House Made of Dawn (6 page)

The canyon is a ladder to the plain. The valley is pale in the end of
July, when the corn and melons come of age and slowly the fields are made ready for the yield, and a faint, false air of autumn—an illusion still in the land—rises somewhere away in the high north country, a vague suspicion of red and yellow on the farthest summits. And the town lies out like a scattering of bones in the heart of the land, low in the valley, where the earth is a kiln and the soil is carried here and there in the wind and all harvests are a poor survival of the seed. It is a remote place, and divided from the rest of the world by a great forked range of mountains on the north and west; by wasteland on the south and east, a region of dunes and thorns and burning columns of air; and more than these by time and silence.

There is a kind of life that is peculiar to the land in summer—a wariness, a seasonal equation of well-being and alertness. Road runners take on the shape of motion itself, urgent and angular, or else they are like the gnarled, uncovered roots of ancient, stunted trees, some ordinary ruse of the land itself, immovable and forever there. And quail, at evening, just failing to suggest the waddle of too much weight, take cover with scarcely any talent for alarm, and spread their wings to the ground; and if then
they are made to take flight, the imminence of no danger on earth can be more apparent; they explode away like a shot, and there is nothing but the dying whistle and streak of their going. Frequently in the sun there are pairs of white and russet hawks soaring to the hunt. And when one falls off and alights, there will be a death in the land, for it has come down to place itself like a destiny between its prey and the burrow from which its prey has come; and then the other, the killer hawk, turns around in the sky and breaks its glide and dives. It is said that hawks, when they have nothing to fear in the open land, dance upon the warm carnage of their kills. In the highest heat of the day, rattlesnakes lie outstretched upon the dunes, as if the sun had wound them out and lain upon them like a line of fire, or, knowing of some vibrant presence on the air, they writhe away in the agony of time. And of their own accord they go at sundown into the earth, hopelessly, as if to some unimaginable reckoning in the underworld. Coyotes have the gift of being seldom seen; they keep to the edge of vision and beyond, loping in and out of cover on the plains and highlands. And at night, when the whole world belongs to them, they parley at the river with the dogs, their higher, sharper voices full of authority and rebuke. They are an old council of clowns, and they are listened to.

Higher, among the hills and mesas and sandstone cliffs, there are foxes and bobcats and mountain lions. Now and then, when the weather turns and food is scarce in the mountains, bear and deer wander down into the canyons. Once there were wolves in the mountains, and the old hunters of the town remember them. It is said that they were many, and they came to the hunters' fires at night and sat around in the dark timber like old men wanting to smoke. But they were killed out for bounty, and no one will remember them in a little while. Great golden eagles nest among the highest outcrops of rock on the mountain peaks. They are sacred, and one of them, a huge female, old and burnished, is kept alive in a cage in the town. Even so, deprived of the sky, the eagle soars in man's imagination; there is divine malice in the wild
eyes, an unmerciful intent. The eagle ranges far and wide over the land, farther than any other creature, and all things there are related simply by having existence in the perfect vision of a bird.

These—and the innumerable meaner creatures, the lizard and the frog, the insect and the worm—have tenure in the land. The other, latecoming things—the beasts of burden and of trade, the horse and the sheep, the dog and the cat—these have an alien and inferior aspect, a poverty of vision and instinct, by which they are estranged from the wild land, and made tentative. They are born and die upon the land, but then they are gone away from it as if they had never been. Their dust is borne away in the wind, and their cries have no echo in the rain and the river, the commotion of wings, the return of boughs bent by the passing of dark shapes in the dawn and dusk.

Man came down the ladder to the plain a long time ago. It was a slow migration, though he came only from the caves in the canyons and the tops of the mesas nearby. There are low, broken walls on the tabletops and smoke-blackened caves in the cliffs, where still there are metates and broken bowls and ancient ears of corn, as if the prehistoric civilization had gone out among the hills for a little while and would return; and then everything would be restored to an older age, and time would have returned upon itself and a bad dream of invasion and change would have been dissolved in an hour before the dawn. For man, too, has tenure in the land; he dwelt upon the land twenty-five thousand years ago, and his gods before him.

