In King City Joseph stood with Jennie at the railway station, and Jennie cried softly, partly because she was leaving, but more because she was frightened at the long train trip. She said, “You’ll all come home to visit, won’t you.”
And Joseph, anxious to be back on the ranch for fear the rain might come and he not there to see it, answered, “Yes, of course. Some time we’ll go back to visit.”
Juanito’s wife, Alice, mourned much more deeply than Jennie did. She did not cry at all, but only sat on her doorstep sometimes and rocked her body back and forth. She was carrying a child, and besides, she loved Juanito very much, and pitied him. She sat too many hours there, rocking and humming softly to herself and never crying, and at last Elizabeth brought her to Joseph’s house and put her to work in the kitchen. Alice was happier then. She chattered a little sometimes, while she washed the dishes, standing far out from the sink to keep from hurting the baby.
“He is not dead,” she explained very often to Elizabeth. “Some time he will come back, and after a night, it’ll be just as it always was. I will forget he ever went away. You know,” she said proudly, “My father wants me to go home, but I will not. I will wait here for Juanito. Here is where he will come.” And she questioned Joseph over and over about Juanito’s plans. “Do you think he will come back? You are sure you think that?”
Joseph always seriously answered, “He said he would.”
“But when, when do you think it will be?”
“In a year, perhaps, or maybe two years. He has to wait.”
And she went back to Elizabeth, “The baby can walk, perhaps, when he comes back.”
Elizabeth took on the new life and changed to meet it. For two weeks she went about her new house frowning, peering into everything, and making a list of furniture and utensils to be ordered from Monterey. The work of the house quickly drove away the memory of the evening with Rama. Only at night, sometimes, she awakened cold and fearful, feeling that a marble image lay in bed with her, and she touched Joseph’s arm to be sure that it was warm. Rama had been right. A door was open on that night, and now it was closed. Rama never spoke in such a mood again. She was a teacher, Rama, and a tactful woman, for she could show Elizabeth methods of doing things about the house without seeming to criticize Elizabeth’s method.
When the walnut furniture arrived, and all the granite-ware kettles, and when everything had been arranged or hung up—the hatrack with diamond mirrors, and the little rocking-chairs; the broad maple bed, and the high bureau, then the shining airtight stove was set up in the living room, with a coat of stove black on its sides and nickel polish on the silver parts. When it was all done, the worried look went out of Elizabeth’s eyes, and the frown left her brows. She sang, then, Spanish songs she had learned in Monterey. When Alice came to work with her they sang the songs together.
Every morning Rama came to talk, always in secrets, for Rama was full of secrets. She explained things about marriage that Elizabeth, having no mother, had not learned. She told how to have boy children and how to have girl children—not sure methods, true enough; sometimes they failed, but it did no harm to try them; Rama knew a hundred cases where they had succeeded. Alice listened too, and sometimes she said, “That is not right. In this country we do it another way.” And Alice told how to keep a chicken from flopping when its head is cut off.
“Draw a cross on the ground first,” Alice explained. “And when the head is off, lay the chicken gently on the cross, and it will never flop, because the sign is holy.” Rama tried it later and found it true, and ever after that she had more tolerance for Catholics than she had before.
These were good times, filled with mystery and with ritual. Elizabeth watched Rama seasoning a stew. She tasted, smacking her lips and with a stern question in her eyes, “Is this just right? No, not quite.” Nothing Rama ever cooked was as good as it should have been.
On Wednesdays, Rama came with a big mending basket on her arm, and behind her trooped those children who had been good. Alice and Rama and Elizabeth sat at three corners of a triangle, and the darning-eggs went searching in and out of socks.
In the center of the triangle the good children sat. (The bad ones were at home doing nothing, for Rama knew how idleness is a punishment to a child.) Rama told stories then, and after a while Alice grew brave and explained a good many miraculous things. Her father had seen a fiery goat crossing the Carmel Valley one night at dusk. Alice knew at least fifty ghost-stories, too; things not far away, but here in Nuestra Señora. She told how the Valdez family was visited All Souls’ Eve by a great-great grandmother with a cough in her chest, and how Lieutenant-Colonel Murphy, killed by a troop of sad Yaquis on their way home to Mexico, rode through the valley holding his breast open to show he had no heart. The Yaquis had eaten it, Alice thought. These things were true and could be proved. Her eyes grew wide and frightened when she told the things. And at night the children had only to say, “He had no heart,” or “The old lady coughed” to set themselves squealing with fear
Elizabeth told some stories she had from her mother, tales of the Scotch fairies with their everlasting preoccupation with gold or at least some useful handicraft. They were good stones, but they hadn’t the effect of Rama’s stories, or Alice’s, for they had happened long ago and in a far country which itself had little more reality than the fairies. You could go down the road and see the very place where Lieutenant-Colonel Murphy rode every three months, and Alice could promise to take you to a canyon where every night swinging lanterns plodded along with no one carrying them.
These were good times, and Elizabeth was very happy. Joseph didn’t talk much, but she never passed him that his hand wasn’t outstretched to caress her, and she never looked at him and failed to receive a slow calm smile that made her warm and happy. He seemed never to sleep completely, for no matter what time she awakened in the night and stretched an exploring hand toward him, he took her immediately in his arms. Her breasts filled out in these few months, and her eyes grew deep with mystery. It was an exciting time, for Alice was going to have a baby, and the winter was coming.
Benjy’s house was vacant now. Two new Mexican riders moved out of the barn and occupied it. Thomas had caught a grizzly-bear cub in the hills and he was trying to tame it with very little success. “It’s more like a man than an animal,” Thomas said. “It doesn’t want to learn.” And although it bit him as often as he came near it, he was pleased to have the little bear, because everyone said there were no more grizzlies in the Coast Range mountains.
Burton was busy with inner preparation, for he was planning to go to the camp-meeting town of Pacific Grove and to spend the following summer. He rejoiced in advance at the good emotions to be found there. And he found within himself an exultation when he thought of the time when he would find Christ again and recite sins before a gathering of people.
“You can go to the common house in the evening,” he told his wife. “Every evening the people will sing in the common house and eat ice-cream. We’ll take a tent and stay a month, or maybe two.” And he saw in advance how he would praise the preachers for the message.
15
IT WAS early in November when the rain came. Every day in the morning Joseph searched the sky, studying the bulky rearing clouds, and again at evening he watched the sinking sun reddening the sky. And he thought of those prophetic nursery rhymes:
“Red sky at morning,
“Sailors take warning.
“Red sky at night,
“Sailors’ delight.”
and the other way around:
“Red sky at morning,
“Rain before dawning.
“Red sky at night,
“Clear days in sight.”
He looked at the barometer more often than the clock, and when the needle swung down and down he was very happy. He went into the yard and whispered to the tree, “Rain in a few days now. It’ll wash the dust off the leaves.”