All the Land to Hold Us (42 page)

He probably knows how to love
, she thought, considering Richard, and the way he was willing to follow the world, rather than trying to lead it or control it or worst of all own it. That he would as lief give something up as take it away.
Damn it, he probably knows how to be in love
, she thought.
Now if only I was in love with him, or even desired to be
. The space in her heart for that was neither dead nor vacant, not lacking as much as simply not activated. It just didn't feel like the right time. She didn't feel like she had the available resources to do both. There was no summons, and even if some such summons arrived, she believed she would do well to resist it. She could not bear to think of failing the children, or her own goal of launching each of them, as many as possible, strong into the world, durable against the forces that would try to marginalize and ultimately ignore them.

Joe was looking at her with puzzlement. “What?” he said, his color rising, and she laughed again, sensing his outrage, and imagining what a feisty competitor he would be in pursuing those strategic alliances. “You don't think I can do it?” he demanded. “You think I can't?”

“No, no,” she said, placing a hand on his arm, as if to stay him from rising to leave, such was his affront. “No, absolutely, I believe you can, and
will
.” He relaxed a bit then, and settled back into his chair.

“I may make it sound easy,” he said, “but it's not. These folks I'm dealing with, it's not like they're—” He cast about, searching for a metaphor. “It's not like they're
children
,” he said. “These are boardroom kind of people, they're sharp customers, you've got to be on your toes.”

“I'm sure it's very taxing,” Ruth said.

She had made a pie, a triple-berry crisp, using berries Annie had grown in her and Marie's garden—both Annie and Ruth were wild about blackberries—and she had planned on bringing it out after dinner, served warm with vanilla ice cream melting over it, but she withheld it now, could not bring herself to reveal it, even though she was certain he had smelled it baking in the oven.

Instead, she rose and went into the kitchen and washed and sliced a single peach, which she brought out on two dishes, and served it without explanation.

They sat there in silence after they had finished the peach, the sand quickly cooling against Ruth's feet as the orange sun settled below the horizon, and then abruptly she stood and thanked him for coming all this way, that it was good for the members of their church to check in on one another, but that he would have to forgive her, she needed to get back to her lesson plans.

“I wish you well in your ventures,” she said, shaking his hand firmly; and sensing her rejection, he felt compelled to lean forward, to pursue, and asked if he could come visit her, could come call upon her, again.

She laughed, started to say the first thing that came to her mind, an emphatic
no
, but instead shook her head and apologized for perhaps having misinterpreted the reason for his visit as being church-based—that she had no interest in suitors.

Even as she was seized, while she was speaking, with the odd notion, almost like a prophesy foretold that within a month she would be Richard's lover, entangled and frightened and in the midst of all sorts of unwelcome chaos, the responsibility of new affections; and she was both alarmed and intrigued by this sudden idea, impressed upon her almost with the force of revelation.

“Goodbye,” she called to Joe as he went down her walkway, back to his green-and-white sedan, to face the lonely drive back to Waco. “I'm sorry my heart's not available, forgive me,” she called out after him, making him look over his shoulder in face-scrunched disbelief; and he had not been gone three minutes before she took the pie out of the oven, and the quart of ice cream, and got in her own car and hurried over to Marie and Annie's, where they sat on the front porch and ate it warm, watching the night descend over the desert, with Marie and Ruth shelling late-season peas from Marie's garden then, and Annie curled up in the porch swing, reading
The Pickwick Papers
.

And as if attuned to the same premonition, for no words had been spoken of Richard, nor of school, nor the water maps, Annie announced nonetheless, without looking up from her book, and with no other prefatory declarations, “I like him.” And Ruth and Marie gave no comment, but merely went on with their own discussions and work as if she had not spoken, and Annie returned to her book.

 

Unbeknownst to his friend Herbert Mix, or anyone, some evenings Richard did not return to his loft apartment, but would stay out at Clarissa's abandoned house, his old gray truck parked in the garage, the barnlike doors to that shed closed.

