First it was a boom that threatened to awaken her. Then the sound of hissing. Connie squirmed in her tightly drawn down sleeping bag. The clay and stucco prayer/meditation room probably build as an afterthought at the far end of this unfamiliar adobe house was so insulated that the sounds muffled. The drunk driver of a pickup truck had hit the telephone pole on the far side of the sandy road and careened across the expanse with a direct hit on the fireplace. She would soon learn this but now she slumbered in the first real sleep in months.
Her body curled in small worm fashion, squashed on a thin pallet stretched over the cold concrete floor. She had carried her suitcase and bag into this dark room attracted by its sparseness: a rustic fireplace with ashes left in the grate, this pallet and a wall furnace. One candle on the mantle. No electricity. It was on loan to her brother for a couple of days. The hissing grew. She struggled to awaken. Her dreams swayed with the reality of this unfamiliar situation.
This first night, far away from the rigors of a tense marriage and young parenthood, had promised an exotic excitement. “The good news is that you don’t have cancer. But you either need to consult a therapist or make some major changes in your life,” the doctor advised after reading her tests. “Do you feel nervous,” he asked and her brittle, “no,” made both smile. It was patently a lie. Rick, her husband, was desperate at this three-month bedrest she had been having and disbelieving she couldn’t come to grips with herself and take control. He would stand in the bedroom door, the fumes of his coffee irritating her nausea. The smells of garlic from the spaghetti also making life miserable. “This is ridiculous,” he said. “No one just goes to bed. The boys need you.” Her brother called her, a nurse, living in a commune in Southern Colorado. He offered to come get her. Rick leaped at the chance. “I can work at home in the afternoons,” he said. “The boys and I will do fine.” He didn’t bother to hide the relief she heard in his voice.
Now in a small adobe house on a sandy road above the city, they headed for sleep. Larry picked the owner’s bed, but she chose the interesting space behind the dust covered baby grand. Just opening the door to the small room, she could feel the wonderful silence, full of moist air from the cool clay of the walls. Immediately she knew that she needed to sleep on that pallet. Now the hissing continued to knock at the cloudy dreams of her children’s voices and the ragged anger of her husband’s continued resentment in her ongoing depression. Without any appetite and knowing the boys, already one almost out of grade school and the other in junior high could cope, she knew she should leave with Larry, her brother. Connie and Larry set out across Texas from Houston, On the road her nerves had been swept into the long asphalt miles as her brother drove her away from Houston, she was worrying through each mile. She was convinced she would become so physically incapacitated that one of these ragged, godforsaken little towns would have to house her in a hoped-for clinic and medicate her.
But then they left the flat lands, the farmlands, the ranch lands and hit the growing elevations of the Sangre de Christo mountains. The humid air lifted and even in her slumped state, the colors of sky, the pinion trees, the vast horizons tugged at her. She sat up in the old van and began to look at the endless blue, a backdrop for the scurrying clouds, the reds and browns of the sands, the ageless growth of the strong stubby pinions. She began to breathe.
The hissing and the now dense miasma of clay dust caused her to cough, forcing her to sit up. Not smoke, dust. The air was cloudy stucco dust. Two round lights on either side of the fireplace blanched the whole room. Connie squirmed out of the bag, tugging at her jeans and sweatshirt. She stood by the wall furnace not remembering the instructions of left of right. Was that the hissing, was it on? It was cool to the touch. She remembered she had only wanted to cold night air. Noises came from beyond the door. She bolted into the living room.
Larry, rubbing his eyes, came out of the front bedroom. “What was that?” Muffled sounds came from the outside, a crowd of sounds, of people yelling. “We have to get out of here,” he said. She grabbed a throw and followed him through the kitchen into the cold night. Dark figures with flashlights blinked around her like fireflies. The neighbors had the story. They kept repeating it in the dark: a drunk woman had skidded on the turn near the house and plowed her truck into the prayer room, hitting the fireplace; her headlights provided the other worldly beams. A large voice, full of authority, filled the dark world. “Who was in that room?” “Me.” She shouted over their heads. He cut his way through the neighbors and standing, a towering figure, said “Come with me.” At the side of the house, beyond the crushed pickup and ambulance, he pointed to a small gas line with his flashlight. “She hit that,” he said. “She missed the Main by two inches. If she had hit that, you and this house and the driver, who broke her leg, would have been blown to smithereens.”
Amazing words to hear under the starry sky of this new world. Her coverlet did not stop her body shakes. “It’s safe now.,” her brother said. “We can go back as soon as they move the truck out. You can sleep in the other bedroom.”
“I am not going back in there,” she said, taking an unfamiliar stand. Another man spoke up. “That’s my place right on the hill. You can have the couch if you wish.” His house was lit up, a warm glow coming from the A frame. “Yes,” she said, without hesitation, already forgetting his name. He gave her blankets, a pillow and water. He also gave her small pimento cheese sandwich. It sat in her mouth like a wafer at communion. She entered a new kind of sacred space. Her taste buds signaled to her that finally her body was coming awake.
Houston Writers' Group 