on the near side of the arroyo. He stops to look back upstream and his light finds them, by pure luck, on the opposite bank. Cosima's thin, waving arms shine like the crisscrossing blades of scissors. They are screaming but he only sees their mouths stretched open like the mouths of fledgling birds. Absolute expectation, Papa will save us. The road is washed out, and he has to think how else he will get to them. He realizes, stunned, that they have been huddled there for half a day. The road has been washed out that long.
How does he reach them? A boat? No, that wouldn't have been possible. He sits up again. He has no clear image of reaching them, no memory of their arms on his neck, he only hears them crying over the telephone. And then he understands painfully that he wasn't able to go to them. There is no memory because he wasn't there. He had to call Uda Dell on the other side of the arroyo. Her husband was alive then, and went down the bank on his mule to find them in a washed-open coyote burrow with seven pups the girls wanted to save.
"There were seven," she'd wailed over the telephone. "I could carry four but Hallie could only get one in each hand and we didn't want to leave the other one. He would have gotten drowned." Cosima is sobbing because in the end, after crouching for half a day in the small shelter of that gravel bank, waiting for the mother coyote to come back and save her children, they had to leave them. He hears Hallie shrieking in the background. They're both crying as if they are drowning themselves. Drowning pups.
When he gets them home they sit hugging each other on the davenport, wrapped in the black-and-red crocheted afghan. They won't stop shaking. They want to know if the baby coyotes died. If animals go to heaven. He has no answers. "We tried to put them in the paper bag we used for the prickle pears, but it fell all apart." The tears stream out until the afghan is wet and he thinks there will be no more fluid in them to run the blood cells through their veins. He makes them drink orange juice. God, why does a mortal man have children? It is senseless to love anything this much.
Chapter 4
COSIMA
4 Killing Chickens
Emelina's was a pleasant, ramshackle place with animals, an old plum orchard and five boys. When I walked up the drive with my suitcases they were preparing to kill roosters. Emelina's eyes and mouth drew wide and she looked briefly like a surprised fish. "Codi, this is Sunday, I thought you said tomorrow."
"No, it was today, I'm here," I said apologetically. I was glad I hadn't waited any longer at the courthouse.
"Shoot, you look like a fifty-dollar bill. Where'd you get that haircut, Paris, France?" She gave me a hug and waved her hand at the driveway. "I'm sorry about this mess. We've just got the water boiled for the birds. Shoot."
I'd just witnessed what I'd thought was going to be the slaughter of a peacock, so I laughed, but this time it was real murder and mayhem. The drive was lined with pails, paper bags, and a tragically stained wooden block that had been used before. Emelina's twins, who were about ten, each held a fat white rooster by the feet. A younger brother was riding a tricycle precariously over the rocky ground. I put down my suitcases.
"Curty and Glen, look at you," I said. "And Mason. You guys are getting too big."
"Aunt Codi, look. If you hold them upside down they go to sleep," Glen said.
Curty said, "No, they get hypnotized."
"Well, either way it's a handy trick," I said. "You don't want them to see what's coming."
Emelina looked dismayed. "Codi, we don't have to do this now. What a god-awful thing to do in front of company."
"I'm not company. You're all set up, so do it. You can't go out of your way for me if I'm going to live here."
She rolled her eyes. "Go on back to the granny house then. John Tucker was supposed to sweep it out this morning before he went to his baseball practice but I'll fall over dead if he did it right now, instead of feeding the baby. I'll bet you fifteen dollars he's laying in the house watching the MTV."
John Tucker was Emelina's oldest, but I couldn't picture