Things You Would Know If You Grew Up Around Here

by Nancy Wayson Dinan

  “This girl. This Boyd. On River Road.” The soldier looked at Carla earnestly, a look that seemed incongruent with his desert fatigues.

  “Yes?” It dawned on her that he knew Boyd, that he was asking after her in way that spoke of caretaking, or of property.

  “I helped her, I think. She was with another woman and she crossed the River Road bridge before it went out. I took her to a house on River Road. Ranch-style, long, stucco maybe? A tile roof?”

  Carla nodded. “I know the house.” She had been there enough times. Carla had followed Boyd. She had traced those footsteps across the countryside. She remembered the snakes, how she had wanted to follow them, how one had gotten her in the heel.

  She shook her head, a private message to herself. She wondered if she smelled like sage, remembered that burnt spot on her polished concrete floor, the spiral on her forehead—and Boyd’s—in the place of her third eye. As Carla was thinking about all of the things she didn’t want to tell this soldier, she realized suddenly that this commune, the place to which she’d been drawn in the middle of the night, was in the shape of a spiral. In the center, the long house, then rays of outbuildings trailing from it.

  The soldier watched her, waiting to see if she was going to say anything else. What was there to say?

  “Do you know this girl? Boyd?” He looked up at the sky for a second before turning back to her. “I don’t even know her last name. Maybe Boyd is her last name.” He tilted his chin as if Carla might corroborate.

  But Carla was going through some things. She wanted to help Boyd, but she didn’t want this soldier around. She didn’t like soldiers and didn’t want one to mess up her chances of becoming part of this community. She sighed overdramatically and said, “Her first name’s Boyd.”

  The man raised his eyebrows. Carla could tell he’d almost given up on her and that she’d revived his interest. He was acting—well, he was acting unsoldierly. How well did he know Boyd? she wondered. Because it seemed as if he was now a Boyd acolyte, as if he had joined the Boyd cult. As if he had fallen under Boyd’s spell, Carla thought, a clichéd statement but true nonetheless.

  As usual, when she had these thoughts about her neighbor’s daughter, Carla became annoyed. Boyd was no sorceress. Sorcery implied intent; Boyd was a wide-eyed ingenue, the kind of movie character that boiled Carla’s blood. Lucy Maud was the one who should have bespelled people, but then, Lucy Maud was forty-seven. Women who were forty-seven were invisible. They did not often inspire acolytes.

  “She said she was looking for a friend, a man. Were you also looking for that man?”

  Carla had forgotten she’d told the soldier she was following Boyd. “It must have been her friend Isaac. They were camping down by the lake before the storm hit.” Carla bit her lip, looking back over her shoulder at the efficient machine of the commune, people going about their daily jobs. She wanted to be a cog. “Oh, but Isaac left.” She remembered that he’d cut himself with the tarp. She had driven him back up to his car. “I don’t know anything.”

  Now Kim came striding up, mud flecked to the top of her rubber boots. “Did you work everything out?” Kim was business friendly, chirpy, but her underlying message was to wrap it up.

  The soldier looked at Kim with fresh hope in his eyes. “Not really, not yet. But you could help,” he said, turning back to Carla. “You could help me find Boyd. You were following her. You know where she was probably headed.”

  Now Kim looked at Carla, too, expectation etched across her features. Carla saw an evaluation: Kim was watching to see Carla’s response in a crisis.

  “Sure. I’ll help. I can tell you where she might have been going.” Carla remembered the footsteps disappearing into the floodwater. She had no idea where Boyd was. But this was not something she should say, not in front of Kim.

  “Great.” The soldier extended a hand as if this were a business deal. “I have an extra life jacket.”

  Kim put a hand on Carla’s shoulder. “I’ll keep your stuff on your bed.”

  Carla almost cried with gratitude. She thought about the weight of that hand as she followed the soldier down the bank, put the life jacket on, walked into the water in her battered yoga slings, and took a seat near the rear of the boat. The aft? Carla asked herself, and just before the man pushed off, Carla saw the water moccasins, weaving their way around the man’s boots, as if he kept them as pets. He didn’t react, almost as if he didn’t see them, and then the snakes were gone, and he was in the boat, his boots dripping flood remnants and bits of the Colorado River onto the cases of bottled water. The sun, partway up the sky, warmed her face but blinded her, so she closed her eyes against it.

