The conductor looked a little surprised when I pulled my bag off the rack and hopped down onto the concrete apron of the depot.
“This isn’t anywhere, sweetheart,” he said, looking down at me from the doorway. He was a very old, very dark-skinned man whose uniform looked as if it could hold up its shoulders without him.
“I know,” I said.
“You can’t get back on,” he warned. “Ten minutes for a crew change, and then we’re headed out for El Paso.”
“I know. I don’t want to get back on. I live here.”
“Well, how do you do,” he said. He stepped back into the car and waved at me through the window. His gloved hand fluttered like a dove.
A hundred yards up the line I saw the fireman climb down the ladder from the engine. It was someone I’d gone to school with-Roger Bristol. Loyd tossed down Roger’s grip and his own, one at a time, and then swung himself easily down the ladder as if he were born for this work. He talked briefly with two other men-the oncoming crew, I guessed. They would speak in their magical language of dog catchers and sun kinks and the ones that had died on the line, picking up trains from the dead and moving on. They parted ways and the new crew climbed into the engine. The other two men walked toward the depot carrying their grips and lunch buckets: one short and stocky, the other taller, broad-shouldered, with his hair in a ponytail. The people you love always look perfectly proportioned from a distance.
Shortly the train began to move again, very slowly, the speed of a living creature. You could still run and catch it. Loyd and Roger kept walking toward me without seeing me. Standing there watching him, knowing what he didn’t, I had so much power and none at all. I was on the outside, in a different dimension. I’d lived there always.
Then he stopped dead, just for a second. I’ll remember that. The train moved and Roger moved but Loyd stood still.
He caught up to me in an instant, with a twinkle in his eye and his bag slung over his shoulder like a ready traveler.
“Thanks for the ride,” I said.
He put one arm around my neck and gave me the kind of kiss no fool would walk away from twice.
26 The Fifty Mothers
For several days I kept coming back to this: we had no body. I wanted to have a funeral for Hallie, but I was at a loss. I knew the remains should not have been important, but in a funeral the body gives the grieving a place to focus their eyes. We sit facing it, bear it on our shoulders, follow it down the road in procession and finally long to follow it into the ground. The body would have provided an agenda and told me what to do, in lieu of Hallie, who was gone.
I went to look for something else that in my mind stood for her: the semilla besada, one of the supernaturally blessed trees that in the old days were festooned like Christmas trees with the symbols of people’s hopes. We could hold a funeral there, outside, under the leaves. I wanted to find the exact plum tree where we’d hidden a lock of our intertwined hair. I knew the orchard but couldn’t find the tree. Either it was gone, or it was no longer exceptional. Maybe the trees all around it had stretched their taproots and found the same nurturing vein.
It was June, a week before Hallie’s thirtieth birthday. The canopies were in full green, each one as brilliant as a halo. The blossoms had dropped and left behind incipient fruits swelling three and four to a cluster, not yet pruned by nature or by hand. Every tree in every orchard looked blessed. So we had the funeral there, in the old Domingos plum orchard.
I’d asked people to bring something that reminded them of Hallie. I spread the black-and-red afghan on the ground and we stood around that. Instead of decorating a tree with our hopes for the future, we decorated a blanket with icons from the past. All the women from Stitch and Bitch were there. And J.T. and Emelina, of course, and Loyd. All of my students, as well. Doc Homer didn’t make it. He didn’t go very far out of his house these days, or very far out of his head.
It was awkward getting started. I remembered the last time I’d hugged her, thinking I could hold on and stop our lives right there. I took some breaths. “Hallie asked to be buried in Nicaragua,” I said. “She wanted that. To enrich the soil of a jungle. But I wanted something here too.” I stopped, because it sounded to me like small talk. Words only cover the experience of living. I looked around at the unpretentious faces like slices of bread, all the black dresses, the dark shoes, and I looked up at the bright leaves lit from above. It was a brilliant, hot day and I didn’t feel at all like crying. The black dresses made me think of Greece. Nothing seemed quite real.
Several peacocks had gathered in the trees behind our heads, keeping their distance, but curious, probably hoping for food. A peacock wouldn’t know the difference between a picnic and a funeral. The outward signs were similar.
“Do you think we should sing?” I asked.
“Yes,” said Emelina. “We ought to sing.”
“What?” I couldn’t think of any particular song that Hallie liked, except some silly things from our teenage years. “Mother and Child Reunion” and “Maggie May.” I thought of Hallie moonwalking to “Thriller,” and then I thought abstractly about never seeing her again, what that really meant. In the back of my mind I was still wondering when she would come home. I couldn’t concentrate. Someone suggested “Let the Circle Be Unbroken,” so we sang that, and then we sang “De Colores” because everybody knew it. Norma Galvez’s husband Cassandro played the guitar.
Then it was quiet again. People shifted slightly on their feet, the same motion repeated many times throughout the crowd, like the dancers at Santa Rosalia. Except unconscious, and unrehearsed. I pulled some letters out of my pocket and read parts of them that Emelina had helped me pick out. I read what Hallie said about not wanting to save the world, that you didn’t choose your road for the reward at the end, but for the way it felt as you went along. And I read some things she’d said about nations forgetting. Refusing to sell tractor parts, then wondering why people would turn to Yugoslavia for tractors. I was aware that my reading might seem a little rambling, but I felt there was some logic to it, and people were tolerant. Truly, I think they would have listened to me all day. It occurred to me that such patience might be the better part of love.
I read a quote she’d written me that seemed important, a thing said by Father Fernando Cardenal, who was in charge of the literacy crusade: “You learn to read so you can identify the reality in which you live, so that you can become a protagonist of history rather than a spectator.” I waited a minute, while a peacock screamed. Then I read some words of Hallie’s: “The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most…”
Another peacock suddenly howled nearby. I saw Emelina’s twins craning their necks, trying to spot it. I went on:
“And the most you can do is live inside that hope. What I want is so simple I almost can’t say it: elementary kindness. Enough to eat, enough to go around. The possibility that kids might one day grow up to be neither the destroyers nor the destroyed.”
I finished by reading the letter from Sister Sabina Martin. She said thousands of people joined us in mourning Hallie. “I know that doesn’t make your grief any smaller,” she wrote. “But I believe it makes Hallie’s presence larger. Certainly, she won’t be forgotten.”
Several peafowl had hopped to the ground and were making insistent, guttural noises, impatient for food. I saw Glen and Curtis sneak off into the trees in pursuit of a peacock they’d never catch.