Ariel's Crossing (51 page)

Thin air. Funny, that reminded her of Marcos’s ghost. He never abandoned his conviction that it was a ghost he’d seen back when he was young. Sometimes she teased her husband about it, but got no laughs from him, as he refused to take it in the spirit intended, so to speak. He was sure he had identified her through research he’d done using antique deeds on the place from the Rancho de Peña era. For such a practical, down-to-earth man, his insistence that he had encountered the ghost of Doña Francisca, the only daughter of the man who first settled this spread back in the nineteenth century, seemed, well, just seemed out of character. Everything else Marcos did or said made such sense. It reminded Ariel of Granna somehow, the fervency of her belief in the altogether unprovable.

Yet, walking in this twilight, seeing the mists on the river, she could imagine how such a vision might come to pass. Desert air, this lean desert air, was chilly tonight, while the creek water ran warm from a long fall sun. The fields were wet from irrigating, the ground tepid. Wasn’t that the meteorology which would produce these skeins of pale haze, these fog strings drifting like spectral tapers across her path? It was, she was certain. This must surely have been what Marcos saw all those years ago.

An owl hooted. A magpie shifted on a branch overhead. Ariel walked even more quickly, and as she did she began to think about the notes she’d been adding to her new ledger, the one she now used, having filled the Calder volume. More noticings, more notes.

How would she evoke what she witnessed here before her? Mist-figures taking on clearer shapes, and one in particular rising toward undeniable form down the path a hundred paces or so, not far from the aluminum gate that would let her back into the lower pasture and on toward the fieldhouse, where her husband and child waited for her. If Francisca was somehow still in Nambé valley, could it be possible beyond just wishful thinking that some small part of Kip was, too?

With rosetilla of Chimayó, Ariel mused, she might have tried to help him remain a presence. With rosetilla the aster,
ambrosia concertiflora
that flourishes along the riverbed, herb of the toad,
yerba
that cures men, women, and beasts whose bodies were suffering. Maybe Francisca prepared for him the traditional mash of
yerba del sapo
and salt and asparagus berries and steeped it in a bowl of creek water and set it out for him under a Navajo willow. Perhaps his
médìca
choreographed his respite from absolute death, knowing somehow that her lover’s great-grandson’s wife would be grateful.

Ariel unlatched the gate, shivering from the deepening chill. At the far end of the paddock, protected by coyote fences, stood her adobe, hidden safely in the moonshade of deleafing cottonwoods— the fieldhouse where Kip had spent so many of his best days. She walked past the stud barn through the vivid meadow fog that floated in fragile bundles across the scape and when she reached the corral fence, an
anil
cloud stopped her in her tracks. It looked for all the world like a woman. Whorly embroidery running the length of her skirt, a silk blouse under a wispy jerkin,
flor
boots soft as slippers, a sombrero banded by silver disks that caught the early starlight in enchanted glints. Flowing from the earth beside her was a condensation, the synopsis of a man, radiant in his handsome mist, as real as Doña Francisca de Peña had ever been or would be. There were others, too, moving about in a fantastic dance. And though Ariel knew the forms and shapes were the work of nightfall haze and her own imagination, as she made her way across the pasture she believed they were also as real as any imagined thing need be. They were family of the roundish earth,
nambay-ongwee,
like the Tewa before them—Doña Francisca de Peña and Kip Calder, clubfooted Gil Montoya and prayerful Granna, Agnes and Grandfather McCarthy, her beloved little Buddha. Though they no longer lived, their mists would be remembered.

When she opened the fieldhouse door, she was greeted by the same amber lamplight she remembered from Chelsea, back when she watched the appalling pigeons on the ledge and countless people passing by on the sidewalks below. And to think she and Marcos lived in this old fieldhouse now, which they’d expanded some, modernized some, but which still had Kip’s fingerprints, quite literally, on its adobe walls. Just as Kip continued to live inside Ariel and Miranda and, soon enough, baby Chase, they lived inside the consequence of his labor of love down here in the lower pasture. The delicate balance was struck.

Marcos kissed her. She took off her barn coat, apologizing for staying out late. The river was so beautiful tonight, she said. The starlight on the water. The clouds rising out of the earth. After dinner, the day nearing done, she asked if she could read them something she’d written, before Miranda was put to bed. Marcos answered yes, and the girl settled down in her father’s lap to listen, though she was still too young to understand. And when Ariel opened Kip’s old ledger and read, “Doña Francisca de Peña never believed in ghosts, and even after she became one herself she couldn’t help but have her doubts,” she glanced up, and Marcos said, “Keep going.” So she did.

