Moving Serafina

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23 C H A P T E R 3 Clay drove south from Solitario for two miles and then turned off the blacktop onto the two-track dirt road, twisting the sixteen miles southwest to his old ranch house. He settled into thought as he listened to the rocks ping against the inside of the fenders. Jovita had been kind about the spare apartment just opposite hers on the second floor of the hotel. It had remained idle for years because, like himself, he knew Jovita guarded her privacy and would not allow just any drifter to occupy it. Yet, she had insisted that Clay and Adelita move their Spartan furnishings into it and to use it toward the end of Adelita’s ordeal. And so they did. And it had been Jovita who comforted Adelita as only another woman could after that final session in Doctor Boone Maddox’s office across the street from the hotel on his weekly visit to Solitario. “It’s going to be fine,” Jovita said to Clay as the two sat alone in the hotel restaurant after the meeting. She had helped Adelita upstairs where she lay in the dim apartment, waiting, refusing to come down even to eat. “There’s always hope, Clay.” “Boone said they’d done about all they could in El Paso with the chemo.” Clay studied his hands on the table, slowly rubbing the palms together. “Said Bob Cherry 24 he wouldn’t put her through any more of that pain, even if it was his own wife.” Clay paused and scowled down at his wrinkled hands as if–like himself–they had become totally useless. “They took both breasts . . .” He began and then looked up into Jovita’s eyes. “Over there in El Paso.” “I know. But they’re doing a lot more things now, Clay. Maybe they don’t know everything. Boone doesn’t know everything,” Jovita said but she looked at Clay for reassurance. “Different things. I’ve read about them.” “Well, I dunno. Maybe something, Jo,” he said but there was no conviction in his voice either, and in less than a month, Adelita weakened and was gone without once more having ridden in Clay’s old pickup truck out to visit Serafina’s gravesite, even though Clay had begged her to try. On that final day, Clay sat on the bedside, exchanging whispered words with Adelita, her painkillers from Boone Maddox adding a dreamlike haze to their dialogue, flowing unpunctuated for hours, each tiptoeing around the inevitable until late in the afternoon the subject changed from the mundane reminiscences about their years of marriage to the grim matter at hand. Clay continued whispering in the same uninterrupted monotone as he said . . . and you’ll be with her . . . I mean after . . . and then as if Adelita had anticipated that this would come up, she interrupted Clay . . . like we talked about, Clay, please . . . and for the only time that day, and then only for a brief moment, Clay paused and then he said . . . Yes . . . and she said . . . here, Clayton, in the cemetery, under that cottonwood, please . . . and he said . . . okay . . . and she said . . . with Sera, Clayton . . . you promise? Please MOVING SERAFINA 25 . . . and then he promised again though he had already told her this . . . Don’t you worry none about that . . . and she said . . . with my baby, okay . . . and then Adelita stopped breathing before she could hear Clay again say . . . okay . . . and before either had gathered the courage–or perhaps the terrible anger–to insert even as a kind of benign and final catharsis into their dialogue a single word about the blackest subject that had infused and stained their relationship for all those years: the circumstances of Serafina’s death itself. So Clay put her in the cemetery at Solitario under that lone cottonwood tree. Jovita and Bea Hernandez came, of course, as did Locket Wagner, the deputy sheriff stationed in Solitario, and Doc Boone Maddox. All three of the county commissioners came: Dobb Campbell in from his ranch and Yebbie Riggs in from his, and old Henry Bennett, the chairman of the county commissioners who lived alone just above the meeting hall in Solitario. Clay’s best friend, Augústin “Gus” Muñoz and his younger brother, Alvaro, drove over from Los Arbolitos, their ranch just north of the village of Redford. A few other ranchers from the area showed up, longtime...