Twisted Tree

by Kent Meyers

  Richard turned to Clay.

  What were you thinking?

  He can’t talk that way about her.

  You were going to fight him? He would’ve knocked your head off.

  I would’ve hit him with my shovel.

  He wouldn’t have cared about your shovel. Don’t start fights you can’t win. Especially when there’s no reason to.

  I had to do something, Dad. He can’t just talk about her like that.

  Men talk like that. It’s just stupid. Stupid and ugly and not funny at all. But it’s just talk. If you can’t distinguish between talk and action you’re going to make trouble your whole life. For yourself and everybody else.

  His words swirled Richard back to that night with Sophie Lawrence. It sank into him that he hadn’t known talk from action then and had missed something vital that was so far gone it was beyond salvaging or recognition, like something swept off a boat and seen later, far away on the water, unrecognizable except as something left behind, that had been an object with a name and use but was now only a shape to be guessed at, in a vastness, in a space.

  Richard was held suspended in that vastness. Then he returned to the world and was awfully sorry. Because he saw Clay’s fallen face. And he knew Clay wasn’t a troublemaker but would all his life be the opposite, someone trying to keep others from trouble, and that it was a burden hard to bear. He saw his son’s life as a whole suddenly, saw Clay as an old man, and it seemed—that life Richard saw—a dignified and sad and noble endeavor never accomplished. Looking back as he was from the end of his son’s life, Richard saw the people Clay had tried to keep from trouble as peeping birds blown by irresistible winds against the hard, invisible panes of their lives, and stunned, always stunned, and crying out, on green lawns bloodied, on sidewalks dusty and bloodied. He saw the old man Clay was lift his hand in a final, useless blessing, and around him a great grieving for a goodness gone. Richard was filled with a sense of the myriad disappointments of that life yet to come—and he knew it was already too late to raise his son to be hard, and it filled him with pride and sorrow.

  You’re not a troublemaker, he said. Jesus, Clay. The last thing you are is a troublemaker.

  He saw Clay fighting tears again. He had this moment to wonder whether Clay would let them fall—observing his son in a crystalline, distant space that was both intimate and aloof, like a single prayer offered in an empty church. And he had the clear, complete thought that if Clay were a daughter he would not be fighting his tears, they would be making clean pathways down the dirt on his face, and Richard would go to her, that daughter, and take those tears onto his fingertips and enclose her in his muddy arms, and they’d stand mudded together, until something had passed.

  Wakings

  One

  He wakes to the stars rampant, reeling: hammered, pointed, painted, printed—and through them satellites jerking, light intermittent and doubtful, storms in the stratosphere, currents of shearing air. He stirs. The earth is comfortable here, this small depression just outside the cemetery fence near the corner, among the prairie dog holes, a sinking of the soil like a bed barely too small, the ground rising at his neck like a pillow, and the grass a mattress. He rises, yellow with pollen, into the stars, yellow as the moon, a golden coin of a man who finds his Thermos, twists the cap, pours, squats, two stumps a choice for backrests, immense old cottonwoods that once thrust into the air above this shallow depression, now jagged, splintered, tornado-twisted, unscrewed from the ground, leverage of leaves and limbs, torsion of fiber, until the trunks erupted crystalline, spiking, the severed trees turned into mindless, blowsy birds. He’s found them both, bone white, nesting in the grass a half-mile and a mile away, spit out from the wall of wind.

  Two

  He wakes to the ceiling of a bedroom in the old house, the house whose very mention brought acid to his grandfather’s voice, like the smell of the powder coating a battery terminal. A dark crack splits the white ceiling, dark lightning in a dirty white sky. He has scraped away the swallow and raccoon shit to lie in the center of the floor and sleep in the house’s sighing, its residual, constant cracking. He can hear it decay, hear it sway slowly back to the ground. He can hear the buffalo herd in the night, as if the night is softly grunting, the air muttering dark to the grass. I’d burn that house, his grandfather said, or he thinks he remembers his grandfather said. I’d burn it I’d burn it I’d burn it, if I hadn’t sold it I’d burn it. And that old, old woman, ancient, rocking in her chair, mother of his grandfather, that old woman with the dark, lightning-like scar on her face, nodding and whispering burn it burn it burn it, rocking to burn it, fire of lightning in her face striking outward to burn it. There is a rocking chair in another room, covered in dried dung and dust. It blows in the wind when the east wind blows. He won’t go near that chair, it is like her chair, the one in his house upstairs, in the room she lived in, that he won’t go into either.

