Holding Wonder Part 18

"Of my advanced age!" I finished, mock bitterly. "'These dern bifocals!"

"But bifocals aren't necessarily a sign of age-"

"I know, I know," I said, "Only of getting old." We had automatically dropped into our usual bifocal speech pattern while our minds busied themselves elsewhere.

"Does this thing bother you when you drive?" he asked.

I was startled. What if they took my license! "No," I hastened. Most of the time I don't even notice it. Then sometimes I catch a glimpse of something interesting and then's when I focus in on it. But it's all voluntary-so far.Paying attention to it, I mean."

"And you focus in as long as you look away from it." Dr. Barstow smiled. "As a matter of fact, some things can be seen more sharply in peripheral vision than by looking directly at them. But I'm at a loss to explain your cactus. That sounds like hallucination-"

"Well," I twisted the tissue in my fingers. "I have a sort of idea. I mean-where our house is-it's in a new housing development-it was all desert not too long ago. I've-well-I've wondered if maybe I was seeing the same place, only before. I mean, when it was still desert." I tried a smile, but Dr. Barstow didn't notice.

"Hmm," he said, looking absently again at his diploma. "That would certainly put cactus almost anywhere you looked, in Tucson," he said: "But how long ago are you seeing? This office building is fifteen years old."

"I-I don't know," I faltered. "I haven't thought it out that far." Dr. Barstow looked at me and smiled his infrequent, wide smile. "Well, there doesn't seem to be anything wrong with you," he said. "If I were having an experience as interesting as the one you're having, I'd just enjoy it. I'd start a little research into it. Or at least start compiling a few statistics. How long ago are you seeing? Is it the same time period every time? What else can you see?

People? Big animals? Enjoy it while you can. It arrived out of nowhere, and it might go back to the same place." He stood up.

So did I. "Then I don't have to worry-"

"Not about your eyes, anyway," he a.s.sured me. "Keep me posted if anything new develops." I turned to the door. His voice paused me there. "By the way, if Tucson were wiped out, eventually the cactus would come back. Are you seeing ago or to come?"

We looked at each other levelly a moment, then we both smiled and I left.

Of course I told Peter, pa.s.sing on the latest greetings from our old friend.

And Peter, after a few sharp, anxious questions to be sure that I wasn't concealing from him some Monstrous Doom, accepted my odd affliction with his usual slight grin and glint of interest. He has long since realized that I don't see quite eye-to-eye with the usual maturing-into-bifocals groups.

Since I didn't have to worry about it anymore, I mostly ignored my side vision. However, there were a few more 'sharpenings' in the days that followed.

Once in a Bayless supermarket on double stamp day, I caused a two-aisle jam of shopping carts because I became so engrossed in one of my peripheral pictures.

There I stood at a strategic junction, staring fixedly at a stack of tuna cans while the rising murmur of voices and the muted clish-clish of colliding carts faded away.

There were people this time, two women and an a.s.sortment of small nearly naked children whose runnings and playings took them in and out of my range of vision like circling, romping puppies. It was a group of Indians. The women were intent on their work. They had a very long slender sahuaro rib and were busy harvesting the fruit from the top of an enormously tall sahuaro cactus, right in the middle of canned tomatoes. One woman was dislodging the reddish egg-shaped fruit from the top of the cactus with the stick, and the other was gathering it up from the ground into a basket, using a tong-like arrangement of sticks to avoid the thorns that cover the fruit.I was watching, fascinated, when suddenly I heard! There was a soft, singing voice in my mind, and my mind knew it was the woman who knelt in the sandy dust and lifted the th.o.r.n.y fruit.

"Good, good, good! softly she sang, "Food for now. Food for later.

Sing good, sing good, Sing praise, sing praise!"

"Lady, are you all right?" An anxious and on my elbow brought me back to Bayless and the traffic jam. I blinked and drew a deep breath.

The manager repeated, "Are you all right?" He had efficiently rerouted the various carts and they were moving away from me now, with eyes looking back, curious, avid, or concerned.

