Trinity Fields (17 page)

Seeing her, though. I guess I have avoided it like the plague, without much wanting to admit my cowardice. In the past I defended myself. I have said to Bonnie Jean, —Listen, you live right there, what do you want me to do, I live two thousand miles away, drop everything and come when you want me to come? She wouldn't know who I was if I did come. I'm carrying my end of the deal.

—Your mother is not a
deal
, Brice, Bonnie Jean would say.

—All right already, you know what I mean. I'm not being irresponsible, I've been holding up my end.

And I have. I pay what bills her savings and small income do not cover. It seems fair enough. She's not yet in a nursing home—Bonnie and I've agreed to forgo that eventuality as long as possible—but when the time comes, no doubt much of the financial responsibility will fall to me.

Still, Bonnie Jean holds that my prolonged absence has made Mother sad. When she says that Mother misses seeing me, there is no escape, it makes me feel rotten and selfish and heartless. And what do I usually do but justify myself, like a fool. I am accountable for my behavior and my distance, of course, I'll say. I don't dispute that. But there is little that you could come up with, Bonnie Jean, to substantiate my inability to “face facts,” as you put it two or three years ago.

—And just what sort of facts are they I'm supposed to face? I asked.

—That you've never cared about us here.

—And what am I supposed to do different from what I'm doing?

Bonnie Jean relied on an old chestnut of hers, harvested from her orchard of cliches, —Well, if you don't know, I'm not going to tell you.

—Come on, Bonnie Jean, I said. —You chose to stay on the Hill, nobody forced you.

—Well, who was supposed to take care of Mom and Daddy?

—They were perfectly capable of taking care of themselves.

—Not after Daddy died.

I thought to say, Dad didn't need taking care of after he died, but settled for, —Look, I don't think by coddling Mother you're doing either one of you any good. You get upset when she doesn't acknowledge your presence, she gets upset when you don't want to talk about her saints and angels. What makes you think, aside from doing the shopping for her and helping with the laundry, that all your ministrations aren't just a nuisance?

I was unhappy with myself for having said that. I had a way of overstating my case to my sister, and had no clear idea of what weight my words might have with her.

She began to cry. —You're the same mean person you always were.

—I'm not mean, I said.

—You just don't get it. You don't know what it's like watching her fall apart, piece by piece, day in and day out.

—That doesn't prove I'm mean.

—You're ignorant of the situation here, for one. And two, you refuse to help in any way beyond sending out checks every so often. I think that makes you mean, Brice, and frankly I don't see it as anything new.

The argument invariably came to this impasse. I promised to come out. I apologized as best I could. And after we'd hung up I had to admit Bonnie Jean wasn't altogether wrong in her accusations. There was inequity, there were imbalances, she did do more to care for our mother, hadn't shoved off like Kip and I had so long ago. But she was mistaken to think I didn't comprehend what was happening out there. I knew altogether too well.

After my father passed away, Mother married Jesus. This was how I put it whenever friends asked how she was getting along, and I wonder if such a shoddy and cynical way of viewing her zealousness wasn't seen by these friends as the wish of a son who would rather have his widowed mother marry
him
. Was my frustration with her Christianity some form of jealousy? I mean really. No, it was more a sadness as I watched her lose some of her roughed-up edges, watched my born-again mother be smoothed, planed, graded a bit by her new beliefs and hopes. She stayed with the drink and how she went about reconciling that with the faith I couldn't say, although I think many religious people manage to weave their wants into their search for
salvus
. In my own perverse way, I approved of this single paradox in her newly forming, but not reforming, character.

Rage is too strong a word, and frustration may not be the most accurate description of what I felt when I found myself on the telephone with her, sometimes letting her go on for half an hour at a time about her quest for transformation and renewal. What must have been tugging at me was that I had such a distinct memory of myself once being, by intuition, so close to the deep comfort that religious sentiment can afford a person—back when Kip and I made our midnight pilgrimage—and now hearing it again from her, well, perhaps what I was feeling was more an agitated wistfulness. But, to be fair to myself, she
could
, at times, become a bona fide drone. She went through a Rudolf Otto phase, which I thought I might not survive. This was some ten years ago, in the early eighties, when during a birthday call to her I was made to endure an exegesis of what the theologian described as “Das Heilige.”