The lilac bushes, unpruned, had grown larger, subsisting in the drip line all around the house, and had risen to nearly roof level, almost completely obscuring the house. Except for the small chainlink fence around the barren yard, and the weedy flagstone walkway leading up to the little copse, it might no longer have even appeared as a place of human habitation, but instead only a strange grove in the desert.

The once-vibrant garden was a tangle of thistle and tumbleweed. Feral cats stalked mice through the concertina maze of it, and at night the wind flapped the tin patchings on all four corners, until it seemed that the entire house might be lifted into flight.

There was no power, water, or phone, only husk, and some nights he went to bed early and dreamed that he was back in those old times, though other nights he lit a miner's carbide lamp and moved from room to room, tilting his head this way and that to illuminate in the weak dull light individual objects of attention, their position unchanged in the last decade—a coffee cup and saucer, clean but still resting on the dusty kitchen table; the grocery list next to the telephone—such mundane concerns, bananas, butter, flour, and in the meantime, a life had slipped by.

Some of the lesser fossils that they had found but been unable to sell were still on the windowsill, dust-shrouded, and the fact that none of it had changed in ten years filled Richard with alternating currents of hope and despair.

And what of me? he wondered. He barely dared to handle any of the objects, so dense with power as to possibly possess the ability to summon her one last time, though also possibly able to sever once and for all that possibility.

How have I changed in ten years
, he thought,
if at all
?

Some nights he lit a lantern and walked out into the garden, where once he and she had nurtured cilantro, rosemary, hot peppers, and basil. Tomatoes, corn, cucumbers, berries, and lettuce, in the months before the summer heat grew too intense. Now the bobcats and other unknown things scuttled from his approach, fleeing the ring of light cast by the lantern.

He stood waist-deep in the tangle. Part of him considered setting fire to the whole structure, while another part gloried in the rot and senescence, and in his ability to hold out and hang on, hoping and believing and then hoping again: and for this part of him, the old house was more worthy to him of enshrinement than incineration, and his visits to it sacrament.

He stood motionless, his shadow giant upon the mesa beyond. Moths swarmed his lantern, fell wing-singed into the clutter of weeds. The coyotes in the sand hills beyond saw his light and began laughing, shrieking, coming closer, and he turned the light out and listened.

Later in the night, on toward morning, sleeping in her bed, he would be awakened by the sound of the football team, the collective hope and fury of them cantering down the road, their wagon-cart rattling behind them; and in those first few moments, lying on his back looking up at the ceiling, and with all the furniture as it had always been, and the curtains half-open, and the window raised, and the morning birds beginning to stir and call, it would seem to him—for half a second, a full second, and sometimes even three or four delicious seconds—that she was still with him, that he had been successful in capturing her, and in capturing his own happiness: that he had not failed.

 

Most evenings, however, he hung out with Herbert Mix, going over to his house and visiting with him in his backyard amidst the cool shade and sweet odor of the willows. They drank iced tea, and only occasionally visited about lore and sagas of the past-stagecoach treasures. Instead, Herbert Mix talked about future plans, about upcoming projects, and about his new clan: and in particular, about Marie, and Annie, and Ruth. He had volunteered to be the school handyman, which afforded him still more opportunity to be over in Mormon Springs, and he soon had the school and its grounds looking first-rate, pastoral and idyllic, even as the elementary and middle and high schools in Odessa languished.

“She likes me,” he said, “but she says she's lived alone too long to ever get used to having a man around full-time. She says a little goes a long way,” he said. “She says she'd rather not see me enough than too much. She says it's not my fault, but that sometimes all the attention makes her feel like she's being buried. She says that some nights she has dreams of being dug up, and that's a good thing, but other nights she has dreams of being buried alive.”

Herbert Mix looked down at his hands, and Richard knew that in those dreams, it must have been Herbert Mix doing the burying, on at least some occasions: and he did not know what to say, did not know what counsel to give the old man.

