The Joshua Tree Page 17

  Is he coming toward me, the beard, the strength, the perceiving eyes?

  I am Colin.

  I am Lily.

  Will we ever learn all the rest?

  But wait, Lily, wait. You’re not me yet.

  Lily. He’ll ask to see you again, even before you rejoin Order and wrap yourselves in sheets of brown paper and look so internally ordered. He’ll ask and he’ll lose strength and be all drawn in and self-denying and resigned to external walls and angles and blocks. But you saw him before and his eyes still look in on a different world. And his hands, you’d seen them from the first moment, containing something unexpressed, power, will to be reborn.

  How many times he’d say, later, how he believed he’d saved your life then. So drawn, to a fine blue nerve, jittery like chalk on a blackboard, transparent. Hating your father, loving him, smothered still by San Valentino. Living in the empty love of the flower children, yet reserving, withholding, resisting with instinct. Giving away whatever you have, forgetting to eat for days and then an apple or some nuts, or honey. Unnourished by the dance that asks the spirit to be free but doesn’t know what freedom means.

  surpassing

  Every moment, every word, every gesture. You contain them, they are at your source. There; true, reliable, constant.

  space

  and

  The restraint of your first meetings, the central flame of I’m sure I’m sure I’m sure spreading out and out through your whole being. (Square, you’d suppose: tradition of the unfolding, the prolonged discovery of love.) Resonance in another, the inner conversation, the inner touching. Two passions, two longings, two to one, reaching out, so unprepared, so hidden from the conscious, so without control.

  time

  He? Colin, dear Colin. Has not your Lily saved you too? What was it you would tell her? Of the crush of the world, of the pollutions and saturations and destructions and killings. And of your escape, your retreat into the last wilderness, walking the mountains and the valleys. You, writing and lecturing of this bitter despairing escape, thus destroying the escape itself. You could see the irony, yes, remember, as you would talk so of it? But what recourse, the final frontier found and destroyed? No further task but death itself. And you were ready.

  Your passion, the blade of grass, the drop of dew, the tremble and the stillness. The doom closes in. Neither touch nor be touched, man was all menace.

  Your infinite inner solitude. Your despair.

  Your fate their progress, your end their goal.

  You knew it, all this, yet you were helpless. Memory, nature, but relation cut. Inward, to yourself, but in absolute isolation.

  anima

  You knew it, these are all your words. Your Lily, though, she could not have put it so. How could she have understood an onanistic attitude, a life so closed and silent and drawn in, an embryo seeking the womb in the self, in death? She, who had so often made laughter from dust. She who held men’s inner images, the keeper of the projected dream. Eternal daughter, eternal mother, eternal lover.

  woman

  in

  Yes, you, Lily. You, that skipping step of joy in the midst of tragedy, that love from hate, that paradise regained.

  man

  But you’d not have thought like this either, Lily, not have known yourself then in such terms. Life, an intuitive process, not to be understood. So gay at times, perhaps when he is somber, dancing ahead of him, turning, laughing in the sun. Or hurled down into the shadow, the dark side, sobbing under the gray moon, irreconcilable whatever his gentleness. Until the inner light changes.

  animus

  man

  Go! Go with him where he will. Whatever the burden of his past, he has withstood it, you saw that strength in him that first night, there is the source of your trust in him, in events which seem uncontrollable. Sometimes a wondering and almost a fear: how could this be, how am I here? But still you go with him.

  in

  woman

  Tests: dragons to be slain, the elemental attacks, the clouds racing through the sky, the fateful cycling. But still you will go on and on and there will be no end.

  The stolen time, stolen from his desperate rush to satisfy a publisher, from his past, from your sad soulless dance on the fringe of the flower children, from reticence.

  The paddleboats in the lake, bicycling down the midday park lanes, the Basque restaurant where your Italian mixed so prettily with the Spanish ’round the long family tables, the Fairmont tower to see how long you could stay before they’d catch you and want you to gulp petits fours on their merry-go-round when you’d so like just to stretch your arms to the Bay and the Bridge and the Pacific and watch the sun drop into the distant fog. Dragon Go Go rock blasting their electronic sadness into tinkly Chinatown, topless breasts swaying in the dark over lonesome men and seventy-five-cent beer. Fish where the violent becomes the poetic, where love is an image of the self, where art is sometimes born of disconnection. Cross-legged on the wall-to-wall carpeting where the black glass trembles to the bellowing foghorn, hoping to avoid the empty disagreements of public issues, hoping lives can be given words.

  Landing

  Place

  The miraculous time, time the ancient fateful pulse, beyond limit and understanding. Time no longer a flat distance in continuum from the horizon behind to the horizon ahead; time turned, tilted up onto its edge, reaching from the center of the earth to the heart of the sky, with you complete in that dimension, containing it all so that it is no longer that continuum but an infinite moment holding all experience, all moments.

