I’ll Take You There

More jagged the horizon became. The interminable midwestern plains of farmland and dull-grazing cattle had fallen away behind me, now a different and more vigorous-seeming cattle were grazing in a different, harsher landscape; here the landscape was sepia-colored as if bleached by a harsher sun; in the distance, a lunar landscape of hills strewn with boulders, strange rock formations, mountains topped with streaks of white like paint. Here, you are made to realize that a landscape is a living thing; a landscape exerts life; a landscape enters through the eyes, and breathes into you; in the West, I could no longer be the young woman I'd been in the East; in Crescent, Utah, a place unknown to me, a young woman impatiently awaited me who was myself, yet altered; in Crescent, Utah, I was determined to be this young woman. My father's daughter. The temptation in such landscapes is to believe that beauty exists in a profound and secret relationship to you. The temptation is to believe that you are the first to have fully seen. I saw that the high-desert landscape shifted continuously in hue and texture with the rapid, skittish movement of light in the enormous sky; unlike the East, where the sky was diminished by treelines, and sometimes obscured completely. My eyes, accustomed to the foreshortened landscapes and horizons of the East, squinted at so much space in the West; impossible to see such vast space without seeing time; vast reaches of time before human history, human speech, the human effort to name such mute phenomena as mountains, rivers, canyons, plateaus, glacial troughs. Such mute phenomena as rock, sand, salt flats, buttes, mesas, bluffs, badlands. Crossing the Colorado River, driving into the Grand River Valley and westward into Utah I saw a world of desolation and beauty open up before me, and my heart quickened with hope; I'd forgotten that my mission was to sit at the bedside of a man dying of cancer; I would pay for such forgetfulness, but not immediately. In my little car that vibrated with excitement. Place-names romantic and exotic to my ear as poetry. Roan Cliffs, San Rafael Valley, Sand River, Dirty Devil River, Green River, Sego Canyon, Dimes Canyon, Death Hollow, Hell's Backbone, Calf Creek Falls, China Meadows, Desolation Canyon, Dead Horse Point, Islands in the Sky.

And Crescent, to which I'd been summoned.

I began to tell myself, fatigued by driving, that I might live in Crescent. Hypnotized by the highway, by the steady, numbing pressure of my sandaled foot against the gas pedal and by a continuous sun-glare I began to tell myself a story of how my father had summoned me to Crescent for a purpose. For the fact of his being in Crescent could not be an accident, could it?

"Daddy? This car, I bought with part of the advance a publisher gave me for a book. A book of stories. My first." I tested these astonishing words and my voice began to quaver. For how would the man I'd known as my father whom I'd never called Daddy, Dad receive such news? Would he be proud of me? Or indifferent? Would a book of stories, and such elusive "poetic" stories, mean anything to a man, a laborer, who rarely read more than newspapers, so far as I knew; a man born to semi-illiterate farming people who owned no books as if in repudiation of any intellectual or spiritual life beyond the dumb stares of farm animals? (Except: in my grandmother's parlor there was a Holy Bible, as this revered book called itself; unread, except by me, out of curiosity and skeptical wonderment; unread, yet kept in a conspicuous place on a lace-covered tabletop; my German-born grandmother's grudging concession to America, and to Christianity which was synonymous with America. The Holy Bible's simulated leather covers and many of its pages were covered with a powdery, smelly mushroom-colored mold in the humidity of Strykersville summers.)

Now in Utah, that hitherto unimaginable state, on a well-traveled I-70 approaching Crescent, where I hoped to find an inexpensive motel, already I was praying (I, who'd never believed in the God of the Holy Bible, nor even in the God of Spinoza) that my father would live to see this book of mine published, at least. Another six months! He would live to see my name, which included his name, on the dust jacket of the book; he would hold the book in his hand and tell me how beautiful it was, and he loved me.

4

"Yes, Erich wants to see you. But he doesn't want you to see him." How intimate my father's name, on this stranger's lips. A hunched little woman with a fussily made-up doll's face and a breathy, girlish voice, yet a voice of steely resolve, this woman who'd introduced herself as Hildie Pomeroy, my father's friend. At 3 Railroad Street she'd opened the front door of the clapboard bungalow as if she'd been waiting for me just inside. There was muted surprise in her face, seeing me; for, however my father must have described me, I didn't look like that young woman; and Hildie Pomeroy, who stood no taller than four feet ten inches, and who appeared to have something twisted in her upper spine, wasn't the woman I might have expected, my father's friend and protector. We stared at each other blinking. At the Economy Motel (Singles $6) I'd had a bath for the first time in memory, soaking in a hot tub; I'd washed my hair, combed damp and wavy and shapeless to my shoulders; I'd changed into a fresh but rather wrinkled long-sleeved cotton shirt and cotton slacks, and I smelled of soap, shampoo, toothpaste; I was visibly nervous; surely I didn't resemble the literary-minded intellectual daughter of whom my father might have spoken. And here was Hildie Pomeroy in nurse-white: rayon shirt, rayon pants, crepe-soled canvas shoes that looked freshly whitened. Brisk and efficient except so unexpectedly made up, like a showgirl: distinctly rouged cheeks, oily crimson mouth, black mascara beading her eyelashes; and her hair!-savagely dyed black, quite long and unwieldy, but coiled and crimped about her head with plastic flower-barrettes. The woman looked like a painted windup doll whose back had been cruelly broken. Seeing the surprise in my face she said, drawing herself up to her full height, "You can talk to him, dear, but he won't be able to talk to you. I will do that for him."

"But he-he is-conscious? He isn't-?"

"Your father is sick, dear. He's had three operations in the past year, for cancer of the throat and esophagus." Hildie spoke in hissed sibilants, pausing. "He has lost fifty pounds and he-has been disfigured by the surgery. He's only himself, dear, for a few hours at a time. Most visitors he won't let in, no more. Only me 'cause I'm his friend and he trusts me." Hildie flashed defiant eyes at me. "I'm his only friend."

This was a rebuke to me and my brothers; a rebuke I accepted as our due; I would not protest. "On the phone you said he knows he's- dying?"

Hildie shook her head sadly. "Oh, he knows, but he don't know. Or don't want to know. Sick people are like us only just different. Their minds play the same kinds of tricks on them our minds play, but more pathetic. A person sick like your father, sometimes he's so weak he can't move his head, can't open his eyes to see, can't talk even if he wanted to talk, and gets confused where he is, who's with him, what's happening… I had nursing classes," Hildie said, as if I'd challenged her. "In Salt Lake City I was studying to be a nurse."

"I see. That's so-fortunate. For my father."

I smiled foolishly at my father's friend in white. I didn't know what to say to her, to placate her anxiety about me.

Hildie snorted with derisive laughter, mirthless and startling. "Oh, yeah! But he'd a whole lot rather be well."

Hildie Pomeroy was so much shorter than me, she stood with her neck sharply craned; her head, that seemed disproportionately large for her stunted body, was crooked upward at a painful angle. I felt that simply by standing before her, looming over her, I was discomforting her; my very presence must have been an impediment; the poor woman spoke breathlessly, stroking her hair and fussing with a little gold cross on a chain around her neck. (Her neck, too, had been powdered, but less effectively than her face; you could see a cross-hatching of lines in the powdery surface.) It seemed to me that Hildie Pomeroy had rehearsed some of her remarks; she'd repeated things she'd told me on the phone; her need was to establish absolutely and beyond my questioning her co