Anchorite
by Bruce McKay
Winner, Fiction Contest
At the K-6 in Nava, Idaho where my sister is office manager the end of the schoolyear rolls around and there’s kissing in the back field, sixth-grade fondling in the summer weather. Tops get unbuttoned. A penis gets shown. It happens every June but the young teachers forget and lose their minds all over again.
My sister is forty-four with flat feet, arthritic knees, a broken toe that won’t heal. She weighs 277 pounds. Her walking speed is two m.p.h. It isn’t her job to raid the love bower, but on Make Out Monday she volunteers to trek out to the cottonwood trees. She gimps over the broken asphalt basketball courts. Through the gap in the chain-link fence. Into the patchy grass. Black leggings and purple running shoes. Lips pressed together. Nostrils working, eyes sardonic. Her hair streaked with gold, bunched by a tortoiseshell clip.
Why are you the quitter? our mother used to say to her. I remember driving you to swim practice, my god, you hated it so bad.
Your trip across the country. Coming through town with Lucy. Two states and you were ready to pack it in. She had to drag you back to the car.
And Wesley. You ruined that.
Now the elementary school. Three years and you’re done. Is it the little criminals? Is it the PE teacher? Tell me so I can finally understand one goddamn thing.
The cottonwoods stand in line on the edge of the property. White seed tufts float solo like dream messengers from the other world. For the teachers watching from the window in the faculty lounge it’s like a movie with muted sound. Celia small in the field. My comedian sister. Hands on hips, head cocked. Chin wagging, talking trash. Swinging an invisible lasso. Lifting her foot like a boot to the ass.
After a while here come the sixth graders of Nava Elementary. Out of the shade into the white sun, shrieking with laughter, mouths open. Sprinting across the field like loose dogs.
What will be our armor in the judgment? Love. Love will be victorious in the end.
That’s the direct communication that hits you between the eyes, my sister tells me.
The PE teacher in the “Our Staff!” photograph on the lobby wall holds his hands flat, fingertips touching beneath his chin, head tilted like Audrey Hepburn.
The kids adore him, hang on him, climb him like a tree. To adults he’s obnoxious, hyper-verbal, unfinished. An ox. Perpetual motion. A kid himself. Daggett, from Twin Falls. “My people,” my sister says.
On Touch a Tittie Tuesday a fifth-grader, Marlon, a multiple offender stripped of all privileges—music/library/PE/computer lab/art—comes to Celia for his timed-read to pass the state standard. Leia the therapy dog rests her head on Marlon’s knee. “Ready, go,” says Celia.
“Are you timing?”
“Did you start?”
“Did the timer start?”
She taps her watch where the second hand pulses.
He stares, needing to hurt someone. “Why do you walk so slow, Miss Celia, like an elephant?”
“Read your book and we’ll discuss.”
He turns to Chapter Five. Thin bare arms, black shoes, no socks. Long hair in his eyes.
“Miss Celia, do you think that’s real?”
He waves the book around in a circle. The torn pages have fallen open. She takes his wrist to hold it still. The pen-and-ink drawing shows Stuart the mouse—prim posture, pressed chinos, button-down shirt, stepping into his canoe.
“Did that happen?”
“I mean…”
Leia sniffs the book. She licks the cover.
“That Ryan, he’s famous, right?”
“The principal’s son? He’s only seventeen.”
“He looks famous to me. His sunglasses are sick.”
Marlon’s mom blocks the sidewalk at 3:30 p.m. with her Chevy Astro van which is green with no hubcaps, Jack-in-the-Box ball on the antenna, smashed side door. She’s in white cut-offs, spaghetti-straps, no bra, barefoot, puffy eyes, half awake, creases from the sofa cushion across the side of her face. In and out of jail. Drugs, beating her husband in front of the kids, changing price tags at Walmart. She’s screaming at Marlon to get into the van. Cars honking, classmates streaming by on both sides. Marlon mouthing back at her, “Keep talking you bitch, you slut, I’ll slap the shit out of you.”
Centipedes in the gym trigger texts from Daggett to Celia. He suffers from paralyzing insect-fear, he claims, and arachnophobia. “Mayday! Mayday!” On the walkie-talkie he calls the custodian. “Lud!” A quiver in his voice. “Lud, where are you. Please, Lud.”
