News from the World (9 page)

THE BROAD ESTATES OF DEATH

A
T NOON THEY
began their descent from the Organ Mountains to the valley below. The road swung from side to side, now hidden by an escarp, then flung into sight as it followed the declining slope. After a sharp turn, Harry Tilson drove the car onto a fenced shoulder and turned off the ignition. Amelia, his wife, yawned and stretched. Harry removed his jacket and folded it across the backseat. Above and behind them, the mountains baked in the midday sun.

“What's in the valley?” she asked.

“Nothing.”

She picked up the map lying on the seat between them.

“When will we be there?” she asked.

“An hour or less,” he answered.

“Are you scared yet? To see him?”

“I don't know. I don't think so.”

He hadn't seen his father, Ben, in twenty-three years. Amelia dropped the map. “How can anyone fold these things?” she asked. The United States lay across her knees covered with the penciled record of their journey from New York City to New Mexico.

“What a long way,” she murmured.

Harry stared through the open window at the pale and heat-drained land below. The visit to his father, old and sick, probably dying, had been planned as a side trip during their vacation in Taos. All morning the mountains had obscured their destination.

Until Harry glimpsed the valley, he had not expected to feel much of anything. But now, along with mounting unease, the past began to own him. It was incomprehensible, all of it. Yet he had constructed from what he recalled of his early life a comic patter for himself and his listeners. It nearly convinced him he had a place to come from, early years, all that.

The stories he told were not so comic. He didn't know why he told them. Perhaps there was something satisfying in the responses he evoked when, in the guise of regional lore, he spoke of nomadic wanderings in search of work, skeletal Fords containing all that he and his father owned, whippings administered with baling wire after his mother died giving birth to his brother, who died a few months later of some childhood disease. Sometimes in midsentence, as he remembered the traveling fairs that passed seasonally through the valley towns, recalling in the wake of their gaudy, vacuous gaiety his hope that life would be different when he was older and smarter, Harry would fall silent. But he discovered that silence had its uses too.

Now, as he gazed down at it, he was astonished to perceive the valley actually existed, and he was confronted with an almost shameful truth that he was unable to find words for. The smell of wild sage assaulted his nostrils. He closed his eyes briefly and found he was straining to catch the sound of something stirring in the silence of the mountains, just as he had when he was a child. All of it had happened. He turned on the ignition and gripped the wheel.

“Did you always live around here when you were little?” Amelia asked.

Harry put the car into second gear; the grade was steep. “Yes,” he said, then, “What? I'm sorry . . .”

“I asked—”

“I know what you asked.” A truck gained on them, passed, and left behind a sound of grinding gears.

“Yes, what?” she asked.

“About living here? Yes. I said yes before. When he—”

“Your father?”

“We stayed near the river. That's where the work was.”

Amelia made another try at refolding the map. The ineffectual rustle of the paper irritated him.

“I had a gift for finding the cheapest cars,” he said.

“When you were little?” she asked.

“I was ten. That's not little.”

“Oh,” she said. He sensed her disbelief. Why did she bother to question him? If he turned to look at her now he knew there would be a certain plaintive sweetness in her face.

“And then?” she asked.

“Then,” he began, accelerating as the road gradually leveled off, “we packed the car and set off until we found work. He drank up the take. Saturdays, he'd end up in a saloon with a hustler and no money. I'd load them both into the car, drive them to wherever we were camped. Sometimes the lady made me breakfast—”

“—when you were ten?”

“When I was a few years older. They cried all over me,” he said. His tone made her feel vaguely implicated, and she moved closer to the passenger door.

“It doesn't look as if you could get anything to grow around here,” she observed somewhat stiffly.

Harry sighed and loosened his grip on the wheel. They had reached the valley floor. A few cattle stood here and there staring at the daylight, as they might have stared at darkness.

“You always think you can,” Harry said. “This is a bad month. But when they irrigate—you could plant a telephone pole and it would take root.”

She offered him a cigarette, and as he took it from her fingers he glanced at her and smiled briefly. Their marriage was recent, their experience of each other still fresh. Everything in the car was about them, of them—their maps and cigarettes, the suitcases in which their clothes were intermingled, a half-empty bottle of whiskey that rolled around the car floor.

He was recalling other cars, heaps of clanging, rusty parts, his father's clothes and his bundled into blankets.

She was looking at him. He was such a solitary being that she imagined him self-conceived—no parents, no past. For all his stories, she did not associate him with the complex accumulation of experience she sensed in other people.

“Look! There's a house,” she said, startled, expecting only horizon and sky.

“We're almost there,” he said. “Mrs. Coyle wrote the place was north of Las Cruces.”

“How can people live like that?” she asked, turning her head to keep the house in view for a minute longer. It looked to her like a lump of yellow earth that had been scooped up roughly from the ground. What seemed like a doorway gave on to darkness. An inner tube rested against the dirt wall, and near it a chicken stood in a pose of expectancy. There was no other sign of life.

“It's a sod shack,” he said. “You'd be surprised what you can live like.”

Amelia, with their destination only minutes away, asked him a question that had bothered her since letters from Mrs. Coyle, the district nurse, and a Doctor Treviot, had arrived, telling Harry of Ben Tilson's stroke. “Will your father be crippled?” Her voice held a tremor that belied her air of detachment.

“It'll be all right,” Harry said. “It's not catching. Only his right arm was affected.” He had casually put his arm around her shoulder as he spoke. But he felt a sudden pain in his gut and withdrew the arm abruptly.

“What's the matter?”

