Episode 106. Delilah in the Desert
So Delilah dug into the task of attending to the death of Daddy Mac.
It meant she would have to fly out there to the little California town where his remains were being kept. Which meant she would do it alone, because Noah was just starting school and Cousin Emma would have to take care of him.
She got on the plane with the words on her mind of her teacher. Gesso had said to her, "You have to get lost to be found. So, this is a wonderful opportunity. Let me know how it goes."
All the way to San Francisco she was angry with the little Tibetan. How dare he make fun when she was grieving so! First her estranged husband Sam, then Mama Bertie and now Daddy Mac, all in the space of a few months. If she hadn't been so angry, she could have added a few million tears to the clouds they passed over.
In Mendocino, she made the decision to have her dad cremated. That way she could bring him home herself. She also decided that they would drive and not fly, because she felt they needed time alone.
They were in the desert past Palm Springs when she got lost. She was still in the clothes she had put on in wintry Nova Scotia, and they were too many in the arid southern heat, so she had pulled off the highway onto a side road and proceeded till there was no one in sight before she changed. She was standing there, in the middle of nowhere in her bra and panties, when her anger flew off and her grief landed on her again. There was a flock of ravens worrying the skeleton of something at the foot of a tall and many-armed saguaro cactus. And she thought, just like that! I am just like that skeleton!
Then she was crying and crying with the bronze urn in her arms, she didn't know for how long, and suddenly there was a dust storm around her. She stumbled she thought toward the car she had rented. But it was not there and soon she was lost just as surely as if she had been in a fog off her village in the cold north Atlantic in Big Bertha's Cape Islander called Noah's Ark. It was not a long storm, but when it abated there was neither car nor road in sight. And she had dropped the urn when she had stopped to turn and consider re-tracing her steps, and the lid had come off and the ashes of her father had blown away over her, in her face and her eyes and her mouth and her nose.
So she was standing there empty-handed in her underwear among a crowd of saguaro, all at least twice her height, who with their many arms seemed to be praying around her, and she was coated with dust and ashes, though the sky was a perfect blue without a cloud in sight.
She wiped her eyes. She spit to clear her mouth. And then the voices came.
"That's our Dee," she heard her father say.
"No doubt about it," said her mother.
"Well," said her teacher, "there you are."
And the voices were all very gentle and kind and well-meaning but seemed to be in on a joke at her expense, of which the humour escaped her.
"Well yourself," she said, addressing the crowd of holier-than-thou giant cactii, "so what now? I can't stay here. I need to go back home."
At that, there came a single squawk from behind her that made her jump and spin around. Out from behind a mesquite bush strode a raven in its stiff-legged way. It squawked again and stood eyeing her, cocking its head to one side.
"What?" exclaimed Delilah. She spread her arms, presenting her powdered near-nakedness. "You want some of this?"
The bird, that was big as a cat, squawked once more and flew up and back over the mesquite bush and settled down on the other side, where, following, Delilah discovered the other ravens and the carcass they were still appreciating.
And her car and the road.
She felt so grateful. She wanted to give thanks, but the ravens now ignored her. She got a towel and a brush and a bottle of water from the car and cleaned and rearranged herself as best she could and dressed and drove away, leaving the empty urn in the desert.
Somewhere down the highway, with the setting sun in the rearview mirror, she began to laugh.
22 December 2018
Texas Jim
Pedernales Canyon, near Spicewood, Texas
www.granitecoast.ca