People of the Valley by Frank Waters

Author:Frank Waters
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ohio University Press
Published: 2023-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

7

At the age of seventy Maria was living alone in a small mountainside hut. It was the old one that lay in the little clearing just below the tall weathered cliffs which jut out to separate the crescent halves of the beautiful blue valley, and just above a steep corn milpa sloping up from the rutty cañon road. Thus unseeing eyes placed it. Maria, whose eyes saw it in time as well as in space, saw it as the point of a completed circle.

But Maria was a character. Such is regarded one who has outlived virtue and vice, having proved invulnerable to both and more powerful than either.

“She is strange and wise,” people said of her.

The strangeness implied her uniqueness among their orthodoxy. The wisdom reflected her ability to see through their opinions.

“But I do not trust her fully,” added some in a whisper.

Such a secret lack of faith do people below have in the truth that awaits above them.

Maria was content to wait. Seldom she allowed Teodosio to drive her down into the valley in his rattletrap buggy. She only saw to it that he came up often enough to weed the corn and to bring her salt, sugar and tobacco. What more was necessary? She milked her goats, split her own wood; was too toothless to eat meat, too contented to require conversation, too busy to relish interruptions. “Besides,” she said, “I can watch from here the empty doings of you all.”

So she thrived on loneliness, and proved that energy creates inert mass. This energy, this understood vitality in one so old and wrinkled, she had sucked from her loves and labors, anxieties and follies, the illusions of her life. Its inert mass sat hour after hour, day by day, on top of the cliffs.

Below her the valley grew, new houses rose from the earth. New roads crawled up the cañons where only foot trails had come down. Burros diminished, rattling tin automobiles appeared—to be pulled out of chuck holes by teams and wagons, the mean that held between these extremes of travel. She saw the valley green, yellow and whiten, the mountain peaks step forth and back again into mists, scant harvests and days of plenty. Gringo voices came back, greaseless wagon hubs squeaked on frosty mornings, the church bells tolled births and deaths.

It all went on outside her as it went on in memory inside, changing but changeless, and thus an illusion. What remained was their common core. It was the reality she pondered.

Wind and rain matted her straggly hair. Sun and frost made leather of her swart cheeks and cleft chin. Her black, bright little eyes took on a queer remoteness. At times her steady gaze seemed turned inward—as if it had rounded the earth only to return to the duplicate within her.

But occasionally her meditations were interrupted. She had gone long to the people of the valley; now they came to her.

“Doña Maria,” a man would say, respectfully standing before her, hat in hand, “you will forgive this interruption, but something is wrong with my house.

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