Solomon's Oak (40 page)

The excuse sounded pathetic even to her ears, and she wasn’t surprised when her suggestion was rejected outright. The president of the painting society, who was also a lawyer, was more than happy to point out the lack of cancellation clause in her agreement form. “This contract of yours is a joke,” he said. “You really should hire an attorney to create one for you.”

What was that supposed to mean? Did he expect her to ask him to do it? Glory would rather pass a kidney stone than give this man one dollar. “Then I guess I’ll see you folks this weekend.”

She walked into her kitchen, stood in the center of things, and shut her eyes. Behind her was the sink with the rough spot around the drain; washing three generations’ worth of dishes eroded enamel over cast iron. To the left of the sink was the four-burner cooktop that was fifty years old but still worked. To the right, her double ovens had baked countless meals, and the dishwasher to the left of that was on its last legs. Her kitchen was her compass, her true north. In here, she knew who she was and what needed to be done, so she put aside thinking about the dog and how difficult the next few days would be and did what she did best, which was lose herself in a menu that began with local-greens salad and traveled to chicken Kiev and came to an end with a fondant artist’s-palette cake and a sculpting-chocolate paintbrush.

Juniper begged to be wheeled outside so she could sit on the porch all day, waiting for the impossible, Cadillac’s return. Halle kept her company while Glory handed out gourmet box lunches to the painters. Each had a single-serving bottle of California chardonnay from a new winery that she hoped would give the attorney/painter a headache from drinking in the sun.

Some of these painters had real talent, apparent in every brushstroke. The layers of paint, a sense of color, and the attention to detail were right there. Glory looked at their renderings of the oak tree and could tell they saw the history in it, but somehow, not its soul. The other painters seemed to have professional outfits and equipment—smocks and visors and field easels made of beautiful hardwoods. Glory searched each canvas, looking for the one painter who’d managed to capture the oak tree, but so far, no one had. Maybe no one could. Maybe it was only there to frustrate photographers and evade painters and to inspire pirate weddings. Joseph walked among the group taking pictures, being friendly and outgoing. When he and Glory passed each other, he whispered, “Your tree’s outfoxed every last one of them,” and Glory smiled because Joseph made her know that while losing Cadillac would always hurt, they would make it through these difficult days and come out on the other side. That there was another side to aim for.

While the painters finished up their salad greens and moved on to the chicken Kiev, the roar of motorcycles cut into the air, and Glory wondered if someone was lost, or a biker gang wanted to throw a weenie-roast wedding in her chapel. Why not? Money was money. She walked around the property to the front porch to see what was happening.

Lorna Candelaria walked up the driveway dressed in chaps, boots, and the pink cowboy hat that was her signature style. In one hand she held a paper lunch sack, and in the other she held by the collar a burr-infested, seen-better-days, emaciated border collie. “Glory!” she called. “Get a load of what me and my posse found.”

The lump that rose in Glory’s throat prevented any reply, but she heard yelling, then she saw Juniper launch herself out of the wheelchair and hop on one leg to her beloved, who dropped and belly-crawled up to meet her like the first—no, this was the
third
—time they met. Glory heard the click of a camera and knew that Joseph Vigil was right behind her. He didn’t stop to ask questions or argue over wages; he recognized a photo opportunity and seized it. Glory thought, Oh, Dan. This must be what you meant by faith.

A few of the bikers were openly crying when Juniper reached her friend. Between choking sobs, Glory asked, “Where on earth did you find him? I thought we’d covered every inch.”

“A mile or so past the Cueva Pintada, the Painted Cave, give or take. I had no idea there was another cave just beyond it, much smaller. In fact, I think we might be the first people to step inside it in a hundred and some years.”

Glory reached out to hug her friend. “Thank you, Lorna.”

“You’re welcome, honey. But don’t get slaphappy just yet.”

“Why not?”

“We found your pooch next to a pile of bones. Took me a whole package of lunch meat to wrestle this one away from him.”

Glory knew they were all thinking the same thing: Casey.

JOSEPH

“May I see it?” Joseph asked. He unrolled the bag until the earth-colored bone was exposed. It had wisdom teeth and molars, too old for Casey. “Were the other bones also human?”

