Winter Count (4 page)

I returned to this valley in 1967 with a friend (whom I would bury the next year in Mexico when a road washed away from under us and left us rolling over crazily in a flash flood). The winds again held me in sway, seemingly alive, so much so that I felt contrite for not having visited in so long. Unable to sleep, I rose several times in the night to smoke a cigarette and, by turning my head slightly one way or the other, to listen. My friend only shrugged his shoulders as I explained, but he made no disparaging remark.

On this same trip I met a man who lived at the western end of the valley, in a small adobe house at the confluence of the dry creeks of Blue and Willow Divide canyons. The first time I saw him he was sweeping a large area of the desert with a broom. As there was no vegetation where he swept, all he could be doing was removing small bits of rock and loose soil. I watched him from behind creosote bushes until some quality of dance or music in his sweeping finally brought me out. I remained concerned as I walked toward him that he might be adrift in another world. My father had told me never to approach such men.

He was pleasant enough, but I could soon see I was imposing somehow. He stopped working while I stood there and did not encourage the conversation. I finally gave an excuse and left. All the way back to the tent I wondered at the improbability and awkwardness of this meeting, feeling that I had ruined something. When my companion returned from a trip to Steadman I told him what had happened. He thought perhaps the man only wanted to be left alone, that I shouldn’t have intruded.

As I thought about watching him from the bushes, I thought how most of us come so late to understanding any need for privacy. I had even asked the man why he was sweeping the desert floor. He said it was an opportunity—an impossible task at which to work each day, as one might meditate or pray. He said he lived on land passed down with his family, that he mostly read—Bernal Diaz, when I asked, the volumes of Bernardino de Sahagún on the Aztec, as they became available, Copernicus—and he said he did not mind the loneliness. Several times a year he went to Steadman. Occasionally he would go on to Tucson, where he had grown up but had not been in a while. I understood him to mean the town had lost its heart, as a place that is photographed too much ceases to seem real.

I returned to the valley in 1973, alone, and—to put it honestly—driven. I wanted to see him again. In my memory his grip, even of what little of his life I had seen that day—the rhythmic sweeping, the distant house and garden shaded under mesquite and paloverde—his grip seemed sure, as though whatever it was he was doing was as good as one might hope to do.

The first evening in the valley I camped by myself and slept hardly at all for the breezes that came and stayed the night. The following morning I walked from the end of the bad road to his house, not more than a mile around the sweeping point of a high, chalky bluff. I noticed as I approached the arbor that sheltered his home that the area he had been sweeping that day was now covered with thousands of stones, seemingly without pattern, though it was impossible to miss the intent of a design.

It was late in the fall, very pleasant weather if you are not used to the heat. He was at home—he remembered me and said I should stay for lunch, if I wished. I experienced a relief at this moment I could not have anticipated. He had just baked bread. There was celery and lettuce from his garden and a kind of small melon I didn’t know. Its cool, yellow flesh reminded me instantly of boyhood days in California. When I said this impulsively he raised his spoon and eyebrows in knowing salute, nodding with his own mouth full, as though this were one of the less mysterious things about food.

His shaded garden he irrigated with water from an artesian well. The water tasted slightly of cedars and made me think of the lush, humid fragrance of hothouses. In addition to vegetables growing there he had several peach trees and ten or twelve rosebushes.

I was there all afternoon. We spoke a little of domestic plants, and the tinkling notes of black-throated sparrows in his garden, but there were long moments of silence.

In the evening he fixed a stew of jackrabbit and quail. When I asked, he said he caught them in snares made from strippings from mesquite roots. Had he known the Pima who had lived here, or read the work of Gibson and Santander? Or ever seen Harrington, who learned to speak the Pima language but whose extensive field notes lie buried and unread? No, he said, he knew little in this area: his interests outside reading and tending his garden were only mathematical puzzles and playing a clavichord that stood in the room. I didn’t know what to expect from the instrument; when he played it later that evening he imparted a sweetness, a fragility to the notes that evoked poignant memories.

Though he was not talkative he did not seem to mind my asking questions. I remember thinking of him that evening as a large bird like a night heron, who might rise and glide away through one of the windows and out across the valley.

I asked about his family, where were they from? Up from Sonora, now scattered. I asked about his education. Through the early grades in Nogales and Tucson, several years in college in Flagstaff, then only reading. I asked about his work. He had had many jobs, moving around Arizona and New Mexico, the Imperial Valley in California, until he was in his forties. In 1958 his grandfather died, bequeathing him the land and a small inheritance. He worked in Steadman now when he needed money.

I became slightly anxious at twilight, not being sure of the way back to the car, and having come to realize that I had perhaps asked too many questions.

We sat in silence for a time. He read. I listened to the air moving through the trees outside. The air was so dry it barely held the fragrance of his garden; only the roses, faintly, if one went to the window and inhaled. I was reminded again of my boyhood in doing this, for there had always been flowers present in the house, especially camellias.

He played something I did not know on the clavichord, which he said was Bach’s
First Partita,
and a few pieces by Eric Satie, one called
Trois Avant-dernières Pensées,
and then he made fresh coffee, very dark and thick. He asked me where I was from, and of my life. I was surprised to find myself so at ease. I answered him simply, without elaboration. He was interested in my father. I told him about coming to the valley with him to look for a kind of cactus. When I described it he seemed amused by the idea of its discovery. He had used it to treat depression, he said, making an ablution from its juice and fiber to rub over his hands, which he then allowed to dry in the air. Was he often depressed? I asked. He answered by indicating the landscape beyond, as though the answer were self-evident, one growing out of the other, no more to be avoided than cactus spines or the rocks under one’s feet. “Only once in a great while,” he said.

