by Lorraine Ray
When we arrived at the party house, with its fence of living ocotillos, a buffet had been set out in the brilliant sun by the pool on some chrome furniture, fashionable furniture then. Under the porch a long centipede of various card tables with Mexican tablecloths offered up an array of food large enough to feed an army of Congregational women. Sickly-looking meatballs floated in greasy cheese, fried chicken with burned spots on the drumsticks crisscrossed atop each other like the singed carcasses of war, mountains of cold slaw with pimento slices cascaded down the watery cataracts of mayonnaise, and fish shapes made of Jell-O displayed sticky marshmallows floating inside like fish eggs. In addition, large conglomerate masses, when seen up close, proved to be molded rice dishes. There were so many of them, some with artichoke hearts, some with gangrenous eggplant.
The breeze came up before the time we were supposed to eat and small khaki leaves, identical rounded rectangles from the shedding mesquite tree, rained down, sprinkling themselves liberally over our food.
We stood in line as more cars, full of church ladies, arrived.
"There's Juney's little girl," said a wizened woman with large ears, indicating me by pointing her shaking finger at me. She had polished her fingernails a bright red shade and she held open a gate for some ladies behind her.
"Yes, the little girl is there, but I can barely see any of her," someone else complained. Apparently I was expected to be a prominent feature of the party.
"You can just see her feet behind her mother's. Those are her feet in the little white sandals."
"Yes, she's behind me," said mother, speaking up. She put her hand on my back and tried to push me forward, to shove me around her big skirt. When this didn't work, she swatted at me a little, not hard, but in a silly way to make me move out. I dodged her swats. "She likes to stand there and hang onto the back of my skirt. She's pulling it down from the belt and ruining the hang of it. Stop that!" she ordered.
"Ah, the little slip of a girl," said a white haired lady, peering behind my mother. "She's just there. A wisp of a girl. As little as a button. But what have you done with her hair?" The nice old woman pulled a frown, wrinkled her forehead.
"They call it a seal cut," Mother explained. "We wanted it cut real short for Indiana when we went back in August. The heat's so bad back there and she really gets the prickly heat on her neck and just digs and digs it until it's raw. She was winding her hair on her finger and pulling it out, too. I can't stop her. Nervous habits. She prone to peculiar hysterics, too."
"Oh, dear. She's so shy," another lady observed. "Won't you come out and say 'hi'?"
"No?"
"She cries if you look at her the wrong way," Mother explained. "Her older brother and sister call her 'Little Running Water.' If I step away, she steps back there again." Mother demonstrated this by stepping away and revealing me and I obliged her by stepping back behind her again.
"I think she doesn't like her hair like that," said the white-haired lady as a way to pass time before we reached all those different rice salads, drumsticks, potato salads. "She just doesn't like her hair like that one bit. A little girl is very sensitive about her looks, but no one around her thinks she is. They think she doesn't know what she looks like, but a little girl of four really wants to be beautiful and if you take that away from her, well, you've really taken away something that they'll never get back as long as they live. A little girl might not show it, but she would be much wounded with short hair like you cut on her. Nobody would like that haircut on themselves. Who would? That's what the problem is. She doesn't want her hair like that anymore forever. Well, who can blame her? It's not becoming on a girl. Not a girl with big ears like her. Dear, dear. Very unfortunate."
"Oh, I don't approve of vanity," said Mother, seething slightly at the old lady's reproof.
"Vanity! She'll certainly lose it thoroughly with that haircut," said another lady laughing.
"A scalping is more like it. A complete scalping, Juney," said another lady behind us, adding in her two cents.
"Poor thing. Just a little button. Come and sit with me little button!"
"She's very shy, Juney."
"Oh, don't pay any attention to her or you'll make her cry. As I said her brother and sister call her 'Little Running Water.'"
"Because you're part Indian, is it?"
"No, that heritage isn't recent, only from my mother's grandmother, well, they call her that because she cries. And wets the bed."
"Oh! I did that!" said the white-haired woman suddenly.
"Me too," said another woman, raising her hand and sniggering.
"I confess, me three!" said Peg.
"More than once," added the woman who called me Little Button.
