The days have begun to hurt a little, drought sticking to the roofs of our mouths. Becca stands with her back to me, fretting over the snuff-colored stream of tarnished water that spews from the faucet.
“I’m not drinking that,” she says. I say nothing back, but motion her over to stand beside me, get a good look at the little countertop TV set. The screen shows a map of current temperatures across the U.S., all bloodshot with inflamed eddies of red, orange, yellow.
“Yeah. So what?” her voice peeling from her throat, like rind from a fruit.
“So, we’re not alone,” I say. “The whole darn country’s burning up.”
She stands beside me, and I can feel her willing herself to be patient. Lately, she doesn’t like when I try too hard to be cheerful. So I keep quiet, reading the newspaper and trying to make sense of its promises – storms that could be pushing inland from the coast. The only news now is weather.
Becca asks, “What’s the temperature in Anchorage?” I tell her.
“What’s the temperature in Vancouver?” I tell her that too.
She tucks her hair behind her ears. “Remember when summer was good?” she says. “The sun would stay out while it rained.”
My mother used to call that phenomenon “the devil dancing with his grandmother,” but I don’t tell Becca this. I don’t want to give her any excuse to get her started on the devil. Or his grandmother.
There’s an overripe smell in the kitchen, like a rotten melon, and her bare feet against the tile don’t look right, the shade of her skin gone metallic somehow. Last night, just like every night, the air went weird and shallow while we slept. We woke, off-kilter. The heat gets into us at night, so that in the morning we wake sticky, syrupy with sweat, the sheets sucking around our legs. We lift ourselves out of damp linen, keep separate because when we touch the heat presses in, leaves its smears and fingerprints on us. So we drift alongside one another like bees, an inch of air between.
In the kitchen, she moves quick between cabinet and table, arranging things, keeping her hands busy. She catches me looking at her. She always catches me. She used to be playful about it, saying, “What are you staring at, mister?” And I’d say back, “I’m staring at my wife.” And then she’d say, “You never seen a wife before?” And I’d say, “Not one like this.” It was corny, but it was our little routine and we liked it. And there’s never been anyone else to please but each other. But now, she’ll catch my eye and her gaze will glance off, waver outward through the window above the sink. And once even, her back stiffened as she let a plate sink through the suds and said, “Stop staring, Joe. Read your paper.” It’s like we’re no longer used to one another.
On the small screen, the weatherman preaches the gospel of rain.
I hear Becca say, mostly to herself, “At least it’s raining somewhere.”
The insects are the only creatures that seem indifferent to the drought. In the evenings, crickets and cicadas throw their voices up into the air, their rasp grating like the sound of the heat itself as it swells, stiff and crackling like flame.
We try to keep track of the things the heat takes, gather them up, and burn them in a pile at the side of the house – brush and bracken, plants that Becca put into the earth with her own hands a season ago. The garden is naked and stubbly. We sprinkle a little kerosene on the dead things. Our new ritual: Becca drops the match and the fire rushes to fill the silence between us, her face taking on the color of butter half-churned, features blurred beneath a film of salt, and then she says,
“You can go inside. I’ll keep an eye on the fire. You look tired.”
She likes to be alone with the burn pile – a thing that, maybe she feels, somehow understands her. As I go back into the house, letting the screen door settle without too much racket, sometimes I can hear her sing very softly to herself, “Burn, baby, burn.”
Early on Sunday mornings, Becca drives herself to church in our pick-up truck, her starched cotton blouse already going limp beneath her arms. After she’s gone, I take myself out to the woods with my rifle, wade around in the underbrush. It’s rare that I find any game, but there’s a nice weight to the light at that hour, and the smell of the blackberry vines and sweet gum makes my throat feel clean, like drinking good water. So I make my way east toward what’s left of Pitt Creek, before the day begins to really simmer.
Three summers ago, I built a deer blind among a cluster of sycamores, and it’s a good place to be alone. The green light sifting through leaves feels clean on your skin. Becca calls this my “treehouse time,” but that doesn’t bother me. She likes thinking of me as a kid, and so I let her. Sometimes while I’m out there I picture her in church, all straight-backed in a pew beneath the whir of the ceiling fans, mouthing scripture to herself. That’s what she likes. That’s how she finds peace. In the blind, I sit and wait for something holy to come, watching as the heat takes shape, the colors changing on the bark of the trees.
“Look here,” I tell her. “You got your church. And I got mine.”
Lately, she comes home and the preacher has pumped her mind full of Old Testament stories of drought and flood: Joseph’s dreams that predicted seven years of famine, cows swallowing cows, sheaves of grain bowing down. And that’s when the drought takes on a new character. It’s part of God’s “covenant” all of a sudden and for the rest of the day she doesn’t complain about the heat. It seems to me that God wouldn’t leave his creation in this state unless he were angry at every single blade of grass. But I don’t say these things to her. Up in the blind, when a deer appears, I watch its slack tongue and cloudy eye, death already there in its empty stomach. And I think of my wife standing in church to sing that song she often brings home with her: As the deer panteth for the water, so my soul longeth after thee, and it’s like her song gives that deer a little of its grace back.
I’ve tried to tell her: it’s not the killing that I like. It’s the patience and grace that killing requires. The blind separates you from the world, and you have to make yourself real small, draw yourself in, teach your body how to breathe right. If deer can smell or hear you they won’t come near. So you train yourself, your movements, and then you start to hear the air itself, the rustling of the sycamore’s roots in their thirst. You can hear the feathery itch of ferns, dryness welling out to the edge of every leaf, while you crouch and will your body back to silence.
