Animal Dreams

by Barbara Kingsolver

  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 polite 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 bo
rn—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.

  The sound of drums and then the drummers themselves emerged from the kiva. The four old men took their position at the edge of the plaza and propped their huge drums on their knees without missing a beat. They began a soft chant. A second line of men with blankets draped over their shoulders climbed down from the kiva, also singing, and took their places behind the old drummers.

  Then deer arrived, from everywhere. They were men and boys with black shirts and leggings, white kilts, and deer antlers. Their human features disappeared behind a horizontal band of black paint across the eyes. They moved like deer. They held long sticks in front of them, imitating the deer’s cautious, long-legged grace, and they moved their heads anxiously to the side: listening, listening. Sniffing the wind. The woman in black stepped forward shaking her gourd rattle, and they followed her. They became deer. They looked exactly as deer would look if you surprised them in a secret rite in the forest, moving in unison, following the irresistible hiss of a maiden’s gourd rattle.

  I was entranced. More people climbed down out of the kiva. Some were dressed and armed as bow hunters who stalked the deer with patience. One man, who didn’t seem to have any realistic function in the drama, was nearly naked and bizarrely painted. His body was ringed with black and white horizontal stripes, he had black rings painted around his eyes and mouth, and his hair was pulled up into a pair of corn-tassel horns. He bounced around like a hysteric, possibly in the interest of keeping warm.

  “Who’s the striped guy?” I asked Loyd.

  “Koshari,” he said. “A kachina. He has to do with fertility. His home’s in the East.”

  This struck me as humorous. “The East, as in New York? Area Code 212?”

  “The East as in where the sun rises.”

&nbs
p; “That’s all part of his job description?”

  “All the kachinas have whole histories and families and live in one of the important places.”

  “I thought a kachina was a little doll.”

  “That’s right.”

  “And also a person dressed up?”

  “Yep. And a spirit.”

  “A spirit with a family and a mailing address.”

  “That’s right. When the person dresses up a certain way, the spirit comes into him. And into the doll, if it’s made right.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Nothing, just okay. I understand.”

  He smiled at me sideways. “You think it sounds voodoo?”

  “All right, I’m narrow-minded. It sounds kind of voodoo.”

  We both paid attention to the dancers for a while. I needed to keep a little distance from Loyd.

  “Anglos put little dolls of Santa Claus around their houses at Christmas,” Loyd said without looking at me.

  “Yeah, but it’s just a little doll.”

  “And does it have a wife?”

  “Yes,” I conceded. “A wife and elves. And they live at the North Pole.”

  “And sometimes one guy will dress up like Santa Claus. And everybody acts a certain way when he comes around. All happy and generous.”

  I’d never been put in a position to defend Santa Claus. I’d never even believed in Santa Claus. “That’s just because he stands for the spirit of Christmas,” I said.

  “Exactly.” Loyd seemed very pleased with himself.

  One of the hunters had drawn his bow and shot an invisible arrow into a deer. It gave an anguished shiver, and then the other hunters lifted its limp carcass onto their shoulders.

  “I’ve seen Jesus kachinas too,” Loyd said. “I’ve seen them hanging all over people’s houses in Grace.”

  Now there was a thought to ponder.

  Koshari must also have been the spirit of nuisance, or a good belly laugh. The other deer dancers still followed the maiden, ignoring the hunters and their own fallen brother, but Koshari clowned and cut between them, getting in their way and generally interfering with their solemnity. But when one of the youngest dancers lost his antlers, Koshari picked up the headdress and carefully reattached it by its buckskin laces. The boy kept dancing, eyes front, paying no attention to the hobgoblin who was putting his costume back together.