he would bundle everything up and take it to the Salvation Army in El Paso.
Others would be wearing Agnes’s wardrobe by next week, in Juárez and Carlsbad and even Galveston. They would never have heard of Agnes Montoya, a ranching wife who’d poured every energy of her youth into homesteading a few hundred acres of wickedly thorny land up by Dripping Spring on this side of the San Andres. Some woman visiting her sister down in El Paso would score Agnes’s favorite dress at the thrift shop, a dark-blue polka-dotted rayon number with a scalloped hem. She’d drive back to Truth or Consequences feeling extravagant as the wind ruffled its sleeves. Others would carry away her stuff, too, unaware that in the early forties their original owner had helped build a house, dig its cistern, erect the windmill, herd cattle, and break wild cayuses at her husband’s side. None who wore Agnes’s jewelry, slacks, coats would ever know how deep had been her grief that she and Delfino never had children. Nor how devastated she’d felt when, in 1944, the army evicted them from their ranch, promising that they could return once the war was over. And how angry over the passing years this wife and her husband had grown, after the government tested its plutonium device just beyond the mountain, on McDonald’s spread, and then other gadgets, rockets, bombers, no one knew altogether just what, on their own usurped land. A girl who wore her shawl to a Halloween party up in Galisteo would never be able to imagine how Agnes and Delfino had lived out their marginal lives in exile. Nor would the welfare woman who fancied the pair of red lizard-skin shoes, which she would pass on to her daughter years later, ever know how much Agnes used to love those chukkas, as she called them, which she always wore with such pleasure on birthdays in their little nothing house in Tularosa.
Sure, she and Delfino wrote dozens of letters, to presidents and senators, representatives, secretaries and undersecretaries of the Department of Defense, a variety of officials in the army and the air force, and White Sands Proving Grounds folks, who were often sympathetic and always unhelpful. They penned articles for the Lincoln County News, sent letters to editors of distant newspapers. They organized meetings, coffees, discussion groups, even drear socials with the other 150 or so families similarly evicted. They waited. Received their disgraceful if not illegal settlement back in ‘seventy-five, along with the others—a sum that failed by many millions to compensate for total ranch values. Ground out more petitions and got back polite letters of nonresponse. Endured the repeated defeat of congressional proposals to establish a commission charged with evaluating claims submitted by those “displaced from their land and livelihood.” Saw the lives of others caught in the same plight vanish.
And Agnes, whose clothes would be floated to the seven winds, had watched Delfino’s life and her own fade as surely as things left too long in the sun.
—He said he needed to go be alone, Marcos told his father and mother when he returned to the dining room.
—Should we check on him? Sarah asked Carl.
—No, I know my brother. Best leave him to his grief. We’ll look in on him tomorrow before we drive back home.
Some days after Agnes was laid to rest—days after Sarah, Carl, and Marcos dropped by with a box of doughnuts before heading back to Nambé, days after his trip down to El Paso, and days subsequent to the departure of everybody who’d turned up for her funeral—Delfino sat himself down to write another letter. Agnes, he believed, would have approved. Giving up had not been in her glossary. He had never yet spent one red penny of the settlement check they’d awarded him. That word awarded had stuck in his craw when one of their public-relations people had called to let them know that the check was being sent via certified mail. The money sat like so much rotten
Others would be wearing Agnes’s wardrobe by next week, in Juárez and Carlsbad and even Galveston. They would never have heard of Agnes Montoya, a ranching wife who’d poured every energy of her youth into homesteading a few hundred acres of wickedly thorny land up by Dripping Spring on this side of the San Andres. Some woman visiting her sister down in El Paso would score Agnes’s favorite dress at the thrift shop, a dark-blue polka-dotted rayon number with a scalloped hem. She’d drive back to Truth or Consequences feeling extravagant as the wind ruffled its sleeves. Others would carry away her stuff, too, unaware that in the early forties their original owner had helped build a house, dig its cistern, erect the windmill, herd cattle, and break wild cayuses at her husband’s side. None who wore Agnes’s jewelry, slacks, coats would ever know how deep had been her grief that she and Delfino never had children. Nor how devastated she’d felt when, in 1944, the army evicted them from their ranch, promising that they could return once the war was over. And how angry over the passing years this wife and her husband had grown, after the government tested its plutonium device just beyond the mountain, on McDonald’s spread, and then other gadgets, rockets, bombers, no one knew altogether just what, on their own usurped land. A girl who wore her shawl to a Halloween party up in Galisteo would never be able to imagine how Agnes and Delfino had lived out their marginal lives in exile. Nor would the welfare woman who fancied the pair of red lizard-skin shoes, which she would pass on to her daughter years later, ever know how much Agnes used to love those chukkas, as she called them, which she always wore with such pleasure on birthdays in their little nothing house in Tularosa.
Sure, she and Delfino wrote dozens of letters, to presidents and senators, representatives, secretaries and undersecretaries of the Department of Defense, a variety of officials in the army and the air force, and White Sands Proving Grounds folks, who were often sympathetic and always unhelpful. They penned articles for the Lincoln County News, sent letters to editors of distant newspapers. They organized meetings, coffees, discussion groups, even drear socials with the other 150 or so families similarly evicted. They waited. Received their disgraceful if not illegal settlement back in ‘seventy-five, along with the others—a sum that failed by many millions to compensate for total ranch values. Ground out more petitions and got back polite letters of nonresponse. Endured the repeated defeat of congressional proposals to establish a commission charged with evaluating claims submitted by those “displaced from their land and livelihood.” Saw the lives of others caught in the same plight vanish.
And Agnes, whose clothes would be floated to the seven winds, had watched Delfino’s life and her own fade as surely as things left too long in the sun.
—He said he needed to go be alone, Marcos told his father and mother when he returned to the dining room.
—Should we check on him? Sarah asked Carl.
—No, I know my brother. Best leave him to his grief. We’ll look in on him tomorrow before we drive back home.
Some days after Agnes was laid to rest—days after Sarah, Carl, and Marcos dropped by with a box of doughnuts before heading back to Nambé, days after his trip down to El Paso, and days subsequent to the departure of everybody who’d turned up for her funeral—Delfino sat himself down to write another letter. Agnes, he believed, would have approved. Giving up had not been in her glossary. He had never yet spent one red penny of the settlement check they’d awarded him. That word awarded had stuck in his craw when one of their public-relations people had called to let them know that the check was being sent via certified mail. The money sat like so much rotten
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