Diamondback

SIGN OF THE SUN

There were times when I felt as though I was raising myself, alone, in the ubiquitous dust of New Mexico. I hid amidst the rubble of two colliding lives, hoping the half people that were my parents would somehow become whole. Waiting, always waiting for things to get better, I clung to bits of color in a drab world; scarlet birds, cactus flowers, bright dresses on perfect strangers were my only glimpses of hope. There were no fairy tales, no music, no children’s fantasies. Holidays were celebrated at other people’s houses, never ours. Nothing ever made a day or a person special. Monotonous mayhem prevailed without wonder or apology. Yet in my leaden life everything good stood out, a picture in a storybook. When my childhood came to an abrupt end, the Depression had swept away the life I knew like a raging flood. The only remnant of that time was a trembling in my soul which welled up, uninvited, taking me captive at the least convenient moments. And the memories of those days were bound tight within my mind, moths in cocoons, fragile, frightful…unavailable even to me.

On my fortieth birthday, my Aunt Ettie handed me a package wrapped in blue paper, tied with a white ribbon. Inside were the only two items that survived my childhood. Perhaps my mother‘s terrible housekeeping kept them hidden all those years. One item was a red leather diary given to me for my seventh birthday. The other was the tail of a diamondback rattlesnake strung on a leather thong like a talisman. I shuddered at the sight of it. When I opened the diary and saw my own naïve handwriting, the world from which it came closed around me like a fog. I stood, once again, on the scrubby plains of New Mexico, my past laid out before me in a sea of remembrance.

Aunt Ettie, being a big believer in horoscopes, said I was born in the sign of the sun. It was mid-August, 1924. Mama and Daddy were taking a small herd of cattle to a pasture miles from our ranch. My mother, even in her very pregnant condition, insisted on driving the supply wagon since Daddy couldn’t spare an extra hand and needed the supplies. Though I was not due for weeks, the bumpy wagon ride must have hastened my birth. I was delivered by an old Indian woman in a little tin shack on the New Mexico range. While he waited for me to arrive, Daddy paced like any expectant father except he did it on horseback. When the Indian woman carried me outside to my father she snatched three hairs from the horse’s tail and wrapped them around my tiny wrist to ensure that I would be a good rider. Daddy said I looked up at him on his big black horse and winked.

Most of my first recollections of him were on horseback. Towering above me as a child, he was tall and ruggedly handsome with high cheekbones like an Indian. Daddy would have spit on the ground in contempt with that comparison. His straight, black hair, always in need of a haircut, fell into his eyes unless it was held back by the sweat-stained gray Stetson he usually wore. That was my father, Nathan Hale Madison. I was Daddy’s favorite. It didn’t mean much, but it meant I got more attention than my brother or sister later on. Unlike most men, my father actually wanted a girl child when he found out he was about to be a father. I believe he was hoping I would grow up enough to cook him the first decent meal he’d had since he married my mother.

Mama named me Lily Anne and no one dared to call me Lily without the Anne. My mother had her opinions and anyone who knew her knew better than to disagree. Only Daddy had the nerve to buck her, occasionally. And since he hated the name Lily Anne as much as I did, from the first time he saw me he called me Tootsie.

Homesteading had long been an American tradition when my parents set out on their enterprise. As it had been in the past, land claimed from the government was the only way some people would ever own property. It made possible the dream of building an empire out of hard work and a little luck. My parents learned quickly about the hard work. It was the luck that always seemed to elude us. But in 1921 the world was an open door and my mother and father stepped through it into a new life.

The six hundred and sixty-five acres the government gave my father was fifty miles northeast of Clayton, New Mexico near the borders of Oklahoma and Colorado. The harsh landscape was hardly fit for raising cattle, but it bordered hundreds of acres of government land that could be leased for next to nothing. Though the land was rough and desolate, Daddy believed he could not have picked a better partner to endure the hardships they would have to face. Mama was small, but tough. She had a determined nature that made her seem larger than her five-foot-three stature. And while he may have had to give up the amenities of good housekeeping and edible food, she had an independence and spirit he admired…and needed. It was Mama who ultimately gave up the most. If she came west for love and adventure, what she found instead were the bitter realities of homestead life; drudgery, sacrifice and isolation.

