Animal Dreams: A Novel

by Barbara Kingsolver

  We left the truck in the company of other pickups and station wagons at the edge of town, and walked up into the narrow streets. In his moccasins Loyd walked with a softer, less aggressive gait. Jack stayed close to his left knee. There wasn't a soul out, but lines of smoke drifted from chimneys and the big adobe beehive ovens that squatted in every third or fourth backyard. A black dog pawed at the edge of a frozen puddle. The ladders that connected one rooftop to the next were drifted lightly with snow. One house had a basketball hoop nailed to the end beams. Front curtains everywhere glowed with warm interior light, though it was still early afternoon, and strings of bright red chilies hung by the front doors.

  Loyd's mother's house had a green door. The front window was crowded with artificial flowers and ceramic animals. Loyd's oldest sister, Birdie, met us at the door. The two of them spoke rapidly in a language that sounded like song, as if the pitch might be as important as the syllable. Birdie had a perm, and wore a large turquoise necklace over her flowered blouse. She stopped talking to Loyd just long enough to touch my arm and say, "He still has that dog, don't he?" and "Come get warm." We followed her into the kitchen, where Loyd's mother enveloped him with a hug, then tugged his ponytail and lightly boxed his ears.

  "What's she saying?" I asked Birdie.

  "She's saying he looks like a Navajo."

  The kitchen smelled of cedar smoke. Inez Peregrina was cooking a goose, among other things. She wore a large dress composed of about six different cotton fabrics, florals and plaids, somehow colorfully harmonic. The frames of her glasses were large and owlish. Her gray hair was trimmed in bangs and a pageboy over her ears, but long in back, twisted into a heavy, complicated coil and tied with red cloth. Her hands were noticeably large. I wanted her to hug me too, but she only smiled and touched my cheek when Loyd introduced us. She continued talking to him in a steady, musical downpour, to which he was attentive.

  Birdie disappeared and soon returned at the head of a flock of women, and I was introduced, but the conversation between Inez and Loyd went on, uninterrupted. One at a time, each of the other women held out both hands to me, which I took, trying to appear gracious while I struggled to get their positions straight. They were Loyd's sisters; a niece; his Aunt Sonia, who had lived in Grace during the war and after; and someone Loyd called his "navel mother." I couldn't discern the generations. Aunt Sonia spoke to me in Spanish and poured cups of coffee for Loyd and me from a huge tin pot on the wood-fired stove. There were also a propane stove and the adobe oven in the backyard, and all three were in use.

  I felt spectacularly out of place. For one thing, I stood a foot taller than any other woman in the room; we don't even have to get into matters of wardrobe. But I was also fascinated to watch Loyd being his mother's son. His sisters' brother, the apple of the family eye. The only remaining boy. The sisters asked him in calm, uninflected English about the drive and the length of our stay and whether he'd seen Aunt Maxine, who evidently had a heart condition. Aunt Sonia asked several specific questions about people in Grace, some of whom I knew better than Loyd because of my Stitch and Bitch association, but I was reluctant to speak. She and the sisters drifted away to other tasks, and Inez still hadn't stopped talking.

  "Is it okay if I look around?" I asked Loyd.

  "You can dance on the table if you want to, you're the guest," he said, grabbing me around the waist.

  "I don't want to dance on the table."

  He held on to me for just a minute, asking Inez in English what she thought of me. I passed a hand through my hair, thankful that it had had time to grow out from Billy Idol to a more or less regulation Mary Martin.

  Inez smiled and said something, running the ladle in her right hand up and down an imaginary line. I looked at Loyd for translation.

  "She says I'm lucky to have gotten such a big, strong girl. She thinks I'm lazy."

  "Tell her I don't put up with lazy men. I make them pull their weight."

  He told her and she laughed, giving me the hug I'd coveted.

  The frosted windowpanes looked out onto the cold plain and dish-shaped, empty cornfields that lay to the south, but the kitchen was smoky and warm. The open pantry behind Inez was stocked with jars of dry yellow corn, cans of Spam, and fruit cocktail. (No orchards here, evidently.) And hominy. In Grace it was golden jars of home-canned peach halves that sat smug on kitchen shelves. Here it was puffy white hominy, jar after jar of it, hominy enough for an army.