  8:36 A.M.

  In the mine shaft, the water was at Ruben King’s breastbone and rising more quickly now, all of the rain that had fallen now filtering through the limestone, filling in cavities, making its slow way to the aquifer. The sound of the cave had changed, now rounder and almost vibrato. A lush sound, a sound that spoke of the tropics. The corpse was gone now, under the water, and Ruben imagined him underneath in the dark, limbs rising as the water rose, newly animated and light. Ruben gasped as he realized why the bones had been upside down—the cave had flooded before, and the man had been lifted and set down in a different pose. Ruben wondered what position the man would be in when the water left again. He held the flashlight above his head and shone it in the corpse’s direction; the light did not penetrate the dark surface.

  Ruben, too, felt himself being lifted, buoyed. Soon he would not be able to touch the rock he stood upon; he wished the shaft would fill more quickly, so that he could tread water on the rising surface. He would rise, too, carried by the water to the chamber’s ceiling, and then he would maneuver himself to the shaft, delivered to the surface by the floodwaters like some Venus on a half shell. He would not die in this dark water, trapped and cold; he would not be left behind to keep this man company. He wouldn’t know what it would be like to lose the body’s breath, the slow exhale without an inhale. He wouldn’t know the floodwater, the last gasp that would fill his lungs with something other than air, that would return him to whatever had been before there had been life, that would complete a circle, lifelong, universal.

  8:38 A.M.

  Angie Mason in a hospital gown, gray eyes scanning the horizon, bare feet unfazed by the rough ground. Her head was full of something else, something that wasn’t this, but she did not yet know how different these two realities were. Now she walked past the dark rectangle of a grave, and the discarded clothes of a scarecrow.

  Angie Mason shed her hospital gown, her naked body crisscrossed with tape lines. Her flesh was flat in the places where it had pushed against a bed for a decade, rosy and surprised by the morning sun.

  She pushed her arms through pink lawn sleeves. The cat’s-head buttons were too difficult for her, so she only buttoned one, the one at her solar plexus. The jeans were too small for her soft body, tight around her hips and belly. She pulled one running shoe over a bare foot.

  Had she registered these things? Not yet, not quite. There was a period of transition, a reentry. She had not yet coalesced, was a bit of double vision walking the countryside, refracted out of herself. Soon, she would come into focus, would be able to understand and evaluate, would be able to decide and not to just act. She was not quite a full person, not quite a thing with a mind or agency, instead still a piece of the storm, a part of a tempest brought to life. She left the hospital gown behind and continued in the direction to which she had been drawn.

  8:39 A.M.

  Boyd, in the trailer, eyes adjusting. Light streamed in through the windows on the other side, and the curtains hung obliquely. The door had slammed behind her as she’d stepped across the threshold, and the floor tilted at such an angle she’d had to brace herself against the wall. In the darkness, her other senses were heightened: she heard the tick of the clock over the refrigerator, the drip of the water from the eaves, and she smelled mold and garbage, even a faint
whiff of sewage. Underlying it all was the scent of baby powder and dish detergent, of a house that had been cared for until recently.

  The woman—Boyd knew exactly where she was. She was on the floor in the doorway between bedroom and hall, and Boyd would have to step over her to get to the baby. But Boyd knew also where the woman had been, things she’d done before the storm. Boyd felt a kaleidoscope of iterations of the woman in this house: standing at the counter boiling water for macaroni and cheese, folding laundry on the dining room table, giving the baby a bottle on the couch while watching an episode of Forensic Files. There had been a life here before the storm, before the water had washed the home downstream.

  The baby was silent, and Boyd wondered if she had imagined it, if the baby was also part of the film of the past laid over the current world. Around her circled the ghost of the woman, doing the things that a mother would do, and Boyd was not entirely sure what was real and what was not.

