A Phantom Herd

by Lorraine Ray

While the hoop of snakeskin disappeared, and the Cocky Baby withheld itself from me, later that year I saw a treasure, a pink striped and coppery flask, as beautiful as any held in an ancient poet's hand, spilling wine as the songster and tale-tellers talked and talked. My coppery flask was the bloom on a barrel cactus.

  My father was installing the new air conditioning unit on a concrete pad near the crack where the scorpion (that nearly killed me) had disappeared. That crack sported a small barrel cactus and a few years later that barrel cactus grew to a stupendous size.

  "If I were a smart person," said Father, "I'd chop that damn thing outta there. But I ask myself 'why do that?' It wants to live there, and Mother Nature chose to put it there. I don't see a reason to kill it. Do you know, I saw it growing a few months after they poured the foundation? It was very small then, about the size of your big toe, and you are small and your toes are very small, and when I saw it, I didn't think it would survive with all the construction around it. The bricklayers must have laid the bricks almost on top of it. Look how big the thing is in just five years. Now it's blooming. After the first summer rains. This is about the most beautiful thing I've seen in a long time."

  "Gotta get this concrete smooth for the pad for the air conditioner. Phew. How much more smoothing is this concrete going to take? Shall I call it quits?"

  Ten ridges or pleats spanned the barrel, and up these pleats clusters of russet and gray needles marched. The spines grew in clusters of nine with the needles near the base of each cluster aging to resemble brittle gray hairs pronging out and bending in strange directions as though falling back or melting in the presence of the central hook, or perhaps in awe of the glorious bloom at the top which happened first in early August of the fourth year of its life. This is how the coppery orange tongue of the bloom on the cactus formed: emerging first as a pimple, a red knob formed on the very top of the green barrel, this bloom expanded to a small red cabbage and this cabbage began swelling out from the green hide until it resembled a teeny turban, swirled with red and yellow. Finally, a bulbous club carried the turban upward and that turban unfurled to reveal the pedals of a glossy coppery orange flask. The most exquisite hues of gold and silver lined the flask, my treasure. And the dusty soft center was barely revealed before the bees swarmed, diving headfirst into the mob of pistols, wiggling their striped bottoms, digging, and drinking. Day after day the beautiful cups of waxy flowers, fifteen in number some years, provide bountiful pale yellow pollen from the large clumps of pistols. Eventually the flowers wilted, and the barrel cactus produced a waxy yellow fruit with a top of stiff black straw-what I saw on the toppled barrel cactus that the pale man and lady photographed. And these fruits which are like crowns of miniature pineapples were a glorious lemony yellow color and remained throughout each winter long after the glossy flowers were gone.

  At first this barrel cactus must have been nothing more than a tiny black speck of a seed lodged in that crack, but it sprouted in less than a year; over time the root end of the barrel cactus atrophied, and the flesh near the roots puckered to a hard tan point, trailing the dry sinewy roots, which could be seen because they weren't planted in any soil. These roots collected the slightest drips of moisture in the atmosphere in order to pump the drops into the green barrel; over time the top of the cactus curled over, leaning southwest as all barrel cacti do, and simply put, the unflappable cactus, the huge green mound, grew, not seeming to be embarrassed by its predicament, into a comma.

  Commas provide suspense; commas imply great need, or importance, or make one feel the stutter of speech or in my case emphasize the hesitancy of my imperfect ideas. The shiny, black full stop of the barrel cactus seed, became a comma, indecisive, a sign that the reader needs to take a temporary, quick breath when reading. A comma has a way of asking for dignity, inspiring rectitude in speech that parallels the way the cactus carries itself. A comma can be inserted before a humorous addendum, the little add-on that improves. Or a comma may fall in place before the phrase which modifies the hung-out cactus, an awkward phrase that is brief, prickly, and succinct. A comma usefully separates ideas and lists of prickly plants in our densely packed desert: barrel cactus, palo verde, saguaro, desert broom, desert marigold, palo verde, mesquite, palo verde, barrel cactus.

  Yes, the spot where the scorpion disappeared became a cactus comma, interred in the foundation and neatly separating us from the neighbors; a big green and bristly thing that in its prickles tells people to pause while approaching, thinking, as you do when you blunder into a cactus: thorns, suck in your breath, wait.