The Fifth Sacred Thing (32 page)

“Where did you go?” she asked. “What are you thinking?”

“I was thinking you might just as well have set the
altar
up. That Bird is dead.”

Best not to respond to that remark, Madrone told herself. Instead she asked him what
altares
he was planning.

“Maya and I did a small one for my mother in Maya’s room,” he said. “You should come see it—it’s beautiful. Maya saved all of Mom’s rock collections, from the time she was a girl, and her notebooks where she worked out the original theorems for intelligent crystal technology.”

“Maya is the world’s worst pack rat. She can’t get rid of anything.”

“The whole time we worked on the
altar
, Maya kept grumbling, ‘I named her Brigid, for the Goddess of Poetry, and what did she like? Rocks, nothing but rocks. Other girls played with dolls; she played with rocks, talking to
them, dressing them up, giving them little rock tea parties, counting them over and over again. How did I produce a child like that?’ ”

Madrone laughed. “She ought to be grateful. If it wasn’t for your mother’s way with crystals, we wouldn’t have the Net, and Maya would be writing longhand instead of tapping away on her keyboard. What are you going to do for your dad and Marley?”

“Just play their music. I fixed the speakers on the sound system, and Maya has a whole collection of discs, every saxophone solo my dad ever blew and all of Marley’s percussion recordings.”

“I should do an
altar
for my mother,” Madrone said. “But somehow when it comes to the point I never can. I don’t know why. Holybear did a nice one for his mom, dripping in lace. And with a nice picture of her—I don’t remember her ever looking so beautiful in life. But then she already had cancer when I first knew her. We’re lucky we come of African and
Indio
stock; that milk-white skin is a real liability.”

She’s chattering, Bird thought, dodging something.

“Do you remember your mother clearly?”

Madrone looked up at him. “Why do you want to know?”

“Memories are precious. Even bad ones. They make us who we are.”

She sighed, nestling deeper into the shelter of his arm. “Sometimes I remember her rocking me and singing to me. And the way she smelled after a day in the clinic, of medicines and disinfectant and just a little tang of the sour smell of the poor. And once, I remember, she took me into the jungle with her to gather plants. She told me not to be afraid of snakes, to sit quietly and listen to the animals and plants and try to understand what they were telling us. Mostly I just remember a feeling, a sense of safety and warmth and everything being okay. And then …”

She stopped speaking. She could never remember what had happened, only a sickness in her stomach, a pressure in the back of her eyes. Bird tightened his arm around her. It’s there in your touch too, Madrone wanted to say. The same warmth, the same peace, the little crawling worm of fear.…

“Then what,
querida?”

Why was he probing this wound? Did she ask him how he felt about Brigid coughing her lungs out in the big epidemic? Or seeing his father shot down in the street during the Uprising? Did Nita talk about the day she went home from the university to find both her parents gasping for breath and dying almost in unison? No, they were all a bunch of orphans, except for Sage, whose father was still hale and hearty up in the mountains. They had all been bereaved. Better not to whine about it.

He patted her gently. “What happened?”

“Then I remember this bare little room in a bare little house, where there
wasn’t much to eat but I couldn’t complain, because everybody was so afraid there. I never saw her again, but somehow I knew she was dead.”

He held her closer, for a moment, but she pulled away.

“Then Rio came,” she went on quickly. “I’d never seen a man who looked like him before, with such white bushy hair and eyebrows and a big white beard. Like the pictures of Santa Claus in one of my books. Although not as fat. So I trusted him. I thought he was going to take me to the North Pole.”

Bird laughed. “Was it a disappointment to land here instead?”

“A bit,” Madrone admitted. “I wanted to see the reindeer.”

“I remember when you arrived, that first night when we all came over here for dinner to meet you, my mom and dad and Marley and me. How old were you? Six? Seven? You were so little and pretty and sad.”

“You were nice to me,” Madrone said. “You and Marley went outside to play ball, and you asked me to come along. And you spoke Spanish to me, because I wasn’t used to so much English. Your accent sounded pretty funny, though.”

“I fell madly in love with you,” Bird said. “You awakened some instinctive male protective urge in me.”

Madrone stiffened abruptly. “Well, you can curb it now,” she snapped. “We’re not seven years old anymore.”

He pulled back from her. Where did that come from? he wondered. We were so close just a minute ago, but she’s like a cat with a wound, who lashes out when you stroke too close to the sore place. And aren’t you the same? a voice asked him. We could fight now, he thought, but instead he grinned at her.

“But I’m still madly in love with you.”

She stuck her tongue out at him, and he caught it between his lips and wrapped his arms around her and kissed her tenderly.

Here is the peace, the safety, that was shattered long ago, Madrone thought. In his arms. I should let him shelter me a bit, stop jabbing at him, leave my own fear behind.

But the fear remained.

Samhain night was Madrone’s twenty-ninth birthday, and they spent it cooking. By family tradition, the birthday celebrant was allowed to request a favorite meal. Because Halloween was the night the ancestors returned to visit, they combined her birthday feast with an ancestor feast, each making a dish that would be pleasing to their own ancestors. Madrone’s favorite food was the
mole
Maya had learned to cook long ago in Mexico that took twenty-four spices and seven different kinds of chiles and three days to prepare.

“That’s bound to please somebody dead,” Madrone said.

“Rio always liked it,” Maya admitted, “even if all his ancestors were Irish and Cockney. I’ll mash up some potatoes on the side.”

Madrone insisted on cooking too, even though it was her birthday. She made
pupusas
in the style of Guadalupe, to placate the ghost of the father she never knew. Holybear baked challah, Nita made rice and beans, and Sage made an English trifle with pound cake, strawberry jam, and real cream.

