Water Rites (22 page)

CHAPTER TWELVE

D
an was holding a towel to his face when Nita came back into the house. “Trouble?” he dabbed at his lip.

“I don’t know.” Carter was so wounded. She hadn’t meant that to happen. “Here. Give me that.” She took the bloodstained cloth from Dan’s hand, teeth on edge. He hurt. A lot. “Who did this?”

“Uniforms.” Dan groaned as she began to clean the blood from the cut on the back of his head. “The protest got violent after all. It’s a good thing you weren’t there.”

He’d been disappointed when she had refused to go.
We need people who will keep their heads
, he had told her.
The more the better
. It was because she was Sam Montoya’s daughter, Nita thought resentfully. Sam had done this kid of thing with them, so he wanted her to be part of it, too. She wasn’t part of it. She didn’t belong here. Now Carter was pissed at her. Damn them both.

“Hold still,” Nita said as Dan flinched. She frowned at the reddened towel. “The cut on your scalp doesn’t look too bad. Do you have anything I can put on it?”

“There’s some stuff in the cabinet over the sink.” Dan leaned his head in his hands. “I don’t know if I can go through this again.”

“Go through what? Getting beaten up?” She couldn’t help but share his pain. Nita jerked open the cabinet door and picked up a tube of antibiotic ointment. That stuff cost on the black market. In fact, Dan had quite a supply of very expensive and hard-to-get medical supplies on the shelves. Interesting. She took down a pair of surgical scissors. “This ought to do it. You don’t really need stitches. Try hard to hold still, okay?”

“This is a repeat of twenty years ago.” Dan hissed softly between his teeth as she snipped hair from around the lips of the ugly gash. “Back then the Columbia Association was squeezing the water, trying to run the farmers off so they could repossess their land. The Corps was on our side back then. We beat the Association, but barely.” He sighed. “People got killed in the process. I don’t want to do it all over again with the Corps. I’m too damned old for this.”

“Then let someone else do it.”

“That’s what I told your father. Last time.” Dan looked at her, squinting through the eye that wasn’t swollen completely shut. “He was the reason we won. Sam kept everyone together, even when it was tough, even when people were getting beaten up and shot. Folks believed in Sam. If it hadn’t been for him, everything would have fallen apart. We’d all be in the camps.”

“Why are you telling me this?” Nita filled a bowl from the tap and began to rinse out the towel.

“Sam was my friend,” Dan said softly. “I want you to know.”

So he had to tell her right now — because he might have died tonight? Because he knew that he might die soon? As her father had died? It was too much, on top of Carter’s wounded anger. “Do you want to know what I remember about my father?” Nita twisted the towel, wringing red water into the bowl. “I remember when the men came. He could have run . . . he started to run. But I was in the yard. So he didn’t run. He grabbed me up and threw me behind our old truck. So I’d be safe from the bullets, I guess.” The gunshots had hurt her ears, louder than thunder. “His blood got on my dress. He fell down right beside me.” She looked Dan in the face. “Mama never forgave me,” she said deliberately. “Because he could have run. Because I was alive and he was dead. Because she loved him and he loved this damn town more than he loved her. Here.” She shoved the cloth at Dan. “Hold this on your face. It’ll help the swelling. But you know that, right?”

“I’m sorry.” Dan took the cloth, all muddy inside. “I was in prison by then. When I got out, Maria was long gone. I’m so damn sorry, Nita.”

Nita turned her back on him, trembling suddenly. She had never told anyone about that day, not even David. This man remembered Sam Montoya. “I am not my father, Dan. Don’t ask me to be.” She fled to the darkness of her room to bury herself in the vivid, wordless immediacy of her daughter’s dreams.

Rachel woke Nita with the sun, insistently hungry. Nita nursed her, then stripped off her wet diaper and laid her on the floor on her back. Rachel laboriously rolled herself onto her stomach, face wrinkled with effort. Nita smiled as her daughter rocked herself onto her hands and knees. “You’re so determined,” she murmured and smiled. Rachel flopped onto her chest, protesting. “Soon enough,” Nita soothed. “You’ll be crawling all over the place.” She stroked her daughter’s dark, wispy hair and went out to bring in the diapers.

They had dried stiff, stained yellow, too soiled to use again without washing. Nita sighed and peered at the brownish water left from rinsing the bloody towel last night. She dumped it into the big plastic pail by the door. She would have to use fresh water, and take it all out to the kitchen garden afterward. Carter had been so shocked, when she had told him about washing in a pail. It hurt to think about Carter. At least she had water for washing here. The price for sleeping in a bed was diapers. Out in the fields, Rachel went naked.

