My brothers made no secret of how impressed they were with this performance of supergirl strength. For a few heavenly weeks I was their buddy. Now and then they would cut me in on a devilish plot, just so I could display my quisling subjection.
Like the day we decided to poison my sister. It was really the silliest ploy in the book. Ann was six, nearly seven, and even if she was tiny and naïve, she was nobody’s fool. The new bars of bluing my mother had begun to use for soaking the bed sheets out in the wringer-tub in the yard were stamped into break-off squares like a Hershey bar, but they were actually blue. When I told her this was a new kind of chocolate she was really going to like, she wasn’t tricked in the least, and said firmly, “It is not.”
Somebody, maybe my mother herself, had said that whatever those bluing cubes were made of could poison you, or at least make you blind, but I still urged Ann to try one. “Try it yourself,” she said, pushing me away, sure that if it was candy and as tasty as all that, I wouldn’t be in such a hurry to share it. But I held her and tried to force it to her lips, just as my mother abruptly came in from the yard and my brothers crawled sniggering from behind the couch and scurried out the door. Ann grabbed her around the knees. “They were trying to poison me!”
My mother glared at me hard, snatching the package out of my hand and reassuring Ann in a voice tight with banked anger. I had watched the boys disappear, and stood there, paralyzed, yet weirdly awake. Ann protested that I had really tried. She was right. I had, to buy an instant of my brothers’ admiration. “They wouldn’t have let you, darling,” my mother had said. But I knew what I knew, and it was like sudden carnal knowledge.
She lay now in the safe circle of my mother’s arms, her hair stroked and kissed, as I slipped guiltily out and across the yard and scrambled into the familiar splayed branch of the cottonwood tree, my own gut tumbling and aching as if I had poisoned myself. Time passed. The screen door swung gently open from the enclosed back porch where Ann and I usually slept together. I could see her tiny shape, in her little blue and white pinafore, emerge tentatively into the yard. Her feet were bare. A mass of hair had escaped from her braids and sprung into irregular loose brown curls around her dusky face. Her face was all wide-open eyes, searching the fading light.
I knew she was looking for me. It was as if I were seeing her for the first time.
I am glad not to have been a mother then. It was struggle enough to learn to be a motherly child. Nothing declared the impotency of parenting more than an apocalyptic Arizona rainstorm, when, after days—weeks—eternities of blanching and relentless blue skies and flaming sunsets, of long, blue-velvet nights flagrant with moonlight, a switch would be thrown on the universe, and rain and wind would flash across the desert, shutting down the world in a solid wall of water and erasing connection to anyone out of the reach of your arms.
My mother, who had a houndlike vigilance about danger (a sixth sense in her, literally, almost as overdeveloped as her sense of smell, which was legendary), would gladly have raised cowards, I think, just to be sure we’d hide safely under our beds like puppies when the power-rains came down. But her sons had just that bit of the blind, gambler’s daring of their father that seemed to have got us to Arizona in the first place, and even something of his queer taste for rousing and then flouting her womanish terrors. When the rain exploded out of the skies that famous year of Aunt Mildred, as suddenly as the lightning plunged into that live radiant soup of September heat, the boys rallied against all cries and dove into the flashing water like crocodiles, disappearing from sight before they had left the horseshoe drive, even before the smashing rain had carromed their reckless whoops and yelps out of the air.
We women and girls stood by, arms helplessly outstretched. But not all of us wanted to stop them. I wanted to be with them, to leap barefoot and bare-chested into that air ocean and let my eyesight be shattered by the sheer force of water and the rain pelt my back like bullets, as I had seen it pelt theirs, and dart and dance into the running river of the road. Here in the house the rain hammered on the metal roof, the wind drove sudden gushes of water at the windows. We could imagine the birds in their screened refuges soaked right through their oily feathers, hunkered down into soft balls, huddling together for comfort as the rushing rain drove deep new freshets into the dirt floor of the sheds. But they were safe, and would not fly, like boys, into the wall of water.
Had she known Carlo was in danger of drowning in a gully before she knew he’d been rescued, my mother might have died, just from the sheer fact of being helpless to save him. Something just that quixotic lay between the two of them, a deep tenderness she felt for his vulnerable smallness, he with that seemingly inarticulate yearning to be her boy, her only boy—to be, in fact, her man. With so much of her family’s strange witchcraft coded into acts of naming and renaming, perhaps there had been the magic of the patronymic he was blessed with as second son, singularly entitled to carry the name of her beloved Papa—or the elegant variation of it acceptable to my father. For Carlo, too, she would have stopped a bullet, a hundred times.
I think he knew he had this hold on her, that he lived and moved within the safety of its possession. Sickly and small, he had first survived pneumonia as an infant (one of our oft-repeated family miracles), then, with Lou, a scarlet fever that had left them both afflicted with the same fever-weakened eyesight. But Lou’s owlish glasses made him look the genuine budding genius, while Carlo’s lay as heavy and huge in his tiny face as the optics of a bottle fly. He clowned, he tricked, he teased, he ruthlessly taunted my sister and me, he did whatever he was told not to. He became ever more the mischievous little scapegrace as he grew. My father, his heart increasingly darkened and sore, felt baited, and even from his sickbed gave him the full brunt of a military, withering scorn. And the more he gave, the more Carlo seemed to want, to taunt him to give, as if it were a drug for which he had developed a habit, or as if it had become the dark side of my mother’s unconditional and enabling love, which could deny him nothing, forgive him everything.
But that day, when they brought him home half-dead, the shriek she shrieked could have stopped your heart. The sun had already burst through the clouds again and was beating the soaked earth into smoke when the whole posse of them abruptly appeared at the bottom of the drive, Lou and the neighborhood boys leading the way. Behind them walked the gas station man from down the road, Carlo lying across his arms as limp as a bolt of wet muslin. We knew he was alive. As they drew closer, we could hear him grotesquely weeping against his chattering teeth in a parody of his own impish laughter, see him wanly waving his brown little legs as if he wanted to run, as if he’d been caught and not rescued.
But he was safe, safe, safe, everyone reassured her! Yet she could not stop wailing in terror-exaggerated pain. And yet I knew she indulged her passion, her fury, and did not drop down dead at the sight of him, because by Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, and all the holy saints, even if he was half-dead, he was still alive.
The boys grabbed excitedly at their breath as they told us that the rain had already stopped pounding, and was just beginning to sift down straight through the sunlight, when Carlo had taken it into his head to breast the wild water flooding the drain ditches in streams as wide and boiling as rivers. He’d been caught, swept into a culvert pipe under the crossroad by the gas station. Lou had lunged forward and grabbed and held him by the wrists, screaming for help as he threw himself across the embankment, but without the strength to wrench him out against the force of the current. There was nothing to do but resist it, the two of them one body, arms tearing at shoulders, until the other boys came and made a chain and held them both back from the flood rushing into the great pipe. And then the garage man with his strong back and forearms had come and just reached down and yanked Carlo out.
For a few moments my mother simply took him in her arms, and, weeping, laid him across a blanket in her lap, took his head between her hands and kissed the streaky wet hair. His chest bled where it had been thrashed against the arch of the culvert, the fine brown-gold skin stripped away from throat to navel. He howled with pain coughing the foul, coffee-colored water out of his choking lungs, and she wept, we all wept, in pity for him. But he was alive. The saints had kept him alive.
Still, it was a deathblow, the last shimmering spike in my mother’s feeling for this beautiful and cursed place—a feeling that from the beginning had never