AT NOON THEY began their descent from the Organ Mountains to the valley below. The road swung from side to side, now hidden by an escarp, then flung into sight as it followed the declining slope. After a sharp turn, Harry Tilson drove the car onto a fenced shoulder and turned off the ignition. Amelia, his wife, yawned and stretched. Harry removed his jacket and folded it across the backseat. Above and behind them, the mountains baked in the midday sun.
“What’s in the valley?” she asked.
“Nothing.”
She picked up the map lying on the seat between them.
“When will we be there?” she asked.
“An hour or less,” he answered.
“Are you scared yet? To see him?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
He hadn’t seen his father, Ben, in twenty-three years. Amelia dropped the map. “How can anyone fold these things?” she asked. The United States lay across her knees covered with the penciled record of their journey from New York City to New Mexico.
“What a long way,” she murmured.
Harry stared through the open window at the pale and heat-drained land below. The visit to his father, old and sick, probably dying, had been planned as a side trip during their vacation in Taos. All morning the mountains had obscured their destination.
Until Harry glimpsed the valley, he had not expected to feel much of anything. But now, along with mounting unease, the past began to own him. It was incomprehensible, all of it. Yet he had constructed from what he recalled of his early life a comic patter for himself and his listeners. It nearly convinced him he had a place to come from, early years, all that.
The stories he told were not so comic. He didn’t know why he told them. Perhaps there was something satisfying in the responses he evoked when, in the guise of regional lore, he spoke of nomadic wanderings in search of work, skeletal Fords containing all that he and his father owned, whippings administered with baling wire after his mother died giving birth to his brother, who died a few months later of some childhood disease. Sometimes in midsentence, as he remembered the traveling fairs that passed seasonally through the valley towns, recalling in the wake of their gaudy, vacuous gaiety his hope that life would be different when he was older and smarter, Harry would fall silent. But he discovered that silence had its uses too.
Now, as he gazed down at it, he was astonished to perceive the valley actually existed, and he was confronted with an almost shameful truth that he was unable to find words for. The smell of wild sage assaulted his nostrils. He closed his eyes briefly and found he was straining to catch the sound of something stirring in the silence of the mountains, just as he had when he was a child. All of it had happened. He turned on the ignition and gripped the wheel.
“Did you always live around here when you were little?” Amelia asked.
Harry put the car into second gear; the grade was steep. “Yes,” he said, then, “What? I’m sorry . . .”
“I asked—”
“I know what you asked.” A truck gained on them, passed, and left behind a sound of grinding gears.
“Yes, what?” she asked.
“About living here? Yes. I said yes before. When he—”
“Your father?”
“We stayed near the river. That’s where the work was.”
Amelia made another try at refolding the map. The ineffectual rustle of the paper irritated him.
“I had a gift for finding the cheapest cars,” he said.
“When you were little?” she asked.
“I was ten. That’s not little.”
“Oh,” she said. He sensed her disbelief. Why did she bother to question him? If he turned to look at her now he knew there would be a certain plaintive sweetness in her face.
“And then?” she asked.
“Then,” he began, accelerating as the road gradually leveled off, “we packed the car and set off until we found work. He drank up the take. Saturdays, he’d end up in a saloon with a hustler and no money. I’d load them both into the car, drive them to wherever we were camped. Sometimes the lady made me breakfast—”
“—when you were ten?”
“When I was a few years older. They cried all over me,” he said. His tone made her feel vaguely implicated, and she moved closer to the passenger door.
“It doesn’t look as if you could get anything to grow around here,” she observed somewhat stiffly.
Harry sighed and loosened his grip on the wheel. They had reached the valley floor. A few cattle stood here and there staring at the daylight, as they might have stared at darkness.
“You always think you can,” Harry said. “This is a bad month. But when they irrigate—you could plant a telephone pole and it would take root.”
She offered him a cigarette, and as he took it from her fingers he glanced at her and smiled briefly. Their marriage was recent, their experience of each other still fresh. Everything in the car was about them, of them—their maps and cigarettes, the suitcases in which their clothes were intermingled, a half-empty bottle of whiskey that rolled around the car floor.