In Celia’s office he torments and annoys. Drops cookie crumbs on the floor. Leaves his messy chicken box by the phone. He hangs over the counter and talks non-stop. Elk hunting, trucks, the night life in Boise. He’s a plus-size dancer. You think he can’t move and then wow. He demonstrates in the office and it’s true. He and his wife go to the clubs in Boise to check out the competition. “We’re kind of a big deal in the city,” he says. Leia the labradoodle bounces in circles around him. He takes her rhinestone collar and puts it around his neck.
His wife runs away with someone else and he becomes a single father to his three boys. The youngest is fourteen months old, not his own. Daggett loves him all the more. This is during my sister’s third year at Nava. Over the winter she watches Daggett pick himself up day after day, again and again, and the reins slip out of her hands. Like I-Ching, she says, like yarrow stalks falling.
It’s Whack a Weiner Wednesday and Yo, the school nurse, puts herself on display. She’s skinny, a weight watcher. Glasses like a sexy librarian. She talks about her protein diet, four almonds in her tiny little hand. Talks about how she’s blowing it. “Oh, my God, I’ve already smashed through my calorie ceiling today.” She wears thin cotton summer dresses, little sandals on her tan feet. She skips down the hall, making fourteen-year-old conversation about television shows and movies and singers.
She arrives ten minutes early to park in Celia’s usual spot. Third spot from the cafeteria door. There’s no assigned parking at Nava Elementary. It’s “just weird randomness” that Yo likes that spot, too. When Celia exits the office for a minute Yo slides Celia’s water flask three feet along the counter. She rearranges the knick-knacks. She disappears from the nurse’s station, gone to the gym “to check something.” Celia texts her--Where u at?—when a parent wants to talk about his kid’s allergies.
Yo takes Daggett’s blood pressure and pronounces it outrageous. She tells him to knock off the caffeine. She pours him seltzer water that he won’t touch. The seltzer fizzes and goes flat in the paper cup on her desk. Inside her cubicle she makes faces and sulks. “Die, then.” She brings him broccoli sprouts. He needs to be having sex, she scolds him. “You need to find somebody to play with, buster.”
For Celia it’s another bladder infection. No rhyme or reason. Maybe she’s not staying hydrated, maybe she drank cola. Even as a little girl she couldn’t have anything in her bath. No bubbles or scented bombs. Her friends got bath sets for Christmas. Not her. “What can I say? I’ve got an angry vagina.” Raging pain. Electrical jolts. “People getting in my space, it’s grrrr. I want to punch somebody. I call Polly the nurse and tell her my symptoms. I tell her I just want to scratch my eyeballs out.” Other times she’s at the doctor’s office and they tell her she has a UTI and she doesn’t even know it. They give her the prescription medicine, give her some fluconazole. Cranberry juice does nothing. In her twenties it would be sex. She got a bladder infection “every time.” Empty your bladder before and after, the doctor told her. Now it’s empty her bladder every chance she gets. “You can’t put off going to the bathroom even for a minute.” Wear the cotton underwear, not the silky nylony underwear. And the underwear needs to come off whenever possible. “You need to free up,” she says. Baggy pajama bottoms. Pantyhose, thank God those are past. The worst. Trapping in moisture. Like cling wrap. She feels an infection coming and starts chugging water. “No sane woman wants to see the gynecologist in the first place, and when your vagina is on fire you know they’ll get up in there and mess with it. Make it crazy. The doc joking with you like he’s your bartender.” Now she has a woman doctor who hands Celia a mirror so they can both see what they’re talking about. Of course. “But that was a shock the first time.”
Yo stands and twirls in her white cotton dress with the collar and thin blue-and-orange stripes. “You like it?”
Daggett deliberates. No expression on his large face. He might be in the saddle on his horse in the Sawtooth Range. Staring at distant ridge and sky.
“Be honest.” Yo wrinkles her forehead and pouts. In the mirror she finds his eyes. “It feels boxy since I’m on my period. My boobs are high like—shoom. It fit different in the store.”
It’s Turnt Up Thursday and Daggett needs six laps in twelve minutes from the fifth graders. They love him, flock around him, follow him like ducklings. But they won’t run for the state standard. He psyches them up. He yells, red-faced. They jog for a minute, then clump together and trudge the dirt-and-cinder track, clockwise under Idaho sky. Every recess they run like greyhounds, they burn five hundred calories per body. But for the standard they walk backwards and eat Doritos and smash chips in each other’s hair.
