Sound Of Gravel, The (33 page)
She tried desperately to calm herself as the reality of the nightmare began to set in. “Well,” she said, breathing heavily and patting the back of my hand while her own shook like a leaf, “at least we know your mama’s gonna be okay. The good Lord knows what He’s doing. You just have to have faith.” She drew in a deep breath. “He has a plan.”
As we walked the length of our long, dry yard, another car drove up, and then another, then five or six, all filled with friends or relatives and neighbors, people I’d known my whole life but who’d never once visited the house. Car doors slammed and Susan answered all their questions. “We don’t know what happened,” she said, her voice saccharine and soothing. “The fence had electricity running through it. We don’t know why.… One of Kathy’s boys and one of Alejandra’s boys tried to cross the fence.… They didn’t make it. Kathy’s with Lane in the hospital.”
Susan and I walked into the living room. Aaron had come back to the house with Susan’s son, but no one had any idea how to get in touch with my older brothers. Luke was probably wandering the roads, while Matt and Maria and the rest of Alejandra’s family had been in Casas since the party. Susan graciously thanked the man who’d watched the little ones, but he insisted on staying and helping until his friend came back with Mom.
A soft whimper came from the bedroom. I had forgotten about Holly. She was still in the crib where Mom had left her before she ran out. I rushed into the room to find her lying down, kicking her chubby legs and smiling. I gathered her up in my arms and brought her out into the living room. There we sat, all of us, on the floor, the couch, the rocking chair, the piano bench. Waiting. I could hear sounds of women sweeping and straightening up the kitchen. The house was so hot I could barely breathe.
“Mommy’s gonna be fine. Don’t worry,” Aaron told Elena while he patted the top of her head. “She’s gonna be home in a few minutes.”
About an hour later, we heard a sound outside. The man who’d helped me with Mom got up, lifted his hat, and said that he thought his ride was here. I went to the window with Holly on my hip. The white pickup from before was in the driveway. Soon I was joined at the window by others who were sitting vigil in the living room. All of us watched as Lane got out of the passenger seat, said a few words to the man and his friend in Spanish, and then stood there as they drove off. He gave them a wave and then turned toward the house.
Another truck drove up with Micah’s and Junior’s bodies in the back. Lane gripped the tailgate for a moment and put his face in his hands. “Let me through,” I said to the others behind me at the window, no longer able to watch. Soon, we heard Lane’s crooked steps approach the house and the kitchen door open. My siblings followed me from the living room. Lane stepped inside without saying a word, closed the door, and confronted the crowd somberly, his hand still on the knob. There didn’t seem to be a drop of blood in his face.
“Lane, is Kathy going to be okay?” asked Susan.
“Kathy—” He paused and scanned the kitchen, looking at everyone but me, everyone completely silent. “Kathy didn’t make it.” He took in a deep breath and looked away from the eyes that watched him. “We took her to that first-aid center in Lagunitas, but they didn’t have what they needed to save her.” Now his voice was barely audible and he stared at the doorknob. “She died right after we laid her on the stretcher.”
Died
. As I heard Lane say it, the word felt like a sharp needle scratching over the record of my mind, stuck repeating the same thought over and over:
Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Wait a minute
. I wanted to go back, start the record over again to see if it might play out differently. This wasn’t the way it was supposed to end. I was sure of it. I looked around the room at my brother and sisters, who all stood completely still around the kitchen table, their mouths agape and eyes darting between Lane and me as if they weren’t quite sure what to do. I started to feel dizzy until I realized I’d stopped breathing, then I sucked in a big gulp of air.
The rest of the morning felt as if I were living in a series of photographs. I saw only flashes of stunned faces, people watching me with mouths and eyes open wide, waiting for me to react. I walked slowly to the kids’ bedroom, stopping at the sink in the bathroom to splash cold water on my face. I packed clothes for my siblings, stuffing them into garbage bags, not knowing where we would go. I accidentally packed a bag for Micah, then closed my eyes to make it all go away. Voices swirled all around me.
