Old Border Road

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Old Border Road Page 20

by Susan Froderberg


  The Quechan has her back to me. Her arms wing up and down and up and down in some task. She turns around and comes over and swabs my eyes with a cotton swatch that has something cool and soothing on it. She puts an unguent onto her fingers, rubbing it in circles on my forehead. There’s an odor of food about it. She rubs more of the oily stuff on the top of my head too, in the place that was once a soft spot, rubbing in circles there until there’s heat. It’s warm in the room, but I’m beginning to tremble. When did I last shake this way? Some time ago up north it must have been, in the cold. I close my eyes and think of places away from here. I think of my father’s house, the darkness of the walls of hewed logs and chinking, the coolness of the rooms, the smell of woodsmoke, the quiet of the woods outside, the quiet inside.

  The woman puts her fingers into my ears and rotates them. A shivering of another kind runs throughout my body. She mutters words in another tongue—or is it the twisting of her fingers making the sounds? My mouth fills up with saliva. I swallow and swallow again and then cannot stop swallowing and have to keep swallowing. The veins in under my eyelids flash on and off like warnings. The padding of the woman’s soles going out makes a worried sound.

  She’s gone from the room a long time. I lie on my back on the table staring at the wall, listening for movement through it. I wait. I think about getting up and going out to find her. I think about leaving. I stay where I am. Finally she comes back. She carries a tray of things that she puts on the little wooden stand. She opens a bundle of dishcloth, and inside there’s a hot water bottle and rubber tubing and kitchen gloves, a bottle filled with clear liquid, square cuts of clean rags, scissors, twine—why twine?—a folded towel beneath the whole of everything. I close my eyes again and listen to her in her arranging, hearing the right placement of things, hearing she has done this before, hearing many times before. She murmurs words to herself, reminders maybe, or rules of some kind, or maybe she could be praying. Birds scratch and chatter in a skirmish atop the roof.

  Put your knees up, she says. Now you hold still.

  A fly lights on my forehead.

  It’s cold, what goes inside. Then it’s like a blade.

  Don’t move.

  I’m sorry.

  Doing good.

  Stop.

  Not much more.

  How much more?

  Hold on.

  Please.

  We’re just about over.

  Okay.

  Cramps?

  Bad ones.

  Good.

  It hurts.

  Keep your legs up.

  Oh, God.

  There. She pats my foot.

  Can I get up now?

  Lay here and keep still for a time.

  How long?

  I’ll be back.

  She goes out of the room and comes back with a musty old pillow that she puts under my head. She has a mole as big as a nipple on her neck. She asks if I need something to drink. She gives me a glass of water, and I take a sip of it and lean back. She tells me everything will be all right. She stands beside me for a while, gazing out the window but not seeming to be seeing anything, her eyes oily and dark within their coal hollows. She tells me the rain will soon be coming and reaches for the glass in my hand. The rain always comes, she says. We need not worry it along. She speaks now in a voice that is different from her tending-to-me voice. She speaks in a friendly, mercantile way. She says she sells cleaning products of top quality that you can only buy straight from the dealer. She says the name of the company, says she has been a distributor for them for a long time. Yes, I say, nodding my head, I’ve heard the name of the company before. I feel a twinge of pain from where the life would be. She smiles. She tells me in her selling-to-me voice that once I’m mended I will want to come back out for a visit and take a look at the stock in the pantry that she’s got. We have soaps and detergents that will clean anything, she says. Dishes, tires, dogs, clothes, tools, plants, shoes, whatever you have or can think of, these soaps will clean. All of what we sell is one hundred percent guaranteed, she says. Or you get your money back. She gives me a wink to mean it.

  Okay now, she says, speaking again to me in her tending-to-me voice. She pats my hand and turns and goes out.

  My tailbone is sore from the hardness of the table. I worry about how long I can keep still as she has said to do. I start to feel a leaking going into the napkin she has put between my legs, but the leaking doesn’t feel thick enough to be blood. I don’t know. I wonder if I should hold in what’s coming out. I want to call for her, but I won’t. I close my eyes and wait, listening for her behind the closed door the whole while. She’s a clatter of dishes, a humming, a smell of cooking beginning, something cabbagey and oniony, or a kind of root food, it might be.

