A Phantom Herd

by Lorraine Ray

"Doesn't look the least bit like rain. Where are the monsoons this year? That's what I'd like to know. Everybody was complaining last night at the Odd Fellows Hall. Then Bertha Ogden said the same thing on the phone this morning." Bertha Ogden was my grandmother's best friend who phoned Gumm, our father's mother, early every morning.

  "Oh, were you out last night?" asked Mother.

  "Yes, I was at the Odd Fellows," Gumm repeated.

  Waiting for a promising halo of clouds hung over one of the saddles in the mountains to make me feel something, I listen to them anticipate rain which makes most in the desert happy, when I felt nothing but the dull desert air swinging past my legs above the dinky goldfish pond in my grandmother's backyard on Fourth of July, 1961. Dullness, which would be what my face would show, even if everyone else around that pond would be smiling. Those smiling parents welded themselves to the iron chairs that were formed of straps of flat iron bent to the body and in these iron chairs they sunk into the Bermuda Grass, so that the adults seemed to float above the brilliant green turf. My grandmother with her stern face and pin in the middle of her dress that fell well below her knee, an ace bandage on her left ankle seen vaguely like some dark omen living under her nylons, foot a-jiggle, shaking her drink, watching her goldfish and the halo of cloud.

  "And yesterday I worked a shift at Benz' until five. Wasn't my shift but I was doing a favor for Jane. Not that I'll get a favor in return. Just see what happens if I ask to change my shift. Well, not a soul will volunteer to do it. Just about killed my feet they were aching so much at the end of the day. The store was so busy I never got my break. Then I had the worst, the most difficult client, and had to cut some very obstinate material for her and her daughter. Making a fancy dress. Velvet. That wasn't too pretty when I finished cutting it and she and her daughter complained to Hal and he chewed me out about it. Said I was arrogant and rude to customers. She wanted me fired and said I deserved whatever she got from me and more so. She says 'can't you cut that right?' 'Isn't there someone here who can cut this better than you? You are butchering that fabric!' I held my tongue for most of her insults and I was proud of it, but finally I broke down and got sarcastic. What do you expect when a person is getting ridden by someone like that lady and her daughter? Butchering? Well, it's about time I quit, that's what I think. Don't know how I made it to the Hall in time for the dinner. Had a run in my nylons and my new dress showed the slip so I had to pin it up. All the way around. And I thought I checked that. Maybe I misplaced the slip I bought. Maybe I only thought that was the new slip, but it wasn't."

  Father, knocking back his rum and coke, made an incomprehensible snide remark about his mother and the innumerable lost things in her house and her buying slips by the dozens so she used up all her money from working at Benz' which was always tiring her out and making her feet ache. Social Security better hurry up and come. That was what he said. Get that Social Security bill passed and shut up his mother.

  "Then I had to pick up old Mrs. Ogden at her son's place and he lives halfway to Nogales out on that horrible road to the reservation where everybody gets killed and you know I don't care to drive out there at night all on my lonesome. Not even half a moon last night. Dark as sin. The wind was blowing too. I hated to do it, to go out there. She was ready when I came to the door, though. She's good about that. I should have just honked and expected her to come out. But yes, we had an installation. And a lovely dinner, meatloaf and a tomato casserole, very elegant that was I don't know who made it but it was a treat, but she didn't know her lines again. Wasn't what it should have been. I've seen better. Mrs. Ogden agreed with me on that. All the Militants did. She didn't know her lines. She should have said, 'the Noble Garter shall upon the receipt of the word of the Scarlett Degree' but instead she said 'the Noble Garter when having possession of the letter from the most noble Scarlett Degree.' Why she's making up lines! I am surprised she didn't flub up 'I AM A REBEKAH."

  "Who? Who did what?" asked Berk, managing to interrupt the lengthy monologue of his mother-in-law.

  "Why the young silly whippersnapper of a fool they've gone and elected to be head of the Noble of the Garters. Was only last month when they did it. She doesn't have a head to remember her lines. Not at all. I tell you. She's the most muddled up little thing. Why they all should have known from how many times she flubbed up what she was supposed to say for Recorder of the Noble. When the report of the Recorder to the Noble is finished the Recorder says: 'So follows the watch-words of our Order.' But she said: 'And here follows the watch-words.' Pah! If you're going to make up words, you might as well create your own club."

