Barbara Kingsolver (25 page)

“We did come here from Illinois. I was stationed there, and went to medical school there. We moved back here after the war.”

“What kind of war had people stationed in Illinois?” I asked absurdly, close to tears. “I’m sorry, but in history class they never told us about the Midwestern Front.”

“Alice’s family despised me.”

I stopped, remembering how Viola had averted her eyes and said, “that family went downhill,” the day. I discovered Homero Nolina up in the cemetery. The red-haired Gracela sister with the temper, who married Conrado Nolina and produced a legacy of trash—that was my father’s family. What he believed he came from, and what we still were. Auburn-haired and angry, living in exile in our own town. There wasn’t enough air in the kitchen for me to breathe, and get all this in.

“So you, what, ran off to the army. Got yourself educated on the G.I. Bill, and then came back here as the mighty prodigal doctor with his beautiful new wife, and acted like nobody could touch you.”

I watched him closely, but could read nothing. I couldn’t even
see
him, really; I had no idea how he’d look to a stranger. Old? Sick?
Mean-spirited? He poured coffee into two mugs and gave the larger one to me.

“Thank you,” I said.

“You’re welcome.”

“Why did you come back here? If it was so important to you to start over, you could have gone anywhere. You could have stayed back there in Illinois.”

Doc Homer sat down opposite me. He clenched and unclenched his left hand, then spread it flat on the table and examined it abstractly, as if it were a patient. I looked at the framed photograph on the wall over his head: his portrait of a hand that wasn’t a hand, but five cacti with invisible spines.

“Why do you suppose the poets talk about hearts?” he asked me suddenly. “When they discuss emotional damage? The tissue of hearts is tough as a shoe. Did you ever sew up a heart?”

I shook my head. “No, but I’ve watched. I know what you mean.” The walls of a heart are thick and strong, and the surgeons use heavy needles. It takes a good bit of strength, but it pulls together neatly. As much as anything it’s like binding a book.

“The seat of human emotion should be the liver,” Doc Homer said. “That would be an appropriate metaphor: we don’t hold love in our hearts, we hold it in our livers.”

I understand exactly. Once in ER I saw a woman who’d been stabbed everywhere, most severely in the liver. It’s an organ with the consistency of layer upon layer of wet Kleenex. Every attempt at repair just opens new holes that tear and bleed. You try to close the wound with fresh wounds, and you try and you try and you don’t give up until there’s nothing left.

For Christmas
, Loyd had given me an Apache burden basket. It was exquisitely woven, striped with the colors of dried grass, and around its open mouth hung tin bells on leather thongs that made whispery, tinkling sounds. It wasn’t much bigger than a teacup.
The night he gave it to me in Santa Rosalia I felt it would easily hold all my burdens, forever. Now it hung on the wall over my bed, and at night I looked at it and wept for my own stupidity in trusting that life could be kind.

I apologized to my classes. I couldn’t see trying to maintain the recommended authoritative distance; I told them my sister had been kidnapped and that I was scared to death. I told them everything seemed very serious to me now, including things like the ozone layer. The kids were extremely quiet. I don’t think any adult had ever apologized to them before. From the storeroom we got down a pre-World War II map that showed all the world’s climatic zones, and we found Nicaragua, Honduras, Costa Rica, El Salvador. The shapes and names of many nations had changed during the lifetime of that map, but not the climatic zones. We talked more calmly about the rain forest and the manner in which fast-food chains were cutting it down to make hamburger farms. We talked about poor countries and rich countries and DDT in the food chain, and the various ways our garbage comes home to us. The memory of the land. My students understood these things perfectly well. There is nothing boring about the prospect of extinction.

On Friday I took the day off to make phone calls. Hallie had left me a list of emergency telephone numbers, mostly speculative, and I called them all. It took the whole morning. I got nowhere with the State Department and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and ended up with the Nicaraguan Ministry of Agriculture. Viola helped me contend with the impenetrable Spanish of international operators. Emelina sat on my other side holding my hand, wringing the fingers, apparently forgetting that it wasn’t hers. Mason and the baby sat on the floor in front of us, silent, wondering as children always must wonder in a crisis what terrible thing they had done to wreck the world.

