the box Friday, May 9 2008

I have been unable to open the box of letters.

The letters, getting older and more faded, are lovingly tied with ribbon, and rest expectantly in a plastic box — correspondence of love and connection, crossing overseas and back, on an almost daily basis while my father was stationed in Korea.
The letters were sent during 1952, before he was killed, two days after his 21st birthday, 2 months before I was born. He knew Mom was pregnant, before the Marines at Cape Pendleton shipped him out.

* * * * *
The bittersweet legacy of the letters are what I have left; they contain the crux of a story, along with the pile of notes I have filed away, for “one of these days” to write a memoir — “Somebody’s Memoir” — I call it. I have not been in an emotionally stable place to open the letters and to read them, for 15 years. But I promised myself I would do so this summer, after my mother’s death last September.

My parents were high school sweethearts in a tiny town in Texas, giddy with love, tender and intense. Old photographs show them dressed in identical sweaters, leaning into each other next to an old Ford. The Gold Dust Twins. Very young love, when cut short, becomes a legend, a story with no bumps in the road, a story of hope cut off at the quick.

* * * * *

With her gentle hesitance, one day Mother gave me the box of letters, along with paperwork that described the gone-wrong tragedy of his death. These belong to you. It’s okay, isn’t it. Is it okay?

*******
The real story is not the sad sacrifice of a man to his country, like current news reports on the war in Iraq that spin the deaths of young men (and women) slaughtered by “the enemy” into heroic and acceptable events.
The real story is that my father was murdered, in “friendly fire”, in the most horrendous way, while getting ready for church at the unit he was stationed in Korea. An idiot boy who was cleaning his rifle, aimed at my father, thinking the bullet chamber was empty, and fired into my father’s heart, leaving blood on the tiny bible he carried in his pocket. I heard from my mother — the one time she spoke of the incident, even longer ago than giving me the box —that the boy “went crazy” and had to be shipped back to the States, where he was held in the mental ward of a government hospital. Neither one of us cared about that. At least this young man came home alive. As the story goes, she said would be no forgiveness when a priest from the prison called to ask her to help this young man by writing to him. What is his story? I used to be so filled with sad rage that I did not care. Now I wonder how the man’s life unfolded, if he had a life tinged with awful regret, if he is even alive.

* * * * *
My maternal grandmother told me my mother collapsed when the Western Union telegram arrived, lay on the couch with her body turned towards the back of it until I was born. I do not think in her entire life that she ever recovered, even though later she was able to move on when she met my stepfather, who she did love deeply, with an adult love, and with whom she shared a rich life.
Except for the one time she gave my “the box” and told me the real story of my dad’s death, she kept her own counsel on the matter. This was her way. I believe the repression of deep pain is the reason she suffered so many health problems and a numbing “housewife addiction” to painkillers.
There have been studies that infants in the womb experience their mother’s emotions. I still experience the churning water of turbulence within her womb when Western Union delivered the news to her as she sat in the isolated Texas oilfield camp house of her parents. Waiting. I often wonder if this is a major reason for my own mood challenges, the unmentioned terrain of a life that has remained so long unexplored?
I always felt very protective of my mother, even as a child, as if guarding her emotional minefield, not daring to walk across it, should something explode and demolish us both.
At one time, I began to plan a memoir, which would of course involve the letters, and yet I’ve yet to read them. In all this time, I just could not, even though they play a critical role. So whose “minefield” am I really afraid to cross?
Despite circumventing the letters themselves, I have read through the noncommittal words on military stationary and the heartfelt letters from some of his camp friends, about the circumstances surrounding the death. I read about the other young soldier who murdered my father and his nervous breakdown in prison. Every year I told myself that “soon” I will open that box full of letters and begin the journey towards healing. Every year I have been unable to do so.
Several years before my mother died, she asked me to promise that when she died, I would scatter some of her ashes on my father’s grave, a little marble tablet resting in a huge cemetery a couple of hours from where she then lived with my stepfather. This was a “secret” request. I promised to do this.
The day of her memorial, after the ceremony, I took my share of the ashes and made my way to the cemetery on my drive back home. I drove into the cemetery and as if guided by her hand and arrived at exactly the right spot. In the back seat of my car was a funeral-designed pot of yellow mums from the memorial and the car was filled with a pungent sacharine aroma. I took the jar of ashes and walked to the grave. Such a small little stone, with his name and rank: Denton Bishop Woods, U.S. Marines, Lt. First Class. Across the cemetery field was a huge carved dappled brown monument with the name “Strange” engraved in calligraphic script. Strange.
My heart broke and the tears poured from my chest, mixing with the snot from my nose. My chest heaved, the tears would flow until it was time for them to stop. I didn’t hold back. Mother was gone now too. And here he was. The story was over.
Working like a madwoman, I spread ashes around the gravestone, framing it, took several handfuls of ashes and smoothed them over the top, outlining his name and the text. Went to the car, took out the plant and tore at the flowers, scattered the yellow petals randomly over the gravestone, sometimes threw them angrily. With what was left of the flowers, I arranged a careful wreath around the stone’s edges. The torn petals lifted a fresh fragrance into the air, which blew gently in the bone quiet cemetery. A little decoration of fake fall leaves woven onto a wire frame decorated the plant. I pulled this out and stuck it in the ground above the grave.
Someone has come to visit you, I tell him.
Relief. I had completed my promise. The other half of the promise is to scatter some ashes over the tiny, out-of-the-way town, where both grew up, sang in the school choir, and drove around the back roads singing with classmate Roy Orbison.

