by Joe Henry
The ends of each of the sheets drag in the dirt and catch on sage and scrub as both little boys go, receding lopsided ghost shapes that dimly reflect the light from the stars and the peel of the new moon hanging somewhere between the barn and the distant wall of the invisible mountains. And then Spencer can no longer see them nor hear them either. But all the way across the meadow and raised up in that same darkness, they are bound toward that one constant light behind that one upstairs window that still persists in that vast and sightless night, like a golden yellow fragile hopeful thing to show them the way. And back to where they started from.
Spencer builds up the fire for himself and watches into it sitting with his back against the tree until his eyes close listening to the slow low creek of the end of summer clucking across its eternal bed of smooth and priceless stones. Listening. Eventually he senses that the dying firelight no longer interrupts the darkness and he stirs with his arms still folded on his chest. The fire has become just two glowing orange coils of ash. He pushes himself up groaning to himself and then crushes what’s left of it and scatters it with his boot. When he turns he sees that the moon has moved closer to the barn, while the yellow light in the upstairs window farther on still reassures him as if it somehow anchored the close even arc of his life, along with those other beloved lives that slept behind it waiting for him.
He always limped some the first few steps when he stood up until he walked through it and through the stiffness. And to him his limp was Parker and somehow Parker’s abiding presence. His best friend in the War and truly his brother-in-arms. And so Spencer was glad that it was there because he never wanted to forget him. And of course he never would. Because that was the first lesson of war. Not the horror, which is its other name. But love. Because knowing you’re about to die, and that the person beside you is about to die too, all of what makes you who you are in an instant of fear so intense that it stops your breath and nearly stops your heart too, disappears. And all that is left is love. Unquantifiable love for the other man who for one more moment is still there beside you. Only love.
And so Spencer’s limp always reminded him of Parker, and especially of Parker’s eyes, which he also had never been able to forget. Not one day since that day. And since that moment when he watched them change, with Parker’s head lying in his lap. And then in place of Parker’s eyes frightened and questioning were the eyes of a statue that no longer could see him and turning to stone.
So that was Spencer’s lameness when he first stood up and not the arthritis nor the jag of the ill-healed bone. It was Parker and the machine-gun fire that hadn’t let up all day since pinning them down, and Spencer’s own life slowly ebbing away beneath the imperfect tourniquet made of his torn sleeve that he had bound about the top of his right leg. Until he suddenly realizes that the round olive-drab boulder in the grass that somehow he hadn’t noticed before was actually the top of a helmet. Was actually Parker inching towards him on his belly to try to help him. Until something that neither of them ever saw seems to just barely lift Parker and at the same time knock him backwards. And he doesn’t move again.
And so finally dragging Parker to lie with his head on him while he sits back against the blasted tree trunk that still shielded him from the ceaseless wind of death that was all around them. That was Parker and the mortal scar torn down the length of the outside of Spencer’s thigh that resembled a broad shiny sword of flesh with little shiny lace-holes like buttons all up and down either side of it.
And then, reminded of his scar, he sees himself and his three boys upstairs in the bathroom after that tremendous water-fight that Lonny had started with the can of shavefoam that Spencer had set out on the sink. Lying in the empty tub and playing the cool water over him with the rubber hose he’d attached to the tub spigot in the days before he’d put in the shower. And before he’d been attacked, with shaving-cream and water all over the black and white floor, and Elizabeth standing for a moment in the door with her hands all white with flour, and them letting her have it too so she jumps back into the hall and maybe even floats back downstairs.
And then finally spent, they declare a truce so they can all dry themselves. And Whitney touches the broad shiny scar that almost covers the outside of Spencer’s upper leg and says, What’s that? with his finger still resting there. And Spencer says, while rubbing his own head with his towel, That’s where your pa got hurt a long time ago. Then he lets the towel down at his side and sits on the curved edge of the tub. Somebody with a gun, Spencer says. And Lonny says, In the War, right Pa? And Spencer says, That’s right son, in the War. And Luke asks, How come? And by then each of the boys is also dry and Whitney and Luke sit on the edge of the tub to Spencer’s right while Lonny sits on his other side. And Spencer’s outspread arms like wings enfold them all.