"Oh, I'm so sorry," I said, clutching the handle of my shopping cart. "I-I suddenly remembered something and forgot where I was." I smiled into the manger's anxious face, "I'm -all right, thank you. I'm sorry I caused trouble."

"No trouble," he answered my smile a little tentatively. "You're sure-"

"Oh, certainly," I hastened. "Thank you for your kindness." And I moved away briskly to look for the pizza mix that was on sale.

Up and down the aisles through the towering forest of food I hurried, echoing in my mind, as I contrasted the little lifting sticks and my chrome-bright cart- Good, good Food for now, Food for later.

Sing praise! Sing praise!

Several days later I stood in one of those goldfish-bowl telephone booths on a service station corner and listened to the purr as Dr. Barstow's office phone rang. Finally his secretary, Miss Kieth, answered briskly, and he eventually came on the line, probably between eyelashes.

"I'm downtown," I said hastily after identifying myself. "I know you're busy, but-but-how long have your people been in Tucson?"

There was a slight digestive pause and then he said slowly, "My folks came out here before the turn of the century.

"What-what did they do? I mean, to earn a living? What I mean is, I'm seeing again, right now. There's a big sign over a store, JAS. R. BARSTOW AND SONS GENERAL MERCHANDISE. And if Jas, means James, well, that's you-" I wiped a tissue across my oozing forehead and grimaced at the grime. Dr. Barstow broke the breathing silence.

"That was my great grandfather. At least he's the one long enough ago with the right name. Can you still see the place?" His voice quickened.

"Yes," I said, concentrating on the telephone mouthpiece. "I'm dying to go in it and see all that General Merchandise. But I don't think I can go in-not yet. What I wanted to know is, when is the store?" After a minute he asked, "Does it have a porch over the sidewalk?" I stared studiously at the dial of the phone. "Yes," I said, "with peeled pine porch posts"-I dabbled my lips-"holding up the roof."

"Then it's after 1897," he said. "That was one of our favorite 'olden days'

stories-the one about the store burning down. And the magnificent one that arose from the ashes. It boasted a porch."

"Then that's when I'm seeing!" I cried. "Around the turn of the century!"

"If," came his voice cautiously, "if all your seeing is in the same period of time."

"Someday," I said determinedly after a slight pause, "someday I'm going to get a flat 'yes' or 'no' from you about something!"

"And won't that be dull?" I heard him chuckle as he hung up.

I walked over to the store on the next scramble WALK signal at the corner. The concrete clicked under my hurried feet, but, when I stepped up to the far sidewalk, my feet rang hollowly on a wooden porch floor. Hastily, lest a change should come, I hurried across uneven planks to the door. I grabbed the handle. Then I paused, taking a deep breath of a general-store smell that was instantly recognizable-I could smell now!

"Oh!" I thought, the pit of my stomach cold with excitement. "To see all the things we keep in museums and collections now! Just walk in and-"

Then I heard Peter, vigorously and decisively, "Don't you dare take one step into this-!"

Caught in midstep, I turned my full gaze on the handle I held. Jarringly, I thumped down several inches to the sidewalk. I removed my hand from where it was pressed against a dusty, empty store window. Automatically I read the sign propped against the stained sagging back of the display window-You'll wonder where the yellow went- The week following came an odd sort of day. It had rained in the night-torrents of rain that made every upside-down drainage street in Tucson run curb to curb. The thirsty earth drank and drank and couldn't keep up with the heavy fall, so now the runoff was making Rillito Creek roar softly to itself as it became again, briefly, a running stream. The dust had been beautifully settled. An autumnlike sky cover of heavy gray clouds hid the sun.

Peter and I decided this was the time for us to relearn the art of bicycling and to do something about my black belt that never lied when it pinched me the news that I was increasing around the middle. It was also time for Peter to stop being critical of the Laundromat for shrinking his pants. So, on this cool, moisty morning we resurrected the bikes from the acc.u.mulation in the garage. We stacked them awkwardly in the car trunk and drove across the Rillito, stopping briefly at the bridge to join others who stood around enjoying the unusual sight of Water-in a-River! Then we went on up through the mushrooming foothills land developments, until we finally arrived at a narrow, two-rutted, sandy road that looped out of sight around the low hills and abrupt arroyos. We parked the car and got the bikes out.

