Gravel crunches beneath the tires of Jessie William’s 2003 Ford Ranger. Apricot-blossom filled trees hide the house from the tiny road that winds across her parent’s valley. The road, thin and often treacherous, runs from the two-lane highway to the green lake with its hidden depths and twisting alcoves. Fifteen years ago the Reservation finished construction on a native school at the mouth of the valley, reworking the broken asphalt into a smooth black stretch of tar. That reconstruction stopped well before her folks’ place. Farmland, low rises of alfalfa and wild grass, grew in wide patches between purple and green mountains dappled by the long shadows of late afternoon. Her truck slows, and the gravel’s music deepens, then stills. The same song it has been singing since her childhood, one of four little girls riding in the back of a tractor. She lifts her eyes for a moment, soaking in the warm sun and intoxicating scent of summer in the valley.
She remembered lying on her bed on a day just like this, the drone of mosquitoes ringing in her ears.
“You can’t leave dishes in the sink and count them as clean!” Her mother called out from across the house.
“They’re soaking!” She said, as a languid breeze floated through the window and past her open door.
“Soaking is code for leaving them there until I get fed up and wash them myself. Not going to happen!”
It’s a terrible thing, to be seventeen and still home in the summer and made to do chores. But to spend that summer in the heart of God’s country? That almost makes up for it. She stood up and slunk into the kitchen, plunging her hands into the now ice-cold water. Jessie hissed and pulled back, glancing up as she did to the sound of the gravel road outside. The window above the sink, with its expansive view of the valley, didn’t show her the arrival, but it captured that particular glow of youth, endless and thick as honey.
With the sound fresh as early summer’s lavender, Jessie pulls her truck into the wide parking lot. A part of the southern field had been carved out and set with the same musical gravel as the driveway. The light is not so pure now, the glow is not so thick– the sun is already descending towards the far side of the mountains. At some point in the past few years her father, Jon Williams, had constructed a rough shed for the cars and for the ancient blue tractor. This was made out of a corrugated sheet metal that reflected and radiated captured heat until you could see it shimmering in the air. He had at least gotten rid of the massive tinder-dry hay bales that used to be piled up right next to the house. Fires now swept through the valley as regularly as clockwork, catching up anything they could. Every time she came it was less of itself.
As Jessie stepped from the truck her mother came out of the back door, underneath the back porch awning. Marge, with her short bottle-red hair and plump frame, had spent her working years as a schoolteacher. The only children in her life now were her grandkids, all of whom lived hours and hours away. She had isolated herself, making her domain the flowers, small garden, and apricot orchard. The garden of Eden- an oasis, surrounded by the larger ranch that spread across the valley.
“Looks like I’m the first.” Neither of her sister’s cars were in the lot. Something to fill the silence as they crossed over the concrete path etched with the names and handprints of generations past. Joanna’s name and print were near the front, in between Marge’s and the rest of the sisters. She had been the only one old enough to take the project seriously, and her name was written in neat, curling print.
“Take your shoes off before you come in,” was as good a welcome home as Jessie was like to get.
“Where’s Dad?”
Marge pointed out across the electric wire fence. A small figure high-stepped his way toward the big wheeled irrigation system, winding between the cows that made their home in the northern field. Jon Williams was a big man, in size and spirit. An old school rancher and a veteran, his character etched in stone, even as the four little girls he raised clambered to soften it. Susanna had always done that best. She was just older than Jessie, and not so wild. As a child, Jessie drove her parents to hysterics, and then past that. Susanna kept the peace.
Jon was the central figure of a valley that seemed at times divorced from the outer world. His hands, tanned and leathered from toil and grime and long days out in the sun, were permanently dirty, yet surprisingly soft and careful. Those hands had birthed calves and lambs, held and loved daughters and grandchildren. He stood small in the afternoon light, dwarfed by lumbering bovines and swallowed by late-summer grain, yet his shadow stretched out like a giant against the far mountainside.
He’d been out in that same field in the summer of 1990, as Jessie drained the cold water from the sink. Cattle littered the field, though at the time they had been dairy cows, not the fat and lazy ones he now raised for beef. It was late enough in the morning that he was already walking back towards the house when she first heard the police car making its way carefully down the drive. The same quiet crunch of gravel, singing out its familiar song.
“Mom! Where’s Hannah?” The youngest Williams girl had just hit her rebellious streak, and though it was not as bad as Jessie’s, it kept her parents on their toes.
“She’s at the Somervilles. Why?”
They stood at the kitchen window and watched as the officers came to a stop in the parking lot, the musical welcome fading into silence. Jon stepped past the wide steel gate and went to say hello, wiping his palms against stained Levi’s, and kicking the dirt and catchweed from his boots.
