Hunger's Brides (127 page)

Loving and hating now are as immaterial as words. Oracle, she has just seen how quickly interest wanes once the other is possessed, sees this in the straining instant she conceives the son who will be called Martín Cortés—the first of two so-named, for names too are made redundant once the conquest has been made. When Cortés returns to Spain to marry, he will name his second firstborn, too, Martín. The tyrannies of a woman's flesh—forced to love the sons of men we've grown to hate. Traitor to the powerful, liberator to the weak, she who speaks and speaks has been by her own tongue betrayed. Speak oracle, speak. What speech can redeem the Sibyl now but silence? Now that the conquest has been made.

Dear Lysis, dear friend, I sense in these legends a script so configured as to be read by me … or completed. And yet it is as if a cloud had settled over my mind, my eyes. If I could but
see, know
if it is already written, or whether I might yet change it.

I pray that a tender God keep you close to his breast, until the day we are made sisters again.

    Your loving servant,
    don Juan Sáenz del Cauri.
²⁷

S
CARECROW
        

S
OME DAYS
I C
AN'T
stomach one more forkful of crow; others I just can't get my fill. Let the transcripts show it. Bring on the angry clown. Unclap his bracelets, ungag him.

I miss my daughter.

Not a deep longing, naturally, given my handicap, a discernible shallowness of emotional response. Madeleine advises me it's termed
poverty of affect
. This species of penury isn't nearly as uncommon as we let on. But this evening, out here at the cabin as the ranch lights blink on below me one by one, I miss the view from the nursery, where I would often sit at dusk, winter especially, until Catherine could fall asleep. A panorama less dramatic than these Rockies certainly, but with home's little consolations, hidden possibilities … swing set, garden gnome, rabbit hutch. Most nights Catherine's terrified of the dark. If in a child there can be anything at all unusual in this, it's that the terrors came into the world with her, on dark wings. It has been with her from the first howling night. And from the beginning, for this one thing, she needed me more than her mother. Does still, I know. I make a better scarecrow.

I came to fatherhood resentfully, it's true. For months the pregnancy swelled between us like the accidental seed of Madeleine's ever ramifying competence and self-mastery. Prenatal classes were pure calamity. The movies were appalling horror shows—bloody, crudely shot, amateurishly played. Projected for us with admonitory grimaces by our instructor, as we all lay paired and splayed on mats around her. I struggled vainly to find in these screenings something other than a squeamish, squirming affront, sex education run amok—cuddling up with granny for a porn flick on the couch.

I found pretexts for missing classes. I was breathtakingly unprepared for what I was about to undergo.

Forty years ago our fathers mimed the incidental character of their role in conception by passing out cigars in waiting rooms. We, their sons, enact a comparable futility today by playing at birth coach in the delivery room. So goes the theory. Then there are moments that thrust themselves upon you, that overrule your every objection, overcome your reservations, overrun your fortifications. Flood you with the here and now.

Bind you tight to
ever always must
. This is how it must be, has always been, will ever be.

You are lifted on a tide, overwhelmed by simplicities elemental as buoyancy On blood, on gore, on a carnal squalor and reek you are lifted—a speck of flotsam—lifted high like untold millions before and after, and in one single inexhaustible plunge, you are driven headlong down and smashed upon a dark shore. Gowns the green of new leaves, blue-greys and reds of blood and living meat. Polychrome reflections smear in the convexities of chromium steel. Mangled battle cries—harsh and clanging—lost heraldries more ancient than speech or mind. By the power of seas moon-pulled, wind-driven, you are broken down. Overthrown. And raised up whole again.

White light, white masks, white sheets. Superhuman intensities burn in our eyes like life like light like need. Donald, look at me. Donald can you see? Tell me what you see. Can you see her yet? Is she breathing? Is it alright? Donald talk to me. Are you crying? Let me see. Let me see you. Look at me. She is
ours
. She is between you and me. Let me see your face, don't turn away.

