by Joe Henry
Does it hurt? she whispered. He shook his head watching her eyes. Waiting. And then her lips without meaning to and without warning suddenly parted and surprising even herself she laughed outright joyous, and clapping her hand over her mouth making him laugh too. But even before he could make a sound the dagger-blade under his bandaging made his eyes close and his lips part too but on clenched teeth that failed to contain his breath.
Don’t, she cried. Please. With her fingers straining against the walls of his forearms as if she would try to hold the thing back that tore at him. Until finally his hands opened that had clutched both her shoulders with such a ferocity that it almost frightened her, his having grasped her as an animal might importuning only a release from its pain. And then it was gone, that pain. And as if her hands had a will of their own they drew him down again carefully drawing against the hard unfeeling adhesive that covered him. Don’t, she sobbed into his chest. Please. And then drawing him down even further he was inside her once again. He was safe inside her once again. And where she still held him even as they slept.
Something seemed to be scratching at the wall where the heater was and where the leaves still slowly rose up, as if something with metal claws was trying to find a way to get in from the outside. Something metallic scraping against a like surface metal on metal with quick repetitive strokes. And then whatever it was it thudded against that same wall which was opposite the bed but still only a few feet away, as if if the sharp determined scraping wouldn’t work then perhaps a more blunt assault would. Then the scratching resumed until it thudded against the wall once again. And then it was gone. But Luke had already fallen asleep again and so his dreaming mind had already made what had disturbed it a new part of his dream.
He was still asleep when she moved out from under where he lay, careful not to wake him. She covered him anew with the blankets and then increased the setting on the heater so the flames grew brighter and gave off more warmth. And then she dressed. When she went outside she pulled the bottom of her wool cap into the high collar of her coat and then stepped around to where she thought she’d heard something scraping at the outer wall and then a heavy thud which she remembered is what had woken her, but she couldn’t see anything in the dark and the blowing snow swirled in her face so she had to bow her head. A single stroke from a tiny bell suddenly sounded once and then again, much too delicate a thing quavering and then silenced in the wind. She looked up to find its source but quickly had to look down again to shield her eyes.
There was a closed service-station across the road from the motel office with a great white disk with a dark star in its center on top of a tall stanchion, and in the midst of the storm it seemed a distant moonlike thing reflecting its pale light in all the ambient and nearly cohered snowfall. They had heard the bell before and Luke had finally decided that it was probably the air hose that hung against the outside wall, and that it must have blown off its holder. And so when the wind blew against it with enough force and at just the right angle the indicator bell that tolled the pounds-per-inch of forced air would ring. Which it did once again.
There were several big prints in the drifted snow and as she went back along the line of ragged dark shapes that were other cabins, she tried to walk in what must have been someone’s nearly filled boot-holes but she also had to step between them so whoever made them took one step for every two of hers. But then they crossed over to the opposite line of cabins before she came to the one where she stayed. She heard the bell again muted and then crystal-clear and then suddenly cut off in the roar of the wind as she closed the door behind her. Her roommate lay in exactly the same position as when she had left, with her hands still clasped before her face as if she were trying to hide from something while she slept. The little travel-clock on the nightstand read five minutes past five. And nothing was the same. And yet everything was.
When Luke opened his eyes it was early in the morning. And she was gone. By the time Whitney returned, Luke was up and dressed and sitting in the chair reading. Whitney had a bag of breakfast food for both of them, and they were supposed to be back on the bus in a little more than an hour. The snow had stopped falling awhile ago and the low sky is as white as all the rest of the earth and a great stillness envelops everything, as if the storm had worn itself out with the night and now morning waited breathlessly to see what would follow.
The cold feels good to him after the closeness of the cabin as Luke waits outside for Whitney to collect their belongings and repack their travelbags. And as he stands there marveling at the world and feeling at the same time as frail as a wounded bird under his parka, the touch of her that’s almost unbearable confined so to his thinking mind makes him remember almost forgetting where each of them ended in the dark and the other one began. And all of it mixed up with her hands and her lips and her hair and those phantom leaves flowing endlessly upward that he could still see if but only inside him.
And then thankfully he remarks to himself a big hole in the snow, a large bootprint on the other side of the door. And then he sees two smaller ones as narrow as a deer’s going off in the opposite direction. And then another of those larger ones along the side wall where the snow is all stomped down. And up above just the outlet to the vent from the gas space-heater inside, a little metal plate set high up in the wall with a small round orifice. And so he fails to see the shiny new scars inside its collar which have been recently scored by a knife-blade.
Whitney doesn’t ask him about anything except how he’s feeling, but on the bus later as they’re flying along the highway and homeward bound at last, Luke says that he heard something strange in the middle of the night like maybe something metal scraping against something else that was metal too. And then whatever it was it seemed to thud against the wall until it must have gone away or else he just went back to sleep again. Or both. And then this morning there’re all these bootprints in the snow next to that same wall. Big ones.