Here and now, Jessie knocked the dust from her own shoes, and set them against the wall in the tiny sunroom. The kitchen looked exactly as it always had. Large yellow flowers bloomed outside the sink window, and an old wood-carved clock ticked hands past numberless grooves. Music played softly from the living room, some classical favorite of her mothers. Several of the antlers that run across the upper balcony hold baseball caps, though one was still wreathed in last Christmas’s tinsel.
“How was the drive?” Marge had her prepared list of questions, and went about systematically collecting her answers while she poured two cups of tea. Jessie’s mug was a handcrafted clay thing her cousin made when they were young. It was chipped now, and the purple glaze had always looked more like a soft gray. But it was kind and familiar, and her favorite.
She hadn’t been up here alone in years. The kids were always with her, or her husband, or her sisters, and she forgot how quiet it could be. Already she felt that old familiar feeling creeping up behind her stomach. The one people got when they returned to the house they were raised in. That she had never actually aged at all – the long years that stretched between her and her youth, the joys and pains of motherhood, all those hours of work and play, were like so much imagined memory. This place, here, was golden. They sat together, mother and daughter, sipping their tea. Conversation faded into comfortable silence.
“I should get my bags out of the car.” The dredges were cold, and through the window she could see the small outline of her father making his way back towards the house. He’d bought a four-wheeler, and it was comical to imagine him flying through the long grass, the few remaining hairs on his spotted head rippling in the wind.
Marge wanted to help, but Jessie only had the one bag. It was a brief visit. “Your father spent all summer cleaning up the graveyard- even put a fence around it. It’s quite beautiful.”
“Well, you’ve always taken good care of it.” She wasn’t sleeping in her old bedroom, which still had a plaque of her name next to the wall painted in a Hawaiian sunset. Sometime in the past few years her parents had updated it into a computer room, with a boxy desktop deeper than it was wide. She couldn’t believe her parents managed to get the internet out here, even though it only existed in this one room. Instead, she was in the opposite bedroom, the one they called the Ancestor room because of its row of grainy photos featuring her grandparents and great-grandparents.
“I think I’m going to borrow the four-wheeler once Dad gets back. Go up and check his work.” Her sisters would be there this afternoon, and they would all go up together to the well-maintained quarter acre with its deep shade and somber flowers, honeysuckle and wisteria. But if she went now she would have a moment for herself– time to be alone, something largely lacking from her life post-children.
She remembered how the policemen stepped across the gravel to meet Jon halfway. For the first time in her life, the crunch of stones did not sound welcoming. Maybe it was how the first officer took his cap off, the way his head tilted up to look at Jon, but Jessie knew before he spoke.
Marge flew out of the back door. Her father fell like a tree, his knees crunching into the gray musical gravel. The policemen tried to catch him, to hold him up. But in this, like everything, Jon did not let anything stop him. He lay on the ground senseless, unmoving- his already thin hair clinging to the pebbles and his hands splayed out and twisting like a scarecrow. In a moment he became fifteen inches shorter. Cut down and tossed aside like hay.
Marge stood by his side in a matter of moments. She had never run in her life. She knelt and shook him and looked up at the officers. Jessie still couldn’t make out what they said, but she saw how her mother rose, began to sit, tried to stand, threw her hands against her mouth, and started to shake like a leaf. Jessie could not move. Could not reach out to them. That moment became something out of time. A snapshot burden. If only she could have reached through the glass, scooped them up like creatures from a menagerie and taken them away from their distant grief. But she did not need to hear the words that resonated within her. She tried to move towards the door. Instead she felt the cabinet scrape against her back as she slid to the floor, the cool tile imprinting itself upon her. There was nothing more to see.
She could still hear the scrape and grind of the gravel. They had to drug Jon and carry him back into the house like a dog. For days he barely spoke. Marge cooked and cleaned and fussed and pretended she was fine– but she did not sleep, and Jessie would often wake to find her weeping on the kitchen floor.
The ride up to the cemetery takes only a few minutes. No sing-song crunch of gravel for her now, driving over the packed dirt path. Three towering oak trees grow inside the low chain-link fence, shading several stone markers half-buried behind mountains of wildflowers. The oldest, for which this place was made, is weathered and gray, its burnished granite just starting to crack. Twenty years. Strange, how memories attach themselves to places. Ideas of yourself, your desires, fade away, until they are replaced by a certain golden haze.
A bench just big enough for two is placed against the bark of the central tree, but Jessie preferred to stand in the shade and listen to the sound of the wind as she talked to her sister. Sometimes, when the light is soft and quiet, she can pretend Joanna responds in the breeze.
Caleb Macduff is graduating with his MFA in Creative Writing. He is the current Editor-in-Chief of Crook & Folly, and a tutor at the Writing Center. His current projects include an upcoming novel and learning to handstand.