For ten years, mama and me lived alone in Utah’s Sevier Desert in a stone cabin at the base of the Drum Mountains. At her own request, my father took us there and left us.
He was a man who felt keen obligation, so he loaded up his Ford and drove south from Salt Lake City, where he lived as a librarian with his wife and several acknowledged children. Then he fetched mama and me from the central Utah mining town of Eureka, where we had lived for as long as I could remember. From Eureka he took us bouncing far out west and south to the Drums. That was spring 1930. And there we were, a hermitess and her son, aged eleven. Out on the desert.
We lived in a cabin built by a man with only one finger on his left hand. Everybody in Eureka knew who built it. And we all knew, by the hearsay that flows among humans stretched thin over long distances, that the man had disappeared a few years ago. So the cabin was sitting there vacant for us, the haunt of rock chucks and bats. No one knew where he went.
His cabin—our cabin—sat to the side of a canyon that tumbled down the mountain, a rough little v-shaped cut, carved by a stream of mostly snowmelt that kept running even in July and August thanks to a stubborn cigarette spring. Even if the spring water smelled and tasted like a saloon in the morning, that solitary trickle was gold out there. So we huddled around it with a few castaway cottonwoods and aspens—they were regular Crusoes among trees, stunted and lost on a narrow strand of wet ground looking out onto the greasewood and alkali flats, the saltbrush and sage ocean, the dried-out playas and shorelines of an ancient lake that was lost before the creation’s sixth day.
It was very quiet there, except for the shudder of aspen leaves. And except for what we called the sounding. That’s where the Drums got their name—the mountains made noise. Sometimes it was a rattle-clanking, like an earthquake shaking ribbons and goblins of accreted limestone off the ceiling of a hidden cavern. Sometimes it was a low burping, like a cosmic raven had usurped the altar of a god who in the beginning claimed the Drums for its own. When the sounding happened, badgers slid into their holes and our aspens ceased their quaking. Mule deer forgot their workmanlike stride and lost dewclaws in little jitterbug catastrophes.
Mama decided we would go to the Drums because she got her nose bitten off. Actually bitten off, dissevered from her face, during a fight at the Copper Blossom Club. Which is where she had worked in Eureka, hustling food and whisky out to the tables and men into the upstairs rooms. The nose-biting happened during a brawl with another Copper Blossom girl, about a no-count john. And after that, and while we were still in Eureka, I became mama’s ten-year-old nurse, stayed mostly by her bedside for a few months and coaxed her spirit back into this world. When she got as back as it seemed like she would get, she said we had to leave. Since she could no longer practice her profession and hated for any fellow human besides me to see her.
My father the librarian left us with “the provisions,” as he called most of the stuff, and some books for me, to “start a little library of your own out here.” Spring 1930. But the way we lived most days, I liked to play it could have been a long time earlier than that. Maybe 1830, for instance. Utes or Paiutes would walk by sometimes, or pass on horseback. And there would be a stray Basque shepherd running his sheep in the distance or looking for strays, living the anatomy of seasons.
Mama would run inside if we saw anyone off in the distance. That made it easy, since before we left Eureka the doctor took me aside. Said he knew we’d have a gun out there but didn’t recommend for mama to hold it, due to her “self-loathing.” He said don’t make a big deal—just tell her you’re getting big now and should be the one to hold it. She’ll go along.
And she did. At her insistence I would stand out in the greasewood up to my belt, holding a pistol, watching the travelers grow larger along the rough road whose nearest tangent never came closer than a half-mile to our cabin. Mostly, they just passed by. But if they were thirsty and saw our Crusoe trees and started toward the cabin asking for water, I’d tell them to keep moving.
I guess I lived up to the social position I was born into pretty well, since the ones who tried for water told me I was a little bastard pretty often—as I stood halfway between the cabin and the road and waved them off with the pistol. And then I’d watch as they grew puny again, out far on the desert, their dust less than the smoke from a spent matchhead. Until they disappeared. Off for some other lick in some other canyon—one that didn’t accommodate a hermitess’s cabin. Or destined for desiccation: Let them die out there, I don’t care, mama would tear into me, when I complained that some of them did look thirsty.
