Love, Son
P.S. Please pick up some groceries on your way home.
A COUPLE OF days went by after the letter and before the telephone call. I was out in Ham’s tackroom going through pages of the names and the weights of the top stock when Ham came in to holler my name. You got a caller, he said. There was a hard stomp inside my chest, thinking it might be the Padre. What to say? What not to say? Never complain, Rose’s Daddy would say. And never explain. And the old man would be right. It’s a bad sign of anything to prosper between the Padre and me if I were to have to explain to him what happened between us, or didn’t happen, I should say, and in doing so be complaining. If he cannot divine it, he could not truly understand what I’d have to say. And he, after all, being a doctor of divinity.
But no, it wasn’t the Padre calling me. It was Son, and his voice sounded fitful in a way it had never been and it sounded truly grim. He said he was calling to ask me to come back to him, like his letter said, and didn’t I get it or what, he said, as he expected by now to hear from me. It was hard to know correctly how to take his manner of speaking, whether for better or for worse, given the words attached to the tone. Finally he gave up trying to spur me to a defense and he shot for simple bargain and appeal.
Why not we give it another go-round? he said. Don’t you know we’ve got a rodeo to be working toward? We’ve got to be a ropin’ team, me and you. His pleas were filled with reminders, filled with we got this and we got that. And we got a lot more too we could work on together, he said. We were good at a lot of things, us two, and you ought not to forget it and just the hell go and let go of it all.
C’mon, Son said. Just come home, he said.
SEVEN
DAUGHTER PEARL
There would not have been time enough away for the place to have this much changed, only time enough away for me to have changed and so to see it this way. It’s like going back to somewhere from when you were a kid, where you are grown in size now and are surprised to find what you return to turned as small as it is. It might be just the eye that betrays. Or maybe the hazed light is what blanches and dwindles what’s seen, draining what color and deforming what form there once was from everything. The way it happens in the fading of a photograph, or in the lessening of memory.
Ham drives on and we face each out our own side window, looking at fields that lay pummeled or let go to fallow, at land scoured by windblow and sunbake, at the many acres man-burnt and mantled in black so black that they gleam like aluminum sheeting in the heat. Ropy-necked wintering birds, come strangely early, scatter about like a toss of debris to pick at what might be left to forage for in the stubble and ash and soot. Farther off, a cultivator still hitched to the disc sits outcast, as if someone just gave the task up and left the piece for attraction or pondering, the machine to be meanwhile taken in in time by ephedra or snakeweed, as what was once fertile earth turns to scrub. We pass through the old lemon grove, the whitewash on the trunks of the trees all but washed out by the sun, the burnt leaves dropped from the stems to clutter the saucers of dirt that top the roots beneath. You can see the old adobe house as we approach it, with the grove disrobed of its emerald cloak, the way the house looks sunk into the hummock from here, as though the thirst of topsoil were sponging up the adobe and wood and clay, and the mud within the thick walls become no more than decayed straw or dusty clots or maybe just empty space. You can see how if a wind lashed through, the tiled roof might be shucked off the house in a minute, the beams and joists then to buckle up and give way from the frame and all the hollow walls surely to topple.
Ham pulls up to the front of the house and sits the truck in idle. Right away, Son comes out the door, letting the screen slap loudly behind him. I get this kind of fizziness in the blood when I see him, and a sinking feeling that comes after. He stands there in the glare, in the lunatic’d trilling of cicada, looking out at us. I spot the old man and the old man’s wife on the porch behind him, standing as if they had been waiting for me the whole time I was away from the place. Son raises a hand and whisks the vision away, and in a blink of an eye they’re but a picture of what was.
Ham flags a hand back.
I’ll be gettin’ on then, he says. You two be all right.
All right, I say.
