Barbara Kingsolver (6 page)

E
melina was up with the chickens. I heard her
out in the courtyard pulling honeysuckle vines away from the old brick barbecue pit. They came out with a peculiar zipping sound, like threads from a seam in rotten cloth. “You can see we haven’t been festive for a while,” she said. She was organizing what she called a “little fiesta” for the Saturday of Labor Day weekend. It was a family tradition; they roasted a whole goat. (Not John Tucker’s.)

I found a broom and pitched in, sweeping up the pieces of a broken flowerpot I’d come to think of as part of the décor. Emelina asked, in the carefully offhand way a good mother would ask, if I’d been up to the school yet. I’d received numerous calls about a teachers’ meeting.

“I know about the meeting, but I haven’t gone up there yet,” I confessed. School would begin the following Tuesday. I needed to get organized and see what kind of shape the labs were in, but I kept putting it off, on grounds of terror. I hadn’t actually taught school before. When Emelina wrote me about the opening at Grace High School it had seemed sensible to apply. While Carlo slept I’d sat up
in bed with my legal pad and a small reading light, feigning competence, attempting to organize the problem areas of my life into manageable categories: I had no real attachment to selling lottery tickets at 7-Eleven; Doc Homer was going off the deep end; Carlo was Carlo; Hallie would be leaving at summer’s end, and without a destination for myself I’d be marooned. Grace was something. If I got this job I could spend ten months in Grace seeing about Doc Homer, possibly without his noticing. I reasoned that I wasn’t qualified and didn’t have a chance of being hired, and so I felt bold enough to apply.

They hired me. The state had some kind of emergency clause that in a pinch allowed people to teach without certification. And of course I did have a world of education in the life sciences. Also, I believe my last name had something to do with it. Nothing else I put down in my wobbly writing on that application could have impressed anyone too much.

I dumped the shards of the flowerpot into a plastic trash bag, making the satisfactory sound of demolition. I started in with Emelina on the honeysuckle vines. As we dragged them out she looped the long strands around her arm like strings of Christmas tree lights. “You excited about starting?” she asked.

“Nervous.”

“Well hell, Codi, you’re bound to be better than the last one. John Tucker says she was scared of her shadow. Some senior boys chased her into the teachers’ lounge with a fetal pig.”

Emelina’s faith in me was heartening.

“Did I tell you J.T. called this morning?” she asked. “They’re going to make it home for the fiesta. Him and Loyd. Do you remember Loyd?”

I yanked at a vine that was rooted right into the crumbling adobe. “Sure,” I said.

“I didn’t know if you would. I think you were the only girl in the whole high school that never fell for him.”

It was humid and hot. I’d tied a bandana around my forehead and already it was soaking wet. The salt stung my eyes.

“I went out with Loyd a few times,” I said.

“Did you? Him and J.T. are real good buddies. He’s straightened out a lot. He’s real sweet.” She unburdened herself of the loops of vines, laying them in a pile, and stood up with her hands on her waist, arching her back. “Loyd, I mean.” She laughed. “Not J.T. He’s just the same as he always was.”

I took off my bandana and wrung it out. The dark drops on the hot brick dried up instantly, leaving behind a white lace of salt. Just like the irrigation water on the alfalfa. In just this way the fields get ruined, I thought to myself.

Emelina kicked tentatively at the brick barbecue pit. “You think this thing will stand up after we get the vines out of it?”

“I think they’re what’s holding it together,” I said.

She cocked her head and looked at it thoughtfully. “Well, if it falls down we’ll just have us a roasted-goat disaster. We’ll just have to get extra beer.”

On the morning
of the fiesta she sent John Tucker and me to town for last-minute supplies, including extra beer, although the barbecue pit showed every sign of standing through another Labor Day fiesta. I followed John Tucker down a path I didn’t know, a short cut through a different orchard. “What kind of trees are those?” I asked John Tucker. The branches were heavy with what looked like small yellow-green pomegranates.

“Quince,” he said, with a perfect short “i,” not “queens.” The Spanish-flavored accent of Old Grace was dying out, thanks to satellite TV, I suppose. I watched the back of his shorn head; the path was narrow and we walked single file. At thirteen he was my height, a head taller than Emelina. It must shift your liaison with a child when you have to look up to him.