Daggett’s father is dead. Now the father wants his ashes tamped down like pipe tobacco into the finger holes of his bowling ball. He wants the bowling ball dropped from his fishing boat. Dropped to the bottom of Lake Lowell. This is perfect because he was both a bowler and a fisherman.
The family has him cremated at Fischer’s on 6th Street. Along with his body into the oven they put his favorite yellow sweatpants. A bass-fishing trophy. A 32 oz. sirloin because he loved steak. Also the four Nutter Butters left in the package after the drive to the crematorium. The package was on the center console where everybody could reach it.
The flesh is reduced to powder and the bones pounded to dust in the crusher. Daggett’s mother dumps the ashes onto the kitchen table that night after drinks. With a playing card she divides the pile equally. Four gray heaps—one for the bowling ball, one for her, one for Daggett, one for his sister.
They rise up early in the morning and drive to Lake Lowell. The water laps the dock. They untie the father’s small fishing boat. In a cove they hold a brief service in the still summer morning. Daggett stands like Galileo and drops the ball. It plunges through the glassy surface and vanishes. Then it bobs up in the water, floating like a cork.
Without warning the Mormon crickets invade Nava, Idaho. They come down from the sage desert into the fields, into the hay they worship. Vast spaced-out herds—walking, hopping, crawling, seething east to west. Gray-green, with jointed Abraham Lincoln legs, with helmet heads and wasp eyes. A nation, as Joel says: “mighty and without number, whose teeth are the teeth of a lion.” For hours they march across the parking lot at Nava Elementary. My sister and I watch them through the windshield of her Dodge pickup, the air smelling of alfalfa. The sound of the cricket feet is like sleet, like a sandy wind, like far castanets. Some are dead and dying, run over, waving their legs. The exoskeletons are silhouettes on the white lines of the parking lot.
My sister’s father has reemerged. This is not my father. This one lives in Minnesota, not far from St. Olaf College. He snuffles on the phone. He says come. She’s going. She perceives it as a pilgrimage to the Kierkegaard library. She has the impression the library is tiny, fusty. Two basement rooms. Kierkegaard ruralized. Made bovine. But the Hongs, the great translators and editors are there. So she hopes to be chastened.
I say, “Daggett?” and she only shakes her head.
“Stop,” she says. “Are you trying to kill me?”
On Feel It Friday the road into town is a picture of slaughter. Insects smashed on the blacktop. What is it like to be a single cricket among these tens of thousands? What is it like to be anything at all? What is it like to be a water birch. A western rattlesnake. A truck driver asleep at the Marsing Motel. A monolith in the Owyhees. A checkered whiptail lizard. A spike of wall barley ten feet off the roadside where as you tremble in the wind a woman stares at you because you are the object, you are the blessing in this world.
Late afternoon Celia says her goodbyes and we drive away from Nava Elementary. She turns the silver pegs where the radio knobs used to be. The FM dial plays one of the five or six local Christian radio stations. “Oh, what a Savior. Isn’t he wonderful,” sings a woman’s voice. I feel my lip trembling, my eyes welling. I gaze over Idaho fields. The sun hot orange over Lake Lowell. Where is this sensation coming from? My sister watches me. Face full of mirth. Her driving cap her black beret. “I know it, son. This one will get you.”
Rising on the east side of the Snake River is Lizard Butte, a small mountain inclined at a forty-five-degree angle. The lizard’s tail is on the ground, his head a thousand feet high. His elbows are two rock projections jutting out. His snout a triangular rock. His face is to the firmament. He’s definitely there. Nobody says, “I don’t see him,” because you see the lizard. A huge cross rises up from his brain stem. The planting of the cross has killed him, pinned him there. But he still venerates the sky. From anywhere around Marsing you can see him, recumbent against the pearl clouds. In less than half an hour you can climb his back, stand on his head, see the whole Snake River valley. Even Celia climbs him, slowly.
We stand in the wind. Her Dodge truck miniature on the dirt road, weighed down by boxes of books. Green fields for miles, white houses. Toy horses, cows, tractors, harvesters. She tells me how Daggett carried little Nita into the nurse’s office with her broken arm. How he hung up a five-foot Christmas stocking for himself and told everybody to fill it up. How in their watercolor night class he would use the hair dryer after the first wash, too impatient to wait. The map of the Sawtooths in his head.
“Now let’s drive.”
Handkerchiefs in both hands on the steering wheel. Her chronic sweaty palms. Deep breaths for her acid stomach. The cloth driver’s seat stained by coffee spills ancient and tremendous.
