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Mama once tried to capture the stars in a quilt she made called Five Point Star.  It was beautiful, but the light wasn’t right.  So she started piecing a Flower Basket and then a Trip Around the World and then, with the little odd-shaped pieces that were left in her scrap bag after all that, she made a Crazy Quilt.

I thin that’s what I’ve done—made a Crazy Quilt out of the odd-shaped pieces of my life, thinking all along I was reaching for some Five Point Star.

Flora G. Adams

CHAPTER ONE

It is nine o'clock in the morning before I check out of the motel and the man with the beautiful cafe-au-lait skin reaches across the desk for my key.  He is handsome with blue-black hair and matching eyes and a smile that is polite rather than flirtatious. I can't stop staring at him, can't yet adjust to the idea of a Pakistani running a motel in Muleshoe, Texas.

It's been twenty years since I was back here for a visit.  Twenty years since Mother and Daddy went broke and moved away.  In that span of time the Pakistanis have moved in and made me feel like a foreigner.

I am passing through this part of West Texas that used to be my home, on my way to visit my Aunt Cora in Lubbock.  I will stay only a day or two.  From there, I don't know where I'll go.  I told Jeff, my husband, that I would be back in a week.  The real reason for this trip is not to visit anyone.  It is that Jeff and I need some time apart.  That's my idea, not Jeff's.  He says I'm running away from reality and from my responsibilities.  That I have, in fact, become an irresponsible wife.  I can't argue with that.  A marriage of almost twenty years is falling apart.  Jeff says it's because I've changed.  He's right about that, too.  I've changed, but I don't know what I've become.

Gravel from the motel's driveway pings against the underbelly of my car as I leave the motel and head east a few blocks to the Dinner Bell Cafe where there is no such thing as a non-smoking section.

"Have a seat, hon," a waitress with tired blond hair calls to me through the blue haze.  She is standing near the coffee maker with five mugs of steaming coffee, two in one hand and three in the other.  She bustles to a table of six men near the front.  Two of the men wear caps, one with International Harvester emblazoned in green on the front, and the other with Dekalb in equally bold lettering.  Three others, older men, the age Daddy would have been, have removed their Resistol hats (which is what real cowboys wear now rather that Stetsons) and they rest, crown down to protect the brims, on nearby chairs.

"You want cream, don't you Wendel?" the waitress asks, putting the mugs down.

"You ort not to have to ask," one of the older men replies with a teasing familiarity.

I sit in a booth near a window, behind a young couple, both with long stringy hair, and a dirty, whining baby.  A long table to my left seats a coarse-skinned, blue-eyed blonde woman in tight jeans.  Two kids, boy and girl, probably ten to twelve years old, sit across from her.  Next to her is an older woman, seventyish, in a polyester blouse, short permed hair, and with a Marlboro hanging from her mouth like a loose tooth while she squints against its assault.  They have all stolen glances at me and recognized me immediately for the stranger I am.  I remember now that it didn't take the Pakistanis to make me feel like a foreigner in Muleshoe.

Before, it was because I had the look of the back country about me, and I came to town only occasionally from the Peterson Ranch thirty miles out of town.  Now, I know, it is because I have the look of the city about me, in spite of the fact that I am dressed in jeans.  It is not just my Liz Clairborne t-shirt or my French manicure that betrays me, plenty of women here can outdress me.  It is the lack of something.  A lack of comfortableness maybe.  Or the lack an unconscious sense of belonging.

I am wondering why I chose to take a step back in time by stopping here.  Dwelling on the past is something I've always thought of as more destructive than constructive.  So why am I here?  Maybe it is to finish off the destruction that started ten months ago when I found the lump in my breast that meant I had to begin a morbid ritual of sacrificing pieces of myself in order to save my life.  I sacrificed my breast first and then my hair, next my white blood cells and immune system, and somewhere along the line, my dignity.  All during my treatment I followed all the psychological prescriptions of thinking positive and using mental imagery to see myself well.  The darkness I feel now, this sometimes inclination toward destructiveness, is like a hangover after an intoxicating binge of what Voltaire referred to as "the mania of maintaining that everything is well when we are wretched."

I have not yet recovered physically from the blitzkrieg of surgery and chemicals.  I still have no hair, my blood count is down, making me look a little too pale and feel a little too weak at times.  My left breast is gone forever, replaced with a flat numbness in my chest and the dark awakening to the fact that I am mortal.  The treatment is finished, no more lethal fluids dripping into the catheter inserted semi-permanently into my chest, no more deadly, invisible x-rays penetrating my body.  I conceal my bald head with an expensive wig, such as the one I'm wearing now, or sometimes a simple turban. I wear a three-hundred-dollar prosthesis in my bra to hide my flatness.  I wear a smile to conceal the fear and restlessness that has moved in to fill the emptiness and take the place of all my missing parts.  My fear is that the cancer will return.  No doctor can guarantee that it won't.  My restlessness results from a need to find something I lost or never had. Something more profound than a breast or hair.

