The Bean Trees - Barbara Kingsolver [43]
We’d come to a place you would never expect to find in the desert: a little hideaway by a stream that had run all the way down from the mountains into a canyon, where it jumped off a boulder and broke into deep, clear pools. White rocks sloped up out of the water like giant, friendly hippo butts. A ring of cottonwood trees cooled their heels in the wet ground, and overhead leaned together, then apart, making whispery swishing noises. It made me think of Gossip, the game we played as kids where you whisper a message around a circle. You’d start out with “Randy walks to the hardware store” and end up with “Granny has rocks in her underwear drawer.”
It had been Lou Ann’s idea to come here. It was a place she and Angel used to go when she first came to Tucson with him. I didn’t know if her choice was a good or bad sign, but she didn’t seem unhappy to be here without him. She seemed more concerned that the rest of us would like it.
“So is this place okay? You’re sure?” she asked us, until we begged her to take our word for it, that it was the most wonderful picnic spot on the face of the earth, and she relaxed.
“Me and Angel actually talked about getting married up here,” she said, dipping her toes in and out. There were Jesus bugs here, but not the long-legged, graceful kind we had back home. These were shaped like my car and more or less careened around on top of the water. The whole gang of them together looked like graduation night in Volkswagen land.
“That would have been a heck of a wedding,” Mattie said. “A hefty hike for the guests.”
“Oh, no. We were going to do the whole thing on horseback. Can’t you just see it?”
I could see it in People magazine, maybe. What with my disgust for anything horsy, I always forgot that Angel had won Lou Ann’s heart and stolen her away from Kentucky during his days as a rodeo man.
“Anyway,” she went on, “we could never have gone through with it on account of Angel’s mother. She said something like, ‘Okay, children, go ahead. When I get thrown off a horse and bash my brains out on the rocks, just step over me and go on with the ceremony.’”
The English teacher spoke softly in Spanish to his wife, and she smiled. Most of our conversation seemed to be getting lost in the translation, like some international form of the Gossip game. But this story had come from Mrs. Ruiz’s Spanish (Lou Ann claimed that the only English words her mother-in-law knew were names of diseases) into English, and went back again without any trouble. A certain kind of mother is the same in any language.
Esperanza and Estevan were their names. It led you to expect twins, not a young married couple, and really there was something twinnish about them. They were both small and dark, with the same high-set, watching eyes and strong-boned faces I’d admired in the bars and gas stations and postcards of the Cherokee Nation. Mattie had told me that more than half the people in Guatemala were Indians. I had no idea.
But where Estevan’s smallness made him seem compact and springy, as though he might have steel bars inside where most people had flab and sawdust, Esperanza just seemed to have shrunk. Exactly like a wool sweater washed in hot. It seemed impossible that her hands could be so small, that all the red and blue diamonds and green birds that ran across the bosom of her small blouse had been embroidered with regular-sized needles. I had this notion that at one time in life she’d been larger, but that someone had split her in two like one of those hollow wooden dolls, finding this smaller version inside. She took up almost no space. While the rest of us talked and splashed and laughed she sat still, a colorful outgrowth of rock. She reminded me of Turtle.
There had been something of a scene between her and Turtle earlier that day. We’d driven up in two cars, Lou Ann