By the Light of My Father's Smile Read Online Free Page A

wobbly construction would not slump to the ground. Of course, she said, from watching their mothers make pots, primitive man would assume God made men from clay. Though why, seeing their mothers’ work, they’d think God male, she could not grasp.

    From the window of my study in the small house we were given I watched them. Susannah and her mother intent on learning askill. Enthralled by the women’s serene mastery of their life-sustaining craft. For it was in their pots that the tribe’s food and drink were stored. And Maggie, off in the arroyos with the wild Indian boys who were already teaching her such feminine skills as how to leap from one formidable boulder to another without breaking a leg. And to run, as they did, like the wind.
    I did not understand her spirit. I yearned for guidance. It seemed to be necessary to tame her, though no one among the Indians or in my own family showed any signs of thinking so. The Indians, I think, admired her. By the age of ten she was like, and even resembled, one of their sons. Their own daughters, however, were, like Susannah, demure, interested in women’s things. There was not one as wild as MacDoc, as Maggie by now was called. She had wanted to be known as Mad Dog, but I drew the line there.
    MacDoc. My daughter MacDoc. At puberty I began to keep her from her friends, the wild boys who were now, some of them, beginning to notice her femaleness, and to attempt to protect her. They did not think she should jump over boulders as recklessly as before, or run about the village with quite the same abandon. Magdalena flaunted a transformation they could not match. Did they have buds forming on their chests like hers? No! Did they have hair beginning to grow on their lower bodies, as she did? No! Well then, they were still children. And not women. Only green little boys!
    She would weep and rage over her homework in the room she shared with Susannah. When the wild boys came to look for her, a hurt puzzlement in their eyes, I sent them away. I insisted that she be called Magdalena.
    This was one of the reasons Langley and I fought. She did not agree that Magdalena did anything wrong in expressing her own nature.
    But what if she gets pregnant? I said. Imagining the expense of supplying rubbers to every young man in the village.
    My wife was quiet. My thinking this way about our daughter disappointed her. It was one of those silences I’d come to read. It meant: Really, why am I with you? Finally she said: But it does not seem to me that Mad Dog wishes to sleep with anyone, other than with her sister.
    This was so like Langley. To be blind to the obvious and to be subversive about it too.
    Magdalena, I said.
    Oh, sure, she said. Don’t you understand there is no more Magdalena? There is no Maggie either. Both Magdalena and Maggie are finished.
    But that is what we named her, I said.
    Yes, said Langley, and obviously before we knew who she was.
    Well, she cannot be called Mad Dog, I said. She is the daughter of a minister!
    But mad dogs here are considered wise, said my wife. Perhaps you should not have brought us here. She sighed, and took my hand.
    You must talk to Mad Dog, she said, and explain to her why she cannot be both Mad Dog and your sane daughter.

    I tried.
    By now Maggie, Magdalena, Mad Dog, MacDoc was fifteen. And taller than I. Except for summers, which she and Susannah often spent with their grandparents on Long Island, she had grown up in the Sierra Madre. She was a silent, brooding young woman whose pleasure lay, almost exclusively, in reading. I liked this. Not the silence, or the brooding, but the calm. Reading ather desk or under a tree or in the shade of a boulder in the yard, she seemed, especially from a distance, quite ladylike, demure. Because she was less active she began to gain weight, and to acquire a lumbering tilt to her gait; a condition that worried Langley but did not particularly bother me.

    She eats so much more than usual.