Chapter 6: Nine Springs

Nine Springs

In 1979 I had a store on Central Avenue in Albuquerque, in the old part of town, where a man could still make a living off what other people were finished with — furniture, china, tools, whatever came in the door on a truck. Counter, telephone, cash box, and my name on the glass in gold paint that cracked the first winter. I opened when I felt like opening. Most days I was in there anyway, because there was nowhere else I wanted to be.

Once a month I walked up to the bank and bought a money order and mailed it to Ray Delgado’s mother. Forty dollars. Ray was in my platoon and he is not in anything now. His mother lives in a valley I have never seen and we have never met. I have sent her forty dollars every month since I got back. Once or twice a year she writes me a page, mostly about her yard. The first year I put a letter in with the money. There was nothing I knew how to write down that did not make it worse for both of us, so I quit.

In the drawer with her pages there is a cigar box, and in the cigar box is a shard of tile about the size of a playing card, white with blue on it, one corner of somebody’s old pattern. It came out of a creek, and the creek came out of Nine Springs. It is the closest thing to proof of anything I own.

My grandfather gave me one rule about ground, and he gave it the way he gave everything, like reading off a bill that had been paid a long time ago.

First you learn the lines in the ground. Then you learn what is under it.

He said most men did it backward and then stood around wondering why they were digging in the wrong place. He had three stories on the subject, and he told them about once a year whether anybody asked or not.

The first was the mother lode. Every man who ever went out to California went out to find the one seam that all the gold in that country came from. My grandfather said there had never been such a seam, that the mother lode was a story men told on the way to dig somewhere else, and that a hundred years of digging had not turned it up because there was nothing there to turn. I have looked at maps since. There are about as many mother lodes as there are maps.

The second was the Dutchman’s mine, out in the Superstitions east of Phoenix. A man came down out of those mountains one time with a pouch of high-grade and never could find his way back to the place he cut it out of, and then somebody killed him, and men have been going up in there after it for eighty years and coming down with nothing but a story, and once or twice not coming down at all.

The third was the Spanish. They came up into this country with a priest and a list of seven cities and two hundred years to spend. What they found up here was not that, and it did not matter, because the seven cities stayed on the map and men kept going.

I would like to tell you that rule did me some good. It did not. It only ever meant that when I went in somewhere, I knew what the place was called.

The summer I was seventeen, we were the poorest people in a town that had no use for poor people, and the only reason we ate meat was the Salazars.

Tomás Salazar ran a trap line in the winter and hunted the rest of the year, and there was usually a quarter of an elk hanging in our shed with the hide still on it. He never wrote down what anybody owed him. My mother sent back pies and preserves, and everybody at both houses understood exactly what the pies were for, and it never came close to even, because you cannot pay off a man who will not keep books.

Dolores was my age, with her father’s hands and his way of not talking. The boy, Chuy, was ten and had decided some time back that he belonged to us.

Tank came up the road one afternoon and told me there was a hive in the fork of a cottonwood above the last of the county road, where the creek came out of the rocks, and that it was the size of a barrel.

“It’s the size of a barrel,” he said. “Bigger. I’d say forty pounds of comb.”

“Forty pounds of comb.”

“Honey in our water all summer,” he said. “Rest of it goes up to Salazar’s, and he hangs a deer in your shed.”

“He hangs a deer in our shed anyway.”

“Then he hangs two.”

“You have never traded with a man in your life.”

“I’ve seen him eat a whole pie at the church supper.” He said things like that all day, and about half of them were true, and not one of them had anything to do with whether a thing could be done.

“You going to say no?” he said. “Men are going in the service every month. Which one of the two of us do you figure they want?”

“They’ll take you. You can carry a pack.”

“So they’ll take one of us.” He was already grinning about it. “And the other one is scared of a bee.”

“I’m not scared of a bee. I’m just not getting stung to death by a thousand of them for honey.”

“Two pails,” he said, and that was the whole argument, and we went the next morning.

We took two coats off the surplus truck that came through in the spring, two squares cut off a roll of window screen, and two lengths of the hollow weed that grows along the ditches. We put the coats on in the shade at the bottom, and by the time we had walked the last half mile in them we were wet through. The bees were working that tree the way a town works a mill, one brown column going in and the same one coming out. Tank stood and looked at it a while.

“You said bigger than a barrel,” I said.

“It is bigger than a barrel.”

“So?”

“So get the goddamn fire going.”

I had dry grass and matches. I built the fire downwind and kept a pile of dirt beside me to throw on it, because it had not rained since June and that country is pine duff down to the roots. Tank took a long dead pole. He counted to three out loud. On three he went at the branch the hive hung from. It took him four or five tries, and then the whole thing came off the tree and hit the ground and the tree emptied.

I want to be honest about the size of it. A hive like that has bees in it, and they came out in a column you could see the shape of, and they were not interested in the smoke at first. It got them eventually, and while it did I was throwing dirt on the fire to hold it in, and then the ones that had got up above the smoke figured out where we were, and it sounded like hail on a barn roof — on my hat, on my shoulders, on the screen over my face. Tank was already running. I dropped the grass and went with him.

The creek there was knee-deep over gravel and we went in face-first. I had the weed stem in my mouth and I lay on the bottom with the current pushing at me and both hands over the back of my neck. That water comes out of the high country. It was so cold it took the breath out of me through the stem, and I lay there and shook and counted.

I don’t know how long. Long enough that when I came up, the bees were scattered off the tree, most of them down in the grass and the dirt and the smoke and the rest up in the air and thinning out. The sun was on the rocks, and I lay in the shallows a while and let it have me.

