Owen's Daughter
Authors: Jo-Ann Mapson
To
Judi Hendricks,
Lois Gilbert,
&
to my son, Jack,
who inspired the first book, this book,
and no doubt what will come after.
Thank you for listening.
You must find grace within the calamity—
that’s where all the beauty lives.
—
Alice Anderson
“The Birds”
The Watermark
Contents
Just as pollen becomes a passenger riding the wind’s coattails, a spirit, too, can travel great distances. One day you may find me at 103 Ave de Colibri, a place I’m quite fond of because I lived there, once, and in that way, I always will. I’ve watched people come and go, tearing down the stables where beloved horses lived, the Appaloosa mare, her chestnut foal, as well as the chocolate-eyed bay stallion.
I see everything.
I watch the new owners whitewash the walls in the traditional way, using lime and water. Later, a traveler shows a man how to make glue so that he can apply wallpaper. Wallpaper inside an adobe house? Don’t forget the turpentine, he warns, turpentine is an insecticide. The fumes are terrible, and anyone who sleeps in that room is plagued with bad dreams.
Time is fluid, flowing both ways.
Some years later the wallpaper comes down, and others paint the rooms sky blue. Still others think red walls are a good idea, but not for long, and they argue about color, but actually they are arguing about something much deeper than paint, and come apart, sell the house, and then move. The latest is diamond plaster, a mixture of white clay, ocher pigment, and crushed mother-of-pearl. When the sun shines in the kitchen window, the walls wink as if they are holding back the stars.
But next door, at 105, there are worse secrets.
One summer an Englishwoman stands outside, wishing on a star. The famous Santa Fe wind blows restlessly through the trees. Left alone by her trader husband, who travels for business, she feels lost and alone. No babies have arrived. Her Spanish isn’t good. Her Navajo is nonexistent. Using sign language, her maid shows her how to keep a house, how to use beeswax to keep the furniture from drying out in the high desert climate. One morning, she stands alongside the maid and learns to make tortillas on the
comal
,
a smooth clay griddle. The trick is to remember that lard itself is an ingredient, and as such is dependent on the condition of the animal from whence it came. One must adjust the amount of masa, sprinkling it slowly, dripping in the water, and use both hands to mix. She is quiet while the dough rests under a flour sack dish towel, hoping her new skills will please the husband, who comes home from his travels unhappy, and drinks, and sometimes, though she tells no one, he hits her. The maid rubs salve on the bruises but says nothing.
She wished on that star every night.
Wishing is the business of children.
Once the woman was in love, with a farm boy who worked her father’s land. She and her lover couldn’t keep their hands off each other. Her father forbade the union and arranged a proper marriage to a man who would elevate his family’s status. The newlyweds took a boat all the way from England, over that rolling sea, and then a train through the dust, only to arrive here to what the woman called a mud hut. She cried. This so-called town was overrun with gamblers and drunks, Spanish men fond of harassing women, Native men who looked so frighteningly different that the farthest she ventured was the
estable
, or the stable, where the horses were kept. Her family shipped her grandmother’s English sideboard to her, across that ocean, believing familiar things would help her settle in. Waiting for it to arrive, the woman imagined where to place it and how it might look when it was filled with her blue-and-white china that had come all the way from the Orient, her husband’s gift to her when they married. The hired men struggled bringing the sideboard in the front door. Her trader husband, cheated out of money from a deal he’d been working on all week, returned home. There stood his formerly unhappy wife, smiling as she pressed coins into the hands of the hired men. She was taking coins out of his purse, his hard-earned money, to pay men who couldn’t speak English. He slapped the purse onto the floor, demanding to know how much she had paid them. Take the money out of the grocery budget, she said. How much? With his hands around her neck, she confessed. Three dollars. At dinner, she was not allowed to eat. That night he hit her again. When she woke on the floor in front of her beloved sideboard, she realized beauty meant nothing in the face of sorrow. The next time her husband went on a trading trip, she decided to sell the sideboard. It would bring enough money that she could return to London or head west, to California. All she needed was a buyer. A chance to arrange her travel.
But no one wanted to buy from a woman. They had no rights.
One night, her drunken husband threatened to push it over. Bust it into pieces. Burn it for firewood. Burn everything she had. Her horses, her linens, the pearl necklace of her grandmother’s. He lunged forward, and she did her best to stop him, rushing to save at least her dishes. He hit her with a piece of firewood and sent her to the afterlife. He took a drink of snakebite—whiskey—before he dragged her body to the barn. He placed her in the stall of the horse she loved best, the sweet-natured mare. He finished his drink before going in search of the sheriff and the doctor. The sheriff declared it an accident. Horse must have got spooked, kicked her to the ground. What a shame, the doctor said. She was such a pretty woman. Pretty but stupid, the husband said. They hauled her body away in a horse-drawn wagon. He shot the mare and had her carcass dragged away.
