Paradise
- Mar 29
- 10 min read
By Jinanne Jones Espinoza
The morning he died, they’d sat here on the porch, drinking coffee and waiting on the sunrise as they did every morning of their twenty-one years together. Now she stands on the porch alone, hands on hips, stalwart, watching the last of the well-wishers trundle solemnly down the long driveway. The pickups kick up red clay dirt, crescendoing clouds that enshroud the procession. Engines rev as one by one the trucks pull onto the county road, rumbles fading into the profound silence of West Texas wilderness, a quiet as silent as the moon.
To her left, bristly tips of a solitary oak glow amber in the setting sun. The house was so crowded today, she didn’t notice until now the time nor the chill in the air. The temperature is plummeting as the clear January day descends into dusk. Ellen turns to go inside. No, she’ll sit out here a spell, a short one, after she fetches her coat.
On her way to the closet, she skips a glance around the empty kitchen and dining room. They look tidy even though a deluge of guests tracked through for the potluck buffet after the memorial. For this she owes thanks to her two stepdaughters, once her nieces before the marriage. To her they have become something closer than either of those things, something just about as close as her own daughter.
“Congrats, Aunt Mom and Uncle Dad!” the wedding cake had said. These new terms of address were often repeated, with a cheeky grin, by their grown children. By and large their seven combined offspring seemed to accept their dad marrying their aunt and their mom marrying their uncle. Yes, of course, some showed dismay at first. Perhaps a little awkwardness clung ‘til the end. But what could they say, really? Wasn’t everyone better off because of it?
Her quilted jacket gives off a whiff of woodsmoke as she slides her arms down the sleeves and steps onto the deck. She grips it tight across her chest and reaches out to dust off the glider’s tufted cushions. They are cold and green and the one on Earl’s side has a hollow where his back rested.
Suddenly the full weight of his absence lands on her. It’s alien, startling, like encountering gravity for the first time. She goes back inside, this time returning with his black felt cowboy hat. Settling into the glider, she sets it on her lap. Chamois-soft fur on the outside, silky satin on the inside. She lifts it to her face and inhales: cigar, English Leather, sweat on dust.
That morning he died, he was suffering. The nerves in his legs were acting up again, and arthritis was aching his hands. She knew this would not stop him from hard work after breakfast—setting fire to rebellious prickly pear pads, dragging bony dead branches into the pile to burn them, too. His tolerance for pain was supernatural.
She’d studied his face in the predawn moonlight. He’d worn a look of rich contentment, eyes treasuring the tranquility and the fruits of his labor all around, where carefully pruned honey mesquites fan out of the bare, ruddy earth. After the last frost, they sprout feathery fronds and in summer, flaunt tawny seedpods that taste like caramel and sway and tempt the deer.
From this porch, a good four-and-a-half feet up off the ground, you can’t see past the tall wall of brush that rings the house and yard. No cedars in the clearing; he’d cut them out, accusing them of being trash trees. But the inescapable mesquites don’t belong, either. Devil trees, people used to call them for their three-inch-long thorns. Their seeds blew in or rode in from Mexico, and they took over like weeds. Not native to this country at all, they suck up all the groundwater. The neighboring landowners cut them down, restoring their tracts to prairie. Earl instead manicured them, sculpted them. In the spring the result is an airy green grove on a carpet of auburn dirt.
Farther out, you can hardly walk for the paddle cactus, horse crippler cactus, barrel cactus, spiny yucca, needlegrass, and the like. Her older son Drew makes the same complaint every year at bobwhite season: “Everything on or in this land either cuts, stings, bites, or pricks.”
Watching Earl’s face that morning, she’d thought it a good time to ask. “Why don’t we go somewhere this spring? Maybe a pretty spot in Canada or Mexico?” Her mind had flitted to some of the many destinations her brothers had flown off to in recent years: Banff, Rome, New Orleans, Tokyo, Santa Fe. For a moment she thought he didn’t hear her. Then he said: “Why’d we wanna do that? We’re in paradise right here. We’ve got everything we could ever need or want.” He put his arm around her and gently pulled her snug to his side. “Besides, turkey season starts soon, and all the boys’ll be comin’ up.” When he raised his mug for another sip, she noticed his hand shaking gently—struggling to keep hold of it, perhaps. Eighty-six-year-old hands with thick workman’s fingers, some twisted with age. Hands that could still wring a feisty chicken’s neck in one twist.