During the luncheon, the young woman in the serape and skirt who everyone had gossiped about before we picked her up, stood in the line awkwardly holding onto her elbows with her hands. When she had filled her plate she sat in an equipale, a leather chair with a bottom like a drum. She had no more than sat down for an instant when, in trying to scoot back for someone passing, she pushed with her sandals and the equipale tipped over backwards, something they're prone to. Her legs flew up and she fell into a bed of cactus.
The whole crowd of women screeched. The hostess screeched the name of her husband to bring him out of the house, where he was hiding from the patio full of women. The young woman who had fallen held herself stiffly and then began crying. From the toppled-over chair in the bed of cactus this mortifying sight reached me, and of all the things in the world, I had never seen a grown woman crying like that and I wondered why did she continue not even struggling but just sitting there in the bed of cactus as though she were a marble statue. She was protected entirely, no barb could pass through the thick leather of the Mexican chair, and it flared at the top like a collar, but she still was crying with the indignity of her position, I suppose, and with the extreme fright and sympathy expressed by all of the other women which was too much compassion for her delicate system to handle.
The husband of the house came barreling out of a sliding glass door, across the patio, reassuring women and setting them aside, and walked out to the place of the accident. With many women screaming instructions he stomped on the bottom rung of the chair which righted it slowly and offered the girl his arm. The crowd of women applauded his gallantry and, when the victim was out of earshot, discussed her fragile emotional health. Of course, I thought they were discussing me.
Surely I can't also be imagining later, after the young woman fell and we ate, the beckoning hand of that wizened woman, whose large ears make her look every bit like a monkey, and whose dark purple squaw dress covers her ankles. But I can only sit and wonder now what in the world is going on when Old Pueblo Style, written by a local dress shop owner and celebrity, informs me dryly that squaw dresses fell out of vogue long before I was a child. What kind of friends was Mother picking? The type who were still wearing squaw dresses when they had fallen out of fashion? They dressed like Midwestern ladies in what I thought were the costumes of farmer's wives; why couldn't they be fashionable? Why couldn't they be important? Why did they have to be dowdy and strange? Why weren't any of them successful?
Squaw dresses. I always think of them as weapons rather than clothes, with enormous pleated skirts that had been dyed unusual colors like ochre, burnt umber, turquoise, and coral. Miles and miles of scratchy metallic rickrack raced in lines of three around the hems and plunged up and down what was actually a very modest V-neck. An aunt or an acquaintance of your mother who came forward, arms outstretched, to hug you and kiss you wearing one of those squaw dresses would send you squirming for cover. How to get away, you'd wonder? Where to run? The rickrack rubbing against your skin was worse than wrestling barbed wire; you would end up with scratches on your arms and face and a prickly feeling all over. They were walking cacti, a barbed and thorny terrain of terror.
This lady seemed forever to be calling me out of the narrow space that I'd wedged myself into first behind mother and
then between a jumping cactus thicket and a patio fence made of living ocotillo branches. It seemed that she wanted me to come out and give her a hug, though I know the silver metallic rickrack around the neck and sleeves of her dress would scrape my skin in a way that was going to be almost as painful as the scratch from a thorn on one of those cholla cactus pieces.
What hideous ladies these were to chase me around and try and hug me. Why didn't they leave me alone? I didn't wish them harm; I didn't want to bother them. Why couldn't they grant me the same consideration? They were obsessed with hugging me and touching my back.
"Come out of the cacti and hug Mrs. Holmes," said Mother. I had retreated to this space beside a cholla. Nobody could reach me there.
"Oh dearie, don't you want to join me? Come out and say howdy to everybody. We sure want to see you. Come on out and I'll take care of you. There's a lot of us that could take care of you. Come out and let us. You don't want to stay there and fall into a cactus like the big girl did, now do you? Come out where I can see you."
"Call her Little Button," suggested the lady who had named me that.
"Yes, Little Button?"
"Are you asking for a lickin?" Mother asked belligerently when I didn't respond. "Do you really need a lickin right now in front of all these fine ladies? Is that what you want me to have to do?"
"Oh, dearie, now, that wasn't what I wanted for her. Little thing. No lickin for her. I'm not trying to make trouble for her. Now let's not talk about that. She will come out when she feels safe. I don't want her to feel afraid."
"Come out of there now before I swat you!" Mother said, escalating things between us.
