The Joshua Tree Read online

  lie alone

  Jamie Pope, , drew it in the sand for you, damn little to brand by then, few mules, all his time on gold, though he’d run cattle once with that brand, back before turn of the century. And you’d showed him what your brand would be when you’d found a ranch, and you’d use it proper too, , scratched in the sand and Jamie had laughed about how you’d not be needing a bull looked like, and you’d got kind of mad.

  die alone

  Twelve hundred head carried that, registered in ’seventeen. And Jamie crawling up your road. And Jamie, his mustache half off, rotting in the desert, buried down the other side in Two Skull Valley more’n forty years back for his loneliness and his gold.

  for your

  Black up there, with only your hobnails screeching on the rock to break the howl of the wind, walking up Toole’s road and on beyond his Two Skull Mine. Big operation, that. Headframe, elevator, mountains of tailings. Up to your black hole picked out in the rock.

  Clem Toole, ’ninety-four he started there, patented in ’ninety-seven. Big operation, stamp mill, cyanide to dissolve the gold. Over the zinc filings, puddles of the black mud, volatizing, leaving gold.

  fevering

  passion

  roll

  on

  more

  Jamie Pope, gold you short-measured on the night shifts, gold you hid, gold you went for in the winter wind when you’d best be home with a fire and a family to look after you, gold that maybe’s buried with you now. Beyond, to the back side where nobody goes, where you look out through the white flower stalks of the ’olina, out over Pleasant Valley and Malapai Hill all black over the purple desert and Squaw Tank, and beyond to the Hexie Mountains. Yucca and buckwheat scratching in the wind. Your shaft, yours and Jamie’s, almost hidden there in the juniper, black down into the hillside, into the rock, half plugged with the tailings you’d not time, for gold hungry, to haul out proper. Hope the melting snow of the last days has run off like it should, not backed up into the shaft. Mean, mining in the winter wet. Silent, he was a good worker when it’s gold. Propping in the timbers, picking, picking, picking, with the gray light far back behind and the head lamp making things blacker. And when you think it’s warm in there you know it’s winter. Good, though, good feeling, get warmed up in there, feel the rock at your back, feel the pick . . . How many are there, pickheads, worn to nubs, lying out there by Robin’s scooter? Tires gone, wheels all twisted and the board’s splitting, but I’ll fix her up when I get to it, I’ll fix her up, keep things going here, maybe one of Juney’s kids – but they’ll not be coming, their mother said so, and they’d whispered “crazy convict” and “Ma, he smells so bad” – or some little fellow out by the Volga, playing on the river bank . . . Picks, picks, picks, shining points like silver in the black rock. Gentle in the high grade, kind of taste the difference. Reluctant, mostly, to give up her gold, a kind of game.

  Packing out the high grade on your burros, packing to the stamp mill at Lady. Weigh it careful, you and Jamie.

  geological

  tying

  tying

  inner

  the

  pockets

  of

  love

  Back down Clem’s road. Clapboard and shingle cabins, one’ll be yours for a time, Jamie. Heaps of their tin cans, rusted and new, bottles, stoneware whiskey jugs – lose the instinct, Indians, prospectors, to clean camp when they leave. Around the shoulder and you’ll see the sun’s light coming up white behind the Little San Bernardinos to the southwest – where one day you’ll be pulling a fresno scraper up to the ridge, finishing Spear’s Outlook few days after you’d put Jamie to his rest, in ’twenty-five it was. Black the mountains against that light. And off to the north the jumbled skyline, where the red-tailed hawk is circling. The rockpiles to the west of Lady Mountain, rockpiles of granite, quartz monzonite, you’d know that or you’d not be a mining man, intruded from beneath into the pinto gneiss and left when the gneiss eroded off. Wonderland, where you got your ranch, where you’ll settle now, up in the hidden valleys, your garden of the gods, rich and fertile pockets in the rock jumble, some encouragement – dams, Will, dams in the right places and the desert will be flowering for you – pockets where the wild hay grows up to your waist, where cattle will stay with just a gate between the rocks, almost, behind the ranch, walled in natural, thousands of acres, clear over almost to Willow Hole, though you might be losing some up in there for years. Hidden valleys full up with flowers in the early spring after the rains, thick like ripening rye – the sand verbena, primroses, harebells, globemallows, desert sage – scoop the wild honey on your hot cakes, in your tin of coffee.

  Water, old Minton’s well, put up a tank and windmill pump, dam right back in the rockpiles behind where you’ve got your privy over the wash.

  rain

  Water for the final washing of the stamped ore, for you’ll be setting up a stamp mill on the edge of the pasture, dry mining, and when you’ll be short you can reuse it by settling out the mud with lime. Eldorado, they’d had to pipe their water nine miles from Piñon Wells.

  sap

  Water, you’ll see an orchard, fruit for the picking, vegetables, melons, even cutting flowers maybe; but what’d an old feller of forty be thinking of flowers for? And a big washtub with the water sluicing through, wash hanging out, great white sheets in the sun; but what’d a mining man, a ranching man, alone in the desert, be having with sheets?

  milk

  blood

  A lake backed up, ice, a swim, alders and cottonwoods and willows finding their way there after a bit. Drink for the deer and the bighorns; for the doves when they come through in the spring bringing with them the thousands of buzzards; bees dipping down before going in for the night. Kind of makes life thicker.

