Walk in Beauty (25 page)

She was caught in the sound and didn’t really tune in at first. He spoke of being the son of a weaver, who had given him respect for what she did. And he told them about Reeves, the gallery owner in Colorado Springs.

These things she knew, and only paid them scant attention. But then he began to tell a story about Coyote, the traditional trickster of Navajo legend.

Suddenly riveted, Jessie lifted a hand to the translator so she could hear the words in the original tongue, and she did miss a few words, but most of it was clear.

“Coyote, this time, isn’t something outside,” he said, “but something inside. He’s like the worm in an apple, trying to make you believe the special gifts you were given by Spider Woman are not worthy of all they can command.

“Some people here are afraid of witches, but we found the boys who were causing that trouble. You know them, and know they are young men with problems. They were working for some of the galleries, trying to make you give up. They put on Coyote clothes to make you think you aren’t worth more, but you are.”

As transfixed as the rest, Jessie stared at Luke. She had never seen this side of him before, this gently funny man, Navajo through and through. With the rest of them, she laughed when he made jokes and teased and made light of the darkness.

But it was as she was laughing over one of his jokes that she realized she
had
seen this side of him. It was this wry, strong Luke who had loved her so fiercely when she was broken and afraid as a young woman. It was this Luke who had loved her so unconditionally and completely and passionately that Jessie was able to be the kind of mother to Giselle that every little girl should have.

It was Luke who had given her the gift of her child and the tools to be her mother.

She glanced toward Daniel, who watched Luke with a glitter in his eye, a resounding and nodding approval. Daniel, too, had played his part, had given Jessie the tools to enter Luke’s world, then pushed her into it, screaming and fighting all the way. Because Daniel knew her, he knew well that Coyote had had a stranglehold of fear on Jessie’s life for a long, long time.

She took a long, deep breath. Oh, yes, the trickster had made mischief in her life, all right. By making her doubt herself and her instincts. By manipulating the guilt carried by most children of alcoholic parents. By making her feel she had no judgment.

With the same stunning sense of revelation she’d felt over seeing the endless mothers in her paintings, Jessie now saw something else. She’d been right to leave Luke eight years ago. It had been the only choice she could have made. In taking that step, for herself and for her child, she’d broken her cycle of co-dependency.

It might have been wrong to hide his child from him all these years. She didn’t know. But the past was gone and couldn’t be retrieved.

And with surprise, she thought of her behavior with Rudy the night before and realized just how far she’d come. No, not everyone felt the need to tend to drunk alcoholics, any more than everyone wanted work in a hospice. The work was too depressing for most people.

She did it because she wanted to, because sometimes there wasn’t anyone else. Like a nurse, she had a need to tend the ones who were ill, to ease their pain until they could get well, or at least be one kind face in the world if they didn’t.

Overcome, she abruptly stood up and walked quickly toward the back door. Luke’s truck was parked in the lot, with the keys dangling from the ignition. For a minute, she hesitated, wondering where Giselle was. A high laugh sounded from the swings around to one side, and Jessie recognized the sound. Jessie whistled, and Giselle came around the building. “Hi, Mom! Is the meeting over?”

“Not quite. Tell Luke I’ll be back in a little while, okay?”

“Okay. Bye.”

Jessie drove around for a while, trying to rein in her emotions, the overwhelming insights that had been rocking her all day. Each one hit her anew, one after the other, in little bursts. Her mother. Luke. The tricks Coyote had played.

At an isolated spot, she stopped at the edge of the narrow highway and parked. She bent her head over the steering wheel and let go. She cried in joy and release and a certain inescapable sorrow. Mostly she cried in relief at the freedom she felt soaring into the free air, where she could breathe, where she was no longer responsible for everyone and everything in the world.

She wept because she loved Luke with every fiber of her being and didn’t want to leave him. H often did it happen that the most sacred, holy, most heartfelt of dreams came true? How many people ever got a second chance?

And when the built-up emotions were spent, when she was cleansed by her tears, she lifted her head to stare at the harsh and beautiful land Luke loved so much. It was beautiful. They were all beautiful to Jessie—the coast of California, the forests of Washington, the farmland in Iowa, the mountains of Colorado.