He was recalling other cars, heaps of clanging, rusty parts, his father’s clothes and his bundled into blankets.
She was looking at him. He was such a solitary being that she imagined him self-conceived—no parents, no past. For all his stories, she did not associate him with the complex accumulation of experience she sensed in other people.
“Look! There’s a house,” she said, startled, expecting only horizon and sky.
“We’re almost there,” he said. “Mrs. Coyle wrote the place was north of Las Cruces.”
“How can people live like that?” she asked, turning her head to keep the house in view for a minute longer. It looked to her like a lump of yellow earth that had been scooped up roughly from the ground. What seemed like a doorway gave on to darkness. An inner tube rested against the dirt wall, and near it a chicken stood in a pose of expectancy. There was no other sign of life.
“It’s a sod shack,” he said. “You’d be surprised what you can live like.”
Amelia, with their destination only minutes away, asked him a question that had bothered her since letters from Mrs. Coyle, the district nurse, and a Doctor Treviot, had arrived, telling Harry of Ben Tilson’s stroke. “Will your father be crippled?” Her voice held a tremor that belied her air of detachment.
“It’ll be all right,” Harry said. “It’s not catching. Only his right arm was affected.” He had casually put his arm around her shoulder as he spoke. But he felt a sudden pain in his gut and withdrew the arm abruptly.
“What’s the matter?”
“It’s just that I’m getting tired of driving,” he replied. He wondered why he had bothered to try and reassure her. His father could have no meaning for her, and for him Ben Tilson was a monthly check and a tax deduction. Ben was a wreck, the doctor had written. No one knew what held him together.
He knew, he thought, watching the road without seeing it, instead seeing his father, asleep in an irrigation ditch after eighteen hours of work, spring up as the water reached his bare feet, a nightmare figure blackened with mud. It was a contemptible life for a man. What was the use of such endurance? He despised the memory—that vision of Ben, a furious scarecrow, drunk with fatigue, digging the irrigation ditch still deeper to receive the flow of water.
“There it is,” Harry said. They had rounded a curve, and just beyond it, oasislike, was a clump of cottonwood trees and, nailed to the trunk of one of them, a sign that read COYLE. Harry parked a few feet from the house. The siding and window frames were nearly bare of paint; the window shades were drawn, and a sheet-iron roof reflected the sunlight with brutal intensity.
For a brief moment, the two of them sat unmoving. Amelia sensed in Harry a vast exercise of will as he reached across her and opened the door, then got out on his side. As she stepped to the ground, she saw a gray stoop and several scrawny chickens roosting on its steps. A dog the color of charred wood gazed at her blankly before resting its head back on its paws. Harry waved his hand at the stoop, and the chickens flew lumpishly into the scrub grass. The dog rose and wagged its skinny tail just as Mrs. Verbena Coyle opened the screen door. She regarded them silently until a smile widened her lips to reveal small discolored teeth. Not a hair escaped from the thick braids wound round her head. Her pale eyes were unblinking. The heavy contours of her face were smooth; mass upon mass, moonlike and placid.
“I knew it was you as soon as I heard the car,” she said. “Ben’s been waiting all morning—wouldn’t eat his lunch. Think you might make him eat it?”
Harry went up the steps quickly, and Amelia followed. Mrs. Coyle continued. “I tell him he’s got to eat meat if he’s going to get better”—she paused to extend a hand to Harry. “ ‘I’ll be on my feet soon, Verbena,’ he says.”
Mrs. Coyle advanced a step and held out her other hand to Amelia. “Is he any better?” Harry asked.
“He’s not,” Mrs. Coyle answered firmly. “There comes a time in an illness where it don’t matter if you have a good day.” She looked up at the sky and smacked her lips. “He’s a sick man, Mr. Tilson.” She released both their hands and folded her own across her stomach. “When I found him laying out in the shack, holding on to his old flatiron—he’d dug a hole right in the dirt floor with it, you know—I thought he was gone for sure. But the doctor did a lot for him. He even gets around a bit, but he’s weak. That real weakness,” the last words said emphatically. She nodded to Amelia. “I’m a trained nurse, you know, the only one for miles around.”
