Clara herself had been in the hospital for two weeks after her near-death experience, and it was not a place she was eager to return to. Hypothermic, having lost two pints of blood from the accident, Clara’s recovery went on even after she was allowed to go home with the baby. Her hair newly shorn in a boyish bob, she did not feel well. “Thank you.”
Clara brought over the baby so Nora could cluck and coo over her. “It’s too bad they rescued me. I think I was dreaming of Charlie when I had the seizure.” She paused, and Clara thought for a moment she might start crying.
“I’m going to need you,” Clara said. “This baby is going to need you.”
“Nonsense. You’ll be fine.”
“But I won’t.” Her throat thickened. “You would think I would have nightmares, but I don’t. I don’t even know what I dream when I do. I’m not afraid, not for myself, but I’m exhausted all the time. I have to keep checking on the baby every hour. Make sure she’s breathing.”
“I was the same with my first. It gets better.”
“I would die for her. I almost did.” Clara went on to talk about how Logan had changed, how well he took care of her, nursing her, but also how he still seemed ambivalent toward the baby. She described her uncertainty about what would happen to her fragile family, her fears about her marriage.
Nora sighed when she was done, “In my day we didn’t have any choice, but I’m glad Charlie stuck with me through the bad times. Every couple reaches some kind of turning point. They either break or find a way to go on.”
“Do you think we’re going to make it?”
“Who the hell knows?” Nora said. She laughed, but it was short-lived when Clara didn’t join her. Nora waved her left hand in the air around her. “Reach in that drawer there and fetch me out what you find.”
Clara opened the nightstand drawer. Nothing was in there but a Bible and a Baggie that looked like it was filled with dark loam, moist chunks like bits of chewed brownie. Clara held it up to light. “This?”
“You know what it is?”
“A bit of land from your family farm?”
“No, it’s from Chimayo. My son brought it from home, but I don’t have any use for the stuff.”
“Chimayo?”
“It’s like the Lourdes of the West or something. People go there seeking healing. Charlie made sure we stopped there on our big trip. His prostate cancer had been spreading. He’d read about the place in
Reader’s Digest
and was determined to try anything. Dug that soil from the church basement where pictures were pasted on a wall, stories and letters of the miraculous, candles glowing all around. They say the dirt was holy to the Indians long before the Catholics built a mission.”
“I thought Charlie died of a heart attack.”
“Yes, but not cancer. His cancer was cured by the dirt. If there is anything a farmer knows, it’s the power dirt has to heal.”
“Why are you showing it to me?”
“I’m giving it to you, dear.”
“I don’t know. It sounds a little pagan.”
Nora smiled. “There are some like me who think that it’s God’s will when a new pastor comes. He is the one God chose for us. But I also believe God sent you here.”
Clara shook her head. “What I am supposed to do with this?”
F
OR THEIR FIRST
C
HRISTMAS
together, Logan brought home a living tree from a farm ten miles out in the country. He put away his boxed, artificial tree, said he wouldn’t mind
needles on the floor for once. The smell of the balsam fir filled the room with piney sweetness. It stood eight feet tall and seemed nearly as wide. “What do you think?” Logan asked.
“Much better than that aluminum-foil tree you had at seminary.”
“That’s antique, you know, made by Mirro. One of a kind.” Every Christmas Logan had decorated that tree with his mother, hung bulbs from the pink frosted metal branches, but this year he said was a time for making new traditions.
While the baby napped in her swing, Clara sipped from her mug and helped Logan string up the lights. They both were drinking cocoa that Clara laced with a pinch of dirt. Miracle dirt, if you believed in such things. Pica, that was the name the ancients had for how a woman craved earth when pregnant or nursing. Just a pinch, so Logan wouldn’t know. What he didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him.
Logan had on a Santa hat as he hummed along with Elvis’s “Blue Christmas.” Together, they put on the ornaments, Clara pretending not to notice when he rehung the ones she had put in place. After the ornaments, Logan hung the tinsel one strand at a time, but Clara tossed hers up in clumps.