The people of the town have little need. They do not hanker after progress and have never changed their essential way of life. Their invaders were a long time in conquering them; and now, after four centuries of Christianity, they still pray in Tanoan to the old deities of the earth and sky and make their living from the things that are and have always been within their reach; while in the discrimination of pride they acquire from their conquerors only the luxury of example. They have assumed the names and gestures of their enemies, but have held on to their own, secret
souls; and in this there is a resistance and an overcoming, a long outwaiting.

 

Abel walked into the canyon. His return to the town had been a failure, for all his looking forward. He had tried in the days that followed to speak to his grandfather, but he could not say the things he wanted; he had tried to pray, to sing, to enter into the old rhythm of the tongue, but he was no longer attuned to it. And yet it was there still, like memory, in the reach of his hearing, as if Francisco or his mother or Vidal had spoken out of the past and the words had taken hold of the moment and made it eternal. Had he been able to say it, anything of his own language—even the commonplace formula of greeting “Where are you going”—which had no being beyond sound, no visible substance, would once again have shown him whole to himself; but he was dumb. Not dumb—silence was the older and better part of custom still—but
inarticulate
. He quit the pavement where it rose and wound upon a hill, suddenly very much relieved to be alone in the sunlit canyon, going on in his long easy stride by the slow, shining river, the water cool and shallow and clear on the sand. He followed with his eyes the converging parallel rims of the canyon walls, deepening in the color of distance until they gave way to the wooded mountains looming on the sky. There were huge clouds flaring out and sailing low with water above the Valle Grande. And, stopping once to drink from the river, he turned around and saw the valley below, a great pool of the sunlit sky, and red and purple hills; and here and upward from this height to the top of the continent the air was distilled to the essence of summer and noon, and nothing lay between the object and the eye.

He began almost to be at peace, as if he had drunk a little of warm, sweet wine, for a time no longer centered upon himself. He was alone, and he wanted to make a song out of the colored canyon, the way the women of Torreón made songs upon their looms out of colored yarn, but he had not got the right words together. It would have been a creation song; he would have sung
lowly of the first world, of fire and flood, and of the emergence of dawn from the hills. And had he brought food to eat along the way, he would have wanted it to be a crust of oven bread, heavy and moist, pitted with cinders and ash, or a blue cornmeal cake full of grit and sweet smoke.

The noon hour passed, and part of the next, and he was below and across the road from an old copper mine, a ghost, too, like the ancient towns that lay upon the ridge above and behind him, given up to the consuming earth and left alone amid the remnants of some old and curious haste: broken implements, red and eaten through with rust; charred and rotting wood; a thousand pieces of clear and green and amber glass upon the swollen ground, as if untold legions of ants had come to raise a siegeworks at Alesia. The black face of the shaft, higher on the slope but not yet so high as the base of the sunlit cliff, there in its gray wooden frame, reminded him of something. It was deeper than shade, and he knew without looking that no cave or crevice in the opposite wall was like it, no other thing in the canyon was so sharply defined. He turned his eyes away from it and saw again the running water and the light upon it and here and there the bits of drift that bobbed and hung among the stones. Farther on he came upon a rise and saw the settlement at the springs, the corrugated iron roofs gleaming, the bright orchards, and the high white walls of the Benevides house. He hurried on.

