Barbara Kingsolver (33 page)

T
here are women in every room of this house, he
thinks: Mrs. Quintana upstairs, and now there is Codi, standing in the kitchen with her baby. Her arms and chest clutch the black wool bundle and it weighs her down like something old, made of stone. The weight makes him want to turn away. He thinks, This is the fossil record of our lives.

“I’m going to bury this. Do you want to help me?” She looks up at him and tears stream down. The grief on her face is fresh as pollen.

“You already buried it.”

“No, no, no!” she screams, and slams the screen door behind her. He follows her down the path but she doesn’t go down to the riverbed this time, she turns and goes right around the house into the backyard. When he catches up, a little breathless, she is standing with her boots on the ground like rooted stalks. Standing beside the old plot where Hallie used to grow a garden. A few old artichoke bushes have gone thistly and wild around its perimeter. Codi drops
the knotted bundle and goes to the tool shed to retrieve a shovel. She comes back and digs hard into the ground. It hasn’t been disturbed for many years.

“Are you sure this is a good place?” he asks.

Without speaking, she steps on the shovel and its tip bites into the sandy soil again and again, lifting, digging, and lifting out a deep, square hole.

“You might want to have a garden here again someday. When this house is yours.”

The shovel stops suddenly. “Did you know I’m staying?” She looks at him.

He looks back, waiting.

“I told Loyd about the baby. Yesterday I took him down there to the riverbed where you showed me. I can remember every minute of that night. You gave me some pills, didn’t you? You really did want to help.” She looks up at the sky, using gravity and the small, twin dams of her eyelids to hold in tears. “So Loyd knows about that now. He’s sad. I didn’t think about that part—that he would be sad. I was thinking the baby was just mine.”

“It wasn’t just yours.”

“I know.” She wipes her cheeks with the back of her hand, leaving a faint dark smudge under each eye. She looks at him very oddly. “We might have another one. Loyd and I. I don’t know. There’s time to see.”

“Yes.”

“Did you know I’m a good science teacher? The kids and the teachers all voted. They say I’m spirited. How do you like that?”

“It’s what I would expect.”

“I’m teaching them how to have a cultural memory.” She looks at her hands, and laughs, but looks sad. “I want them to be custodians of the earth,” she says.

He also looks at her hands. They remind him of something. Whose hands?

“You really can’t approve of me staying, can you?” she demands, suddenly angry. “You raised me to turn my back on this place. That
worked for you, but the difference is you
knew
it was really your home. You knew you had one. So you had a choice.”

“That’s all very well and good,” he says, “but you still might want a garden. These artichoke bushes still produce. Every summer they bloom as if their hearts depended on it. Never mind that there was nobody taking in the harvest.” He takes the tip of a silvery leaf between his fingers. It looks knifelike, but is yielding and soft.

She looks at him for quite a long time, smiling, and then she looks down at the bundle. “It’s all right to bury this here,” she says. “There are no human remains.”

No human remains. No. Human. Remains. The three words chime in his head like large, old bells, three descending notes that ring and ring, speeding up in tempo until they clang against one another.

“How true,” he says finally.

She shaves out the edges of the hole so it is neat and square, and then drops the bundle in. She throws a handful of dirt on top of it and stands there looking down.

“We’re a pair of scarred old souls, aren’t we, Codi?”

“I don’t know what we are. I’m trying to figure out what I hope for.”

“It’s a most dangerous thing, hope.”

Her eyes flash with something bright. Love or anger. But she doesn’t speak.

“Hope involves giving a great deal of yourself away,” he tells her.

“That’s a pitiful excuse.”

“Oh, it’s pitiful all right, but there you have it. It’s hard to give much away when you’re the subject of widespread disapproval and your heart is leaking from puncture wounds.”

“That’s true. We got punctured pretty bad. But we still gave the world a lot, Pop. We gave it Hallie.”

“We did. We surely did.”

