Authors: Carolyn Osborn
Where We Are Now (26 page)
The mountains, some of the lower ranges of the Rockies, the foothills of the Jemez, rise to outline the horizon. I've exchanged them for the low green hills of middle Tennessee. These are steeper slopes, much dryer, and more distant. They can never be turned into part of a pasture. Nothing but juniper and sage grow on these arid heights, yet I don't find them forbidding. The Rockies are geologically young mountains, raw beginnings; I suppose they will be as old as the Appalachians are someday.
I notice the blue delphiniums in the east bed by the porch are drooping. We usually get most of our rain in July and August. I push the front door open and walk outside to water my flowers.
In the afternoon we drive into Santa Fe to run errands and meet friends for supper. Since the children have left, we go into town less often. I'm sitting in the plaza waiting to meet Marsh. The monument in the middle is an obelisk like the one I used to see in Franklin's square as a child except this one wasn't raised to commemorate the Confederate dead. It is dedicated “To the heroes who have fallen in the various battles with the _______ indians in the territory of New Mexico.” As usual I wonder who cut the word off the stone and why. In the middle of one night I imagine a dim figure, file in hand, scratching away. Oddly the blank space demands more attention than people usually give to inscriptions, and everybody I've ever questioned replaces the missing word with “savage.”
I suppose the Indians must have thought the heroes just as savage. Marsh says I'm being softheaded. He doesn't mind revision, setting the records straight, but he dislikes covering everything with a contemporary mask.
“The marker has a marker,” he's pointed out to me. “Look here at this little one saying it was first erected in l862. Back then the people fighting them were sure all Indians were savage.”
I can't decide. I'm willing to see both sides, to stand in the middle of my own confusion, then there are the Indians right there across the plaza stoically sitting on the porch of the territorial governor's palace selling jewelry, and I sway toward them. The children I read stories to every week at the Indian School up the road from us are not in the least savage.
My grandmother, I remember while remaining on the hard iron bench, would call loud little children “savages” meaning they were rude, disobedient and probably dirty. Her greatest contempt however, was reserved for the sort of people who bought the place my grandfather had farmed.
“Common as dirt,” she said, “I remember when they lived in a boxcar.” She was offended because they held a party for a high-priced purebred bull and gave all the male guests pansies to wear in their buttonholes. The bull was pictured in
Life
magazine, but she wouldn't look at it. I've forgotten her whole list of things ladies didn't look at though I know liquor store windows and mating dogs were on it.
When I was younger I had romantic ideas about “savages.” I thought they were people who lived freely, ate with their fingers, painted their faces, wore the least possible clothes, and got dirty as they pleased without being told to take a bath. “Savages” had all the fun. I had to give that up. I'd forgotten I'd believed in those pleasures until we moved to New Mexico. My fantasies vanished completely the winter morning I took a visitor to a pueblo where an aged woman wearing a stripped cotton shawl over her head stepped out of a door into the snowy mud with a slop jar in hand. It must have been an ordinary task for her. That's what deprived me of my funâthe ordinariness of poverty. Soon after that I learned that the lack of indoor plumbing was the least of those Indians' troubles.
Marsh waves and walks from a corner toward me sitting here on the bench musing. I stare at him at a little distance wondering, as long married people do now and then, how I came to be with this man I know well and don't know at all, this middle-sized man with the willing smile wearing dark brown boots, size 11B with slightly worn heels, in this part of the world. Though the bare facts of our lives, our daily schedules reveal a little, much is elided or frequently forgotten. Marsh, because he has historical leanings, finds comfort in the certainty of old wars, the tides of time safely recorded, chaos arranged into agesâstone through atomicâevents neatly stacked though he admits the rumpled edges may show.
Our own lives slip through and around, largely undefined to us. In time, to our children, we may become as eccentric, willful and mysterious as my mother's family, one full of drinking men and dominating women. I may be known as the one who insisted on going west to raise all sorts of horses, spoke bad Spanish and worse French, and in the way family tales grow and change, they may even say that Marsh and I went to live with the Indians. It's impossible to know. At this point all I can hope for is more.
C
arolyn Osborn
graduated from the University of Texas at Austin with a B.J. degree in 1955, and an M.A. in 1959. She has won awards from P.E.N., the Texas Institute of Letters, and a Distinguished Prose Award from
The Antioch Review
(2003). Her stories have been included in
The O. Henry Awards
(Doubleday, 1991) and
Lone Star Literature
(Norton, 2003), among numerous other anthologies. She is the author of two novels,
Contrary People
(Wings Press, 2012) and
Uncertain Ground
(Wings Press, 2009), and several collections of short stories, including:
A Horse of Another Color
(University of Illinois Press, 1977),
The Fields of Memory
(Shearer Publishing, 1984), and
Warriors & Maidens
(Texas Christian University Press, 1991). The Book Club of Texas published an illustrated, specially bound edition of her story,
The Grands
(1990). In 2009, she received the Lon Tinkle Lifetime Achievement Award from the Texas Institute of Letters.
W
ings Press
was founded in 1975 by Joanie Whitebird and Joseph F. Lomax, both deceased, as “an informal association of artists and cultural mythologists dedicated to the preservation of the literature of the nation of Texas.” Publisher, editor and designer since 1995, Bryce Milligan is honored to carry on and expand that mission to include the finest in American writingâmeaning all of the Americas, without commercial considerations clouding the decision to publish or not to publish.
Wings Press intends to produce multicultural books, chapbooks, ebooks, recordings and broadsides that enlighten the human spirit and enliven the mind. Everyone ever associated with Wings has been or is a writer, and we know well that writing is a transformational art form capable of changing the world, primarily by allowing us to glimpse something of each other's souls. We believe that good writing is innovative, insightful, and interesting. But most of all it is honest.
Likewise, Wings Press is committed to treating the planet itself as a partner. Thus the press uses as much recycled material as possible, from the paper on which the books are printed to the boxes in which they are shipped.
As Robert Dana wrote in
Against the Grain,
“Small press publishing is personal publishing. In essence, it's a matter of personal vision, personal taste and courage, and personal friendships.” Welcome to our world.
Colophon
This first edition of
Where We Are Now,
by Carolyn Osborn, has been printed on 55 pound Edwards Brothers Natural Paper containing a percentage of recycled fiber. Titles have been set in Nueva type, the text in Adobe Caslon type. All Wings Press books are designed and produced by Bryce Milligan.
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