Animal Dreams - Barbara Kingsolver [0]
A NOVEL
BARBARA KINGSOLVER
in memory of Ben Linder
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Grace, Arizona, and its railroad depot are imaginary, as is Santa Rosalia Pueblo, although it resembles the Keresan pueblos of northern New Mexico. Other places, and crises, in the book are actual.
I’m grateful for the example provided by many nonfictional volunteers from the United States who went to live and work for a new social order in Nicaragua during the decade following the 1979 revolution. Alongside the Nicaraguan people, they have made indelible contributions to that country, and to history.
For their support and contributions to this book I also owe a warm debt of thanks to my editor at Harper & Row, Janet Goldstein, my literary agent, Frances Goldin, and my remarkable family, especially Jessica Sampson (locomotive engineer extraordinaire), Wendell and Ginny Kingsolver, Joe Hoffman, and Camille Hoffman Kingsolver, who has attached me securely to this world.
CONTENTS
AUTHOR’S NOTE
HOMERO
1. The Night of All Souls
COSIMA
2. Hallie’s Bones
HOMERO
3. The Flood
COSIMA
4. Killing Chickens
5. The Semilla Besada
6. The Miracle
7. Poison Ground
8. Pictures
9. The Bones in God’s Backyard
HOMERO
10. The Mask
COSIMA
11. A River on the Moon
12. Animal Dreams
HOMERO
13. Crybabies
COSIMA
14. Day of the Dead
HOMERO
15. Mistakes
COSIMA
16. Bleeding Hearts
17. Peacock Ladies at the Café Gertrude Stein
18. Ground Orientation
19. The Bread Girl
HOMERO
20. The Scream
COSIMA
21. The Tissue of Hearts
22. Endangered Places
23. The Souls of Beasts
24. The Luckiest Person Alive
25. Flight
26. The Fifty Mothers
HOMERO
27. Human Remains
COSIMA
28. Day of All Souls
About the Author
Praise
Other Books by Barbara Kingsolver
Copyright
About the Publisher
HOMERO
1
The Night of All Souls
His two girls are curled together like animals whose habit is to sleep underground, in the smallest space possible. Cosima knows she’s the older, even when she’s unconscious: one of her arms lies over Halimeda’s shoulder as if she intends to protect them both from their bad dreams. Dr. Homer Noline holds his breath, trying to see movement there in the darkness, the way he’s watched pregnant women close their eyes and listen inside themselves trying to feel life.
A slice of white moon from the window divides their bodies deeply into light and shadow, but not one from the other. No light could show where one body ends and the other begins when they’re sleeping like this. Maybe a mother’s eye could tell, but that is the one possibility that can’t be tried.
Halimeda’s bed is still made. In the morning she’ll rumple it so he’ll believe she slept by herself, and then the girls will make it again. Their labors at deceiving him are as careful as surgery. But morning is worlds away now, it’s still early night on the Day of All Souls. The two of them spent the whole day playing in the cemetery with neighbor children, Pocha and Juan Teobaldo and Cristobal and the twin babies, helping Viola Domingos build a bower of marigolds over the grave of a great-grandmother who is no part of this family.
For a long time he stands gripping the door frame, which is exactly the width of a newborn’s skull and curves similarly against his palm. He watches his daughters, though there’s nothing to watch, and thinks these words: “A great-grandmother who isn’t their business.” He decides this will be their last year for the cemetery and the Day of All Souls. There are too many skeletons down there. People count too long on the oblivion of children.
They’re deep in the corpselike collapse that takes hold of children when they are exhausted, but still he won’t risk going in to stand over the bed the way he once would have. He would see the usual things: unraveled braids and the scraped shins hidden from his punishing antiseptics. Tonight he would also see cheeks and eyelids stained bright yellow from marigold pollen. He’s spent a lifetime noticing small details from a distance. From the