  Now the light inside became almost enough for Boyd, and she reached over to the closest window and pulled the cord, raising the blinds. The inside of the trailer came into focus.

  On the floor, the woman was facedown, her blond ponytail flat and wet. Her knees were bent and her head was bowed in the position in which she’d come to rest so many hours ago.

  Boyd moved forward in the canted space, trying hard to keep her balance, feeling somehow terrible when she stepped in a pile of dry spaghetti that had fallen from the open cabinets. She knew that it would never be cooked. The entire thing was unbearable: being in this house with the mother on the floor and her child in the room behind. Everything in the trailer spoke of poverty, but it also spoke of care.

  Still no sound came from the bedroom, and Boyd knelt next to the woman. Boyd took the woman’s chin in her hand and rested a moment before she turned the face upward. The woman’s eyes were closed, but at the sudden movement, the lids fluttered open, and by some strange trick of the storm, she looked directly at Boyd. Boyd could sense her, still somewhere around, still somehow watching over her child, only recently abandoned.

  And the woman—Boyd knew that she had tumbled end over end as the trailer had careened in the water, and that she had grasped the kitchen counters and the cabinet doors to hold herself in place as the water came in, and that she had finally been caught underneath the kitchen table, unable to escape. Despite the mother’s fate, the baby had not fallen from the crib and had remained higher than the waterline in the bedroom.

  Boyd had to step over the mother to get to the baby, and the bedroom was darker because the blinds had not yet been raised. The air was close and stale; Boyd smelled the baby’s diaper before she saw the child. Then the baby made a sound, a crack in the back of its throat, as though it had been holding its breath and could no longer stand it. Boyd moved toward the crib, wanting to spend as little time as possible here, wanting to get the child and run.

  Again she opened the blinds, and she saw first the diaper bag in the corner of the room, its contents emptied and saturated. The bag was made of a light blue toile, and on the flap was embroidered LILY. Lily. The baby was a girl. Now Boyd turned to the crib, afraid of what she might see.

  But it was okay. Lily sat by the bars, one hand resting on the wood, and when Boyd looked at her, Lily blinked and pulled herself up. She stood at the edge of the crib and reached out her hand.

  Boyd, ready to calm a crying child, was unsure how to react. She put her finger in the baby’s outstretched hand, and Lily closed her fist around it. Sadness in that grip, please in that grip. The child couldn’t know what had happened to her mother, but she knew that she had been left alone. Somebody should have come a long time ago and had not.

  The child opened her mouth and started crying, a thin whimper, the sound of a child who had ceased expecting her cries to be answered. Boyd put her hands underneath the girl’s arms and lifted her, and Lily stopped crying in surprise.

  What would she need? Boyd hadn’t ever been around babies, but she knew they needed formula and diapers and maybe powder or wipes or rattles. Boyd didn’t know how old Lily was and couldn’t begin to guess: less than three, probably, more than one. Diapers were on the floor, escaped from the overturned bag, and though most of them were wet, dry ones were still in a package, and Boyd thought that changing diapers was the first thing she should do.

  Lily wore a tiny floral jersey dress, and it was easy enough to get the diaper off. Boyd used a package of wipes to clean the girl, then in a straightforward operation got a new diaper on. When finished, Boyd rested the baby on her hip while she looked for formula, for bottles. She had never changed a diaper and, forgetting, briefly, about the rest of the circumstances, felt something like pride.

  In the diaper bag also: two bottles and a can of formula. A scoop was in the can and directions on the outside, and for Boyd, the hardest part was finding the water to mix with the formula. Obviously the tap was not working. But in the kitchen was a gallon of distilled water, and she filled the bottle with it, shaking it with the powdered formula, then she put the rest in her own water bottle, severely depleted after the trek across country.

  Then she was ready, and the only thing to do was to say goodbye to the woman and to leave. Boyd knelt again, this time with a child on her hip, and said, “Say goodbye, Lily,” the first words that Boyd had spoken since entering the trailer. Lily, holding her fresh bottle to her mouth, looked at Boyd in surprise. Had Lily been surprised to hear her name? Lily reached out her hand to the woman on the floor, spoke a noise that sounded to Boyd as if Lily realized that it was for the last time.

