The Joshua Tree Read online

  the

  divine

  wilderness

  Turn off and up into the hills. Turn and turn, off into the desert tracks, lost in the rockpiles, found where the Joshua tree reaches out over the blackbush and the lavender wolfberry, stretches its arms, its pointed leaves, into the retreating sky, its spear over Canaan.

  PLEASE ASK PERMISSION TO LOOK AROUND

  Through the gate in his fence of Joshua logs. Wait by the table and the bench and the mattresses deep-hollowed to his shape. He’d have heard the car door slam. Wait, Colin, let him greet you under the Joshua tree.

  where

  Shuffling on the thin floor, the weathered door swinging, “Well, well, yuh, so it’s you come back, and this’d be the Lily girl you wrote of, sit down, sit down, while there’s sun enough.”

  I

  must

  search

  alone

  Before it got quite dark and we had had our Cactus Coolers and listened to Will about how Jim McKinney killed three or four up in north California and hit out for the Mexican border and how Sheriff Henry Loven went out and got him, by golly, at the Caesar Mine, and about how the only hope for the world is to divide all the land up into self-sustaining farms, now that hunting has gone, so machines can’t ruin us for sure, and the government should spend all that war money getting fresh water from the sea, about being guardians with his big brother of that orchard on the Volga and how their sister would bring them hot food in pails on a yoke and they’d feed their dog in a hole in the ground and watch the so pretty blonde girl who guarded the next orchard. Before it got quite dark my Colin had gone.

  Oh! I’ll write you write you every day, and won’t you?

  Far off, flown to discover his father. Whatever he said about always being right here beside you. And behind your smiling kiss as you wished him strength and love and luck were salt seas of tears drowning all consolation.

  are these

  echoes

  Turn to details, here, lying undisturbed and unconcerned about you, adopting you, some of you. Colin’s old Will, his checked wool cap with its corduroy earflaps, his old cardigan, his patched pants taking shape and life from his knotted bent-out knees and his withered buttocks, the fly all torn and safety-pinned, the canvas shoes. His lips sucked in to the gums, his eyes slanted down with the years, his cheeks in loose creases, the two sharp folds of flesh from his chin running down under his pale plaid shirt.

  of his

  Inner Voice?

  The myriad items of his life ordered in disorder about him, his memories and his needs, the array of familiarity. Each a part of him, of his breath and his touch and the gaze of his liquid blue eyes across the teeming room and out the sagging door and over the collection of his ninety years, up to the Joshua tree, the distant piñons and nolinas and the confusion of granite against the sky.

  Details to comfort you, yet your spirit has been torn from you and is far far off. You are a shell, a snail shell dusty in the desert. Will, his lips tight together, his eyes drifting to the past, away, sad in you, and sad there is no reaching out between you – friendship should need no time. Oh! touch him, Lily, open, gain and let gain from your love. Flower in the desert sun.

  For this, Colin has brought you here, to old Will, his desert, his time. Your father is behind you, to go to when you will. Here to find with Will the wholeness, the going on, to wait Colin’s coming, free too, he must, he must.

  seize!

  hold!

  savor!

  be!

  You will spring, just tomorrow, to the rough back of your bighorn, swift through the spring perfumes. You will breathe the desert, embrace it, it will hold you to its flesh. As the days pass you will sit again with Will by the Joshua, by the piñon in the setting sun, the moon looping low. At the kitchen table, black albums soaking up the oil light. You will sleep to the voice of the bat, wake to the cry of the hawk, gold pulling from across the draw. Black water; graves scratched by the passing of creatures.

  Letters will come from your Colin, troubled still, failing to embrace his father. You will reach out to him, put your cheek to his heart, whisper to him across the distance about the strength of your desert ram.

  And his last letter, to his Liliana Touch o’ Heaven, Box 367, a year and two days since that night of the Dance of Disorder. You will read it in the dim light, the Joshua wood giving you its last heat, Will sleeping at the back in their old double bed, the desert voices ringing in the night.

  you told

  me

  fire is

  madness

  or

  force

  My dearest Lily: It is past, for I have dreamt and I have learned. I was imprisoned, deep at the bottom of a rock-walled pit, its opening far above against the sky, and at the edge the small black figure of my father looking down. Escape, the crude steps, the heavy door, the ladder. Yet each is set on fire by the command of that figure above, each escape barred by flames.

  Finally I do escape. I turn the flames on my father, to consume a great edifice on which so much of his twisted energy had been spent. I go, stepping over barbed wire, out across the earth, naked, free, on my heart the touch of heaven.

  Your Colin.

  Those fathers, as they sprang from your inner hearts, as you demanded they be, as they could never be – you have killed them. May they live in truer form. The one; you wanted him as an idol, a perfection, there to receive all the power of his Lily’s love and libido. The other, a man of excellence, of power and success; you expected, Colin, that he too would converse with the inner voice, accepting the rebellion, attacked and attacker.

  Those were your fictions.

