by Ann Pancake
Or—this occurred to me one night I couldn’t sleep—were you in worse trouble than I knew? Was my house a hiding place from somebody or something? Did you really spend all day in the mountain? Or did you slink back inside after I left?
You answered that question the day I came home early and you stayed gone ’til dusk. And during—I’m ashamed to admit it, Sull—I tiptoed into your room. I could not resist, a photo, a note, a list, even a book you were reading. Anything to open you a slit. But, closet closed, suitcase zipped, laptop shut, the room felt more barren than it had before you settled in.
I went no farther than a step inside the threshold, which is why I almost missed the single thing that spoke. A handful of white oak acorns. Pooled in the seat of the cherry wood chair. Without touching, I felt the polleny dust on their peel. I tasted the pucker inside. They’d moved you enough to take them. Something slipped in my chest.
LATER THAT WEEK, I passed a fallow field with buzzards in the hunched dozens. Eating something small and scattered, like carrion sown. Having Sull in my house made my son walk my mind even more than he already did, Jesse also gone from his face last time I saw him, and doubtless buried deeper now. But it was on the night of the buzzards that Sull finally said something real. Said it into the dark, not looking at me. Said she was frustrated—frustrated she said, not afraid—that too many years gone had numbed her forever to what was in woods. “How long do you think it’ll take?”—and she laughed at herself, but for the first time, I heard a fragileness there—“before I’ll get all the city out of me?”
I drew a sharp breath. So it wasn’t just peace and quiet you’d come for. Maybe I’d been right at the start, you did crave what I’d found. “Well, you just have to be patient,” I said. Those vultures had lifted in a chorus. Lofted off in their slow-flop buzzard way. “It’ll come,” I said, praying that time didn’t make a liar of me.
Because truth is, Sull—you’d gone to bed, I didn’t say it out loud—now city is everywhere. There is no place it doesn’t mute and dull and pad. It comes in trucks and on screens, city people carry it when they move in, and whatever is loudest trumps everything. Truth is, Sull, for decades I could not feel it myself, even though I never left this place. I never heard a thing between being little, when you hear it unconscious, like animals do, and my middle age. Only after I’d been torn down and drained did it enter, only then did it find holes to pass through. Even in the Bible, it says it takes an empty vessel. You only have room when loss lightens you.
BROWNBOY’D SUFFER MOST in the days, grazing in a cape of flies. Houseflies, bottleflies, horseflies, deerflies, feeding on panels of sorrel sweat, drinking from the pools of his eyes. The deerflies we dreaded most, playing in the creek in sagging swimsuits and tennis shoes against broken glass. The deerflies were the stealthiest and had a bee-sting bite.
I remember yelping and slapping my hand over my shoulder, the welt already on the rise. I remember shame over the tears in my eyes. I remember you taking my arms from behind and leaning in to find the place. You filled up your lungs. You salved it with breath.
YOUR PHONE DIDN’T ring at the beginning. The person on the other end waited to see if you’d call first. The single spot you got reception was the drive out front, so while I never eavesdropped, you’d pass me in the aftermath. Only a lover or a child, I knew, could light a fire of hurt that hot. Your bedroom door slammed behind you. My mouth went dry.
As Jesse forged on from liquor to pills, from lying to stealing, to probation to jail, Rick started dosing himself to survive our son. Overwork and television, denial and Internet. I swung between panic and talking myself out of what I knew to be true, between foolish hope and despair. Our life had turned a nightmare wait, for the knock, the call, the shot. Our marriage shrunk to scorekeeping, was it more him or me had made Jesse this way?
The afternoon I finally climbed in Clinton’s truck, I’d been faithful for twenty-two years. I undid that not once, but over and over for four months. Like you, Sull, I learned that if you savage others far enough, you end up savaging yourself.
Every morning you still crossed the wire and sloped down over the bank. Walked out of an evening with your empty water bottle, the lines rawer in your face. I watched your frustration cinch to fear, your fear ferment to doubt. And one night, from the bathroom window, I caught a glimpse and startled back. You in the front yard, standing still between sky and ground. I saw how they cupped you like a bird who’d been stunned.
