

Brian Backstrand's first collection of stories, Little Bluestem: Stories from Rural America, is a welcome relief on the canvas of contemporary fiction. His narratives do what literature is supposed to do. They discover and examine the complexities inherent in the so-called "simple" life. The lyrical prose makes music that a reader will take away from the page, and the characters that drive the plots are fueled by real emotional substance. We could ask no more from a first book, or a second, or a third...

—Jim McGarrah, author of Running the Voodoo Down and A Temporary Sort of Peace; editor, Southern Indiana Review

### LITTLE BLUESTEM: STORIES FROM RURAL AMERICA

by

Brian E. Backsrtand

SMASHWORDS EDITION

******

PUBLISHED BY:

The Wessex Collective on Smashwords

Little Bluestem

copyright 2005 by Brian E. Backstrand

Cover photograph by Kathleen A. FitzPatrick

Smashwords Edition

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*****

Acknowledgements

"Side Delivery" and "October Night" were previously printed in _South Dakota Review,_ "Kickapoo Winter" in _Riverwind,_ and "At the Window" in the _Southern Indiana Review_ in 2006.

Table of Contents

Side Delivery

October Night

Hay for Sale

Saying Goodbye

Ida's Café

At the Window

Voices

The Code

Going for the Mail

The Haybine

A Prayer in Winter

Kickapoo Winter

The Bone Yard

Trotter Creek

Ribbons

a note about the writer

##

SIDE DELIVERY

Once again the fields we mow

And gather in the aftermath

–Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

It's hard to get a hay rake in mid-season. Precious hard. They don't really wear out, you know, and there's not much to 'em. Most are metal frame with a good coat of rust, and after a few years the rust slows down and they hold. Teeth, a couple of gears, steel wheels and bearings. That's all they is. You see 'em out by the shed or in the woods near the last field where they was used. Just keep 'em greased. Each time you go past, bring some of that old tractor oil in one of those plastic milk jugs and put it on fresh. Make it plenty. Each year you wonder when you hook on and pull 'em out of the ruts where they is sittin' but they come, like as not, rolling up onto the new spring earth. Almost ready.

I take mine down to the shed for a final going over. Usually a couple of teeth is missin'—making one of the bars into a kind of grin. But nothing more. He gave me a spare bar or two, with all the teeth, from an old hay loader that had gone south years ago and so I was fixed up kind of like a dentist with porcelain spares with all these long, toothy spikes of metal that is more like fingers really. Long probing fingers. They reach down to just above dirt, gathering up strands, moving them along, pushing them out the side into a long braid of pale-green, sweet-smellin' hay.

Met him just last year, up Bear Creek way, after I hooked my side-delivery on a post, bringing it in. Careless thing to do. Was goin' to use the team or the old 8N. Remember standing out in front of the barn in the cool of a real nice day. Then decided on the 8 and got careless—more than I would be with the team, figurin' them to be green and a little jumpy with the clattering of the rake and all. Hooked the post clean, popped the wheel and out springs all the bearings. Boy. I guess some was flyin' off and finding the lush growth of spring grass over by the post. Gone. Disappearing like it was quicksand. The only good thing I guess is that I didn't hook with the team. Gettin' too old for real adventure!

That's when I thought of him up on Bear Creek. Figured he'd have something to sell with his age and all. Bachelor farmer. Member of the school board and the township council. Good looking farmstead when you drive past, careful with his gear. Figured the drive would do me good—better than going to Wilson's dump to search through all the side deliveries he's got just for the parts. Wilson's got these heifers grazing in the midst of things and an occasional young bull he sneaks in there to pasture breed. And this time of year there'll be mud daubers or worse all over the parts. Thank you, no. I may not paint my buildings but I keep 'em clean. I clip everything round abouts down real close. No surprises. I'll pass on that one, up at Wilson's, too.

I backed and pulled my old worn-out, broken down miserable hulk of a rake down the rest of the lane, thinking of the valley and Wilsons as I snaked it over to just past the coop. You know the one; I cut out the south end for the sheep which works slick in winter. I left it there near that line of popple down by the creek and didn't even look back, half sick, thinking that it was a good day for raking and good tomorrow they say too. Not even a mares' tail in the sky to hint of rain. But count your blessings. Lucky I hadn't knocked down some grass first before getting ready to fuss with the rake.

This is supposed to be a fine time of year and usually is. I go up first to the ridge fields. The crop up there is lighter, easier on the horses. Hook up the International High Gear Number 9 with its five foot blade and good gear ratio and go to it. After a day or two of that, we go down and tangle with the bottom land. Oh, its a worried crop down there. Sometimes I have to break down and use the 8N just because the cutter bar is not ground driven. The top is better, though. Sitting up there with the silence, just the chatter of the mower, the horses' heads bobbin', the swish of grass. Sometimes the pittman breaks and I have to take time out down at the shop with my draw-blade to work up another. But mostly its just quiet. I look behind at the flat wake of the hay. It's like rowing out on a pond the way the grass lies like water behind the stern of a good boat, with just a trickle of wake.

We do it early. As soon as the sun burns most of the dew off the field, we're there. Then when the heat builds, mid-afternoons, I take my dinner and the horses get grain and rest. Towards evening, we cut some more or rake. Next day it gets less peaceful when I come by with the old 8 and the baler, square bales lying all over the field. That's when the sweatin' starts, picking them up and running them up into the barn. Dragging the first to the far end of the loft because I stack 'em. But its better than the old hay loader when you'd get hay comin' off faster than you could fork it and then down the neck.

'Course there's a lot of round baling now. Put it up in plastic. Guys driving round in all-wheel drive fancy notions of tractors with these large bales like Shredded Wheat, plopping them down on the edges of the fields or carrying them all up close to the barn and the feed lot. There's always a lot of the old gentlemen up there from years past, waiting for the new recruits. Wrapped in all that plastic, sitting there in a kind of graveyard for hay, it just don't seem natural. Get it up in the loft. Steady the barn. Insulate it. Get it up whole and dry and let the smell permeate the place. Mine's thirty-six by fifty-two with rough sawn oak frames and a good roof. The floor's spotty in places but it's a good, solid barn and when you get all the first cuttin' up there, there's somethin' real good and solid about it. You know what you've done. You know you're going to be throwin' out all that hay down to the livestock and its going to be a good, sweet reminder of summer when they put their nose in it and pull it out of the mow.

I drove up right away. Took my dinner early over at Myrtles' All Hours Kitchen and then went up the Lobo Road so I could run the ridgeline and come down Bear Creek the back way from up above. Figured if I did that I'd catch him in, pretty close to being through with dinner and I could run down to Hanson's Implement closer to town on the way back if there was nothin' he was wanting to sell.

Worked pretty good. Myrtle had her usual specials. Had the hot turkey sandwich and strawberry pie. Gassed up there and took the pretty drive up Lobo. Nice this time of year with the mouse ears of May givin' way to a full canopy of trees. Popple, oak, red elm, shagbark hickory on occasion.

Drove on in and didn't see his truck. It was in the shed, it turned out later. He answered the door. Had been layin' down for an afternoon snooze I suspect and I liked him right away. Wished I had met him earlier. Had heard of the Irish bachelor for several years but never chanced to see him at a sale or in town. His hair had grayed into white and thinned out. White, bushy eyebrows is what I remember at first glance as he put on his cap. A good two days' growth of white on the pink skin of his face where the sun had found him. Clean lenses on the glasses. Bifocals. Denim overalls. Blue denim shirt. Work boots.

Yes he had somethin' or two out by the barn he could part with. Not really sellin' out yet. But if someone like me came by... We walked out. No paint but a clipped yard. And in places, here and there, a new post or board or a square of new blue shingles.

Careful.

Soon it would be in high grass, but now you could see it good. Saw right away he had taken off the long tongue. Yes, and the sulky seat was gone, but right quick he said he had those in the shed. Had just been usin' it with the tractor in the last years. Then he made a point of telling me that he always raked in second gear, so as to not worry the gears, and I was hooked. We settled on forty dollars. Five dollars more than what he'd paid forty years ago when his first one gave out.

It was in the shed, though, where I felt I got to know him best. There, inside, time sort of stood still and watched.

The afternoon sun couldn't get through much, he'd kept a good roof, so I stood just inside the entrance to get my sight. Everything was up, hanging somewhere, and the lane was clear down the middle. You could smell soft earth and old corn and oil. And then leather from the harnesses he had up. I saw old cross-cut saws. Sickle bars. Guards stored neatly in boxes. Grub boxes of parts with old magazines in wooden crates beneath them. Wheels. And to the left, neatly in rows, a sulky disc, six foot, a stack of two harrows, stoneboat, an old sleigh peeking out from under canvas, a high gear like mine, then a power-driven New Idea Number 10A, its cutter bar up in salute, followed by a Deere two-bottom sulky plow, as I recall, and then a ground-driven conditioner. It went all down into the darkness. I could see him driving in and hooking on.

Help yourself boys! Good clean line of machinery, help yourself!

Over here, he said. He motioned right and walked in past a post where there was a good-lookin' oiled collar, full Sweeney. Back in, he pointed out the sulky seat and, up above, resting in a lumber rack, the long tapered end of the tongue. It was all there he said, and I knew it was. And more. He pointed out the teeth from the loader and said if I wanted it for spares he wouldn't mind.

It was a temple in there. I could see him coming in with the dapple team of Percherons that he later told me he once had. Coming in with him a young man, backing them slow, while holding the double-trees, taking down the traces, the team standing in the shade of a hot day, enjoying the cool in there, knowing the place by the sounds and smell, shaking their heads. Calm. And him hooking on to one thing or another in the lineup and then out again, slow and careful, and back into the day. In the winter, he had made sure the door would not ice up. One year he hauled his wood back into the far reaches of the place but the bark and all the dust made too much work in the spring. The bobsled was back in there, though, a real good one with solid hardwood runners, sheathed with metal. Hauled a lot of wood over the years with that and the team, he said. It's funny how when you reach back into all the years your voice can change—become like a prayer.

We stood in there for quite a while. That's when he said what he would take. I said I thought he was kind of low for the condition it was in but he said no, he wanted to make sure it would be used and worked on and kept right. He had put old pieces of shingles over the gears and at both ends of the axle to keep the snow melt or driving rain mostly off. But it was the oil that did the trick, though. That we both knew. And so I said, well yes, it would be used. Would be used good, and we shook on it. I'd be back in a day or so and take it and then we walked out into the sunlight and over towards the barn to get a look at the ramp at the far end where I might draw up the wagon. Hadn't clipped that part, he said, steppin' down on a Canada thistle. Was really the first place where I could see the shrinking of his world, the wild growth getting started now in the late of spring-almost-summer, the long light of days, the natural asking all of us to get going and him wearing out most afternoons, staying in the cool of the house, sleeping longer, mowing the lawn with the lawnmower in the damp of the evening when he was up to it.

Not much fun to get old, he said. "Yes," I said, nodding.

Not much fun to sell out, I thought.

Oh, boys, don't miss out on this one now. Need a good wagon? Boys, look it over. Look it over, now! Look it over real good. Here's a nice 'un with good runnin' gear and good solid timber on the bed. What am I bid? What am I bid for this good solid rack? Who'll get us started?

I climbed into the truck. Bye, Lester through the open window, and next day I was back with the money. Two folded twenties. He came around with his Oliver 550. I dropped in the lynch pin and he brought it right around, backing it up the bank before I pulled in. Then I climbed up, picked up the tongue and eased the wheels down two planks we had laid and out onto the wagon. The comb of the rake stuck out just a bit, but it was where I could see it pretty good in the mirror and after I got the rake strapped down good we was all set. He had a cup by the hydrant next to the barn. I splashed it on good, to get the sweat off, the sun was well up by then, and then had a good, long drink. The water he said was from a spring, well up the draw, that he had capped as a young man. You could taste a little of the pipe, he said, but mostly you tasted limestone, the cool of the place, where it had gathered—waiting.

I had a good long drink of his water and then left with the side delivery. Started usin' it next day. Part of Lester's part of mine.

##

"They're not even going to bother with the house. Jared said they'll just go on down to Prairie and get one of them modulars. Or a double-wide." One of the neighbors was walking up from the shed towards the barn. There was the tractor up there to do, one Jersey milk cow, the Surge equipment and line, and the bulk tank. The auctioneer was pretty specific about the barn. Then the house. That had triggered what he had overheard. Another neighbor had bought the place for their son. Simmons? He thought that was the name. He looked past the two women, walking up, and down towards the shed. They had worked through its contents like a corn picker, taking the best and spitting out the stalks, the little stuff, for later on. Now they was on to the little stuff. Not much little stuff, but what they had was on that wagon. The auctioneer had got back on the platform he had rigged on the back of his pickup and one of the assistants was up on the wagon.

Now this here is a grab bag item, folks.

The handler lifted up a cardboard box and tilted it towards the crowd, showing its contents this way and that.

This is where it gets interesting now. You take a look. You put your money down and you take your chance. What am I bid now for the whole box? No, ma'am. We can't itemize it. Just the whole box. Grab bag, folks. What'll you give for the whole works. Step up and have a go! Who'll get me started? Givemea-ten-andateneanatenanda-seven- andaeanasevenuheanasevenans-five-aneanafiveeheanafive...

The assistant continued his rounds with the box, stepping over a couple of halters, leather not nylon, that he thought about getting but that was before the stone boat and the running gear for a wagon and the bob sled. He had thought they would take all those items out into the yard—still green in late October—but it had started out as a raw day and perhaps that was just as well. But it was tough on the crowd in there and he had made sure to go in early and one of the handlers was looking right at him most of the time, figurin' that he was figurin', and no one bid him up—except on the running gear which most everyone can use. So part of Lester's shed was his. He thought of Lester's family but who would be there? Perhaps a niece or nephew? He saw no one standing off the side or up at the house or talking to one of the auction people or standing offhand by where they give you the numbers up in the milkhouse. Whoever was family was not going to get much. Oh, it was a fair crowd all right. Mostly Bear Valley people, a couple of others from places round about. Early on, he seen one of Hanson's Implement people scouting about, but not much here for him. No, sir! No big stuff or new painted stuff here. Maybe the tractor. Hansons liked to move the tractors.

He had gone back their way on that first day in June and drove through the lot just to price things out. There was one of the newer side deliveries, maybe ten, twelve years old. Efficient enough, but heavy. Got to jack it up to get it on the tractor tow bar. There was one in good shape and he had got the number and walked in to talk to Jack. Pulled open the desk drawer and looked the number up on the little list and paused there a little, too, before looking up, blinking before getting that cool, even stare of his: "Seven-fifty."

"Kind of high, don't you think, Jack." He remembers looking down and the paper now being slid back into the desk.

"Well, you know, Gordon, it's haying season. Rakes, wagons, balers is what they all want this time of year. Had two or three in here looking this morning."

"But not buying."

"Buyin'? Oh, they'll be back." Just then his name, _Jack Hanson_ , nice and clear, repeated two times over the intercom. Even here at Hansons, he thought, the noise of the new ways. Hansons Implement on the move. He remembers nodding as Jack picks up the phone. "Thanks."

Now here's a unique item, folks. Something from memory lane here for sure. Darrell, how many of them is you holdin'? Two or three? Ah, there it is, two. Two of them short handled sickles, sharpened and ready to go with almost-new, looks-like-hickory handles! Yessir, a collector's item. Something for the fence row or something for the wall. Who'll give me twenty. Twenty? Fifteen. Fifteenafifteena-te'en for two...

He remembers working the side delivery with the team. It ran out free and easy, spinning grass into hay with less noise now than his. Lester's would be always Lester's. And because of that he had gone back once, mid-July, to tell him how it was. And Lester had produced some blackberries, fresh picked, and they had splashed them in some cold milk from the spring house, sitting out in the lull of the evening coming on, scolded by a swallow as they sat on the porch, looking at the birds in and out of the barn, a nighthawk above, beginning to collect insects, no cars on the road. Quiet.

Quiet and the last time. Had been back once more in September. But the door was locked and the window curtains pulled tight. Hadn't wanted to snoop, but it just felt shut up. Had wondered of a nursing home or hospital. But the feel was simply gone. Passed away? Passed out of sight for sure. Not really moved off or drifted away. More like settled it. Had gone to town and settled things. He tapped on the window pane a couple more times and didn't even bother with the barn. The weeds were high along the bank side facing the road. Canada thistles.

When they finished with the wagon, he was finished. The wind had shifted northwest and was pickin' up. "Well, I'm done," he had said to no one in particular. Somebody had started taking things out of the house and just looking at them coming out—tables, headboards, dressers—he knew he wouldn't be waitin' for the house. You take a man's field equipment and let it stand around, cobbled together, and it's bad enough, even though it looks natural enough out in the air where it belongs. But when the house has got to come outside, too. And the bedroom is out on the front lawn with the threat of rain, well, the whole place of it is lost. These things were placed somewhere, used, cared for, made up, and—much later—made do. They was a part of a life, gathered and arranged by a person and a spirit of life cultivated nurtured here right along with the fields. What would they be doin' on the front lawn? Lawn already slicked up in places from where the tires of the auction people had spun out earlier, probably in morning dew.

So he left. He knew he wouldn't be taking the Lobo up here for a while yet. Not down Bear Creek anyway. The wind was up, ruffling the tablecloth on the table as he turned to go.

##

The distance to Bear Valley is not far. Prob'bly twelve, fifteen miles if you take the Lobo. You can run the ridge most of that, and in the fall, that's the place to be, with the valleys, hollers and bottomland holding all that russet and gold.

Going back was a kind of solemn drive. Too much was seen. He rolled down the window until it was too cold and hadn't even thought much about the wagon behind with all of Lester's gear. Temple gear. Just drove and looked at the leaves and the color. Can't beat the season for the color. But its raw, too, especially up on the ridge. Real raw.

It was funny how it went. He would never had thought it. Turning on to the highway at Readstown, heading back down Highway 14, and then off onto the gravel of the township road. When he slowed for the turn, and started down through all those popple, mindlessly looking at the fence of Cecil's place, wondering how he was keepin'—well—that's when the memories seemed to line up and come, one after another.

There was no stoppin' them. And they came on not hard. Not rushin' but more like fallin' leaves as he drove down through them, leaves drifting down like pictures. It was like she should be there when he drove into the yard. Like maybe she'd be on the porch with things from the garden. And would look up. Or he would see her outline in the light from the kitchen.

He was coming down the lane, now. Frog's Hollow. The bottom land to the south looked good but he hardly saw it, thinking. It had come fast. Eight years ago real fast it had come. He had plans. Do it right, he had said. Hang it up. Coil it. Fold it. Grease and oil it. Wipe it off. Sweep it. Brush it down. Cover it before the rain. That's the way it had always been for him. Alone. Careful. A Lester man. So when she appeared, he was not going to rush things. No. Would be right. Come over Sundays and sit up at the house. Do the chores and wash up. Come Sunday noon for dinner she had said. Week after week. Sitting out in the warmth of the summer was what he remembered most. And the soft of her hair, lookin' down. Her laugh. The worn look of her hands, her own children growed now and gone.

Why move fast? Things would come when they was right and proper. But then IT had come. Real fast. Tired all the time she had said. Didn't look different. He could touch her and they could kiss and he could hold and she'd be just the same. But she complained of it. Blood tests showed it. Had been growing somewhere inside a long time and she not knowing it until the second sight cropped up. That's what they called it. Moved to a second sight with, what was it, metastasis? He had her down here in Frog Hollow in his mind, was what it was. Had had her down here all the time and not realized. But now he looked. Looked for the form, for the light on in the house, for the meal, for the laugh, the touch. For the sense, the feel of someone around and the door and the place not just shut up when he was gone. Not even a dog. Six and a half years was what it had been and now today at the auction the remembered sense of the funeral. Not of the family. Him standing to one side. Standing back at the graveside. And coming back on Sundays. Sunday afternoons, one time with a basket, until the fall winds come on and him feeling he can leave her. Even in the cold. Thinking of her lying there. Slipping away.

He jammed it into reverse and worked the wagon back up to the treeline by the creek. Leave it. Just leave it there. "If it rains, it rains," talkin' to the air. The sun was behind the ridge and down here the darkness coming on. The sky lightening up; the hills growing dark. The air turning cold and the wind with an edge. Down here, the cup of the hills holds you and the sky asks you to look up. Especially at evening. They had shared this together. Once or twice down here. And then she was gone to the doctors into town.

Then to the specialist who comes from the University on Wednesday. Then on in to Madison and the big hospital there. Then up to Minnesota. Then home. Inside. No more standing and looking up. Just a form in the bed when he came. The family gathered there, most of the kids anyway. Thin, sere lips. Lips making an "o" around the straw when she drank water. And that special milkshake stuff with additives in place of food. A commode in the far corner when the bathroom was too far. Then a walker. A humidifier on all the time. Then a new, hospital bed and people in to help her dress and wash her up. A nurse two times a week. Meals cooked by neighbors and one of the kids. The house stale when he came in. And her smiling when he opened the bedroom window. That was about the last thing, that smile. Just a thin line across the skin, drawn at the corners, saying _So that's who's here._

Was nothing left to do now except to go for the house. Walked down past the garden plot with the dried vines of the melon, eggplant, cucumber and pumpkin. The orange balls of the pumpkin stood up out of the other plants flattened by the frost. Winter snow next. And these things coming automatically with his mind really on the door. Not wanting to look. Not wanting to see if there was a light or not, a shape or not. A sign of life. A sign. Just a sign was all he had wanted up there on the ridge, that Sunday, when he had gone with the basket. Just one blessed sign. Somewhere. Laughing.

And then it was he looked up. His hand reaching out for the storm door. Rattled it. Rattled it open and then he was on the porch. The place where you could hang up tomatoes or herbs. Or keep potatoes and eggplant safe. But his place. His place sure. No one there ahead of him, changing things around. The trowel just where he put it. And now his hand on the door to the kitchen. No light. But he did it anyway. Stopped, half bent over in the darkness. And tapped. Tapped and paused, like up at Lester's. Imagine that! Listening on his own porch. Waiting for her footsteps. Surprise him here after all these years.

Waiting just a moment before opening the door.

OCTOBER NIGHT

You think I'll weep;

No, I'll not weep:

I have full cause of weeping; but this heart

Shall break into a hundred thousand flaws,

Or ere I'll weep. O fool, I shall go mad!

– _King Lear_ , II, iv

The wind is rustling in the trees and shoving them over so that they bow with the weight and lean away from the rude hand of the wind as it pushes against them. It is black out there. And cold. The air has changed over the course of the weeks and now the full sense of autumn and of approaching winter is here in the night with the wind and the cold air.

As the wind pulses and moans outside the frame structure of the house, I think of the night outside as fluid. I conceive of it as a kind of liquid blackness, a spilled bottle of ink, swirling, flowing past the windows and the drawn shades of the living room, of the dining room and the front room which soon will be closed off for yet another season. The chimneys were attended to just the other day. The summer kitchen put right and the flue made ready for the winter stove in the bedroom upstairs, while just below the cookstove in the kitchen is now kept going, morning noon and night, for the sake of all the living quarters on the main floor.

It is time once again to be snug, to draw layers of clothing close about one's body; to pile the blankets on the bed and to rest there as in a cocoon, a nest or burrow, in the wee hours of the night when the cold plays about the contours of the face, after the fires have died down.

My body is almost ready for the close and comforting place of the bed, but before I turn in, I sit here in semi-darkness, the pools of dark finding the corners of the room and the light beside me driving it from the center. I sit here and write.

Each night it is so. I write the journal or diary really. I chart the passing events, facts of the day. Temperatures, weather, projects contemplated, undertaken, completed, continuing. Henry would say that this writing is just nonsense. He does, however, pay attention to the weather notations, asking me month after month for rainfall amounts of the preceding year or high and low temperatures. He is particularly fond of such information just in the first melting of the Spring and then in the summer especially when the rain gauge has gone dry. And then again in the autumn when the corn has dried enough to be picked.

Just last autumn he was at the corner of the porch and by the door—after dinner it was—and him all bundled up against the wind with his coveralls and his brown zippered half jacket and mud boots. Like the wind tonight, he was rapping at the window and asking me to tell yet one more time what it was that the rain had done last month and last year and when was it that the corn first had been picked the year previous.

I told him, for the book was right here, sitting in one of the vertical file compartments of the roll-top. "You are a week later this year with the corn," I half shouted through the window and he nodded, satisfied, before moving back out into the weather. It was a wonder that he even heard, with the wind.

Farming is always weather. But, in autumn, especially a wet one, the weather becomes part of the brunt of what one must face, so that there is an admixture of things: work to be done, weather to be faced. I can still see him then, striding across the yard towards the barn before turning down the lane. Then, even in the wind, there's the sound of the picker coming to life, that air-cooled Wisconsin engine that Henry is always preening and fussin' over. It always comes to life, rarely fails to start. And then, just a bit later, the sliding of the barn door and the jingle of the traces coming across on the wind, even on blustery days, as the team comes out away from the lunch pail and the hay mow for an afternoon of work. He walks them over the tongue of the forecart even though I can't see down the lane from the kitchen. But I know it's happening. It's part of the rhythm of this place at this point in the year. And then, when the hitching's done, they come out of the lane, striding powerfully, pulling the one row corn picker into the edge of the field closest to the barn.

Burdell comes over with his team on the gravity box, as if on cue, and the two of them start down the row, the picker spitting, spilling the ears of corn into the box as Burdell walks his patient team up close to the clacking monster of the picker and keeps them at it. I don't know. Some folks like the patterns in the quilt and can look into the colors and the shapes with real abandon. I work on quilts and love choosing the colors and combining the patterns in a circle of others on a cold winter's day. But the abandon part, the immersing of my self in a scene —well, that's always been the meaning of the work I see outside the shell of this house.

I sit with the accounting books or what-have-you, looking out the window on an afternoon like this, and there it is: there is the place that holds me, the hard unyielding process of working land—I cannot tell you what it means.

That was the afternoon that Henry and Burdell started down the last field of corn, I think, for this whole year. They had worked long and hard at the Cathman's and then gradually had made their way through the home fields here until the final one was left. The wind then was shrieking like the wind in the blackness now. It would come and go in waves and I can still feel the slight nudge of the cold as it worked its way in under the door where the weather stripping had worn away. It would come to my ankles on days like these, in late October. And my toes would feel it, too.

I looked up, from time to time, from the books I was keeping, and I could see them out in the brunt of the weather, working the teams back towards the barn. I could see the growing pile of the corn in the center of the gravity box, where it would mound up. I could see the chaff of the corn flying out and away from the two of them in the wind, and the progress they was making was good. I remember that day, the two of them in a rhythm that they carved out together in the wind. I remember the rusted orange color of the gravity box and the gold of the corn and the moist breathing of the horses as they rested just by the barn before making another round.

They worked until four or so in the afternoon and then it was time to think about milking. Our few shorthorns that Henry saved out from the big sale of the preceding year were clustered near the silo and out of the wind, waiting. Burdell had many more that no doubt would be right at the door of _his_ barn and so he was off to tend them. Good progress had been made. There were only, what, four or so passes to make before the field would be picked and the harvest completed. Then I suppose Henry would be about the fence for a day or so, mending, before the cows would be turned in to make what they could of the corn stalks. The final chapter, final actions, in the growing season now drawing to a close.

I will never forget that day. Especially on a night like this, the memory cannot be denied. It comes to me across the twelve months with a force greater than the wind, greater than the sounds of the black liquid pulsing in the night beyond the drawn shade. I remember and remember.

Henry came in, all ruddy faced and bone tired, from the harvest and the feeding and the milking. He sat down to my pot roast sliced beef supper sandwiches and coffee and mashed potatoes, but passed on dessert which was unusual for Henry. I should and did not mind, knowing the way a long hard afternoon can sometimes take you beyond the point of even blackberry cobbler.

He went upstairs for a warm bath. And I could hear the water drawing from through the kitchen grate from below, the sounds of it spilling into the big white claw-footed tub.

Oh, and the time they had getting that tub up the back stairs! Three of them it was. Wilbur and Henry, of course, and little Jimmy MacDonald, almost down flat on his back, pushing on the cast iron rim of that heavy, leaden, son of a bitchin' tub as he was speaking to it, his voice a drawn file, cutting the air as he struggled.

"Heave on it," Henry said. From where I sat, I could see the pliers in his back pocket and the baling wire that he still had in there. I could see that and the slight swaying of his hips as he spoke.

"You mean, piss-poor, water-holding nothin'; you cast-iron whale; you son of a bitch," came Jimmy's voice again from beyond Henry's quaking legs. And then Wilbur's grunt from up top added to it. I heard that and this sliding sound as the tub itself spoke.

They moved it past that fateful crook in the narrow stairwell, and got it straightened away for the final ascent, and up it went. Henry came down all smiles and I saw it for myself later, with his help— after supper that evening— with the first of the water spilling into it, warm water too, drawn up from that new hot water heater that he had just plumbed over from the hot water reservoir of the cookstove.

Water, it seems is eternal. I _believe_ it. And its sound: always, there is the sound, that day and Henry's day and the water always there, making the same sound. It is always the water; always the water spilling into the tub. That is the sound, beyond the wind that I am always hearing.

Even in the house, when the work is over, there is a rhythm to things. Where does it come from? Outside in or the other way around? Always I am hearing as Henry for yet another time is drawin' the water. Unbuttoning his undershirt and long johns, he would be, standing by the side of the claw-footed iron monster, at the end of that long day. Is his head down? Does he have one foot over, sitting on the rim.? Sometimes I see him reaching down into the warm and the soft of the water with his long arms and his worn, cupped hands, callused and hard, stiff from work.

I am sitting below, just as I am now. Sitting at the desk of an evening, with the records to keep, bills to pay, checks scattered around the surface of the desk and the edges of envelopes staring at me from one of the pigeonholes. I am writing away, listening to the water, when the sound of the water changes.

Oh, the change is subtle. It is not the sound of the water, I suppose, but an additional sound, a layering of water upon water: the rushing of water spilling into the tub and, beyond it, the singular sound of dripping.

I have been attuned to dripping most of my life, from earliest times on. Daddy would wander the house in the rain, some of the places we lived. Always there was patchin' that didn't hold, places where the water would come in from the black night so that the wind and water combined to assault the roof. And then, in the blackest of the blackest night, I would be sitting up—a child of four or six or twelve—roused not by the wind or the drumming of the rain or the thick black paint of the night itself. No, I would be roused, fully awake, by the singular sound. The one sound of one drop finding its way in, in and down. _Pat. Pat, pat._ _Pat, pat, pat, pat-pat_. It would sound. One sound for each drop. And I would lie awake, fully awake, counting.

I looked up then from my check writing, fully awake. Fully awake and roused. And I knew that it was wrong. Something was wrong above me. I knew it was wrong from the moment I heard my own voice, thin and frail, and realized I was counting.

I can see around corners, you might say. At least when Henry is outside, working. Experience and rhythm and habit of years of his working have given me insight into where he is and what he is doing even when there is no sight. From my pivot point, at the desk, I am used to travel far and wide about our place. But at the sound of the water I lost my vision. I lost my ability to travel. As the water poured into the tub and the drip of each droplet made its distinctive sound, I could not imagine what Henry looked like or where he was, exactly. I could not see him slumped under the water even when I called, as into the wind, lifting my voice to make it carry, and heard nothing. I could not see Henry eased down onto the floor, his head against the rough curved edge of the cast-iron tub, his long arms still in the water brimming the tub. Even the _pat-pat_ of the water itself coming through the floor boards and the tongue-and-groove of the pine ceiling that Henry had nailed up just five years ago, replacing the ugly mottled plaster, could not get me to see.

Not seeing, not hearing proper, there was this _need_ to move. I pulled the wheelchair with its long, ugly back and spinning front wheels over to my side, by the roll-top. I locked the main wheels and took the plank that Henry had made special for me to get around over the years, and I eased out, working my body with the strength of my arms, as the water came down. I slumped into the chair and released the wheels just a little too soon so that the chair spun a bit. I sat up and moved towards the stairs.

The sound of the water now was again different. The droplets were mounting, the numbers increasing. I could see rows of droplets on the pine ceiling and now, for the first time, there was water on the stairs. It made a sheen like rain on a freshly oiled road and I imagined it was slick as I thrust myself towards it. At the base of the stairs, I called again. Perhaps this was the fourth or fifth call, I do not know. I could not hear my voice, the way it was. I was inside myself with fear. But now, at the base of the stairs, I came upon the great problem: there was no way to go up.

"Henry, you must carry me," was what I wanted to say. And that is how I know I called again, for even with the hearing of my voice inside myself, I could hear the same cadence of the way I would call for him, to be lifted up to the bed.

I called and heard the sound of the water. I wanted to launch myself onto the hard wood of the stairs, but something in my mind made me see myself, perhaps half-way up, in the crook of the stairs, not being able to claw, press myself up. "You son of a bitch. You piss-poor son of a bitch" was what little Jimmy would say, flat on his back, and now I was there, too, in my mind, fearful of sliding down, with just the weight of my own body threatening to drive me down into the sharp angular corner where the steep, narrow stairs turned and where I could see myself, all in a pile. And so I refrained. I unlocked the wheels where I had made them fast, facing the stairs. I turned, thrust myself back through the raining water and towards the phone.

Why had I not thought of it at once? What was he like, now, above me? That was why? That was the fear both above me and inside of me at once. So I rang onto the party line, three quick and two long, and Elise Burdell took the phone, her voice kind of dreamy it seemed.

"Elise?"

"Well, good evening, Ruth. How are you this night?"