A miracle, unbidden. Then elation, post-catastrophe. The hurricane met and weathered. Aftermath. A giddy relief on wobbly knees carries you clear of the wrecked carnival ride, and the exhilaration leaves you undone. If only for an hour.

Few men, through millennia, had been admitted to this wilderness. Now we're reserved a front-row seat beneath the arc lamps, just when the savage run of nature is elsewhere all but done. I'm no poet, certainly, but no words can capture a thing so raw. I am left fumbling with clichés. Madonna and child. Madeleine and child. Catherine Rose. Mop-head dolls. Catherine Rose. Hummingbird mobiles. Catherine Rose. Clichés.

Pietà
.

I could have loved my wife again. We had a chance.

She loved
me
. It took a lot of things to make her stop, finally. The worst was watching me retreat from this new beachhead, back again to the arid safety of my own sea of tranquillity: stale and dead and drained. My airless desert of inner space. I called it making sense of things, getting my bearings, regaining perspective.

But in that delivery room, dazed and chastened, I swore on my daughter's eyes, on Catherine's eyes, no more infidelities. I will always
be father to this child. I will do what it takes. I will keep her out of harm's way. Something in me needed to promise Madeleine I would keep our child safe, though I know I can't, have begun to fail. A whole lifetime of failing lies still ahead of me.

How will I protect her from here?

For the record: I did keep that first chastened oath. Though when news of the scandal broke, Madeleine wouldn't let herself believe it. In body, at least, I was faithful. Though not in dreams, not in memories.

A view I miss is from the nursery. Catherine Rose.

This Mexican idea of time fills me with anguish tonight. With a terrible clarity I see my past, our present, Catherine's future moving along different loops of the same fatal arc. Just enough variety in the details to obscure the pattern and—mercifully, most days—the path ahead. So supremely sure of having buried my own childhood, the sludge of its toxic waste, I see this thing, now—seeping up out of my past, staining her future …

J
EWEL
        

L
ATELY
, A
BOUT ALL
I C
ARE TO TAKE
of the outside world is walking the dog. Each time I come up to stay, Relkoff lends me Jewel, a Blue Heeler pup. For company, he says, though I'm generally assured of company of another sort, were I to want it. To keep from trespassing, my media entourage has to stop at the property line, out of sight below the evergreens. Jewel and I like to walk the other way, over through the cottonwoods. She's crouching outside the screen door now, her whole body trembling with play. Pausing, in the tirelessness that's in her breed, to coax me out. One end of the stick is clasped lightly in her jaws to remind me she plays fetch perfectly, dropping the stick daintily each time at my feet. I have always liked dogs, had talked about getting one much like this for our Catherine when she was old enough to care for it. I may even have told this to Beulah.

I stand in the living room, at the bottom of the stairs leading up to the loft. On each side of the main window all the louvers are open though the main drapes are closed. The weather is good. You might swear it was summer but our hopes for May have changed. Spring comes earlier, stays longer, cedes more reluctantly. Summer rarely puts down roots before late July.

Today the fields to the east have a verdancy that is almost painful to see.

On the property's northwest corner a stand of fir has been left as a windbreak. Just south of the house a fringe of leafless trees follows a creek bed. A small arbour of willow, apple, and European birch stands at the foot of what was once a substantial garden, now overgrown with wildflowers.

From somewhere out in the yard comes the three-toned ratcheting of magpies …
ric-kric-rick
. A little breeze sways through the cotton-woods, temptingly. Scents of apple blossoms, and sap like bitter wax. From branches bent low with overstuffed catkins, chutes of fluff billow on the wind. Not drifting like snow but pinwheeling weightless in the sun, like blizzards in gift-shop paperweights.

Jewel's eager yelps dart at me through the flyscreen like the creaking of little springs.

Not just now, Jewel. A little later. Soon. I have a little work left to do.