meetings about it and decided to have a lawsuit. A lawyer came up from Tucson to meet with Jimmy Soltovedas."
Jimmy was the mayor. The town council had nothing to do with Black Mountain anymore; Grace wasn't a company town in the classical sense, except for the fact that the company owned everything we walked on.
"What did the lawyer say?" In a moment of vanity I wondered if anyone had mentioned my affidavit. My line about "the approximate pH of battery acid" seemed like something a lawyer could gleefully quote.
"The lawyer said we might have grandfather rights to the water, and so we could have a class-action lawsuit to make the company give us back our river."
"How long will that take?"
She shrugged. "Maybe ten years."
"Ten years?"
"Right. In ten years we can all come back and water our dead trees."
"Did anybody go to the newspapers to get some publicity about this? It's ridiculous."
"Jimmy called the newspapers half a dozen times. I talked to Jimmy's wife. Nobody's interested in a dipshit little town like Grace. They could drop an atom bomb down on us here and it wouldn't make no news in the city. Unless it stirred up the weather over there and rained out a ball game or something."
"So it's a ten-year lawsuit." I didn't want to believe she was right, though her sources were always irreproachable. "Is that the only thing those guys can come up with against the Mountain?"
"Don't call that company the Mountain," she said curtly. "It makes it sound like something natural you can't ever move."
"I've heard the men call it that," I said.
Viola snorted like an old horse and started up the hill.
When we arrived, half a dozen elderly men were putting a fresh coat of white paint on the wrought-iron fence around the huge cemetery. Wrought iron was a theme here; there were iron crosses and wreaths, and over some of the graves there were actual little iron houses, with roofs. Through the ups and downs of Black Mountain's smelting plant, Grace had been home to a lot of out-of-work metalworkers.
Most families divided their time between the maternal and paternal lines, spending mornings on one set of graves and afternoons on the other. Emelina and the boys staked out the Domingos plot and set to work sweeping and straightening. One of the graves, a great-uncle of J.T.'s named Vigilancio Domingos, was completely bordered with ancient-looking tequila bottles, buried nose down. Mason and I spent half the morning gathering up the strays and resetting them all in the dirt, as straight as teeth. It was a remarkable aesthetic-I don't mean just Uncle Vigilancio, but the whole. Some graves had shrines with niches peopled by saints; some looked like botanical gardens of paper and silk; others had the initials of loved ones spelled out on the mound in white stones. The unifying principle was that the simplest thing was done with the greatest care. It was a comfort to see this attention lavished on the dead. In these families you would never stop being loved.
The marigold truck arrived at ten o'clock. Women swarmed down on it like bees, coming away with armloads of floral gold. There were many theories on the best way to put them to use, or to make them go farthest. Viola, who directed the Domingos family operations, was of the deconstructionist school. She had the boys tear the flowers up and lay the petals down over a grave, blanketing it like a monochrome mosaic.
John Tucker stayed at his work but the twins wandered and Mason disappeared altogether. Emelina, wasn't worried. "He's refining his begging skills he learned on Halloween," she said, and was probably right. Grandmothers everywhere, who at lunch had set out extra plates for the dead, were now indiscriminately passing out the sweet remains of their picnics.
By mid-afternoon Emelina felt we should send out a search party, "before he eats so many cookies he busts." Viola volunteered, and I went with her, more or less as a tourist. I wanted to see what else there was in the line of beautified graves. We skirted Gonzalez and Castiliano and Jones, each family with its own style. Some were devotees of color or form, while others went for bulk. One grave, a boy who'd died young, was decorated with the better part of a Chevrolet. There were hundreds of holes drilled into the fishtail fenders, to hold flowers. It was beautiful, like a float in a parade.