Out of Peel Tree

Heavy Mirror: Corina

140 Heavy Mirror Corina Pale yellow butterflies swirl above the grave where Essie’s cast-off body lies face-up, buried in a box under raw dirt, barefoot, that being the only request she had, back when she talked sense. “Bury me barefoot and I’ll sleep easy. If my ghost is a wanderer, she’ll feel the earth and know she’s in West Virginia.” I hug my brother and sisters goodbye, and I touch the fingertips of the newest arrival, Billie and Curtis’s fuzzy-headed baby. His eyes soak up light, dreamy as a lake at dawn. Overhead, hemlocks whisper that I, too, will be buried here. Torn clouds slide fast across the blue sky and ask, what does it matter? I wave and drive off with a map where everything connects under fading coffee stains. I drove here a week ago and held Grandma Essie’s hand, combed her hair, dabbed water on her lips with a tiny sponge on a stick, as she let go of her wafer of a body. Now I’m headed back to Texas, to Ruben, who’s on the couch with a broken leg. One piece of my heart is in his pocket, and another piece is vagrant, floating along this crooked road. My old Subaru wagon’s air conditioning is broken, so I’ve mapped out two-lane highways where I can roll down the windows heavy mirror 141 without the diesel fumes from trucks smothering me. In the first hours of twisting through the mountains, the car’s growls and rattles churn through my skull till my brain goes in circles, tires on pavement. As I cross the muddy Ohio River into Kentucky, I look down at the slow old barges. Here, long ago, the crazed optimist Johnny Appleseed peddled fistfuls of seeds to folks heading west in wagons. As the sun sinks, a pink-orange orb melting on distant treetops, the smell of Kentucky clover deepens. At midnight, in a cheap hotel room, I eat the last of the coconut cake my cousin Hector’s wife thrust at me wordlessly. My fingertips fall into the indentations of hers as I unwrap the foil. The cake is wicked good. Hector, along with my mom, took care of Essie in her last years. I wash the cake down with beer and watch the TV with the sound off. Everyone is kissing or fighting except for the news reporters, who are all mouth and stare, like fish with human faces and sprayed hair. On the second day, I crave air conditioning. Feral heat pounds through the windshield. Sweat stings my eyes, slicks my thighs. As I cross into Tennessee, I go by faster than the wind, ripping past roses, hedges, and mailboxes that raggedly stitch together one county after another. Patience takes the shape of empty porch chairs facing the road. I have no use for chairs or patience, but then I recall Essie’s porch summers ago, wild honeysuckle shading the swing, her sweetened, bitter iced tea in bright tin glasses. I’m wiping sweat out of my eyes as I speed into Arkansas. Monarchs flutter into the sky, a dog leaps to the end of a chain. Pie tins swing in a garden, clanging the light of the setting sun. I find a hotel where pigeons coo in the courtyard. Down the street is a restaurant anchored by old booths with welters of initials carved in the tables, and spicy pulled pork from the smoker in the side yard. I drink cold heavy mirror 142 beer and wonder if Essie felt like her life had a shape, or if she felt like a leaf in a river, spinning between song and zig-zag, like I do. On the third day I detour to swim in a cold lake where a barred owl hoots in mid-afternoon, so close I hear the gravel drop down his throat at the end of each call. No one else is there. I decide to drive as long as I can, see if I can get home to Houston by dawn. I just have to stay awake. The light blues, sinks into the trees. The moon rises in the rearview. America trembles into dusk, an equation balanced on a sheet of dust. A speeding angel, I don’t need to know the reasons. I fly. I cross into Texarkana. The car...