The Joshua Tree

by Robert Cabot

  Money’d be coming from Chicago. Back to dear old State Street.

  here

  painted

  in the

  sand

  the

  Sitting for your photo. Willy with your shiny shirt and dark wool jacket and big white ten-galloner with the fancy black band – looks same as ever, always kind of self-contained in the eye. Arthur with his black hat cocked like only a dude from the East would think you should, bandana not at home, and the black mustache slowly growing up to be like yours. He’d show you his girl, tucked in leather by his heart, framed in oval cardboard with her twin sister. This one, she’ll be for you Willy, I’ll bring them both. The Wellington girls.

  Ending

  But she’ll never come, O Willy. Just Arthur and Frances, Christmas Greetings. Most years. Sixty gone by now, and still somehow his arm’s on your shoulders. A first-rate fellow. You’d be done with Scotty, though, once too often. And it’s time to be back in the Valley. Roger to feed, pencil assessments to make on your claims, bit of developing till it’s ripe for experting with the Boston fellows.

  Maybe too just getting good and out of civilization’ll be good. All these people and their dirt and their noise and their shenanigans. Willy Speare, that’s who you be and there ain’t nobody who’s going to make you over. Choctaw or a fancy-pants cowboy or Jerry Dan the miller boy.

  Indian’s

  Hero

  enters

  the

  Turquoise

  Temple

  Up there at the Golden Girl, not much to it, just keeping your claim up, scarin’ off the jumpers, you and Panamint, waiting for to sell when it gets too much botheration not to.

  But there’s a lot of just settin’ to do, and getting up to the skyline to see what your neighbors are at, and all them one-blanket fellows nosing about – maybe see one somewheres two three times a month – see what the weather’s going to be and how the sun’s getting on, and the purple shadows stretch down the canyons and the flowers come out after a cloudburst.

  Sun Father

  gives him

  Cleaner out there, and you’d like to be clean, what with the miller’s flour and the soap perfumes and the jail stench and the tobacco and the cunt fish that you’d not wanted much anyhow – just kind of got in your way – and all their powders and paints.

  the

  Earth

  The desert wind and the dew under the moon and the sun so’s you know every shade in the Valley and the rains and snows and kind of the wash of the great sea that threw surf on the red cliffs, cutting into the bone of the earth.

  its Bone

  Fossil bones, fossil shells, geological specimens, stretched out on planks and tables and the old troughs, like from Russia clear across Europe and the Atlantic and America to all this monzonite and the pinto gneiss. I’d not bother you with all that and their fancy names. Learned them since a little fellow: where the rivers cut through the Russian plains; where they dig, ponies all blind, out under the Irish Sea; where the Rockies kick up through the plains; where the seas and the great ice and the craters and lava flows and the gnawing wind and rain made these valleys and deserts and mountains and left minerals enough to buy off Armageddon, if you but know where to look.

  its Flesh

  The Missis planted that bamboo, must have been when she first came out here, nineteen eighteen or nineteen, and never could get rid of it; just kept sucking away at the other things we’d put in – all weed and thistles now – never could get rid of it, kind of fond of the well.

  Walter lying on the arrowheads. Can he smell the rabbits’ blood?

  its Blood

  This way, Lily girl, where the stone’s finished for putting out where I shot Crabble. Still snow in the shade from last night. Not enough to settle the dust or open an aster.

  its Treasure

  Over there, now, over that fence of Joshua trunks, that’s where maybe I’ll find more than a bit of gold. Stamp mill’d set there first. Pretty crude, lot of gold got through I’d never recovered. Sometimes, you know, in the mornings, hot sun coming in, and still, like now, sitting at my table maybe writing me some poetry, I’ll get a feeling like a sort of magnet, pulling at me, real strong, right from over there. Had it before and it’s proved out. Must be a good pile there. Get to it soon. When I get done pulling in all that fence wire.

  The earth holds this lightly, waiting

  Collecting, gathering in, the infinite evidences. Sixty years, mining, ranching, farming in the high desert; sixty years draining back into the sand. The means – wagons, trucks, rails, rakes, picks, the stamp mill, bed springs, Hercules Powder, horseshoes, an acre of nuts and bolts, shackles, hooks, buckles, pulleys, wedges, tires, a saddle frame, pipe, hose, axe heads, saws, shovels, hoes, scythe blades, steel traps, a coffee grinder, post holer, curry comb, buckets, pots, ore pans, cultivator, branding irons, chains, stirrups, pitch forks, the grindstone, mine cars, barrels, funnels, gears, bee houses, a baby buggy, a scooter, the fence wire, rolls and rolls and rolls – laid out in a sort of neatness over the valley floor, bleeding, dying the bones back into the sand. Tombs under the Joshua tree.

  The earth holds this lightly, waiting. Always the scars have healed, always the taking away is the giving back. Always the dying is the returning is the giving life.

