House Made of Dawn (7 page)

She led him through the rooms and up the stairs quickly, quietly. The corridor was dark, but there was a night light in her room. The room was warm and full of great soft shadows. She let go of his hand and turned away to undress. He could see her reflection, like a silhouette, in an oval mirror on the wall. When she faced him again, they were both naked. For a minute they stood still in the soft blue light. Abel studied her, but she did not cringe. She was very pale in her nakedness, and slight. But her body was supple and round. Her throat was long and her shoulders narrow and tapered. Her breasts were small and rather too low on her body, but they were firm and pointed. There was a soft curve to her belly, and her thighs flared from the hips. Her legs were slim and shapely; she was wide between the legs.

“What will you do to me?” she asked. She was heaving a little, and her mouth was soft and open. Her face and throat were delicately beautiful against the black of her hair.

They came together and Angela felt with her whole body that he was lean and hard and vital, that his dark skin was warm and wet and taut with excitement. She felt the muscles of his stomach and thighs roll and crawl upon her, and she gasped. He let her down very gently on the bed and lay over her. He kissed her forehead and her eyes and her open mouth, and the weight
of his shoulders and chest bore slowly down upon her until it seemed to her that she should soon be crushed beneath him.

“All right,”
she said again, quickly and without breath.

“No, not yet,” he said, and for an instant she went limp and the edge of her desire was lost. Oh no,
oh no!
she thought, but he knew what he was doing. His tongue and the tips of his fingers were everywhere upon her, and he brought her back so slowly, and set such awful fire to her flesh, that she wanted to scream. At last he raised up and she set herself for him. She was moaning softly, and her eyes rolled. He was dark and massive above her, poised and tinged with pale blue light. And in that split second she thought again of the badger at the water, and the great bear, blue-black and blowing.

 

As always in summer, the moment at which evening had come upon the town was absolute and imperceptible. And out of the town, among the hills and fields, the shadows had grown together and taken hold of the dusk until the valley itself was a soft gray shadow. Even so, there was a great range of colors within it, more various even than the sky, which now had begun to blush and fade. And the tinted rocks and soils grew supple and soft, and the shine went off the leaves.

Whispers rose up among the rows of corn, and the old man rested for a moment, bent still with his hands to the hoe. For nearly an hour now he had not been able to see well into the furrows, and he had reckoned their depth by the feel of the blade against the earth and made them true by the touch of the fronds and tassels on his neck and arms. The sweat dried up on his neck and the mud dried at his feet, and still he rested, holding off for another moment the pain of straightening his fingers and his back. At last he raised up against the stiffness in his spine, gathering the crippled leg under him. He breathed out sharply with the effort, and at the same time unlocked his hands and let the handle of the hoe fall into the crook of his arm. There was a lot of work left to do; he must yet bend again to the fetlocks of the mares,
and his fingers must slip the hobbles from the hoofs; must yet lay hold of the wagon tongue and the buckles and stays of the harness, twice, even; must then carry water to the trough and cleave the portions from the bale. But he didn't think of that; he thought instead of coffee and bread and the dark interior of his room.

But
were
they whispers? Something there struck beneath the level of his weariness, struck and took hold in his hearing like the cry of a small creature—a field mouse or a young rabbit. Evening gives motion to the air, and the long blades of corn careen and collide, and there is always at dusk the rustling of leaves that settle into night. But was it that? All day his mind had wandered over the past, habitually, beyond control and even the least notion of control, but his thoughts had been by some slight strand of attention anchored to his work. The steady repetition of his backward steps—the flash of the hoe and the sure advance of the brown water after it—had been a small reality from which his mind must venture and return. But now, at the end of long exertion, his aged body let go of the mind, and he was suddenly conscious of some alien presence close at hand. And he knew as suddenly, too, that it had been there for a long time, not approaching, but impending for minutes, and even hours, upon the air and the growth and the land around. He held his breath and listened. His ears rang with weariness; beyond that there was nothing save the soft sound of water and wind and, somewhere among the farthest rows, the momentary scuttle of a quail; then the low whistle and blowing of the mares in the adjacent field, reminding him of the time. But there was something else; something apart from these, not quite absorbed into the ordinary silence: an excitement of breathing in the instant just past, all ways immediate, irrevocable even now that it had ceased to be. He peered into the dark rows of corn from which no sound had come, in which no presence was. There was only the deep black wall of stalks and leaves, vibrating slowly upon his tired vision like water. He was too old to be afraid. His acknowledgment of the unknown was nothing more than a dull, intrinsic sadness, a vague desire to weep, for evil had long since
found him out and knew who he was. He set a blessing upon the corn and took up his hoe. He shuffled out between the rows, toward the dim light at the edge of the cornfield.

