Red Hills and Bones

The house was a pigpen when she bought it in the forties. Doors falling off, roof caving in. She’d spent the thirties falling in love, not with a man—her husband had had an affair and she a nervous breakdown—but with a landscape. Red cliffs, and purple hills, and scrubby green cedars. Her husband died an old man in 1946. She buried his ashes at Lake George, where he could hear the water run, and retreated permanently to the desert after that. War had left the whole world in disrepair, and even this corner of it, remote as it seemed, was not left untouched.

The house wasn’t a Spanish house, or an Indian house, or a Mexican house. It had adobe walls, viga-and-latilla ceilings, and a hand-hewn wooden ladder climbing to the roof, which looked down on a central courtyard. On the picture windows she’d insisted, because an artist needed light. The doors all clung firmly to their hinges now—one in particular featured in several of her paintings—and the ceiling, with the addition of the skylights, gave merely the impression of having fallen in. It was a New Mexican house on a sedate Sunday evening. Her house. Home.

Her younger sister had gone back to Beverly Hills, and except for Cook, who hardly seemed to draw breath, the artist once more had the place to herself. As much as she loved her sister, the woman chattered constantly and her departure was never anything but a great relief. But the house wouldn’t remain quiet for very long, as she was generous with her time, and the next visitor was always only a letter or a polite request away. Soon there would be some photographer—she seemed to attract them like flies—stalking her with a camera. Where were the days when she had posed nude for her husband, her breasts hanging like ripe fruit for all the world to see?

Nobody would think of taking such photographs of her now. Now they photographed her on her morning walk, her evening walk, sitting with her rock collection, or climbing the ladder to the roof. She might pose in front of the chimney or while writing letters, while brushing the dog, or standing in front of the white skull of a cow, a horse, a ram on the wall. Portraits of the Artist as an Old Woman. She adored skulls, bones, stones, and shells, but she was far from any ocean now.

Guests she tolerated graciously, but an unannounced visitor brought out the worst in her. She wasn’t often in need of a plumber, but when she was, she expected a single individual to report for the job. The last one had shown up with a friend, not a colleague but some tagalong. While the plumber fixed the kitchen sink, his friend whistled, very badly, and asked to use the bathroom with the house’s water still turned off. Cook had taken fiendish pleasure in directing him to the outhouse in the yard. “Watch out for rattlesnakes,” she’d added cruelly, to her own delight.

* * *

It was Monday morning, and the moment Cook showed up she would express the usual surprise at seeing her employer still breathing. She, artist and old woman, cooked for herself on Sundays, which was Cook’s day off. She was no bad cook—bright soups and hearty breads were her specialty—but the ingredients had to be fresh, and so, with Santa Fe fifty miles distant, she’d long since planted her own garden. Goat milk she procured from neighboring Franciscans, and one of her sisters sent walnuts and dates. She employed a local gardener so as not to spend whole days pulling weeds, which would leave little time for painting or for anything else, such as getting her old muscles massaged on the third Monday of every month. It was one of the few extravagances in which she indulged—before the sun was up and Cook was back on duty.

Cook didn’t want her driving herself now that her eyesight was weakening, but it had always been Cook’s opinion that she drove like a demon. Had it been left up to Cook, her employer’s driving privileges would have been revoked long ago. Cook would have preferred a tire and gasoline shortage, as had been the case during the war. Cook suggested hiring a driver, but if such an individual wanted to work for her he would have to be capable of much more than that.

It wasn’t uncommon for the artist to encounter the vehicles of her neighbors, or travelers, on the way home from Santa Fe, but even with the rising sun blinding her she had yet to run anyone off the road. Not until this particular Monday of an otherwise uneventful month in the middle of the year, when a honking of horns and screeching of tires left two vehicles stranded in the dirt.

Two figures approached each other in the settling red dust. She had been the one at fault but only because the sun was in her eyes, and in an effort to make amends she invited the stranger to her home for lunch. She had known at once that the woman was foreign, with her accent and her complexion like snow. The woman said she was on a road trip through the “good old US of A.”

Cook was already busy in the kitchen when her employer arrived back at the house, and was none too pleased on being informed that there would be an extra mouth to feed at lunch. Man or woman? Woman. Cook huffed. She had a preference for young men she could tease.

* * *

With the dog at her side, she departed for her morning walk. She returned home with yet another of nature’s treasures. Not the skull of a cow, a horse, a ram, but a rattle from the so-named snake; she added it to her collection of a dozen others, which she kept stowed in a plain box by her bed.

She brushed the dog in the courtyard where chamiso and wild sagebrush grew unabashedly through the cracks, and relinquished the resulting fluff to the wind. The woman did not show for lunch, and in the early afternoon the artist settled down for a nap. She was not yet entirely lucid when she heard the approach of a vehicle, and by the time she had made her way to one of the panoramic picture windows, she saw a sky-blue truck disappearing down the drive in a cloud of red dust. A disappointment, some delivery perhaps. The woman had been driving some torch-red monstrosity, probably rented on a whim between two stops of a cross-country journey by Greyhound bus. As much as the artist didn’t generally like people, she did take a liking to certain people, and felt certain that this woman might have proven interesting.

She heard a knock at the front door, and her disappointment doubled when on her doorstep she found the friend of the plumber she had hired not long ago. She found it difficult to like anyone once her hackles had been raised, and unlike some, did not pride herself on making exceptions.

“You’re not by chance looking to hire anyone, are you?” said the man, who now had a mustache that rested comfortably on his lip. He hadn’t had any facial hair on his last visit.

“Hire anyone?” she answered. “Hire you? To do what?”

“This and that. Odd jobs, you know.”

“Such as? Mowing the lawn?” There was no lawn to mow, as she hoped he had noticed.

“Oh, I’ll do anything. Honestly.” The young man with his mustache reminded her of her late husband. She invited him inside. From her studio she retrieved a bucket of badly bent nails and gave these to the young man to straighten. The required tools would be at his disposal the moment he showed enough initiative to ask for them. She sighed when he said that it would be easier simply to buy new nails. It seemed to her that nobody knew the value of anything anymore, and Cook would agree wholeheartedly. What would Cook think of the man’s return?

* * *

The tops of the piñon and juniper trees were just beginning to tickle the belly of the setting sun when the young man finished with his task. Not a half bad job he’d made of it, although the nails were all still quite useless. He had proved to her, however, that he was willing as well as capable. He had asked to use her tools and had cleaned up after himself, and for the moment that was enough. Cook had taken him cold milk and a handful of biscochitos, and had once more delighted in teasing him about the rattlesnakes. Cook insisted that he was a city boy.

She, the artist, had spent her afternoon writing letters and had heard their talk through the open bedroom window. The young man’s whistling had not improved one bit, but this was not a job prerequisite. She invited him to stay for dinner and asked if he could drive a car.

“What should I call you?” he asked. She answered. Where some people thought that she had died years ago, he—no expression of surprise on his face—seemed never to have heard of her.

“—On my mind,” he said, “like that Ray Charles song. Do you happen to know it?”

She asked what he knew about art—not much, which was a relief. Most of her visitors talked of nothing else. “And your name?” She wouldn’t allow Cook to tease him too much, and would swear him to secrecy before allowing him to drive her on the Monday of her next massage.

JEAN-LUKE SWANEPOEL

Jean-Luke Swanepoel was born in South Africa, and currently lives in California with his husband. His work has appeared in Lunch Ticket, CutBank, and Necessary Fiction, among others. His sophomore novel, The Book of David, will be published on January 30, 2025. Find him on Goodreads at goodreads.com/jlswanepoel.