Old Border Road

by Susan Froderberg

  I pick the receiver up, hearing nothing.

  TEN

  THE BREACH

  The silence is what wakes me.

  The old man’s old dog wakes as well, seeming to know my eyes have just opened. She rises old and slow from the floor, stands there, totters, then shakes. I squint out of reflex, but not a bit of dust bursts off her fur. Only pieces of a dream scatter and drift and fade—strange rooms in a familiar place, faces belonging to another time, every picture of what might be just out of reach enough to too soon lose it.

  The storm.

  I arise at once, remembering, and pull the curtain away from the window, looking out to see the rain stopped. Pouches of clouds still fill the sky and reflect like pillows onto a sea of water below.

  There’s a feeling of a beginning coming from somewhere.

  Parts of the dream. Who knows where. Could that have been me?

  I put yesterday’s clothes back on and go into the old man and Rose’s room, where Son lies in the bed breathing soundlessly in his sleep. The room smells old. Son smells old. He smells of sweat and of urine, of things you want to turn from, of what you undertake to forget. I put a rag to his face and wipe the drool and the crust away. He rustles about and mutters something, and quiets again. His lips are cracked and blistered. I touch his skin, feel it cool and sticky.

  The old dog follows me into the kitchen and heads straight to her water bowl and starts lapping. She stops and looks up, but when I open the back door to let her out, she puts her nose into the bowl and goes on drinking again. I fetch a basin from beneath the sink, squeeze a jot of dishsoap into it, and turn the faucet on, watching the iron-colored water in its slow rise to brim, the suds bubbling up and giving out to nothing in the hardness. The cover of dust is at last washed from the glass of the window. Through the panes you can see the skeleton of Rose’s climbing rose, broken from its hold on the adobe wall that it had clung to for its years. Clouds beyond already begin to flatten and break into patches. Coins of turquoise appear here and there in the gray.

  There was water everywhere in the dream, deliriously beautiful water. There was a boat. I wanted to get into the boat in the worst way. I wanted to be on the boat so I could jump off it and dive in, going down and deep as I could into the crystalline water. But I was made to wait, I don’t know why. I waited and waited until I grew tired of waiting, for whoever or whatever it was I was waiting for, and all the time knowing I could swim easily, especially clear and pure as the water was. I couldn’t stay in place anymore, and I jumped aboard the boat as it came forward just before it docked. But it doesn’t dock, and now I’m on the boat and we’re already pulling away from the shore and I see the water beneath suddenly become dark and thick. I’m scared, deathly scared I might fall off into the murky stench, and feel I have to hang on tightly so as not to slip overboard and be done with. The panic—it all comes flooding back to me again.

  The water in the basin overflows into the sink. I shut the tap off and let go the clench I’ve got on the rim. I pick a sliver of soapbar out of the soapdish and take a dishcloth out of the top drawer. I carry the warm basin and the washing things into the bedroom, where I set it all up on the table by the side of the bed. Now I wash Son, beginning with his sun-coarsened face and his ruddy, chicken-fleshed neck. I rinse and soap and rub the cloth over his pale chest, the width of his rib bones like tines of drift in the sand, and then I soap his pale belly over, hairy and densely patched as saltgrass grows. I drop the cloth into the water and bring his knees to a bend, gripping the crag of his shoulder to roll him over to a side. His pale legs fall away lifeless. Rinse the cloth, soap it over, begin again. Reach for the jar of creosote cream and open the jar and rub the pungent-smelling unguent over the places reddening on Son’s backside, over the ledges of his hipbones, around the mounds of his heels. By now I have roused him to some level of confused awake. He blinks and looks around, and opens his mouth when he sees me bringing a toothbrush close to his face. He lets me scrub his teeth, his tongue. His gums bleed. I put the cup to his lips and tell him to spit what’s in his mouth out into the basin, but he swallows instead. I give him another drink and he coughs up the water.

  Remembering the yerba buena from the Quechan woman.

