“Here’s pictures,” Uda reported suddenly. There was a whole aisle of boxes marked “PHOTOGRAPHS,” with inscrutable suffixes. I picked up one marked “PHOTOGRAPHS, AM JOUR GEN” and found it surprisingly light, so I carried it over to the east window and sat down on a steamer trunk, settling the box on my lap before opening it. Inside were stacks of ancient eight-by-tens, their brown edges curled like autumn leaves. Each one was a photograph of a newborn baby with a startled-looking face and marble-white eyes. I leafed through them, one after another, awestruck by the oddity of these children. Of course I knew about the eyes, an anomaly of pigmentation that was genetic proof of Gracela heritage on both sides. But I’d never seen them. They tended to darken just hours after birth, and in modern times a person can easily go through life, in Grace or anywhere, without seeing a newborn.
On top of the stack of photos was a handwritten page with the heading: “Notes on Methodology.” The ink had faded to brown. This would all be for his genetics paper: Doc Homer’s careful notations on how he’d set up the camera, the distance, the amount of light. Apparently he’d rigged some set-up that used powerful flashbulbs, the old-fashioned kind that popped once and then were used up. It was before the days of modern electronics.
All those babies. How they must have screamed, one second after he shot them in the name of science. Or in the name of his own desire to set himself apart. What could be more arrogant than to come back and do a scientific study of your own townspeople, like so many natives in Borneo? I looked through the photos again and kept coming back to one that had an arresting familiarity. The eyes looked back as if they knew me. I stared at the baby for a long time.
It was me.
“You were a doll baby,” Uda said. She was looking down over my shoulder.
“That’s me? Are you sure?”
She took the stack and shuffled through it like a card trick. She produced another photo. “There’s Hallie. You didn’t look a thing alike when you were born.” To her the eyes were commonplace, not a feature to connect us, but they were the only feature I could see. To me, we looked identical.
I held the two photographs up to the light, mystified. The eyes were unearthly. We were two babies not of this world. Just like every other one in the stack of photos; two more babies of Grace. He was doing exactly the opposite of setting himself apart. He was proving we belonged here, were as pure as anybody in Grace. Both sides. Our mother’s name was Althea. Her family despised him.
“We’re puro,” I said out loud. And then I dropped the photographs because I heard the broken-glass pop of the flash and went blind. I heard myself make an odd little whimper.
Then Uda appeared in my field of vision, moving away. “Codi, hon, I’m going on downstairs and beat the rugs or something. I’ll try not to scare up too much dust.”
23
The Souls
of Beasts
“Hallie, I’m going to die.”
“I’m Codi.”
“I’m dying.”
“Well, I know. We all are, more or less.” After a lifetime on the emotional austerity plan, my father and I were caving in to melodrama. When I put my hand on his hand it lay dead on the sheet. It was the diagnosis that killed him. Sometimes that’s how it happens.
“Where is Hallie?”
“Please don’t ask me that again. We don’t know where she is. Don’t worry about her right now, okay? We can’t do anything.”
He looked at me accusingly. “You shouldn’t have stood on the slide. I defended you on principle, but it was dangerous.”
How do people live with loved ones after their minds have fallen into anarchy? I rejected his ruined monologues every day, still expecting order to emerge victorious in Doc Homer’s universe. I can remember once seeing a monument somewhere in the desert north of Tucson, commemorating a dedicated but ill-informed platoon of men who died in a Civil War battle six months after Lee had surrendered at Appomattox. That’s exactly who I was—a soldier of the lost cause, still rooting for my father’s recovery. Pain reaches the heart with electrical speed, but truth moves to the heart as slowly as a glacier.
He’d gone off the Tacrine, his experimental drug; the doctors in Tucson found his liver was wrecked from it. Now his mind scuttled around like a crab, heading always for the dark corners. People with this disease can linger on for six or seven years, I’d read, and on average they do. But Doc Homer wouldn’t.
“Do you want something to eat? Uda brought over this thing made out of crackers and walnuts and apples. It looks like one of your concoctions.”
“No, thank you.”
His bedroom was the largest upstairs room, with dark green walls and a high white ceiling and dormer windows across the west side. As children, Hallie and I rarely came into this room; it held an aura of importance and secrecy, the two things that most attract and frighten children. But for two days now I’d been taking care of Doc Homer here, and when I stopped to notice, I found myself the most commanding presence in the room. I felt long-legged and entitled, and strode around in my boots, adjusting curtains and moving furniture to suit myself. I’d tried to close the blinds, but he wanted them open. He insisted on the light, so I let it be.
I’d been keeping a restless vigil by his bed throughout the late afternoon, watching for signs of a lucid moment. I’d about decided it wasn’t coming. I pulled my chair closer and squeezed his hand hard in an effort to make him pay attention. “Pop, I want to talk to you about Mother.”
“Her kidneys were weak, and we knew it was a possibility. She had already had one episode of renal failure with the first pregnancy. She knew the risk.”
I didn’t really try to absorb this information. “Her name was Althea. How was she related to Doña Althea?”
“No relation.” The answer, quick and firm.
“What relation? I know she came from here. I found some things in the attic. What was she, a great-niece?”
