Barbara Kingsolver (5 page)

“I thought I’d make an excursion into the city,” I said. “Check out the dry goods at the Baptist Grocery.”

She laughed. “If you can wait awhile I’ll go with you. Grammy can listen for the baby. She ought to be home pretty soon from her meeting.” Emelina rolled her eyes as she left the kitchen. “Stitch and Bitch Club on Mondays, bright and early.”

I stood at the window looking out at the grove of trees that ran
the length of the canyon. Plum, pear, apple. And quince, I believe, though I couldn’t identify a quince tree to save my life. I only remembered the word because of the way people here pronounced it—“queens”—with their Spanish-influenced vowels. In the distance I could make out white satellite dishes perched among the cacti on the red cliff—one to each house, like dogs. Well, that was something new. The sky was overcast. In the orchards on the other side of the river I could see men working among the trees. I remembered them beating the branches with long poles, bringing down scattered showers of pecans. Frailing, that was called. In the older orchards sometimes they had to climb up into the tallest trees to reach the upper branches with their poles. But it was too early in the year for that. Pecans didn’t ripen till late fall.

Hallie and I had played in this house once or twice as children, when a pair of pigeon-toed girl cousins of J.T.’s had lived here. Now it belonged so securely to Emelina. It was hard to realize how fully life had gone on. Of course, it would. I could have stayed here, or gone away as I did, it made no difference to Grace.

I washed the baby’s cup, running my finger around the inside rim. While the sun left the windowsill and moved on to other things, I noticed, the prayer plants had closed up when I wasn’t watching. They stood in a self-satisfied row, keeping their thoughts to themselves.

“You keep some
of the dirt on them, and you just stuff them down in paper bags and keep them somewhere dark,” said Lydia Galvez. “Do you have a root cellar?”

“No, uh-uh. We did, but the boys got into it and figured out how to cave it in some way,” Emelina said.

“Well, you could put them anyplace dark. The bottom of a closet would do.”

Lydia Galvez was the wife of John Tucker’s little league coach. I’d been introduced. We’d discussed John Tucker, baseball, and Emelina’s talent for producing boys. The whole town had been bet
ting this last one would be a girl, Lydia Galvez told me. Now they were talking about dividing gladiolus bulbs.

“I’ve got some black,” Lydia was saying. “Do you have any black? I could spare you some. They’re not a
true
black, I’d really call it purple, but they’re supposed to be important.”

Emelina gave me a glance, so I knew she was trying to wind things up. Our whole afternoon had gone pretty much this way. Lydia, like everyone else, had no earthly notion of what to say to me, or I to them; I rarely even remembered who they were. But we were all polite, as if I were Emelina’s lunatic maiden aunt.

I sat down on the wall in front of the courthouse and watched myself in the plate-glass window of Jonny’s Breakfast, which was empty at this hour. My reflection stared back, looking more alone than anything I’d seen in my life. It occurred to me that I’d never drawn a breath here without Hallie. Not one I could be sure of. I was three when she was born. Before that I wasn’t conscious of my place in the world, so it didn’t matter.

Later, it mattered more than anything. Doc Homer drilled us relentlessly on how we differed from our peers: in ambition, native ability, even physical constitution. The nearest thing to praise, from him, was “No one else in Grace knows
that!”
Or, “You are
Nolines
.” We stood out like a pair of silos on a midwestern prairie. As far as I could see, being
Nolines
meant that we were impossibly long-limbed like our father and all the Noline relatives we never got to meet. He and mother came from a part of Illinois (this is a quote) where people were reasonable and tall.

The height, at least, wasn’t lost on Hallie and me. We turned out to be six feet on average—Hallie one inch over, and I, one under. In high school they used to call us forty percent of a basketball team. We didn’t play sports, but they still said that. Height isn’t something you can have and just let be, like nice teeth or naturally curly hair. People have this idea you have to put it to use, playing basketball, for example, or observing the weather up there. If you are a girl, they feel a particular need to point your height out to you, as if you might not have noticed.

In fact, Hallie and I weren’t forty percent of anything—we were all there was. The image in the mirror that proves you are still here. We had exactly one sister apiece. We grew up knowing the simple arithmetic of scarcity: A sister is more precious than an eye.

“You tell that daddy of yours I need a pill to get rid of my wrinkles,” Lydia said loudly.

I made an effort to collect myself. “Okay.”

I should have said, “You don’t need any such thing,” or something like that, but I didn’t think fast enough. I wasn’t managing this first day all that well. I had a lump in my throat and longed to get back to my cottage and draw the blinds. Grace was a memory minefield; just going into the Baptist Grocery with Emelina had charged me with emotions and a hopelessness I couldn’t name. I’d finished my shopping in a few minutes, and while I waited for Emelina to provision her troops for the week I stood looking helplessly at the cans of vegetables and soup that all carried some secret mission. The grocery shelves seemed to have been stocked for the people of Grace with the care of a family fallout shelter. I was an outsider to this nurturing. When the cashier asked, “Do you need anything else?” I almost cried. I wanted to say, “I need everything you have.”