Before the cops got involved, Joseph got in the Land Cruiser and drove to Santa Cruz, located the university’s anthropology department, and knocked on the department chair’s door. No one answered, but the door was unlocked, so he went inside. The man’s desk was a jumble of files and books, papers everywhere: This was higher education? He found a course catalog and checked the man’s teaching schedule. He asked directions from a student and walked to the lecture hall where the professor was teaching. He waited by the door for the man to finish, gather his files, load up his briefcase, and amble toward the exit.

“Professor, it’s Joseph Vigil, again. I’m here about the bones I left you yesterday. Have you had a chance to look at them?”

“I was planning to call you this afternoon,” the professor said, and Joseph thought,
mierda
, manure, you forgot the second you were done looking at them, but stood his ground. “Very interesting, your jawbone.”

“What did you find out?”

“It’s obviously a female jaw, since the lines run in a curve from the earlobe to the chin—”

“Yes, I know,” Joseph said impatiently. “Were you able to determine its age?”

“The late 1890s is my guess. I’d place her age at twenty to thirty-five when she died; hard to pin that down without more of the skeleton. The other bones were from a female toddler, no more than two years of age. If you want to whittle out any more info than that, you’re going to have to go to Stanford. Their equipment puts ours to shame. State university budgets, you know.”

They walked to his office, and Joseph was impressed that he found the bones without tearing the messy office apart.

“Intriguing,” he said as he handed them over. “Found in a place that could have remained undisturbed forever, but for a girl running away and her dog going after her, and those motorcyclists keeping at things, eh?”

The thought of his own role in Cadillac’s disappearance still took Joseph’s breath away. If not for Lorna—well, he tried not to think about it.

“So where will the bones go? We’d be happy to give them a home.”

“That’s something you and the Jolon Indians will have to work out,” Joseph said.

JUNIPER

For as long as there have been boulders big enough to perch on and sunshine to warm the rocks, people have been lolling around asking each other questions about the meaning of life, which so far no one has the answer to. If you want to know the meaning of something, you need more than reference books. You need imagination and you have to be willing to experiment and take risks. Without alternative ways of thinking you can only go so far in the world. For example, take stories passed down from long ago when there were no books, just oral history. Also, music, poetry, and even jokes can tell you something. You can’t just go by facts. Facts are not even the half of it.

In
The Folklore of Eternity
, Comparative Lit 101, Tuesdays and Thursdays, eight
A.M.
to noon, I read a story about when Plato was a baby. When he slept in his rush basket or papoose or whatever passed for cribs back then, bees supposedly landed on his lips as if they were the sweetest flowers on earth. Stinging bees, but they never stung him. Were the bees giving him sweetness or taking it from him? Science says bees land where they do for one of three purposes: to load up on pollen, get a drink, or they’ve arrived home and want to protect their queen and make honeycombs.

But the design of the bee shows that flight is impossible.

GLORY

Glory and Joseph changed planes in Phoenix on their way to Albuquerque, and Glory had second thoughts, third thoughts, and so on.

“I’m going to call home, to make sure everything’s going all right,” she said as they walked from one gate to the other, passing gift shops selling tabloid newspapers and sewing kits and neck pillows for absurdly inflated prices.

“They’re fine,” he said. “I have a better idea. Pay attention to me. I’ll buy you a Grande latte. Or would you rather have Venti? Maybe colossal?”

“Do they have small?” She laughed.

“
Bueno
. Laugh more. You’ll need your sense of humor to survive the Vigils. Our parties go on all night.”

Glory looked out the plate-glass windows at the jets, amazed at the number of people traveling when it wasn’t even a national holiday—just traveling.

They sat down in the waiting area of the gate for their flight. She could tell Joseph’s back was hurting him and she rubbed his shoulder. He leaned in closer. “That feels good,” he said.

“You’re welcome.”

“Before I get your coffee, I’ve been wondering about something.”

“What?”

“You’ve got half a dozen weddings under your belt now, all different kinds. If you were to get married again—theoretically—what kind of ceremony would you choose? Traditional? Civil ceremony? Take your time.”

“I don’t need to take my time.”

“Well, don’t keep me in suspense. What kind?”

She smiled. “Without a doubt, pirate.”

E P I L O G U E

T
HE WORST THING
to happen in 2004 was not my father not showing up, it was the Boxing Day earthquake off the west coast of Sumatra, Indonesia.

An earthquake is a rupture. Plates shift where they are not whole. This one measured 9.1 to 9.3, lasted ten minutes, and was so strong that it made planet Earth vibrate, triggering earthquakes as far away as Alaska. The good part was that plain old regular people opened their pockets and donated more than $7 billion in aid.