“It's just that I'm getting tired of driving,” he replied. He wondered why he had bothered to try and reassure her. His father could have no meaning for her, and for him Ben Tilson was a monthly check and a tax deduction. Ben was a wreck, the doctor had written. No one knew what held him together.

He knew, he thought, watching the road without seeing it, instead seeing his father, asleep in an irrigation ditch after eighteen hours of work, spring up as the water reached his bare feet, a nightmare figure blackened with mud. It was a contemptible life for a man. What was the use of such endurance? He despised the memory—that vision of Ben, a furious scarecrow, drunk with fatigue, digging the irrigation ditch still deeper to receive the flow of water.

“There it is,” Harry said. They had rounded a curve, and just beyond it, oasislike, was a clump of cottonwood trees and, nailed to the trunk of one of them, a sign that read
COYLE
. Harry parked a few feet from the house. The siding and window frames were nearly bare of paint; the window shades were drawn, and a sheet-iron roof reflected the sunlight with brutal intensity.

For a brief moment, the two of them sat unmoving. Amelia sensed in Harry a vast exercise of will as he reached across her and opened the door, then got out on his side. As she stepped to the ground, she saw a gray stoop and several scrawny chickens roosting on its steps. A dog the color of charred wood gazed at her blankly before resting its head back on its paws. Harry waved his hand at the stoop, and the chickens flew lumpishly into the scrub grass. The dog rose and wagged its skinny tail just as Mrs. Verbena Coyle opened the screen door. She regarded them silently until a smile widened her lips to reveal small discolored teeth. Not a hair escaped from the thick braids wound round her head. Her pale eyes were unblinking. The heavy contours of her face were smooth; mass upon mass, moonlike and placid.

“I knew it was you as soon as I heard the car,” she said. “Ben's been waiting all morning—wouldn't eat his lunch. Think you might make him eat it?”

Harry went up the steps quickly, and Amelia followed. Mrs. Coyle continued. “I tell him he's got to eat meat if he's going to get better”—she paused to extend a hand to Harry. “ ‘I'll be on my feet soon, Verbena,' he says.”

Mrs. Coyle advanced a step and held out her other hand to Amelia. “Is he any better?” Harry asked.

“He's not,” Mrs. Coyle answered firmly. “There comes a time in an illness where it don't matter if you have a good day.” She looked up at the sky and smacked her lips. “He's a sick man, Mr. Tilson.” She released both their hands and folded her own across her stomach. “When I found him laying out in the shack, holding on to his old flatiron—he'd dug a hole right in the dirt floor with it, you know—I thought he was gone for sure. But the doctor did a lot for him. He even gets around a bit, but he's weak. That real weakness,” the last words said emphatically. She nodded to Amelia. “I'm a trained nurse, you know, the only one for miles around.”

“Could we see him now?” Harry asked.

“That's what you come for, isn't it?” Mrs. Coyle said. “You go round the house and I'll meet you in the back. Ben's in a little shed my husband fixed up.” She entered the house.

Harry backed down the two steps and stood irresolutely, frowning down at his shoes.

“Isn't she something!” Amelia spoke in a low voice.

“Did you leave the cigarettes in the car?”

“I've got them right here,” she replied quickly, holding the pack out to him. But he turned from her and set off for the back of the house. Only natural, she said to herself, inevitable.

A few cottonwood trees stood between them and the dusty lonesome-looking two-lane road. The heat sang in the silence. The air had the texture of warmed glue.

Mrs. Coyle met them at the back door. She was accompanied by a little pale man who, as she walked, slipped in and out of sight behind her as though he were in league with her shadow.

“In there,” she said and waved toward an oversize chicken coop. At her words the small man took a giant step and Mrs. Coyle looked at him with rapt amusement, then turned to them, smiling archly. “This is my husband, Gulliver Coyle,” she said. Mr. Coyle grinned eerily at them and nodded. Amelia noticed how knobby his fingers were, and she recalled the dry flaked furrows they had driven past.

“Come on,” Harry urged her, as though she'd held back. She felt the sting of resentment. How ridiculous he looked in his finely tailored jacket, his costly slacks, as he stood in front of the shed. The dog had slunk around the house to make a part of their group.

Mrs. Coyle, as though seized by impulse, strode up to the shed door and opened it. “They're here, Ben! Your boy's here with his wife,” she cried as she stood aside to let Harry and Amelia precede her. Amelia stood back to wait for Mr. Coyle, but he shook his head no, moving his abused hands in clumsy amiability. Amelia stepped across the threshold. The room contained a bed, a rocking chair, and a tall dresser from which two middle drawers were missing. The rungs of the iron headrest were patched with white paint. An old man lay on the edge of the bed. He lifted his left hand in greeting as Amelia walked toward him. But he was looking past her, at Harry. His eyes were large, faded blue, and veined. The control apparent in the way he held his long-lipped mouth so stiffly gave way to the faintest of smiles. He barely parted his lips to speak.

“Well . . . it's been a long time,” he said in a thin, grainy voice. Harry held out a hand, which the old man touched with his fingers. “I see your hair's thinning,” Ben Tilson said. He looked at Amelia then. “I lost mine young, too. Seems to run in the family.” There was a moment of silence, which ended when Mrs. Coyle said with arch severity, “Will you eat your lunch now, Ben? I'll bring it in.” He didn't look at her or answer, and she left the shed.

Harry sat in the rocking chair. Amelia knew he was under a strain, but still, there was no other place to sit, and she stood awkwardly in the middle of the small room until Ben pointed down at his bed with a semblance of the authority of a man who knows how to deal with women. In the space he made for her by moving a few inches very slowly, she sat down on sheets thin and gray from years of washing.