Red Sky at Morning (3 page)

We sat on the bed, and he told me what a dope I was, and how he wished he could find a kindly, understanding institution to put me in while he went off to the Navy.

"But no kidding," he said finally. "You be nice to your mother. You watch out for her. There aren't going to be any Southerners out in Sagrado to keep her feeling good, so go easy."

"Doesn't she like it out there?" I asked him. "She was out there with you almost every summer, before the war. I never heard any complaints."

He re-examined the end of his cigar. "I heard a few," he said. "It isn't that she doesn't like it there; it's just that . . . well, I suppose she gets jumpy when she's some place else. She said once that almost anywhere in the South—Natchez, Baton Rouge or Savannah, anywhere—she can always find a Devereaux or a Dabney headstone in the cemetery, and feels right at home."

I nodded, but I couldn't see getting comfort from dead relatives. "I'm a Southerner too, even if I do believe Farragut won the Battle of Mobile Bay, and not Buchanan."

"What you are," he said, "is more of a water rat. You're going with your mother because your brain needs drying out. In my opinion, there are barnacles inside your skull." Another reason for leaving, this one the feeblest yet.

He looked at his wrist watch, a heavy, complicated piece of equipment he'd bought when his commission came through. "It would give me considerable peace of mind if you got your ass in bed. We have a long drive ahead of us tomorrow." He opened the door to the hall. "You know, I'm still not sure about you. You're strong, but you read books. Are you going to be Art or Football?"

"I've been reading too many books," I said. "When I was kissing Corky tonight, all I could think about was Ernest Hemingway."

Dad shook his head. "Your great-great-grandfather Gunnar would have been proud of you. Good night."

"Good night, Commodore."

When I was two I began to get things like Indian fire and ringworm in the summer, on top of the prickly heat. My father stood it for two years, and then said, "God damn it, Ann, I'm taking Josh out of this swamp before some hot-shot skin doctor puts him in the Carville Leprosarium. He's one big open sore."

He got a lot of advice from his friends, sent away for bushels of Chamber of Commerce literature, read weather charts, and finally decided it was a tossup between Tucson and Colorado Springs. The summer that I was four, we drove west to look them over and decide. Dad called Paolo Bertucci into his office and asked him if he could handle the shipyard for a couple of months, and Paolo said, "You want us to keep on building from the keel up, or can I try out my idea about building from the funnel down?" Then they fought out another episode in their standing argument about whether Scandinavians or Italians had a nobler maritime tradition, and whether Ericson or Columbus discovered America. Paolo said the squareheads sailed west looking for beer, and Dad said the dagos sailed west looking for poontang. They decided that Paolo could handle the shipyard for a couple of months. As Dad was leaving, Paolo said, "There is one thing, Frank. There's this one point I'd like you to clear up. Does the deck go on top and the keel on the bottom, or is it the other way around?" Dad stomped out, and told my mother that afternoon that they'd probably be paupers when they got back from the trip west, and she'd better start learning how to use a sewing machine.

We drove around the Southwest all that summer. I don't remember the trip very well, but I recall that as soon as we got into West Texas the Indian fire and the prickly heat disappeared. Dad showed me the itinerary once: San Antonio, El Paso, Lordsburg, Tucson, Phoenix, Bountiful, Ely, Tuba City, Denver, Laramie, Butte, Ketchum, Cortez, Prescott, Albuquerque, Gallup, Taos. He scouted each recommended city thoroughly, entered a belittling comment on his list, and drove on.

It wasn't until late in August that he found the place he was seeking, and he'd never heard of it before.

We had spent two days in Albuquerque, the last major city on his list, and he was getting desperate. "Maybe they'll find something new to cure Josh's horrible diseases, something like cautery or arsenic pills. Maybe we can stay in Mobile during the summer."

"I wanted to stay there all along," my mother said. "I
like
Mobile. What's a little warm weather? And Indian fire is something all little boys and girls get. I had it. He'll grow out of it. Doctor DuBose says that tincture of iodine is still the best treatment." I began to howl along in there somewhere, remembering how the charred skin peeled off my knees after three months of iodine, so they let it drop.

My mother looked out the window of the old black Studebaker as we drove north through New Mexico. "I haven't seen one green thing all summer, Frank. Not one living green thing. Not since we crossed the Sabine River. Just dust." When we drove, she soaked small pieces of cotton in eau de Cologne and placed them on her wrists and her eyes. She hadn't seen much of anything.