“Could we see him now?” Harry asked.
“That’s what you come for, isn’t it?” Mrs. Coyle said. “You go round the house and I’ll meet you in the back. Ben’s in a little shed my husband fixed up.” She entered the house.
Harry backed down the two steps and stood irresolutely, frowning down at his shoes.
“Isn’t she something!” Amelia spoke in a low voice.
“Did you leave the cigarettes in the car?”
“I’ve got them right here,” she replied quickly, holding the pack out to him. But he turned from her and set off for the back of the house. Only natural, she said to herself, inevitable.
A few cottonwood trees stood between them and the dusty lonesome-looking two-lane road. The heat sang in the silence. The air had the texture of warmed glue.
Mrs. Coyle met them at the back door. She was accompanied by a little pale man who, as she walked, slipped in and out of sight behind her as though he were in league with her shadow.
“In there,” she said and waved toward an oversize chicken coop. At her words the small man took a giant step and Mrs. Coyle looked at him with rapt amusement, then turned to them, smiling archly. “This is my husband, Gulliver Coyle,” she said. Mr. Coyle grinned eerily at them and nodded. Amelia noticed how knobby his fingers were, and she recalled the dry flaked furrows they had driven past.
“Come on,” Harry urged her, as though she’d held back. She felt the sting of resentment. How ridiculous he looked in his finely tailored jacket, his costly slacks, as he stood in front of the shed. The dog had slunk around the house to make a part of their group.
Mrs. Coyle, as though seized by impulse, strode up to the shed door and opened it. “They’re here, Ben! Your boy’s here with his wife,” she cried as she stood aside to let Harry and Amelia precede her. Amelia stood back to wait for Mr. Coyle, but he shook his head no, moving his abused hands in clumsy amiability. Amelia stepped across the threshold. The room contained a bed, a rocking chair, and a tall dresser from which two middle drawers were missing. The rungs of the iron headrest were patched with white paint. An old man lay on the edge of the bed. He lifted his left hand in greeting as Amelia walked toward him. But he was looking past her, at Harry. His eyes were large, faded blue, and veined. The control apparent in the way he held his long-lipped mouth so stiffly gave way to the faintest of smiles. He barely parted his lips to speak.
“Well . . . it’s been a long time,” he said in a thin, grainy voice. Harry held out a hand, which the old man touched with his fingers. “I see your hair’s thinning,” Ben Tilson said. He looked at Amelia then. “I lost mine young, too. Seems to run in the family.” There was a moment of silence, which ended when Mrs. Coyle said with arch severity, “Will you eat your lunch now, Ben? I’ll bring it in.” He didn’t look at her or answer, and she left the shed.
Harry sat in the rocking chair. Amelia knew he was under a strain, but still, there was no other place to sit, and she stood awkwardly in the middle of the small room until Ben pointed down at his bed with a semblance of the authority of a man who knows how to deal with women. In the space he made for her by moving a few inches very slowly, she sat down on sheets thin and gray from years of washing.
“Don’t worry,” Ben said. “I can move if you crowd me.” She looked from father to son; a resemblance echoed back and forth between them.
“Everything going good for you?” Ben asked.
“Fairly well,” Harry answered. Couldn’t he give his father the satisfaction of knowing how far he had traveled away from this awful place? Harry had a fundamental frugality, she thought, a reluctance to admit obligation to anyone or anything.
“Remember your aunt Thyra?” Ben asked.
“Sure . . . of course,” Harry said.
“Well, she got into trouble up in Albuquerque,” Ben went on. “She kept on borrowing money, signing papers she couldn’t understand.”
“What did she want money for?” asked Harry irritably. “I thought you wrote last year that Winslow was doing pretty well?”
“Women get queer around a certain age, I guess. She decided she’d missed out on the grander things, bought herself one of them hairless Mexican dogs, took up smoking, bought a truckload of clothes and fifteen silk ties for Winslow. Not to leave out expensive liquor.”
Harry began to laugh. Broken, sibilant, it sounded like weeping. He bent over and covered his face with his hands. When he took them away a moment later, only a faint smile remained.
