Dad got stranded in town again last week. He hung around awhile to see if the range would move back east, finally drove his old Ford over to Eugene and up the McKenzie River highway to get back to the ranch. Said he’d like to stay but Charlie Echeverria would be getting into some kind of trouble if he did. He just doesn’t like to stay away from the place more than a night or two. It’s hard on him when we turn up way over here on the coast like this.
I know he wishes I’d go back with him. I guess I ought to. I ought to live with him. I could see Mama every time Ether was over there. It isn’t that. I ought to get it straight in my mind what I want to do. I ought to go to college. I ought to get out of this town. I ought to get away.
I don’t think Gracie ever actually has seen me. I don’t do anything she can see. I don’t drive a semi.
I ought to learn. If I drove a truck she’d see me. I could come through Ether off the 1–5 or down from 84, wherever. Like that shit kept coming here last summer she was so crazy about. Used to come into the Seven-Eleven all the time for Gatorade. Called me Boy. Hey boy gimme the change in quarters. She’d be sitting up in his eighteen-wheeler playing with the gears. She never came in. Never even looked. I used to think maybe she was sitting there with her jeans off. Bareass on that truck seat. I don’t know why I thought that. Maybe she was.
I don’t want to drive a God damn stinking semi or try to feed a bunch of steers in a God damn desert either or sell God damn Hostess Twinkies to crazy women with purple hair either. I ought to go to college. Learn something. Drive a sports car. A Miata. Am I going to sell Gatorade to shits all my life? I ought to be somewhere that is somewhere.
I dreamed the moon was paper and I lit a match and set fire to it. It flared up just like a newspaper and started dropping down fire on the roofs, scraps of burning. Mama came out of the grocery and said, “That’ll take the ocean.” Then I woke up. I heard the ocean where the sagebrush hills had been.
I wish I could make Dad proud of me anywhere but the ranch. But that’s the only place he lives. He won’t ever ask me to come live there. He knows I can’t. I ought to.
Edna
Oh how my children tug at my soul just as they tugged at my breasts, so that I want to yell Stop! I’m dry! You drank me dry years ago! Poor sweet stupid Archie. What on earth to do for him. His father found the desert he needed. All Archie’s found is a tiny little oasis he’s scared to leave.
I dreamed the moon was paper, and Archie came out of the house with a box of matches and tried to set it afire, and I was frightened and ran into the sea.
Ady came out of the sea. There were no tracks on that beach that morning except his, coming up towards me from the breaker line. I keep thinking about the men lately. I keep thinking about Needless. I don’t know why. I guess because I never married him. Some of them I wonder why I did, how it came about. There’s no reason in it. Who’d ever have thought I’d ever sleep with Tom Sunn? But how could I go on saying no to a need like that? His fly bust every time he saw me across the street. Sleeping with him was like sleeping in a cave. Dark, uncomfortable, echoes, bears farther back in. Bones. But a fire burning. Tom’s true soul is that fire burning, but he’ll never know it. He starves the fire and smothers it with wet ashes, he makes himself the cave where he sits on cold ground gnawing bones. Women’s bones.
But Mollie is a brand snatched from his burning. I miss Mollie. Next time we’re over east again I’ll go up to Pendleton and see her and the grandbabies. She doesn’t come. Never did like the way Ether ranges. She’s a stayputter. Says all the moving around would make the children insecure. It didn’t make her insecure in any harmful way that I can see. It’s her Eric that would disapprove. He’s a snob. Prison clerk. What a job. Walk out of a place every night where the others are all locked in, how’s that for a ball and chain? Sink you if you ever tried to swim.
Where did Ady swim up from I wonder? Somewhere deep. Once he said he was Greek, once he said he worked on a Australian ship, once he said he had lived on an island in the Philippines where they speak a language nobody else anywhere speaks, once he said he was born in a canoe at sea. It could all have been true. Or not. Maybe Archie should go to sea. Join the Navy or the Coast Guard. But no, he’d drown.
