Читать книгу Church of the Graveyard Saints - C. Joseph Greaves - Страница 10

1

“Hey. Are you asleep?”

Addie blinked her eyes open. They were approaching Kayenta and the cutoff that would take them northbound through the iconic buttes of Monument Valley into the vast and rugged canyonlands of southeastern Utah. The part of the drive, she’d promised Bradley, where things would finally get interesting after nine bleary hours of scrolling blacktop and sere desert scrubland.

Except that the long fingers of dusk were closing around them like a fist.

“We’ll want to take a left at the light.”

“Which light?”

She yawned as she stretched in the passenger seat. “The only light.”

“Are you sure? There’s a map there in the door pocket.”

Addie couldn’t suppress a smile. Raised in Southern California, Bradley’s concept of directions involved a series of freeway numbers followed by a street name. Like taking the 110 to the 10 to the 405 and getting off at Sepulveda. Those incantations still challenged Addie in a way she imagined the Navajo Code Talkers’ rhythmic grunts and mumbles must have befuddled the Imperial Japanese Navy.

“Trust me. Besides, I thought real men didn’t need maps.”

“Naps.” Bradley passed his cell phone over the dashboard like a Ouija plank. “Real men don’t—” He sat upright, squinting over the wheel. “Now there’s something you don’t see every day.”

What Addie saw through the bug-flecked windshield was a horse—a scrawny bay mare with an unkempt mane wearing neither halter nor tack as it ambled through the crossroads, pausing midway to rub its dirty muzzle on a foreleg. It brought them to a stop before clopping over the sidewalk onto the weedy macadam of a shuttered gas station.

This maddening indifference to animal welfare was one of the things that infuriated Addie about the Diné, the Navajo people. She’d had friends in high school that wouldn’t even enter the reservation without first packing a leash and a bagful of dog treats. She herself had once rescued a starving rez bitch and driven it to Cortez where the veterinarian’s x-rays had revealed over a hundred BB pellets embedded under the poor animal’s skin.

In Los Angeles, that CinemaScope womb of Technicolor fantasy, her classmates thought Native Americans great stewards of the land and its resources—noble aboriginals living in simple harmony with earth’s flora and fauna. Addie had long since given up on explaining the more nuanced reality.

Or take the Navajo Generating Station, the largest and dirtiest coal-fired power plant west of the Mississippi, and one of Bradley’s personal bugaboos. While girls she knew from college were tying feathers in their hair and driving to North Dakota to join with the Standing Rock Sioux to protest a pipeline, the Navajo plant was quietly burning twenty-four thousand tons of coal from its nearby Kayenta strip mine each and every day.

Not that Addie blamed the Diné for that one, or the Hopi people for that matter, who shared in the mining royalties. With a majority of their households still lacking electricity or running water, the tribes were in desperate straits when the mine’s promoters showed up in their shiny new pickups promising economic opportunity. It was only after the paperwork had been signed that the tribal elders discovered their lawyer had been on the promoters’ payroll, which explained the paltry 3.3 percent royalty rate they’d contracted to accept. Still they’d come to depend on those royalties—and even more on the jobs that the plant and mine created—for their economic survival.

“Hey.” Bradley brushed at her hair with his fingers. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine. Remembering, that’s all.”

“You’ve been unusually quiet.”

“I’ve been thoughtful. Pensive.”

“Brooding.”

“Not brooding. Contemplative.”

“Wistful.”

“Preoccupied.”

“Melancholy.”

“Let’s settle on abstracted. But only by outward appearances. Inside I’m turning cartwheels.”

They both knew that was a joke.

“We could still turn back.” He glanced at the thermonuclear sunset filling his rearview mirror. “Plus there’s an airport out by the tribal park.”

“Do they have a time machine? You’ll recall that my father’s expecting us.”

“Hence your anxiety.”

“Hence we can’t just turn around.”

“My point is we don’t have to do this. Or at least you don’t.”

“Hah. You think I’m a coward, is that it?”

“I think you’re a force of nature.”

“Right. Like gravity, pulling everything downward.”

“I was thinking more of a tornado, standing everything on its head.”

They’d turned into a Martian landscape; a volcanic wasteland sculpted by eons of pebbling wind whose dust cloud yet darkened the far horizon, shrouding the land of her forebears—land that six generations of Olsens and Deckers had claimed and defended, cleared and plowed, watered and seeded, transforming barren tracts of sage and saltbrush into settlements that had grown into towns and that might someday grow into cities.

Moths flared in the Prius’s headlights. Plastic grocery bags raced ghostlike across the blacktop, swirling and snagging on the roadside wire to flutter there like pennants heralding Adelaide Decker’s return.

