Ham turns a cheek to where the sun is plowing shadow into the field.
And I know in that pause that Ham knows about Daughter Pearl and Son. Just as the old man knows. Just as everyone in town knows what Son does and who he does it with, in particular lately, the one.
What time you getting your water in, compadre? Ham says.
You got to check with that kid of mine, Rose’s Daddy says. I am these days leaving him to corporal things a bit more. He has got to come to understand the working of the place sooner than later and so to do it on his own for a change. Besides, I am lately wearied.
You want I ought to go and check on him? Ham says.
Perchance you might, Rose’s Daddy says.
Ham rises and gives a nod of the head and sets his hat back atop it. All righty, then. I’ll adiós you for now, he says.
By dawn of the next day the land around us is shrouded in still, metal-colored water, all the furrows topped full and so ribbing the fields as to make it seem there’s a colossal grating of some giant cattle guard fixed upon the land. The water had come in the depths of the night, as it sometimes does, and much to Son’s chagrin, as it will ruin his plans for sleep, or whatever other pleasures and proclivities—as the old man calls them—that Son aims to keep to. Now Son stands out in knee-high rubber boots—wellies, he will say, that never work welly enough—shoveling a gopher hole closed and likely cursing at the spillage and wastage of water and, as well, of his time and vitality. And he will come back to the house to fill his canteen in a mood too cross for words to soothe over. And he will lave handfuls of water over his head at the sink. And he will doctor his blistered lips with ointment. And he will look at me with that wearied look, burdened by the work before him, burdened by this spell of heat, burdened by this land and all the oughts and duties that surely go with it. As he is burdened by me and all that I too expect of him.
IT WAS A tiny metal box that had been blessed by a holy man and given to me as a baby. The box was a book, the side of it etched with pages, the spine of it ribbed with words all worn by now and which I can’t remember from back when I wasn’t reading yet. The book was engraved with the face of a saint, the forehead and the nose and the stole around the shoulders carved high in relief and worn to a shine. It was brass, is all the box was, might have been just tin, but it opened like a book with tiny hinges worked into it and it closed with a thin latch. It smelled metallic and oldentime and mysterious. It was small enough to fit into a palm, meant as it was for but a child’s hand, and inside the metal box were tiny garnet beads strung on a fine gold chain, the only piece of jewelry of any importance to me, even more so than the ring I’ve now got on my finger.
I ask Son about the tiny metal box and the string of beads the day I notice them missing. He just shrugs, as he does, and turns away. I can’t keep a watch on your things, he says. I got stuff to do. Then he walks out of the room.
I find the old man sitting in the parlor in the afternoon ticking of the clock. Girl, he says. A chain, I say. Of garnets. He gets up from his chair and goes over to the sideboard and takes a swipe of a hand over the wood of it, as if to conjure what has been lost, leaving his fingertip tracings written in the dust. Go ask Rose, he says.
It’s not until several days later that I find what belongs to me. It’s when I’m in Saringo’s Tack and Feed, where I see Pearl Hart’s daughter, Pearl, standing at the counter. She’s wearing the tiny garnet beads around her tiny white neck.
How can I help today? the man behind the counter says.
I came in to buy a quirt, I say.
How are you? Pearl’s daughter says.
Have you also got the box for keeping the beads? I say.
She turns away and tells the man she’ll have a look at a hackamore—a bosal, please, not a side pull. A pale blue vein in her temple throbs her heartbeat out. The fan overhead beats in slow pleading. I swat a fly away from my face and she flinches.
I want it back, I say. The metal box too.
She covers her throat over and holds her hand there. The pulse in her temple quickens. The man behind the counter looks at us and clears his windpipe with a rough cough.
It was given to me, she says.
A thing can’t be given that doesn’t belong to the giver, I say.
The hackamore, she says to the man.
I hold the quirt up, standing ready to do I don’t know what, and this gets her to look at me and now she can see it in my eyes. She can see that I mean it.
For heaven’s sake, the man behind the counter says.