If when you speak you can’t make yourself intelligible, then you’re not speaking.
But no need of tears, my sister tells me. No admiration. “No need for praise.”
My sister is forty-four with flat feet, arthritic knees, a broken toe that won’t heal. She weighs 277 pounds. Her walking speed is two m.p.h. It isn’t her job to raid the love bower, but on Make Out Monday she volunteers to trek out to the cottonwood trees. She gimps over the broken asphalt basketball courts. Through the gap in the chain-link fence. Into the patchy grass. Black leggings and purple running shoes. Lips pressed together. Nostrils working, eyes sardonic. Her hair streaked with gold, bunched by a tortoiseshell clip.
Why are you the quitter? our mother used to say to her. I remember driving you to swim practice, my god, you hated it so bad.
Your trip across the country. Coming through town with Lucy. Two states and you were ready to pack it in. She had to drag you back to the car.
And Wesley. You ruined that.
Now the elementary school. Three years and you’re done. Is it the little criminals? Is it the PE teacher? Tell me so I can finally understand one goddamn thing.
The cottonwoods stand in line on the edge of the property. White seed tufts float solo like dream messengers from the other world. For the teachers watching from the window in the faculty lounge it’s like a movie with muted sound. Celia small in the field. My comedian sister. Hands on hips, head cocked. Chin wagging, talking trash. Swinging an invisible lasso. Lifting her foot like a boot to the ass.
After a while here come the sixth graders of Nava Elementary. Out of the shade into the white sun, shrieking with laughter, mouths open. Sprinting across the field like loose dogs.
What will be our armor in the judgment? Love. Love will be victorious in the end.
That’s the direct communication that hits you between the eyes, my sister tells me.
The PE teacher in the “Our Staff!” photograph on the lobby wall holds his hands flat, fingertips touching beneath his chin, head tilted like Audrey Hepburn.
The kids adore him, hang on him, climb him like a tree. To adults he’s obnoxious, hyper-verbal, unfinished. An ox. Perpetual motion. A kid himself. Daggett, from Twin Falls. “My people,” my sister says.
On Touch a Tittie Tuesday a fifth-grader, Marlon, a multiple offender stripped of all privileges—music/library/PE/computer lab/art—comes to Celia for his timed-read to pass the state standard. Leia the therapy dog rests her head on Marlon’s knee. “Ready, go,” says Celia.
“Are you timing?”
“Did you start?”
“Did the timer start?”
She taps her watch where the second hand pulses.
He stares, needing to hurt someone. “Why do you walk so slow, Miss Celia, like an elephant?”
“Read your book and we’ll discuss.”
He turns to Chapter Five. Thin bare arms, black shoes, no socks. Long hair in his eyes.
“Miss Celia, do you think that’s real?”
He waves the book around in a circle. The torn pages have fallen open. She takes his wrist to hold it still. The pen-and-ink drawing shows Stuart the mouse—prim posture, pressed chinos, button-down shirt, stepping into his canoe.
“Did that happen?”
“I mean…”
Leia sniffs the book. She licks the cover.
“That Ryan, he’s famous, right?”
“The principal’s son? He’s only seventeen.”
“He looks famous to me. His sunglasses are sick.”
Marlon’s mom blocks the sidewalk at 3:30 p.m. with her Chevy Astro van which is green with no hubcaps, Jack-in-the-Box ball on the antenna, smashed side door. She’s in white cut-offs, spaghetti-straps, no bra, barefoot, puffy eyes, half awake, creases from the sofa cushion across the side of her face. In and out of jail. Drugs, beating her husband in front of the kids, changing price tags at Walmart. She’s screaming at Marlon to get into the van. Cars honking, classmates streaming by on both sides. Marlon mouthing back at her, “Keep talking you bitch, you slut, I’ll slap the shit out of you.”
Centipedes in the gym trigger texts from Daggett to Celia. He suffers from paralyzing insect-fear, he claims, and arachnophobia. “Mayday! Mayday!” On the walkie-talkie he calls the custodian. “Lud!” A quiver in his voice. “Lud, where are you. Please, Lud.”
In Celia’s office he torments and annoys. Drops cookie crumbs on the floor. Leaves his messy chicken box by the phone. He hangs over the counter and talks non-stop. Elk hunting, trucks, the night life in Boise. He’s a plus-size dancer. You think he can’t move and then wow. He demonstrates in the office and it’s true. He and his wife go to the clubs in Boise to check out the competition. “We’re kind of a big deal in the city,” he says. Leia the labradoodle bounces in circles around him. He takes her rhinestone collar and puts it around his neck.
