It's Just Dirt

                                   It’s Just Dirt

Dust boiled up.

  I always wondered who first started using that descriptor. It’s a good one. I squatted in the shade of a mesquite tree, and watched that proverbial dust boil up as the cattle, my cattle, stirred about in the shipping pens. Twenty-six head, on their way to the feed lot, and eventually to American dinner tables. In the distance, I could hear the rumble of a big diesel engine and metallic rattles of the truck, coming to take my life’s blood away. I was almost used to the pain. I had been selling off the herd in bits and pieces for five years now.

Used to be that it rained in the summer, starting about July 4^th, and continuing maybe three  or four days a week until almost October.

The land would turn from red-brown and tan to green almost overnight, grass and shrubs and flowers seeming to glory in the moisture as much as I did. They put fresh leaves and blooms and seeds on their dry bones. I put on smiles of relief at the restoration of food for cow and deer, and wee things, too, like mice and bees. Water bubbled from springs among the rocks, and arroyos ran, sometimes roaring with frothing, brown, silt-laden water, and sometimes trickling clear.

Now, we watch puffy white clouds build on summer afternoons, only to see them disappear into the deep blue sky without shedding a drop of rain for us. Oh, it’s been dry before. There are cycles in life and in the weather, too. But not like this. This was not just a drought. This was a disaster.

I heard a scrabbling noise, and glanced over at The Wall, an eighteen-foot-high steel fence meant to keep people─brown people, people who had settled in this western land as much four-hundred-years ago─out of the country. All because some surveyor drew a line through the land, saying this side was ours, and that side was foreign, peopled with ‘aliens’, although they looked and talked and lived just like me.

A couple of teenagers had climbed the supposedly unclimbable fence, and were waving at me from the top of it. “Hey, Rory. Era un pozo seco tambien?”  They wanted to know if the last well I drilled was dry, too.

“Yup. Drilled down over eight hundred feet, and nada─nothing.”

“What you going to do, man?”

“Yo no se. I don’t know. These here are the last of the cattle, so I’m not a rancher anymore.”

“You need help loading them?”

“Don’t risk it, fellas. Elroy and I’ll manage. There could be some Border Patrol following the truck.”

“Yeah. Probably.” They talked together for a minute. “My grandpop might need someone at his place in Chihuahua. He is trying to catalog some things for the library, and a bunch of it is really old stuff like from Europe, written in French. I remember that your mom spoke French. Do you?”

“No. Just read it a little bit. Thanks for the idea, but this place has been in my family for almost two hundred years, just like yours has been in your family. I can’t leave it. Better climb down, guys, before the truck gets here.”

“Okay. Really sorry about this, man. Let my mom know if we can do anything for you.”

“Sure. Thanks.”

That old dust boiled up again as the truck swung around and backed up to the loading chute with a whoosh and squeal of air brakes. The driver climbed out and walked back to check the ramp. It was a girl driver. I should say woman, I guess.

“Those your helpers?” She nodded at my neighbors, former neighbors, now on the other side of the border fence.

“No. They offered, but I can’t let them. The younger kid

isn’t a US citizen, so it’s not safe for them over here anymore.”

“Well, who’s going to help load?”

“Elroy.”

“Where is he? I’m on a time schedule here.”

“Elroy doesn't care about your schedule, and neither do I. Isn’t that right, boy?” I picked up the reins of my horse, mounted, and rode up to the first pen.

“Pull up your gate!” I shouted at her. As the metal gate on the back of the trailer slowly rose, I started pushing cows forward, whistling and slapping my leg with the end of a rope. They milled around for a minute, until one old cow, a herd leader, saw an escape from Elroy and me. She started up the ramp, and was followed by others, accustomed to trailing behind her. We packed them in, so they supported each other too tightly to fall.

“Let the gate down!” And there they were, jammed in, waiting for the next stage in their lives. I wanted to cry, but my eyes were dusty dry, my heart wrung free of moisture, too. It seemed like my life was over, just as theirs would be soon.

“What now, boy? We’ve got land with hardly any water, and no graze. Just lots of dust and dirt.”

“You need to sign these papers, mister.” She handed me a sheaf of stuff on a clipboard. I dismounted, and squatted again in the shade.

“You want me to hold your horse?”

“Elroy won’t go anywhere.”

I looked up at her. She was standing in the sun, and it was going to take awhile for me to read and sign all this stuff. “You might want to wait in the truck, in the air conditioning. It’s going to get hotter before I get all this done.”

She laughed. “That old beater doesn’t have a/c. I’m surprised that it even runs. My dad hauled cattle and sheep in it for years before I started.”

“Family business, huh?”