Why cry? I say.
Then she undoes the chain.
I REACH OUT to the empty side of the bed, the space not yet heated by body or dampened with sweat, and I slide over onto it, feeling the reprieve of cooler sheet beneath me. I lift the hair off the back of my neck and pile it up high on the pillow. The fan whirs overhead, like the sound of a small airplane on a runway in start-up for takeoff. I roll this way, then again that, sleepless in the bit of breeze that wheels off the ceiling, restless in the pitch and drone outside in the night. I think about the day gone by, my visit to the Padre’s office, telling him the story of finding Pearl’s daughter wearing my garnet beads, running through the way things went again, hearing the sudden trouble I had in speaking to him. My hello came out without composure, the l’s so dulled by my nervous tongue, and other words caught and turned backward on my trembling lips, shifting the meaning of things, upsetting what I had intended, as the sentences went off ajumble and without me. Did I say too much? Or not enough? Did I look too weepy, or did I smile too quickly, talk too loudly, or sound too girlish and silly?
What is it that makes me so fluttery around the Padre? Is it because of who he is and what he knows? His nearness to a god, a god or a kind of knowing I can’t say I know or ever did know or would see a need to know? Or is it something else? His manner of speaking? His voice is what it could be—the way he carries words to me, the way he says my name. Katherine, he says, in a deliberate and caressing way, taking care of all my syllables. And the way he shakes my hand and holds it some before letting go. And how his eyes will settle upon mine, making me so uneasy as to have to look away. What else could it be? I picture him and see his stance. Is that what draws me to him? Or is it maybe his height and his shape? Or the color and cut of his hair? Or the style of his shirt? Maybe just that, just the shirt, the white of it, or the wrist in it as it is poised in the cuff, or the weave and the hang of the fabric, or just a button undone.
What is it that catches the eye and the heart at the same time?
I flinch at the ping of the egg that breaks through the sac as it does every month. I turn onto my other side to face the wall. A gecko skips across the adobe. My heart jumps a beat and leaps ahead. I roll this way and that, listening to the night aquiver, so awake I am in the gathered rub of hind legs, in the thin-pitched screeching of insects, so alive in all that’s alive. Gila monsters belly their way through the grass and the weeds, as limes swell and burst in the trees. My bones feel ready to rupture from out of my skin. I throw the covers off and move back over to the empty half of the bed, flipping the pillow to its cooler side, rolling over again to yet the other way. I use a corner of sheet to rub the wet off my flesh. I listen to the stir and hum of the whirling blades above. I listen to the blood, the way it pulses as it does through my pillow.
How could I make it happen to have him?
No, not here. Not in this place. I would have to go to him. But what? Go back to his office? But not his office, not the church. And not his home, not with his wife. All right, a ride. I could suggest a ride. We’ll find a cool place near water, find a place to settle in shade. As if such a place existed anywhere nearby. But if it did. There could be a somewhere I haven’t found here yet. There might be a smooth bank of shady trees alongside a cool piece of the river. We would tie the horses, let them pasture in what might be left of the wild grass. We would sit watching the river flow, water that would be ever so clear and embracin
g, watching and amazed at the way it pools and riffles, the way it courses through the boulders and molds itself over the stones. There would be only the sound of the water, the sound of our breathing, the silent roar of the day. I can see us from above, as if I were the eyes of some up-there-in-the-air being, my gaze affixed on us to stay us in place. We’re side by side, our arms brushing one against the other, our wanting the same. And now he will turn my way and our touch is no longer manner or accident. We fall back, that’s how it is, simple as that. Our bodies together, just that way. Our mouths, our mouths, our mouths. Our arms, our legs, our tangling together as one. And then, then everything. Then the happiness of having.
And I’m shaken back to where I am by the sink of the mattress and the whine of the springs.
Girl, he says, as he climbs into the half-empty bed.
