House Made of Dawn
Page 6
He began almost to be at peace, as if he had drunk a little of warm, sweet wine, for a time no longer centered upon himself. He was alone, and he wanted to make a song out of the colored canyon, the way the women of Torreón made songs upon their looms out of colored yarn, but he had not got the right words together. It would have been a creation song; he would have sung lowly of the first world, of fire and flood, and of the emergence of dawn from the hills. And had he brought food to eat along the way, he would have wanted it to be a crust of oven bread, heavy and moist, pitted with cinders and ash, or a blue cornmeal cake full of grit and sweet smoke.
The noon hour passed, and part of the next, and he was below and across the road from an old copper mine, a ghost, too, like the ancient towns that lay upon the ridge above and behind him, given up to the consuming earth and left alone amid the remnants of some old and curious haste: broken implements, red and eaten through with rust; charred and rotting wood; a thousand pieces of clear and green and amber glass upon the swollen ground, as if untold legions of ants had come to raise a siegeworks at Alesia. The black face of the shaft, higher on the slope but not yet so high as the base of the sunlit cliff, there in its gray wooden frame, reminded him of something. It was deeper than shade, and he knew without looking that no cave or crevice in the opposite wall was like it, no other thing in the canyon was so sharply defined. He turned his eyes away from it and saw again the running water and the light upon it and here and there the bits of drift that bobbed and hung among the stones. Farther on he came upon a rise and saw the settlement at the springs, the corrugated iron roofs gleaming, the bright orchards, and the high white walls of the Benevides house. He hurried on.
Angela Grace St. John sat in the downstairs and waited for him to come. She had waited for days, without caring how many, among the lines of light in the rooms. These were a labyrinth of colors in the afternoon, a glowing on the mouths of pitchers and jars, a somber glare upon the polish of porcelain and wood. She listened. There are sounds that do not designate anything in particular, and for that reason go unheard: water dripping from a faucet and the drone of bees, long steady labor out of sight. There was a tractor in the field across the road, moving slowly back and forth upon a stand of hay. She had awakened to the sound of it, but it had begun a long time before she awoke, and now it was going on long after she had ceased to hear, every thousand hollow strokes of the engine echoing out and away from the land. Then she heard the sudden swing of the gate, and she knew that it was he. Just then she had no need to see him, and she sat still, listening. He worked more rapidly than before and with a certain slight exaggeration of his strength: four and sometimes five and six slanting strokes of the axe, hurried and uneven, then the pause and the spinning away of the chips and the length of wood striking easily upon the pile and clattering down, and at the same time the friction of another log upon the block.
Later, when shade rose up in the canyon and the long false dusk came about, she had to get out. She locked the doors and walked along the road to the bathhouse. The attendant said nothing, but laid out the towels in one of the stalls and drew the tub full of smoking mineral water. Angela closed the curtains, undressed, and lay down in the water. After a while she went limp, and she could hear only her own slow, steady breathing and, with it, the water lapping. She sighed all of her strength away and laid her head back against the rim of the tub. Like drift almost, her limbs rose and rocked in the steaming water. Her feet and the caps of her knees were red with heat. She felt the clean, warm beads of water rising out upon her brow, standing, then running down her temples and into the towel that held her hair. She was glad to lose track of the time, glad of drifting into mindlessness, of holding off for an hour the vague presentiment of shame that lurked within her. Later she lay down upon a table and the attendant wrapped her in light cotton blankets and she dozed.
When she returned to the Benevides house, Abel was sitting on the front stoop—not waiting, it seemed—still and stolid. The last line of light had risen to the rim of the canyon wall, and even then it was dying out upon the blood-red rock above the trees. The enormous dark that filled the canyon was strangely cold, colder by far than the night would be. Half of the pale moon lay upon the skyline. A hummingbird swung slowly back and forth at the bunch of bridal veil under the eaves. The bees had not yet gone away.
