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Show Prologue As if I could not bear to leave it, I have come into this spinning world twicef once dead le first time born from my mother, the second, from a bucket, silver "poor substitute for the womb, yet enough. Given up by my father, a man fluent in the language of sacrifice, I carry the memory of the bucket with me, my second mother, who only asked that I wrap my body in a circle and soothe myself. Loss, then, was my first narrative, the one against which I press the outlines of all the others, as if holding the thin brown tissue of a sewing pattern to a stretch of fabric and seeing how it measures. Late April, 1969. For the past few weeks, purple spiderwort and phlox have begun to appear along the cactus-rimmed roads of Kingsville, Texas, a naval town. The flowers have risen open-faced and ready after a short, mild winter, one noticeable only to the locals. Within several months, somewhere in the hot middle of summer, the roads will fill with June bugs the size of small mammals. Those who have lived in Kingsville for at least one summer already know that when driving these June-bugged roads, they need to turn the radio up to drown the sound of bodies crunching beneath the tires. But this is not yet. Now it is spring. And in rhythm with the rest of the natural world, the obstetrics ward of the Kingsville County Hospital is filled with women giving birth. A man races into the waiting room reserved for expectant fathers. He is tall and thin and strong, wearing a dark suit with a narrow, plain tie. Not stopping at the |