by Molly Gloss
“I sure need a drink,” Arturo repeated patiently.
“I haven’t forgotten.” I peered in the darkness for their cask of distilled water while Arturo went on holding my hand. I was groping with my other hand in the shadows along the shelves of a cupboard, hunting for something to pour the water into, when a barefoot woman came out from the sleeping room.
“Arturo, who is it with you?” the woman said with a loud, false boldness, and I immediately understood that her husband wasn’t in the house.
“It’s Dolores Negrete,” I said. “Arturo was out on the road.”
The woman’s body released its stiffness. She said, “Arturo,” and then tiredly, “He goes out after we’re asleep.”
Arturo released his grip from my fingers and, standing with his heavy legs planted, he swung from the waist toward his sister-in-law, and swung back, lifting his arms slightly. “Dolores’ll get me a drink,” he said.
I made a hand motion. “I can’t find a cup.”
The sister-in-law came across the dark room. She wore a thin cotton slip, white or ginger-colored, that seemed to move alone, luminous, through the darkness. The woman took a cup from a shelf and held it beneath the tap of the water cask. “Here, Arturo, here’s your drink, but you know where the water is, and the cups. You could just help yourself.”
Arturo drank the water swiftly down, holding the cup to his mouth with both big hands. His drinking was silent, neat. Afterward, lowering the cup, he said, “Thirsty,” as an explanation.
“Go and pee and then go to bed,” the woman said to him.
“I already peed. I did it on a tree.” I could see the edge of his white teeth, the sly smiling.
“All right, then. Just go to bed.”
“Hey, Barbara, Dolores wants to live in the houseboat and so do we.” He swung toward me. “My mother isn’t going,” he told me.
“Go to bed now,” Barbara said. She took the big man by the shoulders and turned him toward the door of the sleeping room. He came around with her slowly, his shoulders ahead of his hips and his feet.
“See you, Dolores,” he said, twisting his head back.
“Good night, Arturo.”
“They got a big storm in the Philippines today.”
“Good night, Arturo.”
“Okay, Dolores, see you.”
He went out of the front room slowly. We could hear him in a moment, whispering loudly to someone in the bedroom, his words obscure. “Philippines,” he whispered.
“Thank you for bringing him home,” Barbara said. She stood with her thin arms folded across the front of her slip. She had a small face, short hair, there was no seeing her features in the darkness. I didn’t know her except by her work—delicate clay pots painted with rigid, grimacing faces in dark colors of blood and jade and cobalt, and ornamented by bits of bone and feather. Burial pots, I think they are, and I have enjoyed the irony of their popularity at the souvenir shops, in the gambling casinos and whore houses along the coast.
“Your whole family is going up there? Up to the Miller?” I had to ask her. Other people’s decisions in this matter seemed suddenly important to me—they might have considered things that had escaped my attention.
“We are, but Juan is on the Legal Committee and he wants to stay until the expropriation appeals are all turned down.”
As people leave the estancia for the Dusty Miller, and as the numbers of people here dwindle, there will be a government expropriation of “underutilized” land—this was something that was generally known. The tactic of the Legal Committee always was to exhaust every appeal.
There won’t be a need for attorneys on the Dusty Miller, surely, nor perhaps artists, as some people say there won’t be the resources. I wanted to ask her, What will your husband do in that place? Will you give up your art? Then Barbara said, as if I had spoken, “He’ll be glad to be out of law, he never was happy in it. He wants to take up teaching, now that we’ll be free of government constraints on our schools. He can keep Arturo with him. It’s to be all home schooling and tutoring and apprenticing there, you know.”
I nodded as if I did know, though I hadn’t paid much attention to reports of things to do with children, or families.
“What will you do?” I asked Barbara, now that I’d been made to feel the subject was open.
Barbara’s thin shoulders lifted slightly. “I’m a potter.”
“Yes. I have seen your pots.”