I was eleven years old. Pointing a pistol at strangers. I guess I looked mean—or like a laugh if I didn’t look so mean. But I never felt mean or cute. While waiting to tell mama they were gone and it was safe to leave the cabin, I would think about how a traveler is like something that happens, like an event—like a nose-biting, like a birth, like a gunshot. It starts off in the distance so small you maybe could never predict it and if you’re lucky you see it get bigger before it arrives. Then it’s here, with you, and anything could happen between you and it. You better just hope you look rough and ready to fight. Then it starts getting smaller again until it maybe disappears. But you still have your memory of it, and once that disappears, you still have your memory of your memory of it. And then a lot of times that disappears too. So, you’re back to where you began—standing out there like no traveler ever passed or ever will, until another one passes. I don’t know why—but I guessed the Paiutes would just keep walking by like they always had, and there would never be an end to lonely Basques and horsemen. There would always be stray Fords. The rocks would keep at their slow tumble down our canyon. A trickle would shoulder the world.
Things started looking sideways the first fall and winter. I finally saw that there were things not just held by the rocks, like mama and me, but that became the rocks, turned to stone with them. And it was thirty thousand or thirty million or three hundred million years to think about, in either direction, past or future—that’s how far the traveler was riding to get to us, and how far it would ride after it got to us. Like this place was a pane of glass painted with mercury, a mirror between the stony future and a petrified past, living and dead rock reflected clear to the end. But most important, some of the reflections were legitimate and some were illegitimate, real events and ghosts of them—the acknowledged children of time, and time’s bastards.
I didn’t tell mama any of this, especially about the mirror. When I say mama hated for any human to see her, with the hole in her face, that didn’t include me. But it did include herself. So, we kept no mirrors out there. She’d have a bad day just thinking about mirrors.
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Like I say, I was diligent and frankly mean about keeping humans from seeing her. But even though I tried, I couldn’t help as much with the ghosts. It was the ghosts that took me right up to the mirror.
The man who lost his fingers had built our one-room cabin to sleep only himself, with his old bunk along the south wall. Mama took the bunk, and that first summer I slept with a blanket on the packed dirt floor. But when my father visited in the fall with provisions to get us through winter, he framed a cot for me and set it up—anchored to the wall and the roof’s cedar poles—so my bunk was suspended directly above mama’s. Bunkhouse-style. That’s how we moved into winter, which is when mama first saw them.
In December I think it was just once or twice. In January it was a handful of times. And in February, when we could hardly go outside for the cold, it was almost every night. The way she told it, it usually happened like this. Middle of the night, she’d hear the mountains do their sounding, stalactite-style or the raven burp or both. Then she’d lie awake and watch threads and oozings of light and shadow weave themselves into an apparition, which would step from the door over to her bunk and stare. But, she claimed, she would never make a sound—until the ghost tried to put its finger into the scarred sinus tissue where her nose had been.
Then it was the terrors. That’s where I would join up with her ghost stories—I would hear her scream to break the Drums, shriek to turn the mountain’s stone heart to a ball of tallow.
I’d jump down from my cot still wrapped in blankets and light the lamp. I’d shake her until she woke up and then stroke her clammy forehead and arms and wet hair, as the shrieks died down. Then I’d stoke the fire a little to keep us till morning, and she would tell me who it was, tonight, trying to plumb her lost nose with a finger.
A true pageant of ghosts haunted our winter nights. Including the one-fingered man several times. And then a lot of times it was “the Hellhound,” which is what mama always called Cassidy, the Copper Blossom nose-biter. There were a few others, but the worst: Two or three times it was Lord Horatio Nelson, illustrious admiral of the eighteenth-century British Navy who I had been reading to her about, out of one of the library books we kept in a niche in the wall. As if the Admiral had sailed to the Drums across our snow-foamed sagebrush ocean. I hated Lord Nelson’s apparitions the most, since she would wake me up screaming, “Nelson! No—Nelson!” Nelson—that was my own name. It’s rough to hear your own name screamed out during a terror in the night, even if you know the screamer’s not screaming about you.
I wouldn’t try to reason with her at night. Just calm her down. But next morning, after we would start in on our coffee and fried dough, I’d remind her she had had a terror. And this time it was supposed to be the hermit or the Hellhound or Lord Nelson or whoever she had claimed. Then I would try reasoning with her. Lord Nelson died a hundred years ago and his waterlogged spirit would never come here, to the Sevier Desert. Or, the one-fingered man probably had just walked off, still alive, so his ghost was still knit to his flesh. And I’d especially remind her that the Hellhound Cassidy definitely wasn’t dead. We both knew she married a divorcé who took her home and introduced her to society as his new bride, daughter of old family friends from Back East. Cassidy’s cur teeth were still endangering living noses, I said, and when the Hellhound finally had her day, she’d go straight to hell—no limbo or purgatory, no haunting around.