Outside the wind sculpted a bare moonscape from the snow, and low clouds sifted down their artic spindrift. Logan finished and dimmed the lights so he could turn on the tree. He liked the big colored lights, the ones that
painted a flickering pattern on the walls and ceiling. From out by the graveyard, a familiar sound arose, a few trailing barks rising in pitch, then one, long low howl. Clara went to window to watch them bound in the snow, playfully chasing one another. Logan came behind her and wrapped his arms around her. “They’re beautiful,” he said. He ran one hand through her hair. “What are you thinking about?”
He kissed the back of her neck, the sweet place where her shoulder met her throat. She thought of a boy being tormented by his own father. Kelan had not been buried in the suicide section. He was buried with the saints. Saints and sinners, all of us, Logan said, convincing the council that in death we were one. There might be suicides in the future, but no longer would they be outcasts in death.
Such a nice boy
, the old ones said.
So handsome. Wasn’t Lucifer the most beautiful of the angels?
The story of what had happened went on reverberating in the words and gestures of everything people in town said, migrating in the whispering of teenagers in the hallways of the high school, the low gossip of old people at the pool hall and grocery store, the hushed way parents tried to explain it to their children before bedtime, all of them knowing there was no language large enough to take the awfulness away. They blamed it on the devil. They blamed his father and the man who trained his father, Steve Krieger. And the more they talked and talked, the more they made him into some Other so they could go on. Clara knew. She had set her hand on his skin and knew the monster was as fully human as any of them, even if
she did not understand and knew she never would. “I was thinking about heaven,” she said. “What if it’s not a place? Not somewhere we go, but somewhere inside us.”
Logan kissed her cheek, cupped her face. She thought of those widows hearing voices out in the snow, of her mother fighting to get home. Here was the place that made her, the place they belonged for a time. She had healed her family in coming home. She had grounded her own far-ranging mind.
From the swing, Baby Dena began to cry. Dena had large round dark eyes, a widow’s brow that crinkled up when she was upset. A colicky baby, crying at all hours of the night. Now that they were home from the hospital, it all fell to her, since Logan avoided holding the baby. Clara tensed at the piercing sound. Each cry meant something different, and she couldn’t always tell the “I’m hungry” sob from the “change me now” lament. This cry sounded somewhere in between. Dena wanted to be held.
Logan froze as well, stopped his kissing. The crying bothered him even worse than her, sent him scurrying for cover next door at his church. He seemed still frightened of the baby, born weighing only six pounds, but he followed Clara about, watched her while she bathed Dena, sat beside her during the feedings. The baby, his baby, which he had never expected. His arms were still wrapped around her waist, but they went slack. His breath warm against her neck. “I’ll go get her,” he said, leaving Clara at the window.
HAYING SEASON
A
fter two weeks of working at the farm, few outward signs showed in Lee. His face had tanned, but his plump cheeks and flabby stomach looked undaunted by all the hard work. Near the scar on his left arm, the skin was prickled by hundreds of small scratches and gashes he’d picked up baling hay.
Late afternoon found them in the hayfields once more, Grizz driving a lumbering International tractor that was trailed by a baler and Lee standing on the hayrack. The tractor glinted silver; the baler licked up lumps of hay from the green ground and spat them out in neatly roped twenty-pound bales that Lee caught and stacked on the hayrack beside him. He had to keep his balance as the rack swayed over the uneven ground and the bales came without ceasing. Each bale had to be wedged in tight, a mountain of hay that might come tumbling down if Lee’s aim was not quick and true.
Grizz saw all this, saw the changes in the child. Lee did not hate farmwork the way Seth had, even hard moments like this, and there was plenty of work any given season. Grizz had sold the property around the mountain to the county on the condition that the limestone never be excavated, the burial mounds left undisturbed. In perpetuity, the last of the tallgrass would not be cut. The land would remain as it was, a beautiful portrait of another time. No one would ever disturb Seth’s grave.
The funds allowed Grizz to purchase another semi, and he went to work for co-ops in neighboring counties fulltime, driving loads. He still only just scraped by each season, and after a wet spring the crops went in late this year. Grizz was, as always, nervous about the harvest. He still awaited the perfect season. He still lived in the land of next year, but he was alive and doing what he loved. And there was one boy, at least, whom he had reclaimed from hell.
