A car appeared on the hills to the north; it crept in and out of his vision and toward the town and made no sound until it was directly below him. Then it turned into the town and wound through the streets and into the trees at the mission. All the roosters of the town began to crow and the townspeople stirred and their thin voices rose up on the air. He could smell the sweet wine which still kept to his clothing. He had not eaten in two days, and his mouth tasted of sickness. But the morning was cold and deep, and he rubbed his hands together and felt the blood rise and flow.
He stood for a long time, the land still yielding to the light. He stood without thinking, nor did he move; only his eyes roved after something…something. The white rain-furrowed apron of the hill dropped under him thirty feet to the highway. The last patches of shade vanished from the river bottom and the chill grew dull on the air. He picked his way downward, and the earth and stones rolled at his feet. He felt the tension at his knees, and then the weight of the sun on his head and hands. The dry light of the valley rose up, and the land became hard and pale.
The day had begun as usual at the mission. It was a feast of martyrs, and Father Olguin took down the scarlet chasuble from its place in the wardrobe. He was a small, swarthy man with sharp features, and his hair had gone prematurely gray in part. He was not an old man, but his shoulders sagged and he moved about rather slowly as the result of an illness which he had suffered years ago in his native Mexico, so that from a distance he appeared to be aged and worn out. One of his eyes was clouded over with a blue, transparent film, and the lid drooped almost closed. Had it not been for that, he would have been thought of as good-looking in the face. He had crushed out a cigarette before coming into the sacristy; his fingers were stained with tobacco.
It was cold and dark in the sacristy. The old man Francisco had already knelt at the small glass panel which opened upon the chapel altar, and a small, sleepy boy whose name was Bonifacío stood in the corner, putting on a faded red cassock. There was a shuffle and coughing of people in the pews beyond the wall. It was already a minute past the half hour. “Ándale, hombre!” the old man whispered sharply, and the boy started and hurried out to light the candles, half unbuttoned. The old man watched him through the glass. He loved the candles; loved to see how the flame came upon the wicks, how slow it was to take hold and flare up.
Father Olguin heard the car come over the boards at the irrigation ditch and stop, and he went to the window and looked out. There were smoky lines of sunlight through the trees; they fell in soft, bright patterns on the yard, and the wire fence which ran along the street was overgrown with blue and violet morning-glories. A pale, dark-haired young woman in a gray raincoat got out of the car and stood for a moment looking around. Then she placed a blue scarf about her head, opened the gate, and walked through the yard to the chapel. He followed her with his good eye all the way to the door, trying to imagine who she was; he had never seen her before. Her footsteps sounded in the aisle, and he turned and took up the chalice and followed Bonifacío out to the altar.
The woman did not receive the sacrament of communion, and it was not until afterward, when she came to the door of the rectory, that he saw her face to face. She was older than he had supposed, and she did not seem quite so pale as before.
“How do you do?” she said. “I am Mrs. Martin St. John,” and she offered her hand to him.
“How do you do? You have not been here before.”
“No, I’m a visitor. I am staying in the canyon for a time, at Los Ojos.”
“Will you come in?”
He showed her through the hall and into a small reception room which contained a round black table and several chairs. He offered her a cigarette, which she declined, and they sat down.
“Please forgive me for calling on you so early in the day, Father—I realize that you probably have your breakfast now—but I should like to ask your help in a small matter that has just come up. And of course I wanted to meet you and assist at Mass.”
“Of course, I’m glad you came. I saw you drive up, you know, and I wondered who you were.”
“We live in California, my husband and I, Los Angeles…. This is beautiful country; I have never been here before.”
“No? In that case, welcome. Bienvenido a la tierra del encanto.”
“The sky is so blue. It was like water, very still and deep, when I drove through the canyon a while ago.”
“Your husband, he is with you?”
“No—no. He had to stay in California. He is a doctor, you see; it’s very hard for him to get away.”
“Of course. Well, I know some of the people at Los Ojos. Do you have relatives there by any chance?”
