Barbara Kingsolver - Animal Dreams

I eyed her. “Do you know something about this?”

“What do you want me to tell you?”

“Who were the Nolinas?”

“Come on back away from there and I’ll tell you.”

I stood my ground.

“Honey, come on, let’s leave these dead folks alone. Nobody put any plates of food out for them for a long, long time. They’re not feeling so happy today.”

“Okay, but you have to tell me.”

She told me the Nolinas used to live up around Tortoise River, in the northern end of Gracela Canyon. There was a little settlement there that dispersed when the area was covered by mine tailings. The Nolinas had dug up what they could of the family graveyard and carried the bones a few miles to bury them up here. It wasn’t all that long ago, she said. Around 1950.

“I don’t know any Nolinas in Grace now,” I said.

“No, they’re about gone. They never did settle too good into Grace. The most of them went to Texas or somewhere, after their houses got tore up. They weren’t…” She stopped and took off her shoe, cocking her stockinged foot against her plump ankle while she examined the inside of it, then put it back on. “The Nolinas weren’t real accepted. They were kind of different all the way back. There was one of the Gracela sisters had auburn hair and a bad temper, and she married Conrado Nolina. They say that family went downhill.”

“They were trash, is what you’re telling me.”

“No. Just different.”

I followed behind her as she plodded along, dodging headstones. She was as intransigent, in her way, as Doc Homer. “So how come one of them has practically the same name as my father?”

“You better ask him that,” she said. “It’s his name.”

At that moment something hit me from behind like a torpedo, tackling me around the knees. It was Mason.

“Where have you been, pachuco? Your mama was worried to death about you,” Viola said. Mason had an enormous sucker ballooning under one cheek. He laughed, recognizing Viola’s scoldings as a bald-faced lie.

“I was at a birthday party,” he lied back.

It took a while to coax him back to the fold. There were an infinity of distractions: Calaveras , little skull-shaped candies for children to crack between their teeth. The promise of a chicken leg for a kiss. Little girls and boys played “makeup,” standing on tiptoe with their eyes closed and their arms at their sides, fingers splayed in anticipation, while a grownup used a marigold as a powder puff, patting cheeks and eyelids with gold pollen. Golden children ran wild over a field of dead great-grandmothers and great-grandfathers, and the bones must have wanted to rise up and knock together and rattle with joy. I have never seen a town that gave so much-so much of what counts-to its children.

More than anything else I wished I belonged to one of these living, celebrated families, lush as plants, with bones in the ground for roots. I wanted pollen on my cheeks and one of those calcium ancestors to decorate as my own. Before we left at sunset I borrowed a marigold from Emelina’s great-aunt Pocha, who wouldn’t miss it. I ran back to lay it on Homero Nolina, just in case.

He has to look at her for a long time before he trusts himself to speak. Who is this girl? His daughter Codi, but which Codi? He thinks.

“You look surprised.”

“You startled me. I wasn’t expecting anyone.” He was doing Mr. Garrison’s lab work, waiting for the centrifuge to spin down Mr. Garrison’s blood cells, and when he looked up she was standing in the doorway. He detests surprises.

“Pop, I called five minutes ago, to see if you were here. I told you I was coming. I came straight here. I spent the day up at the graveyard.”

She is leaning against the doorsill holding a bouquet of rabbitbrush and roadside weeds, showering the air with pollen like an old feather duster. She has on purple cowboy boots, which even now are damaging her arches.

“And now you are here,” he says carefully.

“I found a surprise in the graveyard, a headstone with a name on it you might recognize. Yours. Almost yours.”

“Perhaps I am dead.”

She stares. “Do we have relatives from here?”

Uda Dell gave those to her, to both girls, for Christmas: the boots and straw cowboy hats and holsters with cap guns, so that they could run like banshees around the house pretending to fill each other with imaginary bullet holes. He took the guns away, for the preservation of their souls, and the boots on account of their arches. He let them keep the hats.

The minute hand on the wall clock jumps and the centrifuge slows to a stop, clicking suggestively, like the wheel of fortune. Without its mechanical whine the lab is very quiet. He looks up again and she is still there in her stocking feet and red straw cowboy hat, its dark cord knotted under her chin. She understands about the guns, but she wants the boots back. She has come on behalf of herself and her sister, she says. Her left foot in its white sock curls under. Why is it that only girls stand on the sides of their feet? As if they’re afraid to plant themselves? Tears stream from her eyes.

He can’t relinquish either the guns or the boots. He wishes he could do all these things differently, but he can’t. He says, “I don’t think we need to discuss this any further.”

“Oh, come on, just tell me. Would it kill you to tell me?”

Startled, he looks again: she isn’t in stockinged feet, she has boots on. She is much too tall. He is confused and becomes angry. He has a glass vial of blood in his hands. This is his office. She didn’t need to sneak down here and startle him in his own doorway.

“I’m doing Mr. Garrison’s hematocrit,” he says. “I have a good bit more work to do.”

She sighs loudly. She must be fourteen. In a year she will be sullen and furtively pregnant. Or has that passed too? He doesn’t even look at her because there is too much there, and he’s afraid. She is his first child, his favorite, every mistake he ever made.

At the first sign of winter the trees began to die. Leaves and aborted fruits fell in thick, brittle handfuls like the hair of a cancer patient. The abundance of sun and warmth, which we thought would never end, had led the trees on too, promising the impossible. But now the daylight grew thin and they showed no will to live. A dead sea of leaves drifted deep and undisturbed on the orchard floors. No children played there.

I spent a lot of time considering the mystery of my family tree. I didn’t push the subject of the Nolinas, but I did ask people about my mother, whose leavings were scant. I’d grown up with only one sentence, repeated like a mantra: “It wasn’t childbirth she died of, it was organ failure.” I know this was meant to protect Hallie and me from guilt, but “organ failure,” in its way, was equally unhelpful: a pronouncement that reminded me of those doubtfully groomed children in school whose report cards bore failing marks through every season, perennial as grass. “Organ failure” sounded like something our mother ought to be ashamed of, and us after her, for her, in death.

Viola dispensed with the organ-failure myth as easily as snapping a wishbone: “No, it was childbirth,” she told me.

“But Hallie was born in June,” I said. “She didn’t die till later in the summer.”

“It was a few weeks,” Viola conceded. “Hallie gave her a real good round. She lost a lot of blood and after the birth she never got up again.”

I was stunned by this news, and we walked in silence for a while. We were on our way to a special meeting of the Stitch and Bitch Club. To my surprise, I’d been invited as a guest scientist to talk about the pH of the river; needlework was not on the agenda.