Old Border Road

by Susan Froderberg

  Hold it while ye may, yet happy pair.

  Light strikes the metal. Bursts of stars trick the eyes.

  Victuals is hot and about on the table, the old man calls out.

  We leave the pickup to sparkle clean in the shade of a honey mesquite, and then go inside the house to bathe ourselves before the noon meal. We’re used to being the two of us all these recent weeks, whether inside a cabfront or a motel room or a café, and now we’re loath to let the one of us go too far away from the other. So we go into the bathroom and strip our clothes off together, and we climb into the tub and turn the valve full open and start the spray over us as one. We huddle together and turn in circles, the shower drape cocooning about us, lathering each the other, the slipperiness of skin between us stirring our yearnings again.

  We come out garbed in fresh clothes and clean and decent as a new home.

  The old man’s wife has put a fresh linen dress on and has her long braid done up in a knot and she has called us in to sit. She has the table set with fiesta-colored china and flowery napkins and a marigold bouquet. A tiny yellow bird picks at the seeds in a bowl in the cage by the window. I stand behind a chair and compliment the fancy arranging, and that’s when I see there are places for only three people set at the table. She looks at me and puts a hand to a cheek. The little bird flitters about and upsets its water dish. Old habits, the old man’s wife says, and she shakes her head and goes into the kitchen and comes back with a knife and a fork and a plate, and she fills the empty place.

  You ought to call me Rose, she says.

  Rose, I say.

  Rose is all right. She is kind as a mother could be. She tells me about writing thank-yous to those who gave us candleholders and electric mixers and butter dishes and all the rest of what Son and I got just for getting married. She tells me I might want to give some of the many vases and candy bowls to the hired man’s wife or to the church ladies running the rummages. She says there will always be a certain trend in gifts, which only tends to make for excess. But we are not the kind of people who believe in being wasteful, she says, no matter that we can amply afford to be. We do not throw away, she tells me, sitting up all the straighter and tucking stray hairs back into the knot of her braid.

  Rose will tell me many things. After a time she shows me a lot of what to do, too, like how to hide a stitch when taking a proper hem up, and the way you make a chili roast and a casserole and a lemon pie, stiff whites and all. She teaches me what to use and what to do to nourish the earth so as to make a garden sprout and bud and green from seed. All of what I learn about being a wife I learn from the old man’s wife. I learn from Rose.

  Rose calls the old man Daddy.

  The old man, Rose’s Daddy, talks about how blessed he is with his Rose, how hopeful he is when it comes to Son, how proud he is of what he has and what he has cared for, how thankful he is to have been given the old adobe house and all that has come with it. It is my old man that I praise above all, Rose’s Daddy says, for the house and the thrave of acres surrounding it, all handed down to me, as you see before you now. And for the melon shed and the toolhouse out behind the house, he says, I am thankful again. And praise too for the tackroom and the corral, the pasture and the shoots, the swimming pool, and all the rest that adds to the bounty. We have mare and we have bay, we have pinto and sorrel and paint, he says, and we have livestock enough to sell or to trade. We have a good batch of hunter cats, to keep gophers and snakes from making holes and breaks in the field rows. We have rabbits aplenty to eat, which may feed and fatten in the alfalfa. We have all the implements and equipment needed to furrow and harrow, to till and to seed and to mow, to comb and to bale, all of what will take root and rise from the earth. We have the watertruck to water the roads with. We have a good hired man and a steady cadre of Mexicans. We have all of what we need to live and to work and to be as a family. Yessirree, indeedy, he says. And so be it.

  IT STARTS TOO early, the disturbance of weather.

