True to form, she says, “I didn’t hardly do anything. Not that I wouldn’t be happy to if you’d stick around for a change.”
“I’ll be back soon,” I say.
“Right, Brice.”
“No, honestly. I mean it.”
“Say hello to Jessica for me,” she says, finally.
We hang up and I begin to throw together my few things before I realize that probably, yes, I will come back soon. “You mind if I leave this bag here?” I ask my mother. “Just a few clothes. I don’t need them for the trip home.”
This is fine by her. I think, I ought to wash up before I go. But then I realize that my hands might guide me better with a little sacred earth on them. I kiss my mother goodbye, a solid filial kiss with her beautiful, fragile head held firmly in both my soiled palms.
Down from the Hill, down the broad switchbacks of the familiar road that would lead me back past San Ildefonso pueblo, to the crossroads near Pojoaque. I have for Alyse a token of blessed soil for which, being the friend she is, she will thank me ardently before calling Martha to come, see what Brice has brought, touch it because it has magical properties that will make you live forever. Then she will drive me from Santa Fe to Albuquerque for the flight home. I spoke with Jessica last night, and said there was so much to tell her. She asked me how Kip was, and I could only say he was finer than I’d ever seen him but finer, as always, after his own fashion. For her I have some holy clay too, and some as well for Ariel—a humble birthday present to accompany that, or should I say those, for there are so many, from her other father.
The party’s a few weeks after the fact, but what difference does it make. Ariel, twenty-four. I’ve been her father for twenty-four years. I wish she could see what I am seeing here now. I begin to wish she took more of an interest in my history, but catch myself with the thought, Listen, man, you have hardly known your own history, how should you expect her to contemplate what’s never been disclosed to her? That would change, of course. Our histories, set straight, might finally intertwine, ironic as it may seem.
I take in a deep breath of air, look east as I round a hairpin curve. The Sangre de Cristos have been rinsed by rain, and above them rise those inveterate clouds like a second range much grander in scale than the mountains themselves. Released my breath, breathed again. Thin, sweet air.
My thoughts go back to Ariel, Jess, Kip, myself. All parents wish their children took more interest in their histories, I guess.
It is unfathomable to me still that I am a father—and I am a father—and even more unbelievable to me that next year I will be celebrating my birthday of half a century, and seven months later there will be another birthday, as the successful construction of the bomb continues to chase me around the calendar of years. Los Alamos already has commemorative festivities under way, with many more activities planned for the months ahead. The nation will honor (or not) the half-centennial of its magnificent, dubious achievement. Now that we are told the cold war is over and the threat of nuclear war is diminished, the celebrations on the Hill can be mantled in a kind of dignity that pure history offers anniversaries of events mixed with equal parts glory and sadness. Pure history is history sealed from the present. Is safe history. The Trinity blast down at Alamogordo will be commemorated as pure history, if possible. But, of course, it is not. The arsenal Trinity fathered is vast and there are despots not born yet whose pleasure will be to make it vaster and threaten to give us another glimpse of its fearful magic. If only the posito in Chimayó could generate healing soil enough to bury the silos around the world forever, that would be a day truly to celebrate.
At the foot of the pass where the highway no longer holds to the steep beige and charcoal walls of the long mesas, and begins to open out into the straightaway across the flatland, the traveler crosses the Rio Grande. Known to some as Otowi, it is the sacred site the Indians call Po-Sah-Son-Gay, “the place where the river speaks.” There is a love story associated with Po-Sah-Son-Gay.
