The Farmer's Daughter (29 page)

She came out of the bedroom about three-quarters dressed, barefoot in a green skirt and half-opened blouse. She stared at me a moment, doused her breakfast with Tabasco, and quickly ate it. She lit a cigarette and stared at me again then took my forearm coming out of my short-sleeved shirt.

“I've had a fair amount of training and I'm not stupid. I need to know what's wrong with you. You look at least forty not thirty. You're burning up and wearing out.”

I hadn't thought of rehearsing but I had hoped to slowly work into this. I went for broke for want of any options and told her everything except for a few violent experiences I could barely admit to myself.

“Jesus H. Christ,” she fairly screamed. “Get out of here until noon tomorrow. I've got a thirty-eight but I hope I won't have to shoot your sorry ass. I never was afraid of anything.”

“I remember that,” I said with a quaver in my voice. At the door she gave me a full kiss and she was amused that I was shaking.

I broke down in the car and wept, an alien act because I simply couldn't remember ever having wept before. She must have been watching from her apartment because suddenly there was a knock at the car window. I opened the door and she drew me tightly to her breast saying, “Maybe I can take care of you.”

I drove south because I had to find a location for my oncoming seizure in two days. I turned right in Socorro and drove west far into an area called the Plains of San Agustin, again a place on the map cartographers would call a “sleeping beauty” relatively without the blemishes with which we have permanently scarred the earth. I decided to spend the night so had to drive farther to the edge of the Gila Wilderness Area to find firewood because I could see it would be bitterly cold, the kind of temperature I craved in Italy, and I doubted my sleeping bag would be adequate. I had bought a couple of burritos in Socorro which I could warm by the fire. What I most looked forward to was the full sweep of stars as ambient light tends to blind us to them in our populated areas and Europe.

I made camp at the mouth of a canyon not daring to go farther on the two-track in my rental car. I stacked quite a pile of firewood, mostly juniper, and started three good fires so I could sleep in the triangle's middle, an effective ritual. There was about an hour of daylight left so I climbed the steepest slope I could find to try to exhaust myself.

It was a glorious night with the stars drawing almost too closely, or so I thought, stretched there in the cold air within the coals of three fires. The stars helped me slow my mind before the moon rose with its inevitable enervating power. Emelia's last embrace had lightened my mind to a degree I couldn't remember. I suppose that my emotional response to the stars that were nearly creamy in their density came close to what others felt was their religion. It was interesting lying there that my mother as a classicist had given me the gods rather than a more theistic God and perhaps the errant and antic ancient gods offered a better explanation for our life on the planet. In the earth's turning the sky became an endless river and even when the moon rose rather than be disturbed I thought of myself as only a child of gravity. I kept thinking of a poem my Spanish teacher had quoted to me several times when we were sitting on a park bench on a May evening looking out at a dulcet Lake Michigan. The poem was by a Portuguese named Pessoa:

The gods by their example

Help only those

Who seek to go nowhere

But in the river of things.

Before I finally slept well after midnight, and while listening to coyotes in chase, it occurred to me that Emelia might accept me despite what I'd told her because we were lovers so early in life. Embracing nude in the water tank with our tongues and limbs intertwined was a baptism that couldn't be erased by dire language. The adolescent ache of two bodies for each other never failed to reenter my mind and body. It was the overwhelming rule of what was supposed to be.

I did a rare thing and slept through dawn as if I were part of the ground. The weather had changed and there was a slight warmish wind from the south. I made coffee from the small pot in my knapsack and the remnants of a bag of coffee from Modena so that as I drank there was the jarring feeling from the scent and taste that I was still at my breakfast café down the street. I was curious about a canyon far to the west and walked there rapidly, stopping to watch a huge flock of doves circling a water tank. This made me hungry. When I began hunting with my friend Cedric south of Cincinnati we'd shoot ten or so doves, start a fire, and pluck and grill them in the wire basket he'd detach from his bicycle. I had nothing to eat and hunger turned me back to the car. Something nagged at me and I remembered a short nightmare I'd had about the cluster of hummingbirds flitting around the raw wound on my throat in the rain. I stopped in Socorro and had two bowls of menudo, Mexican tripe stew, and headed north toward Emelia and Albuquerque stopping to pick up some decent wine as I had seen an empty bottle of wretched plonk on her counter, also a bottle of fine Herradura tequila.

When I reached her apartment she had just gotten home from her final exam. She was a pink-eyed, frazzled mess. I poured her a shot of tequila watching through the bedroom door as she stripped to her panties. I put a wash-cloth under the hot tap and wrung it out. She drank the tequila in a gulp and I knelt and put the washcloth over her eyes. I kissed a nipple with my heart in my mouth.

“I'm too tired to fuck but I will,” she said with a pained smile.

Afterward she asked me to go see Dicky, also to buy her a steak, barely getting out the words before she lapsed into a soft snore. On a desk mostly covered with medical textbooks and cosmetics there was a photo of her, Dicky, Lawrence, and me dressed up for Halloween so long ago. She was in a turban and I was in a cheap, loose-fitting Superman costume, a yard-sale special.

At the butcher shop I thought how strange it was to make love to someone you loved. I visited Dicky who was happy to see me, half-suspended in a hip cast. “Too bad Lawrence isn't here,” he said, and then we were silent for a few minutes looking at the Jemez Mountains far to the north. I wondered if Emelia had told him anything about my condition but he gave no indication that she had.

“I'm glad you're here for Emelia. She was a fucking mess four years ago. I think she was even taking heroin like her husband. I told that shitsucker that if he ever showed up in New Mexico again I'd have his throat cut.”

We talked for an easy hour and I told him I'd move Emelia out to his place in Sandia Park once I bought a pickup in the morning. She could take care of him and I'd drive up to Dillon and find a place to live. I didn't presume to say “find us” a place to live.

