by Marcia Williams
Late June in Mesilla, New Mexico, was the earthly parallel of the flu, the time when, lips parched and fever blazing, a person couldn’t even focus their eyes. That time before the monsoons arrived with their violent downpours, dust-calming precipitation, a fever break dropping air temperatures.
“No, Mom. I’m not cancelling my trip to make yucca mats,” Sage said, clearing her lunch things. “You’re already bleeding from where the fronds stabbed you.” Her mom’s hands and t-shirt were freckled with blood. Getting near yucca was like juggling razor blades. Not just the yucca but all the cactus in the area: cholla, prickly pear, ocotillo, claret cup and barrel. Their backyard was grass, and the only time she ran across it barefoot, the soles of her feet were punctured by hidden goat-head burrs.
Her mom said, “I thought it’d be fun, working together on this. You’re half Mescalero Apache.” The half certainly hadn’t come from blonde, Nordic Bridget, who’d planted the soapweed yucca when Sage had been born. When Sage was young, Bridget had styled her daughter’s hair in two long black braids, each clasped with beaded leather ties. Bridget had had visions of the two of them, weaving frond-mats, making soap from the roots, harvesting the fruits, brewing medicinal teas, and cooking poultices.
“Dad’s Portuguese,” Sage pushed back. Her parents had divorced before her birth. Other than her mother’s blue eyes, Sage seemed a clone of Eddie, olive-skinned with straight black hair, hers now bobbed, his not yet speckled with gray. Her dad, an archaeologist now living in El Paso, would soon pick her up for a long weekend in Taos, which at almost seven thousand feet, would provide a cool respite. His parents, both academics, had moved to Albuquerque for teaching posts at the university. Ordinarily this trip would include a stop to visit with them, but during the summers they traveled. Sage had lost track of where they were right now.
Having missed spending more time with her daughter as Sage finished senior year at New Mexico State, Bridget said, “I could dig up some of the root, and we could make soap?” The hardy taproot went down twenty feet to supply this desert plant with water.
“Mom, no yucca craft projects.” Not now. Not this weekend. Not ever.
“I want time together before you go away.”
“Jesus, Mom.” Taos was barely six hours away.
“I mean when you’re away in the Peace Corps.”
What the fuck? She hadn’t told her mother about that. “Gotta get my stuff together,” Sage said, dashing into her bedroom and locking the door. Soon noticing a loud noise in the front yard, she peered through the slats of her blinds to see the bad combo of her mother and a chainsaw. Bridget held the saw in one hand and yanked the starter cord with the other. It took a few tries before the chainsaw started with an escalating whine, and Bridget shifted her stance to raise the tool to one of the yucca stalks. Yunh-yunh-yunh followed by silence when the saw bound down in the plant. Bridget struggled to extricate it. Then, the same routine, ending with the saw again stalled and jammed in the yucca.
This time, after freeing the tool, Bridget returned it to the garage and emerged with an axe, a small-headed axe on a long, red wooden handle. What the hell was she doing with an axe? Bridget walked across the crushed stone which covered the front yard, approached the stalk she’d been working on, poised the axe with the handle resting along the back of her shoulder blade, and swung. Ka-whoomph!
Monica Smythe, a transplanted Brit who seemed to have retained a sense of amusement at the global eccentricities of mankind, was their neighbor. She emerged from her house, likely drawn by the noise, and was chatting with Bridget when Eddie arrived. Sage grabbed her bags and bolted into his vehicle, stashed her stuff, called a quick good-bye to her mom, and slammed the truck door. At the end of the block, out of view of Bridget, Eddie pulled over and greeted Sage with a hug and a kiss on the cheek.
“Was your mom going at the yucca with an axe?” he asked.
“Yeah. If you’d gotten here earlier, you could have seen her go at it with a chainsaw.” If nothing else, life as Bridget’s daughter had imbued Sage with a thick skin and a refined appreciation of life’s absurdities.
“I once saw a buddy toss out a cigarette butt only to find it suspended in air, pierced by the end of a frond. Maybe that was Spanish bayonet yucca.” It hardly mattered; none of the varieties was cuddly.
“I told her not to plant that damn thing,” he said. No surprise the saw had bound in the desert plant; chainsaws were intended for a harder substrate.
Not only had the initial slip grown, it had cloned into a grove of wicked plants filling a quarter of the front yard and, with the underground runners, threatening to undermine the rock wall dividing Bridget and Monica’s properties. Though the yucca bloomed, it had never fruited. A few years back, Bridget decided it wasn’t getting pollinated and acquired bees, but her backyard hive was invaded by killer bees that kept stinging the neighbors. Bridget had refused to remove it, forcing the town’s consulting beekeeper to do so; Sage always thought of him as the bee-catcher. She later learned that soapweed yuccas are pollinated either by moths or by hand, not by bees.