So many different things connect here. The old Otowi bridge still spans the muddy river to the right of where the new concrete four-lane bridge crosses over. It is a restored but fragile sculpture of an honest, old design, its concrete verticals holding strong, its necklace of cables graceful, a narrow suspension bridge, the remnant of earlier times. All our families, back in the forties, crossed that bridge, and much of the equipment that went into building our homes and the myriad materials that were assembled into the bombs on the Hill were carried across that bridge. And back in earlier days it so happened that there was a woman who lived by the bridge. Her name was Edith Warner, and when she came here in autumn 1922 to exchange the air of Philadelphia for that of a small guest ranch in Frijoles Canyon her life underwent a revolution, such was the beauty of the landscape surrounding the stone house and cabins that stood near the Rito de los Frijoles—Bean Brook, as Kip used to call it—edged by alders and willows and grama grasses. The sun-warmed cliffs, the dry talus that lay like unmarked amulets at their feet, the smoke-blackened ceilings of the caves covered with line etchings of deer and birds and the cliff dwellers themselves, the Plumed Serpent at Tsirege mesa from whose height she could see mountains in every direction, the stars that at night lay overhead like a quilt—Edith knew she could never leave, that New Mexico was to be her home for the rest of her years. A man named John Boyd and his wife, Martha, who operated the ranch that winter, took Edith into their lives, and they moved on to an even more remote valley, higher in the Jemez where they built a log cabin and settled together for a time into a life of pioneers. If Edith harbored second thoughts about abandoning the East, a trip back to Pennsylvania in the mid-twenties laid them to rest. Ill health forced her return to the Southwest, and in 1928, unmarried, unemployed, thirty-five years old, Edith agreed to take the only work she could find, as caretaker of a rundown house that stood near the tracks of the Denver & Rio Grande narrow-gauge railroad. The train came through, spewing smoke and hot cinders in the fashion of old iron horses of the last century, and deposited in the boxcar station supplies and mail destined for Los Alamos Ranch School. Edith would sign for the shipment and with the help of a pueblo boy named Adam ready things for the truck that came down from the mesa to pick it up each week. She was very poor, but considered it a good life to be paid twenty-five dollars a month plus what she could earn selling tobacco and canned goods, soda pop and gasoline to the Indians, the occasional sheepherder, boys from the ranch, tourists making their way from Santa Fe to the ruins of Frijoles. Gradually she fixed the house up, and gradually the Indians from the reservation began to accept her, this white woman who lived on their land at the place where the river speaks. They helped her plough her garden, they gathered firewood for her, they repaired her leaking roof. O-ne-a-po-vi, an elder woman of the pueblo, knew she had a special fondness for blue cornmeal paper-bread, and saw to it that Edith would have some for dinner. Likewise, the scientists from up on the Hill came down to have supper at her table. Edith developed a special fondness for Niels Bohr, his perpetual pipe and his straw hat, the way his sentences meandered, explored, often trailed off into silence, then picked up once more, always in pursuit, never at rest. Others from the Hill befriended her, too. Parsons, Fermi, Compton, Oppenheimer, the lot of them. Edith, like the trestle span by her house, bridged things. Then she met Atilano Montoya, known as Tilano, who came one day to build for her a fireplace of adobe brick, and her life changed again. Tilano told her of his travels through Europe—Paris and London, Rome and Berlin—as a member of a troupe of Indian dancers. His gypsy days behind, he was now one of the elders of San Ildefonso, with glorious braids that reached his waist, character charged with warmth and wit. He was a widower, and in time his visits to the house by the river became more frequent, until eventually his presence there was permanent. They never married, but were seldom apart. When the engineers came in 1947 to inform her that the Otowi bridge was outmoded and that they were going to have to build a new bridge, which would cast a shadow across
her cornfield and into her kitchen window, she was saddened, of course, but it was said that she and Tilano accepted the inevitability of progress, and felt fortunate that they’d spent those decades down by the river. With the help of Indians from the pueblo and scientists from Los Alamos they built an adobe up in the canyon where, on quiet days, they could just make out the ruffle and shush of the talking river. She died a few years later, in the spring of 1951, and Tilano himself died two years after that.