"Tell her I have a piece of cake here with her name on it," called the hostess. The old ladies nodded at that approach, subtly vetoing Mother's forceful directness.
"You draw more flies with sugar than vinegar," said a lady who was twirling her half-glasses on their chain.
"My husband always said that before he broke down and whipped em," said Peg.
Flabby arms of numerous old women worked on behalf of bringing me out to them. Numerous pleadings in the name of all the candies and special foods were made to tempt me. Mother was not amused by these efforts and assured them that ignoring me and threatening me occasionally was the only and best solution, but she stopped threatening to swat me as it seemed to horrify certain women at the meeting.
"Come out for that cake, at least."
"Yes, you don't want to miss your little cakey!"
I came out eventually for the marble cake they gave me. A large slab with interesting swirls of black and white, almost too beautiful to consume. I dug at it with my fork. I kept my left hand pushing my hair off my forehead. What little hair I had I didn't want to touch my skin; the touch reminded me of how short my hair had been cut. I ate all the frosting, ripping it off the back of the cake, scalping it quickly. Slowly, meticulously peeling back the luscious layer of sugar, bit by bit, revealing the cake flesh, peeling the frosting in a completely perfect piece, unbroken, not even stretched slightly. A little of the cake flesh clung desperately to the frosting. I carefully removed that with a surgeon's precision. I was studying the individual grains of cake and the air bubbles caused by leavening agents.
"What do you think you're doing, young lady? If you keep your lip out like that it's gonna freeze that way forever! Or a crow will land on it and peck it off. Sit yourself up properly and I mean pronto! Get your hand off your forehead. Are you trying to pretend that you have a headache? Who should be the one with a headache right now? Who should it be? Yes, that's right, Mother. Mother is the one who is embarrassed by her daughter acting up at the Congregational church party with all the nice ladies. I should have the headache and have my lower lip hanging out like a baby. I need to pout. That's not the way to eat a cake that this lady baked for the party and went to all this trouble. They had to call you out of a cactus patch! Imagine! A church lady was treated that way by you. You're eating with church ladies. Don't you appreciated that I am taking you with church ladies at an elegant party, a buffet, in this lovely patio and at a party when your brother and sister are at school? Nice marble cake baked beautifully. A beautiful sunny patio full of ladies from the church who want to see you after I've told them about you and them bringing all these wonderful receipts and you slouch in your chair and pout and rip the frosting off your special cake. Not a way to be at all. So much trouble from such a little thing."
"I call her my Little Button," said that lady brightly.
"I have other names," said Mother. "You'd better eat that cake before I take it away! Playing with your food, huh? Making a spectacle of yourself."
Mother glared at me and let me know I was on the wrong side of her plans to do well in the church circles. I had shamed her thoroughly by hiding in the cactus, by hiding behind her, and now I was scalping the frosting off my cake and eating it first.
"She's bound and determined to do it her way. Good for her, I say," said the bright woman. "Does me good to see her doing that. Eat your cake the way you want to. Doesn't make any difference to me. I used to do the same."
"She a very sentimental, emotional child."
"Takes all types."
These denizens of the rural town of the heartland kept their ways of cake baking and recipe clipping in the alien edge so close to Mexico. In a vaguely stupid way, my thought when I was a teen, Mexican things that surrounded us slipped into their language. Their nasal Midwestern accents alarmed me, as I feared catching them by association, and I was not amused by their mispronunciations of Spanish, though I seldom noticed my own. But when I was a teen my anger with them peaked into a fury. It irritated me that they were so preoccupied with what was going on in the Midwest, in the small towns they came from, that they still got their hometown newspapers delivered to Arizona, that they were less than completely western the way their children were, that they were still harkening back to places where grassy lawns without patio walls and lightning bugs that children caught in bottles were the norm.
I had no pity for them, for their obvious distress and dislocation, and if they didn't relish the dirt lots of our part of the country I wanted them to quiet about it, to stop discussing the other places with their green lawns, to stop dumping colored gravel on the desert, and I couldn't forgive them for still wanting to be what they once had been. I wanted them to make a clean break with the East.
