Where We Are Now (25 page)

Our parents died young. The inheritances were modest, but no matter, we've needed to work, needed to fill our days. Obviously we're inclined to help orphans. We've got two married daughters; Kate, the oldest, lives with her husband in London. Sally's Max, a singer, lives on the road much of the year. So does she. There are no grandchildren yet, and we long for them, trying at the same time to keep our wishes to ourselves. I wouldn't mind begging if I thought it would help, but a plea would be seen only as a demand to produce another generation Doing without grandchildren, giving up on perpetuation isn't a tragedy, but I despise the blankness. I wanted to know the next ones. I sit on the straw amid the dust of the stable, stroking the orphan foal, thinking we should have adopted a son and remembering, as I always do, that first I would have none but my own and, by the time we discovered I couldn't, there were few baby boys available. For two years we waited; then we gave up, left Texas, moved to New Mexico, put aside that hope, began again.

I am sixty now, and I wonder why we gave up on our resolution. It wasn't like my failure, after years of speaking tourist Spanish and French, to really learn those languages or Marsh's to buy the older man's reward, a red convertible. Those are still possibilities, though mine for the languages is dim. Perhaps we couldn't truly accept someone else's child. Now we have lived through that part of our lives, raised our children. Now we nurse foals.

Dave Madison hails me. He's shod our horses as long as we've been in this valley, over twenty years.

“What you got there?”

“More business eventually … or we hope so.”

He creaks over toward me. His arthritis is so bad his legs are bent with it. I can almost hear his bones popping
as he walks. Dave looks like an old cowboy who has been thrown a lot though he's told me he'd never ride anything as foolish as a horse. As a farrier for racetracks he's suffered from a lot of high-spirited nervy thoroughbreds, which has given him a low opinion of horses no matter what breed.

“Another paint,” he says. “Named her yet?”

“No. Marsh does that. You know any tricks to get an orphan to eat?”

Dave takes off his beat up straw hat that's as much a part of him as his hazel eyes and grizzled cheeks. He scratches his head with his free hand. “Wish I did. Which way did Marsh get off to?”

I point him toward the set of pens at the far side of the barn where we keep the stallions. He swears he's not going to shoe them today, a threat he usually makes. Stallions are more trouble than horses or mares, much more temperamental, much more liable to kick or rear.

“Sure you are, Dave.”

He shakes his head and goes out the far door moving fast as he can though he walks a ragged line. It's supposed to hit ninety this afternoon. He generally shoes in the cool of the morning.

Diego, our groom from Santo Domingo pueblo, finishes mucking out the other stalls and stops to pet the foal. His hand moves gently over her small bony head.

The foal's eyelids flutter slightly. Diego knows no more than we do about how to get an orphan to eat. He's asked the old men at the pueblo. Unfortunately they have forgotten what their fathers knew about horses. Diego has learned about horses from us although it's mostly a matter of having a place to practice his instincts.

I'm watching Diego as he leaves through the stable's far door when I hear a loud neigh and catch sight of one of the stallions, Maxim I think, flashing by the door. Immediately
I have a vision of Marsh flat on the ground in Maxim's pen. We've lived with these animals so many years, have known we had to be careful and have been. Even so in thirty years of raising horses we have slidden off, fallen off, cracked ribs, had concussions—I've had two, Marsh, one—been kicked, been bitten. Marsh was rolled on once. We had to get rid of an Arab that reared and threatened to flip over on his back. We've dealt with horses that balked, shied and bolted. If it's someone else's racehorse he's training, Marsh will put up with more, but the ones who try to flip a rider off are truly dangerous. Maxim isn't that sort. We respect him as we respect any stallion, for all of them are creatures with moods and temperaments, and any horse is entirely capable of strange actions. I had a quarter horse that sat down like a big roan dog in the middle of the trail leaving me to bail out of the saddle when I felt his hindquarters buckling. We thought of all sorts of reasons why he might assume this peculiar position—there was no burr in his saddle pad, no leg injury, no loose shoe—and never knew exactly why. Geldings can be nearly as temperamental as stallions, so can mares.