The woman made a soft sound, a laugh. “Oh, not those. Not there. Art is craft, anyway, at its pure heart. I’ll make plates and bowls and ceramic parts for machinery. And tiles.” She sounded satisfied, and there wasn’t any way to see, in the darkness, if her face spoke another truth.
I said, shrugging, “I’ve always only farmed, myself. I guess the farming will be the same, there or here. That’s what people say.”
“Only the weather will be better.” Barbara smiled slowly, gesturing with one hand. “Arturo has been telling us everything about the weather up there.”
“And in the Philippines.”
She laughed again. “Yes. In the Philippines.”
“Well, there won’t be any hurricanes in that thing, I guess. And if they’ve thought it out right, the made-rain won’t burn the trees.”
There was a brief silence. Then Barbara asked me, “When is it you’re going up?”
“I’m packed. A car will come for me in the morning, deliver me to the launch site.” I thought of adding, But I don’t know if I’m going, and discovered I had no wish, after all, to let anyone else look at my decision.
Barbara nodded. She shifted her weight silently, and it became clear she was waiting to go back to her bed.
I went to the open door. “Well, good night, then,” I said in embarrassment. I would have kept on with our talk. I seemed to have this compulsion now, to discuss the environment of the Dusty Miller.
“Good night,” Barbara said, without moving from where she stood, arms folded, in the middle of the front room. “Thank you for bringing Arturo home. We’ll see each other up there.”
“Maybe we will.”
I went out again to the cart road and stood at the edge of the ruts and thought of breaking off for home; I thought of giving up this restless, useless night-wandering and taking my poor wayworn body home to bed. But then my feet went on up the track toward the rocky ridge of the Ojo de la Luna.
The air became thicker, freighted with smoke, and I fell to a plodding pace. I wished I had gotten a drink from Arturo’s cup. Wished I had brought him to the door and said goodnight and gone quickly away from the tired woman’s house.
The cart road, when it had gained the ridge called the Eye of the Moon, turned south along the face of the limestone bluff, but I left the road and followed dimly worn trails northward along the backbone. From the high outlook, in the smoky night, the neat checkerwork of fields in the valley seemed fashioned of bronze, copper, umber, terracotta. The darkness was starless and feverish, the moon a smudged, brownish ellipse behind the dirty sky.
Where will the smoke go on the Dusty Miller? I wondered suddenly. People say the bodies of the dead will be burnt and the ashes turned in with the soil, but where will the smoke go in a closed world?
When I was young, still a girl, in certain months of the year the sun would come above the Ojo de la Luna in cool mornings and flood the sky with transparent light, and the atmosphere on such mornings was clear at least as far as the nearest summits of the cordillera. But even in those years, the farming populations all up and down the narrow highland spine of Middle America were burning their fields, the hillsides too stony or steep for plowing, and in the sowing months the burden of smoke in the air would shroud the peaks, the sun would rise red, a glare. Now the vast forests of the Amazon burn throughout the year, making way for fields of cattle, and there never are clear days now, not in the rainy season, not even in January, which has traditionally held the year’s most pleasant weather. In the afternoons in every month the air i
s hot, murky, oppressive.
We grow a maize, a small old kind with a dark purple husk that fits the ear tightly and trails beyond it in a long stiff beard, tough husks that for the most part keep out the weevils that destroy so much stored grain in a climate prevailingly wet and warm, and we go on planting our maize as the Indians must have done on this same land before Columbus came, cutting the old stalks with machetes, dropping the seeds into holes made with pointed sticks, while elsewhere in this world people follow the pandemic, destructive impulse of technology: They plant larger and yet larger hybrids that outgrow their clothes, corn that keeps badly and has to be treated with pesticides, fungicides, formaldehyde. In the rest of the world, huge machines with glassed cabs roll across vast fields of played-out soil, and a bushel of corn is paid for in two bushels of topsoil, lifted to the sky in voluminous brown scrims of dust. In March, when the corporate farms are making ready to plant their fields, columns of smoke rise high above the tops of the ridges all around the estancia, and ash settles on the porches, the fields, the jacaranda trees.
