And Condors Danced (20 page)

No one tried to make her go to school that day, and by noon she had stopped crying. She didn’t want to come down to lunch—not because she wasn’t hungry; to her surprise, she was—but she had finally managed to stop howling and she didn’t want to begin again. It was as if the dark wound that had opened and released the shrieking pain had begun to heal over, but any kind of touching, even the most loving and sympathetic—especially the most loving and sympathetic—would tear it open again. But later when Woo Ying was in the garden and Aunt M. was napping, she crept down to the kitchen and ate ravenously.

Late that night when she had gone to bed, Aunt M. came in again and, without being asked, answered some of the terrible questions. She told first how Father had gone for Doc Booker and had insisted that he come out to the ranch, and how they had waited until there was no doubt. Until any more waiting would only have meant more terrible suffering. She talked, too, about her own secret plan and how it had failed. How she had tried to find a doctor who would give Tiger the Pasteur treatment, but how the Ventura doctor had refused and the Los Angeles man, who might have done it, was away on a trip to the East Coast and had not yet returned. Carly listened without speaking, and at last Aunt M. went away.

On Tuesday she went back to school, and all the business of daily life began again, and as the week went by the pain and grief receded until it was no longer an all-engulfing wave. It would always be there, she knew, a part of her that she would never be without, and which would always be painful to touch, but only a part now instead of the consuming anguish that had drowned her mind and heart.

On Wednesday after dinner Aunt M. began to talk about Trixie’s puppies. Trixie had been a litter mate of Tiger’s, the only one of the litter that the Bufords had kept. And now Trixie had four little pups of her own. Of course, they were just newborn and too young to leave their mother, but Aunt M. wanted to know if Carly would like to go out and look at them and see if—

But then Carly interrupted and said, “No. No I can’t. Not—yet.

And Aunt M. said, “Of course, dear. I understand.”

But that night in bed Carly found herself thinking about the Bufords’ new puppies and wondering what they would look like and if any of them would ever be as smart as Tiger. She went on thinking about them off and on for the rest of the week, and on that very Friday morning she thought about them again when she happened to see Clarence Buford driving his father’s team down Arnold Street.

It was on that same Friday morning that Mama died.

T
HEY WENT OUT
to the ranch in Aunt M.’s surrey. It was gray and drizzly, and Woo Ying was wearing a slicker. Carly and Aunt M. sat in back under the canopy with the side curtains down. Aunt M. was wearing a black dress that had been up in the attic since Uncle Edward died, but Carly was still dressed in the blue gingham she’d worn to school that day, with a wide black ribbon tied around her arm.

Almost all the way out to the ranch Aunt M. held both of Carly’s hands in hers and talked about Mama. Carly sat very still and tried to think only about what Aunt M. was saying and nothing more. Aunt M. spoke about how Dr. Dodge had told the family in August that Mama didn’t have long to live. It was heart failure, Aunt M. said. Congestive heart failure and not the weak lungs that Mama had always talked and worried about.

“I didn’t know,” Carly said. “No one told me. I thought it was only…the same as before.”

“That was what they wanted you to think. They didn’t want you to know she was dying. That was why Nellie asked if you could stay at Greenwood. She didn’t want you to know, and she felt she couldn’t keep it from you if you were there all the time.”

Carly nodded. She understood that now. She understood how Nellie had thought that knowing that Mama was dying would have been too much for her to bear. Of course, that was what Nellie would have thought. Carly turned her face away and closed her eyes. She knew Aunt M. was watching her. Even with her eyes closed she could see Aunt M.’s face. Clenching her fists and gritting her teeth, she tried to shut herself away from the pity and worry in Aunt M.’s eyes.

They were almost to the ranch when they met the hearse. Mr. Strickland, the undertaker, was driving the black horses, and as he drew near he raised his stovepipe hat and solemnly bowed his head. Aunt M. reached out for Carly. She let herself be pulled close so that her face was hidden, but not before she had seen it clearly.

She had seen the hearse before in funeral processions in Santa Luisa and on its way to the cemetery. So even with her eyes closed and her face smothered against Aunt M.’s bosom, she could see the shiny black van with its gleaming brass fittings and glass walls through which a flower-strewn coffin could be seen, except when black velvet curtains were drawn across the glass, as they were now. She had always cried when she saw it. It had been easy to cry then, thinking about death and grief and the poor dead person, whom she usually had known at least a little. But now, when it was Mama who lay behind the black curtains, she buried her face in Aunt M.’s cape and would not allow herself that kind of tears.

