The Sheep Walker's Daughter Read online

  Title Page

  Sydney Avey

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2017 Sydney Avey

  The Sheep Walker’s Daughter

  [email protected]

  Published 2013, HopeSprings Books

  an imprint of Chalfont House Publishing

  Published 2017, The Center for Basque Studies

  University of Nevada, Reno

  www.basque.unr.edu

  Paperback ISBN: 978-1-93570-984-8

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2017954869

  E-book published 2017 by Torchflame Books

  an Imprint of Light Messages

  www.lightmessages.com

  Durham, NC 27713 USA

  E-book ISBN: 978-1-61153-257-9

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 International Copyright Act, without the prior written permission except in brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Scripture quotations: Matthew 11:28, quoted in Chapter 15, and Hebrews 11:1, quoted in Chapter 25, are from the King James Version, which is in the public domain. 1 Corinthians 13:5, quoted in Chapter 23, is from the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright 1952 [2nd edition, 1971] by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. All characters are fictional, and any similarity to people living or dead is purely coincidental.

  Text and cover design: Daniel Montero

  This book was published with the generous financial support of the Basque government.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Contents

  Dedication

  PART 1

  1 — Dolores, Intruders

  2 — Dolores, Brass Urns

  3 — Valerie, Tangled Webs

  4 — Dolores, The House that Jack Built

  5 — Dolores, Shadows

  6 — Dolores, Letting Go

  7 — Valerie, Bird in the Hand

  8 — Dolores, Catch and Release

  9 — Dolores, Stops and Starts

  10 — Dolores, Half Truth

  11 — Dolores, Whole Truth

  12 — Valerie, Alive and Well

  13 — Valerie, Etxea

  14 — Dolores, Smoke

  15 — Dolores, Mirrors

  16 — Dolores, Fire

  PART 2

  17 — Valerie, Roots

  17 — Valerie, Choices

  19 — Dolores, Rebuilding

  20 — Dolores, The Marriage-Go-Round

  21 — Dolores, Confessions

  22 — Dolores, Gifts

  23 — Dolores, Homecoming

  24 — Valerie, Resolutions

  25 — Dolores, Courage

  26 — Valerie, Ospatu

  27 — Dolores, Green Times

  28 — Dolores, Hezitu

  29 — Dolores, Betikotu

  Epilogue

  Resources

  Acknowledgments

  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  Other Books by Sydney Avey

  If You Liked The Sheep Walker’s Daughter

  Dedication

  For California’s Valley of the Heart’s Delight, nurturer of dreams,and the Central Valley, one of the world’s most productive agriculture regions, and for my tribe: Nellie Belle, Opal, Shirley, Cheryl, April and Audrey.

  PART 1

  Part 1

  Losing Leora

  1 — Dolores, Intruders

  H Dolores I

  1

  Intruders

  September 1953

  I stand at the bedroom door while the coroner examines the corpse. He lifts the sheet to cover Leora’s face. I had not thought to do that. Does this guard her dignity? Shield her from prying eyes? Or does this protect the living from witnessing the horror of death, the emptiness of a once-cherished body now void of a soul? Not that I ever cherished Leora, or she me. I hate this whole mess. But now is not the time to have such uncharitable thoughts.

  Leora seemed to leave life one body part at a time. Cataracts formed over her eyes and she could no longer read her magazine stories. Her ears became attuned to only high notes; Saturday evening’s Your Hit Parade annoyed her.

  “Turn that mess off,” she would grumble at me.

  Her joints seized up and easy movement became a memory. Then memory itself became irretrievable. Her heart forgot how to beat, and so she died.

  I follow the coroner into the kitchen and watch him spread his paperwork out on the kitchen table. Carbon copies flutter in the predawn breeze that slips in through the window I forgot to close last night. I stumble over the simplest answers to his requests for information for the death certificate.

  When my husband died, he was sitting at his metal desk in Korea. We had made it through World War II even though, like all Army wives, I was prepared to receive bad news. I would do so with grace and decorum, tears and resolve, I believed. But Henry survived that war and I let my guard down.

  Then three years ago, an Army officer, shiny brass leaves sparkling on the shoulders of his dress uniform, surprised me on a Saturday morning in my vegetable garden. I was plucking brittle squash vines from their final resting place on the hard clay dirt that I fight with every growing season. Lieutenant Colonel Henry James Carter had gone overseas again, but I had decided not to stay in the housing at the Presidio. Instead, I gave up my job at the bank and left San Francisco to care for my ailing mother in the small Craftsman cottage in Los Altos that Henry and I had bought for her. My fingers had just curled around a crookneck squash, a straggler in what had been a surprisingly good harvest, when the crunch of tires on the gravel driveway interrupted my gardening.

  I was certain that Henry would come home from Korea. But he didn’t. His commanding officer found him slumped over his desk, dead of a massive heart attack.

  As I received this news, I stood in my garden holding the squash and watching the soldier’s mouth move while the whole Pacific Ocean roared in my ears. Leora had every bit of her hearing then. Leaning on her cane in the front doorway, she took in his words and then shuffled back inside the house to her bedroom and shut the door.