“What should I cook?” Bird asked, feeling a little superfluous in the flurry of activity that filled the kitchen.

“A salad?” Nita suggested.

“Yeah, I could do that.” He didn’t sound excited.

“What did your dad like?”

“Greens, black-eyed peas, corn bread, sushi, Thai shrimp soup, and that cream of carrot soup that Johanna taught my mom to make.”

“Well,” Maya said, “you cook up a mess of greens in vinegar, and Johanna may well materialize.”

When dinner was ready, they placed small portions of each dish on plates and set them out on all the altars to the dead.

“Another feast of staggering variety, if questionable digestibility,” Holybear said. “Here’s to Madrone! May she live, if not forever, at least for a good long time yet!”

Over dessert, they told stories about the dead. Madrone told the one story she knew about her father: how he had been a student in the University of Guadalupe until one morning he stepped out of his front door and tripped over the body of a child who had died in the night from hunger. Instead of going to class that day, he had gone to the mountains to join the revolution.

Bird talked of his brother, Marley, how in the drought of ’33 he had gone up on Twin Peaks and drummed for four days without stopping, until the rain came. Nita spoke of her great-grandmother, who had come over from the Philippines after World War II and raised eight children alone after their father disappeared with another woman. Sage told about the night her great-uncle Seth, an itinerant Louisiana preacher, stopped a lynching by talking in tongues until he went into convulsions, giving the intended victim a chance to escape. Maya was unusually quiet, concentrating on her knitting even when Holybear told the story of his grandfather Ben’s most famous political trial, an event she had witnessed personally.

“You’re awfully quiet,
abuelita
,” Bird said. He was sitting between Madrone and Holybear on the big couch, with Nita perched on the arm, and they all faced Maya, smiling. “What are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking that we are all descended from survivors here. Like Bermuda grass or the cockroach, we should be hard to stamp out.”

“Not a very flattering comparison,” Nita complained. “Why not like
mint, or blackberries, or even ivy? They also spread all over the place and are hard to kill.”

“Tell us a story,” Bird said to Maya. “It’s your turn. Something instructive and inspirational.”

“I’ve written my stories,” Maya said. “There they are in that pile of books on the table.”

“Read us one, then,” Sage suggested, glancing up from the bright green-and-gold afghan she was crocheting.

“Is there something wrong with your eyes?”

“No, but you can’t get off so easy,” Nita said. “Tell us a story!”

“Tell us a story! Tell us a story!” they clamored.

“Which of the dead should I tell about?”

“To hell with the dead. Tell us about you. You’ll be dead all too soon, and then
we’ll
have to tell your story,” Bird said.

Maya sighed, laying her knitting in her lap. “What I keep thinking about is the discussion we had with Lily.”

“About how to resist the Stewards?” Madrone asked.

“Sometimes it seems to me that I’ve been having the same arguments, over and over, for eighty years. Violence or nonviolence, how to struggle, where to draw the lines? Debate after debate, while all around us violence continued to rage unchecked. If I tell you a story tonight, it will be a war story.”

“Go ahead,” Bird said quietly. “Maybe a war story is what we need to hear.”

“The first war I remember was Vietnam.” Maya settled back in her chair, closing her eyes as if resting before a long climb. “We used to watch the evening news, Rio and I, on an old black-and-white TV. We were living in one big room, converted from an old garage, in Berkeley. He’d gone back to school, which I took as a personal betrayal. Nevertheless, I stuck with him.”

“Why was it a betrayal?” Nita asked.

Maya opened her eyes and looked at her. “Because when I first met him he’d seemed like someone from another star. Unbound by the mundane. An outlaw, a pirate, a savior in a black leather jacket with hair halfway down to his ass—which in those days marked a man as a radical. He’d seemed so free. We’d lived on air, traveling up and down the coast in his van, stoned out of our minds with rock music blaring out of the eight-track. We’d made love on the beach in a rainstorm with the waves breaking over our naked bodies. How could a man like that take midterms and worry about a grade point average?

“Besides, my mother was constantly nagging
me
to go back to school. I couldn’t forgive him for doing what I was so strongly resisting.”

“Why didn’t you want to go back to school?” Nita asked.

“I’d dropped out and run away after Johanna and I got busted. Caught, that is, making love on the locker room floor of our high school gymnasium, after taking a little too much LSD. After that I couldn’t stand structures, hierarchies. They all seemed false to me, arenas where people preened and postured and attempted to impress themselves. I didn’t want that. I didn’t want a degree, I wanted an absolute: enlightenment by the great straight upward path, something real.” She sighed. “I thought I had it with Rio, but what I had was another form of fantasy. We weren’t living on air, we were living on the money he made selling dope. I had sand up my crotch from fucking on the beach, and he was proclaiming ‘free love’ and getting my best friend pregnant, although I didn’t find out about that until years later. Pregnant with your mother.” She nodded at Madrone. “So I suppose we should thank him.”

“I’ll set a little more of that cream trifle on his
altar
,” Madrone said.

“Actually, going back to school was one of the most sensible things he’d ever done. If he’d only stuck with it.” She picked up her knitting and stared at it. “But I was talking about the war. One of those news images is still seared into my brain: a woman on fire, burned with napalm, running and screaming and clutching her burning baby. She haunted me. Whenever I felt bad, when Rio and I were fighting or when I caught cold or wanted to crawl in bed with menstrual cramps, I’d think of her. How could I feel sorry for myself in the face of her suffering? And whenever I felt good, when the wisteria bloomed or sometimes in the middle of making love, I would think of her and feel ashamed. How could I dare be happy, when some other woman, just like me, was burning down to the bone?”

She jabbed her needle into the yarn and swore softly as she dropped a stitch.

“Go on,
abuelita
,” Bird said.