Among the Lesser Gods

by Margo Catts

  She started with small talk—congratulating herself on the detective skills she’d exercised to get my grandmother’s address, asking whether I’d made it through graduation all right. And finally, the reason for writing: She wanted to let me know about a teaching-exchange program specifically for female graduate students in the sciences. I’d be perfect for it, she thought. It would let me get a master’s degree for almost nothing. I could take admission tests in the fall. Be accepted by January. Go back to school next fall.

  I could start over.

  I sank into the wooden chair and looked out the window. The glass pane had been swung open to the inside and pushed the white curtain aside. I could see a section of the porch roof, still brown, and Tuah’s paintbrush spreading blue into the edge of the visible square, then dragging back out. In and out.

  I reread the letter a half dozen times. Go back to school. By the time I had the baby, the door to Florida would just be opening. I could erase this year altogether and return to the world I knew. Bodies at rest. Bodies in motion. Energy expended or conserved. Action and reaction: weighed, measured, and accurately predicted.

  Once the baby was delivered and taken away, I could do anything I wanted. I just hadn’t thought about it lately. What better option could I have than this? Staying here, taking a job as a store clerk or a secretary at the mine office? Looking at every woman with a baby and wondering if it was mine? I’d be winding myself into Tuah’s apron like a scared four-year-old. And the longer I did it, the harder it would be to ever get away.

  I’d already started, I could now see. Grabbing hold of one apron string when I unpacked my clothes, winding it around my finger when I bought toothpaste and a toothbrush to leave at the Koffords, wrapping my wrist when I told Leo I’d see him again. I just hadn’t been paying attention to what those things implied, hadn’t thought to resist each inference and expectation as it appeared. Nothing in Tuah’s comments that morning should have surprised me. No, my need to get out of the house in that moment had come from feeling the strings pull, not because they were touching me for the first time. And certainly not because of hormones. Reading this letter, though, made me feel as if tightening restraints had just dropped off. I flipped over the envelope. Melbourne, Florida. There would be classrooms and laboratories. Columns of figures. Formulas. Outside, the roll of waves, on and on into eternity. Me, standing on the sand. Alone. Free.

  A thump and a scrape. Tuah getting off the chair and moving it a foot or two.

  “Are you all right?” she called.

  “Fine. I’ll be out in a minute.”

  Free.

  *

  “You know who I feel sorry for right now?” Tuah said.

  We sat on opposite ends of the porch, backs to each other, doubled over, reaching under our backsides to slop a base coat under its edge.

  “What?” I twisted upright. She’d caught me completely off guard.

  “Not what. Who. And it’s your mama. She’s missed out on a lot.”

  This turn of conversation disoriented me. Just a minute before we’d been talking about how much ice I should bring up next time I came, which was about all the complexity I was capable of processing at the moment. I’d woken up with a headache, having spent most of the night with my thoughts chasing each other in the dark. Now, a full day after reading Cora’s letter, I was, if anything, even farther away from resolving what to do with myself. Or any other self. What seemed so simple when I first read the letter had grown complicated when I started to consider the realities. Where would I find a job? Or live? And how, with a pregancy that would be fully visible if I went to Florida at the end of the summer? Or would I stay here to give birth, then flee, leaving Tuah with the knowledge that there was a great-grandchild somewhere nearby? Available decisions and consequences circled and twisted until my head throbbed with knots. And here, on the edge of the porch, I’d suddenly found it impossible to sit and bend with the top button closed on my jeans. Of course. Today.

  These boards, this house, these mountains were my family’s history. They were baked into my bones and were being transferred, cell by cell, into the bones of the creature pressing against my pants. If I went to Florida, what, really, would happen to that child there? What would life be like in the family that took it in? Would they stay there? Stay together? Break apart as my family had done? How could I ever satisfy myself that I had done the right thing?

  I rubbed my nose with the back of my wrist. “I don’t think she cares,” I said.

  “Only because she doesn’t know what she’s missed. I’m sorry for her.”

