Dalva (9 page)

There were two Tennessee walking horses Paul used for hunting but I still could not look at a horse without thinking of Duane. Hunting was Paul's main passion along with geology,
and women, to whom he was courtly. I saw the bills on his desk from sending flowers to a half-dozen or so women around the United States. He had a kennel where he kept English setters and pointers for hunting quail, and a Labrador for ducks that was allowed to wander around except at night. His one concession to Grandfather was a large male Airedale kept to look after things. The idea of a guard dog wasn't a popular notion then, though many rural people owned a dog who performed the function. I asked Emilia why one of the hired hands carried a large pistol and she said he was a retired
bandito.
His name was Tino and his son—Tito, of all things—wasn't allowed to carry a gun unless he was walking with me. He used the occasions to exercise the bird dogs, and when they pointed a covey of quail Tito would shoot in the air to keep the dogs interested.

When Paul was home from Mexico we would drive with several of the dogs to new areas within a hundred miles or so. He would point out geological formations, flora, and fauna, but not much of it registered on me. This didn't disturb him. He told me when he first came to southern Arizona it all looked like moonscape to him, and probably more so to me what with being pregnant.

“Should I want to shoot the young man?” he asked one morning. We were sitting near a beautiful spring far up Sycamore Canyon off the Arivaca road, oddly enough the same area where Ruth seduced her priest so many years later. I shook my head no and he hugged me. He smelled like my father had up on the Missouri when I was a child.

“Your father would have. He was a violent man at times. Dad bought us sixteen-ounce boxing gloves so we wouldn't hurt each other. Your father was a great fighter whenever it was called for but he gave it up when he got married. He liked machines. I liked books and rocks. I take after my mother except for the drinking. I don't like to drink very much.”

I asked him why the hired man had a gun. He said the border country was always a little bit risky. The drug heroin was smuggled across the boundary; also, people sneaked into the U. S. and he had a few business enemies in Mexico.

Once when Emilia and I were plucking quail for dinner I asked her if she was Paul's lover. “Sometimes,” she said. I continued the line of questioning until she became embarrassed
and changed the subject by saying the doctor was coming in the morning. I disliked the doctor who was puffy white and wore too much cologne. “Who was the lucky boy?” he asked during the first examination when I lay with my legs up. I told him I didn't know because I had been drunk and there were several. A wave of disgust passed across his face and further examinations were without conversation.

I had my son April 27 in a Tucson hospital. Mother was there with me, and Uncle Paul acted the nervous father. I hugged the baby for just a moment and kissed it goodbye. I wanted to give it Duane's necklace but I knew this would be lost or the gesture misunderstood. Somehow, when I was supposed to be sleeping, I overheard talk in the hall that the baby was going to be adopted by a couple in Minneapolis. I think they were out in the hall waiting to see the baby.

When Mother took me home to Nebraska, Ruth embraced me mightily, then became angry and rushed to her room because I didn't have a photo of the baby. “What's his name, goddamn you?” she screamed. I was too tired to cry. Grandfather embraced me and stared out the window. For some reason I wanted to work in the garden. I walked with Naomi and Grandfather out into the garden, and then slowly around the house as if we had a purpose.

The summer passed a little like a mixture of dreaming and sleepwalking until the afternoon of our polka party. It was Uncle Paul's theory of walking that helped a great deal. I found my father's World War II canteen in the attic and sometimes I would pack a sandwich, or double back to Grandfather's to have lunch and to take some dogs along. I wasn't particularly more observant than I had been in Arizona though later my memory was sharper than I would have expected. Nowadays there are all sorts of technical explanations for such times—I know them because I studied them at the university and in graduate school. For a girl of my age at the time, experiencing what I had, the emotional “burnout,” as it is rather glibly called, was actually a vital emptiness, a time when life was so poignant, and full of what is understood as suffering but
is really only life herself making us unavoidably unique. I still reread a letter Uncle Paul sent me soon after I arrived home.

My Beloved Dalva!

It was a delight to have you here. It made me love my brother more in retrospect because he had a part in your being alive. You are at an age when you are not to yourself what you are to others. You were spreading good feeling from your prison, joking about your tummy, singing while you brushed the dogs, making us Nebraska desserts, telling stories about my father so I actually wanted to see him again. When I got home from the airport Tino and Tito imitated your fine lisping Castilian and we laughed, then fell silent because you were gone. Emilia wouldn't come out of her room, and the Labrador wandered around the property looking for you. In a childish way I was angry that you were gone. I don't wish you any trouble because I love you, but you must know that I am always here if you need a refuge, or want to get away. I haven't been to church since I was fourteen but I pray that things will get better for you. I have never met a girl who made everyone she met feel more strongly that they liked to live, a fuzzy notion but true.

What follows are some notes I made for you about our walks and trips. I felt that later on you might want to know just what it was you saw. I began walking at your age just because the natural world seemed to absorb the poison in me. Then I gradually wanted to understand why this was so and I suspect you will too. Strange, but we started on the same place, the same farm, and I knew some of the same anguish at your age, which is not to say that I fully comprehend what you are going through.

What you saw from Patagonia is much like the entire SE corner of Arizona—a 5,000-foot-high rolling plateau with grassy benches falling off into broad valleys with cienegas of sycamore, cottonwood, and live oak, a cooler, breezier, and slightly wetter place to live than up in Tucson (which is out of the question anyway because of all the realtors!). Sonoita Creek, along with Aravaipa and Madera,
is one of the few remaining Sonoran Desert creeks with native fishes. In that bosque along Sonoita Creek west of Patagonia where you had morning sickness, there are a vast number of pugnacious, iridescent-throated hummingbirds, impossible to identify except the males hovering close to us. The fabled coppery-tailed trogon sometimes nests here but I've only seen him once in the area, and several times up in Madera Canyon where we picked those wild hot peppers, the chilatepines. I take these on airplane and train trips to make the food palatable.