They attended the same churches they had in the Midwest. They kept up with the crops planted on the old farms, even knowing the names of the seed varieties, and the work of the fields and they enjoyed journeys to the farms in Arizona. The still made preserves and couldn't tolerate the burping they got after digesting chili peppers. They regard tamales with a slightly askance eye and visited Mexican restaurants with a worried expression, but despite all this they were genuinely good people in a way that I could not see then, or years later.
They worried over the financial arrangements necessary for their brother's purchase of a new tractor; they discussed their worry with Juney. And the various difficulties he had had in the past with the financing of other tractors seemed to occupy her sympathy and the jealousy I felt at someone taking my mother's sympathy was large and rather overwhelming, emotionally. They had a mistrust of the Mexican, what was for me a fatal feeling of cultural superiority over the Mexicans. They went to Mexico and were charmed and bewildered. They would buy Mexican paper flowers and display them around their houses, or tin masks of Mayan gods on their patio walls, but they might not respect the buckled sidewalks of Nogales. But then did the Mexicans themselves find the cracked pavement charming, as I did, or just annoying and dangerous? In a way the estimation of the Midwestern ladies of the inefficiencies of Mexico was closer to the opinions of actual Mexicans than my ridiculous defense of the indefensible aspects of the land south of my home.
As strange as it seemed to me then, during a detour through our land, through the cactus forest on our way home, an old lady named Mrs. Le Brec of the Congr
egational church registry fell asleep. Just when our outing was getting exciting, just when I was sliding forward eagerly on the car seat and scanning both sides of the road leading into the Cactus Forest, enjoying the thick stands of saguaros, prickly pear and cholla, I glanced over to my side, to the corner of the backseat, and noticed her body slumped against the door.
All across the fabric of the old lady's red cotton dress, chubby Mexican jugs filled with black carnations danced the cha-cha with antic, mustard-colored swirls, but the dress was so rumpled by her slumping posture that it looked instead as though a mound of broken crockery and burnt flowers had buried her. The glasses on her knobby nose sat catawampus, and beneath those glasses her wrinkled little eyes were sealed against a brilliant desert sun that poured on her through the car window. In the way that the corners of her mouth pulled back and the fingers of one white wizened palm were curled upward, she resembled a hibernating lizard that you might find at the base of a shrub if you were shoveling desert dirt in midwinter. And it was mysterious to watch the loop of her purse wave in the air with the rising and the falling of her belly, a belly so compact and round, a fertile belly that had been the earliest playground to five children, I learned later.
But what of the huge stands of saguaros? They massed close, clearly standing as dear friends for life to me, to the old sleeping lady, to the earthen banks on either side of the downward sloping dirt road. A glimpse between two hills revealed thousands of other saguaros swarming over the rolling land, cacti so green and so golden, stalwart friends of ours, glowing on the rock ridges, and prickling the distant foot of a hazy blue mountain top. They stood on the brink of waterfalls. They clustered along rocky outcrops. They grew out of stone, and between boulders. They grew as a triumphant assembly, a vision of vegetative grandeur.
But she was completely missing everything, that silly Mrs. Le Brec! She was missing what I now know, looking back on it, must have been her last trip into the Cactus Forest-she died a few months later-and this despite the fact that she had been the one who had asked the driver, in a cantankerous and insistent voice, to take us there rather than drive us directly home from the Congregationalist Women's autumn potluck. Perhaps she had wanted to extend the length of the rare outing away from her little red brick home which was surrounded by nothing but white gravel and a single stunted mulberry tree. I heard the ladies at the party say she had already locked her door and was waiting with her purse on her arm on the barren porch when they rounded her drive. Before the car stopped fully, she had dashed across the porch and down the step to grab for the car door handle. When she wasn't anywhere near, several ladies had discussed the inferiority of her pomegranate jelly that generally turned out runny and sour, but somehow this struck me as improper when I knew the prior year she had been a Sunday school teacher.
And now she slept while wonderful things were happening outside the car!
"Desert's putting on quite a show today," said the driver.
I was especially disappointed that Mrs. Le Brec didn't wake up when we traveled through a very level section of the forest on a road which split the center of a great grove of ancient saguaros, such enormous green and venerable things they were, too. Their mammoth, twisting arms would have towered over the tallest man, and the pleats on the cactus skin, hastily sewn up with gray needles, were like the scars found on a fiercely loyal regiment of soldiers, or a legion of misunderstood Frankenstein monsters that had been cobbled together from prickly green strips. There were strange shadows cast by the oddly twisted cactus arms, and by the needles, down the side of the cactus and onto the ground.