  "Trouble is they elect the person who's popular," said Madeline. "I've seen the same thing happen time and time again when I was in Theta Rho and in the Officer's Wives Clubs at Wright-Patterson. Not the one who can really do the job. Just the most popular person."

  "Yes, the most popular. But she doesn't know her lines. I tell you it about ruined the installation. Just about. 'Truth is the standard by which we value friends!' 'Truth is the standard by which we value people!' 'Friendship is like a golden chain' she says. When she didn't go on, the whole Lodge yelled back 'that ties our hearts together!' Doesn't know what the Beehive symbolizes to a Rebekah. Couldn't explain the Moon and the Seven Stars! A Rebekah should be able to say, 'The Moon and the Seven Stars represent the never failing order which pervades the Universe of God and all of nature, and suggests to the members the value of system, regularity, tolerance and forbearance.' She froze up and mumbled some nonsense about the moon off the top of her head. And the Militant told her to know how to respond to that question! But a lot of the Lodge is happy with ruined installations. The more ruined they are the better as long as she's beaming around. But they'll come to regret it. Yes, they will. When they realize how badly she does. I don't even want to think about what she'll do as the Grand Noble for the entire year."

  "I wouldn't worry about it," said our mother.

  "Oh, I'm not worried. I'm enjoying it, in my peculiar fashion. Like watching a forty car train wreck. I ought to drive over to San Diego or visit my sister Bertha in Michigan. Would be nice to see the old farm again, too. And Bertha and Cy. But I don't look forward to driving the way I used to. Can't get anyone to go with me. Don't suppose any of you would lend me a grandchild for the trip?"

  We all, the grandchildren, flinched in horror, though I probably didn't know exactly what was being suggested. The thought of merely driving in her old white 1951 Indian Head torpedo-back Pontiac anywhere was terrifying as she had a lead foot, and I witnessed this when she once took me from school to a dental appointment, and people said she was so crabby "she wouldn't get along with Jesus if he had the misfortune to live with her."

  "Why don't you fly, mother?" asked Madeline.

  "Like you do?" said my grandmother turning to her son-in-law, Berk.

  "Sure," said Berk.

  "I've seen lots of inventions in my life, but I will not see earth with no earth below me until I am taken to heaven... Have you read the predictions of Mother Shipton in that clipping of mine? Very telling. Chilling. 'A Carriage without a horse shall go; Disaster fill the world with woe?.'"

  "So says a warty old English biddy born in a cave," mumbled our father sullenly into his rum and coke.

  Berk, smiling gaily, red cheeked, blonde, Air Force pilot rising in the ranks. Madeline watched her son Rik in braces for the last time. They were discussing wheelchairs. All of us, the grandchildren, were in the itchy green grass, Meredith, Jack, my cousin Rik, my cousin Jan, and myself. Sandy listened to music on her own in the house.

  The fireworks over the old stadium were what we waited for there, darkness and the fireworks. Or a hint of rain.

  "Now what did you do that for?" said my grandmother to Meredith who tossed a rock into the goldfish pond.

  "To scare em."

  "Well, that isn't considerate. Why don't you leave them alone? They aren't throwing rocks at you?"

  "I don't care. If they do,"
said Rikki. "They're bad shots."

  "Yeah, they're bad shots," said Jack.

  "The logic of the children," said my grandmother sarcastically. "I could write a book, but nobody would buy it. Where's the basket for the kids?"

  "Did we forget to bring it out?" asked Mother.

  "Yes. We did. Go inside somebody," our grandmother ordered.

  "Ben, you do it," said Mother.

  "Don't look at me," he complained.

  "Send the kids in," Madeline suggested.

  "That's it. It's near the water heater. You know," said Gumm. "I've got to stop them tearing up my grass and throwing rocks at the fish," she added to the adults.

  "They need a lickin," said Mother helpfully.

  An Indian basket with a lid in which she kept the blue plastic jointed man, some blocks, a Wooly Willy magnet game, a handmade stuffed dog with several missing limbs. This basket of toys sat beside her water heater and had a smell of the old refrigerator that was on the concrete floor of the back room where my grandmother slept.