If they want to put my ashes in the soil, there is a clarity to that, a circularity I like, but I don’t want the smoke of my body to foul the air. What if there are no Fourth Month rains, and the smoke from people’s burned bodies is let out to darken the air?
The goatpaths took me gradually down from the Ojo, northwest across a gravel wash and then westerly along the edges of terraced fields where a branch of the river had once flowed—a dusty channel now overgrown with shrubs and small trees. It was this same long-abandoned side channel that divided my own taro field from the maize, and finally, having decided nothing, I followed the troublous avenue of bare rocks in a long slow circling toward home.
My house is older than the Quaker settling of the land—built before The War, before the last several wars perhaps, a thick-walled bahareque with white-washed beams and an idiosyncratic placement: Its windowless back stands to the road, and the unglazed “front” windows look behind to a field dotted with orange trees, and a high-peaked shed roof that one time housed a sugar mill. When I came through the orange trees in the hot night, a Gray’s thrush flew out from the dulce shed, and, looking, I saw she had built her nest high up in a dark corner of the metal roof.
I remember in the days of my childhood, my mother standing with her forearms resting on the wide frame of the window, watching birds crack apart the leavings of corn in their horned beaks, and she would name for me the doves and shy woodrails, the toucans and quails attracted to the spillage. In those days there had been cinnamon-bellied squirrels as well, and a pair of blue tanagers who year after year made a small soft cup on the ridgepole in the very center of the high-peaked dulce shed. But no squirrels have been seen on this land in the last decade, and the tanagers have gone too, after yearly failing to hatch or raise a single nestling. The native birds are steadily more rare as their sheltering forests dwindle and coarser, more commonplace species take possession of the land. In the recent days since my corn was laded up to the sky, only grosbeaks have flocked into the yard to glean the spilled grain, and this Gray’s thrush is the first I have seen in a year.
While I stood pondering the thrush’s neat little nest, the poor bird waited in one of the orange trees, her eggs undefended. She will hatch them, if any of the eggs are viable, after I have moved to the Miller. And standing there in the hot dimness at the edge of my fields, I realized that this bird brooding in my shed might be the last Gray’s thrush I would see in my lifetime.
The fields of the Miller are in the ancient Pennsylvania Quaker manner, every seventh acre set aside for forest, but the plantings are deliberately various, a subtropical pastiche. Among the few trees familiar to me—kapok and paperbark, breadfruit, candlenut—are to be banyan, bamboo, litchi, camphor: trees that seem to me as astonishingly exotic as cactus or the stunted pines of a tundra. And the greater part of the fauna have come from a little parcel of mountainous land that was willed to the Japanese Society of Friends by the Nature Conservancy. No carnivores have survived on that steep little woodland nor any of the big, wide-ranging herbivores; those are gone, all of them, gone for decades. But the Japanese Friends have succeeded in protecting a native biology, a few dozen species of formerly hundreds of tortoises, snakes, lizards, toads, frogs, newts, birds, insects; and these have formed the core of the Miller’s living and creeping things. Whether a Gray’s thrush will make its life in that polyglot forest among that little multitude of Japanese birds, Japanese animals, is not known to me. What birds will nest in the farm sheds of the Dusty Miller?
At last I went into my house and waited in the darkness until the wary bird came back to the eggs. When I put on the light, there were—almost a kind of surprise—the waiting boxes, and the loose drifts of uncrated belongings, things to be handed over to my homebound neighbors. I ought to have gone to bed. The long, absurd walking had brought me no clarity, I thought—had been only wearing and dusty and maundering. I was tired and someone would be at my door early to take away my packing. But I sat down among the crates and then got up again suddenly, restless, and went among my things until I’d found the books.
