They reached the valley floor, then found themselves in trees, taller and more shade-laden than they had pictured from above. There were animal trails, winding off in various directions through grasses and hard-packed dirt, and the one Alma led them down seemed no different from the rest. It too turned and twisted, and branches brushed against their legs as their horses followed the rumps of the ones ahead, in single file now. Ramona coughed and sputtered and lifted her inhaler to her mouth, and Gino turned in his saddle to look back at her. Carlos was in constant awareness of his father, and Gino’s turning seemed a presage of his own, should he too turn to face into that past, strangely erased by the present.
They came into small clearings, and sun warmed their heads and shoulders, and there were places where the trees thinned and they could see ahead for a good distance. It was close to ten by the time they saw through to where the trees ended, and when they reached that place and forest was behind them, they were standing at the brink of an open plain, a shallow bowl of breeze-wavering grasses, at the far edge of which rose up the first stones and rocks of the mossy foothills, and they could see a causeway where the foothills started, a broad trail that ascended gracefully, up through a rocky passage toward the domed mountain. Heavy trees hung languidly in mist, and the trail disappeared in mist before it reached the top, but there was sun above the plain, and Carlos thought the mist was really low clouds and that they’d come to brighter air above.
The Village
Mountain flowers grew where veins of moss joined the rocks like green mortar at their creases. There were bees in the flowers at head level, and Ramona was sneezing occasionally. The trail was broad enough to ride two abreast, and Gino was beside her, attentive in his sombrero. He leaned into her, talking. Carlos thought, all these years, but he had not turned to his father yet for such conversation. They rode beside each other, the donkeys hitched to that line behind them. The horses’ heads were up, scenting, their ears rotated to catch the breeze. They seemed expectant, legs lifting, hooves digging into the trail’s hard dirt with increasing energy, which the men lacked. John nodded off in his saddle, and Larry leaned over to touch and awaken him from time to time, to steady him, though he too was fighting sleep, and Frank rode singly ahead of them, constantly shifting his weight on the blanket and rotating a stiff shoulder. The soothing heat of the pool and the redemption of night’s sleep had worn away now, and they were dead tired in their bones, though the sun they could see through mountain mist above had not yet reached its zenith.
Then the trail climbed out of the bordering rocks and they entered onto a plateau that was a meadow, and they could see ahead, a quarter mile off, where the mountain rose up again in oak and ironwood, thick grasses at their bases, and honeysuckle too, and mountain aspen, white trunks like marble pillars in the greens and russets, and above that the misty blanket, lower now and impenetrable, a cloud layer, though luminous as sun filtered through it. Then they were crossing the meadow.
“Do you ever think of your mother?”
His mother had worked her fingers to the bone. He had thought of that sometimes, the actual words, because the garment factory in Matamoros had been a sweatshop and she had come home bleeding at her fingertips and once her finger had been caught in a machine in sewing, and he had seen the actual bone. His father had been younger than he himself was now, desperate in his gringo paleness, and while his mother had gotten a light-skinned Mexican for herself and a charming and handsome one, there’d been only a dull turmoil below that skin, and she was as poor and dulled in spirit as she had been before, once she had gotten him and then a child too, himself back then as he thought this, to press her down harder in the grinding.
But now his father was an old man and asking plaintively, and though he thought of the fire then, and blame, and his father leaving him, and his own first years of difficult bewilderment in the north, it was long ago and he’d not really thought of it with any feeling in many years. Forgiveness was beyond question now and even a little silly he thought, but his father was asking him for it here, though really for release from it as possibility, and as he looked over and saw his milky eyes, the same, he thought, as he had seen in his awakening to the fire after he had hit his head and fallen so many years ago, he hesitated to speak the real thing, so impossibly complicated, and only said, “Sometimes. She was a good woman. But it was the lunch hour, wasn’t it? And she was probably talking with her friends.”
“I don’t know,” his father said. “But I, too, think of her.”
Alma paused at the meadow’s edge, then turned to move along it for a few yards, until he found the trail again, and they started up the mountain among the trees. The trail was narrow, and they were in single file, branches hanging over them, sometimes low enough so they had to duck their heads. Carlos saw a branch brush against John’s hat, waking him, and saw him shift and settle on his saddle blanket, kick free of his stirrups and stretch his legs. The others were all attentive now, like the horses, no one beside them to infect them with a borrowed exhaustion, each in his own thoughts. Even Ramona seemed completely recovered behind her father, and Carlos saw her reach to the pink cosmetic case hung from her horn, remove a tube of lipstick and a small mirror, which sent a dim disk of light into the trees as she raised it to her face. Then he looked beyond her and saw mist in the trees, and soon they were climbing into it and Alma was no more than a misty shadow up ahead, and Carlos felt the moisture soaking through his pants to wet his legs and groin. They were in it for a good half hour, the horses blowing steam, and Carlos could see his own breath on the air. They were soaked through to the bone before they left it and climbed up into sunlight, which brightened over them as they moved out from under the canopy of branches and leaves and came into a small, mossy clearing, beyond which, just a few yards ahead, was the gateway to another world.
They were sitting their horses near the mouth of what had once been a street, and that city name seemed appropriate to Carlos because of the remnants of actual curbing he saw to his left and right, stone that had obviously been cut and polished and though broken in places now and twisted from its mooring still marked the course of a concave gutter where rainwater had run off. And the street itself was slightly domed for the purpose of drainage, and in the hard packed earth at the horses’ hooves he could see leavings of cobblestone, places where the dirt had washed away in rain. To either side of the street and above the curbs were a few half-ruined planters, massive low rectangles of stone holding dark dirt that had been turned and mulched recently, and growing in the dirt were small tight roses of various rich hues, above which he could see the dark doorways and thatched roofs of a meandering row of huts to the left, a wooded hill rising beyond them, the trees smaller but heavier in rich green foliage here in sun and light air at the mountain’s top.