  A jumble of scenes crowded into my head like shoppers shoving through the door for a clearance sale. My mother bending over me at night, a kiss on my forehead, my father telling me in the morning that she was gone. Sitting alone in the lunch shelter at my first new elementary school, in fourth grade, plucking grapes from their stems as if they needed my full attention. Packing moving boxes. Watching Marcus Welby with my father, the room dark, both of us silent.

  “Why are you saying this?”

  “Well, it’s true.”

  “It’s true that it’s summer, but you’re not talking about that.”

  She scooted sideways along the edge of the porch, her back a rectangle of chambray, her head invisible between her shoulders. “Well, now, that’s right. I guess just because I’m thinking about the baby.”

  Gear teeth of logic dropped into place against each other. Now I could see where she was going: My mother had left me, and I would probably leave my own baby. My mother had missed my childhood, for better or worse, and I might miss my own child’s life. My mother’s absence had scarred me, and my absence would—do what, exactly? I pressed my lips together, dipped the brush in the can, and spread more paint. Yes, leaving my baby—whether here or in Florida—would entail pain I had glossed over in my rush to embrace an escape. But focusing on that would only cost me more sleep.

  “You know, having a child hurts,” Tuah said. “Don’t let anybody fool you on that score. But then the pain is over, and you’ve got a baby.”

  You’ve got a baby? Got? I straightened again and twisted toward her. “But I don’t want a baby.”

  “Well of course you weren’t setting out to have one,” she said. “But something seems to happen, no matter what. When those eyes look at you, well, the whole world changes.”

  What was she talking about? Eyes? Looking at me? It was hard enough to figure out what to do with something I only imagined as a swaddled bundle or a faceless person leading a separate life somewhere. Not an actual soul I would have to engage with. Not a sentient child anchored to a life I couldn’t even manage for myself. No, no, no.

  “I can’t keep a baby!”

  She laid her brush across the top of her paint can, got up, and walked across the porch to sit down beside me. She put a hand on my knee.

  “I didn’t say you should keep the baby. Or give it up. I’ve got no place to say one way or another. I just want you to be prepared that whatever you decide, it’ll be hard. Real hard.”

  “I know.”

  “No, I don’t think you do. Nobody does. Nothing can prepare you for what you’ll feel for that child in your arms. Nothing about it will be easy.”

  “But my mom—” I’d gotten ahead of myself and bit off the rest.

  “Your mama was a frightened woman, her whole life. When she left you and your dad, she didn’t make that decision because it was easy. She did it because she was afraid, and I can promise you she regrets it every day of her life.” Her hand tightened on my knee. “The decisions you make when you’re scared …” She shook her head. “You’ll always wish you could go back and do something different.”

  I looked down. Her hand on my knee was sinewy and corded with veins. The nails were rough. I had the same oval nail beds that went to the tips of my fingers.

  “I can’t keep a baby,” I whispered. Were the baby’s fingers forming like that, too? What other traits from me, from my f
ather, from Tuah and Abuelo, or traits from my mother I didn’t even know about, were reaching through me like rhizomes through earth, now pushing up a new shoot?

  “That’s not a decision. That’s an objection. If you’ve made your decision, then what are you afraid of? Be brave. See the doctor. Make your plans. Figure out what you’re going to do between now and the delivery, then start thinking about what’s next.”

  “But, who do I talk to? How am I supposed to handle everything? What if I make the wrong decision?”

  “There may not be a right one. But there’s going to be one. You need to give yourself a fighting chance to have some confidence about it.”

  “What if … it … winds up someplace bad? Has a terrible life?” My voice was creeping higher. This was an awful time for me to be talking about this. The center of my chest, on the inside, already felt as raw as an open blister. My head throbbed. “I can’t live with …”

  Tuah didn’t wait too long for the words that wouldn’t come. She rubbed my knee. “People live with a lot of things. You do what you have to. And then you go on living.”