“No. Actually, Martin wanted me to try the mineral baths. I have had a soreness in my back for several weeks.”
“They say that the spring water is very healthful.”
“Yes,” she said.
For a moment she seemed lost in thought. The sun had cleared the trees, and it shone directly into the room; the tabletop was a disc of bright purplish light, and there were innumerable particles of dust floating visibly in the air. Bees swarmed at the window and wagons passed in the street. The horses blew and shook to settle the traces about them, pulling for the river and the fields. A soft breeze stirred in the room; it was fresh and cool and delicious.
The priest regarded his guest discreetly, wondering that her physical presence should suddenly dawn upon him so. She was more nearly beautiful than he had thought at first. Her hair was long and very dark, so that ordinarily it appeared to be black; but in a certain light, as now, it acquired a dark auburn sheen. She was too thin, he thought, and her nose was a trifle long. But her skin was clear and lovely, and her eyes and mouth were made up carefully and well. She had leaned back in the chair and crossed her legs, which were slim and bare and expressive. In this light she seemed pale to him again, and her hair threaded with the finest running lines of light, silver and bronze. Her hands were small and smooth and white; there was a pale pink lacquer on her nails.
“You said something about needing help?”
“Oh, yes. I wonder if you know of anyone here who will do some work for me. I have bought some wood that has to be cut. You see, I have taken a house at Los Ojos—the large white house below the forestry station—”
“The Benevides house?”
“Yes, that’s it. Well, there is only the wood stove in the kitchen, and I need to have some wood cut for it.”
“How much wood is there?”
“Quite a lot, I think—I’m sorry; I don’t know how to measure it. One of the men in the village brought it yesterday, but he works in the mountains and hasn’t time to cut it up. I shall be happy to pay whatever… I thought that perhaps one of the Indians—”
“Certainly. There are some boys here…. I can ask the sacristan.”
In the noon and early afternoon there was no sign of life in the town. The streets were empty and sterile in the white glare of the sun. There were no shadows, no dimensions of depth to the walls; even the doorways and windows were flat and impenetrable. There was no motion on the air, and the white dust burned in the streets. At this hour of the day, especially, the town seemed to disappear into the earth. Everything in the valley inclined to the color of dust.
Earlier Abel had returned to his grandfather’s house, but the old man was not there. Nothing had yet passed between them, no word, no sign of recognition. He had been hungry, but his mouth was sour and dry; he could think of nothing that he wanted to eat, and his hunger grew dull and passed away. His mind turned on him again in the silence and the heat, and he could not hold still. He paced about in the rooms; the rooms were small and bare, and the walls were bare and clean and white. In the late afternoon he went to the river and walked along the river to the crossing. He made his way along the incline at the edge of the cultivated fields to the long row of foothills at the base of the red mesa. When the first breeze of the evening rose up in the shadow that fell ac
ross the hills, he sat down and looked out over the green and yellow blocks of farmland. He could see his grandfather, others, working below in the sunlit fields. The breeze was very faint, and it bore the scent of earth and grain; and for a moment everything was all right with him. He was at home.
July 24
Abel came to the Benevides house on Tuesday. He would cut the wood for three dollars. Angela St. John had been prepared to bargain, but there was no indulgence in him, no concession to trade; he had simply, once and for all, shut her off. It remained for her to bring about a vengeance. She smiled and looked down from an upstairs window as he chopped the wood.
She had never seen a man put his back to his work before. Always there had been a kind of resistance, an angle of motion or of will. But it was different with him; he gave himself up to it. He took up the axe easily, and his strokes were clean and deep. The bit fell into the flesh of the wood and the flesh curled and spun away. He worked rocking on his hips, his feet set wide apart and his neck bowed and swollen out. She watched, full of wonder, taking his motion apart. He raised the axe, drawing the curve of the handle out and across his waist, sliding back his hand until it lay against the black metal wedge; then his shoulders turned and wound up the spine. There was an instant in which the coil of his body was set and all his strength was poised in the breach of time, then the infinite letting go. He leaned into the swing and drove; the blade flashed and struck, and the wood gaped open. Angela caught her breath and said, “I see.” A soft breeze blew in at the window and touched her hair at the temples. The sunlight struck silver on the leaves of the fruit trees, and she grew restless and intent.