“The kids can stay with me for now.” “Ruthie, let me hold the baby.” “I’ll go to Casas and pick out the coffins.” “We need to find clothes to bury the bodies in.” “Did anyone find Luke and Matt?” “You have to understand, Ruthie. Your mom is in a better place, away from all the suffering and hell on earth.” “Where are the baby’s diapers?” “Is Leah potty-trained?” “Can’t Holly take a bottle?” “All the kids can fit in my car.”
An hour later, I found myself in the front seat of a four-door sedan with my five-month-old sister sitting on my lap. I don’t remember who was driving; I only remember the feeling of Holly bouncing on my lap as if this were any other day. I felt the car dodge many muddy potholes and hit many more as I turned my head to look back in the seat. Aaron, Elena, and Leah sat behind me in silence, all of them numb. Behind them, off in the distance, our house—our home—was getting smaller and smaller in the rear windshield. The kitchen door was wide-open, the adobe bricks peeking through jagged pieces of cement that barely clung to the walls. The house looked empty and broken—as if it too had touched a buried wire and been electrocuted, as if its heart had also stopped beating.
Alex, Micah, and Junior.
The funeral was scheduled for the next afternoon. I passed a long, fitful night in an oversize wooden rocking chair with Holly, trying to train her to accept her first rubber nipple. Earlier that evening, Lane’s sister Lisa and I had driven from house to house in the colony, desperately searching for a woman who might be able to nurse Holly. Even when we found someone willing to help, Holly refused to latch on and suckle. She kicked her chubby legs at every nursing mother we presented, clenching her fists and screaming each time one of them tried to feed her. She would cry uncontrollably until put back in my arms. I was the only one who could calm her.
Every time I offered her the rubber nipple, Holly jerked her tiny head back and forth, stubbornly resisting it. My hands began to shake when I thought about how helpless I was. I couldn’t help my Mom when she lay dying at my feet, and I couldn’t help my sister, even when she hadn’t eaten in hours. But just as I was at the point of giving up, a tiny drop of liquid dripped onto Holly’s tongue. Either she no longer found the taste of formula offensive or she was too hungry to care. Soon, she was sucking with abandon, closing her eyes and relaxing her body. I sighed as my sister’s warmth began to flow into my arms. It was as if she were melting into me.
Lisa came into the living room and congratulated me on my achievement. I thanked her for her help, carried Holly to a bed in a back room, and lay beside her, my mind replaying every detail of the day. Micah’s and Mom’s deaths might not have happened if I’d prevented any one of the dozens of bad coincidences that occurred within seconds of each other. If I had been able to stop Mom, to say the exact right thing to keep her from touching the fence, or if I’d been watching the boys play—if even one small detail had played out differently, their lives would have been spared. Why couldn’t I have saved them? Why had electricity been running through that fence?
Holly’s stomach gurgled and she soon woke up and started to cry. I put her on my shoulder to burp her and almost immediately felt her little body convulse and vomit chalky-white formula all over my nightshirt. I hardly reacted, so minor did this seem in the grand scheme of things. I calmly cleaned us both up, fed her another bottle, and watched her fall asleep again, by which time roosters were crowing outside and a cool blue glow began to wash over the room.
As the sun rose, its harsh light piercing my eyes like tiny shards of glass, I handed Holly off to Lisa and left the house in search of Mom and Micah, whose bodies were being prepared for burial in another nearby house. Just as with Meri, there was no money to pay for a proper embalming so the burials would need to happen quickly. As I walked to the makeshift morgue, feeling the July sun burn into the dry Mexican earth with every step, I had a sick feeling about what I would find. Still, I had to be certain that they were being given the best possible care, that whoever had dressed Mom had put her in the outfit I’d picked out for her, that they’d curled her hair as I had requested, that they’d used the right kind of makeup.