She begins shoveling dirt back into the grave. He thinks about the fact that all these particles of dirt have now been rearranged. No fixed strata. Alice was the gardener. When she has finished she
moves to his side and he takes her elbow. They stand side by side in their small garden of sand and buried children. The bones in his wife’s arm are as thin as whistles. “Do you have any idea how much I love you?” he asks her.

She stares at him, then squeezes his hand. “Hallie was a protagonist of history,” she says.

“She wanted to save the world.”

“No, Pop, that’s not true. She wanted to save herself. Just like we all do.”

He looks at the tall, living daughter his wife has suddenly become. He is no longer angry about these changes. “Save herself from what?”

“From despair. From the feeling of being useless. I’ve about decided that’s the main thing that separates happy people from the other people: the feeling that you’re a practical item, with a use, like a sweater or a socket wrench.”

He asks, “Are we the other people?” He is curious.

“You’re not useless. You gave yourself to this town for forty years. Scarred soul or not.”

“Yes. But I gave for the wrong reasons. As you have pointed out.”

She laughs. “I did, didn’t I? Damn!” She pulls at the end of a silver artichoke leaf. “I was scared to death I was going to grow up to be just like you.” She looks at him, and laughs again. She says: “God, I could never be just like you.”

They are standing in the garden, in a dwarf forest of artichokes. She has just dug a hole and buried God knows what and now has made a confession of either contempt or admiration. He waits to see what will happen next.

“Maybe the reason you gave yourself to this town doesn’t matter that much. Maybe what matters is just that you did it. Maybe that makes you a good man. You know what Loyd told me one time?”

“No.”

“He thinks people’s dreams are made out of what they do all day. The same way a dog that runs after rabbits will dream of rabbits. It’s what you do that makes your soul, not the other way around.”

It’s what you do that makes your soul. Standing opposite him, staring down into the grave, he sees two sad little girls in cowboy hats. Is this what he has done? “I don’t think you should be here,” he says to them.

The elder daughter looks up, her pale eyes steady. “But we are here, Papa.”

“Yes, you are.”

“Why don’t you want us?”

“Oh, God, I do.” He kneels down and takes them both in his arms and pulls them against his chest. He understands for the first time in his life that love weighs nothing. Oh God, his girls are as light as birds.

G
racela Canyon, if you strip it down to the
enduring things, is a great, granite bowl of air. It’s a wonderful echo chamber. Voices of women and children in the cemetery reached Viola and me from all the way across the canyon, rising on invisible air currents with the ravens and the spirits of all those old bones being tended by their children. It was getting on toward late afternoon, and we walked slowly. Viola had spent the morning supervising family operations, and said she was tired. But she’d promised that any day I asked her she would take me to the place where we watched my mother go. I chose that particular day in 1989, the end of a decade, the Day of All Souls, when we were all up decorating the graves. I don’t know why.

I’d finished sweeping off my father and the other Nolinas and had decked them out with little bunches of marigolds at their heads and feet. It was something like tucking children into bed. I was their historian and their guardian angel. I never found Ursolina, the little
bear. I imagine she’s somewhere closer to the mine, where the earth has been shifted too many times to bear witness to what it has buried in it. The rest of the family, for all the times they’d had to be exhumed, had stayed together surprisingly well.

I knelt all morning in the dirt, laying out a border of creek rocks around Doc Homer. He’d been gone more than two years, but it took me awhile to decide on this. Emelina’s boys had hauled the rocks up there for me. When we took them out of the water and piled them into the wheelbarrow they lost their luster, all drying to the same whitish color of dust, and I was afraid after all that work they would be the wrong thing, but they were fine. Uniform and shipshape, washed smooth by the abrasion of natural forces. I laid them end to end around the dirt mound, knocking them together and working them back and forth a little to find a natural fit. As I worked I thought of the masonry walls of Kinishba, with the bones of children inside.

When I stood back finally and dusted my chapped hands against my jeans, I saw I’d achieved nothing so fine as Kinishba, but had marked out a clear boundary, anyway. He would like it. I’d brought some order to his cosmos finally.