Haying was hot, dirty work. Sharp straws poked out from the bales to jab and claw his skin. By the end of the day his body was furred in a fine green dust. But Lee was no longer the tenderfoot, not the foolish boy who showed up in short sleeves to bale hay and left with aching, bleeding arms. His skin was tougher, his balance even and confident. His back no longer ached in the morning. When the ancient baler choked on too large a lump of hay, Lee could hop down and fix the jam. He had learned to handle the far more complicated gearing of the International and could guide the big tractor over the uneven ground on days Grizz
let him drive a load of hay up from the fields. Hay stuck to his sweat-streaked skin. Blades of it probed for tender places to make fresh wounds. He breathed in the tractor’s exhaust and dust and bugs kicked up from the fields.
And yet it was beautiful to be together in the hot sundown. Swallows dipped and dived around them, hunting insects the tractor stirred up from the soil. The fields shone emerald in the fading light. From this upper pasture, the two had a view of the river valley, and Grizz turned now to point toward the west where thunderheads piled up. They would have to hurry before the rain came. If the hay got soaked, it would mold and rot, and all their hard work would be for nothing. The wind already carried the sweet smell of wet. A shadow from a chicken hawk riding on a thermal passed over the field and chased away the swallows. Lee took the bales and formed neat square stacks while Grizz kicked the tractor into higher gear. They worked in a wordless rhythm, moving faster to beat the rain, his focus on maneuvering the tractor in tight turns, Lee yanking out bales and tossing and stacking.
Then the work was done, and Lee rode down the hill standing atop his lurching hay mound, sapped but triumphant. From his perch, twenty feet above the mowed ground, he could likely see the old landing on the other side of the valley, the silver glinting of the river, and beyond it the rim of the world itself, turning black now with storm.
Lightning rippled from boiling clouds, followed a few seconds later by grumbles of thunder. Grizz heard the cattle
moan out in the yard. One large drop of rain splashed his cheek. “Hurry,” he called to him, grinding the tractor to a halt outside the barn. Lee scrambled down from the pile of stacked bales, chunks of loose hay spraying down along with him.
A minute later, Grizz emerged from the barn with an immense blue tarp and a coil of rope and motioned for Lee to climb up again. Back atop the hay, Lee took the end of the tarp just as the rain began to lash down. Lee balanced along the flat surface, the tarp fanning out behind him. Wind lifted the sheet and nearly tore it from his grasp. Grizz was shouting from below while he clutched a rope that held it from the other end. Rain blinded him. Grizz imagined the tarp filling up like a sail, lifting the boy and carrying him straight into the thunderheads. But Lee got down on his knees to keep his balance and crawled, still dragging the flapping tarp behind him. Then he was climbing down the other side, the billowing plastic stretching and then lying flat across the bales. Wind and rain battered both of them. Lee was drenched by the time Grizz came around the side with another rope to secure it. “You can let go now,” he told him. “Let’s get you inside.”
On a normal day they would sit out on the white sagging porch and sip tea with fresh mint pulled from the weedy garden Jo had once tended. Sometimes they were joined by the pastor’s wife with her baby girl. Seth’s old girlfriend had moved back to the Cities along with her father.
On this day, Grizz left him alone to undress in the
mudroom, stripping off his soaked socks and the very same ragged shoes he had worn during his tumble down the mountain. After a few minutes he carried to him a bundle of musty-smelling clothes and an old towel. “You can shower down here. I have some shoes that might fit you as well.” Lee frowned and said nothing, but when he came back upstairs he was wearing the Judas Priest shirt from Seth and his son’s jeans and shoes. “These clothes?” he said.
“Yeah. They were his.”
Lee said nothing.
“I’ll drive you home.”
“That’s okay. The rain’s stopped outside.” They both listened in the new quiet. The faint sound of a radio crooning trickled in from the next room. “I don’t hear it anymore.” What they heard was the cattle crying out in their pens, and then above it a single, solitary howl.
“Maybe I should drive you.”
“No. Let me do this. You said they were afraid of you.”