For a school genealogy project Addie once had interviewed Jess and Vivian Olsen, her maternal grandparents, about their family’s history. She’d learned how Dag Olsen, her great-great-great-grandfather, had answered the prophet John Taylor’s call for Mormon pioneers to settle the Utah Territory’s southeast quadrant, the contours of which, since beyond the diagonal gash of the Colorado River, were as unknowable in the parlors of Salt Lake as the dark side of the moon. In the company of eleven-score colonists that included his young bride Chastity and their infant son Ethan, Dag had set out from Escalante in the fall of 1879 in a covered wagon drawn by oxen and fueled by a zealot’s certainty in the righteousness of his task.

Expected to last but six weeks, the journey from Fortymile Gulch to Montezuma Creek took over six months instead. Building roadway as it went, the Hole-in-the-Rock Expedition, as it came to be known, chopped and scraped and blasted its way to the west rim of the Colorado only to be confronted with a sheer drop of some two-thousand vertical feet to the muddy waters below.

By then, of course, there was no turning back. And so, in what counts as perhaps the single greatest feat in the history of a nation born of such superhuman efforts, the Hole-in-the-Rock pioneers set about carving a makeshift passage that none but the maddest among them would ever have dared to envision.

They began at a cleft in the rim rock where forty roped men with picks and crowbars chipped and hacked and spalled a slanting trough through an opening they’d blown with dynamite. The job once begun had lasted for fifty days and when it was finished the men had hewn on hands and knees through solid rock and bitter cold a chute through which they hoped their wagon wheels might find purchase against the fatal pull of gravity. Where they could not carve—where the rock bowed or fell away—men were lowered in wooden barrels to chisel holes into which pegs could be set and driftwood laid in cantilever.

The work at last completed, all that remained was to test it. First they sent their livestock down and were pleased when only nine horses plunged to their deaths on the jagged scree below. Next they fitted the first of their wagons into the rut they’d made, its axles roped and its wheels chained, and with teams of twenty men straining at the lines lowered it to safety. In this fashion each of the expedition’s eighty-eight wagons made its way to the narrow mud beach, there to be rafted across the river.

Not a single pioneer was lost. Two, in fact, were born in that cold desert waste under the diamond banner of heaven. And after their struggles on its western rim, the east side of the Colorado seemed as nothing by comparison, taking the expedition only two backbreaking weeks to reach the top.

What lay beyond the river was a kind of fever dream—a dizzying maze of red-rock cliffs and gorges, buttes and mesas slick with snow and studded with twisted cedars. There the expedition traveled another hundred zigzag miles to cover ground a hawk might glide in a leisurely hour. But cover it they did, and in the spring of 1880 arrived at a broad floodplain of the San Juan River warmed by the morning sun and cooled by the evening shadow of a high sandstone mesa. It was there they built their fort, and their homes of log and mud, and christened their little settlement Bluff City.

Reaching their destination was one thing; taming it proved another matter entirely. Ute, Paiute, and Navajo people—some of whom had never laid eyes on a white man—greeted the 225 exhausted newcomers with attitudes ranging from indifference to curiosity to outright hostility. Misunderstandings festered into disputes, and disputes into gunfights. Then the river rose with the summer monsoons, wiping out months of trenching and plowing. Then winter returned with a frigid vengeance.

From those hardscrabble origins the Olsen family began its slow migration eastward to Colorado’s remote and scenic McElmo Canyon where the Red Rocks Ranch, Addie’s point of entry into her family saga, lay nestled in a broad side-canyon of slickrock and sage. It was on the Triple-R that Addie had pedaled her first tricycle, and raced her first pony, and branded her first calf. It was where Jess Olsen, her octogenarian grandfather, still lived in the creek-side cabin his own grandfather had built from hand-hewn logs in the summer of 1921.

Logan Decker, Addie’s father, had never managed to convince her Grandpa Jess or Grandma Vivian to move into the ranch’s main house, two stories of timber and stone that had been their gift to Addie’s mother—Carole’s dowry, in effect—upon her marriage to Logan in 1993. Even after Carole’s death in ’98—before Addie had acquired the language of memory—Grandma Vivian had insisted Logan would need both space and privacy for the new wife that would surely come along to help him raise her only granddaughter.

Except Logan never did remarry, and now Grandma Vivian was dead. Which is how Addie Decker found herself speeding through Mexican Hat as nighttime fell, bound not just for her grandmother’s funeral but also for a reunion with a family whose indomitable will to settle the land around her was matched only by Addie’s iron determination to escape it altogether.

“Besides,” Bradley said, nudging her from her reverie, “it’ll probably be fun. See some old friends. Visit your old haunts.”

“Yup.”

“You’re making much ado about nothing,” he said, reaching for her hand, finding it. Giving it a squeeze. “I mean, what’s the worst that could possibly happen?”