Because in the War, Spencer says, people go to hurt each other. With guns. And Luke says once again, How come? And Spencer looks at the two little boys and says almost in a whisper, I don’t know boys. I don’t really know if anyone knows. And Whitney says, Then why do they do it? And Spencer shakes his head as he watches the open window filled with green leaves that make a soft clattering sound when the warm wind blows, and tells them how people shoot the guns at each other to try to hurt each other. And that a bullet from one of the guns had gone into his leg and broken the bone. And Whitney asks, Did you do it too, Pa? And Spencer says, What? And Whitney says, Shoot the guns at the people? And Spencer whispers, Yes. And Luke says, How come? And Spencer whispers, I don’t know. And then as if he were really just talking to himself, I don’t know if I’ll ever know.
And so that was Spencer’s limp that disappeared altogether after his first five or six steps. And if you hadn’t been looking for it, expecting it when he stood up, you wouldn’t have even known it was there. Unless he was angry or in a hurry or both, and then it might come back again until something inside him would just bear down somehow and make it go away. Until the next time.
He could feel the night dew collecting on his boots as he followed the stubble where the first swath of hay had been mown. Above him infinitely familiar and far was Orion’s belt of stars with its lesser sword, and brightest of all Sirius the home of the gods and where all wisdom was supposed to have come from. The Hunter and his Dog forever tracking Taurus across the northern summer sky. Then he watched up at the yellow bedroom window once more with his steps even and sure so that whatever hurt there may have been in the bone, or perhaps in the heart, was hidden inside him again and no longer made manifest to the night.
He turns the wick down in the ancient lantern on the nighttable beside the bed. Elizabeth is sound asleep and turned so she faces the open window with its delicate veil of a curtain, and with the shallow hump of her shoulder risen up beneath the quilt. Then he stands in the dark hall on the other side of Lonny’s open door listening to his first-born son’s breathing, and somehow satisfied he proceeds toward that same bathroom where a narrow strip of light now outlines the bottom of its door. He stands and listens once again but hears nothing. Then the slow steady drip of a faucet as if it were nearly closed but not quite. He silently turns the knob and enters.
A second door opposite him opens into the little boys’ room, and their light is on too. A haphazard trail of empty sneakers and formless garments flung every which way as if their erstwhile occupants hadn’t had time enough to discard them before taking their leave runs from the sink across the tiled floor and through the other door where two little naked bodies are cast up on what could be if he narrows his eyes marooned pieces of some recent and obvious shipwreck.
Luke is turned upside-down clinging acrobatically to the foot of his bed so he seems to balance at just such an angle as to hang above the floor however precariously. His pillow hides the back of his head and his eyes are closed and his mouth open, but his breath makes no sound. His blankets are twisted up in his feet so one leg and buttock and one shoulder and arm are left uncovered.
Whitney sprawls on his ba
ck clutching his blankets to his chest but his legs hang over the side with one foot resting on Lemon’s shoulder, who sleeps beneath him on the floor. Whitney’s eyes are closed too and as he breathes behind his pressed lips he makes a faint buzzing sound as if a honeybee were caught inside him trying to find a way out.
Spencer closes the overhead light in the boys’ room so a flat pale wedge from the bathroom still shines across the floor. He places his hands under Luke and lifts him into the center of his bed, rearranging his covers and pillow so his dirty face and hands are all that are left exposed. And of course still smelling of little boys in his hair all mixed up with sage and raw soap and cherry and dog. When he lifts Whitney, he rolls over so Spencer has to lift him again to get his blankets out from under him. Whitney sighs and his buzzing grows still when he lies his head back on his pillow smelling exactly like Luke, an amalgam of sweat and claydirt and soap and sugarcherry, and his face and arms and hands are just as dirty.
Lemon makes a sound when he yawns that’s like opening a door with hinges that haven’t been oiled in a long time, and as Spencer finishes tending to Whitney the dog’s tail beats happily against the floor. When Spencer finally turns from the bed he bends down and kneads Lemon’s muscular shoulders and neck so he lies his chin on Spencer’s foot until Spencer moves away, passing silently back through the bathroom and into the hall.