* * * * *
Someday, I will do that, too. And perhaps I will, someday, read the letters.

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ch. 10 – journys to places out of bounds Friday, May 9 2008

Chapter 10

Zoe feels the urge in her bones to move, to be on with it, to hit the road. But she waits. And sure enough, there he comes, an hour before sunset, a speck in the distance against the pink landscape.
On my way to see you, a manitou stood in my path, Antonio explained. It was a hideous shape, then the shape of someone I once loved. It became a whirlwind crowned with the heads of diamondbacks. I put my palm to this image and a snake stabbed me with its fangs. But I knew it was not true, and soon the bleeding stopped.
She agreed things are not always what they seem. I learned this in West Texas, in my incarnation as a schoolgirl. I wove dreams out of oilfields, orange sunsets, Fourth of July Fireworks and love in the backseat of a faded blue and white ’57 Chevy. Not a damn bit of it was true at the time, but it seemed to be. And when life bit its fangs in my heart, I would always bleed until I realized it wasn’t so. On Sundays, the Baptists tried to teach me what was true. They dipped me in a vat of water. They sang songs laced with fear. But fear is not a true thing. It has no wings. It cannot fly, but is tethered by one claw to the ground in the dark and cries endlessly.
Antonio thought about this awhile. Once I took a bud of Mescalito, he remembered. That is how I feel now, lightheaded as an angel, anxious as a chicken before a storm. Through the revolving lens of Mescalito I saw the dogs of Vuelta, muttering with their noses close to the ground, circling in packs. I became a dog of Vuelta, the wild blood running me blind. Looking and looking always. Until I heard the wind clearly speak my name, I was only the body of a man, within the body of a dog, sniffing endlessly, hunting the blood. Sometimes the way of the spirit and the way of the body must ride together for miles, for a lifetime even.
Zoe was getting tired of all this conversation. Even Consuela Osage had left before the telling was done. Too much talk, talk, talk, said the curandera. When Antonio awoke from his trance, he had forgotten his reason for being on the mesa, and he said he was going to Las Vegas. He said the Mescalito he took last week had altered his experience of time. I will leave the rest of the stories to you, he said, before going down the mountain and sticking his thumb out for a ride to Raton, then Vegas. You started all these stories. Now you have to finish them.

