When Raven Dances, page 2
We stayed in a hotel in Seattle last night. When I looked from the seventh floor window at frothy gray ocean, cloud-dotted mountains and the horizon beyond, I was amazed. Gardner had offered nothing like this.
Mama and I were on our way to a strange town called Seward, in the coldest corner of the world I could imagine, Alaska. For weeks I had known this was to be my fate, but that didn’t mean I had accepted the idea. I felt as though Mama was forcing me to leave behind my almost perfect life, where I was born and had been a happy little girl.
There, I was surrounded by family who adored me. By the completion of my ninth year, I knew just about every tree, every fence, every corner of town and most of the people who lived in it. I could predict precisely what my day would be like, and I liked it that way.
We were to sail from Seattle to Seward on a steamship, Mama said. That only confused me more; to me steam was something that hissed when Mama pressed Daddy’s wool pants with a hot iron and I couldn’t imagine how that had anything to do with going somewhere on a ship. The truth is, I was smart enough to have figured it all out, but I didn’t want to.
At this moment, my proximity to that dark abyss monopolized my thoughts. I grabbed the edge of Mama’s jacket tightly and held on. There we stood among all our mismatched paraphernalia, feeling very inconsequential.
The S.S. Denali was as long as a football field and at least five stories high. Its open belly, a great, gaping black maw, swallowed a line of crates and boxes that looked to me a lot like stained teeth. Workmen shouted and grunted, jamming those teeth into any available crevasse they could find.
A group of green-jacketed men marched past us playing horns and beating drums. Then, a tall imposing official approached us in a white and gold uniform, pen and list in hand. He waved us on toward that white chute and we were too stunned to disobey his order. He motioned to a worker who dealt with our suitcases and trunks. Laden with our few small packages, we ascended the gauntlet. I thought about my grandfather and tried to assure myself that we were destined for something more cheery than the branding iron.
Mama’s family had lived in New Mexico for centuries. In 1611, the Spanish King Felipe III granted land in this territory to the Spanish Duke of Vasques Alvarado. My grandfather’s, grandfather, many decades back in time, Manuel Fernandez Vasquez del Pedregál de la Luz, was a nephew to the duke, who granted him land in 1618 with instructions to establish a ranch. At that time, their neighbors were gentle Hopi natives, jackrabbits and rattlesnakes.
That site, known as Rancho San Pablo, was Grandfather’s land where his family still raised sheep, cattle, and wine grapes since before many of the original colonies even thought about becoming states.
Not too far from the old well on his property, an ancient cork oak grows. It’s still a source of Grandfather Felipe’s pride and testament of family loyalty to their roots in Spain. Grandfather continued to harvest cork from that tree occasionally to seal his bottles of wine from his own grapes. Grandfather was proud of just about every part of his life; his wife, his daughters, his animals, his small garden where squash and corn grew. I could almost measure his pride by how deeply his thumbs hooked into his leather belt as he surveyed what pleased him. So I can tell you that he took great pride in his huerta, his orchard just beyond the cork tree. At harvest time when he gazed at the almond trees and his beloved fat clusters of deep purple grapes, his thumbs didn’t just rest in his belt. Occasionally they tapped a light tattoo on his slightly expanded belly, reflecting his gratitude and satisfaction with what life had given him.
I loved visiting and playing at that old rancho house. Around the front and sides of the house wrapped a long, terraced veranda that was embraced by Abuelita Clara’s garden filled with cactus, azucenas, scarlet poppies and black-eyed Susans.
For awhile it became my habit to bring all my retinue of dolls to the house. On many warm afternoons we sat in a line swinging in the timeworn wicker swing.
The only impediment to my joy was to be found in the hall. If I came into the house through the heavy main door, hewn of solid oak planks, I found myself immediately in the hall. I much preferred entering the house through the kitchen where I could count on Abuelita Clara’s kitchen servant, Alma, handing me a freshly made bunuelo or a slice a ripe peach. But even then, there was no way to get from the kitchen to anywhere else without going through that hall, where on the wall hung an imposing portrait of Doña Inéz Albuerquerque del Vasquez. Over the years, an “er” in her aristocratic family name had been lost, but on the polished brass plate below her portrait, the ancient “er” still remained. As I passed her, Doña Inéz always stared down at me, her thin eyebrows frozen, framing her icy imperious black eyes that seemed to follow me wherever I went. Her skin was powder white and her thin, dark red lips were set in prim disapproval. Her neck was long, wrapped in a high white lace collar and, at her throat, she wore a garnet and pearl brooch. A high amber comb held her hair in place. Framing her head was a gossamer short mantilla. Her dress was velvety black, and in her lap, her hands held a burgundy and jasper-colored fan.
Mama told me I was related to her, but I didn’t want her to be my ancestor. She terrified me and I was glad she was imprisoned in that ornate golden frame, unable to step down and smack me with that fan in her bony bejeweled hands. She knew I stole grapes from the arbor, dusty, warm and delicious, and she begrudged me every single one.
***
I held on to Mama’s jacket as we found our way to an upper deck. There we stood looking down at the busy pier, once again feeling no less inconsequential. Mama handed me my brand new Brownie camera from her purse and I began to snap my first pictures.