When I tell it here, it sounds like I might have been patronizing mama, as if I didn’t believe in ghosts and was just trying to reason on her own terms. But like everyone I knew back in Eureka, I certainly did believe in them. I just didn’t believe in these ghosts. Mama was always asleep when I’d get down to her bunk to stop her shrieking. She sure wasn’t looking at any apparition walk over from the door, trying to stick its finger in. Hence dreams were the best way to explain it—they were “just the terrors,” I would tell mama, like she used to tell me after a bad dream.
But by winter’s end? Imagine how you would feel, aged eleven, and what you would start believing, if you lived cooped up alone with her for three cold months, the silence pitted against shattering caverns and raven burps, your mother shrieking in the night and then peeping and muttering all morning with a gravity to level all spires of unbelief—and all about her ghosts. So, I started believing it a little. And as the terror of my belief dawned, I started sleeping with the pistol. For all the good I knew it wouldn’t do against a ghost, I fell asleep every night swearing to myself that I would use it if I saw one. I would show that ghost what kind of bastard I was.
Well, one February night I did see one, or thought I did.
Past midnight something woke me up—it was the Drums, I thought, but couldn’t be sure since by that point in winter, cracking rock and low croaking never stopped echoing in my head. But I didn’t hear any shrieks right now from mama—just her breathing. So, likely the Drums had sounded but this time it didn’t wake her up, to warn her about the ghost. I alone had received the warning, so I shouldered it. I just laid there awake, held the vigil mama would have, eying the door and projecting the short path the ghost—whoever it was tonight—would traverse on its way to the bunks. Mama was breathing steady. Then, instead of my eyes following the path from the door to mama’s bunk, I decided to trace it just a little different, over to the opposite wall.
And there it was, gray like everything in the dark. The ghost—standing, slouching, a thing out of the pit, I thought. Worm-eaten face, grave wrappings flowing from its hunched form.
I tore my voice yelling, “I’m gonna shoot it mama—I’m gonna shoot it!” And mama yelled back with power, “Shoot it, Nel—shoot it now!” No muttering or peeping or shrieking—it was her strong voice, the one she had back before the nose-biting. A full voice, a voice to make me know exactly who she was, for the first time in a long time.
I shot. Three times. With confidence. The kind of confidence where when you have it, it’s like the thing is already done before you do it.
Mama emitted a single shriek as the ghost crumpled to the floor. I was surprised it worked, that the ghost crumpled like that. And then we both just laid there in our bunks. Me with my head under the blanket, hot breath tapering off, and mama’s whimper dying down gradually until, before I knew anything, the February sun, sterile with the snow, came through the cracks between the boards we put over the window to keep the cold out. I congratulated myself. This time I had definitely seen the ghost. And we had fallen asleep after the shooting. So it was the first time without me needing to rush down into the cold and stroke her forehead.
I patted the pistol and crawled down from my bunk, finding no sign of the ghost where it had collapsed. But I did find, in the stone wall at chest-level, three scattered gouges left by bullets, undeniable physical testaments of the spiritual deliverance we had experienced. I fingered the flattened lead slugs in their shallow holes—they were real. I woke mama up.
We drank Brigham tea and ate our fried dough.
I said, “You saw one of your ghosts again, mama, last night. But this time I saw it too. Do you remember?”
She smiled, for the first time in a long time, and said, “Oh yes—and I was so proud of you. The way you shot it.”
I couldn’t help it. I started crying, seeing her smiling the pretty smile she used to have before the biting, like she was finally looking at me and could see something. Like we were two humans in a room together. Rather than me always being her honorary nonhuman, some type of animal priest, like a magpie in black and white vestments—an initiate uniquely authorized to see her noseless face without turning to stone.
She pulled me close and hugged me like she used to, then held me at just a little distance and looked straight into my eyes. She put a finger on the tip of my nose—not like someone who thinks about noses as life’s gravest liability but like someone who takes them for granted, as a true matter of fact. As a place to touch your son and beam when he has done something special.
