Barbara Kingsolver - Animal Dreams

But for once the Doña judged wrong. His intentions were noble, and ultimately providential. When the club assembled in March for its monthly meeting in the American Legion hall, Mr. Rideheart was the guest speaker. He was supposed to lecture on folk art, which he did, but mostly he talked about Grace. He told these women what they had always known: that their town had a spirit and disposition completely apart from its economic identity as an outpost of the Black Mountain Mining Company. During the last century while men labored underground to rob the canyon of its wealth, the women up above had been paying it back in kind. They’d paid with embroidery and peacocks and fruit trees and piñatas and children. Mr. Rideheart suggested that he had never known of a place quite like Gracela Canyon, and that it could, and should , be declared a historic preserve. There existed a thing called the National Register of Historic Places. The landmarks on this list, he said, were protected from the onslaught of industry, as if they were endangered species. He allowed that it wasn’t perfect; listing on the register would provide “a measure of protection from demolition or other negative impact,” he said. “In other words, a man can still shoot an elephant, even though it has been declared endangered, and the elephant will still be dead. But the man will come out looking like a very nasty guy.”

“But really it’s not our houses that are going to get endangered by the poison and the dam,” Norma Galvez pointed out. “It’s the trees.”

Mr. Rideheart replied, “Your trees are also historic.”

He knew all the ins and outs of becoming a historic place. He explained where to begin, and where to go after that, to see that the river would run clean and unobstructed. There was a fair amount of bureaucracy involved, but the process was reasonably speedy. “Considering the amount of publicity that has already been brought to bear,” he said, gesturing toward the window, or possibly the invisible airwaves of CBS, “I think it could be done in less than two years.”

He said we would need to document everything, to prove the age and architectural character of the community. “All the photocopying, photography, and so forth can be expensive. Sometimes communities apply for block grants.”

After a brief silence Viola said, succinctly, “We don’t need any block grants. We’re rich.” And that was that.

At some point during the spring I got a letter from Carlo. He’d finally made plans: he was going to Telluride. The clutch had gone out on our old Renault and he’d junked it-he hoped I wasn’t attached. He was thinking of getting a motorcycle, unless I was coming to Telluride, in which case we’d get another car.

I was in such a state, running on so little sleep and such dead nerve endings, I didn’t know what to think. I knew I’d have to make plans soon. And I was touched that he still took me into account when he made his move, as if we were family. But I felt nothing when I read his words; maybe it was just the same nothing there had always been between us. The words seemed to be coming from a very great distance, with the same strange, compressed tone as a satellite phone call. I looked carefully at each sentence and then waited for it to register. All I could really get clearly was the name of the town, with its resonant syllables: Telluride. It sounded like a command.

I’d become estranged from Loyd after our trip. Of course, because of Hallie. I felt guilty for being away when the call came. Loyd and I had been laughing and making love for all those days while the news was laid out like a corpse in Doc Homer’s house. I didn’t even call him the night we got back into town. We hadn’t wanted the vacation to end, so we just went straight to Loyd’s house and spent the night: Surprisingly, I’d never slept in his bed. Loyd’s house was entirely his own: a mobile home set up against the cliff of upper Gracela Canyon on a masonry foundation he’d built slowly himself, over the years. Through his efforts the stonework had gradually grown up over the metal shell, so that now it was pretty much a rectangular stone house, overgrown with honeysuckle vines.

Leafless for winter, the honeysuckles made a lace curtain over the bedroom window. Their shadows left faint tracings on the walls, which I watched all through the bright, moonlit hours of that first night home. Loyd held on to me tightly in his sleep. I couldn’t find sleep myself, but I was happy.

The next morning he left at dawn for a seven-day stand in Yuma, and I walked down to have breakfast at Emelina’s. But of course as things turned out I didn’t eat-not that day or the next. By the time Loyd got back from Yuma I was too far gone to be touched.

It was Uda Dell on the phone, telling me Doc Homer had gone to Tucson for a CAT scan. She called it a “skin the cat.”

I sat up in bed, cradling the phone and pulling the red-and-black afghan around me; school was out for the spring break, so my life had lost what little sense of order daily work could still impose. “When did he go?” I asked. “Just this morning?” What I wanted to ask her was “Why did he tell you, and not me?” But I guess I knew the answer to that.

“No, honey, he went yesterday. He took the bus.” Uda seemed industrious on her end of the phone, even as she spoke. Every few seconds she paused and I could hear a high ascending sound like cloth ripping.

“Did he tell you how long he’d be gone?”

There was another rip, then Uda’s voice. “Honey, he didn’t tell me a thing about it. I don’t think he wanted anybody to know. You know Doc. He don’t want anybody to make a fuss. [Rip…] But he come over and asked me to look after the house. If you or anybody was to come looking for him, he said just tell them he’d gone to Tucson for the weekend to get some medical supplies. [Rip…] Now, I knew that didn’t sound right. I never heard of him doing that before, and you’d think whatever we all got along without for forty years we could get along without till the Judgment, don’t you think? [Rip…] So I said, ‘Doc, are you pulling my sleeve, there’s something up, ain’t it,’ and he said there was more to it, he was going to get tested for his Alsizer’s and get a Cat Skin Test done on him.”

“Oh, well, that’s good,” I said. It was a challenge to follow this trail of reason. I could perfectly picture Uda: her large face, the cheeks tightly packed and shiny like a plum. I rubbed the top of my head and looked at the clock, with astonishment. I’d fallen asleep around 4 A.M. and slept an unprecedented seven hours.

“So, honey, what I’m calling you for is [Rip…] I’ve been itching to get into that house and clean. I know he hasn’t been up to it, and I don’t mean any offense, Lord knows I think the world of Doc, but I expect he needs somebody to get up there and clean. And I was thinking now’d be a good time but I didn’t feel right about just going in. I’ve had the key all this time, ever since I used to keep you girls. He never did want the key back.” She paused. “But I thought I better call and see what you said.”

The key was more or less a symbolic matter. He didn’t lock his front door. Nobody in Grace did. “I think the cleaning’s a good idea. But I also think he’d be mad.” I hesitated, uncertain of my loyalties. Outside my window I could see John Tucker in the courtyard with a tape measure. He appeared to be measuring the hundred-year-old beams that supported the roof of the back porch. I knew what it was about-the Historic Register. I had a brainstorm.

“Uda, let me go up there with you. I’ve got to go through the attic and dig up some old documents on the house and the land for the historic preserve thing. I’ve been meaning to do it, and you could help me. We could tell him you were helping me look through stuff, and that we just got carried away and beat the rugs and mopped the bathroom while we were at it. If he even notices.”