I understand where she’s coming from. It’s easy to see it as ugly. Especially in this drought – deer licking at leaves in hope of dew, their tongues all blue and swollen. But then you just take aim, feel the gun’s weight pressing your shoulder like a hand of comfort, and you give yourself over to it. You watch the shiver go through the animal, almost like relief, when the bullet enters cleanly, and you watch the carcass shed its weight, moisten the ferns. Then you release that breath you’ve held for the past two hours. There’s a feeling of calm spreading at the back of your neck, and you feel good because in the midst of drought, you’ve offered a grace to this creature that no Creator has. You’ve freed an animal from its misery.
“It’s alright if we don’t understand one another,” I say to her. “Agree to disagree.”
“You think you’re some sort of a – I don’t know, an executioner for these animals? Like you’re doing them a service,” she says. Fresh from church, she still smells like the stale air of the building – like lead paint and animal crackers and disinfectant and the closets of old women.
“Joe,” she says, putting her hands on my shoulders. “You’re wasting a life. I mean, we can’t eat the meat. It’s too tough and skinny. And what if it rained tonight? Wouldn’t you feel stupid for killing that poor animal?”
“Not going to rain,” I say, pulling away.
We try to give each other faith, but we fail somehow.
“So what was the sermon about this week?” I ask, falsely cheerful.
“Oh. It was about what you’d think.” She unbuttons the collar of her blouse, and I can see the sweat gathered in the hollow of her throat – this tiny reservoir on my wife’s neck.
“So…God?”
She sinks sideways into an armchair, pulling a book off the coffee table. She opens it, and I can’t tell if she’s reading or reciting when she says from behind it, “Therefore, be patient, brethren, until the coming of the Lord. See how the farmer waits for the precious fruit of the earth, waiting for it until it receives the early and latter rain.”
I hear the sound of the book closing crisply as I leave the room.
At night, I dream those dreams of famine. I dream that I carve a canoe from the trunk of a fallen tree, and it takes me years. I keep it in the garage under a tarp and don’t tell anyone about it. Then at the end of seven years, when the canoe is finished, I throw back the tarp and it’s all lovely and smooth, but all the lakes and creeks and rivers and oceans have dried up. There’s no more water and I wake feeling cheated.
In the morning, Becca stands in the open doorway, and I come up behind her, gather her hair between my palms and tell her I want to build a canoe.
She laughs as if I’ve made a joke. “Is that right? What are we gonna do with a canoe?”
“Same thing everyone does,” and I realize I’m speaking cautiously, as if in fear of waking someone who’s sleeping nearby. “I mean, eventually. When the rain fills the lake back in. We’ll catch fish and cook them together. It’ll be like there’s no one in the world but us.” I’m beginning to feel like I’m selling something.
“But it’s already like that, Joe. It’s already like there’s no one but us.”
I let her hair fall. I want to remind her of the summer we were both seventeen, when I drove seven hours to Muskegon just to see her. The heat erased everything except a tight pang in the pit of my stomach that only grew the further north I went. I remember packed dirt roads and the smell of manure and piss-warm soda that sloshed like silty creek water. I threw the empty bottles out the window and watched the shards scatter in the rear-view mirror. I shed so much sweat that it blinded me. I found an old rag in the truck and tied it around my forehead just so I could see the road. Twice my truck broke down. The second time I was two hours from the lakes, and I thumbed a ride from a farmer who was hauling chickens. I sat in the back among the crates, and I finally arrived drenched in sugary sweat, pores sticky from all the Coca-Cola I’d drunk, with chicken feathers still clinging to my skin.
I remember thinking, as I stepped onto her porch, that we were still strangers, her and I. We needed more time. I worried that she wouldn’t be happy to see me, that it was too much to have driven all this way. I was dizzy and anxious and trying to wipe the feathers away when her mother answered the door.
“She’s on the lake,” she told me.
I walked down to the shore, wiping the sweat and chicken fluff from my face with the flat of my hand, my muscles all tensed for the sight of her.
She was lying in a little red canoe with the sunlight breaking across the flat of her stomach. She drifted with an arm thrown over her eyes, and I could feel myself growing very still. I stood there taking in the slowness of the water as it buoyed her, the light lapping over her thighs. It was almost too much. Something in me wanted to turn around, even after that long, sweltering drive, and just surrender her to the lake.
But I waited, and finally, after I’d memorized all the angles of her limbs, the perpendicular of ankle against knee, and the sunburned blend of her skin – then I picked up a stone from the shore and threw it out into the lake.
It landed near her with a splash that sounded rude in the silence. She sat up, watching the ripples move outward for a second before lifting her eyes to the shore and finding the form of a sweat-drenched boy swaying shyly.
I thought: I haven’t seen her in two months. What if she just doesn’t give a shit? She shaded her eyes with her palm, and the upper part of her face went dark for an instant. She doesn’t even recognize me, I thought. But then she stood up very suddenly with a cry of unmistakable happiness. The sound I heard was just the solitary note of my name: “Joe!” And it was like a bell being struck, a little happy chime. She wavered for a moment on shaky legs, the canoe unsteady beneath her, and then it tipped and she fell backward into the water. Her shoulders met the surface, the water rising around her and her legs all crooked, clumsy and graceful at the same time. I crumpled with laughter when her head broke the surface. “Joseph Abernathy! Quit laughing at me, you ass!” She sputtered and grinned through the glow of the water, and I tore through the shallows still laughing. I waded out before giving myself fully to the water, reaching for her stroke by stroke.