  With all of everything aplentiful about us, and the homecoming fiestas still ongoing, we’re come hard into a dry spell. We’re come into day after stifling day of roaring heat and burning dust and not a hint of rain to be seen or rumored. We’re caught in thermal pockets of hot that lock us in from above, air without dew point or humits or millibars of vapor, the aridity allowing barely sweat enough to cool the skin with. You should feel it here. You should see it. The hot ground bores through boot soles like an electric heater, and the hot air burns in the nostrils when you breathe it. The sere drives desert rodents and millipedes to hole in the earth, it singes wings of monarchs, silences chickadees, sends cacti into dormancy, has every animal panting. People who claim to have come to this place for their health are speaking of leaving for the same reason. The spike on the gauge has everybody talking and restless and seeking water and breeze and shade, has all of us seeking any anecdote or what facts there might be to reveal some end to the hex of this weather.

  Whoo-ee! Rose’s Daddy says. We have got to keep ahead of the pulverulence come down upon us. We have got to keep the dust down and the animals watered as best we can, so we and all the stock shall not be succumbing to the coughing pneumonia. We know the hardships, he says. We have been through them before. We have gnashed our teeth, yet we have not been beaten back. It is a fallen land that we survive in, yet it is a land reclaimed and so redeemed.

  He hitches his britches up with a thumb.

  Yet pray, he says, this heat shan’t be making any new history.

  For the time being, he says, we start with the watering.

  Now morning and evening Son and I go out back to the melon shed and climb into the watertruck as a team. We ride down the road and head toward the canal, our mouths and our noses covered over with bandannas. We step out into the burn of the sun and drop the hose into the harnessed water and stand and wait for the tank to suck its fill up. We watch the water rush past, just the sight of it pouring a cooling into us. The old man says the river capture is an inheritance set into history, a history that has come with the land. The water is a measure we’ve come to depend on and have paid for, for a time, and the watermaster must divert and deliver every bit of acre-feet to us for wetting down the fields and the animals and the roads.

  Yet even with the water allotted, we’re still surrounded by dirt rectangles of fallow land that lie between lessening acres of green. And despite all the time spent spreading cargo loads of channeled water out to still the road dust, the road dust still gets everywhere. It coats all of everything both inside and outside the old adobe house. We brush it off our clothes, brush it from our hair, even from our teeth. We blow it out our noses, spit it onto the ground, into the sink. Dust pelts the animals, the flowers and the trees, Rose’s old roses. It drifts in through the chimney, sneaks between the screens, gets in beneath the doorframes. It powders the shelves, the dishes, the bedding, settles onto the pillows and between the sheets. Every day we try to keep ahead of it, just as every day we watch it settle back in again and onto everything. Still, we keep on with the watertruck, soaking the roads load after load, washing down the dust before the dust swallows us. We keep on going, believing, I suppose, only in the going-on in us.

  THERE WERE TIMES ago it was as walloping hot as it may worry me about now, Rose’s Daddy said. It was a dry spell that came on before I was set into this world, when life here relied solely upon the favor of the river and of whatever gods there were thereof. So the story had been told to my father, and he to me, he said. You kids want to listen? he said. Or what?

  Son dragged a bench over to the work desk and Rose’s Daddy went back to the story.

  All of life depended upon the river, Rose’s Daddy said. Thus this place was sprung from it, as life was risen up from the dust and given succor by the waters. And hither a settling was born at the crossing, he said, opening the lid of a tin box and taking a pouch of full aroma out. A crossing, he said, that has homed some tough-minded tribes. Sun worshippers, they were, which I g
uess a one would have to be to live in such a cloudless and sudorific land as this. Yet it was place enough for what handful of them and their needs there were for a mighty lengthy reach of years. Yes, indeedy, he said, reaching for his pipe. The waters back then, they did run swiftly. Yet as the earth was multiplied with people, so did men begin to wander in need and curiosity. They went looking for what had been heard tell of from other passing nomads. They went looking for what had been seen by themselves in the depths of their nights.

  He put the cold pipe to his lips and blew into it unlit.