It was a wonderful day, fragrant with wet greasewood-after-a-rain. The breeze was blowing, cool enough for sleeves to feel good. It was a dustless, delightful breeze."I love days like this," I said, as I wobbled away from the car on my bike. I made ten feet before I fell. "I get so lonesome for rain."

Peter patiently untangled me from the bike, flexed my arms to see if they were broken, flexed my neck to kiss the end of my nose, then tried to steady my bike with both hands and, at the same time, help me get back on.

"I get so tired of sun, sun, sun-"

"You talk like a native," said Peter, making nice straight tracks in the damp sand of the road.

"So I am," I said, my tracks scalloping back and forth across his as I tried to follow him. "It's only you fotchedon-furriners that find perpetual sun so delightful!"

I fell again, this time contriving to have the bike fall one way and me the other with the pedals and my feet twined together.

Peter was extricating me, muttering something about a donkey being better for me since it's braced at all four corners, when I saw it-on the next loop of the road where it topped the rise above us.

"Peter," I said softly, staring at him, "I can see a horse pulling a buggy on the road over there. There's another and another and a hay wagon looking vehicle. Peter, it's a procession of some sort."

Peter straightened my legs and sat down on the ground near me. "Go on," he said, taking my hands.

"There's something on the hay wagon," I said "It looks-it's a coffin, Peter!"

The back of my neck chilled.

"A coffin?" Peter was startled, too.

"They're going down the other side of the hill now. There are three buggies and the wagon. They're gone- "Come on," said Peter, getting up and lifting the bikes, "let's follow them."

"Follow them?" I grabbed my bike and tried to remember which side to mount from-or does that only matter for horses? "Did you see them, too?"

"No," he said, flinging himself up onto the bike seat. "But you did. Let's see if you can follow them." And behold! I could ride my bike! All sorts of muscular memories awoke and I forgot the problems of aiming and balancing, and I whizzed-slowly-through the sand at the bottom of a rise, as I followed Peter.

"I don't see them!" I called to Peter's bobbing back, "I guess they're gone."

"Are you looking over there?" he called back.

"Of course I am!" I cried. "Oh!" I murmured. "Uh, of course:" And I looked out over the valley. I noticed one slender column of smoke rising from Davis-Monthan AF Base before my peripheral vision took over.

"Peter," I said, "it is a coffin. I'm right by the wagon. Don't go so fast.

You're leaving us behind." Peter dropped back to ride beside me.

"Go on," he said. "What kind of buggies are they?" I stared out over thevalley again, and my bike backed up over a granite k.n.o.b in the sand and I fell. Peter swung back toward me as I scrambled to my feet.

"Leave the bikes," I said. "Let's walk. They're going slow enough-"

A fine rain had begun. With it came the soft sense of stillness I love so about the rain. Beside me, within my vision, moved the last buggy of the procession, also through a fine rain that was not even heavy enough to make a sound on its faded black top, but its color began to darken and to shine.

There were two people in the buggy, one man driving the single horse, the other man, thin, wrinkled, smelling of musty old age and camphor, huddled in his heavy overcoat, under a laprobe. A fine tremor stirred his knotted hands and his toothless mouth grinned a little to show the pink smoothness of his lower gums.

I lengthened my stride to keep up with the slow moving procession, hearing the gritty grind of the metal tires through the sand. I put out my hand to rest it on the side of the buggy, but drew it back again, afraid I might feel Something. Then I sensed the insistent seep of a voice, soundless, inside my mind.

Seventeen trips to the cemetery-and back again! That's more than anyone else around here can say. I'll see them all underground yet! There-and back! I go there and come back. They all stay!

The rain was heavier. I could feel its gnat-like insistence against my face.

The road was swinging around the base of a long, low hill now.

So this is what she came to. Another thought began. She was a pretty little thing. Thought sure some young feller around here would have spoke for her.