He followed her silently into the house and through the dark rooms. She turned on the light in the kitchen, and the sudden burst of it made her shrink ever so little. She gave him coffee and he sat listening to her, not waiting, gently taking hold of her distress, passing it off. She was grateful—and chagrined. She had not foreseen this turn of tables and events, had not imagined that he could turn her scheme around. She had meant to be amused, but as it was she was only grateful and chagrined. What struck her most, and held her pride intact, was the merest compulsion to laugh, not the derision that she might have intended but a cold, uneasy mirth—and the slightest fear—now taking shape within her. Before her now was the strange reality of her shame and the tyranny of light that lay upon it. She was not herself, her own idea of herself, disseminating and at ease. She had no will to shrug him off. He sat looking at her, not waiting, still and easy upon some instinct, some sense or other of dominion and desire. She hovered about the hard flame of it.
When she polished the cup and saucer and replaced them in the cupboard, Angela’s breath was short and uneven. “All right,” she said faintly, and she sighed. The “all right” was neither consent nor resignation, just something to say. She had hoped that he might say something, too, anything of his own accord; it should have made everything so much easier. But he said nothing.
“Abel,” she said after a moment, “do you think that I am beautiful?”
She had gone to the opposite wall and turned. She leaned back with her hands behind her, throwing her head a little in order to replace a lock of hair that had fallen across her brow. She sucked at her cheeks, musing.
“No, not beautiful,” he said.
“Would you like to make love to me?”
“Yes.”
She looked evenly at him, no longer musing.
“You really would, wouldn’t you? Yes. God, I’ve seen the way you look at me sometimes.”
There was no reaction from him.
“And do you imagine,” she went on, “that I would like it, too?”
“I don’t know,” he answered, “but I imagine you would.”
Angela caught her breath, and after a long moment she came to him. She bent down and kissed him, and he put his hands on her and drew her close against him. She felt the strength of his hands and the heat of his body. His hands were hard with work and sharp with the odor of wood. She took hold of one of his hands.
She led him through the rooms and up the stairs quickly, quietly. The corridor was dark, but there was a night light in her room. The room was warm and full of great soft shadows. She let go of his hand and turned away to undress. He could see her reflection, like a silhouette, in an oval mirror on the wall. When she faced him again, they were both naked. For a minute they stood still in the soft blue light. Abel studied her, but she did not cringe. She was very pale in her nakedness, and slight. But her body was supple and round. Her throat was long and her shoulders narrow and tapered. Her breasts were small and rather too low on her body, but they were firm and pointed. There was a soft curve to her belly, and her thighs flared from the hips. Her legs were slim and shapely; she was wide between the legs.
“What will you do to me?” she asked. She was heaving a little, and her mouth was soft and open. Her face and throat were delicately beautiful against the black of her hair.
They came together and Angela felt with her whole body that he was lean and hard and vital, that his dark skin was warm and wet and taut with excitement. She felt the muscles of his stomach and thighs roll and crawl upon her, and she gasped. He let her down very gently on the bed and lay over her. He kissed her forehead and her eyes and her open mou
th, and the weight of his shoulders and chest bore slowly down upon her until it seemed to her that she should soon be crushed beneath him.
“All right,” she said again, quickly and without breath.
“No, not yet,” he said, and for an instant she went limp and the edge of her desire was lost. Oh no, oh no! she thought, but he knew what he was doing. His tongue and the tips of his fingers were everywhere upon her, and he brought her back so slowly, and set such awful fire to her flesh, that she wanted to scream. At last he raised up and she set herself for him. She was moaning softly, and her eyes rolled. He was dark and massive above her, poised and tinged with pale blue light. And in that split second she thought again of the badger at the water, and the great bear, blue-black and blowing.
As always in summer, the moment at which evening had come upon the town was absolute and imperceptible. And out of the town, among the hills and fields, the shadows had grown together and taken hold of the dusk until the valley itself was a soft gray shadow. Even so, there was a great range of colors within it, more various even than the sky, which now had begun to blush and fade. And the tinted rocks and soils grew supple and soft, and the shine went off the leaves.