I wanted to ask him about the coffee, how he had managed to keep it so fresh. Did he buy only a little and use it up right away? He smiled as if the question pleased him. As one grew older, he said, one learned that with enough care almost anything would keep. It was only a matter of choosing what to take care of. “I have taken great care of a very old instrument,” he said. “Come and see.”

In the corner of the other room in the house, where his books filled the walls, was an orrery. It looked at first like a standing globe but was a compact set of inset spheres and geared wheels that drove planets and their moons around a central sun. Another clockwork mechanism linked the planets with their satellites, so that they moved relative to each other in imitation of the movements of the solar system. The machine was made of iron, bright brass, and a dark oiled wood like mahogany. There was about it something powerful and immediate.

I could barely step forward to touch it. He waved me closer impatiently, both acknowledging my awe and dismissing it with the same gesture. He put my hands on its parts and I stood transfixed as he demonstrated the intricacies of its movements. Mercury turning inside Venus; Ganymede, the largest moon of Jupiter, turning with Io and the others around its mother planet; and beyond Saturn nothing—Uranus, Neptune, Pluto all undiscovered. As he explained its history and the mathematical relationships of its parts he spoke of celestial winds—and I asked at that moment if the winds in the valley seemed peculiar to him, celestial or even otherworldly? Yes, he answered, as though this were the very point he wished to make. Yes, they did.

He stepped out into the garden, into the bright November evening, and I followed as he led through brittle brush where I was afraid of stepping on rattlesnakes. After a few minutes we came to the open area I recognized as the place where I had first seen him. The wind was just noticeable to me then, but it was evidently blowing hard enough at a distance to disturb some of the stones set down on the cleared plain. He motioned for me to keep my place and went on. I could see by his clothing as he moved away that he was walking into hurricane winds, that they snapped all around him, though I could still feel only a slight breeze and hear no sounds.

He moved several stones, seemed to orient himself, and amid spurts of dust I saw the stones lift off the ground. As they rose from the earth, they began to move in an arc across the sky, turning finally overhead in a dark shape like a pinwheel, some four or five hundred yards across. Now there was a waterfall sound, but only the lightest feeling of a breeze against my cheeks. The man came toward me, acknowledging my dumbstruck stare with a conspiratorial nod that indicated he thought it was impressive too. Perhaps because of friction, each of the thousands of stones now glowed, and they assumed the shape of a galaxy against the dark blue sky, like a bloom of phosphor rolling over in the night ocean.

“The winds,” he said, “they are like nothing else in the valley. They stand fully revealed from the moment you first see them. I threw up a handful of petals from the rosebushes. In return—this. I just had to find rocks and stones the right size, make the initial arrangement, Alpha Centauri here, stars of Boötes over there, Cassiopeia on the other side. I noticed the winds immediately—really, I think it was nothing more than throwing up rose petals summer mornings, and they blow like this. Of course, the winds here were unusual to begin with.”

“Yes,” I said.

He pointed to a spot where the planets around our own sun were visible.

“This is beyond—I can’t believe this,” I said.

“Yes,” he said. “Yes, I know.”

The galaxy turned slowly above us. I stood with my hands holding the top of my head, the tail of my shirt lifting slightly in the breeze.

“If one is patient,” he said, “if you are careful, I think there is probably nothing that cannot be retrieved.”

H
E FOLLOWED THE BELLBOY
off the elevator, through a foyer with forlorn leather couches, noting how low the ceiling was, with its white plaster flowers in bas-relief—and that there were no windows. He followed him down a long corridor dank with an air of fugitives, past dark, impenetrable doors. At the distant end of the next corridor he saw gray thunderheads and the black ironwork of a fire escape. The boy slowed down and reached out to slide a thick key into the lock and he heard the sudden alignment of steel tumblers and their ratchet click. The door swung open and the boy entered, with the suitcase bouncing against the crook at the back of his knee.

He tipped the boy, having no idea what amount was now thought proper. The boy departed, leaving the room sealed off as if in a vacuum. The key with the ornate brass fob lay on a glass table. The man stood by the bed with his hands folded at his lips as though in prayer. Slowly he cleared away the drapes, the curtains and the blinds and stared out at the bare sky. Wind whipped rain in streaks across the glass. He had never been to New Orleans. It was a vague streamer blowing in his memory, like a boyhood acquaintance with Lafcadio Hearn. Natchez Trace. Did Choctaw live here? he wondered. Or Chitamacha? Before them, worshippers of the sun.

He knew the plains better. Best. The high plains north of the Platte River.

He took off his shoes and lay on the bed. He was glad for the feel of the candlewick bedspread. Or was it chenille? He had had this kind of spread on his bed when he was a child. He removed his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose. In all these years he had delivered so few papers, had come to enjoy much more listening to them, to the stories unfolding in them. It did not matter to him that the arguments were so abstruse they were all but impregnable, that the thought in them would turn to vapor, an arrested breath. He came to hear a story unfold, to regard its shape and effect. He thought one unpacked history, that it came like pemmican in a parfleche and was to be consumed in a hard winter.

The wind sucked at the windows and released them suddenly to rattle in their metal frames. It made him think of home, of the Sand Hills. He lay motionless on the bed and thought of the wind. Crow men racing naked in an April rain, with their hair, five-foot-long black banners, spiraling behind, splashing on the muscled rumps of white horses with brown ears.