And where he had stood the water backed up in the furrow and spilled over the edge. It spread out upon the ground and filled the double row of crescents where the heels of his shoes had pressed into the earth. Here and there were the black welts of mud which he had shaken loose from the blade of the hoe. And there the breathing resumed, rapid and uneven with excitement. Above the open mouth, the nearly sightless eyes followed the old man out of the cornfield, and the barren lids fluttered helplessly behind the colored glass.

Three days passed, and Father Olguin went about his work as usual
. These full summer days he breathed more peacefully the cool, musky air of the rectory, gathered himself up privately in the mornings after Mass, when his blood was always slow to thaw and his mind to focus and take hold of events. By the grace of these last few days, the affairs of the parish had been set in order. He was content. He had at last begun to sense the rhythm of life in the ancient town, and how it was that his own pulse should eventually conform to it. And this in itself was a grave satisfaction to him. He had always been on the lookout for reverences, and here was a holiness more intrinsic than any he could ever have imagined—a slow, druidic procession of seasons in the narrow streets.

Now, on the first day of August, there was a stirring in the town. Fewer men than usual went out into the fields, and the women scurried about like squirrels, full of chatter, inside and out, from door to door. There was a curious sound of deliberation and haste all around. Embers and ashes rose up on the shimmering columns of heat above the mud ovens, whirled, and settled into the streets, and the sharp odor of cedar and gumwood smoke carried to the edge of the town and beyond, into the still
midmorning of the valley. And there, southward on the old road to San Ysidro, the first covered wagons had come into view. In these were the outriding elders of the caravan, an older generation of the
Dîné
than that which followed and would follow through the afternoon and evening, and which even now convened at the junction to trade for wine. All afternoon the wagons would come from the south, slowly, seemingly motionless on the steady grade, but looming larger until at last the great gray canopies ballooned like sails taking shape in the distant plain, and in the angle of the wake on either side lean young men on horseback, drab and drunk; the beautiful straight-backed girls in sunlit silver and velveteen, supple and slim and born to the saddle; and the panting dogs. Later, when their chores were done, the children of the town would run out to see, to stand at the fences and cheer and chide; there would be an old enactment of laughter and surprise. The end of the train would be brought up by fools, in a poor parody of pride: the fat, degenerate squaws, insensible with drink, and the sad, sullen bucks, hanging on. But these now in view were clansmen, the wizened keepers of an old and sacred alliance, come to prolong for another year the agony of recognition and retreat.

Later, when Father Olguin had taken honey from the hives and heard the general clamor rise above the drone of the bees, he thought of Angela. He could do so now without the small excitement that she had so easily provoked within him at first. He was aware of her as a woman, of course, but he was no longer disturbed by her. Tacitly, as it were, she had agreed to keep her distance. How else could her silence be construed? She was capable of respect. Very well, then, he would repay her in kind; he would extend to her his welcome at once, now, upon this certain occasion of grave good will. Unaccustomed as she was to solitude—lonely, no doubt—she would share in his good fortune simply, implicitly. She would
perceive
that he was occupied, committed surely to a remarkable trust, and she would envy him—not his accomplishment, perhaps, but at least his possibilities. The
prospect of her envy pleased him, and he hummed about in the rooms of the rectory until it was noon, and he rang the Angelus long and loud.

The general sound did not diminish after noon, when ordinarily the weight of silence lay most heavily on the town, but went on, gathering momentum. The customary motion of the day had been suspended, and he had the sense of an impending revolution in time, as if a new, more crowded order of events were about to be imposed upon the world. Nor did the premonition subside when, almost reluctantly, he drove out of the town and into the canyon, leaving behind the din of the coming feast. A strange exuberance had taken hold of him, a low exhilaration like fire; he breathed softly upon it and opened his hand to the force of the air outside.

