Old Miss Gracing by Edward Drobinski - HTML preview
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Chapter 20
Bonnie continued on; “We can rent a car. I’ll take the things I need every day and I’ll send for the rest.”
Zeke suddenly realized that all memorable moments come as a surprise and just said; “Okay.” She put her necessary stuff in a carrying bag. At the last moment she eyed her sword dancer statue and decided that it was something she didn’t want to have handled by anyone else. It had too many memories and she found a comfortable seat for it mixed in with her soft clothes. She took one long last look at the place, remembering Simon and her many young friends and they walked to the auto rental place.
They started the four day trip with the longer version of her New Mexico story, started an hour prior. She was excited and told him of the home she used to know. It wasn’t very developed in the 1920’s and she always saw it as a good hideout.
She spoke of Hector and the funny things that he did. He was always trying his best to please her and make sure that she was happy. She’d have to tell him to “Stop it already. I’m fine.
You’re making me nervous.”
They reached Pennsylvania that night and quit driving when Zeke became tired and hungry. When they saw a motel, they first stopped at a nearby fast food place and then checked in. The functional sparse room had a television and she turned it on,
saying; “Let’s see if it’s any better over here.” They got a late night talk show, wherein the host and the celebrity guests made the laugh machine work regularly. When they finished eating they fell asleep in their clothes.
During the superhighway drive they saw the same man made things every day; three lanes in each direction, a divider, storage buildings and truck stops. The natural topography varied and displayed trees, fields, hills, valleys or water.
She asked him his impressions of the New Mexico he lived in half a decade after her. He hesitated answering as he had been in this conversation before and knew a short answer would be misleading and the full story would take a book. He said; “It’s completely different from New Jersey; the people, the weather, the land and customs. One or the other is Superman’s world of Bizarro and I don’t know which one. We went there because it’s cheap and we like the sun and heat. It’s been built up some, of course. I wouldn’t consider most parts of Albuquerque a place to hide anymore. Some natural places people used to walk have been bulldozed, “improving” the resulting flattened land with the same type of houses that grow anywhere in the union.”
“You don’t like it much, do you?”
“No, I do. It’s hard to describe my feelings properly.
Morrigan and I have a three room adobe casita. Right next to us is an eight room manor house. I like the mix of everything.
Our area is still pretty rural, with horses, pigs, chickens and goats. The best part, though, is that when we go out our back gate, it’s a short walk on a ditch path to the river.”
“I’d like that too.”
“Well, you WILL like it. Don’t give me any nonsense about staying at a motel. You’re staying with us.” Not wanting to make it sound like a huge favor he added; “I know Morrigan will need help with the baby.”
She laughed; “The three of us, soon four, will share three rooms?”
“It’s almost four if you count the small kitchen. Why not?”
He asked her more about her life, especially the early part. He tried to be careful not to bring up any sensitive subject, but sometimes managed to anyway. She answered as she saw fit and he understood the occasional non-answers as sensitive territory and never repeated the question. After filling in some details, he said; “I think I’m going to completely forget about commerciality for a while and write a story that should be heard. Yours.”
She said; “I’m flattered. But you have to let me be the editor.”
Zeke laughed and said; “I hoped you’d say that. Maybe this one will come out better.
When they got to Albuquerque, he turned down a single lane dirt road and into a gravel driveway. Morrigan, who was out in front watering plants near the house, had a very noticeable belly and turned to look at the strange car coming.
When he got near her Zeke yelled through the open window;
“Look who I have with me.”
Zeke and Morrigan somehow convinced her to stay. It was tight in the three rooms, plus a small kitchen, but with nobody on a schedule, it wasn’t hard to work out the details and Morrigan desperately needed a “woman’s viewpoint” at this time of her life. When they got alone in the bedroom, Zeke told Morrigan of Bonnie’s story and that she wasn’t born Miss Gracing. Surprisingly to Zeke, Morrigan didn’t act all that astonished. Of course, the specifics of the story were things new to her, but Morrigan said; “I always found it strange that so good looking a woman wasn’t married and kept so much to herself. I often wondered if there was some kind of tragedy.
I’ll like having her here. Does she smoke pot?”
Zeke never had the thought previously, paused and looked up at the beamed ceiling, finally saying; “The subject never came up. She grew up during the Roaring Twenties, when people were experimenting with a lot of things. I think you were able to buy it in drug stores then; as well as morphine and cocaine.”
Morrigan clucked her lips, shook her head and sarcastically said; “Ah, the wonders of progress.”
Bonnie’s worldly goods arrived at a storage facility in Albuquerque and the group quickly settled into agreeable patterns with Bonnie taking over the living room and its television set. Morrigan did a lot of reading in the bedroom.
