Another hotter-than-hot one today, she says. The old dog and a stream of dust have followed her into the house and she shoos the dog away with the back of a hand and waves the dust away from her face with a handkerchief. She puts her purse and her keys on the sideboard and walks through the cool and dark of the parlor. She goes into the kitchen and pours herself a long drink of cold tea from the pitcher and she stands with the glass in her hand, looking out the picture window, the roses gone, the stalks turned skeletal, the leaves blown out across the field. She puts her glass down and goes into the bedroom in the middle of the day. She shuts the door behind her and takes to months in her bed until death.
And she will die in the month of brides.
We would all of us do what we could do.
Rose’s Daddy tended to her devotedly. Each day he went into Rose’s room with another rose. He went into town to buy all the roses the old florist had yet to sell. He bought a solo rose and put it in a tall vase for her. He bought her one of the last damasks and placed it open cupped in a cut-glass bowl. He rowed china cups of dried buds along the sill of the window. He held a sweet floribunda up to her nose, known as a Dearest.
My Dear Rose, he said.
I would go into the room and roll Rose onto her side for her to see what was left of the roses the old man had brought in. I stayed her with pillows behind the splintery bones of her neck, propped them into the brittled hollow of her low backbone, used them as padding between the bonejuts of her wasted legs. In the afternoon I would go into her room and roll her to face the other way.
Son would sit quiet at the bedside watching Rose in her uneven breathing. He would sit a long time. Mama, he would say.
At night, we could hear Rose. We would lie still in our bed hearing Rose’s Daddy in the room with her, in the bed with her, hear him in his whispering, in the whine and plead of the bedsprings, hear him crushing her bones with all of his needs on her.
WE DROVE TO the bridge, to the once great crossing where an infamous man, name of Abel, ferried settlers and Indians, soldiers, renegades, anything, from one side of the then bursting waters to the next. We got to the peak of the span and the old man had Son stop the pickup and flag the driver behind to move around and on ahead of us. Son opened the bed of the truck and the old man took the box and set it down on the hot pavement. The sound of him opening the hard foam of it made me shudder, the way the lid rubbed against the sides, making a thin, sickening cry rise out of it. I covered my ears to make my eyes stop tearing and my mouth stop watering. But too late—the lump of something moved up in me faster than I could control, and in a sudden came a splattering of frothy spill over the side of the guardrail and down into the ribbons of river. Son pulled a handkerchief out of his hip pocket and nudged me. The old man stood holding the styrofoam lid and looking over the guardrail down to the river. Pools of water, thin and still as shards of mirror, were aglare below, biting at the eyes hard enough to water them again.
No, Rose’s Daddy said, whatever are we thinking.
She always said she wanted this to be her place, Son said.
Not if she had seen it become the dribble it now is, Rose’s Daddy said. Lo, where do you suppose any thirsty coyote or bobcat will come to get what there is left to drink around here?
I don’t know what difference it makes anyways, Son said. Ashes are ashes, whether they be carried around in the bowels of some animal or laid to rest with the rest of the silt at the bottom of a riverbed.
Surely, Rose’s Daddy said. And well said. Yet those were not her wishes. The river was her wish. And this is no longer a river. He put the lid atop the box and carried the thing back to the truck. Get in, he said. We need to get home.
We left a boil of dust behind us, arriving back to the house and parking in a plot of shade with the truck steaming, like a cooking thing. Son reached out to take the load away from the old man, but he was shoved aside. Son let him have his way, let him heft the box straight out to the garden where he rested it in a desiccated and rooted-over bed. It took both his hands and the strength he would use to pull the horns of a calf back to get the plastic bag to come out of its coffer. I had imagined the weight of Rose’s bones to be light as a sack of petals, not as heavy as it now seemed to be. Unless Rose’s Daddy was of a sudden so greatly weakened.
