Pigs in Heaven - Barbara Kingsolver [3]
After their chance reconnection, she and Sugar shared their memories in long letters pressed into fat envelopes, but once they’d finished with the past, neither one had it in her to sustain the correspondence. Alice suspects Sugar’s life never reached the same elevation again; in her letters there was mention of daughters prone to pregnancy. Alice pictures a rattletrap house and flowerbeds gone to jimson weed.
But Sugar once put Heaven on the map, and that has to carry some weight still. Alice stretches her legs into the pale orange morning that is taking hold around her, and it dawns on her with a strange shock that she is still the same person she was as a nine-year-old. Even her body is mostly unchanged. Her breasts are of a small, sound architecture and her waist is limber and strong; she feels like one of those California buildings designed for an earthquake. As surely as her organs are in the right places, she feels Sugar is still there in Heaven. She could write her today. She’s kept feelings for Sugar, her long-lost relative who came home to her one day in the checkout line. Something like that is as bad or as good as a telephone ringing in the night: either way, you’re not as alone as you think.
2
A Mean Eye
“LOOK UP, TURTLE. ANGELS.”
Taylor stoops to her daughter’s eye level and points up at the giant granite angels guarding the entrance to the Hoover Dam: a straight-backed team, eyes on the horizon, their dark, polished arms raised toward the sky.
“They look like Danny,” Turtle observes.
“Biceps to die for,” Taylor agrees. Danny, their garbage man, is a body builder on his days off.
“What do angels need muscles for?”
Taylor laughs at the thought of some saint having to tote around the overfilled garbage bags of heaven. “They made this back in the thirties,” she says. “Ask Grandma about the Depression sometime. Nobody could get a job, so they had this WPA thing where people made bridges and sidewalks and statues that look like they could sweat.”
“Let’s take a picture.” Turtle’s tone warns off argument; she means Taylor will stand under the angels and she will take the photo. Taylor stands where she’s placed and prepares to smile for as long as it takes. Turtle concentrates through the rectangular eye, her black eyebrows stranded above it in her high forehead. Turtle’s photos tend to come out fairly hopeless in terms of composition: cut-off legs or all sky, or sometimes something Taylor never even saw at the time. When the pictures come back from the drugstore she often gets the feeling she’s gone on someone else’s vacation. She watches Turtle’s snub-nosed sneakers and deliberately planted legs, wondering where all that persistence comes from and where it will go. Since she found Turtle in her car and adopted her three years ago, she has had many moments of not believing she’s Turtle’s mother. This child is the miracle Taylor wouldn’t have let in the door if it had knocked. But that’s what miracles are, she supposes. The things nobody saw coming.
Her eyes wander while Turtle fiddles. The sun is hot, hot. Taylor twists her dark hair up off her neck.
“Mom!”
“Sorry.” She drops her arms to her sides, carefully, like a dancer, and tries to move nothing but her eyes. A man in a wheelchair rolls toward them and winks. He’s noticeably handsome from the waist up, with WPA arms. He moves fast, his dark mane flying, and turns his chair smoothly before the angels’ marble pedestal. If she strains her peripheral vision Taylor can read the marble slab: it’s a monument to the men who died building the dam. It doesn’t say who they were, in particular. Another panel across the way lists the names of all the directors of the dam project, but this one says only that many who labored here found their final rest. There is a fairly disturbing bronze plaque showing men in work clothes calmly slipping underwater. “Poor guys,” she says aloud. “Tomb of the unknown concrete pourer.”
“Working for fifty cents an