On the other hand, where did this decrepit (and theoretically almost homeless) octogenarian get off even insinuating castigation of the middle-class moron who held his well-being in the palm of his (also) calloused hand?
I’ll kick out him and his feeble dog and his one-eyed rabbit and his antique horse! Joe snarled. For sixty thousand dollars, I don’t need some masculine reincarnation of Carrie Nation and Billy Graham speechifying pompously every time I commit some dinky sexual transgression! The second I own this place I’ll strangle his turkeys, drown his chickens, and execute his goddam senile wolf!
Finally, what the hell was he talking about—the Old Days? In the Old Days the Spanish waltzed in and castrated the Indians: rebelling Indians then butchered the Spanish. Everybody raped, pillaged, and plundered to their heart’s content. They kidnapped each other, selling the human booty into slavery. They boycotted witches, believed in the Evil Eye, condoned patrons, and died at thirty of malaria, syphilis, tuberculosis, and the common cold. To hell with the Old Days!
Thoughtfully, Joe drawled, “This is pretty durn good-looking earth.”
“That’s because it is good earth. Not too much caliche. I take care of it, too. I feed it goat manure, horse dung, leaves. For years I have pampered this ground. My gardens are beautiful. You’ll see.”
Joe closed his eyes, seeking to block out an image of himself as Hitler, ordering a final solution. Trying to make it sound offhand and innocuous, he queried: “Have you had any luck yet finding another place?”
Eloy grinned. “Qué va? Where would I look?”
Joe said, “Well, you’ll have all that money. You could probably get into those low-income Operation Breakthrough houses they built last year.”
“And do what?”
Die. Lounge around. Water a geranium. Attend senior-citizen luncheons at the county HELP center. Sit in a chair in the driveway watching twenty-eight other decrepits slumped in rockers watching each other. So Joe backed off a trifle:
“Well, yeah, I suppose you’re right. But those houses do have indoor toilets. And gas heat. And you must admit that’s not bad come winter.”
“All my life I used an outhouse—why change now? And as for heat—if I couldn’t chop wood I’d drop dead. My muscles would say, ‘Eloy, Eloy, why hast thou forsaken us?’”
Miserably, Joe said, “Yeah, I guess I see your point.” Guilt worked him over like a professional rubber-hose man. How could he, in all conscience, buy out this crusty old fart? Eloy was the only semi-noble human being left in the valley.
Eloy said, “Have you had any luck, yet, raising the money?”
“I’m working on it.”
“Yesterday afternoon I bought bullets for robbing the bank.”
“You’ll just get killed,” Joe wanted to say, but held his tongue. The bottom was falling out of his hopes; even his anger had been defused. Although he knew that an individual should believe he could actively take charge of his personal destiny as well as the direction of history, right now he felt powerless, flustered, cynical, inept, incongruous, and hopeless.
So Joe gave up. “You got another shovel? I need the exercise.”
“In the shed.” Eloy stabbed in his own spade and grunted, turning over more earth.
They worked together, sweating under the high sun, chatting amiably even though Joe felt lousy. His biographers wouldn’t believe this one. An all-American upper-class, college-educated, and lily-white boy tries to pull off a coke number in order to buy land from an itinerant gardener and sheep farmer with a second-grade education, and winds up dead, or in jail for life. Or he successfully dumps the coke, buys the land, and then can’t move the sly old bird out. No house can go up because the analphabet’s shack can’t come down. In the end, our hallowed scion of the power structure winds up living in a tent and working as tenant labor for the doddering sheep herder, who survives to a hundred and nine. Unless he is killed in a bank robbery five minutes before Joe is to hand him the purchase price, in which case the banks, lawyers, probate courts, and creditors gobble up the estate before you can say “José Miniver!”
But the first sane physical moves he had made in three days soon worked their magic. Joe calmed down. Taking off his shirt, he reveled in the bright heat, and in the smell of damp earth, crushed leaves, old horse dung. Almost sexually, sunshine bruised his tingling shoulders. A peculiarly energetic laziness laid siege to his ulcer-oriented body, and triumphed. All his troubles seemed so far away. Reason returned, and he knew that Tribby was correct. If he could come out of it with his twelve Gs intact, he was way ahead of the game. Perish the greed that desired this land. Joe relaxed. And at the end of an hour, he was grateful to the old man for sharing this mundane endeavor.