Whitney looks up from his reading with some interest and then looks down again without saying anything. They both have schoolwork to do and they’re both quiet until finally Luke shuts his book on his knees and closes his eyes. Moments pass in the constant humming of the wheels and then Whitney turns to him and says, You remember that old man in East Lewiston? In the paper? When they found him in his trailer? Luke opens his eyes and halfway turns his head and says, What? And Whitney says, In that big storm. When they found him they said the snow had filled in the opening to the outside vent for his space-heater was how he died. The exhaust had gotten all caked over with snow they said, and he just never woke up. He never even knew it. He just never woke up. And Luke says, Yeah I remember that.
Well, that heater in our cabin it just reminded me, Whitney says. I’s sleeping on the floor in Percy and Lewis’s cabin and I musta dreamed about it or somethin. And Luke is looking at him. It musta woke me up. What? Luke says. That dream. And it kept bothering me so I couldn’t go back to sleep. Until finally I just had to get up. And when I come back her bootprints that remind me of a doe’s somehow that go up to the door that I saw before when they were fresh are near filled in, but there aren’t any new ones going the other way and so I figure she’s still there. Which made me kinda glad, I have to say. And Whitney gives him that big Whitney-smile of his that never fails to make Luke feel good, even when it just comes to his mind sometimes.
Anyway, I got my knife out. The ones Lonny gave us when we were little? Luke says. And Whitney nods his head. I got mine too, Luke says. Anyway, I know it’s crazy, Whitney says. I mean the odds of something like that happening again are probably a million to one. But I keep thinking, what if? What if? It was still snowing real good and I could just reach that little hole up in the wall, that little orifice from the heater, when I get all the way up on my toes. I couldn’t see up that high but I could still get the blade of my pocketknife into it.
Anyway, my foot went out from under me when I fell into the wall with my shoulder, but then I got my knife up ther
e again just to be sure. Until I slipped again, which was when I give that wall another good shot just for good measure. And by then the side of my face that catches the wind makes me feel like I’m a damn snowman or somethin because my ear’s all filled up with snow too. And I remember thinking, just like that little hole in the wall coulda been.
Whitney twists around to get his bandanna out of his back pocket and blows his nose. With gusto. Neither of them says anything. Luke looks out the window and watches the highway go by as Whitney resumes his reading. Luke rubs his eye and then shakes his head and mumbles something to himself but just barely out loud. And Whitney looks up and turns and says, What? Luke shakes his head again and says, Nothing. And then he turns and looks down at Whitney’s open book that rests on his knees and says, I just said “Brothers.” Whitney nods and then as a little smile starts he says, Right to the end. And then he says it too, Brothers. And turns the page. And Luke nods to himself and goes back to looking out the window.
And the snow that had begun again earlier has finally stopped altogether and he can see where the sun which is still hidden behind the overcast is almost getting ready to break through. But before it does his eyes close again and this time his chin drops on his chest and his shoulder slumps into the sidewall. Whitney turns and smiles again and then goes back to his reading.
And a moment later sunlight suddenly beams in their window following the bus and touching Whitney’s open hand that lies on his book and touching Luke too where he rests his head, sound asleep at last and almost home.
YET STILL OF THE HEART
It had been snowing since sometime during the night. Spencer stopped at the little bunkhouse that Luke had moved into when Whitney left for the university down in Colorado. He was having to attend some cattlemen’s meeting or some such in Cheyenne. The radio says it slackens off somewhere this side of Casper, Spencer says, so I should be back by nightfall I reckon.
I told Mrs. Bowman I’d come by, Luke says. Toebowman’s birthday or somethin. Well, tell her to set up another plate then, Spencer says. You were already invited, Luke says. Spencer shakes his head and says, I plumb forgot. And then raising his free hand as he opens and closes the door behind him, he goes to his pickup.
Luke watches him out the window as his taillights disappear behind the heavy ragged fringe of the snowfall before he even gets as far as the first cattleguard. He places another stick of firewood in the little woodstove and finishes getting dressed. He darned near just woke up and he’s already hungry, he thinks. After he gets something to eat he’ll go feed. Red and Aggie were off to see their new grandbaby, so the cattle will be impatient with him for his having to get to them by himself. Especially after the first load for he’ll be later than they’ll be expecting it but he’ll still be there.
He walks over to the big house instead of going across to Red’s where he’d normally get his breakfast. Spencer had left the light on outside the pantry door and as Luke trudges toward it through the dark snow he sees himself as a little boy still in his pajamas and saying Mama can I have something that he doesn’t remember what and she turns with her fair hair fallen on both sides of her face while she bends over Lemon who is just full-grown then and smiling up at her with closed eyes as she rubs his thick neck saying Lemon Lemon don’t you be an ol’ kitchen-dog and rocking him toward that same door with his toenails sliding on the floor and both of them Elizabeth and Lemon knowing that she’ll invariably change her mind and let him stay before she ever gets as far as opening it for him. I’m coming honey she says still kneading at Lemon’s shoulders as if she can’t quite make herself quit like those good-luck dogs on Chinese amulets, but this one a full-fledged member of their immediate family who is gazing back at her with absolute and unabashed love.
