The Farmer's Daughter (21 page)

We rode far and wide into the mountainous countryside that first fall, hiding our bikes and hiking up canyons, killing rattlesnakes with Lawrence's single-shot Remington .22. Lawrence bought shells containing BBs and potted quail which Emelia expertly cooked on a flat rock surrounded by coals. Little Dicky carried salt in a belt pouch. He was quite outspoken and announced one day in a semimutiny that there were no princesses in Texas and that he was plumb tired of calling Emelia “Princess.” She slapped him several times though the next day she announced that her new name was Zora of the Amazons but that we only had to use the first part. Lawrence told me that she had power over him because she had caught him playing with himself and threatened to tell her parents unless he was obedient.

And so it went for nearly two years. Our clubhouse was in a shed behind our place where I did my exercises. We had a small woodstove for the cold winter days when we had to sit attentively while Zora sang country songs not very well. Her favorite was Patsy Cline's “The Last Word in Lonesome Is Me.” We had a plan that once we could afford horses we would rob a bank and escape south into Mexico and lead a free life.

Curiously, my father was known as “Professor” in the neighborhood though he was only an instructor at Sul Ross State University. We were respected for this and what with my mother so fluent in Greek and Latin she picked up Spanish quickly which delighted all of our Mexican neighbors. I think that my mother thrived because Alpine had a feeling of a foreign country to her.

Our second year together was more awkward because of Emelia's early puberty. At twelve and a half she had become a very attractive young woman with her light olive skin and coal-black hair. Her physical changes seemed to make her unhappy and she dressed as sloppily as possible to hide them, becoming an even more pronounced tomboy if that was possible. One day I caught my father standing at our kitchen window watching Emelia bounce up and down on the small trampoline in their backyard. He blushed in a way I didn't quite understand though I attributed it to his recent horrible mistake of having flown to Fayetteville, North Carolina, for an ornithological conference that was being held in Fayetteville, Arkansas. He was properly mortified and I felt very sorry for him though he rejected sympathy of any kind. Both he and my mother were distressed at the time because I was imitating the Cajun accents of Dicky, Lawrence, and Emelia. When their father had come home for Christmas that year I could barely understand his speech. The mother, Mina, who was from Mississippi, translated for me.

My own body changes began to fill me with anxiety as I was no more interested in joining the adult world than Emelia. I suspected that they were accelerated by the hour of violent calisthenics I did in the shed before school each morning. Emelia was the fastest girl in the seventh grade and I was the fastest boy. We'd ride our bikes down toward Cathedral Mountain, then take off into the backcountry running and leaving Lawrence and Dicky far behind. Texas has strict trespass laws but no one seemed to mind kids. A rancher even gave us a dollar once for locating a sick calf. One warm spring day Emelia and I took a dip in a stock tank to cool off. Far in the distance we could see Lawrence and Dicky plodding toward us. Emelia was wearing a blue T-shirt and soft cotton shorts and the water made her clothes transparent. “If you look at my titties I'll slap your face,” she said. I swiveled around in the water because her slaps truly hurt. She came up behind me and tugged me saying, “You can look a little but don't concentrate on my body. You're my blood brother.” We had done the usual rite of making small cuts on our arms and exchanging smears of blood. She slid her hand down under my shorts and grabbed my erect penis. “Zora's great powers have given you a boner,” she laughed. She massaged me with predictable results and when my sperm rose to the surface of the water she shrieked and laughed while I sweated with shame despite the coolness of the water. “That's your future as a dickhead,” she said pointing at the floating effluent and continuing to laugh. “An eighth-grade girl told me how to do that. If a boy comes at you with a hard dick you do that and he becomes nice as pie.” I continued to burn with shame though it was leavened by her laughter as if she had told a joke and the joke was me. Since Emelia was a blood sister I had restricted my lust to a photo of Janet Leigh clipped from a Life magazine that I'd stare at in a mood of concern. When she expertly flipped herself out of the stock tank the very visible crack of her butt in the wet shorts gave me another hot twinge. At my age of twelve sexuality didn't have a real aim or target but was a warm itchy feeling starting in the abdomen.

