Continuing Work

This is a continuation of these posts, in sequence:

http://voxproletariat.wordpress.com/2008/11/08/down/

http://voxproletariat.wordpress.com/2008/12/28/session-work/

And February thaws outside her window. The window is a small box of access, showing the opposite wall of a very small and unkempt courtyard. Outside, through the warbling ribbons of melt water on the glass, I can see a kid staring at the wall. The bandages on his sides and the stump under his right knee catch the sun and scatters brilliance and whiteness.

Her office has one other window, an inconsequential and out of place rectangle on her left. It lets in a solid shaft of dizzying sunlight, illuminating the dust swirling through the air and the lines of her hand as she scratches on her pad. Today, she has a little makeup on. It’s beautiful, but her lack of perfect proficiency due to rare practice shows a little. Her skin is a little too smooth. Her lips are a little too pink. Our appointment is her last of the day. She finishes her words and looks up at me. Her eyes give me the critical hardness around the edges and gradually fall into ease. Her skin loosens around her cheekbones a little and she smiles.

“So, how are we today?”

“I can’t make any accounting for your mood, but I’m pretty good. No real complaints.”

“You were right, you know.”

“I generally am,” and I see her eyes roll, ” But you’ll have to tell me what I’m right about this time.”

“You do get more country in your accent when you go down there. How was it?”

“Good. I mean, the weather and such was good. Truck run good. He isn’t getting any better.”

And I hear my own voice drop into some deeper and thicker place. And I hate it.

Her smile fades and her brow furrows into the sympathy she knows I hate. In the months I’ve known her, she’s learned me well. She knows not to let sympathy turn into a drip of sickly sweet consolation. She knows when I am about to shut off. And she knows when she can do nothing. And that is what shows as the sympathy flickers away, the resignation.

“Is he just old?”

“Yeah, ninety-five. And he’s had a stroke. And since they don’t believe in doctors, he just toughed it out. He’s slow. And he can’t talk right. But you can tell he’s still all there. Just got that about to die exhaustion.”

“How big was he in your life.”

“I ain’t sure how big. He give me my name. He give us all our name. When he adopted my dad.”

“It does take a lot of love to adopt and raise a kid.”

I squirm. She uses that word to gauge me. Some days I can take it. Some days it makes me squirm. She has something like mirth creeping up from behind her eyes. She scratches in her light hand a few words. I’m lost to what I try and open to her. And myself. At least for a little while. And her eyes get a little hard when she looks up and a little disappointed. I’m not sure about what.

I look past her to the window and through the falling down thaw the kid is being wheeled back across the brown and dry grass into the double doors. He wasn’t staring at the wall before. His eyes are set stationary. He has them set on the same nowhere as the world turns around him and he’s pulled inside by the nurse.  I watch the drama of nothing play out behind her desk in the courtyard as she tries to find me. I know what she’s doing and I wish I could help.

We sit for a few minutes listening to nothing and snowmelt while the sun cuts the room into wide sections through the filterpress of the windows. The wide swaths of light on the carpet drip with the shadows of the water running down.

“I know,” she says.

“Sorry. Just drifted there a while.”

And through the haze of a million other thoughts, her voice forms its own writing on the wall of what I can handle right now.

Was it good otherwise, she asks me. And a larger melting bunch of snow slides fast down behind her.

It was. Beautiful. I’m from there.

Scratching on paper and some words are percolating out of my chest while my mind is seeing the broken cathedral of Shiprock cutting into the haze ahead of the Luca Chucas and the Ute towering up, the skeleton of a failed volcano. And the San Juans to the east, giving birth to a new sun that gilds the snow on the hay fields and in the cedar and on the blue silver branches of sage. You always feel right when you get close enough home, I say. And we were kids running through the house. Playing with the old guitar and wondering at the bellows and brands and pokers over the stone fireplace. And we were listening to the Word, argued out like Joshua was alive and still God’s wrecking ball. The grating basso voice of him. The Stetson hat and the turquoise and silver and cowhide of him. The God in him and through him and ever reaching out into space from his deeds.

I tell her about the time he set my brother’s broken arm. And the time he came to the house and prayed for me with olive oil on his fingers rubbing into my forehead. And the shaking of his voice. And his tight closed eyes over me as he asked God, if it be his will, to keep this one alive as the Church had had to bury too many young ones.

“Were you sick? Was this still before your family started going to doctors?”

It was before, I tell her. I was bit by a black widow seven times, I may have been six or seven. I was seven. It felt like I had been stabbed and set on fire. I’d also been tickbit the same camping trip. I was all kinds of fucked up.

And I come back to her. And she welcomes me back. And I want to tell her something but it hides under another thing that I can’t move. So I keep watching her write.

After we make our next appointment, I get up out of her chair and gather up my backpack. It’s about a mile to the gym and a mile more to my house. I pull the straps over my shoulders and hop little a to set them, a trick I learned from carrying heavier and more important packs in other more important places. I leave before we can change our meeting time again.

And the gym is the same and the gym goers are the same and my heart is still up on the high cold and long gone lonesome blue of that place. But I work hard. I don’t know what else to do. And I think of strength, what it means, where I learned it. And I think of a strong man, a homesteader of some thousand acres of still hostile Ute country and adopter of children he owed nothing, and I think of him laying still and needing bathed and changed and fed. Then of the world, ever loving and dying and screaming low with winter without him in it. And the weight of the dumbbells doubles and trebles and they fall down beside me.  And the veins and battered pinched white scars show heavy on my hands in the sidelighting evening sun.