Now, now that she could see, she was aware of some useless agony that was spent upon the wood, some hurt she could not have imagined until now. And later, when she looked away, she half listened to him still. Beyond the close, damp fragrance of rose leaves and tea, there was nothing but his labor in the day. She would have her bath and read from the lives of saints. Perhaps she would put down her head and close her eyes. That she could do to the makeshift music of the day and night, and even now there was a sound of bees, of dark water lapping—and the ring of the axe against the wood, steady, unceasing.
Angela paced in the downstairs. Always, when she was left alone at a certain hour in the afternoon, she was a shade beside herself. In the lowest brilliance of the day she wondered who she was. At such times now, when a strange blush and dizziness came upon her, she imagined the child within her, placed her hands low upon her body and drew the child up close to her heart, spoke to it in a voice that wavered like a flame. “My darling,” she would say. “Oh, my darling!” and she looked for some sign of disaster on the wind. Now and then she watched the birds that hied and skittered in the sky, but the birds always went away, and then the sky was empty again and eternal beyond all hope.
The axe rang out against her, the incessant sound, hollow, dying away at the source. Once she had seen an animal slap at the water, a badger or a bear. She would have liked to touch the soft muzzle of a bear, the thin black lips, the great flat head. She would have liked to cup her hand to the wet black snout, to hold for a moment the hot blowing of the bear’s life. She went out of the house and sat down on the stone steps of the porch. He was there, rearing above the wood. The canyon was cut out of shadows. The final sunlight had risen to the rim of the canyon wall above the orchard, and there it flamed on the face of the rock. A hummingbird hung among the hollyhocks, and dusk lay in upon the orchard, smudging the leaves. Her feet were naked in mules, and her arms and legs were bare. There was a chill rising up in the canyon, but she was not alive to it; there was a vague heat upon her. He placed the axe deep in the block and came to her. She sucked at her cheeks and let the initiative lie, to see what he would do.
“There is gum in it,” he said at last. “It will burn for a long time.”
He looked at her without the trace of a smile, but his voice was soft and genial, steady. He would give her no clear way to be contemptuous of him. She considered.
“Shall I pay you now?” she asked.
He thought about it, but it was clear that he did not care one way or another.
“I’ll cut the rest of it Friday or Saturday. You can pay me then.”
It offended her that he would not buy and sell. Still, she knew how to learn at her own expense, and eventually she would make good the least investment of her pride. It was just now, for the time being, that she must hold her ground and wait. There was a silence between them. He continued to stand off in the failing light, his still, black eyes just wide of her own. He did not move a muscle.
“You have done a day’s work,” she said, wondering why she had said it, and he stood there. There was no reply, nothing.
“Well, then,” she said, “you will come on Friday? Or did you say Saturday?”
But he made no answer. She was full of irritation. She knew only how to persist, but she had already begun to sense that it was of no use; and that made her seethe.
“You will have to make up your mind, you see, or else I may not be here when you come.”
His face darkened, but he hung on, dumb and immutable. He would not allow himself to be provoked. It was easy, natural for him to stand aside, hang on. He seemed to be watching from far away something that was happening within her, private, commonplace, nothing in itself. His reserve was too much for her. She would have liked to throw him off balance, to startle and appall him, to make an obscene gesture, perhaps, or to say, “How would you like a white woman? My white belly and my breasts, my painted fingers and my feet?” But it would have been of no use. She was certain that he would not even have been ashamed for her—or in the least surprised.
And yet, in some curious way, he was powerless, too. She could see that now. There he stood, dumb and docile at her pleasure, not knowing, she supposed, how even to take his leave. In the dark she could no longer see him. She heard him walk away.