Poor Mrs. Le Brec, she could only snore slightly and sleep while those fabulous monsters who were twice her age massed outside the window. So many of the saguaro arms did funny things, but Mrs. Le Brec didn't see them! She missed the cactus with its arms bent low as though they were holding something. She missed limbs that looked like cartoon noses, or those that resembled ears. My superannuated companion never saw the cactus arms that seemed to be calling down the heavens or the ones that blurred together with a turquoise sky and flowed their drab green color off onto a hill, the side of which suddenly blazed with golden light as the car swept around to reveal a newer, more glorious vista.
That was when holy yellow light, shimmering, shining, poured from a thousand barbs and showed us the glinting spears of a hillside of golden Teddy Bear Cholla. These fat cacti, with thick yellow arms, spewed spikes of light at us and were crisscrossed by low patches of other cacti: green prickly pear, purple Santa Rita, lowly hedgehogs and, amidst all the cacti, messy pack rat dens. These dens, these pack rat midden consisted of dark piles of sticks and bits of trash left at the car pullouts throughout the monument. Then when I was looking at the messy rat nests, beside the car, between, over, near, the barred back of a woodpecker swooped with its beak dipping up and down like a needle punching into and out of this sunny cactus quilt.
"I'm pretty sure, Juney," said the dreamy driver to my mother as she pointed at something on an approaching hill with a finger that might have been trembling, "that the crumbling wall up there is the old post, the post of the ranch I told you about. Boy, was it rough out there then on the old ranch."
All of us looked where she pointed, all of us, that is, except for the somnambulant shape of old Mrs. Le Brec.
"...such a ruin now, isn't it," continued the driver, "a real pity, up there on the hill, do you see it? That's where my father stayed for years until he was murdered by someone when I was just a baby and they kept me in town with my mother."
"Apaches?" someone asked.
"No. Good heavens, no. Not them. This was quite a bit after. I mean to say that was much earlier. No, they hung someone named Fenklestone or Fusselman for it. There was a theory that he didn't do it. But I don't like to think about that."
Suddenly, this brilliant glow of the cholla cactus was picked up and swiped across umber and russet hues of a melted mud wall, pockmarked and pick axed. In time's ultimate turning, that home of her father's had evolved into a mud ruin. The foundation lurked dangerously close to the high edge of a cliff face.
"Yes, something about it," said Mother from the driver's elbow, "seems familiar."
We had no more than glanced at this place of terrible import to the driver when the car suddenly plunged down the slope of a deep arroyo. Our heads snapped to our chests, and when we reached the bottom a deep throaty growl from beneath us warned that the undercarriage of the car had scraped several large rocks in the road.
"Oh, Lordy," exclaimed the driver, "Do you think I punched a hole in the oil pan? I didn't like that noise one bit!" She stopped the car at the side of the road and sat for a moment gripping the big aqua wheel. Finally, she got out quickly. For some reason she took her purse out with her and it dangled from her forearm as she strained to look under the chassis.
"Looks like someone's been digging," says Peg with a degree of alarm from her seat beside me. She was looking at the side of a road cut near us where there were numerous holes. "See where the bank is tumbling down. Someone's been at that with a shovel, recently."
"Terrible holes," says Mother in agreement from the front seat.
"The bank could fall in on someone and crush the life out of them," said Peg.
I knew that feeling thanks to the girth of Peg herself.
Then perhaps because of the lack of motion or from a delayed reaction to the scraping of the undercarriage, old Mrs. Le Brec wiggled her head. Her arm drooped and the weight of her tan purse made it slide down her nylons and her neck snapping forward as though she were reliving the car's dip into the arroyo's trough. As she stirred about, the strange jugs on her dress cracked and reassembled. The driver reentered the car and Mrs. Le Brec, plucked at the droopy strap of her slip and tugged at the waist of her girdle before her thin reedy voice could be heard barely rising above the sound of the wheels spitting gravel from the dirt road against the undercarriage and the engine working to climb us out of the arroyo.