  My heart beats the meter of a clock out in me.

  Let time be what it is.

  Who was it said this? I wonder what it means? I think it must mean nothing. Or could be it means everything.

  It’s dark outside when I wake. Crickets call out in their high-pitched shrill, while night bloomers unwhorl their sepals and petals. I raise myself up and turn toward the window, see the haze of moon caught in faint halo, ringed as it is in sunbeam, held in the however long of earth pull we are fixed in.

  PEARL HART KNEW a lot about breeding. She had a way of holding an ear when she got to talking about it, and it seemed to be a subject she talked about a lot. When she was giving breeding advice her eyes took on a look. She would wave her arms about in the air and up her decibel level. She would slap at the table and stomp at the ground. Her hair would go loose from its knot at the nape and unravel in a wild mane down her back. She would leave it that way, not bothering to knot it up again, not missing a beat of her testimony either.

  Mares, she said. Trouble with mares is they stay with you and need a watchful eye and all-the-time care. And when you’ve got your mares, well, then you’ve got your foals, and soon enough your colts and your fillies too, she said. I once had a friend in mares who would park his car in the barn and sleep out there in the backseat, just to be at the ready for the foaling. Now that’s a claim on your time, not to mention your spine and your backside, she said. And aside from the comfort of the sleep hours you don’t get to keep, there are the sky-high vet bills that can drain your outfit bigtime. Mares are a huge claim on the pocketbook. That’s why my part, you see, is in the siring.

  Most definitely, she said.

  Pearl Hart knew a lot about water as well. There was a day we would ride out to a part of her property so she could show me a giant groundwater irrigation pump. There’s something that ought to impress, she said. We sat our horses and she spoke about drive shafts and vertically stacked centrifugal impellers as we watched a stories-high giraffelike metal apparatus bore deep into the aquifer below. Or was the thing drawing the water upward in through its throat casings? I don’t know. I didn’t ask, or rather, I couldn’t. The groaning sound of the pumping machine’s workings sent an unsettling vibration through the bones. The earth beneath seemed it was being shogged loose from us. Waves of nausea rippled through me. I felt a sweat breaking. I felt a sinking.

  Rights, she said.

  About what?

  Rights, as in water rights.

  Water rights? I swabbed my forehead with a shirt cuff.

  That’s right, she said. Surface water. Groundwater. Rights.

  Only know the water stories Rose’s Daddy told, I said.

  Pearl took a little cigar out of the silver case she had in her pocket. She lit the little cigar and talked the smoke out of her mouth. Yes, he was quite the storyteller, she said. And wouldn’t I know, she said. Wouldn’t I, indeed. But he tended to leave a lot of parts of the stories out. I bet he didn’t tell you much about selling his water to outsiders, did he? He probably didn’t mention that many of us around here look upon this so-called way of doing business as being treasonous. Unless those of us at the district level, whose concern is for all of us—the greater good for the
greater number, meaning in all fairness—unless we as a district should determine the price and the amount of water to be sold, otherwise that water ought to stay here, for the overall betterments of this place. Undermining our already failing local economy is a betrayal. I bet the old man didn’t have too much to say about that, or the tension between us it created.

  I don’t know, I said, as far as the economy goes.

  And that husband of yours follows suit, by not knowing any better. He doesn’t seem to care enough about the land given to him for his keeping, or the water that goes along with it. He cares for little but the one thing. Well, that and rodeo’ing, so that makes two things, I guess.

  The machine grunted and churned.

  My cheek muscles puckered and watered my mouth.

  Now don’t go getting quieter on me. It’s not as if I’m telling you something you don’t already know. I mean to help, she said. Really, she said. I do.

  Her smoke rolled out in ropes and coils in the air about us.

  I should have done a better job of keeping that boy shoo’d away from that Pearl of mine, is all I can say. She fanned at the air to clear the smoke away and she looked at me. You’ve got to do something for yourself, she said.

