Paul’s hand was on my arm, its pressure light, but somehow compelling. “This is where they used to picnic. Can you remember it? Can you remember anything?”
I could only shake my head. The place was strange to me. It was not familiar as the mesa country seemed beyond Santa Fe. Perhaps something in me, always on guard, had buried the memory of this hillside so deep in my consciousness that it was forever blocked from rising.
A steep, rocky path led from the clearing to the ledge below—a ledge that was out of sight of the picnic place because of the brush. Paul led the way again, and I followed him, my sandals slipping on the rough earth as we went down. The ledge below gave way in turn to a steep bank sloping to the bottom of the arroyo, and as I reached it something in me quivered—and was still. For an instant, memory had fluttered, only to be rejected by whatever it was that stood so relentlessly on guard.
How quiet everything seemed. There was no noise of blasting now, but only a faint whispering as breezes touched the treetops and wild shrubbery. I was aware—as though I stood on some dangerous verge—but I was still untouched.
“This is where it happened,” Paul said softly.
Stepping to the edge of the steep bank, I looked down, and now I was shivering and a little sick. This was not because I remembered, but only because of all I’d been told of what had happened here. I turned about slowly, my eyes searching the nearer ground, and then seeking what lay farther off.
Up the hillside I could see adobe walls that surrounded the Cordova house, and I could see that one high room which had been my mother’s, standing up above the lower roofs, I could see the window from which Clarita had looked that day—the window of what was now my room. Hillside and house and window were all as they had been long ago. Only I was not the same. I had been a small child then. I was a woman now. A woman who could remember—nothing.
As I stared at the window, something moved beyond the glass, and I knew someone was watching us. But the light was wrong and I couldn’t see who it was. It didn’t matter. Let them worry that I had come here, if they chose.
Paul no longer touched my arm, and he had stepped back a little to let me be alone. I turned toward him and saw that pale yellow-green of his eyes, felt the pressure his will once more exerted upon me.
“Tell me what you’re thinking,” he said. “Tell me what you see.”
“I don’t see anything except what’s here. It all seems strange to me.”
He was watching me closely. “Let me remind you. Your grandmother Katy and Gavin were in the clearing above when it happened. Eleanor was with them. She was about ten at that time. Two or three neighbors had joined them. Juan was at home because he never liked picnics and he wasn’t well that day. Clarita wasn’t feeling well either, and she was lying down in Doro’s room, which was more airy than her room downstairs. At least that’s the story she tells. Sylvia and I were just leaving the house. We came along the lower path, and Kirk must have been waiting for Doro right here when she arrived. Doesn’t any of this come back to you?”
Nothing did. There had been only that quiver of memory when I’d looked down into the arroyo, but it was nothing clear that I could recognize and account for. Paul Stewart’s presence disturbed and distracted me. How could I remember anything with that intense demand he put upon me?
“Why does it matter so much to you for me to remember?” I asked. “A child’s recollections can’t mean anything. Not in so young a child.”
“I’d like something fresh for this section of my book, of course,” he told me. “But if you can’t remember, you can’t.”
“Perhaps it would help if I could stay here alone for a little while,” I said.
“If you like. I’ll go back to my typewriter. You know the way home.” He was almost curt now—as though he had satisfied himself about something and had no further use for me.
I nodded and he went back along the hillside by the way we had come. Immediately, I was closed in by a pocket of silence. City sounds were far away, and few cars came along the quiet lane above.
What had it been like to be five years old on that long ago day and stand here on this hillside with my mother? What had I seen and heard? Surely I must have been terrified, shattered, hysterical. Yet there was no emotion in me except for that which conscious knowledge provided. This was the place where my mother had died. She had fallen down this steep bank into the arroyo, and the fall had killed her. But first she had deliberately raised the gun she’d brought with her and had shot Kirk Landers.
No! There was something wrong. Something I could not believe in what I’d been told. Since this ledge where they had stood revealed nothing to me, I climbed back to the clearing, and this time I faced the cottonwood tree that I had only walked beneath before. At once a piercing, terrifying sense of recognition flashed through me. This was the tree of my nightmare. It was tall and spreading and thickly leaved, its branches gnarled with age. It commanded the hillside and it must have seemed a giant to the little girl I had been.
Nearby stood a weathered wooden bench, probably left by those former picnickers, and I sat down on it abruptly because my knees were trembling. This was where I must have sat as a child, facing the tree. I had stared at it in my desperate state until I saw it above all else, and it had marked me with a haunting—the symbol of something terrible that a young mind had washed away.
This was the beginning of memory and I was frightened. The tree of my dream was centered in some mirage of horror and I could feel the misty visions sweeping back upon me in waves of vertigo. I put my head down upon my knees and let the dizziness wash over me. My handbag was under my cheek, and I could feel in it the shape of the sketchbook I took with me everywhere. Let me exorcise the tree by drawing it, I thought. Let me register its reality so that I would not dream of it in terror ever again.
As I reached into my bag the little “Eye of God” Sylvia had given me came to my fingers. I held it for a moment, half smiling. Let its spell against evil work now, if ever it did.
