The Entity, page 18
“Just going up the mountain road. It’ll improve your opinion of this country.”
“Well, I have an infant in the back—”
“We’ll only be gone twenty minutes.”
After the cafe closed Carlotta sat with a middle-aged couple in the cab of Garrett’s powerful little truck. She held Billy on her lap. As they climbed higher and higher, Carlotta’s heart began to fill with wonder. She had never been so high, never seen the landscape the way it looked from up there. Valley after valley dropped into view, the shadows of the spring clouds looked like puffs of white smoke far away, and she could see two forks of a river winding slowly through the cactus far below.
“It’s so beautiful up here!” she said.
“Ain’t Los Angeles, is it?” Garrett said.
She laughed. She held Billy up to the window.
“Look, Billy! That’s an eagle! You’ve never seen an eagle before!”
“Hasn’t now,” Garrett chuckled. “That’s a hawk.”
When they got out of the truck, Garrett pointed out some things to the couple. Far away, like a vision it was so far away, nestled in under red plateaus, was a tiny ranch, almost yellow in the dappled sunlight. A creek ran beside it, and farther away, the highway rose over the dry hills.
The crisp air twirled her hair. Her heart was pounding, not from the altitude, but from a strange thrill. Something she had never known before.
“Oh, I wish I could build a cabin up here!” she exclaimed. “I’d live here forever!”
Garrett smiled.
“I told you that you weren’t practical. There’s no water up here, and you’d freeze in the winter.”
She laughed.
When she got out of the truck at the cafe, she thanked Garrett. She got into her Chevy, drove back to the cabin swimming in a sea of mud, and in her mind’s eye was the vision of the yellow ranch far away.
In the early summer the dust and pollen were thick in the air. Billy began to wheeze and cough. She covered his face with a wet handkerchief, but it was something else that was wrong. He began to grow a fever, his face became alternately pale and flushed, and his eyes had a delirious quality. Neither the owner of the cabin nor anyone in the cafe knew what was wrong. The only doctor was gone, traveling in his jeep up the north fork of the river.
Billy was infected. His breathing came and went, sounded like a file rasping on a board. The tiny eyes and nose ran with mucus. He struggled for breath, twisted on the bed, crying. She went back to the doctor’s office. A note said he would not return from the North Fork area for two weeks.
The dust howled through the trees. Dead leaves from autumn were flattened against the cabin walls.
She drove the Chevy down to the north fork, guiding the car as best as she could over the rutted roads. Beside her Billy wheezed in three torn blankets. He was propped up against the seat, coughing and spitting. Far away she recognized the ranch she had once seen from high over the town.
She drove in to the gate, stopped the car, and got out with Billy in her arms. An old couple told her the doctor had gone around the other side of the south fork, around the canyon, and there were no telephones to the area.
They sat her down on an overstuffed sofa inside. The man went to a telephone and wound up the crank.
“Bob? Jamison here. Listen, a woman here with a sick infant . . . No, not me. Somebody from town. Can you make it down here? . . . What . . . Good, good. We’ll be waiting.”
Carlotta shivered on the sofa. Evidently she had not been eating well. She looked pale, clammy. They thought she needed a doctor as well.
“Now listen,” the man said, “don’t worry. Somebody’s coming who knows a lot about medicine. Learned it from the Indians. So you just wait ’til he comes.”
After an hour a truck was heard rattling down the mountainside. Carlotta stood, realized she had a fever: her legs felt leaden, heavy. Garrett stepped from the truck outside, carrying a small bag.
“Mr. Garrett,” she said weakly, smiling, holding out her hand, “I haven’t seen you in ages.”
“Carlotta! I didn’t know—then it’s Billy?”
Without another word he went into the darkened bedroom. They boiled water, mixed in several herbs, and Garrett spent the night on a chair watching over the infant. Carlotta sat in the bedroom, then forced herself to eat something, then sat in the room again. Billy slept fitfully, moaning hotly, his face bathed in perspiration, his eyes glazed. Then he slowly drifted into a deep slumber. Carlotta bent over to look. Garrett started, awakened.
“He’s sleeping,” he said.
“He looks burning with fever.”
“It’s the worst now. By morning he’ll cool down.”
Toward sunrise Carlotta fell asleep. Garrett covered her in an Indian blanket lying nearby. The couple slept on the sofa in the front room, stirred, and prepared breakfast. Billy slept through it all, oblivious to every noise.