Beauty all around me.

With a wry smile, she realized something else. Because of her unstable childhood, because she had no real roots of her own, she’d learned to embrace a feeling of home where ever she went. Her home was inside herself, a private, quiet place to which she had been retreating all of her life.

All at once, she felt an urgent need to paint her mother. Not drunk or sick, but as she had been sometimes when she went on the wagon. Oh, how Jessie had lived for those rare sober days—coming home from school to a house cleared of clutter, to cookies on the table and a fine Irish tea in the pot. In those times, Jessie’s mother had spoken of the Ireland she left behind, that bleak land of the north where war still raged. It had been terribly painful for her mother to leave Ireland, a fact Jessie hadn’t understood until she was grown.

Now Jessie wanted to paint her, the bright blue eyes and the benevolent, patient smile. She would paint her in Ireland, perhaps. She laughed a little to herself. Maybe if she painted her own mother, her real mother, who had done the best she could in spite of her illness, Jessie could finally move on to some other subjects.

And more. Jessie would tell Giselle about her other grandmother, the Irish one, let Giselle claim Jessie’s half, too. She might even call her father, and ask him—

No, she didn’t know how far she wanted to go with her father. Maybe some things were better left alone. Her father had sealed his wounds and put the past behind him. Jessie would not disturb that old pain.

As she sat there, she realized a certain urgent need to do one more thing. It made her feel a whisper of the same lost emotion it always had, but it was time for her to face down her demons. Firmly, she wiped her face and turned the key.

All this time, all these years, Jessie had been afraid of herself. She had been afraid that it was her actions that somehow led first her mother, then Luke into alcoholism, that if she’d been stronger, wiser, better, she could have somehow prevented it.

But that had been Coyote, the trickster, giving her doubts. Jessie wasn’t responsible for her mother or for Luke—any more than Giselle was responsible for Jessie giving up cigarettes.

Jessie’s mother had been unable to escape her demons. But Luke had. Sometimes he was afraid, sometimes he might be tempted. But she had faith, as once he’d had faith in her.

She wanted to laugh out loud. Instead, she turned the truck around on the rough, slim highway and headed back to the meeting house.

Beauty all around me...

* * *

Daniel was grinning from ear to ear as the meeting ended. “Well done,” he said. “We’ll still lose a few of them, but it looks like we’d better get those options in order.”

Luke inclined his head. “Looks like it.” He scanned the milling group for Jessie, who’d stared at him with the most peculiar expression as he talked—he kept seeing her from the corner of her eye.

“Maybe we can borrow some horses and ride, eh?” Daniel suggested.

“Sounds good.”

When they got outside, however, Luke’s truck was gone. Giselle galloped over with a bevy of her friends. “My mom took your truck.”

Luke narrowed his eyes. “Did she say what she was doing?”

“It’s all right, man,” Daniel said. “I’ve got mine.”

“Hey, kid,” Luke said to Giselle, “you want to go riding with us?”

Giselle looked from the men to the children and quickly shook her head. “No.”

He chuckled. “All right. You be good, and we’ll see you later. Mary knows we’re going. If you need anything, just tell her.”

They got horses from a friend of Daniel’s and rode out in the relative warmth of the mid-afternoon sunshine. Luke hadn’t been on a horse for a while and felt deeply awkward at first, but his body remembered quickly enough. “You’ve done a good job with the project, Daniel,” Luke said after a while.

“It’s about done now. By spring, we’ll have the money for galleries in most of the major markets. Now it will go to the hands of the weavers themselves.”

“Who’s going to run the galleries?”

Daniel coughed. “I’ve got a few people lined up already. Sort of hoped to talk to you about the one in Colorado Springs.”

“Not a chance,” Luke said, but grinned to show he had no hard feelings. More seriously, he added, “I’m coming back to the land.”

“Ahh.” Daniel nodded. “Does Jessie know?”

He shook his head.

“It won’t matter.”

Luke shrugged. “She has to find her own way.”

“True enough.” He chuckled. “What about that girl of yours, eh? She’s a pistol.”

This was the one thing that Luke still had not quite forgiven. “Yeah,”he said gruffly.

