Among the Lesser Gods

by Margo Catts

  “That,” she demanded, pointing at it with one finger. “Did it look like that?”

  The fabric swam in front of my eyes. I pulled folds of the quilt into my hands. There was another square. And another. And another. Blue calico with pink flowers. Benencia’s dress, tucked around my shoulders at night. Holding my dolls. Crushed against my cheek when I was sulky or sad. Wrapped around my back on a chilly morning as I twisted my feet into it at the kitchen table.

  “Did it?”

  I looked up at her, eyes wide and aching. I nodded.

  She dropped against the edge of her chair, almost missing it, and fumbled to right herself. It was only then that little sobs started to work in her throat.

  “How would she get so far? How? It’s too far. Roberto, did you ever go to the meadow together? Ever?”

  “I—I don’t know.”

  My father had hardened into my grandfather’s chair as if he’d been carved there as well—chest hollow, following the shape of the chair back, hands locked onto the arms, face gaunt and frozen. Not once had I thought of his reaction to this news. He’d been a child when his sister disappeared. But in his own way, he seemed as undone as his mother.

  “Maybe she kept wandering because she was lost.” Tuah was talking to herself. “I suppose she didn’t have to do it all at once, did she? Maybe she stopped, and then she walked some more.” A sob caught her breath. “For how long?” She breathed the question into a breeze that picked it up and carried it away across the meadows and slopes and hills. She buried her face in her hands. “How long?” she wailed in a voice I had never heard, and I could see the shape of her pain by the way she wrapped herself around it.

  “I’m sorry,” my father whispered. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

  I don’t think she heard him. She had sunk too far into grief for anything to reach her. And it was still only half as far as she would need to go.

  33

  I never found a way to finish the story. Tuah kept crying, rocking over her knees, while my father clenched in his chair and apologized again and again and again. Sitting between them, I didn’t know who to comfort and I didn’t know how. Putting my arms around either of their shoulders felt too foreign to even try. I finally put my hand on Tuah’s arm.

  “Tuah,” I said. “Tuah, the sheriff is coming. Soon.”

  “The sheriff?” She lifted her face from her hands, bewildered, adrift. Her eyes had swollen, but the skin underneath them had collapsed over her cheeks.

  “The sheriff. They got the body a few days ago. They think it’s her, too. They want to talk to you.”

  She started to nod. “Of course. That’s right. Of course. Yes.” She started to catch her sobs and pull them down into herself. She wiped her cheeks with the heels of her hands.

  “No!” My father’s voice surprised me. “No, no, no!”

  “Dad?”

  “Not again! I can’t do that all over again!”

  “Dad!”

  But it was as if he didn’t even know I was there.

  “Roberto, stop it,” Tuah said. Her voice sounded familiar to me again.

  “I don’t remember! I couldn’t remember! I can’t have somebody asking me all over again!”

  “No one is asking you to. No one ever expected you to. You don’t even have to be here. Go, if you have to.”

  “Dad! No!” I reached for his arm. “How could you leave her alone right now?”

  “Elena. It’s all right. Roberto—go. I’ll come get you after they’re gone.”

  I sat between my father and grandmother as they looked at each other.

  “I’m sorry,” my father whispered again.

  “This has nothing to do with you,” she said. “It never did.”

  He shook his head. “I have to go,” he said.

  “Go on, then.”

  He pushed himself out of the chair, stepped off the porch, and disappeared around the side of the house.

  “Tuah?”

  But she put up a hand and shook her head, then got up and went into the house. I was afraid to follow her. I don’t know how much time passed, but I was still sitting on the porch, rocking under Benencia’s quilt, when Mac gave a single sharp bark and I heard the moan of an approaching vehicle.

  *

  I sat close beside Tuah through the interview. The sheriff, now, sank low into my grandfather’s chair on the porch, while Tuah sat straight and proud above him. Mac lay by her side, panting. The afternoon had grown warm, and the air smelled dusty. She told Benencia’s story to him as she had to me, hands folded in her lap, voice level and calm. In answer to his follow-up questions, yes, Benencia was simple, incapable of guile, trusting and open. Yes, perhaps three hundred people lived in town at the time, and she knew them all. Yes, a few others had lived and worked alone on their own claims scattered across the surrounding hills.

