American Chica_ Two Worlds, One Childhood - Marie Arana [84]
“Uncle Jabez?” I asked him. “Who’s Jabez?”
“One of your uncles, Mareezie. But I doubt you’ll ever meet him. He’s out in the mountains. Far away.”
Jabez wasn’t my uncle, as it turned out. He was my second cousin. I learned a good bit about him in those conversations with Nub, but as spring wore on and the years went by, Jabez’s story emerged like a full-fledged historia.
Even as Nub and I lay there, Jabez Clapp was whiling away time in a cave on an Indian reservation, somewhere in the cliffs of Arizona, under the same cosmic void. He was my mother’s cousin, the son of Grandpa Doc’s brother, a fugitive from the military. Gone AWOL in ‘29.
As Nub related it, Jabez’s father—Grandpa Doc’s brother—had died young of leukemia, and little Jabez had been raised by his mother, a Southern belle more intent on teaching him pretty verses than the hard rigors of life. Jabez was a dreamer, inclined to stargazing and poetry, reduced to openmouthed wonder by the smallest manifestations of things. A lacewing over the nettle. An ant hauling grass across rock. The prospect of a long, shiftless afternoon. Somewhere along the way, someone made the disastrous decision that the U.S. Army could make a man out of him, be the father he’d never had.
One night as he wandered away from his barracks, he went farther than he meant to go. “Imagine it, Mareezie,” Nub said. “He took a gander around. No one was there! That’s when he decided to do it. He lit out. Skedaddled!” Down the asphalt he went, across the plain, over the horizon, past the rocky crags into a hole on the side of a mountain. Apparently, he fed on wild berries, roasted roots over a fire, grew a beard down to his knees. The Indians said they saw him drifting through their hills, his face forever turned up. Looks At Stars, they called him. They figured much of his spirit had already departed, gone off to the Great Beyond. So they left him out there to his thoughts, and they taught their children and their children’s children to do the same. For thirty years, no hunting posse, no military police could find him.
But long after those lazy afternoons with Nub, long after we were back in Lima, long after history had passed Jabez by—long, long after his military cohort had marched into Nazi camps or dropped death on the Pacific, after Stalin had purged millions in the name of the proletariat, after Mao descended into Beijing with red dreams and promises—Mother got word of what had happened to Jabez. It was 1959, and a group of government workers had come onto that Arizona reservation to canvass the terrain. One blizzardy morning, they looked about for shelter and saw the great stone at the mouth of Jabez’s cave. They moved it aside. They huddled in. And there, to their surprise, they found themselves surrounded by strip after strip of bark etched with poetry. There were necklaces of bloodstone and jade. There were three feather dream-catchers, a U.S. Army identification, a pan full of gold dust, a diary with silver initials.
Deep in the heart of that stone sanctuary, they found Jabez’s bones, strung out in repose, cold as the ash of his fire.
The story of Jabez—even in its thin, original version—was the single historia that Nub offered me. I listened hard to that story, as I had to so many of Antonio’s, puzzled over its meaning, turned it over in my mind, decided it must be important. All these years later I understand why. It has to do with my own longing for the horizon. It has to do with a part of me—a very un-Peruvian part—that wants to run. Leave. Go.
The sky can have that effect on you. Look out at the Gobi Desert and the eye hugs the ground. Stand by the sea and the urge is to