Old Border Road

by Susan Froderberg

  You kids, he says, and he chuckles the way he does.

  Anyways, I need to skedaddle into town to see a man about a new saddle for the bay, if you maybe want to ride along, he says.

  Son says for me to wait for him, I say, and the old man okeydokeys me and leaves me standing at the mantel. I go back to looking at the pictures, all handsomely framed as they are and carefully arranged between candlesticks and Navajo bowls and pottery vases and those kinds of things set there by the old man’s wife. There’s a photo of Son when he was at the age of still being a Sonny, a small boy in cowboy hat and boots, holding a rope coiled in his kid-gloved hand. There’s a picture of him as a 4-H’er, standing proud beside his show cow, and next to it the purple ribbon won and hung in another frame. There’s a picture of Son grown some, in uniform with numbers on his chest and a ball in the hook of his arm, and I’m struck with a worry now about others that might have loved him before me, girls’ names I’ve heard from him that come back to me, visions that give me this sinking feeling.

  I want to shake the crazy thoughts away.

  I look at the picture of him most recently, on horseback and dressed in vest and hat and badge, his chest out and held proud as a dancer does it, with the old man at his side and with the rest of the posse back in the background. I look all the photographs over again, who knows how many times. Until I notice something about the look on Son’s face, how the look is the same, no matter what age or situation, in each of the pictures.

  There is something that is off in him.

  What is it I see? Is it boredom? Or seriousness? Or conceit? Is it impatience I see? Is it Son’s being posed to be what’s right in the eyes of others? Is it his trying to fit with certain attitudes and virtues they find most redeeming?

  Will that look be changed in photographs of us to come?

  How could I doubt it?

  I will myself not to doubt it.

  I am so much in love these days, I take pity on anyone who isn’t us. I look at everyone throughout the day, couples young and old, people here and there, alone or with others, smiling or talking or whatnot, and I cannot see a single face of anyone who could possibly be as happy as I am. It is only us who really know love, me and Son.

  THE WOUND ON his head adds to the sanctity of this night, to the ritual of it, as if the clout were a sacrifice to powers unseen to ensure the blessings of our marriage. Son laughs when I tell him this, says I’m loco, says I’m loony in my cabeza, is what I am. But I tell him I will treasure whatever scar might likely be there to remind me for the rest of our days. I say I will cherish each day I am graced to see it. I’m looking at Son and staying my eyes on him, trying to embrace what I see. From this moment on, I will myself to hang on to everything here, this night, our beginning. I wonder about the reel of time we are in and how it will spill out into memory someday, and how it will all be lost or be changed. I want what is now to be always what it is. I cling to the words of every song that plays on the radio. I study the arrangement of the bed in the room we are in, where the door is, where the bathroom is, how the suitcase rests open, how the shoes are kicked off, the way the keys splay from the toss, the way the flower in the lapel begins to fail. I press at my temples to stay all that’s before me inside my head. The smell of the perfume on me, on him, I savor it to save it. The feel of the silk of this nightgown that slips from my shoulders and down past my hips, the way the fabric of it puddles as it does to the floor, I will the imprint in. I want Son’s chest in my keeping, his mouth, his hands on me, always to feel it all as I feel it now. I want always this happiness of wanting. This happiness of having.

  Remember this moment, I say.

  I WONDERED TOO late about the luck of the dress.

  It was my mother’s, the one she had worn with my father, the one she had on just the one time on that one day, before all the bulk of it got packed up into my grandmother’s hope chest, where it would stay boxed and wrapped and mysterious until there was serious enough claim for it to be brought out to life again. I had seen the dress only in the photograph, the one my mother had kept for whatever reason, as it was my father in the picture with her, and not any man of hers recent. The photograph is also kept inside a hope chest, this being my mother’s, one of the few items of furniture she will drag along with her from place to place. On slow afternoons I would open the chest to study that picture of my father and my mother, thinking if I had been my mother I would have lived a different story, given that dress.

