His grandfather bought this land and his father tended it but this was not His land. No trees planted or furrows dug or black cinder patches where the severed limbs of apple or cherry or pear trees had been piled and burned and the ash blown away by night winds charging through the valley like ghosts. All this came before Him and continued after.
Only the halfdozen outhouse trailers welded from scrap at sixteen under the eye of an impressively fat and more impressively strong mechanic named Carl and fixed to the back of ATVs and the now settled mound of earth and the cairn crowned with a shard of petrified wood where he had buried the family dog at seventeen on a western slope.
The Place was planted over a century ago on the valley’s northern edge where gentle slopes began to rise steeply and abruptly transitioned from lush orchards into desert hills and from the top of the hills the orchard in summer was a patchwork of greens light and dark. Took about thirty minutes to walk from one side to the other. A couple miles south at the valley’s lowest point was the river and just along the bank grew elm and willow trees, the only natural green in the valley except in the first days of spring when the cheatgrass sprouted and the biscuitroot bloomed yellow amongst the sage forests on the hillside. This was irrigated country webbed with small canals like veins that ran through the acres and then capillaried to water tree by tree. Fingers with fingers. Illusory green. The hard tan of the desert creeping down the hillside reclaiming itself when winter came again.
The farmhouse was built on top of a small hill shaped like an overturned canoe but He didn’t live in the house anymore. The windows had been boarded up and most of the furniture sold off or gifted away and the books packed up in cardboard boxes and dumped at the anemic local library. Now He stayed in the old filthy trailer out back. Cheap all fiberglass interior cast to look like artisaned stucco. Small two-burner stove. Bathroom infrequently used because the waste tank was small with no place to drain so it didn’t stink. A fold-out dinner table big enough for a few people to eat at or play a few hands of cards so plenty big for Him alone. Beat up acoustic in the corner and out of tune with only four strings. A queen bed so not a bad night’s sleep. Got hot during the day, though. Damn hot when the mercury rose above one-hundred-and-six degrees fahrenheit past noon. Even with the windows wide it took hours to cool at night when the temperature dropped to forty-three.
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Story went that back in Grandpa’s day the house belonged to the manager and his daughter. She took up with some trailertrash from down valley. Begged the manager to give him a try. He needs a job she said so the manager got him set up on picking apples. Looked proud coming in the first day. A good ole boy with burlap picker’s bag looped around his neck and strapped snug behind his waist and unscuffed Timberlands and clean denim. The head foreman (whose name was Alejandro but went by Alex) smiled to himself and shook his head scratching the shortcropped vestiges of gray hair that fringed an otherwise bald brown head and stomped a halfsmoked cigarette out with the heel of a deeply worn boot in need of resoling. Later that day after work the foreman drove into town (about fifteen miles) and had a beer with an old friend at the Gonzales Cantina on the intersection of Elm and St. Elmo. A football (soccer) match played on a small tv mounted over the bar and the volume was turned down and the radio played ranchera with the volume turned up so distortion crackled through old and overused speakers. The foreman mentioned about a new kid who wouldn’t last two weeks and the foreman’s friend laughed. They watched the match. Kid didn’t last the week. The next month the manager comes home and sees a rusty pickup, back filled up with half the living room. Inside the living room he finds the kid carrying off with the stereo. Dad said the manager walked straight past him and the kid running like crazy for the pickup. The manager pulled the shotgun off the rack mounted above the washing machine and blew the thief’s ass clear off. Kid sued the manager and won. Years later still walks with a limp, though.
His father told him that story laughing, He thinks. That was many years since and He found He could not recall the telling clearly. He remembered the gist and there was no way Dad didn’t laugh recounting. Too funny a story. How fragile recollections are. When a memory could only be a dream or daydream recalling an experience of remembering. Something had to be some way and so was pictured even long past the forgetting. He can still see a hospital room, all sterile whites and the metronomic beep of the heartratemonitors and sympathetic nurses. He is four. A baby boy wrapped in a blanket in his father’s arms. Why won’t his eyes open, He asked. Open his eyes. His eyes will never open, His father said, and His mother was crying. Mom and Dad insist He was never there. Who would let a child see that?
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He was naked as He unclasped the latch of the trailer door and stepped down the single creaking step to the ground. The ground paved and cool and wet from the runoff of a broken sprinkler somewhere amongst the apple trees and he urinated into a clump of weeds at the edge of the trees. From behind smokeburned eyes he saw tongues of flame and fingers of ash stretch to the sky.
He woke up then and His mother stood over Him gently shaking Him and He was a boy of eight and there was school the next day. Mom looked giddy and almost worried. He looked out the bedroom window that is now boarded up and saw it was still dark but for a red glow to the latenight air. You have to see this, she said. And the hills were on fire. Faintly through the smoke He saw the firefighter’s caterpillars cutting containment swaths through the scorched hillside. In the morning the fire was gone and the hills were black. Not much to eat. Only cheatgrass and sage and biscuitroot so it gorged itself and then died. He thought it had been a dream.
