Barbara Kingsolver - Animal Dreams

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.”

The 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.