  I touch the scar on his forehead, shaped and welted like a centipede. I brush the hair away from his face and brush the sand that comes loose from his hair off the sheets and the pillowcase. I grasp his arms and pull him forward to get him to sit upright in the bed in order to get a square fold of clean sheet beneath him, trying to brace him like this while I straighten the sheet properly. But he won’t stay—doesn’t want to or can’t do it—and I let him fall back again onto the pillow. He speaks in words you’ve never heard. He looks at me without seeing me. I wipe the brine from the creases of his eyes and apply more of the ointment to his lips. I leave the beard growing, coming in thick and red as it is.

  I put an ear to his chest and hear the rapids of his heart.

  I change the casing on the pillow. I gather more pillows to support him with, and I turn him once again to his side and use them to pad his back and stay him this way, using one too as a prop between his useless legs. After a while I’ll come in and roll him yet the other way.

  THE RIVER THAT stems into this region was once a splendid river and colored red, the old man said. And thereby the name was given, Colorado, as the desert that holds the river was also called, until the desert would be fit into a larger ordering of land gain and be given another name of Spanish favoring, the meaning of the latter tending toward diction of a harmonious nature. Yet the discourse would be turned and spoken not altogether in harmony. For the vernacular of these alluvial plains was too soon sharpened by the vanity and the avarice of the men who came. These were prophets who brought with them their visions of profit. Their wish for bounty would be promoted by promising land made desirable for selling, land that was back then called the Valley of the Dead. And hope for private reward would be spoken in the language of the public good. Talk was aimed at harnessing the river and, by doing so, claiming the melting snows of a noble northern mountain range. And these men did indeed procure the acre-feet of water needed to nourish the soil. And report of water stock and land scrip came loud from their greedy mouths.

  Whereupon more prospectors came.

  Whereupon the settlers came and the fields were planted and tended.

  And other men came to lay and control the railways.

  And the clergymen did come to rule by their means.

  Teams of men came and pitched their tents, and with their stakes they marked the boundaries. Others came to dredge and excavate and scrape. Lo, numbers of miles of canals and ditches and laterals were carved into the earth, and the river was thereby captured. Thence came the day that the water did burst like a devil’s tongue from out of the headgate, and it spilled red as it was and silty into the mother ditch.

  And so the great diversion.

  And this stretch of desert was thus claimed.

  And there would be more rail lines to be laid.

  And many more people did come.

  And as the revenues were sown, so did man worship the work of his own hands.

  And he did behold it.

  Rose’s Daddy took a seat on the front porch and went on.

  Yet iniquity would fall upon all the inhabitants of the land. For the work of these men was done in haste and with lack of maintenance, with thinking tending toward the short and not the long of it. Indeed, the floods would come, and the violence and the spoil, the grief and the wounds thereof.

  As the river cast out her waters, so did she cast out her wickedness. The Colorado rose, as did the sister river that fed into it, and the unleashed waters churned and rived away at the sides of the banks until the yokes were broken and the bands were burst and the rivers grew wider and wilder. The manmade canals and flumes and cisterns newly built were breached useless. A great torrent poured through draws and ravines, forming cataracts and rapids, and
over the ledges of barrancas roiled tumbles of falls. The waters boiled and foamed, and the terrain about became a seething pot. Telegraph poles were halved, railway ties were swallowed, homes and farms and ranches were abandoned. People devised crude boats and watercraft so they might flee. Those most quick to leave were the men who had devised the concrete waterways, and they took their proceeds and vanished back east or moved to the coast for other water endeavors. Many keepers of the fields gave up in despair and went elsewhere, who knows where, but never to return to the valley. The pastors’ flocks scattered. Towns were laid waste. Acres upon acres were left to become derelict, the slough and alluvium turned to fen and to pit, a choke of tamarisk thicket, a tangle of boulders and roots, a whirl of debris, the land spoiled by the washout and heap-up of gravel and sand, and thereby to go again unsown.

