Old Border Road

by Susan Froderberg

  We keep each to our thoughts and ride on in the quiet.

  Soon enough we’ve come into a reprieve of privately heavenly shelter, a corridor of desert olives and fan palms and dappled light running along a wide driveway. The wrought-iron gates are left open today, and no man appears in the gatehouse to greet us. Ham pulls the rig up to the front of the pink mission and he helps me out with my suitcase and takes my hand to help me down out of the cabfront. We enter the house through the arched portal, passing through the long dark entryway cooled as it is by tiled floors and stucco’d walls, then out of the zaguan and across the stony path of the courtyard to Daughter Pearl’s room, and why, Ham says, shouldn’t I use it?

  It’s plenty enough to keep you out of the williwaws, he says.

  He goes over to the window and throws the drapes aside, and the light bursts upon swarming motes of dust. He gathers loose garments that are tossed atop the bed and piled onto the floor, and he opens the closet door and tosses the wad inside. I go over to the window and look out at a grove of date palms, the shaggy trees all clustered with drupe.

  As you can see by all the foofaraw, he says, that girl a mine ain’t been wanting for much of anything. She’s been spoiled from the get-go, he says. And yet not a single gracias out of her, no matter the advantages of generous parentage and proper schooling and decent society.

  Son’s fond of her, I say, speaking into the glass. Awfully.

  They’s growed used to each other since they was itty kids. Anyways, he says, I want you to make yourself to home about the place. Mi casa es su casa, as they say. You’ll be doing me some good by giving me a bit of company. It’s too quiet around here with the gals away. So please don’t thank me.

  Thank you.

  Ham puts a little finger inside an ear and shoggles it about and makes a sound somewhere between a snort and a grunt. Inner-ear itch, he says. Only thing that fixes it.

  YOU TALK LIKE you got a bad case of romantic in you, Son had said. You talk like you’re lost, he said.

  He got up from the table and walked over to the kitchen sink and poured the rest of his coffee into it. You ought to quit reading so much of the time, he said. That and your daydreaming. All you’re doing is sounding like somebody else you’re not. All you’re sounding is loco.

  WHAT ARE YOU doing, Girl, just staring off into space? Rose’s Daddy would say if he walked in and found me in Daughter Pearl’s room, sitting as I am at the edge of the bed. He would turn and have a look about, nodding his head at what might be causing my unease, though how could he know the feeling of being fostered out? He would try to comfort me with what he might see as reasons that could be reasoned away. He would probably comment on the hard shade of the lavender walls, or maybe say the canopied bed was a bit claustery, the curtains and pillows and throws all too many and frilly, enough to make one feel smothered in in her sleep. No wonder, he would say, wondering aloud—though keeping his voice low so as not to insult Ham in any way—saying, how could Daughter Pearl’s choosing so differ from her mother’s refined taste in things? He might say, Our children are really less of our doing than a parent believes, knowing Ham would anyway agree with him in this opinion. Take for example that son of mine, Rose’s Daddy would say, nodding at the picture of Daughter Pearl and Son, framed and placed on the bureau top, each of them holding a purple ribbon up for their given livestock winnings. Just a couple of kids they were then, with no more than a couple of years between them, he would say. And in those yesteryears yet somewhat innocent. Or maybe not. Who can say, when we try to hold to our long agos, and with our memory confounding so our hope for things? Yet together those two have grown equally and are much the same, meaning—and I say but the truth—with so little generosity of spirit, with so little integrity, neither one of them believing in a single important thing.

  Rose’s Daddy would take his hat off and run a hand over his forehead to the back of his neck—that hand, patchy and withered as the skin on a river toad is.

  We turn in the silence that comes over us, regarding the room more completely. We study the clutter of childhood strewn about: the stuffed creatures that are bunched on the bed, as though stayed to watch over those who would be lost in their sleeping; the ribboned winnings at animal husbandry pinned along the sashes and the rods and the beams; the adult-bodied dolls stiffly posed among the shelves in miniature mode-of-the-day clothes. We pause at the loud posters of pop song characters that rob the lavender walls, sweaty-torso’d and feral-hair’d, their mouths opened to shout. Stacks of cakes of makeup and tubes of lipstick, disks of gloss and bottles of enamel, halfmoons of headbands and spirals of ribbons, barrettes and hairpins and rollers and combs, files and tweezers, and whatever the rest of the stuff that covers the top of the bureau over might be—all this Rose’s Daddy will eyeball with great curiosity. Are these but girlish paints and polish to play in? he might say. He brings his nose close to the eyes and the teeth of the glamour stars and models taped to the glass. He lifts a sheet of her astrology calendar, noting with curiosity the red X’s that mark the girl’s moons. He opens a bottle and daggles himself with a splash of scent—lilac or violet or lily of the valley?

  That could only be the mother’s doing, Rose’s Daddy will say, pointing his hat at the gilt-framed painting of the thoroughbred hung beside the bed.