Something else good that happened in 2004 was the discovery of
Homo floresiensis
, “the Hobbit,” a complete female skeleton standing three foot and three inches tall, found on the Indonesian island of Flores. In the swampy environment her bones did not ossify, so anthropologists could only take a brief look. They learned she was thirty years old at the time of her death, and that for eighteen thousand years she lay there alongside pygmy elephants and miniature Komodo dragons, tiny versions of the species we think of today as huge.

That same year, the world’s rarest bird, the Hawaiian honeycreeper, went extinct. Dr. Alan Lieberman, who devoted his life to its study, said, “I held [the last known
po’ouli
] when it was alive and when it was dead. If there’s a more fitting example of extinction, it’s impossible to imagine.”

But nature is unpredictable. Fourteen years after being declared extinct, the Large Blue butterfly (
Phengaris arion
) showed up in the garden of a group of Englishwomen attending a tea at Mrs. Hortense Childs’s home in Suffolk, England. She said, “I just turned round and there it was!”

In 2004, the skeleton of a female toddler was found in a previously unknown cave in the wilderness area between Jolon, California, and the coast of the Pacific Ocean. The nearest source of freshwater was two miles away. A dog can survive a long time without food, but death by dehydration can occur in twenty-four hours. Because I ran away rather than face my father, my dog, Caddy, found a woman’s jawbone and the skeleton of a child.

On the Internet, you can find just about anybody, if you want to.

In Anthropology 106, you learn that bones tell a story. Wisdom teeth mark the transition from teenager to adult. Ossification, which occurs in eight hundred parts of the skeleton, backs up that fact. But if you have only a jawbone to go on, there are limited provable facts, and everything else is a guess.

Finding human bones stirs things up. People who’ve lost a loved one hope the bones will end the wondering and the waiting. In some cultures, bones are sacred remains, deserving of dignity, burial, and prayer. In others, bones are meant to be cut in half and studied. They are all stories waiting to be told.

To law enforcement, bones are evidence.

In 2004, the University of California, Santa Cruz, department of anthropology requested the exhumation of Mrs. Alice Halloran’s grave on the Fort Hunter Liggett military base. They wanted a DNA sample from her skeleton to see if it matched the jawbone. After months of newspaper stories and name-calling, Lorna Candelaria, proprietor of the Butterfly Creek General Store (which is no longer for sale), and who can trace her ancestors back to before the mission era, accused the university of desecration. “Bury that child next to Mrs. Halloran and be done with it,” she was quoted as saying. “It took a hundred and six years for them to be reunited. Who are we to keep a mother and daughter apart?”

After my ankle surgery, I returned “home” with Mrs. Solomon.

My father never came to see me.

“Never let the future disturb you,” said Marcus Aurelius in the second century. “You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.”

Three years have passed, and now I’m in college at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, studying—you guessed it—forensic anthropology. I hope it doesn’t take a hundred years to find Casey’s bones. The odds are not in my favor, but here’s my best guess: Someday someone will cut a trail into wilderness, fall down a cliff into a ravine (like me), discover a hidden cave, or dig up land to prepare it for a building’s foundation, and they will find my sister. I might not be alive by then. If you look at the timeline of events in 1898, when Alice and Clara Halloran disappeared, it’s clear that for every mistake a human makes, a hundred good things happen. Maybe even a thousand. My adoptive father, nature photographer Joseph Vigil, calls that the Theory of Greater Abundance, which is the story of how we met at a wedding for pirates. He misjudged a staged sword fight for the real thing, his cop instinct kicked in, and that was the first time he laid eyes on my mother and me. A day that started with his camera ended with a pirate-ship cake. He tells the story whenever he gets the chance, because he says he’s never stopped appreciating the collision of events that caused our paths to cross and become a family.

People make mistakes. They want immediate answers to life’s many mysteries. If you wait a few generations, you learn bigger truths than you would have if you found answers right away.

My name is Juniper Tree McGuire Solomon Vigil.

My sister’s full name was Acacia Tree McGuire, but everyone called her Casey.

My mother, who was in too much pain to stay on earth, and may she rest in peace, loved trees so much that she gave us names to make us put down roots, stand up to the weather, and hold fast, like Solomon’s Oak. Then she blew away like a leaf in the wind, uncovering the rest of my life.

That’s how it will be for my sister. The earth will fall away and her white bones will feel the sun upon them, and rise up.

I just know it.