I can’t say why I behave toward him the way I do. Can’t say why I don’t plead with him to leave. Why instead I roll over to him and put my arms around him and let him rest his head against my chest. Why I just hold Rose’s Daddy like this in the night, hug him and rock him for a long time. Until he lets go and gets up and walks down the hallway, going back to his bedroom, where he will rest the rest of the night in his own half-empty bed.
And what does a man do when the darkness falls upon him? How might he so relieve the pain that tears at his heart night and day? What can rend the blade from the chest? Who might take the suffering away?
Why must this grief come, after I have lived a life of willfulness and uprightness? When in spirit and deed I have aimed my arrow for the honorable mark? Where is the safety that should be from ordinary decency and dutiful living? Where is it now? I have cared for my land and my family with steadfastness and probity, in goodness and in tenderness. I have tended to my friends and my neighbors, been charitable to the elderly and the needy, am ever gentle with children and animals, birds, trees, the land, all living things. All things believed worth doing I have done. I have turned the other cheek. I have dealt no harm, nor have I dealt falsely or with cowardice. Yet right living has not kept me from misery.
What foolishness I speak, to believe in any kind of otherwise. Yet what might I be guilty of but wanting only happiness back? Of wanting a life of having back? Or have all my expectations been out of place from the beginning? Perhaps as are every man’s?
Could it be I have lived too much for the flesh, expecting gain in this? Could I have labored too much for vanity? Have I been too carefree as to the good of the land? Might I not have been mindful or attentive enough?
Yet who is there to say? As who can there be to comfort me? The son who grieves me so very bitterly? Who can know what has become of him in his great regard for but himself? It seems he believes that living by principle brings no reward in the end. It seems he sees that all of us must lose, no matter the way in which we go about our days. So with this thinking does he justify his taking? Yet meanly and hungrily he takes, with little care for the rest. And still he is loved, however unjustly. With his young heart near withered beneath the breastbone. With his young mind weakened by sloth. And as to his soul, I say, how could it have become so lame? Why? Who is it that has failed him? Was it I, I who failed him? Now who is to catch him in his falling? And how am I to help him when I cannot rise from my own descent? How can I lead when the way is lost to me? When the blinding haze keeps me from seeing the steps out ahead? When the heat parches my tongue, my throat, my lungs, my being? When the burn has seared my fingertips so as to prevent me from feeling? When the clotted air shuts the music of others from my ears? The music of living is no longer—it is dried and blown away as the dust. And where be the water that may again quench the thirst? Where be the food that might nourish? Where be the hands that would soothe?
Lo, I tell you, the loneliness I feel even among the others. When all that seemed beauty is now beyond reach. No, no longer. I am past remedy. I am too sluggish to pull myself up, too loath to right myself, too lame to walk through my days or sleep through my nights again. I can no more waken myself to anything near industry. Not with this body worn, the muscles slackened, the bones laced with age. I am but a bended tree, blighted and galled, unable to recover itself in the wind. I am wearied, I tell you. Let come what shall come.
SON GOES OUT for the early morning feed amid the who-coos and no-hopes of the inca and the mourning doves. He opens the top halves of the Dutch doors, and the desert air and dawn light flood inside each stall. The horses one at a time come to him and whicker and snuffle and toss their heads. He goes inside the stalls and fills the troughs with water, and some of the troughs he fills with grain, and he splits pallets of green hay into sheaves and shakes them out for the horses to chomp on at their leisure throughout the day. He slaps at their flanks. He murmurs words. Then he wheelbarrows a load of fodder out to the corral, where the roping cows are huddled, and there fills a common trough with a mix of filler straw and but a bit of green hay for them, and he opens the spigot over the mouth of another trough until the water brims to the top. The cows shoulder their way over to the troughs and stand leaning one against another among a snarl of insects, with that look of not-a-thing in their eyes, their jaws rotating sleepily, the skin on their hides flinching, and their tails swishing at the spurs and the bites of the flies.
