Chapter One: Porch Sitting and Year-Salvaging
August 2043. Late afternoon light slants through a window and ignites old telephone wires protruding from a turquoise clapboard wall. The rectangle of sun continues down and bends at the black and white checkered linoleum floor. Grains of dirt and particles of food appear unnaturally detailed. The front wheels of an aluminum walker move towards the back porch followed by black and red plaid slippers and veiny ankles.
Light on rusted screen. Chipped paint. Gray splintered wood. A hand with knobbed knuckles turns the handle. It creeks open. The porch is big, screened, the woods beyond it blitzed by light and shadow. Rick Carter wheels and shuffles towards the flamingo-pink rocking chair, slightly passes it, until his walker is a foot and half in front. His spotted hands shake on the handles as he lowers himself gently down into the chair. Light accents thin, gray wisps of hair and pale gray eyes.
Even though he sleeps much of the day now, the early morning and late afternoon is still his, as is his grandparent’s house.
Most everything else is gone now. Marie. The boys too, except on holidays when the house and property briefly fill with life—grandchildren rocketing through the woods on hovers, Danny and Courtney yelling at each other in the bedroom upstairs, his beautiful bright-eyed great granddaughter, Nevada, on his lap, looking up in amazement as he talks about the not-so-distant days of blue-ray, ATV’s and the last sliver of glacier on Mount Lehi, or the more distant days of phonographs, 8-tracks and three feet of snow Christmas morning.
Rick stares out across the boulder-strewn, timber-tangled canyon towards the new paved walking trail beyond his fence line. It’s been years since more than a few inches fell, he thinks, picturing deep black water puddled between snow-loaded stones, Boulder Creek sluggish after a heavy December snow. No more. However, winter rain, he had to admit, has its own charm. It’s only the summer fires and floods that terrify him. Luckily, Boulder Canyon has been spared from fire and only flooded badly three times. The last two times though, the water receded just in time.
Visions of winter melt around the edges and bleed into summer. His eyes focus on a woman and a child in the last direct sunlight of the day. She is perhaps in her late twenties or early thirties, though it is so hard to tell now. Everyone but the bed-ridden look so young, so vibrant. Both she and her daughter, who must be around 5 or 7, squat by the creek. The mom’s hair is pulled back in a ponytail and sunlight warms her left ear, cheek, neck and exposed shoulder. She wears a lime-green sports bra and skin-tight bike shorts. It’s odd, he thinks, how styles are like the seasons. It could be the 80’s, he could be in Dallas watching Amber ride off into the woods near White Rock Lake for the last time. And yet sunlight on her shoulder takes him to an even more distant time, to the time he stumbled upon Kristi undressing to go for a swim here, under the cottonwood, along the banks of the pond.
The pond is gone now, all but erased by the flood of eighty-three and totally buried by the floods of 2031 and five. But she, he is sure, is in the same place Kristi slid off her shirt and jeans to reveal a bright yellow bikini before she and Connie went for a swim. That was the last time he ever saw her. She would have been sixteen, but he carried that image like a torch for years: she reaches down, slender, delicate fingers grasping the bottom of a soft, blue and white football jersey, lifts it up over her head, releasing a stream of thick blond hair that glistens in the sunlight as her newly exposed shoulder is warmed by the late afternoon sunlight. Fingers must undo jean buttons up front, but he doesn’t see that, only the cool blue shadows on her back and then her pants coming down, the amazing shock of bright yellow fabric and skin.
It sucks getting old, he thinks. Every thought you think seems unnatural because a corpse shouldn’t desire. Leave the yearning for the living. How do you day dream when only death welcomes you? Everyone else is just there to ease you into your coffin. Someday, lady, that sweet child of yours will either put you in a home, or if you’re ornery enough to fight for your independence, drop in every two weeks to give you a shave, talk to you like a child, and then make hush-hush conversation in the other room with whatever relative is with her about their plans to bury you.
Maybe another flood wouldn’t be so bad, he thinks. I could be pulled under a clog of cottonwood limbs, buried over with boulders and crud from upstream, my corpse resting in the cool moist earth until devoured by worms or speared by the young, vibrant root of a cottonwood yearning to stretch out his tender arms and embrace the universe by decomposing the last remnants of the dead.
Why do I ponder death as so final, he sighs and shakes his head, when I know otherwise? And yet I do. It is just too hard to visualize the hereafter. Forgive me, Marie, forgive me. I should be looking forward to meeting up with you, and instead I spend my days here, trying to dig my way back into the fallen trunk of my life like a carpenter ant drilling into a cottonwood. For why? I do not know. Especially when my life really only started after meeting you. Maybe it is recovery I want—I just don’t know—to salvage the years that could have just as easily been thrown away and make something meaningful out of them. That is it! To make Kristi and the cottonwood count when I know they don’t count for nothing at all.
That, my Dear, is art—the selfish act of restructuring reality into how it should have been while life continues to pass you by. But after over thirty years of living with me, you know this better than I.
Working-Days—Journaling Cottonwood
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| Mitchell and Grandpa cleaning around the cottonwood several years ago. |
Writing is such a terrifying thing. Even in fiction, each word opens up the inner world of the writer, making him or her vulnerable to others. And there is something especially pompous about a novel, a claim that I’ve arrived that I know what I’m doing. And what if one hasn’t arrived and the novel isn’t good at all? No wonder every time I’ve started a novel I’ve quickly abandoned it.
But it shouldn’t be that way. One should be allowed to learn to write good novels by writing mediocre or even bad ones first. One should be able to follow an impulse, see if it will sustain itself or fizzle out.
This is one such impulse. A week ago, I was traveling to St. George to pick up my boys who had spent the summer with their grandparents in Page and there was something about the light that made the cottonwoods stand out more than usual.
Flying by on the freeway, I looked out the passenger window and saw a chalky road, an old house and a cottonwood and I thought that right there is a novel. I pictured the book jacket—a painted illustration in the regionalist style of the 1930’s-1940’s, something akin to the original jacket for the Grapes of Wrath and the tittle Cottonwood printed at the top in simple bold black letters.
I have no doubt Cottonwood as a book needs to exist. I do, however, have doubts about my ability to pull it off. I know I’m a strong poet and adequate essayists, but that’s as far as my confidence carries me. But every time I decide to discount the idea of writing a novel I come to this: do I really want to die without at least trying?
And the answer is no. I think I have things to tell my children, my future grandchildren and great grandchildren—big things that won’t fit in a poem, won’t fit in a story, won’t fit in an autobiography—because there is some truth that can only be told by mythmaking--big narratives that combine God, soil, plant and people. For me, specifically that means a truth which fuses the text of the cricket, the text of the dirt, the text of the coyote, the text of stone in cold creeks, the text of the cottonwood and the text of my people, small town Mormons living big lives outside the eye of the media.
Am I up to it? Who knows, but why not try?
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