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A scarlet semi blew its horn in a trailing wail as it thundered past the house along the paved road to drown the rasp of the grinding wheel, blowing dust and a wave of lighter green across the vines, the grape leaves whispering and turning over like hands, a million upturned begging palms . . . .

The window shook, Mrs. Watkins’ peacock from across the street shrieked a woman’s scream and for a heartbeat frozen at the center of the brilliant pane the immense crow with golden eye and glinting rainbow wings alive with evening sun crossed the glass with sudden opening beak—

“Caw! Caw!”

Nevermore! 666.

The gawking prismed thing flashed a dozen colors and wouldn’t pass and I tore at the snap buttons of the oriental gown stitched with Chinese butterflies, until I glimpsed a shifting world of emerald, lavender, red, a rising line of black and purple indigo.

You’ll die tonight,” repeated the turning fan.

With clumsy fingers I fastened the blue silk, letting my head fall back onto the pillows and my tired eyes stare at the yellow sky.

“Are you or aren’t you?” I complained, my breath coming fast and shallow as my heart began to cramp and I gripped the cotton string so it stretched taut from bed to the lock on the door where one day Aaron Markham would burst in dressed all in white.

No answer.

The grate of the knife against the grinding wheel in the barnyard had ceased. I reached for the tumbler and brought it to my lips, tasting the gold liquor’s sharp sting.

“Kate?” I asked more softly. Is there balm in Gilead?

I heard only the taunting fan and the rustling of dry paper against the wall above my head. At least the raven with changing wings was gone—

I set the glass on the night table, by the bottle with the wild turkey on the label, next to the I Ching with three new pennies Kate had brought spread across its yellow cover, Lincoln’s bright profiles ignoring and gazing past me.

“Four score and seven years ago . . . . “

Beside the National Geographic map of bird migrations rested my silver hand mirror turned facedown and the matching brush, my DM monograms etched in a feathery flowing script that tried to escape the heat.

And a leather-framed sepia photograph of a girl in black kid boots, standing atop granite steps at the leaded-glass doors to a great white house by the freezing sea—

Clear-eyed and alert the young woman stared forward boldly with unembarrassed beauty, her high-cheeked elegance as natural and unaffected as a lion’s.

Piled layers of sunlit brown and golden hair framed her sculpted face, the strong planes of bone spanned by glowing summer skin.

She had a shapely neck and full lovely shoulders and her ample breasts pushed at the rich, closely cut evening dress, the sloping velvet bodice dusted with a rain of garnets and rhinestones.

And yet something was awry, her open glance seemed also furtive, veiling a secret worry—

The corners of her classic sensuous mouth edged toward an expression of concern. Her right hand was hesitant, half raised, the pretty fingers closed across the palm—you could see the ring and its black polished stone cut from the meteor.

(“A star to wear on your finger, a fitting spoil of war for she who conquers night—”)

Was someone calling to her, asking her to stop or wait or hurry? Did she hear the blue flag initialed with an “A” snapping on its staff above the mansion’s mansard roof? Or had she just remembered a name spoken by a mourning dark-suited stranger in last evening’s dream?

Anna—

The key was the elaborate five-inch brooch at her strong-pumping heart, how it sparkled and appeared strangely animate—as if the fashioned butterfly rested only for a moment in its flight toward a glittering tree or a trellis of silver roses.

The butterfly was rare and precious as the golden nightingale from Hans Christian Anderson, the replacement clockwork bird that sang to the foolish emperor in the Forbidden City, the story I read to Kyla as child and later I saw her kneeling on the Chinese rug, touching the singing bird perched on the king’s ringed finger.

The jeweled wings shimmered, trembling, starting to beat—

“Joaquin!”

I turned from the hungry picture that looked like Kate, Kyla’s daughter, in my dress, bending with my hands toward the velvet draped in a bar of sun at the foot of the bed.

The purple fabric felt dull, faded brown, rusty orange at its edges.

But the true gems scattered among the false stones winked and glinted—violet and gold, green and ruby as I touched them and their facets directed the hot light, sending colored stars skipping across the water-stained ceiling and walls.

“You’ll die tonight—”

I let the bandit Joaquin Murrietta’s diamonds Aaron and the hypnotized Ramon had found almost 70 years ago at Cantua Creek go out.

I leaned back against the wet pillow to breathe deeply and slow, the slips of cut newspaper about Geraldine Ferraro lifting and flapping with the fan, then noticed again the yellow shaft at the window where a hundred luminous satellites circled in wide orbit.

The passing gold and red motes were little worlds like Earth, with oceans and continents, mountains and valleys, vast cities and fields. On each planet late August had come and my granddaughter Kate no longer knocked at my door and I waited breathless and afraid for my heart in the same burning square room, looking west at the glaring vineyard of ripening grapes—

The sky is blue with white behind it, like the sky in old tempera paintings of Christ,” I said to anchor myself in the heat—the folio of Fra Angelico and early-Renaissance art lay on its side, in my bedroom bookcase on Alma in Acacia, in the House of the Butterfly, across from Hack Wilson’s corner Chevron station. I lay 30 miles north, near Lemas, five miles westward off the 99, on Linda Verde which means “Pretty Green,” next-door to Kate on the second story of Kyla’s, my daughter’s, white farmhouse by the elm and yellow roses.