How you move is who you are. If this is true, then what is Son but someone without enterprise or aim? What then would he be made of? I watch him walking toward me and see only what he is not. He is not a seeker. He is not in pursuit of. What future is there held in him that could move him eagerly forward? He moves with a demeanor of carrying too heavy a load. His long arms dangle with but a lackadaisical sway, and his long-muscled legs advance him sluggishly, indifferently. His face is wearied, the look remote, his eyes diverted by hardly a thing. He is still tall as to any average, but fallen into himself, making him appear to have lost some inches. He is desert tinged, as he has always been, his hair sandy toned and bitterbrush stiff, his skin coarsened and ruddied a reddish tan. He is colored as one of the desert animals—the pumas, the song dogs, the bighorns, those creatures antlered and hoofed, or rodent and reptilian, where any of them will blend into the textures and hues of their environs and then just up and disappear on you.
Son puts his hands on my shoulders and leans to kiss me. His lips are dry as seedpods, the skin on his cheeks like burlap. His chin is prickly. He pulls me close to him, his body, the body I know more than any other other than mine, having once known the feeling of feeling it as my own, now feeling it entirely as what I do not know. The arms that cling to me are stony, without moisture and give, the smell of his skin, bitter, sandy, peppery, not the same, and still every bit him.
WE HAVE GOT to get a get-go, Son said.
And this snapped me into seeing him differently, hearing a something in him that yet drove him on, something to be aspired to, something to be hoped for. How could it be otherwise? When there’s yet the spirit in him for the sport and the win of the rodeo—a striving enough to lift him, to lift me, to lift us both from the stall of things.
And so we would put our time in, despite the heat, riding around the hot part of the days. Son and I took the horses out of the shade of their stalls and harnessed and saddled them, though they didn’t want to leave their water and their shelter at all. We paced them slowly, and still they lathered and baked in the heat, champing and foaming at the bit and whorling their heads when we loped them, as we all the while tried keeping ahead of the brown cloud folding over us. We rode along the furlong, rode paled in dust, rode dirt-caked through nothing but desert waste. We rode with bodies of dirt rolling up about us, like roving animals they were, come from out of the ether, shapes that shifted and disappeared into fits of wind. We kerchiefed the grit from out of our eyes, moved on through sagebrush and bunchgrass, arroyo and brecha, into mile after mile of no place of shade. We passed burnt animals spread out and pecked at by prey birds. Zebratails peeked out of the creosote, sidewinders coiled up in the dirt of the sun, cats baked in the stingy shade. The old dog wandered off in the dust, and we tracked after her and led her back to water and home.
We rode out along the canalbank and deeper into the day. Son dismounted to open the metal traps of the water gates, letting the water sluice through and funnel in, the garbled voices of holy men heard in the spew and the gush of it. The horses stood at the edge of the cement ditch, and they dropped their heads, blowing between drinks, snuffling their dripping muzzles up at the finish. They stomped their hooves and leaned again to drink.
What thirst there can be. Thirst as great as any yearning.
I was slid out of the saddle like that. I tossed the hat off my head and was right down inside the cradle of the ditch, and I lay back in the buckling onrush of water, letting it riffle my hair and slap at my face, letting it bloat up my clothing, blur over my eyes, brim into my ears, as I waited for the water to all but fill me up inside.
WHY DID YOU let the bird die?
Forget about the bird died.
Why is our wedding picture up here on the mantel?
Put it there for you, Darlin’. Put it there for us. For our happy memories. So we can remember what we’re supposed to look like.
I see the photograph and how my eyelashes in it are matted together with mascara from the weeping. See the satin of the bodice of the dress, the way it’s spattered with the dark that poured forth from my eyes. I know the stain beneath the tulle on the lap of the dress, though I carry the bouquet low enough to hide it from the notice of others. But what am I hiding with that smile but girlish foolishness? Or maybe fright?
What did we know? I say.
Who ever does? he says. Asides, it’s done.
Where are the pictures and all the rest of the doodads up here your mother had?