“Could you ever tell mom anything?” Sage asked, the desolate northern reach of the Chihuahuan desert off I-25 gliding by the passenger window. This was the sort of land where soapweed should, and did grow—not in an irrigated subdivision yard. They passed miles of high desert, punctuated by wind, tumbleweeds, greasewood, and a spotting of mesquite.
“Not really.”
“So, she mentioned the Peace Corps today, but I haven’t told her about it. How’d she find out?”
“Not from me, doll; I’d never do that to you.” Eddie had met Bridget at college in Albuquerque. She’d been gorgeous, an Army brat, used to establishing friends quickly. He’d fallen for her before he realized how wild she was or that she couldn’t see the world from anyone else’s perspective but her own. His brief marriage to Bridget had been enough to keep Eddie from remarrying.
Bridget had had Sage sleeping in the bed with her until she was in high school. Eddie, when he’d heard, put a stop to that. Her mother’s illness explained Sage’s choice of a major. Sitting in Introduction to Psychology, she felt as if someone had given her the key to a coded message. Sage’s mom couldn’t tell where she ended and Sage began, like the yucca, whose main and subsidiary stalks were all part of the same organism.
“If you knew she was bat-shit crazy, why did you leave me with her?” Sage adjusted the air conditioning vents to blast her face. A heat haze outside created an intermittent mirage of water on the road ahead of them.
Eddie explained that when he’d filed for divorce twenty-two years ago, he hadn’t known Bridget was pregnant. He’d found it out through mutual friends and had his attorney file for custody.
“I never knew that,” Sage said.
Moving to the more recent past, Eddie said, “I still remember how unhinged she became when you wanted to move into the dorm.”
“Yeah, like three miles away.”
“I threatened to take her back to court and file for primary custody.”
“So, why didn’t you get custody originally?”
“The system’s biased towards the mother. In fact, even to get visitation, I had to pass a paternity test.” It was hard enough for Eddie to extricate from Bridget without fighting the entire court system, too. A system which didn’t seem to anticipate mothers like Bridget.
“Dang.” The windsock at the bridge across Nogal Canyon snapped with a rising headwind.
“So there’s proof I’m yours and not half Mescalero Apache?”
“There is.”
“Mom’s the one who keeps harping on my ‘heritage’ and yammering about that stupid yucca. Does she know?”
“She did. God only knows if she’s chosen to remember that or instead cling to her alternative narrative.” Eddie paused. “You hungry? Want to stop at the Owl?” he asked, referring to the Owl Bar in San Antonio, New Mexico, famous for its green-chile cheeseburgers.
“Nah. I’m good. Let’s just get to Taos.”
***
Sweat stung Bridget’s eyes as she axed away with renewed vigor following Sage’s departure. Despite the close houses with mature plantings—mesquite, desert willow and palo verde trees as well as cacti—the wind was powdering her with the fine dust common to the area. She wasn’t making any headway and returned to the garage. Maybe she had needed to add oil to the chainsaw, in addition to the fuel. Who the hell knew. It hadn’t worked. Everything in the garage was dusty. Bridget rooted around on the shelves—moving gritty bags of stuff that needed to be taken to Goodwill, shifting some Black Cat firecrackers unused from a New Year’s celebration, knocking a roll of twine onto the floor—before finding the remaining gasoline from the useless chainsaw. Back outside she poured it on a section of yucca. With the wind, it took her a few matches to get one lit. When she finally did, she tossed it onto the fuel-wetted yucca and jumped back as it caught, spitting clouds of smoke. Wiping sweat out of her eyes, she smeared the blood from her hands across her face and poked at the simmering mess with her metal garden rake. There weren’t any flames, but even just smoldering, the fire broke down the structure of the plant, allowing her to make progress with the axe.
She’d chop for a while, then drag the debris into the street to clear more space. The heat from the fire made the project wretched. She hated Eddie for taking Sage away from her. A daughter’s place was with her mother. The Peace Corps. What had possessed Sage? She’d be gone for years. How could she manage without her mommy?
“Excuse me, ma’am,” a uniformed man interrupted. Judging by the heavily-labeled red SUV parked behind him, he was from the fire department.
“Yes?” she answered, raking former bits of yucca fronds and trunks into the street.
“What’s going on here?”
“The homeowners’ association says I have to get this plant out, that it’s causing problems blocking the sidewalk and damaging the wall.”
“I’m going to have to ask you to put this fire out.”
“I’m almost done here.”
“Please, ma’am, put your fire out. Otherwise, I’m going to cite you.”
“I can’t leave the fire untended while I run around looking for the hose.”
“I’ll watch the fire.”
“I don’t think I even have a hose.”
He called her bluff by looking from her to the hose caddy by the front door.
Scowling, she walked over to it, turned on the spigot, unspooled the hose, and spritzed the charred plant, which hissed steam and belched noxious smoke.
