West of Here

We come to the river
To drink the water
Cause someone told us
There’s life there

She was always singing, my Mama. Low singing, off-key singing, sad singing. Songs of death. Songs about people who murdered for love. I never understood these songs, what the people were thinking – dragging the girl to the river to slit the throat, watch the blood stream red while pressing her against the chest, caressing the lily-white hand.

Mama just said some people weren’t quite right in the head when it came to loving but one shouldn’t judge those broken souls for their lack of knowing better, and she should know.

But listen, Honey, just you listen:
“I murdered the girl I loved you see
Because she would not marry me”

It is strange, but…

Oh, but isn’t it a beautiful thought?

***

I caught Daddy at the door listening in on such a time. The arm of his Carrhart caught a nail and I caught sight of his tall frame before he could walk away unnoticed. At dinner that night, Mama chatting away about everything and nothing at all, he watched her so close. When she would glance his way, his eyes would falter, he’d give her a smile, a small nod, look down at the empty fork coming to his mouth, embarrass, reach down and start all over again.

He seemed so unsure of himself then –full of doubting and on guard. It made me sad or something like it. It made me want to protect him.
And all the while, Mama would go on with her talking.

So we drink our fill
And watch intently
The sun falls quickly
We look so much the same

Mama’d have these attacks. A feeling, I guess, kinda just got under her skin. All her sadness would seem to jump-start inside her, leave her struggling for breath, red rushing to her feet, hands, arms, legs – all the way through her.

And then the eye of that terrible storm – where she seemed dead and peaceful – yea, peaceful, I always thought. I wasn’t supposed to touch or talk to her then. But that was difficult – to not reach out, whisper to her – for in that moment, well, she was the most beautiful then. Like a corpse at a viewing done up right – not all waxy and unreal, like my aunt Jane looked – but sleeping, pretty, like one always imagines one’s own death looking.

But she wasn’t dead. Just something inside her. And in that calm in which I dared not touch nor speak, in that calm where I understood she’d be up and gone in a few days; that calm, where her body barely fluttered, that’s when I knew how much I needed her.

And on coming back, the red would disappear from her face, her hands, her feet, arms and legs. And sure enough, as I sat staring, she’d up herself, take a deep breath, and leave.

* * *

After she left that last time, Daddy wouldn’t talk about her. He kept on in spite of the heaviness made his gait slower, his movements hardly there. His speaking voice even slowed down – becoming a slur to the drawl he’d been born to in Texas. I would never again hear him utter her name or make even the slightest mention – save for the few times I’d come home to his sitting in his chair dead-drunk and calling out to her, tongue sweet and thick from all the drink.

And so it was that I learned early on never to bring her up. It was if we had communicated at night – during a rare deep sleep – when bones talk and bodies listen – and the habit is born. You wake and it just is. Existing in place of that terrible other: the desire to know and understand why she left at all, the she we still wanted; and, mostly, why we couldn’t stop yearning for her.

* * *

It was a short time after we’d stopped talking about her that Parker, our dog, got sick. I watched Daddy from the kitchen window, pulling Parker out back, shotgun at his side. Parker looked up at Daddy all apologizing, for what he didn’t know.
It was a sunny day and that didn’t seem right, somehow.

Daddy walking with his head hung low, feet shuffling the ground, Parker half-crawling, half-dragged at the end of the rope now being tied to the back fence post. There would be no bird to retrieve, no grateful smile and roughing of the ears. And there would be no play and no reward for dropping the bird at Daddy’s feet unscathed, no teethmark, no riled feathers.

He knew the gun had something to do with his own death.

After tying him to the fence, Daddy walked backwards a few steps, aimed and cocked, met his eyes before the trigger, and Parker was gone.
It was too much. It was too goddamn much. Love had become too hard.

On his coming back to the house, Daddy grabbed some ice out of the Fridgidaire, brushed right by me standing frozen at the window, walked to the pantry, poured himself a glass of bourbon, lit a cigarette, sat down in his chair, and shut his eyes to it all.