"Hmmm, yes," said the driver. "I agree that they haven't found all that there is in these parts. Many a lost mine exists and the ore in there, or I suppose you mean the taxes, would certainly help the country. Not to mention putting the miners to work."
"I believe it," said Peg, "Aren't some of the mountains out here thinner than eggshells. From all the excavations?"
Old Mrs. Le Brec frowned at Peg for trying to enter the conversation. For a moment the interference deflated her list of mines, a list she was planning to give us, or perhaps she feared the passing mention of eggshells might get all these Midwestern ladies talking about chickens, so she hurriedly started again where she had left off. "There's the Vulture Mine," said old Mrs. Le Brec, gaining interest in the idea that she could provide us with an exhaustive list of the lost treasures scattered about in Arizona, but she tried to go away from vultures, too, in case it made the ladies think of chickens, "the Lost Squaw, the Blind Donkey, the Lost Blind Donkey, the Mine of the Three Murdered Missionaries. Then there's Cochise's Mine, they never found that, and Coronado's Mine, and the Bloody Apache Mine. Of course there's the Iron Door Mine, the-"
"Say," interrupted Peg, "was your husband by any chance a mining engineer or something?"
"No, what makes you ask?" said old Mrs. Le Brec, grumpily.
"You take an interest in lost mines, that's all."
"I take an interest in everything," replied the old woman firmly. "That's the only way for a Christian to live! As I was saying, there's the Mine of the Oaks," continued Mrs. Le Brec, "and that's a very interesting story. They say it all began when a man stumbled into town with his chest full of arrows. It was as though he were a human pincushion..."
"Are you going to be the one who finds all that lost gold?" whispered Peg, leaning down solicitously over me. She understood that I had wanted to sit beside my mother and not beside an unknown old church lady. "Are you going to find the lost treasures out here?"
"Are you? Are you going to find that lost treasure?" she prompted me.
"Yes," I reply earnestly.
All the ladies, except Mrs. Le Brec, laughed, even Mother!
"Well?I'm going to remember that," said Peg, "I am. I'm going to?remember that you're?the little girl who'll?find all the desert's wonderful treasures. And when you find them?I want you to promise me that you'll keep them safe...keep all the treasures?of the desert safe forever. And let other people see them, but keep them safe and put them together." She took my thin hand and sat it on her big knee and all the way out of the cactus forest and to our home she patted my hand and repeated that I was to be the girl to find, and keep safe, the desert's treasures.
My desert passed in radiant beauty that day. Jumbled globs of tawny brown daubed the edges of the gray-green pads of the Santa Rita prickly pear cactus and the sky skimmed soft cobalt blues onto the chocolate mouth of a crumbling cave. The world then played out a length of jet beside a stripe of indigo, and this was the shadow inside the bend of an arroyo. Lemon yellow, in light application, crumbled over cacti pads and finished subtle changes to the green hues, the beautiful soft greens that splashed everywhere. The yellow of certain rocky walls sat well over the reds in other soils and combined with the sky to create, in threads, other interesting dull greens. Umber made a range of rich red browns, and cool gray clouds lightened each of the featured grays. The deep saturated chestnut on the trunk of a palo verde and the lovely, dull greens gave way to delightful ocher sand. The carmine of a Santa Rita cactus with other crimson and black melded into burgundies, and abounded on a busy plain where the olive of the saguaros merged with the black bark of several bare-leafed mesquite trees.
"Beautiful desert," said Peg suddenly. "All around us. Such beauty. So glad I can appreciate it today. With you," said Peg, patting my knee again.
Bright fiery orange on an ocotillo bloom skipped by in snippets. Certain bright chestnut browns and deep violets popped out of shadows. The dusty orange hues in a broad arroyo danced across golden yellow and orange grass. Ocher in the soil flowed onto loose shreds of bark on a dead Palo Verde. Sepias and umbers, cadmium red and cadmium orange dribbled by on boulders, the lichen on them adding lovely chalky greens and neutral and cool grays with pale yellows added.
We turned onto another ridge and my world spooled out light cadmium yellow, mostly from the papery flower heads of the desert marigold, and mashed it into the greens and the grays of lichen on the rocks; it mingled with orange and greenish black into the olive tones of these different palo verde tree trunks and the russet raspberry stain which dribbled aimlessly over the faces of the rocky road cut. And the look of Arizona, my dry and dusty margin of the world, delighted me.
