Ariel's Crossing - Bradford Morrow [64]
—You’re being silly, he’d chide, as they played poor-man’s golf.
—Not as silly as you, she’d respond, smacking the rawhide ball with a putter carved from a fallen fence post.
As it turned out, the old adobe would become the one place in all Nambé where anyone’s seclusion could be assured, since no one entered it after Lanie drowned in a heavy spring runoff flood that came flying unexpectedly down the creek. Marcos discovered his lifeless sister, wet, muddy, as gangly as a newborn foal dropped from a mare that hadn’t yet tongued its eyes open. The flood had caught her in its furious arms upstream, near the mother ditch where the girl had been mucking about by herself. Churning detritus in its gray maw, its gorged water carried her in a roar of plunging stones and tires and tin cans and tangled branches torn from riverside willows. Swept into the murderous brown clot, she was delivered right beside the very fieldhouse she so preposterously shunned.
With Elena gone, the Montoya family changed forever. Sarah was for years unspeakably defeated, to be resurrected only by the slowly evolving idea that she could help Lanie by helping others. Carl and Marcos were stupefied, voiceless, and threw their grief into daily work. Though Delfino assured young Marcos he made up that Itoayemu ogre story, nothing could persuade the boy to enter the fieldhouse again, however much he once delighted in its intoxicating gloom and mystery.
Marcos shared these stories with Kip while they worked on the restoration, and Kip listened quietly as he sawed fresh latillas from cedar saplings and then later slung on scratch-coat mud—clay, sand, straw—after they’d scraped the wall’s eroded surfaces. When Marcos, during a break, surprised himself by telling Kip about the ghost who lived here, and how he’d come to believe she was the legendary Francisca de Peña, daughter of the ranch’s first settler, Kip suggested that if there had been some kind of spell on the place, wasn’t it about time to break it? “Set the poor spirit free, so to say. At least make it a place for the living as well as the dead.”
“I suppose you’re right,” said Marcos.
“I believe you, by the way.”
“About the ghost?”
“Why not.”
At times like this, when Marcos opened himself up to Kip, the older man found himself growing impatient with Mary’s ongoing fraud. He sympathized with her but having himself been down duplicitous roads over the years, having failed people, some of them very badly, Kip hated to watch this probable disaster unfold before him. What was more, he saw himself being drawn into new duplicity and increasingly didn’t like it. Proverbial rock and hard place, though. He wished them both impossible happiness. Or was that the prerogative only of parents, such a wish?
Either way, as Kip toiled down here, he found he was able to take some measure of where he was in relation to where he had been. In his mind he walked from the adobe in lines that radiated from it like rays of the zia. If he began his march at the new front door, headed straight across the porchstone—now scrubbed and reset—due east, he would walk parallel to Rio Nambé and up into the foothills until he reached Trampas, where the trout ran in the cold mountain streams of his boyhood. Were he to walk in the opposite direction, his feet would carry him across Pojoaque reservation land to San Ildefonso pueblo. He’d ford the Rio Grande in his mind and climb into the canyons below the Los Alamos mesas of the Jemez. To his right was Tesuque pueblo, and beyond that Santa Fe. And over his left shoulder was the wide shallow creek and the main settlement of Nambé, population three hundred, give or take. Then desert, more desert.
Kip found that he could spend many hours on end working,