Old Border Road

by Susan Froderberg

  It’s what you call all cowboys just starting up, he says.

  Maybe cowgirl, I say.

  Perky as, he says.

  What happened to Darlin’?

  You’re still my Darlin’.

  I like Darlin’ better.

  Okeydokey, Button. Let’s get on. Hey, just kidding, he says.

  He fixes a pinch to his underlip, nudges the sorrel, and walks out ahead of me, and we go back to riding single-file and silently, as I wonder whatever happened to my given name. Whatever happened to Katherine?

  A military jet sonic-booms above in the waking arc of the aircraft’s passing, the contrails shielded in the dulled metal light of the sky. We settle into our paces, into the lull and the pull of our shadows and the weight of the day we are fated to. The horses snuffle. Son rubs at his forehead. I wonder if he might be pained by one of the headaches again, yet I know my asking would rankle him all the more. I wonder maybe too if quiet is something that simply comes naturally to Son. Or if speaking is something he never learned to do all that well from the beginning.

  IT WAS ROSE who told the rest of the story, Rose who told the part hardest for me to believe. It was Rose who ran a comb through her once flaxen and now gone-to-fine-white hair. Rose who said, This town’s Pearl Hart was, and still is, a mighty beauty. Everyone around who knows of her knows it to be true, Rose said.

  The little bird flitted about in its cage.

  Lord above us, Rose said. This heat. And my, this hair. How I would love to cut the lot of it off. It’s like having to wear a fur wrap inside a steambath. What a burden in such an infernal place. Just who in her right mind would have it? But Daddy, he’d have a fit if I went and cut it, she said.

  They say Pearl Hart isn’t her real name, I said.

  True, Rose said. She was born a Newby. The Newbys have been around these parts since horse-and-buggy days, she said. The grandfather, Jedediah Newby, was one of the original engineers come out here and put this country under ditch. It was Jedediah and his team planned the early waterways of the place. They built the canals and the overflow channels and diversions and the headgates. They built a town. And it was his son, Jeremiah Newby, who became head of Land and Irrigation Company. And along with it, he had a nice sideline in pigs. Indeed, he did quite well in pigs.

  Rose freed the caught hair from the teeth of the comb and let the filaments wift from fingertip to wastebasket in morning strands of light.

  The family lived a life of plenty, she said. Charmayne—Pearl, that is—was well kept and well nourished and well jewelry’d for all of her growing-up days. Her father quit pigs at a middle age and took his family and his wealth and moved over close to the river on a big piece of land that had belonged to his father, and with the riparian rights attached to it, you see, which made the family wealthier and more powerful yet. He moved into cattle then, thinking he was going to clear himself of any linkage to swine and the life that went with it, I suppose you could say. Though to my mind, a pig is a highly intelligent and respectable creature.

  Rose put her comb down and stared at the bird gone quiet inside the cage.

  Anyway, but Newby moved, she said. He built a stucco house in a mission style in the midst of a stand of date palms and olive trees alongside a tender stretch of the river. He schooled his daughter in the East and she came back west knowing how to talk and how to dress even better than she did before she left. She had studied acting and singing and dancing, all of the classical types—your drama and your opera and your ballet. And she had too in the meantime gone and changed her name so that Charmayne Newby would now be Pearl Hart, is what she insisted she be called. Charmayne, turned Pearl, had a way about her, Rose said, a way with mostly the male of the species. It was something that seemed to come naturally to her, just as with the Pearl Hart of legend, you could say, as the both of them always had a passel of fellows about. Maybe being this way made it more difficult for her, as she had a time of it settling down, so I’ve heard tell, that she had trouble knowing which of several men she ought to marry and make a home and bear children with. After a considerable while, she decided upon this man name of Ham. But the condition was that Pearl could have her liberty when it came to other men, and her husband should do the same if he be as inclined. Pearl is married yet these many decades to the same man. She and Ham have done fine together all their lives. They are dueños in the Water Association today, and yet too are steady in the business of stock contracting and the raising of fine thoroughbreds on the side.