  Voices of the wilderness, speak to Lily

  So, Lily, as you lie here in the dark, as the voices of the night, softly in the air, tell you of distance and time and the eternity of moments, what can you take to you?

  all squared

  and

  numbered

  Reality? but all your reality springs from you. Then need your killing of one reality, your image of your father, be replaced only by another still coming from you? Yes? But if you also admit others’ realities, your father’s of himself, others’ of him, then yours can be both all and almost nothing. Can you let the others in, can you accept as many worlds as dwellers, or only yours?

  Philosophical constructions, snarled about you like the cat’s claw that grabs at a fawn; but the intuitions, the feelings, what are they, where are they?

  Let the voices speak, the immediate, the now, the here.

  But damn the rational! Why must it even threaten? Avoiding avoiding the true examination, deep down, here, in here, this is what counts. You’d hear the voices and grammar gets in the way, rules and theories. Leave poor Lily be!

  Let the voices speak.

  soft

  circles

  numberless

  The breath from the bat’s wing, is it joyful? Oh let it be not out for bugs, just flying for the fun. The scrape when it hooks back onto its rafter in the corner. Oh and coffee, grounds boiled over on the Majestic, roasting still on the rusty lid – and you’d be no more orderly than he and enjoy it so – almost sweet like chocolate: back streets of Mediterranean towns, how can the passers-by, the others, not notice and stop and want to stay forever by that grilled window where they’re roasting inside? The sigh of embers settling in their ashes, the stovepipe cracking as it begins to cool. Against the sweet soft voice of the owl in the piñon. The coyote calling from the moon.

  From the firewood in the box by the door the tiny chewing of termites; may they be happy for they must burn at the stake. Rustlings under the floorboards as the desert rat picks up crumbs that have fallen through the cracks. A moth’s despair against the window glass who’d go back to the stars now these false lights here, gained with such exhaustion, are gone – but why, then, why don’t they fly on and on to the shining sky of the night, never to return?

  no

  meaning


  Distant deep breathing, Will in his back bedroom. The bed with the sheets brown with dust, and what does it matter and who’s to know and “Got to get these changed but the knees and it’s not easy.”

  all

  meaning

  His Mana’s quilt, the bleeding wallpaper. Always the inside place against the wall, only the inside, to be easier for Mana, back and forth. Her steps, a feverish child, the long robe, stirring his poetry paper on the floor, her slippers on the linoleum. A faint faint chord on the piano. The wind clicking the latch, Will’s trembling key now the sanctity has gone. Robin on tiptoe with his muddy fingers. A tremor in the weathered frame: the wind, or Jack the jackass, rapist, scratching his forehead on the boards, back from the sage . . . Found him by watching the buzzards and then the flies, bloated.

  A distant motor, they’re reaching reaching. Or is it Colin? Coming up through the sand, that rattle in his car they’d never find, a rabbit racing across, the final rise, the motor cut and the lights out and water gurgling in the radiator, hot steamy metal smell, and flying flying into his arms and whirled around and around and words all tumbled together. If it were! if it were! Another voice, or the many voices about him. Joining, to mingle with so many others, with yours. Special, but not alone.

  to

  be

  alone

  is

  to

  He will come, and you will hold each other and be each other, so warm and pure and naked. And you’ll know him, you’ll hold him from you just so, to know him. And the other voices will talk to him too, not quite though as they’ve talked to you, the web of conversation, each his own, each the other. Hold him from you for now you know you cannot be one. Each his own, each voice, and to make another’s yours is not to hear, is to deny. The hollow unheard voice. Yes, my Lily, you must drive those knives deep, each the other. Only now can the sowing, the harvesting, the cycling, true, begin. Let him speak to all, and all to him, be heard, hear.

  join

  I hear

  To hear all is to love all, but less than all all all and it is but yourself you hear and love. For man this is not enough. Here, Lily, lying, hard, the thin mattress on the cold floor, each voice measured against you, accepted or rejected. The coyote: his voice a thin rope to the sky, tying heaven and earth; his voice to catch a bullet if you spot him. The shifting embers: the seed, the trunk, the food of love, the awful chill of the morning, numb-fingered kindling, roaring, the warm creeping in delight down your spine; death and let him do it, he knows how, is used to it. So so so. The privilege of the moment, the endless duty. Choose the moment, listen; duty, the excuse to resist and hate. Listen and all will hear.

  Speak to all

  Skeleton fingers of the cottonwood rasping on the eaves of the upper floor. The crackling of frozen BVD’s on the galvanized wire out back. Scents of night blooming, a skunk’s regard for gray fox.