Dan was waking up. Nita pressed her lips together as his pain seeped into her thoughts. Why me? she thought bitterly, wishing once more that she had been born normal.

Like Rachel.

Normal. Nita filled a plastic mug from the tap, her throat dry with Dan’s thirst. Mug in hand, she hesitated in the doorway of the bedroom. Pictures hung on the walls, glowing with color in the bright morning light.

“You’re a mind reader,” Dan said, and didn’t notice the flinch she couldn’t quite conceal. He tried to sit up, but eased himself back down with a groan. “The first day is hell,” he said.

The sheet had bunched around his waist. His stomach and chest were purple and green with bruises, his face swollen and ugly. It looked worse than it felt and it felt bad enough.

“Nothing’s broken.” Dan had noticed her expression. “I bet I look like shit, but I’ll be all right in a few days.”

This had happened to him before. Often enough that he knew the healing schedule. Nita put the mug down on the table beside him, wondering if her father had been beaten up like this and how Mama had felt when it had happened. “I’m sorry,” she said stiffly. “About last night. I was . . . in a bad mood.”

“You were right.” Dan sighed. “I’ve been levering you. I wanted you to be your father. I guess it scares me that I might be too old to handle this all over again.” His smile turned into a grimace of pain as he propped himself on one elbow. “It’s ironic. I was pissed when Sam started trying to drag me into things. I’d been wandering all my life, and this place didn’t seem any different than any other town that I’d been through. It isn’t. I guess. But Sam made a place for me here, and I’ve been here ever since.” He met her eyes. “I’ll quit levering you. If you want to take off, I have a bit of scrip put away. I can pay you some wages, at least.”

And go where? “I’ll stay,” Nita said.

“I’m glad.” Dan reached for the mug. “I’m glad you’re here. I’m not sure I could handle a trip to the sink yet.”

“Ignacio was always getting into fights,” Nita said. “But never this bad.” Her older brother had translated Mama’s bitter anger into violence. Nita took the empty mug from him, frowning. She had never asked Ignacio if he felt people the way she did. By the time she had understood it enough to ask, Ignacio was gone, driven down the road by his angry darkness.

Rachel had worked her way to the edge of the quilt and had started to complain. Nita went to scoop up her daughter, detouring into her room. “This will help,” she told Dan when she came back. She plopped Rachel onto the floor again, opened the small plastic jug she had brought. “I’ll have to find another hive before I can make any more,” she said as she poured golden liquid into Dan’s mug.

“What’s this?” Dan’s eyebrows rose as he sipped.

“It’s honey water. I ferment it, so it’s got some alcohol in it. It’s good if you’re sick and it helps if you’re hurting.”

“Maybe you could hunt bees around here.”

“I haven’t seen many. They’ve been dying.” She capped the bottle. “David said it must be some kind of disease. That’s why he . . . had to go find a job.” A hard lump clogged her throat and she looked away, fixing her eyes on the pictures. Most of them showed a river, full of water and edged with green, like pictures Nita had seen in old books and videos. “Is that the Columbia?”

“Yep. Jesse — the woman who used to own this farm — painted those pictures. She could remember water in the riverbed, back before they finished the Trench Reservoir and built the Pipeline.”

“She must have been old,” Nita said, her eyes on the blues and grays and greens.”

“I thought so, the first time I saw her.”

Nita felt Dan’s smile and realized suddenly that Jesse had been his lover. He was remembering her and the echoes of their lovemaking tickled her, softened with his sadness. She had thought David was old when she had first met him. He had been nearly forty, ancient to her young eyes. “I’m sorry,” she said, knowing without his telling her that Jesse was dead.

“Me, too.” Dan sighed. “She was part of the reason I stayed.” He stared at the ceiling. “Sometimes I think Sam dropped me on Jesse’s doorstep on purpose — that he figured we needed each other. He had a lot of insight about people — he cared, and he cared about keeping the community alive. When he died, there wasn’t anyone to take his place. I discovered . . . that I couldn’t walk away. I couldn’t let what he did go for nothing. I guess I still can’t.” He turned his head to give Nita his lopsided smile. “I’m levering you again,” he said. “Or maybe it’s this business with the Corps. It makes me ask myself why the hell I’m still involved. Anyway, I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right,” Nita said. “My father lived here. He was who he was, and I guess I’d better get used to it.” Rachel whimpered and Nita picked her up. “The Valley’s an ugly place,” she said softly. “Salt from the water creeps up out of the ground and coats the bushes with a white crust. The dust stings your eyes and makes you cough. Nothing grows except the bushes. You have to go way up into the mountains to find any flowers.”