It’s already snowed more than a foot since last night. He removes his boots using the old jack that one of the hay-hands had made long before he can remember by welding together several discarded horseshoes. Ever since he was small the kitchen always seems at least half-empty. Spencer could have the whole damn hay crew in with all their kids and their wives fixing dinner for the end of another season and to him, and he imagined to Spencer too, no matter how much commotion there was it was still always mostly empty-seeming because it was still missing Elizabeth, the one person who most belonged there.
He stood at the counter eating from the pot of cold spaghetti and sauce that Spencer had cooked up the night before until he’d made a good dent in what had been left over accompanied by a couple of slices of bread and a big glass of orange-juice. It took him most of the morning to feed and then into the afternoon to reload the hay sleds. They were using the two lower hay corrals all the way across the south meadow which was under how much snow he didn’t know but enough so it surely wouldn’t see the light of day for probably another three months at the soonest. After he’d returned to the house again to have his lunch from the same cold pot where he’d fed at for breakfast he went down to the barn to trim Lefty’s feet and then Copper’s who’d had their shoes removed after the first bad storm at the start of October when the cold had set in strong enough so they knew that the snow was there to stay.
Tom and Jerry the two Belgian drafthorses that he’d used that morning were still playing with the last of their hay and he gave them each another measure of grain so that they swung back to their troughs as soon as they heard it plash against the worn bitten wood. The other and younger team of Buck and Buddy stood dreaming in their stalls as the snow continued all through the day and into the night again like a great shaggy wall of dark cold feathers patiently sifting down and filling all the high country at the foot of what someone a long time ago had renamed the Neversummer Mountains.
Luke rode Lefty the four miles or so up to the Bowmans’ for he hadn’t been exercised since the day before. The snow had backed off some but when they left to go home it was coming down again heavier than ever and Luke could see when his eyes got used to the darkness where Lefty’s hoofprints from earlier in the evening were all filled in and no more than shallow dimples in the otherwise unbroken surface that as they got more than halfway disappeared altogether. The wind had picked up smartly too driving the snow into their faces and making him ride with his head lowered. He had always wondered how the snow sometimes seemed to possess a barely perceptible netherlight of its own, for even in the dark he could still see if not beyond him into his surroundings then at least that diminishing flaw where he knew the road was somewhere beneath them.
Spencer had phoned from Cheyenne to extend Toebowman his best wishes and also to have him tell Luke that they had closed the roads north and west out of the city and so he’d try it again in the morning. When Luke went to get his coat Mrs. Bowman had followed after him with Bradley right behind her, and she says, Luke, you leave that hanging right where it is. And Luke says, Ma’m? And she says, There’s beds aplenty and you’ll still be back in time to feed in the morning. Then she turns and says to Bradley, who was Luke and Whitney’s age, Whyn’t you go and see if Lefty’s got everything he needs. And Bradley reaches over for his own coat though still in his stocking feet.
Luke says, We’re fine, Mrs. Bowman. Honest. She peers at him with that stern look behind her glasses and her hands on her hips and her mouth set hard as if a scolding was just beginning to brew, her being the closest thing to a mother both geographically and probably otherwise that he and Whitney had known for all those years since Elizabeth died when they were little. And once or twice a week, week after week and month after month and year in and year out, leaving a casserole of food or a pan of cake or whatever with Doris at the post office to give to whichever of the Davises that came in first. And if she’d hear from Doris too most likely that one of them hadn’t been out front for the school bus she always seemed to reappear, having gotten all her own taken care of, like some birdlike angel of grace with keen eyes behind her eyeglasses and kind hands rapping on the window of the pantry door until someone would come to open it and to take the cove
red platter from her so she could bend over and kick herself out of her galoshes which she never seemed to have the time to snap all the way shut.
We’ll be fine, Mrs. Bowman. Honest, he says again. She steps in front of him and puts her small determined hand on the sleeve of his coat, that old sheepskin that had already seen better days when Spencer was a younger man but that had so much of his history worn into it and then of each of his boys who wore it in their turn at least to do their chores in, that it would probably remain a part of the physical assets of the ranch like the land and the buildings for the duration.
It’s stormin somethin awful out, she says, and even your paw … Yes’m, Luke says bowing his head. And you know hell’d freeze over and thaw before they kept Spencer Davis from going anywhere he’d had his mind set on. Luke nods and grins in spite of himself and says, If me and Lefty don’t know that road by now between your kitchen and barn and ours … Then he half-turns to meet Bradley’s eyes which somehow convey both agreement and disapprobation all at the same time, until she pulls at Luke’s arm so he looks back around.
Luke Davis, if you go off and get lost … No’m, he says, we’re fine. Honest. She shakes her head slowly from side to side with her eyes and her lips already softening so he can see that the scolding that was just getting up steam has all but dissipated and probably even been forgotten. You boys, she says. All of you. And your paws too, still shaking her head. But Luke can see now that she’s mostly just keeping herself from actually smiling, sort of like when you need to go ahead and yawn but decide to try to keep your mouth shut. Well alright, she says, but you promise me if it’s too bad you’ll turn around and get back here. Ma’m, he says nodding his head.
