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"He thinks people’s drea that runs after rabbits will dream of rabbits It’s what you do that makes your soul, not the other way around"

It’s what you do thatdown into the grave, he sees two sad little girls in cowboy hats Is this what he has done? "I don’t think you should be here," he says to thehter looks up, her pale eyes steady "But we are here, Papa"

"Yes, you are"

"Why don’t you want us?"

"Oh, God, I do" He kneels down and takes theainst his chest He understands for the first tiirls are as light as birds

Chapter 28

COSIMA

28 Day of All Souls

Gracela Canyon, if you strip it down to the enduring things, is a great, granite bowl of air It’s a wonderful echo chamber Voices of women and children in the cemetery reached Viola andon invisible air currents with the ravens and the spirits of all those old bones being tended by their children It was getting on toward late afternoon, and alked slowly Viola had spent thefamily operations, and said she was tired But she’d promised that any day I asked her she would take o I chose that particular day in 1989, the end of a decade, the Day of All Souls, ere all up decorating the graves I don’t knohy

I’d finished sweeping off my father and the other Nolinas and had decked theolds at their heads and feet It was so children into bed I was their historian and their guardian angel I never found Ursolina, the little bear I iine she’s somewhere closer to the mine, where the earth has been shifted too many times to bear witness to what it has buried in it The rest of the family, for all the tiether surprisingly well

I knelt allout a border of creek rocks around Doc Hoone more than two years, but it took me awhile to decide on this Emelina’s boys had hauled the rocks up there for me When we took them out of the water and piled the to the same whitish color of dust, and I was afraid after all that work they would be the wrong thing, but they were fine Uniform and shipshape, washed smooth by the abrasion of natural forces I laid theether and working them back and forth a little to find a natural fit As I worked I thought of the masonry walls of Kinishba, with the bones of children inside

When I stood back finally and dusted ainstso fine as Kinishba, but had marked out a clear boundary, anyway He would like it I’d brought some order to his cosmos finally

I squinted into the sun Across the tops of about a hundred gravestones andon a little rise, her gray hair wandering from its knot She pressed one hand to the small of her back while Mason and Nicholas danced in front of her with their hands full of candy, begging for so her out Nicholas was three and a half; John Tucker was talking about quitting school to be a hoghead for Southern Pacific I thought: "I can’t wait forever" So I went and asked her right then and she said fine, after lunch ould go "I’ar skull of a calavera between her ure out which end of the flowers to put in water without me"

We took the quickest road down into town, then cut across the hill behind the high school and through the splendid canopies hung with fruit that the Stitch and Bitch Club had won back fro From there we headed up the Old Pony Road toward the abandonedbasins and I’d noticed that sprigs of rabbitbrush were starting to grow up there

The road was steep No route out of Grace was an easy climb Twice I had to ask Viola to lethard, a little embarrassed by my infirmity but also a little pleased by the external proof of as still nant

"I feel like I don’t have any energy I come home from school and sleep till Loyd wakes o back to bed" This new relationship with sleep was a et-up-and-do-it goes to the baby Right froonna be the boss"