You see juniper and scrub oak on the north-facing terraces at 5,000 feet. Looking north, the grasslands are mixed with low, scrubby mesquite, a sure sign of overgrazing, just as overgrazing destroyed much of the Sand Hills back home. There are also colonies of Huachuca agave, rising toward the Santa Ritas where a forest of several species of oak, juniper, and piñon pine climbs toward the ponderosa zone at about 7,000 feet. It can be nice and cool up there when the valley is blistering.

In the bosque, under black walnut and big hackberry trees, you see the blunted tracks of javelina (the strong-tasting wild pig that Tino and Tito love to eat), a Mohave rattler in a thicket of wolfberry rustling among fallen leaves of ash and Arizona holly. You liked these usually dry creek bottoms where we saw tracks of deer, coyote, coatimundi, gray fox, bobcat, and ringtail cat. Occasionally I've seen the tracks of mountain lion, the scent of which upsets the bird dogs. Wolves and grizzlies were here into the early part of the twentieth century and the Yaquis still have two words for “coyote”: “coyote” and “big coyote.” I still think that huge coyote we saw that morning down on the slope of the Huachucas was a Mexican lobo. That was the area, the San Rafael Valley, where you asked me why I didn't buy a huge ranch, and I said that was what was wrong with my father. He wanted to own every goddamn acre he looked at. When we were supposed to be hunting he was always looking at ranches and farms. Of course when he got tired of it all, and everything else, he turned quite a dollar selling the land off.

West, the Pajaritos stretch into Mexico and run, under
different names, south toward Caborca and west to Sonoita. The upper Sonoran country is rugged, little known, and remarkably well watered. Remember Sycamore Canyon, where you cooled your feet in the spring and the dogs swam around in circles, their eyes bright with pleasure? Harlequin or Mearn's quail are here. Velvet mesquite grows all the way up to 5,500 feet, the much-frosted zone.

Farther west across the valley there are scailed quail where it's not overgrazed. For some reason you found this area scary, the way the sacred Papago mountain, Baboquivari, dominates the landscape. It is and should be scary. The Papagos are scary, so are the Yaquis and the different branches of the Apache. What grand people! We minimize these people now so we don't have to feel bad about what we did to them. An English author who was otherwise quite daffy said that the only aristocracy is that of consciousness. Some day you must study the hundred or so tribes, the civilizations, that we annihilated.

This is enough for now. Emilia is helping me pack for a trip to Chiapas. Some day we should climb up Baboquivari together, up through the prickly pear, the different chollas, the two acacias, catclaw and whitehorn, jojoba, white rhatany, and Mexican tea; higher is sangre de drago, juniper, pinon and Ajo oak, alligator juniper. Together we can look into I'itoi's cave, the Papago God! You won't see a sorry bunch of Methodists sitting around praying for a fast buck. Please write me. I love you. Uncle Paul.

I'm not sure why the letter meant so much to me because my memories of the area seemed a dullish welter broken only by an occassional sharp image. But the letter served as a totem that, along with the long walks, got me through the summer until the day we all danced together. Of course there is something absurdly nonunique in a sixteen-year-old girl wandering around the fields, windbreaks, and creeks thinking about God, sex, and love, the vacuum of the baby.

On the night of a full moon my breasts hurt from unused milk though I had been given a pill for the condition. I sat at the window all night watching the moon until it set just before
dawn. It arose red, turned pink, then white, then pink, then red as it returned to earth, a summer moon. The moon drew me far away from myself and I imagined that my dead father and Duane saw the moon from a different angle. Before I went up to bed Ruth played me Beethoven's
Moonlight Sonata
on the piano. She could play it in the dark. I could also hear the squeak of the porch swing where Naomi sat every summer evening in what she called a “pointless reverie.” Ruth was embarrassed by the beauty of the mood and told me that my breasts were so big as to look truly silly.

At daylight I dressed in my walking clothes and put a thermos of coffee, something to eat, and two books on local birds and fauna in my day pack. I never looked at the books but carried them along at Naomi's insistence that I do something useful. Suddenly she was standing at the kitchen door in her nightgown as if wanting to say something. I was angry at the intrusion, and wouldn't face her, staring at the rows of tomatoes she had canned the day before. The tomatoes looked as if they were suffocating in the glass jars, livid red and suffering. “Are you OK?” she asked. “I'm just walking off the baby,” I said, going out the door without turning to her, something I regretted halfway to Grandfather's when the rhythm of walking had already taken over and I felt soothed.

The smallest of the bitch Airedales was waiting out where the path neared a cattail-choked pond. She waited there every morning in hopes that she would get to go along. Grandfather liked me to take her because she was a first-rate snake dog; that is, she smelled a rattler before the snake was even alarmed, and if we gave permission, would kill it, and if she was hungry, eat it. Since rattlers meant no harm I never let her kill them except around the outbuildings. The other dogs would merely bark but Sonia—Ruth named her that after a doll—would go in for the kill, first letting the snake tire itself with repetitive strikes. Killing a snake made her very proud and she would march around stiff and bouncy at the same time like a gaited horse. She was also good at chasing away angry range cows who were protecting calves.

Behind Grandfather's, where the county road stopped, the land became hillier and was ill-suited for corn, wheat, or
alfalfa. This land was the back end of a twenty-section ranch which, though it sounds large, barely made its owners a living because all the water was ours. We had all the property on both sides of the bordering creek.