"Elise, Henry is upstairs in the house, and the water is running and I don't know what to do. I don't know what has happened?"

"Oh, Ruth, just a minute. _Burdell... Burdell! Here now..."_ There was a muffling of the phone but her voice nonetheless came through clear:

"Henry's in trouble, collapsed upstairs is what I think. Go quick!" And then her voice towards me again:

"Oh, Ruthie, Burdell's already left, he's on his way."

I could see Burdell already inside of the old Ford pickup, pulling the choke out and pumping the gas. I could see this thing, and hear the pop of the motor coming to life, but upstairs was different. Upstairs was veiled by the water running now across the floor, forming a slick, clear, evil pool—a pool of limpid evil is what I would be callin' it, even if Henry would laugh at such words, such notions. He would be standing, just where the kitchen pocket door made its entrance into the living room, his long lean left leg bent and his elbow crooked, holding himself in this strange way near the _Western Horseman_ and the _Field & Stream_ magazines of the built in bookcase. That's where he would be but for this water. Evil, wrong pools.

I looked at it, and moved my wheel-chair through it and towards the slick sheen of more water on the stairs, each step brimming in a mockery of what surely must be above.

_Trust and obey, for there's no other way!_ Miss Pauline leading the Sunday School girls to the front of the Baptist church during the last of opening exercises, the people singing the last stanza. And I see Deacon Simms bringing the water up. The glass of water for the preacher. Where was I then? How old? Four or six or twelve? Remembering the time when the old man tripped and almost spilled...

At the first step I turned sharply yet careful to the left and into the pantry. There, behind the door as I closed it, were the two round handles of the water supply where I cut them off first from the attic cistern and second from the hot water heater where it was bound upstairs. I turned hard, until the handles tightened, and heard a strange silence. The long, swan-like spigot could make no more noise. Only the patter and the whisper of the water finding the stairs, finding the cracks, finding the kitchen floor, finding the inside of the interior wall where I now sat, sweating, as I heard the water, falling inside the studs, just to the right of my right shoulder. And now as well the sound of rain outside on the window pane.

For me, there was no wind, then. No black paint outside anymore. No rapping sounds or sounds of the wind in the trees. There was just the water, unlayered, making the sound of drops falling helplessly down.

Should I cry? Pray? Perhaps another verse to sing? Perhaps make a fist and smash the mirror by the wash-stand in the back-room of the pantry. There was the sour smell of sweat here. Sweat of Henry at wash-up time, still in the wash cloth and the towel hanging on the back of the door. Smell of Lava soap. And there was me, flushed and contorted, my eyes blank, my lips drawn back into a grin as I saw myself in the mirror, my hand on the door pushing it away, pushing me away, forever, again and again, as I moved past me and into the kitchen and towards Burdell standing under the porch light, the screen door ajar, trying the handle.

The lights of his pickup were still on and I could see the rain, sheets of rain, in the headlights and see it, too, on the shoulders of his blue denim shirt where it made a dark stain as he came in.

"Upstairs!" It was all I could get out, but it didn't matter.

Burdell came by fast, his feet making mud tracks on the steps as he took them two at a time. One, two, three strides across the second floor. I could hear him, breathing, above my head.

"Burdell?"

"No. No Henry, Henry? Henry do you hear me?"

The sound of a heavy weight above me. Henry speaking, I suppose. And now I could see him. I could see him, not in the tub, his face purpled, his arms floating out like limbs in the stock tank after the storm. No. I did not have to see him this way. I could see him down near the claws of the tub. Burdell would have a towel over him and perhaps one under the head. I looked for his eyes, but they were not there.

"Henry?"

"Not yet, Ruth. In just a minute?"

"Henry!" And the voice I heard, my voice, was no longer wrapped in fear. It was tinged with anger, urgent seething anger. What had he done with himself? Where had he gone? For I knew. Burdell would tell me a few moments later, after he had clambered down those damn stairs and over to the phone. He rang the operator and called the doc. And then he told me that what I already knew.

"Henry's had a stroke. He's breathin' sure. But he can't move just now. His eyes don't look right. His foot has a quakin' to it, Ruthie."

"Lord, have mercy!"

"Yes. Something's happened to him, Ruthie, deep inside."

"Oh, I see..."

##

When I was young, my older sister had long tresses. Her auburn blond hair would reach her waist. Mother would French Braid Deborah's hair. She would always go to her for that. But sometimes, of an evening, Daddy would "pretend braid." He would divide her long tresses in two, and began making loops, drawing one through the other. I don't know if he really knew how to do the real thing, but he never tried. His big thick fingers and hands, much like Henry's, were too clumsy for such fine work. Deb would walk around the house and do whatever until she got tired of the arrangement that Dad had made. It was the same as he used in the barn, taking the reins and shortening them, loop after loop, before coming in for dinner at noon.

"Oh, all right," she would say at last. And he would reach out and give the works a big pull, and it all would fall out.

I think of her hair and of Daddy's hands every time I am with Henry. His hands lie on top of the covers, often slightly cupped and palms up, and I think of what they could do and how quiet they are now.

Every other day I am with Henry. Elise drives me over, a real friend who came, no questions asked, to stay with me and set up my quarters in the dining room that first long October night they took Henry away. I bring my diary and read to him: weather reports, field conditions, projects ahead, underway, completed. If there are visitors, and there are a few, I tell him. The diary is my platform. And from it I digress and ramble. I tell him how Burdell is doing, mostly by himself this year, in the fields Henry knows so well. The shorthorns are gone now, but Duke and Dan, Henry's favorites, Burdell still keeps in the barn, out of respect I think, even though they are his now. Of an evening, he stops his home-bound team and Duke and Dan, their lines looped up and shortened and hung on the hames, walk in of their own accord, just like Henry himself was there. And Burdell follows. In the semi-darkness of these October evenings, he rubs them down good and feeds them grain and hay in the tie stalls before he pushes on towards home.

All this I tell to Henry. Often I take one of those big hands and hold it as I speak. And the sense I always have, as I sit with him afternoons, every other day, is that I am talking for two. And seeing for two, looking out from my place at the roll-top and bringing it all here faithfully. Really I am looking and speaking about the things that are happening in those places where I believe he still is. Past the frame of the house in which I sit and from which I look, he is out there, his mind playing over the contours of the land like this wind that rattles the window pane and pushes in under the door and finds every place, every crevice with its cold.

So I bring him to himself, and hold his hands, and hope. Sometimes there is a little stirring, but the doc who comes once a week when I am visiting, tells me that there is very little change. His hands are softening now, in the warm air, the cocoon of this time. It flows around him like warm water with him scarcely noticing. So I tell him about all the things that Burdell is doing, all the things that I think he himself is doing, somewhere deep inside.

That's why I sit here still, writing this diary. It still needs to be done. Oh, how I wish Henry could laugh again and tease. I write late into the night of what I have seen. The wind and the black paint outside doesn't bother, when I am writing. Like the light around this desk, my words push it back, into the corners, while I catalogue the day. And if I am making false braids, I don't rightly say, to myself or to anyone, especially Henry. For just yet I am not ready for him or God or fate or anyone to reach out, and to give it a big yank, and to have it all, these words and all my secret hopes, fall away.

HAY FOR SALE

Get up! get up for shame! the blooming morn

Upon her wings present the god unshorn.

See how Aurora throws her fair

Fresh-quilted colors through the air:

Get up, sweet slug-a-bed, and see

The dew bespangling herb and tree.

— Robert Herrick

He awoke and it was speaking to him, swearing at him really, the voice clotted with fury—its language red and purple. It leaned down on him with a pure, seething anger. And there was nowhere to get away. He could turn in the bed, but only manage inches. He tried to reach and brush the voice aside and later to strike it with his fist, but they had thought of that and had tied him down.

Who were they? Were they the voice? They came and went, white specks and white blobs of human appearance which he looked at through the red-clotted voice suffused with anger. No, he decided, they were not the voice.

"It's the screws of the metal plate, Mr. Johnson."

One of them had said this in a way that he finally could remember. Somehow his mind had become his hand for just a moment and he had reached through the red angry flowing of the voice and had grasped it.

"We have to keep you alert to make sure that there's no swelling."

Then the white blob moved, and he knew that what he was holding onto somehow came from there. The words that he held had an even steel-grey color in contrast to the red of the voice. They stuck. The voice raged purple and red and swore at him and at his head and laughed when he tried to raise his hands. But the other stuff stuck. And that's how he knew where he was. And that he had hurt his head.

He remembered the first time he actually could see more clearly. This moment came just after the restraints were removed. Robert pulled back the covers when no one was looking and through the red veil of pain he had looked down at the bandages swathing the middle portion of the calf and the ankle below now cased in plaster. There was no pain down there. No yet. The voice was all that he needed for pain. As he looked through the torrent of the voice at his own leg, he realized that somehow he still was himself, strangely intact and yet different. And the he found his place in time.

##

It had been a good day to make hay. Humidity was down. By ten o'clock the morning dew was all but burned off the hay, which needed raking. He took it ten acres at a time, raking the drying grass into windrows. After about an hour, he stopped and felt the newly exposed surface of the hay for moisture and knew that it would be ready for the baler by the time that he could bring it up. That's how it all began.

Down at the barn, he hooked up the New Holland 273 baler to the Oliver 550 tractor. It had been a one-man operation for years. The technology for making hay had mostly passed him by. He brought the baler alongside and then ahead of the wagon with the metal JD bale cage on it, painted green. Then he backed the baler up to the wagon tongue, kicked the engine into neutral, set the brake, and climbed down to hook up. He still worked with a thrower rack and a small square baler, gear that others took to the sales in favor of self-propelled mower conditioners and large square balers.

But everything still worked. The bales—mostly turned out at sixty pounds—could be handled by one guy. Propelled by the kicker, they would arc back into the bale cage, falling this way and that, until a full load was made. Then he would unhook the rack, bring over the pickup or the old Farmall M, and take the full rack down to the barn.

It was about the third load when all of the day's events came together. Ernie, the neighbor boy he had hired for the day to help stack the bales, was somewhere inside the hay mow. Robert had unhooked and moved the M over to the elevator where he connected and engaged the power take-off to the elevator. The elevator had clanked in response and then started its inexorable, inevitable churning. Slowly the chain and the little rims of angle iron to hold the bales started moving towards the open maw of the hay loft, the door down, the air already humid, waiting.

Robert climbed back on the wagon, worked his way through the open door of the steel frame of the rack, and started pulling bales. They were like they always were—jumbled this way and that. Sometimes they were leaning, sometimes just touching. Sometimes they held the weight of several: you never knew.

Robert started pulling. He pulled one, three, five bales out and down—setting them on the frame of the elevator to his right and just down below him. They began the formal procession, riding up the chain assembly, now slightly swaying. He reached for more. Seven, nine. Why was it that he had this habit of counting? Always counting. Counting paces in the field. Counting bales. Numbering the cows and counting them each day as they came in for grain. And counting pennies, that's for sure, these last few years.

He was at eleven or thirteen, always on an odd number, when he hooked onto a stubborn one. The bale did not seem to be lodged, but it would not come loose. Robert remembered sinking the hay hook into it deep and pulling finally, at the end of its resistance, with two hands. It came free, then, with surprising speed. Came right at him, the weight of sixty pounds and more suddenly released. He took it mostly in the middle of his body, like a linebacker might take a block, accepting it and looking for the running back, accepting it and looking for a way out, a way to roll up and be free. But there was none. He came down with the bale mostly on him and remembered this sharp pain in his calf.

That's when it all began.

Had the wagon shifted when those bales came loose? Maybe other bales had fallen and the wagon had rolled some with the shifting of the weight. He had not thought to block the wheels on the flat ground in front of the barn.

One thing he knew: the weight of his body with a bale or two on the track of the elevator made for some adjustment. He remembered the growl of the M's engine, adjusting to the load. He remembered also trying to lift his head, to get up. He tried and then there was nothing: nothing to remember until the very end. Just at the end, he felt his leg go over. He felt his leg and knew that this was it: his body and the bales together were about to be flipped into the open, humid space of the barn. Just then he remembered seeing the cat. Persian orange it was. Right at the top of the new stack of bales and by the door, he could see it looking at him. Maybe it was the screaming.

Maybe the continuing thud of the bales. The incessant clatter of the elevator track. Whatever, it was there, in the open, with its wide, dilated pupils. Looking.

##

"Mr. Johnson, we're here for your therapy. Can you open your eyes?" Damn course he could open his eyes! Who did they think he was? It was pre-school talk that they were offering.

"You ever throw a bale?" He said that while opening.

"Mr. Johnson, what? A hay bale?" She had big round breasts and flabby arms where the triceps would be. She was frowning now, no doubt because he had raised in her mind the question of what it was they had taught her some time back: orientation to reality.

"Do you know what the day is today, Mr. Johnson?"

Oh, hell, he knew! He could feel the sheet and blanket eased back off of his body. He looked and the frown was still there.

"It's Tuesday, and I am Debbie, and we are here for your physical therapy session."

"What's this 'we' stuff?" He had this sudden impulse to be unkind. She was there for pain, and both he and the voice knew it. He raised up and the voice swore red at him and he swore. She blinked at the word, then tried to move past it.

"Well, o.k., but it's time to get going. We got to get you up. It's Tuesday morning."

"Damnation! All this talk about 'we' and about 'Tuesday'! _Have you ever thrown a hay bale_?"

The voice was in his voice. He could feel it rising. See it, red and purple.

"Well, no..."

"Well, shit, I suppose not." The red and purple voice was shining bright now with wavering colors. She looked as though she might want to cry, but of course would not.

"I suppose not." Going now: it was going, released and subsiding. "Well, Debbie, this is what you get. This is what you get when it comes to you."

She looked at him, stared at him really, then said something that made the voice shrink even further.

"Mr. Johnson, it's Tuesday morning, Mr. Johnson, and we've got work to do. And no time for hay bales. No time for hay bales—or self pity. Come on, now, let's get you up."

She was quick for her large form. Agile. And her hands were strong. He could feel them slide under him and then feel the pressure of them lifting. He lifted with them and then he was up.

"Now you just swing your feet over, there you go, and sit with your legs over the side and rest awhile."

The room was spinning. He looked for the ceiling and found the sky like he had seen it, that one last look while the cat looked, just before he was free. Ernie came by the other day with his dad, Bill Sandstrom, and he had told him how he fell. Said he dropped straight down, head first, when something happened. Maybe the hay bales he was with. Anyway, Ernie said, his body had turned some at the very end, so he was mostly flat.

Said he fell on and between the bales, but when he hit, there was this awful sound: he must have hit his head on the deck, the barn floor itself, though Ernie could not see. Ran over there:

"Mister Johnson, you was out cold, so I ran for help."

Bone on wood. That was what gave him the voice. He supposed this, of course. Conjecture. All of this was past the mind, past memory. He could see his body falling through Ernie's words, but not from inside. Some day he would go back. Look for the stain of the blood that he had left there. And his mind and body would be pulled back some, but he doubted he would ever go there, past the orange cat and into the space of that dead, humid air, into the blackness of that time, with any more of memory than he already had. It just hung there, a dead place in the middle of his life, waiting to be touched.

"Mr. Johnson? Things quieted down for you?"

"Quieted some." He was beginning to like this woman. Respect her. She had good instincts, he thought—a strength he had not understood, but now yielded to as she reached around him to put the belt on and brought him to his feet.

"Damn!' The spinning had retreated just to the ceiling and the lights, but now it was the whole damn room again, whirling, reeling, twisting until the walls were a wash rag, wrung out and then twisted and wrung again.

"You just stand there a while, get your bearings, feel any pain on that ankle?"

"No."

"Well, that's a good start, then. The last thing we want is you lying down there in that bed. Got a farm to tend to, I suppose."

"Yes, ma'am." He felt the soft of her arm on his back and the pressure of her flesh one with her voice:

"Now, let's just see if you can take a step or two."

"All right."

"Small steps."

"Small."

"Yes, that's it, nice and small." It was a shuffle, really. Nothing like a step or a stride. Not even a half-step, dancing. But the ceiling and the walls were quiet, and he was up, and for the first time in a long time—days or weeks was it?—he was moving.

"Now, when we get to that door there, I want you to stand. Just stand, while I get a chair. And then we'll take a little break."

"I see."

When he got back to the bed, the nurse came with some pain medication. Two pills, dull orange, which reminded him, as he took them, of the cat. What had happened to the cat? He tried leaning back and the voice was waiting, but he was trying hard not to listen. He leaned back some more, onto the pillow, gently—listening to the grumbling of the voice, but not letting it growl or shout out into the pure red of its fury.

Instead, the pressure of his head on the pillow made him think once again of the barn. Ernie said he and his dad had gotten the rest of the second crop cut and baled and into the barn for him. Said that they both were looking after his cows. Things were fine.

A strange word, "fine." Where are the boundaries? The room was settling down and the voice ebbing as the pills worked. He could feel his joints ache and the tiredness, the strange tiredness for him, of muscles soft and unused to being worked now complaining. Almost asleep. He would yield, but there was one more thought that was coming to him. One more thought like a bale to be pulled free, counted, lifted and thrown.

He reached through the veil of sleep and hooked it. Lying there, eyes closed, he, Robert Johnson, decided that all of this would be past when he could walk into his own barn and climb the ladder to the hay mow. He could see himself there. He would hook a few bales and throw them down for the cows. Even though he hoped it still would be summer or early fall, with plenty of green grass in all the pastures, he would do it anyways: a ceremonial of hay, just two or three, for the cows.

But there was something more to do. Perhaps this would come later, he did not know. Maybe even blending of winter into early spring—a time when the mountain of the hay would have melted to a pile, a time when the cows would willingly put their noses into all of that sweet hay and dream of being set free into the pasture greening up outside. Then— in the soft waning light of last-winter—he would turn to the hay.

Lying on the sheets, Robert Johnson could visualize it. He would take his hook and move the bales. He would find the spot. It would be brown and dried out, this blood, but he would find it nevertheless and trace it with his hand. And if any bales persisted in being in the way, he would make a space, push them away, until there was room for his entire body.

It would be quiet. Robert Johnson imagined afternoon. He would be tired from work—the little of work that there was for him in winter. The humid breathing of the cows would roll out onto the air just below him as they ate. Maybe even the orange cat would be around, who knows? But what he was after was this: he would lie down, place himself just at the spot so that his head and the brown spot would touch. Gently he would touch: bone on wood, metal plate resting on the grain of old wood.

He would lie there a moment, his mind, his spirit reaching for what he could never truly know. And then, just like he had done today, Robert Johnson would rise from his old, harsh bed. He would rise and there would be no strong hands pressing, pushing him up. Only his spirit would be there, lifting. Gently, firmly it would press him up. And in the quiet of the hay mow, when he moved from this chosen spot, he, Robert Johnson, would be free. Standing on the barn floor in the midst of the soft tombstones of hay, he would be free to move into the rest of his days.

Resting in his hospital bed with the voice subsiding, Robert Johnson could see it now, the final chapter, the way it would end. Seeing it was good, real good.

He smiled. He slept.

SAYING GOODBYE

Troubles cured you salty as a country ham,

smoky to the taste, thick skinned and tender inside

but nobody could take nourishment...

— Marge Piercy

The first year I was here, I walked out on this field and it was like blacktop. Solid as a rock. The realtor I talked to in town, Dale Erwin, says its mostly true for all the soil in these parts. Said it was due to being farmed. I looked at him like he was nuts but didn't say nothin'. "That's not the way it is, Dale!" I would have said. But kept the lip zipped. Just let him rattle on about the long years of farming and about now how none of the land will stand a perk test. Made it sound like farmin's a crime.

Of course he's right. The land _is_ hard as a rock. But it's not agriculture causing the problem. It's not the nurturing of the land. It's the _lack_ of agriculture that's the whole problem! Lack of care. Guys runnin' over all these fields in four-wheel drive wonders, always hurrying, trying to get it done (whatever it is) before the next rain. Guys pourin' all this shit on the fields. Shit that is not shit.Not pig shit or cow shit. Nope, stuff from the big boys. Field tested stuff. Guaranteed, expensive stuff. Stuff to make plants grow quick—and the land get hard.

I felt like I was walking down an asphalt parking lot. In fact I started looking for storm sewers that first time I walked out on the field. It sloped kind of natural-like down to the Kickapoo River, off in the distance, there, where you can see that glint of flat light. In the middle of the field, where there was a slight dip before a gentle rise, I could see ridges, the washboard of erosion, runnin' down both sides of the crown. There's a lot of soil goin'-goin'- _gone_ by the time you see the washboard. Tons of soil flowing on down to the River. Color it brown...

It _was_ a mess! But what was I to do? Had to have land. Had to have tillable land with the right A-2 zoning. Wanted enough to get started. So I put money down, talked to the local banker, and bought the parking lot.

##

The year she left, the parking lot was tilled and planted down to corn. Oh, I was so mindless then. Her leaving and all. Didn't say but two words. One day there she is sullen in the morning, wearing those black elastic pedal pushers, standing in the kitchen making coffee after I come in from chores. Next day I come in about nine, after feeding the hogs and throwin' down some hay for the stock and horses and it's as quiet as a tomb in that trailer house. It goes back in one long line, not a double wide or anythin', so I knowed it right off. Tomb quiet. Coffee machine off. Not even any unwashed breakfast dishes. Just a two-word note, _I'm gone_ , and this unending silence. Enough to drive me out of the place.

Well, I walked back into the bedroom and checked the dresser. She'd cleaned her stuff out of it and the closet. Two of the suitcases we had back in there were missin' along with a gym bag. Then, out front, the closet holdin' her coats showed them gone along with her best boots, Tony Lama, I think they was—all of that alligator and kangaroo hide and fancy stitchin'. Gone.

I went back outside and looked at the place and took the air. It was a cold March wind that was comin' up the valley—the kind to rub you raw. And there were a few indications from the level look of the clouds that it might like to rain. The earth softening up, patches of snow, a couple of sheep down by the sheep fold kind of shined up by the mud. Nothing much.

I went into the barn and started at those oats we never threshed out. The oats I had saved. Used the grain binder on them and stacked them with the heads all in the center like and they kept in the barn pretty good from the rats and mice. (Helps to have cats.) So I fed them out all winter both to sheep and hogs and all the stock I had around. Pretty slick.

But now there they was just taking up space in my barn. I looked at them like they was talkin' to me. It was like it was my barn and my space but her absence made the grain take up space. I tore into the first two bundles with my bare hands, then put on gloves after runnin' a hollow shaft under my nail. Slowed me up some, but I liked the pain and the way the blood gathered into a purple-bluish spot under the nail before it began to trickle out. Grabbed the pitchfork and started throwin' bundles all over the floor. Not out the door, mind you, I was still thinkin' enough to think about the mud. But all over the place in the lane, oats shattering on the ce-ment of the barn floor. Swallows would have liked it if they had been there to serve as witnesses. But it was too early for them. So the grain shattered, scattered and ran. And about an hour later, thinkin' of her and the way she would come into the bedroom with her little smile and take off her brassiere, I was most done with the oats. There was more in the corner, of course. Can't rearrange a whole season of oats in an hour—even with the oats mostly fed out by then. Still more, standing like sentinels or witnesses in the corner. I threw the fork at a bundle, imagining her knees, workin' up the hem of her dress that Sunday after we come home from her sister June's youngest's confirmation over in Oakdale—with her in a black dress with a black slip and perfume. But then, after that, it was mostly done. Like shuttin' a giant corrugated door on a machine shed. Kind of hard at first. But then you get it goin' and you hear the slow growl of the wheels above your head workin' in the track, and the door at last closes with a hollow sound. That's the way it was, I suppose, even though I don't have a shed that big around this place—the barn door being the biggest thing goin'.

##

The '65 Ford was her truck. Took it and left me the Granada. I looked at that Granada and thought of goin' down to the feed store and loading up feed sacks in the back seat and the trunk. Clouds of white smoke and the smell of bran and molasses all over the velvet-blue interior. Wasn't that just her way? Sure it was hers, but she could have just as easily taken the car. Would work better in town for her. Leave the farm truck for the farm. Next day I took the car down to Jones Used Cars. Looked the whole rank of trucks over and couldn't find one to suit me. Then went out over by Sabin to that country dealer out there. Easy Meadow Auto Sales. Nothin. I wanted to trade even up. The '72 Granada with no liens straight across for some kind of a work truck. Went in to work and asked the guys there and finally, day five—that'd be a Friday night—when I came in for swing shift, Gary said he heard a guy up by the Grove was sellin' a flat bed. Thought it was a three quarter and didn't know what year, but it was used enough, he knew that. It had a second rebuilt engine in it and a new four speed tranny. Field tires with pretty good lugs. And a real nice new bed made out of some full dimension oak the guy had cut down and then finished off himself. Stakes for the sides.

Sounded good and when I saw it, I was sold. Traded him straight across Saturday morning and then most of her was done. Could smell her in the car. Could picture her riding there, lookin' over at me when maybe we went into town for shopping and a movie. Still could do that on Saturdays. Right up to the end. Or seeing her sitting behind the wheel, turning it slowly, the chat of those low-profile tires kickin' up gravel, grinding to a halt.

That's about what it was. Six days of grindin' to a halt. Got rid of her mostly that first hour with the bundles, sold her car, then worked on the house—actually cleaning it good with pine sol. Comin' in with boxes for what was left of her stuff. She left fast. And I wasn't goin to throw away her things that was left. Just sort of put 'em up in cardboard. Packed them up and stacked them in the far reaches of the bedroom closet. Cleaned out the front hall. Boxed her shoes and mud boots. Two can pack, too. Packed her up!

A week later I thought I was all set, but I _still_ wasn't thinkin' straight. Came back from the mill with the corn seed— _hybrid_ seed it was, not even open pollinated—thinking I was rational and all set to go. Can't imagine it, now. Just didn't know any better I guess. Came in and ran off to work, stackin the seeds up in the barn. They stayed there for a while—a good four weeks—before there was time for any plantin'.

I suppose the corn was part of that general rush to get settled that started right up the first we heard of the place. You see, we had come out here late in the fall. Just had time to get the water line run out underground from the well and set up the foundation and the main power outlet before the winter set in in earnest. Moved our stock over. Added on to the shed on the south end of the barn to create a windbreak for the cattle. Roughed up a couple of box stalls for the team inside and brought over my sheep fold in two parts, one half in each wagon load. Got 'em up on skids and nailed them together and took the team and dragged them half way down that parkin' lot to where I thought the sheep would best be for winter. And then the snows and the sealin' in.

With the woodstove set up in the living room, the house was warm as toast. But sealed it wasn't. Back in the far end, when the January clipper'd come through, you could almost think you saw the curtains move. Then at the front, by the stove, you were inside a Mason jar—the air and the heat of that place sealed tight.

So it was my first season plantin'. I just grabbed what everybody else did, and went to it. Spent the two weeks of rain out in the barn working on the old 999 planter and the sulky disk, the spring-tooth and the plow. By the time the rains had quit I was mostly ready. I took the team out and started workin' them. The rains had softened things up some. There was no hard earth-crackin' sun, so the earth stayed tolerable soft and we could plow. I have a walking plow, of course, but started off with the JD two bottom sulky that I've got. Took it easy. There wasn't much to plant. An acre per horse per day is the old rule of thumb. Five days later I had my ten acres of corn planted. All ten. Just saved a little patch for the sheep.

It was only later that I realized that I had the same crazy driven thought about the corn as about those bundles of oats. Just had to get them in. Plowed it all down. That left the sheep in a little patch around the fold, the cattle up by the barn, the horses in the barn or a little space of night pasture that we had fenced off to the east. Nothin' more. Just plowed fields. I wound up discing and dragging the whole thing and then planting it to corn. Hauled manure just for one day before I plowed it down. Didn't use no chemical inputs. Couldn't afford any. And we had some pretty good spring rains after plantin' which washed some pretty good ruts right down the middle of things. So by the time of May, I could see I had a ripe disaster on my hands. Weak sickly stalks of corn. Mud. Mud hardened into an asphalt crust of hard pan. Johnson grass and quack grass doin' just real fine in and between the rows.

##

It was May when she called. First time. Phone was ringin' nine o'clock on a Saturday. Came in from the barn and there was her voice, light as a bird's, at the other end of the wire, reminding me how you just sort of grow together and how that other part, though missin', is still there in your mind. And then, suddenly again, it takes on a voice.

"Jimmy?" There it was, my name with her sound.

"Delores? Baby, where are you?" I had forgot all about those bundles of oats. Instead, all of the loneliness of that wet spring came up into my bones like a damp moist ache and hung there with the sound of her on the phone.

"Now Jimmy don't get started about where I am. _I am._ I am fine, but I've been worryin' about you."

"About me...?" Was just like her. Worried about my colds. And wire cuts. And how I was goin to hold up with the farm and the workin'. Looked at my ribs and worried about if I was eatin' enough. Never talking much about herself or her feelings. Until she left. Just in that last week, when it was clear that the winter was running out into the first days of spring and that we were goin' to be through the worst of it, then, it was like she sort of began to breathe in, look in, start thinking of herself. Sizin' things up, I suppose, the long days ahead with plantin', the long hours of lambin season slated for late March, a couple of calves due in April. And her life. Assisting at the beauty parlor over near Boaz, runnin' the general store Friday morning for Mrs. Foster, then doin' the checkout stand at Big Franks Discount in Readstown every afternoon. This and that. That and then This. Not much to come home to.

"Am I goin' to see you? You know I want to; Delores we never really talked." There was this pause on the line. Like she was thinkin' about that last word. It was a word that sort of stuck out and I don't know why I said it. I'm not big on talk. Talk wastes too much. But I said it because I suppose I felt I should. I _did_ want to see her.

"No talk. You never like talk anyway and this is no time for us to get started with talk. No I was callin' to make sure you was o.k. And to let you know I'm doin' all right."

There was a softness, the same softness I had always heard in her voice, but behind it now a firmness—like she knew where the next word was comin' from—that was pure new. I felt lost in losing her.

"Well where are you?" I had this sudden thought of Delores on a street corner, standing with the hissing of traffic in the rain—buses and truck tires on the slick, blue-purple streets of some city just in back of her. And I had this pang. Like I never had tried. Never had called her folks. Never tried her best friend. Takin' the occasional call when she didn't show for work. The best I had done was call over at the Foster's and ask if Delores had made it to work. That was the second day. No, she hadn't, Mrs. Foster had said. "Is she sick? Hasn't been lookin' too good these last couple of times."

"Where are you, Delores? Can you tell me?" There was a silence then, like she was makin' up her mind, and in the background I heard nothin'. No tires. No roar of diesel engines. But just before she speaks again a Meadowlark's clear sound.

"I got some friends in Tennessee. You never knowed 'em, I never mentioned them. Friends from the past. Good friends. And I'm with them now. Been down here most of the time since I left. And I'm workin' in a little shop—novelty and antiques and hand-made furniture. And I'm good."

I thought of the trailer with the plastic veneer coming off the upper edge of the wall board in the hallway, the wallpaper peelin' back in the bathroom because of the shower. The furniture set from Goodwill. Pots and pans of various sizes. The lack of plants. The thin, shriveled world of the TV. Cans of beef stew and TV dinners. Beer. Too much damn, cheap beer. Bundled up newspapers to be throwed waitin' in the front closet. The hollow sound of the floor. The cold of the place runnin' up into your feet. And I then I thought of antiques, satin glass maybe, and hand-wrought country furniture and her.

It was a long stretch I was coverin'.

"You callin' from _there_?

"Don't you come down here, Jimmy, lookin' for me!"

"No. I just was wonderin' if you was still there."

"Oh." There was a sound of disappointment. Like she wanted more. Wanted me to say I was goin' to look. Goin' to search the state. Would be there sooner or later, just you see. But she just matched my quick "no" with her own word. And when it came back to me across the wire, it seemed full, settled —the sound of her _oh_ , ringing across the lines. I guess I never wanted her hard enough, bad enough, to go after her. Here or there.

She hung up then. Said goodbye Jimmy and click, she was gone.

##

She came back, by phone, in May. Called to check up on me and after she found but way things were, she called to say goodbye.

All the grass would be up in Tennessee. She would be standin' in the first rush of it all, summer comin' on down there, while up here I was still dealing with the wet cold sponge of spring. She had gotten out of the cold and the mud, out of the cramped house, out of the pen of Crazy Frank's store. Me, I felt lost.

I went outside again, remembering that first time in March with the oats. I squatted down, picked up a twig and started drawin' in the dirt. Dirt and no mud, right by the house. Promising. The asphalt was getting' soft, thinking about becoming dirt. Next year it would be even softer, hold more water, feel better underfoot. _Next_ year.

Next year I would start to take care, build more humus. Pour the manure to it. No fall plowin'.

Suddenly it hit me: she on my mind, the softness of her especially, and me outside thinkin' about dirt. I couldn't stay with that one very long. The softness idea would drive me crazy. So I went back to taking the hit on the corn crop, and staying on swing shift, and to movin' ahead with stayin' on. All this in the full hint of warmness in the lee of the wind, on this day in early May.

Here, looking out on things, I could see the future. Soon the stock would be out on the pasture I had leased. Soon the sheep would go, sold off to buy more hogs to hog down that disaster of a corn crop. Hogs was goin' up that spring; figured I might do all right, pay off the corn expenses by the fall anyway. Standin' in the midst of the promise of the season, thinking about what this place might eventually mean, I had no idea of the real foolishness that was all around me. Seemed like I couldn't listen inside the trailer, or on the phone. Only out here. It was always here, thinking about other things, little things, that her voice would come, like a young bird's voice, fragile in this time.

