"Hope involves giving a great deal of yourself away," he tells her.
"That's a pitiful excuse."
"Oh, it's pitiful all right, but there you have it. It's hard to give much away when you're the subject of widespread disapproval and your heart is leaking from puncture wounds."
"That's true. We got punctured pretty bad. But we still gave the world a lot, Pop. We gave it Hallie."
"We did. We surely did."
She begins shoveling dirt back into the grave. He thinks about the fact that all these particles of dirt have now been rearranged. No fixed strata. Alice was the gardener. When she has finished she moves to his side and he takes her elbow. They stand side by side in their small garden of sand and buried children. The bones in his wife's arm are as thin as whistles. "Do you have any idea how much I love you?" he asks her.
She stares at him, then squeezes his hand. "Hallie was a protagonist of history," she says.
"She wanted to save the world."
"No, Pop, that's not true. She wanted to save herself. Just like we all do."
He looks at the tall, living daughter his wife has suddenly become. He is no longer angry about these changes. "Save herself from what?"
"From despair. From the feeling of being useless. I've about decided that's the main thing that separates happy people from the other people: the feeling that you're a practical item, with a use, like a sweater or a socket wrench."
He asks, "Are we the other people?" He is curious.
"You're not useless. You gave yourself to this town for forty years. Scarred soul or not."
"Yes. But I gave for the wrong reasons. As you have pointed out."
She laughs. "I did, didn't I? Damn!" She pulls at the end of a silver artichoke leaf. "I was scared to death I was going to grow up to be just like you." She looks at him, and laughs again. She says: "God, I could never be just like you."
They are standing in the garden, in a dwarf forest of artichokes. She has just dug a hole and buried God knows what and now has made a confession of either contempt or admiration. He waits to see what will happen next.
"Maybe the reason you gave yourself to this town doesn't matter that much. Maybe what matters is just that you did it. Maybe that makes you a good man. You know what Loyd told me one time?"
"No."
"He thinks people's dreams are made out of what they do all day. The same way a dog that runs after rabbits will dream of rabbits. It's what you do that makes your soul, not the other way around."
It's what you do that makes your soul. Standing opposite him, staring down into the grave, he sees two sad little girls in cowboy hats. Is this what he has done? "I don't think you should be here," he says to them.
The elder daughter looks up, her pale eyes steady. "But we are here, Papa."
"Yes, you are."
"Why don't you want us?"
"Oh, God, I do." He kneels down and takes them both in his arms and pulls them against his chest. He understands for the first time in his life that love weighs nothing. Oh God, his girls are as light as birds.
Chapter 28
COSIMA
28 Day of All Souls
Gracela Canyon, if you strip it down to the enduring things, is a great, granite bowl of air. It's a wonderful echo chamber. Voices of women and children in the cemetery reached Viola and me from all the way across the canyon, rising on invisible air currents with the ravens and the spirits of all those old bones being tended by their children. It was getting on toward late afternoon, and we walked slowly. Viola had spent the morning supervising family operations, and said she was tired. But she'd promised that any day I asked her she would take me to the place where we watched my mother go. I chose that particular day in 1989, the end of a decade, the Day of All Souls, when we were all up decorating the graves. I don't know why.
I'd finished sweeping off my father and the other Nolinas and had decked them out with little bunches of marigolds at their heads and feet. It was something like tucking children into bed. I was their historian and their guardian angel. I never found Ursolina, the little bear. I imagine she's somewhere closer to the mine, where the earth has been