I left the day after Jeff told me for the third or fourth, or maybe the hundredth time, that I should go back to work.  He was saying that I have to pull myself together, that I have to stop thinking about cancer, that I have to get back to our old life.  He reminded me that it is difficult to live on one paycheck, and now that my treatment has ended and I am feeling better, I should not extend the leave of absence from my job.  I argued that I'm not ready yet to go back to work, and when I couldn't articulate why, our discussion deteriorated so that I was accusing Jeff of being selfish for wanting more money, and Jeff was reminding me once again that I should have chosen another career in the first place, one that paid better, that I was the selfish one for working at a job just because I enjoyed it and for turning down an editor's position that paid better than the reporting job I had.  He is right.  I have selfishly stuck to a career I enjoy.  I have turned down promotions that would keep me chained to a desk.  I have taken years out my life not to work at all in order to raise our boys when they would have been just fine without me.  I have not contributed as much monetarily as I could have.  In the end I couldn't argue with him.  Couldn't even think of a way to defend myself.  So I left.            I extended the leave of absence from my job at the Albuquerque Post, knowing how it would both anger and worry Jeff.  He would be angry about the loss of income, but he would also worry that I am leaving when I would never have gone before without him.  He would worry that I have changed.

I was less than a hundred miles away from Albuquerque when I began thinking crazy thoughts that would have worried him even more.  I thought that maybe I would make the leave of absence permanent.  That I wanted either a new life or no life at all.  Nobody ever told me cancer would do this to a person.  There's so much the doctors don't know, that I could tell them now if only they would listen.

By the time I got within thirty miles of my old home, I knew that I would stop.  I have no particular feeling for this area where I grew up.  If it is not self-destruction that is driving me, then it is simply a case of curiosity and having too much time on my hands.  A continuation of the listlessness and the spiritual descent that began with the word "cancer."

Home was never the dusty little Texas town with the picturesque name of Muleshoe and the fiberglass mule in front of the truck stop.  Home was the ranch.  The Peterson ranch, it was called.  But Mr. Peterson is dead by now, I'm sure.  After all, he was older than Daddy, and I think I remember Mother and Daddy mentioning they'd been to his funeral.  His son, Owen, will own it, of course, and he will live in Lubbock, just as he and his father always did.  Still the absentee owner.

I wonder who runs the place, who sees after the cattle and the two thousand acres of grass the way Daddy did.  Who farms the hundred and sixty acres that used to be in cotton and maize?  Have they built a better house?  That old ramshackle thing we lived in surely can't still be standing.

Are there children there?  A girl, maybe, with dreams of conquering the world?  No, I won't think about that.  I won't think of that other girl either.  She's gone now anyway.  Replaced by a woman who knows better than to have foolish dreams.

"What'll it be, hon?"

I look up startled to see the waitress standing over me, check pad in hand, pencil poised, waiting for my command.  Before I know it, I've ordered two scrambled eggs with ham, biscuits and gravy, and real coffee, not decaf.  As if I still had the raging metabolism of a sixteen-year-old.  But what the hell, the cancer could get me first.  I even say "yes, ma'am" to the waitress when she reads the order back to me.  I've stepped into a time warp of some kind, except I've kept my middle-aged body, or what's left of it.

By the time I leave the restaurant, loaded with cholesterol, the white sun has leapt half way up the eastern quadrant of the sky and won its offensive against the morning.

The Dinner Bell Cafe is on the highway that will take me straight to Lubbock, but I turn south at the grain elevator and drive to the center of town, just for one more look.  I go past the courthouse, a square, sand-colored temple of bureaucracy basking in the middle of town.  It has shrunk.  It still takes up more space than any building in town, and its two stories surpass everything except the grain elevator behind me to the north. In my memory the courthouse towered.  Now it squats.

My route takes me around two of the four sides of the courthouse past Anthony's dry goods store, Ramsey's Drug Store, a hardware store that I don't remember, along with a couple of insurance agencies and the county agent's office.  Most of the buildings have weathered wooden fronts and turn-of-the-century display windows, but there is the new white stucco newspaper building and the new blond brick public library.  Hopeful harbingers of literacy.

All in all it's the kind of "every town" you see on television when the president makes a campaign stop and there is a parade down Main Street.

Within seconds I've passed the Methodist and Baptist churches and the last Texaco gas station and then the little houses at the edge of town--jumbles of wood siding, curled shingles, and sagging porches.  Something makes me want to look for the shoebox-size red, white, and blue banners I remembered seeing in the windows when I was a child.  They were leftovers from World War II.  Each banner had one star for each son who had served his country during the war.  They're gone now, though--the banners and the sons along with the pride--and the houses are abandoned to White Trash.  Everyone else lives in the new brick homes behind the hospital.