“See?” Garrett said. “His forehead is cooler.”
Garrett prepared several herbs, bathed the child and listened to the breathing. After several more hours he noticed that Carlotta was suffering from a terrible fatigue.
By mid-afternoon it was apparent that Billy was better. His face lost the flushed appearance, and by suppertime he opened his eyes. Garrett drove Carlotta and Billy back to their cabin, the man and woman bringing up the Chevy and driving back in their own car. Garrett took one look at the tiny, dirty cabin and shook his head.
“This is no good,” he said softly.
He leaned over the stove, opened the lid, and peered in. Then he looked at the flue.
“You have no ventilation here,” he said. “No wonder you get sick. And the roof is in bad shape. You’re going to get rain right through it in the fall. What’re you going to do when the snow falls?”
Carlotta stood in the corner, watching him inspecting the cabin.
“This is just no good,” he said to himself. “I never thought it had deteriorated like this.”
“I was afraid to ask the owner,” she said.
“Do you have some other place to go to?”
Carlotta hesitated.
“No.”
“You’re going to freeze like a popsicle in five months.”
“I—I’m not sure what to do.”
Garrett kicked the small woodpile. The rotted wood fell apart in soft chunks. He knew now that the woman depended on him.
“Well,” he said, looking up, “I can put up a couple of new rafters for you.”
“Oh no, Mr. Garrett. You mustn’t—”
“You should have told me a long time ago,” he said, almost angrily. Not angry at her, but at himself. He had seen that she was vulnerable, without a man.
“I didn’t know—”
“You have to trust people, Carlotta,” he said. “Out here we depend on each other.”
They buttered bread and covered it with thick slabs of ham. Carlotta seemed to wait for Garrett to decide what to do. Fatigue and the isolation had eroded her confidence in herself. Now she had no place to turn except to this white-haired man who was lost in thought.
“There’s no harm in running away,” he said softly. “Provided you know what you’re running toward.”
She said nothing. There was no artifice in what he said. He was not trying to be something he was not. She, too, felt the need to be honest, to be direct, for the first time in her life.
“I was afraid of staying where I was,” she said simply. “Anything was better.”
Garrett boiled some water and made tea. The tap did not close properly, and he shook his head.
“Life goes forward,” he said. “Not backward.”
“You’re religious?” she asked.
He broke into a pleasant laugh, the even white teeth shining.
“No. Not at all. Not as it is conventionally known. I love the land. Life itself. That’s my God.”
“My father was a preacher,” she said distastefully. “I don’t think he ever knew who his God really was.”
Now the sun was down. Garrett kicked over a wooden box and sat down on it. They drank their tea, sweetened with honey and lemon. Slowly the hour passed by. Carlotta told him about her father, the inward, striving man who was so bitterly disappointed in life.
“Life apart from yourself is hard, Carlotta,” Garrett said. “You need somebody to teach you to be on your own.”
It relieved her, to hear him speak. It was like removing a cancer from her soul. She found herself telling him private things about herself. She found that a human being whom she could trust was the greatest treasure that the earth provides. In him she saw a different standard of values, something closer to the human. Modest and self-reliant. Self-contained. From that peaceful vantage point she surveyed the wrecked life that had been hers. She condemned it all, this time with the certainty that it would be defeated. She could find a new life. Here. Out where the natural struggle molded you in a different image.
“I believe the sun is rising,” he said softly.
“It is. How beautiful! It looks so clear—”
“By mid-summer it will be rising over Twin Peaks. You see how it changes during the year? Everything moves in a long cycle. Everything becomes renewed.”
She looked at him. She realized she was staring. She was no longer a little girl. She no longer needed to be one. Between two people there could be a natural relationship.
He, too, was looking at her. Frankly. Penetrating her glance with his. The unspoken hung in the air. She went to the bed and picked up Billy.
“His breathing is normal,” she said.
Her own heart had begun beating more rapidly. It was something akin to desire. But it was more refined. A feeling more delicate, so subtle that she was afraid it would dissipate and leave her the same Carlotta who had run away, fleeing herself. She turned, found him standing behind her, unafraid. He reached his hand forward, his fingers gently lifting the curls at the side of her face. He smiled, a sad, intelligent smile, hidden with the sorrows of loneliness. It was a strange face, she thought. Deeply lined, tough, yet the eyes always found something to find joy in. Now she felt, for the first time, that a human being, a man, knew her as a human being, and he wanted her in a way that she also desired.
