Trinity Fields

by Bradford Morrow

  Genuine love was not going to treat us with the same genial if curious touch. Jessica, our Jessie, dear Jess, is—as they say—a whole other story.

  The moon ascends, a dollop of apricot sherbet, and I come awake from a dream that I have already forgotten but for the single detail that in it I was holding someone’s hand. I look at the ceiling, see a spider in one corner working very hard on a web, and then go through the moment all unseasoned travelers suffer: the recognition that my surroundings are unfamiliar.

  I remember, then stand and look out the window toward the ridge across the valley and am seized—I’m wide awake now, and know just where I am—by the need to see the mountains, and I climb into my pants and throw a jacket around me and walk barefoot out onto the ruined veranda and across the stretch of grass there until I reach a coyote fence, a vertical knitting of ragged sticks, and turn to look back over the low roof of the small hacienda and see them again, way off in the distance, the Jemez of my childhood, and it seems to me as I stand in the dew-wet chill of the predawn that the mountains rise away from the earth as if from a need to be as far removed from it as possible. It’s like a dream, still. Do spiders dream? Probably not, I think. Too assiduous to squander time with dreams. I draw a deep breath of gaunt air, close my eyes and open them.

  The clouds begin to take on their morning colors, in the same way pigments cut by mineral spirits and poured over fine, unprimed canvas would spread in billowing shapes until the surface was all beautifully stained. The intricacy of the basin that gives into this smaller canyon, the cloud-crowned peaks, the sawtooth of trees and bushes along the horizon, the Russian olive and the tamarisk, the lilac and paintbrush, the hacienda itself whose irregular white adobe walls are covered with the fingers of creeping vines, the whole scape radiating a fragile strength, all come to me at once.

  The moment is a gift. This was my home. I could resist feeling tentatively cheerful, but don’t. I know it won’t last anyway.

  And then, I realize my feet are stinging with the chill of the night grass, and I run back inside, find some wool socks in my bag, and light the gas burner on the stove to heat water for the coffee Alyse gave me last night after dinner. Coffee beans in a paper sack, some milk and sourdough biscuits. “Just for the morning, to get you started,” she said, and handed me a flashlight for the short walk back. I watch the blue corollas of flame under the kettle and think about last night—maybe as a way of avoiding today, and what it might bring.

  The big house was just that. Flagstone staircases circling upward from one level to the next, doors and windows looking out every direction, southwest toward the lights of the city, eastward up the horseshoe canyon and spray of stars. All their shoes assembled by the front door, there must have been two dozen pairs, sandals, boots, moccasins. Gaslit refectory where we ate. Mission furniture mixed with Adirondack twisted hickory and painted old pine. Disarray and warmth. The pleasant, sincere mess of domesticity. They had roasted a chicken, greens, chèvre, some new potatoes with sage. It was evident that most meals here were less lavish—or, not lavish, but less structured—than what they’d prepared for me. Michael is an architect, so some of this unconstruction must be on purpose, I think. The wine bottle had a white sheen of dust along one side, the wineglasses were wet from rinsing. Little things gave me to believe this was something of a special occasion for them, and so I was made, despite myself, to feel welcome.

  Martha is a pretty girl, self-assured and opinionated, quite a handful. Her first words last evening were, “The sky is on everybody’s heads.”

  I thought for a moment to correct her, but then realized that she was right, and said, “How smart of you to notice.”

  “Thank you,” she smiled.

  Abandoning her earlier restraint, Alyse did ask the inevitable, and I warded it off with the half-truth—or incomplete truth—I’d thought to use if it came up. She may well have seen through it, my ruse about wanting to revisit Chimayó during the pilgrimage, clearly enough to recognize that it was no use to pressure me into giving her more. No doubt that subtlety is available to her.

  “I never saw you as the religious kind, Brice,” she allowed herself. I always forget how much I like Alyse. It is a satisfaction that grows, unobserved for the most part, over the years. Maybe I find her sympathetic because our contact is so intermittent and unburdened by the give-and-take experiences that become an active—thus possibly threatening—part of a true, lively friendship. She never lost her love of the West, and I admire that.