The highway to Lubbock is blocks behind me now.  I am going in the wrong direction.  Going toward my old home.  I've given in to some primitive instinct.

As soon as I leave town, I'm surrounded by flat fields plowed into chocolate ripples and sprouting early summer corn or cotton. The land stretches onward and onward in its flatness until it wraps itself around the horizon.  A farm house here and there interrupts the emptiness, many of them as familiar to me as if I'd seen them just yesterday.  Fourteen miles down the road I pass Needmore, a used-to-be town with a name that was its destiny.  Now there's only a cotton gin and a cafe, both closed until ginning season starts in October.  I'm not home yet, though.  Sixteen miles more into the deep country.

I'm having second thoughts.  I don't have time to do this.  Aunt Cora will be expecting me.  There is nothing here for me anyway. See?  Baileyboro is even more of a ghost town than Needmore.  Fat old Mr. Worthingham's store is closed.  So is the blacksmith shop and the post office.  Nothing there except a few abandoned and crumbling buildings.  Nothing at all a few more miles down the road where Stegall used to be.  The gin is gone, along with the tiny store the Sparks used to run, and so is the blacksmith shop that was next door where Benny Sparks, the slightly retarded son, fell into the forge during a seizure and burned to death. 

It is not until after I pass the spot where Stegall used to be that it begins to look like home--more grass, long, wide stretches of it dotted with cactus and sweet-smelling mesquite with cattle grazing in the distance.  The grass is pale green and short, and white chalky rocks the early Spanish explorers called caliche are scattered around.  Here and there are a few plots where the ground has been plowed up for crops, but there is a tightness to the land in this area where the earth is clay and loam, unlike the loose sandy soil nearer Muleshoe.  Here it is as if the soil has yielded itself to the plow reluctantly, and still, to this day, resents its loss of virginity.

Dirt roads intersect the highway at every section, which is exactly one square mile, and there is no landmark at the one I turn on, nothing to make it look any different from any other section-line road.  But I turn, without thinking, using an instinct that has laid dormant for years, or as if there were some roadside sign pointing north up the narrow rutted road and reading, "Home, 3 1/2 miles."

Home?  Yes, home. I suppose I can't deny it.  If home is the place that shapes your life, then, for better or worse, home is what I'm headed toward.

Johnson grass, three feet tall with tasseled heads making defiant gestures at the wind, lines the barrow ditches.  Beyond the ditches are the once-plowed fields turned back to grass, silent tribute to an old cowboy-turned-fire-and-brimstone-evangelist who was the first environmentalist I remember.  He was an old-time cowboy who hated the plow and never failed to let the congregation of farmers know they were in as much danger of hell fire for turning the grass under as they were for drinking and fornicating.  His memory, I find, makes me smile, and then laugh out loud. What he couldn't accomplish with his preaching, the government's Conservation and Restoration Program did.  It is a program instituted to pay farmers not to farm, but to let their land lay dormant, planted with native grasses, so as to keep America's bounty at bay.

Now I've come to the spot in the road that was always muddy when it rained, where I got the pickup stuck more than once decades ago.  There are still ruts here, still signs that it will be slick when it rains.

There's the Anderson house, a half a mile off the road.  I should be able to see our windmills now.  But I don't.  Some trick of light obscures them.  Two miles further and I reach the corner where I should turn to go up to the house.  The mailbox was here on this corner, but the mailbox is gone now.  Even the corner is gone.  There's no intersecting section-line road, just dim ruts in the grass where the road used to be.  Standing between the ruts and behind the barbed wire fence is a Hereford cow with black liquid eyes staring out of the shaggy white blaze of a face.

When I get out of the car, I can see that the fence is a wire gate with a loop of wire over one of the fence posts--access to the pasture.  It's a struggle for me to unfasten the gate and an equal struggle to pull the awkward strands of wire hard enough to fit the post in the fastening loops after I've driven my car through.  I can see clearly now that the house and both of the windmills are gone--the one that was next to the house as well as the one in the pasture.  I feel a moment of shock. I had not expected this.  Had not expected my past to have completely disappeared.

My car feels like a small craft on a vast sea of grass and the rough surf of two ruts where the road once was.  I glance in my rearview mirror and see the two cows following me, wading through the spray of dust behind my car.  They stop, though, before I reach the site where the house was, and turn away, bored with my silly obsession.

I drive past the spot where the dairy barn stood before it burned down, and stop just beyond it, where the house was. Nothing is left, not even a foundation, and the prairie grass has covered the yard.  As I sit in my car, I can see that there's a cement slab where the windmill used to stand and sing me to sleep night after night.  It's replaced by an electric pump to bring the water up for the cattle.  Only the corral is left, and I can see, even from this distance that it is still in good repair, and so is the branding and loading shoot, as if the Petersons still use it.  The catfish tank just inside the corral appears to be crumbling, though.

