Was the pope Catholic?
Was water wet?
Leaves flicked up their silvery undersides. The sky had the gilded look of storm. Some of the clouds had caught the light of the receding city, and I could see there was rotation in them. I went as fast as I could. I sometimes felt my tires skid and would then have to slow in order to straighten them in time. During one long stretch between two endless cornfields it seemed as if I were just standing still, going nowhere, the landscape was so tiresomely the same. And then the road began to roll and there were trees but the air remained motionless yet with sudden loud gusts. In the dark, one had to swerve to avoid the roadkill — the possums were smashed to slipperiness and the raccoons were large and often stiff with rigor mortis; even in death they could topple you. An unfortunate porcupine on the center line looked like a decorative but treacherous cactus.
I distracted myself with language: Right as rain—what did that ever, ever mean? I was a farmer’s daughter and couldn’t tell you. Was the rain wet? — that I understood: sarcastic tropes of obviousness were always the provincial way, and were made even more obvious by individual personal recklessness. Was the pope Catholic? Does a bear live in the woods? Was he a liver in the woods, and would the pope if hungry (and if caught in the woods along with the bear, heaving their respective masses around, snapping the branches and flattening the grass) eat it? And would the pope die if he did?
The rain began pelting me as if it were hail — and perhaps it was haiclass="underline" cold and stinging. Icy wetness stung my nose and cheeks. Things seemed to be metallically hitting the fender plates of my bike. I had no helmet. My lone headlight seemed to shine its light only a few feet ahead as I kept racing toward it, like a greyhound toward a moving teasing hare. Wind whirled around my ears as if in a vortex, a true gale, my mother’s own name: I would be the daughter of storm. Additionally, I had eaten Sarah’s food and no doubt would be maddened and end up a gorgon! My hair was being blown and tangled into stiff sticks of straw. The key was not to lose heart. In all things probably. Even for gorgons. And so I was determined not to.
——
“It’s not safe for you to be riding that little bike for hours in the dark.” Both my parents were waiting up for me. I entered like a drowned thing, my hair whipped to mop strings.
“You’re wearing your pearls,” said my mother.
I had forgotten. And checked again to feel them. I was drenched.
“They can get wet,” she said, trying to hide her surprise and approval. “That’s OK. It’s actually good for them.” And then she added, “We got a postcard from Robert today.”
“Really?” She handed it to me.
“No more,” said my father, unyieldingly, trying to get my attention. “You’re to ride that scooter only in the day.”
I looked at my brother’s postcard. Hey you all, it read, instead of “Dear Family.” Who said “Dear Family,” anyway? Nobody. Greetings from deep in the love handles of Texas. Food here is like a cross between Alien 5 and Predator 3. We are shipping out tomorrow. Love, R. It was nothing. Said nothing. On the front was a picture of El Paso, with its relentless blue sky like lobelia that had died then gone to heaven and become an invasive. I’d never known a blue sky could look so mean.
“Did you hear me about the scooter?” my father asked tensely.
“Yes,” I said. “OK.” And then I pulled out a copy of the menu and gave it to him. “I found your potatoes,” I said.
“Is that so,” he replied.
I did what I was told. I rode the scooter only in the daylight, into town to get soda pop and movie rentals. I sometimes rode it after working with my dad in the lettuce fields, my bird outfit still on, weaving along the county roads with their lettered names — F, M, PD — that stood for nothing that I knew of. The emptiness of them, and the revving on the curves and hills, was another kind of flight. Sometimes the thought again occurred to me that I was the extraterrestrial trying to get back home to outer space. Or somehow, as with my half-Jewishness, perhaps I was only part extraterrestrial, a mixed breed, a sci-fi tragic mulatto; as anyone could see, I didn’t really know how to get back to outer space at all. I was clearly making a botch of it. The breeze cooled me, even as a bird of prey, though if a storm was brewing, insects began to sense it in panic; slow-flying horseflies the size of bumblebees, as well as gnats and dragonflies, were blown onto my face, catching in my wings and sometimes even in my teeth and throat, if I’d been singing to myself. I would have to turn around and ride back to the house.
Some days, work done, I would just roam the property. Sandy soil was good not only for potatoes but for cottonwoods and basswoods as well, which on our land were giant and shade-giving. I would roam through our tiny ghost orchard, the cherry trees of which had been left unpruned three seasons running now and were spiky, gnarled, and largely fruitless, awaiting, perhaps, a buzz saw, a table maker — or a Russian play! Sometimes I would find an actual clutch of darkening cherries, and as with the apples in the adjacent three-tree cider orchard, I liked to find the fruit that had been slightly roughened. I had a habit from long ago, which my mother had failed to discourage: biting into the bruised spots of apples and cherries, the places under the skin where they had made their own wine, sweet and brown.
Past the old springhouse now used as a shed, past the root cellar built strongly into a small hill near the woodlot, I often headed down toward the fish hatchery with Blot just to look around. Blot himself was mostly interested in locating his old feces from last summer, stools that had turned dry and white as space snacks. “Blot! Get over here!” I would have to call him loudly, lest he tear off on some odiferous, self-seeking pilgrimage, never to be heard from again. Lucy, our nanny goat, was newly tethered for the summer, as she had wandered over to the adjacent construction too often and gnawed on the plywood gazebos.
Beneath my feet the ground sometimes gave way soggily: mole tunnels. Along the path the roots of old oaks had sometimes curled back around on themselves to encircle a clutch of wildflowers. Others stretched across the path not only like a stair’s edge but like the backbone of an ancient animal in an eroding grave. It was amazing to me the charisma of some of these trees, even as the lights were going out in them, the finger-leafed oaks, which were the ragged remnants of old savannah, and the star-leafed maples: my brother and I had climbed them and read in their strong branches. Some had hollowed trunks that allowed you to get right inside, in a sort of hiding cure of some sort, disappearing until you felt better; or you could just climb in and pop out for the hellbent surprise of it. The creaturely fire of them never seemed to extinguish itself entirely. Through the years, and at my dad’s distracted encouragement (perhaps to get us out of the trees), we had also spent time reinforcing the fish hatchery banks with stones plucked and gathered from the fields. The pond always seemed to need buttressing. We made piles from the round, fist-sized field rocks, before we planted them into the embankment. Sometimes they looked as friendly as our very own potatoes. Other times they looked like piles of tailless rodents, and in certain lights they could startle.
I had an idea that the fieldstones I didn’t take to the feed shop for sale to gardeners I would save for the hatchery. Its walls had held largely because we had been children and had been enthusiastic in our repairs, laying the stones tight as Legos. We’d also used a mortar of assorted grit: sesame seeds, toothpaste, bubble gum, and glue. And although the mortar had long ago washed away, the stones had settled nicely due to our original design and diligence in placing them. Plus, the stream was gentle. Fish still found their way in there and stayed. Certain weeks in summer our breakfast consisted of walleye and toast.