They all heard Mrs. Coyle nearing the shed as she crooned to the chickens. She entered the room carrying a small tray on which a plate crowded a jelly glass of milk. “Here you are, Ben. Show your boy how you can eat!”
She put the tray on the dresser, walked between Harry and Amelia, and began to plump up the thin pillows behind Ben’s head, arranging his shoulders against them with demonstrative efficiency. Ben’s eyes were half-shut, but his left hand moved convulsively. His right arm was immobile on the cotton coverlet. Once the tray was on his lap, he stared up at Mrs. Coyle. With ferocity, as though the sentiment had been hoarded until this moment, he said, “I don’t want this stuff!”
Mrs. Coyle, her authority questioned, was at a loss. She sighed heavily. “Well—then I’ll attend to my other charges,” she said, crossing to a door on the other side of the room Amelia hadn’t noticed. It led to another room, into which Mrs. Coyle disappeared.
Harry asked Amelia for matches. As she began searching her bag, Mrs. Coyle reappeared, her plump hands each placed on the heads of two children who clung to her skirt.
Framed by folds of cotton were the pale protuberant foreheads and silken-skinned faces of two little girls, thick pleats of skin around their slanted eyes.
“Alice and Pearly are going to have a little walk, then their lunch, then their naps,” Mrs. Coyle said in a singsong voice.
“Get this tray off’n me,” Ben demanded. Harry carried the tray to the dresser as Mrs. Coyle left with the children.
“Amelia . . . you’ve forgotten to give me the matches,” Harry said. Amelia held out a book of them as Ben’s voice trembled in the close air of the room. “Verbena takes care of lots of folks around here,” he said.
“I thought I’d drop in on Dr. Treviot, Dad,” Harry said.
“He can’t tell you nothing I don’t know,” Ben said. “When you’re old and sick, doctors get this secret organization all rigged up. It’s all about you, but you can’t join it.”
“No secrets,” Harry said briskly. “I’ll stick to the facts.”
“The facts!” exclaimed Ben scornfully, just as Mrs. Coyle knocked on the door and stuck her head into the room. “Mr. Coyle is playing with the children,” she announced. “Perhaps you’d come over to the kitchen, Mr. Tilson, now that I’ve got some time.”
Amelia smiled at Ben, who didn’t smile back, and followed Harry and Mrs. Coyle into the yard. Mr. Coyle was just rounding the house holding the hands of the girls. They moved torpidly beside him, their faded smocks flattened against their legs. Amelia turned from them into Mrs. Coyle’s huge smile. “Perhaps you’d keep old Ben company while your husband and I talk business,” she said.
Amelia cast a pleading glance at Harry; he ignored her.
She went back to the shed. The old man looked at her without much interest as she resumed her seat on the bed. “Well . . . ,” he sighed.
“I’ve never been to this part of the country before,” Amelia said. Perplexed when Ben didn’t answer her right away, she fell silent.
“Harry’s mother died young,” he said suddenly.
“Yes. He told me.”
“You were saying?”
“I’ve never been out here,” she repeated.
“Oh?” He spoke with faint interest. Could he be falling asleep or was it that she’d lost his attention? It was as if she’d never appeared in the room. Then his voice came out of the absence in his face. His lips parted and revealed a few brown teeth.
“. . . like his mother,” Ben said, continuing an inner story. He went on.
“When he was little, he had fat little legs, short like this—” He placed his index finger in the dead hollow of his right arm. “No longer than my forearm. I used to run him down paths, and those fat little legs of his . . . My! He could run!” They looked at each other for a long moment. Amelia thought, it’s not going to be so hard. But she felt some betrayal of Harry. Had he ever thought his father knew him in such a way?
“He always did have friends,” the old man went on. “Wherever we went and stopped a bit.” He looked warily at Amelia. “Maybe you didn’t know that?”
“No, I didn’t,” she said.
“I’ll be getting dressed now,” he said gruffly. With his good left arm, he lifted his right onto his lap.
“Shall I go get Mrs. Coyle to help you?”
“I’ll manage,” he said.
She left the shed. The chickens were gathered around a pile of potato peelings. Amelia avoided them, repulsed by their scrawniness.