When I looked up, Duke, my eight year-old Belgian gelding, was walking down the lane towards the water tank. Funny how he brought her back. Slow sure steps, the sun catching the edges of his clipped mane, and then I could see her. I could see her hand runnin' the soft, rough stubble of the horse's neck. Feelin' the bristle. It was last fall when we roached him.

Seeing his walk, but thinking of her. Now the tangle of it all was over. Not combed out or braided fancy for a show. Just lifted up and clipped. I could see her hand there, and the warm sun on my jeans just now couldn't take away the new cold inside my gut.

Outside, with room to think, I understood. The whole damned thing was clipped. Lifted up, clipped, and thrown away—a beautiful mane, a dazzling mane, roached.

IDA'S CAFE

The first time I seen them was the last time. That is, first and last, they were always there, or so it seemed. Always. Late mornings. Or just after the main group of the lunch crowd had cleared weekdays, there they just were. Came out of the woodwork or from the back kitchen or the men's room. Always sitting in the corner, with one of them sitting facing the other two, swiveled around on one of the lunch counter stools to form, what is it? the _apex_? Yes: the apex of a triangle of conversation—a conversation that you would have to walk through to get to the back dining room or to the restrooms or the bulletin board where they posted the auctions for the week and the notices of church suppers and the like. Early afternoons, it was a conversation I often walked through, and, as though its words were gossamer clinging to my outfit or my apron or my coffee pot, I often carried some away.

I remember two of them from my childhood, so you will have to forgive me if I see them as perhaps a bit younger and a bit more vital then they are. Howard's the one who always sits on the stool. Mr. Apex. And his old-time friend Burkemeister who lives up to Sabin, he sits always looking away to the east, straight into the knotty pine woodwork of the corner as though its a window. And the third, the one facing west and looking out towards the door, well, that's the youngest of this group, the only one who is still farming—Ralph. Ralph Wenger, it would be.

Ralph was sitting there in a short sleeve plaid shirt with his thinning air and his glasses all silver, and he was focusing the group's attention on the activity of the weekend. A kind of Monday quarterbacking it was, but it wasn't all about the Packers. Ralph was discussing his weekend of tree trimming. If he was a year, Ralph was surely fifty, but he looked kind of youngish in his present company as he described taking down the long extended branches of a cherry tree on his place.

"Well, you know, you'd be surprised."

His hair looked like it needed a cap. There was line where one would be most days, but he was in his town clothes and, with Today's Special of roast beef and mashed potatoes and gravy, a side of cottage cheese, and a slice of bread with butter all directly in front of him, he was in no great hurry to get back. Besides, he had an audience.

How trapped they were, pinned into the corner by his words, I could not really tell, because I only heard _what_ I heard while making change at the register or working the coffee route around that bend from back dining room to side dining room.

He'd glance up, noticing my plaid skirt, as I broke through the invisible barrier of his words at that turn in the counter with my coffee and again later with a sandwich order for the side room. And then he would just as quickly be back into those trees.

"Carl, he has some real experience with those booms, so he showed up around—oh, I guess eleven it was—to do some super- _visory_ work."

"He did..." Mr. Apex said with a tone that invited further forays. Howie was always sitting on that swivel.

"Yes," Ralph responded right on cue. "Didn't say much. Looked it all over. Walked around the truck and looked at the jack stands and kind of squinted up at things."

"Well, I suppose, he would be there all right," said Apex.

"Oh yes! And he's got an eye for things, you know."

"Yeah... and when he finds what it is he is looking for, he also has a _voice_ as I recall."

Ralph smiled. "Well, he didn't say much Saturday noon. The limbs were coming down nicely and working in that basket was pretty slick. Only I sure hate to lose a tree like that."

"Yeah." Burkemeister grunted. The rest of what he said was lost while I rang up another Special but, whatever it was, it didn't slow Ralph any. He just shifted some and ran his hand up through the strands of his thinning hair as though looking for the bill of his cap and then plunged ahead.

"Yeah. I sort of feel like a part of me dies when those trees come down. After all those years. I just hate to see a tree go."

"Uh huh." Burkemeister, it seemed, was not a tree hugger. I wondered if he owned a woodlot. Lots of trees up there in the back forties around Sabin.

"So it all went pretty slick," Apex said. "Say, wasn't Carl the one who had an operation a while back?"

"Yes indeed, Howie _._ " Ralph said.

"'Bout a year back, fourteen months?"

"Yes, that's it. Last year when we just were coming off the haying season."

"I _thought_ so," said Apex, anxious to make the point, "and how's he gettin' along with that prostrate of his!"

"Oh fine! But it wasn't the prostate, Howie."

"It wasn't!" Twirling a bit on his stool, Apex looked surprised.

"No, it was some kind of a nasty gut surgery that Carl had. You know, one of them inflammatory things, _Di ver tick cu lit tis_!"

"Oh...okay."

"He had a real nasty go of it up there at the University Hospital was what I heard, but you would never know it."

"Yeah. Well, fourteen months, I suppose that helps some!"

At this point, more of what was said was lost in a milk shake lesson I was giving Mabel. She's new—a woman in her late forties with heavy arms and kind of thick glasses and a real good heart. But, for some reason, that mix-master milkshake machine bothers her. She was real timid about it, so we stood there, not four feet from the men, and I looked at Ralph with his ruddy face and the pens and notebook in the bulging pocket of his checked shirt as he turned towards Burkemeister, who apparently was commenting on Carl's medical woes. Whatever it was, it was lost in the clatter and chatter and the groan of the machine.

Mabel poured the first part of the shake out into one of the glasses. I gave the shake a twirl or two more on the machine and put the remaining portion into another glass, and, when I could hear again, it was Ralph once more doing the talking.

"Oh, that might be, Russell _,_ " looking at Burkemeister, "but you've got to remember that a guy like that's not going to be kept down long. Now that fella's got _drive_. He's a rebounder. And when I saw him down at the mill or ran into him in town, he's a guy who always gives me the impression that _he_ thinks he's got an awful lot of juice."

Ralph had been looking straight at Burkemeister, but after making this last statement, he kind of leaned back in his chair and shifted some so that he could take in both Apex and Russell as he leaned forward and lowered his voice a notch:

"You know what I mean?"

Both men said they did not. And so the highway for Ralphie was broad and wide and paved smooth just like that new bridge they've been building over the Kickapoo down on Front Street. I walked back towards the kitchen where I could pretend to be waitin' on an order as Ralph continued:

"Well, you know Carl. Serious as hell one minute and then off he goes. Yesterday when I got down off that boom and out of the bucket, well he tells me that he's been on one of them Viagra stimulus meds."

"No!" Burkemeister offered in his deep voice.

"Well, that's Carl."

"Yeah," Apex said, "I suppose it would be _._ "

"Yes. And he said it really works, too. He _said_ that he had it for seven days."

"No." Again the deep voice sounded from the corner.

" _Seven days_ he says he had it. Running around the house chasin' the wife. Chasin' her all over until she finally locked herself in the bedroom was how he told it."

Just then the bells on the door to Ida's jingled and two customers came in bound for the side room. I kind of turned from the register where I just had finished ringing up a bill and made off to get them water and menus, but Mabel was there ahead of me. Another, though, was coming out with check in hand, so I turned and walked back to the register and right back to these three locked into their Male Sexual Legend.

" _Well_ ," Burkemeister snorted, "that just sounds like Carl, don't it. He _would_ have himself wandering around in a high state of— _mind,_ now, wouldn't he?"

"Locked herself in her room?" Apex still was a step or two behind, not yet ready for any kind of analysis.

"Oh, Howie, that's just what he said _,_ " Ralph stated, looking at Apex directly, "but of course you have to take it with a grain or two of salt."

"Or _salt peter!_ " Burkemeister boomed out.

The corners of Ralph's mouth started to turn up at Burkemeister's commentary, but I could see that there was more to this business that he wanted to get out. To regain control, he curled his body and lowered his gaze:

"Well. Seven days is a wonderful thought, I suppose, for old Carl. But the fact is that the man's heart would go if" _–_ and here he lowered his voice for emphasis—" _it_ was still, you know, _active_ much of that time."

"Yeah?" Howie was catching up.

"Yessir! And here's how I know. You know Walter Broske?"

"Heard of him _,_ " offered Burkemeister.

"Yes!" Apex responded.

"Oh,'course you do, Howie. Well, Walter _did_ have prostate surgery. About two or three years ago. A complete one, too; I guess they took it all."

Burkemeister groaned. Apex shifted his place so that his elbow, resting on the counter, now lifted as he stroked his chin.

"And back then, well, they give him this shot to take."

"Oh I see," said Apex.

"Yeah, this shot, and Walter said that they really scared him with it. Kept talking it up all the time. Don't let it go too long."

"Scared him, I suppose _,_ " Burkemeister said.

"Yes. When they gave it out, they kept saying that after three hours, max, after three hours if it is not down,YOU COME ON IN!" He whispered this last part for emphasis and because he was aware that I was not that far away. I looked over in their direction and saw their little cluster drawing closer and was almost sad for them, the schoolboy awkwardness, the fascination with sexual function barely disclosed. And then I thought of Walter, who comes in sometimes, and of him inventing this grand erection, this masculine tower behind which to hide the hurt cut deep into his body. Or was it Ralph?

Apex's hand paused near the point of his chin as he considered the Walter's dilemma. "How's that?" He was falling behind again.

"Well," Howie, "I guess that's the limit. Can't go on longer because it's too hard on your heart."

"Yeah," said Burkemeister, suddenly an expert.

I only half-wanted to be there. I knew Ralph was coming to something good. I could see it in his eyes and in the way that he was nursin' this thing along, but I couldn't stay too close. I walked past them on the counter side, past the milkshake machine and down past the ice cream in the freezer chest and towards the clean plates and silverware. I pulled out a couple of placemats and silver for a table nearby, close enough for whatever it was that was coming, while Ralph continued.

"The first time Walter tried it, he said it went real good only it wouldn't go down. He gave himself the shot just like they said, but _it_ just refused."

"No!" said Burkemeister, right on cue.

"That's what he said. Just wouldn't."

"So he went on in to the ER?" Apex offered

"Yup _._ " Ralph said. I suppose I really screwed him up by going right on through this invisible wall right at the height of his tale by coming with my coffee pot, but I didn't care. Fact is, Ralphie was headin' in a direction that was getting worrisome. I could see Kittie and Miss Angelica in the next room, the blue tint of their two heads bent together as they counted change, getting ready with their bill, and I was afraid that a little of Ralph's bawd in the midst of their early afternoon tea might be upsetting to them and get back to Miss Ida, so I went in there as though I hadn't heard a word.

"Coffee, boys!"

This jerked Ralph back to reality. He turned towards his cup and offered it up limply, while Burkemeister clutched his, "No thanks. Three's my limit!" he boomed. So that left Apex, who had turned around back to his cold cup on the counter. He offered it my way:

"Thanks, Darlene."

I took my time, walking away from them, and I could feel their eyes on my back as Ralph gathered what remained of his thoughts on the matter:

"He went on in. And you know Walter. I mean _, he's_ not just going to go in. He's going to _go in_. Comes in there with this swagger. And speaks his problem out real plain. I mean, when Walter has a problem, you're going to hear about it. Real plain."

"Yeah." Howie was laughing into his coffee cup, but Ralph was not stopping.

"Said the nurse just refused—wouldn't even look at him. Just waited for the doctor. I guess she didn't want to believe in this three hour business. But then the doc came and fixed him up with whatever it is that they give you in situations like that. Another shot or something."

"Salt peter shot," offered Burkemeister unimaginatively, and then they were off to talk of the coming corn harvest and the bean crop.

The last time I came through, no one wanted coffee. But, like I said, I walked away with these little wisps of their conversation stuck to my outfit and placed in my mind. And that's why I suppose I am telling you all about it now.

It's funny, you know. Ralph's got a kid in college, been married about twenty eight, thirty years. But old Burkemeister, _he_ never married. I remember him as a kid, always standing in a circle of men. I don't think I ever knew of him even _havin_ ' a woman. And Clarese, who kind of tracks things pretty good up there in Sabin and who's got a nose for news, she's of the same mind.

Howie? Well, his wife died about ten years ago. I really don't know where he was with all of this at the end. Didn't say much.

And then there's Ralph, sitting there, having divested himself of all this news, looking around as he did, for his audience to respond on cue as he told his tale of Sir Walter, and all the time sitting there, with them little pills tucked into his front shirt pocket.

"Antibiotics," he told me two days later.

"Just some antibiotics, Darlene," as I poured Ralphie his second refill of the morning while he was fishin' one of them things out of his shirt front.

"I see, honey," I said, pouring away. And then he actually looked around in the room, small as it is, and whispered,

" _Prostatitis._ Just a little flare-up, you know."

Did I want to know all this?

Anyway, he seemed to go out of his way to tell me, and I caught the drug name while he was putting on the cap. You know me. Couldn't let it go. I checked with Verna at the Medical Center, and sure enough. The stuff's not for prostatitis at all.

It's for cancer.

AT THE WINDOW

The window becomes a part

of his mind's history, the entrance

of days into it. And awake

now, watching the water flow

beyond the glass, his mind

is watched by a spectre of itself

that is a window on the past.

–Wendell Berry, No.16, _Window Poems_

Market Day

"Reminds me of a quid," he said, and his voice carried above the circle of three women, standing closer to the display, who were looking at summer lettuce. "You know, when the spinach is cooked," said the man with the voice, "it all comes together, settles. In the bowl? A quid."

The pork-pie hat would point him out in the modest crowd that was gathering mid-morning, but he was also given a name by the slim woman at his side. "Frank" it was, mid-fifties.

"Enough, Frank," and then to Doyle: "Nice stuff," as they turned to go. He nodded yes _. And lots more where this came from_ was what he wanted to say, but didn't.

More in the boxes at his feet. More in the truck. More not so nice on the compost pile back at the farm, flies all over with the chickens coming to clean up. And more waiting. Passed over, with the dew still on them, glistening in the light of the morning sun. Rows of the stuff. Waiting.

"O, _John,_ what do you think about peppers?" An older man and woman, now, somewhat frail, at the corner of his display table, and at the other end two kids, their mother looking across the aisle to the tables at numbers 32 and 33, her two kids lifting the tops of the carrots to see what they could see underneath.

He walked towards them as they looked up: "Yep, more carrots. You boys like vegetables?"

One boy crooked his leg and swayed slightly, his shoe pointing straight down while his other leg took the weight. "Not really."

"But your mother makes you."

"Yeah, something like that."

"How much for the potatoes, $1.50 a pound?" Mom had arrived.

"And we sell them by the bag, five pounds and ten pounds, blues and russets or mixed."

"I see." She was looking at them over the tops of her sun-glasses, one arm through the woven bag, thinking. Across the aisle, another woman—tawny, a figure in blue-jeans, vaguely familiar—looking.

"Good for French fries. Hey boys, what do you think about blue fries?"

They winced before they saw his smile. He looked her way and then back to them before saying, "Well don't you worry, it's just the skin that's blue."

"Or red?" she said. She had made up her mind.

"Yes ma'am. What can we get you?"

"I'll take five pounds of the russets," she said, handing him a five dollar bill, "at a dollar a pound for the bag?"

"Yes ma'am," he said again, "right on the money." He handed her a full brimming bag of potatoes from underneath the table. She smiled primly, handed it to one of her sons, the same kid with the splay-foot display, swaying again, and they were off. The crowd, such as it was, swirled around them.

The drive home was not much. It had been a good late-August market. He had taken some of the leftovers to Second Harvest, the soup kitchen repository in town, and now his truck was pounding over the last of the washboard as he drove up to the place.

_Put the potatoes in the cool room_ was on his mind, his eyes scanning his farm, when he noticed the south end of a north bound critter poking out from around the edge of the house just about near where the nasturtiums would be.

Or were.

_Doyle, you damn fool, how could you have forgotten the gate!_ He pulled up short and piled out. Shoo boss, and she moved, hesitantly, demurely, big Jersey with a kind of frustratingly slow ponderous flower-blotting grace until he came with the stick. That in itself might not have exactly been the best idea, because then she planted herself, right in the bed of yellows and reds and whites, and kind of lurched, those back feet especially pressing down in the soft earth, compressing the juices out of whatever was beneath them.

He rounded them up, slowly, over about two hours, still puzzling about the gate. Then, after unloading the potatoes and the other stuff, he was ready for the house.

_The little indecencies of farm life,_ he thought as he climbed the porch steps, _the aggravations,_ when he noticed the door. Looking at it, he thought immediately of the gate which also had been open and felt foolishly kind of relieved. It had not been his fault after all. He had hurried after milking, but the gate had been closed. And now his mind was ahead of him, through the door, wondering about what was there.

His eyes brought him back. There were little chips of wood on the deck of the porch and a kind of crude indentation where something like a screw-driver had jabbed, twisted, pried. He could see scratch marks on the latch and on the door mechanism where force had been applied until the whole thing popped.

_Kids._ His mind ranged the rows of farms along Jim-Town road and came up with only the Preston boys about a mile down. Brown-skinned, smiling from the tractor with a load of small, square hay bales when he last saw them. The Prestons? Perhaps, but unlikely. He stood there a while, strode over to the window, glanced at the thermometer, noted it was still in its place, angled so you could see it from inside through the window glass. He did all this before becoming aware of himself—before realizing that he was stalling. _Putting it off_ , _now are you, Doyle?_

He walked in.

There was nothing amiss on the first floor. The morning dishes still in the sink. One rumpled cushion on the living room couch where he had left it, mantlepiece trophies, ribbons from the county fair intact.

He climbed the stairs. The creaks were the same: so far the same place. He turned and eyed the guest bedroom at the top of the flight, his eyes scanning the room and the flight of stairs where he had just come.

Nothing.

He walked the hall, pushed the door open to the storage bedroom, where all the horse tack would be in the wintertime. Some of it was still there now, where he had left it.

Ahead the bathroom. He saw the clawfoot of the tub on the tile floor, the sun filtering through the curtain, everything at peace. So it was his room or the attic room. The stairs to the old attic level were to the right by the bathroom's open door. He looked at the blue painted wainscoting and the blue of the closed attic door before deciding for his own room, the last place he had known before the premonition of first light had brought him awake.

Doyle turned. A lot went through his mind as he did that. The cows crowded at the back of the barn, waiting for the door to open. Chickens at the fence, waiting for the gate. He thought of them now, scratching the compost, heads cocked, beaks snapping catching flies.

He looked in.

The bed was rumpled some. He was a bed maker and sheet straightener. Even as a bachelor he would make the thing daily. No coins bouncing on the sheets, to be sure, but hospital corners, he could manage that.

But now it was rumpled some in the middle from where someone had sat. He thought of himself, naturally, putting on his boots. But it was too far back. Someone had sat and then slid into the middle of things, a medium-sized body, he was reckoning.

The stranger, the person with just a form, had been sitting there, perhaps contemplating what to do?

As he stood in the middle of the room, Doyle looked right and saw the closet door ajar and clothes on the floor from where they had been jerked off the shelf. He went there and looked deeper and saw stuff from the shelf down on the clothes in the back. A couple of boxes of old items which should have been discarded. Cowboy ties. Cuff links. Pocket knifes. Even an old pocket watch resting on the sleeve of one of the shirts.

Overlooked. The face of the watch was pointing out and he turned with it to look towards the gun cabinet at the far end of the room, close to where the door would swing.

The glass on the panel of the gun case looked strange. Spider-webs. One central impression—an elbow, rock or bullet—and then spider webs floating out from the center in all directions.

Gossamer on glass. _One pane's been broke clear through,_ he thought. And then he did not want to look anymore: higher, further. It was as if the glass were an opaque barrier which his eyes could rest upon but his mind not solve. _It was the guns,_ he thought, _it had to be the guns._

Now it was that Doyle Ritchie discovered that he was carrying an instant mental inventory of the things he needed to see. The octagon barrel of the old .22 caliber was first. It hadn't been fired in years. His uncle's gun. Next the 30-06 from his father.

Dad standing on the ridgetop cradling the gun as young Doyle climbed up to take a look-see, ten years old, the brown form of the deer just beyond his father's boots. This rifle was followed by a shotgun, little used. Then his pump action .22: Remington Model 62. Then another shotgun, single-shot 20 gauge. And finally his deer gun, the 30-30 Winchester Model 94, well oiled, waiting like those cucumbers, zuchinnis and lettuce in early morning sun: Everything glistening and waiting.

He looked, swung the door open, and looked again.

Down below, shells were missing. Most of them. And the bullets: Various calibers and loads were all cleaned off down low. Up above he knew before he looked.

The Ought Six was gone. And where his hand would reach to find the tool to bring down a pigeon or a woodchuck or a disfigured old tom, dull yellow eyes staring out from the woodpile, where his fingers would curl and his arm muscles tighten slightly in lifting it free, now there was just the worn felt indentation where the stock should rest: where the barrel would lie against the concave, cupped place that would hold it.

Model 62.

It was, in fact, a small price to pay. Two guns. He could feel the .22 and see it there as his eyes looked the whole place over, even the ceiling. He paused and looked under the bed and then, lighter with what he had seen and understood, he walked down the back stairs past the .22 cartridges on the window sill that had been missed.

It was like they came up and looked through a bit of stuff in the closet, perhaps for shells. One or two? They had then grabbed a whole bunch of shells and cartridges, all kinds, just kind of scooped them up. Two or three?

What were they thinking? Did they know guns? He could see a hand now, younger than his for sure. Much younger. As young as the hands of the splay-footed boy at the market: that young? Perhaps a brown hand, tanned and strong with farm work but young still? It was just an outline of a hand that he could frame in the mind. Curling fingers, tightening of the arm. That and a form on the bed. He could see the form sitting there, facing the glass, wondering what to do, the idea building until it became what there was to do.

The Form

He thought of this while throwing down some third crop grassy hay for the heifers he had penned in the dry lot to the north of the barn. He curled his fingers around the pitchfork and lifted the bales deliberately up high in the air before throwing them down. Hard. Sometimes hard enough to break the baling twine. Lifting, breathing, throwing, sweating.

He did this thing first, before calling the sheriff.

##

It was only later—lying in his room in the last of the light—that he thought of the canvass bag in the closet, a slight memory. It had come to Doyle from the weekend conference he had been to in LaCrosse over the winter. Small group talks on sustainable agricultural and low-input farming. One vendor had offered the bag for all of the books he was buying. He brought it home, emptied it out, and hung it in the closet, empty.

He got up then and looked in the closet and now found the hook empty.

Doyle went to sleep thinking of things this way: The Form had sat on the bed and arrived at The Thought. It seemed an impulsive one. One or two or three? Whoever, however many it was, they had seen the shells and the rifle cartridges and searched quickly (first or last?) and had come up with the bag. Amidst the little shards of glass, someone had reached and pulled the doors free and piled the ammunition home. Then the guns. Then strangely the glass doors:

Someone had closed the doors again.

Questions

Habits are not to be dislodged by a little thievery. Milking the next day, the barn was as it always was this time of year: windows open, doors open in the cool of the morning, welcoming.

As usual, Doyle poured a bit of warm milk by the open door to attract the flies. They obliged, working their way down from the joists of the hay loft above, away from the backs and muzzles of cows, towards the sweetness of warm milk steaming in the morning air. Then, just before turning the cows out, he let the chickens out for the flies. They worked on the flies while he cleaned up things in the milkhouse and then knocked back the old wood stanchions, one by one, the cows pivoting in turn—heading towards the open door and the gate.

There they waited as he worked his way through the herd, Doyle looking them all over for one last time. The gate was riding on a large wheel that Doyle had welded up at the very end. It was an easy matter to swing the gate and set them free.

As he swung it open and back and then latched it, Doyle thought of the events of yesterday. Gates. Not the big one where he was standing but the little one, closer to the barn.

Had he truly forgotten? Had the Form come up to simply play a prank—set the cows loose in the farmstead for the sake of trampled nasturtiums? Or was it intentional? Crafted? Were the cows a diversion, something to distract the farmer were he to arrive too soon? Doyle thought of the Form waiting in the cornfield, close to the house, watching his habits of a Saturday morning. Perhaps the Form had been there several times, studying things? Did he carry a screwdriver?

He could see the cows, heads turned with their big eyes that drink in the world, watching the stranger as he played with the gate, meandering close but not too close, then slowly, carefully, and finally skittishly at the very opening itself, walking through to freedom.

Third Crop

They were at that time of year, now, when the moist air from the depth of the night made dew for the grass and for all the foliage. In places it split light into small, miniature rainbows; in places, it painted a Teflon coat that glistened. The dew clung to the yellow of the goldenrod; to the umbrella-like flowers of Queen Anne's lace and the upper structures of mullein. By the ditch it was on the fox tail as Doyle looked down from the Allis Chalmers D17 while heading out with the flat rack.

For the third time this year it was haying time.

Gilbert was already there at the old Megaard place. He could see the red of a strange pickup through the old thick shrubbery of the abandoned farmstead as he drove in the lane. Two figures in the truck. Jim Gilbert, for sure, and someone else, a woman, sitting behind the wheel on the driver's side.

He had called Gilbert the other night about making hay and had told him all about the break-in when their conversation had extended beyond his usual request for haying help. Now the break-in came back again.

"I suppose you're missing them two guns," Gilbert said, after introducing Doyle to Annie, "a friend of mine come to help." Gilbert seemed at ease with her as she stood there, at ease herself, gloves in the back pocket, shaking his hand firmly, slim, solid. She had a way of looking hard in a probing, peculiar kind of way, without seeming to—a wiry woman with dishwater blonde hair.

They stood there awhile in the shade of the oak that used to frame the house, its branches curving over the mossy roof where shingles were lying amiss, above where others had fallen, missing teeth from a carved pumpkin, lying in a tangle of grass.

"Well, I reckon that the sun has about burned it off out _there,_ " Gilbert said, looking out to where the sun was brightest on the short stand of third-crop hay, and Doyle agreed. They would rake the third crop, while Doyle brought up more flat racks. Then Gilbert would bale, Annie stack the short square bales, and Doyle shuttle the full loads back to the barn. Her presence would make it go some faster than on other years.

Gilbert started the old International M, while Doyle came off the Allis and picked the pin out of the draw bar so as to drop the tongue. He pulled away and was conscious of being looked at. She was pretty, sure enough, but Gilbert's age—eight, ten years away from him—and he felt the old feeling he had, the one that told him that women were a waste of time. Better things to do. A kind of an ache it was when it came to him at night, but now just a matter of principle.

They made hay according to plan throughout the late morning hours and into the early afternoon before stopping to eat. Doyle hauled the stacked bales dutifully back to the barn and wrestled the bales onto the elevator. They were green and sweet-smelling, a sharp contrast from the dull brown, rain damaged second crop hay that they had eventually given up on, consigning most of it to the garden as mulch.

She had the pickup tail-gate down and had a cooler there with iced tea and lemonade that she had brought along. He ate the first sandwich from the tractor seat of the D17, but she motioned him to come over to the Megaard front porch so that the three of them sat facing the field watching the heat build, while behind them the old worn shiplap of the porch patterns made old worn eyes where the wood had given way. Were they to have turned, it would have been the bay window of the living room, etched in spots, that would have looked back upon them, as it captured their outlines and curved, almost recumbent forms for a few minutes as they stretched out in the heat.

"You been here much," she said to Doyle, patting the wood of the porch. "You seemed so hesitant to come over."

"Did I?" he said, hardly paying attention.

"Yeah, you did."

"Well perhaps so," he said, mildly irritated, "but I wouldn't make much out of it."

"Oh," she smiled a thin smile, "I'm not. After all it's just an old worn-out house."

"You got that right," Doyle said, his thoughts on the field.

In the evening, with the last flat rack emptied out, Doyle and Gilbert and the woman Annie gathered one final time at the Megaard place while he paid them their wages. Cash.

She took his money and folded it with one motion of her slim hand and reached back behind her in a move strangely familiar, placing the cash in her back pocket before shaking his hand one more time. She was frank. Settled. Forthright. Gilbert took the M back over to the home place just as she was pulling out with the truck, so she turned and came close to the Allis D where Doyle was sitting. He watched her drive out with the tail-gate still down.

At the washboard, she didn't slow down. The rain slicker that had been stuffed into the corner of the open bed slid free and then he saw the box—green and red on the sides with the top half ripped off. A box of shells, it was, just like the one he was missing.

Invitations

Of course, the shells were a coincidence. A lot of people ripped the top off of a box and many others no doubt left it ragged. Still, Doyle couldn't help thinking about them. He worked through the rest of that week and into the weekend with its market day and, when he was done with all that, the pickup and the shells and the woman Annie were mostly but a memory.

Doyle came back from Saturday market and God was in the heavens and his cows right where they should be in the barnyard. But in the mail there was a note. No return address on a plain, slim, white envelope neatly typed. Inside, on a piece of white paper ripped into one simple square, just three words:

Do you remember?

Doyle felt something at the bottom of his gut. Deep down like looking down the irrigation pipe to the bottom of the well. He saw the woman Annie and the box of shells way down there in the tube of his mind and felt something strange.

It was with him most of the rest of that day, and then the next. The following day, like a wood sliver or a tick overlooked, it had worked its way all the way in, showing up in his dreams.

Night Moves

_For I, being poor, have only my dreams_ says the Irish poet, W. B. Yeats, whom Doyle would read on occasion before falling asleep. _I have spread my dreams under your feet._ He liked Yeats. He liked "The White Swans at Coole" with its sad and poignant vision of aging and the passion of "Leda and The Swan _._ "

But now these things were past him, for Doyle the farmer was sharing his bed with someone else. She would show up in the middle of the night often wearing denim shorts, cut off high, with steel-toed work boots and an old sweat shirt, the sleeves trimmed at the shoulders and the bottom cut high, showing off her tanned waist and navel. She would rest her foot on the bed and jostle it until he turned in his dream. One arm always was behind her back, as she leaned towards him, one hand out of sight. When he would open his eyes in the dream, she was always looking straight at him with that probing, penetrating gaze, her face a pale oval in the night.

_See what I've got for you? Wanna see?_ was how it would end, the words flowing out into the air from her thin lips as he jerked awake, sitting up, at three a.m.

Always three a.m.

He would read, then, to get back to sleep. Farm reports. The newsletter from the USDA. Even Yeats. Sometimes the lines from "The White Swans _..._ " would calm him but now, those final lines, with their sense of transience often would leave him restless. Instead he would choose "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" and read the first verse, saying the final two lines over and over until sleep came:

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,

And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;

Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honey bee,

And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And live. And live alone in a bee-loud glade would become the sound of his alarm raking over his body at four thirty, five sometimes five thirty a.m. when he would struggle up and out to the barn, the cows at the closed door, bawling.

To counter these developments, Doyle would go to bed early. And some nights indeed would be calm. But when she came, it always was the same: boots on the bed, hand behind the back, _Wanna see?_

He took the thin scrap of white paper with the three words, one noon-time after his dinner meal and before an afternoon of work in mid-September and dropped it without ceremony into the burning barrel out back. But that night she was there, nevertheless.

By October, he began to realize that in the dream, the room was different. The wood was old and worn, and one night he glimpsed the rotten floor by the bed where she stood. Ovals. Ovals in the floor reminded him of the oval shape of her face while she spoke her same words. But they also reminded him of the porch where the three of them had sat that day, months back, at the Megaard place. Eyes in the floorboards now in his dream watching.

He rarely drove that far down Jim-Town road unless it was for the fields he rented there. But now, one crisp morning he did so, without explanation. Just turned the steering wheel of the truck right instead of left and watched the fence row and then the old house itself loom into view. He pulled in and sat in the truck and looked at the house with its sad windows, some boarded over some still intact, the grass and weeds sere, having died back from the field-stone foundation of the old home.

It became a weekly habit. Came and sat and looked. He never got out. Just sat and felt that same bottom-of-the-well feeling that he recognized both from the note in the mail and now every time she came, the woman Annie, in his dream. He looked at the frail structure, the weathered boards, the angles of the place collapsing away from plumb and straight, and felt it again.

One night it was different. One night, in the middle of the month, the night air clear and the moon up, he came once more to his three a.m. encounter. He roused himself and sat up and watched his own room return: the gun case, the open closet door, the pale light in the window. He knew where he was but did not feel it. It was as if this night the dream itself were gossamer, clinging to him, refusing to be put away.

Doyle sat on the edge of the bed in the moonlight. Outside, through the clear glass of the window, light was filtering through the last of the autumn leaves on the oak tree—a clear, brilliant fall night. He thought of the garden, of the last of the cucubrits waiting to be harvested. The frost was on the pumpkin. But these things could not make her go away. Her words seemed to hang on the air, her leaning, sometimes leering ways:

_Wanna see_?

He dressed in moon light. It was easy to find his denim jeans, hanging on the chair. Then he pulled on his boots and looked suddenly and quickly at the case where his hand found the 30-30, still there, passed over, well-oiled, waiting.

He came down the stairs hard, crossed the threshold and out into the cool air, 30 caliber cartridges jingling, clinking in his pants pocket. It was a short drive, and when he turned in, he doused his truck lights and drove by the moon.

Nothing, no one was waiting, just the house. Still he took the rifle and worked in three rounds, by the truck, in the quiet.

The screen door was just as they had seen it that day, angled down and half off. He propped it open and tried the door which yielded with an almost smooth arc as it swung wide.

He had been here before. Not on the porch. Not just inside the Megaard home of a Sunday afternoon visiting. Not just at fall harvest, dinner time, eating with the custom cutting combine crew. No, other times. No, one other. _One other time._

Moonlight? No. _Late afternoon light_.