It was past midnight
but a cold moon blazed in the window and I couldn’t sleep. I lay on my back in the little painted bed in Emelina’s cottage. I hated sleeping alone. As little as there was between Carlo and me, I’d adjusted to his breathing. All my life I’d shared a bed with somebody: first Hallie. Then in my first years at college I discovered an army of lovers who offered degrees of temporary insanity and short-term salvation. Then Carlo, who’d turned out to be more of the same. But companionable, still. Sleeping alone seemed unnatural to me, and pitiful, something done in hospitals or when you’re contagious.

I’d finally reached that point of electric sleeplessness where I had to get up. I tucked my nightgown into my jeans and found my
shoes out in the kitchen. I closed the door quietly and took a path that led away from the house, not down past other houses but straight out to the north, through Emelina’s plum orchard and a grove of twisted, dead-looking apples. Every so often, peacocks called to each other across the valley. They had different cries: the shrill laugh, a guttural clucking—a whole animal language. Like roosters and children, on a full-moon night they would never settle down completely.

I wanted to find the road that led up the canyon to Doc Homer’s. I wasn’t ready to go there yet, but I had to make sure I knew the way. I couldn’t ask Emelina for directions to my own childhood home; I didn’t want her to know how badly dislocated I was. I’d always had trouble recalling certain specifics of childhood, but didn’t realize until now that I couldn’t even recognize them at point-blank range. The things I’d done with Hallie were clear, because we remembered so much for each other, I suppose, but why did I not know Mrs. Campbell in the grocery? Or Lydia Galvez, who rode our school bus and claimed to have loaned me her handkerchief after Simon Bolivar Jones chucked me on the head with his Etch-a-Sketch, on a dare. In fact, I felt like the victim of a head injury. I hoped that if I struck out now on faith I would feel my way to Doc Homer’s, the way a water witcher closes her eyes and follows her dowsing rod to find a spring. But I didn’t know. I could have lost the homing instinct completely.

I was on a road that looked promising, anyway. I could hear the river. (Why does sound travel farther at night?) I had my mother’s death on my mind. One of my few plain childhood memories was of that day. I was not quite three, Hallie was newborn, and I’m told I couldn’t possibly remember it because I wasn’t there. The picture I have in my mind is nonetheless clear: two men in white pants handling the stretcher like a fragile, important package. The helicopter blade beating, sending out currents of air across the alfalfa field behind the hospital. This was up above the canyon, in the days when they grew crops up there. The flattened-down alfalfa plants showed their silvery undersides in patterns that looked like waves.
The field became the ocean I’d seen in storybooks, here in the middle of the desert, like some miracle.

Then the rotor slowed and stopped, setting the people in the crowd to murmuring: What? Why? And then the door opened and the long white bundle of my mother came out again, carried differently now, no longer an urgent matter.

According to generally agreed-upon history, Hallie and I were home with a babysitter. This is my problem—I clearly remember things I haven’t seen, sometimes things that never happened. And draw a blank on the things I’ve lived through. I told Doc Homer many times that I’d seen the helicopter, and I also once insisted, to the point of tears, that I remembered being on the ship with the nine Gracela sisters and their peacocks. For that one he forced me to sit in my room and read the
Encyclopædia Britannica
. Novels were banned for a month; he said I needed to clear my mind of fictions. I made it to Volume 19, driven mostly by spite, but I still remembered that trip with the Gracelas. They were worried about whether the peacocks were getting enough air down in the hold of the ship.

I would concede now that all these things were fabrications based on stories I’d heard. Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth but not its twin. It was a fact that our mother had been terrified of flying. This part of our family history was well known in Grace. In her entire life she never left the ground. When her health deteriorated because of a failed kidney and a National Guard helicopter bore down from the sky to take her to Tucson, she’d explained to the men that she wasn’t going to fly. When they ignored her, she just died before the helicopter could lift itself up out of the alfalfa. The big bird hovered for a minute, and went away hungry.

It wasn’t her aversion to flight that was impressive; people in Grace didn’t travel much by car, let alone by air. I think the moral of the tale, based on the way people told it, was the unsuspected force of my mother’s will. “Who else would have married Doc Homer?” they seemed to be saying. And also, I suppose, “Who could have borne those unconforming girls?” People never said this directly, but
when we were willful they would tell us, without fail: “You didn’t suck that out of your thumb.”

It made sense to me. I had no visual memory of a mother, and could not recall any events that included her, outside of the helicopter trip she declined to take. But I could remember a
sense
of her that was strong and ferociously loving. Almost a violence of love. It was the one thing I’d had, I suppose, that Hallie never knew. As the two of us grew up quietly in the dispassionate shadow of Doc Homer’s care and feeding, I tried to preserve that motherly love as best I could, and pass it on. But I couldn’t get it right. I was so young.