  Your treasure, Will

  my

  Treasure

  won

  Rush in, down into your warm old crooked self, Mana’s quilt with the musty smell . . . Fades fast, the glittering treasure, all colors, studding the inner chamber in the mountain cone, Robin on your shoulder. Look now, son, for it’s only once in a lifetime . . . Dry throat scratched up from the breathing, eyes half stuck. Lie still and the aches’ll stay away.

  in the

  Mystic

  Center

  Scratching on the eaves, you’d a fixed it once, pruned up some. Never matter. Rustlings, movings about, stirrings upstairs. Kids restless for the first sun to point in over Lady Mountain, run the trap line. Come banging down the outside stairs, you out to the milking. Tighten up that garden fence. Vegetables for us, not rabbits.

  air

  flows

  Snapping on the clothesline, spring freeze, sun’ll fix that soon enough, and they’ll be flapping with the morning wind and Mana’ll have them in for the fraying and they’re bleached enough and more. Flapping flapping, the crossed-stick scarecrows cocked over the fields of Kov, Kov on the Volga. Will she be bringing it soon, John, I’m so very hungry? So white with her scrubbing and the desert sun. White when you walked up on the ice behind your first dam, for remembering, Helen holding to your arm to keep from slipping and maybe she’d been thinking too how deep it’d be. For remembering. Her hair’s all white too, pinned up tight, you’d know it, under her white knit cap-scarf tied over the black wool jacket. Brown hair, short straight to her shoulders, flapper, her cotton dresses to her ankles, always, all her life . . . Watch down on me, old Helen ... and her tight smile and her happy eyes. Getting sadder, sad and far, up there on the ice with Walter, is that Walter?

  soft

  through

  all

  moments

  Sad, had it been too hard? Had you done that to her, Will? Ride for the wild honey, armfuls of flowers, sunset sitting and the children at their lessons, bedmates you’d not done so bad, snow fights when it came in deep. Hard on her. Little fellows dying. Robin. You getting wrought up, caught in trouble over Milton Hitter.

  And Crabble. Had no business, damn him! Five years and only Mana, June for a time, and the cattle going and the weeds coming in, and things needing fixing everywheres. San Quentin. “Harris, you’ll come to see me?” Harris, your youngest brother, telegraph operating with the UP, that’s all you’d hear from, a fine man, a fine man.

  Crabble, stretched out there, flopped out dead, his finger on the trigger, revolver, Colt thirty-eight. Hat gone and his hair hanging down, his glasses from one ear, his shirt soaking in the blood.

  See, sheriff, no other tracks but Crabble’s. Will, you’d not gone near him after the shooting. Just fixed up the gasoline pump to water the cattle for’d figured this might keep you away for a spell, and turned yourself in to the Justice of the Peace. You can say all you’ll want that he’d been murdered first and then the pistol shot once and put in his hand, but there’s no tracks.

  STAY OFF PROPERTY, SPEAR, THIS

  IS MY LAST WARNING

  liked

  it

  that way

  And all those threats he’d kill you, trying to claim your piece, get at the water hole, best in the valley. Temper to boil oil, even when he’d first come, and you’d not trust him far as you could throw a bull by the tail. Deputy sheriff over in Los Angeles County, good man with a thirty-eight. Temper, though, damn what a temper. Retired to ranching, Merit Crabble, neighbor. But he’d be liking better water and you’ve got it, homestead, all proved up. Cahoots with the cattle and the railroad interests and the sheriff too. Got it in for you all right.

  Will?

  Waiting for you, knew you’d be coming as you’d always done. Waiting back of that Joshua, with a log across so’d you’d have to stop and get out. Comes toward you, you stepped out of the pickup, blue Dodge, lets at you as you drop ’cause you knowed it was coming. Slam into the pickup door and you’ve got your rifle, automatic, from the cab ’fore you’d know it, and you’d not expect another chance, missing old Will once. Dead shot still, old Will, sixty-six back in ’forty-three that was, and you’d three shots in him while he was cocking. He’d not move again.

  And now the best he is is a piece of stone you’d chipped out, this root of a hand, hauled it up with Lily in the jeep to the site, set in concrete.

  HERE IS WHERE

  MERIT CRABBLE

  BIT THE DUST

  AT THE HAND

  OF W F SPEAR

  JUNE 3 1943

  uncommon

  itchy

  Will?

  Five or six others, maybe. Where’d they be now? Nebraska, Montana, Arizona Territory. Where’d they be? You’d not remember. Dead shot and they’d not so much as nicked you. Tail flicking back of that log, closest yet. Now they’d stole your rifles, all inlaid silver and gold, Indian work, just a bit ago, but you’ve the old one still and you’ll have it on them revenooers if they’re up here for you.

  Manslaughter, they’d got you on. Justice. The only jus
tice you make yourself. San Quentin looking over the Bay, scenic. Helen Jane, and the weeds’ll be coming, the summer and the irrigation, cattle-watering if they haven’t stolen them off. The windmill and the fences to fix and the firewood, pumps and the truck and the horses. Dams to build, Canaan.

  floating

  fading

  She danced so pretty, that Mexican girl, with the Riders, down by the Barker dam. Paint her, Will, with her long black skirt and her red red lips and the tambourine. Write her a little poem, down by the river bank. June dancing for her little brother, a tarantella on the table under the piñon. They’d give you paints and paper and even you’d go in to San Francisco, Doctor Gunther he’d said you could, trusty, to get those special fancy writing-pen points at the Weyerhaeuser store.