  “Goodbye,” Boyd said to the woman. “I’m sorry for what happened to you. I promise to take care of your baby.” She touched the woman one last time, this time on the elbow, a solemn oath that Lily was in good hands, that Boyd would see her to safety on the other side of the storm. Boyd swore the woman nodded, thought she saw a barely perceptible tilt to her chin. Boyd thought suddenly of Carla burning those candles underneath the hanging tree, how the curse had been set aflame and transmuted to smoke. She thought of the Comanche blamed for the little girl on Babyhead Mountain—a girl who, in Boyd’s imagination, now wore Lily’s face—and of the woman Hettie Meyer, who had killed her own children.

  Then Boyd left, gaining her footing again in the outside world, adjusting to the normal gravity and light. With Lily on her hip, Boyd set out once more, trying to find Isaac.

  9:00 A.M.

  After too long talking about what to do, they still hadn’t come up with a plan. Lucy Maud decided, as the sun came over the ridge and the early-morning wind died down, to take Lou and Aunt Fern back to Allen Potivar’s. They were all starving, except for Aunt Fern, who was a bird you had to remind to eat.

  Lucy Maud didn’t want to leave Ruben King, but they weren’t doing him any good sitting vigil at the surface. If they splintered away, it seemed less dire in the light of morning, with the rain finished and the sunshine crawling over the earth. Last night, it had seemed as if they were to leave Ruben, they would never find him again.

  The morning light slanted just right above the shaft; she thought she would be able to find this spot again. She looked around and saw nothing that worked particularly well for a landmark. She tried to photograph the spot with her mind: the rise of land, the honeycombed limestone, the crabgrass. Allen had mentioned a cedar brake; she saw no sign of that now. Nothing much to distinguish it but the three women under the sun.

  She knelt. “Ruben. We have to go get a ladder. Nobody’s coming.”

  He didn’t answer, and she knew that he had a hard time hearing with the water rising. But he’d responded only five minutes ago, trying to convince her to go get other people to help.

  “Ruben.”

  When he still didn’t reply, she stood and removed her light flannel blouse, leaving only the tank top underneath. When she unbuttoned the sleeves, she remembered a different blouse, one with cat’s-head buttons, and she wondered briefly what had happened to it. She pinned the bl
ouse to the ground with one of the stones, and before she rose, she yelled into the shaft, “Ruben! We’ll be back soon!”

  Her voice came back to her, dimmed by the water. There was another sound, but she didn’t think it was him, and she wished she had the flashlight.

  She rose reluctantly and motioned to Lou, who had positioned her body to keep the sun off a sleeping Aunt Fern. At Lucy Maud’s cue, Lou shook Fern’s shoulder gently, and the three of them set off in what they thought was the direction of Allen Potivar’s.

  They didn’t get far, however—just to the line of juniper—when they saw Kevin, headed their way with a coil of yellow vinyl rope.

  Lucy Maud, exhausted, felt her knees buckle at the sight of her soon-to-be ex-husband and the rope. She nearly fell forward. Kevin had always been an unlikely knight in shining armor, and she had always wanted one of those. Unlikely was better than not at all.

  She turned to her twin sister. “Lou, you think you can get Aunt Fern back to civilization?” Lou nodded, took Fern by the elbow, and led her over the ridge.

  Things You Would Know If You Grew Up Around Here

  The Comanche Didn’t Kill the Baby on Babyhead Mountain

  Well, of course they didn’t.

  Nine and a half miles north of Llano lies the hill where the girl was found. Nobody quite agrees on the date. One history, given by a professor remembering local stories but writing much later, places the incident in connection with the Battle of Packsaddle Mountain, so after August of 1873. Many other historians, and a historical marker placed at Babyhead Cemetery, claim the girl was murdered in the 1850s. In any case, settlers found the dismembered body of a child who had gone missing, Mary Elizabeth, her head impaled on a stick near the summit of the mountain.