“You’ll have to take care of yourself, Carlotta,” he said softly. “Or else you’ll not live as you were meant to.”
She smiled, uncertainly at first. She did not know what to do. She was not certain what he meant. So far from the city, from other people, there was only herself to rely on. There were no codes of behavior, no rules, no false thoughts. There were only the two people in the room. The sunshine was bursting through the window, streaking the wooden walls.
“It’s only twenty miles up the canyon,” he said, his eyes following her. “By the river.”
Carlotta felt a thousand thoughts go through her mind.
“Yes,” she said quietly. “All right. I’ll get my things.”
From the cab of the truck she took a last look at the cabin, so poorly constructed, and the Chevy stuck in the mud, glistening. Farther up the road, all but a few telephone poles out of sight, was Two Rivers. She turned around, holding Billy on her lap. In front of her was a new landscape, a more desolate, more rugged series of valleys and canyons. She had never seen such a wild land before. She never looked back.
Garrett’s ranch was on a small plateau. Below it were two creeks fed by springs in the canyons. Beyond a small pasture rose enormous red rocky mesas. They cast their protective shadows over the ranch in the day, and in the winter kept the winds away.
Carlotta decorated the interior of the rooms with fabric from town. She learned how to cook simple meals of corn, peppers, and fruits. She fed the chickens, the few pigs, and milked the cows. Her face became tanned, her movements natural and unhesitating. She forgot what it was like to be afraid.
Garrett believed in nature. If a man cut himself off, he was lost. He lost his spirit, his joy, his sense of being alive. In each thing he showed Carlotta, there was a lesson. The narrow fish in the weeds of the pools. The wildflowers and the ferns. The lizards darting through the crevices. For man was as wild and transient as they, but gifted with awareness.
He wrote poetry that described the breakup of winter. The ice that slid down the face of the rock walls. The tracks appearing in the soft mud. The yellow flowers poking through the melting ice. And each poem he worked over and over, until it became hard and perfect, precise and simple, like the pebbles on the bottom of a mountain stream.
One day they rode to the edge of the canyon. Far below the smoke trailed up from the Indian settlements in the valleys.
“But you have to know, Carlotta,” he said, “that there was something only you could have given me. Something I can’t explain. As though a river suddenly had a second source.”
“Oh, Bob,” she said, smiling. “You gave me life itself.”
“You always had that gift. You were with people who didn’t. Who denied it to you.”
“But they don’t exist anymore. Not to me.”
Garrett watched the smoke from below bend into the breeze and disappear. They walked over the red sand, their faces warmed by the setting sun.
“Those people,” Carlotta said, “even to themselves, they never really existed. I know that now.”
“Forgive them. They were trapped. They didn’t control their own lives.”
“I do forgive them. Still, I don’t ever want to see them again.”
Garrett looked at her. He disliked seeing anger. Nevertheless, he knew the scars were deep. So he said nothing, assuming that time and the desert would heal her wounds.
Carlotta became pregnant. He found a new vitality in everything he did. He brought colored ears of corn and wildflowers and put them on the gates and on the doors. He delivered the child himself. For three days she lay in bed, nursing the infant girl. Then she rose and went to work, Julie in a sling across her back, Indian-style.
From time to time she visited the Indian women across the mesas. She learned how to dye her own cloth. How to cure the girl’s rashes with herbs. How to decorate shirts, though her fingers remained clumsy compared to the Indians. She never thought any more of the life before Bob Garrett. There was no life before then. Now there was only the sun, the mesas, the children, and the ranch. Garrett saw her change.
“I see it in you,” he said to her once. “Something akin to the rivers and the winds outside. Perhaps it’s the soul. I have no words for it. But it moves inside you now, and there is no fear—of life.”
She smiled mysteriously.
“What’s so funny?” he asked.
“Something is moving inside me.”
“What are you—”
“Gather some Indian corn, Bob.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Oh, Carlotta! This is the most wonderful thing—”
“It will be a boy,” she said. “Another you. That’s what I want the most.”
It was late at night. Outside the coyote wailed. Garrett laughed, his face excited by the news.