The ranch house was full of people. In the parlor with Father and Charles were Reverend Mapes and Mrs. Mapes and Mrs. Hamilton and all three of the Bufords. Everyone hugged Carly and kissed her, and some of them were crying.

Father was wearing his Sunday suit, but somehow it didn’t look the same, and neither did he. The suit that had always seemed so grand looked worn and wrinkled now, and Father’s eyes, his fierce gray Hartwick eyes, were dull and uncertain. He seemed almost like a stranger, and when he took Carly’s shoulders in both his hands and looked down at her, she suddenly felt frightened. He said her name, and something else, but her heart was pounding so hard that it echoed in her ears and blotted out the words. As soon as she could, she pulled away and went looking for Nellie.

In the kitchen Mrs. Purdy and Maggie Kelly were comforting Lila and Arthur, and no one noticed Carly, so she ducked back into the hall and went upstairs to Nellie’s room.

Nellie was sitting on the edge of her bed, crouched over and shriveled down like an animal in pain. Her face was red and wet and her eyes were blank and swollen. She wasn’t making any sound, but Carly could almost hear the terrible noise that throbbed in her throat, fighting to get out. Hearing that silent sound made Carly begin to cry.

She cried for a long time, and Nellie put her arms around her and rocked her to and fro. The tears, Carly’s tears, were real and painful, and it wasn’t until later that night, back home at Greenwood, that she realized that they really hadn’t made any difference—and why.

The funeral was on Sunday afternoon, and after the ceremony at the church everyone went out to the cemetery. It was a warm day for February, and under the oak and eucalyptus trees the earth was rain-softened and carpeted with fresh new grass. The mourners left their surreys and buggies in the long avenue that led to the central knoll, and went on foot to the Carlton plot. Inside the plot the grass had been mowed to a smooth lawn, and the mourners in their black suits and dresses formed a dark, silent circle around the open grave.

The pallbearers came then, Father and Charles and Arthur, and Dan Kelly and Mr. Buford and Clarence, and lowered the coffin down into the earth between Uncle Edward’s granite monument and Petey’s tombstone. There was no wind in the trees, and after Reverend Mapes stopped speaking, it was very quiet except for the soft murmur of the creek and now and then the sound of crying.

Nearly everyone was crying, and Carly could have too. Standing by the grave, dressed in the lumpy black dress with its high stiff collar that Father had picked out for her at the Emporium, it would have been easy to be the poor orphaned child, weeping over her mother’s tomb. It would have been easy to water the grave with bitter tears, as she had done so many times for Petey. But she didn’t let herself do it.

Then everyone went home and Carly went back to Greenwood with Aunt M. and Woo Ying and life began again, almost the same as before. But not really the same. At least not for Carly.

On Tuesday she went back to school, wearing the black mourning dress, and on that first day Mr. Alderson and Miss Pruitt and all the students came one by one to tell her how sorry they were. While they were talking she held her face very still and stiff, and when they had finished she nodded and said “Thank you” and nothing more. For several days after that everyone was solemn and quiet when she was around, even Emma Hawkins and Henry Quigley Babcock.

She wore the black dress all that week, but on Friday when she got home from school Aunt M. came into the kitchen carrying a new dress. She held it up to Carly to see if it would fit. It was a beautiful dress with tiny pale green stripes, a braid-trimmed bolero, and big puffed sleeves.

“Yes!” Aunt M. said. “I thought so. Suits you perfectly. Now go upstairs and try it on. And when you get out of the dreadful black thing, give it to Woo Ying to make mop rags.”

“But Father said—”

“Never mind that. Tell him I put my foot down. Foolish custom, mourning. Going around reminding yourself and everyone else to grieve. Particularly where children are concerned. Wear your ordinary dresses, child, and smile again. We miss that smile of yours, don’t we, Woo Ying?”

So Carly stopped wearing black, and when Father saw her he hardly seemed to notice. And at school it wasn’t long before everyone began to treat her just as they had before—except for Henry Babcock, who was behaving strangely.

