I peeked into the next room. Charlie Rich was singing from the radio now, and Birdie hummed “Behind Closed Doors” while she bent over an electric sewing machine. Its small light glowed on her face. A baby slept on a flat, fur-lined cradle board that hung like a swing on ropes from the ceiling. On every fifth arc of the swing, Birdie reached up without looking and gave it a push. She noticed me standing in the doorway and inclined her head toward the end of the room, where an iron bed stood behind a drawn-open curtain of blankets. “You can put things there. That’s for you and Loyd.”
“Thanks,” I said. “Who’s the little one?”
“My daughter’s girl. Hester.”
“How old?”
“Three weeks.”
“Does your daughter live here too?”
Birdie pulled her cloth from the machine and shook her head slightly while she broke the thread with her teeth. “She goes to boarding school in Albuquerque.”
I returned to exploring the living room. I was stunned to run across a small framed photo of two little Loyds, identical, sitting astride very different horses. Behind them was a backdrop of dry hills and a brown water tank. Loyd and Leander, nine years old, looking as if they owned the world. Until I saw that picture I hadn’t really heard a word he’d told me about losing his brother. You can’t know somebody, I thought, till you’ve followed him home.
That evening Inez’s house filled with relatives for the feast. Cousins and uncles and aunts showed up, stamping the snow off their moccasins, bringing covered dishes and their own chairs. All the older women had their hair cut in the same style as Inez’s, with short flaps over the ears and the heavy chignon in the back, and they wore silver necklaces and elaborate turquoise rings that shielded their knuckles. The teenage girls wore jeans and about everything else you’d expect on a teenage girl, except makeup. One of them nursed a baby at the table, under her T-shirt.
Loyd and I shared one chair; apparently we were the official lovebirds of this fiesta. He spent a lot of time telling me what I was eating. There were, just to begin with, five different kinds of posole, a hominy soup with duck or pork and chilies and coriander. Of the twenty or so different dishes I recognized only lime Jell-O, cut into cubes. I gave up trying to classify things by species and just ate. To everyone’s polite amusement, my favorite was the bread, which was cooked in enormous, nearly spherical loaves, two dozen at a time, in the adobe ovens outside. It had a hard brown crust and a heavenly, steaming interior, and tasted like love. I ate half a loaf by myself, believing no one would notice. Later, in bed, Loyd told me they were all calling me the Bread Girl.
Our bed was small, but after three nights in the truck it felt deliciously soft. I cuddled against Loyd. “What’s a navel mother?” I asked, drowsy with warmth and a half loaf of bread.
“She’s like a special aunt. She’s the one that cuts the cord when you’re born, and helps your mother get up out of bed when she’s ready. They count that as your birthday-the day your mother gets up.”
“Not the day you were born?”
“Not the day you came out. They count the mother getting better as all part of the birth.”
“Hallie doesn’t have a birthday, then,” I said. “After she was born, our mother never got up. She got real sick, and then a helicopter tried to come get her and she died. All without ever putting her slippers on.”
“Then Hallie never finished getting born,” Loyd said. He kissed the top of my head.
I was aware of the sleeping sounds of Inez and Hester on the other side of the makeshift curtain. I asked, “Is it okay that we’re sleeping together?”
Loyd quietly laughed at me. “It’s okay with me. Is it okay with you?”
“I mean with your family.”
“They’re not hung up about it. Mama wanted to know if you’re my woman.”
“Meaning what?”
“As opposed to woman of the week, I guess.”
“Woman of the year,” I said.
In the morning snow had fallen, as deep as five or six quilts. The windows were round blue tunnels to the light, like the mouths of caves. Loyd got up and went outside, where, at dawn, Inez and Birdie were already involved with the day’s industry. He was sent back to bed with a whole fresh loaf of bread.
“How did your dad meet her?” I asked. Loyd and I were sitting on the roof of Inez’s house now, facing south, waiting for ceremonies to begin in the plaza.
“At a dance over in Laguna. In the summertime. It was a corn dance. Everybody says she was a knockout when she was young. A real good dancer.”
“I think she’s a knockout now.”
“He grew up over at Jicarilla.”
“Where’s that?”
“Not too far from here. It’s another Apache reservation. Everybody goes to everybody’s dances. We used to go over to the Navajo powwows in the fall.”
Today, on Christmas Day in Santa Rosalia, there were supposed to be dances from morning till night. Half the town seemed to be preparing to dance, while the other half were busy getting good seats. I had no idea what to expect. Anxious-looking little boys clutching feather crowns and fox pelts ran across the corners of the plaza bent low, as if this would make them invisible. Earlier in the day these same little boys had run in boisterous gangs from house to house banging on doors and begging for warm crusts torn from the morning loaves. A wholesome version of trick-or-treat. Give these kids one Halloween in Grace, I thought, and they’d never be content with complex carbohydrates.
“So he married your mother,” I said. “And came here.”
“The women are kind of the center of things up here. The man goes to the wife’s place.”
“But he didn’t stay.”
“I never really knew Dad that well. He was already gone when he was still here, if you know what I mean. I don’t know what it was that hurt him. I know he grew up at a boarding school and never had much family and he couldn’t keep to the old ways. Or didn’t know them. I don’t know. It was real hard for him here.”
I let the subject go. As the twig is bent, so grows the tree, Doc Homer used to say, referring mostly to the bone structure of the feet but it applied to moral life as well. And who knew how the kinks happened; they just did. I ought to know. As Hallie had bluntly pointed out in her letter, I’d marked myself early on as a bad risk, undeserving of love and incapable of benevolence. It wasn’t because of a bad grade on a report card, as she’d supposed. It ran deeper than that. I’d lost what there was to lose: first my mother and then my baby. Nothing you love will stay. Hallie could call that attitude a crutch, but she didn’t know, she hadn’t loved and lost so deeply. As Loyd said, she’d never been born-not into life as I knew it. Hallie could still risk everything.
Loyd and I dangled our feet over the side of the roof, looking out over the plaza and beyond, to where the plaza ended suddenly, perforce, by the drop of a sheer cliff. I could only see this precipice as a threat, and wonder how toddlers lived to the age of reason without toddling over it, but many little feather-bedecked children were running along its edge as if it were nothing more than the end of a yard.
I heard a drum and a brief burst of what sounded like sleigh bells. Then nothing. If anything ever did happen, we’d have a good view. We’d climbed a ladder to get where we were. Jack had given a long, dejected look up the rungs as if he might consider the climb, if he weren’t so dignified. Now he lay curled at the bottom keeping watch. Old wooden ladders and aluminum extension ladders were propped everywhere; second-and third-story roofs served as patios. All around the plaza, legs hung like fringe over the sides of buildings. I spotted Inez and some other relatives across the way. Inez’s owlish glasses were the type that turn dark outdoors; two huge black disks hid her round face as she sat, hands folded, inscrutable as a lifeguard.