“Do you hear him?” he said. “He’s so lonely. He has no one.”
She reached for his face, placed her hand on his cheek.
“But we do,” she said. “We always will.”
He kissed her fingers gently.
“Always,” he murmured, finding it difficult to speak.
And so their second child was born—a girl—delivered by Bob. And the seasons passed. There was no other life. Carlotta knew nothing else. There was no other Carlotta than the one Garrett had made of her. She gave herself to him, and he had fashioned something fine and delicate out of her.
In the early spring of 1974 Garrett found himself leaning against a fence post. The snow was still on the ground in patches, and the barbed wire hung from his gloved hands. The melting trickles of water swam in his vision.
He went inside the ranch. Carlotta had never seen him look tired.
“Oh, Bob!” she wept, when he lay down on the bed, looking white.
“It’s all right . . .”
“I’ll get a doctor!”
“Shhhhhhh. Let me just rest a moment.”
He slept through the day. Toward evening a rain began to fall. His breathing became deeper and deeper, slower and slower.
“I love you, Carlotta,” he said weakly. “Don’t ever forget.”
“Oh, Bob—don’t. I’ll go now—the doctor in Two Rivers—”
“No, no. Just stay beside me. For a few more moments.”
Then he passed into a delirious sleep. He called out to her, as though looking for her. He opened his eyes from time to time, but seemed not to see her there. By early morning the children were sitting in chairs near the bed. Waiting.
“Carlotta,” he whispered.
She leaned forward.
He tried to say something. The words buzzed like demented bees in her ear. They made no sense. They sounded angry, wild, and disconnected—a choking death rattle, like he was strangling on his own saliva.
“Carlotta—I—can’t—breathe. Don’t—don’t—leave—me. Don’t—leave—me—”
The chest no longer rose and fell. He was gone into a darkness. Only the body remained, a curiously heavy, pallid, unfamiliar body all of a sudden. Now that the soul was gone from it, it looked alien, even frightening.
“Oh, Bob!” she wept.
But the dead man’s chest felt heavy and hollow to her. There was something repugnant about it, treacherous. She felt guilty for those thoughts. Yet it was true. The bedroom had taken on a sinister aspect. Something vaguely familiar.
“Well, I have an infant in the back—”
“We’ll only be gone twenty minutes.”
After the cafe closed Carlotta sat with a middle-aged couple in the cab of Garrett’s powerful little truck. She held Billy on her lap. As they climbed higher and higher, Carlotta’s heart began to fill with wonder. She had never been so high, never seen the landscape the way it looked from up there. Valley after valley dropped into view, the shadows of the spring clouds looked like puffs of white smoke far away, and she could see two forks of a river winding slowly through the cactus far below.
“It’s so beautiful up here!” she said.
“Ain’t Los Angeles, is it?” Garrett said.
She laughed. She held Billy up to the window.
“Look, Billy! That’s an eagle! You’ve never seen an eagle before!”
“Hasn’t now,” Garrett chuckled. “That’s a hawk.”
When they got out of the truck, Garrett pointed out some things to the couple. Far away, like a vision it was so far away, nestled in under red plateaus, was a tiny ranch, almost yellow in the dappled sunlight. A creek ran beside it, and farther away, the highway rose over the dry hills.
The crisp air twirled her hair. Her heart was pounding, not from the altitude, but from a strange thrill. Something she had never known before.
“Oh, I wish I could build a cabin up here!” she exclaimed. “I’d live here forever!”
Garrett smiled.
“I told you that you weren’t practical. There’s no water up here, and you’d freeze in the winter.”
She laughed.
When she got out of the truck at the cafe, she thanked Garrett. She got into her Chevy, drove back to the cabin swimming in a sea of mud, and in her mind’s eye was the vision of the yellow ranch far away.
In the early summer the dust and pollen were thick in the air. Billy began to wheeze and cough. She covered his face with a wet handkerchief, but it was something else that was wrong. He began to grow a fever, his face became alternately pale and flushed, and his eyes had a delirious quality. Neither the owner of the cabin nor anyone in the cafe knew what was wrong. The only doctor was gone, traveling in his jeep up the north fork of the river.
Billy was infected. His breathing came and went, sounded like a file rasping on a board. The tiny eyes and nose ran with mucus. He struggled for breath, twisted on the bed, crying. She went back to the doctor’s office. A note said he would not return from the North Fork area for two weeks.