“You're happy, right?” he asked. “I mean, look at you, you've changed. You're a new man. You're not . . .” He paused, looking for a word other than “greedy.”

“Greedy?” Herbert Mix said. “No, I'm not. Yeah, I'm happy. It just seems like I could be happier. Like I'm so close. And like time's running out. Which it is.” He looked at his old shovel-digging hands again. “It's like being hungry,” he said. “You always know, or are almost certain, that you're going to eat again. You just don't know when.”

Richard nodded. He knew that he should try to dissuade the old man from looking at it that way, but he couldn't, and still call himself a friend. “You're right,” he said. “That's what it's like.”

 

And slowly, and generously, Herbert Mix brought him further into the fold, inviting him along whenever he traveled out to Mormon Springs, riding out there in his truck and then staying over at Marie's, while Richard drove his truck back to town, returning for him later the next day. And on such occasions, Herbert Mix knew pure bliss, nestling into the old wrinkle-sacked gray-haired skin-and-bones nest of her at night, his own ancient body thrilled by the feel of the crisp cotton sheets, and by the evening wind that stirred through the house; and it felt to all of them in the household that it was as if Herbert Mix was a grandfather, and Marie, a grandmother: and the three of them, Annie and Marie and Herbert Mix, accepted this new braiding, this new identity.

It seemed sustainable and natural and durable, and the whole of them accepted, day by day and increment by increment, the arrival of Richard, in a way that not even the Republican oilmen down in Mexico had accepted him, nor even, so long ago now—suddenly, it seemed long ago—the way that Clarissa had taken him into her life.

He began to feel embedded, cemented, like the fossils they discovered in their diggings; and many nights he found himself dreaming Marie's dream, in which he too was being buried: and it was the entire population of Mormon Springs that was wielding the shovels, incorporating him into their combination, their community, and yet there was no darkness, even as the dirt rained down over him, there was still light, he could still see all that he had been able to see before.

As Herbert Mix knew bliss on the nights when he spent the night in Mormon Springs, Marie, at least, knew comfort, sleeping or sometimes merely resting in the bony cage of his arms and his one leg, his knees and elbows. She knew pleasure if not rapture, contentment if not ecstasy. And she did not quite know what to make of it, sometimes straddling that middle country between receiving the attention of another, after having previously been ignored all of her life, and yet finally possessing also true freedom, after having been for so long a captive or hostage, to one thing or another.

She would lie looking up at the ceiling, aware of her sleeping household—the old man asleep, and pleasantly proximate, but making no claim on her, and the young girl, well on her way to becoming a strong young woman—and Marie would know contentment. Never would she have imagined that her life of deprivation might ever have been moving her all along toward a place where such deprivation no longer existed, yet here it was, real, the child was in her house, and the man too.

And yet, in those same moments of night-wakefulness, she was aware that a hunger still persisted. Almost as if, now that these first pleasures were being met, they were as but the seeds or scratchings for some other awakening, some long-ago hunger she had forgotten or never known.

 

In Mexico, the water had been poisoned by the residue of toxic chemicals used by miners in the mountains, cyanide and arsenic, which stripped away the overburden of ore and sediment, revealing faint traces, here and there, of gold, copper, and silver—and as such, the geologists drank mostly beer, and had had their drinking water flown in from distant sources—Idaho, Montana, Oregon—though Sy Craven had said that there were mines up there that would curl their hair, entire mountainsides stripped away, leaving oozing pustules of suppurating earth, and with so much lead leaching into the creeks that all the fish died or grew mutations, and the men, women, and children downstream grew enormous tumors, became feeble, brain-stunted, and anemic. Whenever a shipment of water arrived, Sy Craven would wipe the dust from the top of the heavy glass milk bottles in which it had been shipped, would open the seal and sniff the water as if it were the most expensive wine, and then he would sip from it, and after a moment would pronounce it either fit or unfit.