Red Sky at Morning (17 page)

"What do you think?" he asked.

"I suppose it can't do any harm," I said. "What does the 'R.' stand for?"

"For my mother's name: Romero."

"Well, there's one thing I'm sure of. All the money's in the bank, either here or in Mobile, and I can't write any checks. So I can't pay any bills or salaries. If my mother doesn't want the money to be paid out for something, there's nothing I can do about it."

"I'm sure your father will think of something to fix that," Amadeo said. "And we can work for a while without getting paid. All you have to do is tell your mother she can't fire us unless Mr. Arnold says she can."

"Oh, boy. She'll love that."

"I sent the letter air mail. I'll wait until your father gets it and sends me an answer before we go back."

Excilda said, "It'll do your mother good to eat her own cooking for a while."

"It won't do
me
much good," I said.

"If she has to do something, like cook, maybe she'll stop drinking all that wine," Excilda said. "When's Mr. Buel coming back from the hospital?"

"I don't know exactly," I said. "Pretty soon. Too soon. I thought this was going to kill him for sure."

"There's nothing the matter with him," Amadeo said. "He's healthy. He ought to be in the Army. He's younger than your father."

"He's a bum," I said. "All he does is visit people and hang around. I thought we were far enough away out here, but he'll go around the world for a free meal."

"Well," Amadeo said, "you'll be okay for a while down there by yourself. I got a few things I need to do around here anyway. I got to hunt some."

"Hunting season's pretty much over, isn't it?"

"When you got all these kids to feed, hunting season's never over. I know it's against the law, but letting kids go hungry is against the law too. If you keep your mouth shut, I'll let you go elk hunting with me sometime. Tony and I need another hand on it anyway. Last time I got a bull it took us three days to bring him in."

Amadeo went into the kitchen to eat lunch. "If you want to look at the place," he said before he left, "get Vicky to show you around. Vicky, take him around. You're going back to school tomorrow, so you might as well enjoy yourself today."

"I'm not ever going back to school," Vicky said. "I'm going to work and help support you."

"I'll tell you when I need help," he said. "I don't mind trouble with game wardens, but truant officers are too much for me. If you won't go by yourself, I'll put you in a sack and carry you down there."

We put on our coats and went outside. It was a clear afternoon, not too cold for walking. Vicky pulled on a pair of black rubber boots, and Don Carlos followed us, sometimes wading through snow up to his belly.

Vicky said very little on the tour, but answered questions when I asked what something was. "That's the bean field," she'd say, or "that's the barn," or "watch your step, that's a ditch." Once she even said, pointing to a woolly-looking bay mare, "That's a horse." I don't think her heart was in her work.

"I know it's a horse," I said. "I could tell right off it was a horse."

"I thought you were from the city," she said.

"Look, if you don't want to show me around, tell me. I can go back to the store and wait for the bus. You don't have to entertain me."

"Isn't there anything you want to see?" she asked.

"I'd be very happy to see everything, but if it pains you to be a guide, you can forget about it. I can see your place some other time. If you want to be sore at somebody, be sore at my mother. I am."

"I don't know your mother. I don't remember her."

"Well, she's the one who's causing all the trouble. Not me."

She plodded along beside me solemnly, her rubber boots making deep prints in the snow. Don Carlos was investigating things under the snow, and plowing ragged, crazy furrows around us. Once he left us and bounded yelping through the snow to a cow which was placidly eating bale hay under a tree. He snapped at her hooves, barking, until she moved off. He ran her until she got close to another cow, circled them both, and ran back to us.

"What was that for?" I asked.

"He herds our stock for us in the warm months," Victoria said. "He's just keeping in practice. If we weren't walking together, he'd herd us. He hates to see animals scattered. People too."

"I thought he was more like a hunting dog."

"Oh, he hunts with Papa," she said. "He says Don Carlos is good for almost every kind of game. He went duck hunting one time, and did real well at it. Then Papa bought some ducks, not wild ducks but, you know, farm ducks. And it got Don Carlos all mixed up. Since the ducks were always around the yard with nobody shooting at them he knew he wasn't supposed to kill them, but he had to do something. So one morning last spring, when the ground was still soft, he took all the ducks and buried them."

