Lions (19 page)

On a frigid morning in mid-December, Boyd rose in the dark and left May sleeping beside him. He made coffee in the kitchen and stood before the sliding glass doors that opened to May's gardens, chicken coop, and the endless weedy fields behind. In the distance the sugar beet factory took shape as the sky behind it brightened from navy to gray. He took another sip of his coffee, then cinched the belt on his robe and stepped outside. It was cold. The air smelled like snow, the sky banked up with thick clouds. He squinted across the fields.

Back inside he took several cans of soup, beans, and vegetables from May's pantry and set them in a paper bag. He opened the refrigerator and took out a small jar of golden jam, from the gooseberry bushes on the side of the house. It was precious fare. Coffee grounds, into a plastic baggie and into the paper bag. A mug. He opened the freezer. May's chocolate bars. One of those, into the bag. He paused, thinking. Beans, sardines, and peaches. He found the first two, but no peaches. He slipped his feet into his old, rubber-soled slippers, and walked outside.

He crossed the yard to the Walkers', his bones aching in the cold, and left the bag outside behind the shop, just beside the curve of a rusted fender skirt from a 1969 Buick Electra. When he was back in the warm kitchen, he took out a skillet and six eggs, leftovers from the pot roast two nights before, and fried it all up in a beautiful mess. By the time May came into the kitchen in her own robe, he'd set the table, poured the orange juice, and made a fresh pot of coffee. He pulled out her chair, and kissed her on the cheek as she sat down, sleepy-headed and smiling. Two mornings later, the paper bag was gone.

They didn't hear from Leigh that Christmas or New Year's. May cried over it with Georgie, their fingers interlaced on Georgie's kitchen table.

“Our kids,” May said.

“I know it.”

The winter passed without sight of either Gordon or Leigh, and those who remained in Lions fell into a regular pattern of visiting, of eating, of maintaining the tidiness of their homes and of Jefferson Street, empty as it was.

Boyd repeated his routine with canned goods once every ten or fifteen days through February, and then in spring and summer, taking pleasure in making new selections at the grocery store in Burnsville. Bristling sardines. Block of sharp cheddar. Bag of green apples. Once the following autumn when Boyd went to check the supply, it looked like it'd been a good month since anyone had come; the last paper bag had dissolved in rain so that the canned food labels were bleached, and some of them had crumbled and slipped off. He thought that was discourteous, leaving it all out unlabeled like that. So he began leaving the canned food and anything else they had to share in the factory itself, in an old metal dairy crate, out of the weather. Though it sometimes took several weeks, even months, eventually everything they set out was taken.

Most everyone assumed Gordon had died. He would not have left his mother, he would not have left the shop. But Georgianna claimed to see him regularly, and she spoke freely of their meetings. Whether in snow or rain or heat, all of those who remained—Dock or Annie Sterling, or May or Boyd, or two of them together—took turns bringing her mashed potatoes and meat loaf and applesauce and pie. They took turns paying her electrical and water bills, and eventually purchasing the goods that Boyd would take out Sunday evenings, passing through the only remaining hay in the county to the line where the cultivated fields met the wild weeds and litter of the factory. He circled around the back of the old building and slipped under the fence where Gordon and Leigh used to, until he got tired of that and Dock went out with a pair of wire cutters to make a passage through the chain-link.

Within a few years Georgianna herself passed away in her sleep and was laid to rest beside John Walker, and when Boyd got sick and needed to be closer to a hospital, the lights went out in Lions. Dock helped May nail boards over the windows of the Lucy Graves and the bar, and she drove Boyd to Laramie the same day, never to return, herself. That left only the Sterlings. Eventually, Dock's hair was as white as whorled milkweed floating in the dark, early mornings, as he tended his hogs. Annie's older brother in Kansas sent money, sometimes, Dock sold his hogs, and they got by. Almost no one came to the shop anymore but once or twice a year—someone from Burnsville who knew Dock was reliable, or someone from up by Horses who needed a small job done, a trailer fixed, a hog kennel repaired. Occasionally he was given a project he didn't know how to execute, but he'd talk through the work-up out loud with Gordon or with John, and figure it out. He kept the shop clean and kept all the Walkers' beautiful machines in running order, and he kept everything where it was—never moved or touched the Walkers' coffee cups from their place on the workbench. Dock was very clear that it was he who was the visitor—the guest in that workshop, and then in the house itself, when Georgianna passed and left it to the Sterlings. He refused to sell any of the equipment, though God knew they could've used the income.