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ch. 9 – journeys to places out of bounds: a novella Friday, May 9 2008

Chapter 9

Consuela Osage explains, This is also a landscape full of shadow. You come in by way of the black arroyo. You could drive it in a day. In this landscape you wait for dawn. A woman could go crazy out here, but she doesn’t.
Antonio the Brujo once told Zoe some people stand in one place and wait for lightning to strike. They will wait forever, he says, They will not see the little sparrow stuffing itself with seeds in a kiva of Pueblo Bonito at Chaco. They will miss the flight of the bird after it has eaten its fill. They will not see the feathers on its head shift upright. These people, they will wait forever for a sign. Si, it will get them when they are not looking! The relampago, it is tricky, it waits for the right time. Then the flesh on the bones melts away, then it is over. Just like that. He says he does not like the word estupido, but about some things, he says, it is true.
Now that Zoe is a medicine woman, she knows about lightning. She made a serious study of lightning when she passed through West Texas. While thunderheads gathered, she stood in a greasy brown oilfield east of town, lifted her hand, pointed straight to the sky, poised for the strike to travel down her arm, into the hot gold center of her solar plexus. It came on command. She was not a woman used to waiting.
Antonio was something that came without warning, a dust devil blown in from the north, a portent of storm. Once he was there, it was no surprise, the appointment made years ago, the date set in memory. He had an owl feather tied
into his tangled black curls. His eyes were fire agate and his face was brown.
What took you so long? she asked, drinking tequila at the end of a sunset.
I have come a long way. He was weary, and his hat hid his face.
She remembers him when she gets into her blue Chevy pickup and drives hard, for miles, to the source of lightning. She heads west for the Caprock, past empty cottonfields flat forever, through little towns–Post, Wink, NoTrees, Slaton, Earth–towns that exist because she passes through. She stops at Sue’s Cafe for coffee. She pays Sue, who lives multiple lives as postmaster, mayor, landscape beautification director. Sue plants orange marigolds in imported Mexican pots decorated with bluebirds, red flowers and senoritas.
He was here, says Sue, filing her nails. You just missed him. He had apple pie and a cup of hot water he put strange things in, like herbs and drops of black stuff.
He’s from the north, explained Zoe. That’s how it is there.
Sue raised her black painted-on eyebrows and pursed her red lips. She ducked under the counter and lifted up a bottle of amber liquid. Mescal, she said and handed over the bottle. For your journey. A rubber worm floated near the bottom. From Juarez, said Sue. Anejo. Very authentic.
I believe everything, answered Zoe. Everything is true at some level. Even a worm turned to plastic. Even him, whose laughter I hear in the call of the crow. She remembers Antonio said laughter is the truest thing of all. She remembers he lifted his black wings and soared out of Penasco Blanco at Chaco, calling her name.
Uranus and Saturn pass each other in October of this year without smiling. When Saturn is not looking, Uranus shoves it over the edge of the galaxy and spins madly into space. At that exact moment the brujo and the medicine woman sit eye to eye in the Great Kiva.
He says, Your heart is pure, I know, but I want to see it.
She cuts it out with her turquoise and amethyst-studded knife. It is transparent as quartz crystal, and begins to melt in the sun. What more can I do for you? she asks.
Show me your dark side, he whispers, But not what I already know–the secret misfortune in your chakras, why you sob like a wolf at full moon, why you play with your shadow at Pueblo Bonito but run away if it follows. I know these things already. He covers his heart with his palm. Show me instead real darkness, the way winter sucks through your soul howling and moaning, the way you lock your legs tight around me as you are drowning, the way you meet your face in the mirror and see your lives pass, dancing, in your own eyes.
She considers this. She considers how true it feels in her heart. She considers the triangle in her third eye, where the road winds into a landscape she has not traveled. I am good at this kind of thing, she tells him, and raises her hand. His spirit lifts from his body to a shock of lightning. It shoots to the half-formed moon over Fajada Butte. It travels forever with no concept of time.
I am good at this, she repeats and her hair lifts wild and red around her face. Don’t play with this. Ever, she warns.
Afterwards at Hungo Pavi, Antonio was weary and rested in her arms. Tell me your secrets, Zoe, he murmured. And she saw the sun on his face, and knew he was, at heart, a man, and would stumble through lifetimes with dust on his hands. Would try, each lifetime, to know something he had not known before.
Do not confuse me with the others, she said quietly. Do not confuse me with those whose lives you have passed through as a magician, invoking them into constellations, stars in fantastic shapes for the galaxy of your invention. She looked down at him. He appeared to be sleeping.
I am not to be kept, except in memory. I will be the memory you consider most often as you take the long journey back north. I survive in memory, in myth, in the space beside you when you look to see who goes with you.
Before they part ways at Chetro Ketl she tells him, Here is the fork in the path. To one side lies the landscape with no moon, through a passage of rock, up a steep pink cliff to Pueblo Alto. To the other side is a winding trail to Una Vida, a lonely village full of wind and dust, petroglyphs of unidentified birds frozen in stone. It is the way the crow flies. It is the only way out. You can come if you wish. If we go the same path, our differences will always be great, but lightning will strike between us.
I need a landscape with moon, he says . Even if it is full of wind and dust.
And I need lightning, she tells him. And a road that winds in and out with mystery.
I need to fly, he replies, scratching his chin where the hairs grow thick and peppery, to disappear in the fire of Casa Rinconada, to play my flute alone.
And I need to travel alone, she answers. With my feet on the road. I need to travel alone, she answers, to tell my secrets to Mother Earth, to weave spells, to search for lightning.
Then there is no way out of this, he tells her, and she agrees.
I”ll put feathers in my hair and paint my face, she warns him, We could go up in smoke.
So what? He is already backing off, growing wings, swirling off of the ground. I’ll take off in a whirlwind, I’ll become the dust devil, and then the devil itself.