The dust howled through the trees. Dead leaves from autumn were flattened against the cabin walls.
She drove the Chevy down to the north fork, guiding the car as best as she could over the rutted roads. Beside her Billy wheezed in three torn blankets. He was propped up against the seat, coughing and spitting. Far away she recognized the ranch she had once seen from high over the town.
She drove in to the gate, stopped the car, and got out with Billy in her arms. An old couple told her the doctor had gone around the other side of the south fork, around the canyon, and there were no telephones to the area.
They sat her down on an overstuffed sofa inside. The man went to a telephone and wound up the crank.
“Bob? Jamison here. Listen, a woman here with a sick infant . . . No, not me. Somebody from town. Can you make it down here? . . . What . . . Good, good. We’ll be waiting.”
Carlotta shivered on the sofa. Evidently she had not been eating well. She looked pale, clammy. They thought she needed a doctor as well.
“Now listen,” the man said, “don’t worry. Somebody’s coming who knows a lot about medicine. Learned it from the Indians. So you just wait ’til he comes.”
After an hour a truck was heard rattling down the mountainside. Carlotta stood, realized she had a fever: her legs felt leaden, heavy. Garrett stepped from the truck outside, carrying a small bag.
“Mr. Garrett,” she said weakly, smiling, holding out her hand, “I haven’t seen you in ages.”
“Carlotta! I didn’t know—then it’s Billy?”
Without another word he went into the darkened bedroom. They boiled water, mixed in several herbs, and Garrett spent the night on a chair watching over the infant. Carlotta sat in the bedroom, then forced herself to eat something, then sat in the room again. Billy slept fitfully, moaning hotly, his face bathed in perspiration, his eyes glazed. Then he slowly drifted into a deep slumber. Carlotta bent over to look. Garrett started, awakened.
“He’s sleeping,” he said.
“He looks burning with fever.”
“It’s the worst now. By morning he’ll cool down.”
Toward sunrise Carlotta fell asleep. Garrett covered her in an Indian blanket lying nearby. The couple slept on the sofa in the front room, stirred, and prepared breakfast. Billy slept through it all, oblivious to every noise.
“See?” Garrett said. “His forehead is cooler.”
Garrett prepared several herbs, bathed the child and listened to the breathing. After several more hours he noticed that Carlotta was suffering from a terrible fatigue.
By mid-afternoon it was apparent that Billy was better. His face lost the flushed appearance, and by suppertime he opened his eyes. Garrett drove Carlotta and Billy back to their cabin, the man and woman bringing up the Chevy and driving back in their own car. Garrett took one look at the tiny, dirty cabin and shook his head.
“This is no good,” he said softly.
He leaned over the stove, opened the lid, and peered in. Then he looked at the flue.
“You have no ventilation here,” he said. “No wonder you get sick. And the roof is in bad shape. You’re going to get rain right through it in the fall. What’re you going to do when the snow falls?”
Carlotta stood in the corner, watching him inspecting the cabin.
“This is just no good,” he said to himself. “I never thought it had deteriorated like this.”
“I was afraid to ask the owner,” she said.
“Do you have some other place to go to?”
Carlotta hesitated.
“No.”
“You’re going to freeze like a popsicle in five months.”
“I—I’m not sure what to do.”
Garrett kicked the small woodpile. The rotted wood fell apart in soft chunks. He knew now that the woman depended on him.
“Well,” he said, looking up, “I can put up a couple of new rafters for you.”
“Oh no, Mr. Garrett. You mustn’t—”
“You should have told me a long time ago,” he said, almost angrily. Not angry at her, but at himself. He had seen that she was vulnerable, without a man.
“I didn’t know—”
“You have to trust people, Carlotta,” he said. “Out here we depend on each other.”
They buttered bread and covered it with thick slabs of ham. Carlotta seemed to wait for Garrett to decide what to do. Fatigue and the isolation had eroded her confidence in herself. Now she had no place to turn except to this white-haired man who was lost in thought.
“There’s no harm in running away,” he said softly. “Provided you know what you’re running toward.”
She said nothing. There was no artifice in what he said. He was not trying to be something he was not. She, too, felt the need to be honest, to be direct, for the first time in her life.
“I was afraid of staying where I was,” she said simply. “Anything was better.”
