Magdalena Mountain. Robert Michael Pyle
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comes a break in the weather. A hint of a promise of an imputation of the rumor of spring arrives on a warm Chinook wind. Grasses in the foothills show the first fleeting green, and along the streams, cottonwood buds swell toward bursting in balsamic waves of fragrance. Up on the mountain, a thaw too soon might start the growing season perilously early, and an unusually late blizzard could jeopardize the early birds.
But it isn’t only temperature rising, or a warm wind. Too well honed by evolution to the irregular weather of the Rockies to be fooled, Erebia waits for the right combination of warmth and length of day before stirring. The alpine grasses he’ll need are tuned to the same two signals. Both the intensity and the duration of the sun must agree before the key is turned.
Such conditions befall the face of Magdalena Mountain one day in late April. The sun strikes the easternmost of the mountain’s twin summits twelve and a half hours before it sets behind the western peak. The temperature hits fifty-five Fahrenheit in the sunshine at noon. A pika pokes its gray face up into the sunshine, and a marmot rolls over in its dreams of green grass and glacier lilies.
Green creeps up a grass shoot cell by cell, and with it, a very small caterpillar. The worm turns, and Erebia begins to feed.
8
One day in late February, Mary Glanville looked into a mirror and recognized herself. Slender, tall, auburn-haired with a curl; high-cheeked, strong-nosed Mary, pretty in spite of recent extremis and winter’s smoky pallor, yet as dull of eye and skin as olives left too long in a party dish. And there was a look to her mouth she didn’t know at all. Her long, strong lips were forced back and down, their corners deep in her cheeks, making shadows beneath and creases to the side a little like a smile, but nothing like it really, for what it said was only this: rue. And though stretched at the corners, her lips pursed a little in the middle, pronouncing a sleek V below her well-formed philtrum. All these features were exaggerated by the cheap lipstick the home’s beautician had applied after she washed Mary’s curls. Rue, she thought. That’s me.
So Mary hibernated, only eating, only sleeping, only expelling, seldom washing, and growing duller, running down, breathing roughly in the cigarette stench. In a more lucid moment she thought, Only a few months, and already resignation creeps over me. Soon I’ll be like these others—I will steal clothes, grow filthy and scabby, leer at visitors, soil myself, turn crazy. And one day, far too far away from God knows where, I shall die.
After a sad parody of a Christmas party, someone mentioned that the days would be getting longer. “Why?” asked a resident.
“Well, honey, no season lasts forever,” said the nurse. “The sun comes up and goes down, and the days go with it. Then, poof! One day it’s spring, and the flowers bloom. You’ll see.”
“Season,” Mary heard. Read the seasons, she thought. And then more thoughts. To read: the verb danced around and taunted her until she tried, but the first book she attempted seemed as belligerent and unwilling to make sense as half the people around her. She threw it down with disgust. The next time she tried, she picked up a battered black book of Bible stories. They made no more sense than the first one. But as she closed it in frustration, a title caught her eye and struck her through like a nurse’s needle, but pricking that felt good. She couldn’t read—why? It was maddening. She kept trying day after day, looking at pictures, fingering the pages, mouthing the syllables. After a month, Mary felt that she had the gist of the story. Excited, she tried to repeat it to a nurse, but her agitation only earned her an extra dose of meds.
Three days later, when again she was able to read, the book was gone from the little library. And this caused Mary to speak her first full sentence in six months: “Where . . . is . . . that . . . book?”
“Which book, dear?” asked a new aide who didn’t know her.
“Bible stories . . . black.” Mary struggled, but got it out.
“Hey, Agnes, Mary’s talking!” shouted Nurse Dumfries, the administrator, who was passing through the floor when she heard the unfamiliar voice. Agnes and two other workers scooted over to hear for themselves.
“Mary, you’re speaking—wonderful!” said Agnes, the nurse who had replaced Iris.
Mary grew more and more exercised. “WHERE IS IT?”
“She’s missing some book of Bible stories,” the aide explained.
“Oh, Mary, honey, that book isn’t good for you. It got you overexcited, so we had to give you a shot. We discarded it. There are lots of other books.”
Again Mary wanted to howl, but she didn’t. It didn’t matter. She knew the story by now, and although the book hadn’t gotten all the details right, it had reminded her. And she knew something else. There would be no keeping her here now. Something had to happen, and if it didn’t, she would kill herself, and that would bring it all around again, with a different outcome. She wandered off, oblivious to the nurses’ pleas to “Talk more, Mary! Say something else!”
“Well, it’s something. First time!” Agnes exclaimed.
“Yes,” said Nurse Dumfries. “But I wish the mission would stop slipping those religious books and tracts in here. They make them crazier than they already are. Do you have any idea how many Jesus Christs we’ve got in here this week?”
“No, but Cyrus told me this morning that as the Messiah, he could damn well have French toast whenever he wanted,” Agnes admitted. “And real maple syrup.”
Mary spoke no more, but she thought. She remembered a time before the accident they said she’d had, even vaguely recalled where she was going at the time of the wreck, but not the ground squirrel that had loped beneath her wheel, nor the plummet itself. And, more important, she remembered before—a very long time before. Yes, one way or the other, things would change. They had to, now; they couldn’t keep her there. As she lay and played herself to sleep, she took a little pleasure instead of mere relief from her sex. And why not? Spring was coming, as the nurse said. And with it, a real release, she felt sure, from the stinking, the sad, the unthinkable situation she’d endured for all these months.
It had to come. If not soon, by some agency, she would fashion her own escape. For to live on here among the lost, having found herself, would be intolerable. All right for some. A few adaptable and clever residents even managed to make some sort of satisfied accommodation. They ignored the worst of it, sleeping there but living lives largely outside the home thanks to shoe leather and the Denver Tramway Company pass. But that was not for Mary. There was nothing on the streets of Denver for her. As she became more and more sentient, she grew less and less capable of shutting out the despair around her. Her only conceivable solutions were departure, denial, or death; and denial was not going to work. Mary wrapped her pupal sheets around herself and slept the most peaceful sleep in what seemed like hundreds of years.
Then one day in March, the snow melted gray and ran brown down the gutters, and Denver entered its ugliest time. But a Chinook wind warmed that day, and a green thing precociously poked up into the vacant lot behind the center—a tumbleweed shoot. Mary saw it and recognized, with the sharpest sense since that first wail, a remnant of something that felt a little bit like hope.
9
“Spring!” announced Mead, alarming Francie Chan, his lab partner. That morning he’d seen something that looked like a swelling bud. He brought it into the lab, placed it in a beaker of water on his desk, and already it had unfurled into a small leaf smelling of balsam. “Spring,” he said again more softly, carried back for the moment to a cottonwood-lined acequia outside Albuquerque. The word sounded almost foreign.
That igneous autumn in New Haven had passed quickly; then came in its place a kind of cold Mead had never known in New Mexico. Riding on particles of dampness, it penetrated his clothing and joints like frost fingers in a sidewalk. He was used to an arid chill, not this gelid breath between the ribs. Shifting between overheated buildings, the dank outside air, and his “all-season beach cottage” that wasn’t really winterized for anyone