And Condors Danced (4 page)

On her left now was a steep wooded rise and on her right a long expanse of paintless picket fence. Beyond the fence straggly rows of tombstones rose and fell over the rolling foothills of the Mupu Ridge range. Here and there larger marble monuments surrounded by low iron fences marked the burial plots of many Santa Luisa families.

When Carly reached the main entrance to the cemetery, she stopped. With one hand on the sagging gate she turned to look toward the west. The sun was low now, a fiery ball drifting in a red-gold sea of clouds. She pushed open the gate and began to run.

The cemetery road went straight down a long corridor between a double row of eucalyptus trees and then branched off in several directions. At the first branch Carly turned to the left and went on running, down a narrow path that wound between spreading live-oaks. A few yards farther on she came to a sudden stop at a low iron fence. Breathing hard, she squatted down in the dry grass and waited for her heart to slow—and for the soft, sad mystery to begin.

It was a large plot, one of the largest in the graveyard, but most of its surface was smooth and bare except for dry dead weeds and here and there the scattered remains of withered bouquets. A stranger walking by would at first notice only one tombstone, a tall, slim obelisk of granite. From where she crouched outside the fence, Carly could read the inscription on one side of its broad rectangular base:

Edward Clark Carlton

born China, Maine, 1827

died Santa Luisa, California 1894

And on the other side:

Mehitabel Johnson Carlton

born China, Maine, 1836

Below that was the blank space that would not be filled in until Aunt M. was dead, too, and buried beside her husband.

Shifting her position, Carly turned to her left where the Carlton plot bordered the Mupu Creek with its edging of willows and cottonwoods. There in the deep shade, where the willow branches bent softly like the limp limbs of weeping mourners, was Petey’s grave.

The tombstone was a small slab of marble with a rounded top on which was carved the likeness of a sleeping lamb. Beneath the lamb, in large letters, were three words,
OUR LITTLE LAMB
, and below that in smaller letters:

Peter Hartwick

born March 1893

died July 1895

The grass on the small mound was faintly green.

Carly sighed deeply. Then she stepped over the fence and made her way along the narrow path that her feet had long since worn through the tall dead grass. At the end of the path she sat down on Petey’s grave and got ready to cry.

S
HE ALWAYS CRIED
at Petey’s grave. All she had to do was to read his name and the two dates, just two short years apart, and a lump would fill her throat. Sometimes when, as now, the long, dry months had turned the grass on all the other graves a dull uniform brown, she would also look at the green of the small mound and say, “The green grave, watered by tears, watered by bitter tears.” Then she would throw herself down across the grave and say, “Our little lamb,” over and over again until tears overflowed her eyes and fell down to sink into the earth. When the crying was over, she usually rolled over on her back and lay for a while looking up through the willow branches and thinking about death and eternity and other sad, mysterious things.

Sometimes she thought about other deaths she had cried over in the past—Little Eva’s, Beth’s in
Little Women
, and, of course, Beautiful Joe’s. They were all so beautifully, terribly sad, and yet they didn’t always make her cry, at least not anymore. The first few times she’d read them, of course, she had wept and wept, but after a while those deaths had less effect, even Beautiful Joe’s, over whose sad end she once had cried until she had nearly drowned in her own tears. But it was only for Petey’s death that she could always cry. Which was a mystery in itself, really, since poor little Petey had actually died a year before she was born.

On the other hand, however, he had been her own brother and he had lived and died among people she knew, and she had heard so much about him—about the beautiful, brilliant, good little boy who had died so young. Every member of the family had special Petey stories, except perhaps for Lila, who had only been four years old when Petey died. Carly knew all the stories by heart. She remembered the ones that were especially Aunt M.’s, or Nellie’s or Charles’s or Father’s, and, of course, the ones that Mama told. Many of the Petey stories were especially Mama’s, because she talked about him so much. Everyone said that she still hadn’t recovered from Petey’s death, and some people said she never would.

Of course, Mama had not been strong even before the Hartwicks left their home in Maine. Father said that Mama’s lungs had always been weak. She’d had pneumonia twice and the doctor said she would not live through a third time. That, Father said, was the main reason he had decided to accept Aunt Mehitabel’s invitation to come to California. He had hoped the mild weather would improve Mama’s health. But, mild weather or not, Mama hadn’t wanted to come.