Then, with my pencil in hand, and the sketchbook open on my knees, I began to draw, shaping the gnarled form of the tree—the trunk and the branches, the foliage that had seemed to reach out to smother me in my dream. The drawing that took shape on paper was more like my nightmare than was the real tree. Its limbs seemed to writhe as if with eerie motion, its leaves appeared to flutter in a raging wind.
I closed my eyes to shut out the horror that seemed embodied in what I had drawn, and at once there was new motion before my eyes. Shadowy figures struggled and fought each other for their lives, and horror had a color—the color of scarlet, of blood. But nothing was clear. There was no real remembering.
Sounds reached me from the path above. Someone was coming down from the direction of the road. Someone real in a real world. I could not bear it if Paul had come back. He must not see me like this—on the verge of dreadful discovery, my hands wet with perspiration, so that the pencil was slippery in my fingers, and my mouth was dry. I opened my eyes reluctantly and looked at the man who stood before my bench. It was Gavin Brand.
He must have seen terror in my face. Quietly he sat beside me on the bench and looked at my open sketchbook.
“You’ve caught more than the image of a tree,” he said. “You’ve caught the spirit of it. When I was a small boy, I used to think that some trees were alive, as men were alive. I used to think there were trees that could menace me.”
I began to breathe in deeply, steadying myself. “I remember this tree,” I said. “Sometimes I’ve dreamed about it in a nightmare. It’s a dream I’ve had all my life.”
“I can understand its haunting you. I was here, you know. I brought you up from the ledge below and got you to sit on this bench for a while. I had to leave you because there was need for help. I climbed down into the arroyo with Paul Stewart and helped to bring your mother up. Nothing could be done for Kirk. When I came back, the way you looked frightened me. You’d stopped crying, and you were sitting there
staring at that tree with a fixed look that was hard to break.”
“I must have imprinted it on my memory, while I wiped out everything else.”
“It’s likely. Katy was concerned about you, but she was trying to see to what must be done, and carry on in spite of her own shock. She asked me to take you and Eleanor back to the house.”
I could say nothing. He was telling me the whole terrible story, and it left me shaken—though I could not feel that I’d been there. Gently he reached out and took one of my damp hands into his.
“This is the way I held your hand that day. You clung to me and didn’t want to let me go. When you went to sleep that night, you wanted me to sit beside your bed for a while. You were so young and frightened, and I suppose I was frightened too. I’d never come up against violent death before. Something pretty ghastly had happened to people I knew. I’d always liked Doro. She was gay and a bit frivolous, I suppose, but she was kind, too. She never hurt anyone.”
He broke off with an exclamation, staring at me.
“Those earrings you’re wearing! Your grandfather gave them to her. She had them on the day she died. I remember those little birds at her earlobes when we brought her up from the arroyo.”
His hand about my own steadied me, comforted me. I reached up with my free hand and touched coral and turquoise. But I did not pull the clips from my ears. They made me feel as though I were coming closer to Doroteo.
“Thank you for telling me all this,” I said. “I don’t remember, really. Perhaps I don’t want to remember. But sometimes the curtain lifts a little and when it does I feel dizzy and terrified. Yet I’ve got to face it. I must remember. I know that I saw someone struggling, but I don’t know for certain that it was my mother and Kirk.”
“It must have been,” he said. “There was no one else there.”
I tried to steady myself, tried to thrust terror away and return to a real and present world.
“How did you happen to find me here just now?”
“I was looking for you. I went up to your room, and when you weren’t there, I looked out your window and saw you here with Paul. I didn’t like that. You should stay away from him. He means nothing but mischief. So I came along by the upper road.”
I drew my hand from his and wiped it with my handkerchief. It was good to be looked after for a while, but I couldn’t let him dictate to me whether or not I would see Paul Stewart. If Paul was on my road to discovery, then I would of course see him.
“Why were you looking for me?” I asked.
A slight smile touched his somber face. “A guilty conscience, perhaps. I’ve been thinking over some of the things I said to you this morning. I was too harsh and I felt it might be in order to tell you I was sorry. Since I had to come back to the house from work to see Juan, I looked for you.”
“You were fair enough,” I said. “If you thought Juan was going to use me in some way against Eleanor, you’d have to protect her.”
He said nothing, and there was silence between us. I was feeling calmer, and somehow safer. Once, when I had been a child, Gavin had protected me, and now I had again a feeling of security in being with him. Since he wasn’t being harsh and critical, I could relax and let down my guard. Perhaps he was the one who could help me.
“Will you take me to the rancho?” I said.
“The Rancho de Cordova?” He was surprised.
I told him then about the message from Katy and the small package she had left for me with Sylvia. I had no idea what I must search for at the rancho, but sooner or later I must go there, and perhaps it would be best if Gavin could take me, rather than one of the others.
He didn’t hesitate. “I’ll stop at the house and phone the store. Then we’ll go out there. I don’t know what you can hope to find, but I’ll take you, if you wish. Katy must have had some intent in mind. She was a wonderfully sane and sensible person.”