"What do you mean, buried them?"

"Oh, he didn't hurt them. He dug little holes all over the yard and picked up the ducks in his mouth and put them in the holes. Then he covered them up with mud except for their heads. He did thirteen ducks that way, and was digging a hole for another one when Tony found him. We talked about it for a long time. Papa said Don Carlos was afraid the ducks might run away, and since he didn't know how to build a cage he put them in holes. He's a smart dog."

We were near one border of Amadeo's farm when I saw the little wooden building with a cross on the roof. It looked very old and weathered, with no windows and a chain and padlock on the door.

"Is that a church?" I asked.

"It's what we call a
morada,"
she said. The Penitentes use them instead of regular churches."

"Is Amadeo a Penitente?" I asked. The Penitentes were a sort of outlaw branch of the Catholics who took everything very seriously, especially Good Friday. They'd pick a member of the church to play Jesus every year. He'd carry a cross while his friends all whipped him with rawhide and cactus and then they'd crucify him. In recent years they just tied him to a cross and left him all day in the sun. A hundred years ago they did the job right, with nails.

"No, he's not," she said. "He never has been."

"Then what's the
morada
for?"

"You promise you won't tell anybody?"

I said I promised, though it seemed a foolish thing. I didn't care what they used the building for. Victoria and I walked to it and she took a key ring from her coat pocket, unsnapped the padlock and swung the door open.

The
morada
was sheltered on the north slope of a hill, and in the winter the sun never reached it directly. It was the perfect spot for a meat locker. Amadeo had three venison sides hanging from the rafters, and a wall was lined with shelves on which sat stone crocks, filled with jerky. On a wooden pole that stretched between the side walls were several dozen rabbit carcasses.

"Everybody around here hunts out of season," Victoria told me, "but they get caught. Papa says not even a game warden will go busting into somebody's private church."

"If anyone asks me," I said, "I'll tell them your father's a very religious man."

"I just didn't want you to think he was a Penitente," she said. "The Archbishop hates them. Papa's just a plain Catholic."

We walked back to the big house, and I said good-by to Amadeo and Excilda. "Why don't you and Victoria go to the movies sometime?" she said. "You don't have to marry her if you don't want to."

Victoria seemed cool to the idea, which I'd been about to suggest myself. "I have enough trouble," she said, "without having an Anglo boyfriend."

"You'll never get any kind of boyfriend with those manners," Excilda said. "You're not too big to spank, you know."

"Will you go to the movies with me, sometime?" I asked dutifully.

"Ask me some other time, when you really want to," she said.

Amadeo drove me back to the post office-hardware store, and the bus limped in a few minutes later. I gave the driver the rest of my ticket, and we started off toward the valley.

"I broke a fan belt just before I got to La Cima," he said. "I was afraid I'd have to spend the night up there. Damn, I hate it up in La Cima. I've been driving this bus for eight years, and I go there every day but Sundays, but those damn people stare at me like I was a foreigner. They won't talk to me. They been living up there too long."

My mother was out of bed and dressed when I got home, and she was sober. "Jimbob's getting out of the hospital in a few days," she said. "Do I really have to tell him to leave? It will break his heart."

"That's up to you. I don't see much of him anyway, so I don't care. By the way, I didn't go to school today. I went up to Río Conejo and talked to the Montoyas."

"Are they coming back to work?" she asked. "It really wasn't a smart thing to do, fire them."

"Maybe. Not right away. We'll make out."

"I'll scramble some eggs," she said, and she did. They were edible. She read for a time while I washed dishes, and then went back to bed. I went to the cellar and chose two bottles, a Hermitage and a Beaujolais, and walked down to Romeo's studio with the wine in a paper bag. I heard voices through the door, but only after I'd knocked did I realize that a fight was going on inside. Romeo jerked open the door, his face still flushed from the argument, and said, "Look what you've done. Look!"

Shirley was striding around the room, waving her arms, calling Romeo a goddamn dago bastard. It was somewhat confused, but I got the idea that she didn't like to wear sandals, and wanted some new shoes and to get her hair done downtown.

