The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament

shows His handiwork.

Day unto day utters speech, and night unto night reveals

knowledge.

There is no speech nor language where their voice is not

heard.

Their line has gone out through all the earth, and

their words to the end of the world.

Psalm 19:1-4
New King James

"The Journey of life is for putting love in order."
Leanne Payne

 

One tank of gas away from home, still in the state of Arkansas, I pull off the freeway and write in my journal:

Comes first, and always must, the loss. Then the time of mourning. And then rest. Then comes the time of wonder, and it is in this time, I think, that journeys can be taken. In journey time, we can know, and we can heal and make whole again. What we seek, we shall find. And what will come to us, if we are fortunate and persist, is peace.

I have left my home and family this second week of Lent, 1992, on the 21st of March to begin a month of traveling. My road is almost 3000 miles. My vehicle is a 1959 Chevrolet Apache 3100, ½ ton, long-bed, step-side pickup truck that belonged to my father and has been in our family more than 20 years. It will carry me through a state so vast and beautiful that I will find myself stopping every 40 or 50 miles to take pictures. The color prints will be breathtaking as now they pass from one of my hands to the other, tiny bits of time I will study intently. Somewhere in the vast chronograpy out of which they have been sliced by the quick, meticulous shutter of my camera lives everything I have journeyed to find and more.

My goals, I think, as I pull away from the deserted gas station under whose awning I have parked to write the first of the journey time words that will come to fill the pages of this notebook and another and still another, are to expect only what is given, to take what comes, to receive it with gratitude. I will drive slow, listen hard, search for the pattern. And, so that I might understand what I have been given, I will tell the story of it.

---

Table of Contents

I. Silence

A Pale Green Shadow

II. Orange Lines on My Texas State Highway Map

Journey Time
"Now you know why they don't make 'em like that anymore."
At My Younger Little Brother's Apartment
In My Little Sister's Round Red Tin
At My Big Sister's Place

III. Through the Empty Spaces Between My Fingers

Sunday Morning
Connie Jean
When I Was a Kid
In the Present Moment

IV. If Anything is Wrong

Roll Back Ricky
"Please, oh please, dear God ...."
Leaving Home

V. Into the Desert

Uncle Thomas

"A table among your enemies"

Among Such Fathers as These

VI. Like the Water of Dreams

Truck Driver Critical After Blaze

In the Parking Spaces Behind My Uncle's Building

Go Now

VII. In a Place Where We Can Keep an Eye on It

When I Got to Waxahatchie Yesterday

 

---

I.
Silence

A Pale Green Shadow

Late on a Saturday afternoon in the fall of 1969, my father and I are working together at Sharp Drilling Company off Loop 336 northwest of Odessa, Texas. The sleek, fast Chevrolet trucks and the long pipe trailers they pull have been serviced and washed, and we have almost finished cleaning up the shop when one of the drivers calls to him, and he steps outside the door. I see the flat pint pass from one hand to another and watch my father fill his Coke bottle. Brown drops fall to the ground. My father covers the top with his thumb and turns the bottle upside down to mix the two fluids. Then he takes a long drink and looks over his left shoulder at me.

I rush to the cold drink machine and stuff a quarter and a dime into the slot. I pull a bottle, open it, and slug down as much as I can while he walks across the damp, clean concrete toward me. He offers the other bottle. I take it, fill mine, and down a mostly straight shot of the first taste of Wild Turkey in my life. Somehow I manage it without choking. Then I look him in the eye, cover the top with my thumb, and turn it upside down. He is stunned.

"I didn't know you drank," he says, a little piece of a grin playing across his lean, brown face.

"There's a lot about me you don't know. I could tell you things ...."

And I could have. I could have told him about my friends, about the ways we spent our time together. I could have told him that I had just bullshitted him into giving me my first drink of hard liquor. I could have told him I had fought a kid at school-finally and for the right reasons-had beaten him up pretty badly, and had walked away unpunished by the principal or the police officer who pulled us apart. I could have told him I was OK. Or I could have told him the truth, that I was confused about the future, torn between equally attractive options: join the Navy, go to college.

Had we squatted together as men do, leaned back against the warm west wall of the shop, and talked into and out of the whiskey, through the cool of the evening and into the night, we might have discovered that we were, after all the years we had ridden, worked, and lived together, still strangers. Had I known that my longest life journey had just now, in this moment of omission, begun to unfold, I would have broken the silence of father and son. I would have asked him to introduce himself, to show me his heart, the wisdom his years must have given him. I might have said I needed his help, his advice, his love. Had I known on that day what I know on this one, I would have talked to him about love and how it comes, slow, sudden, and sweet, how it leaves, fast and bitter, taking everything out of the instant in which it is so utterly and never gone.
Because fathers know these things, he would have told me why that instant is always this one, here, now, and long ago. He would have told me that I might never understand it.

Much later, when we had lived together in the warm, loud place fathers and sons build of the words they share, I would have said to him, "I know. I see. This is how it happens...." And I would have told him this story so full, so empty:

At a dance sponsored by the Episcopal Church on West County Road, in Odessa, I hunt for my friend, Kay. She is one of the volunteers patrolling the floor to be sure nothing interesting happens. When she sees me walking through the loud, murky room toward her, she flashes me a smile so bright that the night around us opens for a moment into morning. I grin back and stumble, stupidly, over a chair I do not see. We shout into the music, which swallows our voices, and we dance. Kay laughs across the space between us as we twist and turn to the sounds of a bad, cheap band.