Tad knows he’ll never drown. He’s Ady’s son, he can breathe water. I wonder where Tad is now. That is a tugging too, that not knowing, not knowing where the child is, an aching pull you stop noticing because it never stops. But sometimes it turns you, you find you’re facing another direction, like your body was caught by the thorn of a blackberry, by an undertow. The way the moon pulls the tides.
I keep thinking about Archie, I keep thinking about Needless. Ever since I saw him look at Sook. I know what it is, it’s that other dream I had. Right after the one with Archie. I dreamed something, it’s hard to get hold of, something about being on this long long beach, like I was beached, yes, that’s it, I was stranded, and I couldn’t move. I was drying up and I couldn’t get back to the water. Then I saw somebody walking towards me from way far away down the beach. His tracks in the sand were ahead of him. Each time he stepped in one, in the footprint, it was gone when he lifted his foot. He kept coming straight to me and I knew if he got to me I could get back in the water and be all right. When he got close up I saw it was him. It was Needless. That’s an odd dream.
If Archie went to sea he’d drown. He’s a drylander, like his father.
Sookie, now, Sook is Toby Walker’s daughter. She knows it. She told me, once, I didn’t tell her. Sook goes her own way. I don’t know if he knows it. I don’t think so. She has my eyes and hair. And there were some other possibilities. And I never felt it was the right thing to tell a man unless he asked. Toby didn’t ask, because of what he believed about himself. But I knew the night, I knew the moment she was conceived. I felt the child to be leap in me like a fish leaping in the sea, a salmon coming up the river, leaping the rocks and rapids, shining. Toby had told me he couldn’t have children—“not with any woman born,” he said, with a sorrowful look. He came pretty near telling me where he came from, that night. But I didn’t ask. Maybe because of what I believe about myself, that I only have the one life and no range, no freedom to walk in the hidden places.
Anyhow, I told him that that didn’t matter, because if I felt like it I could conceive by taking thought. And for all I know that’s what happened. I thought Sookie and out she came, red as a salmon, quick and shining. She is the most beautiful child, girl, woman. What does she want to stay here in Ether for? Be an old maid teacher like Emma? Pump gas, give perms, clerk in the grocery? Who’ll she meet here? Well, God knows I met enough. I like it, she says, I like not knowing where I’ll wake up. She’s like me. But still there’s the tug, the dry longing. Oh, I guess I had too many children. I turn this way, that way, like a compass with forty Norths. Yet always going on the same way in the end. Fitting my feet into my footprints that disappear behind me.
It’s a long way down from the mountains. My feet hurt.
Tobinye Walker
Man is the animal that binds time, they say. I wonder. We’re bound by time, bounded by it. We move from a place to another place, but from a time to another time only in memory and intention, dream and prophecy. Yet time travels us. Uses us as its road, going on never stopping always in one direction. No exits off this freeway.
I say we because I am a naturalized citizen. I didn’t use to be a citizen at all. Time once was to me what my back yard is to Emma’s cat. No fences mattered, no boundaries. But I was forced to stop, to settle, to join. I am an American. I am a castaway. I came to grief.
I admit I’ve wondered if it’s my doing that Ether ranges, doesn’t stay put. An effect of my accident. When I lost the power to walk straight, did I impart a twist to the locality? Did it begin to travel because my travelling had ceased? If so, I can’t work out the mechanics of it. It’s logical, it’s
neat, yet I don’t think it’s the fact. Perhaps I’m just dodging my responsibility. But to the best of my memory, ever since Ether was a town it’s always been a real American town, a place that isn’t where you left it. Even when you live there it isn’t where you think it is. It’s missing. It’s restless. It’s off somewhere over the mountains, making up in one dimension what it lacks in another. If it doesn’t keep moving the malls will catch it. Nobody’s surprised it’s gone. The white man’s his own burden. And nowhere to lay it down. You can leave town easy enough, but coming back is tricky. You come back to where you left it and there’s nothing but the parking lot for the new mall and a giant yellow grinning clown made of balloons. Is that all there was to it? Better not believe it, or that’s all you’ll ever have: blacktop and cinderblock and a blurred photograph of a little boy smiling. The child was murdered along with many others. There’s more to it than that, there is an old glory in it, but it’s hard to locate, except by accident. Only Roger Hiddenstone can come back when he wants to, riding his old Ford or his old horse, because Roger owns nothing but the desert and a true heart. And of course wherever Edna is, it is. It’s where she lives.