He climbed the stairs and climbed back into the past, a boy of what, ten? Eleven? _Thirteen. The house quiet. No one home._

At the top of the stairs, the light was coming through the open door of the bedroom to the right. _Her bedroom._ He entered and felt that deep-well feeling bubbling up. Irrigation water surging, the pump on.

Up.

He looked around: bedsprings, forlorn, forgotten in the last move. Magazines in the corner. _He could see her bed now. Clothes in the closet. And the dresser._

There had been a dresser, not far from the window. He could feel himself close to it. Looking. _Looking at the porcelain horses, the hand mirror, the comb, curlers in a little cardboard box._

Ahead of him the dresser mirror. Below him two smaller drawers and beneath them two other, larger ones _._

_What was in them. Underwear. Bras, brassieres_?

Doyle could see her now as she looked then. The older sister _. Emily?_ He searched for her name through the open window where the moonlight poured in. One of three.

He could see her in shorts. Cut offs. Two, three years ahead of him in school. See her walking the hallways in a pleated skirt, reappearing after these years in the moonlight. And now it was on him in full.

Her face. _His hands were on the knobs of the dresser, but there was her face_. More of an oval than the other two. _Oval in the mirror. Oval behind him. Oval at the door, looking and him turning._

" _I've got something for you. You bastard. Wanna see_?"

_One hand behind her back, leaning into the room_.

" _No! I don't want to_!"

" _I'll bet you don't, you weasel! Come to smell my things, have you! Why don't you get a girl of your own? I'll bet you don't have the balls to do that!_ "

_He sees her reaching, the smooth motion of her arm and forearm, appearing_.

" _I'll bet you don't even have a prick_!"

Shotgun it was. Extension of her arm. Shifting her weight now. Bringing it up. In the afternoon air, the window, half open, was showing him the porch roof.

One, two strides. Western roll. They taught that in track, just last year. Western roll. Sound of glass, breaking, skittering, and him sliding like shingles on an old roof, his knee suddenly bleeding. He went grasping it, blood on the hand, half crawling.

Oval in the window. His finger curling on the edge of the gutter, rolling off.

" _Little dip-shit bastard!_ "

Blast. Rending sound. Leaves falling from the oak tree just above his head. His body hanging free from the gutter. Slab meat. Pump action sound. Shell sliding into chamber.

He drops.

In the moonlight he can see it now.

Drops straight down. Sound of glass as she cleans out the window with the barrel of her father's gun. Below her footsteps, he runs along the wall, sees the door mat besides the kitchen door entrance as he runs.

Sudden thought. A small grace now as he remembers it.

Stops. Picks it up. Comes to the edge of the porch. Silence above while below he lofts the mat, throws it into the air.

Watches the shredded brown of the door mat float out into the sudden stillness of the afternoon before the sound of the gun catches up.

Like the sound of the starting gun.

_He explodes from the porch. Little dip-shit boy flushed out. Running rabbit-like, left and right. Left and right again, until, at the corner of the house he looks, just once, at the oval face, gun down, watching him go, the open window behind her lean form, glass glittering at her feet_.

Where had it all been hiding inside of him? Where had it all gone to? Doyle stands with his 30-30 in the moonlight by the window; by the window with its glass strangely, impossibly in place.

Reprise

Some things are possible once, but not twice. The woman was back with her two sons the last Saturday in October and beneath her sunglasses Doyle now could see the lineaments of one of the Megaard girls. She came into focus quickly after the moonlight.

The middle girl: Jayne. Younger than Doyle. Chubby. Sitting across the table during those fall harvest dinners. She came up to his table while the boys were playing down at the end of the aisle, about Table Seven, with the aunt; with tawny, slim Annie.

Deep feelings from inside now were flowing all over his face as he looked straight at her in the clear, mid-morning light.

"No russet potatoes?"

"Not this time."

"I'm not surprised, because now I remember you."

"You sure, Doyle?"

"Sure I'm sure. Remembering a lot of things lately."

"You got a note from someone in the mail."

"Yeah." He could see the handwriting and the paper. "Got a lot of things, ah, sort of straightened away inside."

"Well good for you, Mister," her lips were steel, "good for you."

She had come with a paper and she shoved it, folded, between two boxes of spaghetti squash at the edge of the table and turned, walking quickly away.

"I'm sorry, Jayne. Real sorry," he said mostly to the air where once she had been, but loud enough to be heard.

She raised her hand, a kind of blunt wave, but didn't turn. Down the aisle at Number Seven, the woman Annie looked up. Then, half-way down, Jayne Megaard did a turn, and looked at him across the open space of the late-fall market crowd thinning out.

"Me too."

Doyle kept the paper folded until he was all packed up. He drove as though to drive out of the parking lot, but stopped in a quiet corner instead and, engine running, read the obituary, two years old.

Her picture was there, sure enough: The woman with the oval face; the woman on the porch roof, glass at her feet.

Emily Megaard Johnson.

It was clear, now. Everything. He sat there in the truck and it seemed to him at last that the light of mid-day had become a little less stern. It was clear, now, and he was clear: At last he remembered.

VOICES

She was getting ready to marry. Sitting at the desk, the head-set on, in between all the calls that would come her way this day, she found herself thinking of the wedding, the black slipover—sleek and new—waiting for her in the bedroom closet. She would wear it at the groom's dinner after the rehearsal. The best part of who she was and who she could be was in that house with her black slipover and her simple elegant white wedding dress hanging in the spare bedroom. Pete never went in there, but she often did, in the evenings before he came home, and she would stand before it in silence, as though it were a kind of altar, tucked away in the holy grotto of the back bedroom.

She was Melissa there. Melissa Ann Holmeier, thirty-four years, always the bridesmaid, never the bride—until now. Melissa, tom-boy and horse woman and tease: fair skinned with strawberry-blonde hair, slim torso, long legs, an infectious laugh. She stood there in the failing light and looked at herself—at who she would be in months, weeks, and now days. Today, sitting at the desk, she found herself thinking of the two dresses and waiting. Waiting for the groom's dinner, following rehearsal. Waiting for the simple service at the Methodist church. The wedding dance. Waiting for the grand entrance into her new life.

Waiting—she was Melissa, not Brenda.

Melissa was soft. She had places in her person which were inviting and spacious. Brenda, on the other hand, was tight, narrow, rigid, defined. Melissa was the one getting married, day after tomorrow, whereas Brenda was right here, waiting for the next call to be dialed up. Brenda was all business.

"Mrs. Curtis?"

She looked down for the name, the first name.

"Cynthia?"

"Yes." The voice was strained, as though the person thought of herself as far away. Remote. Hard of hearing, perhaps.

"Hi Cynthia. This is Brenda from Rural Life and Liability, and I am calling about your last health insurance payment."

"Yes, yes well..."

"Have you gotten that out yet?"

"Rural Life, you say."

"Yes Cynthia. I'm calling on behalf of Rural Life."

"Well, let me see now. When was that due?"

She could hear shuffling of papers near the receiver of the telephone which the old lady has placed down on her desk with a dull thud.

"Mrs. Curtis?"

There was no answer, just the shuffling of papers. She waited. Meanwhile there was the account to read, coming up on the screen. The initial screen gave her only an abbreviated form. F-1 gave the full detail of the present charges while F-5 gave the payment history over the past two years including any interest charges for late payments and the number of times that the account had been in past-due in the 30-60 and 60-90 day columns. F-8 gave personal information. Brenda nee Melissa-about-to-marry went there. The screen told her that Mrs. Curtis was Cynthia Ann Curtis and that she was eighty-five years old. From Brenda's perspective, she lived out—a street address in a small town, one of hundreds she visited each and every month; towns lifted before her on the screen—Wizard, Ohio; Sherman City, Michigan; Kasson, Minnesota—the names coming in a lurid molten light-green against a black background (happened anytime you punched one of the F keys) in a color pattern which definitely made her feel more Brenda than Melissa. _Definitely._

Strange that it wasn't happening now. Now it was Melissa who transported her until she was right there on Harrison Street. She could see the frail form of Cynthia, the old lady standing in her small living room with the wind whipping around the corner of the house and across the front porch. She stood at her desk, hair hastily pinned, her glasses down, riding her nose, her old hands searching here and there in the pigeon holes of the old roll-top. Her hands were like birds, snowflakes. Maybe it was the wedding coming up that made her see her this way, looking with Melissa's eyes through the monitor, past the information of Elma, Iowa, population 653; past the minimum payment information quick flashing on the far right and the new due date calculated and waiting in italics on the lower left. She saw the slender wrists, the blue veined hands which once had held children and washed clothes and set the table for Thanksgiving and Fourth of July. She saw the wrinkles gathering near the eyes as the old woman searched still. And even as she heard the voice murmuring through the headset, she saw the wedding ring and engagement ring in a gold setting surrounding the thin pale shaft of her fourth finger, the red nail polish partially chipped, the finger and the hand in an ache of arthritis shuffling through the very last of the bills drawn forth from the pigeon holes and onto the waiting lap of the desk. _Husband Henry deceased_ said the screen. She wondered how far away the kids were, the ones she had held and changed and nursed and scolded when they got too close to the stove.

"Mrs. Curtis?"

Still no answer. She wondered how long it had been that she had lived alone and her eyes wandered back to the lurid screen which spoke once more: _January 1998._

"Well ma'am," the strained voice said, crackling through the headset on Melissa Mitchell's head, covering a part of her strawberry-blonde hair, bobbed, cut short, "I've looked high and low and can't seem to find it. Would like to tell you that the cat dragged it off, if there was a cat to do the dragging. But it's just me."

"Yes, Mrs. Curtis. I see that. My notes tell me that Henry died in 1998."

"Yes—you got all that? Yes—in the very same month as the one we're in."

"And seven years is not a long time."

"No," crackling on the line, "no it ain't."

Suddenly she looked away. Why was she talking this way? She felt a pang of anxiety. Perhaps this was the one call of the day or the week that they would be recording. They would hear her words. Worse, they would hear her Melissa voice, her private voice. They would hear the softness of its tone, its texture like honey in chamomile tea. They would frown, come out of the office at the far end of the operations room where the window blinds always were drawn closed. And they would look down the serried rows of cubicles until their eyes met hers, until their cupped hands reached towards her, motioning her to come away from the headset and the screen of the CRT, asking her to come into the blank, rectangular space where they worked, monitoring this or that. And she would walk, head high, looking for courage and for the right words to oppose the set of their jaws and their minds.

But not this time. That had been last week. And they had chided her only briefly, because they liked her Brenda ways—curt, efficient, probing, controlled, persistent. She worked. She produced payments—even on accounts in the 90-120 day column. She worked out agreements for post-dated checks, the fifteenth of each month, and the payments actually arrived. That she was about to be married, that she was in love, that she had a black dress hanging in the closet for tomorrow night's groom's dinner and a white one encased in clear plastic hanging in that guest bedroom where Pete never went—ever—these things they did not know, or even care about. They were men surrounded by the silica of files, by numbers and words in light green. And past them there were other men: men she had never met nor would ever want to; men whose voices came into the little rectangular room through a speaker phone; men with voices which were clipped, their words like stones peppering the air, like gravel thrown up by a passing truck.

"I've searched everywhere and can't—who did you say you are?"

"I'm Brenda, Mrs. Curtis." And as soon as she said it, she wondered. Out there somewhere beyond the window in the full light of late morning, she could see cars moving down Main Street: this was not the first time that she had wondered about another life. Brenda was under attack. The dress was part of it. But the other part was here—on the phone—pondering her reply.

"And you say it's Rural Life that we're dealing with?"

"Yes, Cynthia, you have a health insurance policy with Rural Life..."

"That I do.

"And your account is past due." The Brenda in her voice was coming back. "We are going to need a good-faith payment to get us moving in the right direction or your health insurance coverage will have to be terminated. And we don't want that, do we?"

She knew the words by heart. But they were new words to Mrs. Cynthia Curtis, wife of Henry from Elma, Iowa, listening to them on a snowy morning in January, sitting in the front room by the roll top desk, one hand in her lap, one on the phone, trembling.

"No. No ma'am, we don't want that" came the voice, seemingly drained of energy. "Not that."

This was the signal. Brenda would know what to do. There was a separate screen for notations (F-6). She punched it in and got a split screen with the file information on the left and a text frame on the right for brief notes. The cursor waited, blinking. This was her moment: take charge.

She was about to launch into a minimal payment discussion and to pry, get bank information, check information, information which would foster some sort of feeling of control, of commitment. That was the next step, and it was natural. But she couldn't take it. It was there, but strangely beyond her. She felt paralyzed, restrained. Locked in the grip of conflicting emotions, she felt incapable of exerting her will.

Instead she was back in Iowa, with its snow whipped by the wind across the stubble of corn fields, its snow piled deep in the ditches. She imagined pickups with snow-plows driving down the side streets of Elma, with its bank, feed store, hardware, quick stop, old corner clothing store turned into Emily's Whimsical Nothings. Across the street she could see an old abandoned storefront with its tall narrow windows now graced with a sign proclaiming used books old and rare. Imagined or not, this was the stuff of her Elma, and she wanted to be there. Was this crazy or what? she thought. She wanted to be _there_ , past the main street offerings until down some side street she would find 856 Harrison and Mrs. Curtis. Cynthia in a night gown at ten-thirty in the morning, a cup of cold coffee on the kitchen table. Cynthia with her gray-white hair drawn up and her blue slippers and her trembling hands. _That_ Cynthia—one that the men in the far room did not know or understand; one that the voices coming brusquely into the room would reduce to a simple number, a number flashing on the screen.

And indeed it was. It was waiting for her to take charge, to come back from Iowa and to go back there quickly in the firm, set, almost-strident tone of Brenda, Collections Department, representing (today) Rural Life and Liability.

"Are you still there?" The voice brought her to her senses, back into her business self.

"Yes, I am, Cynthia. Could you send me $50 this month on the fifteenth as a sign of good faith? We need to get this account squared away, before you lose all of your coverage."

"Fifty, you say?" She could see the lady opening the worn, dog-earred pages of her check book, flipping to the check register and looking down the columns. Her social security payment, the small annuity from Henry's life insurance, sometimes a gift check from a niece in Chicago. Fifty dollars. Where was fifty dollars?

"I'm thinking Miss Brenda," she said to the voice. And then Brenda became once more Melissa seeing her there with her checkbook open and she did something that she never ever did. She revised downward.

"Well, let's start then with thirty-five."

"Thirty-five! I can do thirty-five."

"And fifty in two months?" Brenda again was returning.

"In two months, yes."

Snow was melting in Iowa; the winter wind subsiding. Trembling was easing at the blue-veined wrist.

"And what about my coverage? My doctor tells me that I have to come in for another examination and my arthritis medicine is running low. This will keep things going for a while?"

"You're good as long as you keep these payments coming on in."

"Oh, well that's good."

On the brink of marriage, she wondered how it was that she could imagine being at the other brink, life mostly lived and some pieces of it entirely gone. Perhaps it was that with Pete she sensed a solid future. Her dreams seemed real and not fanciful. Her way ahead seemed to be shaped and defined by the love which she felt for him. Perhaps it was that she could stop merely thinking of herself and have some part of her free to think about or feel with someone else. Someone outside her family or her circle of friends. Someone who merely entered her life in lurid yellow-green. Cynthia brought her home, put her in the grounded spot where she would have to stay put, love, care for, age, and move inexorbly towards the other brink.

"Are you going to have enough money for food, Mrs. Curtis with the thirty-five-dollar payment?"

"Well, I'll have to." She wondered what ever possessed her to ask such a personal question, as Cynthia Curtis continued. "No, Miss Brenda, I canned up my garden this year, just like usual. And we had good rain, so the corn and the beans came up good. And that neighbor of mine, Hank Akers, he came by just yesterday with another full load of pickup wood. No, I'll get by this month."

"I imagine it gets cold out there."

"Oh, yes. But why do you ask? I suppose you're living in the big city far away from this place are you not?"

She wondered with the old lady about her sympathetic tone and half-worried that they would be listening now. Time was getting on.

"Well, it's not as big as you may think. They want you to think I'm from a big populated place, but actually it's a county seat. About 150 miles away from your place. A town of ten thousand at the last count."

"And you like what you do?"

She imagined the old woman sitting down, the roll top folded, staring absently out at the swirling snow, her mind stretching east towards her caller.

"Oh, now you're asking the big questions."

"Fifty dollars a month questions are big questions for me, you know, Miss Brenda. Is what I ask you such a big one?"

She was caught off guard. There was a persistent ring of steel in the words and in the soft-hard tone of her client.

"I'm not sure what to say. I don't know."

"Yes. Life sometimes twists us, puts us in places where we don't know. But finally, at last, the big ones demand answers, too. If you don't know, you're nevertheless in the midst of an answer are you not?"

"I suppose so."

"Yes?"

"Well, you're making me think."

"Just like you made me. You know, Miss Brenda, I was worried about all of the dollar stuff. My bank account is getting low this time of month. And then you called and made me think hard."

"Yes?"

"Well, yes you did! And now I am just trying to get you to think about what it is that is out there waiting for you. Something ahead, I sense.?"

"Yes. Two days from now, I am getting married."

"Oh joy! Blessings on you and who is it?"

"Pete."

"Blesssings on you and Pete."

"Thank you Mrs. Curtis."

"You're welcome, girl."

The screen was flashing. She had reached the limit. The limit was first signalled by this sort of flashing. The whole screen moved. She did not often trigger this reaction, which they measured. In fact, it had been a full thirty days earlier when she had won, for the sixth straight month, the low-flash award at the month's end.

But that was then and this was now. It was flashing. Thirty seconds from now, if she did not close the call, the line would be cut off and a call would automatically be made to the men in the far room. No one liked that one. It was defended as a way to keep down private conversations, the kind which would lag on and on and cut into the work day. But in reality, it was a screw in a metal halo being worked slowly into the brain. The screw kept turning. Keep at it. Get to work. Focus.

"Mrs Curtis?"

"Yes, honey."

"I have to go now."

"I understand.Duty calls. You call back, catch me up, tell me about your new life?"

"I will."

"And I will be waiting. No place to go, as you understand."

She did not say goodbye. It took too much time and was too difficult. Did a collector ever really say goodbye, with feeling? She cut the call and hoped that the screen had not triggered that other call. It had not.

She was sitting there with the screen blank, waiting for the next call to come up, wondering what she would say when it did—if what she said ever would come out of the depths of her or simply from the script, the one she had been taught, the one she had adapted into her own effective style, the one which was part of an outer layer of who she truly was.

The door to the room opened. Two figures emerged, unsmiling faces in white shirts with dark ties, dark trousers, the usual uniform. And they were both looking her way. They did not seem anxious to find her eyes and wave her in, but their carriage, their demeanor seemed menacing to Melissa. They seemed to already have decided something, something which might play a key role in her life.

And now she sensed she would be tested. Who they were and who she was would collide soon. She walked towards them. It no longer was a matter of courage, of trying to find the right words. She walked with a sense of something deeper stirring inside of her. She could do this job, it was true. But the job also could do her—in.

She did not worry about what she would say or do or how she might feel. As she walked past the last of the cubicles towards the two men in disreputable white, all Melissa knew was that the opening she was about to enter was a narrow gate—and that freedom waited on the other side.

THE CODE

Oh, how bright the path grows from day to day,

Leaning on the ever-lasting arms.

—-Elisha A. Hoffman

The red tail hawk landed in an Osage orange tree, part of the fence row, and waited. He watched it through the window of the study for several minutes, sitting motionless just like the bird, until with one movement it rose straight up, flapping two, three times and then—wings out, like an eagle riding a thermal, except lower down— it waited and then dropped, disappearing below the level of the window and the road just beyond, presumably pouncing on a field mouse.

It was a nice break from the arranging of the bulletin, particularly inasmuch as the Old Testament lesson for the week was from Isaiah: _They who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint._ It put him in mind of Gerard Manley Hopkins' Windhover. _To Christ our Lord_ the priest had written, and he had always liked the final line about _fall, gall, and gash gold vermilion._ Now here it was. The hawk, the eagle, the rising up and the riding of the wind. Finally even the vermilion. Surely the mouse must have rendered up vermilion, down across the road, the frail morsel of flesh crunching in the talon grip of the bird.

It was there, it was everywhere.

Especially in the numbers. Numbers and letters could be especially plain to the discerning eye. License plates, registration numbers, numbers from the telephone book. Most of the time, he could interpret with the guideline of _the first shall be last and the last first._ It was a direct, inverse reversing logic. Z is A, 9 is 1. One or A, it could be either. Zero was 0 or null—a space. Other times, though, he would have to work because the message was entwined with other things also present in the day. Things that came to him in the flow of time, in the moment, would tell him where to start. Some days he would sit in his study and say to the walls above the noise of the steam radiator chirping by the window: _On Margate sands I can connect nothing with nothing._ No one knew how much that phrase helped him in the throes of trying to understand. He liked Eliot, but Hopkins was his favorite. _Mine, O Thou Lord of Life! Give my roots rain!_ But of course in preaching he must stick closer to home. Folks out here would not understand how Eliot or Hopkins could be involved, connected to the Lord in this way. So the Psalter especially helped. Just yesterday, for instance, he had read the appointed lesson from Psalm 139: _O Lord, thou hast searched me and known me! Thou knowest when I sit down and when I rise up; thou discernest my thoughts from afar._ And here it was—the same motion, _down and up_ in the flight of the bird _the achieve, the mastery of the thing!_ And the numbers also spoke. Psalm 139 was z-x-a. But taken numerically it was 971. 971 spoke. Oh, first, simply the local exchange for this part of the county. Nothing special about that. He often saw it. But then, on the back of the radio in the parsonage when the fuse went out _on the same day_ there it was in the midst of the code and again on the back of the fuel oil truck when he drove over to Chanute at noon for the meeting of the local area clergy.

Occasionally there would be someone to tell. For instance the local Swedish evangelical pastor might listen. They believed in a living God so perhaps the pastor might believe that God indeed speaks in strange and in mysterious ways. Wondrous ways, really. Perhaps he could get the man to understand. But many clergy and parishioners alike, would give him this blank look and he would be forced to change the subject and just let it go.

It was his private way. Private. Holy. Deep with its occasional rhythms. Always discovering just how continuous the speaking was. Always coming to him from the numbers, the coincidence of their flow being the grammar of His talking. Numbers. Letters. Patterns. Patterns everywhere.

So he thought about this during the afternoon. The confirmation class would be in at four. Thought about it in terms of hawk and eagle and windhover and decided that yes this could be a part of his sermon. It was Lent now. Purple and black. A bruised season. Christ the bruised rod. The hawk with the bruising grip. The time of light, yes, the coming of the Light, but also the time of reflection. The confirmation class today would be taught about the Lenten Season. The coming of light is an internal journey in which we seek the Light of Christ's face and learn to listen to Him. Listen to Him speaking in the little actions of the day. Live with Him day to day. Take Him to school, to the playground, to the ball games.

The State Championship was coming and Erie was playing Frontenac just next Tuesday. He would go, of course. Sitting with his clergy collar, black in the midst of the puffed, ruddy faces of the people in the overheated gym, the point guard calling the play, the crowd up and down, the coach with a big bull of a voice _BLOCK OUT! BLOCK OUT BASELINE!_ They called out plays and he remembered them late into the night, plays burned into the wood grain of his mind, engraved with a code. He liked the use of numbers which he heard, sitting right behind the Erie bench. During the timeouts he could hear them rising, laced into the noise of the crowd and the blare of the band: _Now this time I want you to shift out of the 2-3 and into a 2-1-2 zone if their point man—23—brings the ball up and comes right side._ Then in the midst of the night he would wake up with a vision, numbers rising and falling against a black background, the numbers in vermilion perhaps or in gold. And up against the canopy of the space of the vision, just like the wall Belshazzaar could see, would come the names of the plays called by the coach, one of his parishioners: _Hazard_ , _Quicksand_ (the zone trap), _Gray Hawk_ (full court press), _Walker_ (hold the ball, final shot), _White Oak_ (high post), _Bramble_ (low post). The man was an English teacher and one night, at the beginning of the season, Gilbert woke straight up with _K-e-n-t-u-c-k-y_ in green, riding a sea of black with the form of the state in the background and switched on the light and went straight down to the Rand McNally and there they were! All the plays were towns in the eastern part of the State! That's when he decided he was led to go to each and every game, if he could—if there was no wedding rehearsal or church dinner. And often even with the team on the road he was back of the bench, thrilled to hear _QUICKSAND!_ or _GRAY HAWK_! rolling across the opponents' gym floor like a kind of spiritual presence.

The game was holy. At least at times it was. But it was all around you, really. Invisible. Hardness of heart. A people living in darkness. Walking in it, drowning in it in the spring especially when the low water bridges would flood out, the water rolling down like the very presence of God.

##

His mother didn't come to the games. Too old. Hearing shot and twisted so that everything that was said against the background of the reverberating gym would drive her outside in just a quarter. Even the football was too much. So she sat home while Gilbert went on.

Last game he came home in a sweat. Something about the final score. LO-RD, he had said. Gilbert and Lord were real close. Connected. But sometimes he didn't watch the road, reading all those plates. She remembered the last game, though.

His Volkswagen Rabbit diesel sputtering in the driveway. Funny how she could hear the car, he thought. Shouting common words at her in the house and then hear the car, even in winter, waiting up for him. Waiting up for a sixty-one year old pastor! But he had wanted to tell her, because there was no one else to tell at that hour of the night and during the other hours no one who would listen or whom he could trust.

Jimmy Lueck had brought the ball up. He always was good with the ball. So he got it over the centerline at Humboldt with :29 left. Came right side. Switched right in front of the stubby redhead that they have for point guard, right under his _nose_ , heading left and he got Red on his hip. Got him there and kept him there, real safe. _Safe and secure from all alarms_. Kept at it, still left, then stopped and looked. Red stopped, too, but a step slow, the clock at 12, so he got a quick look right, the wing man coming up, and bounced it to Jerrod Holtman. _Leaning on Jesus, leaning on Jesus._ Confirmed just three years ago, now a sophomore leaning down and out to snag the ball. Tall gangly kid with a rash of pimples on his face and raw knees. _Leaning on the ever-lasting arms._ Knees and elbows and big hands. When he gets something in those hands! Handshakes in church for instance, not even knowing the power. _What have I to dread, what have I to fear..._ Well, he GOT it. Got it and pivoted and looked low post, real casual like, the ball in the vise of his hands, when they thought they would be having it right then. _Leaning on the everlasting arms?_ He still hears the slap. Hears it at night usually. SLAP and then the whistle. There was this red mark just above the wrist on the right arm, showing up when he dribbled the ball at the foul line. Nine seconds it was. _I have blessed peace with my Lord so near..._ Put in both shots. Ice water in the veins. The Humboldt crowd hooting. Sunk 'em both at nine seconds, then _GRAY HAWK_! _Eight._ And at _seven_ Lueck fills the passing lane, gets it and coils it out to Hudson, the big center. _Five! Four!_ Hudson back to Lueck. _Three!_ Lueck dribbles it out. _Leaning on the ever-lasting arms._

The Erie people are going nuts, and he is just sitting there looking at the board and thinking of the numbers. First, of course, is the score. But also he noted the final seconds—12-9-7-3. Holy numbers. Twelve tribes don't you see. And the trinity. The triune God. And the ninety and nine. Seventy times seven. He waited until things calmed down before trying to get up the nerve to drive away from that one. His knees were weak from the Presence and he was glad he couldn't see the plates very well at night.

His mother understood the twelve tribes. Yes, she could see that. But the score. "It was sixty all when he stepped up to the line, wasn't it," she asked? Yes it was. Gilbert smiled, his white face creased with thick folds when he grinned and it seemed to open up his whole visage, from the high, mostly bald pate right on down to the jowl when he did that. He smiled. And then said softly (but she could hear): _It was the half-time score, Mother. Half-time score was 27-32. Twenty-seven thirty-two them leading, but I wasn't worried. It was so plain. I knew. Twenty-seven equals L + O; R + D equals thirty-two. LO-RD!!! Sitting there right behind them,_ _I just knew_!

##

Gilbert wanted to say something to Jerrod the next Sunday, second Sunday in Lent, but he went out the side door, and Gilbert got stuck with Mrs. Childress, a forward-thinking woman, who wanted to share her plans for the May Day Celebration in which the congregation would be joining church women's organizations from all across the nation—Church Women United—to celebrate the coming of Spring and pray for peace. So he saw Jerrod's fuzzy head with a hint of alfalfa cowlick gliding into Fellowship Hall and gone. He didn't know exactly what he wanted to say to the young man, except that it had been an exceptional event. He imagined, too, that the red mark now had worked its way up into a mighty bruise. Maybe not raised, but blue-black with streaks radiating out from where the capillaries had broken under the blow. It connected with this morning's sermon about the bruising of Lent. The Suffering Servant. Bruised reed. But there was no way Jerrod would want to listen to this sort of thing over coffee cake and juice and his saying anything would make a stir, so he let it go.

Let go and let God. Breathing in and breathing out. "You must learn to calm yourself Gilbert," his mother had said after the last revelation. And he had agreed that there was a need in his life for a kind of spiritual yoga. In and out. Ying and yang. Take what He gives you. Take and treasure and learn. But then let it go. Let it go before you work yourself up into an almighty sweat. Still waters run deep. Let it go and keep quiet for the Lord's sake. Pastor them in ways that they will understand. Silence can be a kind of bruising, too. Silence in Lent. Quiet. The reflective life. He settled on that, Sunday afternoon, just before drifting off during the NBA game—Havlicek in one of his last— missing the numbers from the final score.
On Monday they would drive together over to Chanute and down to Coffeyville so he could get his Volkswagen tuned up. She always came with him. A tradition with them. Take a Monday, get up late, late breakfast. Leave about nine. Drive down to be in the shop by ten-thirty. Get the loaner car so she wouldn't always be walking. Window shop. Eat a leisurely dinner. Shop for groceries. Then pick up the car for the return around three. In February, they could easily pick up all the perishable items that they avoided in July or August. Two or three times a year they did this, depending on how many Lutherans got sick and up to University Hospital—how many miles he'd drive. Between tune-ups they did the oil changes down at the Erie Garage. And tires, brakes and belt work. It was a good system, and his mother liked getting out for a change, making it a special day.

Off they went. Like clockwork. Out of the parsonage lane at nine, down the gravel township road and on down State 39 to Chanute. There was a little black ice down in one of the dips of the road where a creek bottom came up close to the black asphalt, but no traffic. Highway 169 was clean as a whistle to Coffeyville, very few cars. It was a quiet drive. No license plates, no craning of the neck, no passing slow cars to get to more information, following license plates of same-side traffic, message after message becoming a continuing rope of meaning, plate after plate, sign after sign: B-U-R-M-A-S-H-A-V-E! His mother drifted off to sleep on the blue ribbon of highway, waking up halfway through his detailed conversation with the service manager.

The morning went smoothly enough. And in the afternoon, after dinner at Thomelson's Family Diner, she had sent him over to the fresh vegetables, just as soon as they had entered the grocery mart. Gave him a basket with the plastic kiddie guard stuck in the up position and one wheel that wobbled whenever you pushed down too hard and sent him over, hard left, into the place where the ceiling was lowered, and where the U-shape of shelves and bins housed all the fresh produce Coffeyville could manage in February. Fact was, they did pretty good. She had a rather long list this time, and he labored through grapefruit and lemons, Romaine lettuce and spinach, even finding the little packages of bean sprouts. Since dinner he had been feeling it and that last package of the sprouts set his appetite for the rest of the store. He knew why she always shoved him over here and went away. Except for the sprouts and the alfalfa sprouts packaged in plastic with printed descriptions and with bar codes, there were no numbers.

In earlier days she would come up behind him in the middle of a lane filled with canned goods, reading a label from Dinty Moore, the can inverted, figuring the possibilities. Gilbert, you don't really want that beef stew, do you, dear? Taking the can in a surprisingly strong hand, twisting it out of his paw, shoving his cart down the lane at the same time. Getting out of there. He knew. She knew. Too much time with the Lord.

The Lord was omnipresent now in Barnstads, since the bar codes. The bar codes with those little numbers just above the vertical lines changed everything. Message piled upon message as they went down the aisles. Boxes of croutons, dried mushrooms in jugs, peanut butter in tubs of clear plastic, cereal, syrup, even packages of Everlight batteries, three to the box, all began speaking. Began and stopped. One message would just get started in the arc it made from shelf to cart, when another would come from the side and rest gently, placed over part of the first. Fragments. Fragments of the Lord speaking, speaking, speaking. _Lord speak to me, that I might speak in living echoes of thy love._ He would just get on track, making the connection, when another message would pull him in another direction. Jerked. Old Testament. New Testament. Early church fathers. One time he had plucked a loaf of spun white bread off the shelf when a bar code number led him to Athanatius. This, in turn, led him to the creeds to the Arian controversy and all of this during a week when the Epistle Lesson for the coming Sunday was from Colossians. Colossians 1:15: _He is the image of the invisible God, the first-born of all creation; for in him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible..._

He remembers going in to the study with the loaf of white bread, right past the Hoveys who were in to clean the church on a Friday afternoon. Smiling, remembering how they thought they were in for a different communion with that white bread. Standing in the study with the bread down on the desk, looking up references to Athanatius in Harnack's _History of Dogma_ and then in LaTourette's _History of the Christian Church_ , he especially had liked the part of visible and invisible—that was so important to being able to listen, being able to see—and stressed it in the following sermon.

It was everywhere.