  Given my father.

  It’s a white satin dress with a long train. There’s a pale stain my mother left beneath the layer of tulle on the lap of it, but we don’t see this until it’s too late to get another dress, and so I wear it the way it is, stain or no stain. I cover the stain over with a manner of moving my hands or with the gather of the organza or with the collar and flower of bouquet.

  My mother’s most recent bouquet was a small one compared to mine, more a nosegay or a posy, you might say, as though her hopes or her enthusiasm or her something or other had waned along with the size of her blossomed arrangement. Of course she wore no gown or fancy dress this time, nor any kind of altered rendering of one as she had with some of the men at the nuptials in between. She even left the posing out, as far as you could see from the snapshot she sent from the gambling town farther north. There she was, with a new man in hand, with him trailing a couple of steps behind her and her turning in a hurry to go, as if she had to get out of that chapel before someone up in the blue told her no, told her you can’t be going out running around and getting married this many times, over and over again.

  WE LEAVE THE lodge with mist rising like smoke from the dew and with sunrise embering in pink through the trees. Flycatchers chitter and pip and acrobat about in the branches of broadleafs and pines. The wind sways boughs and rustles bracken and skitters twigs and leaves, and it slaps a cold wake-up at our faces.

  We are day one married.

  We’re restless with readiness to get back onto the highway. We get going and are soon moving westward to the coast, where we will from there make a turn right and go straight the rest of the way up toward the northern border. Our holiday lasts half a moon’s phase and it is rapturous and ordinary, detailed and blurry, seeming to go on and on for a long time, and it is too soon over, the way all time can be. Just as in my telling this, present tense to past, just as long and quick as that.

  We do many things in many places. We sit atop a marine terrace eating abalone and vinegared chips, with breakers striking at the cliffs and Son speaking of the old man’s infidelities. We stop at a famous place in Angels City, and I’m lucky they don’t card me, and we drink whiskey and dance a-go-go at a disco, confident as if we should be locals in the place, even with Son dressed in cowboy boots and with the faded ring of snuff tin on the hip pocket of his dungarees. We take rides to the moon and we startle at alligators and we climb up into tree houses and we spin about in teacups, all in a fantasyland, spending day until night there, as if we were young kids again. We pass through clots of dust and sheets of chaff and we pass through cloud and fog and hail and rain and we travel through warm fronts and humidity, choke points and wind shear. We drive over golden and stone and floating bridges, over river and channel and bay. We chug the truck up to the top of a silent volcano and we throw snowballs and pee yellow holes and get cold too soon, not knowing proper coats. We take to the beach, the truck curmurring through scour and berm, and we stop to dig razor clams and geoduck and the tires out. We pick blue mussels and dogwinkles off rocks and we collect sea stars and sand dollars in jars. Each night we stop at a motel with the same something-dollar name—all the motels pinned along the interstate—and each day we start at one of the breakfast places in a coffee shop chain. We drink our coffee sugared and creamy and we eat our bacon crispy and our eggs over easy. Every day is filled with the smell of a beginning, with the sweet wet smell of just-washed skin and hair and the old-spicey smell of Son’s aftershave, and sometimes the air is gr
itty with windblow, or it is minerally with seaweed or is resinous of pine. There are lingering tastes of salt air in the fog or cut hay in the heat, and some days there is a bitter carbon on the lips from the diesel that rises off the highway, and at times a taste of metal, like car parts, or some days there is a taste of rain cloud or artichokes or burnt leaves, and even a taste of wet dog somehow. There is on and on the thrill of a song that comes over the radio and marks our days to be remembered in that way. There is the harmony of our voices in the to and the fro of our words, as we tell of places we have been and of places we would someday like to go, as we talk of accidents that have happened to us—good and bad and neither—as we speak of the still-few people we have been through or those we would like to know, and we take all of what’s said each to the other and shape it into something new to put inside a place that fits right and holds inside us.