  I tried to pay attention to the soldier’s words: Did I want to go inside and sit down? Did I want him to call someone? Did I understand I would receive a call in a few days about the arrangements to transport Henry’s body back to the States? Would I be sure to fill out the paperwork that guaranteed me survivor benefits? Could he get me a glass of water?

  I stood there in the dirt, the sun of a California Indian summer burning into my shoulders. I pictured Henry in his colorless world across a gray ocean, dead on a gray desk in a gray country governed by a sea of gray men in gray uniforms. Then I doubled over and threw up.

  The soldier took a handkerchief from his pants pocket and handed it to me. We walked into the house. I went to the kitchen and poured us each a glass of water.

  “Ma’am,” he said, as I handed him his water, “I can’t leave until you have someone here with you.” We both looked toward the closed bedroom door. I moved to the telephone table.

  “I will call my daughter. She’s at Stanford. She can be here in thirty minutes.”

  I dialed Valerie’s phone number and when he was sure that someone had answered
the phone, the soldier looked around for a place to set down the envelope he had in his hand. I held out my hand to take it and then turned my back to him. He left.

  Things are different this time. I won’t call Valerie yet.

  The coroner leaves and I enter Leora’s bedroom one last time. I pull the sheet off her face and study her in the morning light that is beginning to flash through the branches of the pepper tree near the window. The sun snaking up the back of that tree surprises me with its early intensity and brings tears to my bleary eyes.

  The glow of my mother’s well-cared-for skin has cooled to form the waxy gray mask of death. I replay her struggle over the past year in my head, trying to understand the interplay between a body losing control and a mind holding on to secrets—secrets that my mother has taken with her to the grave.

  There is something else I must do. I pull a stool out of the closet and go to the window. On top of the stool, I struggle to loosen the window frame from its casement until it opens. This takes all the energy I have left, but now Leora’s soul can depart. That was one of the few traditions my mother taught me.

  I climb down from the stool, stiffness knotting my shoulders and settling in my lower back. I fall back down on the kitchen chair I had pulled into Leora’s room earlier in the week. I’m sitting there, trying to stretch out my spine, when the sound of leather-soled shoes slap, slap, slapping up the gravel driveway and the three red cement porch steps precedes two sharp thumps on the green doorjamb. David from the mortuary is here already. He must not have wanted to drive his hearse down the narrow driveway and risk scratching his doors on the hedge I have been meaning to trim. That means a trip down the driveway into the road on a gurney for Leora, in full view of the neighbors.

  It isn’t long before voices out by the mailbox signal that my neighbors are beginning to gather like a crowd of chattering crows. They keep a respectful distance from the hearse and I hide behind the screen door. David apologizes, assuring me that he can handle the transfer discreetly. After the hearse rolls away, the conversation continues and the neighbors elect an emissary to come to the door. If I had any sense, I would go out and get it over with, but good sense seems to have departed along with Leora.

  They choose old Mrs. Dold, who rarely leaves her house these days. She limps up my driveway on swollen feet. I open the screen door and come out onto the porch to save her the effort of climbing the steps.

  “Dolores, I’m so sorry about your mother.” She looks up at me, her watery blue eyes locking on to mine.

  “Thank you, Mrs. Dold. She didn’t suffer. She went in her sleep.”

  She leans on her cane at the bottom of the steps. She wants to know if I need anything. She wants to know about the funeral service. She wants to know if she can call her pastor to help me through this difficult time. No, no, no, I tell her gently. She was a good friend to my mother, a woman who didn’t have many friends.

  The crows have flown. With my last ounce of energy, I strip the bed that Leora died in, intending to take the sheets to the garage and wash them. Instead, I sit back down on the kitchen chair by the bed and contemplate the little altar of memorabilia Leora had arranged on her nightstand when she knew she was going to die. I try to get inside her head, always an impossible feat for me. Why did she choose these particular mementos for comfort?

  I pick up a cheap picture frame and catch my fingertip on the corner where the metal edges don’t meet. The cut is deep and painful. I pop my finger in my mouth, pin two flaps of sliced skin together with my teeth, and probe the wound with the tip of my tongue, sucking metallic-tasting blood into my mouth. My finger throbs clear to my sit bones. I try to focus on the glossy black-and-white photo housed in the frame.

  Two delighted faces shine out at me. A triumphant Leora sports a black feathered hat with a saucy veil. She fluffs her stylish bob with one hand. Her other hand rests on the shoulder of a young girl—Valerie when she was about eight years old. Valerie’s dimpled chin perches on her chubby little fist. Her dark eyes gaze out in the same direction as her grandmother’s. They are admiring themselves in a mirror.

  I remove my finger from my mouth and reach for the rosary beads spilled on the table. I never knew Leora to be particularly religious. I set them back down and reach across the dusty maple nightstand to pick up a bell. It lays heavy in my hand, a cast-iron relic coated in brass and missing the clapper. It looks like a cowbell, onlysmaller. I roll it over and discover an inscription in a language I can’t identify—Ardi galdua atzeman daiteke, aldi galdua berriz ez. Then that unwelcome crunch of tires grates on the gravel again.