  “Why are you asking about all these other people?” she asked after he began to explore how the search had been conducted and who had helped to look for Benencia.

  The sheriff glanced at me. I was within Tuah’s line of sight and couldn’t shake my head. I only stared back at him.

  “I need to conduct every investigation as a homicide,” he said evenly. I think the hesitation and the check with me were too slight to draw attention.

  “Homicide? You mean murder?” I could hear a frantic note dangle off the edge of her voice.

  The door behind me swung open. I twisted in my chair.

  “Dad?”

  He pulled a kitchen chair with him and set it on Tuah’s other side. She frowned at him. “Robert Alvarez,” he said, ignoring her and extending a hand to the sheriff. “I’m sorry to be late.”

  The sheriff stood halfway and reached to shake my father’s hand, accepting the appearance of a new person without any visible reaction. “Pleased to meet you.” He sank back into the chair. “Your mother had just finished explaining to me how Benencia got lost, and I’ve been asking some questions about who lived nearby.”

  “It was my fault,” my father said. “My fault she got lost.”

  The three of us spoke at once.

  “Roberto, stop it.”

  “Dad—what?”

  “Excuse me, sir?”

  My father ignored Tuah and me and responded to the sheriff. “We were playing hide-and-seek. I decided to play a trick on her. I told her to hide and then I went to my friends’ house. The Diaz boys. When my parents found me and saw that she wasn’t with me, they asked me to show them where we’d been playing and I couldn’t find it. I didn’t know. I still don’t. I can’t help you any more than that.”

  Tuah had never told me this part. Clearly, she didn’t blame him. He wasn’t part of the story at all. God, he was just a child, doing what children did.

  But she might as well have blamed him. I recognized the face he wore. I’d seen it when he tried to explain to me that my mother was gone, the final injustice in a world that had always been against him. It was anger—the rims of his eyes thickened, the skin across his nose tight, the lips thin and pale. But I saw it differently now. It wasn’t directed at me. It never had been.

  And then I understood. I understood everything. Past, present, future. The way a laboratory experiment that doesn’t turn out as you expect is the one that suddenly shows you the way things really are. All the anger I’d felt at a self I judged through my own eyes only, at a world that was imbalanced and merciless and unfair, at what I did and didn’t deserve as a consequence of what turned out to be just a childish thing done by a child—it was his anger. At himself. It had been his all along, polished and perfected and passed on to me, ready to use. But I didn’t have to keep it.

  In a wash, I had as much pity for my father’s pain as for Tuah’s, different as they were.

  “It wasn’t his fault,” I blurted. “There was a dog. He always went with her. The dog always watched out for her, and if he’d been there she wouldn’t have gotten lost. But he’d been shot just a couple of days before.�
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  My father swung his attention to me. “What?”

  The sheriff turned back to Tuah. “Shot?”

  She shook her head, dismissing an unrelated, unimportant detail. “It was hunting season. We found him out away from home. But yes, ordinarily Gus would’ve been with them.”

  “That was only two days before?” my father asked.

  Tuah nodded. The sheriff looked at me, then down, then put his elbows on his knees and leaned forward.

  “Mrs. Alvarez, I’m sorry if I’ve been at all unclear. I need you to understand that this is a homicide investigation. We believe your daughter was murdered.”

  “Because of a hunting accident? That had nothing to do with—”

  “Mrs. Alvarez, the body was found nearly eight miles from here. It’s very unlikely that a child would have wandered that far on her own. Also, the circumstances in which we found the body—” He stopped. Fought to clear something in his throat.

  No amount of delivering terrible news can make doing so any easier, I realized. Though stock words might be part of the apology, the message and the suffering is fresh every time. Mr. and Mrs. Jones, your son has drowned. Mrs. Smith, your husband had a heart attack. Mr. Kofford, your wife—there was an accident. We found the car.

