If he could go, then she could, too.
At the end of the week, she sought a private conversation with Asahel. “I’m going to Seattle,” she told him.
“Clara, the fire’s out—”
“I’m not going for the fire.”
“The city is in turmoil, wait a while and then we’ll go—”
“I’m going there to look for work. To live. To make a livelihood.”
His brown eyes swelled with color. “Have we not been good to you?”
“Can you drive me to the ferry in the morning?”
His lips parted but he couldn’t speak.
“Don’t do this,” he finally said. “What about Hercules?”
“I’ll come back and get him when I’m settled. Meanwhile you’ll look after him. He’s happy here.”
She told the lies she needed to tell to Ellen and to Eva and she said what truth she needed to say to Hercules. And as farewell he handed her a book. “The History of the Horse,” he told her. “You’ll learn from it.”
She put on the traveling suit she hadn’t worn for more than half a year, the one she’d worn on the train ride west, she closed the Icarus chest and packed a small valise and put on a hat and gloves. She had seventy seven dollars left of the eighty dollars Lodz had given to her and she gave five of them to Hercules, telling him, Don’t spend it all on clothes. She hugged her brother, climbed onto the buckboard next to Asahel, waved good-bye to the Curtis women and set her eyes on the road ahead. Asahel drove in silence, for which she was grateful.
“It’s not far,” he finally said.
“No,” she agreed.
“I could be there within hours. If you would ever need me to.”
She made no response.
On a stretch of open road, with the proximity of the harbor in the air, they saw a single figure in the distance, with a mule, approaching. The man, bearded, was limping slightly and leaning on a walking stick.
“Speed up,” Clara said.
Asahel held tightly on the reins.
“Speed up,” Clara said again.
As they drew nearer to the figure in the road it was clear to both of them that the man they were approaching was Edward and that he, in turn, had recognized them.
Clara seized the whip from Asahel and beat the horses once, then twice, into a gallop, overtaking Edward in the road and speeding past him, before Asahel had the chance to grapple tack and team from her and bring them to a stop.
“—he’s my brother,” he objected.
“Then get down,” she told him, taking the reins from him and pushing him onto the ground. She was standing in the buckboard with both leathers in one hand, whipping with the other, when she heard the shout behind her—
“—Scout!”
She urged the horses forward, his voice ringing in her ears—
“—Scout!”
And then, unmistakably—
“—Clara!”
She stopped. The road ahead, its vanishing point, beckoned to her like the dark back of time, like the unknown space a figure in a painting faces when it turns its back upon the present, turns its back upon the viewer, on their shared experience. Behind her, someone whom she knew she loved was calling out her name. Behind her, his blue eyes.
And so she turned.
lights out for the territory
We turn, we are a turning tribe — born into, borne by rotation — earth propelling us around its axis once a day, like a revolving door, while gravity deceives us into thinking that the sky is moving, we are standing still.
When Edward Curtis died he had gone around the sun eighty-four times, eighty-four revolutions — my father, fifty-three. Another trip around the sun — another turning — is what we’re really celebrating when we celebrate an anniversary — another journey of 574,380,400 miles. In his lifetime my father journeyed thirty billion miles through space, without noting it — Curtis, almost fifty billion.
Those are major road trips, when you think about it.
Which puts this haul to Vegas in perspective: just a little run around the neighborhood.
Driving east on the 101 toward Pasadena, skirting through the San Fernando Valley, I’m still on former mission land, acres deeded to the Mission San Fernando rancho for growing olives, grapes, corn, wheat and melons. After Glendale, the land rises toward the San Gabriels where the native Tongva, a language clan of the Shoshone, were indentured to the Mission San Gabriel in the eighteenth century, and thereafter called the Gabrieleno tribe. East from here, all the way to Death Valley, the native language was Shoshone, and AZUSA is the first town on the highway to bear a shadow Shoshone name.
The American road is an Indian nation.
FIREBIRD. CHEROKEE. MUSTANG. WINNEBAGO.
Is there any other country in the world that appropriates the names of clans for cars?
If you think you’ve recently been the victim ofIDENTITY THEFT, please press “one,” a voice advises me every time I call my bank, but no one bats an eye at you in your Jeep COMANCHE or your Chevy CHEYENNE.
You can drive clear across the country without being questioned about your Chevy TAHOE or APACHE.
In your TIOGA.
Your CONESTOGA wagon.
I guess I fell in love with being on the road from being in the front seat of the car with my father, late at night, on road trips from Pennsylvania to Virginia.
I don’t think children can identify loneliness in others.
Although lonely, themselves, sometimes, I don’t think children have the depth of experience to recognize loneliness as a state of being that exists in others.
I don’t think we, as adults, are especially aware of loneliness in others, either, unless that person is obviously alone, sitting on a bench, sitting at a remove, picking idly through trash on a street corner, staring from a window.
When loneliness exists inside a family, it havens its own silence. Families breed loneliness that’s disguised as shyness, or as boredom; or as sleep.
Families are designed to be the social antidote to solitude, so to learn to search for signs of loneliness inside a family goes against our instincts.
We’re not taught to look for loneliness, so it passes, like a shadow, over dinners, over evenings watching the TV, between married couples, between parents and their children,
The silence that was probably a kind of dull ache in my father emanated to me on those car rides as a kind of comfort.
He was very good behind the wheel, very capable and uncomplaining, and that communicated to me as a confidence that we were safe, cocooned in a closed environment, he and I up front, mom and J-J in the back, moving through the known and unknown, navigating life together. If there was a social concern over the impulse to manufacture bigger cars and build more roads, those issues were not filtering into the daily news one received as a young girl growing up in 50’s America. To drive was an innocent pursuit. To drive long distances was an adventure. The superhighways — six lanes, eight lanes, the Interstates — were still on drawing boards, so we progressed behind two cones of light down two-or four-lane roads through corn, cotton and tobacco fields, scrubby, cluttered Maryland woods, towns with church steeples and village greens, Fredericksburg, Baltimore, Washington and Richmond. The cities were allegro movements in the symphony; the fields and farms andantes. The night had rhythm. The towns approached, you could sense a town’s encroachment through the clearings in the woods, outbuildings would materialize, the town’s corona would glow above it in the sky, the distances between the barns would quicken, houses would construct a chorus line. Whether it was dark or light there was specificity in every shadow. And because it was that specific passage along Route 1 through Maryland and northern Virginia, as we drove south we drove into American history, too. I could name the battlefields in order, north to south. There’s no other country on Earth that has so many battlefields as road side attractions. If you have a mind to do so you can follow Washington as he evaded or pursued the British through the declared independent colonies or you can stop and scan the twilight’s last gleaming over the same harbor waters as Francis Scott Key or follow Lee and Jackson and the Army of the Potomac into boggy marshes over clay pits onto the higher granite ramparts overlooking Richmond.