I hugged her again. I couldn’t even notice her nose wasn’t there. In fact I’d have said it was there, in spirit, in a way where spirit was finally every bit as good as flesh. Then a wave broke: I felt like I used to, before the biting, when there was a crushing, sweet embarrassment if she saw me cry. I looked for something to distract and saw the place along the wall where the ghost had collapsed. My voice cracked, almost squeaked: “I just don’t know where it went to, after I shot it. Did you see? Mama?”
She answered, still brimming: “Of course I saw, baby. It was scared then. After you shot. You saw it. It stopped what it was trying to do to me and walked straight back to the door and then through it. You scared it that bad, baby!”
“Oh. I didn’t even see it do that. It must’ve got back up and left after it fell down?”
I felt vaguely like I was too old for some of this now, since she laughed the way she used to when I was much younger. The way ladies laugh when their little children say something spritely, precious, cunning—the laugh they make in place of that singsong staccato, Oh. I. Just. Wan-na. Eat. You. Up! After the laugh, she said, “Silly boy—it didn’t fall down. I saw it all from over there.” She pointed to the wall where the lead slugs had bored in. She then started in with a mock pouting frown and let it bloom into a smile of true radiance.
“Last night when the ghost came, you didn’t wake up to help mama, did you? Like you were supposed to? So I picked up my blankets and ran to the wall. And baby,” she stroked my forehead and wiped a tear from my eye: “just when it turned to come at me again—you shot!”
I was flattened out. Absolutely. On a pane of glass painted with mercury. Inside the mountain, a chandelier with three hundred million geodes collapsed. The Universal Raven emitted its thunderous Buuuuuuurp.
I looked over at the holes in the wall, could still feel everything about the lead slugs cold on my fingertips from an hour earlier, before I woke mama up—woke her up from the bunk she had crawled back into last night after I shot three times directly at her and missed. Something throbbed: She was what I saw last night—and the ghosts she thought she saw, they never were there at all.
Then there was a sideways reflection, a ricochet, like it might have been in some other stone cabin built by some other one-fingered man, inhabited by some other hermitess and bastard son. In that other cabin, I could see where the bullets entered and lodged in my mother’s chest. And, real as the slugs in our wall, I could feel the other bullets’ effects, warm and wet on the other bastard’s fingers and frantic palms. Those bullets, in that other cabin. They were three metal blossoms who in confusion burrowed, rather than bloomed, into the whole world. I didn’t know which world I was in.
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Turned out I was in the world where I didn’t kill mama. I wouldn’t take the pistol to bed, after what I almost did, and wouldn’t crawl down anymore to stroke her head and say it was all right. Nothing was all right. I’d had enough of mama’s ghosts.
But the ghosts hadn’t had enough of her. And when she figured I wouldn’t shoot them or crawl down off my cot anymore, the ghosts started coming in the daylight too—at least that’s what mama said. So for the rest of February to early March, it was me and mama and the pageant of ghosts and the Drums. Shrieks and burps and tumbles. I admit I hit her once in the mouth, one day when she thought I was the ghost of Lord Nelson and tried tackling me, tried clawing me, fighting me like we were two girls rumbling across the Copper Blossom floorboards.
For not being there at all, mama’s ghosts made a wreck of our cabin and of me.
So when spring came, I had to get out, more than just to empty our night-pot and fetch firewood. At first I just went out in the yard past our mostly spent piles of cedar twists. And then I’d take off climbing up the canyon, or up one of the next canyons over. When I started leaving like that, for most of the day, mama said, “You can’t leave, Nel—what if they come! You need to be here with the pistol!” I said no one would come—the road out there was still muddy slop from the melt. And the ghosts—they weren’t real so it was no use shooting them.
I got back that evening, feeling good. Like out among the dead stones, with the new green pushing up, I had crawled my way back to the living. Then mama said while I was gone a man tried to walk right in the house showing her a bunch of bugs made of rocks, and what was I going to do about it? I said I don’t mess with your ghosts anymore. The next day I went away again, and it was the same story from her when I came back, and I said the same thing. No more ghosts, mama. But then the devil got in me. So the third morning, after she implored me to stay, digging her nails through my shirtsleeve, I handed the pistol over and said, “If that buggyman ghost comes around here today, shoot it. Like I shot that ghost for you last time. Scare it all the way to Salt Lake City!” She took the pistol but said I was the man of the house and should be doing the shooting. I half wondered if she’d start shooting at me as I walked off.