I’ll make my prophecy. When Starra and Roger lie in each other’s tender arms, she sixteen he sixty, when Gracie and Archie shake his pickup truck to pieces making love on the mattress in the back on the road out to the Hohovars, when Ervin Muth and Thomas Sunn get drunk with the farmers in the ashram and dance and sing and cry all night, when Emma Bodely and Pearl Amethyst gaze long into each other’s shining eyes among the cats, among the crystals—that same night Needless the grocer will come at last to Edna. To him she will bear no child but joy. And orange trees will blossom in the streets of Ether.
Half Past Four
A NEW LIFE
Stephen blushed. A fair-skinned man, bald to the crown, he blushed clear pink. He hugged Ann with one arm as she kissed his cheek. “Good to see you, honey,” he said, freeing himself, glancing past her, and smiling rather desperately. “Ella just went out. Just ten minutes ago. She had to take some typing over to Bill Hoby. Stay around till she gets back, she’d be real sorry to miss you.”
“Sure,” Ann said. “Mother’s fine, she had this flu, but not as bad as some people. You all been OK?”
“Oh, yeah, sure. You want some coffee? Coke? Come on in.” He stood aside and followed her through the small living room crowded with blond furniture to the kitchen where yellow metal slat blinds directed sunlight in molten strips onto the counters.
“Hey, it’s hot,” Ann said.
“Want some coffee? There’s this cinnamon and mocha decaf that Ella and I drink a lot. It sure is. Glad it’s Saturday. It’s up here somewhere.”
“I don’t want anything.”
“Coke?” He closed the cupboard, opened the refrigerator.
“Oh, sure, OK. Diet if you’ve got it.”
She stood by the counter and watched him get the glass and the ice and the bottle, a plastic half-gallon of cola. She did not want to open doors in this kitchen as if prying, as if entitled, or to change the angle of the slat blinds, as she would have done at home, to shut the hot light out. He fixed her a tall red plastic glass of cola, and she drank off half of it. “Oh, yeah!” she said. “OK!”
“Come on outside.”
“No ball game?”
“Been doing some gardening. With Toddie.”
Ann had assumed that the boy was with his mother, or rather her imagination had linked him to his mother so that if Ella wasn’t here Toddie wasn’t here; now she felt betrayed.
Indicating where she should go but making her go first, as when he had brought her through the house, her father ushered her to the back-porch door, and stood aside and followed her as she went past the washer and dryer and the mop bucket and some brooms to the screen door and down the single cement step into the back yard.
He batted the screen door shut with one foot and stood beside her on a brick path, two bricklengths wide, that ran along dividing the flowerbeds under the house wall from the small, shrub-circled lawn. Two small iron chairs painted white, with rust stains where the paint had come off, faced each other across a matching table at one side of the grass plot. Beyond them Toddie crouched, turned away, near a big flowering abelia in the shade of the mirrorplant hedge that enclosed the garden.
Toddie was bigger than she had remembered, as broad-backed as a grown man.
“Hey, Toddie. Here’s ah, here’s Ann!” Stephen said. His fair, tanned face was still pink. Maybe he wasn’t blushing, maybe it was the heat. In the enclosed garden the sunlight glaring from the white house wall burned on the skin like an open fire. Had he been going to say, “your sister”? His voice was loud and jovial. Toddie did not respond in any way.
Ann looked around at the garden. It was an airless, grass-floored room with high green walls and a ceiling of brightness. Beautiful pale-colored poppies swayed by the hose rack, growing in clean, weeded dirt. She looked back at them, away from the stocky figure crouched in the shade across the lawn. She did not want to look at him, and her father had no right to make her be with him and look at him, even if it was superstitious, he should think of protecting the baby, but that was stupid, that was superstitious. “Those are really neat,” she said, touching the loose, soft petal of an open poppy. “Terrific colors. This is a nice garden, Daddy. You must have been working hard on it.”