I closed my sketchbook upon the nightmarish drawing of the cottonwood tree, and stood up, turning my back on the real tree.
“Thank you. I feel better now. I’m ready to go.”
He nodded his approval, and I thought how kind he could be when he was not condemning me.
We took the short-cut path along the hillside to the back gate of the Cordova house, and there were no more twinges of memory to trouble me. Inside, Clarita was not about. I waited in the living room while Gavin made his call, and then we went out to his car and drove away from Canyon Road.
The highway led south out of the city, in the direction of Albuquerque, but in a little while we turned off on a road that led toward Los Cerrillos, The Little Hills. Again there was empty country and straight roads. I settled back in the seat and let the wind from the open window blow in my face. After my experience in the clearing, I wanted only to be quiet for a little while and renew my forces. Gavin seemed to understand and there was no idle conversation between us on the half-hour drive away from Santa Fe.
I was almost drowsing when Gavin spoke to me. “There’s the hacienda ahead—the Rancho de Cordova. Most of the land has been sold and it’s not what it was in the old days when Juan’s father was alive.”
Juan’s father—my great-grandfather, I thought.
He pulled the car up to a curb before a long, low adobe building. Francisco and Maria, the couple Juan had placed in charge of the hacienda, came to the door to welcome us. They knew Gavin, of course, but had come here since Doroteo’s day, so they did not remember my mother. They greeted me warmly, however, as a granddaughter of Juan Cordova.
We stepped into the dim, cool sala, where strings of chili and Indian corn hung from the vigas, and the furniture was dark and shabby and old. Gavin explained that I wanted to see the place and asked permission to show me around.
“Está bien,” Maria said, with a wave of her hand, offering me the house.
As we stood at a window, looking out into an empty courtyard, he told me a little about what the rancho had once meant to the countryside.
“There was always fighting in the early days. And when the Pueblo Indians attacked Santa Fe, most of the Spaniards in the area were killed. Settlers out here came to the rancho for protection. Later, when the Spaniards were gone, Union troops sheltered here when they were fighting Rebel forces.”
I looked out at the empty courtyard of bare earth, baking dry and cracked beneath the sun. A long portal with wooden pillars stretched along one side of the open space, and at the back was a building of adobe bricks.
“Once that was an army barracks,” Gavin said.
I could look out and see phantom horses and men stirring the dust, see my great-grandfather moving among them with that pride of bearing that Juan Cordova, his son, would also carry. New England’s chill rocks seemed very far away, and I knew that I belonged to this place of sun and dust as well.
“It sleeps now,” Gavin said. “Few of us come here to visit. But when Clarita and Rafael and Doroteo and Sylvia were young, it was never quiet.”
“And Kirk?” I said.
“Yes, of course. I only remember him after the time when he came back—just a little while before his death. I suppose I knew him when I was a child, but I have only a vague memory of him as rather wild and dashing—dramatic. I was younger than the others, and I was only a small boy when they all used to come out here. I’ve been told that Doro was a great rider, though a little reckless. She and Kirk used to ride together. Eleanor and I rode too, when we came out here as children. But all that’s gone. Juan keeps no horses here now.”
We turned from the sunlight of the empty courtyard and Gavin led the way into the long, shadowy house and down a corridor, off which many rooms opened.
“I don’t know what to look for that might be unlocked by so small a key,” Gavin said. “Will you let me see it?”
I took the ring box from my bag and sprang the catch. The little key was tucked into its satin nest.
“Perhaps a jewel case,” I said.
He nodded. “We might as well begi
n here—with what used to be your mother’s room.”
I stepped across the sill and looked about. The room was empty of belongings, impersonal. Dust covers had been thrown over the bed and there were no rugs on the floor, or pictures on the wall. All traces of Doroteo Austin had long been removed.
Moving about the room, I opened empty drawers and examined the graceful rosewood desk. In only one drawer did I find something that brought a flicker of recognition. It was a glass paperweight and when I picked it up snowflakes flew over mountains that resembled the Sangre de Cristos, and over the twin church towers of St. Francis.
“I believe I used to play with this when I was little,” I said. “Do you suppose anyone would mind if I keep it?”
“I’m sure not” Gavin’s tone was kind.
He seemed a different man from the one I’d toured the store with this morning. For some reason I didn’t wholly understand, he appeared to have accepted me without the rancor and suspicion he had harbored toward me earlier. In the same way my own resentment toward him had faded because he had indeed become the friend I’d needed. With a new, quiet assurance I felt I could talk to him when the time came—and he would listen. Such knowledge brought with it a warmth that was comforting.
Since there was nothing here in my mother’s room that could be unlocked by a tiny key, we went on to the next door, which Gavin opened for me.
“This was your grandmother Katy’s room whenever she came to the rancho.”
I stepped past him eagerly and came to a shocked halt. Someone had been here ahead of us. As though one of those whirlwinds had struck it, everything in the room had been stirred about in great haste and without any effort to replace the things which had been moved. The room was still furnished, and little effort had been made to dispose of the possessions of the woman who had once occupied it. What was here had been thoroughly disturbed.
The Turquoise Mask Page 14