That day the sun hit my face and neck and hands like it was God’s first color—punchy, raucous, chasing the black away like a bunch of mobbing jays. Also it wasn’t all just greasewood and winterfat—I found a prickly pear blooming with both violet and yellow flowers from the same cactus. Later, up a canyon I found some rocks with blue in them to paint the sky. A snakeskin held the pattern of the one who shed it, more vibrant than I had ever seen happen. And there was a little cave, too, that I figured opened to the Drums’ lost cavern—but none of this has to do with what I found when I got back.
It was late afternoon. A horse stood tied to a cottonwood, pawing the loose rock in edgy snorts, ears trained on a ruckus in the cabin. I ran in and there was mama with a bandana over her face holding the cocked pistol with two hands like I used to play at robbing a bank—but pointing it at a man I had never seen before. It wasn’t the hermit back for his home and stream, no—this man’s every finger was spread whole and hale out from his palms as they waved in front of him for mercy. Mama was screaming at him, words tumbling fast. At first I couldn’t get fixed on what was happening—I kept looking at how a bandana tied over a face looks when there’s no nose to fill it: flat. Unnaturally flat. I knew it wasn’t the thing to notice. She had the pistol ready, and the trigger didn’t care if the tremble in her finger was confusion or vinegar.
But the bandana looked so flat, and when I looked again it was still just as flat. I looked a third time, and there was a ricochet and reflection, like before. Another hermitess in another cabin had shot a man dead. And I wanted that other cabin. That other hermitess would go to prison, be shot by firing squad. And I would leave the Sevier, unattached, no real family in this world. Then I felt stupid. If I was looking for another cabin, where things happened different, why start with today, right now? So, while in our cabin mama was threatening sudden death, I saw a creek by the other cabin and stepped over it—and mama’s nose never got bitten off. I could have stopped there. Should have, in mercy, when she started crying, peeping that holding the pistol felt just like looking into a mirror. But then it was another creek in another canyon. I waded across and wasn’t born my father’s bastard. Then I saw a terrible wide river, and across that river, I knew, I was never born at all. I stripped naked and swam. Got to where time really was a mirror. And there I was in it, spread out on its pane of glass infinitely flatter than a bandana on a face without a nose to fill it.
But the bandana. Mama was tearing at me from the other side of it, and from the other side of the river I had crossed: “Nel, be the man—the pistol—take it and shoot this ghost!”
I unflattened myself, felt the round heft of the pistol in my hand and kept it pointed at the man. I held it on him in the only legitimate world there is. The world where I was a bastard. The world where mama was saying to shoot him. The world where this man had already watered his horse in our spring three days in a row, and stolen water from our cistern. But I knew this was the heart of it: he had already seen her face three times. Just kept trying to walk into our cabin with a sick smile wanting to show her those bugs turned to stone.
But I wouldn’t shoot him. Mama could tell. She said take some money from him then—to pay for the water. But he didn’t have any money when we searched him. Mama even went out and searched his pack and saddle bags. But like mama said, he did have a lot of stone bugs. Trilobites, he kept saying, fossilized trilobites. A couple bugs in his pockets—he said those were to show mama (So she’d see the water’s going to science). And it looked like several hundred trilobites in his pack, maybe a couple thousand. Flat and dead-clinky like nickels, circular like nickels too, but in all sizes: from dimes to beer tokens and on up to silver dollars. I laid my eyes on all this when mama brought his rucksack in and had me look (But don’t take your eyes off him!) into a linen bag inside. She sunk a hand in and let trilobites slide and clink through her fingers like they were gold pieces and she was born into some faraway Arabian night.
With his hands out in front of him where we could see, he said these trilobites were valuable—that’s why he was out collecting them. Not so many over here in the Drums, it turned out, but they littered the ground at places in the House Range. Said a lot of them could be sold to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C. for two dollars apiece. And those that the Smithsonian couldn’t take could be sold for a nickel apiece to a man who sold them through magazine advertisements Back East. Said he’d be happy to write down the names and addresses for us, so we could cash them in, instead of him. He said we could take them all.
“Go ahead and write it down,” I told him, not knowing what we needed money for, since in my estimation all we really lacked was a nose.
Mama gave him a pencil and ripped a blank page from my book about Lord Nelson. Sure, I had seen fossils before. Once in a while back in Eureka when I worked picking through the piles for what the miners missed, I saw a couple leaf shadows in a rock, and once I found a piece with white shells in it that looked fresh as the oyster shells behind a restaurant.
“And write down how they got like this, how bugs turned to stone,” I added.