I have read a book about this woman, which was written by the daughter of Ashley Pond, the gentleman who first founded the boy’s school up at Los Alamos, and in this book the author appends the texts of Edith’s Christmas letters, which she sent to all her friends, and which were famous for their humor and wisdom. The last of these laments the news of Korea. “Co-ha and Hagi, the boys who worked with Tilano in the garden from the time they could pull a weed, came home on leave before going overseas,” she writes. “Five of the boys from the Pueblo have gone and again, after so short a span, the postman is always awaited anxiously.” In the letter she speaks of cycles and of renewal, and of how the snowy peaks of Truchas are lit up by the sun. She delights in thinking of the long-ago people who walked just here in the world and thanks their gods for what generosities life can allow. Then, remembering the war once more, as if the war extinguished the glinting light above, she gives voice to her impatience with just that same world. “How to endure the man-made devastating period in which we live and which seems almost as hopeless to control as drought.” It is as if I can see her leaning intent over the blank page before her. “I only know that the power recognized by those other sky-scanners still exists, that contact is possible. I know, too, what depths of kindness and selflessness exist in my fellow man. Of this I have had renewed assurance recently, when those about me have shared self and substance. When Tilano lights the Christmas Eve fire, perhaps against a white hillside, I shall watch from the house where some have felt peace and hope that in your sky there are some bright stars.”
I climb back up the bank, duck between lengths of the barbed wire fence, having gone down to take a picture of the two bridges, so that I can show Ariel, and tell her this story about Edith Warner and Tilano. The Rio Grande is as silty as ever, rushing along with its yellow clay from Tierra Amarilla, with the red sandstone remnants of Gallina dumped into the river back where the Chama merges, with all the earth washed down through the wild arroyos, all the basaltic sediment from its tributaries, reworking the desert as it makes its way down to the ocean. I found a perfect place to capture the image of the two bridges. It would have been a fine remembrance, bygone time bordered by time present, but I am overwhelmed with the thought that the day will come when those going back and forth over the new bridge would be so many that yet another bridge inevitably will be built, so there would be one bridge used by those ascending and another for those coming down. That’s the way the world works, at least from the window through which I see it.
It is as if the image before me resists being photographed, as if the voice of the river disdains the impulse. One more object for reminiscence? it seems to ask. Another piece of evidence to prove the impermanence of that which endures? Bohr, author of the term complementarity, who understood that matter remains harmonious through the interplay of apparently conflicting forces, crossed this bridge many times. No need to photograph these two bridges, one not quite old, one not quite new—the image would be obsolete before the print so much as began to yellow.
Why? Because they love building things here. The river’s not going to go away. It will continue to speak with its watery brown tongues. And people will continue to want to cross it to make their way up to the Hill, no matter what may happen in the world. It may change, but it will continue, and so another bridge will be built. I cannot get myself to snap the shutter, can’t expose the film. Instead, I look at the bridges long and hard, do not want to forget a single detail, know so well how ruinous forgetfulness can be. A magpie settles in the poplar near where the narrow-gauge railway used to run, a jackrabbit disappears under sagebrush. When I cross the highway, and get into the car, I think of that night all those years ago when we came careening across the desert toward Chimayó, and crossed the river just here. I smile and think, Kip, I’ll always love you, too, my brother. The day is warming and I smell the earth and the dust on the dashboard and the metal of the body of the car. It smells good: earth, dust, metal. A breeze walks up the gradual rise from the river. The river splashes along in its ancient bed. I try to understand what it is saying to me, as this is the place the river traditionally speaks. There are many noises, scrapes and burbles. I cannot make out what they mean. I try harder, but the river only babbles, or so it seems. When I give up and reach to turn the key, I hear it. The words aren’t in any language, really. The river doesn’t bother with words, doesn’t use the shapes and structures of human utterance. It says what it has to say. It is time to be moving on, it says. Like the water that had come down into the valley and ventured into the river, it was time for me to leave the Hill once more. Time to go back home.
Turn the page to start reading the follow-up to Trinity Fields
De la tierra fui formado,
La tierra me a de comer,
La tierra me a sustentado,
Y al fin yo tierra a de ser.
