The Joshua Tree

by Robert Cabot

  Pull that Joshua trunk to the side a bit, pick it up for the Missis’ stove on the way back. Hold up! There’s something there behind that buckthorn. Tarpaulin, back pack, rocks rolled in against the down yucca, ashes, a boot sticking from under. Death in the coyote wind, and you know it’s Jamie Pope. Curled up, rotting between the freezes. Barricade against the cold and the coyotes and the cats and the buzzards. But nothing would work against death and the rotting and the bugs to take you away, Jamie, alone and in despair like you always were. Even your last mule you ate years ago, and your brand disappeared twenty years back and whenever you found cattle in a lonely spot not too far from your cabin you’d shoot and pack off the meat for jerky. More than once your friend, your friend Will Spear, would find the carcass and maybe even his brand still visible, and he’d have gone after anyone else with his rifle, but not you, Jamie, you were too alone. And when your sight gave out and you couldn’t find cattle, one by one you tied a mule to a stake and killed it for meat. And there weren’t any left.

  Remember, Will, in ’sixteen, winter too, out pulling a slip with the mule team, grading down below the windmill, before you married your Mana, your Helen Jane? He came crawling up your road in the dust and puddles. Somehow he’d come those miles from his shack in the canyon under Ram Mountain. Thirty days, he said, with just a case of milk, and too weak to get out of bed, and feared of the hydrophobia skunks gnawing around him, attacking him in his sleep. Somehow he got there – did he crawl just that last stretch for effect, could you even question that of a decent man, you who nursed him back for more than a month? Jerky from your best steers, and gravy and potatoes and lettuce and fruit you’d put up, and the fire always red in the stove. Until one day he danced a jig with the liquor in him again which he couldn’t take for those weeks, from those fellows’ still, a jig with the jug on the kitchen table, such as it was, and said he thought it was time to be going.

  sun

  man’s

  heart

  gold

  earth’s

  heart

  You were the only friend he had, and you couldn’t say much for him, nothing. A worthless old man who’d cast himself out from the world. Worked with him for a time, you had, digging in that mine he’d started on the back side of Two Skull Mountain. Ore was poor, though, you both quit and he moved over across Juniper Flats to where he’d found water, Jamie Pope Canyon it became. And before that he’d worked the night shift for years for Clem Toole’s Two Skull Mine, and Clem had told you how the weight was often short, measured against the day shift. Must have hid the amalgam near his cabin he had up there by the mine. Kept showing up till the end with gold for you to sell for him, though there was nothing up there on Ram where he said he got it – damn, didn’t even have mules for years to work the arrastra he’d set up as a front. Cross-country it wasn’t more than nine ten miles from his shack back to Two Skull, abandoned long before, where he could dig up his amalgam till his pockets bulged. And he was heading back, coming out across the valley, when the coyote wind caught him, worst of the year, remember?

  wind

  death’s

  heart

  And still they want to dig him up and look in his pockets. Buried him as we found him, pushed him in pieces with sticks into the hole we’d dug right there, and we’d had no stomach or heart to touch a thing.

  kings

  all

  and

  none

  deep

  the

  golden

  sulfur

  That’s what you say still, isn’t it, Will? Worthless, a disgrace, no one’d live his life alone like that if he weren’t a black disgrace, like you said in your poetry. Don’t know, though, don’t know. He could dance a jig, and maybe did my take on the gold make up for the cattle he took? Remember his eyes? Those same eyes there, a little light, lot of sadness. Kind of a beauty, hanging on to aloneness, shouldn’t I know this by now? Why’d you go up there, young Will, that spring after he’d died? Weren’t nothing there, you’d known. But Jamie, Jamie was there and it’s the prettiest canyon in these parts. His cabin in the yucca and his well all stoned in, with its bucket rig, his pride. There’s Jamie, there, in that heap of rusting cans and broken stone whiskey jugs and bottles out his door. And he’s there each time you passed, on your way up to the head of the canyon, working on the sulfide bismuth mine. Hundred-foot shaft, two-hundred-foot tunnel. Japs would like it, even if Kaiser dropped it ’cause too much sulfur, killing all the trees round where they worked it at Fontana. In Jerome there was that sulfur and arsenic in the ore and the tuberc’lars came from all over, gosh yes, killed the TB, yuh, killed the TB. Each time you pass there’s Jamie, there, not under that tarp and those rocks we rolled in so’s the coyotes wouldn’t dig him up.

  purifier

  Hard to see in the yellow photo, the black pages with their torn gaps, they soak up all the light. White turns to ragged orange to black streaks: trim it tomorrow. Turn it down, see less. The eyes, bees scratch inside behind them. Touch o’ Heaven, orange bees on the yellow label, Joe Tocca, Valley Hope. Peace, Jamie, I wrote the poetry day after we shoved you underground, I’ve learned, by looking back at you.

