Pull the armchair up close to the bed right next to you, I said. Now we trade places.
The hired man didn’t need to be told to get up onto the bed on his knees. He had the idea by now. We each of us had a good purchase on the rug edge when I gave us the one-two-three. We lifted Son enough to clear him from the bed, and we more or less heaved and pulled and reached him like this and dropped him rug and all into the armchair. The work of the lift made a sweat break on the hired man’s forehead. I felt heat and color rise in me as well.
It’s getting warm again, I said. You’ll need all the fans going soon.
Rain don’t keep us cooled for too long, he said.
Son babbled and flailed his arms at us. We had to get him from the chair to the floor, and this maneuver took less effort, as Son moved with the carry of the rug and was breeched to the boards. We could drag him along without difficulty then, over the threshold and out to the cool dark parlor and into the ticking of the old clock, across the room and over the next threshold, and out and onto the porch. The old dog stood with her nose to the screen and whimpered as we hauled Son down the steps and parked him on the ground close to the back end of the pickup.
I don’t know if I’ve got the strength for the next big lift. I know I don’t. As I was thinking what next to do, the hired man gestured toward a cleanup crew of Mexicans out on the road. He jogged over to the Ambassador and drove out to fetch the help we needed. I went into the house to see what money was left in Son’s wallet.
The rest was easier. I thanked the guys who came to aid, and offered to pay them, but they wouldn’t take the money I held out. The kind-eyed and ragged men just looked at Son, the way he was laid out in the bed of the pickup. They said things in Spanish that sounded like condolences or maybe snippets of prayers, and they shook their heads, surely indicating pity.
THERE WERE NOT many things to put into the satchel but for a clean shirt, a sweater hardly worn since I’ve been here, a change of socks and some underthings, toothpaste, toothbrush, hairbrush, comb, a book never returned to the library, the school letter welcoming me. I put the tiny leathered heart, carried so long in my pocket, into the metal keepsake box returned from Daughter Pearl, and tucked the heart in a pouch in the satchel. I put the garnet necklace around my neck. The old man’s old pocketwatch I put into Son’s pocket, in the fresh pair of dungarees we’ve dressed him in. There are clothes washed and pressed for Son and folded into the suitcase, the suitcase settled next to him in the bed of the truck. Everything else I leave in the care of the hired man. I leave it to Hartry.
Hartry will care for the old adobe house until someone should come to claim it. I leave him to care for the horses—the mare and the bay and the sorrel and the paint—the calves too, and I leave him the hotshot to poke them with, along with all the rest of it that belongs in the toolroom and the tackroom. I leave the ropes and the saddles, the bridles and reins, the spurs, the chaps, the hames and the riggings, and whatever other things—all this I leave in his care. I leave him the old man’s shotgun, the old man’s best hat, his boots. The pickup I will take, leaving the watertruck with Hartry. Last, but not a bit least, I leave him the old man’s old dog.
This is not easy for either of us, meaning the dog and me.
You can’t go, is what I say outright to the animal.
She gives a hacking cough, as if she were trying to clear something stuck in her throat, which likely she is. She watches me get into the truck and she trots alongside for a time as I drive through the stubble and tip pits of the felled lemon grove. By the time I turn onto Old Border Road, the old dog is gone from sight, and soon enough too is the old adobe house. I keep from looking back. I won’t. I only check the rearview mirror to see Son laid out atop the rug, back in the bed of the truck, covered over with a dusty-colored tarpaulin.
I drive on in the polished light.
The incredible, delicate light.
How to describe it, this light? How to tell of the day? How to tell of the rarity of it, the pure aridity of it, the feeling of driving away in it? All of what had been warped in the heat and blurred in the haze stands out pristine in the day’s radiance. Jets rocket in the flawless blue, leaving the yonder above us scripted with unread messages. The tracks and prints of desert creatures are etched as they once were into earth, the eskers and gametrails scrolled into foothills and riverbeds. What do the tidings bid? Where might the paths lead? Is it hope alone that pulls us forward? All about, you see emblems of truth—the heads and shoots of living things breaking through loam, birds nesting in tree limbs and cavities, small animals building their middens anew. There will be stars to see tonight, and nights ahead filled with other latitudes and longitudes, hours and degrees that spur different views.
Hold it while ye may.
Old madrone and smoke trees rustle leaves as we go. Men working along the road doff their hats, families mending homes or erecting them again turn and raise their hands, a pack of dogs runs alongside the truck for a time, barking us onward. We travel one approach of town to the next, heading out the exitway, or entryway, depending on which way you’re facing, and passing the famous desert prison, deserted and ruinous as it is, a tunnel of dark cast within its sallyport. Soon the whirring of tires takes us across the bridge, throwing us over to the other side, the water below flowing again like the river it had been. We move through marshy sloughs and washes rich with ironwood and paloverde. We cross over the old railroad tracks and turn west onto highway, taking what was our honeymoon way.
As we tell of places we have been, those places we would someday go.