  She told us a story about how when she was taking a walk out in the desert one day she came upon an old kiva that had been mostly buried under dirt and sand, and was long since abandoned by all but a colony of red ants. She sat down on a stone to rest, and found herself watching the ants go about their business, as ants do, with diligence and vigor. The ants came up from the depths of the kiva to the surface in a dark florid procession, each carrying building materials for what appeared to be a very old hill, and every once in a while she noticed that one or two of the ants would be hefting along something rather more shiny than the usual bits of sand or clay, which aroused her interest.

  When she walked over to the procession to get a closer look, she saw that what the ants were carrying along were beads they had brought up from the cavern of the old kiva, and she realized that these were beautiful old beads of bone and shell from an Indian necklace or headdress. Before long, without really giving the matter much thought, she began taking the colorful beads from the face of the anthill where they’d been deposited, and soon had collected enough to make a bracelet. She said she went home that night very pleased about her discovery and good luck, and the next day strung for herself a bracelet, just as she’d planned.

  But the first time she put it on her wrist and held it up to the light to admire it, she was suddenly seized with guilt that though the bracelet was beautiful, it wasn’t hers. She’d stolen it from the ants.

  I said, “But the ants stole the beads from the kiva, didn’t they? And besides, ants don’t care one way or another whether they’re building their ant house out of sand or beads or diamonds.”

  “You’ve been in New York too long, Brice.”

  “What does New York have to do with it?”

  “Anyway,” she laughed. “I took the bracelet back up to the kiva site and unstrung it and threw the beads back on the anthill.”

  I smiled into her smile, wondering whether or not she’d made up this fable. I glanced over to Martha for my answer and Martha, rather than staring at her mother with wide-eyed wonder, was absorbed with moving her dinner around her plate with a fork. I could see that to her it was just another piece of her mother’s history, not a fairy tale or fable, not a yarn, and therefore could be listened to with one ear, as it were. This happened, simply, to her mother. Not a big deal. And slowly it was coming back to me, this Western quality I had rejected and then forgotten. It seemed so pure, last night, if sentimental. It seems pure this morning, strangely unsentimental. Maybe the hand in the dream was the hand that gave back the beads? I don’t think so.

  In any event, her being so completely of the West is enviable to an apostate like myself. To me, Lyse is unalloyed and ageless. It has been a good friendship over the years, steady after its own manner, telephone calls from time to time, the occasional visit, an on-and-off friendship only in the sense that our lives have been led in different places. We have never wrangled. I doubt we ever will.

  Need I say what happened to the two of us upon our return—or rather, upon our being returned—to Los Alamos? It was predictable, in a way, that we’d be punished for our Chimayó adventure, but the lengths to which our parents went to keep Kip and me apart were, if not drastic, at least for a period of time passionately imposed.

  —You two are not to speak, not to see each other, not to communicate with one another in any way shape or form, you hear me, William Brice? If I so much as get a hint that you two are talking, or hanging around together, your father and I . . .
well . . . we have discussed what we’re willing to do, so don’t push it.

  Were these words coming from my father’s mouth, I might have allowed myself some moments’ worry, but I knew my mother. We knew each other. My mother may have been furious on the surface, and was badly hurt beneath, but I guessed that somewhere buried amid her anger and hurt was a dissenter’s pride in me and what Kip and I had done. She was, after all, the only one who ever bothered to ask us why we’d appropriated a car and driven it into a ditch up near Wyoming. Everyone else assumed it was a joyride. That element of pride was what I kept looking for in my mother’s behavior those first few days back on the Hill, and I must admit I had to peer hard sometimes to find it there behind her stringent eyes. Given that I loved her, my poor mother—more than a decade younger then than I am now, standing there in her print dress with flowers, big indigo, puce, magenta, ivory flowers that promised all over its fluent surfaces, whenever she wore it, a decent and happy day—this was a nasty combination of emotions for me to admit to having provoked.