What happened to the crop He asked his father. Did it burn? No His father said. There was scorching on the perimeter but not a disaster. We kept the sprinklers going all night and the fire did not spread to us. This was nothing! You don’t remember but when you were very little, maybe three (four His mother said) there was a hailstorm. It only lasted a few minutes but when it was done we lost almost all the harvest for that year. We thought we were finished His mother said and His father smiled sadly at the memory. When you’re livelihood depends on nature’s whim every year could be the last. Here there be gamblers.
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Two weeks after the fire subsided the local news ran a short piece detailing a hunter named Norm who often took his pickup into the hills this time of year. The morning of the fire he told his wife he would be home that night but after dark. Don’t wait up. It was supposed he didn’t bag anything. Decided to stay the night. Sleep under the stars. Make himself a campfire. Try again in the morning. They found the pickup just twisted metal and smoking rubber. He was not far off. A grease stain on the hillsides. Charred bones and melted fat. A singed tombstone in a scorched land. The hunter’s widow said he was a nice man.
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His father also told Him a ghost story once, but badly. Not a ghost story really, maybe history, but as close to a ghost story as Dad ever got. Said the upsidedown canoe was rumored as an Indian burial ground. What remained from an old war from before the last century and before statehood in the 1850s, Dad thought, but maybe earlier. Dad said we have to respect this ground because it’s not right to disturb a grave.
It went like this: when the West was settled there was nowhere else to go but farther West. More lands to take in Alexandrian conquest.
And along the riverbank a ravenhaired girl collected water. Her mother was sick and her father and brothers and husband dead from sickness months past. A child kicked inside her and she hoped in secret it was a girl not to ride off and die at war. She rested her swollen feet and ankles in the cool water of the river and filled skins and tied them to a thin strap of hide wrapped beneath her swollen belly. She sang a song about a heron with a broken wing. She threw a pebble which skipped along the water and then sank. She came across two pale men with hairy faces and dressed in dirty cotton shirts and buckskin trousers standing in the river up to their knees shaking metal plates filled with gravel and mud. She saw them before they saw her and she ran, cradling her stomach. She tripped over a jutting willow root. They knew not why they did, but like bears pursued what ran. When they were done they cut her and her blood was drunk by the thirsty summer earth and then gone. The ravenhaired girl’s mother wailed like black smoke that darkened the sky and she never ate or drank again.
The pale men were led naked into a silent village with ropes around their necks by painted warriors mounted on painted horses. Blood dripped from the temple of the calm man with downcast eyes and the other murmured and chattered to himself madly and clutched a bleeding hand missing three fingers to his chest. The calm man’s eyes raised and saw the stare of hundreds looking back amongst the bisonskin tipis and small dying fires and looked skyward and saw the dim awakening of a familiar constellation that these dark eyes knew by a different name and the calm man began to shake. The two men were brought to their knees at the chief’s feet. The chief’s son gripped the hair of the shaking man and brought the tomahawk down and the silence of the village broke like the stutter between lightning and thunder. The muttering man collapsed to his hands with mouth wide in a silent scream and a dark puddle formed around his knees that spread and mixed with a darker pool as red as the western sky before night and then was black. The bodies of the two men were taken several miles from the village in a shallow canyon stretching into the base of the hills where they were picked at by coyotes and vultures and ravens and worms.
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He could hear the wind shift the trailer behind him back and forth across partially deflated tires and it was a warm wind that carried the smell of burning sage and the panicked cries of coyotes. He heard the concussion of Howitzers and the screams of horses cut into jagged clouds of dust and blood. A warparty of threehundred warriors retreating across the river and into the hills pursued by a regiment of fivehundred dragoons with sabers blazing and dragons blasting in the afternoon sun. The scalp of the chief hung from a length of twine tied to the saddle of a captain and the chief’s son was pierced five times by five swords. The captain was honored for his victory against the savage. They made him a Brigadier General and he fought for the Union Army. Shot dead at Chantilly in ‘62. Got a promotion.
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No firefighters now to stop the burning, He thought, standing naked in the firelit red night. Black hills for a time but the hard tan slowly reclaimed the hillside. From the ash sprouted fresh cheatgrass and biscuitroot. Infrequent rains eventually washed the soot away. The sage forests regrew and the coyotes returned to burrow new dens to house molting pups come summertime. Yet this land was different than before like how many thousands of years ago this land was different. Before a great flood carved the valley from a mass of basalt settled from volcanic eruptions even more remote and violent and washed away all but the few who found refuge on the hilltops.
He watched the hills burn for a time and then stepped back up the single creaking step into the stillhot trailer. He lay on top of the sheets and stared at the ceiling and there was a pattern in the fiberglass ceiling like a face and when He closed his eyes He saw the imprint of that face behind His eyelids. In the morning the sunrise squinted from behind the eastern hills and through the smoke, the sky a faint purple glow.