  "They can bring out the basket in the grass. Tell them to go in. Don't be afraid. Open the back door. Doris Grimm is out. The boarder is out! Don't be afraid. Look at them! Afraid to go in their grandmother's house. Doris isn't in. By the water heater, they should know. Bring it out into the grass and they'll have something to play and not just throw rocks at my goldfish and yank up the Bermuda runners. I leave my drippy hose out here to get the grass thick and here the kids are yanking it out to beat the band."

  "I hope there aren't any monsters in here," said Jack as we went up the steps and into her house. Our older cousin wasn't anywhere near and the boarder's empty room had an unseen ticking clock.

  "Oh," said Rikki jauntily dragging his legs in braces up the steps, "Don't worry about monsters. The United States Air Force will take care of anything that comes our way in the way of monsters. You can depend on the Air Force. My Dad knows all about what we've got protecting us and it's something special. Nothing can get at us. America has special weapons against any monsters. It doesn't have to worry you. Just sleep the night through in safety."

  "What about the sea?" asked Meredith.

  "We got special weapons to kill em really fast. They won't even get up the beach. That's the beauty of the American Air Force. We've got everything beat."

  We brought out the basket, but left it in the grass. When the adults weren't looking we snuck off to the front yard.

  This same state of dullness persisted while I studied the old home for vets across the street from my grandmother's house where the American flag flapped, revealing and obscuring the rows of wheelchairs full of shrunken, shadowy old men, World War I veterans, who had been blinded in the trenches in France, crippled by bombs, made legless, I think. These vets often hollered across the road at us, cursed us without reason, without cessation. "Go to hell with you! You, playing there! I see you hiding behind the fence. I see you. Goddamn you. Go play in hell, why don't you? Goddamn you, you stinking little, noisy kids. We hate you."

  And that Fourth of July Gumm came lurching around the house, saying, "Did they yell at you? Now, tell the truth, you didn't antagonize them? You didn't shake your bottoms at them, did you? Did they holler? I've half a mind to go over and speak to the man and woman who take care of them, but it's best to forgive them. I live peaceably. I do good unto all. But they are not doing good to you."

  "Come on around the back." She herded us together. "Come around and leave them alone. Someday I'm going to go over there and talk to those men. Yelling at children with that kind of language is not right. Cursing. Where are their manners? Being disabled is no excuse for cursing at children."

  "I'm not allowed to curse," said Rikki sanctimoniously.

  "Well, that's right," said Gumm.

  And then in the twilight sky, the cloud actually made a perfect donut riding the tip of Finger Rock, which our father called Dracula's castle, and the adults, speaking from their iron chairs spread out on the thick Bermuda lawn, around her goldfish pond that was surrounded with basalt rocks, my mother and father, an aunt and uncle, and cousins, discussed Michigan and communists in slushy voices.

  "I found the old song book of the Grange. The Grange movement back home in Michigan. Mother's name was in the front, because she played the piano, very well I might add, for the meetings which were sometimes at the old farm in Michigan. I never had the patience to learn piano myself, but my older sister Bertha did. She plays at her house in Lansing for her husband, Cy. A beautiful piano which mother had bought. Of course, Bertha got everything from the old home. She had all the fine things given to her. I once got a little set of the prettiest doll dishes. Well, I didn't even believe they could be for me at all. 'Are these for me? Can these really be for me?' I asked. I was born premature and they put me in a box near the stove and they fed me constantly on lamb broth. Always liked a piece of lamb. My whole life since. So does my sister Bertha. Did you know she once had tea for Hemingway, Juney?"

  "Yes, I believe you mentioned that several times."

  "When he was an unknown writer. Cy was a doctor, you see, and Hemingway's father was a doctor. Bertha was well educated, but not me, oh no. I wanted to play in the fields instead of learning my lessons properly. But this old song book of the Grange is very interesting. Such a wonderful movement. A farm movement. Mother and Father were prominent in the Grange at home in Michigan. You probably know about it, Juney."

  "I don't know what it is," said Meredith.

  "I've heard you mention it," said Father.

  "Well, I know absolutely what it was," said Mother. "And did you know that it was practically a communist movement?" My mother, chuckling quietly, stirred her ice tea around. I watched to see what my grandmother would say to that!

  "What? Communist?"

  "Yes."

