by Noy Holland
I led him along his hood pulled free him lathered in the sudden warm his brisket gaunt and heaving. Cricket you Cricket you.
It would not be long. I knew as much to look at Ma her flicks and starts and sudden flush her voice like something burst in her should she gap her mouth to use it.
I went on. I led him up between the barns where Pa had drawn the trailer up and stood the high gates open.
Ma turned back the once and once again to bring herself to go. We stood on the road and watched her. The road black in the wet in the sudden thaw in the steam that dipped and gathered grown so thick to squat upon our pond that it seemed not our rooster there but the air itself yet crowing.
Stay. Stay. So go.
I gave Goose his head to lunge at Pa to beat the air to strike at him should Pa swing past where Goose could see else think to speak or touch him. To see if she would tend to him. But Ma was going on.
She went up through the lopped and pollarded trees I kept as she went a count of. Pa’s dogs at her heels since the barn. Good dogs.
I leant against Pa’s legs with them. I licked his pants when I was small with them with him not looking. Quick.
“You get.”
Pa toddled off for his gun.
Goose scraped at the road the rilling stream with the shoe those months he had not thrown that I would pry for luck from him and clip the braid of his tail from him hung fat with the mud we had hauled him through, the slickened clay and loamy sweet and thinking I would go there yet where Goose had lain in the sun and moon I found a tree a buckthorn near and deep against it hung them.
I blinkered him to calm him.
I walked into the trailer ahead of him and we could hear Pa coming back, I was backed against the trough with him wedged away under the bars from him and Pa swung the creaking gate shut and Goose went back to thrashing. I felt my head flung back. Pa stood up on the running board and the shaft of the gun pushed through.
So it was Pa shot him.
It is for my sake Pa shot him.
I was in the stall beside him and the trailer shook and ringing quit and the blood of my face where Goose opened it ran free in my mouth and warm.
ENOUGH FOR ME. No matter.
Ma looked back the once and went on.
All that she had left to us and what is yet to come to us the oaks on the hill the lightning hits the fox in the field in the weeds I keep gone red to gray come autumn—it is enough for me. No matter.
I will sing Pa her song the getting up song she sang to me in the morning time when she leaned to me to nudgle me and the baby was in her hair.
I could smell him from her hair.
I SLIP THROUGH the muck the gone-by weeds the flattened grass the dogs bend down and think if I could run from him else think I never came on him wallowed up on the couch in the green suppose Cricket supposing.
We sat on the shore and watched him. I did not know in myself what to do for Pa nor what there might be in tending him to call so even gently. To say: I tend him gently.
Pa would have me poke at him. He would have me pinch and twist at him.
Yet to say: I tend him gently.
And ever in the dusk in the sinking light I knead his feet his withered legs to move the gout and feed him.
Am I not his girl Cricket?
Enough for me. No matter.
I sing Ma’s song to him.
Our blessings count.
Enough for me to keep our Goose and in myself the truth of him and the dogs grow fat and eat of him and by the silken sweet of glue we spread across our palms to peel the skin I feel him with me and feel of the seeds that split in me and of the living harvest, shell and hide and cloven tongue and of the fruit and fowl we strew the yolky eyes the deer we cull the great whales flensed for blubber.
Ever so. Ever so gently.
I lie in the field and picture it. Who have come to be one to picture it. How long it was Goose hung there. Such a time it was he hung there pawing softly at the stars.
CHUPETE
He drove carelessly and the sun passing through the window looked to melt his hair to his head. His eyes were shining. His hands were chalky and raw.
One hand, he kept on the steering wheel and the other let slump between them. A blackened thumbnail, a knuckle bloodied. He made his living with his hands. Like Jesus, she thinks.
But this man is younger than Jesus. His shirt is on the seat between them. On his chest is a lump a parasite makes eating its way toward air. He circles the lump with his fingertip, as if stirring. As if making a doll-sized stew.
The sea was heaving, a mirror that showed back nothing. The town was falling behind them.
She can’t see it—how one sack is going to do. She should have given him two, she thinks. She gave him money. He gave it back to her. He took a shirt from her from her country—two—the ram’s head of a sporting team, a soaring modern god.
Her shirt was—but that was his shirt. Hers stuck to her from the heat of the day and the engine heat pushed through the dashboard. Her shirt was becoming transparent, she thinks. And thinks: what a funny way to say it: make a living with your hands. Make a life.
In the back is a sack of concrete, a tongue of fine gray dust. He has a daughter—there is that. And his god—there is that. And the work of his hands she gives him.
The road was ragged. It was underway. So much in this country was underway. His boy—she supposed you could say that: in the oven: underway. Nearly ready. Some months.
Why the oven, she thinks, and not the sack? Baby in the sack. In the stew.
The sea ate at the roots of the palm trees until at last the tide, when the moon was right, dragged them away. They fell softly and without noise, the wood soft and shallow roots drawn out of the loosening sand. Beyond: islands. Soggy unbroken swells.