Part I
Stranger by the Gate
Nambé
1820–1993
DOÑA FRANCISCA DE PEÑA never believed in ghosts, and even after she became one herself she couldn’t help but have her doubts.
When she was young, Francisca already wore a weathered look in her dark eyes. Stronger than her brothers, she rode better than they did and worked the fields with a grown man’s stamina. Her father, Trinidad Otero de Peña, a pioneer ranchero who settled three dozen hectares in Nambé valley before the midcentury pueblo land grants, taught her the names of animals and plants and stars. Showed her how to irrigate summer pastures and graft pear trees. Her mother, Estrella, schooled her in reading, writing, and numbers. They sensed Francisca was not like other children. Quicker, more awake, but at the same time given to curious reveries. Maybe she was a gentle bruja, they thought, a benign witch. They nicknamed her Francisca esparaván, little sparrowhawk.
On her seventh birthday, Francisca had a dream in which she swam Rio Nambé like some underwater bird, feathering her way with ease through its cold currents. When she awakened, a mysterious change had visited the world around her. Paralyzed in bed, she saw her room was not the same. Sun billowing in her window seemed more like liquid than light. Her cane chair wavered toward invisibility. The book on her table was translucent, as was the willowy table itself. Her room was in the river, it appeared, the universe of her dream having merged with what she witnessed here, awake. Then slowly her alcove regathered itself, and the girl arose into her morning.
Throughout that day, while doing chores on the rancho, a tract of scratchland at the western edge of the pueblo not far from where it bordered Pojoaque, Francisca was tormented by the fear she might never be able to visit her dream place again. For though she liked working the horses and stoking the piñonwood fire in the mud oven where her mother baked their bread, nothing matched the ecstasy of that dream. But she needn’t have worried. That very night she sat on one of the moonlit blades of the wooden windmill, feet dangling as she rode round and round on its spinning face in a carnival of her own devising.
Many different birds visited her dreams. Magpies that squealed like lusty cats in rough basket-nests high in their catalpa trees. Strutting crows dressed in black like debonair hangmen. Roadrunners that zigzagged the open barrens. On her ninth birthday, Francisca dreamed she spread her arms and stretched her fingers and flew above the treetops of Nambé basin. The desert wind combed her blue-black hair and made her pluming skirts flutter against her thighs. When she gazed below she saw herself asleep in her rope bed, another girl who was Francisca de Peña, she supposed, an earthbound creature for whom she felt
a certain pity.
This was the dream that marked her continuous consciousness. It was so viable, so very true, that when she awoke to find herself not in the sky but on the ruddy floor, soaked in sweat, coughing and clawing at the air, flinching in her mother’s arms, the girl opened her eyes awestruck to discover that her mother seemed more fantasy than her spectral flight.
Dreams flowed through her with progressive fury. Looking at another dawn over the Sangre de Cristos, or gazing toward the Jemez Mountains coppered by sundown, she dismissed the temptation to confide in anyone. Who would understand these night visions that caused her to mistrust if she ever really slept? Who would believe she sometimes knew in the morning what afternoon would bring? That this year’s frijoles would grow under generous rain, while next year’s crop would fail? That a cousin living near Santo Domingo was pregnant with twin girls who would survive the hour of their birth even as their mother perished? Francisca herself scarcely believed the things she saw.
All the while, the waking world of mother and father and brothers who’d been christened with good adamant names out of the Bible—Mateo, Santo, Teofilo, Pedro—moved on. Mateo, born scrawny, became a strapping buck. Santo had long sable hair and an eye for the women. Hardworking Teofilo wore a bright-red kerchief tied around his head beneath his hat. Pedro, who lived in the kitchen, grew round as an armadillo. These brothers matured, as did the ranch. More sheep and cattle in the pastures, more horses. The orchards flourished. Her father took a fall off his favorite stallion and walked forever after with a proud limp. Estrella’s gray eyes got grayer, and her hair went white. Crops were sown, harvested, cellared, eaten. Seasons migrated like sandhill cranes.
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