  The kitchen was at the end of a big room that contained a long wooden table, a sofa, numerous small chests, and many, many photos. A radio in another room played Hank Williams. I moved around the living room, idly looking out the windows and examining photographs. There was one of Inez and a man I presumed to be Loyd's father standing together in formal dress: he in silver-buttoned moccasins and a royal blue velvet shirt, Inez in turquoise bracelets and a silver squash-blossom necklace over her dark ceremonial dress. Her legs looked like white birch stumps in their buckskin leggings, and the woven blanket folded across her shoulders seemed to weigh her down. She looked much older than she must have actually been.

  Most of the available tabletops were populated by little ceramic animals of the pastel, cute variety. Loyd had told me Inez made the best pottery in the Pueblo, but evidently it was made for Anglo collectors, not for home use. I did find in a china cabinet a display of extraordinary black-and-white pots, their glazed surfaces covered with microscopically fine geometric designs. Some of the pots were slightly less well made, maybe some of the proud early efforts of Inez's daughters. A crude, dark bowl with a chipped rim sat in the cabinet's central place of honor, and I stared at it, puzzled, until I realized this was Loyd's pot, the one he'd found in the ruins. Loyd's offering from Canyon de Chelly.

  I peeked into the next room. Charlie Rich was singing from the radio now, and Birdie hummed "Behind Closed Doors" while she bent over an electric sewing machine. Its small light glowed on her face. A baby slept on a flat, fur-lined cradle board that hung like a swing on ropes from the ceiling. On every fifth arc of the swing, Birdie reached up without looking and gave it a push. She noticed me standing in the doorway and inclined her head toward the end of the room, where an iron bed stood behind a drawn-open curtain of blankets. "You can put things there. That's for you and Loyd."

  "Thanks," I said. "Who's the little one?"

  "My daughter's girl. Hester."

  "How old?"

  "Three weeks."

  "Does your daughter live here too?"

  Birdie pulled her cloth from the machine and shook her head slightly while she broke the thread with her teeth. "She goes to boarding school in Albuquerque."

  I returned to exploring the living room. I was stunned to run across a small framed photo of two little Loyds, identical, sitting astride very different horses. Behind them was a backdrop of dry hills and a brown water tank. Loyd and Leander, nine years old, looking as if they owned the world. Until I saw that picture I hadn't really heard a word he'd told me about losing his brother. You can't know somebody, I thought, till you've followed him home.

  That evening Inez's house filled with relatives for the feast. Cousins and uncles and aunts showed up, stamping the snow off their moccasins, bringing covered dishes and their own chairs. All the older women had their hair cut in the same style as Inez's, with short flaps over the ears and the heavy chignon in the back, and they wore silver necklaces and elaborate turquoise rings that shielded their knuckles. The teenage girls wore jeans and about everything else you'd expect on a teenage girl, except makeup. One of them nursed a baby at the table, under her T-shirt.

  Loyd and I shared one chair; apparently we were the official lovebirds of this fiesta. He spent a lot of time telling me what I was eating. There were, just to begin with, five different kinds of posole, a hominy soup with duck or pork and chilies and coriander. Of the twenty or so different dishes I recognized only lime Jell-O, cut into cubes. I gave up trying to classify things by species and just ate. To everyone's po
lite amusement, my favorite was the bread, which was cooked in enormous, nearly spherical loaves, two dozen at a time, in the adobe ovens outside. It had a hard brown crust and a heavenly, steaming interior, and tasted like love. I ate half a loaf by myself, believing no one would notice. Later, in bed, Loyd told me they were all calling me the Bread Girl.

  Our bed was small, but after three nights in the truck it felt deliciously soft. I cuddled against Loyd. "What's a navel mother?" I asked, drowsy with warmth and a half loaf of bread.

  "She's like a special aunt. She's the one that cuts the cord when you're born, and helps your mother get up out of bed when she's ready. They count that as your birthday--the day your mother gets up."

  "Not the day you were born?"

  "Not the day you came out. They count the mother getting better as all part of the birth."

  "Hallie doesn't have a birthday, then," I said. "After she was born, our mother never got up. She got real sick, and then a helicopter tried to come get her and she died. All without ever putting her slippers on."

