we never unpacked.
so far east it’s west to another man. no bells here.
still we move. almost back where we left now.
[gboyega odubanjo]
Held in the arms of my desert
I assuredly rest in peace
[tombstone, terlingua ghost town, tx]
Last night I wrenched open all the windows in our house to let the night air in. My husband trailed behind me, closing ones he thought I wouldn’t notice, murmuring asides about the cold, the northwest summer still too new.
But there was a child kicking inside me and I couldn’t sleep and all I could think of was when I was the child, when I was gobsmacked by the scent of early summer in the desert, how you opened the windows in our stucco red-roofed house and let the night breeze blow through. How fresh it smelled in the morning, how sometimes a storm had passed through while we slept.
When the end was near, we discussed what to do with your body. What would you want? It wasn’t a conversation any of us had ever had with you. Your business was only with life, the bullshot crack of it, the flat hot glare of the light midday, the night breeze blowing through the house. We couldn’t contemplate you buried. We couldn’t send you out to sea. The only option left was ash.
Of all the many things you loved in this world, a good road trip was at the top of the list. Something that could be turned into a column in a pinch. We decided to have one more, together, as a family.
Besides, we needed to take you home.
We drove through the West Texas desert, my mother and sister and I taking turns at the wheel, you in a cardboard box in the back. It felt so strange that it somehow came back around the bend and felt right again, the heat lancing in through the window to burn a slice of my right collarbone, the moon eventually rising to the left.
As it dipped in and out of the clouds, my sister pulled up Luckenbach Moon on her phone and began to read. Then there was the moon, she said.
And last night it showed off. The greatest ever.
The first place we left part of you was Prada Marfa. When I looked over my shoulder as we walked away, your shrine had already blown into the desert.
Makin’ silhouettes into things and things came alive
The second was Chinati. How freely you shared your delight with us. The familiar angles rising eternal against the horizon.
On moonbrite nites like this, big eyed deer
Tiptoe into larger openings and they can dance better
‘cause they can see where the rocks are at
The third was in the Davis Mountains, the heat already crackling with the rising sun as we wound up and up through the trees.
Their prancin’ gets fancier and freer because they know mans
Not there to dampen the dance
The fourth was at Big Bend, on the trail to the Window. We slept under the stars, ate tacos in Terlingua at the Starlight Theatre.
This kind of moonshine makes you crazy if you sleep in it,
They say
But I think you’re crazy not to try it
The fifth was Balmorhea. The water as icy as it ever was. We stuck our feet in and let the minnows nip us, the dappled sunlight visible all the way to the bottom, and it was summer again, childhood again.
Those who saw the moon said they could smell it.
One said it tasted like sin
The sixth was on the banks of the Concho River. This water was warm, meandering, unhurried under the eternal eye of the stone mermaid, the Pearl of the Concho. Home.
We’ve been telling strangers who come to Luckenbach ‘bout our Moon
We brought you to your brothers. The funeral home had small urns, but nothing felt right until I found two small cigar boxes from Grandad’s store in the attic and felt whatever part of you that was still in my heart do a little two-step.
But I know they won’t believe that
We have such a big moon
For such a small town
And then, all the sudden, we were back at the beginning. Rattling over a cattle guard through a very old, very familiar gate, at the end of our journey and back to where everything started. A portal to the place where you found your peace. The rest of you, the most of you, we brought back to the farm.
When we stepped out of the car, I wondered where you were, as I had so many times before. I couldn’t exactly feel you there, as I haven’t exactly felt you anywhere. But everything about the familiar wide sky, the heat, the warped timber of the mesquite reminded me of you. I half expected to see you walking up the road, wide brimmed hat, snake guards, walking stick, a crooked smile.
Instead I hefted the cardboard box while Mom wiped her forehead, examined a dead tree near the entrance, and declared, “We can just spread him here.” You would have thought that was funny.
We paused at a few places, the shelter you built with your brother, the trees you planted and watered so carefully, the found art you assembled, the old rusted pickup you loved tangled in the unchecked weeds. We read things aloud that you’d written in your blog over the years. The dim roar of the cicadas rose, then fell, then rose again. We made our way up the hill to a place that felt sacred, a semicircle of stones stacked and crumbling.
We finished it there, laid you to rest, your brothers and their wives, your wife and daughters. A small ritual. We read things you’d written about this place, so humble and beloved by you for so long. We left offerings on the rocks, things destined to be taken by the wind and the sun.
You always cherished the small, the unassuming, the overlooked- rusted mailboxes, a runty abandoned dog, a snakeskin half shed. A dryland farm in West Texas is a thing loved by so few, but of course it was easy for you to find its magic. I don’t know if your spirit is a thing separate from your body, but in case it isn’t, your body needed to be here, in the place you loved best. We read the words over you that you’d written about your love for this place you had christened Spur Creek Farm.
Your granddaughter will be born soon. I can’t think of her without thinking of you, how strange it is that part of you and us all will continue to live on, that life perpetuates itself. I wonder if I will recognize parts of you in her. I wonder if she will shimmy like you once did, if her joy and careful attention will one day strike me as strangely familiar.
Regardless, she will have her inheritance- the knowledge of sift light, Annie Dillard, armadillos and monarchs, rusty mailboxes and strangely worded street signs. She will grow up in a house with dusty paperbacks and strange boxes in the attic filled with oddities, and in a family that loves a good road trip. Maybe she will have hazel eyes and a crooked smile.
I can’t believe that she will never get to know you, your singular way of being. But what she will not lack for is love, and hopefully a sense of wonder at the world and the joyous coincidence of her being here in it, for just a little while.
Maybe she will one day look out the window while driving barefoot across the west at night and think to herself unbidden,
What a big, mean moon we have.
And in that moment, you will be here with her, and with us, again.
Prada Marfa
Fort Davis
Concho River
Spur Creek Farm