In one photo, Mama is in shadows. She stands leaning against the railing, a slim, pretty lady hugging a blue topper coat about her. A soft felt hat perches at an angle on her head—more rakish than was her usual style. As I look at that photo now, I suspect that the tilt of her hat reflected her nervousness that day. When I think about it, she was about the age I am now, and I wonder if I would have been as brave as she was then. Today she would brush off any mention of bravery; she had no choice, she would say, and that she had to move on. As usual, she was right. Nevertheless, her rueful smile in that photo seems to say, Oh Marisol, what have I gotten us into? What indeed?
***
In the year of my birth, 1937, civil war blazed in Spain. Mussolini’s troops marched into Ethiopia. Nazi bombs destroyed Guernica. The entire world seemed determined to destroy itself, and the destruction continued into the next years. Japan’s armies pillaged China, Hitler’s tanks overwhelmed most of Europe…
The date that changed my life was March 1944—a date now seared into my soul in vivid Technicolor.
An unusual spate of rainstorms had soaked New Mexico’s soil over the last two weeks. Immediate and intense, the water came in wind-blown gusts, falling in sheets. Within minutes, the torrent pervaded every available crack and crevasse, creating gullies and streams that rushed into dry, dusty flatlands and cut across roads.
We all feared and respected the cienegas. Those wild, powerful, dangerous, short-lived flood waters could pick up an automobile, twist it and turn it over completely, potentially rendering it a thick, muddy tomb, which could suck away any life force instantly.
Those rains also enabled long-latent seeds to germinate, sprout, and blossom. Their life was brief; their blossoms erupting, maturing and expiring, creating new seeds that would lie dormant in dry clay until the next capricious drenching—perhaps years away. We New Mexicans never knew when we would see another display like the one that spring, so we appreciated its spectacular splash for as long as it lasted.
I recall seeing banks of blossoms, deep pink, gold, and lavender, that day as I walked home from school. Often I skipped home, and there would have been no reason why I would not have done that on this particularly fine day.
I went up the steps, past the huge pottery jug Mama kept on the back porch that contained a hardly-ever-used umbrella and Daddy’s walking stick—his shillelagh, he called it.
The instant the screen door slammed behind me, I sensed something different—something wrong. It was written on Mama’s face. I took a deep breath as I looked at Mama. She clutched a yellowish piece of paper. She was weeping so hard I thought she might collapse. I looked at her hands and thought, absently, that they looked like the claws of a hawk grasping a small critter. My Tia Susana’s arms embraced Mama, her head on Tia’s shoulder. I hadn’t yet let out that breath I realized.
“What?” I whispered softly, my eyes moving from Mama, to Tia, to that piece of paper.
Susana released Mama and reached out for my hands. “Marisol, my dear child.” She swallowed and stepped toward me. “Marisol...”
Mama sat down hard in a kitchen chair. I could hear her continuing sobs.
Tia grasped my hands, gazed at them momentarily, then looked into my face; her face puffy and red like Mama’s. “I am so very, very sorry.” She swallowed and continued. “Your daddy is gone, honey. He, won’t be coming back. He was killed in battle in Anzio, Italy.”
I was not there, I was in some other place looking at my Tia, but I was not hearing the words, those choked words that came from her mouth mixed with all manner of additional sounds that I wouldn’t hear…couldn’t hear. What was battle? I thought. What was Anzio? Where was Italy, for that matter? My throat began to burn. I remember saying, “Why?”
Susana just shook her head. I began to cry, I think. I could well have stamped my feet or kicked a chair, I really can’t be sure. My head felt as if it would explode. I ran over to Mama and buried my face in the apron in her lap, sobbing.
Mama began to stroke my hair, humming quietly, her finger tracing the circumference of my ear over and over. I still remember her repetitious croon; I opened my eyes and saw before me only the brown checks in the apron fabric, seemingly huge and out of focus, and I smelled doughnuts and fry bread, worn into the threads of that apron. For just a moment, I considered pretending we were in a brown-checked tent and what seemed to be happening really wasn’t so and Mama was just cooking and we would fly into the sky and disappear or dissolve right into that apron. As far as I was concerned, that would have been all right with me.
NAASHA’S NAVAJO WORLD
My thoughts snapped back to reality when a ship’s officer, dressed in a crisp bright white uniform passed behind us, hesitated just slightly, then stopped and offered to take a picture of us both. Before he moved on, he handed us several rolls of colored paper streamers.
“When the ship pulls away, feel free to throw them,” he said. “That is a proper nautical way to say goodbye.” He smiled and walked on.
Those were the wrong words to say to me at that moment. All I could think of was my Daddy and the last time I saw him. I thought again, what I had thought many times before. I must not have given him a proper goodbye, because I lost him.
***
In spite of a world in turmoil, my birth was met with joy and pride by my parents and all manner of family, both Daddy’s and Mama’s. At my arrival, I became everybody’s darling as I cooed, cried, crawled, walked and chattered my way through early childhood.