  In another room in this house—a room with window intact and a door he keeps closed to lock out the swallows and coons—is a child’s bed and a nightstand he dusts with his sleeve, and on it a brush with fine hairs caught in its bristles. They move in the room’s small currents. He has poured the fuel, stood in its reek, lit the match, and then held it, hearing burn it burn it burn it. But the fine hairs move, as if the girl is alive on the bed, breathing small, regular breaths, and the night outside grunting softly. He lets the match burn down to his fingers, then escapes like a fox through a window. He folds himself into lightning and leaps away from the words.

  Three

  He wakes to the sound of an owl’s wings, which he can’t have possibly heard, yet he sees it mooncast on the leaves above him, stalker of air, clawer of wind, nightmare of mole and mouse, dread of snake and weasel. A weasel’s nightmare, he thinks, and stumbles to his feet with his rifle already aimed, at nothing. He is lost in the smell of salt cedar blooming: dislocated, ajar. He steadies himself with the Dipper, the sweep of its hand on the sky, the North Star’s jeweled axle. He goes to the river. He has tunnels through the tamarisk, and he stoops like a bear in a labyrinth to the edge of the engineered water, a dam he’s never seen scribing the flow. He thrusts his head under, thinks breathe, breathe, breathe. But his body itself seems against it. He sits on the stones and remembers his mother reading in a chair by the side of his bed. He remembers how he came home with a pheasant in hand to show her, and she wasn’t there, she was gone. His wet hair drips on his knees and wets the backs of his hands. Dick, he thinks, Jane, he thinks, Sally and Spot, and the back of the wind somewhere. Aloud he says, Mom, and then says it again.

  Four

  He wakes inside the herd. He has coated himself in their droppings. He wants to know like they know, wants to suck in the wind and discover with a huff of surprise that his humanness stinks. He wants to know in the smell of their shit comfort, security, care, and other scents as concern. The rumbling of their guts in the night seduced him to sleep: a lullaby of fermentation, digestion, rumination. He couldn’t go any further. Through the fence in the dark, quietly clipped, and chin to the ground like a snake toward the sounds of their guts, their lungs, the popping of tendons in joints, the compression of cartilage. Sounds massive and ultimate and quiet. He couldn’t keep his eyes open. He wakes to find they’ve moved closer. They’d mistook him for shit and lie monumental around him. He can’t see but hears them, their breathing now, the slide of integument, the music of gas. He lifts his smeared face. He feels like weeping and does, silently, so as not to alarm them, with his face to the ground to withhold the smell of his tears. Antelope are older. Only their bones, their muscles and stride and their eyes looking backwards, remember the dire wolf, the short-faced bear. A predatory world, harder, faster, better. This is as close as he’ll get. He drags himself forward among them. But shit doesn’t move, so—the logic of beasts—they ignore it. He passes by them so closely he feels their breath on his neck, sees their horns against the sky, is tickled once by a beard. Is this true?
He passes. On the other side of the herd he stands. Raises his arms, stomps the ground. He doesn’t know what will happen. They may doze on till morning, may trample him, or stampede away. Nothing at first. Then he calls. Shit doesn’t speak: they ignore him. He calls again and again and again. Shoo, he says, you’re free, he says, goddamn you sonsabitches, get your bisonasses off the ground and move, he says. Human language comes only from humans. The logic of beasts: he hears the herd rising awful and grand, moving away, toward the gap he has cut in the fence.

  Five

  He wakes to that old lightning-faced woman. She kneels near one of the crosses, thin boards stuck in the ground. Some have fallen. There are names on the cross boards. He can’t read them. They were carved too lightly to last. Weather has muddled them, made them in moonlight illegible. He’s tried to read them with his fingers. There is an E, a J, an M, a P. First initials. But the smaller letters escape him. His fingers, caterpillars, crawl over them. The starlight flares down. It’s no longer his land. His grandfather sold it. To a Damish, who sold to the buffalo rancher, his neighbor, the one with the daughter he saw born and who leans her horse around the barrels and is weightless. But her father has no right to this place.