She thought of her body and could not understand that it was beautiful. She could think of nothing more vile and obscene than the raw flesh and blood of her body, the raveled veins and the gore upon her bones. And now the monstrous fetal form, the blue, blind, great-headed thing growing within and feeding upon her. From the time she was a child and first saw her own blood, how it brimmed in a cut on the back of her hand, she had conceived a fear and disgust of her body which nothing could make her forget. She did not fear death, only the body’s implication in it. And at odd moments she wished with all her heart to die by fire, fire of such intense heat that her body should dissolve in it all at once. There must be no popping of fat or any burning on of the bones. Above all she must give off no stench of death.
She went out into the soft yellow light that fell from the windows and that lay upon the ground and the pile of wood. She knelt down and picked up the cold, hard lengths of wood and laid them in the crook of her arm. They were sharp and seamed at the ends where the axe had shaped them like pencil points, and they smelled of resin. When again she stood, she inadvertently touched the handle of the axe; it was stiff and immovable in the block, and cold. She felt with the soles of her feet the chips of wood which lay all about on the ground, among the dark stones and weeds. The long black rim of the canyon wall lay sheer on the dark, silent sky. She stood, remembering the sacramental violence which had touched the wood. One of the low plateaus, now invisible above her, had been gutted long ago by fire, and in the day she had seen how the black spines of the dead trees stood out. She imagined the fire which had run upon them, burning out their sweet amber gum. Then they were flayed by the fire and their deep fibrous flesh cracked open, and among the cracks the wood was burned into charcoal and ash, and in the sun each facet of the dead wood shone low like velvet and felt like velvet to the touch, and left the soft death of itself on the hands that touched it.
She took the wood inside and laid it down on a fireplace grate. It caught fire so slowly that she did not see it happen, though she looked hard for it. Then she wat
ched the yellow-white flames curl around the wood, seeming never to lay hold of the hard, vital core.
Later that evening Father Olguin came to the Benevides house.
“Tomorrow is the feast of Santiago,” he said. “There is a celebration in the town. Will you come?”
“All right. Thank you.”
He wanted to stay, to look at her and listen to her voice, but she was brooding, absent, and he said good night.
Angela thought of Abel, of the way he had looked at her—like a wooden Indian—his face cold and expressionless. A few days before she had seen the corn dance at Cochiti. It was beautiful and strange. It had seemed to her that the dancers meant to dance forever in that slow, deliberate way. There was something so grave and mysterious in it, those old men chanting in the sun, and the dancers so…so terribly serious in what they were doing. No one of them ever smiled. Somehow that seemed important to her just now. The dancers had looked straight ahead, to the exclusion of everything, but she had not thought about that at the time. And they had not smiled. They were grave, so unspeakably grave. They were not merely sad or formal or devout; it was nothing like that. It was simply that they were grave, distant, intent upon something that she could not see. Their eyes were held upon some vision out of range, something away in the end of distance, some reality that she did not know, or even suspect. What was it that they saw? Probably they saw nothing after all, nothing at all. But then that was the trick, wasn’t it? To see nothing at all, nothing in the absolute. To see beyond the landscape, beyond every shape and shadow and color, that was to see nothing. That was to be free and finished, complete, spiritual. To see nothing slowly and by degrees, at last; to see first the pure, bright colors of near things, then all pollutions of color, all things blended and vague and dim in the distance, to see finally beyond the clouds and the pale wash of the sky—the none and nothing beyond that. To say “beyond the mountain,” and to mean it, to mean, simply, beyond everything for which the mountain stands, of which it signifies the being. Somewhere, if only she could see it, there was neither nothing nor anything. And there, just there, that was the last reality. Even so, in the same attitude of non-being, Abel had cut the wood. She had not seen into his eyes until it was too late, until they had returned upon everything. And then they were soft, full of color, ranging; they had seen into her, through her, even, but his vision had fallen short of the reality that mattered last and most. He, too, had come upon her everyday dense, impenetrable world. For that reason and no other she could stand up to him. She set her mind at ease and looked into the fire. It had gone to embers, and there were only the intermittent blue and yellow flames, small and going out.
House Made of Dawn Page 3