She thought she heard him rise while it was still dark and she thought she’d said his name again and that he’d told her to go back to sleep again, but she may have only dreamed it. When she woke gray light filtered through the only window, shadowing the outlines of the pictures on the walls and at the instant that she started to remember where she was and what had happened she knew at once that he was gone. She sat up and listened. There was no sign of him. His walking stick was nowhere in the room.
She stood up and was immediately leveled to her knees by pain, clutching at the bed for balance. Somewhere deep inside her pelvis was a thorn that made it hard to stand and as she knelt, trying to overcome it, she saw that she had bled across the sheet during the night. Her thighs were caked with blood and as she rose she reached for her black poplin skirt to dress in and to hide her stain. Over the skirt she pulled her shift and then she walked, one stiff step at a time, to the door.
He was not in the kitchen.
Nor was he in the yard.
She hesitated briefly, deciding whether to draw water to make coffee for their breakfast or to go and find him in the barn.
But his room was empty. His knapsack was not there. Neither was the camera in the other room and in the barn a single stall door stood ajar where the mule had been set free. Through the fresh ash on the ground outside the barn she could see the mule’s tracks leading toward the yard, a line of round depressions from the walking stick beside them. She followed their trace down the rutted track until it met the road. One direction led to the sawmill and the other to the inner coastline and the ferry and she stood and watched the tracks turn sharply toward the route to water where they disappeared to a single vanishing point in the distance. However far away the two edges of the road might seem to converge into the illusion of disappearance, Edward was beyond that point by now, she knew, outside the picture. How far could he go in his condition? He could not walk far—for a day, she told herself—perhaps only for the morning—so her best mode of conduct would be to carry on, prepare for his return as if nothing out of the ordinary had transpired. Except that something out of the ordinary had transpired and she was both confused and disappointed by it and ashamed of her compliance. If he had kissed her, if he had said good-bye, if he had ever said her name—she started turning over ifs as she sat at the kitchen table, waiting. In a rash of energy she stripped the bed and washed herself despite the pain from a basin of cold water and dressed herself to follow in his tracks but then had second thoughts. What would she say to him? He had left her on the morning after what was reputed to be love, reputed to be sacred between a married couple, between a husband and a wife.
She sat through the dwindling light and lit only a single lantern turned down low when she realized it had grown too dark to see her hands. At the moonrise she brought blankets and a pillow to the porch and made a basic pallet on the boards, but didn’t sleep. The moon, gibbous, was the color of her blood.
Northwest Pacific moisture woke her at the dawn, the damp seeping in to chill her bones and she rose, her limbs and back as stiff as corn husks, and began to feel a low-burning anger tempering her mind and body, firing her action. She went through the day accomplishing the chores, rearranging the position of the bed in the bedroom so that it appeared restored or reinvented and no longer reminded her of what had taken place there. Still, after a bleak supper of cold potatoes standing at the window in the kitchen, looking out, when she had tried to retire to the bedroom for the night she found no comfort in the bed that had been bought for one generation of Curtis men and had accommodated another generation of them—where one had died and another had failed to live up to her expectations—and she passed a second night outside on the porch.
When she woke she knew her time within the Curtis family was nearing its completion. She sat up, looked at the new day, hugged her knees to her chest and looked at the ragged compound and its moldering barn and told herself, as Edward must have told himself the morning he had left her, I need to be quit of here. Even when, or if, Edward returned what future was there here, for them, for her, with the old woman and her pallid daughter in the room next door, the endless chores, the evaporating dreams of his and hers from week to week? But then she remembered moments when her heart had thrilled at what he’d said, the way he’d looked, his courage and his photographs. When he comes back, she started to rehearse, and if he tells me why he left and if he tells me he is sorry to have gone with no parting word or explanation, then…
But he did not come back. The buckboard bearing Hercules, Eva, Ellen and Asahel returned that afternoon, Asahel telling her from behind the reins even before dismounting, “I’m sorry, Clara, I could find no doctor who would leave Seattle, owing to the fire—how is Edward?”
“Edward’s gone.”
He could see that grief had had its way on her, her eyes were sunken, her face gray, as if she hadn’t slept, and he thought his brother dead until Clara asked him, “Did you see him on the road? He took the mule, the camera. Asahel, he’s hardly fit enough—”
“Hear that, mother? Your son is cured—we have rushed back for nothing…”
Yes, nothing, Clara thought you’ve rushed back to your home, your lives. To nothing. She avoided conversation with the women and stood with Hercules as he unhitched the horses.
“Did you see the fire, Clara?”
“Only in the sky.”
“—it was enormous. So bright you could see each building from across the water. Sparks like firecrackers falling in the harbor, then they’d fizz and pop and there would be this ghost, scary shape of steam shooting from the water like the spirit rising.”
“—spirit rising, Hercules?”
He gave her a canny look.
“They’re Baptists, Clara, and they talk that way. And the best part—you know who the heroes were that day? The horses.”