New Mexico sun reigned supreme over my little yellow adobe home, in our often cloudless, startlingly colorful sky. Sometimes deep azure, at other times cobalt blue, at sunset, amethyst, coral or violet, that sky could just as easily become glistening ink black, as dark as a child’s image of doomsday. Always intense to my eye was that sky.
Some of my first innocent memories involve riding in Little Lulu, our dark blue Chevrolet sedan. I sat in Mama’s lap, Daddy at the wheel driving roads, string-straight and flat, cutting through biscuit and bronzed soil, baked for time interminable by the sun’s intense rays. That soil, lashed and punished by winds and leading to the cusp of the horizon, lay straight ahead and farther. Daddy would begin a tune as he drove and we would begin to sing in probably nowhere near the right pitch, but always loudly. Somewhere along the way, Daddy would sigh and say, in his affected Irish brogue, “Ah, it is a long, sad road that has no turns.”
And I would groan and say, “Oh, Daddy! Do you see any twists in this road? That’s just the way you say it was back in Ireland!” Little did I realize what import that phrase would have in my life.
Even though there was a war going on somewhere, it affected my life very little. On Saturdays, when Mama, Daddy and I went to see a movie, the news reviews showed battle sites, bombs exploding in places with exotic names like Casablanca and Tripoli—places that were far away from me and Gardner, New Mexico. I continued purchasing my little stamps at school and pasting them into my little booklet, assuring myself that I was doing what I could to win a war somehow—a war that didn’t seem to belong to me.
The war had caused slight changes in our lives. The grocery store manager, the barber, and some of our school teachers left and came home wearing uniforms. Daddy’s brother, Kenan, came home in a navy officer’s uniform and left for duty in the Atlantic. When our second grade teacher left, Tia Susana filled in for him.
One morning, Daddy sat Mama and me down at the kitchen table and explained that he, too, would be leaving. Just for a short time, he said, and when he came back he would be wearing an army officer’s uniform. How was I to know how important that conversation would be in my life?
Gasoline became a precious commodity, purchased with funny-looking tokens. For that reason, Little Lulu languished most of the time in the garage behind our house. Rancho San Pablo seemed to have enough tokens. Grandfather had to deliver animals and produce, so with good planning, we managed to go everywhere we needed to go.
Mama kept a can with a filter on the stove, and every drop of grease from the kitchen went into that can for the war effort. I learned to save every little piece of soap and metal, including tinfoil from my gum wrappers. Just like a lot of kids, I piled newspapers and magazines into my little red wagon and lugged them to the community center each Saturday morning.
Sometimes, when Mama needed sugar, or the butter dish was empty, she looked cross. And once in awhile she said that she would sell her soul for a new pair of stockings.
I recall that Grandfather was often grumpy; I saw him mumbling and pacing on the patio grousing in Spanish about the fascists and communists in Spain and Mexico; he thought I couldn’t understand what he was saying, but I did. That is, I had no idea what those fancy political names meant, but I understood the words for scum and assassin.
Daddy had left and come home wearing, as he promised, khaki pants and shirt and on his head he wore a cap sort of like an envelope that had a silver bar pinned on it. Then, after what seemed like just a few days, he was preparing to leave us again.
I still recall that dreadful night. Dusk was just overtaking the sky as he drove Mama and me in Little Lulu to the airport in Albuquerque. Mama sat beside him and held his hand as I sat in the back, elbows draped over the front seat, chattering away.
He drove us to a spot on the tarmac apart from the main airport building, where a single airplane waited, propellers turning, engine idling clankity, clankity. A door opened onto a set of metal stairs.
He got out of the car and reached into the back for his green jacket. This time, he put on a billed cap with a big gold eagle on the front. I looked up at him, so handsome, and I swear that from my diminutive point of view, a thin line of gray clouds balanced directly on his head. A tear rolled down my cheek and I wiped it away with the back of my hand. He leaned over and picked me up.
Besides Mama, Grandad Cormac and Granny Bridey, Daddy’s sister Maureen was there, and Susana, Grandfather and Abuelita Clara, standing in a loose circle, all talking quietly.
The plane engine noise became louder, more insistent, and that was Daddy’s cue to board. He kissed the ladies and me. Putting me down reluctantly, he made me promise to take care of Mama. He hugged Grandad, shook Grandfather Felipe’s hand, hugged and kissed Mama again and again, and finally picked up his bag, resolutely walking into the gaping, dark doorway of the plane.
Just like that, the door closed and snapped shut, the plane flew away, and Daddy was gone into the evening sky. Tall as the bottom edge of that New Mexico sky, my Daddy was, and now he was forever gone from my life.
***
That’s it, I thought. I must not have said goodbye properly. What should I have done differently? I pondered, knowing that I had thought through every possibility I could imagine. The purser’s innocent remark made me realize how wrong I was.
The ship began to move away from the pier. That was our cue to throw the bright streamers over, peppering those people waving to us from the pier.
That was also my cue to weep. Quietly, but desperately, I wept, I couldn’t help it.
The officer returned.
He led us into the maze of light gray halls and ushered us into our cabin. A heavy chrome handle on a very heavy door opened to reveal bunks against one wall, dressed in tightly turned sheets, dazzling white—whiter even than my saddle shoes.