  Home, Will.

  graves

  they

  need

  tidying

  Slicked up, Will, wagon to Banning, train on to L.A. Mining equipment, material for the dam you’d build, fencing, saddles, a long list for the ranch. Prosperous, Willy, Jerry Dan, who watched a cougar’s tail flick, his saddlebags half empty and that’s all he had but a lot ahead, a lot ahead . . . Prosperous, gold in the pockets. “Looking for gold in the heart,” you’d write in San Quentin, and she’d know what you meant. Gold in the heart. Soft eyes, to touch, to be touched. O Jenny, Jenny, down by the river bank. Janice, petticoated in the Panamints, set Choctaw Will a-trembling. Could tell about Janice, to Diamond George MacMillan, and the Chuckawalla Fiend, and Minton, who worked the Desert Lady, and Bill McQuillen. But not about Jenny, with her fingertips on the ivory keys.

  Slicked up and you’d be thinking of the figure you’d cut with your black hat straight ’round with none of that curl they’ll do today to be smart, and your black coat to your ankles, your beard trimmed shorter and your mustaches waxed up nice. The flashing eyes, the dark blue shirt with the white tie, black button boots. And you’d get your photo took, one of those places where they set you in front of a painted background, tidy things up. You’d a cane then, shiny, for the show . . . Touch them, reassuring, lying beside your tormenting knees, lying on the grave.

  The Rothenstein Hotel, all done up nice, the clerk banging on his bell, plush and velvet, oysters. So gallant with the girl cashier. So pretty and smiling, her hair all up, her dress to the ground all billowing and bows. And she’d join you with her two sisters if her mother said she could, for Sunday.

  don’t mind

  the other

  rutting

  The beach, the Pacific stretched out to the back side of Russia, gulls the hawks of the sea, the pier walking out on its wooden legs into the dirty waves. Bill, three sisters, but only Helen . . . My Mana, my Mana . . . all in white. Her black brimmed hat tied on so dainty with a lace scarf under her pretty chin . . . So soft and smiling from her window in the sky.

  rutting

  Three sisters on a photographer’s burro, side-saddling; prospector Will, who struck it r
ich, standing by. Posing together by the beach houses, then one by one.

  St. Louis, they’d come from, back East, and before that from England, with their mother. St. Louis kind of wrote the rules tight . . . Jenny, Jenny, you’ll not to mind too much . . . Helen Jane, I’ll be back soon.

  business, the ranch and the mine, and there’ll be postcards to send.

  nickelodeon

  the

  boardwalk

  Helen Jane, will you have me,

  Will you be my desert queen?

  Will you come with me, will you ride with me,

  Will you see what a home can mean?

  One knee, Willy, that’s the style,

  Your beard to brush her hand.

  And the parlor scene, permission,

  Would Mother understand?

  Would Helen Jane, Miss Moorton, your daughter, M’am, be thinking you’ve got a castle out there, a kind of mansion in Eden? You’d be not one for running things down as they are, let off how they could become. Will Spear, cut a figure you did, and the stories, they had their way of multiplying, the loaves and the fishes, though you weren’t much one for the Bible in those days. Four men to his name, though best not to say just which. No stranger to places of refreshment and entertainment. Scotty, no mean entertainment. Scotty, no mean myth to be a part of, and the Windy Pass, and the Boston Gun Club, and the Young’s Hotel ball, and Buffalo Bill teaching you his draw.

  A wagon trip, two good days from Banning over the pass and out onto the desert and up to Morongo Valley and high into the Joshua trees and on and home, however loaded with high-price furniture that might show pretty good and all that equipment. A wagon trip can shake up more than some, for a girl all dressed in white, so soft, no end of high-blown stories.

  But she kept the dust to herself, kept so much to herself, or maybe mostly it didn’t hurt, and when it did there might be tears and then she’d look on up ahead – where her firstborn, hers for three days, lay. Drawn, the twilight shining in her tears, and then the sweet smile as she brought you your plate, her touch as she lay by your side.

  the others

  ribbons

  on their

  garters

  Two days in the wagon. How many times would it be, how many years before the stage, and the trucks, the cars that all but one lie dying in the yard, the buses, trailers and campers crawling in? Maybe once a year, six months maybe. One day, it’d take, down to Wilder Well; his windmill brought you water, and the hay carried in the wagon, and grass still, though dwindling even then, camped there for the night or maybe a bed and a meal in his ranch and bottle of something of this or that to leave with him on the way back. On to Banning, the Spokane Hotel, a week. Take in the shows, a livelier town there wasn’t in those days, railhead. Provisioning a hundred pounds of flour, if you’d not enough, clothing, furniture, fancy things. The heavy equipment for the ranch and the mine would come out special with the carter’s team. Sometimes the children too, June and little Robin.

  no one

  to

  lie

  Your doctor’s there now, right where you’d camped – the buzzing and the itching’s bad behind the ears, under your hat (hair to your shoulders, half-breed), the little blue-and-white pills for the blood pressure – in his ranch-style house with his airplane in the garage and the nurse’d say when you get there, three hours after sunup, “Uncommon early, seven-thirty, can’t you read? You’ll have to wait; all right, all right, I’ll tell him.” And the windmill’s gone.

  me

  down

  Or later with the truck. And then the touring car with the truck body on back for to carry supplies, and the children when they came, camp all night, make quite a thing of it, even if the road’s in good shape and could have kept on, out there at the mouth of Dry Yucca Canyon.