She followed him, leading both the dray mares to water in the corral beside the barn.
“The horses drove the water wagons right up to the burning houses and the fire men, the men who put out fires, they put gunneysacks over the horses’ heads and leather blinders on their eyes so they couldn’t see and then the horses went right up to where the flames were because they’re trained to be obedient…”
“You like horses,” she affirmed, smiling at him.
“I love them. Mr. Silva gave me a book about the role of horses in the history of the world—”
“—Mr. Silva?”
“—the farrier. And you probably don’t know this but it’s really horses that have saved the world. Especially America. Did you know there were no horses here until the Spanish brought them? They were looking for gold, the Spanish people were, so they brought horses on their ships. Can you imagine that?”
She smiled. “No. I barely can.”
“—horses on a ship, I mean a hundred of them. And the boat was only, well, from here to here. The only boat I’ve been on was that ferry that we took, but, still, I can’t imagine what it must have been like, way back then, to cross an ocean in a wooden boat with hundreds of these animals on deck…” He smoothed the silver hairs of the mare’s neck. “Are you feeling all right, Clara?”
“Better for the sight of you.”
“You don’t look your usual.”
She tilted her head and asked him, “What’s my usual?”
He shrugged and petted his favorite animal. “Like a horse,” he said.
“—I beg your pardon!”
“—you know. Noble. And intelligent.”
“I love you, Hercules.”
“Well you have to. You’re my sister.”
He would be just fine without her for a while, she sensed, for the time it would take her to secure a job and housing for them in Seattle—but, still, the pleasure of his company and the towline of her duty to him kept her wavering in her decision through the next few days. That, and the fact that in some recess of her mind she still believed that she had forged an understanding and a bond with Edward.
He would come back and they would continue to grow closer, in both mind and body. Or so she hoped.
But he did not come back and his not-coming-back became more than a constant ache, a wound that wouldn’t heal: it became the truth she had to live with, the truth about the man. He would always go, she realized, like that idealized photographer he’d read about when he was ten or twelve in the Christian Weekly, the one who had gone out to map the West with nothing but a camera and a mule. Like Hercules with horses, Edward had found his first romantic love at a young age and nothing in his adult life was going to stand between himself and that first love—not his family—not a woman—not her—and she understood that, now, and, in fact, drew courage from it.
If he could go, then she could, too.
At the end of the week, she sought a private conversation with Asahel. “I’m going to Seattle,” she told him.
“Clara, the fire’s out—”
“I’m not going for the fire.”
“The city is in turmoil, wait a while and then we’ll go—”
“I’m going there to look for work. To live. To make a livelihood.”
His brown eyes swelled with color. “Have we not been good to you?”
“Can you drive me to the ferry in the morning?”
His lips parted but he couldn’t speak.
“Don’t do this,” he finally said. “What about Hercules?”
“I’ll come back and get him when I’m settled. Meanwhile you’ll look after him. He’s happy here.”
She told the lies she needed to tell to Ellen and to Eva and she said what truth she needed to say to Hercules. And as farewell he handed her a book. “The History of the Horse,” he told her. “You’ll learn from it.”
She put on the traveling suit she hadn’t worn for more than half a year, the one she’d worn on the train ride west, she closed the Icarus chest and packed a small valise and put on a hat and gloves. She had seventy seven dollars left of the eighty dollars Lodz had given to her and she gave five of them to Hercules, telling him, Don’t spend it all on clothes. She hugged her brother, climbed onto the buckboard next to Asahel, waved good-bye to the Curtis women and set her eyes on the road ahead. Asahel drove in silence, for which she was grateful.
“It’s not far,” he finally said.
“No,” she agreed.
“I could be there within hours. If you would ever need me to.”
She made no response.
On a stretch of open road, with the proximity of the harbor in the air, they saw a single figure in the distance, with a mule, approaching. The man, bearded, was limping slightly and leaning on a walking stick.
“Speed up,” Clara said.
Asahel held tightly on the reins.
“Speed up,” Clara said again.
As they drew nearer to the figure in the road it was clear to both of them that the man they were approaching was Edward and that he, in turn, had recognized them.
Clara seized the whip from Asahel and beat the horses once, then twice, into a gallop, overtaking Edward in the road and speeding past him, before Asahel had the chance to grapple tack and team from her and bring them to a stop.
“—he’s my brother,” he objected.
“Then get down,” she told him, taking the reins from him and pushing him onto the ground. She was standing in the buckboard with both leathers in one hand, whipping with the other, when she heard the shout behind her—
“—Scout!”
She urged the horses forward, his voice ringing in her ears—
“—Scout!”
And then, unmistakably—
“—Clara!”
She stopped. The road ahead, its vanishing point, beckoned to her like the dark back of time, like the unknown space a figure in a painting faces when it turns its back upon the present, turns its back upon the viewer, on their shared experience. Behind her, someone whom she knew she loved was calling out her name. Behind her, his blue eyes.