They’d eased back into comfortable silence, the only sound exhales of breath ghosting into the half-light. Ellen’s gaze met the January moon, on its way down but exceptionally bright and full. For a moment it appeared to roost in the branches of the one shade tree in front of the house. Well, they say ‘house,’ but really it’s a trailer home he used as a field office during his career as a geophysical consultant. Midland, Odessa, and even Big Spring were too built up for his taste. He wanted more space, so he bought three-hundred-twenty wind-scraped acres at the bottom of the panhandle, fifteen miles from the closest town.
Then sometime after his first wife died, after his retirement, he’d remodeled the little building into a three-bedroom, three-bathroom cabin with an eye toward hosting family and friends during hunting seasons. Every square foot serves a purpose. In West Texas, she’s learned you don’t waste things. Which is why on the back side, a large sheet of corrugated metal from the old shed serves as a shield from blue northers tearing down the Great Plains.
She and her first husband, Boyd, only once had a trailer instead of a real house, and never would it have occurred to her, nor would she have permitted him, to affix sheet metal to it. But here she tolerates it in the name of prudence. The interior she always keeps immaculate.
The position of the sun always set their morning routine. First cup of coffee in the predawn dark. The second in a sweep of teals and blues, the clouds an evening primrose pink, trees black against the always glorious, dusty sunrise. Then when the antlers lit up at the top of the barn, it was time to get up and fix breakfast. They took turns. Each had their strengths. Hers was biscuits and gravy; his was sunny-side up eggs and venison sausage.
That last morning was his day. He hoisted up slowly, testing his balance in his square-toe boots, and scuffed into the kitchen. She heard one loud thunk when he hit the floor. “Earl?!” Jumping up, cup sloshing, she rushed inside.
She found him laying on his side, eyes closed, his bifocals mashed out of shape, black coffee spilling onto the beige vinyl floor. She shook his shoulders, put an ear to his chest, pressed her fingers to his neck. Nothing.
On her knees, she’d stared down at his tanned and wind-burnished face. A tear landed on his cheek, then another and another. He and her first husband looked so much alike, though Earl was eight years older. Maybe what she saw of Boyd in Earl drew her to him. Maybe it just felt practical. When he proposed, they were both widowed, attending some shared relative’s funeral, when Earl turned to her, cocked his head to one side and said, “Well, we’re in the same boat now. How ’bout we start rowin’ it together?”
Gripping the counter edge with one hand, she’d pressed up. She tore off a paper towel, dried her eyes, and drove to the road for a signal. Her first call was to Earl’s oldest daughter.
As she rocks and reflects now, the first stars peer down from the bluing sky. Before they left, the kids offered to put her up in the motel with them, but she had declined. She wants to sleep here one last time, in her and Earl’s bed, listen to the ka-yotes yip. She knows how to aim a shotgun, and there’s Earl’s .45 Long Colt that he was never without. That will go to his son, Ray, along with the ranch, as they agreed.
Why he doted on this desolate land, she’d never really understood. None of their kin hail from here. He, like her, was born and raised in the rolling hills south of Fort Worth, where all kinds of trees easily thrive, as do cows, goats, sheep, and horses. Even llamas, for goodness’ sake. Earl told her he left his family farm when he was only twelve: “One day I just decided, that’s it for the plowing. I’m done with that.” At seventeen, he got a job as a floor hand on a West Texas oil rig. By the time he was twenty-one, he was a foreman, rising from worm to tool pusher in an unheard of five years. He came to where you’re either needed and you thrive, or you’re not and you’re dying or dead.
And thrive he did. It takes six hands to count their twenty-seven grandkids and ten hands for the great-grandkids. So it’s a wonder that in the throng of friends and relatives at the house today, she happened at the right time to walk up on Ray answering a question from a little one.