By then it was Annie who had taken over from Boyd the task of the canned food, blankets, and five-gallon water drums, though the boys, as she called them, often helped her drive out the latter on their ATVs. It was the kind of job Emery liked.

She went in all weathers, in Dock's big sheepskin coat in late fall or winter, or in summer, her nightgown sighing against her blue veined legs as she crossed the summer grass, or across the iron gray furze in February and March. In slippers she climbed the metal staircase to the first landing and left there, right by the old awl, a can of cling peaches. A can of beans. Occasionally a new warm blanket, a little firewood, a note: Thinking of you here. Beautiful sunrise yesterday morning. Supposed to be a big snow. Happy Easter. We love you.

These days, everyone's gone. If you were to take an unmarked county road off of the highway and drive north an hour, if you could find the place, distinguishable by its high rusted water tower and abandoned sugar beet factory, you could stand in the middle of Jefferson Street and hear each note from each barn swallow floating through the air like a globe of silver. In the silence between, blood singing in your ears.

For ten years, then fifteen and seventeen, Leigh didn't go back. She finished college, dated, tried on different jobs, met her husband, married, had two children—did all the things everyone does. When she heard from May over the phone, May said nothing about the Walkers. In everything her mother asked—How were the kids? How was work?—Leigh heard: I'm not going to bring it up; you bring it up. But Leigh would never, and she always had to pour a glass of white wine afterward.

“What is it?” her husband would say, jostling her arm a little, sitting down close beside her. She'd never told him much about Gordon, and had told him very little about Lions, a place of impoverishment and uneducated people—a life they both agreed she'd been lucky to escape.

“Nothing,” she would say. “I don't get along with my mother.”

Sometimes now, grocery shopping, or filing a bill, or scrubbing the bathtub, she looks up, her breath caught high in her lungs. She's forgetting something. She's forgotten something. She races in her mind over the list of things she'd set out to do that day, racing through the list again and again in loops until she is calmed not by the reassurance that she hasn't missed anything on it, but by the list itself. They are half as good as desire, these lists, and keep her twice as busy.

She spends a good deal of her time grocery shopping. A beautiful grocery store three-quarters of a mile down the road from the house she shares with this husband, who came from a little upper-middle-class money, and her children, who are bright and precocious. A clean living room with tiled floors and yellow painted walls and windows full of light. Granite countertops in the kitchen, a big, rustic wooden table for family meals, and the children's crafts and games. A garden out back with red tomatoes, flowers, and lawn. Green lawn. Soft as the hair on a baby's head and you could lie down in it—the kind of pasture everyone at home had dreamt of, had counted on, had every year hoped would emerge from the ground in Lions. And now here it was, green grass, all over her yard.

On occasion, the housecleaning gets away from her, and she finds over the surfaces of all of her furniture a dusty residue like a living membrane, and she hesitates to sweep it away, though in the end she always sweeps it away, her eyes fixed out the window on the street at some passing car or neighbor with a stroller.

In dreams a stiff wind, like a whisper, comes in through a crack under the door, and she wakes troubled and sets her hand on her husband's thick arm and asks no one in particular: am I awake? Terrified that the wind is real, and will keep coming, will break between all the boards and strip the house away, tumble down the smooth creamy walls and come up beneath the kitchen and front hall floor, their ochre tiles suddenly loosed like rotted teeth, rending open the walls so that her children, now old enough not to need or want her, will walk out into the huge empty field she hoped they'd never see, the wind coming and coming until what is at the heart of her home stands exposed for her to face. And the horror of it will be that it is not—as her mother had once told her—personal. There will be nothing in the wind that cares whether she has chosen the wrong life.

Because the truth is, her husband could be the most considerate lover, the steadiest caretaker, and he wouldn't be as real to her as the shadows of leaves printed by cold moonlight on her white belly and thighs, which seem as they tremble to arrange themselves in cipher spelled out across her flesh.

A message from some place or time far away.

And how unfair it was—hadn't Gordon been the one to leave her? She had done nothing wrong. She had very carefully and by much hard work created a life in which she possessed everything she liked, and kept out everything to which she had an aversion. Was there something wrong with that? She had only wanted good company in a pleasant environment. How had that been wrong? She had surrounded herself with people who made her feel good, excised those who didn't, and left everyone else in relative peace. She had been practical and decent and good—had she not?—and had made a family that was likewise practical and decent and good.

