The Stitch and Bitch Club was now wealthy beyond historic measure. On the heels of the blockbuster piñata sale came a steady flow of donations from the outside. Loulou Campbell, the treasurer, had always kept the club’s funds in a coffee can in the back of the Baptist Grocery where she worked. But when the volume of cash filled twelve baby-formula cans she grew nervous. Loulou opened an account at the bank and turned the passbook over to Doña Althea, whose years as a top-notch restaurateur had made her somewhat more comfortable with affluence.
The cash languished in its vault while the women pondered its meaning. Having sent their peacocks out into the world like Noah’s dove over the flood, they waited for the world to inspire their next move.
Inspiration came in the guise of an art dealer from Tucson. His name was Sean Rideheart, and he was a funny, charming little man who understood people as well as he understood beauty. The spectacular popularity of the Grace piñatas (some had been resold for as much as five hundred dollars) moved him to make a pilgrimage to the source. Mr. Rideheart was already an expert and he became a connoisseur; before he ever set foot in Grace he could already recognize the works of several individual piñata makers. Of particular value were those made by Mrs. Nuñez, who had been so resourceful with her Compton’s Children’s Encyclopedia. He wanted to know this town better.
I met him on his third visit, when he came to meet Viola. There was no school that day-I believe it was the birthday of a President-and I was staring at clouds. Emelina didn’t bother me on my bad days; I was allowed to do nothing, not even pretend to feel better, which I recognized as a rare act of human kindness and I appreciated. I spent the morning sitting on Emelina’s front porch, watching our neighbor, whose roof was on the same level with our floorboards. We were having another brief break in the rain, as if the clouds had called a time-out to muster their resources. Our neighbor Mr. Pye was taking advantage of the moment to climb up and inspect his roof.
“Got a few leaks,” he called out in a friendly way. I waved back, unsure of how to answer. I watched the top of his engineer’s cap bob down the ladder out of sight, and shortly thereafter, appear again. Mr. Pye negotiated the ladder with one hand while balancing a small, old-looking cardboard box against his hip. It made me think of the surprises coming out of the kiva at Santa Rosalia Pueblo. Mr. Pye knelt near his chimney pipe and opened the box like a birthday present, carefully lifting out some shingles. They were green, and shaped like the ace of spades-an exact match to the ones on his roof, only a little brighter. Grass-green rather than the green of old bronze. I remembered once, months ago, looking at that roof of antique shingles and assuming them to be irreplaceable.
Curiosity overcame my lassitude. “How’d you match those shingles?” I called out.
He looked at me, puzzled.
“Where’d you get the new shingles? They’re a perfect match.”
He examined the shingles in his hands, as if noticing this for the first time, and then called back, “Well, they ought to be, they’re all from the same lot. I bought two hundred extras when I put this roof on.”
“When was that?” I asked.
He looked up at the clouds. I don’t know whether he was divining the weather or the past. “Right after the war,” he said. “That would have been forty-six.”
Just then Mr. Rideheart came walking up the road under a navy blue umbrella. Maybe it was still raining down the way, where he’d just come from. He walked directly to the front porch where I sat, jauntily hopped up the steps, stomped his feet delicately a few times as if to knock off mud (though his shoes were immaculate), and extended his hand to me. I’d expected to spend the day in numb, depressed solitude, and now I felt uncomfortably honored to sit at the end of Mr. Rideheart’s long line of effort-like a princess in a tale of impossible tasks. Although I was fairly sure he hadn’t come all this way looking for me.
“Sean Rideheart,” he said. He had white eyebrows and bright green eyes; an appealing face.
“Codi Noline.” I shook his hand. “I’ve heard about you. You’re the piñata collector.”
He laughed. “I’ve been called many things in my time, but that’s a first. I’m looking for Viola Domingos.” At my invitation he sat down in the only other chair on the porch, wicker, of doubtful character.
“She’s not here,” I said. “Nobody’s home today. Viola and the kids have gone down to the church. They’re having some kind of a big party down there today, painting the saints.”
“Painting the saints?” Mr. Rideheart extracted a largish blue handkerchief from the pocket of his tweed jacket and cleaned his wire-rimmed glasses with extraordinary care. I watched for a long time, mesmerized, until he glanced up at me.
“The statues of saints, in the church,” I explained. “I guess they have to get freshened up every so often, like anybody else. The women paint the saints and the kids paint each other.”
He replaced his glasses and observed the rooftops and treetops that led stepwise down the hill. Mr. Pye had his back to us now. He was industriously tacking down shingles he’d secured for this purpose ten years before Hallie was born.
“Quite a place,” Mr. Rideheart said, finally. “How long have you lived here?”
It wasn’t an easy question to answer. “I was born here,” I said slowly. “But right now I’m just on an extended visit. My time’s up soon.”
He sighed, looking out over the white path of blossoming treetops that led up toward the dam. “Ah, well, yes,” he said, “isn’t everybody’s. More’s the pity.”
At first the Stitch and Bitch was divided in its opinion of Mr. Rideheart. While he was graciously received into the kitchens of half the club members, where he drank tea and stroked his white mustache and listened in earnest while the piñata artists discussed their methodologies, the other half (led by Doña Althea) suspected him of being the southwestern equivalent of a carpetbagger.
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.”