Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction (37 page)
Read Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction Online
Authors: Lex Williford,Michael Martone
2.
Robert Herrick, from
To Anthea: Ah, My Anthea!
6.
Sleeping Beauty
. Walt Disney, 1959.
7.
Anonymous. Qtd. in
The Book of Kisses.
Ed. William Cane. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993. p. 49.
8.
Anne Culkin.
Charm for Young Women.
New York: Deus Books, 1963. p. 107.
10.
Ellen Peck.
How to Get a Teen-Age Boy and What To Do With Him When You Get Him
. 1969. pp. 230–1.
11.
Sir Thomas Wyatt, [
They fle from me that sometyme did me seke
] (#53).
12.
Robert Herrick, from
A Kiss
.
13.
Evelyn Millis Duvall.
The Art of Dating
. New York: Association Press, 1967.
pp. 210–11
.
14.
William Shakespeare,
Antony and Cleopatra
, III, viii, 17–18.
15.
“M.”
The Sensuous Man
. New York: Dell Publishing Co., 1971. pp. 75–6.
16.
Robert Herrick, from
Upon Jack and Jill. Epigram
.
Harrison Candelaria Fletcher
HARRISON CANDELARIA
fletcher is an essayist and journalist whose work has appeared in
New Letters, Fourth Genre, Puerto del Sol
, and
Cimarron Review.
An essay finalist for the 2007 National Magazine Award, Fletcher has also been awarded the 2005
New Letters
Dorothy Churchill Cappon Prize for best essay and a
New Letters
Readers’ Award. He has been a finalist for the PEN Center USA, Eugene S. Pulliam,
Iowa Review
, and
Gulf Coast
awards. He received a BA from the University of New Mexico and an MFA from Vermont College. A native New Mexican, he lives with his wife and two children in Denver, Colorado, and has recently completed a memoir,
Man in a Box
.
Animals arrive after my father dies. Dogs. Cats. Ducks. Geese. A goat. A peacock. They wander into our yard several years into his absence, appearing on our doorstep, or catching our eye from feed store cages. Always, we take them in. We line our laundry room with bath towels, bed sheets and blankets. We fill cereal bowls with tap water, corn scratch and table scraps. We dab cut skin, comb matted fur and smooth broken feathers. Then we flick off the light and watch them sleep. Strays make the best pets, my mother tells the five of us kids. They won’t leave.
Beggar’s night, 1970. My big brother is late. Again. Our mother has given him permission to play on the ditch behind our house and to see if the neighbors will give him Halloween candy a day early, but when I peek out the back window to check on him, the sun has already set and the shadows drip like ink from the cottonwoods. I don’t say anything to our mother, who sits stiffly in her antique rocker chair, tapping a Russian olive switch on the floor. I scoot across the living room on my knees and take my place in front of the TV, where my three sisters are watching
Dr. No.
It’s a school night. We’ve changed into our flannel pajamas. Our hair is damp from the bath.
“Mom!”
The back door thuds open. My brother clomps through the kitchen, breathing hard, as if he’s been running. My mother stands, grips the switch and intercepts him in the dining room. The overhead light flicks on, bright as an interrogation lamp.
“Wait!” my brother pleads. “I found something. Look.”
I scramble to my feet and jockey for position with my sisters. Our brother reaches into his corduroy jacket, extracts a small bundle, and opens his hands. A baby bird squints at us.
My mother leans the switch against the wall.
“An owl,” she says, kneeling. “It’s adorable. Where did you find it?”
My brother had been hurrying home along the ditch when he heard a rustling from the bushes. When he slid down the embankment to investigate, he startled a hatchling that skittered through the dust but couldn’t fly. He thought it might have broken its wing, so he scooped it up.
“I looked for the nest but couldn’t find it,” he says. “Then I saw the mother by a tree. Someone shot her or something.”
Our mother holds the owl to the warmth of her body. It looks up at her, and blinks.
An ornithologist who lives down the street tells my mother we’ve adopted a screech owl, probably a female, given the description over the phone. Although it’s not allowed under city codes, it should be okay for us to nurse the chick until she gets stronger. She’s not a danger to us, although we might want to wear gloves when handling her. Feed her bits of stew meat, the ornithologist suggests, and later mice. Within six months, the owl should grow to her full height of five inches. We should keep her in a large cage or an enclosed room. And watch out for our cats.
My mother follows his advice, but vetoes the cage. She wants the owl to fly freely in her home. She retrieves a cardboard box from Safeway, lines it with towels and places a piñon branch inside before setting the carton atop the dining room pottery case where the cats can’t easily reach.
The owl is the size and shape of an upside-down pear. Her feathers are gray with black and white speckles. She has two tufts on her head that look like ears, or horns. Her beak is sharp and shiny black and so are her talons. What I like best are her eyes, a piercing yellow, the size of dimes. When she looks at me, it’s as if she’s reading my mind, or seeing something I can’t. One of my aunts can’t even meet her gaze. The owl’s eyes, she says, are too human.
My mother considers the bird’s name carefully. Usually, she names the pets after artists she admires, like Toshiro, the Japanese actor, for the silky black cat. Sometimes, she chooses characters from her favorite films, like Tonya, from
Dr. Zhivago
, for the German shepherd cross. Occasionally, she selects Spanish words that just sound nice, like Sol Pavo, sun bird, for the peacock. When I adopt a mallard duckling from the feed store, I pick Hercules, my favorite matinee hero, and the nickname my father gave me because I was stronger than other newborns in the nursery. For the owl, my mother decides upon Tirzah, after a Hopi basket maker.
