Isabel's Daughter

by Judith Ryan Hendricks

  I held it up in front of my face, rubbing it between my fingers. It was cool and smooth. “Where’d you get it?”

  “It was waiting for me in the desert,” she said.

  “You mean you found it someplace?”

  “No, I mean it was waiting for me. I was walking in a place where I’d never usually go, and it was because I was meant to have this stone. And now you need it, so it’s meant to be yours.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Cassie, sometimes don’t you think things just happen?”

  “Nothing just happens. You think your coming to me was an accident?”

  “What else? You just happened to be walking out of the store when I was running away from Harlan.”

  “Oh, Avery, don’t you see the plan in it? I needed someone to help me. You needed a home. You think it’s happenstance that I stepped out that door at that very moment?”

  I started to take the necklace off and tell her she might as well keep it because nothing short of a well-placed hand grenade would protect me if Kevin Gonzales decided to kick my ass, but she looked so serious and intent. And no one else had ever wanted to protect me from anything before.

  The next morning when I got to the end of Cassie’s dirt road, Jimmie John was standing there, waiting to walk to school with me. That afternoon he was waiting outside the school doors to walk home. And the next day. And the one after that, till finally we became friends by default. We had nothing in common except that neither of us had any other friends—me being the witch girl and him being the retard.

  He was always bringing me junk. Rocks, mostly, but sometimes it would be a piece of glass worn smooth by wind and sand, a twisted chunk of metal, a Y-shaped twig from a cottonwood branch with a few shriveled leaves still clinging to it.

  He was most proud of the gearshift knob. It was teardrop shaped, but flat on one end, like a Hershey’s Kiss. The other end was threaded where it would screw on to the stick shift. It was a pretty turquoise blue and on the flat side, under a thick round of clear plastic, the gear diagram was etched in black, like a little map: R, N, 1, 2, 3.

  I was reluctantly and oddly touched by these offerings, but I didn’t have a lot of storage space. I put the rocks in the garden, and Cassie gave me an old metal cook pot to hold the rest. I kept it on the floor next to the couch.

  It was a funny thing about JJ. Sometimes he’d ask me to help him with homework. We’d sit at Cassie’s table, while he stared unblinking at whatever he was having trouble with until I lost patience and ended up doing it myself. But one thing he knew was the stories his grandmother had been telling him since he was born, and he could recite from memory without any hesitation or stumbling about how Changing Woman created the Dineh from the dust of her own skin and how the Twins killed Yeitso the giant and how Coyote got to marry the maiden.

  He also told me about his mother. How she loved the todilhil—water of darkness, as the Navajos called booze—and it made her sick. So he spent a lot of time at his grandmother’s hogan, past Cassie’s place by another mile or so. And he had his Black Mesa clan—aunts, uncles, cousins, et cetera. Navajos are big on this.

  Of course, the shitheads at school liked to think I was laying down for him, which was pretty funny. He was big as a grizzly bear and he would’ve crushed me, not to mention that he was totally nonsexual. I don’t think he knew there was anything else you could do with a penis besides pee. That didn’t stop Kevin and his buddies from making little sucking noises when we walked by or poking their fingers in their mouths and bulging their eyes.

  At those times, I didn’t see how I could wait three more years to get out of Florales. But then I’d remember that was how I’d felt about Carson, too. I thought if I could just get away from there, things would be different. And here I was doing the same things, listening to the same whispers, the same laughter, seeing the same looks on their faces.

  October.

  The air was noticeably thinner, sharper. I slept with the blankets tucked under my chin, one arm thrown back over my head. Cassie’s hand on my shoulder in the early morning darkness caused me to sit up abruptly, fully awake. I never liked being touched while I was asleep.

  “Time for school?” I squinted at her.

  “Not today,” she said.

  I pulled my knees to my chest, looping my arms over them. “What then?”

  “Dress warm.”

  “Why?”

  “We’re off to the mountains. We got harvesting to do.”

  I slid out of the blankets. “Harvesting?”