  Maybe she sensed what I was thinking, and attempted to deny me. Though I knew better, she did everything in her power to persuade me that she viewed our reckless gambit as just that, an extravagant prank carried out in order to humiliate her, and little more. My father remained more or less absent from home, stayed with his work in a Tech building to which I had no access even if I wanted to talk with him, which I didn’t, and as a consequence he was—to my way of thinking—less concerned than she, distant from caring, which was a kind of freedom, since if he didn’t care then I wouldn’t care. But the days came and went, and rather than forgiving and forgetting, my mother seemed not to want to let the matter go. She said I’d made a fool of her in front of all her students at school, students who happened to be my friends.

  —If you decline to show me a modicum of respect, how do you expect them to respect me? she asked, knowing I understood there was not one soul in the community who hadn’t known about what we’d done. I wondered how Kip might answer this question, and though I didn’t for the longest time speak with him or risk much more than a glance at him outside the classroom where we sat in desks distant from one another, I trusted that he must have been experiencing the same feelings of guilt and disgrace as I, although leavened maybe by some residual defiance I found harder to discover in myself.

  —I don’t know, I said, hoping she wouldn’t call me William Brice again, as she was wont to whenever scolding me.

  —You don’t know.

  She crossed her arms.

  —I guess not.

  —Well, in the future you might consider thinking things all the way through before you just go and do whatever comes into your head.

  Now I had my reply, but wondered whether to voice it.

  —Yes? she asked. My mother did know me. —Well?

  —Nothing, I muttered in a moment of rare grace.

  —You’re too much, Brice, she said, apparently having figured me out. —Don’t even think about starting with that stuff.

  Had I replied, I would have said something like, What about the forefathers of Los Alamos, the grampa progenitors of radioactive death? Talk about not thinking things through. How guilty can you get? Here I am trying to do something good for all of us. How come I’m supposed to feel so guilty? What is crashing one lousy car compared to scorching two entire cities?

  That would have been the beginning. I’d have stretched myself out into the same arguments that had always been convenient when a subject needed changing or some guilt needed lifting from my own shoulders. For once I didn’t grasp at the obvious, and it was fair I didn’t. My mother was forever caught between her devotion to Dad and her own private thoughts about the nature of his work. She felt, I believe with all my heart, the same contempt as I for the plutonium and uranium devices that were birthed on the Hill—“ether ores” she called the atom bombs once, ores that turned their victims to ether, the pun on “either-ors,” damned if you make them and damned if you don’t. Make them and you end the war with astonishing abruptness—Hiroshima, 6 August 1945; Nagasaki, 9 August 1945; V-J Day, 14 August 1945—a week and a day to terminate half a decade’s carnage. Make them and you know in your heart you’ve crippled if not lost what moral supremacy you may have held dear. I didn’t launch into my usual speech for once because I was guilty of hurting my mother’s feelings. I hadn’t thought through to the consequences of my action. And although I was the product of a culture that sometimes behaved no better than an inept adolescent who was intent on flexing muscles and not just climbing trees but shimmying out to the ends of the highest branches as if to dare the limb to break, I managed to get something from her that day. It was a lesson I would have to learn and relearn, but subtly I was impressed and modified.

  I settled into a new life, one part of which was close to my mother, the other devoted to wondering about Kip. They became the presence and absence that centered my world.

  My mother happened to be working on her Spanish, as always immersed in some project to improve her store of knowledge. I learned with her. That was the idea. This was to be my punishment. She and I would stay behind after school, and she’d drill herself as I sat with the open book and asked questions.

  Architecture, as I remembered within the first few hours of being back in New Mexico, was one of the lessons on which we concentrated.