Sull, the next morning, I couldn’t help myself again. After an hour, I pulled on my boots and crawled through the fence. It was easy to pick up your path, a scuffed rut in shin-deep leaves, and then you were following a deer trail. I would have done that, too. This time I wasn’t spying on you or even checking on you. It was something else I only got to once I’d been moving through the trees a while. I’d come to listen for it for you. Maybe if I got it speaking for me, you’d happen into it as well.
I climbed a hollowside on a slant, rested against a shagbark trunk on top. Heard a doe bound down one steep then up the other, dead leaves unbend in her wake. You’d told me you’d tried in those mountains out West, but nothing at all would come. But I knew our throats weren’t fit for out there, our bodies not tuned. You and me made from this land here.
Like I said, for thirty years, I didn’t go in the woods, despite living on their edge. I only went in after chemo, when I was told to “exercise.” Makes me smile to think of me then, winded in minutes, struggling up those shaley ridges, stumbling along dry runs. And of course, it wasn’t really exercise that sent me. Like you, it was the pressure of needing, and, like you, no idea what lay at that need’s other end.
But after a week, I understood how I could pull on the breathlessness of the climb to clear out the mess in my mind. I learned how the trees, if you move between them long enough, will eventually rub off your dirt. I’d fumbled around in here for a month when I turned a bend and the hollow came into my throat. All of it, the brittle of the leaves, the rock, the grit, but I could swallow finally without hurt. That was the first time I knew how to listen without ears, and then I started moving to it, the chords in my body tuning to the chords in the ground. The salving song didn’t come always and never at my bidding, but it came often enough to douse all doubt.
Sull, I see your broken face, the acorns on your chair. I remember your hand on Brownboy’s back, I feel your breath on my bite. If I could call it for you. If I could stand right alongside you, hearfeel it, and pass it through your skin. If I could tell you what to listen for, if I could name the part that hums.
And how much can life take from you? Sull, your livelihood, lovers, beauty, reputation, dignity. Me, my son, husband, breasts, innocence, righteousness, security. And I am not an ignorant woman. The whole world, I know, is losing, too. Rivers drying, mountains toppling, cities drowning under storms, and not many miles from here, in woods like these, they are even shattering the underground.
But still the land sings. And not just a singing, but louder, stronger, I tell you, every month it gets easier to hear. Because—listen—when everything is losing, everything is lightening, the distance between us thins and sheds. This is what loss gives. In these delicate, sharp, and beautiful, these brilliant unraveling days.
THOSE FIRST YEARS after Sull left, the last years before Brownboy’s death, his old body forgot how to shed. Wore into summer a dense, ashy wool a currycomb couldn’t begin to unsnag. That was not long after I got married, I was carrying Jesse, and I felt so sorry for Brownboy one evening I took scissors to the mats. But they were closer to the skin than I knew, and when the blood pooled out, grief speared me from my womb to my mouth. Wheeling away, I heard myself sob, even though Brownboy never flinched. Looked at me curious for four or five seconds. Then dropped his head back to graze.
Usually I was home with Rick by dark, but that night I stayed with the old people on Grandmother’s porch. Late June, the lightning bugs at their lushest, blowing down out of trees, up o
ut of grass. And at one spot in Brownboy’s field, not sailing, or darting, or blinking. But a floating block of them, stuck lit and lurching in the same direction, like a distant house rolling away with its many windows alight.
“Poor ole Brownboy,” said an aunt, shaking her head. “Lightning bugs getting trapped in his hair.”
The picture has stayed with me, the kind of memory that opens wider with age. A plodding earthbound constellation. A dying body broke out in stars.
FIRST NIGHT OF fall brought a week of rain. You went into the woods daily anyway. Came back soaked through your poncho, then for fifteen, twenty, minutes disappeared into the shower’s hot stream. At the beginning, the waste of water would have irked me. Now I was glad I could give you anything.
The evening you told me you had only five more days, we were at the table eating potato soup. The day’s strain had runneled your face more rugged, leached your skin more pale. While you cleared the table, I stepped out on the stoop, stood before those staggered hills in the dusk. C’mon, now, I whispered to them. I reached towards them. Waited, but they didn’t reach back.
I’d climbed the same three ridges for nearly two months for an answer to a question I didn’t have words to ask. By then, I was slipping into it often and easy, I was moving and swallowing earth. But the pulse carried also a hunger, a pull, a gap. I knew always there was some place I hadn’t gotten yet.
