Archive 501
Vivian Galván García
Speed of Light
By Lillian DaviesApril 2024
Returning her face to the cold rush of late Fall air, Joan looks East, towards Republique, presses her eyes towards the rooftops near Oberkampf, where mountains of bouquets are growing.
What is this darkness? Not just the night or the inside of her womb, but like a duende, her Grandmother would say, pulling Garcia Lorca off her shelves and reading aloud in her mother tongue. That strange force that sweeps across the scorched fields on a dry night in late summer when the sun finally sets.
Joan could feel it as a child, and could see the energy take hold of her Grandmother as they cleared their supper dishes. Or maybe it was in hopes her Grandmother felt it too, that she would set her boots by the screen door, upside down so the scorpions wouldn’t climb in.
Dishes dried, Joan’s Grandmother would finally sit down on the wooden stool in the bathroom upstairs. Under the fluorescent tube lights, this tall woman in constant motion, returned to a place she’d worked so hard to get away from, would glow. Doubled was her reflection in the mercury backed mirror that ran behind the pair of porcelain sinks.
Through her papery skin, a tangle of indigo at her temples echoed the veins raised on the backs of her hands, like a web for the chunk of raw turquoise she always wore on her ring finger.
Tossing a towel onto the wrinkled grey linoleum, she laughed at Joan: “You wash your face just like my father did. Like throwing a bucket of water at yourself.”
As Joan brushed her teeth, her Grandmother would brush the girl’s hair back from her forehead. It was when she stretched a thick newspaper elastic around her granddaughter’s dark hair that Joan knew. They were going out.
“Best to leave your hair loose when you sleep, better to catch your dreams. Not those silly pin curls they’d bind our heads with at boarding school.”
Barefoot, Joan walked to the back bedroom, pretending she didn’t realize what her Grandmother surely longed for as the sky quickly darkened, stretching herself out on the worn wire spring mattress. Joan would leave her book on the table beside, still hoping her ponytail meant shooting stars.
She was ready when her Grandmother called her out from the cotton sheets, line dried crisp.
“Come on Joanie, Let’s go!”
What’s the difference between a little girl’s leap out of bed and the speed of light?
As if a dance, the two would swirl something hot and transcendent across the patio, cooling at last, Joan in her pyjamas, her Grandmother in a cotton dress. The purple one Aunt Jo had brought her from her honeymoon in Hawaii. Joan’s favorite. Washed to a kind of animal softness.
Each carried a pair of the Judge’s Army binoculars, the beige ones issued at the old base in Del Rio.
Joan’s Grandmother’s rusting BMW sat just outside the garage, Ruben’s new tractor took up all the space inside. Pushing through the dark fuchsia bougainvillea vined over the cistern, the pair would climb in front, side by side in a hulk like a ship’s.
Grandmother’s star maps, an annotated Summer issue of Sky & Telescope, slide across the cracked leather of the bench seat as the car rolls across the cattle guard. The black enamel gearshift stops the glossy guides from falling onto the floorboards. Joan smooths the pile back together and holds it in her lap. Rolling their windows down with the turn crank, Joan’s thankful her Grandmother stretched the elastic around her thick ponytail, pulling her hair away from her eyes.
They take the first exit off Farm to Market Road 889 and turn at the dirt road that once led to Joan’s Great-grandfather’s house. Only thing left of that house now are the three steps of red-bricks that once led to the front door and the knock-away tree he’d planted when he finished the roof.
August heat wraps around them and warms Joan like cornbread in an iron skillet. Drought. The car’s tires crunch across the dried crust of the county’s caliche road.
“When I was a girl there was drought even worse than this. Nothing for cattle to eat. They were starving. Grandfather and Aureliano would burn Prickly Pear, cook the thorns off, so the cattle could eat. I loved that smell. Just like buttered toast.”
She switches off the headlights when they crawl down the empty roads looking for a dip in the horizon. An open view towards Vega, the Persied Meteor shower that always comes in that month when rain does not. Orion is easy. They’d go for Cassiopeia, Andromeda, Pegasus.
“The North Star, you see it? You see it? Now hold up two fists to measure. Here we go.”
“Can you hear the stars?” Joan asks.
“An echo of the birth of the universe,” I suppose. “The Summer issue has some research about a cosmic microwave background.”
“I wonder if it’s getting quieter?”
“Maybe so, Joanie. Dark energy is what they say is pulling the universe apart. So, that’d be more distance, more space. More quiet maybe. What d’ya think?”
“Wonder what that sounds like, that pulling apart? ”
There’s a Live Oak in the way where Venus and Jupiter are meant to rise. Joan’s Grandmother has found the spot with the plastic dials of her planisphere.
“Let’s drive towards Adele’s. We’ll have a better view there.”
Joan still remembers that night as clear as day.
Under the Milky Way, they cross into the field on Rufus’s side. Where he still runs cattle. The sound was terrible, like the bellow of a blue whale her second grade teacher had played on cassette for her class. Just much closer and louder. And with a melody that sings to sadness, the limits of the earth and human ears, rather than that vast unknown space of the ocean.
“A heifer!” her Grandmother cried, leaping from the driver’s side door, the car’s diesel engine still running.
Joan climbed into the back seat, hot prickles of tears pushing through her eyelids.
“Don’t be a ninny!” her Grandmother shouted, reaching for the black vinyl case with the cellular phone she could plug into the cigarette lighter in case of emergency.
“George! You and Quatro come on fast and meet us. We’re in Rufus’s back field. Joanie and I hit something.”