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ch. 8 – journeys to places out of bounds: a novella Friday, May 9 2008

Chapter 8

Consuela told Zoe it was time she returned to Chaco Canyon. Whether Lucy or Reggie came along was no matter, but Zoe must go. They had been there many years ago, Consuela said, didn’t Zoe remember? Zoe closed her eyes, imagined back a few thousand years. And when she began to speak of it, she rocked back and forth as she droned out her story:
This is a landscape with no moon, a sky full of dull sunlight and lazy turkey vultures, miles across scrubby desert. On the road to Chaco there is everything far as the eye can see: Navajos sitting on old Chevys, faded houses like bones on bleached earth, hungry dogs and goats roaming sandy arroyos, a woman in a red scarf hanging blue and white laundry to dry in the late summer sun. This is the end before the beginning–then the purple rise of mesas, the Anasazi wind, the scattering of pueblos, the ancient city.
Returning is the other side of leaving. This is what is true–of night, of death, of the movement of wind and breath, of the heart turning over in its bed of dreams.
The medicine woman in me knows all this, as I descend into Casa Rinconada, Great Kiva, on a full moon September day. I will wait in the kiva all day for the moon to rise in this century and think, “this is where my body lives, this familiar ground, though my spirit rises in the wind and would take me, if I hadn’t promised to wait for what is true.”
Three of us rest our backs against the cool kiva walls, facing east. We wait for the ancient potion to fill our bodies, dissolve us into stone, shimmering grass, till we become who we were before–a trinity of shamans sharing the mandala of knowledge, gazing far ahead into this moment.
Sun and medicine infuse our bodies with heat. We travel a circuit few survive to remember, past our own deaths, past the edge of what is familiar, into the vortex of fear and open space. Into this place we take a two-sided healing wand, a crystal dorje and a knapsack full of bananas, water, almonds and Hostess cupcakes. We take everything we know.
“Moment to moment,” whispers one friend, who has seen his own blood on the kiva floor and will not give into it. I say to him: When we emerge to the other side, we will know what is true.
A raven skims the edge of the kiva, rests her body in flight and her wings glisten. I say to my companion in flight, who becomes the brujo, In another lifetime I was a young girl in a lonely West Texas town. I stood in the dust forever waiting for this raven.
The kiva sings from its great mouth, the wild dogs sing in the west and lightning shatters the edge of the world. In my heart, restless in its pink dreams, a raven folds her head into her wings and sleeps. On the cusp between two worlds three travelers watch a tourist in a green shirt and baseball cap take 23 pictures of the kiva, inside and out. His wife, the Talking Woman, follows him moment to moment through the endless afternoon.
Later we will eat lentil soup and chocolate birthday cake under a red moonrise. Our lungs will be weary with breathing and our ears will buzz. Lightheaded as angels, we will drum to the moon, and rattle and dance. We will
float through the long night on what cannot be called sleep, listening to the voices of the Old Ones, who will continue to tell us what is true.

