Now Marta’s undoing the drawstring of her butter-colored pants. I can’t see her face in the shadows, and I’m glad.
But just as she’s started to tug at her elastic waistband, Petey comes bounding towards us, his silvery hair streaming behind him like a comet’s tail. Momentum © mass ® velocity. Droplets of water go rolling down his broad, beautiful back as he flings himself down the beach. He looms huge and naked in front of Marta, one celestial body blocking the light from another, and I think, Petey’s job is to be the moon. And the word that bursts from his lips like a lunar eclipse is:
“Tuuuurtles.” Petey points at the nest. And sure enough, there’s something small and black stirring there.
“Shit!” Raffy cries. “I don’t believe it! The motherfuckers are actually hatching!”
Petey, slick and nude as the new turtles, is in no position to be the moon. Raffy scrambles off to get the flashlights.
The baby turtles are such funny-looking creatures. They seem so old and so young all at once, with their wrinkly old-man eyes blinking out of these viscous, fragile little shells. As we watch the turtles emerge from their speckled eggs and take their first false steps away from the water, I start to feel disoriented, too. Raffy is grinning and swinging the flashlights maniacally, and Marta is struggling with the burlap sack, and Petey is still wet and naked and shivering beside me. I keep patting my pockets for the reassuring weight of my planisphere, forgetting for a second that it’s not there. So then I try this technique my dad taught me for getting your bearings when you get nightmares or nosebleeds or dizzy on car trips. The trick is to mentally pinpoint all the coordinates of your own constellation, and then picture yourself in the swirling center:
Raffy is holding the flashlights, and Marta is holding the burlap sack.
I am holding Petey’s hand. I don’t think anybody can see this in the dark. Don’t let go, Petey.
Petey’s still shivering and rubbing at his bare arms. I help him get his shirt back on over his head and whisper part of a lullaby that my mother used to sing. Nobody remembers how the melody goes, not even Dad. But if he’s had a few, he’ll warble the chorus: “For I have loved the stars too dearly to be fearful of the night…”
The baby turtles are turning away from the ocean. It’s easy to see why. The black waves lap up the moonbeams, and the starlight on the inky surface of the water gives off such a pale glow when you compare it to the megawatt flashlights that Raffy is swirling in hypnotic circles.
“Are you watching this?” Raffy laughs. “This is fucking hilarious!”
The baby turtles are waddling towards the burlap sack in a silvery S-shaped line. They push their puny flippers into the sand with comic perseverance. Their black shells gleam wetly in the light. I edge closer to Raffy to get a better look.
“Wowie zowie,” I breathe, as the first of the turtles files into the bag. Everything is going according to plan. Nothing can stop us now.
“Look…” Marta says. She has rebuttoned all her buttons, and there is wonder in her voice.
One of the turtles near the end of the line has paused. Some dim instinct must have turned its tiny head back toward the ocean, and now it’s turning confused half circles in the sand.
“Get in the burlap sack, motherfucker!” Raffy growls. But I notice that he lowers the flashlight a little.
The turtle blinks up at the too-bright beam of Raffy’s flashlight; then it looks back at the starlight on the open sea. It holds up the line, and we all hold our breath.
My job is to be the lookout, so I look past the turtle nest, beyond the flickering confines of Raffy’s electric light. Petey has wandered away from us. He stumbles down a long alley of sand, picking up pieces of his tinfoil armor and trying to rewrap himself. Behind him, I can see the distant neon of the Bowl-a-Bed Hotel. I tell myself that I could at any moment start walking towards Room 422 with Dad and Molly, clean linens, buckets of ice; but my inert body doesn’t believe this. A mile out from shore, the sea and the sky blend into an infinite blackness. I rub my naked eyes and try to stargaze. The blue Pleiades wink out messages that are illegible to humans. The moon shines down its eerie calligraphy from deep space. Last Sunday, when I was out here alone with my planisphere, this was all still a navigable darkness. That feels like it was a long time ago.
