Between Earth & Sky (26 page)

I do not think she is right. Teresa says it is the desert air that has carved deep lines into our faces. Her wrinkled skin has softened these past few years, so that it is nearly translucent. She looks as if she has come from another world. Indeed, when she stares at me with her dark, clear eyes and speaks what is in my heart, I think she has already stepped part way into the life that lies beyond this one.

Your Sister,

Abigail

September 3, 1917

Dear Maggie,

I send my condolences on John's death. It was a long and blessed life the two of you had together. You must rest easier knowing he is no longer in pain and that he is peacefully awaiting your reunion. You said an old woman should not grieve, but I do not think you are right about this. Grief has grown next to contentment in my life, twisting together like vines that feed on one another, their wide leaves climbing towards the sky. I do not know if it is possible to have one without the other.

You write that two of your grandsons are overseas fighting the war and could not come for John's funeral. I will pray for them, as I have read in the newspapers how many are being killed. Teresa's grandson died in the fighting. She brought me the papers that say this is true, but neither of us can understand it, how this happened. There was no body to bury. Such a war as they say it is must be terrible. The newspapers are full of what the Germans have done, and I suppose it is right to hate them.

A small orange tree grows in my kitchen. The bright balls hang from the smooth dark leaves, and I think every morning it is like summer to have a bit of color in the house, a piece of brightness. I wander about from window to window and look out upon the desert I have lived my life upon. Each day it is new. I am no closer to knowing it than when I rode across it for the first time, a young woman in a covered wagon.

Your Sister,

Abigail

October 19, 1918

Dearest Maggie,

Every morning I walk along the river where the cottonwoods have turned to yellow and the river bed is nearly dry. The muddy water moves slowly downstream. There is a young oak tree, and it is all red brilliance under the wide blue sky. Sometimes I think that is why I have stayed these many years, Maggie, and not been able to make myself leave—the color, the color, oh, the color. Picture an azure sky and the red oak and yellow cottonwood leaves flashing against it. I could sit and stare into them all morning, and some days I do just that. If Anna sees me sitting against a tree close to the bank, she carries me a sweater and a blanket to sit on, even if it is quite warm.

I am sorry for the loss of your grandson Michael. Amy has written that he was killed in France. Irene, she writes, is nearly mad with the loss. Will Steven be sent home? Surely the loss of one son is enough for anyone to give to such a war.

Your Sister,

Abigail

April 26, 1920

Dear Maggie,

Today is Anna's wedding day. It is early in the morning, just before sunrise, and I should waken her and begin the preparations, but as I woke, the thought was there that I hadn't written to you in so long, that I hadn't told you she was being married. Maggie, I forget now; sometimes whole days slip by. I know somewhere I have a letter from you, unanswered.

Amy and Ellen arrived yesterday, and Amy says she has told you of the wedding but that I should write down the details. Anna is to marry José and Paula's oldest son, Tadeo. “He is too much like a brother,” I have told her, for indeed they are cousins. But since her father never claimed her, no one else but me finds fault with the match. It will make inheritance of the land favorable, for the two of them, they shall have it all.

Two weeks now Paula has spent baking and cooking, following her mother's recipes for
cabrito
and carne con chile and all sorts of breads and fruit pies. Teresa walks about the kitchen fussing that the dough has not risen enough, the lamb is not tender. George wrote that he would arrive this morning. He can spare only two days for the trip. Today I will sit in their church, the one with the painted statues, next to Teresa. I'll watch Anna walk to the altar in the dress Paula and I have sewn for her. They all call her Anita, and she prefers it. But I cannot. She will always be my Anna.

Your Sister,

Abigail

June 17, 1922

Dear Maggie,

This morning I climbed into the mountains, higher than I have gone these past ten years. I was following a small herd of mountain sheep. They were like ghosts, Maggie, desert spirits wandering through the heat, eating what was saturated with light. “Come, little one,” I called to the smallest, and she let me reach my hand out to brush her cloud-like hair.

I do not know how I could wander forgetting the time and which paths I had taken, but I did forget while following the small, white herd. It was nearly noon and the sun high in the sky when I realized I was lost. Twice I turned around in the hot sun, and the sheep disappeared, as if their gray shapes had melted into the muted colors of sage brush and clay, their thick horns hardened to rock.

I was at first frightened when I realized I had lost my way, for I had only a little water with me. But then my sight cleared, and I saw for the first time a fine weave of threads that ran from bush to rock to tree, disappearing as they stretched toward sky. I saw how the threads touched me, the bright cords nearly invisible but so tightly coiled their strands could not be pulled apart.

And now that I am home again, having found my way somehow through the light and heat, I cannot imagine what it was I saw. I remember only the brightness of it. Teresa says it is like Saint Francis to be led by the spirit of an animal. Anna is certain it was heat stroke. She has sworn she will tell Amy, who is to visit next month, of my mishap, and I am to be followed if I venture again up into the mountains, like the old fool I suppose I have become.

Are you, too, old, Maggie? This old? I cannot understand how it has happened.

Your Sister,

Abigail

March 2, 1925

Dear Maggie,

This morning I finished my final painting of the mesa. My eyesight has failed these last months, but it seemed to reappear, unaltered, long minutes at a time while I finished my painting. And oh, Maggie, now that I cannot see the colors of the world, I find they are fixed inside my mind so that I see them always, brilliant as ever they were. Strange that when I could no longer see the mesa, I finally understood how to paint it

Maggie, I would send these paintings to you. I have wrapped them in paper and tried to puzzle out where to take them so that they can be safely sent. The railroad, I suppose, is obvious, but the problem is I no longer travel off this land. If I can see my way clear to it, I will have Anna carry them there for me.

