I grew older, both she and Pa began to change. Her fingers shriveled like bent twigs. His steel-gray eyes narrowed to slits, as if the light of day would scar them. Her slim face sagged, deep grooves chiseled her brow, hollows dug into her cheeks. His beard grew white in shapeless strands. Bit by bit, the knotted cord that held her slight form together began to fray.
One night a month before she passed, Pa took the cast-iron pan to her when she served supper too cold, and I laid into him. By that time I was almost fourteen, as strong as he was, a head taller and sober. I knocked him flat and drug him into the Ford to sleep it off, locking the house door against him. I cleaned the floor, wiped the walls, set her down with a cool washrag on her brow. From then on, I slept with a baseball bat under my bed, although I was not afraid.
The day I first felt fear, the day the pounding in my chest began, was the day I lost my compass and began spinning free. It was the day my loving mother died.
Five
We take it all in. She holds my hand tightly, a little out of breath, but pleased to stand beside me. I could tell by her broad smile, the excitement in her eyes. She would be the one to take me forward into life. I could no more stop than I could stop my own birth, than I could stop the locust limb that took my eye, than I could keep my mother’s spirit in her body, than I could stop loving this sweet girl.
I reach for it all. I say, “Des, what if we wanted to get us some land?”
She shakes her head like she was trying to get the sense of my words. I feel bold to even try. I feel scared to get it wrong. I feel the weight of each beat of my cowardly heart.
She looks up at me. She says, “Lux, what in the world are you going on about? Do you mean like a business? Like we buy us a little farm somewhere?”
I know what I have to do. I have to say the words, to make it real. Under the bluest of all skies, in the brightest light of high noon, and the spirit of my mother with me at all times, I look at Dessie. “Well, I suppose, we would probably have to get married then,” I say, stepping back up the trail a good yard or so, to give her room, not because I wanted to, but because the words push me, they drive a space between us, a space as solid as my fear.
She is quiet. The breeze holds off. The air is still, the only sound the drum of a woodpecker on a hollow tree behind us. “Lux, you did just say what I thought you said?” she asks.
Four
No one knows for sure what took my mother’s mortal soul. They think her heart gave out. She laid herself down in the middle of the day, pulled up the quilt, and passed from this earth on the tenth of September, 1964, while Pa was on the porch in his rocking chair, swigging from a bottle, and I was at school, too far away to hear if she cried out for help.
That fall, Pa slept on the porch in his rocker, swore he wasn’t asleep when I tried to wake him to come to bed. When the moon was right and he was well, he and I went coon hunting, a momentary truce, us halfway up some logging road or setting out the night beneath that hit ’n’ miss gas well, drinking and waiting for the hounds to bay and the chase to begin. He’d run on about fighting in France and Italy. Though he would never admit it, the more time we spent together, the more I knew that he wanted me to take on his place, make his untended acres produce once more, take him on too, prove to him that he could trust me, keep him from himself, agree with him that everyone was trying to get the better of him. I never knew what would set off the stick of dynamite buried in his gut, but I knew it had a short fuse.
My mother would tell me that she passed from this earth into the arms of her Savior. Maybe it’s true. Maybe it’s for the best. She would tell me that when I find my Savior, there I will find her. I know she left when she could no longer stay, that she did everything she could. I failed her, but she did not fail me.
Three
On the prettiest day of the prettiest month, under the bluest sky, my sweet, beautiful blue-eyed girl says, “Yes.” There is no other sound like this, not even the sound of a perfect strike, the way it hits the glove of the catcher. Her one word, “Yes.” I have pitched a no-hitter. I have hit grand slam homeruns, the ball soaring over the stands and into the junkyard beyond the centerfield fence, kids scrambling, the ball bouncing off the roofs of rusted-out sedans, but I have never known this feeling before or since. She looks at me, she gets quiet. My chest pounds. Maybe she will change her mind, but she doesn’t. Instead, she says, “Lux, we have to do it right, marry in a church.”
My Dessie, whose mind is clear and steers my heart. “I will do it,” I said, the pounding in my chest the sound of the gears of my heart reaching for the gears of her heart, I swear it.
I will stare into the eyes of my Pa, and I will set this before him, one man to another. My best girl, I have nothing to be afraid of with you by my side.
Two
I reach into my shirt pocket. I have a treasure. It is a perfect soft gray bird point, an arrowhead, chip-flaked and as sharp as it was five hundred years ago. I braided a buckskin cord into the notches at the base of the point.
I tell her, I was a boy, walking behind my mother on the ridge trail, on the way to pick wild blackberries. I saw it among the broken rocks at my feet. It stopped me in my tracks. I bent, picked it up, raced to catch up.
Dessie places my gift over her lovely head. This ancient gray point against her skin, resting in the hollow of her neck.
Mother, you came to me, tugged at the hair on the crown of my head, you guided my hands as I braided this cord.
One
My name is Luther, but only on my paycheck, my hunting license, my birth certificate, and in my mother’s mouth, as it will be on my baptism certificate and my marriage license. My name is Lux.
Things can change. I know that to be true. I have been spinning free, a wheel with not a cog to hold it; then, in a flash, I am a part of a great machine, spinning like a gear that drives another gear and so on, until the world is put right.
They will take me to the river and they will wash me clean from sin. My mother who art in heaven, hallowed be her name, she called me Luther. I will be saved for you, Mother, saved for you, my Dessie, the light I carry in my heart.
My girl and I stand together. The world is wide open, the world is new, for our new life together.
In a flash, things can change. I know that my eye was the price I paid. I once was blind. I could say that it was like watching my old life slip through my fingers. Now I can see. It feels like reaching for a second chance.
My hair will be so short that my head will feel naked. My shoes will be so tight that I will barely feel the earth beneath me. Water will stream over my forehead, it will seep under my eyepatch, and it will fill the socket of my eye. It will remind me.
FOUR
BIRTHDAY (1969)
TWO YEARS AND TWO MONTHS AFTER HE GOT MARRIED, Lux traded his eight-year-old dappled gray, half-Arab mare Calamity Jane to his friend Alan Ray. In return, Lux got Alan Ray’s .30-06 Remington 700 rifle and a German scope, and to sweeten the deal, Alan Ray added a rebuilt Gravely rototiller. Alan Ray had hinted that if he proposed to Billie, CJ would make a dandy engagement present. That’s when they shook hands on it.
Lux felt like he should have been happier about the trade, even though for the past couple of years he’d felt like he owed something to Alan Ray for his quick thinking after the logging accident. This trade could even things out. Alan Ray would be getting an even-tempered, well-trained mare. CJ was sure-footed on trails, and unlike some horses she never tried to unseat her rider by galloping under low-hanging branches or balking at fallen logs across the trail.
Alan Ray was happy as a boy on Christmas morning. He’d also offered to buy CJ’s colt Dakota for five hundred dollars outright, but Lux refused. Now that Dakota was old enough to be ridden, everything should have worked out differently, the mare would be for Dessie and the young stallion for him, the two of them riding together, so the colt could learn from the mare’s