Trinity Fields (52 page)

We finally pass through the walled cemetery, around the wooden cross mounted on a small adobe base with its black millstone inset, and into the church.

Thousands of pilgrims have already passed through here this day, and the peace candles warmed the nave, their smoke giving it a smell of antiquity. Kip wants to sit for a while, and we do, together in a pew several rows back from the altar. Just to think, the two of us had stumbled down this very length of flagstone, having guessed with youthful wisdom the impact our community would have on every other community on earth. I stare at Kip, whose head is bowed and whose hands are folded in his lap, and feel a merging of passions to which words would never attach nor from which come forth.

The sky, I swear, is even bigger than it once was. Its midnight blue is bluer than midnight, its moonstruck clouds more capricious, building and building up into massive plumes over against the grand stretches of distant mountains from Trampas Peak to Thompson Peak, then changing shape within the pocket of time it takes slowly to close your eyes and open them again. The daylit pinks seem browner, the pinks of the rock formations, the piñon grayer in its greens. There are more twinkling lights out on the desert, more houses with people in them.

The light, like ghost snow, hints of afterglow in the desert night. I have said goodbye to Kip and know that he accomplished what he'd wanted to do, that he had given me a gift which I could possess for the last third of my life, a quiet and glorious gift, whether it came from largesse or not. Not the diary, that was for Ariel. Nor his inheritance, which was for charity—or rather, for Ariel, too, if she wanted it. The gift was that my youth and my adulthood could now be of a piece, a whole entity with beginning, middle, and yes, an end. Without asking for it, he allowed me to forgive him, and by the same token had forgiven me without my having asked. Forgiveness was the touchstone of redemption, and I hope that Ariel will be able to forgive me for what I've failed all these years to tell her.

Whenever she would ask me about how Jess and I met, I answered tangentially, avoiding the whole truth, and thus denying her a birthright. I knew why, of course. Always knew what it was to hedge and shift and equivocate. —We met at Columbia. I've already told you that story a hundred times, I would say. And Ariel'd confound me with her Kiplike eyes, looking right through me but not knowing what if anything there was to see there. It has been, almost without my knowing it, my great dark secret—so secret that it's often invited its possessor to forget. But Kip has changed this. He had so many secrets to hang like clothing around the nakedness of his life and, as it turns out, so have I. But by telling me his, he's liberated me from holding on any longer to mine. It is as great a gift as anyone has ever given me.

You're her father, Kip. She will know it, know both her fathers now, and so know her mother, the woman that both of them have loved.

The amber lights on the Hill shine, up ahead. Within the hour, I will be at my mother's. Time cannot move fast enough for me now that I have the power to tell.

When I awaken, I hear her in the kitchen, humming a song to herself. She still has a fine singing voice, though the melody seems to stray—is she improvising? I recognize it, and remember it was one of her favorite tunes, “Someone to Watch Over Me.” Whoever wrote it, I can't recall, the Gershwins maybe. In the days when I was growing up, she would sit at the piano and sing it; there was a double entendre she relished, at the expense of the military and the AEC and everyone else who watched over her, who even after the greatest secrecy of the forties carried on into the new decade with a vigilance that beheld a spy behind every rock. But hearing it this morning, it sounds like the wistful love song it was meant to be.

There's a somebody I'm longing to see,

I hope that he turns out to be—

I sit up and look at my hands—Kip's old tic—and see that they are still dirty with the soil from the sanctuary desert chapel.

Someone who'll watch over me—

Look at my watch and see that I had better get a move on if I want to get the car back to Alyse, and make my flight in Albuquerque. I doubt there will be time to drink the coffee I smell that she's made. My father's jacket, buttons ineptly but tightly resewn in the middle of the night with needle and thread from her old tin sewing box, lies folded over a trunk at the foot of the bed, offers me the certain pleasure of fulfilling a promise.

Then she's there in the room before me, and she is smiling. “I'm happy you came to visit, Brice,” she says.

“I'm sorry I've been such an absence—”

“Don't,” she says.

She asks me do I have time to call Bonnie Jean to say goodbye. True to form, I say I'll call her from the airport, or else from the city later tonight. Not all things change, or at least not all at once, I think.

“All right,” she says.

Then I think, Damn it all, call the woman, she's your sister. I ask my mother for Bonnie's number, pull the rotary around in tight incomplete circles, and when she answers begin to thank her for everything.

True to form, she says, “I didn't hardly do anything. Not that I wouldn't be happy to if you'd stick around for a change.”