"Sure, there's been some desert, but there's been some pretty country, too. Don't forget Estes Park. Don't forget the Grand Canyon. And anyway, look at Josh's knees." The state of my knees had brought about the whole trip. They'd looked at them every night, and by this time there wasn't anything to look for. They were just a pair of four-year-old knees, the knees that launched a thousand ships. "What about it, Josh? Would you like to spend your summers out here somewhere?"

"I want to see the bears, Daddy." The only thing I really remembered about that 5,000-mile drive was a bear cub chained to a post behind a gas station, a "See the Ferocious Grizzly 25¢" bear. He was in the hot sun with nothing in his water dish and, when I filled it up for him, he went "whuffle."

"I'm sorry, Hoss," he said. He'd taken to calling me Hoss during the trip; something he picked up from a cowboy. "That bear's all the way back in Williams, Arizona."

"No, Frank. It was in Marfa, Texas," my mother said.

"That was the five-legged calf," he told her. We drove on, toward Colorado, through miles of tumbleweed. greasewood, yucca, horse skeletons, red dust and misleading signs reading "Last Chance for Water."

The ice in our water jug melted, the fine dust from the road rose from the wheels of cars ahead and settled on the windshield. Sometimes Dad would stop and slosh a little water on the windshield so he could see. When he saw the sign "Corazón Sagrado—58 Miles" pointing up a narrower road toward a distant line of blue mountains, he turned off.

"It isn't on our route," my mother said.

"The hell with it. If we keep going this way we'll dehydrate and start to crinkle like paper bags. It's probably cooler up there."

They drove that same 58-mile-long stretch of road every summer for nine years after that. The state paved it in 1940, but otherwise it didn't change. At first the road wandered through the same desert and horse skeletons, but at an arroyo, a waterless gully in which a white-faced steer was decomposing, it climbed to a plateau. No one had blasted a highway there; the road followed a natural path, doubling back on itself, skirting red pinnacles, twisting through narrow canyons as close together as the walls of a tunnel. At the top, a thousand feet or so higher, the hot, dry desert air vanished, to be replaced by air with a completely different set of qualities; mountain air, cool, fresh and joyous to breathe, as clean in its own way as a breeze from the Gulf.

Ahead of us, stretching to the foot of the mountain range, was a great pasture that sloped gently upward, a carpet for a million sheep whose clusters speckled the plain for—I measured it roughly, years later—a thousand square miles. As we topped the plateau, and my father stopped the car to let the engine cool from the climb, a boy with a herd of sheep took off his broad-brimmed hat and waved it at us. My father said, "My God!"

Across the pastureland, the road ran straight, to end in a vague patch of green at the flank of the mountain, twenty miles away. There was nothing else to indicate that there was a town there, no tall buildings, no buildings at all that we could see. The boy, dark-skinned, wearing what appeared to be his fat grandfather's clothes and a wide felt hat, stood in the center of an eddying flock of sheep a few yards from the road, and my father hailed him. "Is this the way to the town?"

The boy and a ragged-looking sheepdog walked over to the car. He smiled and the dog lay down to watch.
"Cómo?"
the boy asked.

After looking at the map again, my father pointed toward the mountain and said, "Corazón Sagrado?"

"Si, claro,"
the boy said. "Vayn-tay my lace." He smiled again and whistled to his dog, who arose and went back to the sheep.

"Wonderful," Mother said. "Nobody speaks English."

"The map shows a circle with a dot in it," Dad said. "That's supposed to mean five to ten thousand population. I'll bet somebody there talks the language."

We parked beside a grassy square in the center of Corazón Sagrado that afternoon, and bought a roast chicken and some Coca-Cola. Dad spread a blanket under a tree for a picnic, and as we ate we watched a string of donkeys carrying wood. "Just like Mobile, in its way," he said. "More jackasses than people."

When we were halfway through the chicken, a big man wearing a badge walked up.

"Tourists?" he asked. "From out of estate?"

"Yes," Dad said.

"It's my juty to inform you that it's agains' the regulations to sit or estand on the grass in the plaza."

"Sorry," Dad said, "we didn't know." He began to gather up the food.