Emelia and I were to have two more collisions that melancholy May when our world began to disintegrate. Her family was moving to Albuquerque, New Mexico, in July to follow a pipeline's construction and once more my father had failed to have his contract renewed though another low-grade teaching job was in the offing in Alpine after which we moved to Cincinnati. He said that there were more warblers in Ohio and when I in tears said, “Fuck warblers,” he tried to slap me but I ducked and ran out the back door.

Emelia and I found ourselves in the shed when her family went out to dinner and she had refused to go. She actually dominated her parents in the same way she did the rest of us. It was early evening and Emelia had brought over her mother's Cosmopolitan which had an article on “effective kissing.” She was back in her soft blue cotton shorts and a white T-shirt that showed her braless titties. We sat on a dilapidated easy chair that smelled like motor oil. We kissed mightily and it shocked me when she stuck her tongue in my mouth. She tasted like peanut butter and grape jelly and let me rub her breasts but when my hands lowered she punched me in the Adam's apple so that I choked. She apologized saying she had meant to hit my chin. She took out my peter from my trousers and jerked it then said, “Wipe it up dickhead” with a laugh, grabbed her magazine, and left.

Early June was murky with sorrow except for my mother who fairly glowed having won a grant to return to Radcliffe for six weeks. My father and I were to drive the Dodge down into Mexico to look for a very rare hummingbird that was said to be semicarnivorous. There were said to be thirty-eight species of hummingbirds in the area we were headed for, the idea of which did not enthuse me.

The gods are not kind to young people in love and I was hauntingly in love with Emelia that June. I had an explicit foreshadowing of the doom of our love. Our Mexico trip was only to comprise two weeks but I was sure she would be gone when I returned. My pillow would literally become wet with tears though she shed none in my presence.

After we took my mother to her dawn plane my dad went back to bed and I went out to the shed to exercise myself into a tranquil frazzle. I had barely begun when Emelia showed up on her bicycle saying that we were going to take a ride out toward our stock tank before it got too hot. She always ordered rather than suggested. Off we went on our bikes both silent at the oncoming unfairness of our lives. We tried to sprint toward the tank a mile distant but slowed our pace in the gathering morning heat. Far to the south there were ominous thunderclouds but I judged that they would move to the east of us. It was years later at the university that I recognized the true meaning of that literary term “foreshadowing.” There was a large rattler on the shaded west side of the tank that buzzed at us as we arrived. Instead of letting a man do the job Emelia in her Zora guise pitched a large rock onto its head and it shivered in its death throes. Rather than going into the tank in her shorts and T-shirt like the other time Emelia quickly shed to her skin. I felt squirmy in my innards at my first clear look at her sex. She folded her arms across her chest and challenged me with a stare. I slipped down my shorts and she said, “Your pecker looks dumb,” and then flipped into the tank. The water was cool that early in the morning and we shivered into an embrace. She ordered me to suckle her small breasts which were semiconical and told me to rub myself against her buttocks which were clenched. She said that if my “stuff” even got close to her pussy it could impregnate her through the water. Afterward she tried to drown me by holding my head underwater. I had become fairly strong and pitched her by running an arm through her crotch. My arm seemed hot where it rubbed against her chubby little pussy. She stared at me blankly and told me to touch her “one single minute.” I did so and she shivered. I was dumbfounded by touching her and looking off over her shoulder at a mountain and the thunderstorm that seemed to be approaching. My hand seemed to be thinking about what it was touching and coming to no conclusions.

A lightning bolt hit but a quarter of a mile away and there was a ripping crackle of thunder. We dressed and ran to the Emory oak about a mile away where we had left our bikes. We had only run a hundred yards or so when the downpour hit stinging our faces. It was a rough and rocky terrain so we ran with heads down and weathered eyes out for rattlers which were a fact of life in the area rather than something to be particularly frightened about. The rain was coolish and we rubbed each other briskly under the tree to warm ourselves. The oak gave us some protection from the driving rain. We began French-kissing and I told her I would love her forever and she said, “Why?” which has always puzzled me. I became hopelessly erect and we repeated our bare-butt grinding with Emelia pressed laughing against the tree. Afterward she went out into the rain past the tree's shelter and let the downpour clean my sperm off her bare bottom, her high clear laughter mixing with the thunder. It was one of those few rare images the brain stores flawlessly.