Afterward, we tied the canoe up at the dock and walked back up the hill to the house with water streaming from the ends of her hair and the cuffs of my pants. I got down on one knee in the pathway, and she got a bashful look, her hands going up to her face to hide the redness there. I bent forward to pretend to tie my shoe, and she laughed aloud and slapped at my back.
Standing up again, I said coyly, “What’d you think I was doing down there?” and she just shook her head back and forth, grinning.
“Honestly,” she said. “I wouldn’t have known what on earth to do if you’d asked me. I think we’re far too young, but would’ve said ‘yes’ anyway.”
She clapped both her hands over her mouth as if she’d just blabbed some secret. That made me crack up.
“I’ll remember that,” I said, kissing her, “the next time my shoe comes untied.”
I wonder if she thinks of any of this when I say “canoe.” Asking her to remember feels like too much right now.
I stand behind her with the morning light sharpening her shape, and I’m trying to reconcile her smell and color with my memory of the girl in the canoe. I start to reach for her hair again, to take her by the shoulders, turn her around to face me, but without looking at me she says,
“Joe, if you wanna build something, if you wanna play pioneer, then why not make something useful?”
A weariness comes over me, and the harsh light through the doorway is drying my throat. “Like what?” I say.
Her husky breathing stutters like a june bug. “We need water. Maybe you could dig us a well.”
I step back. “Shut the door,” I say. “Why do you wanna let all the heat and bugs in here?” She still doesn’t turn. Always with her back to me.
“Hey. Becca, did you hear me?”
“What about the well?” She closes the door, and the light changes. My eyes adjust, and I can swear I smell something burning.
“We’re in the middle of a drought, Becca. There‘s no water. What don‘t you understand?”
“I don’t understand why you want to build a canoe,” she says evenly. “And kill a bunch of animals we can’t even eat. If it’s hunting you’re interested in, why not hunt for water?”
I can still feel the sharp slant of the heat through the door, and everything tilts with it, sliding forward as if to bury us.
“That’s ridiculous. Don’t you get it? Who knows how deep I’d have to dig before I hit water. Who knows if there’s even water on our land anymore. What you want is a fucking miracle.”
She looks at me calmly, her eyes lightly shadowed, and I picture her drenched, wet hair sluggish and gleaming like resin around her shoulders as she swims toward me. Her face seems to say in response, That’s more or less what you promised me, Joe.
And she’s right.
I used to think of us as pioneers. That was a game I played in my head when we first moved out here.
I remember the first night we spent on the land, more than twenty-five years ago now. We’d driven 700 miles that day, and stepping from the truck I swept a flashlight over the creek. She had just said something about how the shadows that fell slantwise through the elms looked like human shapes, ghosts. I shrugged off her superstition and let the flashlight’s beam cut back through the clearing to show there was nothing to fear.
I thought of her as my homestead bride. It was easy to imagine her that way – singing the songs my mother had sung, growing her hair long, braiding and unbraiding the strands as the day moved through her, folding her hands in nervousness when she wasn’t working, because she was a little overwhelmed by her own grace. It was an unspoken part of our vows, that she would chop wood with me, dig a garden, plant seeds that already seemed alive in her palm. And the game kept unfolding as I invented a world with glinting rifles and porcelain butter churns, where I carried a kill slung across the width of my shoulders. And behind the house that I built for us, we’d hang the carcass, peel back the skin with a blade, and be grateful for the muscles that had moved so recently, the heart that beat to bring this animal to our dinner plates.
That first night, I pulled the sleeping bags from the car and said we’d sleep beneath the stars. There was still a magic in that sort of thing then. Our honeymoon had been like that: just driving to a place and making it ours for a night and then leaving again. And she went along with this even though, that first night on the land, our brand new trailer with roof and bed and electricity was just thirty feet away. I built a fire, heated beans and toasted bread, and she watched with her knees pulled up to her chin, like a child, and I was afraid for a moment, thinking: What life have I brought her into?
Fireflies moved above the layers of underbrush. We watched the campfire’s sparks mirror the fireflies, orange and yellow and diving into the night as if seeking reunion with the stars.
“Is this where the bedroom will be?” She spread her bare feet in front of her, and the firelight made her look ageless. I felt reverent and shy, passing her a warm beer and our fingers touching, and I tried to trace, in an instant, the choices we’d made that brought us here.
“We’ll have a west-facing bedroom on the back of the house. Sun on the front porch in the mornings. And don’t worry, it’ll be beautiful enough, even for you.”
But for the first four years we lived in a trailer while the house was being built, and I felt that I’d lied to her somehow, broken a promise that had never really been spoken, but was understood in the vows we’d exchanged. My end of the bargain.
“Okay,” I say to her. “I’ll give it a try.”
She stands before me, the top of her head level with my chin. She reaches up, puts her hands on my shoulders, and the weight of them feels strange. I run my hand up and down her arm, seeking out her palm, waiting for her to make some motion of assent. She takes my hand.
We’ve watched the water recede inch by inch. We’re tired. And now she wants me to dig blindly in hope of groundwater. If I don’t strike a vein, it’ll prove once and for all that there’s nothing left, and that’d serve as a good excuse to leave, find a place in town somewhere. And maybe, it strikes me, that’s what she wants. But in spite of my doubts, I’m already picturing her leaning over the cool stone mouth of the well, lowering the bucket with her pale arms, the rope trilling against the metal wheel of the pulley. She bends to greet the bucket as she hauls it to the surface, lifting it with the water sloshing, water brought brand new from the earth. But whosoever shall drinketh of the water that I give him will never thirst. My holy girl. My Becca.