  "Then Hallie never finished getting born," Loyd said. He kissed the top of my head.

  I was aware of the sleeping sounds of Inez and Hester on the other side of the makeshift curtain. I asked, "Is it okay that we're sleeping together?"

  Loyd quietly laughed at me. "It's okay with me. Is it okay with you?"

  "I mean with your family."

  "They're not hung up about it. Mama wanted to know if you're my woman."

  "Meaning what?"

  "As opposed to woman of the week, I guess."

  "Woman of the year," I said.

  In the morning snow had fallen, as deep as five or six quilts. The windows were round blue tunnels to the light, like the mouths of caves. Loyd got up and went outside, where, at dawn, Inez and Birdie were already involved with the day's industry. He was sent back to bed with a whole fresh loaf of bread.

  "How did your dad meet her?" I asked. Loyd and I were sitting on the roof of Inez's house now, facing south, waiting for ceremonies to begin in the plaza.

  "At a dance over in Laguna. In the summertime. It was a corn dance. Everybody says she was a knockout when she was young. A real good dancer."

  "I think she's a knockout now."

  "He grew up over at Jicarilla."

  "Where's that?"

  "Not too far from here. It's another Apache reservation. Everybody goes to everybody's dances. We used to go over to the Navajo powwows in the fall."

  Today, on Christmas Day in Santa Rosalia, there were supposed to be dances from morning till night. Half the town seemed to be preparing to dance, while the other half were busy getting good seats. I had no idea what to expect. Anxious-looking little boys clutching feather crowns and fox pelts ran across the corners of the plaza bent low, as if this would make them invisible. Earlier in the day these same little boys had run in boisterous gangs from house to house banging on doors and begging for warm crusts torn from the morning loaves. A wholesome version of trick-or-treat. Give these kids one Halloween in Grace, I thought, and they'd never be content with complex carbohydrates.

  "So he married your mother," I said. "And came here."

  "The women are kind of the center of things up here. The man goes to the wife's place."

  "But he didn't stay."

  "I never really knew Dad that well. He was already gone when he was still here, if you know what I mean. I don't know what it was that hurt him. I know he grew up at a boarding school and never had much family and he couldn't keep to the old ways. Or didn't know them. I don't know. It was real hard for him here."

  I let the subject go. As the twig is bent, so grows the tree, Doc Homer used to say, referring mostly to the bone structure of the feet but it applied to moral life as well. And who knew how the kinks happened; they just did. I ought to know. As Hallie had bluntly pointed out in her letter, I'd marked myself early on as a bad risk, undeserving of love and incapable of benevolence. It wasn't because of a bad grade on a report card, as she'd supposed. It ran deeper than that. I'd lost what there was to lose: first my mother and then my baby. Nothing you love will stay. Hallie could call that attitude a crutch, but she didn't know, she hadn't loved and lost so deeply. As Loyd said, she'd never been born--not into life as I knew it. Hallie could still risk everything.

  Loyd and I dangled our feet over the side of the roof, looking out over the plaza and beyond, to where the plaza ended suddenly, perforce, by the drop of a sheer cliff. I could only see this precipice as a threat, and wonder how toddlers lived to the age of reason without toddling over it, but many little feather-bedecked children were running along its edge as if it were nothing more than the end of a yard.

  I heard a drum and a brief burst of what sounded like sleigh bells. Then nothing. If anything ever did happen, we'd have a good view. We'd climbed a ladder to get where we were. Jack had given a long, dejected look up the rungs as if he might consider the climb, if he weren't so dignified. Now he lay curled at the bottom keeping watch. Old wooden ladders and aluminum extension ladders were propped everywhere; second-and third-story roofs served as patios. All around the plaza, legs hung like fringe over the sides of buildings. I spotted Inez and some other relatives across the way. Inez's owlish glasses were the type that turn dark outdoors; two huge black disks hid her round face as she sat, hands folded, inscrutable as a lifeguard.

  Not far from us in a sheltered corner of the roof was a wire pen full of geese and turkeys muttering the subdued prayers of the doomed. "Does your mama know you were a cockfighter?" I asked Loyd.

