“We’ll be going right through town,” she said. “Everyone will see us.”
Joseph clucked to the horses and relaxed the lines. “Will you mind that?”
“Of course I won’t mind. I’ll like it. I’ll feel proud, as though I had done an unusual thing. But I must be sitting right and looking right when they see me.”
Joseph chuckled. “Maybe no one will look.”
“They’ll look, all right. I’ll make them look.”
They drove down the one long street of Our Lady, where the houses clung to the side of the road as though for warmth. As they went, the women came from their houses, shamelessly to stare, to wave fat bands and to say the new title gently because it was a new word. “Buenas tardes, señora,” and over their shoulders they called into the houses, “Ven aca, mira! mira! La nueva señora Wayne viene.” Elizabeth waved back happily and tried to look dignified. Farther along the street they had to stop for gifts. Old Mrs. Gutierrez stood in the middle of the road, waving a chicken by the legs while she shrieked the advantages of this particular chicken. But when the bird lay croaking in the wagon box, Mrs. Gutierrez was overcome with self-consciousness. She fixed her hair and nursed her hands, and finally scuttled back to her yard waving her arms and crying, “No le hace.”
Before they got through the street the wagon box was loaded with trussed livestock: two little pigs, a lamb, an evil-eyed nanny goat with udders suspiciously shrunken, four hens and a gamecock. The saloon belched forth its customers as the wagon went by, and the men raised their glasses. For a little while they were surrounded by cries of welcome, and then the last house was gone and the river road was before them.
Elizabeth settled back in the seat and relaxed her primness. Her hand crept through the crook of Joseph’s arm and pressed for a moment and then remained in quiet there. “It was like a circus,” she said. “It was like being the parade.”
Joseph took off his hat and laid it on his lap. His hair was tangled and damp, and his eyes tired. “They are good people,” he said. “I’ll be glad to get home, won’t you?”
“Yes, I’ll be glad.” And she said suddenly, “There are some times, Joseph, when the love for people is strong and warm like a sorrow.”
He looked quickly at her in astonishment at her statement of his own thought. “How did you think that, dear?”
“I don’t know. Why?”
“Because I was thinking it at that moment—and there are times when the people and the hills and the earth, all, everything except the stars, are one, and the love of them all is strong like a sadness.”
“Not the stars, then?”
“No, never the stars. The stars are always strangers— sometimes evil, but always strangers. Smell the sage, Elizabeth. It’s good to be getting home.”
She raised her veil as high as her nose and sniffed long and hungrily. The sycamores were yellowing and already the ground was thick with the first fallen leaves. The team entered the long road that hid the river, and the sun was low over the seaward mountains.
“It’ll be way in the middle of the night when we get home,” he said. The light in the wood was golden-blue, and the stream rattled among the round rocks.
With evening the air grew clear with moisture, so that the mountains were as hard and sharp as crystal. After the sun was gone, there was a hypnotic time when Joseph and Elizabeth stared ahead at the clear hills and could not take their eyes away. The pounding hoofs and the muttering of water deepened the trance. Joseph looked unblinkingly at the string of light along the western mountain rim. His thoughts grew sluggish, but with their slowness they became pictures, and the figures arranged themselves on the mountain tops. A black cloud sailed in from the ocean and rested on the ridge, and Joseph’s thought made it a black goat’s head. He could see the yellow, slanting eyes, wise and ironic, and the curved horns. He thought, “I know that it is really there, the goat resting his chin on a mountain range and staring in on the valley. He should be there. Something I’ve read or something I’ve been told makes it a fitting thing that a goat should come out of the ocean.” He was endowed with the power to create things as substantial as the earth. “If I will admit the goat is there, it will be there. And I will have made it. This goat is important,” he thought.
A flight of birds rolled and twisted high overhead, and they caught the last light on their flickering wings, and twinkled like little stars. A hunting owl drifted over and shrieked his cry, designed to make small groundling creatures start uneasily and betray themselves against the grass. The valley filled quickly with dark, and the black cloud, as though it had seen enough, withdrew to the sea again. Joseph thought, “I must maintain to myself that it was the goat. I must never betray the goat by disbelieving it.”
Elizabeth shivered slightly and he turned around to her. “Are you cold, dear? I’ll get the horseblanket to go over your knees.” She shivered again, not quite so well, because she was trying to.
“I’m not cold,” she said, “but it’s a queer time. I wish you’d talk to me. It’s a dangerous time.”
He thought of the goat. “What do you mean, dangerous?” He took her clasped hands and laid them on his knee.
“I mean there’s a danger of being lost. It’s the light that’s going. I thought I suddenly felt myself spreading and dissipating like a cloud, mixing with everything around me. It was a good feeling, Joseph. And then the owl went over, and I was afraid that if I mixed too much with the hills I might never be able to collapse into Elizabeth again.”
“It’s only the time of day,” he reassured her. “It seems to affect all living things. Have you ever noticed the animals and the birds when it’s evening?”
“No,” she said, turning eagerly toward him, for it seemed to her that she had discovered a communication. “I don’t think I’ve ever noticed anything very closely in my life,” she said. “Just now it seems to me that the lenses of my eyes have been wiped clean. What do the animals do at evening?” Her voice had grown sharp and had broken through his reverie.
“I don’t know,” he said sullenly. “I mean—I know, but I’ll have to think. These things aren’t always ready to hand, you know,” he apologized. And he fell silent and looked into the gathering darkness. “Yes,” he said at last, “it’s like that—why all the animals stand still when it comes dark evening. They don’t blink their eyes at all and they go dreaming.” He fell silent again.
“I remember a thing,” Elizabeth said. “I don’t know when I noticed it, but just now—you said yourself it’s the time of day, and this picture is important in this time of day.”
“What?” he asked.
“Cats’ tails lie flat and straight and motionless when they’re eating.”
“Yes,” he nodded, “yes, I know.”
“And that’s the only time they’re ever straight, and that’s the only time they’re ever still.” She laughed gaily. Now that the foolish thing was said, she realized it might be taken as a satire on Joseph’s dreaming animals, and she was glad it might. She felt rather clever to have said it.
He did not notice what construction might be put on the cats’ tails. He said, “Over a hill and then down to the river wood again, and then out across the long plain and we’ll be home. We should see the lights from the hilltop.” It was very dark by now, a thick night and silent. The wagon moved up the hill in the darkness, a stranger to the hushed night.
Elizabeth pressed her body against Joseph. “The horses know the road,” she said. “Do they smell it?”
“They see it, dear. It is only dark to us. To them it is a deep twilight. We’ll be on top of the hill in a little, and then we may see the lights. It’s too quiet,” he complained. “I don’t like this night. Nothing is stirring about.” It seemed an hour before they breasted the hill and Joseph stopped the team to rest from its climb. The horses sank their heads low and panted rhythmically. “See,” Joseph said, “there are the lights. Late as it is, my brothers are expecting us. I didn’t tell them when we would come, but they must have guessed. Look, some of the lights are moving. That’s a lantern in the yard, I guess. Tom has been out to the barn to see the horses.”