No human remains. No. Human. Remains. The three words chime in his head like large, old bells, three descending notes that ring and ring, speeding up in tempo until they clang against one another.
“How true,” he says finally.
She shaves out the edges of the hole so it is neat and square, and then drops the bundle in. She throws a handful of dirt on top of it and stands there looking down.
“We’re a pair of scarred old souls, aren’t we, Codi?”
“I don’t know what we are. I’m trying to figure out what I hope for.”
“It’s a most dangerous thing, hope.”
Her eyes flash with something bright. Love or anger. But she doesn’t speak.
“Hope involves giving a great deal of yourself away,” he tells her.
“That’s a pitiful excuse.”
“Oh, it’s pitiful all right, but there you have it. It’s hard to give much away when you’re the subject of widespread disapproval and your heart is leaking from puncture wounds.”
“That’s true. We got punctured pretty bad. But we still gave the world a lot, Pop. We gave it Hallie.”
“We did. We surely did.”
She begins shoveling dirt back into the grave. He thinks about the fact that all these particles of dirt have now been rearranged. No fixed strata. Alice was the gardener. When she has finished she moves to his side and he takes her elbow. They stand side by side in their small garden of sand and buried children. The bones in his wife’s arm are as thin as whistles. “Do you have any idea how much I love you?” he asks her.
She stares at him, then squeezes his hand. “Hallie was a protagonist of history,” she says.
“She wanted to save the world.”
“No, Pop, that’s not true. She wanted to save herself. Just like we all do.”
He looks at the tall, living daughter his wife has suddenly become. He is no longer angry about these changes. “Save herself from what?”
“From despair. From the feeling of being useless. I’ve about decided that’s the main thing that separates happy people from the other people: the feeling that you’re a practical item, with a use, like a sweater or a socket wrench.”
He asks, “Are we the other people?” He is curious.
“You’re not useless. You gave yourself to this town for forty years. Scarred soul or not.”
“Yes. But I gave for the wrong reasons. As you have pointed out.”
She laughs. “I did, didn’t I? Damn!” She pulls at the end of a silver artichoke leaf. “I was scared to death I was going to grow up to be just like you.” She looks at him, and laughs again. She says: “God, I could never be just like you.”
They are standing in the garden, in a dwarf forest of artichokes. She has just dug a hole and buried God knows what and now has made a confession of either contempt or admiration. He waits to see what will happen next.
“Maybe the reason you gave yourself to this town doesn’t matter that much. Maybe what matters is just that you did it. Maybe that makes you a good man. You know what Loyd told me one time?”
“No.”
“He thinks people’s dreams are made out of what they do all day. The same way a dog that runs after rabbits will dream of rabbits. It’s what you do that makes your soul, not the other way around.”
It’s what you do that makes your soul. Standing opposite him, staring down into the grave, he sees two sad little girls in cowboy hats. Is this what he has done? “I don’t think you should be here,” he says to them.
The elder daughter looks up, her pale eyes steady. “But we are here, Papa.”
“Yes, you are.”
“Why don’t you want us?”
“Oh, God, I do.” He kneels down and takes them both in his arms and pulls them against his chest. He understands for the first time in his life that love weighs nothing. Oh God, his girls are as light as birds.
COSIMA
28 Day of All Souls
Gracela Canyon, if you strip it down to the enduring things, is a great, granite bowl of air. It’s a wonderful echo chamber. Voices of women and children in the cemetery reached Viola and me from all the way across the canyon, rising on invisible air currents with the ravens and the spirits of all those old bones being tended by their children. It was getting on toward late afternoon, and we walked slowly. Viola had spent the morning supervising family operations, and said she was tired. But she’d promised that any day I asked her she would take me to the place where we watched my mother go. I chose that particular day in 1989, the end of a decade, the Day of All Souls, when we were all up decorating the graves. I don’t know why.
I’d finished sweeping off my father and the other Nolinas and had decked them out with little bunches of marigolds at their heads and feet. It was something like tucking children into bed. I was their historian and their guardian angel. I never found Ursolina, the little bear. I imagine she’s somewhere closer to the mine, where the earth has been shifted too many times to bear witness to what it has buried in it. The rest of the family, for all the times they’d had to be exhumed, had stayed together surprisingly well.
I knelt all morning in the dirt, laying out a border of creek rocks around Doc Homer. He’d been gone more than two years, but it took me awhile to decide on this. Emelina’s boys had hauled the rocks up there for me. When we took them out of the water and piled them into the wheelbarrow they lost their luster, all drying to the same whitish color of dust, and I was afraid after all that work they would be the wrong thing, but they were fine. Uniform and shipshape, washed smooth by the abrasion of natural forces. I laid them end to end around the dirt mound, knocking them together and working them back and forth a little to find a natural fit. As I worked I thought of the masonry walls of Kinishba, with the bones of children inside.
When I stood back finally and dusted my chapped hands against my jeans, I saw I’d achieved nothing so fine as Kinishba, but had marked out a clear boundary, anyway. He would like it. I’d brought some order to his cosmos finally.
I squinted into the sun. Across the tops of about a hundred gravestones and many people I saw Viola in her black dress, standing on a little rise, her gray hair wandering from its knot. She pressed one hand to the small of her back while Mason and Nicholas danced in front of her with their hands full of candy, begging for something, wearing her out. Nicholas was three and a half; John Tucker was talking about quitting school to be a hoghead for Southern Pacific. I thought: “I can’t wait forever.” So I went and asked her right then and she said fine, after lunch we would go. “I’m about done here,” she’d said, cracking the sugar skull of a calavera between her molars. “They can figure out which end of the flowers to put in water without me.”
We took the quickest road down into town, then cut across the hill behind the high school and through the splendid canopies hung with fruit that the Stitch and Bitch Club had won back from Black Mountain Mining. From there we headed up the Old Pony Road toward the abandoned mine. The tops of the flat tailing mounds were dimpled with rain-catching basins and I’d noticed that sprigs of rabbitbrush were starting to grow up there.
The road was steep. No route out of Grace was an easy climb. Twice I had to ask Viola to let me catch my breath. I held a fist to my breastbone, panting hard, a little embarrassed by my infirmity but also a little pleased by the external proof of what was still mostly an internal condition. I was pregnant.
“I feel like I don’t have any energy. I come home from school and sleep till Loyd wakes me up for dinner, and then I go back to bed.” This new relationship with sleep was a miracle to me.
“Oh, yeah,” she said. “All your get-up-and-do-it goes to the baby. Right from the start you know who’s gonna be the boss.”