A low line of thunderheads lay on the high horizon in back of the northernmost peaks. They were deep in the distance and seemed always to have been there, dark and unchanging in the end of vision, in some sense polar and nocturnal. He kept an eye on them and speeded up, half hoping to rush upon the scent of rain. The specter of rain in August is a distillation of light upon the land, a harder efflorescence upon the rocks and a sterile, uncommon shine upon the river and the leaves. An element of darkness, however vague and tentative on the midsummer sky, implies a thin and colorless luster upon the sand and the cliffs and the dusty boughs of cedar and pine, and there is a quality like vain resistance in the air.

The roof and walls of the Benevides house gleamed in the sun. He touched the brake and turned off the road into the white gravel driveway, in which there were drab patches of hard earth and protruding gray ridges of rock, too deeply embedded to be removed. The incline to the steps of the porch was uneven, and the gravel rolled backward under his sandaled feet. There were more flies than usual about the porch, and the vine cover rang with bees. Angela opened the door and nodded him in without speaking, smiling faintly in that way of hers that meant she was,
or had just been, lost in her thoughts. Had he been in the least suspicious, he might have seen that she was startled, however little, to see him, and been aware of a certain oppressive stillness about her. As it was, he came into the dark room, in which all the shades were drawn, and sat down. He made himself comfortable, at home. They were making ready in the town, he said, like dervishes. She should see.

From the first he presumed to approach her officiously, on the basis of his own prejudices: a jealousy for Aesop and the ring of Genesis, an instinctive demand upon all histories to be fabulous. Thus he went on for several minutes. The town, he said—though not in so many words—observed an old and solar calendar, upon which were fixed the advents and passiontides of all deities, the last, least whisper of all oracles, the certain days and years of all damnation and deliverance. She listened. She listened through him to the sound of thunder and of rain that fell upon the mountain miles away, that split open the sky and set an awful tremor on the trees. She heard the touch of rain upon the cones and evergreen spines, heard even the laden boughs bending and the panes of water that rose and ran upon the black slopes. And this while he spoke and the heat of drought lay outside upon the windows and the walls. She had a craving for the rain. Her eyes smarted for it, and the lines at her mouth deepened. Directly he fell silent, aware of her behind him. He turned and looked at her for the first time. She seemed very small in the dark room. He waited for her to speak. “‘Oh my God,'” she said, laughing. “‘I am heartily sorry…for having offended Thee.'” She laughed. It was hard and brittle, her laughter, but far from desperate, underlain with perfect presence, nearly too controlled. And that, even more than the meaning and the mockery, horrified him. He stiffened. There was nothing then but her voice in the room, going on wearily, without inflection, even after he had ceased to hear.

 

Afterward, when Father Olguin returned to the town, the streets were filled with people. Children shouted to him and animals darted in front of the car, chickens and dogs and sheep. He drove down upon them and they scattered. He leaned on the horn and swerved. Out of the corner of his good eye he saw a child leap out of the way and fall. The child rolled over and laughed. Suddenly the walls of the town rang out with laughter and enclosed him all around. He turned here and there into the streets, and the streets led only to an endless succession of steep earthen walls, and the walls were lined with people, innumerable and grotesque. Everywhere he caught sight of men and women, bloated or shriveled up with age, children running and writhing on the sheer tide of revelry; and a sameness of distance upon all their eyes, their one timeless enigmatic face constrained into idiocy and delight. Fear and revulsion jarred upon his brain. The car lunged under him, veered sharply around a blind corner of walls, and the tire nearest him lay over upon itself and the sharp edge of the tread blasted the sand of the street into the metal about and beneath him; and there, directly before him, were the high covered hoops of a wagon, the iron bands of the wheels and the small black cavern of its depth. He slammed on the brakes and heard the tires slice and fold into the sand and lock upon the packed earth. He felt the whip of momentum pass through him, the enormous weight of motion that fell upon the engine and drove it down on the coils. Then in the ebbing pitch and rock that followed, as the cloud of dust and laughter drew down upon him, he saw the cradle-board fixed to the wagon. And just above and beyond the bobbing ornament of the hood, at the level of his own eyes, was the face of the infant inside. Its little eyes were overhung with fat, and its cheeks and chins sagged down in front of the tight swaddle at its throat. The hair lay in tight wet rings above the eyes, and all the shapeless flesh of the face dripped with sweat and shone like copper in the sunlight. Flies crawled upon the face and lay thick about the eyes and mouth. The muscles twitched under the fat and the head turned slowly from side to side in the agony of sad
and helpless laughter. Then the wall of dust descended upon the face, and the cries of the children became a shrill and incessant chant: “Padre! Padre! Padre!”