I put my arms around her, wanting to measure her shape against mine. I can feel the sweat build between the skin of our arms before she says, “It’s just too hot for that,” pulling away.
“Becca,” I tell her. “Something is wrong. Tell me what it is.”
“What do you mean?” Playing dumb. All these years and we still find comfort in pretending we don’t know where we hurt.
“Something’s wrong,” I say. “What’s all this really about?”
She is looking at a place on my chest. I can see the tiny blue veins on her eyelids, a web of miniature rivers.
After a moment she says, “I can’t tell you, Joe. I can’t tell you because it doesn’t matter anymore.”
I press her but she says, “It’s just best to leave it at that for now.” And then, “When will you start digging?” she asks, bringing her mouth close, a few inches between us.
“Soon,” I tell her.
I know how it‘s done. I helped a neighboring farmer dig his well when I was fourteen. It starts with a circle you draw in the dirt with the edge of your shovel. About four feet in diameter. Then the hours of digging as the hole swallows you inch by inch. Deeper and deeper, you haul the dirt up to the surface in a bucket, hollow out a path through the earth, down to where the water pulses like an unborn animal. Bring it forth, feel the brown water soaking into your shoes, climbing up your leg, always an inch or two more with each bucketful of earth unloaded, each time the shovel strikes the ground. Then lower down a wide pipe for casing, with holes drilled around the base for seepage, and fill in the space around it with rocks hauled from the creek. Then finally, shovel the dirt over the creekbed stones, tamp and pack it down, and then it will be finished.
So I drive into town to pick-up a five-gallon bucket, nails, rope, pipe, and a short-handled shovel for when I hit water. I drive slow because I feel like taking my time, and my mind lingers over the image of black water gleaming at the bottom of a deep hole. Becca was right: it’s good to keep the mind busy with work, to battle the heat this way instead of just sealing ourselves in. Nearing town along the blurred black-top, I watch the yellow lawns. The hollowed carcass of a cat is spread across a pile of compost. Bleached laundry slumps on the line in the dead air. Civilization, I think, sneeringly.
I stop at the gas station on the edge of town to fill up. The smell of the gasoline and the hum of the bell as I push open the door seem to wake me up a little. Inside, I put money on the counter along with a state lottery ticket, and I look around at the cool, glass doors along the walls, with bottles inside, full to their necks with cold beer.
“You got your numbers picked?” A lone old man leans against the counter with a game of solitaire laid out. He doesn’t look at me, keeps his eyes on the slow turning over of the cards.
“Yeah,” and I feel the sudden urge to confess everything to the little bald place on the top of his head. We don’t know how to talk to one another anymore and some kind of an end is coming sure as hell, and I don’t know what to do to guard against it except dig a well and buy a lottery ticket. As long as the old man keeps his eyes on the cards, doesn’t look up, then I can tell him anything.
“I use the same numbers every week,” I say out loud. And I’m starting to feel old. I push the money and the ticket an inch closer to the card game, and the old man suddenly looks up, fingering a jack with an air of listless concern. All the world is burning up.
“Ever had any luck?” The old man speaks harshly, as if daring me to say what I’m thinking. But I’ve already lost interest in him. I sense his frailty, his eyelids crusted with wrinkles and a film of shame all around the edges of his face – not guilt, just a private knowledge that he’s messed things up at some time or other. I guess that’s familiar, at least.
“I don’t know if I believe in luck,” I breathe this lie, watching the rows of cards, faces and numbers in their strange patterns.
It’s not true. I’ve felt luck from the beginning, lifting us, separating us from despair, that fragile halo of darkness that hovers around every man, waits for him to falter. I feel this most of all when I watch Becca’s little private movements, lifting her hair like a veil away from her eyes. There’s always been this kind of music beneath her, not just her speaking but her limbs as she carries armfuls of leaves to the burn pile, as she pulls her knees to her chin and her gray eyes glisten in the light of the TV set. She glows and gives that glow back to everything her eyes fall upon. That’s the kind of luck I believe in.
Looking across the counter I see the man with his cards spread out, and there’s such a nakedness to him that for a moment I feel embarrassed, caught in my lie.
“You don’t believe in luck but you play the lottery every week?” The old man chuckles, eyes on the cards. Three of diamonds, nine of clubs.
“Oh, I believe in the lottery,” I tell him. “You don’t have to believe in luck to play the lottery.”
The old man laughs outright as if I’ve just made a joke. “You have to believe in something,” he says, and his eyes narrow as if he’s looking into a bright light. I shrug and slide the ticket across the counter until it touches the queen of spades. The old man punches my numbers in, looking at me after each number.
“So,” he says finally, leaning back away from the counter, “how’d you pick your numbers then? Your lucky weekly numbers?”
I want to tell another lie. To shrug again and tell the old man that it’s all just random, the spinning of the wheel, the cards on the glass counter, the numbers that I pick that mean nothing and will never mean anything. But instead, the man dips his head again, eyes hid in the game of cards, and I tell the truth: “It’s my anniversary. The date that I was married.”
“Aw,” the old man drawls. “Ain’t that sweet.”
I pay and leave in a flurry of embarrassment, not looking back as I start the engine. The old man’s game goes on, and I drive through the nasty heat, suddenly grateful that he didn’t say a single word about the weather.
I find myself on a back road that skirts the town, edged by shabby trailer parks where the heat cakes itself into the gutters along corrugated metal roofs. I drive past empty fields and remember a time when they were flooded, and the still water was blue-brown like a polished bruise, with long green reeds struggling for breath and foxes drinking along the edges.