A Biography of Bradford Morrow

Bradford Morrow is the award-winning author of six novels and numerous short stories, essays, poetry collections, and children’s books, as well as the founding editor of the celebrated literary journal
Conjunctions
. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, the Academy Award inLiterature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Pushcart and O. Henry Prizes, and the PEN/Nora Magid Award, as well as other honors.

Born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1951, Morrow grew up outside Denver in Littleton, Colorado, where his parents had settled after growing up in Red Cloud, Nebraska, and Oak Creek, Colorado, respectively. Morrow’s maternalgrandparents were farmers from Nebraskawho eventually migrated to Colorado after losing their farm during the Depression, and his paternalgrandfatherwas a doctor who came to Colorado to set up his practice on the frontier. His family instilled a spirit of adventure and curiosity in Morrow, traits that would be evident in his writing as well as his peripatetic travels and career choices.

Morrow left home at fifteen, traveling first to Honduras to participate in a summer program sponsored by the American Medical Association, where he worked as a medical assistant helping to inoculate thousands of impoverished, rural Hondurans. He then spent his senior year of high school as a foreign exchange student in Italy, earned his undergraduate degree at the University of Colorado, and spent time in Paris. For over a decade after setting off on his own, Morrow lived an itinerant life, moving back and forth from Europe to the States. He then spent five years in California, where he met the poet Kenneth Rexroth, and finally settled for good in New York City. Before becoming a fulltime writer and editor, Morrow worked as a bookseller, jazz musician, and translator, and attended graduate school at Yale. His first book-length work was a bibliography of Wyndham Lewis, published in 1978.

In 1981, Morrow launched the literary journal
Conjunctions
. His taste, passion, and editorial savvy quickly attracted a diverse slate of contributing writers and editors, including Chinua Achebe, John Ashbery, and Joyce Carol Oates. The novelist Robert Coover has called the publication “without exception, America’s leading literary journal, one of the greatest such magazines in the literary history of the country.”

After years of contributing to anthologies and supporting the work of others in his role as editor, Morrow published his first novel,
Come Sunday
, in 1988. Morrow’s debut set the tone for his later works with its rich historical allusion, globe-spanning plotlines, lyrical prose, and illuminating philosophical exploration. Morrow’s second novel,
The Almanac Branch
(1991), was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and highlighted the author’s interest in the complex interior lives of his characters. The tone of his work is often Gothic, especially in
Giovanni’s Gift
(1997), which was partly inspired by the work of Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Morrow meticulously researches his fiction: For his diptych consisting of
Trinity Fields
(1995) and
Ariel’s Crossing
(2002), the author interviewed special ops veterans from the U.S. engagement in Laos, students involved in the Columbia University riots, and Manhattan Project scientists, among others. He even lived for a time near Los Alamos—where atomic weapons were first tested—to better understand the characters in his sweeping historical sagas of American life in the atomic age.

Aside from his work as an editor and writer, Bradford Morrow has taught writing and literature throughout his career, which has included positions at Brown, Columbia, Princeton, and the Naropa Institute. He currently lives in New York and is a professor of literature at Bard College, which sponsors
Conjunctions
.

“Lois Hoffman and Ernest Morrow, my parents-to-be, standing in front of the Luscombemy father flew them in on their first date in 1949. My father was a pilot and the owner of a Harley-Davidson that he regularly drove from Oak Creek, Colorado, over the continental divide to Denver, where Lois lived at the time, an all-day drive on his cycle.”

“Age one, striking something of an authorial pose with the forefinger to the cheek. I remember those curtains, very Western in theme with the cattle and other cowboy imagery.”

“Looking at this photograph, it’s really those narrative Western-themed curtains behind me that I find most interesting now. I remember staring at them and inventing stories in the drapery. This was in our house on Cove Way in Denver, Colorado.”

“The
H.M.S. Pinafore
outfit that I wore onone of my two youthful outings as a thespian (the other being Gilbert & Sullivan’s other workhorse operetta,
The Mikado
). My mother made the costume from scratch, right down to the epaulettes and medals. I still have this outfit in a box somewhere and the bookcase, too. Littleton, Colorado.”