Animal Dreams

Curiosity overcame my lassitude. "How'd you match those shingles?" I called out.

He looked at me, puzzled.

"Where'd you get the new shingles? They're a perfect match."

He examined the shingles in his hands, as if noticing this for the first time, and then called back, "Well, they ought to be, they're all from the same lot. I bought two hundred extras when I put this roof on."

"When was that?" I asked.

He looked up at the clouds. I don't know whether he was divining the weather or the past. "Right after the war," he said. "That would have been forty-six."

Just then Mr. Rideheart came walking up the road under a navy blue umbrella. Maybe it was still raining down the way, where he'd just come from. He walked directly to the front porch where I sat, jauntily hopped up the steps, stomped his feet delicately a few times as if to knock off mud (though his shoes were immaculate), and extended his hand to me. I'd expected to spend the day in numb, depressed solitude, and now I felt uncomfortably honored to sit at the end of Mr. Rideheart's long line of effort-like a princess in a tale of impossible tasks. Although I was fairly sure he hadn't come all this way looking for me.

"Sean Rideheart," he said. He had white eyebrows and bright green eyes; an appealing face.

"Codi Noline." I shook his hand. "I've heard about you. You're the pinata collector."

He laughed. "I've been called many things in my time, but that's a first. I'm looking for Viola Domingos." At my invitation he sat down in the only other chair on the porch, wicker, of doubtful character.

"She's not here," I said. "Nobody's home today. Viola and the kids have gone down to the church. They're having some kind of a big party down there today, painting the saints."

"Painting the saints?" Mr. Rideheart extracted a largish blue handkerchief from the pocket of his tweed jacket and cleaned his wire-rimmed glasses with extraordinary care. I watched for a long time, mesmerized, until he glanced up at me.

"The statues of saints, in the church," I explained. "I guess they have to get freshened up every so often, like anybody else. The women paint the saints and the kids paint each other."

He replaced his glasses and observed the rooftops and treetops that led stepwise down the hill. Mr. Pye had his back to us now. He was industriously tacking down shingles he'd secured for this purpose ten years before Hallie was born.

"Quite a place," Mr. Rideheart said, finally. "How long have you lived here?"

It wasn't an easy question to answer. "I was born here," I said slowly. "But right now I'm just on an extended visit. My time's up soon."

He sighed, looking out over the white path of blossoming treetops that led up toward the dam. "Ah, well, yes," he said, "isn't everybody's. More's the pity."

At first the Stitch and Bitch was divided in its opinion of Mr. Rideheart. While he was graciously received into the kitchens of half the club members, where he drank tea and stroked his white mustache and listened in earnest while the pinata artists discussed their methodologies, the other half (led by Dona Althea) suspected him of being the southwestern equivalent of a carpetbagger.

But for once the Dona judged wrong. His intentions were noble, and ultimately providential. When the club assembled in March for its monthly meeting in the American Legion hall, Mr. Rideheart was the guest speaker. He was supposed to lecture on folk art, which he did, but mostly he talked about Grace. He told these women what they had always known: that their town had a spirit and disposition completely apart from its economic identity as an outpost of the Black Mountain Mining Company. During the last century while men labored underground to rob the canyon of its wealth, the women up above had been paying it back in kind. They'd paid with embroidery and peacocks and fruit trees and pinatas and children. Mr. Rideheart suggested that he had never known of a place quite like Gracela Canyon, and that it could, and should, be declared a historic preserve. There existed a thing called the National Register of Historic Places. The landmarks on this list, he said, were protected from the onslaught of industry, as if they were endangered species. He allowed that it wasn't perfect; listing on the register would provide "a measure of protection from demolition or other negative impact," he said. "In other words, a man can still shoot an elephant, even though it has been declared endangered, and the elephant will still be dead. But the man will come out looking like a very nasty guy."

"But really it's not our houses that are going to get endangered by the poison and the dam," Norma Galvez pointed out. "It's the trees."