When he returns, the dog has gone back to sleep too and both boys are in exactly the same positions as he had left them. He places a piece of notepaper on top of their clothes-bureau, which still has half its drawers open with garments and socks spilling over and hanging down. And a five-dollar bill that almost covers the one word that he’s printed on the paper in pencil. Tomatoes. Then he retrieves one of the little sneakers and places it on top of the money and the piece of paper so the soft breeze in the window curling the filmy curtains won’t blow them away. Tomatoes.
Inextricably joined from then on, like the rewiring of dissimilar synapses that once touched together become fused so in the fabric of memory. Immutable, irrepressible and inviolable to everything except death. Tomatoes. Forever after inspiring images that have little to do with the nourishment of the flesh. But like everything else having everything to do with the feeding of the soul.
Tomatoes.
SLEEP
The barn was closed off to us the whole day of Christmas Eve, Luke says. Because Spencer, our father, would be working there no matter how cold it was. And I remember how small we were, Whitney and me, wrestling and tumbling over each other. And how Lonny, our older brother, was always the leader. And so we always wanted to do what Lonny was doing. And too, how Lonny seemed to have this patient kindness for us, the almost-grown shepherd to his tiny flock of half-wild little boys.
And at that same time my memory of Elizabeth, our mother, is always of her cooking all day. And the smells of it building and carrying us in a fever of expectation until it would reach a kind of fragrant crescendo that by the time we would finally sit down to Christmas dinner would have nearly exhausted all our senses. Her having to stop in the midst of her chores to see that we were bundled up enough against the cold and then ushering us toward the door with Lonny taking us each by the hand. You boys can walk up towards Doris’s to see those Christmas lights, she says, but I want you home again before it gets dark please.
We wanna ride Blue, Whitney says. The biggest animal that Whitney and I were allowed to be around. A great big sixteen-and-a-half-hand blue roan gelding as gentle as a long-legged old grandfather who had to be wary of where he placed his feet so that he would do nothing to jeopardize that unhurried gait of his, tired and knobbly but still eventually getting him where he figured he needed to go. And so solicitously careful when we were about him that in later years I often wondered if he had gained an instinct for us as being small two-legged creatures somehow akin to the phantom sons and grandsons never yet birthed into being but who still may have lived in his imagination behind that singular and imperturbable regard of his that was always on his greying face, bespeaking a boundless kind-eyed forbearance that somehow in the ancient way of the beast loved the young, the foals and the puppies and the little boys too.
And Elizabeth says, Not today boys. You mind that barn, Lonny, and be back before it’s dark. And Lonny says, Yes’m. And then we’re bumping and shoving each other along the frozen road that’s become the bottom of a topless tunnel between story-high snowbanks, eventually crossing both snowed-over cattleguards and then the culvert where the buried creek runs along that side of the ranch.
And then it would be dark and we’d finally leave the house to go down to the barn, and the sky behind the high country would just barely yet hold the very last of the light so that if you didn’t think to watch for it you’d miss it, the day’s end. There’d be four or five pickup trucks parked below the barn, and my remembrance is always of a crystal-clear moonless night with the temperature already below zero and the snow crunching so loud under our boots that you could even hear the steps of the other people and their kids walking up from where they’d left their vehicles.
And the stars by then, the stars seemed so big in the sky that you’d think you could almost hear them too like the burning of distant torches if you were to stop and really listen. There was this one huge one in the east in the winter that shone with different colors, and it stayed there all through the cold. Whitney and I assumed it to be the same star that all the stories talked about, but Lonny told us sometime later that it was in the constellation of the Dog. And we liked knowing that because our lives down here on the ground were so intertwined with animals that it only seemed natural for the stars to have a similar frame of reference too.
