I made a bargain with my mother. If I got to the ground in one piece, I wasn’t leaving it again.
The Amtrak didn’t depart until three-thirty; I made it with time to spare. The station clerk wouldn’t sell me a ticket to my destination, saying it wasn’t a passenger stop. I argued. I knew the train stopped there for a crew change. Finally I realized he could sell me a ticket for anywhere at all on the eastbound line, it didn’t matter. I knew where I was getting off.
We pulled out of the station and I hugged myself, cradled in the wide reclining seat, letting the rails rock me like a baby. The car smelled like smoke and old leather. I lay sideways in the seat, facing the window, my legs curled under me. Tucson, Arizona, passed slowly enough to nod at, take notice of, and then let go. At a steady, measured pace these things were revealed to me: the backs of brickyards, the backs of barrios, a large outdoor factory where Mexican women painted tiles. We passed buildings whose high walls, empty of windows, were spray-painted with huge secrets seen by no one but the travelers of the Southern Pacific. And then came the broad, open desert—mile after mile of it. I understood the appeal of train travel. You couldn’t help knowing where you’d been.
At some point I fell asleep, and at some point I woke up again. I felt I’d been on that train for the whole of my life. We approached Grace from a direction that was new to me. We didn’t go by the junkyard. There was a tunnel through the granite cliffs and we entered it fast—the dark rock wall magnifying the rocketing clamor of tons of forward motion—and then, quiet and sudden, out into the bright light again. I blinked against the overexposed world. By the time my eyes adjusted we were right downtown behind the old jailhouse, pulling the sighing brakes, slowing down. We came gliding under the long wooden porch of the depot. The sun glinted on its pleated tin roof, and I noticed a carob tree there with a trunk the size of a rain barrel. It must be the male—the mate to the one up by the liquor store. The one I’d been looking for.
The conductor looked a little surprised when I pulled my bag off the rack and hopped down onto the concrete apron of the depot.
“This isn’t anywhere, sweetheart,” he said, looking down at me from the doorway. He was a very old, very dark-skinned man whose uniform looked as if it could hold up its shoulders without him.
“I know,” I said.
“You can’t get back on,” he warned. “Ten minutes for a crew change, and then we’re headed out for El Paso.”
“I know. I don’t want to get back on. I live here.”
“Well, how do you do,” he said. He stepped back into the car and waved at me through the window. His gloved hand fluttered like a dove.
A hundred yards up the line I saw the fireman climb down the ladder from the engine. It was someone I’d gone to school with—Roger Bristol. Loyd tossed down Roger’s grip and his own, one at a time, and then swung himself easily down the ladder as if he were born for this work. He talked briefly with two other men—the oncoming crew, I guessed. They would speak in their magical language of dog catchers and sun kinks and the ones that had died on the line, picking up trains from the dead and moving on. They parted ways and the new crew climbed into the engine. The other two men walked toward the depot carrying their grips and lunch buckets: one short and stocky, the other taller, broad-shouldered, with his hair in a ponytail. The people you love always look perfectly proportioned from a distance.
Shortly the train began to move again, very slowly, the speed of a living creature. You could still run and catch it. Loyd and Roger kept walking toward me without seeing me. Standing there watching him, knowing what he didn’t, I had so much power and none at all. I was on the outside, in a different dimension. I’d lived there always.
Then he stopped dead, just for a second. I’ll remember that. The train moved and Roger moved but Loyd stood still.
He caught up to me in an instant, with a twinkle in his eye and his bag slung over his shoulder like a ready traveler.
“Thanks for the ride,” I said.
He put one arm around my neck and gave me the kind of kiss no fool would walk away from twice.
26
The Fifty Mothers
For several days I kept coming back to this: we had no body. I wanted to have a funeral for Hallie, but I was at a loss. I knew the remains should not have been important, but in a funeral the body gives the grieving a place to focus their eyes. We sit facing it, bear it on our shoulders, follow it down the road in procession and finally long to follow it into the ground. The body would have provided an agenda and told me what to do, in lieu of Hallie, who was gone.
I went to look for something else that in my mind stood for her: the semilla besada, one of the supernaturally blessed trees that in the old days were festooned like Christmas trees with the symbols of people’s hopes. We could hold a funeral there, outside, under the leaves. I wanted to find the exact plum tree where we’d hidden a lock of our intertwined hair. I knew the orchard but couldn’t find the tree. Either it was gone, or it was no longer exceptional. Maybe the trees all around it had stretched their taproots and found the same nurturing vein.
It was June, a week before Hallie’s thirtieth birthday. The canopies were in full green, each one as brilliant as a halo. The blossoms had dropped and left behind incipient fruits swelling three and four to a cluster, not yet pruned by nature or by hand. Every tree in every orchard looked blessed. So we had the funeral there, in the old Domingos plum orchard.
I’d asked people to bring something that reminded them of Hallie. I spread the black-and-red afghan on the ground and we stood around that. Instead of decorating a tree with our hopes for the future, we decorated a blanket with icons from the past. All the women from Stitch and Bitch were there. And J.T. and Emelina, of course, and Loyd. All of my students, as well. Doc Homer didn’t make it. He didn’t go very far out of his house these days, or very far out of his head.