Then one afternoon, even that knowing dissolved, I was body only, and I let that lead. I ended up on the far side of the last ridge. I listened hard for what I should ask, but it told me only to close my eyes. Time left, place stayed. The hillspeak sank back in the ground.
And they came, Sull, no God we’ve ever heard of. They came in the song’s still center and they blew. Tenderness in gusts that doubled me down, swaddled in a giving from a thousandfold directions, an offering that expected not a thing in return. I sat there lavished, laved, for as long as I could keep my mind at bay. But even now, I hold the memory. I don’t have to have faith. I know.
Two days before you were to leave, you caught me by surprise. Late morning, and you at the kitchen door, mud to your calves, wet hair in your face. You wrenched off your boots, grabbed a dish towel, and when you tilted your head to rub it, you gave me a bashful smile. And right there, I saw it. The live coal of you.
I smiled myself, then turned away. Partly to give you privacy, but part because I wasn’t sure. I wanted to be for a while with the probably. That sab I took for me.
ME AND MY DADDY LISTEN TO BOB MARLEY
IN THE GOOD Granma smells Mish stands—nighttime powder and church perfume—his fingers tumbling the man in his pocket. His daddy peels the foil from the tiny package he has taken from Gran’s dressing table drawer. Daddy, hand tremoring, fishes in the package’s dropper of water, snares the lens on a finger and daubs it at his eye as Mish watches. It’s not out of curiosity for the contacts—those he has seen his whole life, whenever Daddy can get them, Mish is used to that, looking on from the low single bed at Daddy’s house, bedtime, get-up time, Daddy picking plastic in and out of his eyes. Mish watches for the funniness of Daddy at the same dressing table where Granma combs her hair and puts on her makeup, for the strangeness in Gran’s mirror of Daddy’s raggedy-brimmed Stihl cap, his penny-colored beard. With the effort to keep his eye open, Daddy’s top lip is raised, and in the mirror, Mish can see the two big front teeth browning from the middle out. Then the lens pops in, and as though having the thing in his eye grants him the gift of seeing behind, Daddy speaks.
“I told you, wait for me downstairs.”
Daddy’s right eye streams, and the man somersaults in Mish’s pocket.
“Well.” Daddy is whispering. “Be very, very quiet. We can’t wake Pappy up.”
Mish feels around him his coat.
Daddy presses the other contact at the other eye, his hand quivering, the lens falling onto the tabletop, and he quiet-cusses. They are very tearable, very expensive. The contact goes in, and Daddy is stepping away from the mirror, blinking hard, then he turns back, sweeps the little packages into the pockets of his coat, and as he passes Mish, he hisses, “You wait right here, Mish. You hear me? I’ll be right back.”
Mish follows Daddy. Daddy doesn’t hear the rustle-roar of his coat, just like he didn’t hear it when Mish walked into Gran’s room to watch. Arms held away from his body, his feet in slow motion, Daddy wobbles down the hallway like a cartoon wolf, Mish swishing behind, them passing the bathroom, the closet, to the open door of Pappy’s room, where Mish stops. The smells of this room are the inside-out of the Gran room smells—unflushed toilet smells, dead thing in the ditch smells, smells of crusted laundry—and Mish does not go in, he never does.
A floorboard shrieks. Daddy’s splayed elbow hooks Pappy’s hat rack, the rack bobs, but Daddy teeters on, balancing on the toes of his boots until he can reach into the clutter on Pappy’s high chest of drawers. From the door, Mish can see only the standing-up things on the dresser. He knows there is a picture of old-timey people, of Uncle David as a grown-up, another of Daddy as a little boy, looking exactly like a Mish with blond hair. Daddy is unfolding Pappy’s hip-worn wallet, and Mish flicks his eyes to the caterpillar shape under the rusty knit blanket on the bed, Pappy’s head on its end. The spooky pink of Pappy’s shut eyelids without his glasses over them. Mish looks back to Daddy, one hand replacing the wallet, the other tucking bills into his jeans pocket, then back to Pappy. Mish sucks a quick breath. Pappy’s blue eyes are open. They hold Mish’s there.