Everyone knew that Anna Hartwick hadn’t wanted to leave her birthplace in the state of Maine and her relatives and friends. Sometimes she even wrote poetry about it—poems about autumn colors and snow and being homesick and far from home. But she had agreed to come for the sake of her husband and family. “Ezra really needed to make a new start,” Carly had heard her say more than once. “He should never have tried to be an educator. He lacked the patience and forbearance. We really had no choice but to accept Aunt Mehitabel’s offer.” So Anna had agreed to leave her birthplace and, with five young children, travel three thousand miles to a strange new world. “Charles, my eldest,” Mama told people, “was nine when we arrived in Santa Luisa and my baby—Petey, my baby—was only two.” “Only two,” she would say again, and her beautiful eyes would fill with tears.

When the Hartwicks first arrived in Santa Luisa, they all lived at Greenwood with Aunt M., because the house on the ranch was being rebuilt. The ranch house had once been Edward Carlton’s home, but when he married Aunt M., they moved to Greenwood, and the old house had been used by a foreman’s family. Later on it became a dormitory for seasonal workers, and by the time the Hartwicks arrived it was rundown. So all the Hartwicks had to stay with Aunt M. at Greenwood while the ranch house was being repaired—and while they were still there Petey had suddenly sickened and died.

“Eighteen ninety-five,” Carly whispered, and reached up above her head to touch the sharp-edged furrows where the date was carved into the marble tombstone. Then she rolled over onto her stomach and rested her chin in her hands. Staring at the inscription, she wondered how a date, one short day between sunrise and sunset, could bring something so final and endless as death, a death that ended one life and changed so many others, forever and ever.

“When that baby died,” Aunt M. had often told her, “your mother went into a serious decline. Brain fever, Dr. West called it, though there were others who diagnosed it differently. Took to her room and didn’t come out for more than six months. Your father, poor man, did what he could, but he had the ranch to manage and a thousand and one things to learn about farming in California. And then there were the children. Four lively children here at Greenwood for all that time. Charles and Nellie were good as gold, of course. Always have been. Too good, to my way of thinking. But Arthur and Lila were a different matter entirely.”

“Lila wasn’t bad, was she?” Carly asked. She didn’t have to ask about Arthur. Arthur, she knew, had never been particularly good. Even Nellie, who had always been partial to Arthur, wouldn’t go so far as to say that he had ever been what you might call good. But Lila? “What did Lila do when she lived with you?” Carly had asked Aunt M.

“Whatever she wanted to,” Aunt M. said, but then she had looked at Carly and smiled. “Don’t look so shocked, child,” she said. “Your beloved Lila wasn’t really a naughty little girl. She always minded her manners and did what she was told. As long as you were looking, at least. But she always got her way in the long run. And when she really wanted something, she always got it. You could count on that.”

“And what about me?” Carly had asked, grinning. “How bad was I?”

“Terrible,” Aunt M. said. “A holy terror.” Then she smiled and hugged Carly and kissed her on top of the head. “You were the most beautiful baby in the world,” she said, “from the first day you were born—from the first minute. I was the first one to hold you, you know.”

Carly knew. She’d heard about it many times. How her birth had not been the cure for her mother’s deep depression, as everyone had hoped it would be, and instead had nearly resulted in her death. So Aunt M. had been the first one to hold Carly, and afterward when Mama was sick for so long there had been no one to take care of the new baby except Aunt M. “And Woo Ying,” Carly said. “Woo Ying took care of me too.”

Aunt M. snorted. “Took care of you!” she said. “Smothered you, would be more like it. Spoiled you within an inch of your life. Wouldn’t let you cry for a moment. Would have carried you around under his arm every minute you were awake, if I’d let him. For six months that crazy old Chinaman cleaned house, and stirred the soup, and fed the chickens with one arm, with you tucked under the other like a little sack of rice. It’s a wonder you lived through it.”

Thinking of herself as a sack of rice under Woo Ying’s arm made Carly giggle—and the sound echoed startlingly in the silence of the graveyard. She sat up suddenly, wiping the last of the tears for Petey off her cheeks, and then scrambled to her feet. It was almost dark.

