Previously: I see light like this when I go visit Jeremiah Barger’s bedroom … He said he was thinking about getting one of his guns and shooting her between the eyes; she said, go ahead, he’d be doing her a favor … A footlocker at the foot of the bed held a sawed off shotgun, an AK-47, two .357s, three hand grenades and a dozen boxes of ammunition … I wonder if, all else being equal, if his house had been situated just a little bit differently, if the sunset light wasn’t so extreme in his room, if things would have been different for him.
Last Week:
Take it from the top:
fernweh (fern-way) n.
1. An ache for distant places
2. Being homesick for anywhere but home
You talked to my sister, your aunt Stephanie once, on the phone, when you were a baby. I suppose it’s an exaggeration to call it talking, but she heard your voice, your little jabbers and blabbers, and you heard her sing to you.
Rock a bye baby, in the tree top,
when the wind blows, the cradle will rock,
when the bough breaks, the cradle will fall,
and down will come baby, cradle and all.
Such a sad and lovely song, which makes it the perfect song for your aunt to sing, since she was so sad and lovely herself.
You remember she’d run away as a teenager. I was supposed to meet up with her in San Francisco — I’m sure your remember hearing about this — but never found her. When I was pregnant with you, I got a postcard from her from Sante Fe. She was living there with her partner, working as a potter, making just enough to live. She wrote her phone number on the postcard and said I was welcome to call anytime and soon after you were born, I did. I hadn’t heard her voice in over twenty years. We cried as much as we talked. I told her about you, told her about your father and about the farm. I told her that I had gone to San Francisco to look for her. She told me that she never made it to San Francisco. She met some people in a campground near Moab and trav- eled south with them. She liked Santa Fe when they got there and she never left. She apologized for losing touch.
I invited her to come visit. I offered to pay for the bus fare. She said she would have to think about it. She said it sounded like a long ride. You couldn’t hold your head up yet, so I cradled you and the receiver in my arms. I couldn’t understand what she said to you, but you cooed back to her.
“He sounds happy,” she said.
“He is, I hope. You sound happy, too.”
“I am,” she said.
“I hope you come visit.”
“I’ll think about it,” she said again.
I waited a few months and called her again. The number was disconnected.
Thank you for reading. Next week will start like this:
One of my favorite scenes from your life is the first time you smoked pot, out on the prairie, under the stars.