Garrett boiled some water and made tea. The tap did not close properly, and he shook his head.
“Life goes forward,” he said. “Not backward.”
“You’re religious?” she asked.
He broke into a pleasant laugh, the even white teeth shining.
“No. Not at all. Not as it is conventionally known. I love the land. Life itself. That’s my God.”
“My father was a preacher,” she said distastefully. “I don’t think he ever knew who his God really was.”
Now the sun was down. Garrett kicked over a wooden box and sat down on it. They drank their tea, sweetened with honey and lemon. Slowly the hour passed by. Carlotta told him about her father, the inward, striving man who was so bitterly disappointed in life.
“Life apart from yourself is hard, Carlotta,” Garrett said. “You need somebody to teach you to be on your own.”
It relieved her, to hear him speak. It was like removing a cancer from her soul. She found herself telling him private things about herself. She found that a human being whom she could trust was the greatest treasure that the earth provides. In him she saw a different standard of values, something closer to the human. Modest and self-reliant. Self-contained. From that peaceful vantage point she surveyed the wrecked life that had been hers. She condemned it all, this time with the certainty that it would be defeated. She could find a new life. Here. Out where the natural struggle molded you in a different image.
“I believe the sun is rising,” he said softly.
“It is. How beautiful! It looks so clear—”
“By mid-summer it will be rising over Twin Peaks. You see how it changes during the year? Everything moves in a long cycle. Everything becomes renewed.”
She looked at him. She realized she was staring. She was no longer a little girl. She no longer needed to be one. Between two people there could be a natural relationship.
He, too, was looking at her. Frankly. Penetrating her glance with his. The unspoken hung in the air. She went to the bed and picked up Billy.
“His breathing is normal,” she said.
Her own heart had begun beating more rapidly. It was something akin to desire. But it was more refined. A feeling more delicate, so subtle that she was afraid it would dissipate and leave her the same Carlotta who had run away, fleeing herself. She turned, found him standing behind her, unafraid. He reached his hand forward, his fingers gently lifting the curls at the side of her face. He smiled, a sad, intelligent smile, hidden with the sorrows of loneliness. It was a strange face, she thought. Deeply lined, tough, yet the eyes always found something to find joy in. Now she felt, for the first time, that a human being, a man, knew her as a human being, and he wanted her in a way that she also desired.
“You’ll have to take care of yourself, Carlotta,” he said softly. “Or else you’ll not live as you were meant to.”
She smiled, uncertainly at first. She did not know what to do. She was not certain what he meant. So far from the city, from other people, there was only herself to rely on. There were no codes of behavior, no rules, no false thoughts. There were only the two people in the room. The sunshine was bursting through the window, streaking the wooden walls.
“It’s only twenty miles up the canyon,” he said, his eyes following her. “By the river.”
Carlotta felt a thousand thoughts go through her mind.
“Yes,” she said quietly. “All right. I’ll get my things.”
From the cab of the truck she took a last look at the cabin, so poorly constructed, and the Chevy stuck in the mud, glistening. Farther up the road, all but a few telephone poles out of sight, was Two Rivers. She turned around, holding Billy on her lap. In front of her was a new landscape, a more desolate, more rugged series of valleys and canyons. She had never seen such a wild land before. She never looked back.
Garrett’s ranch was on a small plateau. Below it were two creeks fed by springs in the canyons. Beyond a small pasture rose enormous red rocky mesas. They cast their protective shadows over the ranch in the day, and in the winter kept the winds away.
Carlotta decorated the interior of the rooms with fabric from town. She learned how to cook simple meals of corn, peppers, and fruits. She fed the chickens, the few pigs, and milked the cows. Her face became tanned, her movements natural and unhesitating. She forgot what it was like to be afraid.
Garrett believed in nature. If a man cut himself off, he was lost. He lost his spirit, his joy, his sense of being alive. In each thing he showed Carlotta, there was a lesson. The narrow fish in the weeds of the pools. The wildflowers and the ferns. The lizards darting through the crevices. For man was as wild and transient as they, but gifted with awareness.
He wrote poetry that described the breakup of winter. The ice that slid down the face of the rock walls. The tracks appearing in the soft mud. The yellow flowers poking through the melting ice. And each poem he worked over and over, until it became hard and perfect, precise and simple, like the pebbles on the bottom of a mountain stream.
