by Joe Henry
Elizabeth presses up against me as we proceed down the aisle, but before we reach him the judge leans forward and says something to someone on either side of the front row. And so the prosecuting attorney stands up beside me as my best man, while the defense attorney rises and stands beside Elizabeth as her full-bearded maid of honor.
The judge instructs each of us in turn. And then digging into my pants-pocket and finding only keys, I experience a moment of real panic that disappears when I find what I’m looking for on my other side. And I give it to him, and then he gives it back to me. And as I turn to Elizabeth, she turns too, and I slide the silver ring onto her finger and continue to hold her hand in mine to steady it, both my hand and hers.
The judge speaks again as we face him. And then turning back to one another we embrace and kiss. And that whole courtroom of strangers, including accused and accuser, still probably more than a little stunned at their unexpected change of perspective, suddenly erupts in a din of applause and cheers as now-wedded and still holding hands we flee back up the aisle and out that same door through which we had first entered.
Angels.
FAMILY
There were summer evenings I remember coming up from the barn after the long day’s haying, Spencer says. And seeing Elizabeth through the trees before she could see me. Her apron still about her waist, sitting on the porch steps, and with the warm wind blowing through that beautiful straw-colored hair of hers as she watched at the sky already darkening in the east with that faraway look on her face. As if she could still hear the rising and falling tide that she had grown up with washing up against the bank of the lower meadow.
And I never asked her, for I was shy of her answer and maybe even a little afraid too of what she might say. Because I always knew in my heart, as the brutal winters wore on, that she suffered us our way of life. And maybe not the way of it so much as its grinding harshness.
That second winter with that filly of hers. I tried to make her understand well before the mare dropped the foal how it was too late in the year in our country for something to be born. Too late for the little one to be able to gain enough strength to make it through the winter. And how when such a thing happened, it was always best for both the mama and the little one to do away with the baby. So the mother could recover herself before the really bad cold set in. And not prolong the life of the little one, for no matter how strong it seemed at birth it would fight a painful battle with winter and lose. For the cold is always that much more powerful than the warm, than the fragile heat of life.
But no, she absolutely refused to hear of it, refused to even consider what I wanted her to understand. Which at the root of it was the very law of the land. Red or one of the other hands happened to be around the barn when the mare went down, shaking and all sweated through. She’d begun to tie-up, which is caused somehow by the muscle enzymes going haywire, and for any number of different reasons. And being pregnant, with her hind end suddenly one big contraction, it had thrown her into labor too although she was still a couple of weeks early.
We finally get ahold of Stony Walls, our vet, just coming in to his dinner, and he comes and goes to work on her. But it seems as if one bad thing follows another. The mare can’t really help herself, with her muscles seized up like that, and to top it all off the baby’s gonna come breech. Which is when the butt is positioned to deliver first instead of the head.
Stony’s up inside her trying to get the foal turned around, but it’s just no damn good. And all the while Elizabeth’s kneeling close to the mare’s head and rubbing up and down her neck whenever she quiets down some, thrashing about and making these godawful groaning sounds and then resting back down again. Stony gets the little one’s rear legs started, with the smoke rising off his bare arms, and then Red and I take over for him so’s he can have a breather. We sit with our knees against each other pulling steadily on the foal’s legs until we can finally see it’s a filly for sure, but it seems to hang up on something inside the mare who continues to thrash and grunt against the bed of shavings where she lies.
Elizabeth, I say as I move her hair out of her face, you be right careful for the poor thing’s having an awful rough time. And then for one second, the way your mind does, her hands on that distressed animal remind me of my mother’s hand on my forehead when I was a little boy and had to stay home from school. And then that image jumps all the way into the future and turns back into Elizabeth’s hand again but this time on the forehead of one of our own children who as far as I know hadn’t even gotten started yet.
Stony gets between Red and me once again, nudging us off to either side, and reaches back inside the mare until he gets the foal’s one foreleg that was bent and holding it back freed up the way it needs to be. He continues to pull against its hind legs until suddenly the baby rushes out of her, knocking Stony on his back and lying on top of him. He finally straightens up with the baby clasped in his arms and just sits there like that.
You alright? I ask him. And he tells me he wants whatever blood that’s left in the placenta to get into the foal before he cuts it loose from the mama. The mare lies back with her head stretched out and Stony ties off the cord and then carries the foal into the next stall. Elizabeth’s brought him a couple of blankets and he kneels in the corner with the baby beneath them and his arms around it like before, with its head over his shoulder. And I can still see its lovely little face with its big eyes blinking with wonder in the gloom of the barn as if it were thinking to itself, So this is life. So this is what the fuss is all about.
Elizabeth stays with the baby, and Stony draws off the mare’s first milk and then tube-feeds it into the foal through its nostril to be sure she gets all of it into her stomach. It’s past nine o’clock and I send Red home for he’s got a full day in the morning, and of course I do too. But as it turns out, the night has just begun.
When an animal ties-up like that, its kidneys will eventually shut down which will lead to its death. So our only chance of keeping the mare alive is to keep running fluids into her until she’s urinating normally, which should indicate that her kidneys are still OK. But then it’s still a damn crapshoot, because if there’s been too much muscle damage she wouldn’t be any good for herself anyway.