Harry was sitting at the kitchen table with the Coyles. Mr. Coyle was staring at his wife with doggy admiration. No one looked up as Amelia came into the kitchen.
“Your father is getting dressed,” she said sharply.
Mrs. Coyle nodded. “Sure he is. He expects you to take him around the valley to visit old friends. He doesn’t hardly get anywhere these days.”
Harry got to his feet. “Is there anything else?” he asked.
“I’ve tried to tell you all of it,” Mrs. Coyle replied. “There’ll be no point in your seeing the doctor.”
“I’d like to use your bathroom,” Harry said with a touch of plaintiveness.
“Mr. Coyle will show you the facilities,” Mrs. Coyle said. Her husband rose obediently, and Harry followed him out of the kitchen. The clump of their footsteps sounded very loud, as though the house were hollow. Mrs. Coyle made no effort to detain Amelia, and after a minute she walked out of the kitchen. Ben, wearing khaki pants and a faded blue work shirt, leaned against the shed door. She ran to him, but he waved her away.
“Where’s the car?” he wanted to know.
Slowly, they made their way to the front of the house. He wouldn’t let her take his good arm. Once they were inside the car, he seemed to ignore her. After several minutes, he reached across her and pressed the horn.
“He’ll be along soon,” she said.
“What’s he doing in there?” Ben asked irritably. Harry emerged from the house to the sagging porch, wiping his mouth fastidiously with a handkerchief. Ben moved one foot back and forth, and Amelia felt on her cheek a drop of sweat like a tear.
“Where to?” Harry said as he got into the car.
“Toward town,” Ben said.
Here and there houses like shacks rose into the yellow light of the still afternoon. Once, Amelia saw a truck without wheels, abandoned in a field. A dog ran by the side of the road, its pink tongue hanging out. They went past a porch upon which an old person sat in a rocking chair, unmoving, mouth open to the heat. As they drove by a store, Ben poked Amelia with unexpected familiarity. “You can buy a pork chop or a hoe in our store . . .” Next to it stood a gas station with a large tin bucket in front of a solitary gas tank.
“Stop here,” Ben directed. Harry pulled off the road in front of what Amelia guessed was a boardinghouse. After the motor died, the two men got out of the car without a backward glance. Amelia scrambled out and followed them as they approached the steps leading up to a narrow swayed porch. In the shade of its overhang stood a cluster of old men. Their work clothes were shapeless with use and age. It crossed Amelia’s mind that if touched, they’d turn to dust.
Ben neared the steps cautiously, his head down. Harry walked beside him. Amelia sensed a struggle between them as Ben edged away from his son, holding the dead arm with his other. As he placed his foot on the first of three steps, the old men began to shout his name again and again. One did a short buck-and-wing. Amelia imagined she heard the click-clack of ghostly bones.
When Ben reached the porch, he looked back triumphantly at Harry. Look what I’ve done, his look seemed to say; I’m somebody here in my own country.
He introduced her: “Amelia, my daughter-in-law.” His voice loud. Amelia smiled, and it seemed to suffice, because the old men, Ben along with them, drifted to the other end of the porch. Amelia looked around for Harry and found him a few steps behind her. He pointed at Ben, shook his head, and sighed exaggeratedly. They listened to the loud guffaws, the moments of silence broken sharply by the rise of someone’s cracked old voice, a faint mumble.
“I’ll wait in the car,” Amelia said. She was nearly asleep when Harry and Ben rejoined her.
That afternoon they paid another visit. All the way to the Sherman ranch, Ben was loquacious. He told stories about his friends, the ones they had just seen on the boardinghouse porch. Their stories all bore the same stamp of misfortune—long droughts, disastrous storms, grudging harvests. They had outlived it all, Ben said, they had the last laugh.
No one has the last laugh, Amelia thought.
They parked in a driveway of sorts and entered a darkened room that held a stale coolness. A rancher’s huge, callused hand swept a black tomcat from a chair.
“Get off there, cat,” Mr. Sherman said. “You sit right down here, Ben. It’s fine to see you. So your boy come home and brought his new wife? Well now, Mrs. Tilson, why don’t you go visit with Mrs. Sherman?” He pointed toward the kitchen.