I caught a glimpse of bright car windshield through the trees, and knew where we were. You could picture Grace as a house, with orchards for rooms. To map it of course you’d have to be a botanist. We left quince and entered pecan, where the ground was covered
with tiny, immature nuts. “So what’s happening with these orchards?” I asked, kicking at a slew of green pecans the size of peach pits. “I’ve been seeing this all over.”

“Fruit drop.”

John Tucker was already a man of few words.

The Baptist Grocery was nondenominational, but harked back to a time when everything in Grace, including grocery stores, was still segregated. This wasn’t recent, but maybe a century ago. Here the Hispanic and Anglo bloodlines got very mixed up early on, starting with the arrival of the Gracela sisters. By the time people elsewhere were waking up to such ideas as busing, everyone in Grace had pretty much given up on claiming a superior pedigree. Nowadays the Baptist Grocery peddled frozen fish sticks to Protestant and Catholic alike.

John Tucker shopped like an automaton, counting out bags of chips and jars of salsa. Since he seemed interested in efficiency, not congeniality, I suggested we split up. I would go to the liquor store and meet him in front of the courthouse.

Drinking establishments had proliferated in Grace since my day. The mine had closed in the interim, of course; bars and economic duress are common fellow travelers. I passed the Horny Toad Saloon and the Little Dipper plus the one I remembered, the State Line, which was no more situated on the state line than the grocery was Baptist. New Mexico lay thirty miles to the east. I think the name referred to the days when Gracela County was dry and people had to drive to the border for beer.

Emelina had advised that I’d find the best price on beer at the Watering Hole, a package store. I located it on the corner of Main Street and the depot alley, which led down past the old movie theater to the railroad station. The theater had been remodeled into an exercise salon and video rental store called the Video Rodeo, with a huge hand-lettered sign in the window announcing “
NINTENDOS NOWHERE
.” I stared for a good half minute before I made out that it meant “
NOW HERE
,” not “
NOWHERE
.” The calligrapher got cramped.

The Watering Hole was closed, with a sign on the door saying
“
BACK IN TEN
,” so I waited. The placard was lettered in the same hand as the “
NINTENDOS
” sign. Maybe one person actually ran all the stores in Grace from behind the scenes, like the Wizard of Oz, powerfully manipulating people through hand-lettered signs. It was hot and my mind was fraying at the edges. I wiped the sweat out of my eyes and massaged my prickly scalp, thinking I must look like a drowned hen, but maybe nobody would recognize me today. Living without a lover was beginning to produce in me the odd sense that I was invisible.

A pretty, old carob tree stood near the door of the liquor store, throwing dappled shade on the sidewalk. I knew that its twisted, woody-looking pods could be crunched between the teeth and tasted like cocoa. I sat on a concrete block and leaned my back against the trunk. Apparently this was a frequent waiting spot. Fallen carob pods lay all around my feet. I picked one up, polished it on my T-shirt and bit down: the first sensation was sawdust, but then the splinters turned strongly bittersweet on my tongue, a nostalgic tang. I looked up into the leathery leaves. Hallie had told me carobs were dioecious, which means that male and female parts are possessed by separate individuals. In plain English, they’re like us; it takes two to tango. This one was loaded with fruit, but there wasn’t another carob tree in sight. I looked all the way down the main street and down toward the depot. No male carobs. I patted the trunk sympathetically.

The door of the Watering Hole was opened by a proprietor who looked as if she might not be legal drinking age herself. In fact this must have been the case because after she bagged and rang up my purchase she asked if I’d mind waiting while she went next door to the Video Rodeo and got her dad. He arrived shortly to accept my money and put it in the register. I suppose they switched off, since she probably wasn’t old enough to rent out porno movies either. I recognized neither father nor daughter, and they didn’t make a point of knowing or not knowing me: a relief. The daily work of remeeting people was overwhelming, and Emelina’s party was going to be a whole lot more of the same.