I think I glimpse a long tail of heat lightning, but it is so quick, and the afternoon so bright, that it could’ve just been sunlight catching the metal roofs at the right angle. I wait, slowing, to see if it’ll reoccur, but there’s nothing.
I think of a past thunderstorm, and how ripe everything seemed afterward, how the horizon wavered between green and gray like feather’s meeting on a rooster’s neck. It was many years ago, while the house was still being built. A storm had struck while Becca and I were visiting our friends in town, Richard and Joyce, a married couple who’d just had a little baby, a girl. The baby was so new, eyes still blue and full of strangeness. The four of us bent over her crib, Becca’s beads like tiny robin’s eggs dangling just above the baby’s face. She reached out a fist to grasp them, so solemn as if staking claim, and we made predictions about her future as if forecasting the weather: “She’ll be a heartbreaker for sure. You’ll have to carry a baseball bat, Richard,” or “Listen to those lungs. She’s gonna be an opera star.”
The storm hit just after dinner, winds ripping the trees as easily as a child shredding a dandelion in its hand. The five of us spent a long, feverish night waiting out the storm in the sweet mildew of their basement. At first, the baby sang and screeched as if competing with the outside racket of the storm. But eventually she sank into the rhythm of the thunder, allowed Joyce to silence her with her naked breast, while the rest of us played cards, and the drowsy gurgling of the baby seemed to make everything go quiet for a minute, the storm loosening its grasp.
Later, Joyce got out her baby book to write “Baby’s first big storm,” showing us all the calendar squares that each held a different “first.”
Richard and Joyce dragged mattresses down the stairs and laid out quilts on the floor for us. The wireless radio in the corner talked on and on about tornadoes. The power had gone out, and we all chatted in the darkness for awhile, until, heavy with wine and dinner, Becca and I slept deeply for a few hours, senseless to the thunder and the rattling windows and the baby’s coos and whimpers.
When I woke again, I could hear Richard and Joyce’s hushed arguing nearby. I listened to their whispering voices meeting and receding, song-like, their disagreement almost friendly in its rise and fall, like a dance.
“I’m awake,” I confessed, with the shame of an accidental intruder.
“Good, good,” they purred back. “Join us, Joe!”
And I turned over to touch the small of Becca’s back, and she said delicately, “I’m awake, too.”
The shape of the baby sleeping on the empty mattress made her seem all the more fragile, adrift somehow. I wanted to scoop her up, but didn’t dare. We all sat on the floor together, drinking wine from the bottle and spinning coins across the concrete floor and talking about the weather as if it were someone we knew, some obnoxious friend that we all, nonetheless, thought of fondly. We made guesses about the damage, which trees would be uprooted, lingering over our predictions, over the tornado that whirred miles away like a great and terrible machine.
“How far away is that town that the twister destroyed, Richard?” Joyce asked, passing the bottle without drinking and smiling strangely through the watery light of the candle.
“Bout ninety miles. As the crow flies. The whole town just wiped clean. Four days ago,” Richard answered, fingering the fringe of a rug. Joyce glanced toward the baby. She shivered a little and asked for the bottle back. “I can always pump and dump,” she said, and the phrase embarrassed me but I tried not to show it.
“I heard on the radio,” Becca began haltingly, “—a nurse on the sixth floor of a hospital looked out the window just as his shift was ending, saw that everything was gone. And he walked the six flights of stairs down to the parking lot, and realized his was the only wing of the hospital left.”
“Spooky. You heard that on the radio?”
“Yeah.” She took a drink, and as I watched her throat move to swallow, I felt proud of her, the color that rose in her when she spoke of what was lost. “And I heard about an acting troupe that was performing at a local church when the storm hit, and they had to shelter in a doorway. Two of them didn’t make it, and a woman laid on top of her son to protect him. She laid there for hours and all the little pieces of wreckage piled up – broken branches and glass from car windows and garbage – burying her and her son until neither knew if the other was still alive. But they both survived. And the woman told the news crew afterward, ‘I thought I’d lost him…’”
She trailed off, following Joyce’s gaze over toward the baby. Joyce looked back at Becca.
“It’s funny how…” she paused, “you are just so much more afraid. Once you have one. She wasn’t here and then all of a sudden she was, and that just seems so fragile. Like she could so easily be taken away. Any instant.”
Richard said gently, “Don’t talk like that, honey,” and Becca put a hand on her knee.
“I know it’s just foolishness,” Joyce said. “Too much wine,” even though she’d only had a sip or two.
In the silence that followed, I thought about the nurse on the sixth floor looking out the window and his eyes finding all the fragments that had held on, and I thought there must be potential for joy even in that. I felt lucky and warm – the wine sloshing in the bottle and inside each of us, the smallness of the new life sleeping nearby, the light drifting from face to face, and the words calm and easy between us, even as we spoke of the misfortunes of others.
I drifted again toward sleep with the battery-powered radio hissing like an oil lamp and my wife’s voice falling upward like ash as she spoke again and again of the world outside.
I woke when it was still dark, and there was such stillness that I thought the world had finally flickered out – that I was awake only through some strange and precious oversight. I waited for my wife to wake, and as I gathered our things to leave, she watched Richard and Joyce sleeping with the baby between them on the mattress.
“A whole little family,” she said, and I put a finger over my lips to tell her to hush. The baby stirred a bit, the flesh of her face very white as it turned toward us.
As we drove home, there was a mist being born all across the back roads, swelling forward to meet the curious headlights.
