Light changes everything, p.20
Light Changes Everything, page 20
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Rebeccah had some kind of stew cooking on the stove, by the smell. But she was on the porch along with some grizzled old fellow we’d never seen before.
“He doesn’t seem to speak a word of English,” Rebeccah said. “I offered him some water, but he didn’t want it. Can you talk to him, please?”
Mama just looked sort of helpless and questioning at the man. “Que es?” I asked. “Que paso?”
“Teen tou-sand doe-lors. Quick, quick. Teen tou-sand. O los chicos están muertos.”
Ten thousand dollars. It didn’t take a translator to understand that. “A donde los chicos? Where are they?” I demanded. “Wait a minute. Have I seen you somewhere before? Weren’t you with those banditos on the road to Mexico?”
The man flung something dark and shriveled like a large dead bat at Ma’s feet. She screamed and clasped her hands to her face, reeling against the door jamb. It looked like a human hand. He said, “Get money o los chicos will hang. Llevarlo a la estación de Marsh. Cinco. Five days.”
He got on his lathered old mule, a ragged-eared, U-necked critter barely standing, and rode south.
Rebeccah was the first of us to get hold of her senses. “We have that much, Mama. We have ten thousand and a little more. We can get them.” Mama teetered back and forth as if she was faint on her feet. Beccah said, “Come on in the house, Ma. Come sit. Pa will be home soon.”
When the men got back from burying Duende, they were sweating and ragged themselves. I was thankful they hadn’t asked me to take part in the shoveling. Charlie, Gilbert, and Brody all had helped, making up a family that felt as close as if we were brothers and sisters.
Charlie was the first one who got the gumption to pick up the hand and look it over. “This,” he declared, “is not from a boy the size of your brothers. This is an old man’s hand, mummified, the way they get, buried in the hot Arizona sand.” It was true. I’ve seen a mummified cat and a pig, all shrunken, black, and shriveled, but every inch of skin intact, heated and dried like raisins or prunes, like you could add water and plump them back to life. The hand was not Ezra’s or Zachary’s. I spread my fingers wide, knowing Ez’s hand was the size of mine, and this hand was as big as Pa’s. Charlie took the thing in a bucket and said he’d go bury it with the horse, because the caliche had been broken up and he didn’t relish digging another hole tonight.
I don’t know if anyone slept that night. The talk went on until just ruminating set in, then people would talk some more. Finally Rebeccah went to bed and Mama lay on the settee in the parlor. I knew I wouldn’t sleep. Couldn’t. I strode the floor of my room, restless and hotter than I could ever remember being before. My baby wiggled in different places now, so that I could imagine tiny feet and hands. I had to tell them or run away soon. I’d wait another week until the boys came home. Or if they didn’t. That’s all I had. I decided to pack.
I opened the trunk with my camera and all the plates. There were some good ones in there of Duende. Maybe I’d take a few hours to develop some. I’d take more photographs. Five days. My little brothers. They’d probably have changed. They’d been kidnapped for six weeks now. Probably not fed well. Hopefully not mistreated in any other way. Oh, please, let it not be in any other way. One thing was true, though. I felt, or believed, that now I could not just up and leave my family and home without telling everyone why. I pictured it would break Ma’s heart anew.
I’d be strong. Determined. I’d make a way for myself. Even without the Grand Canyon, I could take a few more plates here. The summer thunderstorms should start any day, and clouds made nice backdrops. Almost anything would make a nice scene well lit and developed. All we had to do was take ten thousand dollars to Marsh Station where everyone in the area picked up their mail, five days from now. I figured then, the boys will be home, and I’ll wait just two or three days longer and confess my situation, and get ready to leave. They might disown me. I’d take my camera and my plates and make a life. That’s what. I already felt determined.
Toward sunup, I heard distant thunder. The rains were coming at last. That meant an end to cool breezes in the morning and stifling humidity all day. It meant roaring thunderstorms and sometimes wildfire. It also meant no more carrying water to the garden, and instead hoping the vegetables didn’t drown or wash away. It meant streams would run, and blood would run down your face and arms from mosquito bites. I dressed carefully, and wore my heaviest boots and widest hat. I packed ten plates in my camera box and carried all of the equipment downstairs a few at a time.