  His grandfather should never have sold it. He lived upstairs with his mother. Each in a room. She rocked. Her lightning struck forward then back and forward again and then back. While the floor creaked. It was his job to take up her meals. Up the stairs with a plate almost too heavy to carry, and through the doorway, after a knock. She made him sit while she ate. Told him stories. Warned him of things. He can’t remember the warnings. She knows the names here. She came here in secret, alone, dug the holes, placed them in it, he knows, each in a sheet, and with a knife carved the names. This place can’t be seen from the old house. It is covered with buffalo berry and cedar. The old man who gave her that lightning wouldn’t have known she was down here. She hid the graves well. He found them fleeing a failure to burn down the house. He ran, hearing burn it burn it behind him. He hid under cedar. When he woke he saw them: the crosses. Four of them, next to each other. He raised the fallen ones up. When he sleeps here, sometimes she comes. She lays her clean cheek on the ground, the lightning cheek to the sky. She kisses the graves. It is always while he is waking. When he knows he’s awake she is gone.

  Six

  He wakes in a culvert. The sound of a car stopping wakes him. The tight, ribbed, galvanized sky. Voices coming down into it. This is what death is: the sky close, and voices coming from somewhere. Maybe, he thinks. Maybe. He digs in his elbows, crawls forward dragging his feet, wriggling for purchase, the O of the world before him enlarging. What if it didn’t? What if he crawled like this toward it, but the burrow just lengthened, the O stayed the same size: a circle of light reducing itself, adjusting forever to his movement? He almost wishes it so, these ribs of steel like the bones of the earth close around him, and he thumping within it forever. But the light does enlarge, both wider and more, and the voices, one calm, one almost the cries of an animal, get louder, and then he’s emerging headfirst, blinking, quiet as slither, onto the borrow ditch bottom. He hears another car coming, hears it stop, hears a door open and shut, footsteps, a question within the animal cries: Should I go for help? Stay here. He slides up the borrow ditch, peeks over. They’re not looking his way. They’re looking at what he is: a blood-red girlchild held up to the light, and bawling, a new voice in the morning.

  Seven

  He wakes among bones. Yards of bones going down, he feels them, the earth a matrix of bones here, the earth crazed with bones. Above him the butte, straight-edged, blocks out all stars to the east. All is dark. All hidden. He nestles deeper and dozes. He dreams of the herds as massive rain falling down, over the edge of the cliff, to cries: hailing down darkly, tumbling, their hooves upside down running in air, their horns like moons curving earthward, their spindle legs which will break upon impact. A blizzard of blood and of flesh piling up. And the predatory men plying spears, cocking their arms, while the women, holding stone knives, wait for the dying to end.

  Eight

  He woke only once here, to nothing. No movement or sound. But he tasted blood in the air. He thought as he came out of sleep that he had swallowed a knife. He thought he was choking on blood. The stars were serene, the moon distant, indifferent. He coughed into his hand, looked at his palm, expecting a gestalt of darkness. None appeared. He wasn’t, then, dying. But the scent of blood grew. As if he had brought down a pronghorn, had opened it, was kneeling beside it. But greater. And not an antelope’s blood. He knew. The air or the ground here: one or the other was bloody. Or both. He left. He never returned. The place was inviting, two depressions, with soft grass, far from the old house, from anything. So far that the moon seemed as close as the earth. But the air there was red. Something didn’t want him there, sleeping.

  Draw

  ANGELA MORRISON WAS SIX years younger than Brock, and only twenty years old, when she married him. She’d visited the ranch before, but settling there, living there—she’d had no idea. It felt like the ends of the earth. There wasn’t even enough noise to mark time’s passage. She had to keep a radio or TV on. She missed everything about Sioux Falls: traffic, the Empire Mall, restaurants, the muddy Big Sioux River. And green lawns. She spent hours, while Brock was off doing whatever he did with cattle and machinery, watering the grass and flower beds. The garden hose spewed musty-smelling water pumped from the stock dam. She was holding it, watching the arc and splash, when she saw her first rattlesnake, sunning itself on a rock in the bottom of a deep, steep-sided ravine that curved away from the house.