He was just getting started with all those fragments when his mother came up with three or four cans of water-packed tuna, dropping them into the sea of words jostling in the cart, saying, "Gilbert, go on down Number Two and get us a good twenty-five pound sack of bakers. I'm not up to lifting today," and with that he was off, obedient son, the messages left alone in the chrome bin of the cart, labels from the shelves a blur of color as he took his customary long strides, shouldering the spuds and finding her at the check out.

On the drive home, he reflected on how it was always so hard unpacking, too. Packing and unpacking in the welter of the possibility of His speaking. _Speak, Lord, for thy servant listeneth._ The drive back got them behind a Yellow freightliner probably heading up to Lawrence or Olathe and obediently doing the speed limit. There was a call 1-800 message on the back of the truck to alert motorists to the company's safety program and another about joining the winning team. The license plate was partially covered.

Oklahoma mud, he supposed. He got past in Chanute, taking the side-street by the Methodist church, and then up State Route again when about a mile and a half past the Neosho River bridge it all jammed up. Mostly eighteen wheelers ahead of him and a pick-up or two. All jammed up. Some people way up ahead of him already out of their cars.

He had seen it coming. The numbers had been telling him. First in the parking lot of Barnstads he had seen B-E-W-A-R-E. Not numbers, mind you. Just the letters on the plate of a flat-bed pickup, an old 1950s model with the cab and underbody in primer gray, tire chains jangling, dangling on the rack and large, stiff, extra-wide mud flaps with Back Off! and this cartoon character with pistols drawn—what was his name?—staring at you. The black edge of the bed had another message which he saw just before the plate itself: **Insured by Smith & Wesson.** So it was a somber, reflective, almost-Lenten drive back to the dealership. And then—several times along the way back—the mark of the beast, 666. A Colorado plate passed—no numbers to be seen at that speed, but just the ^^^^ of the Rockies at the top of the plate—and suddenly he thought of the Psalter, no doubt reminded by the Lord: _I lift up mine eyes to the hills, From whence does my help come? My help comes from the LORD, who made heaven and earth._

So driving out 39 he was still thinking about Beware, the presence of evil and the help of the Lord when they came upon this mess. Who knows how long it would take to go just the few miles up to the Erie junction where they could turn north and home.

When they came up the next rise, they began to see smoke. A little early to be burning fields, he thought, and then the flash of yellow and of red. Pumper on the scene. Highway patrol.

The truck was mostly settled over the car. Kind of like a big beetle with fire in its belly, fire rolling out from beneath the truck where the car was supposed to be. Men were still running back and forth with hoses. The roof of the car was completely gone, covered by the truck. Squashed, he supposed. They inched past. In and out of gear. The officers at the side waving them through, but everybody watching. He wondered if he should stop. Did they need clergy? Where were they? Had they been carted off. The last policeman was in County Sheriff brown and he recognized Ira. Hadn't seen him too often at church during the last months, but always at the home games, doing security.

"Think I should pull over?" he had asked through the open window.

"No need to, Reverend. Happened too quick." Ira lifted and replaced his hat.

"What happened?"

"They were just off the side there on the north and he come over the ridge and must not have seen 'em. Hooked 'em with the bumper and just drove them off the road. Real sad. Well, better move on now. See you, Reverend."

The line inched along. At the Erie junction they turned off, the black smoke just a wisp now, curling in the rearview.

##

But it would not go away in his mind. It curled and curled out of its yellow center, billowing out black and thick and choking. He saw it at night. He would wake with a message, the beginning of the Code, and then IT would come, drifting along, sure of itself, blotting out the scene with its thick, black presence.

The Lenten season was altered for him. No longer was it just a time of quiet reflection. Now it became a time of testing: messages at night when he would waken, sweating in the stillness, were now imperiled by smoke. Smoke curled over the numbers, blurring, blocking out. Perhaps it had all come too easily these years, he thought. Perhaps he had been given a gift and had squandered it and now was being judged:

O God, why dost thou cast us off for ever?

Why does thy anger smoke against the sheep of Thy pasture?

Remember thy congregation, which thou hast gotten of old

which thou hast redeemed to be the tribe of thy heritage!

He preached from the Psalter on Sunday. Preached on the trials and on the sense of abandonment and the smoke of the Lord with an earnest, passionate tone, a tone sounding strange even to him, as he heard his voice rolling out through the assembled faithful of the congregation just before Holy Communion.

It was an exhausting sermon. He had risen early and pondered the text as he had Friday night after returning from Coffeyville and all through the day on Saturday. Suddenly he was bereft. He had to struggle through, each word arching its back, prickling that he should find its meaning. Through the commentaries he went. Devotional material. The church fathers when he could track down a reference. Then, sitting in the study, early Sunday morning he had seen the hawk again, drifting over the scene at first light, and his hunting and presence seemed not a glory but a trepidation. The bird was ordinary. _Between the potency/ And the existence,_ Eliot says. _Between the essence/ And the descent/ Falls the Shadow._

Strange then that they came more his way, in the narthex by the main doors, then out the side way to Fellowship Hall at the closing. Searching eyes. Warm handshakes. Vigor. A blessing of sorts. He could not understand. This message so tentative. So careful. Just the words before him preached not the surety of special meaning. Even his mother after the coffee hour and back in the parsonage brought it up just as they were taking off their wraps.

"A good sermon, Gilbert," she had said. "Good and sensitive and clear. Your best this year, I think," as she made her way into the pantry to scrub the potatoes for Sunday dinner.

At the Frontenac Game on Tuesday he took his usual place. They played hard that night. Real hard. Jerrod pumping elbows and knees like pistons in the engine of his body. Jimmy Lueck caring for the ball. Good passes. In and out of offenses in response to the changing zone-press and man to man of the Eagles. He heard all the old names. White Oak, Bramble again rolled out across the floor and into the minds and bodies of the players who arranged themselves accordingly. But, by the end of the third quarter, it was over. He knew that without even looking at the score, sensing it like the rest of the crowd who saw it in the flagging energy of the players, the failure to block out, the lack of offensive boards, the long, desperate jump shots rattling the rim and falling away. When they got too tired for Gray Hawk, the taller team from Frontenac took the ball into the four corners—and with it they took the clock. They lost by 14, the Eagles going away.

It was two weeks later when he discovered one day, in the midst of thinking about the confirmation lesson, that he no longer had to hide it. What was it that he had often said to himself: Keep it down? With a pang he realized the numbers were diminishing. He slept longer at night, sometimes all the way through. He saw the road better, too, his mother said, with not all that gawking.

He thought perhaps it was his vision. Perhaps he should go on down to Pittsburg and get his vision checked. But it didn't seem wrong. It was more like the numbers just didn't jump up at him. The final score of the game was when he first sensed it. Didn't even look while climbing down from the bleachers. Thought instead of Ira, standing at the far corner with two others, shaking his head. _That's_ where he had looked. Had to wait for the Chanute _Herald_ on Saturday to get the score. And then, sitting in the parsonage in front of the TV with the paper, splitting the game into quarters, still the numbers didn't add up.

It must have been that smoke. Billowing out, it was a strange smoke, wiping clean with its heavy black accretion of oil and plastic and tar. He never learned the names of the people who had died, killed instantly. It had been in the paper but he had not looked. Somehow, in a strange manner, the smoke had ended it, coming insistently in his dreams. Whatever it was, it had given him a jolt. And the numbers, like the flood waters that can surge up in late winter, drained off and went the other way.

The call from the Bishop came late Friday afternoon. He was canceling his trip for the last week in February. Then saying something strange about hearing he had been getting better. Better? What was there to recover from? Bishop telling him he had been hearing good things about his recent sermons from the people of the church. How could that be, with all the struggle he had put into them? Wanted just to come down for his annual visit in May. "Don't look for me until then, Gilbert," he had said.

So it came down to late one Saturday afternoon, with the last of the month running out under a dreary gray sky, fog covering the river bottoms, moisture heavy, dripping from the trees, with the mercury hovering around the freezing mark. He was sitting quietly in his study with no one around. Quiet. A heavy cold was creeping into the study since the space heater was off. The only light was graying at the window. And now late on this afternoon, he felt himself giving out. He put his head down on the Bible and closed his eyes. His head had ached in the last weeks. But now he felt just kind of soft: Soft and cold and ordinary.

The kingdom of God is not coming with signs to be observed; nor will they say, 'Lo, here it is!' or 'There!' for behold, the kingdom of God is in the midst of you.

The numbers had gone. The web of connections had vanished, thinning out and then just plain disappearing. Sixty-one year old pastor. He stretched his arms out and felt with both hands the fluted edges of the large desk. He felt the cool pages of the open book on his cheek. He listened to the quiet of the church, an expectant, gathering silence. And then, for no particular reason, he said, in his rich bass voice, his head still down, the full contents of the Lord's Prayer.

Said it out, alone, and into the waiting silence. Said it out, a simple prayer, not special. Said it out plainly. And when he had finished, this sense of peace. Exile and return, his Old Testament professor had said while doing the theology of Gerhard Von Rad. And now here it was: a memory, not a message.

Gilbert felt finished. He was getting to know himself again in the common-place.

An ordinary man.

GOING FOR THE MAIL

We live in an old chaos of the sun,

Or old dependency of day and night,

Or island solitude, unsponsored, free

Of that wide water, inescapable.

–Wallace Stevens

East

She has always been here, it seems.

All her adult life she has lived along the main road—first gravel, then oiled into macadam—that led into the town. Alongside the parsonage, she has watched a procession of neighbors—ministers and their families—come and go. Some take two years, some as long as eight or ten, but they always go. The names blur. The faces fade. But the routine never varies. Sometime on the day of arrival or departure, the church chairman, usually Vernon Larson, will drive over in his pickup. There will already be a truck in the driveway, rented and half full. Then a couple of others from church will slow and turn in.

She misses nothing. Through the curtains, the window over her kitchen sink which faces east, Mary Pierce will watch it all coming or going: bulky headboards and hutches, sofa beds, writhing mattresses, and sometimes even a what-not for the occasional porcelain collections of Mrs. Parson. That's what she calls them: Minister and Mrs. Parson. It has become a blanket designation, a name bestowed with each successive shape and face: The Parsons. The Parson Kids are tagged, too. "You the minister?" she says when they first meet. She needs them there: One of the Parsons bending over the lawnmower; Mrs. Parson out in the back trying to turn the garden; the hay bales in winter alongside the north side of the Parson house trying to keep them warm. Through the blinds she sees it all, imagining the rest when she moves away from the kitchen window and out into the parlor, the floor creaking. Upstairs in the soft hollow of her old bed, she remembers still, her mind facing east.

East.

Mary Pierce is a Lutheran, and so she knows that East is a special direction, a spiritual place. Her pastor from her youth, a man most severe in a strained, almost chaste liturgical orthodoxy, was the one who originally taught her. She remembers his complaint to the confirmation class after the church board failed to listen. In a dry, even tone he talked about the church sanctuary being wrong, the altar facing south instead of east. "When we pray," he said, "we should face east." With his back turned, leading the congregation into the holy of holies on Sunday, _he_ should face east. "We look east for the coming of Christ, like we do the coming of day," he had said.

Mary looks east. Down, farther east, the sound of the freight train rends the air. It comes like the sound of the fire on the stove when she lights it, the gas first cutting the air, then sucking it in. But then the train's sound rises, building into a wail which coyotes sometimes answer at night—the wail which now simply cleaves the dense, still air hanging with its humidity.

"Close," Mary says to herself as she swings open the screen door, the rusty hinges singing in answer to the train, the screen itself speckled with rust and ballooned out from where the hands of little Parsons have found it in years past.

She takes the umbrella. There will be no rain, but the sun is out. Out and high and strong, she thinks. Slowly she pieces together the sidewalk ahead and its path to the side driveway, the culvert, and the thin gravel border of Route 103.

The train passing brings up memories of earlier times. She thinks about it as she walks: the regular procession of passengers following the noise, clumps of people regularly disembarking down near the bank, the car dealership, and the former furniture store. She is half remembering, half in the present as she pecks with her cane, a bird turning the stones ahead of her as she moves east, past the parsonage, past Frank Steiwalt's house with its broad verandah, past the Miner's place, the kids with their dirty faces out in the front yard. She passes much in her journey; passes much of her history as she pecks, minces her way past the vestige of the dry goods store to the east of the Miner's, a row of bricks ripped down from the west facing wall, the windows out, the roof good and holding, the porch sagging before the fading magnificence of the front door. To the north, opposite the Miner's place, the store, and an empty field, Mary remembers a frame house that once was standing there and now might nod on occasion to the memory of that place as if to both respect it and keep it there still as she walks in the heat of the summer sun building high above her and her black speck shape, the umbrella a canopy above her now, the cane tapping the way.

The bank, still a well kept, brick building, is now the post office to which Mary goes in the early afternoon. Florence Seeper knows she will be coming, with her old black umbrella, out for sun or rain, right about one fifteen. She has Mary's packet banded and ready for her—although she pretends not to, going to the pigeon-hole of a box while Mary waits, peering into the confines of the darker space in the building, made darker by her sun-glasses, where once there was money. Now it's mostly third and fourth class stuff she gets. Rarely does Mary ever sign for a package or registered mail. Florence thinks she has witnessed that event maybe only once or twice in the last two years.

Florence keeps track. Certified mail is an event here, a big tally. Florence thinks it's now as big as the bank deposits in the days when the oil first came in—pumped from the land round about by those persistent, iron engines with their off-beat, oscillating motion. For a while, there were fields of them, almost more than the cattle grazing alongside. Then going to the bank was a matter of some purpose. She can see the crowds inside this building, the watch chains and the bib overalls, though not as well as Mary. Still, Florence can remember the people going to the bank and shopping for the week on a Saturday night, the town filled with the residents of Allen County, all part of a weekly routine. People still come in here with their striped overalls, but now they're mostly from town. The farmers in the township wait for Joe Schmucker's old Ford station wagon with the little orange bulb on top to find its way out along the gravel roads and lanes of the county. They only come in for the big packages when the weather looks bad. Now the few oil pumps left are only a sideline. The big oil is south and west in Oklahoma, Florence thinks. When the new state highway came through, that was when it all changed. The town, settled alongside the rail line, suddenly found itself 1.5 miles away from Possibility. That's what Florence calls it. She looks west to Possibility, but only inside, only to herself. It is blacktopped out there. Expansive. It makes the rail line, the one she can see through the side window of the bank, look small.

Mary is here every day like clockwork. Florence looks at the gun-metal gray of her hair, pulled tight and gathered into a bun at the back. A few strands have pulled loose and hang out to the side like coiled bed springs. That's about as much as she can see of the hair, under Mary's broad-brimmed slouch of a hat, the band rotting out like a porch, as she hands Mary her the package. Mary receives it like money—collecting it, looking it over and putting it away into the black, crocheted bag with long straps which she keeps for her forays east down Route 103 and into town.

"Buildin' heat," she says to Florence who looks back at all her black and says,

"Yes, Ma'am. Kansas summer."

"Uh huh." Mary's head is down. She has taken a few slips of mail out of the bag and is shuffling through them as if they were cards, looking for counters. High cards. Trump. Suddenly the post mistress sees herself grown older, the years having stolen softly about like the layers of Mary's black wool coat—much too thick for summer.

"Was it hard walking down?"

"Oh, not too bad..." The voice trails off and Florence looks up. Their eyes meet briefly and Florence can see, even through the tint of the sun-glasses the gaze of Mary's eyes, searching.

"Not too bad." Florence echoes her, to put Mary back on track, but she is lost, gone in the mail, her thoughts straying into Fourth Class. Oh well, she thinks: Eighty-nine years. Dressing out of habit. Alone. Eating like a bird. A cellar full of fruit put up and never used. Coming down here each day like clockwork. Given this work to do. The rut worn deep, past thinking. Florence think of the air conditioner, the sweat coming like dew on her forehead as she looks at the thick clothes of Mary and sweats some more. She punches the control from medium to high and turns the setting up. The old unit shudders back on, vibrating on the ledge of the window to the west.

When Florence turns back, Mary is almost through the door, the thin, black back rigid from the waist half-ways up, then hunched up by the shoulders. She looks down at the long hem of the coat and the black leather shoes, knotted up tight. Mary has not said goodbye. She feels no need to. She has come like clockwork, persuaded by habit. She has obeyed the first half of the journey and she obeys still.

When Florence looks again, out the window past the air conditioner, Mary is at the tracks, feeling with her cane, heading back west.

West

West is always the place of hope. You were taught that in school. Westward expansion. All the farms around here are the product of the west, the looking west and the going. The west was western Kansas, of course, but there were other places, too. People talking of California. Of moving out to western Kansas where the great plains stretched forever. Colorado. And others, later, talking of Alaska and of the Peace River country way up in Canada. All hope. West. The cane now points west, touching the rough edges of the macadam, the loosened gravel at the side. Even through the glasses, she can see the polished iron of the rail as she works her way over the crossing, pecking, hanging her head sometimes to the side to gain some additional light. She can smell the creosote from the timbers and later the thick smell of the tar oozing out of the surface of the road. When a car comes, she can hear it a long way off, the tires on the pavement making the sound of a pot boiling. She makes sure then that she is well away from the road itself, working herself slowly over into the gravel strip until she can feel the brushing of the chicory, burdock and Queen Ann's lace at the edge of the gravel before the ditch, and see the ribbon of the grass straying out to her left, past the ditch, into the shimmer of maize in July heat. The plants, touching her, tell her to stop and she does so just as the noise of the car builds until it flashes past, all metal and light.

The car reminds her that there is an anxiety about the west. All this going: People heading out and leaving behind; traditions withering in the new of the moment and the hard of a new place. Her father had left Ohio and an established dry-goods business. From first memory, this place has been her present: Savonburg. Her father had moved here and built the house. But mishandled finances had given the place a sense of limited prospects. Her sister and she found themselves growing up in the house with only their mother after their father—desiccated by the heat of diminished expectations, and chafing at the possibility of blatant failure—traveled farther out, talking of ranching. There had been one letter, two months delayed. Somewhere out there were the mountains he looked upon and described before the country swallowed him whole with a silence which turned Mary towards the little town, the keeper of the present, Mary the one who cherished, remembered, scrimped, kept, and saved. She was the one who had learned the traditions and kept them, making routine into rituals. Year by year she filled the house. Like a tree growing in instead of out she added annual rings of accumulation, accentuated after her mother's death. Her life made layers, impossible to clean, know or sort through. Even now the gathered accumulation is pushing out from the walls, closing in the space in which she lives, as she walks slowly back, holding her umbrella. "Close," she had said of the air, but it remains a term fitting for her house.

Close.

Beyond the Pierce house the trees of the town end in the shimmer of the fields. The road stretches to a line. It stretches towards infinity, disappearing to be numbered with the things of the past, the things told to her as a child, unremembered if sensed, told by her mother at bedtime in the waning light and so brought inside of her like a special darkness which she still holds. Even on this bright day, it is there, residual winter inverted into humidity, the edge of the wind transmuted to its absence: the hanging, suspended heavy air through which she moves as if it were liquid, to be pushed aside, her cane like Moses' staff parting the sea as she heads back towards the island of her home. Towards dry land.

With the car safely gone, she can begin again. Today the sea of the wind is running. She feels it in the caress of the weedy growth by the roadside. She leans against it, pecking and holding her shade aloft. Her journey seems to be widening, embracing more than simply the received contents of her crocheted bag. It lies west, towards the place where the sun this evening will burn down into darkness, the vast black of the west that asks for the inner shadow of her own self. She almost sees it. But no, it is a cloud.

Just past the Miners, across from the Steiwalt place, Mary stops. The umbrella comes down and rests upside down against her thin frame. She takes off the sunglasses and takes a step to the side at the brightness of found day, then squints ahead while absently cleaning the lenses against her coat. Far off to the west she makes it out, a thin dark line at the base protruding up into a height blooming like a wash. The thunderhead seems suspended, but she knows better and as if to confirm her fears, the cottonwoods on both sides of 103 began to sizzle with the sudden discovery of a gentle breeze turning their leaves inside out.

"Sign of rain. Rain and darkness coming," she says to no one in particular, though when she says it she thinks of her sister, dead these eleven years. Her sister died on a plain, hot day—a day without flies, snakes, June bugs or even wind. Just a day, but the point was that Lizzie had always hated rain, always had been the first to come in. Mary can see her closing the windows at the first threat of a shower. Thinking of all this, now, Mary has to stand still, looking off into the distance at the gathering clouds, at a sight that would stir Lizzie into action, goad her into it, like a kind of natural cattle prod.

She should get moving, too. She lifts the umbrella at the first step and discovers that the wind is persisting and that in the wind it has become a kind of sail. She cannot raise it up overhead because of her thin arms and the nudge of the wind, so she carries it in front, like a shield or buckler, leaving the hat to take the sun. In that way she begins to march, an old soldier, looking ahead now over the rim of her shield at the thin line deepening to black, becoming a smudge.

Across from the edge of the Steiwalt place, Mary decides that she needs less of a shield and more of a sword. Bundling up the umbrella with the precise, fixed actions of habit she is aware also that the light has softened. She looks up and there before her sees the towering, convoluted face of clouds, drawn up close from the southwest. It is an immense bleached wall with a blackened underside making her think of cliff dwellers of the Mesa Verde.

"Sons of mercy," she says, but the wind sucks the words away quickly, like a vacuum. "Out flanked!" She thinks of her high school teacher and his love of history, drawing battle lines from the Battle of Wilson's Creek, Missouri on the board, showing the reserves, the high ground, the flanking column of Franz Sigel's 1200 men while Union commander, Nathaniel Lyon, attacks from the front. She remembers sitting mesmerized in front of the board and the changing form of lines as the battle wages through the afternoon and into the early evening before the rebels win. She had wanted them to win. _"Never get outflanked_. _Always have reserves."_ Simmons was from Springfield, but why was he taking this always so seriously? It had become a family joke between the sisters. Throwing snowballs or clots of dirt from the garden. Lizzie. "Reserves! reserves!" But in real life reserves are never enough. It seems there always is something more that could happen, maybe even will. She has held it all back in these last years, storing the accumulation of the past like treasures, like reserves drawn up in the battle, but there always was and is one more thing.

Carl McCullough lives on the south side of the road, not far from Mary's and she can see the short, uneven patch that is his front yard. The grass is clipped, the burdock and timothy and chicory clipped down along with thistle and bluestem to form a green patchwork. The clouds are over it, and it is getting darker, along with the whole aspect of his house and the surrounding cottonwoods.

_Comin' soon now._ She looks up, but can look only once before the long fingers of the wind have her hat and pull at the steel-grey of her hair. In that look she sees the underbelly of the storm, the black, blue-black bruised ventral side, the place where the cliff dwellers left the deepest soot from their fires on the rock surface, their smoke smelling of ozone as the storm arches its back and moves over the land, over Carl's place, over where she is standing.

She is losing weight. In this wind, she is thinning, a sere winter leaf. The cottonwoods are shedding clots of green leaves. Twigs and little fragments of branches begin to rain on Carl's lawn and down over the road. She thinks of her cherry trees, of the pear tree and the apple trees and the coming harvest. The wind is a fist, pounding. It is a blunt, thick hand shoving, slapping her. She turns from it and plants both umbrella sword and cane and stands with her back to it, hunched up. The sun is going, the dark is growing in patches down the street until it takes the whole street.

"Lizzie get in the cellar!" she says to the wind and laughs. Lizzie must be there now. She can see her in there with the hurricane lamp, the round orbs of her eyes, the way the soft light makes your face into wax, Lizzie no longer afraid of the mice and the cobwebs, moving away from the chattering doors of the cellar, the howl of the wind.

Mary looks for her mother. She looks over, across the street at the Parsons. Nope. The wind takes her crocheted bag and tosses it back to front and into her vertical lap. She takes it between the knees and holds it, the thin gatherings of the mail, the keys to the house, place she needs right now, buried deep with all of her whatevers.

Then, hearing the wind beginning to cry, hearing the rush of the wind in the trees like a mountain stream out west, she begins to test. She shifts her weight to the cane side and lifts her umbrella. It is a pointer, a probe, but the wind quickly makes it a wand, tearing at the folded edges of the fabric as it waves in front of her. She is making an arabesque with the help of the wind which wants it, wants it badly. She and the umbrella are becoming one. It is as if she is thinning and then growing, flowing into its raised presence. She sees the bony, veined presence of her clenched hand and feels the struggle in her wrist.

And then the umbrella is down. And she knows that it will no longer do to stand here, propped by two sticks in her hands, like a horse facing down wind. It has pushed her already—shoved her out, a step at a time, until she is standing in the midst of 103, amidst the crab-like scuttling of cottonwood branches, heading northeast. She is standing like a deer frozen by a jacklight, standing in the midst of the road and she knows it will not do.

So she makes the two sticks into a walker of sorts. The umbrella first, then the cane: she plants them before taking the half-step that becomes two. The wind makes room and moves her about not only in body but also in mind. Now Mary is in the hallway with her own mother during the last week of her life. Erie, Kansas. There is a group home there and her mother is walking down the hall from her bedroom to the kitchen for supper. She is leaning, like Mary, from wall to wall, the walker stubbing the floor with its rubber feet because she won't lift it up.

"Ma. Lift it up." Her face, too, is wax. Her eyes are blank with concentration. She is moving ponderously along and Mary wonders if she knows that it's a meal that's waiting ahead of her. "Ma," she says, "smell the liver and onions?" " _What!"_ She half turns back to Mary and spits it out. It is not a question. She has been interrupted. She is on a journey and knows only that the walls are like hands guiding her. It is the last thing they say before goodbye.

_My, but it was a hot day then!_ Now the wind drones like that air conditioner in the dining room of the group home. The wind drones and vibrates. Mary feels the wall of the wind shoving. Shoving harder, insistently. She is near the sidewalk and thinks of hop-scotch. _Take one giant step._ She feels the warning of the weeds at the top of the ditch, laid down by the wind , but it is too late. She pitches forward into it, her arms out with their extensions of cane and sword, flying briefly, remembering that as the last thing she does.

##

It is the rain that wakes her. It doesn't succeed until it is coming down in corrugated sheets. She sits up in the metal shed of the rain. It is pounding on the bare skin of her legs, streaming off every angle her body makes as she works the sticks around as if they were ski poles and shoves against them, getting up. It is not the wind she thinks of, just the rain, the soot of the Mesa clouds coming down silver and pewter and lead. Coming down black in the darkness of the southwest. It is like poured lead. She can't see Carl's place and on the pavement the rain is little lead balls, or water on the hot cook stove, bouncing.

She stands up; the heavy coat and the long soaked skirt beneath it cling to her. Water is growing in the ditch and she sees it now streaming off the dormer and the eaves of Parsons. The water comes evenly off the roof line and down into the flower bed and down the main, wide steps of the porch. It runs down the sidewalk, cleaning it, clots of mud dissolving, brown in silver. She can hear it splattering near the porch from where the downspout has come off.

The missing downspout makes her think of her uncle's farm. _Rainin' like a cow pissin' on flat rock._ Her uncle standing at the dining room window looking out at the massive sheets of endless rain, rain pouring, pounding down on his corn crop, drowning it out. It's the only thing she remembers, him standing there with that phrase and nothing else but the loop of wire and the pliers in his back pocket. She walks in that rain now, heading towards the Parsons' house as though it were her uncle's—the time flowing seamlessly together.

_Got to get in out of this rain_. She is there now, at the porch, studying the grain of the wood where the paint of the front steps has come off. Then they see her. The door opens. The little blonde Parson comes down, a thin wisp of a girl, the littlest of them all on her left side.

"Mom!"

She sees the flared haunches of Mrs. Parson coming at her down the steps and feels her arm behind. They walk her up. The cane and umbrella go down, forgotten. She feels the warm strength of their flesh and the humid warmth of the air still trapped in the Parson house as they go into the front room. Her coat goes off and she feels a blanket. She sees the soft living room sofa chair where she inevitably will sit. Later a chair, brought from the dining room, goes under her feet. She looks at the full, flushed, concerned face of Mrs. Parson who is trying to say something softly, but Mary cannot hear.

She strains, she tries, but it is no use. She sleeps.

Island Home

Mary doesn't remember when they brought her home. She just traded places. She remembers vaguely the kitchen, the wooden spoon in the oatmeal of her breakfast and her own looking to see if the fire is out. But she does not remember the stairs, the loose rug that always catches on the door, the grandfather clock in the entry way facing the wall clock, always one minute early, looking down from the upstairs hallway where she must have gone.

For she is—here, now—in her own room. Someone has dressed her for bed and settled her into it and gone. Mrs. Parson, no doubt. She can still see the trail of underwear from the middle dresser drawer. She can hear the rain, dripping off her black wool coat in the closet, but outside it is quiet. She looks south out to the street. The window is open a few inches; the trees over at Carl's place are as quiet as are her own.

She sees that in the last of the light. Even to the west it is settled down into black: black and quiet. There is nothing to do: nothing to do but settle into the soft inundation of the cotton mattress like a cloud. Nothing to do but wait for sleep. Like a dry leaf driven by the wind this way and that, old Mary has returned. It is almost Biblical. She is dry, safe on dry ground in her island home. Only her coat, dripping in the closet, tells of the long journey and the rain.

Is she unsponsored in the hollow of her old bed, her frail form lodged there in the depths, in the exhaustion of her long journey? Or does memory, the warm fabric of memory itself—held beyond conscious awareness—surround her now as she rests in the darkened sanctuary of all that her mother maintained; of all that her father wanted to extend and ultimately left?

Finis

In the darkness Mary wakens. In the darkness almost woolen, gathered around her like a blanket, she can hear his voice. She cannot see the faded curtains or the dark frame of the window, but she can hear the voice. At first she thought it was her confirmation pastor from long ago, but now she knows better. She can hear it quite plainly now.

Her father is talking to her in the darkness. It seems to Mary that he is in another room, a room to the east. And he is calling.

Sometimes she thinks she is with him in church, sitting on his lap as the final hymn is being sung. The communion is over and the old hymn is wafting on the air:

I came to Jesus as I was

Weary, and worn, and sad

I found in him a resting place,

And he has made me glad.

Her father's voice is there. Yes. She can hear his voice, thinning on the highest notes as it always did until it almost disappears in the larger chorus of voices lifted softly.

But then she wonders if it is voices that she is hearing, or merely the wind?

Whatever it is, it has come for her. It is drawing her forth—inviting her out.

Mary can hear her heart thumping, pounding away beneath the thin crust of her fragile chest. She thinks of the wind: it is like the wind, come again. It pushes her away. The wind is a hand in the middle of her back, shoving her. She thinks of her umbrella, her cane. The wind is probing, unpinning all the protections. The wind is in her heart.

_Go on out!_ She can feel the wind, forcing her to other places. She has known it in many ways in all her years, felt it on her body, heard it at the windows and in the protest of the very timbers of the house. But she has never really been afraid.

The wind simply is. And now, it seems, that it has come for her. Lying there, before the wind, in the midst of the wind strangely in the midst of her, Mary seems to decide. Her mind, her spirit, begin to wander out—searching.

Go on out!

Old Mary knows what she must do. It is an old knowledge: instinctive, primal.

Strange, in the midst of the very last of her breath, old Mary can almost smile.

Old Mary is listening.

THE HAYBINE

The Grass divides as with

a Comb–

A spotted shaft is seen–

And then it closes at your feet

And opens further on–

—Emily Dickinson

#986, A Narrow Fellow in the Grass

It jammed again, solid this time. He looked back and saw the rotating power takeoff and the jaws churning and heard the chatter of the knives working somewhere low near the roots of all of the rank growth of legume and grass. Then he saw behind the gap where the cut grass stopped and swore softly under his breath. You could swear here; you were a long ways from church. He thought of some of the ladies downstairs having coffee after church after one of his sermons and how they would frown if they heard him now, the skin wrinkling around the corners of their mouths. But not even this thought could lift his spirits as he climbed down from the Oliver 550. All he knew was that another perfect afternoon for making hay was about to be slowed and perhaps ruined by mechanical adversity.

Funny how everything wants to quit on the hottest day, a day to make snakes and lizards sweat. His arms were already coated with sweat and chaff that had raised little pock marks along the underside of the forearm from where, earlier today, he had taken the old, almost-rotten bales from the last attempt and broke them open and scattered all of the wet warm hay out on the ground. "A day away from mildew, and only a day," he had thought to himself when he rolled the bales heavy with rain and ran his gloved hands along the baling twine and slashed it open. Not that it mattered. It was too late for tedding. All that could be done was to give it back to the soil, disc it, work it to where the rotting would do some good. Work it in and then go on past this last attempt to beat the weather and get that first crop into the barn. .

There had been, what, two three hundred bales out there in the bright sun of the morning and the growing humidity, and if he had not been able to chop them down to size with the seven-foot cut-ditioner, then there really would be no way in hell to fix the mess. He could see himself wrestling all of those bales onto the flat rack, straining under the wet mass of the soaked hay, hauling them down to that low ground near the creek where they would have been piled, rotting in sun and rain, into a make-shift compost A lot of work. Desperate and stinking work too, in this heat.

So he was grateful that the morning was past and that now he could turn again to the remainder of this large field, clothed in tall, resilient, rippling grass. He had turned to it, willingly, even in the heat, and was ready for the long hours of the burning afternoon sun when the wire showed up like a snake in the midst of delayed Eden.

Mowing is always a mystery; you always wonder what is there, hidden away in that sea of waving grass. And when you mow, you find out, especially the first cutting. But how the few feet of smooth wire found its way out to the middle of the field was beyond him. He had led the nine-foot haybine right to the spot, right to the intersection, the crossroads where the wire jutted up out of the hard ground like it was stuck in a crevice of rock. It had been waiting, hidden away, for weeks if not months.

