Barbara Kingsolver (7 page)

Hallie would laugh at “farming department.” She’d laugh at the whole scene, the education of Trish the Cheerleader. She would love me.

“The Communists,” Trish said knowingly. “I heard about that. I heard they’re thinking about sending the Marines down there to stop them from doing that.”

“No, it’s the other way around,” I said patiently. “The Marines aren’t rooting for the new society. The U.S. is paying the contras, the guys that attack the farmers.” Hallie would not laugh now, she would be inflamed. She said we were a nation in love with forgetting the facts. She saved clippings that proved it. When Castro released those prisoners from Mariel: One day the headlines said we’d gotten him to free all these wonderful political prisoners. A month later when they were burning down halfway houses in Miami the papers castigated Fidel for exporting his hooligans and junkies.

Trish fiddled with her bra strap. “Hallie always would just up and do anything under the blue sky,” she said.

“You’re right,” I told Trish. “I wish I were that brave. I’d be scared to death to be where she is.”

“Well, you know, we can’t all be the hero,” she said, jutting her lower jaw to blow smoke up toward the olive branches. If I could have drawn blood, if I’d known how to do that with words instead of a needle, I would have. I wasn’t sure what Hallie craved but I knew it wasn’t glory.

“How’s Doc Homer?” she asked.

I hadn’t yet found the valor to go see him. I feared seeing him in failing condition. And still disapproving of me, on top of it. “Hard to say,” I said.

I felt a tap on my shoulder and turned to see Loyd, grinning broadly. “Too good to speak to an Indian boy on Main Street?”

The tingle of a blush started behind my ears, and I ignored it. I’d learned since high school that in an emergency shyness can be disguised with a completely fake bravado. “You tried to run me down, Loyd! I ought to turn you in for reckless driving.” I ran my fingers through my hair. “Actually, I didn’t think you’d know who I was.”

“Are you kidding? How many beautiful six-foot-tall women you think we’ve got in this town?”

“Five eleven,” I corrected. “I’m the shorter of the bean-pole sisters.” I felt suddenly drunk, though I wasn’t, chemically speaking. Trish drifted off toward the barbecue pit.

He looked at me for a long time, just looked. Grinning. His left hand was fingering the tip of an olive branch and I expected him to snap it off but he didn’t, he only took in its texture as someone might eat chocolate or inhale a cigarette.

“You want another beer?” he asked.

So that was going to be it, no filling in the last fifteen years. No constructing ourselves for each other—otherwise known as falling in love. “Think you can get over to that ice chest and back before this party is over?” I knew he wouldn’t.

“In case I don’t, I’ve got your phone number.” He winked.

“Don’t you worry. You’ll be hearing from my lawyer.”

I felt adrift and disappointed, though I hadn’t held any conscious expectations of Loyd. I looked around at other faces, wondering if they all held secret disappointments for me. Doña Althea, the ancient woman we used to call the “Peacock Lady,” was holding court in a lawn chair under the fig tree. She was the one who used to collect the feathers for piñatas. She looked today like she always had, dressed in black, fierce and miniature like a frightening breed of small dog. Even with her braided crown of silver hair she wasn’t
five feet tall. J.T.’s mother, Viola Domingos, and several other women sat in a group with her, fanning themselves in time to the music and drinking beer. J.T. and Loyd had apparently been commandeered into serving them food; the goat had been pronounced done. People were beginning to move toward the makeshift table, which I’d helped Emelina improvise from the doors to Mason’s and the twins’ rooms, covered with embroidered tablecloths compliments of the Stitch and Bitch Club. There was enough food to save an African nation. Potato salad, deviled eggs,
menudo
, tortillas and refried beans and a thousand kinds of dessert. I heard somebody say in a highpitched voice, “
Tomato soup
in that cake? I wouldn’t have guessed that for love nor money.”

I wasn’t in any hurry. I moved out of the way of the principal rush and stood near the gate to the side yard, near my little house. I noticed a dog lying very still and alert, just on the other side of the gate. It looked like an oversized coyote but it was definitely a domestic creature. It had a green bandana tied around its neck. This dog didn’t belong to Emelina’s household—I was pretty sure I knew all the family animals. It sat with its mouth slightly open and its ears cocked, staring steadily through the wire gate at the people inside.

“You thinking about crashing this party?” I asked the dog.

It glanced up at me for a second, with a patient look, then fixed its gaze back on the crowd. Or maybe on the roast goat.

“I’ll bring you some of that, if you’re willing to wait awhile,” I said. “Nobody’s going to miss one little bite.”

The dog didn’t respond to this promise.

