“Do you like acorn squash?” Esther asked, to change the subject.
“Sure,” said Peter.
“Good. You clean a couple. They’re in the back bedroom. I’m ready for another little nap. If I’m asleep in an hour, rub them down with oil, and set them in the oven on three seventy-five.”
Esther dumped the junk mail in the firestarter box, set the letter from her sister on the side table by her chair, and took a toke from her pipe. “Help yourself,” she said to Peter. Then she lay down and pulled the blue wool blanket over herself. She wasn’t really sleepy. She just needed to withdraw and think.
Esther let the generator banging seep out of her brain.
“Shit,” Esther heard Peter say from outside, she frowned at his choice of word, “she must have ten years of firewood!” Esther wondered if Prabaht’s not-quite-audible reply bore any resemblance to reality.
Most people locally considered it gross tyranny that the Forest Service required a permit for local firewood usage. Esther bought permits from the Forest Service for the full ten cord personal use maximum and then got someone to cut the wood for her on a one third-two thirds share. That ten cords’ worth of permit always produced a few extra cords. Everyone Esther had dealt with took as much pride in delivering her fair third as they did in getting something unauthorized out of the Forest Service.
Prabaht probably was embellishing this simple conflict with extravagant conspiracy fantasies, Esther thought, and yet… She realized that the world her great grandson was growing up into was what she needed to contemplate.
Esther thought back. When she’d divorced Jerome, in the early sixties, it was already not the shock such events had been only a decade earlier. Still, it was traumatic. Stolid Jennifer’s marriage had been traumatic, the divorce a relief.
Sylvia… It pained Esther to think of her granddaughter’s chaotic life. She couldn’t blame Jennifer. Jennifer could be overbearing, but she was the stable one. It was Esther who undertook risque adventures: hitchhiking at seventy, smoking pot—let alone growing it. People Prabaht’s age thought nothing of smoking pot, approve or disapprove, but Esther still knew hardly anyone of her own generation who smoked.
Now there was Peter. With no stable male role model, with an upbringing far more chaotic than his mother’s, he seemed bright and well-adjusted. What was she to make of it all? Perhaps it was easier to grow up sane in a blatantly insane world than to watch apparent stability disintegrate. Esther recalled the insanities of her own youth called Hitler and Stalin, the shocks of World War II, the bomb, the Kennedy assassination, the increasing social turbulence ever since.
In Esther’s youth, the world had an apparent order, with its clearly defined good and its evil, its stability of family, community, and religion, and its aberrations of war and Depression. That was no longer so. Prabaht’s paranoia, Colin’s opportunism—personality flaws, sure, but they were also part of the society her great-grandson was growing to adulthood in. What was she to make of it? What, on the summit of her life’s long climb, could she give him to help him make sense of the unknown world he would live in?
Esther could hear the low hum of Peter talking with Prabaht: A good man, she thought, but a walking encyclopaedia of misinformation. Could someone Peter’s age understand that? Peter’s a sharp kid, she thought, but what does he have to measure his perspective against?
Still alert, Esther drifted in the spirit realm of her own mind.
Subjective and objective, how was one to tell? The creek and juniper trees on the bluff, now that was objective. A feeling came to Esther that she knew she had felt before. It belonged to the spirit realm, which made it all the more difficult to differentiate subjective and objective: an intensification of the nearby and a dissipation of the larger but farther away. Is it my nearing death? she thought. That seemed redundant. You could not live alone, so isolated, at forty-two, let alone eighty-two, without confronting your own death. A long-familiar companion, death taught an awe that enhanced the canyon’s beauty to her aging senses.
Esther thought of the events of the last two days. Whatever lunacy had occurred nationally, the effects were local wherever you were: Lucy Meadowcroft having access to a generator, Grant Harkins being hung-over. True everywhere, but more obvious in Tellez because you knew everybody.
Esther felt the spirits all around her. They were like colors and flavors, but she had no names for them.
Esther had tried church once, around the time of the divorce, and had been cruelly snubbed for the very reasons she needed spiritual solace. She had learned some Apache and Zuni names for spirits, but, well, she wasn’t Apache or Zuni. After all these years, it still bothered her not to have a handle on the substance of her own soul. Thinking of Peter, she realized, as she had before but with great immediacy and poignancy, that this was not just a personal condition.
Values, Esther thought. No one can really tell him what to do, how to act, what to call the brightness the pot helps me see when I close my eyes but have no name for. And not just because he’s young and spunky. No one knows. I certainly don’t know what he’ll need to know next week, let alone by the time he’s my age! That’s always so, but it has so speeded up in my lifetime. I remember the first talking movies, and now you can have a videophone if you’re rich. Fast as things change, I might even live long enough to have one. I read once that the first ballpoint pens cost thirty-five dollars, and now look at how cheap they are. Would I want a videophone? What values is Peter learning? It’s not what values I would teach him if I had any idea what to teach, Esther thought. It’s what values does he learn from his own experience? What can I give him that he can make any sense of at all?
Esther opened her eyes. There was a dim lavender glow as the last of the sunset reflected off thickening clouds beyond sun-faded curtains. She was not aware of having slept, but the squash were in the oven and it was on. The elk meat was also on the stove, stewing with onions and garlic Esther could smell.
Esther stepped outside. The air felt balmy and smelled wet. She went back in and checked the food. The squash had not been in long. The stewing meat needed water, which she added. She wondered if Prabaht or Peter would think to check it before the meat scorched. Esther sat down to read her novel. She certainly hoped that whatever insanity was going on in the world would not affect the State Library Books by Mail program. She had read barely a page when Prabaht and Peter came back in.
“We followed the chickens, but we didn’t find any eggs,” said Peter. “I’ll try again in the morning.”
“Okay. Shall we try calling your grandmother again?”
“Sure.”
Esther dialed Jennifer’s number. The line rang, but there was still no answer. She hung up after the tenth ring.
“How ’bout some tunes,” said Prabaht.
Concerned for her daughter, Esther looked up and blinked. “What? Oh, sure.” Sometimes Prabaht could be amazingly insensitive. Esther turned to Peter. “Would you like to pick a tape?”
“Okay.” Peter looked about, spotted the basket of tapes on the shelf below the player, and rummaged through them. “How about this one?” he said, holding the tape out to Esther.
It was her Glenn Miller tape, a little scratchy, as the records had been pretty worn by the time she’d recorded them onto the tape, but still one of her favorites. “Sure.” She smiled.
Peter put the tape in the player and turned it on. “In the Mood” recalled a world in which Esther had been younger than her great-grandson was now. Her foot tapped a bit of long-remembered rhythm.