  “Can’t stand around jawin’, child. Señora Sanchez’ll be here soon.”

  “Why does she have to go?”

  Cassie laughed. “She’s probably wonderin’ why you have to go.”

  “She makes me feel funny. Like she’s always watching me.” I stepped into my old, soft jeans and pulled a long-sleeved T-shirt over my head, then a sweater.

  “Probably ’cause she is.”

  “What’s she watching for? She think I’m going to take off and fly?”

  “You can ask her later. Now get busy and brush your teeth.”

  Amalia Sanchez drove the hulking brown pickup truck like she was born in the driver’s seat. One hand on the steering wheel, elbow resting on the open window. The other hand draped over the black shift knob. She and Cassie shoehorned themselves into the cab, chattering in Spanglish. Their laughter pealed out across the desert.

  I rode in back with the gear, periodically slammed against the rear window of the cab, choking in the clouds of dust that the truck kicked up.

  I wasn’t unhappy about going camping with them, but Cassie was so big on school, I couldn’t imagine why she would let me miss. All I could figure was that maybe she didn’t trust me. Maybe she still thought I’d take her money and run away.

  At the Florales River, we veered northwest off the highway onto a narrow, unmarked strip of pavement that burrowed into the foothills of the San Juans. I leaned against Cassie’s bedroll, letting the sun warm my face and watching the landscape of greasewood bush and chamiso give way to dark clumps of piñon and juniper nestled in the folds of the hills. Higher up the flanks of the mountains, splashes of yellow and orange signaled stands of aspen. There were other pickups on the road, heading in the same general direction, back ends sagging from the weight of dogs, children, tools, camping gear.

  Each time Amalia pulled out to pass one, there was a moment of stillness—it felt like paralysis—in the path of oncoming traffic. I closed my eyes and imagined the sickening impact, broken glass, twisted metal, blood on the pavement. Then the engine would groan, dig in, and we’d fly past the other truck, Amalia honking and waving.

  After a while, we turned due west on an unpaved road, leaving the other vehicles behind. When the truck’s bald tires finally slid to a stop at the edge of a small canyon, I was thirsty, covered with dust, and bruised from the bouncing around. All business now, the two women jumped down, moving quickly to unload the gear and set up a campsite.

  Cassie handed me a pair of old canvas gloves. “We’ll need a good pile of firewood. Why don’t you stack it by them rocks.” As I wandered off into the trees, she called, “Mind where you put your hands and feet.”

  All day long we gathered the small piñon cones, stopping only briefly for apples and water. Some cones were on the ground, some still clung to the branches. Amalia knocked the tiny brown nuts out, her hands greased to avoid the sticky pitch. The cones that hadn’t yet opened we put into sacks to take home and lay out in the warm autumn sun. She showed me how to find and loot the ratoneras, the leaf-and-stick-covered caches of industrious little mice who stockpiled the nuts for the winter.

  Cassie disapproved of this practice. “Mice worked for their piñones,” she said. They argued stubbornly for a few minutes, then compromised by taking only half the nuts. From the relaxed sound of their bickering, I figured that they had this same discussion every year.

  When the sun was low in the sky, they tied the ends of the bags sh
ut and threw them in the truck bed. Cassie dug a pit, started a fire with some of the empty, pitchy cones, and began heating a cooking pot full of oil. Meanwhile Amalia took the top off a plastic tub that probably once held margarine, but now held flour. With her fingers, she scooped Crisco from a can, working it into the flour. When it was crumbly like coarse meal, she added water, little by little, from a can that had sat on a rock in the sun all day. Dough emerged between the stubby brown fingers.

  She kneaded it on a plastic plate and divided it into six pieces, humming tunelessly to herself.

  She looked up at me. “A stick would be good, niña.” She held her hands about a foot apart to indicate length.

  When I brought back a slender twig, stripped clean of leaves, there were six flat rounds of dough on the plate, each with a hole in the middle. Hooking the stick through the holes, Cassie dropped them, two at a time in the hot fat, turning them till they were golden.