He scooped a handful of ash out of the sack and we followed his lead, the sun ringing like an alarm in its seethe above. We sprinkled the ash about the garden the way the old man did it, the way we would scatter grain and seed to pullets or chickens. We were careful to scatter evenly among the rows and the mounds of the dead and the dying roses. We spread the bonedust out among the wilds and the teas and the climbers, among the twisted stalks and the burnt thorns. The ash fell to earth chalk-heavy from the cling of our fingers. We blew the last of it from the palms of our hands.
Rose’s Daddy opened the pages and read aloud from a book of psalms. Son and I watered the ground of Rose’s garden with watering cans. Then we left the old man. We left him sitting out by the rose garden in the sere of the day. He sat with his shotgun flat across his lap, the rod of hot light of the metal sparking and glinting in the sun. He fired into the sky, shooing a clutch of little pecking birds away. But he would not shoo any spirit of Rose away.
DAYS AND NIGHTS go by, regardless. The days are but a form to prop us, a stay to prevent our undoing, the nights but a measure of distance and passing. We go through the hours, the weeks, a month now, see one or the other of us here or there, always in silence and avoiding the other’s eye so as not to see, or not to be seen, as we move from one act or event, until we are somehow moved into another yet, gone on to the next thing as regularly as the clock is changed. We move present to future, within a kind of oblivion and intensity, in the time and the tide that keeps us, in a strange register of passing and continuing—instant to minute, interval to episode, season to eon, sudden ending to everlasting—doing what we must do to go on. We move through the rituals and the labors of our days, in stubbornness and resilience, the days accumulating all the same and so becoming one. We tend to what land isn’t yet sold or let to go fallow. We disc and we till. We keep the horses groomed and ridden and shod, we feed and doctor the animals, we water the roads with the watertruck. We wind the old clock in the cool dark parlor. We sit together each meal, eat and drink, averting our eyes from the empty place. We sleep and we rise. We draw breath. We carry. We bear.
Within the plod of the days comes an evening when the Padre makes a visit. He comes to say things about being sorry about Rose. He says things about how a soul never ends, about the blessing of the hereafter, about how people never really leave us, about how they are always with us, if not in flesh, then in spirit. Son clenches his jaw and rises abruptly from his chair, his fists balled and his breathing caught, and the Padre stops talking.
How can you come here and talk to us like this? Son says. How can you talk about being sad for us? If you truly believed in all the hogwash you talk, with your bliss and your life-everlasting business—if all of this is so, then why would you or anyone be sorry? Why be sorry if death is the blessing you say it is? Son shakes his head. He contorts his mouth. Because it’s all a load of horseshit, is what it is, he says.
He stands over the Padre. The Padre is looking at Son the whole time and without a flinch—the Padre’s face calm, without a tell of anything. This seems to rile Son all the more.
You fake, Son says. You go to hell, he says. He reaches for his hat on the rack and walks out the front door. Rose’s Daddy sits silently and stares emptily at the floor the whole time, moving but to take sips of his ink-colored drink.
I think of what to say to make the Padre not leave.
Please stay, I say.
We leave the old man in the cool dark parlor, in the ticking of the old clock, in the endless shrill of the crickets. We take our glasses of tea out to the porch and sit out on the steps, where the stars above are covered over in their carapace of dust. An elf owl throws a hollow too
t from the hole of an old saguaro. The old dog comes over and settles in at my one side, panting her sharp animal breath at me. The Padre, at my other side, smells like the mint chewing gum he’s chewing.
Those crickets never stop, I say.
I like their harmonious sound, the Padre says.
It seems more like monotonous to me, I say.
Try to think of it as breath, he says.
Huh-huh, huh-huh, huh-huh, huh-huh, the old dog pants.
Huh? I say.
Think of it as a cosmic humming, he says. A unifying om.
An om?
Yes, he says. An elongated amen, you could call it.
Crickets? I say.
Life, he says.
That any life thrives here as it does is a miracle, I say.
The old dog whines.
You ever think about the drives in nature? I say.
For example?
For example, the way striving comes out in everything. The way it does in gravity and electricity, in cosmic energy. In hunger and in thirst.