We watch as the single turtle’s instincts wither beneath the hot lights. It flips itself back and forth in a miniature of real agony. We laugh harder; we strain our bellies with laughter. We stare at each other pop-eyed over the burlap sack and laugh as if we’re afraid to stop. Somebody needs to say the magical, abracadabrical words that will turn tonight’s crime into a joke. Marta has buttoned her wet sweater up to her neck. Petey’s vanished. Now Raffy swirls the flashlights with true panic. Our joke keeps hatching and waddling forward in a snaky black procession, growing longer and less funny by the second, and this time nobody, not even Raffy, knows the punch line.
from
Children’s Reminiscences of the Westward Migration
In the winter, our mother got hold of Fremont’s History of the Western Territories and brought the book to my father to read, and he was carried away with the idea. Mother said, O let us not go…
My father, the Minotaur, is more obdurate than any man. Sure, it was his decision, to sell the farm and hitch himself to a four-thousand-pound prairie schooner, and head out West. But our road forked a long time ago, months before we ever yoked Dad to the wagon. If my father was the apple-biter, my mother was his temptress Eve. It was Ma who showed him the book: Fremont’s Almanac of Uninhabited Lands!
Miss Tourtillott, one of the fusty old biddies in her sewing circle, had lent it to her, as a curiosity. It contained eighteen true-life accounts of emigrants on the Overland Trail, coupons for quinine and barley corn, and speculative maps of the Western Territories. The first page was a watercolor of the New Country, a paradise of clover and golden stubble-fields. The sky was dusky pink, daubed with fat little doves. In the central oval, right where you would expect to find a human settlement, there was nothing but a green vacuity.
Unflattened Pasture! the caption read. Free for the takers!
“Can you imagine, Asterion?” My mother smiled like a girl, letting her finger drowse over the page. “All that land, and no people.”
You could tell that even my mother, in spite of her sallow practicality, was charmed by the idea. Easy winters, canyon springs. No one to tell the old stories about her husband, or to poke fun at his graying, woolly bull head. She let her finger settle on the word free, the deed to an invisible life. She traced the spiky outline of the mountains, a fence that no church lady could peer over.
“Look at that, son.” My father grinned. “More grass than I could eat in a lifetime. All that space for your ball plays. Now, wouldn’t you want to live there?”
I frowned. Whenever my folks promised me something, it always turned out to be both more and less than what I had expected. My sisters, for instance. I’d spent nine months carving a fraternal whimmerdoodle, and then Ma gave birth to Maisy and Dotes, twin girls. The New Country looked nice enough, but I bet there was a catch.
Besides, we had plenty of grass already. My father had retired from his wild rodeo life, and now lived in quiet retirement. We leased a small farm, raising mostly flowers and geese, where my father had negotiated a very reasonable price on rent. The lunatic asylum was a block away, and the intervening lot was vacant. It bothered my father that we didn’t own the land outright, and my mother kept a pistol in the watering can, in case one of our gibbering neighbors ever paid us a visit. But that intervening lot was great for ball plays.
“Don’t be silly, Asterion,” my mother snorted, a habit she’d picked up from Dad. “Every member of my family lives in this town. Why, if we went west, I would never see them again in this world! My sisters, my mother…”
“Now wouldn’t that be a tragedy?”
A charged look passed between them.
Since retiring, my fathe
r has gotten to be on the largish side for a Minotaur, not fat so much as robust, and now he gathered his bulk to an impressive eighteen hands high. He pawed at the earthen floor. (Ma liked to complain about this, Dad’s cloven trenches in our kitchen. “Go do your gouging out of doors, like a respectable animal!”)
“Asterion,” my mother said, slamming the book shut. “Stop this nonsense at once.” Ma is a plain woman, with a petite human skull that calls no attention to itself, but she can be just as hot-blooded as my father. “We have a life here.”
Outside, the sun was setting, spilling through our curtains. My father’s horns throbbed softly in the checkered light. His ears, teardrop white, lay flat against the base of his skull. His expression was unrecognizable. Who was this, I wondered, this pupiless new creature? I had never seen someone so literally carried away by a desire before. All the reason ebbed out of his eyes, replaced by a glazed, animal ecstasy. If he hadn’t been wearing his polka-dot suspenders, you would have mistaken him for a regular old bull.