Mama and Daddy were like-minded when it came to land. Both treasured it and believed it was the only thing truly worth fighting for. The difference was, while Daddy loved vast expanses of land because it meant freedom, Mama appreciated real estate because it made money.

New Mexico was not an easy place to live. As feeble as man’s attempts were at taming that wild land, nature was in her glory keeping it uncivilized. The weather went from blast furnace summers where the sun sent shimmers across the desiccated land to teeth-shattering cold winters and blizzards that buried the forage that kept the cattle alive. Even the sparse rains were seldom gentle. Calamitous thunderheads steamrolled down the hills dropping rain in sheets, turning creeks into impassable torrents. There were times when the spring winds were so relentless, men have been known to scream at the sky for a little peace. But knowing the worst New Mexico had to offer meant you could accept her gifts without guilt; glowing sunrises, perfect red sunsets, vast clear night skies and miles of untouched land to ride across with only the pronghorn antelope and mule deer crossing your path. Mama called it God-forsaken. Daddy called it heaven.

DADDY’S DREAM

Daddy’s people were wealthy landlords in St. Louis at the turn of the nineteenth century. His father died of consumption, what we now call tuberculosis. It was not common among the wealthy, but a prevalent cause of death in the lower class of people who rented his apartments. My grandmother contracted the same disease the following year and was placed in a sanitarium where she died six months later. My father was nine years old when his mother died. He and his younger brother and sister were placed in an orphanage by their guardian. It was a grim, deficient place and shortly after his arrival, my father came down with consumption as well. He was sent to live in a sanitarium in the mountains of Colorado. While convalescing, he immersed himself in cheap novels that romanticized the cowboy way of life. He passed the long hours listening to the older patients reminisce about cattle drives and campfires. Something about their stories stirred the soul of the lonely boy. When he returned to the orphanage three years later, instead of continuing his education, he was put to work as a carpenter’s boy, his wages were used to pay for his board and that of his siblings. Daddy worked long hours with little to show for it except calluses and strong muscles until he came of age and could collect his inheritance, but when he turned eighteen he discovered his guardian had sold most his parent’s property and run through all of the money. Shy and mistrustful of people, my father drifted back out west to try his hand at ranch work. His quiet way made him perfectly suited to work with animals, especially horses. They put up no pretense, told no lies. After working in Texas, Colorado and Arizona, Daddy decided something about New Mexico fulfilled his dream. There was plenty of open land still available so he filed a homestead claim with the government and headed back to Southern Illinois to settle up on some small tracts of land his family still owned. That’s where he met Mama.

Mama and Aunt Ettie lived on a farm near Keans, Illinois with their parents and three brothers. The two sisters could not have been less alike. Aunt Ettie was as delicate as a female could be. She loved bows and lace, baking pies, bubble baths, all the trappings of femininity. Mama was a tomboy. She could outride, outshoot and out-cuss any of her brothers or most men for that matter. She called Aunt Ettie, L’il Angel as she pulled the ribbons from her hair. Barefoot and bareback was how Aunt Ettie described her uncivilized older sister. While Mama was learning to be a crack shot and to leap onto a galloping horse, she was not learning how to cook, clean the house or wash clothes. My father had no way of knowing about her lack of domestic skills when he met her in 1921. It wouldn’t have mattered; he was smitten.

Tell me again how they met, I would ask Aunt Ettie. It was my favorite story.

But you know that story by heart, she would say.

I know, but tell me once more.

Alright. You can remind me if I forget something. Let’s see where to start.

Mama was working…

That’s right. Your mama was working up in Michigan. She was engaged to a dentist up there. They had even set a date for their wedding. She had come home to arrange the wedding. Your Uncle Harry had just opened a café in Keans. Bess agreed to help him for a few weeks until it was up and going.

