“The statues of saints, in the church,” I explained. “I guess they have to get freshened up every so often, like anybody else. The women paint the saints and the kids paint each other.”
He replaced his glasses and observed the rooftops and treetops that led stepwise down the hill. Mr. Pye had his back to us now. He was industriously tacking down shingles he’d secured for this purpose ten years before Hallie was born.
“Quite a place,” Mr. Rideheart said, finally. “How long have you lived here?”
It wasn’t an easy question to answer. “I was born here,” I said slowly. “But right now I’m just on an extended visit. My time’s up soon.”
He sighed, looking out over the white path of blossoming treetops that led up toward the dam. “Ah, well, yes,” he said, “isn’t everybody’s. More’s the pity.”
At first the Stitch and Bitch was divided in its opinion of Mr. Rideheart. While he was graciously received into the kitchens of half the club members, where he drank tea and stroked his white mustache and listened in earnest while the piñata artists discussed their methodologies, the other half (led by Doña Althea) suspected him of being the southwestern equivalent of a carpetbagger.
But for once the Doña judged wrong. His intentions were noble, and ultimately providential. When the club assembled in March for its monthly meeting in the American Legion hall, Mr. Rideheart was the guest speaker. He was supposed to lecture on folk art, which he did, but mostly he talked about Grace. He told these women what they had always known: that their town had a spirit and disposition completely apart from its economic identity as an outpost of the Black Mountain Mining Company. During the last century while men labored underground to rob the canyon of its wealth, the women up above had been paying it back in kind. They’d paid with embroidery and peacocks and fruit trees and piñatas and children. Mr. Rideheart suggested that he had never known of a place quite like Gracela Canyon, and that it could, and should, be declared a historic preserve. There existed a thing called the National Register of Historic Places. The landmarks on this list, he said, were protected from the onslaught of industry, as if they were endangered species. He allowed that it wasn’t perfect; listing on the register would provide “a measure of protection from demolition or other negative impact,” he said. “In other words, a man can still shoot an elephant, even though it has been declared endangered, and the elephant will still be dead. But the man will come out looking like a very nasty guy.”
“But really it’s not our houses that are going to get endangered by the poison and the dam,” Norma Galvez pointed out. “It’s the trees.”
Mr. Rideheart replied, “Your trees are also historic.”
He knew all the ins and outs of becoming a historic place. He explained where to begin, and where to go after that, to see that the river would run clean and unobstructed. There was a fair amount of bureaucracy involved, but the process was reasonably speedy. “Considering the amount of publicity that has already been brought to bear,” he said, gesturing toward the window, or possibly the invisible airwaves of CBS, “I think it could be done in less than two years.”
He said we would need to document everything, to prove the age and architectural character of the community. “All the photocopying, photography, and so forth can be expensive. Sometimes communities apply for block grants.”
After a brief silence Viola said, succinctly, “We don’t need any block grants. We’re rich.” And that was that.
At some point during the spring I got a letter from Carlo. He’d finally made plans: he was going to Telluride. The clutch had gone out on our old Renault and he’d junked it-he hoped I wasn’t attached. He was thinking of getting a motorcycle, unless I was coming to Telluride, in which case we’d get another car.
I was in such a state, running on so little sleep and such dead nerve endings, I didn’t know what to think. I knew I’d have to make plans soon. And I was touched that he still took me into account when he made his move, as if we were family. But I felt nothing when I read his words; maybe it was just the same nothing there had always been between us. The words seemed to be coming from a very great distance, with the same strange, compressed tone as a satellite phone call. I looked carefully at each sentence and then waited for it to register. All I could really get clearly was the name of the town, with its resonant syllables: Telluride. It sounded like a command.
I’d become estranged from Loyd after our trip. Of course, because of Hallie. I felt guilty for being away when the call came. Loyd and I had been laughing and making love for all those days while the news was laid out like a corpse in Doc Homer’s house. I didn’t even call him the night we got back into town. We hadn’t wanted the vacation to end, so we just went straight to Loyd’s house and spent the night: Surprisingly, I’d never slept in his bed. Loyd’s house was entirely his own: a mobile home set up against the cliff of upper Gracela Canyon on a masonry foundation he’d built slowly himself, over the years. Through his efforts the stonework had gradually grown up over the metal shell, so that now it was pretty much a rectangular stone house, overgrown with honeysuckle vines.
Leafless for winter, the honeysuckles made a lace curtain over the bedroom window. Their shadows left faint tracings on the walls, which I watched all through the bright, moonlit hours of that first night home. Loyd held on to