“Haven’t you ever been out back here?”
She shook her head. She had never even been in the bedrooms. She had been three or four times to this house since Stephen and Ella married. Once for Sunday brunch. Ella had served on trays in the living room, and Toddie had watched TV the whole time. The first time she had been in the house was when Ella was one of Stephen’s salesgirls, not his wife. They had stopped by her house for her father to leave off some papers or something. Ann had been in high school, she had stood around in the living room while her father and Ella talked about shoe orders. Knowing that Ella had a retarded child, she had hoped that it wouldn’t come into the room but all the same had wanted to see it. When Ella’s husband died suddenly of something, Ann’s father had said solemnly at the dinner table, “Lucky thing they had that house of theirs paid off,” and Ann’s mother had said, “Poor thing, with that poor child of theirs, what is it, a mongoloid?” and then they had talked about how mongoloids usually died and it was a mercy. But here he was still alive and Stephen was living in his house.
“I need some shade,” Ann said, heading for the iron chairs. “Come and talk with me, Daddy.”
He followed her. While she sat down and slipped off her sandals to cool her bare feet in the grass, he stood there. She looked up at him. The curve of his bald forehead shone in the sunlight, open and noble as a high hill standing bare above a crowded subdivision. His face was suburban, crowded with features, chin and long lips and nostrils and fleshy nose and the small, clear, anxious blue eyes. Only the forehead that looked like a big California hill had room. “Oh, Daddy,” she said, “how you been?”
“Just fine. Just fine,” he said, half turned away from her. “The Walnut Creek store is going just great. Walking shoes.” He bent to uproot a small dandelion from the short, coarse grass. “Walking shoes outsell running shoes two to one at the Mall. So, you been job hunting? You ever talk to Krim?”
“Oh, yeah, couple weeks ago.” Ann yawned. The still heat and the smell of newly turned earth made her sleepy. Everything made her sleepy. Waking up made her sleepy. She yawned again. “Excuse me! He said, oh, he said something might would open up in May.”
“Good. Good. Good outfit,” Stephen said, looking around the garden, and moving a few steps away. “Good contacts.”
“But I’ll have to stop working in July because of the baby, so I don’t know if it’s worth it.”
“Get to know people, get started,” Stephen said indistinctly. He we
nt to the edge of the lawn nearest the abelia and said in a cheerful, loud voice, “Hey, great work there, Toddie! Hey, look at that! That’s my boy. All right!”
A blurred, whitish face under dark hair turned up to him for a moment in shadow.
“Look at that. Diggin’ up a storm there. You’re a real farmer.” Stephen turned and spoke to Ann from shade across the white molten air to her strip of shade: “Toddie’s going to put in some more flowers here. Bulbs and stuff for fall.”
Ann drank her melted-ice water and got up from the dwarf chair that had already stained her white T-shirt with rust. She came over nearer her father and looked at the strip of upturned earth. The big boy crouched motionless, trowel in hand, head sunk.
“Look, why not sort of round off that corner, see,” Stephen said to him, going forward to point. “Dig to here, maybe. Think so?”
The boy nodded and began digging, slowly and forcefully. His hands were white and thick, with very short, wide nails rimmed with black dirt.
“What do you think, maybe dig it up clear over to that rose bush. Space out the bulbs better. Think it’d look good?”
Toddie looked up at him again. Ann looked at the blurred mouth, the dark-haired upper lip. “Yeah, uh-huh,” Toddie said, and bent to work again.
“Kind of curve it off there at the rose bush,” Stephen said. He glanced round at Ann. His face was relaxed, uncrowded. “This guy’s a natural farmer,” he said. “Get anything to grow. Teachin’ me. Isn’t that right, Toddie? Teachin’ me!”
“I guess,” the low voice said. The head stayed bowed, the thick fingers groped in earth.
The Unreal and the Real, Selected Stories of Ursula K. Le Guin Volume 1: Where on Earth Page 28