What did she do in the café? I asked, unable to picture my mother cooking.

We know it wasn’t cooking or Uncle Harry wouldn’t have been in business long. But Bess was always good with money. She could count change in the blink of an eye, so she worked the cash register and the counter, pouring coffee, cutting pie. Your daddy and his brother, Ray, were fixing up a farm to sell over by the river, a place folks called Four Mile. He’d already filed a claim out west so he was trying to get a little cash to buy some cattle. That was your daddy‘s dream to have a cattle ranch

And he was going out there all by himself, I added.

Yes, all by himself, but he walked into that café to get a cup of coffee one day and he looked into your Mama’s big, green eyes and love just twisted his ear.

It was love at first sight, wasn’t it, Aunt Ettie?

Something like that, Aunt Ettie would say. She was pretty, kinda sassy, too. Nate was so good looking, he just turned your Mama’s head the minute she laid eyes on him.

And Mama broke that old dentist’s heart.

You bet she did. She never even went back to Michigan to collect her things. She wrote him a letter of regret, but I don’t think she was too regretful. Our Papa pitched conniptions over his daughter jilting a man of substance for some no-account who didn’t have an education or an occupation or anything to call his own. All your daddy had was a dream. Our Papa didn’t trust dreams. Oh, there was a fight to end all between Papa and Bess, but in the end Bessy had her way.

Then Mama and Daddy ran off to New Mexico. They got married and I got born. That’s the end of the story.

Well, that’s part of it anyway. We both know the story didn’t end there. The dream had to be played out in that big, open country they call New Mexico.

Yes, I reckon I know the rest.

And so I did. The rest of the story wasn’t a dream to some of us, it was sometimes a nightmare depending on who you asked. The only thing constant was New Mexico. There was a beauty in the starkness of our land. Everything was done in bold strokes. The valleys, swept in tawny colors, contrasted with the dusky mountains in the distance. Rocky arroyos, left over from a long dried-up ocean bed showed signs of ancient waters flowing, shaping the now hard-set land. Ever so often large piles of boulders dotted the landscape as if nature had been playing with rocks and dropped her playthings. I would scramble up the randomly placed stone towers and sit on top looking down at the world like a smug cat. To the northeast of the ranch we could see the Black Mesa, a huge dark plateau that stretched from sunrise to sunset. Each direction had a clear theme, to the south, an endless grassy plains which led to Clayton, to the west, the foothills of the mountains, to the east, Oklahoma beckoned, only a few miles, across short hills dotted with rock heaps.

The cabin we lived in was made of log and wood planking with adobe mud packed into the cracks. My father, I was told on many occasions, built every bit of it by hand with a little help and much advice from Mama. There were three rooms; a kitchen/sitting room, my parents bedroom and my bedroom, which started out as the storage area for everything from the big tin tub we dragged out into the kitchen to bathe in to the fancy hand-tooled saddle Daddy won at a rodeo. I must have been an afterthought as I was sort of stuffed among the winter stores of canned goods, sacks of flour, sugar and coffee and the extra blankets which kept us from the cold. Everything in the cabin was quickly made, slapped together with the threat of that first coming winter. It was never brought up to the standard most people would have wanted.

The kitchen was the largest room. A store-bought table and chairs occupied the center of the kitchen; it was also the center of our indoor life. Every chore was done there. I did my homework on it, Mama shoved the dirty plates aside to read a book, Daddy fixed leather and cleaned his guns on the table, our few guests visited around it, countless meals of beef and beans and biscuits were eaten on it, and the fighting that was a regular part of our existence often began with a simple statement spoken there. Milk and tears and melting snow fell on the worn surface of the once-white dining set; fists pounded it, dirty, little fingernails picked at the chipped paint. The front rung of one chair was broken; a quiet testament to my mother’s fierce temper. It dragged the floor to remind us all.

