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What Remains in the DesertZachary Redfearne
Because to face your fear is to end something, you jumped.
Clouds clear the foothills without rolling. As though it can in one night reconcile an arid summer, the storm breaks upon the valley the way a wolf pack will clear a rise with a howling that culminates in fur and fang. The rain, for all its apparent voracity, is still pulled down by its own weight. It falls, never up, never across. Far off the cannon of the siege sounds, a delayed response to the flashes that cascade over the saguaro and feast on the poles that hold gray barreled transformers aloft as offerings to Thor. A power line tears, whips sparks in all directions, no longer able to contain lightning's domesticated cousin. Like you, electricity can be a comfort or it can destroy.For a moment, I stand transfixed behind the tall adobe wall and wonder if that which protects also defines fear. Then I look over the prickly pear yard for anything that may need to come inside. The redwood Adirondack chair has been quietly sinking into the ground since I was last here. No desert wind could lift it now. My mother's tomatoes, strung over chicken wire along the house, will have to fend for themselves. The windows are pressed so deep into the thick strawbale walls that they have never been shuttered. It has come to this, a possibly fatal complacency vulnerable to flash floods.I have come out here alone, mid-August, to talk to you while mother is visiting Celia in Taos. You were a father who loved from a distance, provided without risk to yourself, so I can find you only when my life is empty and the day promises a mixing of symbols. Afternoon thunderheads are going to throw their grim bodies down the valley, then, reluctant to hold back their light, pick at us with lightning bolts. What did you expect? This is the perfect backdrop for time with you.For years you smoked, smoldered, took in what dissipates. My eyes teared with dust as I watched you burn into ash. Our days were always like this: living on the approach of a fire or storm that could suddenly reverse back on anything chasing its fury.The grouse have now silenced themselves. The geckos that frequent the rock garden are gone into their private lives. The Russian Olive hunkers up its spine. No portentous winds have warned of an impending darkness, but those who have been out here know. With the really big storms, night arrives early.Inside, the house looks unnaturally dark. Candles flicker weakly in the humid air, so I light the lantern to wash dishes by. Then it is time to bring in the rug off the line. It won't dry anymore today, so I roll it in the north room where the shadows pile thickly under the windowless wall where you slept. My plans for today's garden will have to wait. This is a better time for baking sourdough biscuits and preparing a pot of peppered stew.I may have gotten my cooking skills from you, though you so rarely indulged. Instead, you tried to dissolve into wine. So many things around you—cranberry, grape, pear, even dandelions—could be made into wine. Looking out from the kitchen onto the stalwart elm, I imagine you standing so. I imagine your tasting something like dandelion wine. We scattered about you like leaves, tried futilely to worship you as a mystery. We bowed down so that you could not push us away. Your shade was like moonshade, so thick we bumped into each other.The heat of the wood stove bubbles through raspberries I gathered this morning. I add enough sugar to thicken them into a syrup and think of how all our attempted affections only thickened your heart. It must have been something akin to this fruity smell that kept us here. My hands deftly reach for cinnamon and ginger as though I'd never left.The rain approaches up the slope and threatens the sort of mudslides that inspired you for their ability to cover up, to alter the landscape, to be heard. I tried to listen, heard sorrow in every shift. I tuned myself to what I could not have. You would not give your life to any other for its safekeeping.Back on the porch with biscuits and fruit syrup when the first drops begin to fall, I almost hear you call to me with a name I didn't keep. I couldn't remain your inheritance, and all that entailed. All your answers stretched into one-way roads I couldn't navigate. You gave me hands too small for such courage.A raven lands on the second porch chair with a reflection of you in its eye. I surprise myself by offering it a biscuit. When you were in the hospital, for a moment I found you within reach, then too soon, gone. I could not catch your barreling body, didn't know how to love close.Now I am left looking for you. Last year when some whales beached, I combed the sandy shore for a sign. A gull cawed, but not with your voice. Each time the weather shifts I check the shadows, or the spaces of sky cooling after the sun has burned them. Maybe you'll start out small: a match that can so perilously take a forest, or in a mirror that only I can see into.
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