  "No. You can't be right. Father did not approve of communism. He wanted it run out of the country, run off the face of the earth. Why, he hated the very word, the very idea of it. He said it made his blood boil when he thought of it. He and the old man on the other side, on Harry's side, that was something to see when the two of them were together. Harry's father liked Mr. Sinclair who ran for Governor in California and he was one of those socialists. Never seen two men go after each other so. They fought like tigers. Arguing and fighting to beat the band. Golly, it was something. Father said Mr. Sinclair was a prime example of an idiot. That meat industry book was from Sinclair. All about unclean meat? In the factories? I heard it was mostly true, though. I don't blame him for writing what was true, even if it made America look bad. Dad thought he ought to shut up about the bad things and work behind the scenes to make those changes. Sure, changes were needed, but why make out that our country was bad. Dad thought he probably was telling the truth. Dad would have known, well, I'm not sure he ever went to the stockyards in Chicago or anything. I was a Michigan farm girl and I couldn't say for sure about what might or might not have been happening in Chicago. Sure, it might be bad down there. Harry's old man made me read aloud to him when I married Harry from that book of his. The Jungle, that was it! Could not think of the name for the life of me. Said he would not let his son marry an illiterate sixteen-year-old girl and I had to prove I could read out of The Jungle. When I quit school, I went up to the old school teacher to say goodbye. She was nothing but an old maid, dried up and everything. A spinster was what she was. And she said, so coy like, that I would regret what I was doing, dropping out of school to marry."

  "Oh, spinsters," said Madeline. "They think you would regret dropping out of school."

  "Well, you did didn't you?" said our sassy Mom. She was being real smart-alecky to her mother-in-law.

  Our grandmother looked sharply at her daughter-in-law. She knew that was a dig, and so did the rest of us. But it was an honest dig, and our grandmother couldn't get mad. "Yes, I did. Yes and no, Harry was no prize. Shoulda stayed in school. Maybe. I never could spell to beat the band. Tried to learn Spanish. I was going a little in the
right direction. Poco y poco."

  "Pokey? Slow?" asked Jack.

  "Poco means a little," said Gumm, sternly and wisely.

  "But the Grange was a populist movement all about banks being bad," said Mother, going back to the original topic. "It really is a populist movement. Not pro-banks. You could call it socialist or communist."

  "Well, I saw some things about banks in the lyrics. But Father agreed with what the lyrics said and I agree with that!"

  "Well, isn't that socialist?" Mother pointed out. "Or going that way. Surely if you think banks aren't always upright you think-"

  "No. That just might be true, but it doesn't make me a socialist, Juney."

  "Your father was a wealthy man. Didn't he have a lot of money in banks?"

  "Well, I don't know about that. He had plenty of money. He was a success at everything he tried. Enough to buy the boarding house here and the place in San Diego, yes. But Dad sure had the biggest barn in the county. Right outside Lansing, Michigan. West of it. Maybe he put all his money into the barn. It was beautiful. Huge and red. Real beautiful. Built perfectly with perfect boards. It was a beauty."

  "If you go back to Indiana and want a trip, you might drive up to Michigan and visit there. Bertha would tell you how to find the barn. I'd love a picture of it."

  "Well, we might. We might just visit Bertha."

  "Biggest barn in the county, but cheap, though. Dad, I mean. Mother wasn't cheap. When they owned the boarding house in San Diego after they sold the Russell House here, they wouldn't even buy themselves a phone. They used the one for the boarding house. I'd have to ask for them when I called if one of the boarders answered, which they mostly did because they were younger and moved to the phone right away. It was awkward like. I didn't like it one bit and I tried to talk to Mother and Father about it. I said 'why don't you get yourself a phone so I can call you directly and privately in your own rooms?' Dad wouldn't do it. He said the one for the boarding house was good enough for him. He claimed he had nothing to hide from all the world, but I didn't like calling on that phone and having everyone hearing our business about my DIVORCE. And if I went to visit and called back to Harry, well, I had to speak so that everyone in the boarding house could hear everything I said. And they had the biggest barn near Lansing. Did I ever tell you about how my brother and I tried to make a fortune from horseradish?"

  "A hundred times," said my father glumly.

  "Yes, you might have," said Mom. "It made you sick, didn't it?"

  "What about the time the horse and buggy wrecked on our fence?"

  "No, I didn't-"

  "Oh God," said Father.