  "No." He hesitated. "She knew Dad did it, and that he took Leander and me to the fights when we were little, but she didn't care for him doing that. She never knew I went on with it. And you better not tell her."

  "I'm gonna tell," I said, poking him in the ribs. "I'm going to look up in my Keres-English dictionary, 'Your son is a dirty low-down rooster fighter.'"

  Loyd looked pained. Pleasing his mother was nothing to joke about. He'd given up cockfighting for Inez, not for me, I now understood. I'd just been the cricket in his ear. But that wasn't insignificant, I decided. I could settle for that. I looked down at the plaza, whose quilt of fresh snow remained a virginal white, unmarred by tracks. This seemed miraculous, considering the huge number of people crowded around its edges--a good two hundred or more. People must have come from outside the Pueblo. Jicarilla Apaches looking for knockout wives.

  "How come those houses over there near the edge of the cliff are falling down?" I asked. Their adobe plaster had cracked off, revealing the same artful masonry as Kinishba, in a state of collapse.

  "Because they're old," Loyd said.

  "Thank you. I mean, why doesn't somebody fix them up? You guys are the experts, you've been building houses for nine hundred years."

  "Not necessarily in the same place. This village was in seven other places before they built it up here."

  "So when something gets old they just let it fall down?"

  "Sometimes. Someday you'll get old and fall down."

  "Thanks for reminding me." I shaded my eyes, looking to the east. Something was happening near the kiva, which was a building with a ladder poking out through a hatch in its roof. Loyd had suggested I shouldn't show too much interest in it.

  "The greatest honor you can give a house is to let it fall back down into the ground," he said. "That's where everything comes from in the first place."

  I looked at him, surprised. "But then you've lost your house."

  "Not if you know how to build another one. All those great pueblos like at Kinishba--people lived in them awhile, and then they'd move on. Just leave them standing. Maybe go to a place with better water, or something."

  "I thought they were homebodies."

  Loyd rubbed his hand thoughtfully over my palm. Finally he said, "The important thing isn't the house. It's the ability to make it. You carry that in your brain and in your hands, wherever you go. Anglos are like turtles, if they go someplace they have to carry
the whole house along in their damn Winnesotas."

  I smiled. "Winnebagos. They're named after an Indian tribe." It occurred to me too late that Loyd already knew both these things. For months, I think, I'd been missing his jokes. Empress of the Universe, instructing the heathen.

  "We're like coyotes," he said. "Get to a good place, turn around three times in the grass, and you're home. Once you know how, you can always do that, no matter what. You won't forget."

  I thought of Inez's copious knickknacks and suspected Loyd was idealizing a bit. But I liked the ideal. The thought of Hallie's last letter still stung me but I tried to think abstractly about what she wanted to tell me: about keeping on the road because you know how to drive. That morality is not a large, constructed thing you have or have not, but simply a capacity. Something you carry with you in your brain and in your hands.

  I'd come on this trip knowing I still had to leave Loyd in June, that Grace wouldn't keep me, but maybe I was just keeping to the road. I felt guilt slip out of me like a stone. "It's a nice thought," I told him. "I guess I'll probably carry something away with me when I leave Grace."

  He looked at me carefully, started to speak, then stopped. And then did speak. "It's one thing to carry your life wherever you go. Another thing to always go looking for it somewhere else."

  I didn't respond to that. I blinked hard and tried to look unconcerned, but the guilt nudged back along with the sharp glass edge of my own rationalization, recognized for what it was. I wasn't keeping to any road, I was running, forgetting what lay behind and always looking ahead for the perfect home, where trains never wrecked and hearts never broke, where no one you loved ever died. Loyd was a trap I could still walk out of.

  I listened to the sad geese in their pen, and realized the crowd was quiet. The snowy plaza was marked with a single line of tracks: in the center of the white square stood a tall young woman in a black dress that hung from one shoulder. Her other shoulder was bare. Her waist, her upper arms and wrists, and her buckskin moccasins were all decorated with garlands of colored yarn, fur, and sleigh bells; at the crest of her head was a tuft of white eagle down. The sun shone purposefully on her hair. It was cut like Inez's, but hung loose to her waist, swaying as she moved slightly from one leg to the other, her feet barely leaving the ground. She looked graceful and cold.