  Or Cotton’s ranch, Finn Cotton, the son, stay there even if no one at home and leave the quart of brandy under the hay in the manger.

  Or on by train to Los Angeles, provisioning’s cheaper, send it back to Banning while you’d be seeing the girls and Mother, and maybe see the magic show again and have a glass with your friend the magician; Captain Claude his son, L.A. fire chief.

  washing

  my feet

  my

  child

  There’d not be another I’d let take me like that, by the arm, help me to my feet; even she’s drying my cheeks with her sleeve, this Lily. No, no, we’ll leave the jeep, I’d like to walk home, watch the moon for a bit, see if it’s back in orbit, should be no more’n two feet above or below Venus, kind of feel it will be, been out since the atom bomb. I’m all right, I’m all right, no, no, I’ll get the firewood in (or would she be doing this to make me young, not old?).

  Walter, sitting on the doorstep, waiting for old Will. Walter and Will, when there used to be such laughter and running about and visiting, school, McQuillen, Jamie Pope for a piece, the teacher, the crew, and pets of skunks and snakes and the eagle and the coyote, the horses and mules and burros, chickens, twelve hundred cows, pigs. What else?

  close out

  close in

  Fiddling for the keys, keys for everything now, and we’d used to leave everything open, even when we were at Banning maybe for a good spell. The teams would come by, help themselves to grub and shelter and the fire, and they’d leave off something, maybe money or provisions, and a note on the table, and everybody knew Will Spear. Only postbox there down at the junction then, for all to see, Speare Ranch – drop the “e,” that fellow down at Serrano Palms – Leev Mail Here Pleas Serrano Palms Stage. Now it’s a town and filling stations and old folks come up to retire and die. Nineteen twenty-one, and the nearest post office Serrano Palms and then Dale where Abe Grant ran it with the saloon, and when Dale closed up Abe took off with the government money and they’re still looking for him.

  Fig Tree John at Salton Sea, how’s he fit? Don’t remember.

  Kov orchard

  sister

  with the

  yoke

  Figs and fruits and all the fresh vegetables. Honey, wild and you’d be off with the Missis, with Mana, sweet Mana the children would call you, the only time you’d be got on a horse, off to follow the bees, and later you’d get hives with J & M, Minton’s hives, when the wild bees began to disappear with the drying up of the high desert, and you’d no longer find their honey in the old Joshua logs and the rock caves, honey of the piñon and the blue sage and the mesquite, best there is. Flowers, the armloads you’d bring back with Mana and the children from Rattlesnake Canyon in the spring.

  immortal

  cycling

  The children, June and Robin, they’d learn to swim, back in the lake, the first dam you’d built, they’d helped with the hauling. Robin shooting black-tailed deer in ’thirty-seven, dead shot learned from Dad . . . That cougar tail is flicking, Willy boy, he ll be on you . . . Drove off twenty-four bighorns once, and the cliff hawk circling above them, diving at them, shrieking angry at them where her nest was, all white-splashed from the droppings, and slice down through the sky at you too, whistle by your hat.

  Manzanita and lupin, the rabbit brush black with its silver stems. Would you be dreaming, Will, of finding a soft rock, stretching out on it, just feeling your desert around you? But it’d not do, with the south fence line still to ride and the bags of high grade from last season still to mill and Mana to be got to the doctor soon, her fourth. You can think it, though, and that’ll be enough, and you’ll never stop working while there’s daylight. Bed happy, not long after the gold has faded from the rockpiles, always happy, kind of knowing there’s something done today, results, yours and no one can cut you from them. Safe and self-sufficient and doing what you’re made to do and it’s what man’s destructing now with all his machines and his pleasure-seekings and his fornicating when the female’s out of season. Mistakes you’ve made too, Willy, but now you know. Bed happy, Helen Jane beside you, all filled out and the bumping inside, warm and gentle and you’d n
ot want more.

  Golden years.

  Breathe, old Will, breathe deep. Give life.

  O mystic

  Child

  riddles

  your

  wisdom

  Lose life too, four standing back there. Home, and the gray fox’ll be sniffing there already and the kangaroo rats racing out of his way. Soft and sure in the moonlight. Four without regret. Two little fellows, three days, hadn’t a chance, hospital and all. Robin, we’ve taken off the windlass now, but we’d done our best and we didn’t know and your laughter still comes across the wash, and Mana’s there beside you. Too, her time had come, the hospital, San Gorgonio Pass by Banning. Our desert lady, home.