His wife runs away with someone else and he becomes a single father to his three boys. The youngest is fourteen months old, not his own. Daggett loves him all the more. This is during my sister’s third year at Nava. Over the winter she watches Daggett pick himself up day after day, again and again, and the reins slip out of her hands. Like I-Ching, she says, like yarrow stalks falling.
It’s Whack a Weiner Wednesday and Yo, the school nurse, puts herself on display. She’s skinny, a weight watcher. Glasses like a sexy librarian. She talks about her protein diet, four almonds in her tiny little hand. Talks about how she’s blowing it. “Oh, my God, I’ve already smashed through my calorie ceiling today.” She wears thin cotton summer dresses, little sandals on her tan feet. She skips down the hall, making fourteen-year-old conversation about television shows and movies and singers.
She arrives ten minutes early to park in Celia’s usual spot. Third spot from the cafeteria door. There’s no assigned parking at Nava Elementary. It’s “just weird randomness” that Yo likes that spot, too. When Celia exits the office for a minute Yo slides Celia’s water flask three feet along the counter. She rearranges the knick-knacks. She disappears from the nurse’s station, gone to the gym “to check something.” Celia texts her--Where u at?—when a parent wants to talk about his kid’s allergies.
Yo takes Daggett’s blood pressure and pronounces it outrageous. She tells him to knock off the caffeine. She pours him seltzer water that he won’t touch. The seltzer fizzes and goes flat in the paper cup on her desk. Inside her cubicle she makes faces and sulks. “Die, then.” She brings him broccoli sprouts. He needs to be having sex, she scolds him. “You need to find somebody to play with, buster.”
For Celia it’s another bladder infection. No rhyme or reason. Maybe she’s not staying hydrated, maybe she drank cola. Even as a little girl she couldn’t have anything in her bath. No bubbles or scented bombs. Her friends got bath sets for Christmas. Not her. “What can I say? I’ve got an angry vagina.” Raging pain. Electrical jolts. “People getting in my space, it’s grrrr. I want to punch somebody. I call Polly the nurse and tell her my symptoms. I tell her I just want to scratch my eyeballs out.” Other times she’s at the doctor’s office and they tell her she has a UTI and she doesn’t even know it. They give her the prescription medicine, give her some fluconazole. Cranberry juice does nothing. In her twenties it would be sex. She got a bladder infection “every time.” Empty your bladder before and after, the doctor told her. Now it’s empty her bladder every chance she gets. “You can’t put off going to the bathroom even for a minute.” Wear the cotton underwear, not the silky nylony underwear. And the underwear needs to come off whenever possible. “You need to free up,” she says. Baggy pajama bottoms. Pantyhose, thank God those are past. The worst. Trapping in moisture. Like cling wrap. She feels an infection coming and starts chugging water. “No sane woman wants to see the gynecologist in the first place, and when your vagina is on fire you know they’ll get up in there and mess with it. Make it crazy. The doc joking with you like he’s your bartender.” Now she has a woman doctor who hands Celia a mirror so they can both see what they’re talking about. Of course. “But that was a shock the first time.”
Yo stands and twirls in her white cotton dress with the collar and thin blue-and-orange stripes. “You like it?”
Daggett deliberates. No expression on his large face. He might be in the saddle on his horse in the Sawtooth Range. Staring at distant ridge and sky.
“Be honest.” Yo wrinkles her forehead and pouts. In the mirror she finds his eyes. “It feels boxy since I’m on my period. My boobs are high like—shoom. It fit different in the store.”
It’s Turnt Up Thursday and Daggett needs six laps in twelve minutes from the fifth graders. They love him, flock around him, follow him like ducklings. But they won’t run for the state standard. He psyches them up. He yells, red-faced. They jog for a minute, then clump together and trudge the dirt-and-cinder track, clockwise under Idaho sky. Every recess they run like greyhounds, they burn five hundred calories per body. But for the standard they walk backwards and eat Doritos and smash chips in each other’s hair.
Daggett’s father is dead. Now the father wants his ashes tamped down like pipe tobacco into the finger holes of his bowling ball. He wants the bowling ball dropped from his fishing boat. Dropped to the bottom of Lake Lowell. This is perfect because he was both a bowler and a fisherman.