As Son moves through these dawn rituals, the morning star tacks to the sun in its fade toward day, brightening again in its will toward vespers. Whiptails gather a breakfast of insects and spiders, regal horns squirt blood from their eyes at their foes, iguanas bask upon rocks at first light. Collared peccaries cleave broken tracks in the sand. Angel’s-trumpets yawn open their corollas at the cockcrow. We stand and look upward and outward, seeing time the way it so rolls away.
When the morning water run is over and the engine of the watertruck has cooled enough, I climb into the cabfront of it, using the door as a handhold to lift myself up and inside. I slide onto the cracked and sun-bleached leather seating, its yellowed stuffing sponging through in places, and reaching beneath I press the lever and scoot the whole bench forward, and the coils and the rods and the springs groan because the workings are old and bent and stiff. I adjust the sideview mirror and catch a glimpse of myself, seeing myself differently—a grown woman now. It seems a sudden and shocking thing, and yet I’m still the same as I’ve always been, in the what is gone and the places lived, in the here where we are and the what we are in—that same girl and different, I am.
IT WAS IN the middle of another long afternoon, within the monotony of the heat and the dust, the flat and the straight, the chafing and the blistering. It was a shot so loud and stinging that it would forever ring inside our ears, if it should not be immediately and mercifully blown from memory. The blast shook the whole adobe house, inside and out. It shook screens and hanging things, webs and bottles and leaves, the animals, the help, setting flesh atremble, hides aquiver, wings aflutter. It pounded the ribcage and spurred the heart. It emptied the breath right out of the lungs, leaving a sizzling in the blood. It blew from his bedroom and ran throughout all the rooms of the house. It bled down the hallway to fill the cool dark parlor before bursting out into the kitchen. It rattled kettles and teacups, potlids and silver, bowls and traps and bins. It flew out the open windows, clattering panes and blinds and shutters of those that were closed. It rose into and up the chimney, gusted up into the cupboards, eddied beneath all the doors. It got rocketed as far back as the melon shed, where it was swept over cement. It got sucked in through the toolhouse and ricocheted out and away in a whooosk. The blast drummed the doors of the watertruck, pricked the ears up on the shaky old dog, sent the hired man running, left the Mexicans stunned. It howled down the dusty road, stirred the dust up in the dirt-bare fields, and then went tornado’ing off into the wind, sounding a hideous moaning. It moved as far off as far could be, into the vastness beyond, settling into the wobble and spin of moons and planets and stars.
The bedroom wall would be left all pocked and scoured with buckshot. It wo
uld be me and Son left to haul buckets of water in and scrub up what Rose’s Daddy left us. We sponged and rinsed the walls in the slash and the warp of the light of the blinds. We got down on our knees, choking, gagging, keeping ourselves from weeping in the reek. We climbed onto ladders, reaching tipped and upward to the ceiling. We rinsed our hands of the stench, again and again, though the odor of the water would forever remind us of our ghostly task. After the cleaning was done, we piled up and hauled away and we patched and we spackled and painted. And still we could see it, the wound, the way it was imprinted in the walls and the ceiling, all as it was and would be. As the wound had been imprinted in us.
What is there to do otherwise, but abide by what has been given?
Son and I will take all of what the old man had to leave us. We will live in it and sleep in it, drive it and feed it. We will care for what’s left here just as the old man had taught us, the way he had cared for it all himself. We will will ourselves to do the work that needs doing, carrying on with the days coming on in sameness and routine, with every day a seeming repeat of the empty day past, all within the victorious dust and still unmerciful heat. And the birds will rise up and cry out in warning. And the sun will peal in its glory and might.
LET US BOW our heads and pray.
Good people, we are living amid a most unsettling and strife-filled time. We are thrown into a calamity that has uprooted many of late and thinned our congregation. Most have lost livestock and farmland and business, many of you loved ones and homes. I see the anguish of the days in your faces. I see the weight of the losses and the burdens in your eyes. I see doubts in the loll of your shoulders, questions in the slump of your heads. How can we have been so betrayed? you may say. It is an old query, raised time and again: How cruel might a God be to have put us into existence only to then abandon us? And you are silent in your suffering as you wait for a voice to speak.
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