Chapter Sixteen - First Day Home.

First Day Home.

Breakfast with Mr. Sandoval turned out to be just like being home.  For the first time since the pandemic, the girls sat, eating ravenously, with no place to get to, no place they had to be.

Mr. Sandoval politely suggested he should get along, made up all sorts of lame excuses where he had to go, chores he had to do, those things that guests say when they can't tell if it's time to get along.  The girls shushed him - he was delighted.  He had been pretty lonely for company, himself.

The sunlight poured warm and bright into the little front room of the cottage and scattered through the house.  The little kitchen was bathed in golden sunshine.

There was a long side veranda on the south, put in so as to block the high summer sun from baking the windows, but allowing low winter light to slant in.  The kitchen looked off to the south.  It was a big lot; the neighbors were down a bit at least fifty yards.  Nice and open and sunny.  And springtime.

Spring and summer raise the green out west, up through the gold and blue landscape that's always there year-through.  Red's not too common - you see it in the streaks of rust where volcanoes have thrown up red iron dust and rock, here and there.  But red, living red, is the color of Spring in the West.  It's in flowers, and it fades down in the baking heat of the summer.  But the whole beauty of the Western sky and plains opened up and washed the kitchen through and through.

"You sure picked a beauty of a house," said June.  "How'd you pick this one?"

"It was FOR SALE, sign out in front," and Judy and Ben smiled a little, seeing how the real estate market was fairly slow these days.  "No, really." Judy said, a little cross.

"It was closed up, it was empty when Captain Trips came on to town, at least a few months." Judy went on, and their smiles slowly faded.  "Meaning the last inhabitants were well when they left.  Probably some college couple after graduation.  No beds, no dressers, no clothes, no crib, no baby's toys."  That put a shudder into Ben.

"It actually took a while to find this house.  I marked it when I chose it."  Ben noticed that there were a few splashes of crimson paint on the house near the front door, like paintballs.  He'd been meaning to ask if Judy wanted it painted over.

"There's been no death in this house - no unnatural death," she went on.  Captain Trips passed by this address.  "And all the furnishings, all the bedding and utensils, are clean, brand-new.  We've gotten so used to corpses, and treading over stains and marks and dried-up crud that we've just gotten used to the idea that Death owns this town.  We ought to be stopping that habit."

"You know, I didn't think of it as such, but me too," said June.  "All the stuff I collected was new - I passed over some really nice-looking things because I didn't know if they were...I dunno..."

"Yeah, it sounds a little superstitious.  We know that we're immune to the virus - we call it flu, but its symptomatology is a little irregular - there's a profound neck swelling associated with this infection...."

"Maldición escrófula." said Ben.   "It was an epidemic long ago.  It was treated with a brew of alcabar, altamisa  and cottonwood bark.  Altamisa por el alto abeto, y alcabar fresca, y corteza de álamo, o toque de rey, cura de la escrófula.  Wow, that's an oldie.  I'll bet you girls never even met a curandera from the old school...  That's curandera lore.  That scrofula's not been seen for two, three hundred years.  Used to have a blessing on día de San Blas to ward it off."

Ben stared off down onto the plains, a thousand yards away, musing.  "You know, I'd never thought I'd remember that stuff, but talking with you kids, the old stuff comes back easy."