Here, Son says. In the burn pile here. To light up first cool evening comes through. He reaches into the pit of the fireplace and peels a blanket away from a great mound of things—Navajo bowls and crystal vases, brass candlesticks, tiny figurines carved out of desert stones, a hand-painted box, conch shells collected from the coast, Rose’s old Bible, a family album of letters and honors and clippings, a lot of photos in frames, one with the eyes of a child looking out.
That stuff won’t burn, I say.
What doesn’t gets hauled away. I’m tired of looking all the time at what was.
What do you call us?
Is, he says. I call us what is. He comes over and puts a hand up inside my shirt. Let’s go make us some kids, he says.
Don’t be kidding around.
Let’s go and practice at it anyway.
Let me settle in.
I’ll get you settled in.
He puts a hand around my shoulder and leads me out of the kitchen and scoots us on through the parlor. When we near the open door of Rose’s Daddy and Rose’s bedroom, I stop to look in. Son tugs at me, but I persist. Bars of white light drape the bed, the bed still made up the way it was when I left, with Rose’s lacy-edged pillowcases and her best set of linen sheets all ironed crisp and everything tucked in just the way she would have liked it. The bed she withered away in. I see her there, reaching out to me with her spidery fingers, see me rolling her and molding pillows about her to prop her into a change of placement. I see the long braid, come loose from its coil and draped like a rope along the delicate pedicles of her thinning spine. I hear her bones cracking in the shifting of her position. I smell yet the camphor of balms, the ointment of zinc, the iron and salts and metals that rivered through her body, as with every body, smell too the last breaths and the mottled flesh, the fester and rot of what’s gone—smell all of this, even through the spackling and primer and fresh coats of paint covering the ceiling and walls. I stand and wonder, seeing a room that was once put to ruin, with now the whole smoothed over and seemingly righted. I look inside, thinking of how our yesterdays will all the while deform us. Just as through memory we deform every yesterday.
Look. This is a room where the dead have lived. This is a room where the dead have gone and done their dying.
Where is the dried rose I put to stay on the pillow? I say.
In the fireplace with the rest of that pile of junk, Son says.
He closes the door.
The dead are just dead, he says.
I stand looking at the woodgrain of the door at my face.
How can it be so strange to comprehend? I say.
Comprehend what? he says. What’s it you can’t comprehend? Their lives are just done. So’s having to live the way they had in mind for me to live, that’s done too. Living with all their tales and their make-believe. Living for something now because I’m worried about when I’m dead, is not what I call living.
The clock stopped, I say.
What did the old man want anymore anyways? he says. He was selling his water to outsiders far away as the coast. Fussing about watering the roads when everything else around here is drying up on us. He told a lot of stories but never told one about the long run. Well, as he liked to say, in the long run we’re all of us dead anyways.
I open the glass and insert the key, and it grates in the slot at the wind.
Now the old man’s gone and he’s nothing, Son says. And she’s gone and nothing too. And this place is nothing.
The clock begins to tick again.
What’ve you got in mind that might be something? I say.
How about getting on with the living of my life? he says. For the first time in my life. I’ve got me some ideas. But let me tell ’em to you later. Come here, he says. Let’s do it the way we used to do it.
He pulls me by a beltloop and leads me into our bedroom.
What about fixing the hands to set the time right? I say.
The time’s right, he says.
AND WE WOULD go dancing again. Son would get duded up in his newest pair of denims and pearl-buttoned shirt and his walking-heel boots. He would saddlesoap the boots and splash his face with aftershave. I would get out my after-the-wedding dress, which I had not worn since our night of matrimonial celebration. I would wash and set my hair, run a razor over my legs, put a frosty pink to shine on my lips.