  "Well, we heard an awful loud commotion. Out on the road. Dad could see people running on the road in front of our property. He was about to slice the roast at the time. And he said 'What's going on? Pull back the curtain. Why, can't I even slice the Sunday roast without interruptions?' Nobody ever ran in front of our property before and it shocked Dad. Our house was on a little rise and we could see the road, through the fence and some little hedges we had, but we couldn't see what was making those people run that day. So we all went out. Left our food cooling on the table. Even mother, and she was very sensitive about her roast and how we treated it. You'd have thought it was still living, said Dad, the way she went on about the roast. Ah well, it made me laugh. Ah, that day, let's see, we all ran out to see what was happening. We lived on a turning of the road. The road made a sharp turn and it was dangerous if you didn't know what you were doing with a team. Out we went. Mother in her apron. And there we found it. A horrible scene. Dead people. I had never seen dead people before. Mother saw them while she was still in her dirty apron. Not strangers or relatives. It was a bad scene. Let me tell you. Blood. Wow. Horse had to be shot with Dad's rifle. I don't want to tell what was wrong with him. He went back in the house to get it. Buggy was split in two ?.practically."

  "Don't say that 'had to shoot the horse' to her," said Mother, talking about me, indicating me with a little flip of her hand in my direction.

  "Why not?"

  "She's rather sentimental."

  "Does she get emotional? About horses?"

  "Get emotional? She's closer to hysterical all the time. Most of the time she's crying. The kids call her Little Running Water. I had to take all the sad animal stories away from her."

  "Well, I never."

  "I know."

  "Oh, everybody has a personality." But she looked at me, studied me, with serious disapproval. "Even if it isn't what others would like." She looked me over again as though she had never properly seen my flaws before. "Why does she have that bald patch?"

  "She winds her hair around her fingers and yanks it out," said Mother.

  "Well, I never. Say, my goodness, lookie who's coming. Here's my friend Anna stepping over for a visit. Doesn't she dress poorly, though? Poor little thing. Not eating enough. Thin as a rail and twice as brittle. Doesn't do her any good to go without food. She's living on a good pension from the school district. Her being a principal. Smart woman, too. Anna, good to see you! Come through the gate. Don't be shy. Did you hear us out back? Were you ringing the bell?"

  "Yes, I was," said Anna timidly. She once had taught on the Yaqui reservation, but she couldn't get the back gate open. "Can't get the latch up. How do you do it, Ola?"

  "Somebody help her," ordered my grandmother to those of us around her. "I've only showed her a million times before."

  "You have to lift the gate a little, Anna," said my dad patiently. He got up to show her how. "Nobody will come to help you but me."

  "Thank you."

  "Well, we were out here in back!" my grandmother called to Anna.

  "Yes, mother saw the cars. I thought I heard voices," said Anna quietly. She clutched her purse against her tiny and thin body, which barely suggested by her dress a style unpopular in the thirties. Small pince-nez glasses pinched her nose and her hair was tightly curled against her head. She had a hooked nose and long bony arms.

  Struggling across the grassy lawn, wobbling through the thick Bermuda grass and scaring grasshoppers ahead of her, insect which were whizzing away and almost up her skirt.

  "She sent you over to snoop, huh?" said Gumm, talking about Anna's mother.

  "Yes, that's true. That's right," said Anna, cheerfully enough.

  Everybody laughed that Anna had been good-humored enough to agree.

  "Old snoopy."

  "Old snoopy, that's me. Can't even get through your gate," said Anna sadly.

  "Oh, everybody has trouble with it. I gotta try to do something sometime," said Father. "I've got a fix in mind but it involves changing the hinge"

  "Yes, he's going to do something?sometime. Well, I've got the family over. The grandchildren and Ben and Juney. And my daughter and Rikki are here." Rikki was with us in his braces. It must have been one of the last times before he went into a chair.

  "Oh sure, hi folks," said Anna.

  "Take a chair. The kids can lay in the grass. We're waiting for the fireworks to start. They want to ask you out for Thanksgiving," said Gumm.

  "Oh?"

  "Yes, we do, Anna. It would be a great honor. And bring your mother, too," said our mother.

  "Well, that'll be fine. When is Thanksgiving this year?"

  "Why, Anna!" cried Gumm in shock, "It's the same time it always is. In November. They're asking you real early. That's all."

  Everybody in the backyard laughed at poor befuddled Anna. And she had been a principal of a school!

  "I think you should bring Mother," said Gumm.