I lift the foal's head out of my lap as quickly and quietly as possible, unlatch the stall gate, and run through the barn gesturing toward Henriette, the mare most likely to be in heat. Diego, who doesn't really need my instruction, is going toward her stall with a lead in hand. She's already haltered so all he has to do is clip the lead on her and take her out. Even if she's not in heat Maxim will come to her.

Running out the door I almost collide with Dave.

“Damned idiot!” He growls.

“Is Marsh—?”

“Out there. Your damned prancy old son-of-a-bitch stallion—”

Dave is an inventive, sometimes musical cusser, but I can't stop to indulge him. I find Marsh standing by the gate
to Maxim's pen and breathe freely again.

Rufus, Maxim's buddy in the next pen, is trotting back and forth whinnying.

Marsh, tension lines showing tight around his mouth, says, “He was in a hurry to get out and brushed past me. That's all.”

I put both arms around him. “You all right?”

“Of course.” He's a little annoyed that I've asked. Between the two of us I'm the worrier. “You know Maxim doesn't like being shod. He took a look at Dave and bolted.”

“Diego's gone after him with Henriette.”

“I'll tell Dave we'll wait a while on Maxim's shoes.”

Marsh turns back toward the pens where Rufus is trotting back by the dividing fence and forth shaking his head and whinnying for Maxim. The trouble with horses is though they have memories, they still act instinctively. When Maxim left, Rufus was totally abandoned; he has no knowledge of time's duration, no hope that his buddy will return. He's anxious about the possibility of absolute loss.

Diego rounds the corner of the barn leading Henriette and Maxim. Rufus neighs a welcome.

Marsh grins. We're both accustomed to their rituals, but they please us still.

I go back through the barn to the garden to check on the beets and tomatoes. It's June, our hottest, driest month, still an oddity to me since I was born in the South and complained for years, along with everyone else, about August heat. From here I can't hear the phone, so Lupe shouts for me. I hear Chihuahua in her voice still, although she was born on this side of the Rio Grande and so were her parents. She says she hears Tennessee in mine.

“A friend calls.” Lupe has worked for us so long she can distinguish the voices of all the family and friends. If she's in the least uncertain, she puts the unknown caller in the
friend category, a habit that leaves us at the mercy of fundraisers and brokers making cold calls. So far I haven't been able to convince her to ask for names. To do this, though she doesn't say so, goes against an inner conviction that asking for someone's name is an unpardonable rudeness. Necessary for business, yes, but not for home. She'll ask if she's in our office, but not if she's in the kitchen or one of the bedrooms. We do not quarrel about this. Lupe and I never quarrel. I know the names of all her family and some of her friends as well.

“It's me, Marianne.” Uncle Phillip's voice alarms me immediately. He seldom calls except to tell me of someone's death. In my mother's family only he and his one child, Fergus, remain, and of course Uncle Phillip isn't really a Moore. He's just lived with them so long he seems like one of them. Aunt Lucy, despite her anxieties, lived to be eighty-three; she died three years ago leaving him to live in a heap. Fergus lets him since he lives in one as well. In separate houses they hang their trousers on the backs of chairs, stack their newspapers, march their shoes in pairs along the baseboards of the walls, leave their beds tumbled, canned goods assembled on their kitchen counters. The difference is that Fergus's collection grows—he acquires new pictures, new drinking glasses, new signs, new clothes and equipment for his recording studio—while Uncle Phillip's stays the same. In the living and dining rooms where all the curtains are drawn Aunt Lucy's silver blackens in darkness, the patient dust settles on family pictures, on the carved oak leaves and acorns of my Grandmother Moore's Victorian furniture. There are piles of cards and paper, some of it never used, on the dining room table as if someone meant to write letters or send invitations
then utterly forgot, or the occasion was canceled. On Grandmother's dusty whatnot shelves flickers of cut glass, including the upside-down top hat that so fascinated me as a child, gleam in the swath of light when the door is opened. I'm seldom there to open it.