 

Angela Grace St. John sat in the downstairs and waited for him to come. She had waited for days, without caring how many, among the lines of light in the rooms. These were a labyrinth of colors in the afternoon, a glowing on the mouths of pitchers and jars, a somber glare upon the polish of porcelain and wood. She listened. There are sounds that do not designate anything in particular, and for that reason go unheard: water dripping from a faucet and the drone of bees, long steady labor out of sight. There was a tractor in the field across the road, moving slowly back and forth upon a stand of hay. She had awakened to the sound of it,
but it had begun a long time before she awoke, and now it was going on long after she had ceased to hear, every thousand hollow strokes of the engine echoing out and away from the land. Then she heard the sudden swing of the gate, and she knew that it was he. Just then she had no need to see him, and she sat still, listening. He worked more rapidly than before and with a certain slight exaggeration of his strength: four and sometimes five and six slanting strokes of the axe, hurried and uneven, then the pause and the spinning away of the chips and the length of wood striking easily upon the pile and clattering down, and at the same time the friction of another log upon the block.

Later, when shade rose up in the canyon and the long false dusk came about, she had to get out. She locked the doors and walked along the road to the bathhouse. The attendant said nothing, but laid out the towels in one of the stalls and drew the tub full of smoking mineral water. Angela closed the curtains, undressed, and lay down in the water. After a while she went limp, and she could hear only her own slow, steady breathing and, with it, the water lapping. She sighed all of her strength away and laid her head back against the rim of the tub. Like drift almost, her limbs rose and rocked in the steaming water. Her feet and the caps of her knees were red with heat. She felt the clean, warm beads of water rising out upon her brow, standing, then running down her temples and into the towel that held her hair. She was glad to lose track of the time, glad of drifting into mindlessness, of holding off for an hour the vague presentiment of shame that lurked within her. Later she lay down upon a table and the attendant wrapped her in light cotton blankets and she dozed.

When she returned to the Benevides house, Abel was sitting on the front stoop—not waiting, it seemed—still and stolid. The last line of light had risen to the rim of the canyon wall, and even then it was dying out upon the blood-red rock above the trees. The enormous dark that filled the canyon was strangely cold, colder by far than the night would be. Half of the pale moon lay
upon the skyline. A hummingbird swung slowly back and forth at the bunch of bridal veil under the eaves. The bees had not yet gone away.

He followed her silently into the house and through the dark rooms. She turned on the light in the kitchen, and the sudden burst of it made her shrink ever so little. She gave him coffee and he sat listening to her, not waiting, gently taking hold of her distress, passing it off. She was grateful—and chagrined. She had not foreseen this turn of tables and events, had not imagined that he could turn her scheme around. She had meant to be amused, but as it was she was only grateful and chagrined. What struck her most, and held her pride intact, was the merest compulsion to laugh, not the derision that she might have intended but a cold, uneasy mirth—and the slightest fear—now taking shape within her. Before her now was the strange reality of her shame and the tyranny of light that lay upon it. She was not herself, her own idea of herself, disseminating and at ease. She had no will to shrug him off. He sat looking at her, not waiting, still and easy upon some instinct, some sense or other of dominion and desire. She hovered about the hard flame of it.

When she polished the cup and saucer and replaced them in the cupboard, Angela's breath was short and uneven. “All right,” she said faintly, and she sighed. The “all right” was neither consent nor resignation, just something to say. She had hoped that he might say something, too, anything of his own accord; it should have made everything so much easier. But he said nothing.

“Abel,” she said after a moment, “do you think that I am beautiful?”

She had gone to the opposite wall and turned. She leaned back with her hands behind her, throwing her head a little in order to replace a lock of hair that had fallen across her brow. She sucked at her cheeks, musing.

“No, not beautiful,” he said.

“Would you like to make love to me?”

“Yes.”

She looked evenly at him, no longer musing.

“You really would, wouldn't you? Yes. God, I've seen the way you look at me sometimes.”

There was no reaction from him.

“And do you imagine,” she went on, “that
I
would like it, too?”

“I don't know,” he answered, “but I imagine you would.”

Angela caught her breath, and after a long moment she came to him. She bent down and kissed him, and he put his hands on her and drew her close against him. She felt the strength of his hands and the heat of his body. His hands were hard with work and sharp with the odor of wood. She took hold of one of his hands.