They paused, contemplating their work. The symmetry and richness of that exposed terrain, freckled with white fluff, pleased them both. Joe asked, “What do you usually plant here?”
“Over there, where you see the old stalks, that’s obviously corn. Those humps are where the squash—scallop, summer, zucchini—and the pumpkins go. Then I plant two rows of avas—horse peas, in your American lingo. And snow peas and regular peas. And ten rows of beans. Couple rows of carrots, beets, potatoes. Mustard greens, spinach—and over there, that green row already sprouting, that’s my garlic. It comes up automatically every year. I have tomato plants in the house. And the chile grows back over there, in the corn.”
“It must be a lovely garden.”
“I dry many things in the autumn. Squash, apples, pears. I harvest enough beans for the winter, and chile, and corn. I make chicos and use them in posole. I pack some apples and pears in straw and eat them for months. Same with the beets and carrots, although, depending on what the cavañuelas say about the winter, sometimes I just mulch them in their rows and pull them when I need them. You can feed your family year-round from a little garden like this.”
Joe pictured the garden. A minute ago his greed had ebbed: now lust for ownership flooded back into his veins. Yet benign thoughts launched a glowing altruism. Eloy could stay on as caretaker of this land he had loved and nurtured much of his life. His deft hands would keep it healthy and productive, pruning the fruit trees, mulching rose bushes, mowing their new lawn, tying up suet balls for the chickadees at Christmastime. The old man would always be on call to cheer Joe up with a bit of Old Days doggerel, or a slew of pithy observations.…
For the next hour or two, they discussed land. Eloy demonstrated which dead apple-branches needed cutting and told why fruit saplings shouldn’t be left to grow around the parent tree’s roots. He explained what it meant to say that alfalfa was a “preataphyte,” and went down on his knees to caress a clover plant rising in the backfield brome. “Two autumns ago,” he recalled, “I saw these burnt brown clover seeds beside the La Ciénega road, stopped and picked a bagful, and sprinkled them in my field. Of their own accord, now, they are spreading.”
Some weeds were undesirable; Eloy cursed vehemently and tugged them out by hand. Each time they passed a clump of horseshit, he kicked it, saying: “You got to spread the wealth around. If I had a tractor I would drag this field. But I don’t, and nobody else does either, these days, so I won’t.”
In a corner of the back field had sprouted a small group of thistleburr plants. “For the last ten years I have dug out these leaves at least three times every summer,” Eloy grumbled, “but I never manage to kill every plant. I hate this weed. Its burrs destroy Geronimo’s mane and his tail.”
For eleven summers sparrow hawks had nested in that particular dying cottonwood tree. Occasionally, Eloy opened his pocketknife and cut, and ate raw, a wild asparagus spear. He also pointed out a nondescript weed called calite. “You Americans would probably call it wild spinach. Prepared with onions, a little chile, and garlic, and fried in oil, it’s delicious.”
At Wolfie’s cage Eloy paused. He opened the door and attached a plaid leash to the alert, flea-bitten animal. Joe marveled at how the infirm beast seemed to glide over the groun
d on tiptoes, his paws an inch above the dirt, as if he were swimming through the air using an elegant, effortless stroke, never tugging at the leash. With them, now, he quartered the terrain silently, sniffing carefully, peeing wherever piss was called for, listening intently to Eloy’s monologue, and from time to time, with an easy twitch of his head, snapping flies and grasshoppers out of midair, gulping them down in a single swallow.
So Eloy’s random observations metamorphosed into a grand tour of the property. Joe got a first-hand look at the oystershell-scale disease attacking four fragile aspens along the garden’s southern border. Each hand-cut fence post delineating the property boundaries had come from a special place in the Midnight Mountains. Two sagebrush plants along the eastern fence Eloy had brought in off the mesa about a decade ago: he loved the smell of chamiso after a rain. Each wooden headgate along the Lovatos Ditch had a story. Tiny lateral ditches leading to the garden, to the orchard, to the sweet-pea vines had a pertinent history. Soundly castigating a gopher hole, Eloy wondered aloud why one son of a bitch always survived his extermination efforts.