Maggie, I am not sure why, but after all these years I want you to have the world I have seen. Perhaps it is because I still want confirmation that this strange land was worth losing you and the life I would have had in Virginia. I pray that I will find the proper means to deliver them.

Abigail

November 12, 1927

Dear Maggie,

I rode in a wagon today, up into the mountains to gather the piñons. Anna has a husband and three children, all brown as clay, and I am asked, the grandmother, the old, white-haired woman, to accompany them. And what does it matter, my skin so wrinkled it could be any color?

So many nuts falling from the trees, the sweet smell all through the air and ground. The children scooping handfuls and dancing. We filled the wagon all morning, it seemed, while from the tops of the trees a long, thin cry circled. “A place of ghosts,” Anna called out, or was it Teresa, who has left me finally to be the old one alone. They say she ran out into the field when it was covered with butterflies and that she gathered them in her wide skirt and flew into the air. She would have laughed. I can hear her still. Now I am the bruja, the old woman they whisper of, with my handful of salt and charcoal.

“Coyotes,” I told myself when the sound came again, their cries like death. And: “Clayton will go and fire his rifle.” Too many I think of now are gone, my Jenny and Paula. Margaret is here and then not here. Anna tells me George visited the entire month of September. How could I have forgotten? If I could, I would straighten time so that it runs like a river bed.

Your Sister,

Abigail

May 27, 1930

My Dear Maggie,

I saw the sun come up this morning, turning the desert red. Now I sit on the front porch looking out over my yard, where the prickly pear blossoms a deep pink. I seem to have fallen asleep and dreamed for a few moments that I was a young girl again in Virginia, where the yard was a lush green and we two were running across it, our skirts filling with the wind. You stopped at the line of trees and held your hands out to me, and when I took them, we danced perfectly in step with one another.

Forgive me, dear Maggie, for not writing to you these many years, but as Anna says, I am an old woman and forget much of the time to do as I should. Perhaps I will come east for a visit. Amy says I must and soon. She promised to take the train west, to come and see me, but then poor Everett broke his leg. I have great-grandchildren there now, for Anna tells me that Ellen married some five or six years ago. I cannot remember their names. These days my body has wings and the world I touch is sky, sky, sky.

Your Sister,

Abigail

Last month, shortly after I signed the papers for Anita's land six months after her death, I began to clean the closets and attics of everything left there, old or unused. In the crawl space over the older section of the house, where a bird startled into dark, dusty flight, I found a large package wrapped in stiff brown paper, die address written in familiar script: Mrs. Margaret Mason, 175 Vine Street, Stillwater, Virginia.

Julia helped me to peel away the paper, and we found three canvases dated during the last years of Abigail's life, thick with explosions of color, heavy brush strokes of red, brown, purple spreading out of blues, as if the landscape was set in motion by the sky. My grandmother had two of Abigail's paintings in her house, but they were more realistic desert landscapes, carefully proportioning the land to the sky or detailing the borders of a ridge. Their colors and strokes were highly controlled, almost artificial. These three paintings, done at the end of Abigail's life, broke loose of all form, so that the mesa was unrecognizable, and it was impossible to tell where the sky ended. When I looked at them, I experienced the same feeling I had when gazing off towards the mountains or looking across the sweep of valley: I was lost in the raw sensation of color and space.

I hung Abigail's paintings on the wall in the living room, across from the window that looks out towards the mountains and the long flat mesa. In the late afternoon, as the world's colors deepen, they are like strange mirrors, reflecting what the eye takes apart, the image it keeps in memory.

A few months after coming to New Mexico, I moved in with Anita and Julia. The first winter I learned to make tamales, spreading corn husks with
masa
and
chile,
folding the husks and steaming them until their smell filled the house. The three of us baked
bollitos
and
molletes,
we cooked large pots of tomatoes and garlic and peppers, and while everything simmered and roasted and baked, I read Abigail's letters. By spring, when I looked out across the old orchard or the fields where the mesa rose nearly symmetrical in the distance, I saw her history layered there, the words she had written crisscrossed like a bright net laid over the world.

That first year I met the others who live on the same road: Hernandos, who had moved back to the valley after working for three years in the city; Cheryl, a retired nurse; Carol and Mark, who had moved from Denver to farm the land; and David, a free-lance photographer, who had returned to the valley where he spent summers with his grandfather while growing up. Through them I have become involved in a struggle to prevent the state from damming the river to provide more water for the nearby city, which is rapidly expanding. We've written articles and taken photographs, hoping to save the valley, with its small farms and orchards, from being put under water or turned back to desert.

At first I tried to retrieve the farmland, planting a field of alfalfa, irrigating the orchard and transplanting more saplings. I carefully designed a large vegetable garden. But I knew little about farming, and even with Anita's advice, I let in too much water from the acequia or planted the seeds too close to the soil's surface or forgot to account for the long dry months of June and July. I now work part time as a substitute teacher at the high school. I have given up cultivation, except for tending a small vegetable and flower garden next to the house, but I still spend much of my time outside, walking along the river or climbing up into the desert or chasing Julia across the yard. In the evenings I often meet with my neighbors to work on saving the valley.

Anita must have already suffered several small strokes before I came that first time to see her. The morning I drove her to a nearby hospital after finding her semiconscious on the kitchen floor, she warned me to be careful that I didn't drive over any small animals. She was especially worried about the tiny lizards that she kept seeing dart out between shadows or from the mirages of pooled water. “Slower,” she kept insisting, until I was afraid she would try to make me pull over and let her out to walk the long way through the desert heat.