Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart_ A Novel - Alice Walker [47]
There was a long silence.
And I wish they had because when the digging up of the lake bed was well under way what do you think the development people discovered, not at the bottom of the lake but underneath it?
The bones? asked Kate.
Exactly, said Hugh. The bones of the old man’s people from thousands of years ago. Resting there forever with a huge body of water separating them from any disturbance, and with only a tiny, trickling spring to connect them with the living.
It changed me, said Hugh. Even before I got sick.
I can see how it would, said Kate.
His devotion, he said, seeming to choke on the word.
Yes, she said.
Oh, so that’s what it means to love, I thought. And had I ever loved? I thought not.
How did he, did they, even know their ancestors’ bones were down there? asked Kate. And beneath a lake?
A gorgeous multilegged bug, green and gold and red, landed on Hugh’s shoulder. Very carefully he removed it and studied it as he talked.
How adequate is word of mouth? How reliable is family? Kinship? How can something precious be kept that way across ten to thirty thousand years?
The old man must have felt so grateful, said Kate. To be who he was, to have had those people before him, shaping him into who he was.
Hugh was scanning the bug closely so as not to reveal the wetness of his eyes. The geologists thought, he said, that there had been a cave, a burial cave, then an earthquake, then, who knows, the ice age. . . . But they didn’t really know. They made something up, you know, What the White Man Knows About Folks He’s Never Known, and printed it in their journals. But they didn’t inspire a lot of confidence. The old man though, he knew. And he taught what he knew to his grandson.
And did the grandson come back to the ranch?
Not yet.
Devotion, thought Kate. Hugh Brentforth V wanted to know devotion.
The more I thought about it, he said, it seemed the only thing worth knowing.
Kate lay in her hut, which was open on all sides, and quite damp from the frequent showers that, according to Armando, “never came in October,” and she thought about devotion.
What was she devoted to?
To her sons, Henry and Charles, one lost to her in the United States space program of which she knew little and feared much. Space colonies? she’d asked her son. How can you get behind anything that’s colonial? The other, Charlie, an itinerant saxophone player and jazz man perpetually fulfilling the stereotype by being stoned on grass nine days out of ten. On the tenth day he looked for his supplier. Suppose something happened to one of them, she thought. What would I do? And then she thought: But it’s already happened to them and there was nothing I could do. I could and did say to Henry: Be careful of joining any endeavor that is too “complicated” to tell your mother. And to Charles, since high school, I ranted, raved, and cajoled against overuse of marijuana. He’d laughed. Everybody is doing it, Mom, he’d said, as if I were the only human being on earth who was not.
She thought of Yolo. The first time she’d thought of him on this journey in a way unrelated to the stability and comfort he brought to her life. If he became sick, or say he was bitten badly by a big shark out of the novel he was reading there in Hawaii, what would she do? She’d take care of him, she knew. She could even imagine enjoying it. And surely some part of devotion was the pleasure it gave. But was this the same as loving ancestors you never saw, no one you knew had ever seen, for more than ten thousand years? But maybe these particular bones beneath Hugh Brentforth’s lake had permeated the land to such a degree that the land and the lake and the spring and the souls were one.
The next day, seeing Hugh sitting with Lalika next to the deeply wrinkled and ropy trunk of a large tree that looked like, she blinked her eyes, an old Indian man, she called softly out to him:
Hey, Hugh, I’ve been thinking about what the old man did with the water.
In fact, she had dreamed the night before that there were two burial grounds on Hugh’s property.