  "I don't think she'll be able to go. She thinks Poncho Villa is going to attack us soon. If I take her anywhere she starts moaning about Poncho and murder! She gets so nervous she shakes and starts talking wildly. It's embarrassing. Very."

  Everybody laughed real hard about Anna's mother. My dad whipped his leg and laughed so hard he spilled a little of his rum and coke over his jeans. He took his cigarette out of his mouth so he could laug
h so hard it made him cough into his fist a whole bunch. "Ha ha! You're kidding! Oh no!"

  "Golly, that's funny," said Madeline.

  Berk drank up and smiled broadly. His Dutch face was breaking in two.

  "Oh boy, it's funny on this street. Anna keeps me in stiches. Now you know why I'm so jolly. It's Anna and her mother," cried Gumm.

  "Yes, I'm the one making your mother laugh so much, sorry. But no, I'm not kidding at all about mother. She is getting really bad. She thinks Poncho Villa is on the loose and he is going to ride up the arroyos from Nogales and we won't have a chance when he starts executing us all. She keeps dragging down her suitcase from the hall closet so we be prepared and pack up and leave town before Poncho and his gang gets us. She got herself positioned at the back window because she thinks she'll be able to see the dust his horses will raise. She was hysterical when it rained in April because she thought we wouldn't be able to see Poncho's horses when they rode up the arroyos from the pass in Nogales."

  "Ha!" exclaimed Father, beating his leg again and laughing.

  "Do you suppose she's doing that now?" asked Mother.

  "Yes, I do imagine she is. There's hardly anything else she does now. I can't even get her to eat properly."

  Everybody laughed even harder.

  "Poor thing!" cried Mother.

  "Oh, you don't tell. Hey, I hafta tell the Lodge about that. Doesn't she know he's dead? Poncho's dead?" asked Gumm.

  "No, she doesn't know what year it is." Anna laughed, a little sadder now that everyone's mirth had worn off.

  "Maybe you shouldn't leave her alone," said Madeline. "It doesn't even seem safe."

  "You're right. It isn't. I'll go right back in a minute. I can't leave her at all anymore. I'll get my cousin to eat with her. For Thanksgiving. If you still want a member of such a peculiar family at your big dinner."

  "Sure we do!" said Mother.

  "Oh, that's all right then. You can come out with me and not worry if your cousin is with her," said Gumm.

  "Sure."

  "Humor her. Poor old dear."

  "Yes."

  "Anna, I'm making you an African," cried Gumm suddenly, merrily.

  "A what?" asked Anna in terror.

  "So hard of hearing!" said my grandmother in a whisper, "An African, Anna. I making one for you and later I'll made another one which will be for your mother."

  "What is it?" she cried.

  "That's afghan, mother," said my father, correcting her again. She persisted in calling them Africans.

  "Oh, that's right. What am I saying? An afghan. I'm making you an afghan."

  "Okay. I'll come over and we'll see a show."

  "No, well, yes, Anna. Come over and we'll see a show."

  "I want to see The Sound of Music."

  "Oh, I can see that again. That is the best movie ever made. Any time you want to go I'll join you Anna. We'll go downtown together. Just you and me. A day out."

  "Sure we will. I'll get my cousin to stay with Mother."

  "Sure, isn't she handy to do that?"

  "Her husband comes, too. They make a game of it. He writes down what Mother says and he says it's better than Reader's Digest 'Laughter Is the Best Medicine.' They save it and read it back again in the week. It keeps them laughing."

  "Oh, I like that. "Laughter Is the Best Medicine.' Are you still getting Reader's Digest, Ben?"

  "Yes," said Father morosely.

  "Well, do you like it?"

  "It's good."

  "The kids read it," Mother said.

  "Oh, good."

  "You haven't seen The Sound of Music?"

  "No, but I hear it is very good."

  "It's wonderful."

  "Saw it was showing at the theater at the Marshall Square," said Anna.

  "Oh, no, don't mention that Marshall woman to me. I simply can't stand the thought of her. How can anyone become famous and be so respected when she murdered her husband! She helped unwed mothers! Started a foundation for unwed mothers. Well, what I say is 'what is that compared to MURDER'? She shot her husband dead and she got away with it. All because of money, I say. She said he had cheated on her. Well, so did my husband and you don't give out the death penalty for somebody cheating on you. And she gave it to him. Bam, bam, bam. Three shots. One wasn't good enough. She got away with murder!"