The Padre offers me a stick of chewing gum. Even in sexual desire, he says. As well as jealousy.
The old dog nudges me.
I take the stick of gum and sit looking at it.
The place is not the same without Rose, I say.
When is anything the same?
Something is wrong with Son, I say. But I suppose that’s been.
Tell me.
He’s a tough one to explain. He’s changed. He’s not the person I thought he was—though who did I think he was? You would think a wife should know her husband better. But I’m not one who does.
Many do not, he says. I see it all the time. A wife cannot know her husband if her husband does not know himself, he says. As it may too be otherwise, a man may not know his wife.
Something is worse off with the old man, I say.
That I can see, he says. Give him time to recover.
Will he?
Why shouldn’t he?
He’s been doing strange things.
Such as?
Talking oddly. Like he’s reading from the Bible half the time.
Could be he is reading the Bible.
It’s the way he treats me as well as talks to me. He has me ride with him every day, but riding the mare now instead of the paint. He has me in Rose’s saddle too, has me in her riding suit and in her hand-tooled boots. We’ll be riding down the canalbank and he’ll be talking to me the way he does, reminding me to use my knees and to sit tall in my saddle, telling me there will be no clucking or giddyapping, telling me as if he’s never said these things to me before. And sometimes now he calls me by her name.
Rose, he says.
I REIN AWAY from the water edge of the canalbank, speaking calmly to keep the horse from spooking at the approach of the watertruck. With the animal steadied, I can sit watching the water spilling out in broken streams from the back of the tank as the truck passes, knowing Son will drop wet tons of cargo loads over the roads before the day is come to an end. I put my bandanna up over my nose and close my eyes as he drives on, listening to the sound of the tank slosh, hearing the river moving in it.
I put the horse forward with my knees and gallop out into the open dry valley, through a haze of quartz and gypsum and clay and silt. Hot dirt gusts about us in ropes and swirls on the ground. Tumbled-up weeds spring and roll in the wind, a wind that sings the sand past in soprano. I break the horse into a walk at its falter and meander on through a maze of saltbush and cactus, my thoughts drifting to Rose. I’m stuck wondering about my promise to Rose not to give up on Son, wondering what it is that holds us to the oaths we’ve pledged to the dead.
I’m thinking about the Padre’s sermon on love again, about what he said about devotion, what he said about forgiving. Thinking about what I’ll say to him when I talk to him, about how I should devote myself more fully to my husband, how I ought to forgive Son for what he’s done if we’re to go on living a life as husband and wife do. It’s the only way to rescue all that we’ve had and should have between us, is what I’ll say to the Padre.
I think too of what Pearl said to me the day she came out of the pink stucco house and found me out at the corral with Holy Roller. She could have seen some kind of fluster in me, from having just been with the Padre. Or maybe what she was going on was what she knew of Son, the way he is, for she spoke directly as to the problems of marriage.
A piece of advice? she said. Don’t go trying to hobble a man. Not a single one takes well to the rope, and if he does and you’re able to keep him from straying, you’ll find yourself with a tamed and lifeless animal. I’ll tell you a secret, Girl, she said. It’s the trick of the cowpuncher—those wranglers that bossed many a steer up the trail in the old days—and that is, never let any of the herd know they are under restraint, she said.
I wonder what the Padre would have to say.
FIVE
THE SERMON
We swing in the lull of a little eternity, in the spell that comes near evening, in a stall of hours that bears the day’s most weight. The sun bows at its summons and is fat with brimming as it dips and it seeps into earth. Cactus wren and sagebrush vole skitter for insect and seed in the mesquite and paloverde. Raptor birds soar in updrafts above, stayed at the ready, to plummet for rabbit or quail or snake. The old adobe house turns luminous as the star that colors it, molten gold in the light that remains.