The family has him cremated at Fischer’s on 6th Street. Along with his body into the oven they put his favorite yellow sweatpants. A bass-fishing trophy. A 32 oz. sirloin because he loved steak. Also the four Nutter Butters left in the package after the drive to the crematorium. The package was on the center console where everybody could reach it.
The flesh is reduced to powder and the bones pounded to dust in the crusher. Daggett’s mother dumps the ashes onto the kitchen table that night after drinks. With a playing card she divides the pile equally. Four gray heaps—one for the bowling ball, one for her, one for Daggett, one for his sister.
They rise up early in the morning and drive to Lake Lowell. The water laps the dock. They untie the father’s small fishing boat. In a cove they hold a brief service in the still summer morning. Daggett stands like Galileo and drops the ball. It plunges through the glassy surface and vanishes. Then it bobs up in the water, floating like a cork.
Without warning the Mormon crickets invade Nava, Idaho. They come down from the sage desert into the fields, into the hay they worship. Vast spaced-out herds—walking, hopping, crawling, seething east to west. Gray-green, with jointed Abraham Lincoln legs, with helmet heads and wasp eyes. A nation, as Joel says: “mighty and without number, whose teeth are the teeth of a lion.” For hours they march across the parking lot at Nava Elementary. My sister and I watch them through the windshield of her Dodge pickup, the air smelling of alfalfa. The sound of the cricket feet is like sleet, like a sandy wind, like far castanets. Some are dead and dying, run over, waving their legs. The exoskeletons are silhouettes on the white lines of the parking lot.
My sister’s father has reemerged. This is not my father. This one lives in Minnesota, not far from St. Olaf College. He snuffles on the phone. He says come. She’s going. She perceives it as a pilgrimage to the Kierkegaard library. She has the impression the library is tiny, fusty. Two basement rooms. Kierkegaard ruralized. Made bovine. But the Hongs, the great translators and editors are there. So she hopes to be chastened.
I say, “Daggett?” and she only shakes her head.
“Stop,” she says. “Are you trying to kill me?”
On Feel It Friday the road into town is a picture of slaughter. Insects smashed on the blacktop. What is it like to be a single cricket among these tens of thousands? What is it like to be anything at all? What is it like to be a water birch. A western rattlesnake. A truck driver asleep at the Marsing Motel. A monolith in the Owyhees. A checkered whiptail lizard. A spike of wall barley ten feet off the roadside where as you tremble in the wind a woman stares at you because you are the object, you are the blessing in this world.
Late afternoon Celia says her goodbyes and we drive away from Nava Elementary. She turns the silver pegs where the radio knobs used to be. The FM dial plays one of the five or six local Christian radio stations. “Oh, what a Savior. Isn’t he wonderful,” sings a woman’s voice. I feel my lip trembling, my eyes welling. I gaze over Idaho fields. The sun hot orange over Lake Lowell. Where is this sensation coming from? My sister watches me. Face full of mirth. Her driving cap her black beret. “I know it, son. This one will get you.”
Rising on the east side of the Snake River is Lizard Butte, a small mountain inclined at a forty-five-degree angle. The lizard’s tail is on the ground, his head a thousand feet high. His elbows are two rock projections jutting out. His snout a triangular rock. His face is to the firmament. He’s definitely there. Nobody says, “I don’t see him,” because you see the lizard. A huge cross rises up from his brain stem. The planting of the cross has killed him, pinned him there. But he still venerates the sky. From anywhere around Marsing you can see him, recumbent against the pearl clouds. In less than half an hour you can climb his back, stand on his head, see the whole Snake River valley. Even Celia climbs him, slowly.
We stand in the wind. Her Dodge truck miniature on the dirt road, weighed down by boxes of books. Green fields for miles, white houses. Toy horses, cows, tractors, harvesters. She tells me how Daggett carried little Nita into the nurse’s office with her broken arm. How he hung up a five-foot Christmas stocking for himself and told everybody to fill it up. How in their watercolor night class he would use the hair dryer after the first wash, too impatient to wait. The map of the Sawtooths in his head.
“Now let’s drive.”
Handkerchiefs in both hands on the steering wheel. Her chronic sweaty palms. Deep breaths for her acid stomach. The cloth driver’s seat stained by coffee spills ancient and tremendous.
If when you speak you can’t make yourself intelligible, then you’re not speaking.
But no need of tears, my sister tells me. No admiration. “No need for praise.”