  How can I remember, then, with time tipped up so? How can I sort out events when there was no progression, when everything happened at once? San Francisco, so many images, so many moments, the stitching together of time. Our trip, our Calabrian trip to the back of time, to ancestral mountains. Can I ever remember the way other people remember, step by step, building like a plot even if it never was that way? O my Colin, my companion, my liberation, my life! You could take me where you would, you could bring me such discovery – and I you. How dare I remember, how dare I touch the miracle we found?

  Let me wait, hold off the elements that swept us up and bore us into existence. And savor the waiting. I’ll try, but later, please, please. Now let me be here.

  With Will. In his old jeep held together with fence wire. The cat claws ripping at us as we spin in the sand and sage. The buzzards still circling over the pink peaks which hide his little lake now, over the thin concrete dam sliding out of view. Along the wash bed, the going’s best, least brush. “Indians’ summer campground over there, water here them days, good location for the hunting.” Olla bits, charred bones, a metate stone.

  A tumbleweed still rolls, restless in the dying wind, but old and silvery, its seed spread long ago. “That’s Russian thistle, Lily, that tumbleweed, came to America recent, brought here from the Volga, rolled here maybe, like young Willy.”

  time

  Stretches of the evening primrose, opening now in the fading afternoon, yellow which will soon turn orange. Rattling along and up onto the old desert road leading to the ranch. Black willows, yucca, Joshua trunks pushed aside, wild pear.

  tipped

  up

  Up into the opening in the hot granite pinnacles that leads into the hidden valley. Here he would stop. To show me the graves. Stop the jeep in the middle of the track, no one coming or going now but Will himself.

  Graves, they busy Will these days.

  They’d roll no more

  Desert’s edge, to the boulders and cliffs where the bighorns had stood against the sky, curious at man thunder, where the Joshua tree throws thin shadow, where the tumbleweed rolls to a stop.

  Four stones standing, reaching up still into the low sun, holding their place there for yet a time. Guarding, at the head of each plot. Where the sand drifts in and the wild grass grows again and the bobcat’s track is blurred by the lizard’s tail.

  The tallest, rounded at the top, de
corated with a border, an arch, a whirling sun in turquoise . . . Walapais, over across the Colorado. He’ll jeep out there soon, one of these days, when the foreman writes they’ve mined some more, they’ll give him some and he’ll bring it back and cement in other designs, pretty on her stone, pretty on theirs, green blue . . . The others with the stars and the sickle moons: the two sides of life, the Indians knew.

  HELEN JANE

  MOORTON SPEAR

  BORN SEPT. 8

  1886. DIED

  JAN. 19 1963

  ROCK OF AGES

  Half hidden in the wild grass and the dust splashed up by the last rain.

  Who will there be to chip out Will’s stone, cut him into the rock, lay him lovingly under the Joshua tree? Will, why do you cry? Younger, you’d have been ashamed, you’d have turned away from another, from this Lily. Now there are tears on your cheeks.

  Me, Willy, I’d roll on, more

  To lay me out under the Joshua tree. This button of a girl. She stands there by the Missis. June, she’s gone; and she’d called me a weak-headed old crank and would say it’s uncivilized to want to stay here, a pauper under the sand.

  These that stayed at the gateway to my valley. Their stones, they blur in the tears and the time. They’ll last, though, and there’s no coyote that’ll dig them up.

  Jerry Dan

  Ancient

  of

  Days

  Lily, Lily, why do you kiss this stumbling dirty old man? You, so fresh, I wouldn’t want to disgust you. I know old men, knobbly and sucking, with their dirty necks where they can’t reach or remember to wash, the fetid smell, the bits of clothes that have become a part of them, the old eyes and the twisted hands. How can you kiss this old man? Don’t, please don’t, I’d not have you so close, the white stubble on my cheek, the dirt and the blackheads in my ear, the tremble.

  This warmth, and sweet like a flower . . . O Jenny, Jenny by the river bank! . . . I’ll leave it all, how can I hope, little Lily? On where paradise stretches out to Siberia and no one hurts for want. Leave here where it closes in, where there’ll be no one to stretch me out under the Joshua – not you, Lily, not you! Where they nibble at you and blast in the Indian blue sky and in the red earth under your feet. Where their black pollution pours out onto the desert: antelope ran thick there as Nebraska buffalo.

  Keeper

  Four of my heart, three of my loins. Look close, old Will, draw to them, down, on your knees – patched and padded with the trembling stitches, don’t look too close, Lily—to the boy, Robin. Your shoulders are shaking some.

  of

  Nature’s

  You can hear her calling, strong and firm like always, hut scared, and the bell you’d hung up ringing in the rocks. Scared, you too, Will. Wouldn’t be ringing this time a day and calling out without something wrong. Your Robin, lying on his cot, his eyes open, so quiet.

  Law

  Gone to help his Mana, always helping, always the laugh and the skip and, “I’ll do it.” Plenty of tank water there was already, but he’d knowed she’d liked it cool and fresh right from the bottom of the well. The crank windlass, a lot for a little feller to manage and the heavy bucket halfway up when the handle must of slipped and spun with the weight and got him on the forehead.