“What things in the attic?”
“Cousin?” I crossed my arms like the obstinate child I was.
No answer.
“Granddaughter?”
His face changed. “Malcriado.”
“Doña Althea’s family didn’t want you to marry her, right?”
He let out a short, bitter little laugh unlike any sound I’d ever heard him make. “We were Nolinas.” Just the way he said it told me plenty.
“And you married her anyway. You eloped.” I leaned forward and touched his forehead, something I’d never done. It felt cool and thin-skinned, like a vegetable. “That’s so romantic. Don’t you know that’s what all of us would like to think our parents did? You didn’t have to hide something like that from us.”
“You understand nothing.” He seemed very lucid. At times I suspected him of feigning his confusion, or at least using it to his advantage.
“That’s probably true,” I said, withdrawing my hand.
“We were a bad family. Try to understand. We learned it in school along with the multiplication tables and the fact that beasts have no souls. I could accept the verdict, or I could prove it wrong.”
“You did that. You proved it wrong.”
In the slanted afternoon light his eyes were a cloudy blue and his skin was translucent. He looked up at the ceiling and I had a disturbing view of his eyes in profile. “I proved nothing,” he said. “I became a man with no history. No guardian angels. I turned out to be a brute beast after all. I didn’t redeem my family, I buried it and then I built my grand house on top of the grave. I changed my name.”
“You still have plenty of guardian angels.”
“I don’t think anybody in this town remembers that I’m a Nolina.”
“No, you’re wrong about that, they do remember. I think people are sorry. And they love you. Look at your refrigerator.”
He gave me an odd, embittered look. How could he not know this was true? “Refrigerators don’t preserve love,” he said.
“The hell they don’t. Yours does. The w
omen in this town bake you casseroles and pies like the world was going to end.”
He made a slight sound by breathing out of his nose. He seemed strangely like a child.
“They probably can’t forgive themselves for the past,” I said. “Mother died before they could get everything straightened out. And then you kind of took your phone off the hook, emotionwise.”
He looked away from me again. “We aren’t from here, we came from the outside. That is our myth and every person in Grace believes it, because they want to. They don’t want to see a Nolina when they look at me. They want a man they can trust with their children’s ear infections. And I am that man. If you change the present enough, history will bend to accommodate it.”
“No. I’m pretty sure you’re wrong about that. What’s true is true, no matter how many ways you deny it.”
He closed his eyes for a while. I’d never seen him frail or impaired. All the time I’d been his daughter, he’d never been sick.
“How long are you going to stay in bed?” I asked softly, in case he was falling asleep.
“I’m exhausted.”
“I know. But after you rest, you might want to get up for a while. I can warm up some soup.”
He didn’t open his eyes. “Do you think Hallie is coming back?”
“I don’t know what to think. We have to think yes, don’t we?”
“You’re the advocate of ordained truth. Are you telling me now that we can will Hallie back to safety?”
“No. I don’t guess we can. We just have to wait.”
It was the first honest conversation we’d had about Hallie. It took us both by surprise. We were quiet for a long time then, but I knew he wasn’t sleeping. I could see his eyes working back and forth under his eyelids, as if he were reading his own thoughts. I wondered what his thoughts looked like, in his clear moments and in his confusion. I very much wished to know him.
“Pop?”
He slowly opened his eyes and looked at the ceiling.
“Did you really see me bury the baby?”
He looked at me.
“Why didn’t we ever talk?”
He sighed. “You get beyond a point.”
“You could have just given me a hug or something.”
He turned away from me. His short, gray hair stood up in whorls on the back of his head. He said, “It’s Friday, isn’t it? Mrs. Nuñez’s lab work is due back today. Can you pull her chart?”
“Okay, sleep now,” I said, reaching over to pat his shoulder. “But after a while I want you to get up and get dressed. Today or tomorrow, whenever you’re feeling up to it.”
“I feel fine.”
“Okay. When you’re feeling better, I want you to take me to the place where I buried it. I can remember a lot of that night. Cleaning up the bathroom, and that old black sweater of Mother’s, some things like that. But I can’t remember the place.”
He didn’t promise. I think he’d forgotten again who I was. We were comically out of synchrony—a family vaudeville routine. Whatever one of us found, the other lost.
I received a letter from the school board. It was early April, a long time after I’d stopped my hopeful excursions to the Post Office box and had given the key back to Emelina, so this letter appeared on my table among the breakfast dishes while I was at school. I saw it the minute I walked in, but tried to ignore it for the longest time. I carefully went around to the other side of the table and dropped a heavy pile of tests and began to grade them, trying not to see it. “A predator is a big guy that eats little guys,” wrote Raymo. “A herbivore is your wussy vegetarian. In other words, lunch meat.” She’d wedged it between the coffee cup and a bottle of aspirin. Did she think it would be bad news? I gave in and tore it open.