  Do what? I swallowed the bitter taste down.

  Some advice. For starters, I’ve got a water lawyer for you to talk to. You can’t sell the place when it’s time to sell without the water rights to go with the house and the land property.

  Son’s been talking about it, I said. He wants out.

  Then it’s time you got your name put on things.

  The giant pumping machine jabbed away and ruckled on. I breathed with my mouth open, trying to calm my stomach down.

  C’mon, she said. You need to brisk up a bit.

  Pearl knee’d her horse and led us out to the shade of a big cottonwood. We got out of our saddles and benched on a tumbled-up bale of hay. She carried a canteen of water and reached it my way.

  I’m not feeling just right lately, I said. My head was dropped toward my knees.

  Pearl put a hand on my back. You’ll feel better in a few minutes.

  Her hand felt good there. I held still, not wanting her to pull it away, but after a minute I lifted my head and took a long drink of the sulfury-tasting water.

  Lean back, Sweetie, she said.

  I rested my head against a pillow of hay.

  How about I tell you my buffalo story, she said. Or have I told it to you already? she said.

  I would’ve remembered a buffalo story.

  She lit another cigarillo. I looked at the dry bale we sat on, thinking how quickly everything could go up in flame. She waved the little cigar about and talked on as I listened and kept an eye on the smoldering glow.

  So we were out on roundup for a couple of weeks up near Wickenburg way, sometime back. One of the ranchers up there had a mind to expand his enterprise, so he added a small herd of bison to his capital of cattle. We rode out to the rincon he had parceled the bison on, and where these great animals could roam, you know, as buffaloes are known to do, and made our camp among them. The rancher that invited us had a handsome outfit. There was a chuckwagon and a chef assigned to it that had cooked for one of our past American presidents—he was good, I tell you, that chef was. And there were a lot of good men riding good horses on that particular outing, men you could talk to and drink with and sport with, if you know what I mean. Pearl gave me a wink and a nudge of an elbow. That was one dandy roundup, she said. She sighed and smiled and took a puff on the cigar.

  Where was Ham?

  He was along, of course. He wouldn’t miss a good time.

  He didn’t mind?

  Mind what? My style? My men friends? You are young, she said. She laughed and shook her head.

  I’m feeling better now, I said.

  She looked at me a minute, seeming to be judging my condition for herself, then she went on.

  This one night, she said, I had to get out of my tent to relieve myself. So I crawled out and put my boots on—I was buck naked otherwise and did not want to linger any out in the cold, cold as desert nights can be, you know—and I went out under the most magnificent cover of stars there ever was to be seen, and found a good-size boulder nearby to squat behind for a bit of privacy and to admire the sky by—and my! what stars there be there. So I hunker down and get comfortable and let the sight above fill me with delight and wonder, and I begin to let the pee go when suddenly the boulder seems to be moving. And now the entire boulder is absolutely moving, and it’s grunting with indignity as well. Lord, did I ever buck up and trot off quick-like. She laughed and slapped at her thigh.

  Feels good to laugh, she said. You ought to try it more often.

  I gave her the smile she asked for. I lay back listening and she would go on.

  There would not be much time for visits with her, this most remarkable woman, this Pearl Hart. She was too soon gone back north, and with her daughter with child to follow. And she would never come to say good-bye. I don’t know why. Though maybe, in all honesty, I might have the tendency to do the same. But in the time we did have, there were more good stories, and she had things to say that she would leave me with. She spoke as though she knew what was. She spoke as though she knew who she was—seemed to me she must have, in the very act of naming herself, in the very deciding from the beginning who she would be.

  What do you want? she asked me once.

  This was early on in my married time with Son, and hardly knowing her. No one had asked such a forthright question of me before, unless I was knocking on a door or reaching for something. I stood there before her, a bit stupefied and likely flushed. After that I thought about Pearl’s question a lot. I’d be standing at the kitchen sink, tearing at onions, or mixing a bowl of kibble for the old man’s old dog, or riding alongside Son, watering the roads with the watertruck. Whatever I was doing, I would all the time be wondering about the very thing I might be wanting.