The haybine had dutifully taken it in; had started to chew and to cut. Then it gagged as the wire, finding the sprockets on the side and grinding and wrapping itself like a metal glazed snake in and out of all of the gears, brought it to the point of indigestion.

The sun was up overhead him, now, and slightly ahead of him to the south and to the west. It was unobstructed. He could feel it pushing through the back of his shirt like a warm, heavy hand and he knew that this was just the start. An initial shove. Alone on the downslope of the forty acres behind the dry lot and closest to the creek, he felt suddenly more isolated and alone than he was. Singled out, squeezed, in his solitary battle—with no one to come along to spell him— a man in the sun, finding his energy absorbed by the close, dense fabric of the heat while he thought about what he now suddenly was facing. Part time preacher man, part time farmer.

He went back to the tractor for snippers, popped the tool box and fished around awhile. Funny about the conjunction of some things. Just yesterday, Mr. Marsh, one of the deacons at church, had read the Old Testament lesson from Numbers Chapter Twenty-one. A few parishioners were scattered here and there in the pews, and the wind pushed the curtains through the open windows as he read, his thin voice trailing away in the air of the silent church:

And the people spake against God, and against Moses, 'Wherefore have ye brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? For there is no bread, neither is there any water; and our soul loatheth this light bread.

Perhaps it was the suggestion of the text itself, or the palpable heat, but Drew remembered it was here that the old deacon stopped for water, the blue-veined hand quaking a bit as he raised the glass to his lips, even narrow lips, before his light but piercing voice picked up the cadence once more:

And the LORD sent fiery serpents among the people, and they bit the people; and much of the people died.

So much for complaining.

Drew returned to the silent red beast, a dull red in the blazing sun, and he knelt in a prayer of sorts. Monday prayer. The grass laid back down into a soft mat as he compressed it with his weight, feeling around for some entrance point while prone on the ground. Then he began the journey—a little pilgrimage of his own, a dense winding journey in the grass.

He worked himself in under the haybine until he found a space where he could get close to the gears jammed with the wire. Then he worked the snippers in and worked at the wire, back and forth, starting the long process of pulling it free.

It was a superb snake. Not the brass that Moses made in response to the serpents of the desert, but a good metal snake nevertheless. It had coiled and writhed from the gears up into the rollers and slithered over to the edge of the roller where it was bolted on. He snipped and pulled, thinking of a real snakeskin lying perfect and whole when it was abandoned, and of this contrast as he took one little piece after another. Beads of sweat on his forehead rolled easily down along the bridge of his nose as he worked.

Snakes. Murmuring in the desert. And, earlier, snakes in the garden. You mention snakes in church and that's where everyone would go: to the Garden. But there were others snakes. Snakes that Deacon Marsh did not know of: great sea snakes slithering their evil, swimming in the texts of Mesopotamia. Astarte, Baals consort in Canaanite religion, always with her serpent. And serpents in the _Gilgamesh Epic_ of Babylonia. Snakes that the Leviathan of Jonah might just dimly reflect. And now this little satan, mocking him, reduced to one stubborn wire woven into the gears, grinning as he dismembered it piece by piece.

_Take what it'll give you!_ He almost said it out loud as he worked in the compressed tin space, a temple of sorts, suddenly improvised and necessary and full of the close smell of grass, dank air and oil. But he thought it more than said it. And then, in the midst of all this work, suddenly a door was opened and he was back with his uncle, in another time, back before texts and seminary reading lists; back before half-filled church pews, before any of it, standing on the hay rick.

A hot day like this one, it had been. And the horses moved slowly with the weight of the building load, pulling the wagon and the hay loader along as his cousin drove the team and his uncle, walking along beside in the oppressive July heat, gave advice.

The hay did not come out smoothly—like on a conveyer. Instead it came in clumps, some big, some small. An average-size clump was no problem for him with his young, unsteady legs and his fork. He could get behind these clumps and roll them along and stomp it down.

But the big stuff was a puzzle. It was always too much. He didn't have the strength yet to slam into it with the fork, though he tried. And so it would sit there inert, a rock of grass immovable in the hot air, with the clatter of the loader telling him it was time, more hay was coming. Sometimes he could break a piece of it loose and scatter that farther along on the load and work it in, but mostly not. And then along with everything else, there were the bits and pieces, fleeces of hay coming off the loader; wisps, some falling, some finding the air.

"Take what it'll give you." He looked down at the two silver-rimmed glasses reflecting the sun. His arms felt tired. The fork, growing heavy, felt increasingly foreign and awkward and the man behind those blazing orbs could see that. He looked down again and said it as much to the air as to his uncle, "I don't think I can."

He remembers the veins on the forearms still. The strong calloused hands and the veins and tendons bulging as his uncle took hold of the frame and pulled himself up. One, two pulls and he was there, standing beside the boy. He took the fork in his hand and it became a toy. He almost twirled it, this way and that, moving the little stuff, striding, punching the hay home with his feet, tying it in. Even the big stuff was moving. Nothing disobeyed or balked, until the whole top of the load was smooth, the bunches locked into one another, the last of the hay smoothed over the top, and they were ready for the barn.

"There is a dance to be done up here, son." His uncle smiled, the sweat glistening his face and running off his jaw and down his neck, "a hay dance." The loader was unhitched while the horses stood. Then they were moving again, coming off the field and into the lane. The load and wagon lurched and his uncle quickly jabbed the fork into the load and balanced there. The boy lunged into him and found the metal button of his coveralls with one hand and the deep back pocket with his other and hung on.

"You'll get the idea. It takes time...and practice."

He nodded at the steel blue eyes behind the wire framed glass, and then, almost in tears, he looked down. "If you dance right and move each piece quickly out of the way to where it should be, well, then there's far, far less chance of getting the next clump down your neck."

The arms around his shoulder were flecked with chaff.

They were on the level now. The horses' heads were bobbing. His uncle picked him up in those same strong arms and turned him around and put him down again and he saw the growing closeness of the barn. They would unhitch the team then, with this load of hay directly under the open mow. His cousin would disappear up the ladder just inside the barn door and his aunt take the team over to be watered before the next step, the pulling of the hay into the barn.

Timothy and clover it was. He could see it now and feel it on his neck as he worked in the sticky shade offered by the haybine. The last piece of wire almost was out. One more pull and then it was free. He slithered back out, rolled to his knees, and gathered up the snipped pieces of the wire in his leather-gloved hands. Then he wrapped them around his palm and put the bent pieces back into the box with the snips and the pliers.

He stood and looked around, and looked again while mounting the tractor: no desert. No crosses of brass reptiles. No horses or giant mounds of hay going up into the open maw of the barn. No bulging arms. No blue-veined hands. Just this: grass.

The grass still to be cut showed a silky sheen as it waved in the wind, the first breeze of the day strong enough to lift for even a moment the hard hand of the heat. He looked at the grass and into the dense cover it provided over the rough texture of the land itself. He stared. It was as if he was trying to look through it, as though grass itself covered and capped the present with this field, this heat and work; and he wanted it to yield, to show him to himself again after these years.

And the children of Israel set forward, and pitched in Oboth, and they journeyed from Oboth, and pitched at Ijeabarim, in the wilderness which is before Moab, toward the sunrising.

Back somewhere past these words, these years, was the place where he was young again. Whenever Marsh read, it was always time. Time in the guise of white slender fingers and blue-veined hands, closing and holding the book as he stepped away and down from the pulpit after reading.

Time.

He wanted the belt loops, the slow swaying motion of the wagon and the horses heads. He was looking for horses, you see. But there were no horses, now. No horses, no hay rick, no man riding the load or striding beside it with his red bandana round his neck, looking up.

_Take what it'll give you!_ The phrase danced on the air and drifted, until it too was woven into the texture of the waving grass, and disappeared. Suddenly it came to him why he had remembered it. It had come back to him through all those years, because it was true. Truth is moments when you have to step aside. And time is grass, always in the present, coming up the ladder.

Drew pulled the ignition and flipped the key. The tractor sprang to life. He worked the power take-off and turned and watched the spinning jaws of the machinery chewing insatiably and synchronously once more. He pulled the clutch and the machine behind him began to eat. Then he turned, set his course just under the lip of the rise that ran across the middle of the field and carved a swath into the waving grass.

For Drew, this was the long trail of what must be done; a long winding entrance into the afternoon, the unrelenting sun, and all that was waiting. As he mowed, Drew's path made a trail in the sea of the grass, a temporary path which marked his place in time.

A PRAYER FOR WINTER

_Another ambulance was coming down the lane. A Dodge four by four with a winch on the front and a red cross emblazoned on the roof—a dull-green truck which Peters of his unit, after just two weeks in England, began suddenly to call a "lorry." Strange word, "lorry_."

Through the open door of the barn, cracked just enough for the cats and the dog to come in out of the snow, Daniel looked for a lorry. He saw the outline of a truck moving slowly through the curtain of the softly-falling snow. It came and went in the folds of the storm until, finally there it was:

Someone ground a gear and the engine slowed, it's sound muffled. Daniel was waiting for its bland, squat green form to emerge from the shadows of the swirling snow that is falling still. There would be bodies on it, he was sure. Bodies of soldiers draped over the hood, and he saw them now, draped with no helmets, and could almost feel their weight, the helpless weight of dead men that he must lift. He was waiting for the lorry and waiting for the inexplicable task of tending to death.

The truck emerged from the white of the storm to become the surprising color of red. He looked around: the snow was building. The tracks he had made earlier, coming out to do the chores and the milking, were now almost totally obliterated from view as the truck turned, the twin saucers of its headlights turning towards Dan, who leaned slightly through the door and waved.

Father Seymour got out of his red Ford pickup and slowly waded towards the barn, head down, snow sticking to the wire rims of his glasses in spite of his efforts, the collar of his clergy shirt buttressed by the plaid of his red Mackinaw. The old priest walked slowly, stolidly towards Dan who slid the barn door open for his sudden guest and then they were both inside, standing in all a barn should be in winter: warm, humid air; manure and hay smells; the comforting sounds of cows chewing, nosing the water cups for a drink.

"Well, Father," he said, "you've caught me by surprise, coming out on a day like this." They shook hands, and then Dan took one step back, eyeing the priest nervously.

"Daniel," the priest said, looking straight into his eyes with those steel-blue eyes of his own, "you've been on my mind."

Two would help out. They always needed two. One for the head especially. He wanted the feet, but even there he could not help but looking for the face. Always it was the same. You were drawn there. You had to look, had to check the face. And if there were none, then it was dog tags. The dog tags were somewhere. In the shirt pocket, sometimes wrapped around a boot.

"Well, why's that, Father? I've just been here, working away with the cows."

"Yes, of course." The priest looked around at the cows staring back at their strange guest from the U-shaped pattern of their stantions. "Can we sit down?"

"Sure," Daniel replied, motioning Father Seymour to the hay bales that were piled haphazardly together in the center of the barn, just below the hay drop.

They sat. The coffee thermos was still there from the morning's milking and the stuff was still warm as Daniel poured himself a drink, the brew steaming in the air as if in response to the breathing of the cows. There was enough for two. He found a cup and then the two of them drank, Dan with his long legs stretched out in front of him, both of them thinking of what the snow was making still, both of beauty and of work, just outside the door. It had been two long hours of shoveling before his work had finally brought him to the barn and its massive doors, and now that work was almost totally gone, covered.

Outside it was still falling. Inside they were a party of three. The two of them sitting on hay bales in the midst of the cows who surrounded them in stanchions on three sides, this the third party, gathered as if for court—or church—the blowing and chewing of the Guernseys and Jerseys not unlike the coughing of the gathered congregation on a winter morning, many holding back the sound during prayer or times of silence to release them in loud hoarse hacking noises during the organ's introduction to the first hymn.

He turned to the priest: "Now why have you been worried about me, Father? Because of Dad?"

"Yes. I suppose something of that great loss has been on my mind as it should."

"Well, there's nothing to bother you about that, then. I am grieving, sure. But he lived long and well. And those last weeks in the nursing home, seeing his frail form in the bed—well, I' m glad that's done."

"And so am I Daniel," Father Seymour said, his hands around the steaming cup.

The team was still outside and now a white horse's head appeared in the window. He had turned them out as he usually did in first light, scraping the snow away from the manger and shaking out a full bale for the two of them—the dapple-grey Percheron and the blonde sorrel Belgian, gelding and mare, who nosed it eagerly. Now she moved from the window to the door and the show began.

"You'll see this, now, Father—watch."

She could get down low, almost on her knees and work the metal handle of the door into the middle of her back, and then up. She was at it now, leaning and lifting with her 1800 pounds until the door itself shook and lifted some. She stopped. It dropped with a loud, predictable bang that surprised no one in the barn, except the priest who jerked some. He took a sip of the coffee:

"How often does this happen?"

"Oh, Dolly just wants to come in. Happens everyday." Sure enough there she was, back at the window, ears pricked, looking in, waiting.

"You see, Daniel," he said, "there it is. Ritual. We need it deeply within. It's a sure part of who we are— humans and animals, too—we feed on its patterns and its cadences."

And Dan had thought of the pall then, on his father's coffin, and of the long reach of the embroidered cross, flowing down its length and its sides, so that all at once he was back in the crowded room, hearing the shuffling feet of the congregation and the cough of the old organ getting its wind into the leathers of the billows. And then, at the open door, the first prayer for the reception of the body:

With faith in Jesus Christ, we receive the body

of our brother Joshua for burial. Let us pray with

confidence to God, the Giver of Life, that he will

**raise him to perfection in the company of the saints**.

Then the clicking of the keys, the sound of the old organ, its coughing and the coughing of the congregants together as the air found the pipes to begin the first hymn.

"Daniel, you seem a long way away. My comment on ritual take you somewhere?"

"Well, yes, sir," he said, surprised at the last word, and while he completed his thought aloud about reflecting on his father's recent death, his mind was full of boots and of dirt mixed with blood. Another lorry was pulling in.

He was at the feet this time. Corporal Peters at the other end. They turned the soft frame of flaccid muscle and of bone and he had to look. This time he knew the face. The face of a boy across the mess tent just two days ago. Picking up the tray. Boy from Tennessee with a soft drawl that Dan liked and a spirit that found humor whenever possible. Shrapnel had hit high, so that the helmet he was grasping in the mess tent was now grasping him, a crown of thorns: the dried blood on the boy's right cheek, the brow above his right eye, caved, compressed some—and still he had to look.

He found his way back to his father's funeral day and now to the priest's eyes, direct and probing, eyes just like his own, refusing to look away.

"You've gone somewhere just now, have you not?" Steel-blue eyes were still looking.

"Yes, I suppose you could say so."

"And where has it been that you have gone?"

"Well," he shrugged, "to tell you the truth, Father, to places of death."

Well there he had gone and said it. Said some of it anyways. Opened the door some. The priest gave his coffee a twirl in the cup before responding.

"What places, Daniel?"

"Well, my father of course."

"Yes. But we have just been there. You had something else in mind: where else do you go?"

"Well, sometimes... Sometimes I find that I must go...well, just to other places."

The priest frowned without knowing it, and a kind of pall of concern settled in over the features of his face.

"Well I would be less than honest, Daniel, if I didn't tell you of my concern when you go away this way. Go away to these places. Maggie seen it?"

The word brought her to him, across the space of two farms, the woman he would marry, freckles and calico and summer sunlight in just the name. That and her inner strength and resourceful spirit.

"She's seen it and she's worried. She gets this worried look when I just slow down and get all quiet at once."

"I see." His voice trailed out on the air of the barn.

Another lorry coming. Softly, in the snow. He could almost hear it. It was gearing down for the hill and in the sound he could feel the weight of the cargo that was coming to him. More lifting. And then, later, all the muddy boots out in front of the chaplain, his stoles like Father Seymour's at his own father's grave, whipping in the wind, the troops facing the boots, the man in prayer:

For none of us liveth to himself,

and no man dieth to himself.

For if we live, we live unto the Lord;

and if we die, we die unto the Lord....

Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord....

for they rest from their labors.

"And you're still there now?"

"Yessir. I suppose you could say that a part of me is."

"And, Daniel, where precisely is it that you are?"

Slowly he was unwrapping him. Daniel was surprised. How could this old man take him, like a Lazarus suddenly visited, lost in death, and suddenly begin pulling off the grave-clothes? Here in the humid barn, a strange place for nakedness, he was being slowly unwrapped.

"Well, sir, mostly France."

"How long ago?

"It's been eight years. Winter of Forty-four."

"Muddy?"

"Well, yes, often. But at times it really snowed when we worked our way up north into the mountains."

Neither one said anything, but they both instinctively looked to the window where snow was falling still. This morning he had measured it as he leaned through the open door, his left leg extended into the space of the mud room, his left hand curled around the door jamb, like his father would, his right hand probing with the yard stick.

"Seventeen inches!" he had announced to the air, the jackets, caps, coveralls hanging to his right; the onions, leeks and beans behind him on the shelves, a nodding somnolent audience at first light.

Now more snow. But it was safe, a good place to be in this barn.

Now he saw the brown outline of the hut he had found one day, just four of them that day, stumbling upon it in a snow-storm, no animals inside, just musty hay. A place to stretch out while the snow covered their tracks. They sat there on mouldy hay bales and stayed one full day—safe, secure, away from the war.

"And now you're there again? Just now?"

"Yessir. I did lapse off. It's been a while, now, but today, with the snow, I've been there a lot today."

The priest looked at him openly and Daniel, before looking down, saw him suddenly smile.

"And you have been good enough to let me in, Daniel, on this snowy day. You've been good enough to give me some sense of what it is that is hanging over you. And I thank you for that."

"Well, Father, I wouldn't make too much of it. It comes and goes, you know."

But the priest knew better. He knew that something was slowly being drawn forth into the light for both of them to view. And when they could both see it, together, and acknowledge its presence, it would assume a greater reality and focus. It would cease to be a vague dream. It would come in such a way that he could feel its substance, feel its weight—the burden that he was always carrying.

"Oh, yes. I am sure it does. But you have let it be here. Just a bit. You have not hidden it today. Or turned aside. It has come with the snow and you have felt it and gone there in my presence."

He stood. "Well I'm sorry if I—you, you know I got work to do." He wanted to move, to be moving somewhere, to go. "Sorry, work."

"Oh now, Daniel, " the old man said, standing and half turning, searching him out again with his eyes. Now his hands were out, hands impossibly close, arms extended, hands on his shoulders in a soft, strong grip:

"No son. You should not work to be sorry. You should work to be free."

He did not want this, and yet Daniel reached towards the man. He did not want any more of the burden, but nevertheless, Daniel bent down and found himself on the edges of the old red Mackinaw, touching clutching.

Was he simply another one? Another one to lift? Another body? Would he have to look and see yet again some wounded place, some destroyed face?

_No, not another one. This one was different_ —he thought as he clutched the old man's arms— _soft with life_.

It was then that Daniel felt the tears. First tears they were. First time he had found his way back to tears. And as he cried, there was the voice of the old man, rasping in his ear, and praying—yet one more time—the prayer that the chaplain too had prayed day after day as they had stood before the boots, the muddy boots in the searching cold wind:

Son of the living God...give mercy and grace to the

living, pardon and rest to the dead, to thy holy Church

peace and concord, and to us sinners everlasting life

and glory; who with the father and the Holy Spirit livest

**and reignest, one God, now and for ever. Amen** _._

How did Seymour know to say these words? _Mercy and grace...mercy and grace. Pardon and rest..._ They were an invitation. Pure somehow. No mud, no blood. They were an invitation to unlock some door, an invitation to exhale and begin breathing in a way that he had not thought possible. He did not like them, these words, because they brought with them the rending that he was now feeling deep inside of him, but yet he suffered them, took them inside of him, nevertheless.

Daniel stood there, clutching the old man, while the words, with their sound and substance, floated out upon the moist air of the barn. These old words, suddenly new, came to him powerfully, painfully—warming him from the inside out as Daniel stood there in the congregation of Jersey and Guersey cows, a tall, thin man bending awkwardly from the waist clutching the other, an old man with the collar, who stood there when his prayer was done, and simply waited **.**

KICKAPOO WINTER

I withdrew yet farther into my shell, and endeavored to

keep a bright fire both within my house and within my breast.

–Henry David Thoreau

It was not the best kind of a day for the stove to go out. The wind was backing south, southwest to west and by the afternoon, when McHugh first noticed the floor a bit cold and his wife said something about it, too, the wind was coming 25 to 30, the gusts rattling the windows of the old frame house even though it was off the ridge and settled comfortably in the bottom of the broad valley along Knapps Creek.

He switched on the blower, something that he had recovered from an air-handling unit and mounted right up under the floor grate in the kitchen. He had piped the return line of the hot water system so that it would flow through the fin tubing of the unit. Then, upstairs, when they needed a little more heat, he'd flick on the switch and _presto!_ heat flowing up through the grate in the floor and into the kitchen.

"Jason, you know that's cold air, don't you?"

Marion was standing in slippers, her housecoat over her sweater and slacks, just starting with dinner in the far corner of the kitchen. She had this uncanny feel for things, he thought as he squatted down by the grate. How could she know about the cold from that far away where she stood under all those layers?

But she did.

He walked down the stairs into the basement with that feeling of an uncertain future. Then he flipped on the light and the future moved a step closer when his eyes found the pool of rust-colored water on the cement floor. He got his flashlight off the shelf and confirmed his suspicions. The boiler had rusted through.

There was no backup. They had had impeller problems once, but nothing more. They did their traveling in the late spring to early fall and never _had_ gotten around to installing a gas-fired boiler for occasional, emergency use. So—standing with his flashlight and picking out the edges of where the pipe had rusted through— McHugh got this sudden vision of forced air heat. Oh, it dries you out some, that he knew. But it also was something you could count on. You'd know if the firebox was startin' to go. He probed around in there, widening the gaping wound of the boiler, finding more than one heating coil gone and the others soft. All the kings horses and all the kings men.

Now what? Take a six hundred pound boiler up the stairs and out to truck and to Readstown for welding? Today? The wind rattled the panes of the door at the top of the basement stairs and he knew that Marion had better gather up her things and call over to the Olsens. They would be staying at least one night.

She called. He could hear her cheery tones above his head as he worked below, draining down the pipes into a couple of buckets that he alternated, dumping the contents at the floor drain. Half an hour and it was done. He brought the car down. She brought her favorite plants down into the basement where they might take a freeze. Put a light sheet over them in the corner by the canned goods of the summer, perhaps for inspiration. Grabbed their clothes and put anything else that might freeze into the refrigerator. He even thought to pour a bit of antifreeze down the drains in the sinks and into the toilet.

Then they were off.

Harold Olsen was a wood burner himself. Burned it. Cut his own. Even sold some. He showed off his wood furnace to McHugh, got it up at Black River Falls.

"They've got a large selection up there. And they deliver."

Thinking of his six hundred pound corpse of a boiler in the basement, McHugh could quickly see the logic of that feature.

"And you say you just stoke it two times a day?"

"That's about it." He opened the door of the furnace and McHugh's eyes feasted at the sight of the deep red coals that Olsen had in there.

"We loaded it about two hours ago." He held the door ajar a moment longer and the oak embers did the talking, radiating out some of the heat, throbbing slightly in the presence of more oxygen.

"I load it in the morning before heading out to feed the hogs. Kyle gets up and checks on its before school and might put in a log or two. Then about one or two in the afternoon, Karen comes down here and feeds it some more."

The blower kicked on and they could both hear the air traveling up the duct-work to the main floor. McHugh reached up to touch the duct just above the plenum.

"Easy now." It was hot to the touch.

"Nice heat."

"It works pretty good for us."

But where to get the twelve hundred dollars? McHugh wrestled with that one during the night. And in the morning, looking over the _Advertiser_ from The Grove, he quite naturally found himself in the _Wood Related_ column. That's where he saw an ad or two for the Kickapoo. The price was right. Three to four-fifty. Not counting the sheet metal for the duct work of course. But a lot more reasonable than twelve hundred plus. There was one for sale down at Blue River, and another with a number that would put it out to the northwest near Liberty Pole.

He chose Blue River.

The next day there they were, the three of them, completely filling up the bench seat of Estelle Eriksson's pickup, working their way through the backroads where the towns of Clayton and Scott crowd up against Richland County. The Eriksson place was but just three places up from his along that washboard stretch of gravel where the township road parallels the creek.

Frank and Alma Eriksson had a good creek bottom farm. And 'Stelle, their only child, seemed to come out of the womb with horses on her mind. Drew pictures of horses. Exclaimed after them with her sharp piercing infant's voice. The first word she made they say was horse. The pattern never varied and now here she was in her mid-thirties, living at home, the cows mostly sold except for some feeder stock and the heifers Frank took in. Box stalls in the barn and the loafing area converted into a nice ring. Boarding and training. And a little sign by the barn which read _Horses we take. But no horsin' around!_ and down by the space she had rigged for an office—near where her dad had always had the barn phone wall-mounted on one of those white-washed pillars of rough-sawn, green oak—she had one of those cartoon posters with the man almost falling out of his chair laughing _Ha ha ha! You mean you_ _really_ _thought we took checks? Ha ha ha!_

But that was all the edge she had. He had come out there the following morning, watching her with that lean will-o-'wisp form of hers that had bands of steel inside longeing horses, looking over the carefully-kept feet of the Paint and Arab fillies she was breaking in. Had hardly got started mentioning the reason for his sudden early-morning arrival, his breath trailing clouds out into the sharp air, when she was all but signed up. Mentioned she'd be happy to drive down if he could get, maybe, Roland or somebody else from around the valley.

And that was it.

Now the three of them worked their way on down—township and county roads carrying them into Port Andrews and over the river into town. The wood furnace was in a dry basement with a straight run up two timbers the owner had thoughtfully placed by the cellar door, and the four of them had it out in daylight in short order. Roland had a lot of muscle hiding under that broad-beam body of his.

"Well, I reckon that we're not much but spit if four good strong backs can't get this up and in that pickup."

Roland, it appeared, would be their cheerleader. They were standing around the sides of the furnace, looking down at the sheet metal shroud of the top of the thing resting on the ice and snow and two two-by-fours by the tailgate. And then it was in the truck, and everybody was breathing hard—feeling the cold, rough edges of the metal through their work gloves as they slid it home.

Kind of like a rifle bolt was what Jason thought. Or an oar in a river skiff, shoved under a thwart.

"We're just getting warmed up!" Roland said as they settled back into the truck. The truck was settled some, too. You could hear the engine on the way back, when they climbed some of those hills, Roland listening to the livestock reports from both Ithaca and Boscobel, the stiff springs making the shocks work on the washboard stretches. Stelle said it felt like she was towing horses in her sixteen foot stock rig. McHugh looked across the top of Roland's bib overalls as she discussed her last trip—delivering two traffic-broke drafters out to Waverly for their fall sale—her auburn hair occasionally just visible when Roland shifted his position, but mostly just her knuckles and firm, thin wrist on the gear shift.

Back they went.

At McHugh's it was a bit different. They considered both the back door and the storm cellar door, which McHugh used to get in his wood, measuring things up good. It was no contest: the storm cellar route would not take the height of the Kickapoo.

"Looks like it just growed on the way back when we changed county lines," Roland said as he and McHugh watched Stelle back the truck right up to the backsteps. The first try she spun out in the ice. Pulled forward, shifted, and the next try came back real strong, stopping just before the first cement step.

"Can see you've been doin' this some," Roland offered as she uncoiled out of the truck.

"Well, that's for sure. Horses need haulin' you know. You get kind of broken in."

"Well I knew haulin' but I didn't figure so much the backin' part."

Stelle reached up and threw back both sides of her hair over her shoulders and behind her cap.

"Guess you haven't seen the north side of our barn much have you, Roland?"

"North side?" Roland was squatting down, eyeballing the distance from the truck bed to the last step before the threshold.

"Nope."

"Well it's another world there that will teach you about backing. Late fall its mud. Crusts up and breaks through. And now its the drifts. You go to school out there."

He slid a loose two-by-four just past the level of his glasses and the bill of his cap, measuring.

"Final examinations. Farm skills one-o-one." Her even voice rode out on the crisp air of mid-morning. McHugh tied off the door. He disappeared into the black hole of the basement entrance and came back with two more two-bys, this time twelve footers of two-by-six. They slid them under the furnace.

"You know, I had this feelin' there was something more," Roland said as he and McHugh each grabbed a side and started pulling. Stelle had sprung quick as a cat up on the truck and was jammed between the stove and the cab, pushing.

Nothing.

"Kind of settled some," Roland said as they repositioned.

"Ready?" McHugh said.

"This dance is mine," Roland had his head down and shoulders forward. "Anytime the music starts."

There was a scraping sound this time, and a kind of shriek of metal just as the furnace slowed to a stop. The two-bys were standing straight out, the furnace resting on top of them.

"Now what?" Roland said, looking at those two straight boards. He blew on his sleeve.

"I don't know about you, but I've got this sudden vision."

"What's that Roland..." Stelle was not beyond humoring him.

"Oh, I'm kind a seein' this wood stove getting out on those two pieces of wood like they was planks. And then when it gets out there, it just cuts loose. The planks become rails. And this runaway freight takes us all down into the black hole of that basement."

"Oh _that's_ a nice one," from the back of the truck. "Any solutions?"

"Well I got this come-along," McHugh offered. And with that they went on an inspection tour of the barn. Well—he _headed_ out towards the barn, but got four or five steps away and then stopped dead, lost in thought, before angling over towards the machine shed.

"I'm starting to feel my feet again. You got any tractor chain, McHugh?"

"No. Stenner borrowed it for some log skidding."

Half the metal shed was open-faced. There was this dull growl of unoiled tracks as McHugh made a narrow opening into the inner sanctum. He disappeared and switched on a light as they squeezed through. Then there were these sounds of McHugh sifting through what appeared as a random pile of stuff as their eyes adjusted to the light.

Halters was what Stelle saw. Roland the jump cables and tongs. These were set aside on the work bench where there were batteries and a pile of burlap feed sacks. McHugh mumbled something as he reached down, feeling into the depths of the pile, kind of a compost of things was what Stelle thought and—because she read Melville in high school and was patient with it— _ambergis._

"What do you think, Jason?" she said, the cloud of her speech drifting towards his arm, his blank face facing hers as he tried to read the braille of the tangled heap and then brightening as he slowly stood, the pile adjusting, an old electric fencer sliding off with a feeding pan and a coil of e-wire.

"Got it." He began pulling a metal carcass out of the pile.

"Been fishing long?" Roland wanted to know. McHugh held up the catch.

"You know we ought to take that on down to Starks in 'du Chien and get it weighed and measured. Pretty big, McHugh, for this late in the season."

He smiled.

"Just hope it works," was all he would say, holding the thing by the snap hook as though it were a fin and the cable what remained of the spine, the fish mostly eaten, the rusty frame and gears of the main part a head and entrails. At least that's what it seemed to her.

"Got any oil, Jason" was what she said, but it was the fish that was on her mind. A dull, quivering fish raised up stiff through the hole in the ice.

"Here." She took it in the open palms of her hands, holding it in the brown cotton of her jersey gloves as he turned to the bench, looking for oil or liquid wrench or something. Found a spray can of silicon spray. Next a can of starter fluid. And then, at last, the old copper-colored oil can with its long spout which he tipped up, pressing with his thumb, all of them standing in the light from the one bulb in the silence, listening to the pop and release of his working the oil out of the spout while she held the gears exposed to a slow flow of yellow liquid turning the rust a dark brown.

"Must be thirty weight," Roland observed, looking at the stubborn liquid, "thick as sorghum" while it settled carefully, prodded by the spout as McHugh pushed it along.

"Good enough" she said, handing it back, their gloved hands touching. The metal thing was a treasure, a gift brought up from the heap of the pile, a fish lifted up into the naked revelation of cold, searching air, but he carried it off now like a no-account catfish, the handle bumping in the snow as they traveled back. The sun was gone when they came out of the shed and it made all of the hills, where the snow had filtered through the trees, dark around them as they walked in the white landscape of the fields and yard in snow.

"Could snow again" was Roland's comment. The flat, white light seemed to absorb his words, and there was nothing said, it made so much sense. Their boots worked through the snow.

"You got ductwork down there, Jason?" she asked.

"Not yet." He strode across the yard with the careless ruins of his catch.

"And what'll you do if it turns sharp again in the next few days?"

"Well, I've got some good oak and red elm dry and cured. I'm hoping that with the door open and that fan pushing air up through the grate and maybe with an extra fan and the portable oil space heater that Harold gave us we can get things warm enough to manage while I put in the ducts."

"I don't know, Jason." was all she would say.

Roland put it right.

"Good luck."

It turned out Stelle had a chain all along. She knew, of course, but surprised them when they first got back, swinging down the seat bench and fishing out the chain.

"Well, Merry Christmas! A stout-looking chain, McHugh. And she had it here all along."

"Merry Christmas Roland," she said, "three weeks late."

After that things went pretty fast. She pulled forward just a bit, so that the ends of the board would just reach across the threshold. They hooked the chain on to a good, cast iron section of the bottom of the furnace and down past the two boards so that it could dangle near the trailer hitch. Then they hooked the come-along to the truck and back to the chain. The Kickapoo furnace slid down nicely across the threshold and rested there while they repositioned the boards, using the come-along to break the skid down the steeper part of the narrow stairs inside the house. She stood by the come-along—working the old, bent handle as it clicked away, McHugh and Roland guiding the furnace along until it reached the cement floor, past where she could see, and they told her to ease off.