All the old men had served themselves first and were settling down into a huddle of folding chairs near the front door of my cottage, holding their plates carefully horizontal above their knees. I started to move away, out of deference, but I noticed they were talking about fruit drop. I plainly heard one of them say the words, “poison ground.” I stood four feet away and invisible, I suppose because they were men, and women talked to women. They asked questions of each other, to which they apparently already knew the answers.

“Do you know how much sulfuric they put in the river? He said
the EPA give Black Mountain thirty days to shut down that leaching operation.”

“Damn, man, that’s
veneno
. How long you think we been putting that on our trees?”

“When did anybody ever tell the Mountain what to do?” The man who said this had a remarkably wrinkled brown face, like an Indian mummy I’d once seen in a roadside museum. “They’ll pull some kind of strings,” he said.

A man who sat with his back to me spoke up. “They won’t fight the EPA. It’s not worth it. They been saying for ten years that mine is dead. They’re not hardly getting anything from that leaching operation.”

Another man nodded at this, pointing his fork toward the head of the canyon. “Just enough to pay the taxes. That’s all. They’ll shut her down.”

“You think so?” asked the one who reminded me of a mummy. “They’re getting gold and moly out of them tailing piles. If they wasn’t, they wouldn’t keep running the acid through them. You boys know that damn company. They’re not going to stop no leaching operation on account of our pecan trees.” His voice trailed off and he was quiet for a minute, his callused fingers fooling with an unlit cigarette. I heard women’s voices rising randomly over the din of the party, calling out instructions, reining in their kids. The party seemed like something underwater, a lost continent, and I felt profoundly sad though it wasn’t my continent. I would go get a bite to eat, say something grateful to Emelina, and slip back into my house.

The man with his back to me said, “It’s in Ray Pilar’s apples and quince.” He pronounced it “queens.”

Another man, younger than the others, said, “It’s going to kill every damn tree in this canyon. If I’m wrong, my friend, you can shoot me.”

The man with the wrinkled face said, “If you’re right, my friend, you might as well shoot yourself.”

T
he dead mountain range of tailings on the lip
of the mine had sat for decades, washed by rain, and still was barren as the Sahara. From a distance you might guess these piles of dirt to be fragile, like a sandcastle, but up close you’d see the pinkish soil corrugated with vertical ridges and eroded to a sheen, like rock. It would take a pickaxe to dent it.

It was high noon and I knew where I was. I bypassed the old mine road at the top of the canyon and stayed on the unmarked lane that people called, for reasons unknown to me, the Old Pony Road. All Grace’s streets went by odd names that had mostly to do with picturesque forms of transportation: the Old and New Pony roads, the Goatleg, Dog-Cart Road, and the inexplicable Tortoise Road. Amazingly, most or all of these also had official, normal-sounding names like West Street and San Francisco Lane, which were plainly marked on painted aluminum street signs and totally ignored. Maybe somebody had just recently dreamed up these normal names and hammered up signs to improve the town’s image.

From the canyon’s crest I could see down into the isolated settlements at the north end of the valley, some abandoned, some buried in deep graves of mine tailings, through which, presumably, Black Mountain now ran quantities of sulfuric acid. Far to the south lay open desert. The road I was on would pass through one more flock of little houses, all settled like hens into their gardens, before reaching Doc Homer’s drafty two-story gray edifice.

I bypassed the main entrance of the hospital, the only one of the ghost town of Black Mountain buildings that was still in use. The hospital itself had finally closed—people had to leave Grace for a more equipped town if their problems were major—but Doc Homer’s office in the basement could handle anything up to and including broken limbs. He wasn’t working there today. I’d called him at home; I was expected.

“Cosima?
Cosima Noline!
I want you to look.” A heavyset woman in a housedress and running shoes was standing at her mailbox, shouting at me. “Child, will you look. If you aren’t the picture of your mother.”

My mother was dead at my age. The woman put her arms around me. She was nobody I recognized.

“We’ve been so anxious to see you!” she said at a convincing decibel level. “Viola told us at sewing club you’d got in, and was staying down with her and J.T. and Emelina till you can help Doc get his place straightened out and move in up here with him. Oh, I know Doc’s glad to have you back. He’s been poorly, I don’t expect he’d tell you but he is. They said when you was overseas you learned the cure they used on that actress in Paris, France. Bless your heart, you’re a dear child.” She paused, finally, taking in my face. “You don’t remember me, do you?”

I waited, expecting help. It had been fourteen years, after all. But she offered no hints. “No, I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t.”

“Uda!” The woman said.

“Oh. Uda. I’m sorry.” I still didn’t have the foggiest idea who she was.

“I won’t keep you, hon, but I want you to come for dinner soon as you can. I’ve baked Doc a squash pie I’ve been aiming to take up there. Hang on, I’ll just run get it.”