Bonnie regularly went for morning walks at the river, often getting back before the other two woke up. Depending on the weather, she’d often also go in the afternoon and early evening, saying; “You have to keep old bones moving,” but she also liked the solitude. She never told Zeke and Morrigan the latter part, as these types of statements so often get misunderstood. The couple knew anyway. It was only natural.
Zeke commandeered the kitchen to work on his new project which he titled “Bonadea Carson - A Life to Remember.” Bonnie had a habit of editing by objecting to certain parts, insisting on their removal, but not saying what should go in their place.
After many growling and smiling sessions, Zeke completed a book that she said she “liked with reservations.”
The odd surprise was that this book was more interesting to the publishers than anything else Zeke had previously written.
He considered that this may be due to his unwittingly changing his category from fiction to non-fiction, but he also knew that he had a great person to write about. Whatever the reason, he
wound up with an advance against sales, hefty enough to buy his little family a four room adobe casita, with a small kitchen and a heated one room separate structure, with easy access to the river.
While Bonnie liked her present accommodations, the idea of again having her own place made her as happy as she had been only a few times in her life. She made arrangements to have her things delivered from storage on the closing date and anticipated the fond re-kindling of memories attached to the items.
The dreams she encountered sleeping on the couch in front of the television were produced by a new programmer. The old repeats disappeared and were replaced by visions of the near two thousand children she had taught over the years. Sometimes she saw actual events, sometimes imagined ones and sometimes she saw them in their adult lives. Whichever, they all seemed real and possible to her.
Despite her disdain for repeats, her favorite was one that played a number of times, precisely the same way each showing.
She wished she could see it on demand.
It was a warm summer evening, the sun having long ago retired behind the New Mexico Sangre De Cristos. The stars in the clear black sky provided the only ungenerous illumination as the moon must have followed her brother. Castor of Corpusbury walked in the dark wearing a hooded black one piece cloak with a
huge hunting knife glistening at stomach level. The king sized hood concealed all of his head, allowing the vision of his unsmiling, resolute, determined eyes, long pointy nose and thin-lipped mouth only from certain angles. He moved quickly, on invisible feet, to a huge, barren, clay planting pot, climbed in and sank into the dirt.
As the sun rose over the mountain Bonnie and Hector emerged, hand in hand, from their front door. Hector immediately went to a new bag of fertilizer, cut it open with a pen-knife he had in his pants pocket, poured one-quarter of it into the pot and used his hands to spread it around evenly.
Propelled by a warm southern zephyr, fluffy white clouds rolled in covering the entirety of the mountain. A gentle warm rain commenced as the sun effortlessly retained its place and generated heat, radiating high in the sky. Simon came out of the trees and after rubbing against Bonnie’s legs perched the front paws of his furry orange body on the lip of the pot and peered in. A single red rose with abundant green foliage pushed its way out of the dirt and quickly reached a height of ten inches.
As Simon sniffed the fragrance of the beauty, another emerged; then another, then another, then another, each taller than its predecessor. When they were too numerous to count and still coming, Bonnie and Hector put their arms around each other
and kissed, as the engineer pulled the handles announcing the train’s unseen presence somewhere in the distance.
As they were moving in, Morrigan was very, very near giving birth and maybe all the commotion hastened things a bit, but before they were the least bit settled, Morrigan went over to Zeke, grabbed his hand and said; “Take me to the hospital now.”
Bonnie heard the comment and said; “Me, too.” She sat in the back seat trying to comfort Morrigan as Zeke wildly drove through streets he didn’t know, trying to get there as quickly as possible. Zeke managed to unnerve only himself as the two women in the backseat were occupied with more pressing matters.
Morrigan named the little blond crying girl Bonadea Virginia Carmichael, quite a mouthful for anyone, especially one so tiny. Little Bonadea came to know Bonnie as gramma. Old Bonnie liked that a lot and felt good getting an experience she thought she had missed. She spent plenty of enjoyable time with the little girl, teaching her about Art Deco and Art Nouveau design, as well as everything about the river and all the things that live and fly there.
The four also spent a lot of time together, Morrigan and Zeke playing their Beatles, Doors and Blind Faith records for gramma and she returning the favor with Bix Biederbecke and Louis Armstrong. When alone in her colorful cabin, she’d often stare out a window at the purple mountain. She had a view of
the rocky side and would spend hours following the shadows, lines and dark spots, in an attempt at seeing if there was any clear path or series of close paths leading from bottom to top.
The fact that she continued doing this for so long suggests what she found; a lot of interesting possibilities, but nothing clear.