Both people and livestock hoped the rains would come again soon.
Davy looked around warily. For some reason he couldn't explain, he didn't like this place. "Why are we stopping here?"
"We have work to do, Olhoni. Come. Bring the rake and shovel."
Carrying the wreath and the candle with her, Nana Dahd slid heavily out of the pickup and trudged toward the base of the largest of the cottonwoods.
The rake and shovel, half again as tall as Davy himself, were unwieldy and difficult for a six-year-old to carry, but he struggled manfully with them, making his way without complaint over the rough track from the truck to where Nana Dahd stood staring down at the ground.
It wasn't until Davy reached her side that he saw what she was looking at-a shrine of sorts, although he didn't know to call it that. In the middle of a circular patch of barren ground stood a small wooden cross.
On it hung a faded plastic wreath, and before it sat a smoky glass vase that had once contained a candle. Both cross and glass were framed by a broken circle of smooth white river rocks.
"What is this, Nana Dahd?" Davy asked. "A grave? Is this a cemetery?"
He looked up. Nana Dahd's usually impassive face was awash with emotion. A single tear glistened in the corner of her eye. In all his six years, Davy Ladd I had never before seen his beloved Nana Dahd cry.
Tears were precious and not to be spilled without good reason.
Something must be terribly wrong.
"Let's go," he begged, reaching up and tugging at her hand. "Let's leave this place. It's scary here."
But Nana Dahd had no intention of leaving. His touch seemed to jar her out of her reverie. Patting his shoulder, she reached into the pocket of her apron and brought out a huge, wrinkled hanky. She blew her nose and wiped her red-rimmed eyes.
"I'm okay, Olhoni. We will leave, but after, not right now. First we work."
Nana Dahd showed Davy how animals had scattered some of the white border stones into the brush. She directed him to find and rearrange as many as he could.
Meanwhile, she retrieved the hoe and began scraping the small circle clean of all encroaching blades of grass and weed. As soon as the clearing satisfied her, she carefully removed the faded wreath from the cross and replaced it with the new one.
It was summer, and the harsh early afternoon sun beat down on them as they worked. Davy rebuilt the stone circle as best he could. Rita nodded with approval as he moved the last piece of border into place.
"Good," she said. "Now for the candle."
While Davy watched, she placed the new candle before the cross, bracing it around the base with a supporting bank of rocks and dirt.
"This is to keep the candle from falling over by accident," she explained. "It would be very bad if our candle started a range fire.
Finished at last, she knelt before the cross one last time and examined their handiwork. It was good. She motioned for Davy to join her.
"Light the candle, Olhoni," she said gravely, handing him a book of matches.
Davy scratched his head in exasperation. How could grown-ups be so stupid? "But, Nana Dahd," he objected.
"It isn't even dark yet. Why do we need a candle?"
"The light is for the spirits, Olhoni," she told him. "It's not for us."
Davy had used matches a few other times, but always in the house, never outside. It took three sputtering attempts before his small fingers managed to strike a match and keep it burning long enough to touch the flame to the wick of the candle. Nana Dahd watched patiently and without criticism, allowing the child to learn for himself of the need to shelter the match's faltering flame from unexpected breezes.
At last the wick caught fire. Davy glanced at Nana Dahd to see what he should do next. When she bowed her head, closed her eyes, and crossed herself, Davy did the same, listening in rapt silence while the old woman prayed.
To most Anglos that prayer, murmured softly in guttural Papago, would have been incomprehensible, but not to Davy, not to a child whose first spoken word, uttered almost five years earlier, had been a gleeful shout of 11gogs"-Papago for dog--on the day Nana Dahd brought home an ungainly, scrawny puppy. She called the pup "Ohlo," Papago for "Bone."
From that small beginning, Davy had learned other Indian words at the same time he learned the English ones. He spoke his godmother's native language with almost the same ease as his mother's English.
Listening now, he heard Nana Dahd's prayer, a fervent one, for the immortal soul of someone Davy didn't know, someone named Gina. The child listened quietly, attentively. When the prayer was finished, the old woman discovered that her legs and feet were painfully swollen.
She had to ask Davy to untie her shoes and help her to her feet.
Once standing, Rita reached over and picked up the rake and hoe. "I'll take these. Get the old wreath, Olhoni. If we leave it here, hungry cattle may try to eat it."
He gathered the wreath and the empty candle glass, then followed the limping woman to the truck, straggling a few thoughtful paces behind her.
Only then, as they walked, did he ask the question.
"Who's Gina, Nana Dahd?"
"My granddaughter, Olhoni. She died around here."
Surprised, Davy paused and looked back at the grove of trees.
"Here?"
Rita nodded. "Seven years ago today. Each year, on the anniversary, I decorate her cross to let her know she's not forgotten."
"Is that why you lit the candle? Because it's the opposite of a birthday?"
It was a precocious question from a child whose mother gave him plenty of words to use but little of herself "Yes, Olhoni."
For a moment, Davy frowned, trying to assimilate this new and unexpected piece of information. He thought himself as much Rita's child as his own mother's. The idea that Nana Dahd had another child or a grandchild of her own came as an unwelcome surprise.
"What's the matter?" Rita asked.
"I didn't know you had a daughter," he said accusingly.
"Not a daughter, 01honi, a son. Gina was my grandchild, my son's only daughter."
"She's just like my father, isn't she?" he said.
Nana Dahd frowned. Had Diana told Davy about the connection between the two deaths? That didn't seem likely. "What do you mean?" Rita asked.
"Gina died before I was born," he answered. "So did my father. Why did everybody have to die before I was born so I couldn't meet them?"
The question was far less complicated than Rita had feared, and so was her answer. "If you had a father, little one," Nana Dahd said gently, "then you wouldn't be my Olhoni. Come. We still have to go up the mountain."
When she reached the truck, Rita turned and looked back at the disconsolate child shambling behind her, kicking up clouds of dust with the scuffed toes of his shoes.
"Now what's the matter?" she asked.
"Where's my father's cross?" he demanded. "Does my mother put flowers and candles on it?"
Nana Dahd shook her head. She doubted it. "I don't know," she said.
It was high time the boy knew the truth about his father, but telling him wasn't Rita's place. She wouldn't tell Olhoni about that any more than she would have told him about his mother's rhinestone-studded cowboy boots.
"That's another question you'll have to ask your mother, Olhoni. Now, climb into the truck. It's getting late."
Andrew Carlisle didn't have to wait long for a ride. The fourth car to whiz past him on the entrance ramp, a green Toyota Corolla, slowed and pulled over the side to wait for him. The set of yellow lights trapped to the top told him the car was an oversized-load pilot car. The driver, a woman, leaned over and rolled down the passenger window just as he reached the car.
"Where to?" she asked.
The woman, a faded, frowsy blonde in her late thirties or early forties, was moderately attractive. She wore shorts and a halter top and held a glistening beer can in one hand while a lipstick-stained cigarette smoldered in the ashtray.