Animal Dreams - Barbara Kingsolver [113]
I could never know the truth of my mother, but there was another story now. Another side. I closed my eyes and listened to Doña Althea with the joy of a child. I don’t know what they heard on the CBS news. I heard a bedtime story thirty years late.
22
Endangered Places
It rained and rained in Gracela Canyon. February passed behind a mask of clouds. It seemed like either the end of the world or the beginning.
The orchards, whose black branch tips had been inspected throughout the winter for latent signs of life, suddenly bloomed, all at once: pears, plums, apples, quince, their normal staggered cycle compressed by the odd weather into a single nuptial burst. Through my classroom window I watched drenched blossoms falling like wet snow.
Water, in Grace, is an all-or-nothing proposition, like happiness. When you have rain you have more than enough, just as when you’re happy and in love and content with your life you can’t remember how you ever could have felt cheated by fate. And vice versa. I knew, abstractly, that I’d been happy, but now that I was in pain again, that happiness was untouchable. It was a garish color picture of a place I had not been. Memory runs along deep, fixed channels in the brain, like electricity along its conduits; only a cataclysm can make the electrons rear up in shock and slide over into another channel. The human mind seems doomed to believe, as simply as a rooster believes, that where we are now is the only possibility.
But it isn’t. In spite of the promise of plenty that dripped from the rooftops and gushed down Gracela Canyon’s ravines throughout February, the winter rains would soon dry up. Then there would not be another drop until July. During those brittle months the taste and smell of rain would be lost to us, beyond the recollection even of children and the deepest root tips of trees. That is the way of the seasons in a desert place. Only the river ran continuously. The river was Grace’s memory of water.
We heard nothing from Hallie. First I tried to tell myself she was already out of danger. In the past, the two-week delay of her letters had caused me to keep a distrustful eye on Hallie, like a star so many light years away it could have exploded long ago while we still watched its false shine. Now I tried the reverse psychology: we would hear, soon, that she’d been safe while we worried.
But we didn’t, and I gave over to panic. I began to call Managua every week. The Minister of Agriculture, whose secretary now knew me by voice, said there wasn’t any reason for me to fly down to Nicaragua; there was nothing I could do there but wait, which—he implied—I was doing badly enough where I was. He really was not unkind, just frustrated, like any of us. He pointed out that Hallie was an exceptional person, to those of us who loved her, but not an exceptional case—the contras made daily forays across the border to attack workers in their fields, sometimes even schoolchildren. Thousands of civilians had died. “If you came here,” he said, “you would see.” Every home had a framed photograph on a table that stood for a fresh empty space in the family, he said. Teachers and community workers were particularly at risk.
He said I might try making Hallie’s status known to the general public in the United States. It could pressure her captors to show restraint; or, he warned me frankly, it could do the opposite.
I knew nothing else to do, so I wrote letters. Emelina helped. We papered her kitchen table with letters in progress. I drafted mine on stationery from the Grace High School principal’s office, but the letterhead intimidated Emelina, who preferred lined paper from her kids’ loose-leaf notebooks. Viola put a request to the Stitch and Bitch Club, and after that we had volunteers in Emelina