  Our journey turns a great blessing in its perfection. Within each day upon day there is suppleness and reflex, as in the movement of our youth, all within the changing and the staying the same. That knowing, or whatever it was it was—the thing that had risen from inside me on the way to the church—it must have been leftover matter of some kind, like a comet, you could say, that just got rocketed out and away.

  Why should I have been so afraid?

  Yes, we are yet the happy pair, we are, with not a thing to mar any day of all the days on the road for us. Save for a comment about my not eating all the breakfast on my plate. Save for the fall and the lump on Son’s head.

  WE COME TO my father’s place, arriving in a terrain of mountain and waterway and evergreen, a wilderness that was a beginning for me—a childhood place and so of innocence, a paradise that way. We come to my father’s house just outside the borderline of town, an old log abode built close to the shores of the sound and buried deeply in forest. A great western hemlock stands at the edge of the woodlot and serves as witness tree, its coned crown and fluted trunk and drooping leader bearing claim through generations to this family’s parcel of land. The hemlock has been witness too to my imaginings, as I played hero or captured or saved in the woods for the countless hours of lost days. There are still the worn paths where in the past I have ambled alongside my father, picking wild blackberries or Indian plum with him, or I have stooped with him to brush the duff off chanterelles and fiddleheads, to know them and so to pick them too.

  To be safe, my father would say, and he would blow on the underside of the mushroom. Look here, he would say, these split gills will always tell you. Then we might fill our coffee cans full to the top with berries, him reminding me to pick only the tiny wild ones, leaving the fat himalayas for the bear and the deer behind. He might tell me other things that would stay inside my head. He might say, Let the clams you dig sit in a bucket of their water overnight until they have spit the sand out of their shells. Or he would say, Carry a stick when walking down a lonely road so if you should come upon a mean dog, all you need do is shake the stick in the dog’s face, and mean it, to keep him away. Or he would say, Walk fast when there are other people around and they will leave you be, because they will think you are busy.

  There’s a light in the cabin window on, and we knock and find my father there with his wife. My father opens the door and puts a face of welcome surprise on. Well, hello, Daughter, he says. He has a scruffy beard as has always been his habit. He has a bigger, rounder belly now. He smells like just-chopped wood. He shakes Son’s hand and gives me a pat on the back and he offers us drinks and we follow him into the kitchen. His wife is pale and thin of hair and flesh, and her smile is cool and thin too. She says her name and flutters her arms and then she pivots and disappears somewhere.

  My father makes a joke about marriage and the bump and the gash on Son’s head. Son says he hates to say it, but he’s had a headache ever since the wedding day. I say I hope that a husband isn’t like wearing reading glasses, where after a time you get so to rely on them you can’t manage without. Son says something clichéd about love being blind, which doesn’t make much sense or fit right with what’s said, and my father seems embarrassed for him but laughs anyway and goes on quickly to one-up Son with another joke of his own. I look at Son, who looks smaller now than I had before seen him, even though he rises a good half foot over my father.

  My father takes a bottle of wine from the refrigerator and screws the top off. He puts the screw top to his nose and sniffs it.

  Good week, he says.

  I breathe in the home smell of maple bacon and cherry tobacco and woodsmoke. I leave my father and Son in the midst of their polite talk and I go to stand over at the sink and look out the window. I can see the smokehouse outside my father built for the curing and drying of fish and meat. Next to it is a large vegetable garden, neatly rowed and tended, with bulging heads of lettuces and lazing squashes and beans vining their way up tepee’d poles. There’s the swing still hung from the alder, and I can see me there now on the wood seat of it, swinging high and hanging on tightly for life. There’s the thick dark wilderness out there surrounding it all—the swing, the garden, the smokehouse, the house. The wild of all that wilderness out there, the dark and the hush in it, the surprise in it, the hide, the seek, the find in it.

  Go play, I can hear my father say, prodding me out.