The rest of the room was background. There were two large cabinets on each side of a nickel sink along the west wall. They were made of rough-cut wood with knotted rope for handles. A black pump next to the sink supplied the only indoor water. The water was icy cold, the handle too stiff for a little girl to raise. I was always at someone else’s mercy when I was thirsty. Above the cabinets were shelves for cans and sacks of supplies, dishes and cups, a hodge-podge of chipped china and tin. In a dark corner next to the cabinets stood the wood-burning cook stove, a Majestic, caked with grease and the days boiled-over rations. It burned off eventually, only to be supplanted the next day. Mama called the cast-iron behemoth, the dragon, because it breathed fire and irritating smoke. A large wood box served the stove and fireplace and was home to a firmly entrenched family of mice. They skittered around in the silence of darkness picking up the bountiful crumbs of cornbread or biscuits that Mama brushed off the table. A boulder stone fireplace dominated the west wall of the cabin. What my father had learned being a carpenter’s apprentice served him well enough building the cabin, but he was lacking in skill when it came to masonry. The fireplace, our only source of heat, had a bad draft and leaked smoke through the numerous cracks in the poorly fitted stone at the whim of every wind. The cabin, winter and summer alike, smelled strongly of wood smoke, rancid grease and horse and human sweat. Two mismatched armchairs with dirty, threadbare upholstery faced the fireplace. There was a picture of some nondescript mountains above the mantle, one of the few concessions Mama made to civility in the room.

By the door hung an ancient, but effective shotgun. The only daylight in the kitchen came from two windows, a small one over the kitchen sink and a larger one by the cabin door. Neither of them opened as they were just panes of glass held in place by nails. The paper shades that hung over them were always drooping, like sleepy, half-closed eyes. The wood floor in the storeroom where I slept was never finished; in its place canvas covered the packed dirt. Nothing in the place ever saw a drop of paint. Everything was made for utility, never for comfort or beauty. Just to get by, Mama always said. Get by until when she never said. It was her philosophy of survival both literally and emotionally.

Somewhere along the line a promise was made to fix up the living quarters after everything else was done, but it was a promise no one pressed for and no one found the necessity to keep. Mama tucked the promise away to use as a weapon during battles on drafty, leaky nights.

As rough and ratty as the cabin was, the barn was as carefully crafted as my father’s abilities were capable of building. It showed where his priorities lay. In the rough plank barn there were six tie-stalls and six box stalls, used mostly in winter, a tack room with saddle and bridle racks, a feed room and a large hayloft. On one side of the barn was a loafing shed for the horses we used often and wanted kept close to the cabin. On the other side was a large lean-to used for more hay storage. The barn was cool and dark in the summer; warm and tight in winter. It was Daddy’s sanctuary. He puttered for hours in the solitude, grooming or shoeing horses, mucking stalls, cleaning tack. Any time Iwas privileged to be there with him, I sat on a bale of straw watching him rub the stiff leather with neat’s-foot oil or file a horse’s hoof to a smooth oval. We rarely talked. What was there really to talk about? He never would say a word about his past, and I didn’t have any past to speak of. He lacked the imagination to speculate about the future, I lacked the experience to imagine it. So we were only left to discuss the present and it seemed to be right there before us, a man, a girl and a horse. I was content just to be in his presence. The barn was our place to be together.

Though I was forbidden to climb into the hayloft, it perpetually lured me into disobedience, especially when the hay had just been baled and stacked. It was sweet- smelling and piled to the rafters. Climbing the bales like giant stairs until I reached the top, I would scoot on my belly and look over the edge. It was a long way down but very much to the liking of somebody pretending to be a cat. Often times I had cat company. If Mama called me, I crawled out of the light and back into the darkness out of sight. I think she suspected where I had been as she picked off bits of hay clinging to my back. Where did you say you were? she would ask. Still the risk of getting caught was worth the pleasure of lying on my back with a cat napping on my stomach, daydreaming. I would have preferred to live in the barn had it not been for the snakes which sometimes came out of the scorching July heat to lurk in cool, dark corners. Even though I knew they wouldn’t come up into the hayloft, the fact that I might have to pass them in the aisle was enough to send me back to my own bed among the dry goods.