When I was a teenager, I used to hurtle down pitch-black roads I knew as well as my own name, and I’d stare hard at where the darkness broke and parted just ahead of the headlights. Sometimes there’d be a voice that would come up real quiet alongside me to whisper, “Switch off the lights,” and I’d listen, a flutter of the good kind of fear filling my chest, the fear that comes when you know you are about to do something reckless. And my hand would slide over to obey that little voice. With the lights gone, I plunged blind and fast through a tunnel that just kept moving with me, cut loose from the road. I was nothing but a raw, dark little tangle of motion hurtling forward like its own black planet, and I felt so happy it was almost frightening. I had to force myself to remember how fragile this was, to pull myself back from the brink, to switch the lights on and bring the world back.
Driving home after the storm I felt that urge again, that voice. I looked at Becca, her face open and slack with contentment, her window cracked enough to let the night in and her elbow resting there, the gust of air pulling her hair into its current. I looked back at the road, grinning, and reached to switch the headlights off.
She shrieked crazily, but the sound had joy in it, and when I turned the lights back on after just a quick plunge into the heavy dark, her mouth was open in disbelieving laughter.
“Have you lost your goddamn mind, you crazy bastard?” she howled. And then she said, “Do that again.”
I did, and she screamed. Her hand gripping my arm and the nails dipping into the flesh made me feel solid and awake. I knew we were sailing over the edges of ourselves and it was good to be lost together that way, no longer separate. I don’t know if you could really call it prayer, but I felt caught in the gaze of something right then, and I said words back to the darkness. I just prayed quietly keep us before switching the lights back on and seeing a huge fallen branch loom across the road ahead, stretching from ditch to ditch. I slammed on the brakes and the truck skidded on the wet road. We slid to a stop inches from the branch.
I never told Becca afterward that I’d prayed, kept telling myself it was a fluke, a coincidence. That we were blissfully lucky, blessed with more luck than we could use up in a lifetime. But I never tested that luck again; that was the last time I played the game of driving blind.
In the moment that followed our near-accident Becca had her hands up over her mouth like she had the day I’d pretended to propose. “Well shit,” she said.
“We’re okay,” I said, looking around to make sure this was true.
Beside us, a creek was rising from the recent rainfall, and we could hear it brimming toward the black-top just a few yards away. The branch itself was fairly slender and didn’t look too heavy.
“We’re gonna have to move that thing if we wanna get home,” I said.
I killed the engine, then finally the headlights, and we just sat there for a moment, letting our eyes adjust to the stars that were coming out like birds waking up, the clouds frayed and submissive. In the new half-light, the branch in the road hastened toward a shade of silver I’ve never seen since. And I wanted to just stay there – let the night pass and the mist uncurl itself and the dew to go unnoticed on the soaking fields. We could hear frogs, all ready for breeding and song.
In the darkness, she leaned across the gap between us to kiss me, a kiss that was simple and full of knowing, and I kissed her back almost cautiously at first, like those first few times we touched, then the taste of her flooded my mouth and she tasted like the night itself, the wet newness of it. She tasted like driving blind. We kissed like we were trying to remember that taste, listening to the lonely frogs cricketing in waterlogged ditches.
She pulled back to say plainly, “Joe, I want a baby.”
And it was both surprising and completely natural that she would say that, so I seemed to know what to say back. I was calmly brushing the hair from her forehead when I said, “Well, there’s plenty of time for that, Becca honey.” And she nodded, her eyes shining. “Now let’s get this branch out of our way.”
We climbed out of the truck, bending to touch the rough, wet bark, and knowing it instantly the way I knew her skin. I counted to three, and we lifted and started to move the branch aside, but we moved in opposite directions, the branch pulling between us.
“No, on three. Then we go left.”
“Your left or my left?”
“Toward you. We’ll move it toward you.”
I stumbled backward into the ditch, the frogs plopping around me as I staggered through thigh-high water.
“What is this, a Laurel and Hardy movie?” she said. We laughed for a long time afterward, the whole drive home and even in bed, closing our eyes and still seeing the branch appear out of the darkness, giggling over our precious good luck.
So many of our days back then, we’d simply pick up our feet and move from one space to another, room to room, porch to garden, the house containing us, the land outside – what was ours that we’d bought, what was mine that I’d built and then given to her. I don’t know when that ceased to be enough.
A tremor came into her voice that hadn’t been there before. The birdfeeders remained empty and the clocks unwound. Sometimes I’d hear her talking to herself, pulling up weeds and burning them in a small, private brushfire. I’d watch her stand too near the flames, almost singeing her clothes which carried the smoke smell indoors, as if she’d nearly escaped something.
At first, I told her, let’s wait for the house to be finished. Then we waited to settle into the house. After a few years, I found out I’m no good at farming and got a job at a lumberyard on the edge of town. At night I’d come home exhausted and smelling of sawdust. Sometimes I fell asleep still in my work clothes, slept all night on the sofa downstairs, woke and re-entered the workday without so much as a shower or a slice of bread. Other times, I’d come into the house and I’d feel this slow dread while I climbed the stairs – stairs I’d designed and built to be easy for climbing – and knowing at the top of them Becca would be sitting up in bed with the counterpane pulled to her waist, Bible open across her lap.
“Darling,” I’d say. “Can I bring you anything?”
And even if she said no, I brought her things anyway – sliced apples in a little bowl, hot tea and cold tea and tall glasses of ice water that her hands seemed too loose to hold.
I think she was waiting for me to come right out and ask her, “What’s wrong,” just two words that, even if I’d asked, could’ve done nothing to save us. I was afraid that everything was slipping, but I knew that bringing her ice water from downstairs was a hell of a lot easier than admitting to one another we had no power to give ourselves the life we really wanted.