  Lily of the Valley, so slowly turning from you

  I

  a Lily in

  the earth,

  Home, little Lily, returned to Valley Hope. The sun shines in from the clearest blue, through the yellow poplar leaves, through the morning voices of a million birds, through the mist of muslin breathing gently in the air, the floating fairy dust, the secret princess perfumes, warming the tear on your cheeks. Thin, so pale and drawn, with the green eyes looking up at the gabled ceiling, looking inward, homeward.

  a Lily in

  a vase

  Somewhere back behind your eyes, back and far far down, the black oily roar, the long corridor, the tap tap in the wet palm, and the reasoning and formulae and books and ritual symbols. A shuddering back of your shoulders, swallow to clear the smell and the sting.

  And somewhere in your head, maybe at the roots of your warm soft hair, hair slept on against the lie leaving a crease of pain, somewhere an ache of hurt, of his going, so blond and tall and handsome, so silent, so afraid.

  The ceiling, rippling from the leaves, white shelter, reflections of home. Pots and pans and hot honey for the flapjacks, up through the rattly register. That complaining kitchen pump. Hands and her humming voice. Hoofs on the barn floor, a creaky gate. Long thin legs, high-heeled boots, a great floppy hat slapping at the rumps, his sweating face shining with love for you. A calf bawling in the west pasture, a tractor starting up at the Pini place for the plowing.

  can

  I

  ever

  land?

  Bathrobe spread, green like the peacock Mario keeps for shrieking at intruders, with an ache of will, slowly rising, up from the grass, up through the poplars, a little more effort, up into the sky to sail so easily. Pa’s here, take his hand, he in his bathrobe too. The sun is so splendid and the tops of the poplars are feathery plumes, and the doves fly about encouraging, giving tiny downy shoves. Cedar-shakes roofs among the swaying branches, white clapboard with the two-pane windows, brown bare-wood barns, white front fences, cedar poles and barbed wire in the pastures. Greens and the black plowed fields and the dusty white road, purple mountains and the blue blue sky. Stores with their false square fronts to make two stories of a peaked roof, lining Elm Street. The church all clapboard white with the open bell tower, the bell swinging soundlessly under its pyramid roof, gingerbread on the eaves and the pointed windows. The pioneer log cabin with its tippy roof, but the tourists never come to Valley Hope. Flower beds through the oak trees, hollyhocks and pansies and geraniums. The mothers in their bonnets, the fathers in their black suits, the children swarming ’round, clusters moving down the lanes and out to Elm Street and on to
the church.

  ever?

  ever?

  Fly on and on and on, hold tight to his hand. The others don’t know how, earthbound, but you and he, you’ll fly forever, up where the poplars point so stiff, reaching for the sun.

  The screen door slams, his heavy footsteps in the kitchen, the clanking of the pump. Sudsing on his strong fine hands, strong to hold you and keep you and protect you and never never let you go, fine to love you and be so tender and give you such beautiful gifts . . . Why does he tremble so? . . . Throw off the covers, race in your bare feet down the stairs, your long robe streaming out, fly into his arms. Tears and screams of laughter and the tarantella thumping on the linoleum and suds and the pump still splashing as the handle sinks down.

  Never never never will I leave you, and never will you ask me to, and I don’t care at all if I ever see him again, no, I shan’t see him again. I want nothing nothing nothing but to stay here and go riding with you for the bees and be in my own own town.

  The amused look, the quiet look, the wink to the others as the flapjacks are forked out and the honey pours golden with the bacon from last Christmas’s pig so crisp along the side. You love each other so, Lily, you and your best best father.

  Every moment, Lily, every single instant bursting with fullness, shouting to be heard forever and to admit none other.

  my Prince

  so

  strong

  beneath

  Bareback, though Ma would have you clean off of horses: stretches who knows what, and isn’t fitting for a young lady, college and all. Bareback with just a hackamore on your little mare Stella, down Elm Street and Orchard and Bari, “Hi!” here and there, maybe Bella, “Gosh, college hasn’t changed you much!” And then maybe, “It’s awful, they flunk one out of three, hardest field there is, I’m doing fine.”

  me

  carry me

  on

  Out into the meadow land beyond town, along the valley edge. On to the creek, willow banks cut down in the sandy soil from the freshets. Follow it east toward the desert, bubbling, lesser lesser, until it simply disappears in the sand. Our water has a way of doing that.

  You see him there, a stranger; still, loose in the saddle, leaning with his elbow on the horn. He must have been watching you as you lay out on Stella’s neck and kissed her and told her you’d never leave her again. But you don’t care a fig, and you swing over to him and ask, “You’re a stranger, lost?”

  “Not likely, I own this.”

  Turns out he’s the nephew from Alturas, got this ranch when old man Rocca died in the winter. Taken it well in hand, Pa said just this morning. And he rides so easy and he talks so soft, and it won’t be more than a mile before you’ll be going with him to the barn dance Saturday in the Servadio hayloft.

