.”
“Jimmy called the newspapers half a dozen times. I talked to Jimmy’s wife. Nobody’s interested in a dipshit little town like Grace. They could drop an atom bomb down on us here and it wouldn’t make no news in the city. Unless it stirred up the weather over there and rained out a ball game or something.”
“So it’s a ten-year lawsuit.” I didn’t want to believe she was right, though her sources were always irreproachable. “Is that the only thing those guys can come up with against the Mountain?”
“Don’t call that company the Mountain,” she said curtly. “It makes it sound like something natural you can’t ever move.”
“I’ve heard the men call it that,” I said.
Viola snorted like an old horse and started up the hill.
When we arrived, half a dozen elderly men were putting a fresh coat of white paint on the wrought-iron fence around the huge cemetery. Wrought iron was a theme here; there were iron crosses and wreaths, and over some of the graves there were actual little iron houses, with roofs. Through the ups and downs of Black Mountain’s smelting plant, Grace had been home to a lot of out-of-work metalworkers.
Most families divided their time between the maternal and paternal lines, spending mornings on one set of graves and afternoons on the other. Emelina and the boys staked out the Domingos plot and set to work sweeping and straightening. One of the graves, a great-uncle of J.T.’s named Vigilancio Domingos, was completely bordered with ancient-looking tequila bottles, buried nose down. Mason and I spent half the morning gathering up the strays and resetting them all in the dirt, as straight as teeth. It was a remarkable aesthetic—I don’t mean just Uncle Vigilancio, but the whole. Some graves had shrines with niches peopled by saints; some looked like botanical gardens of paper and silk; others had the initials of loved ones spelled out on the mound in white stones. The unifying principle was that the simplest thing was done with the greatest care. It was a comfort to see this attention lavished on the dead. In these families you would never stop being loved.
The marigold truck arrived at ten o’clock. Women swarmed down on it like bees, coming away with armloads of floral gold. There were many theories on the best way to put them to use, or to make them go farthest. Viola, who directed the Domingos family operations, was of the deconstructionist school. She had the boys tear the flowers up and lay the petals down over a grave, blanketing it like a monochrome mosaic.
John Tucker stayed at his work but the twins wandered and Mason disappeared altogether. Emelina, wasn’t worried. “He’s refining his begging skills he learned on Halloween,” she said, and was probably right. Grandmothers everywhere, who at lunch had set out extra plates for the dead, were now indiscriminately passing out the sweet remains of their picnics.
By mid-afternoon Emelina felt we should send out a search party, “before he eats so many cookies he busts.” Viola volunteered, and I went with her, more or less as a tourist. I wanted to see what else there was in the line of beautified graves. We skirted Gonzalez and Castiliano and Jones, each family with its own style. Some were devotees of color or form, while others went for bulk. One grave, a boy who’d died young, was decorated with the better part of a Chevrolet. There were hundreds of holes drilled into the fishtail fenders, to hold flowers. It was beautiful, like a float in a parade.
The ce
metery covered acres. To the west of us were collections of small neglected mounds whose stones bore the names of families that had died out. “Trubee,” I read aloud, wandering toward the desert of the forgotten. “Alice, Anna, Marcus. Lomas: Hector, Esperanza, José, Angel, Carmela.”
“Honey, we better get back to where people are,” Viola cautioned, but I wandered on, as distracted in my way as Mason must have been, wherever he was.
“Nolina,” I shouted. “Look, here’s my long-lost relatives.”
Viola looked at me oddly from her distance across the graves.
“I’m kidding,” I said. We came from Illinois, as she well knew. “Here’s my Aunt Raquel, my aunt…something Maria.” Most of the graves were illegible, or so crudely marked there was nothing to read. Then I found one that stopped me dead.
“Viola. Here’s a Homero Nolina.”
“So it is,” she said, not really looking. “Son of a gun.”
I eyed her. “Do you know something about this?”
“What do you want me to tell you?”
“Who were the Nolinas?”
“Come on back away from there and I’ll tell you.”
I stood my ground.
“Honey, come on, let’s leave these dead folks alone. Nobody put any plates of food out for them for a long, long time. They’re not feeling so happy today.”
“Okay, but you have to tell me.”
She told me the Nolinas used to live up around Tortoise River, in the northern end of Gracela Canyon. There was a little settlement there that dispersed when the area was covered by mine tailings. The Nolinas had dug up what they could of the family graveyard and carried the bones a few miles to bury them up here. It wasn’t all that long ago, she said. Around 1950.
“I don’t know any Nolinas in Grace now,” I said.
“No, they’re about gone. They never did settle too good into Grace. The most of them went to Texas or somewhere, after their houses got tore up. They weren’t…” She stopped and took off her shoe, cocking her stockinged foot against her plump ankle while she examined the inside of it, then put it back on. “The Nolinas weren’t real accepted. They were kind of different all the way back. There was one of the Gracela sisters had auburn hair and a bad temper, and she married Conrado Nolina. They say that family went downhill.”
“They were trash, is what you’re telling me.”
“No. Just different.”
I followed behind her as she plodded along, dodging headstones. She was as intransigent, in her way, as Doc Homer. “So how come one of them has practically the same name as my father?”
“You better ask him that,” she said. “It’s his name.”
At that moment something hit me from behind like a torpedo, tackling me around the knees. It was Mason.
“Where have you been, pachuco? Your mama was worried to death about you,” Viola said. Mason had an enormous sucker ballooning under one cheek. He laughed, recognizing Viola’s scoldings as a bald-faced lie.
“I was at a birthday party,” he lied back.
