Ariel's Crossing - Bradford Morrow [177]
Thin air. Funny, that reminded her of Marcos’s ghost. He never abandoned his conviction that it was a ghost he’d seen back when he was young. Sometimes she teased her husband about it, but got no laughs from him, as he refused to take it in the spirit intended, so to speak. He was sure he had identified her through research he’d done using antique deeds on the place from the Rancho de Peña era. For such a practical, down-to-earth man, his insistence that he had encountered the ghost of Doña Francisca, the only daughter of the man who first settled this spread back in the nineteenth century, seemed, well, just seemed out of character. Everything else Marcos did or said made such sense. It reminded Ariel of Granna somehow, the fervency of her belief in the altogether unprovable.
Yet, walking in this twilight, seeing the mists on the river, she could imagine how such a vision might come to pass. Desert air, this lean desert air, was chilly tonight, while the creek water ran warm from a long fall sun. The fields were wet from irrigating, the ground tepid. Wasn’t that the meteorology which would produce these skeins of pale haze, these fog strings drifting like spectral tapers across her path? It was, she was certain. This must surely have been what Marcos saw all those years ago.
An owl hooted. A magpie shifted on a branch overhead. Ariel walked even more quickly, and as she did she began to think about the notes she’d been adding to her new ledger, the one she now used, having filled the Calder volume. More noticings, more notes.
How would she evoke what she witnessed here before her? Mist-figures taking on clearer shapes, and one in particular rising toward undeniable form down the path a hundred paces or so, not far from the aluminum gate that would let her back into the lower pasture and on toward the fieldhouse, where her husband and child waited for her. If Francisca was somehow still in Nambé valley, could it be possible beyond just wishful thinking that some small part of Kip was, too?
With rosetilla of Chimayó, Ariel mused, she might have tried to help him remain a presence. With rosetilla the aster, ambrosia concertiflora that flourishes along the riverbed, herb of the toad, yerba that cures men, women, and beasts whose bodies were suffering. Maybe Francisca prepared for him the traditional mash of yerba del sapo and salt and asparagus berries and steeped it in a bowl of creek water and set it out for him under a Navajo willow. Perhaps his médìca choreographed his respite from absolute death, knowing somehow that her lover’s great-grandson’s wife would be grateful.
Ariel unlatched the gate, shivering from the deepening chill. At the far end of the paddock, protected by coyote fences, stood her adobe, hidden safely in the moonshade of deleafing cottonwoods— the fieldhouse where Kip had spent so many of his best days. She walked past the stud barn through the vivid meadow fog that floated in fragile bundles across the scape and when she reached the corral fence, an anil cloud stopped her in her tracks. It looked for all the world like a woman. Whorly embroidery running the length of her skirt, a silk blouse under a wispy jerkin, flor boots soft as slippers, a sombrero banded by silver disks that caught the early starlight in enchanted glints. Flowing from the earth beside her was a condensation, the synopsis of a man, radiant in his handsome mist, as real as Doña Francisca de Peña had ever been or would be. There were others, too, moving about in a fantastic dance. And though Ariel knew the forms and shapes were the work of nightfall haze and her own imagination, as she made her way across the pasture she believed they were also as real as any imagined