I took my paper bags and headed across the street. A red pickup truck beeped its horn and startled me—I’d charged right across
without looking. I froze up, like one of those ridiculous squirrels that dart one way and then the other and are doomed to end up a road kill. Except my life was in no danger here; he’d stopped. It was Loyd Peregrina, looking exactly like himself. If anything he looked younger than fifteen years ago. His arm was out the window and I hurried out of his way thinking it was a turn signal, that he was trying to turn right. It didn’t occur to me till he’d gone on down the street that he was waving at me.

I stayed in the shower
forever trying to rinse the salt out of my scalp and skin. I had fantasies of not going to this thing, but Emelina would be hurt, and also my house sat in the middle of the party like a floral centerpiece. It would be hard to pretend not to be home. I put on the most minimal thing I owned, a white cotton dress, and sneaked out my front door.

It was like a high-school reunion. Everyone was boisterously friendly and dying to be filled in on the last decade and a half, which in my case was not that pretty a picture, and of course they asked about Hallie. Children ran underfoot like rebel cockroaches. Emelina, my guardian angel, kept setting me up in conversations before running off to clean up some mess the kids had gotten into or check on the goat.

J.T. came over and gave me a hug that lifted me off the ground—but that’s J.T., plus a few beers. It really was nice to see him. “I hear you wrecked a train,” I said.

“Wrecked her good,” he said. J.T. was broad-shouldered and dark, with the kind of face that’s made more handsome, not less, by the scars of teenage acne. We’d known each other since we were babies. His older sister Pocha was at the party, and his brothers Cristobal, Gus, and Arturo, all of whom had been our neighbors when Hallie and I were small. I remembered playing Dutchman’s tag with them at the graveyard on All Souls’ Days—it was always a huge family picnic up there—until Doc Homer decided the graveyard was off limits. (Bird mites no doubt.)

People were jammed into the courtyard belly to elbow and it soon got too noisy to talk. I stood near the edge of things, in the shade of an olive that was probably planted when the house was built, middle-aged as olives go. A band called the Sting Rays, featuring one of J.T.’s formerly pigeon-toed cousins, was belting out “Rosa Lee.” I spotted Loyd across the way, but would have had to step on a hundred toes to get to him. He was leaning against the wall with his arms crossed, paying attention to a small woman in a strapless dress. Loyd looked like someone in a cigarette ad, except he wasn’t smoking: white T-shirt, white smile, those models are always the picture of health. His hair was mink black, in a ponytail. And he had terrific arms. I hate to admit things like this, but in a certain frame of mind I am a sucker for good muscle definition.

A woman approached me suddenly from behind and shouted, “Codi Noline! God, honey, you look like a rock ‘n’ roll star.”

In my sundress and dimestore thongs I looked no more like a rock ‘n’ roll star than Mother Teresa. “I’ll take that as a compliment,” I said. “I take them where I can get them nowadays.”

“Lord, I know what you mean,” she said. It was Trish Garcia, who was a cheerleader and clandestine smoker when I’d last known her. Now she smoked openly, had a raspy cough, and looked like a cartwheel was out of the question. “I heard Hallie’s in South Africa.”

I laughed. “Nicaragua.”

“Well, what in the world’s she doing there?”

In high school, Hallie and I were beneath Trish’s stratum of normal conversation. I remembered every day of those years, no lapses there. Once in the bathroom I’d heard her call us the bean-pole sisters, and speculate that we wore hand-me-down underwear. I wondered how the rules had changed. Had I come up in the world, or Trish down? Or perhaps growing up meant we put our knives away and feigned ignorance of the damage. “She’s teaching people how to grow crops without wrecking the soil,” I said. “She has her master’s in integrated pest management.”

Trish looked indifferent, but she was working hard at being
unimpressed, whereas before it came naturally. I took this as a good sign. “Well, I guess it pays good,” she said.

“No, they’re not really paying her, just living expenses is about all, I think. She’s doing it just to do it. She wants to be part of a new society.”

Trish stared. I pretended Hallie was there at the party somewhere, about to walk up behind me. “Six or seven years ago they threw out the dictator and gave all his land to the poor people,” I said. “But they need a lot of help in the farming department now, because these soldiers keep attacking the poor farmers from across the border and burning up their crops.”