 

Thunder cracked in the sky and rolled upon the mountains. It grew deep and filled the funnel of the canyon and reverberated endlessly upon the cliffs. Lightning flashed, rending the dark wall of rain, casting an awful glare on it, and the rain moved into the canyon, almost slowly, upon the warm and waning gusts of drought, and the golden margin of receding light grew pale in the mist. And there behind the squall the still-invisible torrents coming on, like the sound of a great turbine, the roar of the wind and the rain on the river and the rocks, the heavy drift borne up and set loose to spin into the pools and collide on the banks, and the faint falling apart of the earth itself, breaking and shifting under the weight of water.

The wind rose up under the eaves, and the rooms of the Benevides house quaked and grew black. Angela drew herself up and waited. The intermittent drops of rain upon the roof seemed almost to subside; then the first great slanting sheets of water drove against the gutter and ascended the north wall; it beat down on the windows and the eaves like hail and set a deafening roar on the iron roof. So sudden and loud was the descent of storm that she dug her nails into the heels of her hands and cowered instinctively. She arched her throat and her eyes glanced upward to the dark ceiling and source of so much sound. The intense wake of the sound engulfed her and she flung open the door and looked out. She could hear only the roar of the rain and the peal of thunder, breaking low and overhead in the hanging darkness. She could see only the flashes of lightning and the awful gray slant of the flood, pale and impenetrable, splintering upon itself and cleaving her vision like pain. The first, fast wave of the storm passed with scarcely any abatement of sound; the troughs at the eaves filled and flowed, and the thick ropes of water hung down among the hollyhocks and mint and ate away the earth at
their roots; the glaze of rain water rose up among the clean white stones and ran in panels on the road; and across the road the rumble and rush of the river. And again the wind rose up and the thunder struck and the rain leaned out across the canyon. It drove into the open end of the porch like shot and glanced off her bare legs. At the source of the rain the deep black bank of the sky swelled and roiled, moving slowly southward under the rock rims of the canyon walls. And in the cold and denser dark, with the sound and sight of the fury all around, Angela stood transfixed in the open door and breathed deep into her lungs the purest electric scent of the air. She closed her eyes, and the clear aftervision of the rain, which she could still hear and feel so perfectly as to conceive of nothing else, obliterated all the mean and myriad fears that had laid hold of her in the past. Sharpest angles of light played on the lids of her eyes, and the great avalanche of sound fell about her.

 

The feasting had begun, and there was a lull on the town. The crippled old man in leggings and white ceremonial trousers shuffled out into the late afternoon. He dried his eyes on his sleeve and whimpered one last time in his throat. He was grown too old, he thought. He could not understand what had happened. But even his sorrow was feeble now; it had withered, like his leg, over the years, and only once in a while, when something unusual happened to remind him of it, did it take on the edge and point of pain. So it was that as he made his way along toward the Middle and smelled the food and fires of the feast, he wondered what his sorrow was and could not remember. Still the wagons came, and he heard in the distance the occasional laughter which brought them in. It had the sound of weariness now, and it rose up less frequently. It would soon be time for the Pecos bull to appear, and the smaller children made ready to attend. Out of the doorways he passed came the queer, halting talk of old fellowship, Tanoan and Athapascan, broken English and Spanish. He smelled the odor of boiled coffee, and it was good. He cared less for the
sweet smell of piki and the moist, broken loaves of sotobalau, the hot spicy odors of paste and posole; for old men do not hunger much. Better for their novelty were the low open fires of the wagon camps, the sweet fat which dripped and sizzled on the embers, the burned, roasted mutton, and the fried bread. And more delicious than these was the laden air that carried the smoke and drew it out in long thin lines above the roofs, swelling in advance of the rain. The immense embankment of the storm had blackened out the whole horizon to the north. The compressed density of its core, like a great black snake writhing, drew out of the mouth of the canyon, recoiled upon the warm expanse of the valley, and resumed the slow, sure approach upon the intervening gullies and hills and fields above the town. And the old man had an ethnic, planter's love of harvests and of rain. And just there on the obsidian sky, extending out and across the eastern slope of the plain, was a sheer and perfect arc of brilliant colors.