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ch. 7 – journeys to places out of bounds: a novella Friday, May 9 2008

Chapter 7

Zoe told Consuela that she hadn’t seen a raven for days, till one divebombed her Chevy window. It yielded upward on a note of grace, then out of sight. I thought of Lucy, said Zoe. She was sure this was an omen, an apprehension of flight, a reminder that the biggest turn in the journey begins with a peculiar disturbance of vision.
Everything that has made sense in the past will leave you till your soul is squeezed dry, says the medicine woman in Zoe’s mirror. Zoe talks to herself during the insomnia of 3 a.m. She forgets her dignity, head in the refrigerator, looking for something to fill the space. She keeps trying to remind me of her existence, says Zoe. I keep trying to forget. Search cabinets for almonds, black tea, odd foreign cookies leftover from Christmas, brie and stale bread, good chocolate.
I’m supposed to be a medicine woman in this lifetime but I’ve forgotten the ritual. A mesquite branch will not shift to a snake . I cannot read the face of the full moon in February. A piece of toast on a sleepless night retains its own power, but is not the ceremony I really seek, is not the chocolate of knowledge, rich in its center with something so sweet I take my time to taste.
A fortune teller in Los Angeles told Zoe, Be careful when you cause the clouds to turn dark and move. Be aware of the force of lightning in your thoughts. This made her remember that tornado in Tula many West Texas years ago. Thinking she had a hand in it somehow, she stood watching the swirling wind full of leaves, feathers and dirt. Stood with her hand shading her eyes till the grandmother yanked her down the storm cellar and they sat in the stale darkness like two seeds till the wild wind crossed over. Lifetimes passed above them, full of familiar spirits. When they spoke, the kerosene lamp flickered with their dry whispers.
Only when the rushing voice stopped–far past the yawning silence in the eye of the storm–only then did we push the heavy aluminum roof up off the funeral swell of earth and emerge. We looked at the house, looked again for anything dead on the ground. This was a new world we were born to, past rapture, past anything we knew. With dread and hope we pushed that roof up and stepped into the weak sunlight.
Then the grandmother pointed to the ravens and said, There they are.
Lucy was the one had a handle on this kind of thing, though a girl could go crazy with this kind of information. Coming all at once, it dazzles the soul.
I remember that first time, when I was still Lucy, Zoe told Consuela, out to check oil wells with the grandfather at 5 a.m. Stunned as a rabbit by headlights with what was coming down from the stars, I froze–face up to the sky, feet flat to the hard brown field. Papaw, a rouster, said, “Girl, didn’t you hear me?” But I was listening to something else. Cause the wind was always talking to me, whining in through cracks in the aluminum storm windows, rustling through the leaves .
That day they got up before dawn cracked. The grandmother made breakfast while the dog Peanuts growled low in his throat for some bacon. A pound of it sizzled in the cast iron skillet. They ate hot oatmeal iced with sugar, and burnt toast, black coffee.
Somewhere my soul, on loan as it is, floated into this paradise of sweet and salt and hot on the tongue. Eight-year-old girl drinking black coffee on a cold ass West Texas day. This was part of the ritual, before getting out on the field, to wander face up at the nothing gray sky. To wait for grace. To be there in the still time before light, the time prophets must have been awake, sensing the wonder that we continue to evolve from darkness.
In the hard brown field she stood on a body of black water slicked with oil, oil tight in the hard rock underneath. I put my left spirit arm over my right body arm and prayed till I passed out of that flat place, till I passed out in memory of Milky Way, stardust forever, raven wing darkness, so soft. I hear Papaw calling. He calls from the other side. His face is a blur under a red gimme cap, his voice is the wind. I know from this moment I will hear another voice I was not born into, that roots made in this lifetime would not be enough. Seven solar systems revolve in my blood. The knowledge lifts in my dreams and blinds me with its wings.
The message is to keep rising, outward into a spiral of light. The message is in medicine words, a language which contains all words, to which all other languages fit into like a perfect cosmic puzzle. A Mayan prophet says, “Ge is egg is gene.” There is no way out of here but a word can save us. A dark man whispers in Spanish, Relampago! Lightning strikes, and there is this urge to fly.