I don't like leaving Uncle Phillip alone in his heap of useless things. I'm not in Nashville often and I could never order his life. That's up to him and to Fergus. Uncle Phillip is ninety-three now. Gradually I've begun to realize where I see disorder and sorrow, my uncle and my bachelor cousin see convenience, accommodation, ease. In their kingdoms, things do not require looking after; they are only things.

My tolerance, I know, is also convenient. Distance smoothes out my reactions to my Tennessee kin; I'm too far away to build up a reservoir of petty annoyances, and since I usually come and go only once a year, there's always a way out.

Talking to Uncle Phillip I imagine him in his kitchen reaching over stacked cans of green peas, tomatoes, applesauce to the phone on the wall. He sticks to a soft diet because of a nameless stomach problem. Food continues to interest him, particularly his own diet, and he informs me gravely that he's drinking “a lot of sweet milk.” Except for other southerners of his generation, no one else I know makes that distinction between sweet milk and buttermilk now.

Fergus, Uncle Phillip tells me, is out of town. In his sixties Fergus took to wandering. He says he's going fishing. He fishes a little; mainly he roams around looking at the country. He used to keep a boat in Florida. In the past few years, after getting a manager for his sound studio, he's extended his range to bone-fishing off the coast of Belize, bass fishing somewhere in Louisiana, pike fishing in Minnesota. And he's often gone for a month or longer. He phones me sometimes from bars in places like Key West or New Orleans, and the
first thing he says, using a gravedigger's tone, is, “This is your cousin, the last of the Gainers.” His voice generally sways as if he's standing on a boat when I'm sure he's standing as near as he can to a bar. His father and I both wish he'd find someone to marry again. Uncle Phillip must be lonely there by himself. I should call him more often. This morning he says he's called because he's seen something about Indians and horses on TV. He has remembered we raise Appaloosas.

“You see that?” He asks as he usually does. He has no idea how I spend my days and believes, I suppose, that I may be watching the same programs. I say no giving him license to tell me about the Nez Percé's selective breeding, how they were the first to breed for color. I know this already. I act interested because he is. His call is so unusual I have to ask him again how he's doing.

“I'm fine, Marianne. Just fine.”

General phrases of well being are all he'll admit to unless I prod him. Fergus, I discover, is in Canada fishing. Uncle Phillip seems mildly annoyed that he's flown so far away.

“ He's up there in Ontario carrying a canoe from lake to lake.” Then he adds, “There's no fool like an old one. I had on my glasses to watch that program and now I can't find them. I know you can't do anything.”

“Have you asked the people upstairs to—?” Fergus insisted he add a small apartment in his attic after Aunt Lucy died.

“They aren't there.”

“Are they out-of-town too?”

“I don't think so.”

“Well, when they—”

“I know, Marianne. I know. I'll get hold of them, get them to help me look. I just called up to tell you a man can find himself in a ridiculous position in no time. I'm ninety-three
and generally in good health except for this old stomach thing and my eyesight. Everything's a blur. I had to count the numbers on the dial to call you. Lucky I've still got a dial telephone. Fergus wants me to get one of those touch ones. I wouldn't know where the numbers were on one.”

He laughed, and I knew he'd probably be all right.

“Call me back when you find them.”

“No, honey. Those folks will be in after a while. I just called you while I was waiting.”

I'm immediately provoked because I live so far away I can't really help him. I remind myself as I always do that I chose the distance. Marsh chose too, but I chose to marry him and move. At twenty-one I chose gleefully to part with my southern family and this is where we are now, living in an adobe territorial style house not far from the Rio Grande. From my front door I can see the Russian olive trees, locusts, cottonwoods and mulberries lining it. Behind it there's an old orchard where we still raise a few apples mixed in with the red clover, alfalfa and fescue for the horses.