After two years of struggling to run the ranch by themselves, my parents were able to hire help. They took on two wranglers, Skelly and Miguel. The first job they tackled was to build a bunkhouse for themselves. It was a long, low building with a slant roof and a porch that ran its entire length, protection from the blazing New Mexico sun. It slept eight men. The heart of the bunkhouse was a large stone fireplace. It provided cooking facilities and heat. Miguel’s knowledge of stone must have augmented my father’s lack of masonry skills because the bunkhouse fireplace was much tighter and more effective than the one in the cabin. In the winter, the bunkhouse was cozy warm. Mama found several mismatched chairs at an auction sale to sit around the hearth. The chairs were dragged onto the bunkhouse porch every spring for evenings of warm sunsets and deep discussions. Each man had a bunk and a wooden trunk in which he kept his personal belongings. There were hooks on the walls for hats and guns. A 1923 calendar with a picture of a pretty girl on the top perpetually stuck on January was the only decoration. There was a manly, musty aura in the bunkhouse that made me feel safe there.

The men built a chicken coop under Mama’s careful scrutiny close to her bedroom window so she could hear the chickens squawking if a coyote or skunk came near. Mama wanted the chicken coop to remind her of Illinois. Skelly grumbled about it for years, ‘that galdarned hen house’ they had to build three times because the first two times Mama said it didn’t look exactly like the one in her family’s back yard. Daddy had to make a special trip to Clayton to pick up a weathervane Mama ordered out of a catalogue to sit on top of the coop. It was the spitting image of the hen house in Keans except the one in Illinois was white and neither Mama or Daddy believed in paint.

And, of course, there were the outhouses. I still can’t think about an outhouse without cringing with dread at the overpowering smell in the summer, the butt-tucking cold in the winter, flies, spiders as big as fifty-cent pieces that inhabited the corners, biting centipedes that loved to hide under the wooden seats and the rattlesnakes I imagined would strike every time I opened one of the creaky doors. The outhouse at night was filled with its own set of terrors. Some nights were so black you could be escorted off to hell by the devil himself and not see him do it. Half the animals that lived on the land came out at night; things we rarely caught a glimpse of in daylight; skunks, bats, owls, cougars, wolves, and coyotes. Mama wouldn’t let me drink anything past suppertime no matter how thirsty I claimed to be just to prevent that midnight trip to the outhouse. One night, however, my bladder did not co-operate. I lay awake for a long time weighing the prospect of wetting the bed and decided the shame and discomfort of sleeping in a wet bed didn’t make that idea worthwhile. I tiptoed through the curtain that separated my bedroom from the kitchen, but was afraid to venture any further into the dark. I called out to my mother.

Mama? Mama, I got to pee. No response. Again, louder, Mama, wake up. I got to go bad. Maybe ‘please’ would get her attention, Please, wake up.

I heard Daddy’s voice. Bess, wake up. Go see to the girl. No response. Bess, the girl needs you. Still no response.

I bounced for a while, one foot then the other. It didn’t make the pressure go away. Holding onto the wall, I inched my way to my parents bedroom then retreated back in timidity. Unable to hold it any longer, I steadied myself with the curtain and squatted outside my doorway. I can still remember the muffled sound of water hitting the wood, and feel the warm urine running around my right heel, pooling between my toes. Then there was Mama holding the lantern before me as I stood up to face her from the puddle of pee. She set the lantern down. Expecting to be swatted, I flinched.

I never thought I’d to have to housebreak you like a whelp, Lily Anne.

I’m sorry Mama. I couldn’t hold it no more and I didn’t want to go pee in the bed. I won’t do it again. The disapproval on her face softened.