In the northeast corner of the back field, where Geronimo had overgrazed, the area had been usurped by wild lilies. Stooping, Eloy scrutinized an old meadowlark’s nest. “They build here, and half the time their young are drowned when I irrigate. But they always try again. I like their music, though I always wondered why God gave such a beautiful song to such a common bird.”
As they wandered, Eloy used his shovel to assassinate a thistle plant, knock down a careless weed, and clear an offensive clod from the as yet dry ditch. He scratched a kitchen match on his zipper and flicked it into dead ditch grasses; they caught fire immediately. While the grass burned, Eloy talked about the acequias. Wolfie’s eyes grew heavy-lidded as he dreamily focused into the smoke.
“It’s all over, I’m afraid—irrigation farming. I’m the only person who cares that water still runs in this ditch. There isn’t even a commission anymore. And for eighteen years I have been the mayordomo. Though only a lateral off the main ditch, it’s almost a mile long. Every year, all by myself, I clean it. This year, this week, in fact, maybe you can help me. Three years ago I went to court against the state engineer, who tried to declare it non compos mentis. I won my case.”
He grinned good-naturedly. “On three other occasions, in the past five years, I’ve gone to court to stop a newcomer from building a house or a garage or a tennis court on top of my acequia. All the newcomers along this ditch hate me, they can’t wait until I die.”
A little later, as he pried open a brittle milkweed pod and thumbed out the silken seeds, Eloy said, “When the ditches die, the land dies. And when the land dies, what interests me in people also dies. Do you know how much they are paying now—the Town of Chamisaville, for example—for water rights to a little plot like this?”
“I’d guess a lot.”
“Up to twenty thousand dollars.”
Eloy spoke not bitterly, but with an extreme sadness Joe found quite touching.
He continued introducing Joe to the property. Every year, up in that birdhouse, starlings nested. The pretty red bug nibbling on his hat was an elm beetle. Skunks often wrecked his corn; the best way to combat them was to leave a radio playing among the stalks at night. Often, during irrigations, a trout, or a couple of chubs, wound up splashing in the field. Muskrats honeycombed the ditch bank: Eloy shot at least a dozen every summer. Three years ago a weasel he could never trap had killed almost twenty of his chickens—then it had moved on. Those trees, which hadn’t leafed out yet, were honey locusts—they always matured a month after everything else. The front-field grass was largely native, with a little timothy thrown in. You couldn’t excavate in the field because it was solid rocks, part of an old stream bed. The water level was only a few feet below its surface.
Eloy’s shadow darkened an anthill. “To get rid of these hormigas, I pour gasoline on them.” Later, his hand settled proudly atop a rickety fence post. “Normally, I only use cedar posts. But this is an old pine log I brought out of the mountains eleven years ago. If you can’t afford creosote, just save the old stuff when you change your car oil, and soak the underground part of the post in it—the wood will hold up for years.”
Several times he stooped, picking up baling-wire strands, which he wound into hoops and draped over the nearest fence post. “Wherever you are,” he intoned religiously, “always save a piece of wire. With it, you can repair the world, even your soul.”
Eloy knew every inch of the land by heart, every weed, every animalito. “My wife planted this little snowball bush in 1962: in July it will be covered with white balls of flowers.” A rosebush had been around since 1958. And: “We got the sweet-pea seeds from Francisco Naranjo in 1949.”
He opened the rickety door to a chicken pen, and gathered a handful of eggs. In a shady area carpeted by dandelions, Eloy rested momentarily on a disintegrating blue bench. Wolfie snagged a large blue dragonfly and settled on his haunches, chewing reflectively, savoring the taste.
“I built this bench for my daughter, Teresa, in 1928,” Eloy said. “I made her little dolls out of cornhusks, and she would sit on this bench, under a different crab-apple tree that finally died, making up games for her dolls to play.”
Bemusedly, he fingered a rusty nail almost covered by the bark of a silvertip poplar. “My youngest boy, Larkin, built a treehouse here during the war.”