“And are you happy, Velina, with our life here? Have you stopped hoping for anything better?” This last bit got drowned out by the five o’clock scream from the asylum, which set our blood curdling like clockwork. My mother winced, and I could tell that Dad had a wedge in the door.
“Why not make a fresh start of it? Six hundred acres, and all we have to do is claim it. You will be the wife of a very rich husband. Think of the children! All those unwed miners—your daughters will never want for a dancing partner. Young Jacob will have a farm of his own before his twentieth birthday.”
“Asterion.” My mother sighed. She gestured around her, palms up. “Be reasonable. You’re no frontiersman. Where would we get the money for a single yoke of oxen?”
“Woman!” Dad boomed. He pushed out his flabby barrel chest. “You married a Minotaur. I’ll pull our wagon.”
“Oh, please!” Ma rolled her eyes. “You get winded during the daisy harvest!”
I was still rocking in the willow chair, slurping up milk.
“Your husband is stronger than a dozen oxen!” he roared. Dad patted his ornamental muscles, the product of flower picking and goose plucking. “Or have you forgotten our rodeo days?”
He tusked his horns at her, with a brute playfulness that I had never seen between them. Then he charged at her, herding her towards the bedroom door. And my mother giggled, suddenly shy and childlike, letting herself go limp against him. I coughed and slurped my milk a little louder, but by this time they had forgotten me completely. “We have each other,” he bellowed. “And everything else, we will learn on the Trail….”
I was startled by this, the speed with which one apocryphal watercolor was transforming our future. A minute ago, there had been an opened book, a crazy notion—we could go or we could stay—and now, not five minutes later, the book was shut. We were going. Simple as that.
We have been on the Trail for over a month now. Last night, we camped on Soap Creek Bottom. Down here, it’s all soft green mud and yellow bubbles of light. No potable water for our stock, and barely enough for us. The weeds we suck on for moisture taste bitter and waxy. Ma’s been complaining of bad headaches, and the twins have been doing most of our cooking. Basically, this means they wake up early enough to beg boiled coffee and quail eggs from the other wagons. Dotes lumps some salt into the yolk and calls it an omelet. Apparently, my sisters still haven’t mastered the pot and the spatula, that fiery alchemy, whereby “raw” becomes “food.” So help me, if I have to eat another stewed apple, I am defecting to the Grouses’ wagon.
We have joined the Grouses’ company, at my mother’s insistence. Ours is a modest wagon train, twelve families, among them the Quigleys, the Howells, the Hatfields, the Gustafsons, the Pratts, a party of eight lumberwomen, and a sweet, silly spinster, Olive Oatman, who is determined to be a schoolteacher. Olive trails the wagons on a toothless mule, each step like a glue-drip. “Hurry up, Olive!” the men yell, and the women worry in overloud voices that she’ll get lost, or fall victim to Indian depredations. But nobody invites Olive to join their family’s wagon.
In the beginning, everybody was gushing about the idylls of the open road—look at Hebadiah’s children, sitting high on the wagon! Listen to Gus, warbling on that mouth organ! Let’s sleep outside! Let’s close our eyes, and drink in the cool, violet dune glow with our skin!
But now, we spend most of our time scowling, sunk in our private nostalgia for well water and beds. It is cold and cloudy, with the wind still east. We are on a very large prairie. The few trees are stout and pinky-gray, like swine, and the scrub catches at our wheel axles, as if it wants to hitch a ride with us to somewhere greener. Dad’s back is carved solid with red welts. His skin is coming off in patches. Flies twist to slow deaths in the furry coves of his nostrils. Dad shakes his head more violently with every mile, a learned tic, to keep the buzzards from landing on his curved horns.
We keep passing these queer, freshly dug humps of soil. Ma told Maisy and Dotes that they are just rain swells, and the domes of prairie dog houses, but I know better. They are graves. Nobody leaves markers here, Clem says, because there’s no point, no chance that you will ever come back to visit the site. We have decided to count them, these tombless losses. It seems like somebody should be keeping score:
Made twenty-two miles…passed seven graves.