I stayed at the window looking out at Parker all still and unmoving. Wanting so much, straining to see some blood. But daddy’s shooting was too neat, too precise. The bullet pierced clean through and Parker just lie there, calm, as he had been every night, at the foot of my bed, for the past five years.

This is what death felt like.

I lit the cigarette I’d stolen from dad’s pack earlier that morning, stood at that window, staring at Parker, for I don’t know how long.

Walking back along the path
We’d known since we were children
You shook your head
I turned my tears inside

I had never seen the ocean. Though my mama told me about it. She’d talk of water all the time. Water of all kinds. She’d tell me stories of a river called Jordan. How some water takes your sinning self and washes you clean. Clean as snow, she’d tell me, clean as the day you were born.

Shortly before she left that last time she came into my bedroom, smoothed herself a place to sit at the foot of my bed, sat, lit a cigarette and stared at me reading my book. It was funny because it seemed to me that she was taking me in. Like one does with someone that looks familiar but you’re not so certain. So when she spoke, I gently closed my book, kept it in my lap. I dared not put it up on the shelf. I was scared that sudden movement might startle Mama out of this place she was in.

She took notice of my dropped hands and took one in hers. Oh Honey, Mama sighed. Honey, Honey. It’s frightful, this living. You just don’t know until you’re older and all your dreaming is gone from you. I used to write down all my dreams. Did you know that about your mama, Honey?

I was too scared to talk. So I sat, drowning in my mama’s touch, her eyes, the smoke curled round her hands, the hair come loose hanging in her eyes.
Did I ever tell you I was baptized in a river? Not in one of those big bathtubs in the back of the church, but an honest-to-god river?

Well, I was. The Brazos River. Down in Mineral Wells. What a frightening day that was for me. You see, I almost drowned when I was a little girl. At a family picnic or somesuch. All the aunts and uncles, cousins and friends were cooking and drinking and just paying no mind to me and Jane Anne and, meanwhile, she had taken to mind to teach me how to swim.

Well – nothing too interesting about it really, but that I almost drowned, Janie couldn’t help me, it was Uncle Ray saved me. I got a spanking for going in the water at all and spent the rest of the picnic fighting back tears in the back of the pickup trailer with my dolls. Banished, as it were, for giving everyone such a fright.

So when it came time to accept Jesus as my lord and savior, well, it came time for me to face my fear.
Oh, Honey, I was more scared that day than I was struggling for breath caught up in some moss at the bottom of the lake. I didn’t want to do it. Cried and cried to Janie about it. But I didn’t say a word to my mama and daddy. Oh, they wouldn’t of had no patience for a child of theirs refusing Jesus because she was scared of some water. And truth was, I was more scared of my daddy than I was of water or almighty God himself.

So there I was, seven years old, waist-high in the middle of a river, not daring to look my mama or my daddy in the eye, preacher holding me tight, praying his prayers, one hand on my head, the other raised up high, waving at the Lord. And before I could think to call out to Jesus, Janie, or anyone who’d care to save a drowning girl getting baptized, hell, Honey, before I had time to even consider crying, that preacher had dunked me near-clean to the bottom of that river and just as quick had pulled me up to breathe in the sticky summer air. I stood in that muddy water under that hot sun, and after a few minutes, after the shock had worn off, I realized I felt good.

I wasn’t scared anymore.

Mama paused, as if it were too important a thing to say to not get it right.

You know, Honey, I really do believe it was the hand of Jesus come down. Now I don’t know about washing me clean or nothing, but he washed away any fears I had about the water. Just like that. And they were gone.

And that changing can come on and over a person so quick and all….

Well that’s something. Don’t you just think that’s something?

I don’t know if I’d call it a miracle or anything – but I’d sure as hell call it something.

And with that, Mama’s eyes drifted even further away. To where I couldn’t tell you. We sat like that for some time. Finally, she raised herself off my bed, walked to the door, stopped, turned, and looked right at me.

Honey, you might not ever know where that water’s gonna be taking you. But it’ll take you.

Oh Honey, it’ll take you all right.

We went to the river
To drink the water
Cause someone told us
There’s life there