Tank came up out of the water holding one hand in the air and turning it over like it belonged to somebody else. “There’s something in that goddamn creek,” he said.

“Something like what?”

“Something like I’m bleeding.”

I went down with my face in the water where he had been standing. The gravel was packed hard and I went over it with both hands until I felt the edge, and then I pulled it up.

It was a piece of tile, white with blue on it, a pattern of little leaves, one corner off a bigger piece. I stood there with the water running off it and knew it, because there was a shelf in my grandfather’s front room with dishes on it that had come up out of Mexico or Spain or wherever a hundred years back, one piece at a time, and the blue on that shelf and the blue in my hand were the same blue. I never saw that blue anywhere but on that shelf. Those dishes are gone now, one way and another.

Tank told me to throw it back. I put it in my shirt pocket. I could not have told you why then and I cannot tell you now, except that it had come out of a creek where nobody had ever lived.

We cut the comb out of the tree with a butcher knife and filled two lard pails, and the whole way down the draw we smelled like a candle shop.

We carried it up to the Salazars’ that evening. Dolores’s mother took the pails and set them on the shelf in the kitchen and said something over them, and then we sat at the table and watched her work honey into cornbread, and she did it fast, with her sleeves pushed up. There was a row of jars and dishes on the shelf behind her and no two of them matched. Some were cracked and some were whole and all of them were old.

“Where does that all come from?” I said.

Dolores said every woman who married into that valley had some of it. Her mother had two. Her grandmother had four and broke one and cried about it.

“Come from where?”

“Out of the creek.”

I said a dish couldn’t come down a creek without breaking.

“In the ice, in the spring,” she said, as if I had asked her which way water runs downhill. Then she said, “The creek comes out of Nine Springs. Where did you think it came from?”

I took the shard out of my pocket and put it on the table. She looked at it and did not pick it up.

“There’s more of that up there than anybody wants,” she said.

It was dark by then, and Ruthie Tobin’s father came up our road at a run.

Ruthie’s mother had had trouble with her lungs since the thaw, and an old woman at the bottom of the valley used to say there was a root up in the springs that would loosen a chest — her own mother had used it on her. Ruthie had gone up before daylight with a bucket and a mattock. It was nine o’clock at night. He did not ask us to go. He stood in our yard with his hat in his hands and told it.

The men were all down the mountain on the job and would not be back until Saturday.

Dolores Salazar came down the road with the dog and two guns before I had my boots on.

“We go by my father’s rules,” she said. “Don’t walk in the water in the dark. Don’t go past the second spring. Nobody goes anywhere alone, not even to take a leak.”

“That’s three,” Tank said.

“Three.”

Chuy wanted to come and Dolores told him to stay and keep the fire, and he stood in the road and watched us out of sight.

“You got me in the goddamn water for two pails of honey,” Tank said, on the county road. “So don’t think you’re going up there by yourself.” That was true, and there was nothing to say about it.

We went up the county road three miles and then took the old grade, the one the silver company cut in there and then let go of, grown over now so that it was a path again. There were prospect holes in the rock along it and stumps above on the hillside from where they took the timber out. Chestnut was two years old and had never been worked a day in her life. She would pick up a scent and run it a hundred yards and lose it at water and come back and start over from the last place she was sure of. So we went up that canyon a hundred yards at a time, all night, and nobody slept.

Tank talked for the first hour.

“There’s nothing up here,” he said, maybe twice.

“There’s her,” Dolores said.

It got gray in the east and then it got light, and Chestnut came off a stretch of gravel with her nose up and went out ahead of us, and we came out of the timber onto the flat at the mouth of it.

The wall went up in front of us with nine white lines of water coming down it. Nine. I counted them twice. Between the lines the rock was black and wet even in August, and every one of the nine had cut its own channel, and all nine came together in a pool at the bottom and went out through the trees as the creek that ran past our shed.

My grandfather kept a book in the drawer with his chalk line, and I had been through it enough times by then to have some of it in my head, and there was a page in it for ground like that. Nine waters over one wall, a mountain at your back, and the slope between the waters laid open like a fan. The page had a name for it, and the name was Nine Springs.

It said the best use of ground like that was to put a woman in it. It said what happened to a family that put a man there instead, and it said that part twice, which was not like the rest of the book.

It did not tell me where a girl was. It named the place. I have carried the name a long time now, and it has never once been any use to me.

Chestnut worked the flat twice, in and out of the wet rocks under the falls where the spray had soaked the ground, and then she came back to Dolores and sat down in the shallow water and put her nose up at the wall, and that was the end of the trail.

Dolores called her in.

“Three of us and a dog,” Tank said, “and she’s been up this canyon since before daylight yesterday.”

Nobody answered him.

The water came over the rock in the nine places, and behind it the light was coming up, and then Tank said he was hungry, and we stood there in the wet rocks and did not go up.

I’ll admit I’ve got a soft spot for Dolores Salazar. She’s in this chapter for about a minute — two guns, her father’s dog, and three rules rattled off before Elias has his boots on — and she’s the only person in that canyon who knows what she’s doing. Her little brother is told to stay behind and keep the fire, and he does. Nobody thanks her. Nobody has to.

Then there’s the tile. He can’t say why he pocketed it, and I can’t either. If you’ve got a read on it, I’d like to hear it.

If you’d like to read ahead, I post early chapters on my Patreon: https://patreon.com/zuochuang