  Pain returns to my spine and shoulders. The screen door pops open, squeaking in protest, and a sharp, insistent rapping rattles the front door.

  The heavy breathing of a large man who doesn’t handle stairs well is the tipoff. If I am very quiet, maybe he will go away. He doesn’t. I curl my fingers around the bell. This call is not unexpected. I go to the door and open it.

  “Mr. Belch.”

  “It’s Beche.” He curls his lip into a poor excuse for a smile. “I’m here to collect the money your mother owes me. Where is she?” He has put his foot over the threshold as if he is expecting me to slam the door in his face. He is so close that I am overpowered by the odor of his Old Spice losing the battle under his armpits.

  “She’s dead,” I hiss.

  “Nice try.” His smile broadens and he yells over my shoulder. “Mrs. Moraga, it’s no use siccing your daughter on me. You are ninety days overdue and you need to pay up.”

  He has lugged his black sales case full of brushes up the steps. He’s hoping that if he collects his due from Leora, he can sell her more useless cleaning implements. What I’ve been able to tolerate in the past, the game these two have played over how much crap he can talk her into and how long she can put off paying the bill, ignites a choking fury deep in my chest. I puff up like a cobra, gather as much height as I can, and I strike, pushing the big man so hard in the chest that he is jettisoned off the landing. He tries to keep his balance by grabbing for the railing. I am cocking my arm, rage burning in my eyes, so he grabs his case and hightails it for his car. I fling the bell as hard as I can at his head, missing him and denting the driver’s door instead. He is turning the ignition before his behind hits the seat, gunning the car in reverse, spraying gravel everywhere. The hedge brambles claw the paint off his Nash Rambler. My mailbox splinters as he backs into it and then gears forward to make his escape.

  I could not have shed enough tears in a lifetime to feel the release I am experiencing now. Searching the ground for my bell, my pounding heart begins to find its rhythm, my breathing settles down, and a deep, warm chuckle that is not my own fills my ears. I look up to see a priest standing before me.

  2 — Dolores, Brass Urns

  H Dolores I

  2

  Brass Urns

  A pie-faced man stands in my driveway. He erupts with the warm, hearty laugh of a man who is truly tickled. The humor of the situation finally strikes me and I laugh too. Big, gulping guffaws burst out from the same place that breathed smoke and fire an instant ago. I laugh until I hurt.

  The priest stoops to retrieve my brass missile, walks up the steps with me, places the bell in my hand, and then covers it and my hand with his own. He shakes my hand so hard that the gravel lodged inside the bell rattles like a maraca.

  “I’m Father Mike. Mrs. Dold sent me.”

  “Oh, she shouldn’t have done that.” I pull my hand away. The sun is beginning to disappear behind the pepper tree that shades the front door and a chill sets in. It’s easier to invite him in than to think about how to make him go away.

  He’s a modest-sized man for someone with such a big head. He follows me into the kitchen. Although speaking to the clergy is not on my list of favorite things to do, he is more welcome than the parade that has passed through my day so far. I want to make him laugh again, but I can’t think how. I strike a match and light the burner on the stove to heat w
ater for tea.

  “Dolores, I’m very sorry for your loss. It’s not been a very happy birthday for you, has it?”

  “Mrs. Dold told you that?”

  “Your mother told me that. She told me you were born on September fifteenth, the Feast Day of the Seven Sorrows of Mary.”

  Stinging, bitter tears spring from my eyes. Five different retorts spin in my head like balls whirling in a roulette wheel. I opt for the most accessible one when the wheel slows down.

  “You knew my mother, then?”

  “Oh, yes. She came to church with Mrs. Dold. You didn’t know that?”

  “Well, I knew she walked over to Mrs. Dold’s every Sunday morning, but I didn’t know they went anywhere. Frankly, I’m surprised. Forgive me, Father, but my mother hated Catholics.”

  He grins like a Cheshire cat, his eyes peering at me over mounds of cheekbones. “I should have explained. I am not a Catholic priest. I’m the rector at Saint Matthew’s. It’s an Anglican church—similar traditions, different governance, no pope.”

  “And you knew my mother well enough that she talked to you about me?” I reach for a canister of tea bags, plop the chamomile one he asks for into a mug, and drown it in boiling water. Then I pour the rest of the water over the English Breakfast tea bag I’ve chosen for myself. I slide his mug across the table and sit down at the other end.

  Father Mike sits up straight, arranging his face to conceal the humor that seems to be a natural part of his complexion. “She talked a lot about you, Dolores.”

  “Actually, I go by Dee. I wasn’t pleased when I discovered I’d been named for the patron saint of sadness.”

  “I understand. Well, Dee, um …” Father Mike obviously has something on his mind. But I’m in no mood to make it easy for him. “Are you aware of what your mother’s wishes were regarding her final resting place?”

  “No. I’m not aware she had any wishes about … that.” My plan is to meet with David at Spangler’s Mortuary in a day or so and let him walk me through whatever is necessary. Leora didn’t leave a will. Apparently, though, she had confided in this stranger.