When I got back to the apartment she had largely recovered. She didn't have a grill for the steak but assured me she could do fine with an iron skillet. I had forgotten to take the price tag off the wine.

“I'm not going to tell you that you've had all the luck,” she laughed.

We had the best evening of my life and in the morning we shopped for a pickup. I told her that it was time for me to leave town for two days. She wanted to go too and take care of me but I said that maybe in the future we could do so once we created a “safe” situation. She was tremulous when she said, “You sure you're coming back?” The world has created so many waifs.

I went back to the Plains of San Agustin and exhausted myself for two nights but had the minimal sense to move in a wide circle since I finally had a destination though I took a little more of the drug than usual in hopes of staying safe. When I got back I moved her out to Dicky's house then headed north to Montana to find a place for us to live.

I looked around Dillon in wider and wider circles for nearly a week, constantly on pay phones with Emelia who always reminded me that we'd need enough space for a horse. She liked the idea of keeping up with me on my monthly jaunts. I finally found a place only a few miles south of Melrose which was about thirty miles north of Dillon. It was an old but spacious trout fisherman's cabin that had ten acres on the Big Hole River and a shed I could convert into a stable. I'd have liked something a little more remote but the surrounding territory redefined the modern concept of remote. The local bar and restaurant already had a hitching post along the front for horses. I bought a pair of hip boots from the local fly-fishing shop and made my way across the river from the cabin to look at a triangular flat of pasture surrounded by fairly steep cliffs, one stained copiously by bird dung and far up you could make out a golden eagles' nest. At the back corner of the flat there were sage bushes ten feet high, a phenomenon I had never seen before despite my years working in ranch country in the West. When you lifted the lid a bit the natural world, including ourselves, offered as much darkness in human terms as light. To look at it with any clarity you certainly had to attempt to look at it through the perceptions of a million-plus other species.

Epilogue

I drove back to Albuquerque and we moved north not really like newlyweds after having Christmas with Dicky. I did the cooking, clearly seeing this as part of my future as Emelia's attention span was ill-suited to it (“Let's put the lamb chops in the oven and take a walk”). During Christmas dinner with lots of wine we argued about which set of parents were worse but lightened up in the forgiving nature of the season. Their mother had gone back home, had had a questionable second marriage, and was starting on a third with a neighbor in the alligator business, whatever that is.

Emelia liked her job in Dillon and more importantly the place I had bought near Melrose. I took a month during a very cold January to convert the shed into a stable and tightly mend ten acres of fence. We ended up buying two reasonably priced horses because Emelia insisted that “one gets lonely.”

Our life together fell well short of an idyll but then idylls by definition are short. I had one truly bad seizure in April ten miles west in the Pioneer Mountains and was arrested for possessing an illegal deer. The charges were dropped when the game warden couldn't figure out how the animal had been killed. After that Emelia dropped me off in the largely vacant high-altitude Centennial Valley with an acreage of 400,000. I had to be well prepared because the temperatures reached forty below zero in the winter.

The relatively bad news came in June when we were nearly a week in Chicago. I spent much of three days with the doctor while Emelia went up the elevator in every tall building in which she was permitted plus various museums. She was quite frightened flying out of Bozeman because she had never had the occasion to fly before. She loved having room service breakfast looking out at Lake Michigan. Those from the Southwest can't conceive of that much water and she kept saying, “Just look at that water.”

The bad news came in the form of the doctor telling me that I showed signs of having a form of canine progeria, a malady of accelerating aging that would include inevitable kidney and joint failure. I was thirty-one and he doubted I'd reach forty. I refrained from telling Emelia this not wanting to diminish her pleasure in Chicago. I told the doctor I had found a place where I could endure my seizures without the stultifying drugs which took a week to get over. He was happy for me. I must say that my death sentence vastly intensified the pleasure I took in my remaining time. So there is an end to all of this, I thought stupidly. Emelia noticed the lightening in my spirit after Chicago.

On the long flight back to Montana Emelia mostly slept with her head against my shoulder somehow cracking her gum once in her sleep. I thought how curious it was to see the outline of the girl in the woman. It is so difficult to wrap certain sets of feelings in language. Naturally we're all afraid of the suffering in our future and in the middle of the suffering we just as naturally wonder, How long can this go on? When there is some relief the most ordinary aspects of the world can look quite beautiful. There on the plane crossing the improbable Mississippi and the verdancy we never see in the West I recalled a harsh morning a half dozen years before up near Choteau in northern Montana south of the Blackfeet Reservation. A neighbor had called needing help with a bear. His small ranch backed up to the Sun River coming out of the Bob Marshall Wilderness. I drove over stopping in the yard to say hello to his wife who was a mixed-blood Blackfeet and to look at her gorgeous row of peonies. The trouble with the bear was that he had shot it in the act of killing a calf. My neighbor had pulled his front-end loader around to behind the shed where the bear lay, an old female grizzly, and he said her two-year-old cub had taken off for the mountains. I looked down at the massive sow and then over about thirty yards to the dead calf with quite a chunk taken out of the back of its neck right through the upper spine. My neighbor said, “Poor old girl,” then went into the shed to look for a wrench to tighten the nuts on the loader. He was going to bury the animal to avoid dealing with the game officials. While he was gone I stooped down to examine the bear's teeth determining that she was old indeed and that the escaped cub was anyway her last. At age two the cub would likely not survive but maybe. On impulse I lay down beside her and looked into her dead eyes a scant foot from my own. I put a hand on her massive head as if she were a lover. I had a disturbing thought, saying to myself, “It's not you or me but us,” including the dead calf off to the side and the bright blue sky above us. Though her head was the size of a bushel basket and her claws as long as my fingers at least for a moment I felt as if we were cousins.

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