Valentine(58)

Jesse’s voice is small. Okay, but don’t come in here. I don’t want no company right now.

The mouth of the drainpipe is about six inches wider than Debra Ann is tall. She steps just inside the concrete lip and slides down the curved side to sit with her back against the wall. It is early August and the day is tired and still. Even in the shade, the air burns her face and neck and shoulders.

There was this old rancher’s wife who lived down by the Pecos River, she tells him, back when they still ran sheep in this part of Texas. She was a beautiful woman with hair so thick and red that when she stood in the sunlight, she sometimes looked as if she were on fire.

But she was unlucky. A blizzard came up suddenly while her children were out riding fence with their daddy, and they all froze to death. The searchers found the children in a dry wash, huddled together with their horses. Her husband was just a few feet away with his head resting against the barbed-wire fence the woman had helped him build just a few weeks earlier.

For three years, nobody saw her. She didn’t come into town, not even for coffee or cornmeal. The stationmaster kept her mail in an old wooden crate behind the counter at the depot, and although a few men sometimes talked about going out to check on her, nobody wanted to interfere with her grief. And besides, it had been a bad couple of years. They all had their hands full with the Big Die-Up and the ban on Texas cattle and anyway, they figured, she was probably dead.

Finally, somebody got the idea to draw straws and send the loser out there to cut her body down or pull the buzzards off her bones, but when the sixteen-year-old boy who drew the short straw arrived at the woman’s homestead, he found her very much alive and working in her garden. She was bony and sunburned, and her hands were covered with scars and sunspots. Her eyebrows and eyelashes were so sun-bleached they were practically white.

But what a garden she had! The boy had never seen anything like it. They hadn’t seen a good rain in three years, but the woman had plants growing out there that nobody had seen since they left Ohio or Louisiana—peach trees and ropy cantaloupe vines, corn plants and tomatoes. There was honeysuckle below her kitchen window, and one corner of her garden had been planted with wildflowers. Hummingbirds drifted from blossom to blossom. The boy stared and stared, trying to figure it out, and after a while he noticed a deep trench running between her garden and the Pecos River. All by herself, the woman had changed the course of the river!

She sent him back to town with two baskets, one filled with melons, the other with cucumbers, and anyone who happened to be standing around the depot when the boy returned shared in a spontaneous and joyful feast. One man got out his buck knife and sliced up all the cucumbers. Another fetched his machete and split the cantaloupes in half, then quarters. The men scooped out the tender orange flesh with their bare hands and ate and ate until their chins were sticky, and their shirts were soaked through with juice. They feasted. And for a while everybody admired the woman for her green thumb and her fortitude. How was it possible to have such a garden out there in the desert?

One night, while the men were sitting around the depot drinking somebody’s homemade whiskey and enjoying a basket full of peaches the woman had sent into town, one of them joked that maybe she was a witch. Maybe she had cast a spell and changed the direction of the Pecos River. Or maybe she dug a trench, one old man called from his table in the corner, but he was a known liar and lunatic, and nobody listened to him.

Months passed, and each time a man rode out to check on her, the woman sent a basket of fruit and vegetables back to town with him.

And then, predictably, there was an influenza outbreak.

Predictably? asks Jesse. His voice is hoarse and low, nearly a whisper.

Yes, Debra Ann says. That is the exact word my mama always used.

Predictably, Ginny would say, and she meant that every tall tale has to have some kind of calamity.

And because the men couldn’t believe it was just bad luck, or their own stupidity, they started looking for someone to blame. How could a woman grow such a marvelous garden all by herself? How could she change the course of a river? How could she bear to go on living without her husband and her children? Any self-respecting woman would have killed herself, one man said, or at least gone back to the Midwest.

When several babies and young children fell ill and died, the woman’s fate was sealed. If she was bringing death to their offspring, five of the town’s men decided, they wanted to see it for themselves.

They’d started drinking before sunset and they were about half stupid.

They left the depot after midnight, and bad luck struck almost immediately. One man was so drunk he fell off his horse, struck his head on a rock, and choked to death on his own vomit. One wanted to take a detour and show the other men the strange pockets of gas between rocks where you could toss a lit match and watch the flames dance across the stones, but more gas than he expected had gathered in the crevices of the rocks and he was consumed with fire.

This left three men riding out to see that poor woman and ask her if she was a witch. When a sudden thunderstorm came barreling across the land, as if summoned out of nowhere, one man and his horse were struck by lightning. When one of the two remaining men tried to save him—not one of them was smart enough to understand electricity—he too died.

And so, after all that, only one drunk, scared, and angry man made it to the woman’s door.

And do you know what happened? D. A. pauses.