Grabbing the bottle she kept hidden in the fence corner, Carly vaulted the fence, pushed through the hanging willow branches, and slid down the steep slope to the creek. While she waited for the bottle to fill, she glanced around nervously at the pockets of changing, wavering darkness under the overhanging trees, shaking the bottle to make it fill more quickly and scolding herself under her breath. Crazy to lie there daydreaming, in a graveyard, of all places. Crazy to get home so late and worry everybody. Nellie was going to be so angry.

“Dunce, blockhead, ninny,” she told herself as she scrambled back up the embankment. “Hurry, hurry, hurry.” She stopped just long enough to empty the bottle over Petey’s grave—because bitter tears needed a little help in such hot weather—snatched up her package, and headed for home at a run.

Running was a mistake. Walking in a dark graveyard would have been bad enough, but running was an invitation to panic. As Carly’s feet slipped and stumbled over the uneven surface of the dirt road, dark shadows and misty shapes oozed out of hidden places and slid toward her. A few yards before the gate she slipped and fell, tearing her stocking and skinning her left knee and the palms of both hands. Almost before the pain had time to begin she was on her feet and running again; a limping run that took her as far as the gate before she turned back to retrieve her package—because even graveyard ghosts and a bloody knee weren’t going to make her forget a new book that was probably too stimulating.

When Carly got home that night it was dark. Her face was dirty, and blood from her skinned knee had run clear down to her ankle. Nellie was waiting on the veranda, and just as Carly had feared, she was extremely worried and angry. And then, just as she was beginning to calm down, Carly had to go and make it worse by saying that it was a good thing Father wasn’t at home.

Nellie was cleaning Carly’s skinned knee with Sears, Roebuck Microbe Killer and she stopped suddenly and narrowed her eyes. Carly realized immediately that she’d made a mistake.

“And just what do you mean by that, young lady?” Nellie said.

So Carly quickly said she didn’t mean anything and Nellie said that if she was trying to imply that Father was too strict, or unfair, or unkind, it just went to show what an ungrateful, unnatural child she really was, because Father was a wonderful parent, strict—yes—but no more than necessary, and she just wished that he had been here tonight to see how thoughtless and careless his youngest daughter could be.

She’d been dabbing at Carly’s knee while she was talking, and for a long time Carly didn’t say anything except “Ouch” and “Be careful, Nellie,” and by the time the knee and Nellie’s tirade were finally finished she was crying a little.

“I’m sorry, Nellie. I’m sorry,” she said, fanning her smarting knee with both hands. “It hurts, Nellie. It hurts a lot.”

“It has to hurt to do any good,” Nellie said curtly, but then her voice softened and she said, “It won’t hurt for long. You run along out to the kitchen and eat something. I put a plate in the warming oven for you.”

Later, while Carly was eating at the kitchen table, Nellie came in and got out the milk pans and began skimming the cream into the churn.

“I’ll do that,” Carly said. “I’ll do the churning in the morning.” She wanted to do something for Nellie to make up for worrying her, and besides, churning was her favorite chore, since it could be done while reading.

Nellie smiled. “All right. In the morning.” She picked up Carly’s empty plate and took it to the sink. “You run along to bed now.”

Carly hobbled to the door. Then she stopped and said, “I’m sorry I worried you, Nellie. Was Mama worried too? Did she ask where I was?”

Nellie put down the milk pan she was drying and looked at it for a moment before she came over to Carly and put an arm around her shoulders.

“No,” she said. “She didn’t ask. And I didn’t mention it to her. She’s had such bad dizzy spells lately, and if she worries, it always brings one on.” She smiled and gave Carly’s shoulders a little squeeze. “I suppose she thought you were staying over at Aunt M.’s.”

Carly squeezed back. “I suppose so,” she said.

I
T WAS A
little before noon when Carly burst through the back door at a dead run and leapt the three steps to the ground without breaking her stride. She was racing down the well-worn path at breakneck speed when suddenly she grabbed at her waist and came to a skidding, stumbling stop. Her trousers were falling off. Hitching up her skirt, she pulled up the tweed knickers she was wearing under her dress and, clutching them tightly, was back at top speed in an instant. A practiced skid around the honeysuckle trellis that hid the outhouse from public view, and she had reached her destination.