  I looked back up. “How? How? How do you know? What decision have you ever made that you regretted?”

  She released my knee and leaned back. “Oh, good heavens. Lots of things.”

  “Name one.”

  “Oh, I don’t remember. Not just off the top of my head like that.”

  “Of course not.”

  “Lena, that’s because it happens all the time. That’s the nature of life. You can only go down one path and you don’t get to know ahead of time what’s down the other. Pick and go. Sometimes it turns out better than you expected. Sometimes worse. No point dwelling on the path you didn’t take. And no matter what happens, some good will pop out of it somewhere. Just because it came from something awful doesn’t mean it’s poisoned, somehow. You gotta hang on to it anyway, be grateful for it.”

  She bent forward, picked up a rock, and tossed it, backhanded, it toward a tree. A mountain jay lifted out of it and winged slowly away, black over blue.

  She brushed her hands against each other. “Look,” she said. “Your life, it’s a gift. It’s a good gift. And the child you’re carrying, that’s a gift, too. But no gift comes for free.”

  Sunlight on water as Kevin and Sarah cheered for their haphazard sailboats. The circle of lamplight as we read stories together and talked about their mother. Mindy’s hand on mine; Olive’s living, loving granddaughter bearing me up in a cowboy bar as I said that yet another soul was on its way into the world.

  Gifts, all, it was true, no matter how small they were or from how much filth they might have been recovered.

  Tuah put her hand on my knee again and patted it, then pushed herself to her feet. “Start making some decisions, Lena. Good and bad will come, no matter what you do. Accept it, and look for the good.”

  I squinted up at her. Fuzzy strands stood out from her head, silvered by the sunlight behind her.

  “You haven’t answered my question,” I said.

  “What question?”

  “About a decision you regretted.”

  “Why do you want to know?”

  “I want to figure out how you make decisions after you know how much harm one person can cause.”

  She looked down at me. “Ah, my Lena,” she said. She pressed her lips together, then turned to look downhill, toward town. The jay swung back into view, settling into a different tree, willing to wait for whatever scraps our dinner might offer. Just when I began to wonder whether I’d gotten all the answer I was going to, she spoke.

  “I let Benencia go,” she said. She cleared her throat. “In her blue calico dress with the pink flowers, with no coat or shawl, and without Gus. I didn’t want to let her go, but she knew she wasn’t a child, and she’d get angry with me when I tried to keep her safe. So against my better judgment, I let her go.” She looked back down at me. “I let her go. I shouldn’t ever have let her go. I live with that every day, but I live. It’s the best anybody can do.”

  21

  Dust rose and sparkled as I turned onto the lane for the Flying J Guest Ranch, the setting sun straight in my eyes. I squinted, my head still throbbing. I would be spending the night in Leadville anyway, before going to the Koffords’ early in the morning, so I would far rather have skipped the cookout and headed straight there. Pulled the blind and put my head into the pillow. But Tuah didn’t have a phone for me to let him know, so here I was.

  I passed the opening in the split rail fence where I’d turned off when I dropped Leo here yesterday morning. As he’d instructed me, I followed the sign for guest parking to a gravel lot with flower boxes lining the fence, each with a little American flag stuck into it at a jaunty angle. Yes, it was a parking lot, but the sight of my mud-crusted Pinto between a Mercedes and a Lincoln Continental made me wonder whether I’d really gotten the directions right.

  I got out and shoved my keys into my pocket. A cabin of polished logs had a sign nailed to the corner, pointing along a boardwalk to “guest registration” and “lodge” and “mess hall.” I followed it around the corner of the cabin, then stopped. Before me spread a wide lawn that ended half a football field away in front of a log lodge, three stories high, with green shutters and red geraniums at the windows, a deep porch, and an American flag swaying beside the steps. Red, white, and blue bunting ran along the porch railing. A life-size chainsaw-art bear held a welcome sign and a flag. Smaller cabins encircled the green, with paths around them disappearing into the pines. A couple of girls in white shorts swatted a shuttlecock across a net stretched near the corner of the lodge.