Then Daddy is hurrying through the door, scooping up Mish as he does, and they are down the stairs and into the kitchen, where Daddy sets Mish on his feet. “Shhhh.” He grabs a block of cheese from the refrigerator, a package of lunchmeat, reaches across to the breadbox and snags one of Gran’s mini-doughnuts for Mish—Mish crams it in his mouth right there—and Daddy swings Mish up again, Daddy grunting, staggering back a step, the enormous coat, the cheese and lunchmeat, Mish’s lengthening legs, then he finds his footing and they slam out the back door.
It is late afternoon, the land winter-hard and unsnowed, the air hard also, Christmas three weeks past. Gran’s car is gone, her at Wal-Mart in Renfield a long drive away, exchanging one of Daddy’s Christmas presents. Daddy is strapping Mish into his car seat in the old car of Pappy’s that Daddy has been driving since he had his wreck in Pappy’s newer one—Mish was at Mommy’s during that—then they are tearing out of Gran’s driveway, gravel splattering, and the Cavalier leaps onto the highway.
Daddy leans into the gas. They swallow Route 30, fast, faster, spewing it spent behind, and as Gran’s house vanishes and the woods close in, them alone except for the cars passing in the other lane, Mish feels the man who lives in Daddy ease down. The Cavalier insides are sealed, invisible to the other cars, just whush and gone, and by the time they swing onto the county back road that goes to Daddy’s house, Daddy has loosened enough to scrabble in the mess on the front seat floor. “Listen, Mish,” he calls over his shoulder. “Tater made me this for Christmas.” He thrusts a cassette into the deck and begins to sing, a high, chokey string. It is not Bob. Mish reaches into his coat pockets and pulls out the Silver Surfer in one hand, a red Power Ranger in the other.
He’d waited until lunch on the couch at Mommy’s in his new coat, a Dallas Cowboys coat given him for Christmas by Gran, the coat reaching almost to his knees on one end and almost to his ears on the other, Now I got it a couple sizes too big so you can grow into it, a Ninja Turtle shell, Ranger armor, the Dallas Cowboys coat is football pads. The Dallas Cowboys are his daddy’s favorite team, and the noise of its nylon, the “I’m here!” crash, the blue star on its back with a white border around it, and sometimes Mish can feel the star there behind him, lit up and hot. Him on the couch and Mommy on the phone, her face bearing down as she made the fourth call to Daddy, then fifth. She sucked a breath and blew it out. “Take off that coat, Mish. You’re gonna burn up.”
Carlin sat cross-legged in f
ront of the TV, thumbing the iPod his own daddy got him for Christmas, while Kenzie, whose daddy got her nothing, perched at the kitchen bar where Mommy’d put her because Kenzie couldn’t keep her hands to herself. Kenzie pitched at Mish pizza coupons folded tight and hard when Mommy couldn’t see—“You look like you’re a hole with your head sticking out!”—but Mish heard her voice only at a distance, didn’t hear her words at all. He was watching Carlin. “Wet me wissen,” Mish said it again, low, conspiratorial, his tone simultaneously pleading and leaden with respect. “Wet me wissen, Cawwin,” because Carlin, thirteen, sometimes gave up a kindness if it cost him nothing (Kenzie, nine, a deerfly, poison ivy, never gave anything at all). But Carlin, bent in concentration, his mouth slightly open, two juicy scabs under his lip, the thumb scrolling, pretended not to hear even though the buds weren’t in his ears. “Pwease, Cawwin, wet me wissen,” Mish tried again.
“Wet we wissen. Wet we wissen,” Kenzie simpered, and Mommy yelled, “Lay off, Kenzie! Mish, Steve’s pulling in.” Kenzie threw a refrigerator magnet at Mish. “Just three hours late. I guess that’s not bad, a busy man like he is. Mish, let’s get that coat zipped up—”
Now they are looping down Bonehaul Ridge, the last hill before the last curve before Daddy’s house. Daddy’s singing trickles to a hush. He brakes, and as they creep up on the curve, Mish slips his men back into his pockets. The car comes to a stop, the man who lives in Daddy back on his feet, finger to his lips, and Mish watches, too. Late afternoon, just this side of dark, Mish holds his breath. But the road in front of Daddy’s house is vacant. No taillights of waiting cars. No figure slumped on the crumbly steps. They lurch forward, turn into the dirt tracks by the side porch, and pull around back, where they park right up against the chimney. The yard brown waves of high winter weeds, dogless doghouse coughing bright garbage. Mish strokes with his thumb the Power Ranger’s chest.
