Heart Earth - Ivan Doig [20]
Compared with Phoenix where an Americanism of another kind, an arterial slum of the dark and poor and addicted, has consumed the Alzona Park housing project without a trace, this town as my mother and father and I met it in World War Two is surprisingly enterable again. Wickenburg then was still mostly burg, with the fancy houses and subdivisions only starting to be poked onto the hills around, but then as now the place banked on the one commodity it knew it had: sun. Basking beside the Hassayampa River composing sonnets for itself—"the wine that is called air" was one trill tried out by the weekly paper while we were there—Wickenburg was likably frank about what it was up to. You didn't need to be the reincarnation of Marco Polo to recognize that the accommodations along the main street, Wickenburg Way, were there to sieve tourists through, while around the corner along Tegner Street ordinary town life was carried on. Guest ranches were a sideline Wickenburg quickly tumbled to; in a historical blink, Indian territory had given way to Dudeland. Signs for trail rides and chuckwagon dining notwithstanding, my parents must have only ever semi-believed that there existed a class of people willing to pay to mimic, for a few tenderbottom hours at a time, the horseback mode that had governed life at Moss Agate and the Doig homestead and Faulkner Creek.
Requiem for the lariat proletariat. Even then the pools of us were drying up, and we never were many. Maybe cryogenic moments of my parents' existence, museum instances of how she sat small but vivid in the saddle beneath a mountain arch of stone and how he gallantly performed in cattle corral and bronc arena, are the only currency by which Berneta and Charlie Doig mean anything to today's world. But coming again to Wickenburg, I find the inscribing shadows of the desert saying much more of them.
***
In the cabin of then, my father is mending from his surgery day by day. He is also growing jumpy, as he tends to do when he doesn't have work in his hands.
We have stuck to cabin routine, except when Dad reports in to the Wickenburg doctor once a week. A Sunday ago, Allen Prescott drove out to say good-bye before their trip home to Montana, so it is Allen who was behind the camera, catching a bit of his own shadow on the side of the cabin, for the only Arizona picture of my mother and father and me together. Dad and I with our workaday hats on (his with that jaunty crimp, mine sitting on me flatbrimmed as a lampshade) while my mother, wearing a striped frock and high heels and with her hair fixed, looks like the one doing the Sunday visiting to this bareboard abode.
Here it is Sun. again, our first visitless week. But even in this pottery landscape we are not as alone as wed assumed. Regular as breakfast, desert cattle like bony Moss Agate cow ghosts plod past the cabin. My parents keep trying to figure out how many acres, how many miles, of the Sonora each gaunt beef has to range across in a day; the things look like they'd eat the eyebrows off you.
My father and I are on the hoof ourselves each desert dusk. While my mother clears away the supper dishes, he and I take his prescribed daily walk. "That doc's favorite medicine is shoe leather," my father has said more than once.
Ever since Dad came out of the hospital I have stayed as close to him as a sidecar, because you never know. Now out we go as always along the road to the foot of the big hill and back, far enough to be dutiful without getting silly about it. Cactus garden to the right of us, to the left of us. Wicks of thorn stand especially sharp in the evening desert light, every saguaro spacing itself prudently away from its neighbors' prickles, all the ocotillos in surprise binge of leaves between their devilwhip barbs. The last of sunlight retreats from us up the foothills and then the ashy mountainslopes.