  Kov

  men

  kiss

  And there’s me above and they’d got the beard off sure. Beard better’n Colin’s it was. Got it off me, womenfolks. He be keeping his, trimmed up some for his Lily, though, since he came through here that other time. Half the Sonora on it then. Me, I dumped a bucket over his head – must’ liked it, stayed a week. Or’d trimmed up for his Dad? Yuh, I see you smiling, girl . . . Juney, little daughter, here, we got that copybook to do . . . crying, girl, but he’ll be back, few days. Denver’s no place, not for Colin.

  on the

  lips

  Yuh, that’s me, all posed and slicked up. Didn’t get the mustache, not that time, bushy too to make up, the hat to hide the bald.

  Me, Lily; touch your heaven, little Lily

  Honey

  Propped against the honey can – Pa’s honey sent to Colin and me – the first album. Time tipped unsteady in the dim light. You’re there, so many of you.

  birth

  from

  death

  Will Speare, dropped the “e” when the fellow in Serrano Palms got all your mail (why you?). With your finger propping up your cheek and your thumb hooked in a jacket pocket, pocket they don’t have nowadays.

  And Jamie Pope, the crack in the gloss rotting your skull.

  Here Buck Brown, high on the covered wagon, like you’d always sat on that bench with your foot on the board and that loop of a whip and the waterfall of a brown beard (did you make the name or the name make you?) with its white spray in the center, framed by the front hoop with the canvas shoved back to the second, water barrel strapped to the side, black oxen looking amused under their yoke.

  And your Indian girl straight like a poplar, the band on her forehead, the black braids in front of her shoulders down as far as her crotch, bits of colored cloth woven in, and the cougar-claw necklace, and the doeskin dress to her ankles and wrists. Standing beside the front wheel. Squaw walks.

  You-without-names in the willows and the sage, your boots and blacks and whites, kerchiefs, you on that great roan white-stockings-and-star with the rifle slid under your knee. No leather chaps in that country – no brush, no cactus, no rain. One-Man Canyon, leading down from the east into Death Valley. Down from his Golden Girl Mine.

  All that, propped against the honey can.

  love’s weight

  is

  hate

  He’s put a can in my duffel bag. The bus leans down on top of us. His arms are so strong and warm, and I shan’t! I shan’t go! O dearest Pa, do not let me go, don’t make me go, like all those other times. The duffel shoved into its roaring stomach, like all those other times. It’s terror and can’t you hear me cry, or don’t you dare? All that I would do is love you and stay with you always, and instead you push
me off into the dark, into all that metal and black glass and vomit and gasoline. How could you take my arms from around you? And you are crying too, I am sure.

  Your pride, you want something better for me, you say, but it’s really your pride; what you’ve done, not what I’ve done. Your PhD.

  The door bangs shut behind me. A cop, he seems, with his uniform, that thing on his belt, his badge, his manner. And the cells down the dark corridor. I look back tight against the glass. The pickup’s lights swing off into the dust, up the line of poplars, gone behind the hay barn. Forever.

  He sank me into forever.

  Up that line of poplars. Little Lily, driving the Percherons, leaning against the oak tubs with your little bottom for support, feet spread out in their new boots. Proud, as your Pa watches you bring the sloshing grapes up to the cellar door.

  black Crow

  Black grapes and their thick smell and the bees hurrying to drink the juice before it’s dumped into the tun.

  white Dove

  Black scowls from over at the silent house, for “That’s not proper girl’s work.”

  white

  white

  white!

  “Give me a son then.”

  Black cellar as Pa and the neighbors come and go with the tubs. Loud and cheery and sweating against sunset, the more so for the black disapproval from over there, “But you know this is not wine country and all that fretting for no more than we can drink and give away to Padre John and you could be working more bees and hauling in more firewood.”

  white Knight

  black Troll

  Your alliance, how you love him, how you spring straight from his temple. And she slapped you and screamed in a whisper because you leaped up, your arms around his neck, your legs around his waist, all crumpling the dress, and kissed him and kissed him . . . Years later to learn from Bella next door that Valley Hope, your people, gossiped of incest. Stunted, stupid, and I don’t care, let them, they can’t hurt anything.

  Your braids tug when they’re tucked into your blue jeans, but they don’t get into trouble there. Your hands stick to the harness and to Sun’s sweaty rump when you slap him off into the corral. Purple from the juice, black from the vine mildew, aching from the millions and millions of bunches you snipped into your basket, from dawn.