  "Well, mother?"

  "I'll be seeing all of you!" said Anna. Anna leapt out of her seat at this mention of Mrs. Marshall, a common harangue of my grandmother's, which made poor Anna afraid at the mention of cheating and gunshots.

  "Well, stay awhile Anna," Gumm protested. "You can stay. You only just sat yourself down and everybody was getting to talk to you."

  But Anna fled. She flitted around at the gate until our father got up and opened it for her again.

  After Anna was gone grandmother discussed Anna and Anna's mother briefly. "She's so delicate."

  "I say that's what comes of isolation."

  "Not enough food. That's for certain."

  "A very sad situation."

  "Intelligence often comes to a bad end. In women."

  But should I go on assuming their comments are about Anna and not about me and then hear my name and the alliterative passage "Sam seldom seeks silly Sonoran sombreros," I would immediately experience such grief and humiliation at the thought that they were discussing my lisp among themselves that I would pour myself off the front of my chair and crawl away in the grass, sobbing. Everyone might look at me, at my bald spot where I'd pulled out my hair, and everyone might have their thoughts about my weaknesses, but I would not give up my sobbing state to make them happy.

  "Little Running Water," said Meredith. "Run to the river, Little Running Water." That was her mocking Native American name for me.

  Eventually, I stretched out beside the old stone metate which lolled in the setting sun, and then, when I was imagining that metate was the rasping pale pink fossilized tongue of a desert-dwelling monster, my smile was unconquerable though everyone then would want me looking guilty.

  Years later on the same lawn I returned with a scrap of description, a short paragraph describing the hanging halo made of several puffy gray cumulous clouds above a desert mountain in July, and this scrap of paper was sandwiched in my jeans pocket. I had conceived the paragraph as a sort of prayerful work, and had carefully edited it all that winter, but after it was edited, I notice it was dead, vastly inferior, uninspired, a sham. I had killed it with time and too much attention. Frustration and anger overcame me and I planned to destroy what I wrote in the metate. I gave myself over to this emotion.

  I saw wonderfully the way the same stone had an oval depression or hollow where the ground corn was supposed to mound up and as usual it was filled with a brackish pool of water from a careless squirt of the hose. And the white mano, the stone you rubbed against the metate, floated in the scummy puddle, and exactly mimicked an overweight swimmer in one of the slimy green tanks in the desert canyons of our surrounding mountains. To examine the metate's curious pale pink surface, to find that I was strangely excited by small bugs, was all that I needed for my mood to soar. Yet when years intervened and I recreated the Fourth of July scene in my head, I would notice that the word wiggle wrestled with the word wriggle which in turn battled with squirm for supremacy and the result was tremendous heartache, a falling feeling, free floating frustrating loss.

  This is followed by peace at the bottom of the loop of creativity when I realized that those caverns and the exact movement of the teeny centipedes and fleas were already lost, and that the animals might even be dead, that its industry in eons would succeed in scraping away the very metate the bugs inhabited, and the real world of the bugs was as dead and as scattered as my art, and my art therefore was no less perfect. The pleasure of that image of the fat white belly of the rock lapped by black water was tinged with the thought that the water served to erode the very tank it 'swam' in. Maybe that explains why I wanted to use it. I seized it; the flattened ovoi
d nicely fit my hand.

  "Excuse me," I whispered, slightly awed to be handling the mano, which I had always thought of as a head, a skull warmed that day. After begging its pardon, I quickly slip the scrap of paper with the description of the clouds out of the pocket of my jeans and trapped it against the metate with the mano.

  Before they could escape, I ambushed my words quickly, slapping the wet side of the mano down on the paper; I pulled the mano back across the words and was gratified to see the offending paper arch up in agony; then I shoved the mano forward, rasping it across the stone; all it took was a couple quick swipes, carrying dribs of water from the puddle to make the job easier, and the stone pulverized my words.

  The fragment bore an early sample of my writing. Now all that remained was a lumpy mass of blue-gray paste (yes, comically, the paper now resembles the storm cloud I had so fervently desired to describe) smeared on the metate; with a teen's turgid love of the symbolic, I jabbed the tip of my thumb into the small smudge of cold mush and brought it to my lips; I sucked my thumb and taste the starchy blob. It was almost palatable. Today nothing remains of the failed paragraph but the memory of writing it, destroying it, and tasting it.