Eventually she told me, “Something’s not right. Inside.” And I told her that it would happen when it was meant to, that we couldn’t rush these things, that the time wasn’t right but it would be and then it would all work out. And so more time passed. She went to a doctor and he said there was nothing wrong with her. She asked me to see a doctor and I said, “Let’s not force it. It’ll come naturally. It’ll all be the way you want it to.” Finally, I went to a doctor and he said the same thing, “Nothing’s wrong with you. It just doesn’t happen for some couples. It might just be a case of bad luck. You can only wait and see.” But time was already starting to run out. A lot of years thickly woven, insulating us against one another.
She’d pray at night, pulling me down to kneel beside the bed with her. We must’ve looked like a pair of children with our hands folded and heads bowed, as we’d been taught. “Pray with me, Joe,” she said. “Ask and you shall receive.”
“Becca honey, it’s never that simple.”
“Sometimes it is,” she said back.
Side by side on the floor that way, I once asked her, “But why do we have to be on our knees, honey?”
Then she started to cry and I got up to get her a glass of ice water. We’d patterned ourselves this way – her needs that I couldn’t fill, always offering something else instead, something very small.
Sometimes we’d move closer in the midst of prayer, her arm brushing against mine, the hairs rising in awareness of our skin. And I’d think: How often can a prayer be heard before God is forced to say, “Nope. I’ve given them all I can give,” or before he says, “Alright. I guess they want it badly enough.”
And maybe that was the trouble. Maybe I didn’t want it badly enough. Maybe I wanted the two of us to be enough for one another. Maybe I thought that, once she realized that, everything else would fall into place.
More time passed, and we stopped kneeling but I don’t think she ever stopped asking. Sometimes we were happy and sometimes we weren’t. Like everyone, I suppose.
On my way back from town, all the well-digging supplies secured beneath a tarp in the truck bed, I pull over for a minute onto a gravel shoulder overlooking an empty field. I root through the glove box for an old pack of cigarettes. They’re wrapped in a faded road map, who knows how old. I light one, and sit breathing in and out, watching the withered field and a shy deer nosing among the chickweed and cockleburs and crabgrass and whatever still manages to grow. I watch the doe, her teats swinging below her with a parched look, and I sing my wife’s song in my head: As the deer panteth for the water so my soul longeth after thee. I try to watch the deer without wanting to end its misery, without thinking about pulling the trigger, but I keep picturing its gaunt body going slack and quiet. I draw hard on the cigarette. It’s been months and the tobacco tastes coarse, itching its way down my throat.
A couple of weeks ago I brought home a bird I shot – a duck whose flight was all wrong, listing crooked through the heat. It flew almost as if it had gone blind, wings reaching wildly like a kite caught in a wind that was too much for it. Only there was no wind that day.
Becca held the bird, its neck loose and dangling, shedding a few feathers onto the countertop. “What am I supposed to do with this?” she said.
I shrugged. The duck had nothing left for us, nothing to give. I felt like a fool offering it to her, this scraggly lump with no meat on it. And Becca keeps growing thinner, as if the heat is making its way inside her, the flesh a very last line of defense.
Becca’s right: if it’s hunting you’re interested in, why not hunt for water? I sit smoking and thinking about the well I’ll dig for her. How cool it will be down there. How calm. Darkness has begun to fall by the time I start the engine again. I know already that when I get home Becca will smell the smoke in my clothes and hair, and I’ll blush and say something like, “It was a moment of weakness.” The thought makes me queasy, so when I near the winking, weathered lights of a roadside bar, I turn into the parking lot.
I sit in the truck’s cab watching the shadows of dusk drift and gather in the rearview mirror. A man with a blank, wooden face and wearing suspenders crosses through my side mirror, and I turn my head to watch him enter the bar, thinking that this is exactly what I’m always meaning to keep away from – those sad, stupid cowboy songs that run through your head like sand in an hour glass, shifting from one complaint to another, and you sit there drinking, stewing over the home that you’re avoiding or whatever it is: some creaking screen door that needs oiling, the smell of the air in your bedroom that’s gone musty. Or your wife’s disappointment in you, the stiffness of each piece of furniture. Or the digging of a well.
That is what I’ve always avoided, feeling unfaithful to Becca’s cleanness and uprightness just by being in a place like this. And forgiveness doesn’t come as easily for her as it used to. And my clothes already smell of cigarettes.
I watch through the windshield a sad little gathering of old men, as they lean against their trucks, red-faced and smoking, talking of the weather, of the distant hope of rain. The light along the horizon is already waning down to an ember, and I know these men are gearing up for the night, ready for the real talk, the ugly stuff that the liquor will let them voice. And I already know that I’m about to join them.
So I go inside and sit on one of the many stools, watching the glass eyes of the severed deer head over the bar. The boy-faced bartender raises his voice over the din more than he needs to, as if he assumes I’ll be hard of hearing. “What can I get you?” Tex Ritter’s “Rye Whiskey” is playing on the jukebox and that sounds alright to me so I say, “Whiskey please.”
“Yeah? Which one?”
“Nothing fancy.”
“Okay. Ice?”
“Sure.” He pours from a shabby bottle, and all the noises of the bar are clean and liquid, the light easy on the eyes. I gulp the whiskey, cough a little from the foreign coldness, and realize straight away that what I really, truly want to believe is that the greatest needs of every single man and woman can be met. Eventually. Somehow.
I knew I’d just be sitting here thinking about her, and I feel myself rushing back to times when her love felt fragile, and I held doors open for her, watching her enter a room as if always curious about what she’d find in there.