We learned nothing useful. They were sure now that Hallie had been taken across the border into Honduras, probably to a camp where many other prisoners were held. It was a well-outfitted camp; they had Sony radios and high-quality C-rations. It made me smile,
a little, to think Hallie might be eating C-rations I’d dutifully paid for with my taxes. Dinner was on me. So were the land mines.

I spoke with a dozen secretaries of this and that and finally with the Minister of Agriculture himself. He knew Hallie. He talked for a long time about what an extraordinary person she was; it made me suspicious that she was dead, and I started crying. Viola took the phone and translated until I was fit to talk again. The Minister promised me she wasn’t dead. He would call me the minute they knew anything at all. He was fairly sure the contras took her by mistake, not knowing she was an American citizen, and now were probably confused as to how to release her without generating too much bad publicity. He asked, had I called the President of the United States?

In the meantime, Hallie’s letters still came to the Post Office box. I knew she had mailed them before she was kidnapped, but their appearance frightened me. They looked postmarked and cheerful and real, but they were ghosts, mocking what I’d believed was a solid connection between us. I’d staked my heart on that connection. If I could still get letters like this when Hallie was gone or in trouble, what had I ever really had?

I didn’t read them. I saved them. I would open them all once I’d heard her voice on the phone. I wouldn’t be fooled again.

At some point
between Christmas and mid-January, Grace became famous. The several hundred piñatas planted in Tucson had grown into great, branching trees of human interest, which bore fruit in the form of articles with names like “This Art’s Not for Breaking” and “What Piñatas!” in slick magazines all over the Southwest. The Stitch and Bitch Club’s efforts in papier-mâché became a hot decorator item in gentrified adobe neighborhoods like the one in Tucson that Hallie used to call Barrio Volvo.

It was the birds that caused the stir, but because it was there, people were also reading my urgent one-page plea for the life of Grace. Where Mayor Jimmy Soltovedas’s repeated calls to the press
had failed, Stitch and Bitch succeeded: our story became known. Hardly a day passed without some earnest reporter calling up to get a statement from Norma Galvez. The club designated her the media spokeswoman; Doña Althea was more colorful, but given to unprintable remarks. Ditto for Viola, who was even more unprintable because she spoke English.

But when a scout crew from CBS News came to town, they wanted the Donñ. They sat in on a meeting at the American Legion hall and zeroed in on the Stitch and Bitch figurehead with her authority and charm and all she represented in the way of local color. They got some of the meeting on tape, but made an appointment to come back on Saturday with a crew to interview the Doña in her home. Norma Galvez would be (for safety’s sake) her interpreter. By the time Saturday morning came, when CBS rolled into town in their equipment Jeeps like Jesus into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, the whole town was anticipating the visit of what Viola had been calling “the B.S. News.”

There were about fifty of us packed into Doña Althea’s living room, just there to watch. The Doña looked as she always looked: tiny, imperious, dressed in black, with her long white braid pinned around her head like a crown. As a concession to the cameras she clutched an embroidered shawl around her shoulders.

She refused to close the restaurant, though, and it was lunchtime, so there were still comings and goings and much banging of pots. Cecil, the sound man, had to run his equipment off the outlet in the kitchen, since it was the only part of the house that had been wired in the twentieth century. “Ladies, we’re just going to have to be cozy in here,” he said, turning sideways and scooting between two Althea sisters to reach the plug.

“Son of a,” he said, when one of the sisters tripped over his cord and unplugged it for the third or fourth time. The Althea in question stopped in her tracks and looked for a minute as if she might deck him, but decided to serve her customers instead. She was so burdened with plates it’s lucky Cecil didn’t get
menudo
in his amps.

The director of the crew had the Doña sit in a carved chair that normally stood in her bedroom and held the TV. Two men carried it out, sat her down in it, and arranged vases of peacock feathers at her feet. “Just cross your ankles,” the director told her. Norma translated, and the Doña complied, scowling fiercely. She looked like a Frida Kahlo painting. “Okay,” he said, wiping sweat off his forehead. He was a heavy man, dressed in Italian shoes and a Mexican wedding shirt, though his mood was not remotely festive. “Okay,” he repeated. “Let’s go.”