“I'll be back soon,” I say.

“Right, Brice.”

“No, honestly. I mean it.”

“Say hello to Jessica for me,” she says, finally.

We hang up and I begin to throw together my few things before I realize that probably, yes, I will come back soon. “You mind if I leave this bag here?” I ask my mother. “Just a few clothes. I don't need them for the trip home.”

This is fine by her. I think, I ought to wash up before I go. But then I realize that my hands might guide me better with a little sacred earth on them. I kiss my mother goodbye, a solid filial kiss with her beautiful, fragile head held firmly in both my soiled palms.

Down from the Hill, down the broad switchbacks of the familiar road that would lead me back past San Ildefonso pueblo, to the crossroads near Pojoaque. I have for Alyse a token of blessed soil for which, being the friend she is, she will thank me ardently before calling Martha to come, see what Brice has brought, touch it because it has magical properties that will make you live forever. Then she will drive me from Santa Fe to Albuquerque for the flight home. I spoke with Jessica last night, and said there was so much to tell her. She asked me how Kip was, and I could only say he was finer than I'd ever seen him but finer, as always, after his own fashion. For her I have some holy clay too, and some as well for Ariel—a humble birthday present to accompany that, or should I say those, for there are so many, from her other father.

The party's a few weeks after the fact, but what difference does it make. Ariel, twenty-four. I've been her father for twenty-four years. I wish she could see what I am seeing here now. I begin to wish she took more of an interest in my history, but catch myself with the thought, Listen, man, you have hardly known your own history, how should you expect her to contemplate what's never been disclosed to her? That would change, of course. Our histories, set straight, might finally intertwine, ironic as it may seem.

I take in a deep breath of air, look east as I round a hairpin curve. The Sangre de Cristos have been rinsed by rain, and above them rise those inveterate clouds like a second range much grander in scale than the mountains themselves. Released my breath, breathed again. Thin, sweet air.

My thoughts go back to Ariel, Jess, Kip, myself. All parents wish their children took more interest in their histories, I guess.

It is unfathomable to me still that I am a father—and I
am
a father—and even more unbelievable to me that next year I will be celebrating my birthday of half a century, and seven months later there will be another birthday, as the successful construction of the bomb continues to chase me around the calendar of years. Los Alamos already has commemorative festivities under way, with many more activities planned for the months ahead. The nation will honor (or not) the half-centennial of its magnificent, dubious achievement. Now that we are told the cold war is over and the threat of nuclear war is diminished, the celebrations on the Hill can be mantled in a kind of dignity that pure history offers anniversaries of events mixed with equal parts glory and sadness. Pure history is history sealed from the present. Is safe history. The Trinity blast down at Alamogordo will be commemorated as pure history, if possible. But, of course, it is not. The arsenal Trinity fathered is vast and there are despots not born yet whose pleasure will be to make it vaster and threaten to give us another glimpse of its fearful magic. If only the posito in Chimayó could generate healing soil enough to bury the silos around the world forever, that would be a day truly to celebrate.

At the foot of the pass where the highway no longer holds to the steep beige and charcoal walls of the long mesas, and begins to open out into the straightaway across the flatland, the traveler crosses the Rio Grande. Known to some as Otowi, it is the sacred site the Indians call Po-Sah-Son-Gay, “the place where the river speaks.” There is a love story associated with Po-Sah-Son-Gay.