  Now I can see, Dear Girl, why your eyes are so wide, because I myself say, My oh my, Lordy, Lordy who can live a life like out of some French story? Of course, everyone around says the same thing, especially when they see Pearl about town. But the fact is they cannot admit to admiring Pearl for what is but a straightforward manner. I admire her for the kind of courage she has. Don’t you? For her willingness to ask for whatever it is she wants. Because you never know when asking might just lead to getting. Well, Pearl is a strong woman, no doubt about it. It is not only her comeliness, and her money, and the power of family history, which has indeed helped a lot as well, but that she has had a need for sexual excess, which has only added to her attractions.

  How could you know all this? I said.

  Daddy told me, Rose said. And Daddy’s facts come firsthand.

  Why would he be telling you?

  He tells me a lot of things. Always has. Tells me everything, ever since our wedding day. Rose gathered her length of hair up and draped it over a shoulder, then began to knead her fingers through it, as if she were playing a reed instrument.

  Yes, I truly believe it is best to tell the truth, she said. That is, if it can be taken. Not everybody can take the truth. Daddy and me, we made an agreement before we were married. And we carried it through all these years together, with the greatest amount of mutual respect. It is not such an easy way, but I tell you, two people can gain a mighty lot with honesty. And I have come to know what I could never have known, simply by listening. And Daddy surely learned a lot from Pearl Hart, learned about being a free spirit of sorts, learned about being more attentive to women and to their needs, and learned too about the water business. You could say I learned a lot from her as well. Though I am no beauty and have never had any money to speak of and I would rather sex be left to the animals. Those are surely the big differences between Pearl and me, Rose said.

  What animals?

  That’s a big part of why I don’t mind much what Daddy does, she said. Easier on me, if you take my point. Though I must say, I do enjoy the stories quite a lot.

  How do you know the stories are true?

  It’s surely difficult to think they would be true, she said. I don’t see how any story like Pearl’s could possibly be. I only know it is Daddy who tells me so. And his testimony, it never has changed.

  Rose finished braiding her waist-length braid and she coiled it up atop her head and pinned it up into place to stay.

  Lord, she said. This heat has got teeth in it. It’s about to eat right into me. It’s about to chew me up and swallow me right down. Reminds me, she said, throw a little bit of seed into the feeder cup for the bird while you’re standing there.

  It still got water? she said.

  DID YOU SEE her?

  Did I see who?

  You know who. Who could have missed her, I say, dressed as she was in that getup. I could see her dabbing at her eyes, even under the big fancy hat she had on. I could see the handkerchief dangling in her hand the whole last half of the sermon.

  What? You think she’s been converted? Son says. Not her.

  Maybe not converted. But what the Padre was saying seemed to be having an effect on a lot of people. You could see it on everybody’s faces. What he said even got to me some. What he said about love.

  Yeah, but Pearl’s girl’s like Pearl. She’s no fool, he says.

  To question the existence of God, he said, is to question the existence of love. Where is it that comes from? I
say.

  Son grinds the gears in the downshift and hard-turns the pickup, listing me over into my door side. He jars us to a stop in front of the restaurant and cuts the engine. The hood of the truck steams in the heat.

  Didn’t he say it was out of the book of something? I say.

  Smell them fresh corn tortillas in the air, he says.

  Not that I’m saying what he said fits right with the facts.

  He said a lot of superstitious hooey, Son says.

  It wouldn’t be science, I say. But the way he described the why of our being here. And talking about what he called the light, and becoming the light. It was poetical, didn’t you think?

  The ratchety tight noise of the pullback of the handbrake puts a stop to my talk. Son spits his chew out the window. He says he hadn’t really heard a thing. He says he was too busy thinking about getting back before the water order was set to come in. Says he was just there and having to listen for the sake of his mother, as it is, after all, her birthday. There’s work to do later in the day. The work piles up, he says. And the water doesn’t wait.

  But I know too that the water is not scheduled until tomorrow, as Rose’s Daddy had mentioned it at the stove this morning when he was showing me the proper technique for milk gravy. Telling me, Let the butter melt real good, and add your flour and let the flour brown some before you start adding the milk, and add the milk in slow—no, slower than that—slow, real slow, here, let me show you. And Rose’s Daddy takes the fork out of my hand and says, Work your fork into the mix like this so it should not clump up any, so we don’t have any lumps in our gravy, he says. Thou shalt not have lumps. No man wants lumps, he says. There you go, now you have got it. Praise be we have got time for cooking lessons today, he says, as the water shan’t be coming till mañana. I planned it that way because of Rose’s birthday today.