"Slick as a hog on ice," Roland said, passing her the chain, half-way up the stairs, as he turned to go back down to Jason.

"Now what, McHugh?"

"Well, Roland"—Jason was looking the stove all over, making sure—"now we haul the little beauty over next the chimney and put in a stove pipe."

By the time she was back from her errand, they had half-skidded and half-walked the little beauty over to where it could be beneath the floor grate above and close enough to the chimney. They wrested the pipe off the boiler and pivoted it at both elbows so it could settle over the opening of the furnace.

"Well, nothing to it." Roland and the other two looked at their efforts. The blower was still up in the truck, McHugh remembered. He would have to get it before they all left.

"And now you're all set, friend."

"Yeah, Jason, what do you think?" She was thinking of holding the catfish up in the soft light, the oil working its way down into the entrails while he poked it along with the oil can, her eyes looking at his blunt, naked thumb, working the bottom of the inverted can, pushing it out.

But now Jason's hands were resting on the top of the furnace. To her it was like a horses' withers, the way he touched it. Did he know how to touch a horse, to touch living flesh instead of metal?

She could not know then that his mind also had reached out to wrap itself around the thin wrists of her hands and her auburn hair. Now, however, he was somewhere else. Lost in the midst of the cool, placid depths of this place that so desperately needed to be home.

"Well thank you both" was what he said. Said that simply out in the cold of the place while they nodded.

"Sure." she said.

There was a scraping of feet. Roland pulled off his glove and repositioned his cap. And then all three of them turned their backs on the Kickapoo wood furnace—most of the work of one, good day—and headed up.

##

McHugh began to love that basement. He started the very next day, finding the old places where the ductwork of a coal furnace once had been and cobbled that into the new line until his work stretched from the furnace out under the floor joists in two directions. The blower unit had a pretty good squirrel cage, and when he plugged it in and had a good load of oak so that you could feel the heat radiating out into space, well Marion said it felt pretty good.

Not maybe as good as the Olsens' but good enough.

That was how he put it, early one afternoon, sitting at the nook in the back of the place where they could look out on the two acres of good creek-bottom pasture before the hills came down, as if to touch this place.

It was dry down there in the basement. Each day he would throw another catch of wood, gleaned from those brooding hills where he would go with his old 8N Ford, chains on the rear tires and his chain saw resting in the little cradle he had fixed up to haul saw, gas, bar oil, and eighteen inch sections of wood he had found for the day. That was first off, in the morning. By ten or so he would be pitching the results into the bowels of the house as though it were some cargo hold or a barge. Inside, each day, the pile grew, resting on some of those large two-bys and slowly oozing from the north end of the basement where just last year he had worked cement around and over the last of the field stone. It was tight now, sealed like a jar of fish eggs, but giving off instead the smell of dry air and wood chips when you opened the door. The bark he usually scaled off before loading up the tractor, but of course some remained and each day he would take the scoop shovel and offer up a load of old, discarded wood-skin through the cellar doors and out into the cold.

By noon they would be sitting down over dinner, the heat pouring up through the grates. He would have checked on the sheep, before and after his wood excursion, and the afternoon was his.

It was like that in February.

He had bred his ewes late and they wouldn't be lambing until mid-April. That left the flat, wood-lovin' days of February to find him deep in the rutted patterns of his living, following the paths of yesterday out to the shed, or renewing the tire tracks again this day—his tractor heading out across the field, up along the ridgeline and into the hills.

It was an ordinary time—each day like the middle of his life. The big events—where the light breaks from or again finds the belly of the darkness—were now far removed, tucked safely away by the flat, recurrent pattern of his world. Sometimes, sitting in the kitchen, listening to the whir of the air handling unit forcing its warmth up through the grate, it seemed to him that his life was like one note, played over and over, or one lure—alone and unadorned—dropped through a hole in the ice.

It was towards the end of this time, coming back with Marion with some salt blocks and a pickup load of feed for the sheep, that he got this idea about the fishing out on the Wisconsin. It was cold enough in the pickup, the side windows all frosted up in sub-zero weather, and she looked at him when he said it like he was crazy.

"I can understand the Bahamas," she offered. "Understand going down for a long afternoon in front of the TV down at Chet's bar, but to go out on the flat plain of that river with a wind like it gets this time of year, well _that's_ a strange one!"

He conceded her point, but not his idea. In fact, after pitching all the feed sacks into the near corner of the barn, he pulled the truck on over to the shed, plugged in the radiator heater, and found himself going through his tackle, looking for the kind of stuff that they might use this time of year.

"So you're really going to do it," she said as he came in with his fishing gear. "Just can't wait for a thaw."

"I don't know, Marion. Just seems sort of nice."

"Well, you're welcome to it. Just don't get to thinking I'm going to be a part of fishing in February. I know they do it. But I'd thought, Jason, you'd had enough of that cold, all of those bone-rattling days we made do down here. And that just a week or two ago."

"A month, Marion."

"A month then. Soon enough. But you're welcome to it. I'll keep the home fires burnin' as they say."

The next day, during the lull in the afternoon, the Kickapoo all stoked up, he drove on down to Prairie du Chien and Starks. He looked at their array of flat-bottomed john boats sitting on edge with snow settled on them and walked in wondering about it all.

But what was there to wonder? Guys do it all the time. Sitting out on the Wisconsin or especially the Mississippi, mostly in fishing shacks but some always out in their insulated suits, their gas-powered augers nearby. It was this and snowmobiling. But ever since Harold had given him that ride over to Boaz in his Yahama once, them riding the ditches, rocketing across the stubble of corn fields in the black of a moonless night, looking for them little markers to point the trail, he thought he'd just go down in the car with Marion for the Friday fish frys and stick with his sheep.

So what was he doing at Starks? Of course they were friendly in there. Talked in general about the places most folks like to fish the river. The latest fishing results. Bait and lures that were the most popular. It was strange how he had lived in that country and never fished the river. Driven over it often enough, especially that bridge on in to Boscobel. And eaten along its shores in that place with that large parking lot and no apparent need for its sign: _Immediate Seating_. And had canoed it with his cousin from Chicago, riding it down, watching the riverbars, noting the turtles lazing in the late-July sun, nodding to the rivermen sitting on the swivel seats of their bass boats, their motors tilted up. But this was different. Real different. And perhaps that was why.

The next day he got up three days' worth of wood. Got is cut and stacked and ready for his absence. Then he dug out his rod, checked on his leaders, his floats, threw out a mostly-used old can of Mike's Cheese It fish eggs, and lubricated two of his reels, sitting at the kitchen table over old newspapers.

"Smells like summer," Marion said, but they both knew that summer fishing had never really been a part of his life. His older brother had given him the stuff, the summer before he headed off to teach in the deserts of Saudi. English prof. And if he were here now, Jason reckoned, he would certainly have something to say about fish. Fish eggs or something. Perhaps mythology. He remembered his brother once going on about the first catch of the season. Said he had gleaned it from reading about the Tlingit Indians of the Northwest Coast. And even the Huron, over in Michigan. He remembered his brother standing in the front of the tree, one Christmas eve, just before they were going to all sit down to dinner at his wife's folks' place—Norwegian they were. Just before the creamed herring and Lutefisk, talking about the Hurons and how they preached to their fish! He had thought about this later that same night when they were sitting in church. Selected the best preacher and had him go on about it for days. Trying to convince the fish that they should not be afraid. Frank said the Huron would not burn their bones. Sitting in the silence the best among them preached long and hard to the first fish of the season so that the others might also come and be caught.

But a fish fry was as close as he came to fish. Except now.

Two days later he was out on the ice, down north of Wauzeka, close to where the Kickapoo empties in. He pulled in next to a couple of other trucks within sight of the river. He took his axe in one hand and in the other he held his rod and a large insulated thermal bag, with thermos and sandwiches and tackle box inside, as he worked his way down and out onto the ice.

He started his journey up towards Clear Creek, about a mile south where the river and the road come close. But then, after saying a few words with the two there, men long used to the cold and who had carved out this place for their lines, he decided on south and headed off, his bag slung over the shoulder, taking long strides, the snow crunching underfoot as he worked his way on down the river.

It was a nice day, once you got used to it. Just getting warmed up was what Roland would have said. And he wondered of Stelle with her long hair and delicate wrists and the steel of her eyes. What would she have said of all this? Roaming out on the ice with his insulated, steel-toed boots?

He hiked on down quite a ways. The river was broad here, flat with ice and an occasional spot where it seemed the air had trapped the water in the midst of making a small wave. In other places there were ridges where the snow had melted down, he supposed, into a solid core. Down south, well out of sight of the others, he finally stopped, chopped a hole and began to set up. Baiting a hook, he left the rod to lie, resting on the handle of the axe, the bopper floating in the impossibility of water still flowing. He tried the coffee with a sandwich and waited, sitting on the ice, alongside his spot, thinking of those turtles of the summer, now somewhere below him in the mud—waiting.

Something cleaned his hook. He rebaited, feeling the cold on the bare skin of his hand as he worked quickly. There were tracks of jet planes in the sky and drifting on the air the sounds of cows, across the highway, where he could make out both house and barn.

It wasn't long—perhaps two hours by McHugh's calculation— when sitting on the blanket he had brought along for insulation—even with the coffee coursing through his veins—would no longer do. He thought of the furnace in his basement dutifully chugging out heat and felt the cold deeper within his flesh and stood to go.

Of course that didn't happen right away. By himself, the decision was an easy matter. But there was the rod. He freed up the bobber and worked the weights free after cutting off the hook. He reeled it in and put knife and gear neatly away in tacklebox. When he stood up, to put blanket and thermos back into the sack, he was cold.

Well, maybe not the bone-rattling cold Marion had talked about, but cold enough anyway. Cold with a way that tells you it could get dangerous, quietly, without fanfare. Like a widow-maker in the deep woods, the rotted elm tree standing with the clothes of its bark all around the trunk. Dead-still. Dangerous.

He was stiff when he walked. It took more steps than usual to get up a rhythm and to swing his sack over his shoulder. A wind had come up out of the northeast, so he figured he'd be better walking back along the shore. He would go there and then cut through the brush and back up to the river road.

He headed north. Had come quite a ways west, he thought, crunching his way on the ridges of the ice. He was surprised to see the fringe of trees that marked where the Kickapoo flowed into the Wisconsin. To the east, he looked back on the railroad bridge and where he had left the last human companionship before this mighty venture. He could feel the cold working its way into his hands, remembering the many times in the early grey of the morning when he would hold the chainsaw in the blue smoke of its first starting and the cold would work its way in.

Almost to the shoreline. His steps were flowing now. At first it was almost like that old furnace in Stelle's pickup, his body like a hunk of metal that would not move. But it was better now, tingle of the cold wearing off in his boots, his stride extending. It was better with the stiff leather of his form loosening up and working free, when he broke through.

They had of course told him about certain places along the river where there were springs. Standing in the warm air of Starks in the afternoon, looking down at the display of knives under the counter-top, the idea of springs in the river had seemed nothing out of the ordinary. But now here it was and him standing with his right leg down in a sudden hole, the water working its way, like thick oil, out onto the ice, and him knee-deep in water.

In the summer, canoeing, he remembered seeing people half across the river and standing knee deep. But today the water was a knife. He felt it at once, working over the tops of his boots and through the matted layers of insulated suit. Knee deep. He lifted it up quick. Held it, like a dog that suddenly gets ice in one of its paws. Holding the wounded thing up in the searching cold of the air. He lifted up his leg like it was a prize catch and thought of Roland by the furnace: _not much but spit if...can't get this up and in that pickup._.

But the first time he set it down, he felt the river of water running down his pant leg and the lake in the bottom of his boots. It was some different _. "Some different, Roland!"_ he said out loud to the river. It was sort of funny. He was not that far from shore. But that's where it can get a little dicey, they had said. Right about at the edge of things: where trees meet pasture and breath finds the air. Or dreams, with their warmth the cold of your slowing life.

He moved quickly then. Never dropped his rod or lost his sack. Just in. Then up and holding it while the water drained. Then the nudge of cold and the foot placed down on solid ice. Then— with the knife of the water working on his leg—quick as he could over to shore. He could see through the brush only a few yards. It would be a good push through. Several hundred yards of Lord knows what. And so he lightened up— dropping the sack, dropping the rod and axe—lumbering off. Like a hamstrung deer, he thought. Stove up.

But getting to the road wasn't as hard as he first supposed. He shoved through the worst of it and tried not to think about what was happening to the leg as he worked all that cold around with each step. Near the road he climbed over some pretty good windfall before he could make out the rising slope of the roadbed. A car passed, just a glint of metal through the trees. He worked his way on up and broke free, finding at last the level of the road, civilization with a yellow strip in the middle and posts along the side, painted white.

From there it was easy. Two cars later he was unlacing his boot in the front seat of a warm sedan as a good-natured woman heading up to Bell Center gave him a lift. The water felt like it was trying to work its way through the last of his skin, like it was acid, relentless, etching the metal of his being, while she talked of shopping down at Prairie and how they liked the quiet of living out. He smiled in the midst of the confusion of his leg until the talking stopped. She dropped him by his truck, took his quick thanks and moved away fast—perhaps too fast, because of his success in hiding what was really happening. He limped into the truck, fished the keys from the top, zippered pocket of his coveralls and fired it up.

Then, praying for heat, he carefully took off his boot and peeled down the layer of his wool socks, like it was skin, looking at the pale white of his ankle and foot, almost silver in the cold, the water of the river dripping off like scales. The pain was warping his vision. The leg was killing him with its pain. It was a living, breathing thing, not a stick of cold wood. Would he be all right?

Slowly now heat worked its way into the cab of his truck. He was lucky it was only sub-zero windchill and not sub-zero cold. He would come back later for his gear.

##

Somewhere north of Steuben on the way to County W, Jason began to take stock. He had rubbed his leg into a bright raw pink and then put on a dry cotton sock, his right foot into a moccasin, his right pant leg rolled up to the knee; his left foot still housed in the bulk of his boot.

The heat poured out of the engine onto the floor of the pickup cab and he began to think of all the words Marion might find—now and later— over this little thing. He longed for a warm basement. And some strands of long, auburn hair? A delicate wrist?

He almost missed the turn it came so fast. It was like a part of him lifted up out of the darkness—out of the tangle of just living. A dull metal unexamined part, coated with rust. He had not thought of her since that day in the truck riding over the hills with the furnace in back. Perhaps it didn't matter. Perhaps. What was new was that he now touched a cold that had been inside. A piece of river ice lodged in his gut.

Strange that he had found it in the outside, wandering out on a river in the midst of ordinary time. He had been trying to warm himself outside in—gathering sticks of wood from the edges of his life. He could feel the heat now on his foot. He was losing his internal source. His heat source. The calories of those hardwood trees, the trees he burned, always worked their way out from inside, showing up in the dull, red coals of the wood he so dearly loved.

In the middle of his years, he was like an old elm, lodged in the crook of another, half-supported there, bark falling away. Growing cold.

His foot started shaking. Like a fish hooked and lifted up, it was quivering in the air. That was what it was—a need deep inside him. He _was_ like that tree. Or like an old fish. He looked at his foot, at the pale skin above the layer of the sock and thought of an old cat or a sturgeon down in the bottom of the river, iced up, slowing in all that cold, winding down into some deep, eternal rhythm, waiting for the thaw.

The old rusty thing, metal and cable. How much oil did it take that day? He saw the brown of her jersey gloves and the slow, sludge-like oil working its way into the moving parts. And now this water. He could still feel it, thumb tacks and knives, sloshing away in his boot. This water like oil. How much water would it take, he thought, to loosen all the moving parts that ached inside?

THE BONE YARD

The kid had a face like gravel, roughed up and angry-looking, especially high up on the cheekbones where the sere blonde scatterings of his beard did not reach. Munson thought of the rocks and the dead grass of what passed for a front lawn where he had parked _._ To reach the bone yard, he had driven a gravel township road until he saw _C.J. Chester_ , the bold lettering bringing him down the lane to where the first tractors appeared—mostly worn and rusty, some grill-less and grinning as he drove in.

"You sure you know what you're lookin' for, Mister?"

They were in the middle of the field, now, and the lanky form of his guide was half hidden by the clumps of Canada thistle, the angular protrusions of Goldenrod and the curled dead stalks of Queen Anne's lace that he parted as he led the way. The boy looked familiar.

"WD and not a C was what you said?"

"Yeah that's right—WD radiator, grille and battery box, if there's one out here that still has the top."

The bone yard spread out over a good three acres—most of it in the faded orange of the Allis Chalmers brand which rose up—islands, skeletons, torsos—out of the weeds. He passed an axle sticking up like a femur from the weeds and not much farther along skirted a swirl of bees emanating from the large rotting presence of a rear tractor tire—13.6 x 28 probably—their scant, rising forms making him think of the almost random of electron cloud probabilities orbiting, covering the positive attracting charge of an atomic nucleus in one of his general science textbooks. Dr. Bohr's neat atomic model—orbitals instead of probabilities—is being revised before my very eyes, Munson thought, looking at the bees, but then he remembered that school was just a week away and that he was still out in the open air and away from the closed, humid palm of his classroom; still privileged to be looking for tractor parts.

The face and form of the Chester boy stopped and half-turned in his direction. Munson dutifully followed. He rounded a particularly thick, sickly-green clump of thistle and came upon the first almost-complete corpse of an Allis WD against which the teen was now leaning, eyeing him in his approach.

"Something here might work for you," he said, still watching with his sometimes languid eyes, heavy-lidded like a lizard in the building heat, now falling, pressing upon Munson's form as he looked things over.

The tractor had a narrow-front with the AC decal still visible on the tin as he moved front to rear in his examination. Below the curve of the engine cover, Munson saw the familiar mix of grease, dust and oil where the main head gasket had been leaking. He traced the rivulet of flaked paint where the coolant had cleaned things up by the number four cylinder and below the bright metal track of its flow noted that the crankcase was still securely bolted in place.

"I'm also looking for a bearing," he told the boy, "if there's an engine with the pan still on it out here like this one."

"Help yourself," the kid said carelessly, "or we might have some back at the shop." Perhaps he had caught Munson's sudden vision of a long, hot afternoon, wrenches and sockets settling into the thick brittle carpet of the weeds as he worked the bolts free and eased the pan on down, just for one damn bearing.

"Yeah," he said, tiredly, "maybe we should take a look later."

Where had all this come from? He was disking, asking the tractor to take just an eight-foot snap-coupler disk across one of his garden strips when it started slowing, got increasingly rough sounding. He moved the throttle up to no avail and then he heard this metallic sound beneath the firing of the engine. It was coming from down low, from where the bearing would be.

And that was that.

In the heat of his shed in the late mornings and into the long afternoons, Munson had sweated over that tractor. He had pulled off the radiator to get at the engine—to just pull it off and take it into the shop—when he had discovered radiator rot in the bottom portion of the radiator. He hauled the pulled engine to Smiley's and got the bad news about the possibility of replacing the rings as long as the block was out and that little event—once it was fully priced out—had got Munson's dander up, bringing him out in the heat for whatever he could scrounge in the way of used parts. Cheap parts, make-do parts. After all, he reasoned, this was not some kind of a prissy, baby-doll cream-puff restoration that he was doing; he just wanted a usable tractor.

Trevor was the name, but—somewhere in the course of things—Munson remembered that the name had been transmuted to Trivet and then often shortened to Triv. That's where he had seen the boy, he thought, going back four years or so to the mesh of the backstop at the middle school, the shrill cry, "good job, Triv," coming to his mind as the opposing team's catcher came away, after bouncing off the metal, holding the caught foul ball over his head. Yep, he thought, that was the kid, less lanky then, and no foul pustules of acne, a kid new to the area.

"Still play any ball?" he said, from somewhere down near the crankcase.

"Oh yeah," the voice brightened, "a little."

"Home Town League?" Munson offered.

"Yup. Blue River Team."

Munson stood up, eyeing the radiator that seemed perfectly sound and usable.

"Where do we go from here? I'd like the radiator off'n this one."

"Well, fine," the kid said, "I'm not afraid of wrenches. Good for the wrists. I'll pull it off for you, Mr. Munson." He was coming clearer now; coming into focus.

"It's been about four years or so, hasn't it?"

"Yeah, I guess that."

"And Blue River's two and three..."

"Yup. We made a bad start."

"Catchin'?"

"Oh yeah."

The shop was cool as they walked in. A little breeze was coming up from the West, rattling the big metal door. Triv slipped it open farther and took Munson into the dark quiet of the guts of the place. Along the walls and in two columns wooden shelves held an enormous variety of parts securely in well-marked boxes—a shocking contrast to the front yard, the bone yard, and even the front of the building itself were tools were lying randomly on the ground and parts from two half-disassembled tractors were scattered about.

"See anything?"

"Oh sure. The bearing for that WD engine were pretty-much standard through the WD, the '45 and the early D-17s, so we've got plenty of 'em."

He held one up to the light, dim as it was, and Munson saw the shiny surface of the metal around which the rod would go.

"Fine" he said.

"If you want to wander the yard, Mr. Munson, and give me a half an hour, I'll have that radiator for you. And the grille and battery box."

He wandered the yard. Al Chester kept a couple of black steers in there to keep the grass down and they watched Munson's progress from the shade of two oak trees along the western border. He found a couple of Farmall As back in the far reaches of the place, complete with cultivators, noted the teeth of several sickle-bar mowers standing at attention in the travel position, spotted a potato digger (three point) and an old pull-type mower conditioner with chunks of rubber missing from both rollers and tires before it was all over.

Triv worked fast. Dark blue islands of sweat had formed on the front and back of his light blue T shirt as he carried Munson's trophies back to the car—now suddenly the hunting guide just from the kill after gutting out the carcass, the quartered meat in hand, carrying it back to camp.

He placed the rump and flank of Munson's radiator and grille on the flatbed of his old truck and said, as though he owned the place, "Come on in to the office so we can settle up."

The office was just a corner of the shop, not far from the door, with a window above the oily wood of a workbench serving as desk where you could see out on to a small pen where calves once had been. Or hogs, Munson thought as he wrote out the check.

"Just make it out to C. J. Chester & Son," the boy offered and Munson wondered about that even as he wondered how C.J. could have ever been transmuted into Al. But Al it was. Al had been leaning on the bar just two days ago when Munson came in for his drink.

"The usual" he had said to Julie and she poured out a screw-driver, topping it off with a little extra vodka and, for some strange reason a cherry, when, with eyes properly adjusted in the dim light, he saw Chester sitting half-way down the bar.

"Well if it isn't the Klondike Middle School baseball coach," the voice said in the darkness, "how are you, Munson?" And so he and "Al" Chester spent an hour. Three screw-drivers later, screwballs he called them by the end of the series, he had discovered that Chester owned a junk yard.

"I'm not much there, though, these days," Chester offered. "On the road a lot doin'over the road driving. My boy sees to the place." And so he did, taking Munson's check and filing it away carefully in the worn cash box that served their needs. Even walked him back to the car.

Turned out, though, that the boy had a purpose.

"So you need a hand with that radiator? You need a hand, I could come on down and get it all settled in. And there's that bearing problem."

He'd had sized things up right, Munson thought. Got them figured out pretty good. He eyed the boy. Below the blonde tassel of hair and the downy gravel of the face and the heavy-lidded eyes were two strong, supple-looking arms.

"Sure" he said, somewhat surprised at himself. "That would be fine, Triv. Come down on Tuesday."

##

"Voral!" The voice scalded the air. She could raise it higher and higher until pigeons would take flight at the pop of the last syllable when she put it in earnest: "Vor-AL!"

"What?" he said from the work bench. "What Louise?" She stuck her head into the confines of the stable turned to workshop, and the old dog looked up at her stout legs in shorts and apron and expanse of her sleeveless blue blouse and brown freckled arms and wagged his tail.

"Chester boy's here," she said confidentially. "Your partner in crime."

Interesting choice of words, he thought, as he looked at her from the workbench and nodded: "Okay."

The first Tuesday went well and led to another. They got the pistons out and the rings that Munson had ordered came in by UPS in the late afternoon, so they also were in place. He washed the parts in the basement where there was an old cast-iron laundry sink while the boy fiddled with the bearing. Things went together smooth.

So smooth that he decided to take Louise out to the Blue River-Juda game the following night. Triv obliged by throwing out a runner stealing third and chipping in with a bases-loaded, opposite-field single in the last of the ninth, producing the tying and the winning run.

They knew Munson over here at Blue River. Several of the parents remembered. One even called him "Coach." The sound settled nicely around him, like a mantel, soft and light on the shoulders.

The following day school started and he found himself way behind. He was ready for class that first day, but the room itself was not organized. The microscopes were still locked in the closet and needed inspection before being set out at the lab tables in the back of the room. The gas was still off—he would have to get Wilkins, the janitor of twenty years, to get in the crawl space and throw the main valve. Posters, maps, vertebral skeletons were scattered in the far corners of the room: Munson was glad that Mr. Gladding usually avoided his room. It was at the far end of the hall, on the second floor. Even with the windows wide open, it would take the heat and hold it nicely on the unsufferable afternoons of waning summer, so the principal mostly stayed away. That left Munson to teach as best he could in the dense, sticky heat, hearing his own voice as a drone, sometimes wondering if he had energy to push the words across the thick spaces of the stifling room to the glazed eyes and flushed faces of his students.

Tuesdays were the only change in the routine. And was this why he was always waiting for Tuesdays? It was nothing special, really. An old engine was being restored in the cool of the evenings.

In the heat of those early afternoons, he stood before his pupils, showing off one of the skeletons, resurrected like Lazarus from the depths of the closet. Bones. He was good at discussing bones, pointing them out. Besides the skeletons, there were the bones, which he drew forth and lifted up into the light. The eyes followed his hands as he worked the articulations, showing off the left and right _manus_ of amphibians, then passing the turtle and alligator _manus_ to the students, the bones clicking away as they worked the joints.

Clicking: in the heat of those early afternoons, why did the sounds of the bones always come to him as the ticking of a clock? He well knew there were not many years left for him in this job. Their own children were all grown up with one out to Kansas City and the other to Jefferson. And here he was in the midst of his bones, Voral Munson, finding himself waiting.

##

"I've got something for you."

He almost didn't hear it. The kid's voice was soft, dampened in the quiet of the shed on Tuesday evening with the sunset coming on. It was coming from under the rails of the tractor frame where the boy was putting the pan on. His legs were splayed apart, and Munson could see one elbow and bicep as the boy struggled with the oil pan bolts, grease from the frame now a black smudge on his arm.

"What is it?" he finally responded. The light was bad in the place and he was by the window trying to light a propane lamp to bring over so that the boy could see things better. The mantels popped to the match flame; he turned towards the boy who was sliding out from under his work.

He stood up, his left hand reaching into his back pocket.

"Got it finished. I think the gaskets will hold real good," he said, coming into the circle of the light. He unfolded the paper carefully, and Munson saw newsprint. Newsprint and grease. He handed the kid a towel and the two of them stood in the circle of light reading.

The boy's hand was trembling, though not at first. The story was long enough to spill onto two pages. Munson's eyes traveled down page one; the paper was from Lawrence, Kansas. He did not see the date, but the paper was faded.

"My mom left two years ago," the voice said, soft tones in the hiss of the lamp. Munson shifted position, his standing suddenly awkward, as the boy brought up the second page.

"We moved here a few months after," he said. "She came with, of course, but even then, I kinda knew." Family wreckage, Munson thought. Pieces, fragments, old rusty parts like a tractor being parted out. He wondered what to do. The silence was a blanket. The boy helped him out. "He liked math, engines; ran the shop program. Boys from the school, freshmen, sophomores mostly, would hang out down there." Munson finally registered why there suddenly was an "Al." Charles James Chester was a name with too many miles, a name worn out, worn thin. "He said nothing really happened, but there was this association. People started making things up."

They stood there, together, in the quiet of the evening, the hissing of the lamp, each with his own thoughts drifting up into the dark recesses of the building.

There was no sobbing sound, just the sound of air going in and then a rending pop of breath released in a half-cough, half-shout—grief and pain coming out of the form that would grow rigid and then soft in an alternating fashion; grief and pain like oil and coolant finding the places now where the gasket of years finally was wearing thin, giving way, while his voice made the sound, the sputter of an engine coughing.

They stood there in the quiet, his arm around the shoulder of the boy, until Munson finally thought enough to thoughtlessly say, "Perhaps this is enough work for tonight." Triv nodded and moved a few steps away. He wanted to put two hands on the boy's shoulders and look deep into his eyes. He wanted to say, "You can get clear of this," but he did not.

Louise always put pop into the cooler that he left by the door. The boy stood, carefully folding the paper, while Munson got out two cold bottles of Coke, opening them on the bottle opener along the side of the workbench. He always got the old kind, glass bottles, whenever he could find them. And now he placed the cold surface of the glass into the palm of the boy's waiting hand.

"Come on out back," he said, and the two of them walked to the far end of the shed. Munson slid the old door open to the backyard where the garden patches stretched out into the dim light and the two of them stood and drank quietly, working the cool fluid down into their bodies with the sounds of swallowing making the only ripples upon the air to be heard.

"You come here for dinner tomorrow night."

The boy looked at him.

"No, I don't think so. It wouldn't be right."

"You come," he said into the quiet air. "You're expected."

He didn't know where all of this would go, but he knew that they had an extra bedroom. He also knew Louise would love to cook for three. He figured the tractor repair easily could become a restoration project. After all, the boy needed someone. And even if he didn't stay down here with them on a permanent basis, he needed a place to go. It was lonely down there in the yard with just the junk, the old wasted skeletons to talk to. And when Al came back, the two of them would talk.

Voral took another drink. He would lay it all out; articulate the pieces together, proximal to distal elements, and he knew that the father would not object. The boy could go up there whenever the dad came off the road—if the boy really wanted to. That and Saturdays: Triv could run the business of the bone yard Saturdays and take calls right here at the house.

As the two of them stood together, Munson got the rest of the vision, the part that would cement the deal with a boy who wanted no favors. Then and there he decided that the WD would indeed need a full restoration: new rubber, overhauled brakes, new clutch. His mind stretched until he saw that old tractor sitting in the shed fully orange. New paint, it would have.

He smiled to himself: it would even be a little prissy. Not just a skeleton, some vestige of its former self. No-sir! It would take on flesh, get its color back. Yup. Drinking the last of his coke, he saw it in its full glory. The engine would purr, start on the first crank. And there would be no leaks, no traces of coolant running down the engine block. All the gaskets would be tight.

Putting his bottle down into the antique box squared off for empties, Munson could _see_ the WD sitting on the front yard in the long light of an early summer afternoon. He was getting nuts about this tractor. It would take a lot of hours—the two of them, together.

He smiled into the darkness with all these notions of a finished product. He wouldn't say anything about it all now. He would talk with Louise later tonight. For now, however, all he could see and seemingly think about was a baby doll tractor in bright orange: a real cream puff.

TROTTER CREEK

Casey let the first one in, the gray mare with the look of the Arab in her. She went in easily and her filly foal followed. Her younger sister, though, had not been there before. She walked past the barbed-wire fence, through the gate and into the pasture, and then, when Casey was looking at the gray mare getting acquainted again with the yearlings and the two year-old bay gelding, the younger mare turned and walked back out.

Nobody panicked. She stood there on the pavement of the county road in the gathering pools of the darkness and soft hush of the land waiting for night and looked at them, humans and horses, looking back at her from the fenceline and the green of acres of pasture, waiting. Besides, her baby was there.

"Di," Casey said softly and Amanda gave that low whistle of hers.

"Diamond, get over here," Casey said once more, swinging the gate wider, and she dropped her head and blew out a soft, almost guttural snort, her nostrils flaring at the warm stones in the pavement where she was standing, and then she slowly strode, demurely and elegantly, into the green beyond the fenceline.

Green freedom of fifteen acres.

Amanda watched them sorting, settling, getting reacquainted, the two older mares and their two foals mingling in with the two yearlings and the gelding: ears forward and back, little explosions of air, slight nips with reachings and turnings of necks, dance of hoofs jostling bodies together and apart.

Contact.

She wondered what they might be saying, if anything, beneath and in all of this: Where have you been? What is this place like? Do I trust you anymore? Who's our leader, now? But they seemed to know what they were doing, as if questions were never an issue. The lead mare, the gray, turned and gave a snort and trotted away from the gate and into the tall grass. It was almost dark now, so the swish of the grass and the hollow sound of hooves on the ground told Amanda that the trot was changing into a soft canter, and then she saw floating forms, the winding serpentine line of horses galloping this way and that up the ridge. The younger ones, who were familiar with the place, thought of the high ground to the west and they broke away from the mares, only to turn back when the lead gray disregarded this invitation and curled back towards the fenceline, her force as the number one horse drawing the others back into the long winding snake of their progress, until she stopped, took a long look at them watching and then dropped her head for her first mouthful of grass.

"They look pretty settled, don't they?" Casey said, his hands curled around the top rung of the metal gate.

"Yes, they do, Casey," Amanda said, "looks like the two older ones remember this place." She put her hands on the top rung of the gate, too, and watched them encountering, exploring.

They were running again: running, trotting, stopping, then turning, heads high, surging through grass shoulder high in places, grabbing mouthfuls, snorting, trotting, running again. Maybe this dance was a sensing and remembering. Maybe. Maybe it was just pure freedom. The words and the language of response to this new place were being played out in muscle and bone, carried to the circumference of their bodies—carried to skin of shoulder and flank, to nostril, orb of eye and loose soft lip. It was more than dance that she was seeing. It was delight.

