It made her pensive and reminiscent: his youthful rapt gaze. She thought of the first time she had driven out here, with the couriers’ training school. It had been raining; up on Baldy there was a light snow and there was mist around Jemez. She had felt terribly excited. All the other girls told her it was the altitude. Whatever it was, she liked it. And then the bus had come near Española and the valley.... They were almost there now; she watched the boy like a cat, to see what would happen to him when he saw it.
Yes, he got it. She knew it by the way his thin little shoulders jerked and his head leaned back, closer to the window. She could just see the back of his head, but she knew. When she had first seen it, she had cried. Probably the effect of the altitude, but why not? There was nothing like it anywhere else. The valley was absolutely naked; bare rock shaped in lumps on the bare sand, drowning in mists of vague lavender and dark blue and thin brown and yellow, transparent colors. The rock was shaped in pillars and blocks and squat cylinders, cut off flat at the tops. It was all dead and ghostly. Nothing lived here. The few scraggy clumps of juniper were not alive, for they were as ancient and dusty as the rocks, and as motionless.
It was only for a few miles. Beyond, the land lived again, flushed to foliage by the lazy sandy river. Back of all of it were the real mountains, with pine forests and trout streams, but now while Gin and the boy looked at them they were too far off to be green; they were dead dark blue.
“My, that’s gloomy,” said the cheerful lady from Chicago. “Miss Arnold, is that land good for anything? Does the government own it, or what?”
They crossed the wide white bridge to Española and followed the road through a rocky country, bearing down on the ugly round buildings that housed the Government schools. Approaching Santa Clara, the driver honked his horn loudly to warn the pottery-venders. By the time he came to a stop before the church, in the dry yellow plaza surrounded by square adobe huts, the women were filing out to the clear space in the centre, carrying their pottery on their heads and swinging baskets of smaller stuff—modelled animals, black-painted, and bead belts and necklaces. They walked serene and fat, surrounded by children and yellow dogs. They sat down in a neat half-circle before the bus and spread their wares out, impassive or smiling in their cotton shawls and long smocks. Eleven potential customers climbed out of the leather chairs and looked curiously at the big black bowls and the brown faces.
The men of the party were already saying, “That would be fine for Cousin Sally,” and the women were saying, “Now, John, be careful. We’ve just packed the trunk as it is; we can’t buy everything we see,” when Gin slipped away. She hurried around the corner of a house and walked down one of the many back paths, trying to get away before someone asked her to argue with an Indian about the price of the bowls. She stopped at one of the screen doors and peeped in. Her friend was at home, making a bowl in the middle of the whitewashed clay floor.
“Oh, come in, Ginny,” said Rufina, pushing a chair with her feet. “I heard you coming. How are you? I haven’t seen you here for a week. Been sick?”
“No, they sent me to the Canyon all of a sudden, and I just got back yesterday. How’s all the family?” A sticky little girl, pursued by flies, climbed up in her lap.
“Not so good. My mother is still sick, but she is getting better. Did you bring many people today?”
“One full load, that’s all.”