Everybody is coming to the grim conclusion that we have overloaded our wagons. Our necessities, the things we couldn’t have lived without just two weeks ago, are now burdensome luxuries. The whole Trail is littered with cherished detritus: heirloom mirrors, weaving looms, broken loved-up dolls. Maisy and Dotes got Dad’s permission to pitch Grandma’s empress china set at the trees. Our mother ducked the antique pestle, and cried a little bit.
At dusk, we entered a tall, shadowy belt of timber. Clem spotted an orange polecat, sinking into the mud, nibbling at the little hand of a giant clock face. Brass kettles glower in the shadows. Empty cradles line the sides of the road, rocking soundlessly in the wind.
During the day, my mother sits on the high chair, shouting instructions to my father. Maisy and Dotes sit inside, shelling peas. Both of my parents continue to implore me to ride in our wagon, but I refuse to. If my dad is sensitive to the weight of a china plate, I don’t want to add one bone to his load.
Instead, I walk in the back with the lumberwomen. I love the lumberwomen. They are widowed and ribald and sweat through their tongues, like dogs. Sometimes they let me roll inside the deep tin wells of their hunger-barrels. They ask lots of cheerful, impolite questions about Dad, which are far easier to endure than the frank horror of other emigrant children, or the veiled pity of their mothers.
“Your pa,” they holler, “he the one with the…?” Then they scoop at the air above their temples, and whistle. “Whoo-ee! What a piece of luck, that, you children taking after your mother!”
It doesn’t feel so lucky. Most times, I wish that I had been born with a colossal bull’s head, the bigger the better. People on the Trail act as if it’s just as strange, and even more suspicious, my seeming normalcy. We are freckled and ordinary, and it makes every mother but our own uneasy. I could be Clem’s brother; my sisters look just as peachy clean as their own daughters. This seems to alarm them. They wrinkle their noses slightly in our presence, as if we are the infected carriers of some hideous past.
My father is doing the heavy labor, sweating through the traces, plunging into the freezing water, into rivers so deep that sometimes only the shaggy tips of his horns are visible. But he is happier than I have ever seen him. People need my father out here. In town, there was always a distinct chill in the air whenever he took Ma to birthday parties or pumpkin tumbles, barbecues especially. But on the Trail, these same women regard him with a friendly terror. Their husbands solicit him with peace pipes, and obsequious requests:
“Mr. Minotaur, could you kindly open this jar of love apples for us? Mr. Minotaur, when you have a moment, would you mind goring the
se wolves?”
And I am so proud of my father, the strongest teamster, the least mortal, the most generous.
Ma is, too, even if she won’t admit it to him. She told Louvina Pratt that he looks like the Minotaur she married, before he was a father. It’s hard for me to imagine, staring at my dad’s gray belly hair and blunted horns, but I guess he was a legend once. At the early rodeos—my mother keeps all of his blue vellum posters, hidden inside her Bible—he bucked every gangly cowboy on the circuit. The Pawnee gave him top billing:
The bronco with a human torso, a chipped left horn, and a questionable pedigree!
Back home, people told so many stories about my father! Especially those people who had never seen him perform. That he was a sham man, or a phony bull; that his divinity had been diluted by years of crossbreeding with wild cows and “painted ladies.” My own cousins called him a monster. I always wished that they could see my dad just being my dad, covered in goose dander, or pulling a wheelbarrow of poppies. Here on the Trail, people are finally getting to know all the parts of him.
As for my mother: well, things could be better. She spends most of her time gathering twigs and buffalo excrement, and saying terrified prayers with the other women. Her face is brown and wizened, like apple skin left in the sun. She looks shrunken, stooped beneath the absence of small pleasures: fresh lettuces, the seasonal melodies of geese, the anchored bed she used to share with my father. I think she even misses the asylum, its predictable madness.
Ostensibly, the women meet behind the wagons to beat laundry with rocks or plait straw grass into ugly hats. But mostly, they just make implications.
“Velina, you must be so proud of your husband, pulling your wagon.” Louvina smiles. “My Harold would never consent to walk in the traces.”
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