She brought shoes from her country to give to him, tiny as a doll’s. Now she would keep them. That part of her life was over—years of nights of waking to find her children in their beds. They are the sons and daughters, she thinks. And Jesus died and was buried, she thinks, and on the third day—was it the third day? And she began to write the story in her head:
He needed money and I had money. He needed concrete to make a coffin with and he didn’t have money to buy it. Just a sack was enough to make a coffin with. He didn’t have the little money to spend on a sack so I gave him the money to buy it. He just needed enough for his baby. They didn’t have money for a hospital and when they got there, the baby was dying. The baby was being born and dying across the river all at once. I had money so I gave him money. I gave him a ride to where he lived with his wife. I had a truck I could borrow from Tulio that didn’t have doors and the windows were cracked and he had taped them back with packing tape and that was what we drove. He put the concrete in back in the rusting bed. He had a girl and a dying baby and we drove along the sea in the sunlight until—
AND SHE REMEMBERED the baby when her boy was born that went on tossing inside her. She had a real living baby on the outside and another baby knocking on the inside, saying: I am still here. And she thought of the baby as it was being born and dying all at once and of what it might be doing, why—what it groped at, what it pushed off from and clawed at—to get out, to stay in. Of what it might know, what it knew of what was happening to it in the minutes it had to live.
And she thought if the coffin were hers to make, who made little with her hands, that she would begin with a coconut, a heavy, sturdy, hollowed-out seed to pack the mud around. To keep the dogs off. A seed inside a seed inside the concrete. You might want it to float but it wouldn’t but a seed at least gives a body room. It will rattle in its pod like a pea, she thinks—and wishes she had never thought it.
But if he packed the mud right against the baby wouldn’t the concrete burn the baby or pull it apart as it dried? That seemed likely. Nobody wanted to think about that but he was going to have to think about that who made his living with his hands. The blackened thumbn
ail, the knuckle bloodied.
He drove on. She could not think quite what she had seen in him, what she was seeing now. The lump in his chest. His Halloween teeth—like the teeth of the dead she finds walking. Teeth and bones and burying beads. Still—something. Some old durable hunger.
She had given him a chupete, of all things, a lollipop, a knob of candy on a paper stick. Now he tossed the stick out the window. He reached around to smear a clear patch in the dust to see through the glass to drive.
A butterfly snagged against the windshield and the wind the truck made moving plucked iridescent dust from its wings. There were thousands of butterflies like it flying above the sea, dipping to leave their eggs on the water. They arrived for days, a living cloud, and she remembered the summer her daughter was born that crickets had made their way into the house—by the dozens—by the hundreds—a great abundance. And sang all night with their knees.
His skin was seeping where the bicho pushed against it and polished from being stretched too far. And she wondered in a dream of his baby he might have if the baby like a god would burst through his skin and, once and again, as the bicho did, keep blooming in his blood.
That seemed likely.
He needed money and I had money, she thinks.
She thinks, I had it all along.
She had the baby all along and it moved in her and it would bloom as when the rains came and burst out through her head. That seemed likely.
Life longing for itself.
And the baby would be the size of a beetle, how it felt. And on one face would be her father’s face and on the other the face of her mother. And wings like a bee. And little snelled feet. And a great booming voice like a god’s.
PERIHELIA
She had been sick for days washing clothes in the river so the witchdoctor came with his gunnysack and his parrot clinging to his hat. The parrot was skinning a grape, turning the fruit against the blade of its beak with its purple tongue. The girl was pale as a cloud and cold. Unmoored. The witchdoctor pulled off her shirt. From his sack he drew a leafy bundle of stalks and beat her across the back. He had a stew of sticks and leaves in a jar and something fat that floated. This he filled his mouth with. He spat the stew with terrible force against the girl’s narrow back. Archipelago of bone. Faultless, her skin. His mouth was leaking. The witchdoctor drew two eggs from his sack. He rolled these as though in orbit over the litter of leaf and bark and the sewn-over drift of her spine. He broke the eggs into the jar. Spun them. The girl cried out from pain or fear and the parrot mimicked the sound she made and the skinned grape dropped from its mouth. They should never have come. What kind of mother? The girl was radiant, beyond human. Fever had lacquered her eyes. Snakes in the trees and dinner arrived bungeed to the back of a motorbike, a river fish, battered, fileted on the floor with a machete. Ojos, said the doctor, looking up at the mother. The eggs hung in the murk: a doubled sun. The parrot with great patience repeated the word. Someone envied the girl. Cursed her. Someone had sickened the girl with her eyes.
QUERIDO
A seed caught in her teeth that moved when she spoke. Her son was killed. She had tattooed into her arm a dragonfly to summon him by, the glassy wings, the obscenely quivering body. A water creature once, millennia ago, flown into the hinge of her elbow. Angel beyond life. Beyond mercy. Wingspan wide as an owl’s. The seed swam across her tooth. The sea kept coming.
CUERNAVACA
There were three little girls who were sisters named Sparrow and Phoebe and Wren. Wren was the father’s favorite. One day he watched a bird in an airport flying from chair to chair. The bird flew into a window and dropped to the floor and for an hour lay stunned at his feet. In great anguish the father knew Wren had left him. She had fled to Cuernavaca. Here he found her, and dragged her home by her hair.