It’ll soak in, we’ll avoid that spot, she said shaking her head. Mama picked me up and dried my foot on the curtain. It’s just little girl pee anyway. I never did it again, but there was a slight dark stain in the grayed wood outside my bedroom, little girl pee.

Inside and outside of the ranch ran together. The landscape was constantly drawing you out, the outside followed you in. Mama was one of those no-nonsense people who believed a little dirt was good for a kid. There were no playpens, highchairs or cribs. As an infant I slept on the floor when I got tired and played in the sandy soil next to the yucca and creosote bushes while Mama hoed the garden or did the wash in big tubs in the yard. Chickens and flea-bitten cats, smelly old dogs and scurrying lizards were my playmates. Everything ran free. And the wind, which blew continually across the plains from the distant mountains, left a fine silt of alkali grit in my hair, on my skin, in my teeth. My mother would pick me up by the arm and literally shake the dust off of me.

The soil in northeastern New Mexico was not particularly good for farming, but every opportunity to makes ends meet had to be pursued. Mama’s garden was the only chance we had to get vegetables on a regular basis. The garden was limited to whatever the sandy earth would grow. Corn grew well, as did squash, lots of beans, red and pinto, green beans and chick peas, tomatoes, onions and cucumbers. Potatoes and bell peppers, red, yellow and green and hot chilies were also staples of our garden. The men loved hot peppers to spice up the beans and tortillas that made up the bulk of their diet. Mama cleared a patch of hard scrabble earth with a pick and hoe beating the clods into fine workable dirt and every year the summer sun baked the soil back to concrete so she had to start from scratch each new season. The size of the garden expanded every spring to accommodate the growing number of mouths to feed, bigger crew, bigger family. On the west side of the garden she stacked any bales of hay that had gotten moldy or bug- infested during the winter. This provided one barrier to keep unwanted animals out of the garden. It was easy to drive stakes into the hay to attach a canopy which shielded the tender, young plants from the afternoon sun. The other three sides of the garden were protected from varmints with bits and pieces of leftover barbed wire, chicken wire and wood fencing from cattle enclosures, the chicken yard and horse pens. The fence was high enough to protect it from deer, nasty enough to keep out skunks and buried in to stop jack rabbits and prairie dogs. Tin cans were strung along the wires to alert Mama to any marauders messing with the fence. My mother was very resourceful and while her garden wasn’t a pretty sight, nothing was going to get those vegetables without a fight. It was her fight alone, except for the part-time, questionable service I was forced to give.

Gardening was Mama’s favorite chore. Though it was hard work she preferred being out-of-doors. She loved to plant the seeds, dig out the weeds, harvest the crops and even to pluck the big green tomato worms off the plants and drown them in kerosene. From my earliest memories, I sat in the garden while she dug and pulled and picked. Sometimes, she would tell me about her family’s garden back in Keans, Illinois.

Lily Anne, there is nothing better for your heart than dirt on your hands. Back home the dirt is black and healthy, not like this pitiful grit. In the spring you could smell it, moist and rich; just asking you to grab a big handful. And every summer we had raspberries and gooseberries, cabbages so big you’d have to cut them in half to fit them in a pot. The tomatoes were much sweeter than the sour things we grow here, and peaches, the peaches were as big as muskmelons and the juice would run down your chin… Her bright expression would sag as her voice trailed off.

As soon as I was old enough, I was recruited to help Mama pull weeds and pluck pests. I cried when she made me pull the writhing green tomato worms off the pungent-smelling plants. Still she forced me to touch them, to prepare me for all the hateful things I would have to do later in my life. I figured if I didn’t touch tomato worms, it would be one less hateful thing I would have to do. Picking off the bugs in the garden was an altogether unpleasant task, worse by far then weeding which I hated as well. Squash bugs and cinch bugs left a funny smell on my fingers. The cucumber beetles were so numerous it seemed impossible to try to pick them all. Into the can of kerosene the bugs would go. The next day Mama would strain the dead bugs out and go back to the garden which was filled with as many bugs as we had picked