Ariel's Crossing - Bradford Morrow [55]
“Kip?”
“In here.”
His fieldhouse was low to the ground and cast, as did he, scant shade. Its adobe was discolored and had partly fallen off in chunks around the corner bases of the walls. Unlike the adobe of the main house in the upper park, this place had not been repaired for years.
Tin gutters had let some rainwater off the flat roof, but not enough, and so the round vigas that supported it sagged. Many of the old latillas that had originally been laid in a herringbone pattern from viga to viga had rotted into wood dust and fallen in. Kip and Franny stood side by side looking up at the sky through the ceiling, like a pair of celebrants gazing into sacred sunlight from the depths of a kiva.
“Kind of a mess,” she said.
“I’ve seen worse,” he replied, and they went on with their appraisal of where to begin in earnest. The windows were square and meager, a traditional design of pintle casement meant to hoard heat in winter and ward off the merciless sun of long summers. Earthen floors in what had once been a kitchen, bedroom, and sitting room, fitted with a corner bell-shaped fogón blackened by piñon smoke, were in pretty good repair, except where holes in the roof had let the weather trespass. Other than a rusted spring mattress, a rickety table, and a few other broken chattels, the fieldhouse was empty. A wooden horse, grayer than time itself and probably used for lasso practice, was the biggest prize. Kip and Franny set it up by the front door, a guardian god.
No one had lived within these thick mudded walls for a century, or longer than that, really—since before the days of statehood. The last inhabitant had been some Hispanic gentlewoman, one Francisca de something or other, whose name showed up in the deed, but about whom little was known. And yes, the place was rumored—beyond Marcos’s sightings, which he’d still discussed with none but Franny—to be haunted. A couple of boys from the other side of Rio Nambé had told a patrolman they’d seen the ghost of a woman in Carlos Montoya’s pasture. That was a decade ago. Poker-faced, the patrolman had taken notes with the eraser end of his pencil and never reported the claim.
Now, using trowels like archaeologists, Kip and Franny began to remove deteriorated adobe from the south side of the house, their backs to the sun, the grainy chipping music of their work such an ancient percussive sound, the air dry around them as they labored together. Franny noticed Kip seemed resurrected incrementally, not unlike the adobe he’d become obsessed with fixing, and though she still felt shy around him, she said as much.
He hummed a sort of thank you, audible over the several soft noises of the wind in the higher branches, the nearby shushing river, and their own scrapers. Then he surprised her by asking when she planned on telling Marcos her real name.
“I sort of hoped we could forget about that.”
Kip just kept working at the lower section of a wall where water had capillaried up to rot it away into nothing more than semi-hardened mud.
“It didn’t seem like you wanted to hear,” she added.
“Sure I do. Why don’t you tell me what you were going to tell me?”
She fell quiet while Kip waited, not glancing over at her but hearing her breath pass in and out.
Franny Johnson had very much remained Franny Johnson, while Mary had begun to protest less often her own chosen hiddenness. But lately matters had gotten more tangled, not less, in her head, thanks to her unwonted growing affection for Marcos, for all the Montoyas. Pulling her past and present into harmony, coming to some kind of truer truth, had thus become matters of some urgency.
As before, Kip seemed her ideal confessor, because like