They say she was bad. Shipped her back from the city to bury her. Women sure had a fit about burying her with their honored dead. Honored dead! Honored because they are dead. Every evil in the book safely underground here in the graveyard. Hope Papa's having a good time. Sure likes funerals.

I reeled away from the buggy. I had walked full tilt into a fence post. Peter grabbed me before I fell.

"Well?" he asked, pushing a limp wet strand of my hair off my forehead.

"I'm okay," I said. "Peter, is there a cemetery around here anywhere? You've hunted these foothills often enough to know."

"A cemetery?" Peter's eyes narrowed. "Well, there are a few graves in a fence corner around here some place. Come on!" We abandoned the road and started across country. As we trudged up one hill and scurried down another, treading our way through cactus and mesquite, I told Peter what I'd seen and heard.

"There!" Peter gestured to the left and we plunged down into a sand wash that walked firmly because the night rain had packed the sand and up the other steep side and topped out onto a small flat. Half a dozen forlorn sunken mounds lay in the corner of two barbed-wire fences meeting. Gray, wordless slabs of weathered wood splintered at the heads of two of them. Small rocks half outlined another.

I looked up at the towering Santa Catalinas and saw Peter. "Move, Peter," I said. "You're standing on a grave. There are dozens of them."

"Where can I stand?" Peter asked."In the fence corner," I said. "There's no fence there-only a big rock. Here they come." I moved over to where the procession was coming through the barbed-wire fence, hearing the first. waves of voices breaking over me.

The first buggy- Bad-bad! Rouged, even in her coffin. I should have wiped if off the way I started to. Disgraceful! Why did she have to humiliate me like this by coming back? They've got places in the city for people like her. She was dead to respectability a long time ago. Why did she come back?

The woman pinched her lips together more tightly behind the black veil and thought pa.s.sionately, Punish her! Punish her! The wages of sin!

The next buggy was pa.s.sing me now.

Poor child-oh poor child-to come back so unwanted. Please, Lord, cleanse her of all her sins.

There were two women and a man in this buggy.

Good rain. Needed it. Oughta be home getting things done, not trailing after a fancy woman. Good rain for this time of year.

The metal tires gritted past me.

They'll be bringing me out here next. I'm dying! I'm dying! I know. I know.

Mama died of the same thing. I'm afraid to tell. All they could do would be to tell me I'll be the next one to come out here. I'm afraid! I'm afraid! I'm crying for myself, not her!

A woman alone was driving the next buggy-a smart shiny vehicle. She was easily controlling the restless horse.

At least she has had someone love her, whether it war good or bad. How many wanted her and had her doesn't matter now. Someone cared about what she did and like the way she looked. Someone loved her.

By now the men had got out of the buggies-all except the old one-and I heard the grating sound as they dragged the coffin from the hayrack. It thumped to an awkward angle against the mound of desert dirt, rocks, caliche and the thin sandy soil of the hillside. It was seized and lowered quickly and urgently to the bottom of the grave. The men got shovels from their vehicles. They took off their coats, hitched their sleeve garters higher and began to fill in the grave.

"Isn't anyone going to pray?" The shocked cry came from the one woman. "Isn't anyone going to pray?" There vas a short, uneasy pause.

"Preacher's prayed over her already," said one of the men. "For her kind, that's enough." The woman stumbled to the half-filled grave and fell to her knees. Maybe I was the only one who heard her. "She loved much-forgive her much."

Peter and I sat warming our hands by cradling our coffee mugs in them. We were in a little hamburger joint halfway back home. Outside the rain purred down, seething on the blacktop road, thrumming insistently on metal somewhere out back. We sat, each busy with his own thoughts, and watched the rain furrow the sandy shoulder of the road. It was an unusual rain for this time of year."Well." My voice lifted Peter's eyes from his coffee. He lifted one brow inquiringly. "I have Told All," I went on. "What is your considered opinion?"

"Interesting," he said. "Not everyone's aberrant wife has such interesting aberrations."

"No, I mean," I carefully balanced the tinny spoon on my forefinger, "what why-"

"Let's not try to explain anything," said Peter. "In the first place, I know I can't and I don't think you can either. Let's enjoy, as Dr. Barstow suggested."