I waited while she hurried on her small feet up the path to the house and disappeared into the cave of honeysuckle that had swallowed her front porch. Uda returned directly with a covered pie tin that I accepted along with a bewildering kiss on both cheeks. I wondered how many people in Grace believed I’d flown in fresh from Paris with a cure for Alzheimer’s.

He’d told me
two years ago. I had no idea if it was the confirmed truth or just his opinion, since Doc Homer made no distinction between the two. And if it was true, I still didn’t know what to think. What we are talking about, basically, is self-diagnosed insanity and that gets complicated.

Carlo and I in fact weren’t living in Paris (we never had), but in Minnesota; we’d already come back from Crete. Hallie had kept decently in touch with Doc Homer but I hadn’t, and felt guilty, so I engineered a visit in Las Cruces. God knows how long he would have waited to tell me, otherwise. This meeting was not a plan he’d cooked up to give me the news, but my idea, sprung at the last minute. An accident of science, actually. Someone had recently spliced the glow gene from a glowworm into a tobacco plant, and the scientific world was buzzing over this useless but remarkable fact. All the top geneticists were meeting in New Mexico and my boss wanted me down there to take notes. I was working at a high-powered research lab; this was prior to my moving back to Tucson and falling into convenience-mart clerking. If I ever wrote down on paper my full employment history, I assure you it would look like the résumé of a schizophrenic.

And in my professional upswings I had more of what passes for confidence; it dawned on me that it’s an easy bus ride over the state line from Grace to Las Cruces. I’d phone Doc Homer.

I was astonished when he agreed to come. “Barring unforeseen
difficulties at the hospital,” he’d said over the phone. I didn’t know yet that the hospital had closed; that he sometimes forgot.

“You always say that.” It was true, that was his standard disclaimer on every promise to Hallie or me, but it was uncharacteristic for me to tease him. Truthfully, after such an ice age, there was no such thing as characteristic. I tried out joking, more or less to see if it would work. “You’ll say that at your own funeral, Pop,” I’d said boldly into the receiver. Later, after he told me, I could have bitten my tongue off for that.

We met in the lobby of the Holiday Inn, just for a couple of drinks since he said he had to get back to Grace that night. The bar was done up in this madly cheerful south-of-the-border décor, with a blue tile fountain and silk bougainvillaeas climbing out of clay pots shaped like pigs. It was somebody’s idea of what Old Mexico would look like if you didn’t have to take poverty into account. The waitresses wore swishy miniskirts with ruffles in contrasting primary colors. In this setting my father told me he had a terminal disorder of the brain.

All I kept thinking was that he must be wrong. I doubted he’d had a CAT scan. The thing to do would be to check into the University Hospital in Tucson and get a neurological workup, to rule out other things, but I didn’t try to talk him into it. The nature of my relationship with Doc Homer, which had eluded me over the phone, came back instantly when I saw him. There are all the small things you love and despise about a parent: the disappointed eyes, the mannerisms, the sound of the voice as much as the meaning of the words, that add up to that singular thing—the way you are both going to respond, whether you like it or not. It had settled heavily over our table and I could hardly breathe. I knew this man. He wouldn’t seek out a second opinion to stack up against his own. He’d suffer his own doubts but never anyone else’s. The waitress swished over and brought us fresh margaritas. The trickle of the fountain put me on edge, the way a running toilet will, or any sound of water going to waste. “What are you going to do?” I asked Doc Homer.

“I don’t see a need to do anything special, for the time being. I’ll make arrangements when the time comes.”

My stomach was tight. I felt perversely annoyed with the smiling clay pigs. I touched my lips to the coarse salt on the rim of the margarita glass, and the crystals felt like sand in my mouth, or broken glass. I thought of walls I’d seen in Mexico—high brick
hacienda
walls topped with a crest of broken bottles imbedded in cement, to keep people on their correct sides of the fence. If they want to provide an authentic Mexican flavor they should have something like that in here, I thought.

“Nobody else knows,” he said. “And I’d like for you not to mention it to your sister.”

I stared at him. I knew it wouldn’t matter what came next, whether I said “Okay,” or “Why?” or “That’s not fair,” which is what I mainly felt. Dr. Homer Noline had stopped talking, there being nothing more to say, in his opinion. I imagined him going back to Grace on the bus and lying that night in his bed, tired but wide awake, recalling the events of his day and wondering what pathways of thought in his brain might be slipping off track. Trying to remember what vegetable he’d cooked for dinner or what tie he’d worn. He might be confronting these thoughts with fear, or only clinical interest. I really didn’t know.