The house was quiet and the storm was miles away. Hopefully I could get out and back before they rose. After all, I doubted anyone slept before midnight and it was barely four forty-five. I left a note for Mama.
All my developing chemicals were in our barn. I’d set up and make some prints when I got back. I saddled the little mare, Fixie, and tied everything down just like I liked it, well-balanced, not likely to make a slip. At the last second, I saw my pistol belt hanging in the barn, and I strapped that on, too. Never know when you’ll meet a snake out in the desert.
I rode south for half an hour, turned my head so as not to look upon the disturbed mound of Duende’s grave. Thunderheads gathered in the distance and orange lights flicked at their centers—lightning that circled the clouds and didn’t come to earth.
Farther up a steep slope, I stopped at the top. From there, the thunderclouds appeared to be closing in. Mighty unusual to come in the morning, too. They were some of them a dark blue, some tinged with pinks and golds. In one place the whole sky became a color that reminded me of a piece of turquoise stone under water. A bit too blue. Lightning shot from cloud to cloud and forked across the sky. Oh, how I wished I could photograph the colors. My poor skill mixing paints would never capture what I saw. If I tried it would look ridiculous and no one would believe the colors of this sky or the straight shaft of a cloud burst of rain drenching the land below it miles from where I stood. I set up the camera and studied carefully, held my breath. Hoped for lightning. Opened the aperture. Counted. Closed it. Pulled the plate and put a second one in. I moved the camera a few inches to the right. I waited and a bright streak of light filled the sky, accompanied by a rumble of thunder like distant cannons. I opened the aperture just a half a breath too late, I was sure. When I pulled out the plate I put my head under the shade cloth and turned the camera on its tripod to where down below stood that old shack. It made kind of a lonesome-looking thing, desolate in the desert. So I put in another plate and focused the lens.
I wasn’t thinking about lightning, but the lighting. I was too far to use a flash pan. Shadows were good as long as you don’t have too many. I opened the aperture. Counted. Waited three seconds longer. Just as I began to close it, a streak of light crossed the sky and the thunderclap made Fixie jump and stir. She whinnied. “Oh, all right,” I said. “We’ll go home before you get wet.” At least she was docile. Not given to Duende’s fits and starts. “Imagine,” I said to her as I packed up my things, “imagine a horseless carriage running right up beside you and a girl throwing a scarf, and that set you to running right up on the granite stair steps of a college. Imagine you were such a grand horse that you ran like you had wings. Imagine you could be Pegasus. What would you think then?”
She stirred sideways and I knew I had to get her home before we got caught in the fracas. I kept her moving easy, though, back down the slope and across the flat of Maldonado’s land and by the big ocotillo cactus that marked the boundary to Aunt Sarah’s place. We got to the house just as the clouds passed overhead. A cool breeze came with them, breaking the wall of heat in the air. Hares scattered before me as I rode up to the barn to put Fixie in the corral and go to the house. I left the camera in the barn.
Ma was in the kitchen, washing dishes. “Where did you go, honey? I needed you to milk the cow.”
“I’m sorry, Ma. I went for a ride.” How could I tell her I wanted some landscapes to fill out a portfolio? How could I explain to her what a portfolio was, and why I needed one? “Did Beccah do it or is Skeeter bawling out there?”
She gripped the back slats of a chair before her. “Help me to the rocker. I can’t catch my breath this morning.”
“Are you sick, Ma?”
“No. I’m sure it was just the wind, stirring up dust. Makes it hard to breathe. I’ll rest a bit and I’ll be fine.”
“Where is Beccah now?”
“In the parlor. Writing a letter to Dr. Pardee.”
“That’s sweet, the two of them.”
Ma smiled. She breathed heavily, slowly, and for a moment I thought she’d gone kind of gray. “It is.”
“Do you feel all right? Should I bring you some lemonade? Where’s Pa?”
“He rode your aunt Sarah and Granny home in the buggy. Then he said he was going down to Marsh Station to see if there’re any hooligans waiting around to pick up money instead of mail.” She coughed lightly, and patted her chest with her fingertips.
