|
Jonas Parker's ebony hands moved idly in the mud of the stream bank where he sat solemn and brooding. Splashing in the stream in front of him, four cowboys with milky white bodies and red turkey-looking necks, naked save for their wide-brimmed felt work hats, laughed and hooted as they took a late afternoon swim. Jonas felt like an outsider this afternoon. Back in the old days, he'd have been right in the middle of the group. But not since he'd come back from New York. He had grown up with three of the cowboys in the stream. Their parents had all owned small ranches here at the edge of the New Mexico badlands.
Jonas watched as Duke Gilbert led the horseplay in the water. Duke had always been the leader of their group, if it could be said that the loose-knit band of friends had a leader. Duke just naturally made the first move and everyone else followed if it seemed like a good idea. Early this morning, Duke had led the cow-gathering on the Tillman ranch despite the fact that Brady Tillman's boy, Bob, was in the group. As they'd left the trucks and trailers back on the road, Bob had been the one to ask Duke where they ought to start. Bob knew the land better, but Duke knew horses--and he knew men. He'd immediately broken the bunch up into the most efficient groups and sent them on their way. Even T.C. Martin surrendered his will to Duke. T.C.'s dad, J. Gregory Martin, owned the biggest ranch in the area, was president of the state cattleman's association, and owned the only three banks in this part of New Mexico. By agricultural, social, and financial rights, T.C. could easily have demanded to lead the group and everyone would have backed down and let him. But he didn't. T.C. never demanded. He never pushed his father's weight around. If he had, the group's peer pressure would have gotten rid of him long ago. Everyone in the small group of friends pulled his own weight.
Jonas had done his share from the time his dad had been brought from Arizona to run the ranch that lay between the Tillman and Gilbert spreads. His dad had eventually bought the ranch and he'd brought Jonas up to work hard and stand proud. It had been that pride that had brought them all together the day after the first football practice at Rock Creek High. After he'd knocked down Freddy Bursell for calling him a nigger, Jonas had looked up to see six of Freddy's city friends descending on him. He'd moved until his back was against the whitewashed concrete block wall of the men's restroom under the bleachers to give himself some kind of defensive position, then braced his legs for the beating he knew was coming. But the city boys had stopped several feet short of Jonas, looking behind him. Duke, Bob, and T.C. had walked out of the restroom, and Duke, looking Jonas over and noting his faded jeans, boots, and hat, had stepped in on the side of Jonas.
"I don't see no nigger here," he'd said quietly, doubling his callused hands into fists, "just a bunch of us poor, ol' ignorant cowboys. But if you think one of us is a nigger, then I guess you got four niggers here to fight."
That had been the last time the word had been used in public in Rock Creek, at least as far as any of the boys knew. But that had been nearly 25 years ago, Jonas thought as he watched Duke and Bob and T.C. carrying on with the new hand, Shorty. Twenty five years was a long time. That was before he'd graduated RCHS and gotten the art scholarship to New York. Before he'd married Elise and they'd had J.J. Before the art shows and the fame. Before the wreck. Twenty five years was a long time. But here he was, back home helping his dad. New York, Elise, J.J., fame and fortune, they were all just memories, just like Jonas' memory of that day at the football field when he was 15. Just like the artwork he could no longer do.
As Jonas thought, his hands began to move less idly. Despite the four months worth of calluses from roping, branding, and fence building, his hands were still sensitive. Unconsciously, he scooped up a double handful of mud from the bank, worked it into a football-sized lump. He stared out at the New Mexico badlands across the stream, seeing nothing but hearing Dr. Sanford's lecture again on eye placement. Without looking down, he scooped two thumbfuls of mud out about two-thirds of the way up the lump. It had been for those lectures, for the studio work, that he had gone against his father's wishes.
"I've built this place for you," his father had said.
"What I want is in New York--art," Jonas had practically screamed back. As he remembered the angry look of his father turning away, he heard his name mentioned in the conversation from the stream.
"Hey, Jonas," Duke Gilbert called out, "do black guys get sunburn?"
Jonas tried to laugh, looking out over the four white bodies topped by sunburned necks and wide-brimmed cowboy hats, both of which looked as if they were long past their prime. It was a game he and Duke had played for years. Whenever Duke felt there was some kind of tension in the group or someone was getting too serious about something, he'd come up with some lame-brained question. Jonas, the thinker of the group, would then try to come up with some equally lame-brained story to ease the tension. Jonas assumed that Duke must have gotten wind of some undercurrent of tension in the horseplay of the group. Possibly from Shorty, Jonas thought. He's the outsider here, coming from Texas and all and being new. He doesn't know everybody's little quirks yet. Must have made some innocent statement that somebody would take the wrong way if Duke didn't break the tension.
Knowing that a story was coming from Jonas, his three old friends waded out of the stream with Shorty following. They danced gingerly over the hot sand, scrambling naked except for their hats into the shade of the cottonwood tree that stood next to where Jonas sat in the sun, molding and shaping the sandy-clay lump between his knees.
"Sure," Jonas said. "Don't you know that's how we got this way? Even your ancients knew that."