“If you follow your heart,” John Walker had once told her from his reading chair, “everything lines up perfectly. Like crystals in a dish.”

In remembering it, something misgives her, something knocks softly at her sternum telling her she's gotten something terribly wrong. That somehow she's missed some very small but very important thing. She goes out into the yard or playroom to look at the faces of her children—one girl, one boy—beautiful towheaded extensions of herself, fresh-faced proof of her goodness. It's a consolation she knows is running out; they don't even look up at her anymore when she enters the room.

So must every woman like her keep a secret place. An empty space perhaps unbeknownst even to her, and that grows in proportion with everything she's ignored until it hollows her out completely. She tries to fill the space with messages and signs that she sometimes catches herself collecting, as if her real life were going to take place somewhere else, some other time—later—once she's assembled all these messages and signs into a clear map, a clear set of directions. This couldn't be her life. Not yet.

Eventually, walking home from the movies with her family on a busy street lined with buildings and stores as bright as toys, she pulls her hand away from her tall, sturdy husband, and drops her arms. She ignores the child pulling at the back of her sleeve.

“Mom?” one of her children says.

“Sweetheart?” Her husband turns around and looks back at her where she is frozen on the sidewalk, a look of wonder, or terror, on her face. In her hand she's holding loosely the twine handles of a printed paper bag. Inside the bag, a yellow ceramic serving plate carefully wrapped in tissue paper. She drops the bag and both hears and feels the plate crack. What is she paying for these things with but the days of her life? The space between her shoulders burns and the backs of her eyes burn. She feels dizzy, the inside of her head emblazoned with bright white light.

She sees that her young daughter is more beautiful than she, that even as a child, it is the daughter, not the mother, who turns all the heads. She sees that her choice of husband is as good a choice as any reasonably priced purchase she's made in her life, and that all her choices have amounted to a respectable pile of props in a comfortable game of make-believe.

Before her, her husband and daughter and son are staring, their eyes wide, their hair shining beneath the lights strung among the trees along the street.

First, she'll leave them for half a day.

Then a long weekend.

Eventually, she knows, she must leave them for good.

She'll drive east through the unoccupied town, the street overrun with weeds, all the glass punched out of any unboarded windows. She'll take shallow breaths, and she'll slow to barely moving as her old house and the Walkers' come into view. She'll stop before the shop, holding a hand to her mouth. She'll walk hurriedly over the hard uneven ground and peer inside to see nothing. No machines. No coffee mugs. The interior swept as clean as the wind gusting outside its sealed-up windows.

She'll drive north, alone, up higher and higher, as she searches for a tall narrow hut. She'll look for the white circle of a man's face flashing like a light among the trees. She'll look for a blue feather of chimney smoke. She'll drive five hours, six, ten, searching desperately from behind the wheel, but she's tried all this before. She'll find nothing up there. A road sign for an antique junk store that didn't seem to exist. An old wooden spool.

It will be when she's dead-tired, long after she's given up, turned back around, and is on the county road some five miles outside of Lions when she sees it for the hundredth time: a set of silvery, dusty tracks disguised among the stones and gray weeds that run four hundred yards into a field of brush and sage and end at the old homestead.

She'll turn down the tracks before she knows why she's doing it, her heart knocking hard, already running, tripping and sprawling out on the dirt and fine gravel and prickly pear. She'll tear open her palms on the rough ground, split her lip.

That broken little house.

The windbreak of dead trees.

A single chimney pipe.

Unremarkable.

Not a place you'd even notice if you passed by.

Can hardly even see it from the road.

Not unless you're really looking.

Still, there it is, and there it's always been.

The door will be locked, but there'll be a small window, five feet from the ground. She'll just see inside. Plates of blue light shifting in through cracks in the siding, gaps that years of rain and snow and wind opened in the mortar, now here and there stuffed with rags. A faded G.I. Joe sleeping bag on the dirt floor. An old Coleman lantern, caked with dust. A pile of paperback cowboy books. A single shot glass, opaque with dirt. Dust motes slowly sinking in the light. Behind her, the trees watching from their distant posts.

When the wind and the birds quiet, she'll press her forehead against the locked door and listen for the sound of breath, of footsteps, of a hand behind the doorknob. Someone's in there. Someone has to be in there. Over and over she'll say it, then: I'm back. I'm so sorry. I've come back. Please, God. Let me in.