  From here where I stand at the window, I also see the add-on my father built as his family grew. I can see out and into the window to the bedroom across the way there. There where my father’s wife stands looking in the mirror, brushing her pale thin hair and putting lipstick on her pale thin lips. She stands in the bedroom that used to be my room. She looks in the mirror that used to be mine.

  Yet it was me who left my father’s house, after all.

  Wasn’t it?

  THE RAIN COMES and the rain ends and the woods are left gauzed in pockets of mist. We walk out into air soft as baby hair, air that has a weight to it too, air that makes ferns and leaves and needles shimmer in droplets that tick wet to the earth. We say our farewells and get settled back up into the pickup, sitting quietly with the truck warming and humming, and then Son wipers the windshield and U-turns us around. I rub the vapor off the glass with a sleeve and through the blur I see a door close and the lights go out inside the house. Take it slow, I say, and Son does, moving slowly along the rooted-over driveway to keep the rattle of us down. He pulls us out onto the road and toward the way we have come, taking a left at the crossroad, where we will head down along the coast highway to the interstate and so back to Old Border Road, a place to be called home, a place to begin another beginning.

  TWO

  ROSE’S DADDY

  We move into the hold of a ministering day, with dawn smoking up in color off the horizon, with foothills behind dimmed in hour and distance. We pass through outcrops of rocks and stands of cactus, pass through miles of sand and scrub beyond that, and finally we enter a broad flat valley of watered and tended land, a vega of plowed and pastured earth girdled by trench and by flume and by ditch. The air of the lowland is heavy with the aroma of manure and chemicals for growing, nitrogens and ammonias and whatever other compounds and minerals there are that bite the nose. Brown-skinned people are scattered about in the fields at the start of their day, stooped amid the rows and dressed in colorful clothes, hoeing and picking, some lifting and packing, others walking with burdens loaded atop their heads.

  This great trench was nothing but tamarisk and pedregal before it was turned watershed, Son says. He says, We’ll get the old man to tell you some of the stories, about the might put into the making of this place. Open your ears and it’ll open your eyes. You don’t know that we’re driving through gold.

  He reaches over and gives a squeeze to the back of my neck and turns us off the highway onto a long straight two-lane. If we keep along this route, it would take us all the way to Mexico, down to the headwaters of the Gulf, down to a delta of mud, is what Son says, a desert of salt cedar and iodine bush and pickleweed. But some miles before the border we come to
a crossway and go a different way, making a hard turn onto a gravel section-line road, driving by ditches and siphons and headgates, moving now straight ahead toward home. We cross over the cattle guard, and metal strakes zip through the tires and the shocks of the truck, sending a quivering that rises into the bones and vibrates out through the molars. Soon enough the old adobe house comes into view, perched atop the hillock as it is, moated by emerald groves and all aglow in pale light. We see the old man and the old man’s wife out on the porch of the house, the morning sun sainting their heads, the two looking as if they had been standing there waiting for us the whole time we had been away.

  The old man comes out to the pickup to greet us.

  Son, he says, and he claps his son on the back.

  Girl, he says, and he reaches for the suitcase in my hand.

  WE SETTLE INTO living as a family in the old adobe house.

  Who ever would have thought this would be? I say, thinking of the day I first saw the place, riding along Old Border Road in Son’s truck on his way to taking me home, both of us sunburnt from having camped out for the weekend on a beach down in Mexico with people we had in overlap, and both still feeling the pain relief of the tequila in us. He pointed and told me to look through the grove of old lemon trees, and that’s when he reached over and pulled loose the back string of my haltertop.

  That’s how it all started, and so we will tell our children someday.

  Today we start out our being married and being at home by washing the honeymoon off the pickup. We hose and we sponge all the earth that we’ve collected up along the way, rubbing off what’s left of the chalked and faded sentences that someone intended for us to live by, words we had ridden with as the moon rode full circle about us. We soap and we rinse and we chamois, shrugging at the etchings in the side panel that don’t go away, though knowing what remains of the saying will soon enough fade in the scour of dust and the bleach of sun of this place.