Animal Dreams

"In high school you were doing a pretty good job of taking care of yourself."

"That's what it looked like. It probably looks like that now, too."

Loyd took me back onto his shoulder, which felt hard like a cradleboard under my head. He stroked my cheek. "You still have all the family you grew up with. Hallie's somewhere out there. She'll come back. And Doc's still here."

"Neither one of them is here."

"Codi, for everybody that's gone away, there's somebody that's come to you. Emelina thinks you're her long-lost sister. You know what she told me? She wants you there in that little house forever. She said if I let you leave Grace she'll bust my butt. She loves you to death."

"So this is all a conspiracy, I said."

"Yeah. Emelina bribed me to fall in love with you." He laughed and kissed my hair. "Honey, there's not that much money in the world."

I didn't wish to be comforted. "You can't replace people you love with other people," I said. "They're not like old shoes or something."

"No. But you can trust that you're not going to run out of people to love."

"I don't think I can trust life that far. I lost my mother. You don't know what that's like."

"No, I don't."

"You don't have any idea what the whole story is, Loyd. You don't know everybody I've lost."

He gathered me into his arms and we didn't talk anymore, but in my chest I could still feel a small, hard knot of anger and I held on to it. It was my wings. My exit to safety.

Finally I read all of Hallie's letters. There were half a dozen I'd never opened, the ones that came after. I knew she'd mailed them before she was kidnapped-I could read the postmarks-but I still held the hope that there might be some clue in there that would help bring her back. Once I opened the letters that hope would be gone.

But I was past a certain point now, like Loyd's train going over the hill. The momentum of wanting to hear Hallie, even for a few minutes, was growing heavier than anything I might have had to lose. More than ever in my life I needed to ask her what to do, how to live without guarantees, without safety.

So I read the letters, and there were no clues. Only the ordinary, heartbreaking details of war and rural life and the slow progress of hope.

I'd forgotten that her last letter, which I'd read on the trip to Santa Rosalia, was a tirade. I had to get it out and read it again to remember, and the sting was gone. "If I get another letter that mentions SAVING THE WORLD, I am sending you, by return mail, a letter bomb." (Had I really used those words? But I knew I had, more than once.) "I don't expect to see perfection before I die. What keeps you going isn't some fine destination but just the road you're on, and the fact that you know how to drive." Two hours after she'd mailed that, she had written a pained apology that reached me now, a lifetime later. Any one moment could be like this, I thought. A continental divide.

Codi [she wrote], I'm sorry, I didn't say it right. I'm touchy about being worshiped. I'm afraid of becoming Doc Homer Junior, standing on a monument of charity and handing down my blessings, making sure everybody knows where we all stand. I don't feel like I'm doing that, but it's the thing you fear most that walks beside you all the time. I don't want you of all people to see me that way. I'm not Saving Nicaragua, I'm doing the only thing I can live with under the circumstances. The circumstances being that in Tucson I was dying among the garden pests. Working with refugees, and also subsidizing the war that was killing them. I had to get out.

By virtue of our citizenship we're on one side of this war or the other. I chose sides. And I know that we could lose. I've never seen people suffer so much for an ideal. They're sick to death of the embargo and the war. They could say Uncle, vote for something else, just to stop this bludgeoning. And you know what? I don't even consider that, it's not the point.

You're thinking of revolution as a great all-or-nothing. I think of it as one more morning in a muggy cotton field, checking the undersides of leaves to see what's been there, figuring out what to do that won't clear a path for worse problems next week. Right now that's what I do. You ask why I'm not afraid of loving and losing, and that's my answer. Wars and elections are both too big and too small to matter in the long run. The daily work-that goes on, it adds up. It goes into the ground, into crops, into children's bellies and their bright eyes. Good things don't get lost.