  Spring, with the winter hay gone and the new hay not yet in. Dances in the church from now on. That hangs a weight on you, though, a kind of dusty deep organ note on a fiddle and an accordion and a tambourine, a kind of upraised vestmented hand which slows the pulse of pagan whirl. So who’d miss the last hayloft dance? Who’d miss the rites of spring?

  my Prince

  In the late twilight his shiny pickup comes dusty up your line of poplars, and he’s at the garden gate, his boots, all shiny with their stitchings and their inlays, reach long up the pebble path. His tight twills, his heavy belt that a man’ll work a winter on with its buckle maybe an Indian did, his sleek white gabardine shirt so tight to his body with its pointed buttoned pockets and its obsidian arrowhead at the throat – so tight, so strong. The Sunday-go-to-meeting hat all stiff and sitting straight, so proud he is, so steady he moves, like in the saddle, under that Stetson hat.

  my father

  It’s the only hayloft with a stairway instead of a ladder up to it, and at that it’s narrow and you yell at the bottom for right of way and your skirt all standing out brushes along the walls and picks up some dust of the hay but it doesn’t matter at all or if it did you wouldn’t be there. It smells of last year’s hay and the milk cows and the girls’ perfume that hasn’t worn off yet. At the far end the table with the punch, at the near is the fiddle and the accordion and the little fellow from up the valley who does the calling when they do the reels and the squares. Light bulbs strung along the rafters, all swept up clean, and the folding chairs from the primary school. Wax in little lumps still on the floor.

  soft

  opening

  The tarantella, whirling whirling in your heart, the tambourine shivering hot under your skin, and you’re out there, your hair flying in your eyes. He’s there at first, you see his face so serious and proud and detached with his black hair loose over the sunburn line. Everything rushes past behind him. Then there’s nothing but the rush inside you and the breath burning on your lips and your skirt swings out on its own and you’re stripped bare to the sweat on your throat and thigh. You feel the swelling of your breasts and the shine in your eyes and the dancing of your feet high over your head where the music spins.

  for

  my

  Colin

  The music stops and the room swings about you like atop a haywagon all piled high across a rocky field. His hand is strong on your elbow, the punch is sweet lemon and honey on the tongue. You stopped ’em all, Lily, and they clapped but you’d not have heard. And the air outside is cool with the desert dew, the light from the hay door above, roped so’s not to fall by mistake, makes the shadows so black, and the fiddle makes the owl’s call silent.

  slim

  I think he’d kiss you if you’d help him just a little, but you’ll not have thought of kissing at all, you’ll not know what it is but for the movies and Pa’s cheek with the after-shave lotion. If he touches you it is to help you, if you were to touch him it is the better to talk and maybe the better to know how strong and true he is. And somehow he knows that and somehow he doesn’t.

  the hard ribs

  under

  my breasts

  What is it, Lily, that makes them tremble so, that makes their voices go hollow and high and lose the song? Or the others that reach out, tap tap tap tap, with their eyes on you? Or the others who hate and hate? What did he mean and who was it told you, innocence corrupts?

  Power, Lily, you’ll not learn until, no, not even then, until it turns full on you and drives you to the edge.

  day

  night

  Almost every day Stella to take you to the north range land, or the haying or the shearing or the branding, and he’ll be there, somewhere. And he’ll come over when he’s able and he’ll touch your elbow when he says hello, and he’ll talk soft to Stella and ask after Pa and once he’ll have a lead rope that he braided for you, white and black and roan, and joke, “But you won’t take offence, will you, Lily?”

  wrap

  the

  red Earth

  He’ll come when Pa invites him to supper, late, when the sun’s gone behind the mountains. Straight in from the haying he’ll come and he’ll not touch you on the elbow and he’ll talk about the bees with Pa straight through. And about how Ma’s risotto is so good. And he’ll say “Goodnight Lily,” so correct, so formal, and you’ll not help but smile and laugh at him a little and Ma will look so black.

  skin

  of the

  Earth

  Your room, your sheets, so icy with the window wide from the sunny day, with the cold midnight air flowing down the mountain in streams. Remember, on the back of your neck, Lily, when you’ve come down the canyons evenings with Pa, packing out the hives when the honeydew in the white fir has stopped, late August? Felt it sliding in under the hot breath of the black rocks?

  Ice sheets, and there’ll be your cotton flannel gown, but even not and your ooo’s! would be so happy. For that’s a part of being home, you see, Lily? Exiled, alone, and the chill touch tightens around your heart. Home, and it drives in the warmth to bubble in your heart. (Fannie Farmer who would have you plunge the baked potatoes into cold water to drive the
heat to the center, and Pa would laugh so at it. But that’s what happens, you prove it every night.) And the warmth creeps out and out and out, and so slowly you relax and sneak your toes down, opening, an inward opening.