Halting at a certain spot in the back field, he said, “Right here is where I found one of my sheep dead in the summer of 1956. She slipped out of the corral, and before I noticed her escape, she had eaten too much alfalfa. In minutes she bloated up and died.”
Fascinated, Joe watched the old man stake out the land, sharing its history with the potential new owner. Right about here, in 1947, a favorite horse had stepped in a gopher hole and broken its leg. Right over there a daughter, Adelita, and her new husband had discovered a killdeer nest a week after their 1951 wedding day. Some charcoal shards in the grass pertained to a shed that had burned in 1943—struck by lightning, by God! Some now-wild yellow iris had been cultivated near the sweet-pea vines by another daughter, Marta, in 1936. All the hollyhocks surrounding the little house had arrived on the wind and proliferated of their own accord.
By the end of the tour, Eloy had Joe close to tears. By what right could he—an easterner, a college-bred, self-indulgent, morally reprehensible idiot—come in and take over, calling this miniature farm his own, in one fell swoop annihilating the historical vibes with his alien presence? Joe was surprised that flowers didn’t wither when touched by his shadow as he lumbered along clumsily behind Eloy, bald-facedly exhibiting his ignorance of nature every time he opened his mouth. For a mere sixty Gs, it seems, he could purchase (and become caretaker of) a man’s soul. And how (after a tour like this, and the historical intimacies shared) should he be so lucky as to raise the cash, could he order the old boy to scram? Eloy Irribarren belonged to this cherished piece of terrain: Joe would always be a brazen interloper. Better he should retreat, tail between his legs, letting them as had legitimate claim to the place—through years of toil, love, and everyday living—run out their string.
Bewildered by conflicting emotions, Joe slumped against Eloy’s adobe hovel and basked with melancholy peacefulness in the soothing sunshine. Eloy drew up a bucket of icy well-water, poured some into a platter for Wolfie, and drank from the tin cup himself. The old wolf licked his chops after drinking and, with a careless, lightning jab, plucked a little black beetle out of the air. He tasted it for a second, found it undesirable, and, pursing his lips, spat the bug out like a watermelon seed.
Yes—Joe ached to own the land. He also did not want the onus of ownership. He was wavering about risking his neck to unload the coke to obtain the bread to swing the real-estate deal. On the one hand, he fervently hoped Heidi would flush the dope down the toilet, sparing him the agony of actually purchasing this sacred land. On the other hand, if she actually did that, he would strangle
her!
Suddenly, his heart thundered, his brain pulsed, his guts throbbed. Caught in a cerebral dust devil, thoughts intrabuffeted giddily. He had such powerful lusts; he also wished to do the decent thing. He was terrified of Ray Verboten … he would kill to possess trees and flowers … the risks weren’t worth it … he needed Heidi and the kids … he wouldn’t mind another shot at Nancy Ryan, either … he would help Eloy rob the bank … he was going crazy.
In the warm sunshine, Joe’s teeth chattered.
Eloy splashed half a cup of clear water into the dust at his feet. A hummingbird buzzed between them. The day had become ultra-lazy. Chickens scratched in the driveway, clucking soporifically. Turkeys lay on their sides, ruffling feathers in the dust.
How could they kill this way of life?
Eloy said, “I’m hungry. It’s time to eat.…”
* * *
BUT AS THEY relaxed beside that well, passing the tin cup of icy water between them, a late-model celestial-blue pickup towing an orange-and-white U-Haul pulled into the driveway and stopped. Behind it a jungle-green 1967 VW microbus screeched to a halt. Crouched on its roof, face obliterated behind the snout of his eight-millimeter Bolex, Rama Unfug assiduously immortalized the scene. Doors in both the pickup and the bus opened: Shanti Unfug and Iréné Papadraxis emerged from the VW, Nikita Smatterling and Ray Verboten descended from the azure cab. Using a pair of pliers, Nikita promptly began to snip at the barbed-wire fence, making a gate.
Eloy murmured, “Ay, qué sinvergüenzas!”
Joe said, “What the hell are they doing?”
“Bringing the brass monkey. You know I rented the pasture for their unveiling.”
“But they’ll destroy everything. They’ll trample the grass and defecate in the ditch.…”