The glass is empty. I jiggle it at the bartender. He fills it.
I’m sinking. Through my drink and through the stool and through the floor, the depths of old soil beneath the floorboards opening up for me. And I’m thinking of the well again.
Two drinks. Half-drunk already. My body doesn’t hold these things too well. The jukebox swells forward, and I listen for a sign: I’m goin’ home, pack my trousseau, gonna live just like Robinson Crusoe. “Set ‘em up, Joe,” I sing along.
“What’d you say, old man?”
“Another whiskey, please.” Old man. Maybe he says that to everyone. Every man is old to a boy of twenty-one.
Somebody’s spilled and there’s a slick patch spreading across the bar and dripping over the edge. Tomorrow, I’ll start. I’ll stand behind the house with a shovel, churn up the earth worms and roots that have never known light. And seeds and husks, millipedes, maybe the bones of some rodents. A lotta death down there. Do I really want to construct a goddamn pit for us to fall into? Fuck it. Fuck it!
“Hey, buddy. Settle down.”
And the water seeping into my shoes, the tree limbs leaning overhead – to cast their shadows and throw down their seeds. And drinking water pouring in. So I’ll lean on the shovel with a stripe of sweat and all that damp dust across my forehead, and I’ll say, “It’s good,” and then I’ll rest. I’ll climb up the ladder. Because as good as it is, light and heat are better than the thick, black tunnel that you dug because your wife is thirsty – has always been thirsty. Even at the wedding while everyone else drank glistening champagne and red wine, no, she just drank water. That’s just the way it goes. We’re all thirsty now. And even Christ himself, dizzy and close to fainting, sees a woman at the well. She has a jar, and he says…What does he say? Oh yeah, he says, “Gimme a drink!” And then somebody fills his empty glass. And fills and fills and fills again even though everything might just spill out, dripping down the side of the bar onto the floor.
“Hey. At least switch to beer or something.” There’s a man sitting on my left, and his grayish, pocked face with its frost of stubble is so familiar that I feel a thrill of recognition. But, squinting, I realize that he’s just a stranger. Like me.
“You look familiar,” I say. The ice in my glass has melted and the whiskey looks slick like kerosene.
“Yeah, I sold you a lottery ticket earlier today. At the gas station.” His face snaps back into focus. He was a handsome young man at one time. I’m sure of it. But I don’t want to look anymore. I turn to the stuffed deer head above the bar and raise my glass to it. Smiling, grateful.
“Glad you‘re here,” I say, then add confidingly, “My ice has melted.”
“So what’s your plan?” the old man is leaning toward me. In this light, he has a look of wisdom and patience. I remember how at the gas station, I’d trusted him with something. What had that been?
“Well, first things first: I plan to win the lottery.” I laugh at my joke. I can’t tell if he’s laughing. His face is dark.
“I meant how are you getting home?”
“You’re right. It’s time. We’ll just have one together, and then I’ll be on my way.”
“You shouldn’t be driving,” he says. I’m suddenly hungry for the dark blur of the road and its forgetfulness, and I hate this man’s caution. I want to be alone with the darkness that remains beyond the headlights. I want to switch them off and plunge.
“I need to get home,” I say to the deer head. I hadn’t meant to end up here. It’s all a mistake. “I need to start digging.”
“Digging?” the old man thinks I’m talking to him.
“Yes. I’m gonna dig a well.”
The old man leans closer to me, and I can smell the heat of his breath, a brittle, waxy smell. “You’ve found water?” he says to me, that same old urgency laid bare. I find his eyes, and they have no color. Clear all the way through. You can look right through into something else.
“I found….no, I mean, I don’t know it’s there. I’m just gonna dig, and hope for the best.”
The old man crows with laughter. I don’t get the joke. He laughs with his head tilted upward a little, Adam’s apple bobbing in the flesh of his neck. I think of a coyote howling with a rabbit bone stuck there, and my lip curls a little. I feel sick.
“That‘s gotta be the goddamn stupidest thing I‘ve ever heard.” I let myself hate him, and it feels good. He stops laughing to ask: “Why don’t you get yourself a water-witch?”
I start to say it right back to him, That’s gotta be the goddamn stupidest thing I’ve ever heard, realizing at the last minute how childish that would be. “What?” I say.
“Don’t you know about dowsing?” Again, I think it should be my turn to laugh. There’s no noise from the juke box, the bar tender is not at the bar, and there’s not a single sound of laughter in the whole place.
“That business with the rods,” I say, “I’ve heard of it. It’s just a load of horseshit. Superstition.”
The man is very solemn, and he starts to put a hand on my shoulder but I frown as hard as I can, and he lets it just rest on the bar. “You’re wrong about that, son. Really, really wrong.”
“Prove it.” I sip the milk-warm liquor, and it doesn‘t taste right. I want to spit it out, but instead I swallow and wait. […]
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Renée Branum lives in Cincinnati where she is pursuing a PhD in Fiction Writing. Renée was recently awarded a National Endowment for the Arts 2020 Prose Fellowship to aid in the completion of her first novel (which will be published by Bloomsbury in January 2022). In May of 2017, Renée finished her MFA in Creative Nonfiction at the University of Montana. She received an MFA in Fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 2013 where she was a Truman Capote Fellow and a recipient of the Prairie Lights Jack Leggett Fiction Prize. Her work has appeared in Narrative Magazine, The Georgia Review, The Gettysburg Review, Lit Hub, and Alaska Quarterly Review among others, and her short story “As the Sparks Fly Upward” was featured in Best American Nonrequired Reading (2019).