It took a while to coax him back to the fold. There were an infinity of distractions: Calaveras, little skull-shaped candies for children to crack between their teeth. The promise of a chicken leg for a kiss. Little girls and boys played “makeup,” standing on tiptoe with their eyes closed and their arms at their sides, fingers splayed in anticipation, while a grownup used a marigold as a powder puff, patting cheeks and eyelids with gold pollen. Golden children ran wild over a field of dead great-grandmothers and great-grandfathers, and the bones must have wanted to rise up and knock together and rattle with joy. I have never seen a town that gave so much—so much of what counts—to its children.
More than anything else I wished I belonged to one of these living, celebrated families, lush as plants, with bones in the ground for roots. I wanted pollen on my cheeks and one of those calcium ancestors to decorate as my own. Before we left at sunset I borrowed a marigold from Emelina’s great-aunt Pocha, who wouldn’t miss it. I ran back to lay it on Homero Nolina, just in case.
HOMERO
15
Mistakes
He has to look at her for a long time before he trusts himself to speak. Who is this girl? His daughter Codi, but which Codi? He thinks.
“You look surprised.”
“You startled me. I wasn’t expecting anyone.” He was doing Mr. Garrison’s lab work, waiting for the centrifuge to spin down Mr. Garrison’s blood cells, and when he looked up she was standing in the doorway. He detests surprises.
“Pop, I called five minutes ago, to see if you were here. I told you I was coming. I came straight here. I spent the day up at the graveyard.”
She is leaning against the doorsill holding a bouquet of rabbitbrush and roadside weeds, showering the air with pollen like an old feather duster. She has on purple cowboy boots, which even now are damaging her arches.
“And now you are here,” he says carefully.
“I found a surprise in the graveyard, a headstone with a name on it you might recognize. Yours. Almost yours.”
“Perhaps I am dead.”
She stares. “Do we have relatives from here?”
Uda Dell gave those to her, to both girls, for Christmas: the boots and straw cowboy hats and holsters with cap guns, so that they could run like banshees around the house pretending to fill each other with imaginary bullet holes. He took the guns away, for the preservation of their souls, and the boots on account of their arches. He let them keep the hats.
The minute hand on the wall clock jumps and the centrifuge slows to a stop, clicking suggestively, like the wheel of fortune. Without its mechanical whine the lab is very quiet. He looks up again and she is still there in her stocking feet and red straw cowboy hat, its dark cord knotted under her chin. She understands about the guns, but she wants the boots back. She has come on behalf of herself and her sister, she says. Her left foot in its white sock curls under. Why is it that only girls stand on the sides of their feet? As if they’re afraid to plant themselves? Tears stream from her eyes.
He can’t relinquish either the guns or the boots. He wishes he could do all these things differently, but he can’t. He says, “I don’t think we need to discuss this any further.”
“Oh, come on, just tell me. Would it kill you to tell me?”
Startled, he looks again: she isn’t in stockinged feet, she has boots on. She is much too tall. He is confused and becomes angry. He has a glass vial of blood in his hands. This is his office. She didn’t need to sneak down here and startle him in his own doorway.
“I’m doing Mr. Garrison’s hematocrit,” he says. “I have a good bit more work to do.”
She sighs loudly. She must be fourteen. In a year she will be sullen and furtively pregnant. Or has that passed too? He doesn’t even look at her because there is too much there, and he’s afraid. She is his first child, his favorite, every mistake he ever made.
COSIMA
16
Bleeding Hearts
At the first sign of winter the trees began to die. Leaves and aborted fruits fell in thick, brittle handfuls like the hair of a cancer patient. The abundance of sun and warmth, which we thought would never end, had led the trees on too, promising the impossible. But now the daylight grew thin and they showed no will to live. A dead sea of leaves drifted deep and undisturbed on the orchard floors. No children played there.
I spent a lot of time considering the mystery of my family tree. I didn’t push the subject of the Nolinas, but I did ask people about my mother, whose leavings were scant. I’d grown up with only one sentence, repeated like a mantra: “It wasn’t childbirth she died of, it was organ failure.” I know this was meant to protect Hallie and me from guilt, but “organ failure,” in its way, was equally unhelpful: a pronouncement that reminded me of those doubtfully groomed children in school whose report cards bore failing marks through every season, perennial as grass. “Organ failure” sounded like something our mother ought to be ashamed of, a
nd us after her, for her, in death.
Viola dispensed with the organ-failure myth as easily as snapping a wishbone: “No, it was childbirth,” she told me.
“But Hallie was born in June,” I said. “She didn’t die till later in the summer.”
“It was a few weeks,” Viola conceded. “Hallie gave her a real good round. She lost a lot of blood and after the birth she never got up again.”
I was stunned by this news, and we walked in silence for a while. We were on our way to a special meeting of the Stitch and Bitch Club. To my surprise, I’d been invited as a guest scientist to talk about the pH of the river; needlework was not on the agenda.
Viola had on a brown cloth coat and what must have been her dead husband’s hunting cap, earflaps down, the whole thing cocked forward to accommodate her thick, coiled bun. She stopped to pick up two stray peacock feathers, which she tucked into her coat pocket. One was perfect, with an iridescent blue eye bobbing at its tip. The other one had no eye.
“What did she look like?” I asked.
“Like you. Exactly like you, only smaller. She had real little hands and feet.”
I looked down at my size 9’s, defensively. “Not like Hallie?”
“Hallie always favored Doc more,” Viola said.
I pondered this but couldn’t see it—Hallie was so vital and Doc Homer looked drawn. But then what I saw really was their interiors, not their façades. Your own family resemblances are a frustrating code, most easily read by those who know you least.
“Well, I know she was pretty,” I said. “Everybody says that. With a name like Alice how could you not be pretty?”
Viola made an odd sound, like unconsummated laughter.
“What?”
“He was the only one that ever called her Alice. Everybody else called her Althea. It means ‘the truth.’”
Animal Dreams Page 16