We traverse saltbush and greasewood, snakewood and creosote, ride over sun-varnished ground and on into barren uplands of pedregal and old lava flow. The tarpaulin billows about Son as we pick up speed, and before long the wind is tugging the tarpaulin loose from its hold under Son’s head and the tuck under his boots. I’m thinking to pull over to the side of the road to fix the canvas better, but before there’s a chance the thing entire gets lifted by an updraft and right like that it’s spiraling up and off into the sandhills beside us. I look into the mirror and see it ghosting away, watching until it disappears.
Going on. Moving through the alone that solely the desert instills.
Up ahead are the remains of an airfield where the carcass of an old aircraft lies ablaze in full sun. The land past it turns dense with cholla and prickly pear, with organ pipe and beehive and ocotillo, with sotol, yucca, agave, with barrels of saguaro fattened by the rain, their plump arms raised in praise. The truck climbs through a gap in the foothills, where hoodoos and pulpits and spires rise above, where the road cuts through outcrops of bubbled rocks and salmon-colored cobbles and tumbles of boulders, the stones spray-painted lately with Spanish names or incised with Indian myths from centuries ago—the petroglyphs and the intaglios—the sticked figures and ways of living carved into rock face, the gravels pecked and tamped and scraped to make hunter, lion, bison, horses with flowing manes, unnameable creatures, creeping things. The truck chugs on into higher country yet, a land of scrub pine and juniper and pinyon. I sight the turnoff to the lodge that was our honeymoon place—just the beginning of all the places we say we have yet to get to—and a feeling comes over me that catches under the breastbone. I fix the mirror to get a better look at Son, see him flat on his back, his boots rolled outwardly, hands at his sides. Going on. I hit the radio switch but find only crackles and buzz. I try to find a song in me and get a melody and the first line of one or two going, but nothing will stick. And on. Until arriving now to the top of the pass. We coast the rest of the way, speed through habra and gore, canyon and butte, and down into lowland, old patrol roads nudged south in the distance. I clutch and shift and touch brake when we come to where the road goes two ways.
Take the road now you have yet to take.
It’s simple enough from here, with just an interchange onto a feeder road that keeps going and takes you right to the place. You know you have arrived by the arrows an
d signs that point the way, and by the swells in the paving that are meant to slow you, know too by the tall palms, yet anchored and pillared for support and made to stand sentry at the entrance. Dwarf roses ornament the dirt plots of the parking lot all about, and little pyramid evergreens and flowering shrubs here and there do their best to cheer, though the charm of the outside cannot disguise what the inside is. A smell of overturned earth mixed with new-sawn wood and just-laid concrete pours in through the window, all of it the smell of beginning. A piece of heavy equipment in the distance growls along a driveway being laid. I pass the many empty slots, some of them with names stenciled in paint to lay claim, but instead of putting the truck into park in a proper space, I pull up to the front of the building and stop, where here I will quit the engine and get out and let the tailgate down, with its protest of joint and hinge. Then I climb up into the bed with Son.
He looks bad. His eyes are swollen, his lips cankered, his face reddened and sweaty. No longer is he handsome to look at, and for this I can be relieved. I don’t want to want him the way I did. I don’t want to want him at all. I hold his head up and try to get him to take a drink of water, and he puckers his lips, but most of the water spills out of his mouth and trickles down the folds of his neck when I tip the canteen. Try again, I say, and he does, and this time he chokes and spits and curses me. I wipe his throat with a bandanna, seeing the flesh there that I have put my lips to and loved, and a pang from an inmost place too buried to get at becomes a reminder of what I would wish away. I wet the bandanna more and wipe the road grime from his face, glad he keeps his eyes closed and doesn’t look at me, likely because of the sun, or could be the crust on the lids keeps them stuck, or maybe it’s because of me, I don’t know, but no matter the case, I open the soaked cloth and use it to cover his face over. I take a deep breath in, for me, for him, and wait for what’s next, waiting and noticing the light, how different it is here in particular and with the season of year—a light strange as it is familiar, making for a splendored deformity in the day that can’t be explained. What can’t be explained, that which we are held in by, and what it is that’s impossible to see, simply because we’re in the midst of it and can’t yet know where we are. There is no map to map the way. No one to tell you that you’re right or that you’re wrong. A big perching bird on a lamppost chucks at us from above. Son says something, but what it is is blurred by the damp mask and his mix-up and daze. I say something to him about time and things getting better. I chase a fly off his chest.
There’s a pounding of hammers, overlapped as irregular heartbeats, coming from over where another part of the building is being built, a cement mixer nearby that churns and whines, but no voices anywhere to be heard nor anybody to be seen. After a while I spot a couple of people through the entryway, standing inside the place looking out toward the truck at us, and I raise my arm to gesture them toward us. The wide glass doors open and close on their own, and two men are breathed out. They saunter across the brand-new concrete, wearing pastel-colored pajamas, their faces cameo’d by the sun behind them, a slice of moon high above in the blue. They get to the truck and see Son laid out in the back of it, looking the way he does, and one of them nods his head and goes back in through the magic doors, this time coming back with a stretcher. The men speak in undertones, one to the other, as if knowing what is and what might be, and together they get Son out of the bed of the truck and onto the rolling cot, covering him with a clean sheet, as a heap-up of cumulus cuts in front of the sun and dims us and everything below. I stand back as they place Son’s arms and legs the way they were taught to do, and they fix him snug into the sheet, and one of them unlocks the foot brake and they trolley Son along, with me following at their heels, with the cement mixer roaring more loudly in the background now, with the hammers hammering on, with the doors opening wide for us with a mechanical sigh, and Son is wheeled deep into the wondrous cool of the tiled lobby. Here I will stop at what they call Admitting, and let them go without me, watching as they move across the room to head down a long hallway, going from soil and pavement to molding and flooring, from sunlight to fluorescence, from the space they so inhabit to the emptiness that is left, as they turn the corner and are gone, with me standing and waiting, as if someone should come to put back what there had been.
