FEEDING IN A FAMINE
Megan Miller returns to the farm in July or August when the river is low and the air yellow. There’s been a six-year drought. She looks across the barley field to the twin silos and interprets them as reassuring. It’s all a sequence of impressions to which we assign meaning. I could call them sores or anchors, she thinks, deliberately selecting the later.
Eleven Cottonwoods line the front fence. She counts them anyway. There’s a new horse in the pasture. There’s always a new horse in the pasture. She’s been told his generic name several times but forgets. Blacky. Honey. Wheaty. Rusty. She can’t remember them from season to season. There’s a take-home message here. One must not fraternize with livestock. To give them names implies a psychology, a personality, an emotional involvement. The next thing you know, you’re screwing sheep and everyone in church knows precisely the category of your sin. They smell it. It’s a capacity they’ve developed, like scenting sudden wind changes and ominous indications in shifting cloud structures.
She calls this horse Lady Gaga. “Hey Lady,” she yells through dense sunlight, across channels where voices are effortlessly lost. It strains the mouth to carve syllables into the laminated glare. The Sargasso is with us, Megan thinks, in our suitcases, our briefcases. We unpack salty red kelp as we do our silk suits. And the horse comes running. Megan waves a carrot she prepared in a slow motion, stood at the sink pealing with a dull knife while watching the aluminum coated silos. Such containers are festering lesions or acts of revelation. The farm is ground zero. And the silos her first punctuation. They rose from the ground like metal teeth.
Her father passes, almost grazing her shoulder, and climbs into his pick-up truck. “You’re going to spoil that horse,” he warns. He shuts the truck door hard, but it’s not a slam. That would be too decisive. Still, it’s a clear dismissal.
Megan observes her father drive away. This is how she remembers him, precisely, in insomniac nights in Paris, Maui and Los Angeles. He leaves a deliberate funnel of dust and the irritating scratch of gravel scattered beneath him. It’s an unmistakable threat. He’s a man of tornadoes and flesh wounds, surrounded and camouflaged by untouchable elements, stones, wind, motion, and the ripped air that leaks through wire fences. You know his plaid jacket better than his face.
An area is defined not only by what it contains but also by what is missing. That’s what Megan thought three days ago when they picked her up at the airport and drove home. She saw thunderheads and smelled damp barley. Fields like sea grass wind cut paths through. Perhaps this is the specific absence she is trying to fill or define, some weedy fluid movement loitering at her borders.
We carry intangible mistakes and garish miscalculations we never reveal. Megan recognizes they are simultaneously indulgent and brutally irretrievable. She glances at the barley. It’s a piece of her that’s been removed. It’s an amputation.
Megan is assaulted by the absolute knowledge of place. She surrenders to it, the river swollen with sun and insects, heat blowing in, thunderheads circling like gray walls growing up from the ground. Clouds are a speckled bouquet in reverse; a mysterious expanding fabric a woman initiated in such practices would know how to pick. Here all materials are saved, arranged and stitched. It is always quilting season.
August is white and yellow moths, monarch butterflies, oriels and golden eagles. Dust turns the sunset red and exquisite. It redeems and elevates the flat fields of wheat and barley, alfalfa and potatoes. There’s an insistent indication of gold between sheets of leaden gray and she thinks, suddenly, of medieval illuminated books.
That first afternoon, watching her father carry her suitcases into the house, Megan realized climate and personality are intimately linked. It is possible that geography is a form of fate. The valley is entirely ringed by clouds. They rise from the earth like a sort of crop. Potatoes are flowering with tiny white buds and if she ran the division of nomenclature, she would call the blossoms comafaces.
It’s two o’clock and Megan inhales heat from the unpaved road where her father drove away. It feels brittle, could settle on skin the way dust does, pollens, particles from plants and stalks when they’re cut and everyone’s eyes run. Harvest tears. But there’s more in this air, an underbelly tarnished with bits of wings from dying butterflies and yellowish feathers from sun-bleached hawks that often fall, a further layer of stained accumulation.
The posts on fences are ashy, the identical color of gravel in the driveway. Everything is chipped off, rubbed away. Even horses in the pasture with stalled summer across their backs are muted, dazed. The one blue spruce by the highway looks parched, neglected, scrubbed out. It’s merely an inconsequential blue afterthought, easily erased. There’s residue to this thought containing a darker implication, a midnight blue of bruises, perhaps. It’s not a psychological resonance but three-dimensional; you might actually see it in a mirror.
“She’s so dark,” her mother repeated. “That’s the darkest girl I’ve ever seen.” Dylan was four that summer, black haired and olive skinned like her ex-husband. A girl with enormous dark brown eyes who laughed and tanned easily, wanted to touch and ride the horses, swim in the river, pick flowers, eat peas from the garden, feed the chickens. A four-year-old from the season of infinite yes.
“I’ve never seen a child that dark,” her mother said again. “So dark and so small. Is that normal? You get her tested? She going to fade out? Is that her permanent complexion?”
Megan has not brought Dylan back. Now she wonders why she returns to her hometown, continues this pilgrimage in reverse, this journey where she expects to find nothing and does.
Restless, she drives the gray pick-up her father doesn’t use anymore. She parks on River Street, one block north of Main, and walks toward Maple. If the town had a center, this would be it. If there were answers, they would be here under the accidental circle of tall pines. In such shadows, one can engage in acts of personal architecture and invent a strategy for reconstructing seminal events.
Megan squints into sunlight. Morning comes at her in fragments, as if she’s an accident victim with extensive memory damage. She has a form of selective amnesia. That’s why she returns to the actual site where place should reveal itself as definitive.
Megan spends much of her life picking out shards like a woman stumbling from a car crash. She is paralyzed in a long startled, moment of pulling splinters of glass from her skin. There’s a sharp, gritty irritant she can’t identify. That’s why she returns each summer. It’s an archeological excavation. Decades of dust, sun and relentless digging pass before the unearthing of one gold bowl, an orb of what might have been a concubine’s earring. Or one singular coin with the face of a princess known only from rumor. You stand on a plateau, wind anointed, staring at the face of a god in your palm. There is danger in this heat; in the way thunderheads assemble above her shoulders when she isn’t tracking them. You must constantly bear witness. Now a crack of thunder behind her, close like a warning shot. And could it have happened here, on Maple or Main or River Boulevard? The specific coordinates she is searching for?