Early the next morning, I recall it was dawn, we packed our crummy camping equipment and a carton of cans of my father's favorite pork and beans and were off, passing the darkened Gagnon home at five-thirty
A.M
. with me swiveling in the seat for a last look. Her whole family had gone to a movie the night before and I had waited patiently on their porch for their return. I shook hands with Dicky and Lawrence and Emelia walked me out to their sidewalk gate. She said she was tired and had got her “monthlies” during the movie which was Butterfield 8. She said it was about rich people and that she was going to marry a rich man and live in a very high building in New York City. Our good-bye kiss tasted like Dentyne, a gum I didn't like. It was to be almost twenty years before I saw her again.

We drove south toward Mexico, a scant ninety miles south on our fatal trip, fatal for me at least so that in later years I could see the slender, attenuated line of my destiny as Route 67 heading toward the border crossing of Presidio and Ojinaga. I was chief navigator, normally my mother's job. Added to my father's other difficulties he was a dyslexic so I couldn't say “turn left” or “turn right” but had to point in the correct direction. On the other side of Marfa the Dodge had a flat tire which set my father to wailing. He was amazed when I expertly jacked up the car and put on the spare. Lawrence helped out at the corner gas station, changing and rotating tires, and had taught me the ropes. Lawrence got a dollar for changing a tire and when I helped I'd get a quarter. My father sat in the shade of the car reading Alexander Skutch's Life Histories of Central American Birds. I knew the book because I had to read it aloud while he drove. When I finished the tire chores he asked me where I'd gotten my muscles. This surprised me as his tiny study had a window that looked into the backyard and he must have seen me go out to the shed hundreds of times to exercise but then he probably had never looked in through the shed door. He was without curiosity except for birds and their predators.

This kind of journey is inevitably a stomach churner for a boy of twelve and a half. He's aware of how far he is from his friends who are more family than his own, his mother in distant Massachusetts which he saw once when he was young but the memory is truncated beyond bits and pieces, and the inscrutable dodo father beside him swerving the car ineptly to look at any passing bird, yelling “Aplomado” in personal triumph. On the outskirts of Ojinaga I saw two women necking passionately outside a cement-block bar and Father said, “Disgusting.” I knew better having looked into my mother's volume containing the fragments of Sappho. Mother had told me in regard to Sappho that it wasn't for us to quarrel with the nature of nature. After my inconclusive good-bye the night before I had even read the fragment, “Eros shook my mind like a mountain wind falling on oak trees,” and thought this was on the money for Emelia at the water tank and under the oak tree. Love was messy to be sure. Before we swam we'd have to step gingerly around all of the nasty cow plots.

I decided that Mexico so far didn't look very foreign when we turned onto Route 49 after an uneventful border crossing. This was the 1960s well before the media was full of the dangers of Mexico. Back then it was considered a serene alternative to our overpowering busyness, our grotesque squabbles in Vietnam. Emelia could sing what she called “Mexican country songs,” really corridos, which were even sadder than our own and comprehensible with the rudimentary Spanish I'd learned at school which was a multilingual babbling ground.

Meanwhile I had the gut feeling that we were going in the wrong direction because I had just read my mother's copy of Drums Along the Mohawk, one of her favorite early books. In my then-literal imagination I wanted to be an Indian in the northern forests, perhaps capture a white girl from a settlement and live with her near a waterfall. Prophetically enough I intended to wear a suit of wolf pelts. Mexico was also the wrong direction for another recent reading experience, mother's copy of Little Women where I had the somewhat unpleasant perception that girls were only big women in miniature and consequently quite dangerous. Lawrence had told me how a nun had broken one of his fingers for “tinkering” with a girl.

We reached our campsite near La Poquito de Conchos by suppertime. No one had told me but it was grand indeed to see that we weren't camping alone. There were three other men my father's age, all former graduate school ornithology pals from Cornell. The dominant male apparently was George, already an associate professor at Yale. He evidently had some money because as a “treat” he had hired a Mexican outfitter and his wife, Nestor and Celia, who had set up our floor tents. George had brought along his wife, Laurel, a sullen woman interested in the primitive art of the Sierra Madre. She was lovely and the beginning woman in the very long line of attractive creatures who seemed quite unhappy to me, but then she was married to the kind of man described by Emelia's little brother Dicky as “just another asshole.”