“Do you have a burn permit?” he asked, knowing that she didn’t; the fire department didn’t issue them in conditions this dry and windy.
“Who called you on me?”
“Ma’am, we could smell this smoke at the fire station.”
“I’m just clearing a little area on my front gravel.”
“If you were clearing it with your axe, or a saw, or a backhoe, we wouldn’t be here. May I see your permit?”
“I’m almost done. Look at how much I’ve taken out.”
“No fires in your yard. I’m giving you a warning this time, but I don’t want to have to come back,” he said before striding back to his vehicle.
Frustrated at being interrupted before she had the satisfaction of finishing the job, Bridget went inside, drank some water, and wiped the worst of the filth from her face and arms. She ate some tortilla chips with a beer and then, unaccustomed to the heavy physical exertion, fell asleep on the couch.
She awoke about 6:30 that evening with a renewed determination to finish her project before the sun set in a couple of hours. Besides, the Mesilla Fire Department closed at 5:00 p.m., so those busybodies couldn’t infringe on her right to maintain her property. She checked the yard where she’d hosed down the fire earlier. With the wind and the low humidity, it seemed dry enough. She scouted around in the garage and found a couple of cans of lighter-fluid she’d bought for the charcoal grill. On her way out, she noticed a package so dusty—the fine sand seeped in even through closed windows and doors—she couldn’t read the brand or contents until she wiped the grit away: leftover firecrackers from some celebration years ago. She grabbed those, too, separated them, and shoved them into various spots in the yucca, rained the lighter fluid over it all, and—with the wind at her back—tossed a lit match onto it. The grove popped into fire, emitting a smoke even more acrid for the addition of the lighter-fluid and now punctuated by the detonations of the firecrackers as the flames reached them.
***
Arriving in Taos, Eddie drove directly to El Gamal, where it was East Indian night with menu specials and live sitar music indoors. Sage’s phone started beeping alerts.
“How about shutting that thing off,” Eddie said.
“Okay, okay.” Sage wasn’t used to her dad being so abrupt. They chose a patio table behind the sidewalk planters of blooming flowers and sculptural greenery. Outside the music was muted enough for the two to converse. This was not the sort of establishment where perky waitresses popped over to your table announcing, “Hello, my name is Kimberly, and I’ll be your server today…” It was instead the sort where the cook wore dreadlocks and the wait staff sported denim aprons over black pants and shirts. After ordering, Sage went to wash her hands. Walking to the back of the restaurant was like jostling through a souk with smells of cardamom, turmeric, and cumin, crowded tables, and music from the band. By the time she returned, a basket of fresh, hot naan bread awaited her at the table. During the meal the clouds changed colors like a mood ring: from rose to gray, then to black. As they finished their food, Sage turned her phone back on and searched frantically.
“What’s up?” Eddie asked.
“I think I know how she found out. Nosy, snooping, no-boundaries bitch!”
“The Peace Corps?”
“Yup. A couple of weeks ago Mom borrowed my phone, claiming hers was dead, and she needed to order a bee-hive, or a tomahawk, or some damn thing. After that my password no longer worked.” But, here’s the proof in trash: the dual-authentication email confirming that her password had been changed that weekend. Changed twice: first by Bridget and then, after the phone was returned, by Sage. Bridget had logged into Sage’s email. Sage scanned her Peace Corps folder and saw where her mom had found out about her after-college plans.
“Let me live with you, Dad? Just until Peace Corps.” Sage’s phone started beeping so many messages and voicemails it sounded like a performance of “Flight of the Bumblebee.”
“What’s all that?” Eddie asked.
Before Sage could check the messages, the phone rang, and brow furrowed, she swept her finger across the screen to answer. Monica reported that a fire in Bridget’s yard had gotten out of hand that evening. Sage tipped the phone so that her father could listen in, too. The fire appeared to be under control now but had burned up a good bit of the landscaping on that side of the street as well as charring Bridget’s and her houses. The fire department was still there monitoring, and the town marshal had, in Monica’s quaint phrasing, “invited Bridget to join him for a little ride in his vehicle.” Sage thanked Monica and shut off her phone.
Bridget would always create havoc and attempt unusual solutions to perceived problems. Eddie pulled his chair next to Sage, put his big arms around her and pulled his daughter to him. Resting her head on his shoulder, she couldn’t fault her mom for pining for the simplicity of a young daughter—braids bouncing as she tagged along—game to dig up yucca root to brew soap, or weave fronds into mats, and maybe even treat the ensuing cuts with a poultice made from the flowers. Wind had cleared the clouds from the Taos sky as stars emerged against the vast dark background. Nothing had changed, yet everything had.
An assistant editor for Narrative Magazine, I am pursuing an MFA in creative writing at the University of Montana.