There was a camera on the interviewer and two cameras were on Doña Althea: bright, hot lights everywhere. A crew member dabbed the interviewer’s nose and forehead with a powder puff, eyed the Doña once, and backed off. The interviewer introduced himself as Malcolm Hunt. He seemed young and wore an outfit that suggested designer-label big-game hunting or possibly Central American revolutions. He probably meant well. He carefully explained to Doña Althea that they would edit the tape later, using only the best parts. If she wanted to go back and repeat anything, she could do that. He suggested that she ignore the cameras and just speak naturally to him. Norma Galvez translated all this. The Doña squinted at the lights, fixed her scornful gaze on a point just above the kitchen door, and shouted all her answers in that direction. Cecil took it personally and slinked around behind the steam table.

Mr. Hunt began. “Doña Althea, how long have you lived in this canyon?”

“
Desde antes que tú cagabas en tus pañales!
”

Norma Galvez shifted a little in her chair and said, “Ah, since before your mother was changing your diapers.” The Doña scowled at Norma briefly, and one of the Altheas laughed from the kitchen.

Mr. Hunt smiled and looked concerned. “When did your family come to this country?”

The Doña said something to the effect that her family had been on this land before the Gringos took over and started calling it America. The prospectors came and mined out the damn gold, and
the Black Mountain company mined out the damn copper, and then they fired all the men and sent them home to plant trees, and now, naturally, they were pissing in the river and poisoning the orchards.

Mrs. Galvez paused. “A long time ago,” she said.

Mr. Hunt lost his composure for the first time. He made an odd, guttural noise and looked at Mrs. Galvez, who spread her hands.

“You want an exact translation?”

“Please.”

She gave it to him.

It wasn’t the afternoon anybody had expected. Malcolm Hunt kept adjusting his posture and his eyebrows and appearing to start the whole interview over, framing new questions that sounded like opening lines.

“The Black Mountain Mining Company is polluting—and now actually diverting—the river that has been the lifeblood of this town for centuries. Why is this happening?”

“Because they’re a greedy bunch of goat fuckers” (Mrs. Galvez said “so-and-sos”) “and they got what they wanted from this canyon and now they have to squeeze it by the balls before they let go.”

“They’re actually damming the river to avoid paying fines to the Environmental Protection Agency, isn’t that right? Because the river is so polluted with acid?”

The Doña waited for Norma’s translation, then nodded sharply.

“What do you think could stop the dam from being built, at this point?”

“
Dinamita
.”

Mr. Hunt appeared reluctant to follow this line of questioning to its conclusion. “In a desperate attempt to save your town,” he said, trying another new tack, “you and the other ladies of Grace have made hundreds of piñatas. Do you really think a piñata can stop a multinational corporation?”

“Probably not.”

“Then why go to all the trouble?”

“What do you think we should do?”

She had him there; Malcolm Hunt looked stumped. He looked
from Norma to the Doña and back to Norma. “Well,” he said, “most people write their congressmen.”

“No
sé
. We don’t write such good letters. I don’t think we have any congressman out here anyway, do we? We have a mayor, Jimmy Soltovedas. But I don’t think we have any
congressman
.” She pronounced the word in English, making it stand out from the rest of her speech like a curse or a totally new concept. “
Si hay
,” she went on, “If we do, I haven’t seen him. Probably he doesn’t give a shit. And also we don’t know how to use dynamite. What we know how to do is make nice things out of paper. Flowers, piñatas,
cascarones
. And we sew things. That’s what we ladies here do.”

I smiled, thinking of Jack following old habits, turning around three times on the kitchen floor and lying down to dream of a nest in the grass.

“But why peacocks, what’s the history?” Malcolm persisted, after hearing the fully translated explanation. “Tell me about the peacocks.”

“What do you want to know about peacocks?” the Doña asked, giving him a blank look. The full Spanish name for peacock is
pavo real
, “royal turkey,” but Mrs. Galvez let that one slip by.