Only the maid suspected what the husband had done. She didn’t show up for work the next day, but she came a few days later and continued to cook and clean the way she always had. Actually, she cooked a little differently, because quite soon the husband went a little mad, and then he became ill, bedridden. Her recipes came from her ancestors. Foxglove salad. Delphinium tea. The cherry laurel made into a jam. Yew berries.
A lingering punishment, accompanied by suffering. Only then, the peace of death.
The sideboard stayed with the house whenever it sold. Too heavy to move, it fit the room just right. Generations of families used it to store their treasures, and there it stands still. In the year 1966, a young couple painted it sky blue. Imagine the history! they said to anyone who visited. What stories it could tell, said the next owners, and finally, the old woman who owned it last hired a furniture maker to restore it to its original state, a walnut stain. Now her niece uses it to hold woven baskets, books, and toys for the child she sometimes babysits.
History is trapped in every object, no matter how small. Story lurks in empty spaces.
Over generations, I’ve watched women burn meals here, and cry. Bake cookies to decorate, to prove to the grandchildren that holidays are sweet times, exempt from whippings. Women smiling while their hearts are breaking over their husbands’ secret lovers. Planning a Christmas meal that takes three days to prepare. They believe that a sumptuous feast, with everyone gathered around the table, will make everything better. They run themselves ragged, then slump at the table, too tired to enjoy the meal. Unhappy that the children are fighting, or the men are drunk, again, or that one of her sons, she is positive, has stolen her mother’s sterling silver Chantilly spoons and sold them to purchase drugs.
A wall’s purpose is to separate and to hold things in, so why should it surprise you that rooms contain secrets? In these various rooms, people make love, give birth, miscarry, weep silently, rage inwardly, consider leaving, break the law, commit adultery, force unwanted sex upon each other, contemplate suicide, murder, and eventually die. Some of them go so off course in life, it makes sense that people are mortal.
I was once that sort of person. Earthly. Salt water and flesh.
With my limited abilities, I remind people of the reasons to stay. They are the main characters in this never-ending play. Don’t they know they can change the ending? I pop open the cupboard latches. Blow out the candles. I press hard enough to make the beams groan. I turn the bathroom tap so it will drip. On certain days, when the conditions are just so, when it is essential, I may appear, but not for long. It’s exhausting to project a corporeal form, to get the features in the right places. Another day, in another home, I peer over the shoulder of a writer in his office on Upper Canyon Road. When he falters, I whisper in his ear,
Don’t stop now
.
I want to hear more.
Other days I feel too confined indoors and ride the wind to Navajo Lake, to get away from these messy, stupid people, and I swim with the fish. I pluck the bait from a fisherman’s hook. Farther north, I perch atop Shiprock and commune with
those ones
—
what the Navajo call their dead—who unfortunately don’t speak English or Spanish. Their Navajo is so formal, I often don’t understand. I never stay long. We all have our work to do. Today, it’s up to me to whisper into this young mother’s ear as she writes to her long-lost father. She’s so angry that the room she is in cowers around her. Anger has its time and place, but stay there too long and it will chain you to a stake in the ground, like a mistreated dog.
Dogs, by the way, can see me just fine.
Dear Daddy,
Part of the program at Cottonwoods Rehab is to work the Twelve Steps, and that’s what I’m doing writing this letter to you. I hate all the Steps, but Step Five particularly sucks. By comparison, Step Four is Yay! We’re having cherry pie for dessert, but not until you eat the liver and spinach. Step Five is Sorry, we’re having textured vegetable protein loaf from now on, and don’t expect ketchup, just clean your plate. Duncan, my group leader, and FBI (Full Blooded Indian, Navajo), says working the Steps is the only way to get out of this hellhole so I don’t have a choice. Just so you know, I’ve written dozens of letters to you, but this one I’m actually going to mail.
The problem is, I have no idea where to send it, so I’m going with the last address you gave to Mama, that P.O. box in Blue Dog, New Mexico. Sounds like made-up Hollywood movie towns with dirt roads, dust devils, fake Indians war-whooping all over the place, and one bar that never closes. Duncan says that it doesn’t matter if the letter never reaches you. He says the reason to write you letters is to forgive you and to clean my own house.
As if I had a house to clean! Or even a pot to pee in.