Megan cannot master the book of birds. She cannot articulate flight patterns and body characteristics. It seems incredible that she grew up in this region and can barely name what is flying or growing, trees or bushes or birds. How did she manage to miss all this? Did she spend her adolescence sleepwalking? Was she already living in Los Angeles, surrounded by another vocabulary of vegetation and necessity, even then?
“No. You don’t come at Christmas when we could use something festive,” Martha informs her. She has left her three children in the gravel roadside and they sit down, reach out for small stones, and dig with them. Soon Martha will leave her children at a daycare facility in town while she returns to her job in the photo developing section of Smith’s Supermarket. That’s what she did before her disastrous marriage. She spent her days in an enormous blue cotton smock counting out pictures of men exhibiting their rainbow trout while smiling sunburned from boats and docks. And women at barbecues, holding up spatulas and infants, raising them to the camera like banners or trophies. Megan remembers photographs muted by too much sun, all the backyards, lawns and moorings blunted, beaten into conventional submission. Even the water looked barely alive, undernourished, anemic.
“Don’t you dare look at me like that,” Martha sneered at her in the supermarket once. “Don’t stick your nose up. It’s an honest living.”
Now it’s a high plains August, baked green with flashes of neon white lightning in the night storms. Megan remembers thunder after midnight, how the air was vacant after the strikes and the shake. She considered the possibility that the house might collapse. She felt not bruised but numb.
“No, sir,” Martha screams. “ You got better stuff to do for Christmas. Hawaii with your boyfriends of the Hebrew persuasion. Skiing in that town where Oprah does with all the movie stars. You come when the river is low and the air stinks. That’s how you remember us. You come with the dust. You come to feed in a famine season.”
She crosses the highway, a demarcation she suspects Martha will not venture and she doesn’t; she turns back to her three gravel-sitting children. It’s always a disappointing yield with not enough to go around, Megan thinks. Who are you kidding?
Suddenly, she remembers an August when she was ten. She went to Y camp in town for theater week. They put on a production of Little Women and she was Jo. Later, she won the summer county library award. The prize was dinner at the pizza parlor and a game at Bowlero in the mall next door. She had to read forty books to win, including The Yearling and the entire Anne of Green Gables series, nine in all. Megan thought her achievement was worth more than a slice of pizza and twenty minutes of bowling. That’s why she stood in the parking lot crying. There is the matter of worth and value and the moment when we set our price per pound.
Martha stands on the edge of the highway. “You pretend you’re coming to see us,” she says, voice high and wavering. Behind her wind is blowing. “You come back for us to see you. Your new implants and hair-dos. Don’t pretend.” Martha laughs and it is harsh, brush and wire, gravel and wild fires. “But that’s what you do. That’s what keeps you in feed. Lying and pretending.”
Martha is experiencing a contempt so vast it’s completely beyond the known human range of expression. She is rocked with a silent laughter that makes her body violent. It is swollen and mute and terrible. Then she starts crying.
Megan walks toward the trail that leads to the marsh where there are bird feeders on poles and numerous nests and she is certain she will not classify anything. We become the landscapes we inhabit, she thinks, the molecules in the air we allow to enter our lungs. There is nothing random about this. It’s volitional. We consort with textures and fragrance, the shadows they cast and what they imply. We are infiltrated and redesigned. Of course there are spirits of rock and sky, reasons to worship eagles, hawks, the flight of geese and cycles of the moon, all moons, those named and charted and those still encased in their unmolested and hidden sleep. But this is only a partial explanation.
In the afternoon, Megan rides her bicycle out Lincoln Boulevard past the town limits to the ridge where she can see the Oregon Trail markers, the two pieces of mountain she considered indisputable as a child. They were what she would always navigate by.
It is mid August and patches of barley on the low hills are round as wells. Wind rolls through them like waves. Everything is some gradient of yellow, a golden swirl in unceasing motion. It is precisely the hay fields van Gogh painted, the dried grasses battered by their own hurricanes, perpetual, rising and falling as the Earth breathes. It occurs to her that, if she watches the barley field long enough, if she finds the one absolutely accurate angle, she will know what van Gogh was thinking.
It had nothing to do with absinthe or inhaling fumes from turpentine. Such an interpretation of van Gogh is trivial. The fields actually swirl as if painted and lacquered. They reveal the entire history and etiology of yellow and the wind is a hieroglyph a lucky woman might decipher.
For six consecutive days, just at sunset, one lone black elk passes a few yards in front of her parked bicycle, almost brushing the wheels. He crosses the highway, ambles into the scrub around the barley. It’s the color of twilight then, a suspended washed out purple that elongates and has no edges. The moment of borderless held breath. Megan is waiting for an indication, perhaps magical, like a stumbled upon enclave of lavender scented with prairie rock no one has seen before. If she could discover and resolve this, it might be possible to determine where home actually is and go there.
The next morning, Megan witnesses a storm form around her. She rides her bicycle into a squall and finds herself in the absolute unblinking yellow center of it. The gold bull’s eye. It’s like a nest. She is in the barley field on the top of the ridge where she spends afternoons attempting to determine what van Gogh knew. The sky is black, she is surrounded by it, but she stands in a circle of sun. Then it comes at her, gray and black clouds distinct like bats flying at her face, moving like predators, shockingly fast. She watches them approach and thinks, Then come, already. Come. And the squall is wind and rain and then a sequence of sudden pink lightning she simultaneously smells and hears. The air is a wound you put sulfur in, she thinks. You can put it in me.
She lies down in wet barley. Her bicycle has fallen over. It is raining hard. There are so many women within me, she realizes. Women with histories of tin and feathers. Women with veins of infected yellow water. Women abandoned by their fathers and mangled by August, by voices that ricochet through screen doors, by sirens and cursing. There are dialects of stones and bullets. Then she puts her head against the ground and lets the rain enter her.
On the plane the next morning Megan takes a window seat. Her mother and sister are standing against the fence waving handkerchiefs. She wishes her mother would ask her now, as the plane races across asphalt, what she is thinking. Now, at the juncture between ground and air when all things are possible. She is thinking van Gogh knew we are less than islands. We are anomalous rock in a stretch of bad ocean, one boulder in a thousand miles of aggrieved waves. We stand as long as we can, dreaming of yellow, our feet bleeding in sand. Then we collapse.