You could hear Toebowman’s guitar from inside the barn when you were still a little ways off, Bradley Bowman’s uncle Tobin who everyone called Toebowman as if his two names first and last were really one name put together. The sound of the guitar in the delicate clarity of the newborn night made everybody quiet as we approached, the loveliness of it so achingly simple and pure from out of the whelming darkness like an earth-bred accompaniment to a universe cut from glass. With the crunching snow and that simple human refrain on this side of the cold, and the stars so familiar and yet so distant on the other side.
Whitney and I and Lonny would all have fallen into that hush as we walked, and Elizabeth would squeeze my hand in my mitten without saying anything. And I could see her face in my mind without having to look up at her. We’d all be still as we entered the barn as if it were really a church of some kind, and as I remember how it always made me feel I really can’t imagine any difference.
In the far corner where the wall met the first stall was where Spencer would have set up the tree that late the day before he had cut and drug down from somewhere off the high ridge that looks over the lower part of the ranch. Lonny went with him on horseback, and watching from the parlor window we saw them walking their horses out of the growing dark with Lonny’s horse first and Spencer’s a step or two behind with the tree tied off at his saddlehorn and dragging over the surface of the snow.
And I remember the candles. The whole tree seemed full of lit candles. So many of them that their light seemed to push back the darkness when we’d come into the barn from out of the hard cold black night. And the shocking pristine vision of that candlelight would be like a miracle to me when I’d first see it. And then I’d see that all amongst the candles were hung apples and carrots and other fruits and vegetables wherever the broad boughs of the tree would support them.
Haybales would be positioned on the earthen floor for places to sit in front of the tree and also to separate the two or three horses, all groomed and with a tiny red or green knot of ribbon tied in their forelocks, who were free to walk about on the other side where Spencer had placed hay and grain for them to eat. Several yearling calves would be settled in two of the stalls and a number of weanling lambs that Spencer had trucked over from Ollie Wheeler’s early that morning in two others.
Toebowman would be sitting on one of the bales and playing and humming along as he picked at the strings of his instrument with those gloves that leave the fingertips exposed. We thought he’d cut off the ends of his gloves so he’d be able to play his guitar in the cold, and I remember thinking about cutting the ends of my mittens too but seemed to forget before actually getting it done. There’d be platters of cookies and pitchers of juice for the kids and eggnog for the folks and glasses arranged on trays that were set on top of three bales that were piled one on the other against the near wall.
The kids’d break away from the folks and the folks’d cluster on either side of Toebowman with handshakes all around and all the good wishes spoken back and forth from out of that shared existence of people living close enough to the earth to be kin to the various other families of beings who lived there also in that harsh and generally unforgiving environment that made us all—the Bowmans the next ranch over and nearly four miles away, and Ollie Wheeler and his family and hands and their families nearly fifteen miles off to the south—all neighbors. Folks who worked much longer hours than their work-animals, from dark to dark and most always beyond, day after day without heed of arbitrary divisions of time into weeks or months, and so telling the passage of it by the building and diminishing of the light and the waxing and waning of the moon and perhaps too by the awesome concentric circles of the fiery and yearning stars.
And closer to the heart, by the births and deaths of all the creatures given and taken from life around and about our high clear place on the earth that was rimmed by the near hills on one side and the far mountains on the other. Winged and two- and four-legged and silver swimmers and arrowlike flyers and runners horned and not with cloven feet and some with ten toes. The peach-fuzz turning to whiskers on the sons of man and coming up from the barn some warm Saturday evening seeing the gangly little girl you’d known right from seed suddenly appearing on the porch like her own lovely ghost waiting and then hugging you around your neck that had to still smell of the horse you’d been shoeing and saying, Your supper’ll be cold Daddy. And kissing her cheek, a woman, with her mother in her eyes and her own daughter there too if you were wise enough to see that far. And time turning grey in your beard and your hands like limp old claws turned hard with callus and age and your fingers cracking in the deathlike cold and healing with the earth under the healed places and cracking open again like fissures in the frozen ground waiting for the renewal of spring to restore what is held in abeyance back to the tender and fecund flesh, another winter. For time here wasn’t generally referred to in years but rather in the winters we have lived through. The sun is low and the warmth is brief and the light lives on between the dark and the dark.