  Amalia smiled at me, patting the blanket on the ground with her chubby hand. I sat down. When the bread was done, Cassie wrapped it in a scarf and set it on a rock near the fire while Amalia heated beans and Cassie chopped peppers and tomatoes and crumbled queso fresco. I lay back on the blanket, eyes shut, drifting at the edge of sleep. The smell of the fry bread mingled with piñon juniper smoke and their voices were like the soft buzzing songs of insects, telling stories—the ones about brujas (witches) and magic.

  Actually Amalia was doing most of the talking. Cassie talked offhandedly about magic all the time, but I don’t think she actually believed all the spooky stuff about witches changing themselves into coyotes who can run beside your truck at night doing fifty miles an hour and you don’t dare stop because they’ll kill you. Amalia swore she had seen them. I shuddered, remembering how JJ told me the Navajos believed that just saying the wrong thing can draw evil to you.

  At Carson, they taught us that Christians didn’t believe all that superstitious nonsense. But they had their own stories—Jonah and the whale, Noah’s ark, loaves and fishes—that seemed just as far-fetched to me. I always figured the best thing to do was act like you believe everything, but don’t believe anything.

  After dinner there was coffee. Amalia pulled out her pipe, filled it, tamped it down, and lit it with a stick from the fire, drawing deeply. She passed it to Cassie and they smoked, absorbed in their pleasure, barely noticing when I left the circle to pee behind a rock.

  Starting back from the darkness, I stopped, struck by the picture they made. Two old women, wrapped in their blankets, white pipe smoke curling up around the darker smoke from the fire like a climbing vine. Orange flames flickered up through the trees, silhouetted black against the midnight blue sky.

  Amalia’s eyes were closed, but she heard me come back and sit down next to Cassie.

  “Avery,” she said without opening her eyes. “What will you do after school?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe go to Santa Fe.”

  They looked at each other and then Cassie said, “Why Santa Fe?”

  “I don’t—I’m not sure.”

  Amalia took the pipe from Cassie and drew on it slowly. “There are good curanderas in Santa Fe. My sister could tell us.”

  I looked at Cassie. “What are you talking about?”

  “Amalia thinks you have a gift,” she said.

  “You have the sight, niña.”

  “No, I don’t. It’s just that my eyes are weird.”

  Amalia smiled. “There is nothing wrong with your eyes. I was born with a veil on my eyes. My tia Yolanda, she cried in her mother’s womb. These things are signs, niña. Your eyes are a sign that you have the don, the gift—”

  “I do not!” I dug my heel into the blanket. I didn’t say what I was thinking, which was, If I have this stupid “sight,” why have I never been able to see my mother?

  Cassie turned to look directly at me. “Don’t you sometimes know things and can’t figure out where the knowing came from?”

  “No,” I said.

  “There are dreams,” Amalia said.

  “I don’t have dreams.”

  Cassie picked up a long stick and poked at the fire until the top log rolled, turning its flaming belly up to the sky. “But we have dreams about you, Avery.”

  “So what?”

  She drank the last of her coffee and set the cup on a flat rock. “Sometimes when a person refuses what comes to them, why then, that knowledge has to go someplace else. Other folks start picking it up. I felt that power in you as soon as we met, Avery.”

  “It is a gift from God,” Amalia said.

  “Well, He can have it back.”

  Amalia looked about to scold me, but Cassie cut her off. “What you do with it’s up to you. But there’s no denyin’ that you got it.”

  Snow came the Tuesday before Thanksgiving. I sat in the stuffy classroom after lunch, listening to people cough, smelling their menthol cough drops, watching the first big, wet flakes dissolve into the pavement. By the time JJ and I were heading out of Florales, the snow was clinging to our coats and frosting the adobes till they looked like a Santa Fe Christmas card. Gray slush clumped on the side of the road, and then the flakes started coming down so thick and fast the horizon disappeared.

  We stopped at Cassie’s road, and I said, “Can you find your grandmother’s place okay?”

  I don’t know why I even bothered to worry. JJ wasn’t mighty of brain, but he had some kind of homing device inside his head. He wandered all over the desert between his clan’s houses and he never got lost.