“Tirzah,” my mother says, savoring the syllables, which break like sunlight through her window crystals, turquoise and yellow.
“What does it mean?” I ask.
“It’s an old name,” she says. “A religious name. From the Bible.”
Later, I look it up in a library dictionary: “Tirzah — A city in Palestine, a beautiful place alluded to in the Song of Solomon (‘You are as beautiful, my darling, as Tirzah’).”
During the first few weeks, Tirzah stays put on the pottery case. But as she gains strength, she flutters from her box, hovers a few seconds, and drops to the floor. Worried the owl will break its wings, my mother drapes the box each night with a sheet. But as soon as morning comes, she throws off the cover and sets the container on the dining room table while she makes breakfast, draws in her sketch pad, or pays bills. Tirzah hops out immediately, waddles over, and nibbles her pen. If my mother leaves the room, the owl tries to follow. The only way my mother can finish her household chores is to wrap the owl in a wash cloth and tuck her in the breast pocket of her denim work shirt. Tirzah remains there for hours, lulled by my mother’s heartbeat.
My grandmother grew up on a farm village on the western bank of the Rio Grande, the oldest of nine children. She hated every minute of it, the hard work and the animals, but she learned the old ways despite herself. She knows which herbs make which teas, how to brand cattle and castrate goats, and how to make red wine and corn whiskey. She also knows about spirits, which visit her dreams. Unlike my mother, who also has visions in her sleep, my grandmother sends the specters away for fear they’ll claim her. Sometimes I play with my toy knights on the kitchen table while she and my mother make tortillas and gossip. Every so often I hear them whispering in Spanish about dead relatives. When my grandmother catches me eavesdropping, and she always catches me, she laughs under her breath and beckons me with a long arthritic finger. “Come here,
mi hijito
,” she says, leaning forward on the edge of her chair, clutching a shiny black handbag. In a low voice, through the Crisco smoke and flour dust, she tells me about the fireballs dancing along the Rio Grande bosque, the footsteps dragging down her hallway at midnight, and the hooded crone who transformed into a banshee and chased two of her brothers home on the irrigation ditch between Alameda and Corrales. “It’s true,” she says, nodding at my wide eyes, then breaking into a smile of bright red lipstick and crooked teeth. “Did you go to church like I told you?”
On Sunday evenings, my grandmother stops by our house for pot roast. When the owl flutters over her head during one such visit, my grandmother makes the sign of the cross. Owls are bad omens, she grumbles. Navajos consider them evil spirits.
Brujas
use them to deliver messages.
“
Que fea
,” she scolds my mother. “What have you brought into your home?”
“I think she’s beautiful,” my mother replies, shrugging.
When Tirzah settles on a chair back directly across from her, my grandmother holds the owl’s gaze. Then she slips a glow-in-the-dark rosary from her purse, turns her head, and spits.
I don’t go camping, like the other kids on my block. I don’t go fishing, boating, or even to Uncle Cliff’s Family Land. My mother doesn’t like tourists. She doesn’t like to do what everyone else does. On the weekends, we go exploring. We pile into her metallic green ‘67 Comet and hit the back roads. We visit churches, graveyards, ranch towns and adobe ruins, chasing a culture she says is vanishing before our eyes. She talks to old people and collects antique tables and chairs while I run with my siblings through the juniper and ponderosa pine playing
Last of the Mohicans
.
On a Saturday morning washed clean by spring rain, we take my grandfather’s pickup north to Truchas, a farm village so high in the Sangre de Cristos we almost touch the clouds. In a grassy meadow beside the main road, my grandfather discovers a slice of aspen bark, eight feet long, crescent shaped, with a knot hole at one end. My uncle, who lives with us, says it looks like a cobra, but I think it looks like a dragon. My mother says it has character, so we pitch it into the truck bed.
Before heading back to Albuquerque, we stop at the
tiendita
for gas, chile chips and root beer. The old man behind the counter tells us the bark was cut by lightning a few nights earlier. He saw the flash and heard the boom. This makes my mother smile. Great symbolism, she says.
Back home, she and my uncle nail the plank across the living room wall as the centerpiece of her artifact collection. Tirzah notices immediately. She flies from the dining room pottery case and claims the perch as her own, sliding to the knothole, and watching us through the dragon’s eye.
My brother finds most of our strays. Or they find him. He’ll see a German shepherd digging in a garbage can, walk right up, and it’ll lick his hand, a friend for life. He has a way with animals, which soothe him in a way our mother can’t. He was six when our father died. He has the most memories. I was two. I remember almost nothing. We’re polar opposites, as our mother likes to say. She’s right. My brother loses his temper like the strike of a match, plays hardball without a glove, and keeps a Mexican switchblade in his drawer. He’s always moving, always fidgeting, always running, as if he’s afraid to look over his shoulder. I’m steady, docile and brooding, like my duck, Hercules, with his blunt beak and orange feet, quite happy never to leave his yard.
On weekday afternoons, Tirzah waits by the front window for my brother to return from school. She hoots when he shuffles through the driveway, flies to his room while he changes into blue jeans, and perches patiently on his shoulder while our mother tethers them together with a strand of yarn; boy’s wrist to owl’s leg. Task complete, they step outside to straddle his Stingray bike. I watch from the porch as Tirzah’s eyes swallow light and motion; the flashing chrome handlebars, the fluttering cottonwood leaf. “Be careful,” our mother says, but my brother ignores her. He stands on his pedals and steers a wide circle under the street lamp, gathering speed for the lap around the block. Tirzah grips his jacket, and leans into the wind.