The old man lifts his head from his reverie. He looks at his watch, takes it off his wrist, shakes it, puts it to an ear. He looks out toward the fallow ground to the west of the house, where the land swallows in what’s left of the day. The old dog lifts her head, as if to ponder this turn of the world as well, and then her ears twitch and I hear it too—the rumble and growl of engine and piston in the distance—and now the stock-and-combo gooseneck rig comes rolling in, with a column of spiraling dirt trailing behind. The steel body rattles to a stop, sending mourning doves aflutter and hunter cats askitter, as a great wave of dust crests over the whole thing and volutes on ahead, until the dust will trough and settle before it’s stirred up again. We fix our eyes toward the end of the porch as we wait for a form to appear, hearing a creak of hinge, a clap of steel, a crunching of boot steps over the gravelly path—and it’s Ham shuffling up the porch steps, in that stiff-hipped swagger of his, the old dog up now and tagging back in a wheeze at his heels.
Pree’ hot, Ham says.
No doubt as hot as any day has gotten, Rose’s Daddy says.
Ham takes his hat off and palms the sweat away from his head. He stoops and scratches the old dog’s head.
That crate should seat a man, Rose’s Daddy says.
Ham pulls the wood crate over beside us, crouches down, and perches himself upon a paper label colored over with tangerines and leaves. He holds his hat between the bow of his open knees and fusses with the shape of the rim. Then he just stares at it.
Then speak, Rose’s Daddy says.
Pearl is gone.
Rose’s Daddy stops the swing of the porch swing.
Gone to where?
She went and left to be with him.
She went and left to be with whom?
The thoroughbred. She took off after the thoroughbred. She said she missed her ole Holy Roller. So she says. But what she really meant was she and Daughter Pearl couldn’t take it here no more. Couldn’t take this hellish place no more. Said it was no way for a woman to live. For anyone to live. Said I was either coming with them or I wasn’t.
So?
So, said I wasn’t. Told her if she had to go, go. Told her this harder spell of weather surely could not go on forever. Told her anyway somebody had to stay and keep the place up, as a man can’t just run away when things get a bit hard on us, now can he?
So be it, the Indians would say.
Yessirree-bob, Ham says.
Listen to me, Ham, Rose’s Daddy says, your Pearl will likely be home soon. She has been gone hither and thither before, for on
e reason if not for another or a dozen more. Surely you need not trouble yourself. When the woman is ready, she will come down from her mountain. She will come back as she always has. You have still got her right here in this world.
Yes, I do, Ham says. That I do indeed.
Is that bolo Navajo? Rose’s Daddy says.
Ham gives the silver tips a tug and looks up. You know you got her too, he says. You got Pearl and you got me and we all been close as kin from the beginning, don’t you know it without me having to tell you it? And you got lots of people you’ve knowed around here for near a lifetime. So don’t you think it’s time you picked yourself up and stopped actin’ weepy like? You got to buck up, man. Act like a man again, old man. ’Tisn’t right to go on feeling sorry for yourself this way forever. It’s no good to be giving in. It don’t look good. Nor is it good. You’re making everyone feel bad, asides yourself.
Rose’s Daddy clears his throat and turns his head and looks out toward the lemon grove. I saw another bolo close to that I almost bought for myself once, he says. But it was Zuni, I believe.
Anyways, Ham says. I come out to see how you’re getting on with them roping cows. They working all right? No muleys in the bunch, is they?
No muleys.
You putting your time in?
Not so much as I ought to be. Yet I have been teaching some. Been showing Girl here how to work the heels. And I would say she is picking the skill of it up in good time. Is that not right? he says, looking my way.
I’m picking it up okay, I say. I push off to put a little swing back into our porch seat.
We shall be doing fine come rodeo time, Rose’s Daddy says.
You’ll have them barrels beat, Ham says, looking at me. You would have had ’em beat even if Daughter Pearl was still here to enter the show. She hadn’t been rehearsing as she should on that horse a hers as it was. She was too busy gallivanting about town doing who knows what she was and wasn’t. But I try to keep out of women’s business, as is my policy.
Old Border Road Page 11
