Barbara Kingsolver - Animal Dreams

“No. I don’t guess we can. We just have to wait.”

It was the first honest conversation we’d had about Hallie. It took us both by surprise. We were quiet for a long time then, but I knew he wasn’t sleeping. I could see his eyes working back and forth under his eyelids, as if he were reading his own thoughts. I wondered what his thoughts looked like, in his clear moments and in his confusion. I very much wished to know him.

“Pop?”

He slowly opened his eyes and looked at the ceiling.

“Did you really see me bury the baby?”

He looked at me.

“Why didn’t we ever talk?”

He sighed. “You get beyond a point.”

“You could have just given me a hug or something.”

He turned away from me. His short, gray hair stood up in whorls on the back of his head. He said, “It’s Friday, isn’t it? Mrs. Nuñez’s lab work is due back today. Can you pull her chart?”

“Okay, sleep now,” I said, reaching over to pat his shoulder. “But after a while I want you to get up and get dressed. Today or tomorrow, whenever you’re feeling up to it.”

“I feel fine.”

“Okay. When you’re feeling better, I want you to take me to the place where I buried it. I can remember a lot of that night. Cleaning up the bathroom, and that old black sweater of Mother’s, some things like that. But I can’t remember the place.”

He didn’t promise. I think he’d forgotten again who I was. We were comically out of synchrony-a family vaudeville routine. Whatever one of us found, the other lost.

I received a letter from the school board. It was early April, a long time after I’d stopped my hopeful excursions to the Post Office box and had given the key back to Emelina, so this letter appeared on my table among the breakfast dishes while I was at school. I saw it the minute I walked in, but tried to ignore it for the longest time. I carefully went around to the other side of the table and dropped a heavy pile of tests and began to grade them, trying not to see it. “A predator is a big guy that eats little guys,” wrote Raymo. “A herbivore is your wussy vegetarian. In other words, lunch meat.” She’d wedged it between the coffee cup and a bottle of aspirin. Did she think it would be bad news? I gave in and tore it open.

I can’t really say what sort of news it was. Surprising news. It was notification that my contract was going to be renewed for the next year. The term wasn’t over, but the school board recognized my circumstances as unusual and wanted to give me ample notice; they were eager for me to return in the fall. My temporary teaching certificate could easily be extended, especially if I had intentions of working toward certification. It was a personal letter written on behalf of the entire board and signed by someone I knew of but had never met, a Mr. Leacock. His letter cited my popularity with the students and commended me for my “innovative presentation” and “spirited development of a relevant curriculum.” It didn’t mention contraception or Mrs. Josephine Nash or the ozone layer. I wondered how much they really knew; it made me nervous. I kept looking sideways at that word “spirited.” After knocking myself out to be accepted, I’d finally flown off the handle in a seditious direction, and won a gold star. “We are all aware of the difficulties of engaging teenagers in a vital course of academic instruction,” wrote Mr. Leacock. Someone apparently felt I’d succeeded in this endeavor. I was going to be named something like teacher of the year. Teachers and kids all voted, secret ballot.

I was stunned. I stuck the letter into the pocket of my corduroy jumper and went out for a walk. I tramped quickly down the hill past Mr. Pye’s green roof and Mrs. Nuñez, who sat in a rocker on her front porch, leaning precariously forward out of her chair, trying to nail a fast-moving spider with the rubber tip of her cane. She lifted the cane and stabbed the air sociably as I passed by; I waved back. I wondered about the lab work Doc Homer had mentioned in his delirium. Was she really waiting for someone far away to examine her cells or her blood and pronounce a verdict? Or was this history, a sentence she was already serving?

In town, the 4-H Club had set up a display of rabbits and fancy chickens in cages in front of the courthouse. A little county fair was planned for Easter weekend. The rabbits were of an odd-looking breed but all exactly alike, fancily marked with black-tipped ears and paws and a gorget under the throat, and it occurred to me how much simpler life would be if people were like that, all identically marked. If I were not the wrong breed. I corrected an old habit of thought: both my parents were born in Grace, and their parents before them. Possibly Doc Homer was right-I’d believed otherwise for so long it had become true; I was an outsider not only by belief but by flesh and bone.

Children knelt by the cages and talked to the rabbits in high voices, poking in sprigs of new grass from the courthouse lawn. Some shoppers had strayed over from their errands across the street. Mary Lopez, a middle-aged woman I knew from Stitch and Bitch, waved at me. She was there with her mother, a very short, broad woman with a long black braid down her back. The old woman leaned over the rabbit cages like a child. Mary rested a hand on the back of her mother’s neck, a slight gesture that twisted my heart. I turned up the road toward Loyd’s house. I knew he was home, or would be shortly. He was on a fairly regular schedule these days, running the Amtrak to Tucson and back. We stayed in touch.

The air had a fresh muddy edge, the smell of spring. I had several choices of route, and on a whim I took a less familiar road. I found myself walking through a neighborhood that wanted to pull me into it: the dirt shade of salt cedars, the dogs that barked without getting up. A woman and her husband argued congenially while they picked grapefruits off the tree in their backyard. The fruits rustled solidly into grocery bags while the woman talked in a low, steady voice and the man answered, on and on, a cycle of gentle irritation and love that would never be finished.

“Gee, you’re pretty. Are you the new schoolteacher?”

I turned around, startled by a man on a moped. I’d never laid eyes on him before, but I was completely charmed by his line. I felt like Miss Kitty in Gunsmoke.

“Well, yes,” I said.

“You want a ride? There’s a wicked pair of brindle bulldogs up at the corner.”

“Okay.” I gathered my skirt and straddled the back of his bike. We buzzed smoothly uphill past the putative wicked bulldogs, who lay with their manifold chins on their paws.

“My son Ricky’s in one of your classes. He says you give them a pretty good round.”

“They give me one, too,” I said.

He laughed. “You’re Doc Homer’s girl, aren’t you?”

“That’s right. Homer Nolina of the white trash Nolinas. He married his second cousin for mad love.” I’d been lying to strangers all my life, and no wonder. Here was the truth and it sounded like a B-grade fairy tale. But I wanted to know if Doc Homer was right-if everyone had forgotten.

“I never heard that,” my driver said. “I just heard she was dead.”

“She’s dead all right. But she was born and grew up right here. You’re around the same age I am, you wouldn’t remember her, but it’s the truth. Her family thought unkindly of my daddy, so they ran off for a while and he put on an attitude.”

He laughed at that, but said, “You oughtn’t to talk bad about a man like him.”

“Oh, I know. Doc Homer’s inclined to be useful. But I swear it looks to me like he’s been running his whole lite on vengeful spite.”

“I got me an old Ford that runs on something like that.”