Trinity Fields (12 page)

—Nothing, I muttered in a moment of rare grace.

—You're too much, Brice, she said, apparently having figured me out. —Don't even think about starting with that stuff.

Had I replied, I would have said something like, What about the forefathers of Los Alamos, the grampa progenitors of radioactive death? Talk about not thinking things through. How guilty can you
get
? Here I am trying to do something good for all of us. How come I'm supposed to feel so guilty? What is crashing one lousy car compared to scorching two entire cities?

That would have been the beginning. I'd have stretched myself out into the same arguments that had always been convenient when a subject needed changing or some guilt needed lifting from my own shoulders. For once I didn't grasp at the obvious, and it was fair I didn't. My mother was forever caught between her devotion to Dad and her own private thoughts about the nature of his work. She felt, I believe with all my heart, the same contempt as I for the plutonium and uranium devices that were birthed on the Hill—“ether ores” she called the atom bombs once, ores that turned their victims to ether, the pun on “either-ors,” damned if you make them and damned if you don't. Make them and you end the war with astonishing abruptness—Hiroshima, 6 August 1945; Nagasaki, 9 August 1945; V-J Day, 14 August 1945—a week and a day to terminate half a decade's carnage. Make them and you know in your heart you've crippled if not lost what moral supremacy you may have held dear. I didn't launch into my usual speech for once because I
was
guilty of hurting my mother's feelings. I hadn't thought through to the consequences of my action. And although I was the product of a culture that sometimes behaved no better than an inept adolescent who was intent on flexing muscles and not just climbing trees but shimmying out to the ends of the highest branches as if to dare the limb to break, I managed to get something from her that day. It was a lesson I would have to learn and relearn, but subtly I was impressed and modified.

I settled into a new life, one part of which was close to my mother, the other devoted to wondering about Kip. They became the presence and absence that centered my world.

My mother happened to be working on her Spanish, as always immersed in some project to improve her store of knowledge. I learned with her. That was the idea. This was to be my punishment. She and I would stay behind after school, and she'd drill herself as I sat with the open book and asked questions.

Architecture, as I remembered within the first few hours of being back in New Mexico, was one of the lessons on which we concentrated.

If indeed memory is a function of the intensity of original perception, so that the stronger the perception the stronger the memory of what was perceived, these study sessions must have been singularly intensive. Not only do I recollect with fantastic clarity the chalkboard running one length of the deserted classroom, and the soft light pouring in from the bank of windows along the adjacent wall, not only are the wooden desks with their wooden tops distinct, but the sound of her voice—deep and sure, mellifluous and bigger than her frame might lead one to expect —I can summon at will. I would write on the blackboard with soft white chalk the word
encalar
.

—That's a plasterer, she'd say. —No wait, that's
enjarradora
, that's plaster—that means to whitewash, whitewash.

I'd look in the book and, yes, “to whitewash” was right.

Next, I'd chalk out
viga
.

And she'd say, —That's too easy, give me another.

—
Fogón
.

—
Fogón
is fireplace.

—Fireplace, and what else?

—You're a taskmaster, she smiled. —Fireplace, and hearth.

—Furnace, too, I said. —
Bulto
.

—Too easy.

—
Postigo
.

She thought for a moment, —That's window grating?—no, uhm. Hold on.
Postigo
's the small opening in a door, like a little window in a big door.

—So what is a window grate called?

—
Reja
, she said without hesitation.

—You know all this stuff, I complained. I turned some pages, and drew on the blackboard:

Then said, —What's this?

She said, —That isn't anything. Do it again.

—You don't know what it is, I said.

—No. I know what it should be. You drew it wrong.

—No I didn't, I said and looked at the figure in the book. I'd drawn it wrong.

She said, —Thundercloud is what you were trying to make. Your artistic skills leave a little to be desired.

—You're wrong. It's not a thundercloud. Just a cloud is all.

And I smiled a half-serious see-there smile, and she smiled an impatient smile back. —It's upside down, she said, more stern than the situation might have called for.

I was not going to be daunted; gusts, small bursts of wind soughed in the stout green needles of a ponderosa outside the window. Such solace can be drawn from little things like that breeze-song. She'd waited for me to go on.

—Here is an easy one, I said as I drew:

—Rain, she answered.

And so our sessions went until she would say, —
Bien, bastante,
that's enough for today.

Still, hard as I tried to force myself into this other life with my mother, I couldn't help thinking about Kip. I wondered about how he responded to the rebuke his parents must have given him. Was he feeling better? His injuries turned out to be relatively minor, he had a neck brace and a cast that he allowed no one to sign, and then the brace and cast came off, and he walked with a cane for a time. Did he show defiance? Yes, he must have, though I had no word from mutual friends or my parents or sister. Defiance was part and parcel of his nature. Did he feel regret, and if so, did he allow anyone to see it? Yes, again, I imagined he might have regretted what we'd accomplished, since it came to so little, and also because regret and defiance were contradictory and Kip seemed to like all things contrary. But, no—I doubted he let his regret be seen by anyone. Did he miss me? To this question I had no answer. I knew that my own feelings of warm indignation, which came on me deep in the night when everyone was asleep, and all the mountain birds were mute, and I was wide, wide awake, I knew my indignation—which I used in a way to get myself closer to him—was outdone, surely, by Kip's. I could feel his blistering hostility as if it emanated from my own heart. If he was thinking about me, what was he thinking? I had stayed with it right up to the end, hadn't I? I hadn't failed him, I believed. Would he speak to me again once these parental constraints were rescinded? Did he still consider me his best friend and true blood brother? I knew I hadn't measured up, yet one moment hoped he was thinking about me, while the next—this felt strange, like when you've lost a tooth, and your tongue keeps inserting itself in the wound, curious and persistent and disbelieving—I hoped we would never set eyes on each other again. Wouldn't a life of not having to measure up be the best?