The last song of the evening is slow and predictable-"My Girl." But what I could never have predicted as we step close and take each other into our arms is the great loud rush of pure, clean air that suddenly sweeps through the room, clearing it, until she and I are alone, swaying together, she holding me, her head on my shoulder, her fine brown hair brushing softly against my cheek, and I holding her, my blood racing, my breath coming in shallow, ragged gasps. The music swells, and the boundaries between us soften and swirl until I can no longer tell where she ends and I begin, where I end and she begins.

When the music is done, I release her, and she steps away, holding still to my hand, as the other dancers and the noise and she and I crowd back into the room. Her fingers slide across mine, break contact, and she moves from one group to another, saying good night, telling people to drive safely, glancing back at me, smiling. I cannot look away.

Later, I take Kay home in my old Ford. We drive slow down back streets, the dry night air cool against our faces. We do not talk. At her curb, she slides across the seat to my side, and we hold each other. She kisses me, a little Kay-peck-on-the-lips kiss, the way she always has kissed me. I walk her to the steps and hug her. She looks up at me, searches my face, and I imagine that she sees what this night has written there, that she, too, has felt, feels what I am feeling. We are silent, and then she turns and disappears through the front door of her parents' house.

When I see Kay again, it is as though nothing has happened. We never talk about what we do or do not feel for each other, what has or has not taken place, what might come of it. I try, but the inflection of my voice tips her, and away she flies from me, into some joke or the details of this or that class or into rumors of what our friends are and are not doing. I am puzzled. I am afraid. And so I do not pursue her. We do not touch; we do not hold one another. In all the rest of our time together, we do not mention the dance at the Episcopal Church on West County Road. And in that silence, what might have been is lost.

Years later, Kay calls to invite me to our ten-year class reunion. In her voice, in the way she laughs across the long lines between now and then, I can hear the Kay I knew so long ago. And in the quiet spots, in the stories of her life since high school, I hear another Kay, one who has grown and deepened and come into herself. We talk for a long time. She tells me about her children and her husband. I tell her about my wife and my daughter. We talk about the old times, but they are old, and we have little to say. I am sorry we cannot attend the reunion, and she is sorry we will not be there.

Afterward, as I sat on the porch in front of my Iowa City apartment, I thought about Kay and Ruth, my wife. I thought how wonderful, how strange it was that I had fallen in love with each of them to the sounds of the same song at the end of a hot, crowded night of dancing. Kay and Ruth, I knew, would become great friends. I imagined them together, talking for hours, laughing, holding and hugging each other, growing to love one another as I love them both. I could see our daughters growing up, trading letters and stories, sharing clothes, spending the night. I could see Kay's husband and myself, moving past suspicion and regret into friendship and then trust. We would work on cars and drink cold beer after hot days at the Sand Hills State Park. We would watch football and play cards, our friendship floating upon the bright smiles and gentle laughter of Kay and Ruth and our children.

Not much later a good friend calls to tell me that Kay has been killed in a head-on collision on Forty Second Street in Odessa. The driver of the other car had crossed the center line. Kay's daughters and their friends, passengers in the van, would be OK. The other driver would also live. Kay died instantly.

"She will be buried tomorrow afternoon."

I hear my friend's words, but I cannot hear their meaning. Unequipped, I step away from the edge they reveal.

"How are you?" I ask him. "How's school? What do you hear from your Mom and Dad?"

Not understanding that there is no room in me where his news might dwell, he grows angry and hangs up. Telling Ruth what I have heard about a woman she has never met, I feel nothing. She looks puzzled, but does not speak. I turn away.

That summer, back in Odessa, I awaken one night, and what I could not feel in Iowa City rushes out of the darkness upon me. Breathless, I whisper Kay's name, and all the brief and endless moments in which she lives suddenly swirl about me, full and potent. I watch her hand sliding across the tips of my fingers, pulling me across a loud room at the end of a dance that has never, even in its smallest details, left me–the smell of her hair, the pressure of her small breasts, the tightness of her thigh against the inside surface of my leg. My fingertips tingle and ache, hunger to feel her hand. My ears strain to the far away echoes of her laughter.

In the darkness before me, I see her at the door of her parents' house. She reaches for the knob and looks back at me. Her smile flashes and fades, and then she is gone, leaving the door ajar. Having no choice, I step over the mat, open the screen, and cross forever into the still and airless room of absence.

Now, when I am in a bar and someone orders a Wild Turkey, I remember that Saturday afternoon at Sharp Drilling Company. Adrift in the space that opened between my father and me, I watch the pale green shadow of the Coke bottle move across my arm as we turn away, back to our work. In the terrible quiet of that moment of remembering, in the space between longing and fulfillment, between love and loss, now and then, these words rise within me, forcing their way to the surface, like water pressed upward by the weight of ice on a frozen lake, pressed upward to harden in the dark days of a winter whose cold splits mountains, a winter whose long silence can never be broken.

I do not know if my father would understand what I feel, if he would hear me or walk away, but I would give everything to have that afternoon again, spread like a banquet of possibility before the hard present tense that binds me now so fast.

Before the loud voices pull me back to the bar, I finish the hot, flat Coke of long ago, put away my tools, and climb into my 1955 Ford. My father shades his eyes with his left hand, raises his right to wave me goodbye. I see his mouth move in the distance, and then he disappears into the dust that swirls behind me as I race across the yard and out the gate, ready to begin, at last, my Saturday night. I am going to a dance at the Episcopal Church on West County Road. My friend Kay will be there.