Casey ran the rope through the lower part of the gate as a safety because the chain of the top only hung by a nail and the wood of the post was getting pretty soft. But even as he did it, Amanda knew that they wouldn't try the gate. This was their place. It was big and spacious and grassy, and the two creeks that joined just on the north side by the road came from cold springs less than a quarter mile away to offer them abundant water in the one stream that ran diagonally across the land. In the evening and all through the night, they would drift to the high ground for their night pasture and then work their way down low by the water and the two burr oaks by mid morning for the heat of the day, fighting off flies, standing nose to tail in the humid air and the shade before starting off their high ground migration again in the soft evening light, working their way slowly, grazing their way along the nice run of flat land by the stream before slowly climbing the hill.

"They should be fine," she said to Casey and to no one, because it was so clear that they would. She felt sad, leaving them here, even though it was just a mile from the place—even though it would mean no wrestling with small square bales, breaking them apart each day, a winter's work in summer, before they all came down here.

"Let's go," she said, and her twelve year old visitor obliged. The dome light was out in the truck so both of them still had their night vision when she turned the key and started the engine. They look one last look at her brood, her babies, already forgetting them with each moist mouthful of rank, sweet grass. Then she slipped it in gear, found the lights and drove away, the gate on the back of the trailer rattling away in the sudden blackness of night.

##

Casey was here like he usually was: right after school and then into July. His stay always lasted a month. It gave Steve's sister a chance for some space apart and now it was a part of their lives over the last several years. Cousin Casey, she called him. She supposed it more rightfully might be Nephew Casey, but she was closer to him than that, and besides, since just living with Steve and not being technically a part of his family, cousin seemed at once closer and more informal.

He liked the country. He came out and away from the hot apartment and the close, car-lined streets of the little neighborhood in the city where he spent his days, and the tense lines that she could read in his face and especially in the muscles of his body always eased after the first day.

She helped them ease. He would complain, when she first came into the room with its saddles and its one bridle, hanging off the knob of the dresser mirror and down one side. She would see his resistance when she first entered. Both windows would be open and there would be this heaped form in the bed that she would rouse with her "up, up, you sluggard, daylight in the swamp" routine. She would peel back the covers and he would clench the sheet, not looking, with his eyes closed tight. Then she would find his feet, and he would helplessly release the sheet at the first tickle and it would be all over.

Cold cereal for breakfast, quick orange juice, goodbye kiss to Steve. As soon as his car cleared the driveway, it was time for the horses. During his visits, it usually went this way for a good week before the pasture transfer began. But this year it was longer. The older nineteen-year-old stallion had died in mid-May; they brought in a new horse just for breeding season, and the mares wouldn't settle. They would go in and respond and the stallion would breed them, but they wouldn't settle, still in heat. So Casey got a sex education different from the one he was receiving from those semi late-night shows on cable TV. Real sex. Neighs, biting and raised hooves and then the grunts and motions of the act itself. It courses through us, she thought, the last time they brought the stallion alongside. He was a pretty old boy and gentle, so she did not fear handling him. Still, she made Casey stand aways back, out of respect, she told him, for the loving couple. She wondered if he thought that this was how she and Steve were, under the covers, or his mom and her occasional boyfriend. It is a river, a current—sometimes a swollen flood, sometimes a gentle flowing, but it is always there. We are animal, we are mammal, she thought, as the old boy dismounted and moved away, his distended penis in full view of the boy and Amanda both as it slowly retracted into its sheath.

Because of all this love-making and lack of mares settling properly, they fed out a lot of hay. This was the first action after their quick breakfast. Hay and water both were carried. The stud got his last, the mares and the foals theirs first. Casey would be sweating pretty good by eight thirty and when it reached nine they both would be dripping wet from the humid air and their work.

"How do you know when they're 'settled'" he wanted to know. He had just broke off the last leaf of some good green sweet-smelling hay that she had bought at the baler from her neighbor down the road. More of it was piled in the hay mow and still more waiting for them to buck it up into the rack from the wagon out front.

She looked at him.

"Well, there's this ache, an ache deep inside and then it's not there anymore."

He flipped the last green morsel towards the second filly foal standing farthest away.

"And for him, too?"

"No, not exactly. Stallions always seem ready, but not the mares."

"Come on," she said, moving towards the blue tarp covering the wagon. "Help me get this off the load, then we'll hitch up and drag the wagon inside and get this over with."

Casey groaned.

"Come on. Another load will be here tomorrow night and there's a chance of rain this afternoon with all this heat."

They began peeling back the blue plastic tarp from the sweet-smelling bales.

"This is how it is in June, Casey—and July too. You get to sleep when the day is done. Besides, aren't we going riding this afternoon?"

"You _said_."

"Yep, guess I did."

He was a nice kid. Even wore the slouch hat she gave him one Christmas back. Looked at it, then, thanked her at the promptings of his mother, and then moved on to computer games. But when he came out that summer, there it was, riding his head. Casey took things in. Drank them hurriedly one moment and others sometimes just sipped, but he was always at it. There were wheels beyond the brown soft orbs of his eyes that took what the eyes offered and locked them away: gifts, perceptions, insights. She sense acquity; he missed nothing. Today it was sex education, tomorrow an essay on competition and survival. Always. He was always at it. Was this the way she was once?

"Where we gonna go?" His city lip had softened here in their presence, and at times he acquired a country lilt. Steve mocked him once, but she looked daggers at him across the table, and he learned to let it go. Give the kid a chance. He was telling her that he wanted to follow. He was the yearling straying off away from the line of the other horses and then slowly curving back towards the rest in the last of the light.

"Trotter Creek, I suppose."

"Good. Jimmie says I'd like it down there and the horses'd like it too."

"Well, Jimmie should know. Been here all his life."

"How old _is_ Jimmie?"

"Lord, Casey, I'm not sure I could tell you. His face is ageless. He moves freely and has great energy."

"Kind of like Dobbin?"

She was struck by this. The boy came just two and a half weeks after the horse went down and she was still grieving him and the boy quickly sensed that. Apparently it was still on his mind, too.

"Dobbin had a fair sized lead over Jimmie. I mean, the horse was nineteen when he died.

"And he never showed any signs you said."

"Nope. Dobbin just lay down and quietly died. But this is horses and people you are doing, boy, and that won't do. You should know: we all hang by different life lines."

"Sounds like we're just dangling."

"Kind of spidery isn't it, Cousin Casey."

"Yes it is, Cousin Amanda," he said, smiling, pulling a straight green stem of grass out of the closest bale like his uncle would do.

The blue tarp was on the ground and the heat already was building. She would be going for the truck.

"C'mon," she said to the boy, "it's time to buck that hay."

##

It was well past noon when they were ready. She had made sandwiches for their journey and packed away a couple of pop cans surrounded by ice packs in her saddlebags. They did this under the shade trees of the front lawn of the home place where they had left two riding horses from her small remuda of the night before. She always saved back two. They had an acre of pasture both to the right and left of the house and the two horses, both geldings, traded human attention for the night ramblings the others were enjoying in the bigger pasture to the west.

Buck was her horse, named after his buckskin color. He was a good trail horse, slow and deliberate and almost fearless. She had to blind-fold and lead him across a rickey wood bridge, once, but after that he was good with the hollow sound of wood over water.

Goober was the other one. She had no idea how he came about that name. The guy at the stable where she bought him after the summer riding season was done didn't know either. She surmised that he was named something else earlier and that one of the summer hired hands—girls mostly out from the city, who worked the trail rides and fed out the horses—came up with that one. He was a grade horse while Buck was a registered Quarter. Buck had some cutting horse in him whereas Goober was just Goober, a good quiet horse, good for guests and country cousins, recently entitled, out from the city.

Goober nuzzled Casey's pants, and when he turned the horse ran his mug across Casey's T-shirt, where a pocket would be, looking for handouts.

"What's with this horse?" he wanted to know.

"Spoiled him, I suppose. Lookin' for treats."

"Oh, _that's_ it. It's not just me."

She pulled on Goober's cinch and felt the horse's stomach muscles tighten. "No, not just _you_. Now Casey, you stand there, relaxed like and run your hand along the horse's neck and when you feel his muscles kind of relax, you pull on that cinch belt real hard."

"Okay." He looked her way, "what about you?"

"Well, Buck here is different. He wasn't ridden every day most of his life, so he doesn't mind the cincture so much. Doesn't tighten up."

Casey pulled down hard. "Got him!" he said.

"Now wrap it like I showed you and tighten that near rein up some before you mount him. He shouldn't move off, much, but you never know with riding horses. Sometimes they remember old habits at just the wrong time."

They moved off from the farm and along the paved road of the ridge. Ahead they could see the valleys and the open field of CRP land where they would angle down towards the long, extended bottom of Trotter Creek.

He had the lead and turned in the saddle to look back at her.

"This is good, Amanda. I've been dreamin' of this all year. Thanks."

She had never seen him so expressive. He had his slouch hat down low, but the tone of his voice along with the offering of the words themselves surprised her. A really nice kid, she thought, and Missy better know it in the midst of all her preoccupation with bill-paying and men and survival. She would tell her again, and maybe she wouldn't bat it away this time and just look at it and relax.

He turned Goober and led him down into the first rut of the trail through the grass field of the set-aside. Ahead she could see the first trees that would usher them into the shady portion of the ride. A breeze was up and that was good. The horses seemed ready for this excursion and that also was good. It was hot, but not hanging-hot and the flies eased off the horses and their riders in the wind.

"Yep. A trail ride," he said as Goober and Casey together slipped into the tall grass of the field. He put his right hand out and leaned over hard and touched the heads of the grass as the bay horse worked his way slowly down the gentle slope.

"Any dew?" she said.

"Nope. Too late."

Now Buck was in it, tossing his head a little above the waving stems of the grass he would be eating. You could almost lean into the heat, but it was an enfolding blanket and not a heavy firm hand, pressing down.

They found the trees. Ahead of them was the cool of the woods. Casey knew the way, and so did Goober. The trail wound down past the first of the oaks and then past a clump of prickly ash and into the lush dark of the woods themselves. Already Amanda could feel the cool.

"Listen," Casey said.

She did and heard the sound of the woodpecker below them in the trees. She looked down and saw just the first glint of the water, still quite a ways off, flowing beneath the canopy of the trees. The trail angled up and around a couple of ancient oak trees and some stumps where others had fallen. Ahead was a snag of an elm tree with a widow maker still angling off to the up side of the slope. Casey wound past her and the snag and then dropped down as the trail resumed its descent.

He was looking all over. He looked relaxed and confident on his mount, she thought. Goober's ears were forward: he had the lead.

It took them about ninety minutes to wind their way down to the actual bottom land. When they arrived on the flat plane of the riverbottom, Trotter Creek itself had angled away to their right, to the north some, while the trail worked through some scrub brush and then some meadow grass. It was a good place to stop.

Amanda carried two longer ropes on her saddle and she handed one to Casey for Goober. "Everybody's goin' to eat," she said to the boy. "Here's his halter, swap it out for the bridle and tie him to that tree," pointing to a scrub growing all by itself and out some in the grass.

She had taught him well. He had the halter ready when he slipped the bridle off, while the loop of the knotted reins were still around the horse's neck. She did the same for Buck and then unpacked their saddle-bag lunch.

"So Jimmie came down here?" he said, half into his first sandwich.

"Yes. He rode all over as a kid and still does when he gets the chance."

"I wonder what it was like when he rode here as a kid."

"Oh, nothing's much changed really. Perhaps the trees were smaller, although some of the bigger ones were surely logged off, and perhaps there was more pasture about. Maybe even some more fences. Farther on down, there is the remains of a house that was burned out one year by lightning. But the creek's pretty much the same."

"That's good."

"Why do you say that, Casey?"

"Everything changes."

"Everything?"

"Yeah, well, you know. People, houses, streets, cars. Everything seems to be flowing like the creek there," he was looking and pointing to the glint of the water ahead of them at the edge of the meadow grass, "and sometimes you'd like something to hold, to stick and hold tight."

She did not realize that he was inclined to be so much of a philosopher.

"Well, what if it did? What if it did hold?"

"Yeah. Wouldn't that be pretty nice..."

"Well, I'm not so sure."

"What do you mean?"

"Well the water needs to flow. It would stagnate. And the life forms down stream, waiting for the food and the oxygen in the flowing water would be denied what _they_ need. And if you dammed it and denied it it's proper motion downstream then this grass meadow would be asked to hold all that water and it would be forced to change. One change. Even one slight change from the pattern denies us the life that lies in its flow."

"So it's got to flow?"

"There is a force in the flow and in the design of the pattern that responds to the flow. And if you disrupt it, there are consequences. We are alive in the flow of life, my boy, my country cousin"—she added that to soften the seriousness of it all—"and you'd better get used to it."

"Yeah. Right." He threw the crust of his sandwich at a dragon fly coming close. "But in my picture of the freeze, everything freezes, even the life downstream. The grass, the trees do too, so there's no decay." He worked another piece of crust loose and threw it out once more. Let's talk about something else."

"All right, you choose," she said, throwing a clump of grass listlessly at his feet.

"Okay. I choose silence."

It seemed a good choice. They ate in silence and drank their cold pop. One more can for each remained in her saddlebags, but she would surprise him with that one when they needed to climb back to the ridge when the afternoon sun would be again on their shoulders and backs. If it was hot enough, they would be walking the horses and sweating heavily and the pop would be good.

Amanda watched the horses. Sometimes when Buck got too sweaty he would think about rolling, even with the saddle and blanket and bags. Both horses were calm, flicking flies with their tails, their heads down into the grass.

"Jimmie ever say anything about this place?"

"Trotter Creek?"

"Yeah and this valley and the people who lived here and got burned out?"

"Not the people, really. I never learned their name—where they came from and where they went. It was a long time ago, when Jimmie was a kid, I guess. No, the only thing he mentioned was that Trotter Creek was a nice ride. I told him that I liked it too, and liked riding the creek itself on hot days and he looked at me and said that I should be careful with that because there's some soft places in the creek bottom."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, places where the bottom goes soft and you can sink down."

"Quick sand?"

"Yeah, I suppose."

"Cool."

"He said watch out for places where the current slows some and test it out."

"He have trouble when he came down here?"

"Casey, I really did not ask, but you can ask, he's coming to dinner tomorrow night."

"Cool. Jimmie's cool."

"Yeah. I agree. Jimmie's _very_ cool."

They swapped halters for bridles and mounted up. Ahead past the green heat of the shimmering grass was the cool of the trees that snaked along with the creek. She had been down here before, so she knew exactly where she wanted to enter the stream. Casey would insist on riding the creek after that story, that she knew.

Amanda took the lead. She led them into the darkness. They worked their way along the stream, listening to the purling of the water in places where it shoaled and ran over rocks. It was dark, cool and inviting. A quarter of a mile of this and they came to the ford. The banks were alluvial, but the ford was well fortified by stones. She turned Buck into the ford and then sharply pointed him south, aligned with the flow of the water. He stepped off of the ford and down into the soft, packed sand of the creek bottom, the water up to his knees.

"I suppose you wanted this?" she said to Casey who was following closely with Goober in the middle of the stream.

"Cool, awesome!" he said, the horse splashing water from his forefeet as he stepped. He smiled and let go of the reins and leaned back in the saddle, his hand and arms making a wing span as though he would fly in his new setting, his new freedom.

They ducked under branches and worked their way down. At the first pool, where the water noticeably slowed and expanded, Amanda stopped Buck. He nosed the water. She asked him to move and he took one step. The bottom held. She asked for another and he went down six, eight inches into hard packed sand.

They moved ahead, repeating the process each time they left the obvious flow of the small stream and edged into a pool. The sun was shielded from them most of the time and the wind continue to blow through the woods, sometimes rippling the water. Off to the right in places, they could look out on the valley. There were Holsteins grazing and other clustered under some oak trees in the pasture of one farm. Way off to the north, occasionally a car could be seen across the open fields shimmering in the obvious heat of the land open to the sun. But their riding place was cool.

"Any wild stuff down here?" Casey wanted to know.

"You mean like panthers and that sort of stuff?"

"C'mon, I'm not _that_ stupid. I mean like coyotes or racoon."

"Oh, yes. Plenty of coyotes and coons are all about. But I think there are also turkeys around here and black bear. Wild enough, Country Cousin?"

"I guess."

She offered him the lead. Goober's ears again went forward and Casey sat up in the saddle. She told him to take the lead and check every slower, deeper spot before wading in. He did. There was a snag that he guided Goober around and low branches from some willow trees that he did well with also, riding with his head along the horse's neck. He was learning real fast, she thought with a smile: this boy who did not like change. And she thought about Steve and their relationship and wondered if it, too, would change. If it would lead to marriage, if he would finally relent, quit all his opposition and arguments, and move into deeper water. These boy-men who are so fearful of 'ever after'! And she smiled at him, too, trying so hard to be so serious about things and just not plain admit that he was scared.

They passed through one of the deeper pools, with the water over Goober's knees and Buck taking it higher up, water splashing some on his belly, and then the stream narrowed. Amanda took the lead back, for she was not exactly sure where the best place would be for them to climb the bank. She headed down the straight run of the stream, everything going smoothly, when all of a sudden he was swimming.

She was sitting in water and the horse was breathing right at the water line, the nostril blowing heavily on the water and the legs beneath her churning. She looked down into the water and it held coffee grounds: water, sand and dirt. She eased herself down into it and turned and called to Casey who, Lord be praised, had lagged just a bit behind and was just coming up to where Buck had dropped into the deep.

"Stay back!"

"You okay?"

"Stay back. See if you can climb the bank back somewhere."

"Quick sand?"

"Stay back."

Goober's ears were forward and she was alongside Buck's neck, her legs out straight near the surface of the water, while beneath their heads and torsos his legs were pounding, churning the bottom. She kicked with her legs and held his head up. The reins were trailing back in the brown suspended sand and mud of the water, and her one hand was under his jar, while her other hand grabbed a clump of his black mane. She forgot to be cold or even wet. She forgot to breathe and to think. She held on to his mane, and pushed with her left hand under his jaw to keep his head up. If he breathed, they breathed.

Casey was alongside. She was dimly aware of him, riding above her to her right. He was calling to her, but she couldn't understand. The words were too much. She kicked with her legs and pushed with her hand. She felt frozen in time, locked in and held. Suspended like the coffee grounds of the water.

Then his shoulder came up. She almost fell away. Then Buck's muddy form rose and lifted, and she did fall away. He slipped past her until she reached his tail, finding the loose reins at the same time. Amanda pulled on the tail and her slim form aligned itself with his churning legs, the hocks now visible, and then her own feet felt the solid of the bottom as the horse came free and pulled away.

She stumbled after.

"Buck!" The horse's sides were heaving, he was walking slowly.

"Buck!" Casey said and then he rode down a broken spot in the bank and stopped Goober right in front of Amanda's exhausted gelding.

She slogged through the knee deep water to her horses and Casey.

"Keep him right here," she said to Casey. "You stay right there on Goober while I get this guy's saddle loosened up and off." She worked the cinch strap and lifted the saddle and heavy, sodden blanket off the horse's heaving sides. Buck turned some and looked. She could not just carry it over to the bank. It was too much. It slumped down into the mud and Amanda took the blanket first and worked it up and down in the light colored water before throwing it to the bank. The saddle came next. She carried it over to Casey who helped throw it up onto the bank. She had not heard or seen him coming to help.

"You get on back up there to your horse," she said, brokenly, trying to breathe, and he obliged. Then she took water and ran it along the rib cage and flanks of her horse. His head was down. The muscles of his flanks were quivering.

"Pretty tired boy, Bucky," she said to the horse, who was blowing on the water. "Pretty tired boy."

They stood there this way, frozen in time: Casey with Goober ahead, Buck quivering, and Amanda knee deep in muddy water until she was satisfied that the horse was ready.

"Don't do to rush things," she said to the boy when she felt the horse getting some energy. "Let's see if Bucky boy here can climb the bank." She led him along the flank of Goober and then up the incline that Casey and the horse had found. The reins stretched back to Buck's head, but as soon as Amanda started up the slope, he followed, straining a bit until he was sure he was out. She had Casey hold the horse while she went back near the saddle and found the halter and ropes. She put the halter on quickly and gave the horse the rope and watched him move about some in the grass. Then he went down and rolled, like she knew he would.

A horse is an ungainly sight in tall grass with its back and head hidden; with it's soft belly open to the sky and its legs flailing about. He rolled and the tension rolled out of Amanda and she felt suddenly tired. She looked at Casey still holding Buck's bridle with one hand and Goober with the other. He looked small now under his slouch hat as he looked back at her. What did he see? A woman in her late thirties. Wet jeans, muddy muddy boots. Hair a mess, that she was sure. But was it also lines in her face; was it also the listlessness that she felt that he also saw? She had been frozen in time and it was all she could do to come back from its sudden grasp and into its flow once more.

Life.

"What you lookin' at?"

He seemed to rouse himself—as if from a reverie—and straightened some.

"What?" she wanted to know.

"Well," he wrinkled his nose and looked a little boy again. "Mud."

She looked down. It was all over her.

"Yuck," he said, as if to sympathize. "Amanda, you are _mud-dee_!" And he laughed and pulled some on his slouch hat and she looked back and laughed, too, in the glare, and in the sudden growing heat of the afternoon sun.

RIBBONS

He woke in the light before the light—the light mostly in his mind before the sky itself was streaked pewter, then silver. It was in this early going, lying still in the silence with his first sense of the light that he remembered.

He had made promises all his life: why was this one any different?

There were chores to do. He rose, feeling the protest in some of his joints. He washed and shaved, carefully, knowing that this was a special day, and then went to the barn. Breakfast would wait.

Five cows were milked. Gordon pasteurized a small amount for his own use in a small, electric unit and poured the rest into the old five-gallon stainless steel milk pails that he carried to the calves. There were seventy-five of them, now, raised on milk: mostly Jersey-Holstein cross replacement heifers along with a couple of steers. They would be ready for pasture next month, except the youngest group of ten.

His horses were next. He had two teams: one of black geldings which stood an even seventeen hands and weighed 1900 pounds, the other of blonde sorrel mares, both of which were in foal. They nickered softly in the semi-darkness, smelling the molasses from the horse feed as he scooped it into the bucket. Later, from the loft, he would throw down some hay into the mows.

Two hogs got some of his corn each morning and the rest went to the chickens, most of it thrown out into the yard where they would soon go. No, he was wrong, there. Gordon smiled at the reason. No chickens in the yard today; keep them inside today on account of the wedding guests. He threw more corn on the dirt of the chicken pen for the laying hens before collecting the eggs.

His bride was Rose Coffering—she of the school library, first and then of the feed mill. Gordon reckoned that he had bought too much feed this past year because of her, always contriving some reason to go into that cramped, disorganized office that she always kept straight. Six months ago, they had begun in earnest and he had known that he could love again. Three months ago, they had shared living, staying mostly at her place in town and sometimes out here on the ridge.

Gordon could see Rose with her lanky form and her long auburn hair and see only her. It had not always been that way. Allison's death had quieted a great part of him, and he had kept to the worn paths of his old ways, knowing she was always there—a presence—until finally he had been ready to see again and had seen Rose. She was ten years younger, never married, with one major romance buried deep in her past. He could sit with her on the porch at his place up on the ridge and feel that everything had now come together. For him, she was the missing piece, often overlooked and then found. For her, he was a gentle presence who carried light into some of the dark, forgotten corners of her life. They came together and felt, both of them, that together they could stay.

Coming out of the barn, Gordon looked again at the sky, now streaked with cirrus clouds and tinged with pink and amber hues. It was a promising day, he thought. Most of the guests would be coming mid afternoon, but he had no idea when the first family members would arrive—especially the members of her family. Her brothers always were notoriously late, and Rose had told him last night that they had made fishing plans for this morning.

But _his_ family would be early! Noon seemed a likely time. He came by early as part of a long-standing tradition. It was a four o'clock wedding with beer, wine and a full dinner to be served as a buffet from the staff of Ida's Café around five. What his people would do up at his place during those four hours, Gordon had no idea, but, despite Rose's best efforts over the last weekend—cleaning and straightening and even painting—he had left a bachelor trail from room to room that he needed to make right. The cirrus clouds told him that tomorrow if not today there could be rain, so the inside of his place could well be filled. They had planned an outside wedding on the lawn, the two of them facing the gathering of a small community of well-wishers who, looking past the bridal couple, would have the best of the view of the ridges to the southwest, the contoured fields green and gold making ribbons on the land which they in turn imitated in some of the decorative bows which would be streaming behind them in the wind.

Gordon took one last look at the sky before going in. No, he thought, the rain would hold off. He wondered when Rose would be coming up. She would not keep herself sequestered this day—neither of them were young enough for such things. It was life they had lived, and it was more life they were choosing. She would be here mid-morning and had planned to prepare a dish or two in the kitchen for her own wedding feast. He would make the house clean before then and she would take over the guest bedroom in which to dress for the ceremony and celebration. The minister would arrive by two-thirty or three and the wedding party at the same time with perhaps even both of her brothers! There had been no formal rehearsal. They would talk things over at three before the main party of the guests arrived. The early arrivers from his side, if not directly involved, would make themselves useful and, at other times, be simply in the way. There had been talk of getting the horses out. Several would be present who could do the driving, but the two of them, when this was presented, saw only ostentation in the midst of common bonds and ties, in the midst of a day of promises made for ordinary days.

All this was what Gordon Lovett knew and surmised about his wedding day. He was aware as well of the following additional facts: thirty five to forty people would sit down to dinner on the ridge. He and Rose would try dancing together on the front lawn. A wedding cake would be cut. A small string band would play from the porch. Ribbons would be streaming in the wind. Late in the afternoon, John Jenkins would quietly disappear to milk the cows. Later on, the guests eventually would disperse. He and Rose would make love in their new four-poster bed made up with new sheets. They would travel some in the next few days, with John helping out with chores and most of the stock out on pasture. Then the fall crop of hay would be ready to cut and they would return and settle into their new life.

##

She came as expected at ten thirty. The wind was up by then, and when Rose Cottering got out of her car with her bridal gown surrounded by plastic from the cleaners, the wind made it a sail which she guided, the white skirts billowing, towards the house and the safe harbor of its front porch. He saw her coming and gathered in the soft folds of her bridal dress with both of his arms, his foot propping the door open against the wind, her face grazing his as they kissed.

What were they making here? Was it anything more than they together had already made, or was what they were doing today like her dress in the wind, something to be gathered in and held; something to be treasured for what it meant of their past and of their continuing into the future?

"Is it going to be windy like this all day?" The wedding dress was between them and he was looking deep into her eyes.

"Don't know, Rose. Could well be. After all, a front is coming in and this _is_ the ridge that you're standing on."

"I'm shocked," she said.

The screen door creaked in the wind. He pushed the front door open behind him and she eased past him with her dress and he followed her meekly into the house. He was proud of it now: it was clean. They had never spoken of living anywhere else. What was his was hers. Her place, in town, she thought they eventually might put up for sale. There was much to think about that they had put off, kind of strange for Gordon to be putting things off, but he was more impulsive and less organized these days. He was also happy. He was now, she thought, remembering him both from before Allison's death and after, set free at last, a ribbon in the wind.

The ribbons were in the box. She began with them. Ruthie, her sister, would be here soon, and Rose laid out the bows and the ribbons on the dining room table for her sister to place here and there, inside and out. Why old man Jenkins had put up that clothes line in direct view of the best view of the land, Rose had no idea, but she and Gordon had not had enough time to take it all down, so Ruthie was instructed to dress it all up: winding ribbons round the poles and placing bows and streamers along the lines in the colors of this day. Green was the color of hope, she had explained to Gordon one evening; and gold was where they now were, their lives a bounty of riches. He had listened patiently, and Rose had decided that in fact he had not heard a word, but then the next day he had commented over their supper that he liked her colors and her reasons for them. She had extra ribbons. But now as they felt the wind whistling about their house, Rose wondered about how many of the bows and streamers would indeed survive their first hour out of doors. Ruthie would have to decide. Perhaps they all belonged indoors. Perhaps the wedding party would stand in the lee of the house on this bright, windy day, who could tell?

##

Gordon had one good dark-brown suit with a faint stripe pattern which he had laid out on the bed in the guest bedroom with his best white shirt and special gold and green striped tie which Rose had purchased for the occasion of their ridge-top wedding. He would dress here, along with Tom Willets, his best man and close friend from deep into his past. They went farther back than Gordon most days cared to go. He touched him with all of this past, and his presence here today was affirming as they dressed together, mostly in silence. Rose got the master bedroom, and he could hear voices trailing off in the midst of the wind rattling the windows as all four members of the bridal party dressed in close proximity. Occasionally he could make out the lower tones of Rose's voice and the clear, strong laughter of Ruthie's in the adjacent room, and,when he heard her sister's voice rising up above the timbre of the wind, Gordon could not help but smile.

Tom was all done dressing and now was staring at himself in the dresser mirror, fussing with his hair in front of the old varnished dresser standing before him against the blank white of the bedroom wall with its browns, the settled, worn patinas of its surface mottled by long use and the sun. He flashed a smile at Gordon as he caught his eye in the mirror.

"Not long now," he winked. "How you holdin' up?"

The last phrase turned him somewhere in his spirit and he saw, again, Allison the very last time he saw her alive, the slight form in the bed, the long sunlit afternoon against the drawn blinds, the dust on the nightstand, the commode in the corner, the constant, eroding hum of the oxygen-humifier, the plastic tubes in both nostrils with their tendrils winding up around her auburn hair and about her ears, her worn eyes.

He had wanted to say it and almost did—how you holdin' up—but then almost miraculously he had found the straight-forward and the simple words he had wanted, the words to cut through time, to cut through weariness, to cut through the gathering weight of mystery that was coming upon her:

"You know, Allie, I love you. I love you now and I loved you then, and I always will."

He could almost hear the resonance of his voice as he said these words, five years back in the back-bedroom of her first home, her parents' place, where she had finally come to rest in the last days. He could almost feel, once more the pressure on his wrist that was the pressing of her hand before their fingers touched and tangled themselves together in one firm knot, before the last strong words she would ever utter to him, her words rising above the dull throb of the machine in the room:

"I know all about your love, Gordon. I carry it with me. I love you too."

She had set him free, then. Told him to carry her with him into the rest of his days, but also to grasp life anew, find it when and wherever it presented itself. He remembered his deep surprise at the fervor and substance of her words as she told him to grieve and then to come clear of it and to go into the very best of the light that he could find. "You do that," she had said, in between spasms of coughing, "and I too will be fulfilled. Somewhere, deep in the flowing of spirit, I too will be free."

"Hey, buddy, you'd better get cracking." Gordon could see Tom's back in the mirror as he turned to face him. "You okay?"

"Yeah. I'm fine. Just lost in thought, getting ready, I guess, somewhere inside."

Tom had first thought to say, "Now, don't go putting yourself in one of your somber moods and get all philosophical on me," but then he had thought of Allison, too, and had wondered if she would perhaps be on Gordon's mind today and therefore kept his words to himself and offered instead an affirming smile and a nod.

Gordon finished buttoning his shirt and fumbled through the tying of his tie, his thick fingers more like stubs working the last of the knot while Tom waited.

"Now Gordie, I've got the ring for Rose right here in my right coat pocket, and up here," he patted the left side of his coat, "I've got the license all ready to go. Once you get pronounced and the celebration begins, I'll give it to the Reverend, and he said he'll take care of the signing and mailing it off to the county clerk."

Gordon nodded. He had just said good-bye; he had just shut the door to her room, softly and for the last time. He had just walked away from her grave on an afternoon not unlike this one, the wind surging around the gravestones, turning up the undersides of leaves from the willow and the oak trees. He had just sold the house, down at Frog's Hollow, leaving the small, tree-shrouded fields that he had plowed and cultivated and mowed for all those years, the place that was his and almost hers as well. He had just come out here on the ridge on what he often thought of as the first morning, seeing the sun on the flanks of his new team, the fog rising up like steam from the surrounding valleys. He had just set the plow into the earth then, the earth soft from the first long summer's rain and said "Come up" to the team and watched the first furrow unravel along the long run of the ridge, the long run of his new home up here. He could see it, now, as Tom opened the door of the small bedroom to the living room in which just beyond the seated forms of the gathered community were waiting.

It trailed behind him, a long length now. As he stepped into the room, Gordon remembered looking back at the furrow's long sinuous length, and it seemed to him that it wasn't what he first imagined it to be: a scar upon the earth that he and the team were making. No. Looking around in the midst of his first strides towards the arch of the dining room, where their vows were now to be said because the roaring of the wind had pushed aside an outside celebration, he caught Rose's eye and almost stopped, so full she seemed of something ahead of him, of something he had hungered for a long time and now was approaching so surely in the midst of this muffled room heated with bodies; this room filled with wondering eyes, smiling faces and the scuffling of feet. He almost stopped in the midst of his own smile, but her look beckoned him, drew him forward until there was no other place to go but directly towards her. And this he did, with one last thought of that first day plowing on the ridge: the horses' ears were forward. And the long, unwinding furrow starting just behind their feet and unwinding into the distance of the past was not a scar. No-sir!

The dark earth in the bright light of the afternoon sun and against the bold green of the surrounding grass was always what it would be for him now: it was a ribbon, beautiful and bold, a dark ribbon dancing in the wind.

a note about the writer

Brian Backstrand is a writer, a poet, a teacher and a clergyman. He is also former poetry editor of The Long Story. Currently he is a priest of a small Episcopal Church in rural Wisconsin where he and his wife Marilee own a farm and are in the process of becoming energy self-sufficient and living off the grid.