No matter how I reasoned with myself I knew, nevertheless, we were linked. Woven together somehow. Even outside all these imaginings, rumor and derision held us in an unwelcome embrace. We were young, an amalgam of smart and stupid, like all kids. We had bolted confinement, we had gamboled and got lost, gambled and lost. And now we were doubly constricted, confined by the isolation of the Hill, and at the same time restricted each from the other.

I spent early mornings that fall studying for school, read my books at a small oak table in my room, made sure my bed was made to perfection with the edges of the bedspread just touching the floor and even all around, and was quiet as the shyest mouse throughout my classes, sat at my desk and busied myself with making pencil notes in my notebook, careful to keep my head down in the hopes of not being called on, and when I was, made sure my answer was correct. After school, when my mother and I didn't stay for our lessons, I came home and busied myself once more at my desk. I would help with the dishes after dinner, and if my father had chores for me to do, I did them, going at everything with the deliberateness of a tortoise, serenely defeated and uncomplaining.

Whenever my mother spoke to me at home, in front of Bonnie Jean and my father, I answered, —Yes ma'am. When my father spoke to me I answered, —Yes sir. Bonnie Jean I did my best to ignore, didn't hear her, couldn't see her. Her comparative triumph, the triumph of being a good girl in contrast to my bad boy, I didn't want to acknowledge. I was sufficiently abstracted that when I murmured my yessums and yessirs I probably meant them, probably didn't have during those strange directionless days the strength or presence of mind to invest my politeness with teenage scorn, although I must have fathomed that after a while this regime of abdication would break down their resolve to mete out a continued punishment. —Yes sir, I said, and went about drying dishes, or watering my mother's geraniums where they stood like sentinels in their pots at either side of the door, or sweeping the front porch that was littered with cottonwood tufts, mud cakes, pine needles, sister's almost-outgrown dolls. —Yes ma'am, I said.

Kip and I were lucky the legal actions that could have been taken against us were not. Because our parents were friends with the Wrights, there was never any serious discussion about them pressing charges. My father and Mr. Calder agreed to split the cost of repairs to the Wrights' car. Thus the insurance company was kept out of the picture, and somehow—through murky channels I have never to this day comprehended (such murkiness abounds up on the Hill, always abounded, shall ever abound)—we were never charged with anything. We were insignificant outlaws grounded by our parents. That was all our provocation inspired. What a disaster, in its way. Our act meant nothing to them. We'd risked everything, we thought, to purify them by performing a civic rite on behalf of their arrogant souls, and what had they done in return? Whitewashed our crimes, wept some, thundered and threatened some, we being too old for a spanking, removed us from each other, taken what they deemed necessary steps, then finally exonerated and so enfeebled us.

—Brice?

—Yes sir? I answer, a watched pot of sorts, not quite boiling but not quite cool, either.

—Pass me the pepper, son.

—Yes sir, I say.

A few moments ease by.

—Brice?

—Sir. And I stare at my eggs and bacon, concentrating with an almost religious ardor.

Another few moments, then my father speaks. Quiet, vehement. —You will stop this minute with this “yessir, yessum” malarkey, you hear me, young man?

Only a few weeks later I could smell my pending freedom. I didn't push it, though the temptation was strong to respond with an obvious
Yes sir
.

Manipulation: moving matter, tots, oldsters, trees, flowers, birds, emotions, imaginings, stones, leaves, all of it, all of it, all of what we can put our hands and heads to, moving it around to fit our fancy: this was what I realized we did, as people, then. This was how we imposed ourselves, and defined our presences. How we said, We live, we are alive here, this is our time on the earth, we exist!

The truth is, Kip and I were a little behind. Or rather, we were out of step by being a little ahead, and a little behind. The anger we felt toward Los Alamos, anger that drove us to Chimayó, was not unjustified, in the larger scheme of things, that is, in a scheme that would take a historical perspective in a measure of centuries rather than the jot of years we adolescents had wandered through. This was not how it was viewed by those who lived it, though, flesh-and-blood men and women in the middle of it all.

To this day most of us Hill people stand by our own. Our land may be poisoned with thousands of unmarked dump sites, we may hear the stories about Indian women who continued to dig from our canyons clay for their pottery and now have all lost their hair, and we may many of us be cancerous, but look here, it is
our
land, they were radioactive toxins fabricated by
our
hands, and they are
our
carcinomas, so stand out of our glowy light that we may continue to see as we desire.