she known Carlo was in danger of drowning in a gully before she knew he’d been rescued, my mother might have died, just from the sheer fact of being helpless to save him. Something just that quixotic lay between the two of them, a deep tenderness she felt for his vulnerable smallness, he with that seemingly inarticulate yearning to be her boy, her only boy—to be, in fact, her man. With so much of her family’s strange witchcraft coded into acts of naming and renaming, perhaps there had been the magic of the patronymic he was blessed with as second son, singularly entitled to carry the name of her beloved Papa—or the elegant variation of it acceptable to my father. For Carlo, too, she would have stopped a bullet, a hundred times.
I think he knew he had this hold on her, that he lived and moved within the safety of its possession. Sickly and small, he had first survived pneumonia as an infant (one of our oft-repeated family miracles), then, with Lou, a scarlet fever that had left them both afflicted with the same fever-weakened eyesight. But Lou’s owlish glasses made him look the genuine budding genius, while Carlo’s lay as heavy and huge in his tiny face as the optics of a bottle fly. He clowned, he tricked, he teased, he ruthlessly taunted my sister and me, he did whatever he was told not to. He became ever more the mischievous little scapegrace as he grew. My father, his heart increasingly darkened and sore, felt baited, and even from his sickbed gave him the full brunt of a military, withering scorn. And the more he gave, the more Carlo seemed to want, to taunt him to give, as if it were a drug for which he had developed a habit, or as if it had become the dark side of my mother’s unconditional and enabling love, which could deny him nothing, forgive him everything.
But that day, when they brought him home half-dead, the shriek she shrieked could have stopped your heart. The sun had already burst through the clouds again and was beating the soaked earth into smoke when the whole posse of them abruptly appeared at the bottom of the drive, Lou and the neighborhood boys leading the way. Behind them walked the gas station man from down the road, Carlo lying across his arms as limp as a bolt of wet muslin. We knew he was alive. As they drew closer, we could hear him grotesquely weeping against his chattering teeth in a parody of his own impish laughter, see him wanly waving his brown little legs as if he wanted to run, as if he’d been caught and not rescued.
But he was safe, safe, safe, everyone reassured her! Yet she could not stop wailing in terror-exaggerated pain. And yet I knew she indulged her passion, her fury, and did not drop down dead at the sight of him, because by Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, and all the holy saints, even if he was half-dead, he was still alive.
The boys grabbed excitedly at their breath as they told us that the rain had already stopped pounding, and was just beginning to sift down straight through the sunlight, when Carlo had taken it into his head to breast the wild water flooding the drain ditches in streams as wide and boiling as rivers. He’d been caught, swept into a culvert pipe under the crossroad by the gas station. Lou had lunged forward and grabbed and held him by the wrists, screaming for help as he threw himself across the embankment, but without the strength to wrench him out against the force of the current. There was nothing to do but resist it, the two of them one body, arms tearing at shoulders, until the other boys came and made a chain and held them both back from the flood rushing into the great pipe. And then the garage man with his strong back and forearms had come and just reached down and yanked Carlo out.
For a few moments my mother simply took him in her arms, and, weeping, laid him across a blanket in her lap, took his head between her hands and kissed the streaky wet hair. His chest bled where it had been thrashed against the arch of the culvert, the fine brown-gold skin stripped away from throat to navel. He howled with pain coughing the foul, coffee-colored water out of his choking lungs, and she wept, we all wept, in pity for him. But he was alive. The saints had kept him alive.
Still, it was a deathblow, the last shimmering spike in my mother’s feeling for this beautiful and cursed place—a feeling that from the beginning had never been love. Ever on the watch for signs, she lost no time in reading this one, as she had my father’s slow decline, only without doubt or equivocation. Even as we moved through our own slow gulfs of childhood time, increasingly haunted by the thinning form we caught only in occasional scaring glimpses when the bedroom door was left ajar, we knew conferences were held, plans made; we felt a nameless danger, sensed a new horizon of hope.
Aunt Mildred, restless for independence, perhaps superstitious enough to be repelled by the morbid sadness of our house, had moved out and nested into special single blessedness at the back of her own shop in town until the Christmas baby arrived, and then into a special kind of madonna-with-child blessedness afterwards. She turned a small income from cutting and draping and stitching her artful fashions, drawing on Ferril’s army pay and what was left of her savings, finding her niche, content to wait out her soldier in the Arizona sunshine.
She was still a mesmerizing sight for two little girls whenever she visited the squab farm. From the somewhat sprung-out armchair in the family room, our eavesdropping perch on the kitchen, we could see, as she moved the baby from shoulder to shoulder, that she was cultivating a slightly blowsy Rita Hayworth look now, self-consciously tossing her mass of brassy gold hair out of the way, and dodging carefully as my mother careered about the room. Both of them seemed caught in an instinctive dance of frenetic Spagnola energy, rapt in jolted, telegraphic conversation filled with hushed allusions to doctors in the East.
It snowed the following winter in Tucson, for the first time in fifty years. The snowflakes floated out of a lowering gray sky like fine volcanic ash and sublimed back into the air almost before they had dusted the earth. In my anguished and misremembering mind’s eye it is all one image—the vanishing snow, my father taken from the house on a stretcher that then lifts so lightly into the train it seems to be empty, the sighing train heaving itself away as if it could feel pain.
The farm vanishes, the birds, the splayed cottonwood tree. For a very little time we seem to be with my aunt and the Christmas baby with the lovely Disney name, my little sister and I, together, climbing up and down the dust pile in her parking lot, collecting bits of scrap metal for the war effort.
And then the lights behind the big blue sky go quietly dark.
3
My father’s illness, the key that unlocks the mystery of this childhood experience of the West, is itself a palimpsest erased and told again so many times that it is no longer possible to say of it, “This is the truth.”
I remember with an embarrassing rush of nostalgic joy how as a girl, even as a young woman, I imagined that I knew the truth and would always know it, that truth itself was drawn to me—loved me, discovered me the way the wind itself did, roughly caressing my face—that somehow great mysteries locked to others would open obligingly to my unconquerable mind. I dreamed dreams of flying, too, so real and convincing that I would swear I could step off the sill of my bedroom window in broad daylight and float at will, twenty or thirty feet above the lawn.
I cannot fly, nor do I know what the truth is. I cannot tell my story as linear history, as if it were a chain of cause and effect defying ambiguity, or play it like a musical score. Even to tell the truth as it was for me then—tell it and leave it alone—seems a luxury. How much truth is possible—not just within the range of my own capabilities, but within the conventions of this confessional mode? Am I allowed, slowly or suddenly, to peel away the layers of discovery in strategically timed revelations as they did in fact come to me in real time?
This is not a novel, though I might sometimes wish it were. And because it is called “true,” who knows whether such mysteries and gaps are licensed by the contract between the one who writes and the one who reads what is written? I strive to recover what I felt as a child, but my story does not therefore become the diary of a child’s life. It remains the self-reflective account of a woman for whom childhood is half