An hour and the blue will grow deeper and bluer and suddenly flash cobalt just before dark—soon the first crickets will begin, tentative at first, wary that the day has really ended, calling back and forth across the vineyard and lawn—

Venus, my guardian Ferraro, will appear, pure like a cool lamp above the purple vine rows where owls cross and nighthawks with backward-curving wings swerve and dip for insects. The welcome stars will start to burn and the mercury lights announcing the different farms blink on, dimming the sky and staining the barnyards with a shadowless fluorescence—

Then Kate’s window screen will scrape open and the rose trellis tremble against the side of the high house—

“Quoth the Raven, ‘Nevermore.’”

Who spoke? Aaron Markham back from the grave and wearing white again?

My heart leaped and hurt and I clasped the cord to the locked door, watching the window pane for the colored crow, overhead the clippings of Ferraro fluttering and scraping like dry leaves, the blown air a desert atomic wind against my dripping cheek.

Like the red diesel truck, a green pickup honked as it passed the house and again I remembered Delmus’ harvest party.

In the morning the men would butcher the pig.

The stone screeched from the barnyard and the tumbler’s edge jarred against my capped teeth. I sloshed the warm whiskey into my mouth and swallowed, then held the glass at my waist, watching the reddening fattening sun slowly drop toward the Coast Range.

There the sea began and the moist sand sloped to meet the breakers— Seventy years ago at Santa Cruz my sisters and I played in the freezing surf, tossing the great ball that caught the light—

From me to Jean to Crystal to Pearl to Harriet and back to me. Round and round. I could see it clearly, a buoyant floating sun. Then backward, the other way—                

Now when I threw the ball to hateful Harriet through the sunlit flying spray a new girl caught it.

She wore a bathing dress that flickered a dozen colors like a mermaid’s scales, like a layered swim cap made for Carole Lombard or Janet Gaynor, like a butterfly’s wings . . . .  As she reached high for the shining globe her hair came unpinned and red-gold and brown and blonde fell in a torrent past her bare shoulders.

Her eyes shone green and large as mine.

I turned and the circle had broken, my four sisters were gone, swimming far out to a ship with red sails that lifted a barbed anchor. It was too late to follow them as they kicked after the new girl whose strong slender arms sliced the water like fins. The sun sank fast. The moon rocked the waves, cast its white light in broad V’s across the black tide.

The pale ball bobbed back and forth in the backwash and breakers.

“Kate!” I opened my eyes, squinting at the falling orange sun.

My hand fumbled for the string and I grasped it, then turned my head on the pillow to listen.

But it was too early, it wasn’t night yet, there was only the tired whining of the fan, the crackling of the clippings like kindling catching fire, and now the muffled whistle of a man in white linen before the grindstone squealed again—

Each morning Kate and I had spoken after breakfast—about love and Eddie Dodge and Ramon Zapata and Ferraro—and each night I had waited for her footsteps in the hall.

They came quickly, never stopping, always passing my door—Kate’s door would open and close—and ten minutes later her window screen would creak, then bang softly as the rose trellis hit against the house’s wall.

I would get up and hurry to the window to wait, until Kate emerged onto the porch-lit lawn and ran wading out into the vineyard’s plowed dirt with her sandals in her hand, as in the painting of Persephone rushing to save the world before sunrise—

The pink or peach-colored blouse, the white slacks or creased, knee-length khaki shorts, one of the simple solid or print cotton dresses?

Whatever Kate wore, it proved a perfect ending for the day, and an omen for the dark—each night had its own identity and mood, a fated leaning toward passion or calm or explosive disaster, and could wear only one name, like those elusive introverted girls who look and act only as a Cathy or the darkly handsome men with the long-strided confident walk of a Bill—

I took a short drink as the grinder kept up.

Sometimes it was almost funny, it seemed crazy, something I had read once in a book and forgot or maybe smiled or marveled at for a moment, the story’s otherwise-normal character who harbors an obsession for gooseberries or reading Robinson Crusoe over and over like the Bible.

After all, I was Dolly Mable, who had loved and been loved A to Z, been sought after by men brilliant and numerous as stars—

(But who else was alive who knew my full story? Hack had no idea and I’d told Kate only a small if important portion, carefully disguised—)

It was true, I had dazzled Ambrose Bierce and General Blackjack Pershing, Jack London, the governors of both California and Nevada, wonderful athletes and artists like the DiMaggios, Jim Thorpe and Joe Louis, Wells and Hemingway, Saroyan, Cooper and Gable up from Hollywood, young Elvis . . . .