  Purple stains on the linen, bread crumbs strewn about, chicken bones, and still there is venison salami – oh, don’t shoot, don’t shoot! – on a chunk of bread and they didn’t water your wine this time at all. It’s just planks on those sawhorses, stools, benches from the tack room and the honey room, and it’s still warm in the night air.

  fairy

  princess

  Lily

  It’s not, though, it’s not, it’s not! . . . The lords and ladies, down from the castle with their wolfhounds, reds and blacks and billowing skirts, tambourines to the tarantella, a hundred flasks on a table from here to there, the donkeys screeching and screeching for attention, the sleeping pigeons fussy about all the commotion, black-frock blessings, and meats that you never had, and cakes and fruit and holy wine and coffee thick as an egg yolk.

  And Miele Toccacielo, il Nettare d’ltalia, they say Garibaldi lived on it for a week and afterwards they would bring him a jar whenever they could. From the oranges and the almonds and the wild flowers of the hills.

  Bee

  royal

  Pa smuggled them in, when he was three months old, remember? They’d brought a swarm over all the way, in steerage, fed on rock candy. Drugged them with smoke from the bark they’d brought, before they got to Ellis Island, and with ice from the galley. Sewed them into little Beppe’s mattress and hoped the wet wouldn’t wake them up. The buzzing baby.

  Right across the country too. And they flourished and swarmed and divided and divided until Tocca honey reached all over the West. And those Tocca Italians with their four dark yellow bands, so diligent and gentle and hardy. Pa, he raises queens now.

  And buys bus tickets.

  Oh Lily, you were so happy! Even when you had to go off to high school every morning, Fort Badly. Not that other bus; this came back every afternoon, and you’d hardly missed a thing.

  spinning

  colors

  Like packing in the hives, high into the mountains for the summer sage and the mahogany and the late wild flowers and the fir honeydew. Like the grape harvest on the last day of September. Like working the old centrifuge before he hitched it to a motor. Like honey tastes – lined up in little plates with numbers, and still you close your eyes so as not to see even the color and know how much the sample has ripened in the comb.

  figures

  racing

  tumbling

  glorious

  skelter

  Like our Saint’s Day with the procession and the Dodg’ems and the Cracker Jack surprises and the spaghetti-eating race. Like being a little girl and pinning all those black skirts one to the next as they knelt in a row during mass and watching one after another tug and trip and turn livid and not being able to swallow your laugh and being spanked on your bare bottom as the tears ran down his face and you loved him so. Like kissing the little cross Pa takes with him whenever he’s up in the mountains.

  Ma’s Madonna, over the olive-oil flame – how she can yell when you leave the front door open and the valley wind snuffs it out! But you don’t care, and he just looks severe. And there she sits, flicking the shuttle back and forth with her thin wrists, up and down on the treadles, knotting in her colors, counting rows against her pattern pinned to the frame. High heels and a permanent now that summer’s here and the mountain road is open and she could find time to get over to Alturas. The dresses she brings you girls, and’ll make you wear to school in the fall!

  “Remember your position, girls. We’re not just anybody. And I won’t have you running around with those Mexicans.”

  But she’ll work away on your trousseaus year after year though what’s the matter with the bedspreads at McFadden’s? But don’t say it, Lily. Her eyes are so tired and you’ve crossed her enough and she just isn’t like you, that’s all.

  Pa’s: “Tomorrow I head for heaven. Who’s with me?”

  You leap on him, screaming. How can you help it? They all know you’ll do that, and they’d be embarrassed, and they’d think it sentimental, and they’d think it unbalanced. But don’t you listen and don’t you think, Lily. You will go and none of the others would dare go too, even if they wanted to.

  free

  straight!

  With her dearest father, that little girl, bouncing on air, flinging about like a tumbleweed or a horse’s mane, or really like only that little Lily can. Two miles straight up, there’s the touch o’ heaven, the home of the gods, the food of the gods.

  from the

  heart

  soar

  up

  And you’re already there. Every step is a skip . . . Oh! walk with joy; remember London in the fog, my Liliana, London on your way together to Calabria, on Birdcage Walk when your Colin could hardly keep you from floating off into the tree tops? . . . every word is a shout of double joy, and you throw your arms about your mother and even she laughs and smiles and kisses you as she grumbles. And you pinch your sisters’ eyes and bite their ears until they become quite cross – but I love you, I love you, can’t I love you? are you all so boiled in propriety that you just can’t move? I won’t say I’m sorry.

  wed

  Oh! but there’s nothing, nothing, nothing else but now, this only moment, this explosion which is you, Lily. Look around you, there’s nothing but the sun, the mountain air, you touch heaven. And do they know it, these sitting here just like before, looking away, looking busy, looking untouched? All except for him. He’s watching you, and he’s dancing with you, and he loves you. It’s just that he has to sparkle mostly inward. You have to watch him carefully to see it, his way of sort of storing it up for later. But you can see it, his way of playing with his wedding ring, his oh-so-solemnness, an
d he turns all gruff and delicate.