Chapter 9

I didn't bother going into the office the next day. There wasn't any point in it that I could see. I only work because I want to anyway – I don't need the money at all, and there've been times when I took so few cases that I actually had to put my own money into the operation to keep it from going into the red. Of course, I could run the office at a loss indefinitely, I've got so much money, but I've found that Marla gets uneasy if I don't keep it in the black.

Instead, I took Darlia to school. Calvin Academy is way up on Paseo del Norte, in an area which is getting pretty built up now but was basically empty back in 1990 when the school started up. The guy who founded it, and still runs it for that matter, bought cheap land, and today if he wanted to he could sell out and be rich. Well, not quite – he donated the land to the school, and while he runs it he doesn't own the land nor the buildings.

Anyway, it's a pretty fair drive up there, but Cecelia and I don't mind. It's a solid Christian school, which agrees with us on some points where most churches and Christian schools don't, and Darlia likes it. Finding a school a child likes is tough, though I suppose some of that's just the nature of kids. By the time we human beings realize just how useful education is, we're usually too grown up and involved in making a living to put any kind of serious effort into school.

At that I'm pretty much self-taught. I graduated from high school and had Cs and some Bs, but I've never been to college. What I know I've learned on the job, or through job-related classes, or just by trying things out. That's how I learned to write poetry – I'd liked reading it for years, and decided to give it a try, and now Cecelia's got a file, a thin one, of favorable reviews of my stuff. And she's got one unfavorable review in the file – one she wrote a few years before we met, on a poem I'd submitted and forgotten about, and which I'd thoroughly revised by the time she showed me the review. I like to look at that review occasionally, thinking of this woman who'd reviewed my poem for a college newspaper, and hadn't even remembered doing it till we'd been married a while.

But what I know is mostly useful, practical stuff. I can ride a horse and rope a cow, and brand and cut and put in ear tags, and if I had to I could go out to the OX Ranch in Lanfair Valley and get a job working cattle. I can shoot and I've got years of experience as a detective, and I could go to a lot of small towns and get a job as a cop without any trouble. I can hammer nails, and saw boards, and while I'm no sort of carpenter if I needed to build something I could as long as it wasn't too fancy; probably a one-room shack would be the limit of my ability, but that shack wouldn't fall down in the first breeze. And I'm a preacher, though I've never been a pastor, and I've got hands-on familiarity with a lot of theological books and can even puzzle out a bit of New Testament Greek here and there.

But I'm glad Darlia's getting an education and enjoying it. She might never need geometry and chemistry – I never have, and neither has anyone else I've ever known – but she's learning a lot of things that you don't get in government schools, like manners and a solid grounding in science and respect for legitimate authority. And when she gets older the school offers Spanish, French, German, Russian and even Latin classes. She's already fluent in Spanish of course – as fluent, anyway, as any 10-year-old – but if she ever wants to learn another language Calvin Academy can teach her. We pay hefty tuition, but it's worth it – especially since those of us who pay more are helping parents who don't have as much money get their kids into the school.

I took Darlia up and let her off in front of the elementary school building, and reminded her that Sara would pick her up. She remembered, and showed me the note Cecelia had written for the school secretary authorizing it. These days even good friends need written permission to pick your kids up. And thinking that such a situation was the result of jerks like Vern Hitt, I pulled off the grounds and headed back home.

When I got there I found Cecelia on the sofa with a book of Ginsberg's poems. I like Ginsberg's stuff, mostly, though sometimes I swear he put in cuss words and nasty images just 'cause he could. It's not usually Cecelia's bag, though – she prefers older stuff, like Christina Rosetti, who's her favorite poet. As I came in the door she stood, and I saw that she had on a pair of narrow-legged black jeans, tucked into her Apache style moccasins, and a brown vest buttoned over a pale pink shirt with sleeves down to her hands.

"I thought," she said, "that we might walk for a bit."

"Walkin' generally ain't your style."

"Nor is speaking proper English your style, Darvin, yet you can when you choose. Today, I choose to walk with you – not far; we're not going all the way to Tramway this time. But I do have an urge to see the outdoors from atop shank's mare."