Flood
It was New Year’s Eve. Someone played an old country song our parents loved, their parents loved, I sang the psalms of the brokenhearted toward a jet-black night. Hail water crawled down those red canyon walls, the crests of coal horses. I said, I don’t drink this much. You’re supposed to take care of me. My grandmother sang to fevered infants in hospitals. She took care of me. Quilts, skirts, cedar beads wrapped around a wrist, afternoon t.v. — I sank into the warm wings of her, squeezed into the narrow, dusty openings of memory.
There are ten-thousand ways a desert can gut you; ten-thousand ways water finds the smallest openings to create a crack in the stone, a flash flood. She knew her heart was weakening. A snake rattles, hidden, in the brush. A blue jay lands on a man who fell asleep in the snow. I slept as you pressed your best shirts, packed a duffel. I watched you step onto a Greyhound headed to Prescott or somewhere south — headphones in, Cash singing that old country song our parents loved, their parents loved, listening with your head hanging low —
Love, I waited for your call, watched dust glitter in sunbeams, searched for star maps in letters you wrote. I found your father, met him for coffee in Holbrook. He received and kept the postcard you sent from Las Vegas years ago. I drove deeper into desert, searched every bus station in Phoenix, glanced at each doormat for a boot-print of Halchita red, red. They heard a clicking in my heart once, said that I cried with each heavy rain. They told me to stop crying, to never chase after a man, to splash walls with herb-water, to never keep his things around. A weakening. A flash, a flood, an absence. A horse’s heart, a red stone beating.
I kept the boots you left by the door; white linoleum stained with a vermillion dirt. Spring-water runs red through the canyons. It’s been years since that new year. The desert flashes in lightning-light — a juniper, white shells, swallows, the coal horses flash their teeth. Love, I’ve learned that my grandmother loved a man — I imagine him riding up on a dark horse, stirring the quail, walking up to the one-room house in a flower-printed, pearl-button shirt. I see her pouring him coffee, hair curled, jet-black and shining, each willow opening with the desert’s breathing. What did he do, where was he from, where did he go? He was from Utah, where red towers touch the blue, blue sky. He stopped coming around. We did not ask her about him. We heard he drowned in a mountain lake many years ago.
Love, I still imagine jumping into the Pacific with you. I still see her waiting, watching the hills for a break in the landscape, for a dark horse. I imagine you in a desert deeper than this one, pensive, somewhere. I see you sitting in the short shade of a cedar tree. There are ten-thousand ways the desert can gut you; ten-thousand ways water finds the smallest openings to create a crack in the stone, a flash flood. You never looked at me and sang that old country song our parents loved; their parents loved — we never slow-danced in a one-room house.
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Paige Buffington’s family is originally from Tohatchi, NM, a small town sitting in the eastern portion of the Navajo Nation. She is Navajo, of the Bear Enemies Clan born for White People. She received both a BFA and MFA in Creative Writing from the Institute of American Indian Arts. Her work has been published in Narrative, Terrain.org, and Yellow Medicine Review, among others. She currently lives in Gallup, NM, where she is an elementary school teacher and is at work on her first book of narrative poems.