“We’re making things worse,” Dan murmured. “We’re running so hard to keep ahead of this damned drought that we can’t stop. We’ll never be able to go back to the way it was, even if the rains start tomorrow.”

David had said the same thing. The bushes didn’t need bees and the salty Valley had scared him. We scared him, too, Nita thought and settled her fussing daughter onto her hip. “The soaker hoses in the south end of the field are plugging up. If I don’t get them cleared, the beans are going to wilt.”

“Could I ask you to do me a favor?” Dan asked. “You can drive, right?” Would you take the truck and go over to Sandy Corbett’s place later? I need to talk to her, but I think she’ll have to come here.” He grimaced. “I’ll draw you a map. The Coalition needs to start dealing with yesterday’s mess.”

“Sure.” Nita picked up the mug. The honey water had blurred away some of his pain and he was sinking into sleep. She needed to get out of this house. Her father had sat at the table in the kitchen, had looked out the window at the dry riverbed. Maybe I
will
leave, Nita thought, but there was nowhere to go. “I’ll go give Sandy your message as soon as I get the hoses clear.”

The Corbett farm lay west of The Dalles, on a bench of level land above the riverbed. Nita found the gray-haired, stocky woman out weeding beets, shaded from the afternoon sun by a handwoven grass hat.

“What got into that fool colonel?” Dirt-stained hands on her hips, Sandy glared when Nita told her about Dan’s beating. “Dan’s the best ally that idiot has. Is he trying to cut his own throat?”

“Carter didn’t do it. He brought Dan home.” Nita caught the speculative flicker of Sandy’s curiosity, heard the defensive note in her voice. “That’s what Dan told me,” she said in a calmer tone.

“Dan’s too quick to forgive. Of course, that’s not a bad trait, considering that he’s usually smack in the middle of things.” Sandy wiped her hands on her dirty jeans. “The man just can’t say no to folks’ needs. Your father was like that, too.”

Not this again. Nita pressed her lips together, pretending to adjust Rachel’s sling.

“Anyway, I’m glad you’re staying out there. I worry about Dan. He takes too much on himself.”

“He says that you need to meet, that you’ll know who to tell.”

“Oh, I’ll round ’em up, although there’s a couple I’d like to leave out of it,” she grumbled. “I’m afraid we’re in for real trouble, no matter what miracle Dan thinks he can pull off.” Her weathered face crinkled into a sudden smile and she stuck out a finger for Rachel to grab. “Come sit and have a drink. I’ve got some scones left over from breakfast, too. No sense going back there hungry.”

The house turned out to be three battered mobile homes parked in an open-sided square around an ancient maple tree. A decrepit wooden barn sagged out back. The trailers squatted on their concrete-block foundations, scabby and settled, as if they’d been there a long, long time. A thick layer of old leaves carpeted the space beneath the tree.

“Sit down. I’ll bring stuff out. The place is a mess, as usual.” She waved vaguely at a few old yard chairs. Old baling twine, bleached to a pale orange, had been woven into seats and backs over the battered frames. Nita spread Rachel’s quilt on the crackly leaves, put her daughter down on her belly, and gave her a string of wooden beads to play with.

“Here you are.” The gray-haired woman reappeared with a pitcher and two glasses clutched in one hand, a plate of thick, golden cakes in the other. “The boys are down in Bonneville, buying some new hose for the east field, and Cathy’s teaching at the co-op school this week. She’s got the whole brood with her.” She handed Nita a glass and sat down. “I’ve got the place to myself today.”

Nita nodded, not sure what to say, and covered her confusion with a bite of the crumbly, biscuit-like cake. An upright piano was visible through the open door of the trailer. “Do you play?” she asked.

“Some.” Sandy sighed. “My hands aren’t as nimble as they used to be. When I was a kid, I was going to be a concert pianist. I had it all figured out — I was going to get a scholarship, be another Van Cliburn, or Horowitz, or Huang. Oh yes, I did have dreams.” She shook her head and laughed gently. “I taught your mom to play, you know.”