The landscape then grew more densely packed with cacti, prickly pear, saguaro, and cholla. In the mix of green there were trees, palo verdes that looked like wispy-haired madwomen, clutching cacti to the base of them; these were the nurse palo verdes. The big barrels of some cacti leaned away to the southeast. The saguaros gradually appearing one or two at a time and then thickly massed at the side of the road; their arms signaling up or drooping down; old fat saguaros looking prosperous and many armed. Some thinner, less healthy specimens, clung to life on the barest piece of land.
I tried to remember a certain bank of an arroyo and the way a scraggly mesquite tree leaned out over the rocky bottom. On the verge of the cliff, a shining white stand of cholla with a yellow nest tucked in the center protruded. Along ridge lines on the mountains in the background silver trails, which were mountain streams, glistened in the winter light. I tried to memorize the clear blue sky and the bright crisp light that made the shadows of the prickly pears find their deepest purple and violets. I tried to remember the pattern of turned prickly pear pads which formed half-moon shadows and deep inky patches, the warm violet and indigo shadow loops all interlaced with the pale greens of the pads themselves. Long barbs stretched out from the edge of the prickly pear pads and they were like shining lances of tiny knights, or needles of justice. The bark of a certain dying palo verde trees had wrinkled elbows where the branches came out of the tree and even the dead limbs were held with great elegance against the sky. Entire trees had died and were in various shades of brown and white. Sheets of paper like bark fell about them like a dress that disintegrated at a party. The beans were everywhere. Beans were left draped over the pads of the prickly pear. Beans filled the crook of the limbs of the tree itself.
And the clouds. Soft bundles of white and gray against the crisp turquoise heavens. The clouds rode in majesty. It almost seemed that there were backs to the clouds, then shoulders, finally heads! A thrumming, majestic herd of-cloud cattle.
Tossing their heads, trampling the mountain saddles, persisting and growing. It was the herd! The herd of cattle Meredith had boasted of to the pale man and woman earlier that year. But this herd consisted of phantoms. A mass of moving beasts, trouncing our sky, shoving their way over the desert mountains, chaotic, wilful, and wild. These cattle were uncontrollable and maybe even stampeding, though I wasn't sure. I couldn't see anyone leading the herd and it was moving very fast to the East. But I knew this was it. The animals from Rancho Supremo were running the sky, filling it, thrumming my heart.
I was rich. These were my legacy. It was there. Phantom cattle in the sky. My herd for the roundup, all I had to do was get control of them. The treasures, gems, cattle, land, it was all mine for the taking. First just a few cows, then a whole herd of mighty beasts that I controlled, that I owned. Nobody else knew about them. This must have been what Meredi
th and Jack were talking about to the pale man and woman! Of course, they must have known from long before that the cattle existed and were ours. They must have known the same thing. This was our ranch, all right. This was our land. We really had a huge herd. There was no lie in it. The herd existed. I was an heiress to the great Rancho Supremo in the sky.
"What you seeing up there?" asked Peg. "What's up there that is so interesting?"
"My herd," I said.
"Well," she looked, and not missing a beat added, "I see. I see them in the clouds."
I feel the whole scene of our drive back that day persists so beautifully that it is a crime for one moment, one image, to be stolen away by another. That future moments will swallow up present moments, that time cannibalizes its young, that perceptions will crowd upon each other in layers so as to steal away the essence of everything, all this frantic tragedy which makes up my disappearing life, yes, that makes up life, is now--looking back at that ride seventeen years later-well known to me. Yes, time is the biggest rustler and it steals everything.
Time would gladly steal away all this day and wash it out, rub it flat, for time is a great destroyer of art and impression, a belching, greasy front loader that levels my life and my art. The blending palette of the past streaks by, beauty heaped upon beauty, until a terrible thought darts out. This ugly thought is exactly like a hideous little articulated scorpion, scurrying out from under a rock. "I'll never write this," is what that thought conveys. "I'll never be able to. I like it, even love it, but I can never create anything using it. The beauty of this freaky, far-away place with its huddled globes of shimmering cacti will forever defeat my descriptive ability." And this awful thought, which I have thought many times before, reaches out and seizes me by the throat, paralyzes me, weakens my knees, stabs at my heart.