For the first time in my life then, and just for a few seconds, I was able to see Doc Homer as someone I felt sorry for. It was a turning point for me, one of those instants of freakishly clear sight when you understand that your parent might have taken entirely the wrong road in life, even if that road includes your own existence. I pitied Doc Homer for his slavish self-sufficiency. For standing Hallie and me in the kitchen and inspecting us like a general, not for crooked hems so much as for signs of the weakness of our age: the lipstick hidden in a book satchel, the smoldering wish to be like everyone else. Being like no one else, being alone, was the central ethic of his life. Mine too, to some extent, not by choice but by default. My father, the only real candidate for center of my universe, was content to sail his private sea and leave me on my own. I still held that
against him. I hadn’t thought before about how self-sufficiency could turn on you in old age or sickness. The captain was going down with his ship. He was just a man, becoming a child. It became possible for me to go back to Grace.

I arrived at the house
, nervous, ludicrously armed with Uda’s squash pie. But he was in his darkroom. Not waiting. He called it his workroom, I think to try to legitimize his hobby to himself. Doc Homer made pictures. Specifically, he made photographs of things that didn’t look like what they actually were. He had hundreds: clouds that looked like animals, landscapes that looked like clouds. They were pressed between slabs of cardboard, in closets. Only one was framed. The matting and framing were my present to him one Christmas when I was in high school, after I’d started making my own money. It had cost me a lot, and was a mistake. His hobby was a private thing, too frivolous in his opinion to be put on public display. I should have foreseen this, but didn’t.

Nevertheless, he’d hung it in the kitchen, God only knows why because the man was far from sentimental, and there it still hung. It was the first thing I noticed when I knocked on the screen door and walked in. The photo was my favorite, a hand on a white table. And of course it wasn’t a hand, but a clump of five saguaro cacti, oddly curved and bumpy, shot against a clear sky. All turned sideways. Odd as it seemed, this thing he did, there was a great deal of art to it.

I put the pie in the refrigerator and nosed around a little, telling myself it’s what a good daughter would do. I pictured these good daughters—wifely and practical, wearing perms and loafers and Peter Pan collars. I didn’t remotely look the part. As I crept around the house it felt to me like a great, sad, recently disclosed secret. The kitchen seemed smaller than when I was a girl, standing on a bucket to reach the sink, but that’s natural. It was also crowded with odds and ends you wouldn’t expect in a kitchen: a pair of Piper forceps, for example, washed with the day’s dishes and sitting amongst them on the drainboard. This didn’t signify any new eccentricity on
his part. He’d always had a bizarre sense of utility. I could picture him using the forceps to deliver a head of cabbage from a pot of boiling water. Holding it up. Not in a show-off way, but proud he’d thought of it, as if he were part of a very small club of people who had the brains to put obstetrical instruments to use in the kitchen.

The rooms were cool and stale although it was hot outside. I stepped through the living room, over the old Turkish carpet, which looked malnourished, its bare white threads exposed like ribs. Doc Homer could afford better, I heard somebody say in my mind, a voice I couldn’t identify. “All the money he’s got up there.” Which of course wasn’t true, we never had much, that was just what people thought because we were standoffish. Beyond the living room was the parlor where he used to see patients who’d come to the house, embarrassed, it seems to me now, at night when the office was closed. At present the parlor was shockingly cramped. The door to the outside porch was blocked by furniture I didn’t remember: two sofas and something that looked like a cobbler’s bench. Folded on a sofa was one thing I remembered well, a black crocheted afghan with red flowers. Hallie and I used to drag that thing around everywhere, our totem against disaster. It looked cleaner now than I’d ever seen it.

Magazines and journals were everywhere. His
American Journal of Genetics
was still organized chronologically on the shelf. That was his pet interest; they’d once published his article on the greatly inbred gene pool of Grace, with its marble-eyed babies. (He’d even rigged up a system for photographing the newborns’ eyes, for documentation.) The trait first began showing up in the fifties, when third-cousin descendants of the Gracela sisters started marrying each other. Emelina would have been one of his subjects. You needed to get the gene from both sides; it was recessive. That’s about what I knew. For me it was enough to understand that everyone in Grace was somehow related except us Nolines, the fish out of water. Our gene pool was back in Illinois.

Other magazines, many in number, were piled on the floor. I picked up a
Lancet
: 1977, my first year of med school. There was an
important article on diabetes I remembered. Underneath, a recent
National Geographic
. There was no order at all. Though if I mentioned it he’d come up with some elaborate rationale before he’d admit to disorganization. South Sea Islands and Islets of Langerhans, I could see him saying, and not meaning it as a joke. The smell of mold was making my eyes water. I was inclined toward the stairs, to go up and see what kind of shape the bedrooms were in, but I didn’t have the heart. It wasn’t my house. I forced my hand to knock on the darkroom door.