  Now I turn to Son and say, Why can’t you be a better liar? Are you mean? I say. Or are you just dumb?

  Don’t ever call me that, he says.

  And he jabs a hard forefinger right into my breastbone.

  The sedan pulls up beside us at just this time, and Rose’s Daddy rolls his window down and thumbs his hat back.

  What foolishness is wrought between you two? he says. They will kick you out of the posse, Son, if people see you behaving in the way just witnessed. That bump on the head must have done something, he says. Or are you weakened by the heat? He looks past Son and sets his eyes on me, studies my face as if to find the rest of the story there.

  You children ready for some patty enchiladas? he says.

  The old man looks at Son. He looks at me.

  Put your party faces on, he says, and let us get to our meal.

  I open the door and slide out of the truck, the poke from Son’s finger burning right into where my heart is.

  THE MAN LEAVES a mark, Rose’s Daddy says. I found out by having him to ride the buckskin yesterday and taking him out onto the mesa. He sat a horse rightly, yet you can see the old boy is not seeded from horse people. Rose’s Daddy chuckles and pushes his menu aside. Lo, you should have seen him arrayed in his vestures of camelhair, and with shirt and suspenders and a tie on of the city kind, not your bolo. Camelhair! In this heat. Whoo-eee! I put a hat on his head and what a Buffalo Bill he looked to be, what with that long hippie wild hair of his.

  Rose’s Daddy sops into the tomatillo sauce with a piece of tortilla.

  A teacher back east would have taught him the basics, as he handled the horse with skill to suffice, he says. The buckskin was a fine match with his camelhair, mind you, so he was properly suited. Though he did not ride straight-backed, but with that cultivated slump you see in some of those ivy-schooled easterners. Whatever the cultivated slump is supposed to mean. Yet he and I had a pleasant ride. The Padre has got a bit of wirecutter spirit in him. He minds his ways by a different set of rules, his rules, if you know what I mean. Something you would not expect in some bible’d personality such as his. He would be rather more in keeping with a few of the old-timers we have got around here. You could say the Padre is more what they call, these days, new-agey, rather than old-timey.

  Pass me over some of the avocado mush, he says.

  Therein we are riding along and the Padre said to me how I ought to be meditating. I said to him, said, I am meat eating. Always have I been meat eating. A good meat eater am I, I said. No, he said—said meditating, as in pondering, is what I mean. And I told him I am without doubt well-practiced at pondering. Riding is the very best thing for pondering. He said he means something more like finding peace, or finding a quiet stillness inside. And I said, Surely, I do that all the time, right in the middle of the night. Said, That is what I love best about sleep, all that magnificent peace and quiet and stillness I find inside. And I think he might have thought my laughing impertinent, as he dropped the entire matter of pondering and meat eating after that.

  I shall have a machaca burrito, deep-fried, Rose’s Daddy says, handing his menu to the waitress. Make it swimming in green sauce today, he says, not red.

  Then we got somehow upon the topic of Pearl Hart, a name that seems to be cropping up in every conversation these days of a sudden, he says. The Padre tells me she has tithed a plenteous sum of money to his church or to his congregation or to his whatever body the money will go to. Maybe to the Padre himself, who knows? And the Padre said to me, What a good-hearted woman Pearl Hart is. Said she has donated not only her money but also her time lately to the service of the church. Said Pearl Hart is generous indeed. And I said, Yes, indeedy, Pearl is that. She is giving in many ways, she certainly is. Who would say she has not been truly giving?

  Rose napkins the corners of her mouth.

  Oh, Daddy! she says. You would not have said that.

  I kindled no wrath, Mother.

  Pass the bottle a hot sauce, Ma, Son says, all the while keeping his eyes on the waitress standing over at the register.