One day they rode to the edge of the canyon. Far below the smoke trailed up from the Indian settlements in the valleys.
“But you have to know, Carlotta,” he said, “that there was something only you could have given me. Something I can’t explain. As though a river suddenly had a second source.”
“Oh, Bob,” she said, smiling. “You gave me life itself.”
“You always had that gift. You were with people who didn’t. Who denied it to you.”
“But they don’t exist anymore. Not to me.”
Garrett watched the smoke from below bend into the breeze and disappear. They walked over the red sand, their faces warmed by the setting sun.
“Those people,” Carlotta said, “even to themselves, they never really existed. I know that now.”
“Forgive them. They were trapped. They didn’t control their own lives.”
“I do forgive them. Still, I don’t ever want to see them again.”
Garrett looked at her. He disliked seeing anger. Nevertheless, he knew the scars were deep. So he said nothing, assuming that time and the desert would heal her wounds.
Carlotta became pregnant. He found a new vitality in everything he did. He brought colored ears of corn and wildflowers and put them on the gates and on the doors. He delivered the child himself. For three days she lay in bed, nursing the infant girl. Then she rose and went to work, Julie in a sling across her back, Indian-style.
From time to time she visited the Indian women across the mesas. She learned how to dye her own cloth. How to cure the girl’s rashes with herbs. How to decorate shirts, though her fingers remained clumsy compared to the Indians. She never thought any more of the life before Bob Garrett. There was no life before then. Now there was only the sun, the mesas, the children, and the ranch. Garrett saw her change.
“I see it in you,” he said to her once. “Something akin to the rivers and the winds outside. Perhaps it’s the soul. I have no words for it. But it moves inside you now, and there is no fear—of life.”
She smiled mysteriously.
“What’s so funny?” he asked.
“Something is moving inside me.”
“What are you—”
“Gather some Indian corn, Bob.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Oh, Carlotta! This is the most wonderful thing—”
“It will be a boy,” she said. “Another you. That’s what I want the most.”
It was late at night. Outside the coyote wailed. Garrett laughed, his face excited by the news.
“Do you hear him?” he said. “He’s so lonely. He has no one.”
She reached for his face, placed her hand on his cheek.
“But we do,” she said. “We always will.”
He kissed her fingers gently.
“Always,” he murmured, finding it difficult to speak.
And so their second child was born—a girl—delivered by Bob. And the seasons passed. There was no other life. Carlotta knew nothing else. There was no other Carlotta than the one Garrett had made of her. She gave herself to him, and he had fashioned something fine and delicate out of her.
In the early spring of 1974 Garrett found himself leaning against a fence post. The snow was still on the ground in patches, and the barbed wire hung from his gloved hands. The melting trickles of water swam in his vision.
He went inside the ranch. Carlotta had never seen him look tired.
“Oh, Bob!” she wept, when he lay down on the bed, looking white.
“It’s all right . . .”
“I’ll get a doctor!”
“Shhhhhhh. Let me just rest a moment.”
He slept through the day. Toward evening a rain began to fall. His breathing became deeper and deeper, slower and slower.
“I love you, Carlotta,” he said weakly. “Don’t ever forget.”
“Oh, Bob—don’t. I’ll go now—the doctor in Two Rivers—”
“No, no. Just stay beside me. For a few more moments.”
Then he passed into a delirious sleep. He called out to her, as though looking for her. He opened his eyes from time to time, but seemed not to see her there. By early morning the children were sitting in chairs near the bed. Waiting.
“Carlotta,” he whispered.
She leaned forward.
He tried to say something. The words buzzed like demented bees in her ear. They made no sense. They sounded angry, wild, and disconnected—a choking death rattle, like he was strangling on his own saliva.
“Carlotta—I—can’t—breathe. Don’t—don’t—leave—me. Don’t—leave—me—”
The chest no longer rose and fell. He was gone into a darkness. Only the body remained, a curiously heavy, pallid, unfamiliar body all of a sudden. Now that the soul was gone from it, it looked alien, even frightening.
“Oh, Bob!” she wept.
But the dead man’s chest felt heavy and hollow to her. There was something repugnant about it, treacherous. She felt guilty for those thoughts. Yet it was true. The bedroom had taken on a sinister aspect. Something vaguely familiar.