I get out of my car and walk to the corral, feeling the soft caress of the summer wind on my face and the kiss of the sun on my arms.  The corral is not often used, I see now, because the grass has grown up inside the fenced area.  But for a moment, I see it as it used to be, the Herefords standing around the catfish tank, one of the horses against the fence where the kerosene barrel used to be.

I see myself standing inside the corral holding the five-gallon milk bucket full of the night's milking, little bits of hay floating in the warm foam at the top.  The scent of the fresh milk was a deep, earthy smell that lingered at the roof of my mouth.  I can almost feel the old tabby barn cat winding himself around my ankles, wanting his share.  I remember two little motherless calves I had to feed, teaching them to drink from a bucket by first allowing them to suck milk from my fingers.  The yearling steer my brother and sister and I used to ride when Daddy wasn't looking was in that second pen, there.  How Daddy would yell at us when he saw us riding Bully!

"What the hell are you doing?”

The voice startles me. I whirl around.  It is a stranger's voice that has pulled me back to the present, a stranger's bluegreen gaze squinting at me from a serious face as direct and challenging as granite.  In spite of the fact that he has lines around his eyes and a coarseness to his skin, there is a look of innocence to him.

With one quick glance, I take in his pickup, which he has parked a good distance away.  Had I been so absorbed in my day dream that I didn't hear him even in this vast openness where there are no other sounds except the cattle and the wind?

"I--I was just looking at. . ."  I stop, angry at myself for stammering.  I've grown wary, having suddenly realized I'm miles from civilization and being confronted by a stranger.   

"You know you're trespassing?"

"No, I'm not really trespassing."  I try to edge toward my car, but he's a solid, imposing presence standing in my way, all shoulders and chest. "You see, I used to live--"

"You the one left that gate down?"

"Well no, I didn't. I made sure it--"

"Had to be you.  There's nobody else around is there?" There's a smirk to the sound of those words, and he gives a cursory glance around.  The words "condescending smartass" come to mind, but I say nothing.  Instead, I look at his boots, his denim-encased legs.

"I saw two cows out in the road and the gate down," he continues. "I herded 'em back in and shut the gate, and I sure as hell hope that's all that got out.  How long you been here anyway?"

"You must work for Owen Peterson."  I begin to relax a little.  He's just doing his job.

"Who?"

"Owen Peterson.  The owner of this place."

"I don't know any Owen Peterson.  Burlington Enterprises owns this place.  Bought it five years ago from Henry Campbell.  I see after it for Burlington."

"I know Henry," I say.  "I went to high school with him."  I'm making small talk, but I am struck by the idea that I am speaking to the agent of destruction.  The new owner of the place is an institution, not a person.  And the institution has torn down the house, let the road disappear from disuse, torn down the windmill, erased almost every physical reminder of my past.  I feel a moment of anger, but then force it to cool.  Perhaps this man and the institution have done me a favor.

"Henry sold out and moved away," the man says.

"I see.  Well, I was just leaving."  I walk past him, no longer feeling so intimidated by his presence, just eager to get away.

"Wait!"

It's the sound of his voice more than the command itself that makes me stop, turn around slowly.

He takes off his hat, wipes his brow with his forearm, and at the same time asks, "What's your name?"

I don't answer.  I just look at him, wondering why he wants to know.

"I reckon I have a right to know who's trespassing," he says.

"I didn't mean to trespass," I say crisply, wanting to get this over with.  "I thought if the Petersons still owned it they wouldn't mind, and I'm sorry about the gate.  I thought I fastened it tight.  I won't bother you again."

I try to leave before he says it again. "Wait!" I hesitate. "You still haven't told me who you are."

"Flora Adams," I say, thinking if I take the line of least resistance I can get away quicker.

"Where you from?"

"Here."  I say that before I realize I'm going to.  I see him glance at my New Mexico license plates.  "I mean, I used to be from here.  I live in Albuquerque now."

"Just passing through, then?"

"That's right."

"We got serious problems with trespassing.  I just have to watch that kind of thing."

I wonder if he's trying to make an apology for being so abrupt with me.

"Just be on your way, Miss Adams," he says.

I am as anxious to leave as he is to have me leave, and I drive away, glancing in my rearview mirror and see that he is watching me as if to make sure I will be gone for good.

That is my intention--to be on my way, to be gone for good.  I am almost to Muleshoe again when I change my mind.  I turn around and start the drive back into the country.  I am headed for that rise just beyond where the house used to be.  Jeff would say I'm being foolish, since my only reason is because I know there is a good view of the stars there at night when the moon is dark.