Whispers rose up among the rows of corn, and the old man rested for a moment, bent still with his hands to the hoe. For nearly an hour now he had not been able to see well into the furrows, and he had reckoned their depth by the feel of the blade against the earth and made them true by the touch of the fronds and tassels on his neck and arms. The sweat dried up on his neck and the mud dried at his feet, and still he rested, holding off for another moment the pain of straightening his fingers and his back. At last he raised up against the stiffness in his spine, gathering the crippled leg under him. He breathed out sharply with the effort, and at the same time unlocked his hands and let the handle of the hoe fall into the crook of his arm. There was a lot of work left to do; he must yet bend again to the fetlocks of the mares, and his fingers must slip the hobbles from the hoofs; must yet lay hold of the wagon tongue and the buckles and stays of the harness, twice, even; must then carry water to the trough and cleave the portions from the bale. But he didn’t think of that; he thought instead of coffee and bread and the dark interior of his room.
But were they whispers? Something there struck beneath the level of his weariness, struck and took hold in his hearing like the cry of a small creature—a field mouse or a young rabbit. Evening gives motion to the air, and the long blades of corn careen and collide, and there is always at dusk the rustling of leaves that settle into night. But was it that? All day his mind had wandered over the past, habitually, beyond control and even the least notion of control, but his thoughts had been by some slight strand of attention anchored to his work. The steady repetition of his backward steps—the flash of the hoe and the sure advance of the brown water after it—had been a small reality from which his mind must venture and return. But now, at the end of long exertion, his aged body let go of the mind, and he was suddenly conscious of some alien presence close at hand. And he knew as suddenly, too, that it had been there for a long time, not approaching, but impending for minutes, and even hours, upon the air and the growth and the land around. He held his breath and listened. His ears rang with weariness; beyond that there was nothing save the soft sound of water and wind and, somewhere among the farthest rows, the momentary scuttle of a quail; then the low whistle and blowing of the mares in the adjacent field, reminding him of the time. But there was something else; something apart from these, not quite absorbed into the ordinary silence: an excitement of breathing in the instant just past, all ways immediate, irrevocable even now that it had ceased to be. He peered into the dark rows of corn from which no sound had come, in which no presence was. There was only the deep black wall of stalks and leaves, vibrating slowly upon his tired vision like water. He was too old to be afraid. His acknowledgment of the unknown was nothing more than a dull, intrinsic sadness, a vague desire to weep, for evil had long since found him out and knew who he was. He set a blessing upon the corn and took up his hoe. He shuffled out between the rows, toward the dim light at the edge of the cornfield.
And where he had stood the water backed up in the furrow and spilled over the edge. It spread out upon the ground and filled the double row of crescents where the heels of his shoes had pressed into the earth. Here and there were the black welts of mud which he had shaken loose from the blade of the hoe. And there the breathing resumed, rapid and uneven with excitement. Above the open mouth, the nearly sightless eyes followed the old man out of the cornfield, and the barren lids fluttered helplessly behind the colored glass.
August 1
Three days passed, and Father Olguin went about his work as usual. These full summer days he breathed more peacefully the cool, musky air of the rectory, gathered himself up privately in the mornings after Mass, when his blood was always slow to thaw and his mind to focus and take hold of events. By the grace of these last few days, the affairs of the parish had been set in order. He was content. He had at last begun to sense the rhythm of life in the ancient town, and how it was that his own pulse should eventually conform to it. And this in itself was a grave satisfaction to him. He had always been on the lookout for reverences, and here was a holiness more intrinsic than any he could ever have imagined—a slow, druidic procession of seasons in the narrow streets.
