Animal Dreams - Barbara Kingsolver [69]
The cemetery covered acres. To the west of us were collections of small neglected mounds whose stones bore the names of families that had died out. “Trubee,” I read aloud, wandering toward the desert of the forgotten. “Alice, Anna, Marcus. Lomas: Hector, Esperanza, José, Angel, Carmela.”
“Honey, we better get back to where people are,” Viola cautioned, but I wandered on, as distracted in my way as Mason must have been, wherever he was.
“Nolina,” I shouted. “Look, here’s my long-lost relatives.”
Viola looked at me oddly from her distance across the graves.
“I’m kidding,” I said. We came from Illinois, as she well knew. “Here’s my Aunt Raquel, my aunt…something Maria.” Most of the graves were illegible, or so crudely marked there was nothing to read. Then I found one that stopped me dead.
“Viola. Here’s a Homero Nolina.”
“So it is,” she said, not really looking. “Son of a gun.”
I eyed her. “Do you know something about this?”
“What do you want me to tell you?”
“Who were the Nolinas?”
“Come on back away from there and I’ll tell you.”
I stood my ground.
“Honey, come on, let’s leave these dead folks alone. Nobody put any plates of food out for them for a long, long time. They’re not feeling so happy today.”
“Okay, but you have to tell me.”
She told me the Nolinas used to live up around Tortoise River, in the northern end of Gracela Canyon. There was a little settlement there that dispersed when the area was covered by mine tailings. The Nolinas had dug up what they could of the family graveyard and carried the bones a few miles to bury them up here. It wasn’t all that long ago, she said. Around 1950.
“I don’t know any Nolinas in Grace now,” I said.
“No, they’re about gone. They never did settle too good into Grace. The most of them went to Texas or somewhere, after their houses got tore up. They weren’t…” She stopped and took off her shoe, cocking her stockinged foot against her plump ankle while she examined the inside of it, then put it back on. “The Nolinas weren’t real accepted. They were kind of different all the way back. There was one of the Gracela sisters had auburn hair and a bad temper, and she married Conrado Nolina. They say that family went downhill.”
“They were trash, is what you’re telling me.”
“No. Just different.”
I followed behind her as she plodded along, dodging headstones. She was as intransigent, in her way, as Doc Homer. “So how come one of them has practically the same name as my father?”
“You better ask him that,” she said. “It’s his name.”
At that moment something hit me from behind like a torpedo, tackling me around the knees. It was Mason.
“Where have you been, pachuco? Your mama was worried to death about you,” Viola said. Mason had an enormous sucker ballooning under one cheek. He laughed, recognizing Viola’s scoldings as a bald-faced lie.
“I was at a birthday party,” he lied back.
It took a while to coax him back to the fold. There were an infinity of distractions: Calaveras, little skull-shaped candies for children to crack between their teeth. The promise of a chicken leg for a kiss. Little girls and boys played “makeup,” standing on tiptoe with their eyes closed and their arms at their sides, fingers splayed in anticipation, while a grownup used a marigold as a powder puff, patting cheeks and eyelids with gold pollen. Golden children ran wild over a field of dead great-grandmothers and great-grandfathers, and the bones must have wanted to rise up and knock together and rattle with joy. I have never seen a town that gave so much—so much of what counts—to its children.
More than anything else I wished I belonged