In early Meetings, worries were raised, and laid to rest, about the technology in the Miller: People wanted to go on living plainly, in the manner of Friends, and after all there would not be the resources for repairing or replacing complicated machinery, problematic instruments and appliances. But the balance that has been struck is sometimes odd, incongruous. Books, which are the plainest of human tools, must be housed in a manner to keep them carefully from the wet and warmth, and the limited space in that sealed and air-conditioned place, set against the necessary compass of knowledge, means a vast library of microfiche and videos, and just a tiny library of bound volumes. There are, in the two rooms of this house, many hundreds of books that will remain behind, and a single crate of twenty-six books that will travel with me to the Miller. The size of the box, the bulk and weight that are permitted to me, have forced me to providence: I have kept Zardoya’s translations of Whitman, but nothing of Calderon. Have put aside Le Grand Meaulnes, kept Les Miserables. Now I was inexplicably, suddenly, stricken with apprehension: had I put Song of the Lark in the stacks to be given away, or the box to be taken up? Adios, Mr. Moxley? Sigrid Lavransdatter? I sorted through the books, reading and rereading the indexing in a fever of suspicion. By what measure had I included The Magic Mountain, but not Pajaros del Nuevo Mundo?
The air remained thick, hot. I knelt painfully before the box, overcome with nostalgia and an indecipherable sorrow. How had I imagined I could live the balance of my life without holding the pages of Cesar Vallejos in my hands? What if the people who had promised to include Beloved, Ficciones, Historie de ma Vie, changed their minds or forgot their promises?
In my crate, one book is old, rare, has a value beyond words. Elizabeth Martin and her husband had been among the First Seventy who settled the old estancia, and her handwritten diary is a family treasure. The First Seventy had been members of Ohio or Iowa Yearly Meetings, had emigrated after one of the first World Wars—escaping militarism, as they thought—thus Elizabeth’s diary is in English. I am even now making my slow way through it for the third time or the fourth, my English still as poor as my Esperanto. There is a rayon ribbon I use to mark my place in it, and the ribbon now lies among painful pages: She is waiting for the slow doctor, the slow lab, to say if she has a cancer. She kept the secret, the little hard bead in her breast, even from her husband, confided her dread only to the pages of her diary. It is an old anxiety, made edgeless by familiarity, and tonight when my hands brought that book up from the bottom of the box I suppose my sudden brief weeping had as much to do with birds and starless nights and the burned and buried bodies of the dead, as with the worn old sorrows of Elizabeth Martin’s life.
I have wondered: When Elizabeth wrote her secrets, who were they meant to be read by? She always would identify people. “Mary (my mother),” she would say. Or, “Arthur, my aunt’s sec
ond son.” Did she know, then, that her private words would be read by strangers? Why else identify these people she well knew? Who did she imagine would take the trouble to work out her English words, her crabbed vertical hand? Who would need the benefit of such naming?
Many people are keeping diaries again. They want to record the momentous events of these times, and their feelings—explanations, apologies, defense—addressed to children and grandchildren and the seven or eight generations afterward who must live out their lives within the hull of that houseboat until it fetches up on the distant rocks of Epsilon Eridani. I have no children, no one to whom I must apologize. I have wondered: What person would struggle to work out my spidery handwriting, my idiomatic Spanish, to read of arthritic joints, of the making of pottery and the growing of maize? For whom should I write?
But here, as you see, are the first pages of my diary.
Perhaps Elizabeth Martin imagined herself writing for a woman then unborn—for Dolores Negrete, who is only an old and childless woman descended from the Martins’ family line, a Spanish-speaking woman who trudges through the night in order to circle round to the truth, a woman who sits on the floor of her house reading old painful confidences as she makes ready to begin her life again after sixty years. As I now imagine you, an Esperanto-speaking person unrelated to me, a person now unborn, who in 150 years, or two hundred, will be circling round again to the truth, beginning your life again. I imagine you sitting on the floor of your house reading my anxious musings about the smoke of burnt bodies and the leaving-behind of birds’ nests, and as I am writing this, you are thinking of the forepart of your life and the after, in the days that separate them.
PART ONE
INSCRIPTIONS