It wasn’t that Henry had really reformed, because he was still tormenting everyone else as much as ever. But he didn’t pull Carly’s hair anymore, or push things off her desk, and he’d stopped calling her Mehitabel in his normally nasty tone of voice. Carly knew there was something unnatural about Henry’s behavior but she didn’t know what was behind it, so she simply went on ignoring him as she always had.

Sometimes Matt, on his way home on Rosemary, stopped to talk to Carly as she waited for Lila. Usually he talked about school things or about what had been happening at Grizzly Flats. But once he said his grandpa had been up in the Sespe again and had seen five condors in flight at one time.

“I was thinking,” Matt said, “that if we went up to the spring pretty soon we might—”

“
No
!” Carly interrupted. She hadn’t meant to say it so fiercely, but the thought of condors brought back that bright fall day when she had been so sure she would see them dancing. Looking at Matt’s startled face she said “No” in a more ordinary manner. Matt nodded, looking puzzled, and didn’t mention condors again for a long time.

On Saturdays Carly still went to the ranch on Chloe and helped Nellie and Lila with housework and sewing. Sometimes she swept and dusted and sometimes she helped with the baking, and when Duchess had her new little heifer calf, she was the one who taught it to drink from a pail. Clarence Buford had started coming to the ranch every Saturday evening to sit in the parlor and talk to Father and Nellie, and sometimes just to Nellie alone. Lila had begun work on a beautiful white dress that was covered with tucks and ruffles and panels of lace, and sometimes Carly helped with the pinning and basting. Lila was still wearing black, but she said the dress was for high school graduation in June, and Father had agreed that she could be out of mourning by then.

The days went by and everything was the same and yet not the same, and the changes began to seem more and more normal. Some of the differences were definite improvements if looked at from certain points of view—improvements like industry and diligence and self-control. Carly was working harder at school as well as at home, and spending less time chattering and playing and daydreaming. Particularly less time daydreaming.

It wasn’t that she enjoyed scrubbing and ironing and dividing fractions any more than she had before, or even that working hard made her feel any better. It was just that work felt safer now, and dreams more risky.

I
T WAS ON
a Friday early in March that Alfred Quigley came to Greenwood to talk to Aunt M. He came in the Quigleys’ fancy phaeton, and after he’d tied the grays to the hitching post, he and Henry Quigley Babcock came to the front door. Carly had seen them from the window, and she decided to go to her room and stay there. But in just a few minutes Woo Ying knocked and said that Aunt M. wanted her in the parlor. And there they were—Alfred and Henry.

It was a cold day, and Alfred Quigley was wearing a Prince Albert coat and a wide silk tie, and Henry was still in his school shoes and knickers instead of his after-school overalls. As soon as Carly came into the room, Henry looked at his grandfather and then stood up and began to talk, as if he were reciting at an entertainment.

Afterward Carly couldn’t remember all of what Henry said, because she had known immediately what it was going to be about and she didn’t want to hear it. So she stood perfectly still in the doorway, and all the time Henry was talking she was silently saying
Stop! Stop! I don’t want to hear you
over and over again. And even though she didn’t say the words out loud, they echoed so loudly inside her head that she missed some of what Henry was saying about how sorry he was about Tiger, and also how sorry he was about the float and the firecrackers, and how he had asked God to forgive him and God had, and he hoped Carly did too.

When he finally stopped talking, Carly nodded and turned to Aunt M. and asked, “May I go now?”

She hadn’t meant to be rude, but she was so desperate to get away that she didn’t realize what was expected of her until Aunt M. said, “Of course, child. But you do forgive Henry, don’t you?”

So she said quickly, “Yes. I do. I forgive him. I forgive you, Henry,” and then she turned and ran upstairs and back to her room. She was still lying on her bed thinking about God’s forgiveness and whether it was useless to ask for it if you didn’t deserve it, when Aunt M. called her to come to dinner.

In the kitchen the table was set with the best china and silver, just as it had been when Woo Ying had made a celebration because Carly was coming back to live at Greenwood. As soon as she came into the room, Carly could see how excited Aunt M. and Woo Ying were and they both began to talk at once, telling her about what had happened. It seemed that one of the reasons Alfred Quigley had come was to say that he had removed his objections and Aunt M. was now a member of the water company.