  “Hey! Elena!”

  I turned to see Leo stepping down from a seat atop the split rail fence.

  “Right on time,” he said. He wore dark jeans, boots, a hat, and a snap-front plaid shirt. A pressed stars-and-stripes bandana was knotted around his neck.

  “You didn’t tell me this was evening dress,” I said. I had on jeans, a pair of Chuck Taylors frayed along the tongue, a Who ’76 concert T-shirt, and a sweatshirt knotted around my waist.

  “You look great.” He pointed to a golf cart, the nose of which protruded beyond the corner of a cabin near where he’d been sitting. “You want a tour? We’ve got about an hour before dinner.”

  “First I want you to tell me how I never knew this was here.”

  “The ranch?”

  “No, all this. That place I dropped you off, where it looked like a regular summer camp? I expected more of that. This is …” I looked back toward the lodge, now noticing little croquet wickets set into the grass near a pair of Adirondack chairs. “I had no idea. And—” I waved from the boots to his dove-gray hat. “Is that a costume?”

  God, I sounded like a snotty teenager. But he just grinned.

  “Something like that,” he said. “But as long as I’m in it, I can let you drive.”

  We followed a sand-and-gravel cart path that curved into the trees and led us past the pool. Tennis courts. Mini golf. A recreation building with Ping-Pong, billiards, board games, a library, and a toddler playroom. In addition to the twenty guest rooms in the lodge were family cabins, nestled into little aspen groves around the property. Lanes and paths wound through the trees. Finally he had me stop at the corrals, downhill and downwind from all the guest quarters so no one would be troubled by the smells of an actual ranch. A dozen or more horses stood in a clump at the far side, a head shake here, a foot stamp there, tails swishing without regard to whose faces or flanks benefited. I parked the golf cart beside the barn, and we got out.

  “There’s Spot,” I said as we leaned against the fence rails, pointing at a black and white pinto. “Right? The one I rode?”

  Leo nodded, squinting under the rim of his hat. “He’s pretty busy this week.”

  “Busy?”

  “Every guest gets assigned a horse. The lucky ones get the ten-year-old girls, and the new guy hit the jackpot. Little girl from Florida. He’s getting a lot of good
ies.”

  Florida. The setting sun, behind me, warmed my shoulders and lit the ridge in the distance. These mountains. I squeezed my eyes shut. Stop. I crossed my arms on the top fence rail and dug my chin into the back of my wrist. “The ponies are for little kids?”

  “Yup. But they’re all kinda stubborn and mean, so one of us has to be right there with them if a kid wants to ride.”

  “And guests can just go on rides anytime they want?”

  “There’s a schedule of planned rides, and most folks just do that.” He pointed past the horses to a large, empty corral with wooden bleachers outside the far fence. “They can ride anytime in the rodeo ring. We get the beginners started in there, and we use it for roping, barrel racing, all that stuff.”

  “Roping? With actual calves?”

  “Sure. You can do as much real work around here as you want. Go on roundup rides during the summer, do some branding, the works.”

  “Cowboy play land.”

  “That sounds about right.”

  Suddenly one of the ponies, tucked in between larger horses, pulled its head up, ears back, so that its bared teeth were just visible over another horse’s rump. It snapped, and there was a muffled percussion of hooves stamping the dust, a shifting in the crowd, but within a few seconds everything settled back down.

  Leo shook his head. “Ponies. Always with the Napoleon complex.”

  Or maybe it was just a completely reasonable reaction to bodies that were too big, too immovable, and too oppressive getting way too close. That pony understood me. I shoved myself away from the fence.

  “Dinner soon?” I said.

  “Sure.”

  We got in the golf cart and wound our way back uphill, humming past the mini golf, the pool, the tennis courts, some larger guest cabins, to a spot behind the mess hall where three other golf carts were parked. I heard a clank of horseshoes and smelled charcoal smoke as we got out.