  The first recorded explorers that arrived to this place came up from what was yet New Spain. They traveled up the Gulf under the command of de Ulloa, so it was written, on a flotilla of royal ships. They sought a fabled people within a fabled landscape. They sought a promised life. They sought gold. They imagined finding silken-haired women with pearl combs in their hair and precious stones and corals in their noses, pouring wine from golden vessels. They heard tell of men here wearing tiny golden shovels clasped on braided chains about their necks, shovels that were used to scrape the sweat off the flesh of their bodies. The explorers hoped to find a golden life hither within a grand fertile valley of wild palms surrounded by snowy mountaintops. And lo, they sailed out of the Gulf and on into the yawn of the river and were sucked into waters reddened thick with mudstone sediment. And their hopes and fanciful notions were soon doused out. For upon the shore they found nothing but barren land and blazing heat and whirlwinding dust. They walked across sandbanks of hot ash, the ground on which they walked trembling like paper sheeting, as if it were a fiery lake bubbling and steaming right beneath them. At night their ships pitched and swayed at anchor within the darkness of the mouth of the river. In the seething heat of the day they worked their way upward into the waters in search of a channel, turning the sterns of the smaller boats now this way and now that, yet they made no progress against the swift currents and the weight of the river. And they toiled and they sweat and they thirsted. And they baked inside their armor and their sap was boiled away. And there was no relief come to them. Indeed, many of those men perished and the wearied rest of them did turn back the way they came toward New Spain.

  We’ll get soon to the point of the story, Rose’s Daddy said. He packed a wad of tobacco into the bowl and tamped it in with a thumb.

  Yet again the people would come to this place some years later, this time not for gold but for souls. The colonists would come, and with them the missionaries with their books and their crosses and their what-such would come. And as you well know, New Spain became Mexico, and in time our country would deal and steal and take this northern piece of southern land away for its keeping.

  Rose’s Daddy struck a match to the desktop and lifted the flame to his face.

  And just like that, he said, blowing the fire out. In a quick swish of a horsetail a great head of settlers came out from the east. The drovers came with their cavayards, the shepherds with their herds and yokes and flocks, the nesters came with their households, the miners with their mules and implements, the merchants with their wares, and the hustlers came and the losers came and the whole lot of them came. And they inhabited the missions and the presidios and they built up more settlements. And these damned many people demanded more of the land. And what they needed most was water for it. A lot of it. In a place where there was never much of it, save for the river. Water was as gold was. Is.

  Pretty loco when you think about it, he said, choking smoke. He reached for the waterjar and took a drink, then held the waterjar out toward me and I nodded it on to Son.

  Henceforth, Rose’s Daddy said, the world entered upon modern times and man came to believe in the power of himself, rather than believing in that of which he was made and of what made him—that nature or what you might call the maker in him or the something or other in him. Man believed in the power of science to deliver—a science that could conquer all, even conquer nature herself. Modern man did believe that all of everything was in his command.

  And I say to you, how be it that some yet do?

  Rose’s Daddy looked at me. He looked at Son.

  He took a long deep pull on the pipe.

  WE’RE SETTLED INTO the old adobe house not yet the full length of another whole moon together. That moon of ours, seeming only a rumor lately, rubbed out of the night sky in the dust as it is, but swinging all the while above and gently as a ball, as the laws will tell us. Maybe its being hidden is what brings the changes on, as nights come now and Son will rise from the bed and go off into town without me, without a word, even after my questioning, as if he has given in to a kind of lunacy. He will leave the old shotgun loaded by the door and ready to shoot, though I’m not sure how to use it or even what to use it for. He leaves with the old dog lying atwitch in the spook of her dreams on the porch, with the hired man gone home hours before the dark should fall, with Rose gone to the coast for a rest at the sea, with the old man sleeping alone.

  It’s another night darker than dark most nights.

