Barbara Kingsolver - Animal Dreams

He saw me looking at him. He stood with the refrigerator door half open, illuminating his face. “Codi, you could be a doctor if you wanted to do that. You learned the skills. Don’t try to put the blame on something abstract like your nerve-you have to take responsibility. Is it something you want, or not?”

“I don’t know.”

He didn’t move. I kept thinking he ought to close the refrigerator door. He’d always had a million rules about everything. Wasting electricity, for example.

“It’s not,” I finally said, for the first time.

“No?”

“No. I thought it would be an impressive thing to do. But I don’t think it was a plan that really grew out of my life. I can’t remember ever thinking it would be all that delightful to look down people’s throats and into their nasty infected ears and their gall bladders.”

“You’re entitled to that opinion,” he said. “That the human body is a temple of nastiness.”

I held him steady in the eye and he smiled, ever so slightly. “You bet,” I said. “People are a totally creeped scenario.”

The news from Hallie was brief and moderately alarming. There had been contra activity in her district, nobody hurt but four John Deere tractors burnt down to scorched metal hulls. She sounded sick about that. “A Deere is like a hunk of gold here. Because of the U.S. embargo we can’t get parts, and the ones still running are Nicaragua’s patron saints.” She sounded completely, happily settled in, though, much more so than I was in Grace. She talked about waking up in the mornings: Roosters hopping up onto the windowsill. An army of little girls in polyester dresses out in the street with huge baskets on their heads, forging out on a hundred urgent missions. She was making good progress with some new cultivation methods; wished she knew more about diesel mechanics. A man named Julio, a literacy teacher from Matagalpa, had asked her out on a date. (She drew stars all around the word “date,” making fun of herself.) They had busy schedules, so finally they met after work and rode together to a meeting in a church where Hallie delivered a lecture on pesticide safety. The church was full of gnats and kerosene smoke and little kids crawling around on a big piece of plastic, crying, impatient for their parents to take them home to bed. She and Julio had ridden over together on her horse, Sopa del Dia , and had a nice time going home.

Sunday night was Halloween and Emelina’s children took to the streets. Grace was at an interesting sociological moment: the teenagers inhaled MTV and all wanted to look like convicted felons, but at the same time, nobody here was worried yet about razor blades in apples.

Emelina volunteered me to go trick-or-treating with the four older boys while she stayed home to dispense bribes to the rest of the town’s marauders; she felt a pagan holiday would do me good. I was only chaperone and crossing guard, not expected to go in costume. There was a state law against anyone over twelve wearing a mask or making direct requests at people’s doors. The city fathers of Grace were independent to an extent: they ignored state law when they closed school on November 2 for the town’s biggest holiday, the Day of All Souls. But to be on the safe side they were going along with the Halloween mask law. John Tucker was disappointed but tried not to show it. Emelina encouraged him to go with us anyway, more or less as a second chaperone. She was wonderful to watch. I guess I’d never really seen good mothering up close.

He agreed to go, dressed in J.T.’s black raincoat, with a quarter-inch of talcum powder on his face. Emelina ran deep eyeliner shadows under his eyes. It was convincing-he looked either sick or dead, depending on his position. Mason went as a bug, with grocerybag wings and radio antennae strapped to his head with a yellow sweatband. He instructed Emelina to draw on bug fangs with her eyebrow pencil. I don’t think Emelina ever actually wore makeup, she just kept it on hand for emergencies. The twins both were going as teenagers (i.e., convicted felons), but decided they needed fangs also.

We made a pretty good haul; in this fruit basket of a valley, I’d never seen such an orgy of sucrose. Jawbreakers and Gummi Bears multiplied in the kids’ bags like the loaves and fishes. The twins pulled me along by both hands, and Mason gripped my leg when we crossed the street. We hit every house on the road that circled the canyon to the south-the longest possible route to the courthouse. John Tucker hung back in the shadows at the edges of yards, but I escorted the boys right up to the doorsteps, secretly enjoying these little peeks into people’s bright living rooms. Our last stop was at the lemon-yellow home of Mrs. Nuñez, whom I knew to be an important figure in the Stitch and Bitch Club. I was beginning to learn my way around the matriarchy of Grace, a force unknown to me in childhood.

Old Mrs. Nuñez recognized the kids immediately, but for some reason mistook me for Emelina. I think she just didn’t really look. She chattered at the boys as she dropped Hershey’s kisses and bubble gum into their heavy grocery bags: “Oh, what an awful-looking bug you are. You get away from my house, you old cucaracha. And you ugly old twins, too. You’re too scary.” She kissed them all on the tops of their heads.

She stopped suddenly, holding her glasses and peering out at the pale apparition of John Tucker, who was hanging back around her shrubs as required by law. “Cielo santo!” she said, with real concern. “What’s the matter with your brother?”

“He’s thirteen,” said Glen.

All Souls’ Day dawned cool, and the people of Grace put on their sweatshirts and gave thanks. The heat wave was broken. By half past eight the sun was well up and sweatshirts peeled off again, but it was still a perfect day. Every able-bodied person in Grace climbed the canyon roads to converge on the cemetery.

It was the bittersweet Mexican holiday, the Day of the Dead, democratic follow-up to the Catholic celebration of All Hallows. Some people had business with the saints on November 1, and so went to mass, but on November 2 everybody had business at the graveyard. The families traipsing slowly uphill resembled harvester ants, carrying every imaginable species of real and artificial flower: bulging grocery sacks of chrysanthemums and gladioli; tulips made from blue and pink Styrofoam egg cartons; long-stemmed silk roses bouncing in children’s hands like magic wands; and unclassifiable creations out of fabric and colored paper and even the plastic rings from six-packs. The Stitch and Bitch Club had had four special meetings in a row.

When Hallie and I were very small we used to be allowed to participate in this celebration, with J.T.’s family. I wondered if Viola remembered having us in tow. In my own mind it was all vague; what I remembered best was the marigolds. Cempazuchiles , the flowers of the dead. I asked Viola about them.

“They come on the truck,” she answered cryptically.

“Do you remember when Hallie and I used to come up here with you?”

“Sure I do. You always ran all over the graves and messed up everything.” Viola didn’t pull her punches.

“Well, we were little,” I said defensively. “Doc Homer made us quit coming after a while. I remember that. I remember him saying, ‘Those great-grandmothers aren’t any of your business.’”

“Well, he was the boss.”

“Right. He was the boss.”

Emelina and the four older boys were marching ahead, but I was pushing the stroller over gravel and Viola was over sixty, so we both had an excuse to lag. We were a harvester-ant clan ourselves, burdened not only with flowers but with food and beer and soft drinks and sundry paraphernalia. John Tucker was carrying a new, largish St. Joseph for Viola’s husband’s grave. J.T. was still in El Paso, and Loyd was on a switch engine in Yuma, but we didn’t seem to need them all that much. It looked like a female holiday, what with the egg-carton flowers. A festival of women and children and old people and dead ancestors.