“Before I set up my developers, do you mind if I take one more plate of you?”
“Not in this old housedress. Let me put on something nice.”
“You are already perfect, Mama. I want a plate of you just like this.” I almost said that I wanted to remember her like this when I left, and stopped myself. “You look like a portrait of a mother. It’s gentle. The light from the window is coming in just right on your hair.”
“It’s gray.”
I smiled. “It’s golden, the light is. Like a halo in some old paintings by the Renaissance masters.”
“I don’t believe in such things as halos.”
“I know. Just sit there a minute more. I’ll be right back.”
I ran to the barn and retrieved my getup. Set it up in the parlor where I could see Mama sitting at the kitchen table. She was sitting so still, I had another devious idea, too. I opened the aperture without telling her. Then I closed it. Then I said, “All right. Hold still.” She turned to me and straightened her shoulders. I counted and tapped the box with my fingernail. “All done. Thank you, Mama.”
I got out my tubs and the clay jars of liquids. One of them really fumed when I pulled the cork. I decided right then that I had better print up all my exposed plates and dump the chemicals way out someplace flat and dry.
I set to work, laying papers out on bales of hay, and setting up on a table outside. I fetched three cans of water from the well. I stretched a string and added clothespins. I pulled out sawhorses and put boards on them for exposing the paper to the sun. In the heat of the late morning, the air stopped, as if the sky were holding its breath. It seemed to suck the very breath from your lights, making you feel dried and shriveled. Up from the south I saw thunderheads forming. Those would make good photographs. In a little bit, Clover’s courting buggy with red wheels came up the road. It had to be Rachel and Aubrey.
Happily they went into the house and didn’t come bother me at all. The very first print I made was of Mama sitting at the kitchen table. Next I did my landscapes, and one of Duende. Last of all I put into my exposing frame the one with the stormclouds and the little shack.
I stared hard as the paper took some shading. Hard to tell what it was before rinsing, but it looked like the glass had cracked. I checked my plate but it was not cracked. “Lightning!” I said aloud. I’d caught lightning on a plate! To capture lightning was something people tried forever with no success and I’d gotten one at only eighteen years old. My baby wiggled.
I rinsed and washed, setting the image onto the expensive paper. Finally I hung it on the string and clipped it with three clothespins. With all the care I knew how to manage, I put the precious plate between two pieces of heavy paper and strapped wood shims around it, then tied them with more string. That plate would make my reputation in Albuquerque or anyplace I decided to live.
As I’d imagined, it only took a few minutes for the first papers to dry. I took them down carefully, placing them between other papers in case there was the slightest bit of dampness. How could there be, in this desiccated air? When I stood before the last print, with the lightning, I looked upon the paper hanging from the line with pride. The lower right corner was damp. I blew against it. And then I screamed. I threw my hands across my mouth, looked at the page again, and screamed again.
I ran for the house. “Ma!” I shrieked. Holding the upper corners of the paper in both hands, I kicked open the screen door, scared the porch cat out of eight of his nine lives, and nearly tripped over Aubrey’s big feet. “Ma! Oh, Ma. Oh, my soul.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Mama, Rachel, and Aubrey were sitting in the parlor, sipping lemonade and fanning themselves with card fans. They looked at me in that huge tarry milking apron as if I’d come to the house to throw manure into the room.
I tried to speak, but I could only shake. I stammered. I broke out in a heavy sweat from running. “The lightning did it, Mama,” I finally got out.
“What are you talking about, Mary Pearl? Is that any way to come into the house? You came in here like a hooligan with no more upbringing than a banty hen—”
“But, Ma,” I interrupted. “It’s, it’s Zachary’s face! I’d stopped to take a plate of a nice landscape. The lightning flashed. I thought it was great that I caught lightning, Mama, but it lit up inside the shed through that window and Zachary and Ezra are in that shed. We looked around it and saw nothing, but they could have been moved there or threatened to be quiet or were too sick to call out. Look in the window of this photograph. Isn’t that Zachary?”
Mama dropped her best teacup. It shattered to crumbs on the hard floor. Only the handle remained whole. The lemonade ran down her skirt and onto her shoe.