  I stare at the wall and listen for Son. I listen for the miss in the sound of the engine, for the rattle of loose metal or the squeaking of a hinge. I wait for the crackle of gravel under tires, for a glimmer of headlight through the blinds. I see the places where Son might be, the lots his pickup might be slotted in, the barstool he might sit on, leaning over his drink, the way he will look around searchingly, the sofa he might be sprawled on by this time with some other. I see the faces of the women he could be with, hearing their laughter, hearing his. I close my eyes in the silence. I listen for voices through the adobe, listen to the wind scouring roof and bending limb, swirling the hot dust up. I lie awake a long time, through the long night, eyes open, eyes closed, and on it goes like this until nearly morning. Finally there comes a stumble of boot steps on the front porch, a fumbling of keys, a crick in the wood, the clap of a door. I keep my back facing the empty place where Son should be, keeping still enough to be sleeping. He comes into the bedroom, cricket shells popping beneath his feet. He sits at the edge of the bed, huffing in his struggle to get a boot off, then the other one, the bedsprings whining beneath us, the ticking of the parlor clock creeping in to settle between. I can hear Son’s tongue moving thickly in his mouth when he curses. I can smell the drinking on him, smell the women he’s been with. I can feel my heart pounding loudly enough to give me away.

  Son flops out full length onto the bed, still with all his dusty clothes on, with the loose hairs of other women clinging to the weave. He coughs the dust from his lungs. He licks his cankered lips. He settles into a labored slumbering breathing.

  Outside, the night vibrates.

  The crickets ring on of courtship and warning.

  The watertruck settles and pings.

  THE KNOWING HAD been waiting for me the whole time Son and I were gone away up the coast. It showed itself as soon as we were back to town, to Old Border Road, to the old adobe house. The knowing I should have known better. The sense I should have had better sense. The terrible unease or forewarning, the in-the-bones or in-the-gut or in-the-whatever-it-might-be-called feeling, the premonition that hit me in the backseat of the station wagon on the way to the church that day—it was that that was right here homing in on me not long since returning from our journey.

  We are too young to be doing what we’re doing.

  Maybe I just didn’t want to see it right away. I wish there were a way to fool myself into telling the story differently. But the reckoning is here, likely has been all the while. It’s as true in me as the weather is, and there is no way to sleep it off or will it gone. The knowing has settled in with the heat. It has settled in as we do our living here in the old adobe house. It’s put into place as with housekeeping. It’s seen in the common and routine. It’s everywhere and in everything, resting like some warp in the climate between us. It billows in with the grit through the windows, making us as separate as the imprints we leave on the truck seats. You can see what the matter i
s in our habits, in our manner of dressing, in our ways of moving and being. What’s wrong sits with us at dinner, gets chewed in with our biscuits and stew, gets swallowed down with gulps of our buttermilk. It hangs about in the silence. It shows up in our talk. I stock the pantry, feed the dog, launder a load of denims, stake the failing roses up, write a letter to my father or send a card my mother’s way, chat with Rose and Rose’s Daddy, do my reading, wake from a daydream, try to sleep, always in the knowing it. I look out the window and see Son in the yard watering dying patches of grass, the burden showing in him in the way he furrows his brow, the way he drops his shoulders over, the way he stoops to put feed out for the cats and the rabbits. I see it in the way he licks his canker-blistered lips or rubs the scar on his forehead, see it in the way he sits, in the way he can’t sit.

  Still we will dream side by side in it.

  We will dance with it at the Saturday night dance.

  As my reckoning moves through the swelter of our hours, making me desperate, always a little too afraid.

  What I know is not forgotten, only breathed aside, when Son reaches over for me in the night. Just as the knowing will be slighted on those days when he comes in from the scorching fields midday. When he kerchiefs his brow and takes a long drink from the waterjar and looks to find that his folks are out of the house for a time. When he comes over and reaches for me. When he takes the cloth out of my hand and the bandanna from off my head. He leads me by the shirtsleeve out of the kitchen and on through the cool dark parlor. He takes me into the bedroom and I fall back onto the bed and what I know becomes no more than what I don’t. Whatever the matter is, it falls away for this time, as our shirts and our belts and our dungarees drop to the floor at our feet. And I will close my eyes to it. And I will forget what it is I have seen.