It was a mixer for the English department, and I think the girl started out believing me—after all Inga Beart and I have the same last name. Then she asked me why she had done it, and of course I didn’t know what it meant. Then not only did the girl not believe that Inga Beart was my mother, she didn’t even believe I had been invited to that party, because how could an English major not know that Inga Beart had dug out her own eyes with a kitchen knife?
I hadn’t gone back to the ranch since I left for college, not even for Christmas, but the next morning I skipped my classes and drove a friend’s old car down. The car made it all the way to the last turn off the highway—by then it had become the interstate—before it gave out completely, and I ran the rest of the way along the frontage road and up the driveway framed by the Russian olive trees that the dreamer who built the dude ranch had planted all those years before. I remember seeing Aunt Cat down by the ditch, doing something with a roll of chicken wire. Perhaps it was my imagination, but I remember thinking that she didn’t look all that surprised to see me there, like she had a pretty good idea of why I’d come. I don’t think I’d even said one intelligible word before she was setting down the chicken wire, not minding that it caught and tore her sleeve, saying, “Don’t you think it’s your fault now, Ricky, don’t you think like that,” as if the thought had even crossed my mind. I remember I was swearing and crying like a kid and saying some terrible things. Aunt Cat came up and put her hands on my shoulders, like men do when they’ve got something to explain, and I remember thinking how gray her hair had gotten, how that grim grip to her jaw had relaxed a little in the year I’d been away.
The librarian poked her head in to check on me, and I turned the wheel of the microfilm machine, letting the news of the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth of ao?t 1954 go by, remembering that day down by the ditch with Aunt Cat and the chicken wire, me eighteen or nineteen years old with all the righteousness of the world behind me, demanding to know why Aunt Cat had never told me the details of my mother’s death. And Aunt Cat saying well, she’d decided back then that it was for the best, and so on. Even at the time I remember thinking that she was probably right.
In fact, for the past forty years I’ve told myself I shouldn’t be too hard on Aunt Cat for keeping my mother’s injury a secret. I never thought too much about the details of that afternoon or why, as Aunt Cat held me by the shoulders, she took a deep breath, as if what she was going to say was long and saying it would take some doing. But then she hesitated for a moment. She looked at me, she let the breath out slowly.
“You just don’t tell that sort of thing to a child,” she’d said, and turned back to the chicken wire. And in all the years since, it’s only now that it occurs to me to wonder what it was my Aunt Cat might have been about to say.
{MAGDALENA}
Swindon, May
Magdalena left the apricot tree and walked around to the front of the church, where the nun who had given her the jam was digging a hole in a flowerbed for the bird.
“Good-bye,” Magdalena said to her.
“Good luck,” said the nun.
She stopped at the drugstore on the way home, and kept her glasses on, reading all the words off the face and hands of the woman at the cash register. She learned that the woman had allowed her baby sister to drown in the bathtub, that she believed in God, kept her mother’s garden, and would die of something called lymphoma. Magdalena had to stare hard to read the path the lymphoma would take through the woman’s organs as it spread, which was written small across her jaw. It made the woman nervous, and she kept running her tongue along her teeth, like she was afraid food might have gotten caught there.