  I take a swallow of my cold cola drink, taking mouthfuls of ice chunks in and crunching them up with my teeth. Feeling that burning spot over my heart turning to a numbing. Thinking reasoning doesn’t do a bit of good when you think it should.

  What else? Rose says.

  What else? Herein I can tell you I was honest with the Padre. Said to him, You might call me a Christian man, certainly, sir, with a good deal of respect for other people’s way of thinking, yet nay, I do not believe most religious talk to be very near any truth. Said, I myself find most of it a hard thing to reckon with when it comes to intelligence.

  Those are rude words to say to such a man, Rose says.

  He did not wax sore as to what I had to say, Rose’s Daddy says. The Padre seemed to take my opinion just fine. He is not the closed-minded kind, as some hombres are—as though they be afraid of their brains spilling out. Do you not think he has heard all the arguments before? The Padre is a listening man, the reflective type, he says. He may go quiet on you, but I believe that be a trick among their profession to try to get you to think about what it is you went and said. Yet much as I have already thought plentifully over the years about the delicate subject matter of which I have spoken, I have not come to any change of mind about any of it. So I told him.

  I give Son a kick in the leg under the table. This gets him to turn his head away from the register, away from the waitress, who is by this time regarding Son in the same way he is regarding her. He gives me a look. I give him a look back, the unspoken words turning to stones and arrows between us.

  Before we bid our good-byes, Rose’s Daddy says, We were the two of us laughing about this and that and the other, who knows what subject we had got on to by then. And the Padre had his camelhair jacket shoggling over the cantle of the saddle. And he was using his straw hat like a fan and Lord forbid he would not have had it to fan with.

  Lo, would you behold what has arrived?

  The waitress comes to the table carrying a flaming cake.

  You kids like the pretty new jinglebobs Rose is wearing for he
r birthday? he says.

  Rose closes her eyes and blows, and the candles sputter out.

  I leave my eyes open and make a wish of my own.

  THE RIG COMES jouncing and fishtailing by the old adobe house, trailing a funnel of dust in its wake. The commotion gets the old dog to stop the mad chew she has going at a tick on her haunches, and she gets up and shakes and trots down the porch steps to go after the ruckus. Rose’s Daddy comes out of the house and lets the screendoor slam, ignoring Rose’s protests for the noise of it, and he heads out to the corral after the trotting dog. I follow behind too, getting there in time to see the man that’s driving the horse trailer get out of the truck and square the hat atop his head afresh. Then I see the woman get out the door on the other side. See the woman dressed in a pearl-buttoned silk western blouse and slender-fitting cowboy denims, her riding boots drawn up to the calves with the britches tucked into the ostrich shaft, her concha belt studded with turquoise and silver and aglitter in the sun. See Rose’s Daddy turn his head to the woman and tip his hat. Then he goes over to the man and reaches a hand out.

  How you, Ham? the old man says.

  Pree’ good, Ham says.

  Holding up in this godamighty weather?

  Pree’ much, Ham says.

  How you, Pearl?

  Can’t complain, she says.

  How be your girl? he says.

  Pearl’s fine too, Pearl says.

  She places a wide-brimmed, pencil-rolled black Montana on top of her head and turns and walks over to the pasture fence, looking about as if she were expecting something coming. The man called Ham goes around to the back of the horse trailer and unlatches the slidelatch, and he swings the doors of the horse trailer open. There before us are the powerful hindquarters of the horse. There’s the oilslick shine of hide, the plaited hang of tail, the stocking of hockjoint and fetlock, all those parts of the horse the old man has taught me to regard. He and Ham stand one on each side of the stallion, and Ham gives the horse an easy slap on the flank and the horse backsteps until it is backed out of the trailer. Ham clips the reins to the hackamore and Rose’s Daddy takes the reins and leads the animal to the post and tethers him. The horse is thoroughbred and magnificent, above sixteen hands, must be, and well muscled in the shoulders, the withers high and sharply defined, the neck long, and the eyes intelligent. I go over and put my hand to the blaze on the flat of its forehead. I look right into the large, dark, glossy eyes, seeing facets of my reflection inside. The horse looks right back at me, flares its nose, knowing, I tell you, seeming wise beyond belief.