“Gracias, Abuelita,” I said softly to Doña Althea as she clumped away.
She didn’t look at me, but she heard me say it and she didn’t deny that she was my relative. Her small head crowned with its great white braid nodded a little. No hugs or confessions of love. We were all a little stiff, I understood that. Family constellations are fixed things. They don’t change just because you’ve learned the names of the stars.
Uda Dell went last. “I brought this bouquet of zinnias because every spring Hallie helped me dig my zinnia bed.” She laid down the homely, particolored bouquet, and added, “I crocheted that afghan, too.”
“You did?”
She looked at me, surprised. “Right after your mommy died. Well, I don’t guess you’d remember.”
“This blanket got us through a lot of tough times,” I said. I was feeling a little more steady on my feet. I folded in the corners and drew it all up into a bundle against my chest. About everything Hallie and I had ever done was with us there in the Domingos orchard. Everything we’d been I was now.
“Thank you,” I said, to everybody.
I turned my back and headed alone with my bundle up the Old Pony Road to Doc Homer’s house.
HOMERO
27 Human Remains
There are women in every room of this house, he thinks: Mrs. Quintana upstairs, and now there is Codi, standing in the kitchen with her baby. Her arms and chest clutch the black wool bundle and it weighs her down like something old, made of stone. The weight makes him want to turn away. He thinks, This is the fossil record of our lives.
“I’m going to bury this. Do you want to help me?” She looks up at him and tears stream down. The grief on her face is fresh as pollen.
“You already buried it.”
“No, no, no!” she screams, and slams the screen door behind her. He follows her down the path but she doesn’t go down to the riverbed this time, she turns and goes right around the house into the backyard. When he catches up, a little breathless, she is standing with her boots on the ground like rooted stalks. Standing beside the old plot where Hallie used to grow a garden. A few old artichoke bushes have gone thistly and wild around its perimeter. Codi drops the knotted bundle and goes to the tool shed to retrieve a shovel. She comes back and digs hard into the ground. It hasn’t been disturbed for many years.
“Are you sure this is a good place?” he asks.
Without speaking, she steps on the shovel and its tip bites into the sandy soil again and again, lifting, digging, and lifting out a deep, square hole.
“You might want to have a garden here again someday. When this house is yours.”
The shovel stops suddenly. “Did you know I’m staying?” She looks at him.
He looks back, waiting.
“I told Loyd about the baby. Yesterday I took him down there to the riverbed where you showed me. I can remember every minute of that night. You gave me some pills, didn’t you? You really did want to help.” She looks up at the sky, using gravity and the small, twin dams of her eyelids to hold in tears. “So Loyd knows about that now. He’s sad. I didn’t think about that part-that he would be sad. I was thinking the baby was just mine.”
“It wasn’t just yours.”
“I know.” She wipes her cheeks with the back of her hand, leaving a faint dark smudge under each eye. She looks at him very oddly. “We might have another one. Loyd and I. I don’t know. There’s time to see.”
“Yes.”
“Did you know I’m a good science teacher? The kids and the teachers all voted. They say I’m spirited. How do you like that?”
“It’s what I would expect.”
“I’m teaching them how to have a cultural memory.” She looks at her hands, and laughs, but looks sad. “I want them to be custodians of the earth,” she says.
He also looks at her hands. They remind him of something. Whose hands?
“You really can’t approve of me staying, can you?” she demands, suddenly angry. “You raised me to turn my back on this place. That worked for you, but the difference is you knew it was really your home. You knew you had one. So you had a choice.”
“That’s all very well and good,” he says, “but you still might want a garden. These artichoke bushes still produce. Every summer they bloom as if their hearts depended on it. Never mind that there was nobody taking in the harvest.” He takes the tip of a silvery leaf between his fingers. It looks knifelike, but is yielding and soft.
She looks at him for quite a long time, smiling, and then she looks down at the bundle. “It’s all right to bury this here,” she says. “There are no human remains.”
No human remains. No. Human. Remains. The three words chime in his head like large, old bells, three descending notes that ring and ring, speeding up in tempo until they clang against one another.
“How true,” he says finally.
She shaves out the edges of the hole so it is neat and square, and then drops the bundle in. She throws a handful of dirt on top of it and stands there looking down.
“We’re a pair of scarred old souls, aren’t we, Codi?”
“I don’t know what we are. I’m trying to figure out what I hope for.”
“It’s a most dangerous thing, hope.”
Her eyes flash with something bright. Love or anger. But she doesn’t speak.
“Hope involves giving a great deal of yourself away,” he tells her.
“That’s a pitiful excuse.”
“Oh, it’s pitiful all right, but there you have it. It’s hard to