Miss, a clerk behind a desk says.
A woman will hold a clipboard my way, and I will take it along with the pen attached to it that hangs from a chain, not saying anything, just filling in the blanks that need filling in, signing in all the places where the check marks have been made, and writing my full and proper name.
Reading Group Guide
OLD
BORDER
ROAD
A NOVEL BY
SUSAN FRODERBERG
A CONVERSATION WITH SUSAN
FRODERBERG
The author of Old Border Road talks with Stephenie Harrison of BookPage.
This is your first book to be published, so to start, congratulations! Can you tell us a little about what prompted you to write a novel and what it was like trying to get it published?
Old Border Road began as a short story, published in a literary journal and later anthologized. I went back to the story because I believed there was still more to be said. I had found a place where I could wander about, and with it a way of speaking that was coming to me pretty easily. So I wrote a first chapter, “A Home to Go Home To,” which was also published as a short story. There was enough to keep me going after this, and I carried on. From there it was a matter of patience and will and discipline.
I had written a novel before but put the thing into a drawer, thinking it not worthy of publication. I was satisfied enough with Old Border Road to read parts of it over the telephone to a writer friend when it was finished. He encouraged me to send it out, and I took his advice and did. My agent was the first person to read the entire book.
You lived in Arizona during your high school years, and you set your novel there as well. Although you have since lived elsewhere, and now live in New York City, why did you choose to set your novel in Arizona? Did you feel you had some unfinished business there?
It was more that I still had feelings for the place. I was sixteen years old when I moved to Arizona, a time of acute memory, and with it lots of adolescent daydreaming and yearning. I wanted to be an artist at the time, more than anything. My mother advised me to think about finding a job, as mothers are wont to do. I went to nursing school, and soon after graduation left Arizona and moved back home to Seattle, where the rest of my family was living.
At times, this novel is a fairly harrowing read. As an author, do you find it difficult to put your characters through such hardships?
No, for two reasons. First, characters are words, not people. Second, human existence is filled with hardship. Every epic or dramatic poem or great novel is about a struggle of some kind; it’s a striving for happiness, it’s about someone trying to get something. There are endless wishes and wants. Unless we’re able to strangle all desire and thereby achieve nothingness, or nirvana, there remains to us a state of being in which one desire necessarily follows another. If there is no such thing as lasting contentment or absolute happiness, how could it be a subject of art? I am with Schopenhauer here.
One piece of advice that is frequently offered to aspiring authors is that you should write about what you know. To what extent would you say you apply this principle to your own work?
Sure, it helps to be familiar with the subject matter you’re delving into. Melville’s experience on a whaling boat gave him the authority to write about whaling. On the other hand, I don’t believe Melville necessarily threw a harpoon or survived a sinking ship, just as McCarthy did not scalp Indians or make love to dead bodies in order to write what he did. As for myself, it’s true I have run barrels, and have even tried to throw a rope to heel a calf, however inexpertly. But I lay no claim to ever preparing for any role in a rodeo, except that of hollering bystander.
/> As an author, what is harder to write when it comes to a book: the first sentence or the last?
I would say they are equally difficult, or equally not difficult.
Trying to find a rhythm or a meter specific to the telling of a particular story, and keeping on with it from beginning to end, is the trickier thing.
Are there any particular authors who inspire you or that you feel have had a notable impact on your own writing?
Certainly Schopenhauer, as I mentioned earlier. And absolutely Emerson. Add to the list Frost and Stevens, Joyce and Beckett, O’Connor and Robinson, among others. To my mind, there is no greater American writer alive than Cormac McCarthy. All of us, as writers—as artists—come out of some petri dish, and I will admit to coming out of his. There is no such thing as the innocent eye, or the innocent ear, no matter what anybody tells you. On the other hand, we are each of us necessarily what no one else can possibly be.
Do you find your philosophy background has enriched your writing?
Probably, because the opportunity to study philosophy has enriched my life. But I’m happier being a writer than I would have been if I were doing philosophy work, as writing has set me free in a way that philosophy—specifically, Western philosophy—could not have. In Western philosophy, you must follow formal logic—if A, then not B. In fiction, you may have both A and B, if you so choose. You can be exhausted and you can be exhilarated at the same time: one state need not negate the other. Or you can be derived and you can be unique, without contradiction. This is not to say we can do away with logic—there would be no language without it. But in writing, it’s possible to bend language toward a more Eastern way of thinking.
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