It was awkward getting started. I remembered the last time I’d hugged her, thinking I could hold on and stop our lives right there. I took some breaths. “Hallie asked to be buried in Nicaragua,” I said. “She wanted that. To enrich the soil of a jungle. But I wanted something here too.” I stopped, because it sounded to me like small talk. Words only cover the experience of living. I looked around at the unpretentious faces like slices of bread, all the black dresses, the dark shoes, and I looked up at the bright leaves lit from above. It was a brilliant, hot day and I didn’t feel at all like crying. The black dresses made me think of Greece. Nothing seemed quite real.
Several peacocks had gathered in the trees behind our heads, keeping their distance, but curious, probably hoping for food. A peacock wouldn’t know the difference between a picnic and a funeral. The outward signs were similar.
“Do you think we should sing?” I asked.
“Yes,” said Emelina. “We ought to sing.”
“What?” I couldn’t think of any particular song that Hallie liked, except some silly things from our teenage years. “Mother and Child Reunion” and “Maggie May.” I thought of Hallie moonwalking to “Thriller,” and then I thought abstractly about never seeing her again, what that really meant. In the back of my mind I was still wondering when she would come home. I couldn’t concentrate. Someone suggested “Let the Circle Be Unbroken,” so we sang that, and then we sang “De Colores” because everybody knew it. Norma Galvez’s husband Cassandro played the guitar.
Then it was quiet again. People shifted slightly on their feet, the same motion repeated many times throughout the crowd, like the dancers at Santa Rosalia. Except unconscious, and unrehearsed. I pulled some letters out of my pocket and read parts of them that Emelina had helped me pick out. I read what Hallie said about not wanting to save the world, that you didn’t choose your road for the reward at the end, but for the way it felt as you went along. And I read some things she’d said about nations forgetting. Refusing to sell tractor parts, then wondering why people would turn to Yugoslavia for tractors. I was aware that my reading might seem
a little rambling, but I felt there was some logic to it, and people were tolerant. Truly, I think they would have listened to me all day. It occurred to me that such patience might be the better part of love.
I read a quote she’d written me that seemed important, a thing said by Father Fernando Cardenal, who was in charge of the literacy crusade: “You learn to read so you can identify the reality in which you live, so that you can become a protagonist of history rather than a spectator.” I waited a minute, while a peacock screamed. Then I read some words of Hallie’s: “The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most…”
Another peacock suddenly howled nearby. I saw Emelina’s twins craning their necks, trying to spot it. I went on:
“And the most you can do is live inside that hope. What I want is so simple I almost can’t say it: elementary kindness. Enough to eat, enough to go around. The possibility that kids might one day grow up to be neither the destroyers nor the destroyed.”
I finished by reading the letter from Sister Sabina Martin. She said thousands of people joined us in mourning Hallie. “I know that doesn’t make your grief any smaller,” she wrote. “But I believe it makes Hallie’s presence larger. Certainly, she won’t be forgotten.”
Several peafowl had hopped to the ground and were making insistent, guttural noises, impatient for food. I saw Glen and Curtis sneak off into the trees in pursuit of a peacock they’d never catch.
“This is what I brought.” I knelt by the afghan and set down a pair of Hallie’s small black shoes, about second-grade size. They could have been mine, it was impossible to tell, but I said they were Hallie’s. I put them in the center of the red-and-black crocheted blanket. “I brought these because they just reminded me of growing up with Hallie. We had to wear these ugly shoes. It was just one of the important things we did together. I don’t know. We felt kind of alone sometimes.” I stood up and looked at the trees through the curtain of water in my eyes.
Viola laid down some marigolds. She had on her polyester, the funeral dress for all seasons, and she was perspiring; broad damp spots underlined her bosom. “Whenever I think of you kids I think of the cempazuchiles and being up at the graveyard for All Souls’. You were always a very big help.”
I looked at Viola. She stared back, rubbing the bridge of her nose. There was the faintest light of a smile.
Several women had things they claimed we’d left in their houses when we played there as children: a doll with unpleasant glass eyes and a gruesomely pockmarked head where its hair had come out; a largish plastic horse; a metal hen that, when you pushed her down on her feet, made a metallic cluck and laid a small marble egg. Also a pink sweater, size 6X. Mrs. Nuñez swore it was Hallie’s. “It was behind the refrigerator. I didn’t find it till last year when the refrigerator give out and we had to call the man to move it out and get us a new one in there. The dust, I hate to tell you! And there was this little sweater of Halimeda Noline’s. She used to set up there on top of the refrigerator, because I told her she couldn’t drink beer till she was as tall as her daddy.”
This was the truth, dead center. I remembered her up there huddled among the Mason jars and bright cracker boxes. I stared at the freshly laundered pink sweater lying with outstretched arms and thought about how small Hallie had been at one time. Miss Colder and Miss Dann were just then displaying an ancient-looking picture book, but there was a roaring in my ears and I lost track of what they were saying. I believe it was the physical manifestation of unbearable grief. But you learn in these situations that all griefs are bearable. Loyd was standing on one side of me, and Emelina on the other, and whenever I thought I might fall or just cease to exist, the pressure of their shoulders held me there.