There was a place in town where a band yet played on Saturday nights. We went inside and stood like a couple of moles, waiting for our eyes to adjust to the dark. A bar loomed up amid the lights, as did the bottles behind and the customers among the stools that rimmed the wood. A man tending appeared on the other side of the counter, sliding back and forth it longwise, like fingers running over frets on a guitar. There was a stage ready to be lit, with instruments and equipment set up and a bunch of tangled lines and paid-out cables looped about. There was a dance floor fenced in by tables and chairs and only half-filled yet with people talking and drinking in the dim. There was a door-to-door perfume smell in the air, and a smell of spilled and soured beer, and too a musky scent, all of it mingling in the stale fold of tobacco smoke.
We took seats in the back and waited for the woman in the short skirt to come to us and for the live music to begin. There were songs being piped in from overhead, songs about getting drunk and aching hearts and being sorry. Son was already eager to dance, even to recorded warm-up music, but I said I needed something to drink first. A woman came with her corkboard tray and put little napkins out on the table in front of us. She readied her pen and wrote our orders on the pad on the tray. Son watched her the whole time, his eyes moving from her pushed-up and glittered bosom to her colorful drawn-on eyes and back again. She finished writing and looked up and smiled at him. Back with the seven-sevens in a minute, she said. She left to retrieve our drinks.
It’s not polite to stare, I said.
C’mon, he said.
There would by now be a couple of couples out on the dance floor. Son is as good a dancer as he is a rider, and it has always been easy to catch on to his feel and his time and to follow. We would take breaks after several dances at a stretch and go back to our table and drink our drinks, and we would order again and go back out to the dance floor once more. We two-stepped. We west-coast’d and disco’d. We slow-danced and line-danced. Son rotated his hips and frapped his feet and winged his elbows and knees. He had his arms outspread, moving them about up and over his head as if aiming to throw a rope. He screwed his mouth up in drunken concentration, and his brow broke out in a sweat. In his feverish dance I could not help but think he hoped every woman in the place he took notice of would be taking even more notice of him.
We went back to our table and our drinks. There were two women seated at the table next to us who had come in during our dancing. One of the women said to the other, first you do it this way, then you flip around and do it that.
Son turned his head and asked her what she was drinking.
WE GIVE THE hotshot to the hired man and get him to work the chutes and the gates. Son heads and Ham comes to work the heels, and they each one teach me to heel too. Then one of the two of them coaches me on the paint on a couple of runs through the cloverleaf. We cool the horses and
water them between runs. We get water for ourselves from our waterjugs and canteens. We cough and we spit and we curse the dust.
Son says, Whoooo-ee! calling out in the voice of the old man.
Ham tells us we’re toughened as brahma bulls in this heat.
Some nights, we trailer the horses over to Ham’s place, where he will put the arena lights on and play host to what he calls his authentico ranchero rodeo. Most of his vaqueros and a few of the outside hands and old punchers will gather for the contest. Some people come for but pure spectacle. Others show up just for the sake of showing up.
One night it’s nothing but bronc riding. Ham picks his roughest stock, some of the animals meant to be broken and ridden for working or pleasure use, others chosen specifically for the sport of rodeo’ing. He saddles every horse with stock saddles meant for everyday riding. Rules at Ham’s are that riders may ride with their free hand down, instead of held up and in position for any judge to see. They may hang on to whatever keeps them in the saddle—horn or horse, reins or mane, prayers or curse words, whatever it be—in a ride-as-ride-can kind of style. Folks from town string themselves along the perimeter of the arena, propped on rungs of fence, or wooden benches, or bales of hay. They fan themselves with their hats and hoot for each rider gotten atop a stock pony or a brush bronc, cheering every one to stay on for the clock.
Eight seconds can be a godamighty long time, says one old puncher. He stands beside me at the fence, and I nod and smile and avert my eyes from the man’s nose, most of it gouged out, I suppose, by some hack surgeon’s knife to rid it of the cancer. Or maybe the vet’s knife, could be.
Lookee here, he says, I have the crooked limbs to attest to them seconds.
Old Border Road Page 17