  When I saw Pearl next, I told her I had an answer. She smiled her smile. What perfect teeth she had. I wanted such perfect teeth. Maybe that’s what I should have said. It would have been a simpler wish altogether.

  But I told her about what I’d been thinking. I told her what it was I wanted.

  What’s holding you back then, Sweetie?

  I hitched a shoulder. It would scare me to death, I said.

  I bet it would scare you to life, she said.

  SON TAKES THE frozen dinners out of the freezer and puts them into the oven and sets the timer. When the bell goes off I get up from the sofa and go into the kitchen and see him putting forks and plates and glasses of milk out on the table. He has set us up in the breakfast nook in the kitchen, and we sit there in the quiet, gazing out to the lemon grove as the sun begins to gild it into olden ruins. The steam from the food rises in little bodies before our faces. I feel again that big clot of something that spilled out of me, slippery as a fish coming out it was. It splashed into the water and sank into the neck of the bowl. And then more blood poured out. I sat waiting for the bleeding to slow, my legs trembling uncontrollably, up and down and up and down—more spasmy, really. I put my hands on my knees to stay them. Then I put the pad between my legs and went to lie on the sofa in the parlor until Son called me into the kitchen.

  You’re back to not eating all the food on your plate, Son says.

  I feel kind of achy today. Crampy, I say.

  Seems like every day it’s that time of the month, he says.

  I need to lie down.

  You just got up.

  I leave my full plate at the table and go into the bedroom and turn the ceiling fan to high speed. Loose papers skitter off the chest of drawers. A few clothes take on lives of their own. Everything about looks thickly edged, as if another cast were added to the three-dimensional. Things are become oddly textured and are too spongey or too dense, either one. The spring of the mattress has turned hard as wood, harder, like concrete. I toss the sheets off, brittle as paper
wrapping, and lie with the fan blowing over me, feeling the rigid and the soft of things at the same time. Thinking of the milk soup my mother fixed when I was a child and sick. There was a crust of sugar on the top of it. I feel the spoon going into the soup now, but the liquid has turned gravelly and it scratches the metal that’s going in. My mouth is so awfully dry. What age am I? There is a taste of the wood of the headboard where I left the baby-teeth marks. There is the relief of the ache, the need of the hardness then. My grandmother shaking her head. Go to sleep, she said. I’m falling off the horse again and there’s no end to the falling—how lovely it is, the soft floating along of falling along. I’m going, I’m gone. I hit the ground. I spit dirt spit. Come on, spit it out. Gum comes out. A wad of chewed gum falls from my mouth and goes into my mother’s hand. I back the truck and turn the wheel before going forward, but the turn is too sharp and the hill too steep and I have to back up and struggle with the wheel again and inch forward, but still it’s no good, and just look at all the people out of their cars and waiting for me ahead, and the cars behind so close I can’t back up enough, and you need to turn the wheel as far as you can, but I’m trapped on a hillside too steep to climb.

  A door slams.

  Time moves away in a vapor. And time comes back in on itself. It carries the sound of nobody here.

  There are voices of people from a faraway and long-ago place. Someone’s calling my name out. A woman’s voice, I know it, but who? I open my eyes and see a dark thing big as a small being hurtling at me. I put my arms out to cover my face. I lift myself up in the bed, panting. My heart is risen out of my chest and moved up to pound inside my head. I look to see the nothing there. There. See. Nothing. Nothing but the pain. Like something inside me on fire. Worse. I lie back and turn to my side and bring my knees to my chest. I turn the other way. I roll onto my stomach. The pain, it won’t dull, it won’t change, no matter how I shape myself. Make it stop. I go back to my back and keep still as I can, thinking not moving might make it go away, but no, the pain is everywhere inside. I call Son’s name out, but he’s already next to me. I don’t know since when. I’ve got to get up, I say. Does he hear me? Help me get help. Are my words coming out? You need to carry me. He must hear me. He’s picking me up, but the hot knives—no, no, put me down. Can’t walk. Oh, please, somehow.

 

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