I opened a wooden screen door directly into a square living room. It was dark and empty except for the three bodies lying on long, portable tables. Mom, Micah, and Junior were all dressed in burial clothes. Box fans whirred in each corner of the room, circulating warm, damp air that only seemed to speed up the decomposition. The breeze made the pleats in the boys’ dark slacks tremble, and I noticed that they’d been dressed identically, in stiff white shirts and navy-blue ties. Micah’s and Junior’s hands had been placed at their sides and their hair slicked back like two proper Mormon boys. Micah’s face was still freckled and sunburned, and a straight black line ran across each of his palms where they’d made contact with the fence. His fingers looked as if they’d been burned from the inside out.
I was more hesitant to approach Mom, whose body was laid out on the opposite side of the room. Even from a distance I saw that the burial preparations hadn’t gone well—she wasn’t in the dress I had picked out. Instead she wore white, a color Mom never wore. A woman I barely knew walked into the room, approached me, and explained that my mother’s body had been too swollen to wear the dress I’d chosen. She needed a larger size in death than she’d worn in life.
The closer I moved to Mom’s body, the more confused I felt. Her hair was combed and curled convincingly, parted down the middle and feathered back, but otherwise, she barely looked like herself. Her face was caked with too much foundation. Her swollen, straight lips were overpainted with pearl-pink lipstick, and her eyelashes too thickly coated with brown mascara. She was no longer wearing her ever-present, ever-slipping eyeglasses. Someone had found and retrieved them from the spot where they’d fallen, but like the dress, her glasses were too small for her swollen face.
On the plus side, her palms hadn’t been burned during the brief time they’d made contact with the fence. Her fingers looked just as they had before—just like mine, short and chubby with fingernails chewed to the quick. Mom had always told me that I resembled the LeBaron side of the family, but examining her bare legs and feet under her ruffled dress, I saw clearly that I wasn’t just my father’s daughter. Our calves were the same shape; so were our feet and toes.
The rest of the morning, I busied myself with dressing my sisters for the funeral, as well as preparing a diaper bag with a clean outfit for Holly, diapers, bottles, and formula to make it through the afternoon. People from out of town began to arrive—but for the most part I didn’t have the energy to greet them. Finally I looked out the window and saw a fragile figure walking down the road toward the house where we were staying: my grandmother. I ran out to meet her. She made her way awkwardly, her head down, watching the road and stepping around potholes. The surprise and joy of seeing her, not to mention the man who’d driven her down from the airport in El Paso—Matt—brought fresh tears to my eyes.
Trailing Grandma, my brother looked exhausted by the trip. He rubbed bloodshot, swollen eyes as I ran and threw my arms around him, and around Grandma, as if they were the last links between me and the life I’d once known.
“I should have been there,” Matt said, sobbing and embracing me, his entire body shaking. “I’m so sorry. I should have helped with Mom. I should have protected her, protected Micah. What are we gonna do without them?”
“I don’t know.” I was incapable of any words of consolation. “I don’t know what we’re gonna do.”
All the while, Grandma just stood there, her head lowered, crying yet speechless. It was the first time I’d ever seen her without Grandpa, and the first time she’d been to the colony in over a decade. We walked inside the house, and for a while the three of us found ourselves in a square living room in a round house surrounded by cement walls with rounded corners, trapped in an uncomfortable, heavy silence. Grandma kept her head bowed and her shoulders hunched forward in a navy-blue polyester suit that looked too big on her. She had become so thin and frail.
I watched her raise her solemn, stunned face to adjust her wire-framed glasses and massage her temples. Finally she looked at Matt and me and said, “Well, I guess we’ll talk more about the younger kids after the funeral.”
“Yeah. We should probably get goin’.” Matt wiped his swollen eyes. “Are they all ready to go, Ruthie?”
I nodded. “They’re in the backyard. I’ll get them and the diaper bag.”