He finished the addresses, looked up, and said better if he told us rather than wrote how they got like this.
I nodded. Mama threw her hands up and hissed for me to shoot. But I nodded again.
He started explaining about the trilobites (write that word down too, I insisted) as an “ancient band who lived and swam three hundred million years ago—that’s a three with eight zeros.” He said it was when Utah was under the ocean. I called him a liar and fairly yelled, “It was a lake—Utah was under a lake!” I knew it because everybody knew it—they said you could see the lakeshore carved into most any mountain in Utah. Benches—that’s what we called the ancient shorelines, and there was a bench carved up on the mountain above our cabin. He smiled, like I wasn’t holding a gun on him. “Oh you mean Bonneville? That’s the name—Lake Bonneville. But,” he said, “Bonneville was just ten thousand years ago, just yesterday really, geologically speaking.” He said he was talking about three hundred million years ago. And he spread his arms out, like he was ready to die on a cross, and looked from side to side and said, “My arm span, from fingertip to fingertip, represents three hundred million years, from the present-day to when Utah was covered by the ocean. This fingertip here—this is today, March 1931. But give my fingernail a little clip and that takes us back to yesterday, to ten thousand years ago, to your Lake Bonneville. And after that you’ve still got nearly all of the three hundred million years left, before we get back to the ocean. That’s when the trilobites scuttled.”
“So how did they get like that? Turned to stone?” I said, jabbing the pistol at him a little.
He talked fast about freshets and permineralization and oxygen-free water and sediment. It was actually a pretty interesting process, as he explained it all. Reminded me of what I had been thinking about, about not the event itself, and not the memory of the event, but the memory of the memory of the event.
“These ones around here have no eyes. Imagine that—haven’t evolved them yet. But eyes or no, I like to say they got caught staring at time’s Medusa. So old they turned to stone.”
I must’ve given him a look, since he offered by way of explanation: “You know, son, Medusa—the monster woman whose face is so ugly it turns men to rocks, petrifies them?” Mama shuddered and cussed him under her breath.
I shook the pistol and said, “Write that down too: time’s Medusa.” He leaned over, put the page against his knee again, and wrote it. The Drums sounded as he formed the letters, and the pencil lead jabbed through a couple times, hit denim.
“That’s a loud geological fault you’ve got here in the Drums. They say it’s a double fault, otherwise it couldn’t make those noises,” he said.
I knew mama and me were wild, feral, holding this scholar captive. I guess he just walked into our cabin and wouldn’t leave mama alone, but to me it felt like it was all about whether Utah was covered by a lake or an ocean. And about if he would do like I said and write that thing down about time’s Medusa on a page torn from Robert Southey’s The Life of Nelson. We were wild. And I knew if we let him go, he might come back with a crew and shoot us. Or tell a sheriff somewhere. Even if he didn’t, folks would hear about it sooner or later—how we held a gun on him and took him for all his trilobites.
I started losing my nerve. First it was that river. And now training the pistol on him—it felt like mama had got me to reach out and grab a wild coyote by the ear. I couldn’t hold on forever, and once I let go I had to pray it would turn tail and run rather than bite. The solution to that old story about grabbing a coyote by the ear? You just shoot it, if your other hand is holding a pistol. But I wasn’t going to shoot him, even if mama said to, and even if he would bite when I let him go. Plus, there was just nothing a whole bag of trilobites could do for our lack of a nose.
“Mama, if this bug-man had any money, what would you charge him for three days’ water?” I said.
“He doesn’t!”
“But if he did. Like if he was a nother man but the same man.”
“Twenty dollars,” she answered. Mama was mean, even when she was being hypothetical.
I took the pistol off him and said, “These bugs spend just like money if you’ve got the right address? Right? Like beer tokens.” I glanced at mama, since she’d had me playing with Copper Blossom beer tokens as my toys, ever since I could remember, back in Eureka. I pointed to his pack and said, “Come over and find ten two-dollar bugs and hand them over to mama.” He looked relieved and dug and sorted till he found them. “That’s all we want,” I said: “Get out and take the water you need before you go. You paid for it.”
He made to leave. Mama was looking down at the trilobites in her hands, and I could tell from the wrinkles around her eyes that if she didn’t have the bandana on, and if she had a nose, she’d be screwing it up, confused. She looked up at our geologist and said, “Every one of these bugs looks like it’s got a teeny-weeny man’s thing on it! Running right down the middle.” I looked over and she was right. It was unmistakable on these silver-dollar-sized specimens.