  It was so far away, seventy or eighty yards, that at first she squinted, wondering at the rock’s weird mottling. Then something in her perception shifted, and the snake’s contours leapt into clarity, so defined it seemed to jump off the rock and float in the air between her and the ravine. She dropped the hose with a little cry and ran into the house. When Brock came home for supper, he found the hose running and gullies eroded into the dirt between clumps of grass, and small lakes gathered in wheel ruts. He stepped into the house intending to explain to his new wife that they had enough water in the dam for the lawn and flowers, but there wasn’t much sense in letting the hose run once you had the job done, it wasn’t like water was a nuisance out here with so much of it around. But when he saw Angela’s face, he changed his mind.

  Something happen? he asked instead.

  When I was watering the lawn, I saw a snake.

  What’d it look like?

  It was big. It had these dark blotches.

  Sounds like a bull snake or a rattler.

  A rattlesnake? I saw a rattlesnake?

  How close were you?

  She nodded toward the living room window. It was in that ravine, she said.

  That’s probably what you saw, then. There’re rattlesnakes in that draw. You got some eyes if you spotted one from the yard.

  You never told me there were rattlesnakes here.

  He paused, puzzled at the accusation in her voice.

  Didn’t tell you there was wind either, Ang.

  I knew it was windy. You never told me there were rattlesnakes.

  Brock had jacked his boots off before coming into the house, and now he stared at his stockings. Maybe he hadn’t ever mentioned rattlesnakes to her. They were like dry weather or the occasional tornado. You lived with them. He’d bought her a pair of boots, but maybe he hadn’t told her all the good reasons to wear them. Still, he thought it best to apologize.

  Guess it never came up, he said. Sorry. Now you know.

  I want you to get rid of them.

  Brock glanced at her just in time to understand she was serious, and he cut off the smile that almost made it to his face.

  That’d be a fine thing, Ang, he said. So would getting rid a grasshoppers. Or having enough rain.

  Good, then, she said—and rose and kissed him.

  He was so surprised he kissed her back. But when
he accepted the kiss instead of pulling back and putting out his hands and saying, Wait a sec. Let’s get clear what I’m saying, he found himself complicit in a promise he’d never made.

  Four months before the wedding, while making plans with her mother, Angela had wondered whether she should even get married. She couldn’t give reasons. She just wondered, Was it really what she wanted?

  Honey, her mother said. It’s kind of late for doubts. We’ve already ordered the cake.

  Angela bent, blinded by dismissal, to the wedding magazine in her lap.

  Now, the bouquet, her mother said. Carnations or mums? Or maybe roses?

  Angela couldn’t think. She didn’t care about the flowers. She didn’t want a thing to do with them.

  You decide, she said. It doesn’t matter to me.

  She was determined after that not to give space to any doubt or uncertainty. She would simply insist that it would all be good, and it would be. Except for a single unanticipated moment, it mostly worked. Right before the vows she handed her bouquet to her bridesmaid, and as she saw it float away in the bridesmaid’s hands, she realized she wouldn’t have chosen carnations or mums or roses, any of them. A feeling of being out of control of her own life, of being sacrificed to something she couldn’t name, bucked into her chest and throat, and with it the added desperation that she couldn’t let it show. She jerked her head away from the bouquet to Brock’s face and smiled. He saw the glistening in her eyes and was overcome himself.

  In those hours alone in the house after seeing that first snake, even before she knew it was a rattlesnake, Angela allowed herself to wonder out loud if she’d made a mistake. Two things kept returning to her mind. The first was the way the snake had suddenly and irreversibly become what it was: the way it had been just a rock with puzzling markings, and then instantly had changed, and she couldn’t get the rock back. The second was flowers. There were all sorts of flowers. There were calla lilies, gladioluses. Why not sprays of white and purple lilacs, plucked minutes before the ceremony? Or bouquets of wildflowers, profusions beyond naming? Or why even a bouquet? How about a single flower, a garden tulip, a yellow one, with deep purple striations? Her mother might have been horrified, but it could have been.