  “Mrs. Alvarez, the evidence indicates that your daughter was held captive. If your dog was shot two days before, that’s an important piece of information. We will do everything we can to find out what happened. I’m sorry.”

  It was as if I could see something fall out of Tuah’s center and her shell collapse around the empty place. She grabbed the edge of her chair and turned hollow eyes to me.

  “What did you see?” I didn’t hesitate this time but reached to draw her toward me. She fought back. “What happened? What happened?”

  My father put his hand on her arm. “Mama, I’m sorry,” he said, pleading, but she jerked her arm away and slapped at his hand. She jumped up and staggered backward, knocking the chair over with a clatter and a puff of gray from the floorboards.

  “No!” she shrieked. “Get away! All of you!” She thrust herself toward the sheriff. “Tell me what happened!”

  The sheriff alone remained calm and matter-of-fact. “We found evidence she was held in a cave,” he said. “I know this is a shock. I’m very sorry. But you knew everybody who lived here better than anyone, and only you know the sequence of events. I’ll need your help to understand who might have been involved.”

  Her body looked like clothing caught on a hanger—shoulders loose, sleeves dangling at her sides. She lifted her eyes over the sheriff’s head and turned her face toward the trees that separated us from the ruins of her town, the houses that had sheltered people she knew. People who had borne her suffering with her. Houses that were now nothing but bones.

  “I don’t know,” she said without looking back at us. And then, as if she had just opened a drawer where she was accustomed to seeing familiar objects and found it empty, added “I don’t believe I know anything.”

  *

  I awoke to the gray light of morning, the chilled quiet, the blanket of night being prodded and tugged by the drowsy mutter of the first birds. Then crunching footsteps and a car door slamming. The car started. It drove away. I should have run after it, but the process of understanding what I heard and analyzing the distance between my bed and the place where I could make a difference convinced me I would be too late. Perhaps I should have acted rather than taking the time to think.

  I got up shortly afterward, pulling Benencia’s blanket with me. As I expected, I found my father’s bedroll on the floor by the stove rolled up and pushed into the corner. I eased the door open to look into Tuah’s room. Only the top of her head was visible, gray waves hazed over the pillow, face buried under the blanket. Mac, lying on the floor at the foot of her bed, lifted his head to look at me, then put it back down. He wouldn’t leave the room until she did. I closed the door. Every minute she spent asleep was a gift, but long habit would probably wake her soon.

  I opened the stove door and started stirring the coals to life, feeding them pine needles and wisps of bark from the kindling bucket. In time it started to crackle and I was able to put on water for coffee.

  “Where’s your father?”

  I turned to see Tuah in the doorway, barefoot, hair pinned back in an untidy knot, a canvas barn coat over her nightgown. Mac detoured around her ankles and went to the door. I let him out.

  “Gone. I heard the car leave a while ago.”

  She came the rest of the way into the room, pulled out a chair, and dropped heavily into it. She sat for a moment with her hands loose in her lap, then crossed her arms over her belly and doubled over.

  “He won’t be back,” she said.

  “What do you mean? He didn’t—” But as I spoke I looked to the corner where the bedroll was tucked and realized his satchel was gone as well.

  “How did you know?” I said. “Why?”

  She sat up slowly. Her head hung slightly to one side as if its weight was more than her neck could carry. Her gaze fixed on the wall somewhere to the right of the stove. She looked so, so old.

  “You saw how he blames himself. He’s never gotten over it, never listened to reason, no matter what I’ve said. Sometimes I’ve been just so angry that he won’t stop thinking about himself. But bad as it’s been for him, now to think she suffered something worse—” She stopped herself. Caught a breath. Looked at me. “He’s hardly been able to look at me for forty years. Even while he keeps trying to make it up to me somehow. Now … it can only be worse.”