BOULEVARD
The daughter held the gate open for her to walk through to the field. Against the fence were the horses. Where the horses were inclined to stand, there were bald spots in the field. A fine dust kept falling. At night, the dust disappeared and the bald spots appeared to the daughter like small clouds sunk down. In the dust, the mother’s footsteps were as soft as if she had not worn shoes.
It was a night you could smell the river. A hard rain had come from the north and—saffron to the riverbed—enough water for all the fields.
There were laws about the water.
You were only allowed water certain days, certain times.
The daughter brought the chain around to pull fast the gate and the horses shied at the sound this made, and snorted—circling in a slow, breaking canter around the dry field. The fence leaned from the leaning of the horses. Walking the fence line away from her mother, the daughter jostled each post with her hand.
“Candysara,” said the mother, “Lady Jane,” calling to the horses.
The daughter watched from the mouth of the ditch the horses mill around her mother; only the one mare let her mother come near.
“Candysara,” said the mother again.
“MOTHER?” THE DAUGHTER had asked. “How do you spell O-H-I—?”
“Why?” the mother had said.
“How do you spell Ohio?”
THE MOTHER STROKED the mare named Candysara in the hollow of her throat and the mare, as though her head were a thing to be carried, gentled her head against the mother’s coat. The mother kissed the small white star that marked the face of the mare. In the mother’s coat was a deep square pocket the mare had learned to muzzle into. This was why she was called Candysara—the mother’s favorite—she came with a whinny to the leaning fence anytime the mother came near the field.
“What are you doing?” the daughter asked.
She could hear her mother talking to the horses.
The daughter’s horse was Blue One—a white mare, speckled gray, a mare named the name of the color she had turned when rain fell on the field.
The mother walked out from the horses. Past the bald spot where the horses stood, roots clumped where grass had been and the ground was brittle where rain had dried in the deep prints of the horses. Above the ditch that traversed the field, the sound of the leaves of the cottonwoods turning above the daughter was the sound to the mother of water running into the ditch to fill.
But the daughter had not remembered: the gates ought not be opened fully, but opened at once. The ditch behind the gate had filled and water so pressed against the gate, the daughter could not raise it. The gate was metal and cool with the coolness of the water that had run down off the mountainsides into the Rio Grande.
They worked the gate from side to side, their shoes pushing into the slope of silt washed from the river bottom. The metal edge of the gate cut into the bend of their fingers. When water ran out under the gate and tugged at the cuffs of their jeans, the mother said, wanting to rest, “What’s this about Ohio?”
The daughter shook her hands out, copying her mother.
“Is there an ocean in Ohio?” the daughter said.
“Why?” asked the mother.
“Is there?”
The daughter patted the water with her shoe.
“We’ve got to get this thing open,” said the mother.
She felt the brush of a weed, the small tapping touch of a stick passing beneath the metal gate in the quickening water. The water’s smell, the mother knew from years of snakes in coffee tins—she had let her children keep things—a broken-winged dove the dog brought home, a ringwormed cat. Her own smell, she thought, was of something kept, an old smell, something hoarded.
THE DAUGHTER HAD cut the tail of the mare who had blued when rain fell on the field and carried it to her mother, a tail they would pull through a nylon stocking to bend into a drawer to save. In the drawer was the braid of the mother—fine hair banded at either end—a girl’s—still flaxen as the daughter’s. The daughter’s braid had been so long she had threaded the loose ends of it through the back belt loops of her jeans.
Cut short—pixied, her mother said—it swung into her face when she bent to the gate again to work it open.
The daughter reached around from behind her mother saying, “Guess,” her fingers cupped over her mother’s eyes, saying, “Who is it now, Mother?”
She nickered—a low, caught sound in the daughter’s throat, a sound that no longer seemed practiced.
“Lady Jane,” her mother guessed.
“Nunh-uh.”
“Bubbling Fancy.”
“Now?” said the daughter.
She stooped into her mother. They were almost as tall as each other.
“Guess!” the daughter cried. “You’re not guessing! Guess again!”
She stamped her foot in the water of the ditch, blotting her lips together.
“B-L-U—”
“I know,” the mother said.
She had thought as a child they would come to her in the underwater tongue of leaves—words—how many she could not guess of them nor how they might be said—a spell, a plea, she was certain—you could walk out into them. They would sit like birds on your shoulders. They would light on your hair as they fell.
She heard the slow steps of the horses. The air was cool against her back where the weight of her daughter had been.
“MOTHER?”
Her mother had said those were mare’s tails, but what did that mean? She had said they meant rain coming. When the rain came, the mare had blued and the sky blued when the sun came up, but those were not the same colors. Those were colors named the same name but they were different colors. Her name was Melissa—a yellow name, her mother said; she said every name had a color. Different names had the same color and different colors had the same name and mares’ tails meant there was rain on the way—high, said her mother, serious clouds that streamed above the mountains. The mountains were named Sandia—watermelon in Spanish—because that was the color people thought they turned when the sun went down in the desert. The daughter had not thought you could name a mountain for the soft inside of a fruit, so she had thought of the color of a watermelon’s rind, which was the color of the name of her mother.