  Rose’s Daddy rose from his seat and stood looking outwardly, speaking now as if addressing the land surrounding him.

  Yet the few souls who braved to remain ran to and fro and created brazen walls to contain the waters, he said. One of these men would be my father. My father and the others worked to fill the mile-wide break through which the river poured. They used boulders and gravel and clay to stanch the flow, and levees were constructed and mattress dams of piling and brush were made. Once the waters were held and had begun to recede, new headgates were built, and canals were dredged of silt, and the railways put into order. And men of ambition did again appropriate the waters. And people came and began to dwell in the gutted terrain of the valley afresh.

  The old man stopped and gestured a hand at the countryside about.

  Once more, man had obtained his dominion, he said. Now be it with the foresight to cage the mighty river and lessen any chance for it to again rage and take its revenge. Thence as the story goes, the great dams were erected, and with them came the reservoirs and the generators, the diversions and the aqueducts. And as the land was thus reclaimed, so were the agencies and the departments and the corps and the associations made, and too came the lobbyists and the absent landlords, and more fortunes and power were gained by speculators and those who believed water ought to be treated as property, and they might thereby wax rich. Wherefore these men called themselves practical men. Thus it came to pass that the water was tamed and it did flow river to valley accordingly. And the land was made pleasant by much of the alien labor that supported it, and was inhabited once again.

  Yes, indeedy, Rose’s Daddy said. Until there shall come the next great disaster, whether by nature’s hand or by the violence of man. For the covet of profit is inherent in men, and the sovereignty of the economy will rank over ideals of lesser value. The monopoly of water is the goal of those who have so staked their interests in it. And yet water, to all men, is life, and thus its claim to each and every should be so justified. Would this not be right?

  Yet did I not too look to water for profit?

  Rose’s Daddy shook his head.

  Nature concerns herself not with the single mortal, but only with the species, as I have said before, he said. Is it for this reason man has taken nature for the enemy? Yet what fool would think that in this battle he might succeed?

  The old man went back to his seat and spoke no more.

  NATURE WOULD SURPRISE us soon enough, just as Rose’s Daddy had said. The storm we got caught in caused the trenched stretch of sluggish water that still possessed a bridge overhead, and had once flowed the color red, to run hard and quick as the great river it had long ago been. The grinding waters eroded the river’s banks, and the river deposited its silt and sediment and detritus in different places. Sandbars were formed anew and other channels cut, the river having reshaped itself and moved along an alternate path to take a more westerly bearing. The downpour made a mess of all the waterways, brimming over and spilling out as it did in the mother ditch, in the channels and canals, with the flood beating its way wildly through the floodgates, chewing up bypasses, bursting through the intakes. The overflow went heaving by, at who knows how many miles per hour, carrying tangles of thicket and shrub, downed trees, jams of wood and debris, bags of feed, bales of hay, pieces of equipment, drowned animals, even people in the boil and the foam of it. It would take weeks to mend the wreckage and breach. It would take days to find bodies and what else mattered. So much of everything disappeared entirely.

  Godwater was what the Padre always called rain that fell in this place. A word, he said, he had learned from the Mormons during a time working up north with them. What would the Padre have now to say? Was the mighty torrent a result of overpray? Was the whole mess due to some kind of extreme power of believing? Would he be of the conviction that the gathering he held before he had yet to flee this town could have produced such a deluge?

  Might he truly believe these things?

  Who could really believe any of it?

  But people did go, as he bid them to. I wanted to see who those people were. I wanted to see what their faith looked like. Mostly I wanted to see how the Padre would do his conjuring. Because hadn’t he maybe used some conjuring with me?

  There were those that had come to the prayer meeting inspired by the new pastor and inspired too to bring about a change. These were the hardy kind that knew heat, knew how to live in it in the day-to-day, as anyone has got to in this place. But when the heat persisted well past its normal and barely tolerable length of stay, well, people became entirely unsettled about it. My guess is that those who came to pray did so because praying was better than doing nothing, better than waiting the weather out, just sitting around panting and sweating most of the day every day, day in and day out. And hadn’t the Indians prayed for rain? If not outright danced for it? So you might say this kind of thing was in the town’s history.