“Not really. Just have to make extra bucks so we can keep the family business going.”

“What business is that?”

“Pottery. We are potters.”

“That’s a business? I thought it was a hobby for the idle rich.”

Her face flushed, and not from the heat. “Who do you think makes your flower pots, your cups and saucers and plates?”

“Some factory in China or somewhere.”

“Pagan!”

I laughed. “Am I? Sorry. I guess I never thought about it. What’s the difference?”

She spun on her heel, strode through─yup, the dust─and climbed back into the truck. I thought I had offended her, and she was going to wait in the truck after all. But here she came, carrying a beautiful coffee mug carved with a mountain scene on one side. She tipped it so I was looking at the bottom. There was a symbol, like a tiny brand. An S lay on it’s back, and there was a Q hanging from it. It looked familiar.

“SQ? Lazy SQ? That’s the old Sequel Ranch brand. Outfit went out of business seven or eight years back. How’d you get this?”

“I made it. Yeah, we went out of the cattle business. Land had been in my family for over a hundred years. Ran out of enough water and grass to support the herd, and lost pretty much everything. Just about had to sell. But then this lady, she was from France, ended up at our place one day for a meeting of the Bookmobile Board, one of those things my grandmother did. And she was talking with the librarian about that book, Les Miserables. Have you read it?”

I shook my head.

“Well, this really poor guy changes his life by developing a way of making a special kind of glass. Glass is mainly just melted sand. So, this French lady said that it was too bad we didn’t have a way of turning all the sand in our arroyo into fancy glass, like Jean Val Jean, the hero of the story. And my grammy said that there was so much clay in our soil that we should find a way of making glass from clay. Then she remembered the seep.”

“The seep?”

“Grandma’s  grandma used that nasty smelling mud from the seep. You know, where a spring kind of dries up and a little water seeps, just enough to make mud? Anyhow, they didn't have money for toys so she made pinch pots for the kids to play with. You mix mud with clean water and pour it through a sheet over and over until it makes a nice clean ball of clay. And that is how we became potters, by going back over a hundred years to learn what my great grandma knew back then.”

“Say, that French lady lived over on  this side of the county. Do you know her? I have always meant to thank her for getting us thinking out of the box. She said that, on her ranch, there was a cliff face with red and white bands of clay, and we could use it if we wanted. But Dad’s too crippled up now, and my sister and I have enough clay to last the rest of our lives. Besides, It takes a lot of muscle to process clay.”

She sighed. “Red would be nice, and white would be great. I’m kind of tired of brown that has to be glazed or painted.”

“That would be my mother. She was French-Canadian actually, but never lost the accent. Died last year. Pneumonia. Come on, I’ll show you that cliff. It’s real close to the road.”

I mounted Elroy and we trotted off, the truck a few hundred yards behind. Some of those promising clouds that never kept their promise drifted over, cooling it off a bit.

“We are going to Willow Draw, Elroy. I bet you never thought there was any good reason to go there on a hot afternoon, did you?” He put one ear back, listening, as usual.

We stopped under a desert willow tree. It’s not a real willow, just has long skinny leaves like one, but it blooms real pretty in early summer. And, it sits right close to where there used to be a spring that dripped out of the cliff face. The spring is gone now, and there is just a…. Hey, it's a a seep! Kneeling by the few weeds emerging from the damp soil, I dug my hands into it, squeezing to see if it would hold together.

“It has too much sand,” she said, “ but look at that color! It’s beautiful, so red that it’s almost purple. I wonder what it would look like once it's processed, and run through the kiln?”

“Got a bucket? You can find out." She brought a five gallon water bucket from the truck, and we filled it with mud.

“There you go. Have fun.”

“Thanks. What’s your name again?”

  “It’s Arturo, but everyone calls me Rory. You?”

“Rennie, but everyone calls me Rennie.” That made me laugh again, and I didn’t do much of that these days. She smiled, and I realized that under that baseball cap, and layer of dust and sweat, she was real pretty.

“So, if you want it, you can have as much of this stuff as you like. I mean, it’s just dirt, you know. I can help you dig it out.”

"It’s not just dirt. It's beautiful dirt. Thanks, Rory. Can I come tomorrow morning?”

I nodded. I wasn’t sure why, but I felt like smiling, or laughing.

The sound of Rennie’s old diesel engine masked distant thunder, so Elroy and I were surprised when a few cooling drops hit us. There was a breeze from the west, and a dark curtain of rain was coming. The shoulders of my work shirt were getting wet.

“Too late to save the cattle, but just right for mining clay with a pretty girl. Who knew our dirt was pretty? What do you say, Elroy?”

He just snorted.