And so she turned.
lights out for the territory
We turn, we are a turning tribe—born into, borne by rotation—earth propelling us around its axis once a day, like a revolving door, while gravity deceives us into thinking that the sky is moving, we are standing still.
When Edward Curtis died he had gone around the sun eighty-four times, eighty-four revolutions—my father, fifty-three. Another trip around the sun—another turning—is what we’re really celebrating when we celebrate an anniversary—another journey of 574,380,400 miles. In his lifetime my father journeyed thirty billion miles through space, without noting it—Curtis, almost fifty billion.
Those are major road trips, when you think about it.
Which puts this haul to Vegas in perspective: just a little run around the neighborhood.
Driving east on the 101 toward Pasadena, skirting through the San Fernando Valley, I’m still on former mission land, acres deeded to the Mission San Fernando rancho for growing olives, grapes, corn, wheat and melons. After Glendale, the land rises toward the San Gabriels where the native Tongva, a language clan of the Shoshone, were indentured to the Mission San Gabriel in the eighteenth century, and thereafter called the Gabrieleno tribe. East from here, all the way to Death Valley, the native language was Shoshone, and AZUSA is the first town on the highway to bear a shadow Shoshone name.
The American road is an Indian nation.
FIREBIRD. CHEROKEE. MUSTANG. WINNEBAGO.
Is there any other country in the world that appropriates the names of clans for cars?
If you think you’ve recently been the victim ofIDENTITY THEFT, please press “one,” a voice advises me every time I call my bank, but no one bats an eye at you in your Jeep COMANCHE or your Chevy CHEYENNE.
You can drive clear across the country without being questioned about your Chevy TAHOE or APACHE.
In your TIOGA.
Your CONESTOGA wagon.
I guess I fell in love with being on the road from being in the front seat of the car with my father, late at night, on road trips from Pennsylvania to Virginia.
I don’t think children can identify loneliness in others.
Although lonely, themselves, sometimes, I don’t think children have the depth of experience to recognize loneliness as a state of being that exists in others.
I don’t think we, as adults, are especially aware of loneliness in others, either, unless that person is obviously alone, sitting on a bench, sitting at a remove, picking idly through trash on a street corner, staring from a window.
When loneliness exists inside a family, it havens its own silence. Families breed loneliness that’s disguised as shyness, or as boredom; or as sleep.
Families are designed to be the social antidote to solitude, so to learn to search for signs of loneliness inside a family goes against our instincts.
We’re not taught to look for loneliness, so it passes, like a shadow, over dinners, over evenings watching the TV, between married couples, between parents and their children,
The silence that was probably a kind of dull ache in my father emanated to me on those car rides as a kind of comfort.
He was very good behind the wheel, very capable and uncomplaining, and that communicated to me as a confidence that we were safe, cocooned in a closed environment, he and I up front, mom and J-J in the back, moving through the known and unknown, navigating life together. If there was a social concern over the impulse to manufacture bigger cars and build more roads, those issues were not filtering into the daily news one received as a young girl growing up in 50’s America. To drive was an innocent pursuit. To drive long distances was an adventure. The superhighways—six lanes, eight lanes, the Interstates—were still on drawing boards, so we progressed behind two cones of light down two-or four-lane roads through corn, cotton and tobacco fields, scrubby, cluttered Maryland woods, towns with church steeples and village greens, Fredericksburg, Baltimore, Washington and Richmond. The cities were allegro movements in the symphony; the fields and farm
s andantes. The night had rhythm. The towns approached, you could sense a town’s encroachment through the clearings in the woods, outbuildings would materialize, the town’s corona would glow above it in the sky, the distances between the barns would quicken, houses would construct a chorus line. Whether it was dark or light there was specificity in every shadow. And because it was that specific passage along Route 1 through Maryland and northern Virginia, as we drove south we drove into American history, too. I could name the battlefields in order, north to south. There’s no other country on Earth that has so many battlefields as road side attractions. If you have a mind to do so you can follow Washington as he evaded or pursued the British through the declared independent colonies or you can stop and scan the twilight’s last gleaming over the same harbor waters as Francis Scott Key or follow Lee and Jackson and the Army of the Potomac into boggy marshes over clay pits onto the higher granite ramparts overlooking Richmond.
How my mother’s parents came to settle in a place between the James and Appomattox Rivers in the tidewater delta of Virginia from their separate Aegean islands of Skopelos and Limnos was embedded in conflicting legends, different versions of one family’s history, but their separate acts of reinvention, taken some time between the two world wars, certified the fact that their only daughter Mary was not only Greek, she was a Southerner.
Which is to say that life with her was, by turns, life with Vivien Leigh playing Scarlett O’Hara and Vivien Leigh as Clytemnestra.
Landscape shaped her: the farther north my mother went, the more Scarlett she seemed; the farther south, the Greek-er.