  Still, the evening was an odd one.

  The Padre was strumming his guitar when I walked into his study at the church. He was wearing a long white garment with long bell-shaped sleeves, and he was barefoot. Around his neck was a long, ropy gold chain with a Celtic cross big as a hand penduled at the end of it. His hair was grown longer and it flowed over his shoulders, Jesus-like, and his eyes had a glazed-over look to them, as if he were seeing something past the handful of people that sat about the room—this look being kind of Jesus-like too. There were a couple of the older church ladies there, perched on cushions on the floor, and their eyebrows were raised as they saw me come into the room. There was a husband who belonged to one of the ladies, and he nodded at me, and the man who worked at the tack and feed, he also nodded. Pearl was there, and Daughter Pearl—both of them came.

  Everyone sat about to form a circle on the floor around the prayer rug and the Padre. The desk had been pushed against the wall and the chairs moved out for the occasion. He plucked the guitar strings softly in the middle of those convened, and I took a seat between the two men. Once I was settled, and the others resettled, the Padre began to play the instrument louder. He broke into full song. His voice was deep and surprisingly good, as if he had been schooled and knew how to use it, which likely he had. His Jesus eyes went away and his look became more searching, and as he sang he stared keenly into the eyes of those of us on the floor, one by one, as if singing to each alone. When his eyes touched mine, I couldn’t help but look down. His gaze was piercing, and it was too much to have others see him seeing so hard into me. The Padre switched his melody and went directly into another song, and he soon had the whole group singing along to one of those tunes or hymns that it seems everyone who goes to church knows. I just faked it, a word here, a word there, as one does. Daughter Pearl was the whole while singing and now looking at me as well. Her stare was mean as a pinch.

  After the song was over, the Padre put his guitar aside and sat down on the floor between Pearl and her daughter, so to fill the circle. He had us all join hands, which didn’t please me, for I had to touch the sticky palms of the two men I sat between. The Padre had us every one close our eyes. He spoke to God for all of us. He said to God that we were assembled here for
Him and we were receptive to His powers. He said to God we were His vessels and that we had come here to empty ourselves and to ready ourselves to be filled by Him and only Him.

  After the holy appeal, we all opened our eyes. The older church ladies fidgeted on their floor cushions. Pearl Hart smiled at me. Daughter Pearl looked to the Padre and waited. I could imagine her yet with my garnet necklace around her neck. I could imagine, as well, the Padre rubbing her feet as he did with me.

  We are not here to pray for rain, the Padre said, talking to us straight on now, and in a not-praying-for-us voice. We are here to bring a change in the weather by our visions of it. Vision is power. Do not try to will the rain, he said. Do not try to grasp it. Just imagine it. Godwater, he said. He stopped talking and got his Jesus eyes back. He reached behind himself and lit a stick of incense.

  Let all of us close our eyes again, he said, his voice a coarse whispering, gone monotone. Breathe deeply and begin to imagine the clouds moving in from a distance and thickening above our heads in the heavens. See the clouds fill with spheres of water, he said. See the molecules within the spheres as they cluster and stick. Picture the forming of droplets beginning. Feel the expansion, the energy, the release. Hear the sky as it will seethe and pulse above us. Now see the rain. Godwater, he said. See the godwater falling. Feel the touch of it like love upon your skin. Feel it cool you. Feel it soothe. Faith will move mountains, Jesus tells us.

  The Padre opened his eyes. Somehow knowing, I opened mine at the same time.

  Do not reason, he said, looking right into me. Only believe.

  When I look back to that evening, I see the whole séancelike gathering being as strange as it was ordinary. People do act this way and believe such things, they do it all the time. The stranger thing was what followed, for it was the next day that the church would burn down.