I could hear people’s words, but my vision was jarred by showers of blue sparks. Or the world went out of focus. And at other times I could see but couldn’t hear. Doña Althea clumped forward with her cane and set down a miniature, perfectly made peacock piñata. It perched there on the pile of childhood things, its small eyes glittering and its tail feathers perfectly trimmed. It was an exquisite piece of art that could have made it into Mr. Rideheart’s gallery, but it was for Hallie. I tried to listen to what she was saying. She said, “I made one like this for both of you girls, for your cumpleaños when you were ten.”
To my surprise, this was also true. I remembered every toy, every birthday party, each one of these fifty mothers who’d been standing at the edges of my childhood, ready to make whatever contribution was needed at the time.
“Gracias, Abuelita,” I said softly to Doña Althea as she clumped away.
She didn’t look at me, but she heard me say it and she didn’t deny that she was my relative. Her small head crowned with its great white braid nodded a little. No hugs or confessions of love. We were all a little stiff, I understood that. Family constellations are fixed things. They don’t change just because you’ve learned the names of the stars.
Uda Dell went last. “I brought this bouquet of zinnias because every spring Hallie helped me dig my zinnia bed.” She laid down the homely, particolored bouquet, and added, “I crocheted that afghan, too.”
“You did?”
She looked at me, surprised. “Right after your mommy died. Well, I don’t guess you’d remember.”
“This blanket got us through a lot of tough times,” I said. I was feeling a little more steady on my feet. I folded in the corners and drew it all up into a bundle against my chest. About everything Hallie and I had ever done was with us there in the Domingos orchard. Everything we’d been I was now.
“Thank you,” I said, to everybody.
I turned my back and headed alone with my bundle up the Old Pony Road to Doc Homer’s house.
HOMERO
27
Human Remains
There are women in every room of this house, he thinks: Mrs. Quintana upstairs, and now there is Codi, standing in the kitchen with her baby. Her arms and chest clutch the black wool bundle and it weighs her down like something old, made of stone. The weight makes him want to turn away. He thinks, This is the fossil record of our lives.
“I’m going to bury this. Do you want to help me?” She looks up at him and tears stream down. The grief on her face is fresh as pollen.
“You already buried it.”
“No, no, no!” she screams, and slams the screen door behind her. He follows her down the path but she doesn’t go down to the riverbed this time, she turns and goes right around the house into the backyard. When he catches up, a little breathless, she is standing with her boots on the ground like rooted stalks. Standing beside the old plot where Hallie used to grow a garden. A few old artichoke bushes have gone thistly and wild around its perimeter. Codi drops the knotted bundle and goes to the tool shed to retrieve a shovel. She comes back and digs hard into the ground. It hasn’t been disturbed for many years.
“Are you sure this is a good place?” he asks.
Without speaking, she steps on the shovel and its tip bites into the sandy soil again and again, lifting, digging, and lifting out a deep, square hole.
“You might want to have a garden here again someday. When this house is yours.”
The shovel stops suddenly. “Did you know I’m staying?” She looks at him.
He looks back, waiting.
“I told Loyd about the baby. Yesterday I took him down there to the riverbed where you showed me. I can remember every minute of that night. You gave me some pills, didn’t you? You really did want to help.” She looks up at the sky, using gravity and the small, twin dams of her eyelids to hold in tears. “So Loyd knows about that now. He’s sad. I didn’t think about that part—that he would be sad. I was thinking the baby was just mine.”
“It wasn’t just yours.”
“I know.” She wipes her cheeks with the back of her hand, leaving a faint dark smudge under each eye. She looks at him very oddly. “We might have another one. Loyd and I. I don’t know. There’s time to see
.”
“Yes.”
“Did you know I’m a good science teacher? The kids and the teachers all voted. They say I’m spirited. How do you like that?”
“It’s what I would expect.”
“I’m teaching them how to have a cultural memory.” She looks at her hands, and laughs, but looks sad. “I want them to be custodians of the earth,” she says.
He also looks at her hands. They remind him of something. Whose hands?
“You really can’t approve of me staying, can you?” she demands, suddenly angry. “You raised me to turn my back on this place. That worked for you, but the difference is you knew it was really your home. You knew you had one. So you had a choice.”
“That’s all very well and good,” he says, “but you still might want a garden. These artichoke bushes still produce. Every summer they bloom as if their hearts depended on it. Never mind that there was nobody taking in the harvest.” He takes the tip of a silvery leaf between his fingers. It looks knifelike, but is yielding and soft.
She looks at him for quite a long time, smiling, and then she looks down at the bundle. “It’s all right to bury this here,” she says. “There are no human remains.”
No human remains. No. Human. Remains. The three words chime in his head like large, old bells, three descending notes that ring and ring, speeding up in tempo until they clang against one another.
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