  He grinned at me, black hair plastered to his forehead like bars on a jail window.

  “JJ, where’s your hat?”

  He pulled it out of his pocket, the red stocking cap Cassie had knitted for him. “Don’t want to get it all wet,” he said. “Bye now.” He turned and walked into the swirling white wind, waving over his shoulder.

  Cassie didn’t celebrate Thanksgiving like other people. She said she didn’t believe in spending one day doing what you should be doing all the time. Holidays didn’t mean a lot to me either.

  Thanksgiving dinner with Cassie consisted of beef stew with cornmeal dumplings, and it was better than any turkey I ever had. For dessert, there was vinegar pie with roasted piñones. Afterward we washed up, and then settled in by the woodstove, drowsy and stuffed.

  I was doing about half a job of reading A Tale of Two Cities, which I was supposed to write a paper on before the semester ended, and Cassie took up some mending work, holding it at arm’s length to focus on the tiny stitches. She kept telling me I needed to learn to sew, if only to do repairs, but up to that point, I’d managed to avoid it.

  I was nodding off again when she set down her work and said, “What’s your birthday, Avery?”

  “December fifteenth, I think. Nobody knew for sure.”

  “Probably a bit later than that, if you was four weeks when they found you. Maybe like the twenty-first.”

  I closed the book in my lap and looked over at her. “It was just a guess. What difference does it make? They’re not going to make it a national holiday.”

  “December twenty-first is the winter solstice,” she said.

  “What’s that?”

  “It means standing-still sun.” She looked out the window into the dark. “It’s the day every year when the sun’s furthest away from the earth. The shortest day. And the longest night.”

  “I don’t see what that’s got to do with my birthday—”

  “Be more ’n happy to tell you, if you quit interruptin’ me.” She took a sip of coffee and made a face. “Put the pot on, please, child. This is stone cold.”

  While I filled the pot with water and put it on the stove, she launched into a long, rambling story about ancient people being afraid the sun would go away and never come back, so on the longest night there were all kinds of ceremonies designed to convince the sun to come back.

  I sat back down by the woodstove and pulled up the blanket to cover my legs. “You been listening t
o Delbert Begay too much,” I said.

  She frowned. “Got nothin’ to do with Delbert. I’m not talkin’ about just Indians. People all over the world doin’ the same thing at the same time. Don’t that strike you as more than a coincidence?”

  “Never thought about it.”

  “It’s a powerful day,” she said.

  “A day is a day. They’re all alike.”

  A soft sigh. “Not by a long shot. There’s forces in the earth, Avery. To make plants grow and animals be born. Seasons die and change. Wind and clouds and rain and fire—”

  She got up to scoop the coffee into the boiling water. The can opener made a plonking noise in a new can of milk. “A person born in that time when the forces are strong, well, it’d be only natural for ’em to be a tad different.”

  I thought about this for a few minutes. “So what do you know that I was supposed to know? Does it have anything to do with my mother?”

  She looked stern. “It don’t work that way, Avery. You got a gift, but you have to accept it. Take the responsibility that goes along with it. Treat it with respect. If you want the knowledge it brings you, you got to work for it. Like making a living. You can’t refuse to work at it, then expect other folks to give you their money.”

  I looked down at my book again. “I don’t really care. I don’t believe in things I can’t see, anyway.”

  I could feel her eyes on me. “You ever seen the ocean?”

  “No, but—”

  “Me neither. But I’m pretty dang sure it’s out there.”

  eight

  Floyd Chamaco owned Florales Hardware. Tall and bony, big knuckled. Mouth thin and straight, always had stubble on his chin. Smelled like a goat. The way he looked at me—at all the girls—made you want to go take a bath.

  It was bad enough going there with Cassie, but sometimes she sent me by myself to get something while she was off on another errand. I always tried to find whatever we needed without asking him for help, because if he got you back between the aisles at the end of a row, he’d stand too close and accidentally brush against you. Cassie snorted when I complained about him.