  I didn’t have an answer. I cooked oatmeal while Tuah sat motionless in the chair, served her a small bowl, and sat with her as she pushed it from one side of the bowl to the other. Eventually she put the spoon down, then took my hand and pulled it into her lap. We sat that way for a minute or more, with no sound but the muffled crackling from the stove.

  “You started the fire,” she finally said.

  “Yeah. It’s okay, now.”

  She nodded, slowly. “That’s good.”

  Another minute passed. Mac scratched on the door. I got up, let him in, and came back to my seat. Took Tuah’s hand again.

  “It seems a person is never finished learning about sorrow,” she said.

  “No,” I agreed.

  There was a pop and a faint hiss from the stove, probably a wet knot in the wood. She squeezed my hand.

  “I’m glad you came,” she said.

  “Me too.”

  Another pause.

  “You’ve been a blessing.” She stopped. Squeezed my hand again. Then she shook her head, correcting herself. “You are. You are a blessing.”

  There is a balm for every wound. An atonement, however inadequate, for every wrong. Or perhaps proportion and balance are measures we don’t understand at all. I felt the oil of healing break over my head, pour through my hair, down my neck, and over my shoulders. In the cabin kitchen we found rest on each other’s shoulders and wept together, the two of us.

  *

  I packed up the food, pulled in the porch furniture, and waited until I was sure the stove was cool, then told Tuah I thought we were ready to leave. I closed and locked the windows, then locked the door as soon as Tuah was through it. I had to be back at the Koffords’ in the morning and I didn’t want to leave her alone.

  “Come on,” I said, putting a hand on her elbow. “Let’s get you home.” The wrongness of the final word coated my lips as it passed.

  She’d been about to step off the porch but pulled up. She straightened and stood still for a moment. Put a hand on the porch post. Took a deep breath. Then without looking back she stepped off the porch and walked to the truck.

  *

  The story, as we pieced it together later, was that my father had appeared at a ranch a couple of miles up the road beyond the Hat Creek turnoff while the family was eating breakfast. The ranch was owned by a man he’d grown up with, who was about my father’s age and had
come into Hat Creek for school when he could. My father asked for a horse, was gone all day, then at the end of the afternoon handed his weary mount over to one of his friend’s sons, along with a twenty dollar bill, and left. We found a note when we checked Tuah’s mailbox by the road on our way out of Hat Creek.

  I have to go home, it said. I’m sorry.

  For the rest, I have only my imagination. The way to Washington meadow he already knew well. The creek along the base of the hillside wouldn’t have been difficult to find, and by this point, the path to the cave was surely well worn by the many horses that had traveled it recently. The anchor in the rock would have still been there. I don’t know whether any rope remained. I don’t know how long he stayed there. Whether he sat in silence. Whether he cried. Whether he threw his head back and screamed to the wind and the empty mountaintops.

  Out of pity, I never spoke of it to him again.

  34

  Tuah was up early the next morning, moving ghostlike through the Leadville house long before I needed to get up and go to the Koffords. I heard the scuff of her slippers against the long boards of the hallway, the softened clack of a door closing, the shuffle of things being sorted and moved. I opened my bedroom door to find her standing on a stool in front of the coat closet, nightgown loose around her ankles, pushing something onto the top shelf.

  “You didn’t sleep much,” I said.

  “No.”

  She reached slightly to the side, then pulled a small box against her chest and stepped backward off the stool. Glanced at me. “Things of Benencia’s.”

  “Oh.”

  She turned and disappeared into the parlor.

  “Should I start coffee?” I called after her.

  “That’d be nice.”

  I went to the kitchen. Yesterday afternoon’s paper lay on the table with the headline, Body Found May Be Long-Missing Girl, staring up at the ceiling from its front page. I folded it over, started the coffee, and sliced bread for toast. When everything was ready I carried the mug and plate to her in the parlor and set it on the lamp table. She sat on the stiff sofa under the window, with articles from the box arrayed on the cushion beside her. A bonnet. A pair of baby shoes. A tiny silver bracelet. A baptismal certificate with gold leaf around the edges.