Sad John Gilbert, after Garbo. Sweet Jon Hall. Valentino.

Thanks to Errol’s girlfriend, awful old Joe Kennedy, JFK’s tyrannical father.

Flo Ziegfeld.

All the Big Ones heard and came . . . .

Though never Ramon, who had been Murrietta in another life, in love with me who had been his doomed ivory-skinned and black-tressed fiancée, his true love Belle Solar ravished by the awful Americans—

(The middle of the afternoon as I waved from the north window and drew back my gown I was sure Ramon had driven into the barnyard at the wheel of the long white car with the shining silver horse on the hood. The Butterfly belonged to Joaquin, never never to Aaron Markham—)

Every night after eight I waited nervously for a 17-year-old girl to run to meet her boyfriend, and just as eagerly watched for her return toward morning as my tired but loyal heart kept the time—

Now five mornings and five nights in a row Kate hadn’t knocked at my door or appeared at the foot of the trellis to disturb the gray jackrabbit grazing the lawn—

Tonight would be six . . . . 6  + 6.

“It’s not funny, it’s not any girl,” I objected, taking a sip as the grinding wheel stopped and started—like the Ferris wheel, the night of my kidnap at the Harvest Fair“Oh Anna, have I at last found you again?”—and I wished I had an ice cube for my cocktail.

The girl was Kate, who was a part of me, my own granddaughter, the only future I would have now!

And the boy Kate ran to see was Eddie Dodge, who had driven my blue Cadillac and saved me when I most needed saving, when my boat was shipping seas and foundering on the far side of despair and he had insisted we push on to find Kyla when I had given up.

“It only takes one—”

All summer it had been as if I were Kate and Kate were Eve and Eddie was Adam who was also somehow Ramon Zapata, Aaron Markham’s chauffeur before Ramon left San Francisco for Hollywood to become a star.

As matinee idol Domingo Esquivel with silk mask and sideburns, black cape and flat-brimmed shiny hat, Ramon galloped to my rescue across the silent Silver Screen, through shadows of oaks in the dusty moonlight, toward Aaron’s white mansion too late to save the beautiful and dishonored Belle Solar.

And so Joaquin began his revenge and later turned outlaw, with Three-Fingers Jack and the others hiding the treasure Ramon would remember in another life, by the dry creek as Captain Love and the murderous posse approached.

“Hasta la vista!” Joaquin shouted.

“In heaven or hell?” Jack laughed.

“Vaya con Dios! Whoever lives can have the gold!” Joaquin cried, then the last words he spoke on Earth—“Andele Rey Negro!” and the black stallion named Black King galloped forward.

Each night that I watched Kate cross the lawn for the vineyard I had seen that Creation was beginning over in front of my eyes, I knew again that Love existed, there was Hope—what Kate wore was the color of the Future and promised that the World would survive and wasn’t doomed by the crazy “Death Valley Days” actor who joked about the Bomb, that Ferraro and Mondale  (My Valley in French) might win the election in November—

And for another night I was safe from the Butterfly.

The fan swiveled, the dust fell like hot snow across the window as a white peacock cried and I raised the glass of unchilled bourbon.

I wondered, watching the deepening azure sky, remembering the changing crow, feeling the beads of perspiration along my lip, the sudden pulsing of my heart—

Should I welcome my panic and be grateful for it?

All things are made ready? 777?

Without the terror there would have been no reason to leave Acacia—I would never have known Kate or Eddie, the two would never have met and fallen in love and become the twin avatars, the perfect living symbols of the New World about to be born!

In answer, an early moth, a big gypsy, hit against the rusty screen, then again, and I thought of San Francisco, of pretty Madame Zanda in her turban, her palms and Tarot cards—

Lightning Striking the Tower.

A mourning dove!—the same dove, my muse?—called above the vineyard beyond the elm where it used to live, before the great horned owl had come. The dove had given me the poem I wrote down for Kate, after Kate told me about loving Eddie Dodge and how afterward the roses on the trellis seemed alive and awake:

When doves assume the branch at dusk

In shadows cool and murmurous.

I watched the amber wings fly into the sun, above the sea of vines toward the darkening blue gum grove.

There had been a subtle shape and logic to it all, how my fear had come full circle and formed something perfect, like a shining, heavy, dead-ripe fruit–––––

 

 

***

Nels Hanson grew up on a small farm in California’s San Joaquin Valley and has worked as a farmer, teacher and contract writer/editor. He graduated from UC Santa Cruz and the U of Montana, and his fiction received the San Francisco Foundation’s James D. Phelan Award and Pushcart Prize nominations in 2010, 12, and 13. Stories have appeared in Antioch Review, Texas Review, Black Warrior Review, Southeast Review, Word Riot, Montreal Review, and other journals, and are in press at Tattoo Highway  and The Milo Review. Hanson lives with his wife, Vicki, on the Central Coast of California.

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