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ch. 6 – journeys to places out of bounds: a novella Friday, May 9 2008

Chapter 6
Zoe’s memories are fierce, they shatter into her consciousness like a meteor exploding into the vast dense black of space. No one hears a thing, but the little points of light burn, descend, enter another atmosphere. And one Indian Summer afternoon, sitting on the mesa outside Vuelta with her friend Consuela Osage, Zoe remembers:
In West Texas, an ice storm is not something to take lightly. It impedes progress. You go nowhere. You cannot get back to Santa Fe. Its oncoming is foreshadowed by a dome of gray sky, like a bell jar plastic paperweight. Any minute the sky could turn upside down and fall. And it won’t be snow, but a hybrid of rain and snow called sleet, which comes out of the sky as ice, slushes onto the streets. And tires make a wet, slopping sound on the way to the downtown area, the courthouse “square” that always marks little one-eyed towns like Post, Colorado City, Tahoka, Smyer, Tula.
When Zoe was a local girl, slipping through an incarnation positioned vaguely between Lucy and Reggie, she knew someday she would leave. She told her friend Consuela Osage about it, that she saw it in a dream. A woman appeared to me, Zoe told Consuela. In fact, she looked a lot like you. She was short, and brown, and she had the most beautiful long brown fingers. And she smelled like blue sage. She told me “You must learn to soar above your loneliness, to circle it like your own death. But you cannot leave until you learn to love your solitude, until it becomes like the wind on the rock and you think of nothing.”
Then she remembers the ice storm. How it threatened to keep her from getting back to Santa Fe. It shut down the town of Tula, the Texas-New Mexico-Oklahoma busline, and Highway 84 to Lubbock, to the airport, back to the particular light of Santa Fe. The dome dusted the ground with sleet, the air froze the breath. The sloppy streets hardened bluish gray as a glass eye. She was in her parent’s house in that lifetime.
To get to the newspaper on the driveway, she inches her feet one by one, learning to ice skate. The wind whips through her think cotton robe and baby blue satin pajamas. She is grateful to be cold, the escape the house where her blood boils because central heat is 85° at all times, is consistently cozy as a cocoon, or a coffin, and whenever she throws up a window, down it goes. So she stands on the driveway, stands in thin moccasins on solid ice. She uncrosses her arms and opens her robe to the cold. A dim black spot overhead looks like a raven, she hopes to god it is.
Days later someone in a beauty shop downtown on the square will remark on it. How she saw the woman with electrified hair standing out in the open, an apparition, face up to the sleet, robe open, a crazy person. As Bobbie rolls Jolene’s hair into tiny pincurls, she’ll tell what she saw, purse her lips. The women will murmur a bit, cluck their tongues, as is customary. Well…My goodness…I declare….And someone will wonder, Why is that girl home? The woman on the driveway hears their talk, and she doesn’t know the answer any better than they do. Beats me, she’ll say, and Bobbie and Joretta will get a little chill down their back. And Bobbie will say, pulling her old pink polyester sweater close around her shoulders, I better go see if that window’s cracked open.
By the time the ice storm lifted, the prodigal daughter was far gone. She took the raw knowledge of her loneliness, how it holds the heart captive in the dead of winter. She knew if she followed the raven past Fort Sumner, Santa Rosa, Lamy, to where it circled three times over the bones of the Old Ones near Vuelta, a brujo would appear in the shape of a man playing a shakuhachi flute. He spins hollow sounds that follow her thin blood through its network of personal history. He plays through the crystalline structures of her cells, far back to where knowledge is stored in memory, past the Ice Age, past Pluto and Nepture, past anything that makes sense in this dimension. He plays past doubt and certainty, to where the soul itself resides on a mesa near Vuelta and contemplates the bones under the earth, the pounding blood in the skull. And while Zoe’s soul sits zazen in the curl of her heart, she remembers something she learned from Lucy, many years ago.

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