I squinted into the sun. Across the tops of about a hundred gravestones and many people I saw Viola in her black dress, standing on a little rise, her gray hair wandering from its knot. She pressed one hand to the small of her back while Mason and Nicholas danced in front of her with their hands full of candy, begging for something, wearing her out. Nicholas was three and a half; John Tucker was talking about quitting school to be a hoghead for Southern Pacific. I thought: “I can’t wait forever.” So I went and asked her right then and she said fine, after lunch we would go. “I’m about done here,” she’d said, cracking the sugar skull of a
calavera
between her molars. “They can figure out which end of the flowers to put in water without me.”

We took the quickest road down into town, then cut across the hill behind the high school and through the splendid canopies hung with fruit that the Stitch and Bitch Club had won back from Black Mountain Mining. From there we headed up the Old Pony Road
toward the abandoned mine. The tops of the flat tailing mounds were dimpled with rain-catching basins and I’d noticed that sprigs of rabbitbrush were starting to grow up there.

The road was steep. No route out of Grace was an easy climb. Twice I had to ask Viola to let me catch my breath. I held a fist to my breastbone, panting hard, a little embarrassed by my infirmity but also a little pleased by the external proof of what was still mostly an internal condition. I was pregnant.

“I feel like I don’t have any energy. I come home from school and sleep till Loyd wakes me up for dinner, and then I go back to bed.” This new relationship with sleep was a miracle to me.

“Oh, yeah,” she said. “All your get-up-and-do-it goes to the baby. Right from the start you know who’s gonna be the boss.”

Those first few weeks are an unearthly season. From the outside you remain so ordinary, no one can tell from looking that you have experienced an earthquake of the soul. You’ve been torn asunder, invested with an ancient, incomprehensible magic. It’s the one thing we never quite get over: that we contain our own future.

I’d written this to Hallie in the pages of a bound notebook that would never be torn out or mailed. These letters stayed with me. I told her: it feels like somebody’s moved in. It’s a shock. You find you’re not the center of the universe, suddenly it’s all flipped over, you have it in you to be a parent. You’re not all that concerned any more with being someone’s child. It helps you forgive things.

We reached the crest of the canyon where the white salt crust of the old alfalfa fields began. Dead for two decades, the earth was long and white and cracked, like a huge porcelain platter dropped from the heavens. But now the rabbitbrush was beginning to grow here too, topped with brushy gold flowers, growing like a renegade crop in the long, straight troughs of the old irrigation ditches.

A wind was picking up from the south, and Viola and I could smell rain. High storm clouds with full sails and a cargo of hail made their way in a hurry across the sky. Viola’s hair blew around her face as she walked. I asked, “Did you know her kidneys had failed her once before, when she was pregnant with me?”

“Sure,” Viola said. “She was real sick both times.”

“But she went ahead and had Hallie anyway.”

“You don’t think about it that much. You just go on and have your kids.”

I wanted to believe my mother had thought about it. That Hallie was her last considered act of love—an act with unforeseen consequences, some of them just now coming into flower in the soil of another country. I said, “I always knew I was up here that day. I can remember seeing the helicopter.”

“You remember that?”

“I thought I did. But people told me I hadn’t, so I’d about decided I’d made it up.”

Viola took my hand. I could feel the soft flesh and the hard wedding band in her grip. “No, if you remember something, then it’s true,” she said. “In the long run, that’s what you’ve got.”

I knew the place when we came to it. We were right there already.

This is what I remember: Viola is holding my hand. We’re at the edge of the field, far from other people. We stand looking out into the middle of that ocean of alfalfa. I can see my mother there, a small white bundle with nothing left, and I can see that it isn’t a tragedy we’re watching, really. Just a finished life. The helicopter is already in the air and it stays where it is, a clear round bubble with no destination, sending out circular waves of wind that beat down the alfalfa. People duck down, afraid, as if they’re being visited by a plague or a god. Their hair is blowing. Then the helicopter tilts a little and the glass body catches the sun. For an instant it hangs above us, empty and bright, and then it rises like a soul.