  He’d be all right, he’d be all right. Scurrying in the rocks again, bringing us his bits of this and that, never but gentle with his sister. Quieter though, failing, will he be all right? Never, never, never! They’d send him to the hospital, L.A., operate, tumor they said, but all you know’s he never come back but for you to lay him here under the sand.

  Beside his brothers, babies, and now their Ma.

  I feel your hand, Lily, light like the sun, on my shoulder.

  homeward

  Yet how’d you be here, Willy: this cove in the high desert rocks, down across the Mohave from your ridge above the Golden Girl, from Death Valley; this burying, knees in the sand; this desert flowering, this desert dying?

  Gold in red rock, Willy, your Desert Lady

  ghosts

  Death Valley drops below, climbing over the pass. Wave your hat, all stiff and new, to the men who lie down there, the ones you’ve found, buried them with a sermon you’d penciled in poetry. To Indian Tom, even Scotty with his rascal ways, the prospectors. Single blankets. Seldom-Seen-Slim Ferge, Ballarat with Jim Sherlock, and Shorty Harris. Shorty who struck it good over near Skidoo with Anglebury; called it Harrisbury Mine; asked to be buried next to Jimmy Dayton near Eagle Borax.

  busying

  about

  Looking around some you’ll be. The Mother Lode. Nevada City, gables and the balconies of the National Hotel. The high-country camp at Alleghany. Comstock, Virginia City, most dead. Kern County for a spell, the Yellow Aster at Randsburg with five- and ten-stamp mills, open pit. The Dale District – east, beyond Lady Mountain from here, on into the Pintos, more’n a day by horse – the Virginia Dale Mine, Dale the Second . . . June, will you take old Will there again one day? No, no, you’ve gone, Will knows that: Las Vegas, lost in their corruptions, turned forever from your Dad your desert your little brothers waiting in the sand. They’d read me your last will and testament like as why they’d buried you there and how you’d not be moved home by the Joshua. Old Will, he’ll go alone. Dale Mine, just the headframe and some rubble the tourists haven’t got, they say.

  Mana

  Mana

  And the Desert Lady, your Desert Lady mine, here, just on beyond the ridge where the sun hits golden, she who brought you here, her red rock with the gold.

  “So flashy,” Helen’d say.

  by the

  well

  Bowman, it was he’d found you, Wm. F. Speare mining man, Death Valley Golden Girl. Good pay, stock in the company. Pocket mine you’d bet, and you were always one to smell out pockets and you took the job, with Bill McQuillen.

  Bill, partner, like a dad, in the albums, was it just last night? Beard white as the snow around your cabin, still there back of the adobe, and you’d come to eat the Missis’ cooking that last winter, and you’d old Will to chip your stone down at Serrano Palms.

  Bill McQuillen with brother Jim who’d run a pocket dry, the Desert Lady, she’d brought others up short too. Feller found her in eighteen ninety, then got bushwhacked dead by encroachers, two cowpunchers. They were tried in County Court and it was Hale Minton who saw they wouldn’t be working that claim for more’n a bit and he jumped it and worked it, Bill said, five years till the pocket thinned and sold to Jim and Bill. Till theirs thinned too and the San Bernardino bank took over, cattlemen then. They’d got a stamp mill in and were rich till it petered out. And the bank sold to Bowman. Bowman, he couldn’t pay Will Speare like he’d contracted, so he’d give him stock instead until the Desert Lady was yours, Willy boy, ’fifteen.

  Still golden shining on the ridge, and red on Lady. Up on Lady, where Tucker’d been – never’d had time for strolling yourself, especially straight up when there weren’t a reason – and seen the Indians’ tripod of sticks across the cave’s mouth, all covered with grass. Gold in the quartz, all sparkling red, they’d seen it and knowed the white man’s passion; the tripod to protect the treasure from that evil. Filled with desert-rat nests when Tucker’d got there. And under the cap rock on the top, Indian hier’glyphs.

  For a pail of cool water, Robin, he’s left. Full of life, helping his Ma and his Dad. Built that big cage over by the arrastra for the little eagle he’d found up in the rocks. Fed it with mice he’d trap. It’s yours, Robin. Got to understand he’ll owe his life to you and you to him, for he’s wild nature and without that we’d be nothing. Water too. And a rattlesnake in a box, and a coyote pup. Knew a feller, over Coachella way, smashed his wrist on a well windlass, slipped, started whirling, tried to catch it, busted all the bones. Standing right there’d been Robin, in the gap in the bamboo the Missis planted and could never get rid of. Took the windlass off, dangerous.

  Same well Minton dug when he homesteade
d here in ’seventy. Built the adobe barns, built well too, in good shape when you came, Will, forty years later, though you got to coat the outside every so often, even the best adobe, or she’ll wash away. Pretty gone now.

  Sixty years back it was you come here, Will. Some cash in your jeans still from the Golden Girl, and the Desert Lady yours. Been prospecting some on the side, poking about here and there. Worked a bit in the Two Skull area with Jamie Pope. High on the back side of the mountain; black up there, yuh, always think of it as black.