  And so the weathered metate devoured my writing years ago, and those lines which disappear in their original physical form when the paper that described a cloud was pulverized into a cold pulp, now materialize on this new flattened plane, a new art, sketching for you that story of the metate and my act of wastage, for your mental consumption.

  Flitting around the edge of my mind are the analogies to explain the reason I chose to grind up my writing on a metate and not simply toss the paper away in a garbage can, and some of my reasons are quite ridiculous; I could explain to you that over my lifetime writing has mutated into an act comparable to grinding; that the words I choose often liquefy horrifyingly, phrases disintegrate, paragraphs deteriorate, as I attempt to manipulate them on the page; perhaps the grinding stone supplies the analogy I need when every plot I devise seems to be people with fantastic phantoms and the actions of these phantoms inevitably turn into meaningless mush; a metate may have meaning to me because my words seem to dissolve in my hands like a fine misty powder even as I attempt ever more frantically to make them more refined; that I overwork every passage until it has been reduced to a cold vapid slime; or do I mean, by telling you about the metate, to depict the workman-like way that I simply went back again and again to writing, with my nose to the grindstone, day in and day out, grinding out family meals?; is writing a daily chore or routine?; do I like to think of the words I write as rhythms or movement, the way a grinder at a metate will work her shoulders, elbows, and hands and have to glide back and forth in front of her rock?; did the back and forth movement of the worker at the metate mimic the pulse of the Anglo-Saxon words, the steady stroke of an iambic beat and is it fitting that my iambic beats are destroyed by a rock which beat the paper to shreds? Are my words, or my plots, abrasive, grating, or crushing to others? Is the effort of creating beauty crushing me, wearing away little bits of my being? Am I a nutmeg paired with its grater?

  Get out the old metate so that I might let it devour my words of a cloud like a halo, of the most handsome man I've ever seen, of a white ox smashing the window of a cowboy store, of the man who helped me find my art, and that art which disappears in its original physical form when the paper which describes it is pulverized into cold blobs, and now materialized on this new flattened plane, a new art, which sketches for you the story of the old metate and my act of wastage, which you have just consumed mentally.

  But then, in the ultimate irony, I contemplate mincing more of my words. "It's hard to say what first attracted our attention to the pale lady" might meet the fate of my cloud passage all those years ago. Or start at the end and destroy the librarian who will soon be holding me hostage. I could destroy my newest art now, before you could read it, starting at the first sentence; and the act of grating my old art would be another new art, which I could write about again. Though I have shown that a conventional metate does an excellent job of dissolving every bit of what you write and entertaining you in the process, providing your elbows and shoulders with a good workout to boot, the old metate is gone from the porch of my grandmother's bungalow, along with my actual grandmother. But I know that the earliest Hohokam settlers often favored the volcanic rocks which were still in the ground for their metates; they brought their mesquite beans, and corn to these built-in metates, so to speak, hefting tubular pestles which were like miniature submarines to a vertical position above the hole and then smashing them down on their flinty food. Imitating them, I could hike to the top of Tumamoc Hill or to the backside of the Rincon range, through the twiggy palo verde trees which in late May are full of rattling and blaring Apache cicadas, huge gray gnats with terrible great eyes, the gray of their bodies showing veins of white like the curly white hairs blooming from and crisscrossing the head of a middle-aged woman, until I could find one of the ready-made grinding holes, in a red, brown or black boulder. And imagining myself to be a very workman-like woman, looking out upon our valley, I would use one of these convenient grinding stones and happily drop in the first page you read and stamp it down, but now this new art I have just created has described the way I would destroy my old art, and it in turn would be fun to destroy. The thought of the very opening sentence of this work, my masterpiece, my life's creation, which you have just begun to read, being ripped away from the body of the work and spread-eagled on the black volcanic stone in a manner that is every bit like a goofy sacrificial victim, pinned down and then scraped and ripped and torn to teeny shreds by the pulverizing effect of a manifest mano amuses me almost as much as writing that just now did, as I contemplated tearing apart my art, before you ever experienced it, because I can sit back and watch in a crazy house mirror, writing devouring writing, devouring writing, just like a snake swallowing its own tail, or the process in which the egg proceeds the chicken, which engenders the egg, which pre-dates the chicken?