So many different things connect here. The old Otowi bridge still spans the muddy river to the right of where the new concrete four-lane bridge crosses over. It is a restored but fragile sculpture of an honest, old design, its concrete verticals holding strong, its necklace of cables graceful, a narrow suspension bridge, the remnant of earlier times. All our families, back in the forties, crossed that bridge, and much of the equipment that went into building our homes and the myriad materials that were assembled into the bombs on the Hill were carried across that bridge. And back in earlier days it so happened that there was a woman who lived by the bridge. Her name was Edith Warner, and when she came here in autumn 1922 to exchange the air of Philadelphia for that of a small guest ranch in Frijoles Canyon her life underwent a revolution, such was the beauty of the landscape surrounding the stone house and cabins that stood near the Rito de los Frijoles—Bean Brook, as Kip used to call it—edged by alders and willows and grama grasses. The sun-warmed cliffs, the dry talus that lay like unmarked amulets at their feet, the smoke-blackened ceilings of the caves covered with line etchings of deer and birds and the cliff dwellers themselves, the Plumed Serpent at Tsirege mesa from whose height she could see mountains in every direction, the stars that at night lay overhead like a quilt—Edith knew she could never leave, that New Mexico was to be her home for the rest of her years. A man named John Boyd and his wife, Martha, who operated the ranch that winter, took Edith into their lives, and they moved on to an even more remote valley, higher in the Jemez where they built a log cabin and settled together for a time into a life of pioneers. If Edith harbored second thoughts about abandoning the East, a trip back to Pennsylvania in the mid-twenties laid them to rest. Ill health forced her return to the Southwest, and in 1928, unmarried, unemployed, thirty-five years old, Edith agreed to take the only work she could find, as caretaker of a rundown house that stood near the tracks of the Denver & Rio Grande narrow-gauge railroad. The train came through, spewing smoke and hot cinders in the fashion of old iron horses of the last century, and deposited in the boxcar station supplies and mail destined for Los Alamos Ranch School. Edith would sign for the shipment and with the help of a pueblo boy named Adam ready things for the truck that came down from the mesa to pick it up each week. She was very poor, but considered it a good life to be paid twenty-five dollars a month plus what she could earn selling tobacco and canned goods, soda pop and gasoline to the Indians, the occasional sheepherder, boys from the ranch, tourists making their way from Santa Fe to the ruins of Frijoles. Gradually she fixed the house up, and gradually the Indians from the reservation began to accept her, this white woman who lived on their land at the place where the river speaks. They helped her plough her garden, they gathered firewood for her, they repaired her leaking roof. O-ne-a-po-vi, an elder woman of the pueblo, knew she had a special fondness for blue cornmeal paper-bread, and saw to it that Edith would have some for dinner. Likewise, the scientists from up on the Hill came down to have supper at her table. Edith developed a special fondness for Niels Bohr, his perpetual pipe and his straw hat, the way his sentences meandered, explored, often trailed off into silence, then picked up once more, always in pursuit, never at rest. Others from the Hill befriended her, too. Parsons, Fermi, Compton, Oppenheimer, the lot of them. Edith, like the trestle span by her house, bridged things. Then she met Atilano Montoya, known as Tilano, who came one day to build for her a fireplace of adobe brick, and her life changed again. Tilano told her of his travels through Europe—Paris and London, Rome and Berlin—as a member of a troupe of Indian dancers. His gypsy days behind, he was now one of the elders of San Ildefonso, with glorious braids that reached his waist, character charged with warmth and wit. He was a widower, and in time his visits to the house by the river became more frequent, until eventually his presence there was permanent. They never married, but were seldom apart. When the engineers came in 1947 to inform her that the Otowi bridge was outmoded and that they were going to have to build a new bridge, which would cast a shadow across her cornfield and into her kitchen window, she was saddened, of course, but it was said that she and Tilano accepted the inevitability of progress, and felt fortunate that they'd spent those decades down by the river. With the help of Indians from the pueblo and scientists from Los Alamos they built an adobe up in the canyon where, on quiet days, they could just make out the ruffle and shush of the talking river. She died a few years later, in the spring of 1951, and Tilano himself died two years after that.

I have read a book about this woman, which was written by the daughter of Ashley Pond, the gentleman who first founded the boy's school up at Los Alamos, and in this book the author appends the texts of Edith's Christmas letters, which she sent to all her friends, and which were famous for their humor and wisdom. The last of these laments the news of Korea. “Co-ha and Hagi, the boys who worked with Tilano in the garden from the time they could pull a weed, came home on leave before going overseas,” she writes. “Five of the boys from the Pueblo have gone and again, after so short a span, the postman is always awaited anxiously.” In the letter she speaks of cycles and of renewal, and of how the snowy peaks of Truchas are lit up by the sun. She delights in thinking of the long-ago people who walked just here in the world and thanks their gods for what generosities life can allow. Then, remembering the war once more, as if the war extinguished the glinting light above, she gives voice to her impatience with just that same world. “How to endure the man-made devastating period in which we live and which seems almost as hopeless to control as drought.” It is as if I can see her leaning intent over the blank page before her. “I only know that the power recognized by those other sky-scanners still exists, that contact is possible. I know, too, what depths of kindness and selflessness exist in my fellow man. Of this I have had renewed assurance recently, when those about me have shared self and substance. When Tilano lights the Christmas Eve fire, perhaps against a white hillside, I shall watch from the house where some have felt peace and hope that in your sky there are some bright stars.”