Ariel's Crossing - Bradford Morrow [33]
—I’m sorry, he nodded.
—No need for apology. I just want you to be all right.
He lifted a piece of bread to his mouth but couldn’t eat it so put it down again beside his plate before telling Marcos, quietly, —Fact is, they probably are. Happy about it, I mean—proud of themselves.
—How could anybody be proud of pushing folks off their land and then slowly depriving them of life?
—That’s how it works. That’s how it was. And the more they do nothing, more they just keep good and tight-lipped and leave us dangling, the more all that’s left of us die off. One day it’ll come to pass that nothing will have happened. I’ll be with Agnes. The Onsruds’ll be gone, like the Harmans, the Wards, the Stearns, the McDonalds, everybody. Every one of the other ranchers down here’ll be dead and gone and that’ll mean they were right and we weren’t. Why wouldn’t they be proud of being right?
Sarah overheard, despite his whispering. —Maybe you’d like some coffee, Delf.
—He’s okay, Marcos said, and rose, after his uncle did, to follow him to the men’s room where the widower wept quietly in one of the stalls. Marcos washed his face and dried it with a paper towel. He left the echoing room, then waited outside in the corridor for some while before his uncle emerged, stonefaced, to take his nephew by the elbow and ask him to accompany him to the parking lot. Would he mind making the necessary excuses for an old man who had to get back home, and who truly appreciated everybody’s concern and the effort they’d all gone to, coming from such distances to be with Agnes today?
The air outside was sere and smarting with gypsum sand carried on the breeze from the white dunes west of town, past the gargantuan air force base. —Tell Sarah and your father I’m fine, just tired is all. Need to be by myself.
Marcos asked if he might drive Delfino up the road to Tularosa. His uncle was grateful but climbed into the pickup with no further comment, turned over the engine, and pulled out onto the highway that bisected Alamogordo, paralleling the old El Paso—to—White Oaks railroad line, which had, before drought settled in a century before, falsely promised this catastrophic basin fruits and wealth beyond dreaming.
When he got home, the widower folded his necktie into a kind of crunched coil, like some burned and flattened sidewinder, then placed it ceremoniously in Agnes’s rags drawer. He changed out of his suit into a flannel workshirt and khaki trousers, then set himself the task of laundering his wife’s clothing—her seersucker robe, her cotton nightshirts, her thin white ankle socks. He had it in mind that on the following morning he would bundle everything up and take it to the Salvation Army in El Paso.
Others would be wearing Agnes’s wardrobe by next week, in Juárez and Carlsbad and even Galveston. They would never have heard of Agnes Montoya, a ranching wife who’d poured every energy of her youth into homesteading a few hundred acres of wickedly thorny land up by Dripping Spring on this side of the San Andres. Some woman visiting her sister down in El Paso would score Agnes’s favorite dress at the thrift shop, a dark-blue polka-dotted rayon number with a scalloped hem. She’d drive back to Truth or Consequences feeling extravagant as the wind ruffled its sleeves. Others would carry away her stuff, too, unaware that in the early forties their original owner had helped build a house, dig its cistern, erect the windmill, herd cattle, and break wild cayuses at her husband’s side. None who wore Agnes’s jewelry, slacks, coats would ever know how deep had been her grief that she and Delfino never had children. Nor how devastated she’d felt when, in 1944, the army evicted them from their ranch, promising that they could return once the war was over. And how angry over the passing years this wife