"No, no," the man continued. "Jew don' have to move. Enjoy the lonch. It's only my juty to tell you. There ain' no panalty for it. Hell, Mayor Chavez, he eats his lonch here every day. That your little boy?"

"That's right. His name's Joshua."

"Oh,
Josué,"
the man said, pronouncing it Ho-sway. "Me, I'm Procopio Trujillo. They call me Chamaco. I'm the shariff." He took off his hat, and we shook hands. "Jew from around sea level?"

"Mobile, Alabama."

"Jew better buy some big hats, and don' ron aroun' too much. A lot of people, they think it's nice and cool here, they go ronnin' aroun' and drop dead from the sun estroke. Estick aroun' for a while, we gonna have a fiesta after Labor Day. An' don' forgat about sitting on the grass. Jew been warned. I won' tell you more than three, four honnerd time, and then I'll clamp down. Hokay?"

Later that afternoon, after getting us a room at La Posta Hotel, Dad went to a real-estate agent and bought nine acres of land at the top of Camino Tuerto, which means One-Eyed Street. The agent said he was sorry the price was so high, but the property had a good view of the mountains. Dad said he didn't think four hundred fifty dollars was unreasonable, and could the man recommend a good building contractor?

"We don't have any real contractors here, Mr. Arnold. What we have is people who can build houses. I can recommend a man named Amadeo Montoya from up in Río Conejo, that's in the mountains. He'll build you any kind of house you want, as long as you want adobe. Adobe bricks are two for a penny. I'm sorry, the price went up last year."

I don't remember these conversations. My father told me about them later. He and mother argued for a week in the room at La Posta. Corazón Sagrado was too small, she said, too lonely and isolated. She didn't speak Spanish. The town was full of Catholics. Why couldn't they spend their summers at Sea Island, like everyone else. She had to rub cold cream on her arms because the air was so dry. The streets were full of donkey manure. They'd never find anyone to play bridge with. Most of the population had dark skins. They
said
they were Spanish, but how could you be
sure?

But he wore her down, finally, and until the war they drove in the early summer from Mobile to Corazón Sagrado when the first wet heat from the Gulf sloshed in. Dad would hand the shipyard over to Paolo, turn the car west on Highway 90 and race through the swelter until they topped the plateau and saw the sheep, the pasture land and the blue mountains. The same boy or another like him would be standing among his sheep as they drove over the top. Dad would point and ask, "Corazón Sagrado?" He knew it was the right road, but he would always ask.
"Sí, claro,"
the boy would say. "Vayn-tay my-lace." Twenty miles.

Amadeo Montoya, from Río Conejo, built three adobe rooms on our land that first year, and planted apple and peach trees. The next year he built three more rooms, planted poplars, and dug irrigation ditches. He and my father worked on it together in the summers, digging foundations, forming the big adobe bricks, plastering, setting pine beams in place, whitewashing, putting in Mexican tile they brought up from Juarez. My mother, who had filled the house in Mobile with all the fragile and antique crap she could find, had exhausted her interest in decoration, so Dad furnished the house himself with sturdy, handmade tables and chairs, Navajo rugs, bright Southwestern paintings—many of them involving horses—and the delicate Pueblo Indian pottery from the area, that would hold anything but water. The thick-walled house seemed to grow naturally from the brown earth.

The two men worked well together, my father middle-sized and lithe, like a handball player; Amadeo like a round-headed bull. Dad could never get his Baltimore tongue around Spanish, but as the years passed he became roughly fluent in the Sagrado dialect, which was full of English words. Once, before the house was finished, Dad was stirring some enamel and asked,
"Que pasó con el paint?"
Amadeo answered,
"Yo lo diluted con turpentine."

My knees gradually lost their importance as an excuse for the summer house. Sagrado was my father's personal retreat, a refuge from the damp, noisy problems of a shipyard on Mobile Bay. He spoke of Sagrado as if it were the Lost City of the Incas, but it wasn't really that obscure. Tourists wandered in sometimes, usually lost; many of the residents had come to cure themselves of tuberculosis or asthma in the thin, clean air, and remained because life there was easy and undemanding.

I went there every summer until I was ten, the year I discovered the joys of catboating. After that my parents went without me, and I stayed behind with Lacey in the big house, sleeping and eating just enough to keep up my strength for sailing. There was nothing for me in Sagrado. It was two thousand miles from salt water, and the movies were always two years old.