The man stayed around for a minute, even after I took the pistol off him, to answer mama’s question. He instructed us that what looked like a “phallic shaft” through the middle was called “the central lobe” or “axial lobe” and that on either side, where it looked like two sets of little ribs, those were “the other two lobes.” That added up to three lobes, he said, holding up three fingers: “And, hence, tri–lobe-ites.” He looked at me and said, “Tri. That’s three with zero zeros.” I guess I just shrugged since it seemed like he was being funny but why would you be funny with someone who just had a pistol on you?
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That night after he was gone, mama picked my book up from her bunk where she had thrown it after tearing out the flyleaf. She called me over to look, and she opened to the beginning, where, like a lot of those old books, it has a page-by-page summary of what’s going to happen before it happens. She read the first line: “Nelson’s Birth and Boyhood.”
And just as if she had seen me cross that river where on the other side of it I was never born, she started telling me a different story, something that ricocheted off what my beginning was supposed to have been.
“You know we didn’t always live in Eureka, Nel.”
“I know. We lived in Salt Lake City near where the librarian lives.” That’s what we called my father when we talked about him: never papa or father or daddy. Always the librarian.
I couldn’t have said it in so many words at the time, but I knew she was the young and nubile daughter of one of the best families in Salt Lake and that the librarian was a dutiful and married man. But that he was, at least for a few weeks with mama before she was twenty, a proficient adulterer whose seed took root even when he didn’t want it to. And I knew that after mama refused to go away to have the baby, and after she began showing, and then especially after I was born, the librarian asked her to keep his role in their handiwork a secret. And she did. That’s what kept him obliged to her, still after so many years. I also knew that because I came along, she became “a hiss and a byword” in Salt Lake among friends and the city’s best families, including her own. So she moved us to Eureka, just me and her, where she took up a life to fully merit the disdain of her Salt Lake hissers.
“But I just know what you told me about it, back in Eureka. I was too little to remember when we lived in Salt Lake.”
She nodded, took the bandana off her face and said, “You probably think you sprung directly into me from the librarian’s…axial lobe.” She had never kept any of the bare mechanics of it a secret—of baby-making or working at the Copper Blossom. I smiled back at her, knowingly as I could, at this newfound geological term for it.
She said it was one way to think about it: that the librarian was my father. But she also said that before I was born, she had hoped the librarian would marry her. When he said he couldn’t, that their love had been a sin and that he loved his wife and children, she named me Nelson, after a book he had lent her during their few hot weeks of joy and conspiracy. And whenever family or friends would try to pry and prattle, she’d inform them, in the way she had that was always two notches louder than anyone wanted: “It’s Lord Horatio Nelson’s child.” Never mind that the commander of England’s Royal Navy died a century before I was born! So there I was, from my very beginning, from my birth and boyhood, coming into this dried out world of stone-dry bones, alleged to be the son of a seafaring ghost. It was the preemption of everything: his father was a spirit.
She said, looking down at the book she was holding: “This is the same book he lent to me. It’s got my underlining.”
Mama flipped a few pages in and read a passage she had marked a dozen years earlier, when she hoped the librarian would be hers but couldn’t see her way there. In it, the boy Nelson is sitting lost next to a stream he can’t cross. And then she flipped a page and read another line, but like she was dictating it to an amanuensis rather than taking it from a book already written: “There are aftergriefs which wound more deeply, which leave behind them scars never to be effaced.” She took my hand and guided my finger to where her nose would have been, hovering out just beyond her face.
The Drums didn’t sound. Nothing did. I doubted they ever had or ever would again.
And I remembered earlier that same afternoon. I swear I was out on the desert, watching the trilobite-toting horseman ride into the distance, after we sent him off. But as I stood out there, I kept seeing blotches of illegitimacy, time’s bastard children, conceived in spirit: A man dead, blood black on our packed dirt floor, mama standing over him with the pistol. And then sometimes it was me lording over him with it instead, like I shot him and couldn’t remember.
But he was riding away. He was. Alive. Getting puny. Along the road. Until what he carried out there on that far desert was three hundred million years plus the lost ocean. All shrunk down to a single point.
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Art credit: Brian Russell Roberts, Bullion Beck & Champion Mining Company Headframe, Eureka, Utah, 2022. Linocut. Courtesy of the artist.