I should have seen it coming. Once she and I had gone to see a documentary on the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, which was these Americans who volunteered without our government’s blessing to fight against Franco and Hitler in the Spanish Civil War. At that point in U.S. history fascism was only maybe wrong, whereas communism was definitely. When we came home from the movie Hallie cried. Not because of the people who gave up life and limb only to lose Spain to Franco, and not for the ones who came back and were harassed for the rest of their lives for being Reds. The tragedy for Hallie was that there might never be a cause worth risking everything for in our lifetime. She was nineteen years old then, and as she lay blowing her nose and sobbing on my bed she told me this. That there were no real causes left.
Now she had one-she was off to Nicaragua, a revolution of co-op farms and literacy crusades-and so I guess she was lucky. Few people know so clearly what they want. Most people can’t even think what to hope for when they throw a penny in a fountain. Almost no one really gets the chance to alter the course of human events on purpose, in the exact way they wish for it to be altered.
I loved her for feeling so strongly about things. But I’d watched Doc Homer spend a lifetime ministering his solemn charity to the people of Grace and I’m not sure whose course was altered by that, other than Hallie’s and mine, in a direction we grew to resent. It’s true that I tried myself to go into medicine, which is considered a helping profession, but I did it for the lowest of motives. I did it to win love, and to prove myself capable. Not to move mountains. In my opinion, mountains don’t move. They only look changed when you look down on them from a great height.
5 The Semilla Besada
I’d agreed to move into the guesthouse on the condition that I wasn’t going to impose on Emelina’s family life, but apparently her life was beyond imposition. She sent John Tucker over in the morning to fetch me for breakfast.
He stood tentatively outside my screen door, unsure of what to do with all his limbs. “Mom says she’ll break your face if you don’t come over for breakfast.”
“Okay, sure,” I said, following him back to the house. John Tucker was the most appealing kind of adolescent. I couldn’t begin to picture the man he would soon become-armpits and arrogance, scratching the back of his neck, throwing a baseball. Out of the question. He was wearing a cap to cover what looked like an overly enthusiastic summer haircut.
“I know you don’t have anything to eat over there yet,” Emelina said. “Everything was closed, yesterday was Sunday. Today you can get on your feet. J.T. called from El Paso and said to be sure and give you a kiss.” Emelina buttered a piece of toast and handed it to Mason, who was four going on five. “Glen, don’t put jam on your brother. If you want to wear plum preserves today that’s your nickel, but not Curtis’s. Curty, honey, don’t hit. John Tucker, help him with that, will you?”
“He called from El Paso?” I prompted. Conversations with a mother of five are an education in patience.
“Yeah, he’s in Texas. He’s got to stay for an investigation. So are you going to be able to stand living in that shack?”
“It’s not a shack, Em. It’s nice out there. I like it.”
“Codi, honey, there was goats living in there at one time. And Grammy lived there too, before the goats. But she said she got the ague in her bones and she decided she had to move in upstairs.” Grammy was J.T.’s mother, Viola Domingos.
“Mom, make Glen stop,” Curtis said.
“Glen, for heaven’s sakes, just eat that toast and put it out of its misery. The bus is going to be here in a minute and you don’t even have your shoes on.”
“No, but I know where they are,” Glen declared.
“Well, go get them.”
“School doesn’t start till next week,” I said, alarmed that I might be wrong. I was always having dreams like that.
“No, but they’ve got this summer thing for kids. They go up there to the river park and shoot each other with bows and arrows or something. Tomorrow’s the last day. So you think you’ll like it out there? We make enough noise over here to raise up the quick and the dead.”
“It’s fine. I used to live three blocks from a hospital ambulance entrance.” I didn’t add: with a man who reattached severed body parts for a living. I buttered my toast, holding my elbows in close and keeping an eye out for wayward jam knives. “So what kind of an investigation?”
“Oh, J.T.? He put sixteen cars on the ground outside El Paso. A derailment. Nobody got hurt. Oh shoot-John Tucker, honey, will you take the baby in the living room and watch him a minute? I can’t hear myself think.”
John Tucker took the baby from Emelina’s lap and carried him under one arm into the next room. The baby waggled his arms and legs like a swimmer in green