I can’t really say what sort of news it was. Surprising news. It was notification that my contract was going to be renewed for the next year. The term wasn’t over, but the school board recognized my circumstances as unusual and wanted to give me ample notice; they were eager for me to return in the fall. My temporary teaching certificate could easily be extended, especially if I had intentions of working toward certification. It was a personal letter written on behalf of the entire board and signed by someone I knew of but had never met, a Mr. Leacock. His letter cited my popularity with the students and commended me for my “innovative presentation” and “spirited development of a relevant curriculum.” It didn’t mention contraception or Mrs. Josephine Nash or the ozone layer. I wondered how much they really knew; it made me nervous. I kept looking sideways at that word “spirited.” After knocking myself out to be accepted, I’d finally flown off the handle in a seditious direction, and won a gold star. “We are all aware of the difficulties of engaging teenagers in a vital course of academic instruction,” wrote Mr. Leacock. Someone apparently felt I’d succeeded in this endeavor. I was going to be named something like teacher of the year. Teachers and kids all voted, secret ballot.
I was stunned. I stuck the letter into the pocket of my corduroy jumper and went out for a walk. I tramped quickly down the hill past Mr. Pye’s green roof and Mrs. Nuñez, who sat in a rocker on her front porch, leaning precariously forward out of her chair, trying to nail a fast-moving spider with the rubber tip of her cane. She lifted the cane and stabbed the air sociably as I passed by; I waved back. I wondered about the lab work Doc Homer had mentioned in his delirium. Was she really waiting for someone far away to examine her cells or her blood and pronounce a verdict? Or was this history, a sentence she was already serving?
In town, the 4-H Club had set up a display of rabbits and fancy chickens in cages in front of the courthouse. A little county fair was planned for Easter weekend. The rabbits were of an odd-looking breed but all exactly alike, fancily marked with black-tipped ears and paws and a gorget under the throat, and it occurred to me how much simpler life would be if people were like that, all identically marked. If I were not the wrong breed. I corrected an old habit of thought: both my parents were born in Grace, and their parents before them. Possibly Doc Homer was right—I’d believed otherwise for so long it had become true; I was an outsider not only by belief but by flesh and bone.
Children knelt by the cages and talked to the rabbits in high voices, poking in sprigs of new grass from the courthouse lawn. Some shoppers had strayed over from their errands across the street. Mary Lopez, a middle-aged woman I knew from Stitch and Bitch, waved at me. She was there with her mother, a very short, broad woman with a long black braid down her back. The old woman leaned over the rabbit cages like a child. Mary rested a hand on the back of her mother’s neck, a slight gesture that twisted my heart. I turned up the road toward Loyd’s house. I knew he was home, or would be shortly. He was on a fairly regular schedule these days, running the Amtrak to Tucson and back. We stayed in touch.
The air had a fresh muddy edge, the smell of spring. I had several choices of route, and on a whim I took a less familiar road. I found myself walking through a neighborhood that wanted to pull me into it: the dirt shade of salt cedars, the dogs that barked without getting up. A woman and her husband argued congenially while they picked grapefruits off the tree in their backyard. The fruits rustled solidly into grocery bags while the woman talked in a low, steady voice and the man answered, on and on, a cycle of gentle irritation and love that would never be finished.
“Gee, you’re pretty. Are you the new schoolteacher?”
I turned around, startled by a man on a moped. I’d never laid eyes on him before, but I was completely charmed by his line. I felt like Miss Kitty in Gunsmoke.
“Well, yes,” I said.
“You want a ride? There’s a wicked pair of brindle bulldogs up at the corner.”
“Okay.” I gathered my skirt and straddled the back of his bike. We buzzed smoothly uphill past the putative wicked bulldogs, who lay with their manifold chins on their paws.
“My son Ricky’s in one of your classes. He says you give them a pretty good round.”
“They give
me one, too,” I said.
He laughed. “You’re Doc Homer’s girl, aren’t you?”
“That’s right. Homer Nolina of the white trash Nolinas. He married his second cousin for mad love.” I’d been lying to strangers all my life, and no wonder. Here was the truth and it sounded like a B-grade fairy tale. But I wanted to know if Doc Homer was right—if everyone had forgotten.
“I never heard that,” my driver said. “I just heard she was dead.”
“She’s dead all right. But she was born and grew up right here. You’re around the same age I am, you wouldn’t remember her, but it’s the truth. Her family thought unkindly of my daddy, so they ran off for a while and he put on an attitude.”
He laughed at that, but said, “You oughtn’t to talk bad about a man like him.”
“Oh, I know. Doc Homer’s inclined to be useful. But I swear it looks to me like he’s been running his whole lite on vengeful spite.”
“I got me an old Ford that runs on something like that.”
Ten seconds later he let me off at the base of the path up to Loyd’s house. Loyd was sitting outside, drinking coffee under the huge mesquite that shaded his front yard. He was just out of the shower, wearing only a pair of soft gray sweatpants. His damp hair lay loose on his shoulders. He looked very happy to see me but also unsurprised; typical, maddening Loyd. Jack betrayed excitement in his thumping tail, but Loyd made no sudden movements. He let me come to him, bend over to kiss him, sit down in the chair beside him. I was oddly conscious of his skill with animals.
“You want coffee?”
“No thanks.”
He sat looking at me, smiling, waiting.
“Guess what,” I said finally, handing him the letter. He read it, grinning broadly.
Animal Dreams Page 28