The desert is the only place. I mean, that is, the only place for me that I wish to write about. But I'm unlucky in my obsession. I'm born in the desert, a place which others think is stripped and alien. It seems to me as though the whole world of important art, of everything beautiful, resides where there is abundant, traditional green. And it seems that someone important long ago wrote that memory itself must be green.
But I don't believe what I've been told. I don't believe the desert is barren for an instant, and I know there are interesting details in my world, subtle color changes and evidence of life, hidden life, harder to extract and therefore more gemlike and valuable. But can a desert that is not fertile in the ordinary sense be fertile in the imagination of an audience that I inspire?
Can that beauty can be captured by me? Can it be preserved like drips of the canteen, can I divvy out my life, my art?
The ride back with the ladies was an excellent opportunity to practice not speaking for long periods of time and to listen as the old ladies laughed and shared tales about their childhood memories of the Midwest and all their wintry days spent skating on ponds and their exaggerated innocent exploits in the corn fields. "In the corn field!" they shrieked and Peg, beside me, threw back her head and laughed so that I could feel her sides jiggling, something I would rather not have felt. "In the corn field?" someone asked from the front seat. "In the corn field!" they echoed loudly from the back, leaning forward and putting their hand on the back of the seat. "That was the way it was back then," said the driver. "In the cornfields!" someone shrieked. I didn't want to remember those calls and responses, and I blocked my hearing of them.
In those days, and in unexpected places as I mentioned, the old tubercular sanatoriums still loomed shyly, perhaps hidden behind a cactus hedge and far back from our long straight roads; I remember that day we passed a certain mysterious and grim place called the Grandfield Good Lung Home that was sitting somewhere out in the far reaches of town. Until they tore it down, in about 1970, I suppose, cars used to zoom by without anyone noticing the sad brick face with the gray sashes pulled closed on its melancholy eyes. Tuberculosis, by then, stayed out on the reservations mostly, but the quaint notion that Tucson's climate, its fresh air, sunshine and low-allergy saguaros could cure people of the killer lung disease was hinted at still in the sunny, cheerful postcards for sale at the motels, in the healthful orange and date stands on the side of the roads, oh, and in those neglected remains, the monstrous sanatoriums, and the teeny one room bungalows where the families of the tubercular stayed while they visited a patient in a sanitarium. Some of the old citizens whose cousins or little sisters had died of the disease stayed in Arizona afterwards, and the death of one of our loved ones was something my grandmother referred to obliquely at times as "poor Laura who died right after we came out."
"Wasn't someone you knew out here?" the driver asked my mother with a kind of ridiculous urgency, as though she had to know the answer immediately, as though any delay would mean that she wouldn't really be able to go one with her life as before she had planned; I thought the idea that she could care about these random facts of someone's family, someone who was also now dead and barely remembered by my grandmother, was totally absurd. "A relative of yours?" she asked even more solicitously. "I believe I heard you tell."
"Yes. I think it was at Grandfield where a Laura died. Grandfield or Garland. Something very close to that."
"Laura? That's a lovely name," someone said.
"It means beautiful in Spanish," said another, knowing, lady.
"Oh does it? Well, sure, I know that," said the driver. "You practically speak it don't you?" she asked Mother.
"What?" asked my mother in shock.
"Spanish. Because of your husband's family? Your husband's Spanish background." "Spanish" was a euphemism for Mexican and "background" sort of a vague way to claim kinship.
"No, I don't," she said honestly. "When I came out West, though, someone tried to hire me to teach Latin at a very exclusive private school here that, oh, took the best kids from back East."
"Is that so?"
Mother had impressed them, or else they were being kind in reaction to her feeble attempt to impress them. "Well, I said I'd only had one year of high school Latin, and that didn't qualify me to teach, I thought. And the person told me to buy a book of Latin and fake it until you learned it."
"Did you?"
"Of course not. That would have been highly dishonest," said Mother.
"Lots of people would have. For a job."
"But what about Laura?" asked Peg.
"She came all the way out from Michigan only to die out here. Her mother and my mother-in-law's mother were twins and they wouldn't be separated," Mother explained.
"Didn't so many feel that way. There ought to be a memorial to them somewhere out here," said Peg.