Mrs. Sherman, the middle-aged woman in a housedress who had greeted them at the front door, was making coffee. She wiped her hands on her dress and pulled out a chair at a round table for Amelia.
“You must find it different here from back East.”
“Yes, it is.” From the other room, she could hear the men’s voices rising and falling. What could wake her up fully? Her eyes nearly closed, she looked up to see Mrs. Sherman pouring coffee into thick white mugs. She was speaking about children.
“No. We don’t have any,” Amelia replied listlessly to the question.
“Whatever would that be like?” exclaimed Mrs. Sherman. “My children are all grown up and they’ve moved away. I don’t know why I bother with that cat. It spends its nights getting into fights and coming home limping with its ears unstitched. I suppose you got to have something around that’s alive and don’t fight with you.”
“Those two children Mrs. Coyle takes care of—” Amelia began impulsively.
“Pearly’s my niece’s little girl. Alice comes from somewhere down the valley. Bless Verbena. It isn’t everybody who would bother.”
“But there are special places for children like that,” Amelia insisted, remotely outraged that anyone would bless Mrs. Coyle.
“I suppose so,” replied Mrs. Sherman. She put the mugs of coffee on a tray and started off to the parlor. Amelia followed, carrying a sugar bowl and a pitcher of milk. Mrs. Sherman served Ben first, placing the mug on a stool where he could reach it.
“I’m not supposed to drink coffee,” Ben said. “But I will, thank you. If Verbena was here she’d knock it out of my hand.” He drank the coffee slowly, only his eyes closing to show his pleasure. Amelia sat down beside Harry. He seemed unaware of her. No one spoke or moved until Ben put his emptied mug down.
“You’ve got to take care of yourself, Ben,” Mrs. Sherman said in a kindly voice.
“Yeah . . . ,” the old man sighed, opening his eyes, his mouth slack. Mr. Sherman, who had been watching him, turned his attention to Harry.
“You going back East soon?” he asked.
“This afternoon,” replied Harry, shooting a warning glance at Amelia.
“It’s a short visit,” Mrs. Sherman remarked. Nothing more was said. And what if they were leaving? Amelia asked herself. What could be solved if they stayed longer? People went off and returned, again and again until they died. Generations of tomcats left and came back, staying home until their wounds healed. The heat was immutable.
Harry stood up and handed his mug to Mrs. Sherman. “Dad,” he said. Ben looked blankly about the room. “We’re going?” he asked. He too got to his feet, but this time he took Harry’s arm.
“It’s been grand to see you,” Mrs. Sherman said. Ben nodded as though he didn’t know the Shermans.
“Come again, soon,” Mr. Sherman said.
Outside, the intensity of the light had diminished. As they drove back to the Coyles’ house, Amelia saw far ahead the Organ Mountains, shadowed, mysterious in the twilight.
Mrs. Coyle was waiting for them on the porch. “I’m glad you brought my boy home safe,” she called out amiably. Ben grunted, but whether it was from disgust or the effort of moving, Amelia couldn’t guess. They walked with him to the shed, Mrs. Coyle following like fate. The sky grew plum-colored.
As soon as they went inside, Ben lay down on his bed. Mrs. Coyle covered him with a blanket and left.
“We’ll be on our way,” Harry said.
Ben stared up at them, his eyes empty.
“I’ll keep in touch,” Harry promised.
“Goodbye,” Amelia said and held out her hand. He touched it with one finger. At the door, Amelia turned back. Ben hadn’t moved. There was such desolation in the whole look of him, though there was no expression on his face she could name.
While Harry spoke to Mrs. Coyle, Amelia went to the car. It’s over, she realized.
Harry reached into the car for his jacket, still folded across the back seat, and got in. He felt in his pockets for cigarettes and turned on the ignition at the same time. Mrs. Coyle lifted a fat white arm, the broad hand dipped, and she turned slowly and entered her house. Just as the Tilsons drove onto the road, Amelia looked back once more and saw Mr. Coyle with something between a leap and a run suddenly appear on the driveway. He too waved, then stood still, staring after them.
They drove for a while in silence.