“What’s this, Uncle Ray?” asked Jake, five, copper-haired, freckled, and dressed for the occasion in a boys’ blue Wrangler snap shirt. He was holding up a rusty relic: a metal spike with a loop on one end.
“Well, lookie here. Lemme see that,” said Ray, balancing his plate of ribs in one hand and examining the artifact with the other. “I bet that’s a old stake for a horse tie-out, maybe from the ghost town over there.” He tipped his chin toward the barn. A couple of other young ones circled up, reeled in by the unfamiliar object and the words, “ghost town.”
“What ghost town?” Jake demanded.
“Y’all don’t know about that?” asked Ray, eyes wide, incredulous. “Several hunnerd foot past the fence thataway, there’s foundation parts in the ground from a town called Spade that started up around 1890. About a hunnerd people lived there, with a little schoolhouse, a little church, and a post office. It lived and died just like a person. It died before your Pawpaw Earl was born.
“Now the old-timers say, before it was a town, it was a Ranger camp. In cowboy and Indian times, a band of Texas Rangers from Company C rode down from Dallas, enforcing the Law and getting mighty thirsty along the way. They were ten days out and drinking filthy water from hoofprints. Then they stumbled on Wildhorse Creek and they were so happy, they named it Paradise and set up a Ranger station on the spot. That’s why your Pawpaw got such a kick out of calling this place ‘paradise.’”
The children nodded, and Jake reached out for the stake. “See if Mamaw Ellen wants that,” said Ray.
Ellen stood stock still as the boy dutifully turned to offer her the stake. She knew about the faded town of Spade, but she’d never heard this Paradise tale. It struck her, as she reached down to grasp hold of the old iron picket, that through strength of will and hard work, Earl had wrought something out of almost nothing. He built a refuge, welcoming and open to their loved ones. A wise steward, he was always deliberate about which acres to lease to cattle ranchers and the like, and how often. The land will have its sabbaths, he would say.
Here on the porch—this porch she once fell off trying to shoot a snarl of rattlesnakes in the crawl space beneath—the kitchen light lets her make out little dove nests left in the trees for next season. Forming a family can be a complicated thing, it seems to her. Sometimes you have to build something new because, well, people die. Earl had realized, when he asked her to get in and row with him, that they could forge something new out of their heartbreaks and sorrows. He had loved Alice, and she had adored Boyd—even in the darkest times nursing him through the end of his illness while she crawled across the finish line for her law degree—so much that it never crossed her mind to look for someone new.
Tuesday would have been her and Earl’s twenty-second anniversary. They almost made it. The death of a spouse is the death of two things: a person and a marriage. The end of an era. Never again will he set a glass of bourbon atop the upright and play her a ragtime tune. Never again will the worn nap of his blue Wrangler work shirt, the only type of shirt he owned, brush her face the way it did when he pulled her in for a tender hug.
Enveloped in darkness, her body begins to quake, and then a wail like that of some mourning animal, a cry of unadulterated anguish, sweeps out across the yard. Grief seizes her barely five-foot frame, shakes her by the shoulders, threatens to turn her inside out. She’s relieved no one is here to see her sobbing like this; they’d think she’d lost her marbles.
When the shaking lets up, she rises and moves to the edge of the deck and looks up at watery stars. The sky is thick with thousands on this clear night. She prays in her mind: “Heavenly Father, please ease this pain and help me remember I’m never alone.”
Exhaustion overtakes her. Time to go to bed. Scanning the clearing one last time, she realizes it’s no longer ambivalence she feels but a sense of conviction. Conviction that this was indeed a paradise when Earl was with her. They made a refuge together for a clan of almost ninety people for whom he was the beloved patriarch. “He was just the best dad you could ever have,” one of their daughters said at the memorial. A memorial where his own grandchildren played his favorite hymns on guitars and a mandolin.
She might not come back to this paradise, but she will see Earl again in the heavenly one. Oh, he’ll be there, a man of that kind of faith and integrity. And surely Boyd, and also Alice. Picturing this makes her grin a little. No wonder marriage is ‘till death do you part.’ What a mess in heaven, otherwise. Though she can hardly fathom what it will be like, one thing she knows for sure: They’ll all be healthy, and free of sorrow, and one great big family. Paradise.