Aubrey snatched the print from my hands. “I don’t see a face. Show me where you see a face.” He sported a finely trimmed beard and side whiskers that almost hid the scar that I’d left him.
I jerked the paper right back and handed it to Ma. Rachel and Rebeccah came to her. I said, “Look in the window. Look what the lightning did.”
Ma cried out as if she’d been whipped. Then she moaned, “My baby.”
Aubrey immediately said, “I’ll take charge of this. I’ll get the buggy. Where is that shed?”
I didn’t have time to tell Aubrey what I wanted him to do was twist on a spit in everlasting perdition. Instead, I said, “You can’t get there with a buggy. Take your rig to Aunt Sarah’s place and fetch any men you can find around there. Gilbert and Charlie, too, and Brody. Tell Charlie it’s the shed and he’ll know. If whoever has got ’em is in cahoots with the Mexican Army and Maldonado, this could go parlous.”
“Mary Pearl, you mustn’t go!” Ma said.
“There’s no time to get help. Only people besides me who could find that shed are Charlie and Brody. Beccah, won’t you and Rachel get me a parcel of food? Blankets and slickers, and plenty of food for Zack and Ez. Something they can carry in one hand like biscuits and a jug of milk. I’m going to change my skirt.”
It didn’t take any time at all for me to get changed and saddle Fixie. Then I strung on another two horses, one to hold the goods my sisters were bringing, and the other the Belgian just for a spare so the boys could ride. If the boys could ride.
Let me tell you, there was plenty of squalling from my sisters about me going alone and sending the only man in our parlor in a buggy to find my cousins. The only person who didn’t think I was dead wrong was Mama. She took me by the shoulders and kissed my cheek. She whispered, “Don’t let anything happen to you. Don’t try to be daring. Get them but get them safe and don’t let me lose you, too.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said. “I love you, Mama.”
“Godspeed, daughter.” She looked into my eyes like she was seeing something deeper than what color they were. I was hard put to keep eyes locked with her, so knowing was her stare, like all my secrets were hers to hold, now.
“I’ll come home with them, Mama.” I buckled my gun belt and slid my skinning knife into the scabbard in my brother’s boots.
I took off on Fixie, moving fast as I dared to do. It felt like the horses’ hooves were carrying dead weight. What was that verse about feet of clay? Mama would know. Granny would know. Why on earth had I spent so much time learning about dead painters when I should have learned scripture verses? Wouldn’t that help more now?
I trailed with my horse string until the boulders were too rough beyond the hill where I’d taken the photographs. I got off and went on foot up the steepest side of the hill. Just below the summit I stopped and tied Fixie to a mesquite branch.
I watched the shed for several minutes. A heavy woman came from it with a bucket. It was the old lady who’d been at Maldonado’s house and who had asked me if I was hungry. There was a man with her. He looked to me like the old peon who’d dropped the mummy hand on our porch. A burro brayed raucously next to him, but the man just leaned against a piece of corral fence, scratching his back on it like a bear would do. He swatted at flies near his head. The woman spoke to him, but he didn’t answer. Any minute now, I thought, Charlie should be coming up the hill.
I watched the old woman and the old man collect their things and take the burro’s bosalito in hand. They started back up what looked like a trail toward the old Maldonado place. Would Maldonado himself come over the hills with an army of vaqueros? Would they fight my cousins, and would some of us die?
Or was this whole kidnapping plot something stewed up by those two? It couldn’t be. Why would they tell us to go all the way to Agua Prieta? Or were we to have been intercepted by that small band of banditos? The old people moved on up the road that stretched back to the Maldonado hacienda. They walked like people used to the trail, not looking around or back, not expecting to be dry-gulched by a girl on a little mare, confident they had the upper hand. Behind me, in the south, clouds grew higher and white, like great anvils in the sky. If that bunch let loose, we’d get a gully washer this afternoon. I left my horses tied where they were and crept down the hill toward the shed. I walked all around it like before. The window where the face had shown in the photograph was dark. I tiptoed to the front where the door was, and lifting my boots so they made almost no sound, I stepped inside. There was no window on any wall but there had been a window outside. That meant there was another room behind this one. A false wall. Oh, why had we not thought of that!