Stony had come prepared for the long haul when we’d described to him over the phone what was happening. And so he’d brought with him several cases of those electrolyte fluid-bags along with a week’s supply of milk-replacement for the baby. And he gets himself all set up like he knows that tomorrow’s a hell of a long ways off but he still intends to be there with the mare alongside him and that they’ll both see the morning together.
He sews a catheter into her jugular vein and then hangs the first of the clear plastic bags from a hook he’s screwed into an overhead beam. Then he attaches a long transparent tube that goes from the bottom of the bag into the portal at the mare’s neck. And I watch with him for a few minutes as the liquid begins to drip and fall.
Elizabeth’s mixed up a batch of that milk-replacement, and she’s got a baby-bottle of it with a rubber nipple, and she’s setting in the next stall talking to the foal and rubbing its forehead and trying to get it interested in what she’s got to offer. I kneel down with her and tell her that I’ll get the baby started, and could she get Stony some dinner, which reminds me that we hadn’t had our own yet either. And she goes off.
Well the baby keeps nosing around the bottle in my hand with that wonderful soft skin of the newborn, and I’m setting up against her as Elizabeth had been and probably mumbling some of that same foolishness in the foal’s ear as I watch her eyes wide and new. And her eyelashes when she blinks somehow make me smile. She finally gets it in her mind to try what’s behind the nipple and begins drawing at it, with those lovely eyes of hers going back and forth and every now and again looking right at me.
Looks to me like she’s found her a daddy, Stony says. And I look up to see him standing against the opening to the stall with his arms cros
sed on his chest and a big smile on that mug of his. The mare’s quiet, he says. We’ll keep the fluids to her as long as it takes. Will she eat anything? I ask him. And he says, Oh she’ll nibble at some grain every now and again but she’s not real interested. The baby takes another bottle of the milk substitute and then just puts its chin down on its knee and closes its eyes and goes to sleep. And I move away and close the stall door real quiet-like so’s it’ll take its rest.
We all eat in the runway between the stalls with Stony periodically checking on the mare. He’s got three of those fluid-bags strung together and hanging there so it gives us time to eat our dinner. But while we’re still at it, there’s a thrashing from the baby’s stall and we look in at her just beginning to get her legs. She gets her hind legs under her and nearly locked and pauses like that, quivering, but when she goes to rise up off her elbows she rocks back and falls over.
Stony’s gone back to the mare and Elizabeth goes in to the foal. She’ll do’er, I say, standing back and watching. For it’s always been a miracle to me, the birth, and then seeing them make themselves stand upright and soon after bouncing and jumping around like they’d been practicing their locomotion for months instead of just hours.
Elizabeth crouches in the corner beside the little thing as it somehow forces itself back into the same position. Pushing up its hind legs all aquiver, and with its little tail sucked right flat against its butt. Elizabeth slides her open hands under its belly, not hardly touching it, and as it pushes up off its front and starts over again she supports underneath it so that all four legs are straight and locked. It hesitates for just a moment, still trembling with its new little muscles that only an hour or so ago had been what it only needed to paddle with in the warm safe waters of the womb. And then it extends one foreleg for its first step, but before getting it accomplished it pitches forward and dives woefully back onto its face.
Don’t take very much to learn to fall, Stony says quietly beside me. But the getting back up again, I say, the will to get back up. Aye, Stony says, for each and every one of us I reckon. And inside myself I say, Amen. And then again, A-men.
We get Stony all fixed up with a pillow and that ancient great-grandma’s quilt that must weigh fourteen or fifteen pounds at least. Elizabeth feeds her filly again which had been sleeping on its side weary from the hard journey it’d traveled that evening. All the way from that far inland sea which is all it’d ever known before being cast up on a rough and fearful shore. And then more wondrous than frightening amid the quiet hours of myriad discovery, it had found itself not seacreature at all but something apparently unsuited to its new environment.
A fragile tottering stick-legged thing, having known its first hunger and then perhaps its first independent dream too of unimagined places where its legs once they worked more harmoniously might take it. For it had finally managed its first few precarious steps, and known warmth again after its startling discovery of the cold, and recovered the darkness too after its incomprehensible discovery of the light. And there appeared to be many mothers for its choosing. None that slept beside it just then but many kindly mothers nonetheless.
Stony tells Elizabeth that he’ll feed the baby through the night as long as he’s right there, for she’ll no longer have such a luxury after he leaves. But, No, she says, she reckons where she’ll be in that baby’s stall every two hours for the next three days. And then she’ll proceed from there onward until the poor little thing is ready for weaning. And I can see right then and there that this whole event is about to provide an actual treasure of learning for someone, and as I walk back up to the house by myself I figure that I’m probably the one that’s about to be reeducated. For Elizabeth seems to know just precisely where this whole affair is headed. And I’ll be damned if she isn’t up and down all night long those first few days.