"It's those thyroid pills," he said. "It's just like giving her benzedrine. She's been going on like this for a day and a half."

"Close that goddamn door, you stupid Guinea son of a bitch, I'm freezing my ass off."

"Come on in, Josh," he said.

"I'd better not," I said. "Here." I handed him the bottles. "This may help out. Maybe you ought to cut the dose down on her."

"No," he said. "I'll buy her a big bottle and send her back to San Francisco. She'll make out all right now."

"Shut that effing door!" Shirley yelled.

"Good night, Josh. Thank you for the wine."

"I'll see you later," I said.

Jimbob Buel left the hospital at the end of the week, and came back to our house. He was shaky and weak, and went straight to bed. He'd done so much complaining when he was well that being sick left him nothing to say, so he lay quietly while Mother fed him toast and cocoa and canned chicken broth. It occurred to me that he was lonely; he was the only person I knew who never got any mail. The people he knew were probably afraid that if they wrote him he'd answer with a suggestion that he come and stay at their house for a while. I don't know what his record was as a guest; his visit to Sagrado was stretching into months.

Sometimes my mother or I read to him. So far as I knew, pneumonia didn't affect the eyes, but he said the strain of sitting up and moving his eyeballs back and forth was a little too exhausting. He had some sort of taste, but it wasn't mine. He liked fancy boys: James Branch Cabell and Lafcadio Hearn. I tried reading the war news to him: the First Army had taken Aachen, the Canadians had cleared out the Scheldt Estuary so we could use Antwerp as a port, the Russians were in East Prussia, we had won a big sea battle in Leyte Gulf. He said he didn't give the tiniest damn for the Scheldt Estuary, that it was all too coarse for his frail condition.

My mother said it might be better if I read something gentle to him, so I opened
The Wind in the Willows,
the gentlest book I know, suitable for invalids of all ages. He said the Water Rat and the Toad were too vomit-making. After that, I left the reading to my mother.

I had lots of school work to do anyway. The grounds at Helen De Crispin High School couldn't compare to the lush grass and hockey fields at Point Clear, but the instruction was first-rate. For one thing, nobody taking American History at De Crispin had any doubts about who won the Civil War. It was right there in the textbook.

The school even had a few traditions, and the one that set the standard was the Annual Indian Lore Lecture by Helen De Crispin herself, a rich Boston lady who'd moved west about the time of the Battle of the Little Big Horn. The Sagrado City Council gave the school her name because of a timely and generous donation she'd made.

When the architect designed the school back in the 1920s, he forgot to put in the washrooms, and the building was finished before anyone noticed the oversight. During the first term the students and teachers had to trot over and use the post-office facilities. Things got so crowded that the postmaster wouldn't let anyone in the bathroom unless he mailed a letter first.

The appropriation money was spent, but Mrs. De Crispin came through with a big bundle for construction of a separate building, full of toilets. It was such a decent gesture that the Council named the school for her, and the annex for the architect.

Romeo told me about her. When she moved west in the 1870s, leaving behind everything but her money, she took up Indians as a hobby. She lived with the Yankton Sioux in South Dakota for a spell, resided briefly with a Navajo band near Tuba City, Arizona, and eventually settled in Sagrado to be near the Pueblos. All the Indians were afraid of her. The Sioux felt she was personally responsible for the disappearance of the buffalo. Her Navajo visit coincided with an outbreak of Malta fever among the sheep. When she moved in with the Pueblos they were hit by a two-year drought, and their corn shriveled up. Now she lived in a big, gloomy house on the outskirts of Sagrado, full of pottery, baskets, headdresses and hunting fetishes.

Parker Holmes had been in her house once. He had baited his fox traps with some of the $3.50 vixen urine from Tennessee and caught Mrs. De Crispin's cocker spaniel. When he tried to return the dog she wouldn't let him in at first; she thought he was a Jicarilla Apache come to ravish her. He said she had a permanent cooking fire going in the middle of her living-room floor, and a hole cut through the roof to let out the smoke.