  I look around and wonder, what does Son see in this girl, Pearl? Or see in any of the rest of them? What does he see in all his other-than-me’s? I don’t have to speak the thoughts aloud, as Rose’s Daddy knows me well enough to know. And always he tries his best to soothe. He will say how it is too easy to get caught in trying to make some comparison of worth with respect to yourself and Daughter Pearl, or whatever other female company there be for Son’s keeping. When there is no likening to be made, he will say. When the fact is, it does not take much to turn a man’s head. There will always be some woman or another who will catch the eye and make a lively man lean a different way. There will forever be the temptation to reach out for the other. It is but an urge built into us, is it not? And most remarkable yet, is that our desire to act does not spur us out and onward more often, that whatever rules we are harnessed to keep us from going astray. Unless some kind of agreement can be made otherwise, which I did so attempt, in Rose’s and my case. Or until one day a man just tires and gives out. Then what more would there be left to him? In any case.

  A man does know his time, he will say. He cannot be blamed. But this I will tell you, he too will say—what Son does, you ought not to believe it is anything to do with you.

  The old man’s words bring little comfort. Am I not enough to sway and keep him engaged? I reach for the picture and bring it closer to my face. The two are rangy and pale eyed, with the same wheat-colored hair and sun-dotted skin.

  They could be brother and sister.

  And Rose’s Daddy will look at me in a way that I see such a notion would not be an impossibility.

  I look at him to say, If it’s so, why wouldn’t they know better?

  He will fiddle with the edge of his hat brim, curled one-sidedly where his doffing hand has gripped it so often.

  Nothing anyone could prove, he will say, or even wanted to. And it is long past what anyone could do about it.

  I will nod.

  I will shake my head.

  I worry about what you might think of me for leaving, I say. Leaving Son, leaving the house, leaving all the things that need caring for behind. I still think a lot about what you and Rose would think of me.

  Yes and indeedy, Rose’s Daddy will say. For were we not family? And do not the dead surely lay their claim? Perhaps more so than do the living. Whereby the laws of the fathers have been set into place, this we know. A bell and a pomegranate, a bell and a pomegranate. Do as commanded or elsewise live in fear. Girl, I tell you this—death is but one less day to be afraid.

  And he will square the hat back atop his head.

  THE OLD MAN had told me a story, a story about a woman who had lost an only
daughter, a woman who had come to motherhood in the late afternoon of her life, so to speak, a daughter not yet to reach the dawning of a birthday of twenty. The daughter had left a handwritten will, odd as it was for one of such a tender age, anybody would say, and filled with but vitality and youthful exuberance. Lo, the girl was mature beyond her years, he had said, and as they come, somewhat precocious.

  Now in this will the daughter lay out her requests in detail and in relative depth, he said. She asked that the mother, if it so be that she be alive at the time of the daughter’s death, should dispose of the said ashes according to the girl’s wishes. And the wishes were exactly these, that the mother should seek three places within all the seven great landmasses that cover the earth, and that the ashes be scattered in those three sites that the mother would deem holy.

  And it came to pass that the daughter gave up the ghost.

  And the handwritten note was found during the midst of the mother’s grieving, placed in a drawer of the daughter’s bureau among a gather of keepsakes and fewtrils, with other remembrances and forgotten things.

  There was no father. There was no family besides.

  And the mother did so mourn.

  Scattering the ashes required toil and yield and will, means and reserve and fortitude, all of which were the greater burden in the mother’s grief and in her already graying days. Henceforth, it took the mother years to carry out the daughter’s last wishes. Yet she held her countenance and completed the task before she was herself sent to the grave.

  Why should the mother do it? I said. If, after all, the girl is dead?

  A question worth pondering, indeed, he said.

  Inconsiderate, I said, to inflict a burden that would be obeyed through guilt.

  Maybe obeyed through necessity, he said. Or obeyed through virtue. Or obeyed through the desire to perform an act, an act of beauty, an act that might be called, in and of itself, sublimity.

  And for this the mother went to all the trouble?

  Who can say? he said. Yet would not the planning and the tending become consolation? Would not these efforts thereby be turned a blessing?

  Did the mother get over her grief?

  Is grief something that ought to be gotten over?

  Well, what I mean is, how did she seem?

  I know no one who knows, he said. No one, so I am told, spoke to her upon her return. She came home after the last scattering, it is said. Neighbors saw her unloading her bags and her duffels from the vehicle, but she soon after disappeared. Friends say they gathered one day to make a visit, hoping to bestow an offering of baked goods and a bouquet, as her home seemed open and welcoming from a distance. They knocked on the screendoor, receiving no answer. They put their noses to the mesh and peered in. They called out, yet only to quiet. They went inside and walked room to room, repeating the mother’s name. They found the house in perfect keeping, the beds made up with ironed linens and the dishes stacked in the drainer, with sunflowers freshly cut in a vase, with handkerchiefs and underthings drying in the sun on the line, the water-sprinkler yet on on the lawn.

  HE OPENS THE door and I want to move into his embrace. He knows this. I can see it. I can see me in his eyes. He comes forward and puts his arms out and pulls me against him. There’s a hard pounding of heart between us—mine or his? Or both?

  Please, the Padre says.

  He gives me a pat on the back and puts a halt to us.