Shorty Plumjoiner raised up on one elbow, spit a stream of tobacco, shaded his eyes with his hand, and said quite profoundly, "Huh?"
This felt like old times, Jonas thought, realizing for the first time that he was actually forming a piece of sculpture, even if it was pretty primitive.
"Back in ancient times--Greece or Rome, I don't remember which--Apollo the sun god had a son who wanted to drive his dad's chariot," Jonas said without looking up from his handiwork in the mud. The eyes were taking shape quite nicely. "Now, Apollo's chariot was really the sun and he didn't really want Phaeton to take it out. But Phaeton laid a guilt trip on him, all about his not really loving his son and all. So, finally, Apollo gave in and let him drive the chariot of the sun."
Jonas' fingers shaped and molded the soft, loamy clay deftly as he talked, pinching out a flat semicircle on each side. He could feel the tension from the past few months moving from his massive back, through his bulging biceps and sinewy forearms, into the long, shapely fingers. Much like it used to do. Before.
"Well, young Phaeton had never handled a real team before and then, being up there so high in the sky and all, he got scared and let 'em get away from him. Y'all know how a horse can sense fear. They took off into the heavens, burnin' stars left and right. Then they swooped down to the ground, burning cities and fields.
"In Mexico, they got so close they burnt the Mexicans a nice toasty brown. Did the same in Spain and Italy. Missed most of you European guys. Didn't get quite so close to the ground in China and Japan. But when they hit Africa, they damn near burned the whole place up. That's what made the Sahara Desert and that's why black men are black."
"Naw," Shorty snorted, staring all squint-eyed and sideways at Jonas. You're puttin' us on."
"No way, Shorty," Jonas replied, trying to keep the snicker out of his voice and noticing Duke scooping up a hatful of water behind Shorty's back. "It's the gospel."
Jonas molded a nose with his thumbs, made a mouth with his right index finger. A face was taking shape before him there on the bank. A familiar face, but one he couldn't quite place.
"Jupiter had to shoot ol' Phaeton right out of the saddle. Killed him with a thunderbolt between the eyes. I know. My great granddaddy was there. Seen the whole thing."
Just as Shorty realized that Jonas was, indeed, pulling his leg, Duke dumped the hatful of water on top of Shorty's head. Shorty howled and swung at Duke. Duke dove back into the water with Shorty right behind him. Bob and T.C. waded into the melee.
But Jonas simply sat and stared at the face that stared back at him from there in the mud of the stream bank. It was J.J.'s face. From before the wreck. The wreck he'd had in the car Jonas had bought him for his sixteenth birthday. The one he'd died in, crumpled against the concrete at the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel.
Crack, they'd said. Not my boy, he'd screamed, not my boy. Jonas had never cried, but he'd stayed drunk for months. When he sobered up, Elise had been gone. Gone back to her mother to try to find the comfort for her grief that Jonas couldn't give her in his. If only he'd brought J.J. back out here. Out where there was clean air and water. Back where people saw you for who you really were, not for what you wore or who you knew. He'd meant to. He really had. But he'd kept putting it off. Too much money. Too much work. Too many "important" statues that would live forever, proclaiming his fame and talent. A talent that hadn't been used these last few months. Only after he'd lost it all had he returned to find his dad a near invalid from a stroke, the ranch deteriorating rapidly. Then the divorce papers from Elise had arrived. It had seemed that the weight of the world was on his shoulders. No one could ever have been as miserable as Jonas Parker. No one.
Then, as the sun slid farther down in the sky and the shadows of the cottonwood leaves flickered across the black clay head in front of him, Jonas saw the corners of the mouth move. He knew it was just a trick of the light, maybe a slight change in perspective. But the mouth did move. Instead of the condemning look which Jonas had molded into the face, the lips raised. They reminded Jonas of a statue of Jesus he had seen once in a museum in New York. Jesus had been looking at the Roman soldiers, forgiving them. Tears filled Jonas' eyes, streamed over the lower eyelids, and raced down his cheeks to fall into the eyes of the perfect bust of his son. For a moment, it appeared as if they both were crying, unashamedly, silently. The tears began to make furrows into the mud statue. It began to lose its resemblance to J.J. Jonas raised his head, tears streaming, and looked out at his friends in the stream. Again the light had shifted, throwing a golden glow over the landscape.
Jonas raised himself up, yelled a long and drawn-out "Yaaaaahooooo," and, with all his clothes on, did a cannonball into the stream.
The wave that followed the splash washed over the statue of J.J., leaving only another formless lump of clay along the bank. But the wave went higher than the mud and kicked up a swirl of dust, nearly the size of a man, from the dry sand above. As Jonas surfaced in the stream, the brim of his felt hat drooping wetly around his ears, a breeze rustled the leaves of the cottonwood, and Jonas watched as the cloud of dust hovered for just a second, then drifted off on the wind toward the west. Jonas' tears were no longer visible amidst the water that streamed down his face.
Duke waded up to Jonas and clasped a firm grip on his shoulder.
"It's good to have you home, pard."
*~*~*~*~*
Copyright © 2002 George Wilhite. All rights reserved.
|