Daniel rode silently. “I didn’t know for a long time, man. Not until she painted the portrait.”

“And when was that?”

Daniel touched his nose. “Four or five years ago.”

“And by then—”

“By then I thought you were a jackass and didn’t deserve her.”

Luke lifted his chin, determined not to be offended. “You were there when Giselle was born. Didn’t you see the birth certificate?”

Daniel looked at Luke steadily. The sound of the horses’ hooves clomping softly against the earth and the ring of the bridles against the air were the only sounds.

“She didn’t put a name down,” he said quietly, as if he knew the knowledge would wound. “Not then. She went back later and put it in.”

Luke absorbed this without speaking, his eyes trained on the swoop of a hawk above them.

“What are the chances,” Luke said, shaking his head, “that she would find you, of all the Navajo people there are in Albuquerque?”

“Very small,” Daniel replied. “But big enough. Sometimes, the Creator is kind.”

Luke decided he didn’t want to ask to whom the Creator had been kind. “So, you live in Albuquerque now?”

“Yeah, but not for much longer. There’s a peach orchard near Canyon de Chelly, abandoned and caught up in probate. I’ve been talking to a man about it.”

“You don’t miss living on the reservation?” Daniel shrugged. “No good phone lines. The electricity is patchy, too. I have trouble with it sometimes.” He looked a little sheepish as he admitted, “I gotta have my computers.”

“Computers?” Luke laughed, thinking of the battery-operated bells and elaborate circuits Daniel had built when they were children, from scraps of anything he could find. “What do you do with them?”

“All kinds of things. Fix ‘em, build ‘em, play with ‘em.” Again he gave Luke that slightly apologetic look. “Went to school for programming at UNM. Teach a little now, too.”

“Maybe you’ll teach me,” Luke said with a grin. “Maybe. If you’ll come fix the wood at the farmhouse.”

Luke reined the horse for a minute. “I owe you, man,” he said seriously.

Daniel chuckled. “Yeah, I reckon you do.” He frowned. “Tell me how you let that woman get away from you.”

Luke lifted a brow. “Someday maybe. Not today.”

Daniel nodded. They rode on, content in the silence.

* * *

When Jessie got back, Daniel and Luke were gone, which made it somehow easier. She slipped inside the big hall and paused there a moment, breathing in the change of the room as young men pulled tables to one side and set chairs in a circle around the drum.

Jessie steeled herself and went to the kitchen. On the threshold, she stopped. Here were a dozen women working, as if they knew exactly how to mesh themselves together, the skirts of the grandmothers swirling against the calves of the younger women’s jeans. Navajo and English spilled around them.

Swiftly, before she could lose her courage, Jessie surged forward, taking a knife from the counter. A woman was spilling onions onto the table, and Jessie scooped several toward her. The woman said, “Chop them fine for the chili,” and Jessie nodded.

Next to her, another woman gave her a kitchen match to put in her mouth. “For your eyes,” she said, and stuck one in her own mouth. Side by side, in easy silence, they chopped.

After the onions, there was lettuce to shred, pans to wash—a host of small things that needed doing. Jessie forgot her self-consciousness and moved along with them, feeling a quiet kind of joy in the smell and sound of the other women moving all around her, talking and laughing, teasing each other, chatting about children, complaining about husbands or sons. It was safe. It was homey.

It was exhilarating.

And because she saw the world with the eye of a painter, it was beautiful, too. Piles of chopped red tomato next to an enormous bowl of pale green shredded lettuce, the silver gleam of knives, the old hands and young hands deftly patting big angles of fry bread into shape. Women’s hands.

Mary Yazzie nudged Jessie in the ribs, lifting her chin toward the wide window toward the hall. Luke stood there, watching her with a peculiar expression on his face, as if he’d been passing and had only glanced over, then been caught.

Mary nudged her again. Jessie took a breath and put down her knife. She wiped her fingers on her apron and then took it off. She glanced at Mary, who nodded at her, then walked toward the door.

“Are you all right?” Luke asked. “I was kind of worried about you.”

“I’m fine. Will you come outside with me for a few minutes?”