And somehow Hallie thrived anyway—the blossom of our family, like one of those miraculous fruit trees that tap into an invisible vein of nurture and bear radiant bushels of plums while the trees around it merely go on living. In Grace, in the old days, when people found one of those in their orchard they called it the
semilla besada
—the seed that got kissed. Sometimes you’d run across one that people had come to, and returned to, in hopes of a blessing. The branches would be festooned like a Christmas tree of family tokens: a baby sock, a pair of broken reading glasses, the window envelope of a pension check.

Hallie and I had a favorite
besada
in the old Domingos orchard, and one cold day on the way home from school we tucked wisps of our hair into its bark. Secretly. We’d hidden in the schoolyard to snip the ends off our braids and tie them up together with a pink thread unraveled from my coat button. If Doc Homer found out, he would construct some punishment to cure us of superstition. We agreed with him in principle—we were little scientists, born and bred. But children robbed of love will dwell on magic.

I stopped suddenly in the center of the road, in the moon’s bright light, with shadow trickling downhill from my heels like the water witcher’s wellspring finally struck open. I’d found the right path. The road angled up out of the orchards toward the top of the canyon. The steepness of the climb felt right. I would come back in daylight and go the rest of the way to Doc Homer’s, past the old
helicopter landing pad up in the alfalfa field. Those fields would surely be abandoned now, like half the cropland in Arizona, salted to death by years of bad irrigation. I didn’t want to go up there now and see it all under moonlight, the white soil gleaming like a boneyard. It was too much.

I turned back down the road feeling the familiar, blunt pressure of old grief. Even the people who knew me well didn’t know my years in Grace were peculiarly bracketed by death: I’d lost a mother and I’d lost a child.

I
was fifteen years old, two years younger than
my own child would be now. I didn’t think of it in those terms: losing a baby. At first it was nothing like a baby I held inside me, only a small impossible secret. Slowly it grew to a force as strong and untouchable as thunder. I would be loved absolutely. But even in the last months I never quite pictured the whole infant I might have someday held in my arms; that picture came later. The human fact of it was gone before I knew it. But evidently that word “lost” was somewhere in my mind because I’ve had thousands of dreams of losing—of literally misplacing—a baby.

In one of the dreams I run along the creek bank looking among the boulders. They are large and white, and the creek is flooded, just roaring, and I know I’ve left a baby out there. I thrash my way through mesquite thickets, stopping often to listen, hearing nothing but the roar of the water. I feel frantic until finally I see her in the middle of the water bobbing like a Cortland apple, little and red and bright. I wade in and pull her out and she lies naked there on the bank without so much as a surname, her umbilicus tied with a man’s
black shoelace such as my father might wear. I see her and think, “It’s a miracle she’s survived.”

That thought is the truest part of the dream. Really there would be nothing new or surprising about a baby being born in secret and put into a creek. But to pull one out, that would be a surprise. A newborn has no fat yet; it wouldn’t float. It would sink like a stone.

Loyd Peregrina was an Apache. He took me out four times. Our football team was called the Apaches, but Loyd was also a
real
Apache, and the kind of handsome you could see coming down the road like bad news. When he first asked me, I thought he’d made a mistake, or a joke, and I looked to see who was watching. Nobody was. Four Saturdays in a row, for exactly one lunar month: the odds of getting pregnant out of that were predictable, but I was unfathomably naïve. I was a motherless girl. I’d learned the words
puberty
and
menarche
from the
Encyclopædia Britannica
. The rest I learned from girls in the schoolyard who weren’t even talking to me when they said what they did.

Loyd wouldn’t remember. For me it was the isolated remarkable event of a tenuous life but for Loyd—with his misspelled name and devil eyes—it was one in a hundred, he was a senior and ran around with everybody. Also he was such a drinker in those days that I was frankly surprised to hear he was still alive. He never knew what he’d spawned, much less when it died. Even Hallie didn’t. It’s the first time I understood that even with a sister I could be alone. At night I lay feeling my limbs, seeing what Hallie still saw, which was nothing near the truth, and I felt myself growing distant and stolid. I was the woman downtown buttoning her child’s jacket, her teeth like a third hand clamped on a folded grocery list, as preoccupied as God. Someone important and similar to others. I was lured and terrified. I couldn’t help but think sometimes of escape: the thing inside me turning to blood of its own accord, its bones liquefying, leaking out. And then one evening my savage wish was granted.

I never did tell Hallie. I kept quiet, first to protect her from the knowledge of terrible things, and later to protect myself from that rock-solid element she came to own. That moral advantage.

It divided me from the people I knew, then and later, but in broader human terms I don’t pretend that it sets me apart in any great way. A miscarriage is a natural and common event. All told, probably more women have lost a child from this world than haven’t. Most don’t mention it, and they go on from day to day as if it hadn’t happened, and so people imagine that a woman in this situation never really knew or loved what she had.

But ask her sometime: how old would your child be now? And she’ll know.