And when the filly can finally go for four whole hours between feedings, it almost seems like a vacation, at least to me and our alarm-clock. Like when you get a spate of twenty- or thirty-below-zero weather, and it sets in real good and firm sometime after the new year. Why, a rise up to say five-below-zero is near to almost being downright tropical. And a day that actually makes it all the way back to zero, so you’re neither on the plus or the minus, why that’s practically shirtsleeve weather. Making you wonder as you leave the house if you really do need your coat or not. And although you’ve still got nearly five months to go, you know that spring is absolutely inevitable. And hellfire, why a man’s hopefulness can just about soar on rosy new wings unfettered.
I’ve already finished shaving and I’m nearly dressed when the alarm goes off for the six o’clock feeding. I tell Elizabeth that I’ll take care of that one, and I’ll see her by suppertime. I guess she’d fixed Stony some food at the four o’clock, and as I enter the barn all is quiet. I creep past the baby’s stall and see that she’s asleep with her legs stretched out straight as if she were dreaming of standing squarely upright. And then I look in at the mare and Stony and, I’ll be, I whisper to myself.
The lights over each of the stalls are off but the ones that are spaced further apart over the runway are still on. The last one is opposite the mare’s stall so that the baby lies in near darkness, while a dim half-light spreads over most of Stony and the mama.
He’s got the fluid dripping at a slower rate and of the three bags that hang there she’s almost finished with the second one. A couple of empty plates are stacked on top of each other and pushed off to one side with a fork laid across them. And Stony is setting in the bedded shavings with his back leaning away from the wooden partition and his legs out before him. And with the mare’s face lying across his lap.
He’s still got the quilt wrapped about his shoulders but it’s nearly fallen off one side of him. His left arm is turned away from the horse, with the fingers of that hand almost touching a saucer that holds an empty teacup. As if he had just had time to set it down before sleep had finally overtaken him, in midstride so to speak. His other arm lies across the mare’s neck, and his face rests on her head. And they’re both sound asleep.
All God’s creatures, I think as I stand there watching them. And the beauty of it, of the oneness of all life, just about freezes me so that I am almost afraid that if I blink I might disturb them. All God’s creatures.
TOMATOES
Behind the house and out the kitchen window with the mountains shimmering violet and white in the distance, all the summer’s bedlinen ballooned and flapped in the wind. Like the furling snapping sails of an imaginary old schooner that had somehow run aground in the tall green pasture before making it back to the level swaying ocean somewhere beyond. That none of the three boys had ever seen.
Luke and Whitney raced each other up the stairs but Whitney got there first, grabbing the compass that Lonny, their older brother, had given them and shown them how to use. And that they both tried to watch at the same time as they came bumping back down. Until Whitney had to catch at the banister, so that Luke could snatch it away. But then Whitney grabbed it right back even before the little red needle had ceased turning. There was a tin with pie left in it on the kitchen counter that Whitney said was west of the stairs, but when Luke plucked the compass back out of his hands he corrected the heading as actually being west-northwest.
They took the pie tin to the table and stood there with each of the two pieces dripping through their fingers and crushed against their faces. Their father, Spencer, was off with the haying and Lonny was with him. They didn’t know where their mother, Elizabeth, was for the pickup was gone too. But surely not all the way into Lewiston because this was Saturday and she always went to town on Monday.
The sunlight glared through the window and over the floor and up the table where they stood with their mouths full, chewing madly to see who could finish first with bright red cherry-fruit all over them like a paint. They both went to the sink at the same time. Luke dragged the stepstool up so they could stand and thrust their hands under the rushing water tha
t bounded off both of them like they were puppies in a bath.
The bedsheets through the window were like gleaming bright banners sailing away from the lines that anchored them until the wind fell, and then they looked like big whitewashed walls lacking ornament or artifice. The mountains seemed to ripple in the sun almost purple and with a silver band of old snow that never melted completely outlining each peak and saddle as if they were the seldom exposed ramparts of the fortress of the world that you could only see glimpses of for a month or two in the middle of summer before the snows returned to cover them up all over again. And just then the mountains seemed to ride on top of the sheets, which were flapping again like massive white wings. And on the other side of the tomatoes.
Arranged in neat rows on the sash of the lower half of the window and crowded up against each other on the sill and the ledge above the sink where the bar of soap and the bottle of detergent and the sponge had all been moved aside so that as many tomatoes as could fit in that parallelogram of almost blinding brightness could bask and sun in safety. Already red and just about ripe and obviously set there to ripen even further, that Elizabeth must have brought back from the greenhouse in East Lewiston because there wasn’t ever enough time where they lived to grow tomatoes down on the ground. What with how late spring arrived and then only that brief respite from the cold that they called summer squeezed in between the end of June and the end of August. And with that prescient suspicion of October already coloring the wind somehow like a precursor sometimes just after dusk.
And so there just wasn’t enough time. Whether in the high valley that protected the town of Lewiston nearly eighteen miles away or higher still amongst the vast ranchlands carved out of the government territory long ago that couldn’t be called a settlement with any manner of confederation except that one fortunate tributary ran through most of it. And too, with one of the original old homesteader’s cabins centrally situated where Doris Moore still lived, widowed and with her children long grown and gone, as postmaster of what had always been called as long as anyone could remember, Lime Creek.