Now, on the first day of August, there was a stirring in the town. Fewer men than usual went out into the fields, and the women scurried about like squirrels, full of chatter, inside and out, from door to door. There was a curious sound of deliberation and haste all around. Embers and ashes rose up on the shimmering columns of heat above the mud ovens, whirled, and settled into the streets, and the sharp odor of cedar and gumwood smoke carried to the edge of the town and beyond, into the still midmorning of the valley. And there, southward on the old road to San Ysidro, the first covered wagons had come into view. In these were the outriding elders of the caravan, an older generation of the Dîné than that which followed and would follow through the afternoon and evening, and which even now convened at the junction to trade for wine. All afternoon the wagons would come from the south, slowly, seemingly motionless on the steady grade, but looming larger until at last the great gray canopies ballooned like sails taking shape in the distant plain, and in the angle of the wake on either side lean young men on horseback, drab and drunk; the beautiful straight-backed girls in sunlit silver and velveteen, supple and slim and born to the saddle; and the panting dogs. Later, when their chores were done, the children of the town would run out to see, to stand at the fences and cheer and chide; there would be an old enactment of laughter and surprise. The end of the train would be brought up by fools, in a poor parody of pride: the fat, degenerate squaws, insensible with drink, and the sad, sullen bucks, hanging on. But these now in view were clansmen, the wizened keepers of an old and sacred alliance, come to prolong for another year the agony of recognition and retreat.
Later, when Father Olguin had taken honey from the hives and heard the general clamor rise above the drone of the bees, he thought of Angela. He could do so now without the small excitement that she had so easily provoked within him at first. He was aware of her as a woman, of course, but he was no longer disturbed by her. Tacitly, as it were, she had agreed to keep her distance. How else could her silence be construed? She was capable of respect. Very well, then, he would repay her in kind; he would extend to her his welcome at once, now, upon this certain occasion of grave good will. Unaccustomed as she was to solitude—lonely, no doubt—she would share in his good fortune simply, implicitly. She would perceive that he was occupied, committed surely to a remarkable trust, and she would envy him—not his accomplishment, perhaps, but at least his possibilities. The prospect of her envy pleased him, and he hummed about in the rooms of the rectory until it was noon, and he rang the Angelus long and loud.
The general sound did not diminish after noon, when ordinarily the weight of silence lay most he
avily on the town, but went on, gathering momentum. The customary motion of the day had been suspended, and he had the sense of an impending revolution in time, as if a new, more crowded order of events were about to be imposed upon the world. Nor did the premonition subside when, almost reluctantly, he drove out of the town and into the canyon, leaving behind the din of the coming feast. A strange exuberance had taken hold of him, a low exhilaration like fire; he breathed softly upon it and opened his hand to the force of the air outside.
A low line of thunderheads lay on the high horizon in back of the northernmost peaks. They were deep in the distance and seemed always to have been there, dark and unchanging in the end of vision, in some sense polar and nocturnal. He kept an eye on them and speeded up, half hoping to rush upon the scent of rain. The specter of rain in August is a distillation of light upon the land, a harder efflorescence upon the rocks and a sterile, uncommon shine upon the river and the leaves. An element of darkness, however vague and tentative on the midsummer sky, implies a thin and colorless luster upon the sand and the cliffs and the dusty boughs of cedar and pine, and there is a quality like vain resistance in the air.
The roof and walls of the Benevides house gleamed in the sun. He touched the brake and turned off the road into the white gravel driveway, in which there were drab patches of hard earth and protruding gray ridges of rock, too deeply embedded to be removed. The incline to the steps of the porch was uneven, and the gravel rolled backward under his sandaled feet. There were more flies than usual about the porch, and the vine cover rang with bees. Angela opened the door and nodded him in without speaking, smiling faintly in that way of hers that meant she was, or had just been, lost in her thoughts. Had he been in the least suspicious, he might have seen that she was startled, however little, to see him, and been aware of a certain oppressive stillness about her. As it was, he came into the dark room, in which all the shades were drawn, and sat down. He made himself comfortable, at home. They were making ready in the town, he said, like dervishes. She should see.