  Please, come in, he says. Come in and talk to me. He says he is happy I have called on him. He says, Do you mind removing your shoes? A house rule, he says. Not mine but my wife’s. To keep the dust out, is what she says. Though who would hope for any such miracle here? he says, bursting into the pleasant laugh I’ve heard him laugh before. He touches my shoulder and leads me into a room.

  I hope I’m not disturbing you and your wife tonight, I say, knowing the wife has gone away for a few days.

  My wife’s gone to the coast to partake of a music festival.

  I stand in the warm homey glow of the place and look about the room, hoping the dishonesty of my words doesn’t show on my face. So much to read, I say, and I nod at all the books stacked in the cases that line the walls. Atop the cases are rows of gleaming copper pots in pregnant shapes. There’s an urn centered on the mantel that makes me think of family ashes, and there are figurines seeming to belong to some long-ago arranged along a sideboard. All about are growing things for tending—delicate ferns dangling on hangers, wandering jews pedestaled on stands, creeping greenery coiling along the rods and the sills. Everything is placed just right according to a given eye, to say a certain thing to any other’s, and this, you can see, has cast some fraud upon it. There’s a notion spelled out in the assembly of things that I take to be the wife’s doing, not the Padre’s—ideas of hers as to how to live in the proper way, a way of being, even in this newly built abode of faux adobe we’re in. I decide I don’t like the wife. I don’t like her dried flowers posied in vases, or her faded embroidery mounted in oval’d frames, or those overly posed family photographs she has nestled on a chest. I don’t like anything.

  Come, he says. Sit down.

  I follow him and take a seat on a loveseat and fold my hands into my lap—I see me folding my hands into my lap, I hear me saying things that I don’t know what I’m saying, I see me listening to him say things. What is he saying? Practical things about the practical world—things about housekeeping, about collecting things, about life, about his wife. I decide he doesn’t like his wife either.

  The Padre gets up and lights a stick of incense. Then he goes over to a cabinet and takes a disc from a sleeve and opens a record-player case. Smoke begins to swirl about the room. The sharp trill of flute smothers the quiet and winds about us as the smoke does. He opens the door of the cabinet and takes a couple of tiny glasses and a decanter out.

  Home remedy, he says.

  I take the glass he hands to me and sip. Strong as tequila, whatever it is.

  He watches me drink. Eau-de-vie, he says. Water of life.

  He keeps looking at me, his eyes welcoming as open doors.

  A ceiling fan sets the buds and the stems and the leaves of the plants around us atremble. I look down at my hands and see them shaking too. I take another sip of the drink, feeling the burn of it down my throat and the hot thread of it moving into my chest. I drink the rest of the glassful, wipe the drips off my chin and my lips—water of life, beads of sweat, what would be the difference?

  If it were red wine, would we be drinking the blood of Christ? I say.

  Given a different intention, yes, he says.

  He reaches for the decanter and fills my glass to the brim.

  The second is smoother going down the throat. It loosens the words to make them come up and out easier when I speak, but still what I say isn’t what I mean. I empty the drink again and this time reach the glass toward the Padre. Smoke and melody snake about the room. I sit back and hold the glass with both hands, wanting to steady the swimminess in my head, and then I’m speaking, the words pouring out strangely easily.

  I think it would be wiser to believe in gods, I say, or god, I say, with a small g, as I see it, all things being equal, that is, as a person would be happier probably, in any case, seems to me anyway, but then that would be believing in believing, is what the problem is, now that I’m thinking about it.

  We are born believing, he says. Some of us just stop paying attention.

  I’m paying attention, I say.

  The Padre takes a drink of his drink and looks at me with his open-door eyes.

  Anyway, as best I can, I say. Though maybe I haven’t been. Or maybe I wasn’t, is what I’m saying. I don’t know. Because how could I have been looking, with everything the way it just went and slipped out from under, when we must not have been looking, or something, me and Son, I mean, because we should have been able to see what was happened to Rose’s Daddy, the way he was going, and maybe could we have stopped him from going that way? With him doi
ng what he did. If we’d been looking. If we’d done something differently. God, everyone must say the same thing about the same things. I could be a recording.

  What would you have done differently? the Padre says.

  I shake my head. What was Rose’s Daddy’s rush? I say. I’ve read over what he left written, trying to understand. I try to imagine what he would have to say about it, about doing such a thing, and I hear him at times, really—and no, I’m not talking make-believe, about believing in spirits, I’m not talking ghosts or anything like that, but just what we remember, is what I’m saying, or trying to say, the way the sound of a voice lives on in you so you can hear the voice, hear it when you want to and hear it even when you don’t want to—anyway, you know what I mean, I’m sure you do, without the person even being there, they’re there.

  Voices speak through me at times, he says.

  Why did he go? I say.

  There are those who find it too sad to live without gods.

  That sounds preachy.

  Forgive me.

  I’m sorry.

  You’re sad.

  I’m not sad.

  Not sad?

  Angry, maybe.

  Understandable.

  I have an unfaithful husband.

  Adulterous, you mean.

  Right. As in roaming around with other women, I say. One of them in particular.

  Sex between two people should be approached as a divine act.