—The sacred, you see, Brice, the sacred inspires more than awe, it inspires the deepest terror.

—Terror, I said.

—Yes, a feeling of profound terror in the face of the majesty of mystery, here, let me quote from Mircea Eliade—

—Mom? I said.

—“the
feeling of terror
before the sacred, before the awe-inspiring mystery . . .
mysterium tremendum
—”

—Mom, how are Bonnie Jean and the kids?

—Listen, “the majesty—
majestas
—that emanates an overwhelming superiority of power—”

—Mother?

—“
religious fear
before the fascinating mystery—
mysterium fascinans
—in which perfect fullness of being flowers” which is so much like the ritual the Hispanics perform with Las Tinieblas, it all has to do with darkness and light, with apocalyptic fear. . . .

And so she might go on. There was to her, still, a kind of cool, an eccentricity that could distress or nettle me but which, when in a tranquil state myself, I was able to see as admirably unique. Who would've foreseen it, my mother over the course of a lifetime metamorphosing into a handsome old bird who loved nothing better than to invite you to pull up a chair at the kitchen table and share a tumbler or two of gin while discussing the Bible? Not I, but there it is.

Now here I turn off the radio, having had my fill of “Gotta thank Mama for the cookin', thank Daddy for the whoopin', thank the devil for the trouble I'm in.” Enough of “Daddy's hands were soft and kind when I was crying, Daddy's hands were hard as steel when I done wrong.” Good god, I think. Enough of fiddles and twang.

All I want to hear is the sound of the wind rushing through this funky old tub. My eye stretches out in a way I haven't felt it stretch in a long time. It is no wonder that the sky is what people most mention when they talk about the Southwest; the earth is just a floor for this blue ceiling and these kaleidoscopic clouds. The sky is higher, and I don't know why that is, although I'm sure my father could have told me—there must be some meteorological explanation. The clouds are a vast scrim, frothy and mercurial as ever. The mountains blue in the near distances, violet out farther. The road broad and the air stark. A magpie overhead, its long tail black and belly white.

I'd forgotten how much I enjoy driving, out on open highway like this, the Tesuque reservation lands dirty pink bespeckled with scrub, and past Camel Rock, which way back when we used to climb—somewhere in one of Mother's albums there was a photograph of Kip and me posing as small humps on the camel's back—and along past the same souvenir shops that have been here for decades selling kachinas and corn dolls, dreamcatchers and cowhide drums, past Arroyo Cuyamungue, past the pueblo bingo hall, past boneyards littered with great piles of cow skulls, elk and deer antlers, past all the tacky bric-a-brac, past porch railings hung with tourist rugs—
REAL INDIAN KRAFTS
—and past the cut-rate liquor stores that now have drive-through windows so you don't even have to get out of your car before you kill the old bottle and break the paper seal on the next.

After I turn to head up toward the Jemez, Black Mesa comes into view and reminds me of an enormous dark porkpie hat laid there on puebloland, Oppie's hat of course, and anxiety begins to hew the sweetness of all these familiarities.

Mother, Mother, I think. Please answer your door and know who I am. And as I think this, Bonnie Jean begins to make sense, come into focus. Well, not so much Bonnie Jean as such—siblings, I believe, are fated never to make sense of one another—but her hostility toward me, her impatience with my distance from her and our mother. I can see it, there's some reason to it, some value. Or is this the necessary regret felt by any prodigal son? Regret that refuses to acknowledge that though the prodigal has come home, chances are good he will leave again just like he did before, shamelessly strewing the path of his exit with a hundred empty promises of a quick return.