  If indeed memory is a function of the intensity of original perception, so that the stronger the perception the stronger the memory of what was perceived, these study sessions must have been singularly intensive. Not only do I recollect with fantastic clarity the chalkboard running one length of the deserted classroom, and the soft light pouring in from the bank of windows along the adjacent wall, not only are the wooden desks with their wooden tops distinct, but the sound of her voice—deep and sure, mellifluous and bigger than her frame might lead one to expect —I can summon at will. I would write on the blackboard with soft white chalk the word encalar.

  —That’s a plasterer, she’d say. —No wait, that’s enjarradora, that’s plaster—that means to whitewash, whitewash.

  I’d look in the book and, yes, “to whitewash” was right.

  Next, I’d chalk out viga.

  And she’d say, —That’s too easy, give me another.

  —Fogón.

  —Fogón is fireplace.

  —Fireplace, and what else?

  —You’re a taskmaster, she smiled. —Fireplace, and hearth.

  —Furnace, too, I said. —Bulto.

  —Too easy.

  —Postigo.

  She thought for a moment, —That’s window grating?—no, uhm. Hold on. Postigo’s the small opening in a door, like a little window in a big door.

  —So what is a window grate called?

  —Reja, she said without hesitation.

  —You know all this stuff, I complained. I turned some pages, and drew on the blackboard:

  Then said, —What’s this?

  She said, —That isn’t anything. Do it again.

  —You don’t know what it is, I said.

  —No. I know what it should be. You drew it wrong.

  —No I didn’t, I said and looked at the figure in the book. I’d drawn it wrong.

  She said, —Thundercloud is what you were trying to make. Your artistic skills leave a little to be desired.

  —You’re wrong. It’s not a thundercloud. Just a cloud is all.

  And I smiled a half-serious see-there smile, and she smiled an impatient smile back. —It’s upside down, she said, more stern than the situation might have called for.

  I was not going to be daunted; gusts, small bursts of wind soughed in the stout green needles of a ponderosa outside the window. Such solace can be drawn from little things like that breeze-song. She’d waited for me to go on.

  —Here is an easy one, I said as I drew:

  —Rain, she answered.

  And so our sessions went until she would say, —Bien, bastante, that’s enough for toda
y.

  Still, hard as I tried to force myself into this other life with my mother, I couldn’t help thinking about Kip. I wondered about how he responded to the rebuke his parents must have given him. Was he feeling better? His injuries turned out to be relatively minor, he had a neck brace and a cast that he allowed no one to sign, and then the brace and cast came off, and he walked with a cane for a time. Did he show defiance? Yes, he must have, though I had no word from mutual friends or my parents or sister. Defiance was part and parcel of his nature. Did he feel regret, and if so, did he allow anyone to see it? Yes, again, I imagined he might have regretted what we’d accomplished, since it came to so little, and also because regret and defiance were contradictory and Kip seemed to like all things contrary. But, no—I doubted he let his regret be seen by anyone. Did he miss me? To this question I had no answer. I knew that my own feelings of warm indignation, which came on me deep in the night when everyone was asleep, and all the mountain birds were mute, and I was wide, wide awake, I knew my indignation—which I used in a way to get myself closer to him—was outdone, surely, by Kip’s. I could feel his blistering hostility as if it emanated from my own heart. If he was thinking about me, what was he thinking? I had stayed with it right up to the end, hadn’t I? I hadn’t failed him, I believed. Would he speak to me again once these parental constraints were rescinded? Did he still consider me his best friend and true blood brother? I knew I hadn’t measured up, yet one moment hoped he was thinking about me, while the next—this felt strange, like when you’ve lost a tooth, and your tongue keeps inserting itself in the wound, curious and persistent and disbelieving—I hoped we would never set eyes on each other again. Wouldn’t a life of not having to measure up be the best?

  No matter how I reasoned with myself I knew, nevertheless, we were linked. Woven together somehow. Even outside all these imaginings, rumor and derision held us in an unwelcome embrace. We were young, an amalgam of smart and stupid, like all kids. We had bolted confinement, we had gamboled and got lost, gambled and lost. And now we were doubly constricted, confined by the isolation of the Hill, and at the same time restricted each from the other.