Bonnie I will visit first, I decide, although in my paranoia I begin to worry that she may not know who I am any more than Mother. Strange, all this sudden desire of recognition. Maybe Bonnie Jean's tones of moral ascendancy about all this are at times defensible. Maybe my right to recognition here is less than I had ever imagined, developed as it's been from the distance of an utterly different way of thinking and style of life. Still, though, I hope my mother will know her son.

It was September 1962, and within a month of our arrival in New York, Kip's disquietude began to acquire new focus. At first he tried to get with it, gave it what he could manage, tried to settle in to the life of a student, but his patience—never a long suit to begin with—wore thin with magnificent dispatch. He'd adjusted to the quickened rhythms, the babel, the pandemonium of the city with the same relative ease as I. It was not the city but university life that seemed to bother him. Restrictions, as Kip saw them, were here much like they'd been back on the Hill: odds meant to be gambled against, and beaten. He never read his books at a library carrel or in his dorm room, which was down the hall from mine, but preferred during days to linger on stoops in nearby neighborhoods, and at night in some noisy coffeehouse. He was forever wandering off campus and into the streets of the Upper West Side. Harlem, ten blocks to the north, or Morningside Park, where none of the students were ever seen, suited him better than anything on campus. The Greentree, the New Asia where seventy-five cents got you a good lunch, Tom's Diner, these were where he preferred to eat, rather than the paneled dining hall. John Jay, our dormitory, from whose windows we stared out south and east into the hard, inviting outside world, was to him an unwelcome confinement. He devised myriad ways to avoid honoring the curfew hour of eleven, after which you were supposed to sign your name in a registry book. I forged his signature a couple of times, other times others must have done the same. He was perpetually astir. Indeed, the one or two times in our lives that I saw him asleep, his eyes shivered beneath his lids like nystagmus, and his foot twitched in an involuntary mime of whatever dream he was having, a dream most probably of running.

—What're you so edgy about? I asked him one day in regard to some incident I've since forgotten.

—Edgy? and on his face was a look of genuine bewilderment.

I waited.

—Look, if I'm edgy, it's because this place is getting on my nerves. It's like a chicken coop here.

—That's ridiculous.

—It's an incubator, where eggheads come to get hatched.

—I don't see any shell around you.

—That's because I've got the good sense to chip away at mine.

Maybe he tried harder than I could see. Kip was forever full of hidden energies. Even when his spirits were low, some deep power was there, smoldering and impatient to burst back into flame. Dutiful to the degree allowed by his creeping cynicism about the value of higher education (—Like,
higher than what
? higher than a kite?), he went through the motions, bought the books, attended classes, though even in the freshman composition course we shared he managed to posture himself in his desk chair in such a way as to emanate rebelliousness and impetuosity. His entrance into Columbia was a means to an end, not for him of value in and of itself, not even finally a place to learn, but instead a crossroads—similar to the one back in Chimayó where he chose Taos over Pojoaque—valuable in that it freed him from one home he refused to accept as home, and at the same time offered a kind of solace, a transient residence that would shelter him until he could figure out how and where next to go.

For better or worse, the converse was my response to this new life. Though pride forced me to conceal my outlook behind facial expressions that ranged from skepticism to scorn, behind complicities such as —Yeah, this is no good, and —That's terrible, sorry complicities that were nothing short of lies, this life was, for me, radiant and chimeric at the same time, forbidding and spirited, a rich, promising amniotic sea in which I swam with such inner ease that it seemed everything I'd ever done before was preparatory to this moment. And, of course, I wasn't too proud to consider myself something of an intellectual embryo afloat in its albumen, in need of just the right amounts of warmth and time to gestate. I understand that I, too, was impatient in my way, but impatient about different things than Kip. And it wasn't as if paradoxes didn't await me, it wasn't as if the time wouldn't come when I myself considered the idea of a cloistered school with Ivy League pretensions, set apart from the community that surrounds it—as if you could separate culture and research and reflective thinking from the realities of adjacent communities—to be medieval. The difference between my arrival at this idea and Kip's was subtle, but as defining as anything in a dictionary.