WHEN THE ARRANGEMENTS needed to be made, I knew who to call. There are some people who have a high degree of skill and experience when it comes to such a topic, and many of them will tell you that the loss of what no longer seems to exist is only temporary. It’s one of those eternal mysteries that creates questions and war, with some claiming answers and peace, but those were questions for another time. Now I had to make this call, and as I reached for the phone, I chose to look in a less tense direction.
He answered after the seventh ring, just as I was about to hang up. It was mostly a businesslike exchange. Transactional. She lived a long, good life. Yes, of course, I’ll handle it. Oak? We’re running low but I’ve got enough I think. He’s supposed to get more any day now and bring it over. You know how he is. But I think I’ve got enough. Yes, we’ll do the service. It just rained so the ground should still be damp and easy to move. Just leave it to me. Don’t worry, I can bill you later. Did you want the inscription? Okay. The top or the end? Okay. Are you sure? You don’t have to do that. Okay. I’ll be here.
THE SUMMER AFTER I graduated high school I got a job in a casket shop to pay for my upcoming tuition. I had enrolled in college classes and housing an hour away in Nashville, while most people in my class were going to stay behind and either work toward taking over the family farm or line up in the cheese factory that employed nearly half the town. My father had begun to cajole me into staying, which turned into harsher, more frequent cornerings: Why do you want to leave? Just what is it you think you’re going to accomplish? To him, his reasoning was sound. In a year or two, I’d make lead or supervisor if I got on at the factory. Manager after five years. Twenty dollars an hour, an honest day’s work, food on the table, and the satisfaction of providing something useful. Something you could see. Maybe buy you a little bit of land and work it in the evenings and on weekends. What more was there? You know, your grandpa worked till the day he died. Milked cows at 4am in cold that makes your bones draw up. Reaped hay by hand when it was more than a hundred degrees and he was grateful to be out there. It was exhausting to hear. I knew the man only through old snapshots and stories and the occasional funeral. I pushed back each time he brought it up, eventually hitting him with blame (Who was it that got me the telescope?) and finally he met me with a force of his own when he said that I would have to pay for school myself if I chose to leave. That was his stance, a firm and final effort to keep the family together. My mother began to ignore me and busied herself with long, drawn-out tasks, one after the other.
I was a normal candidate to stay behind, an uneventful and modest upbringing, complimented regularly as smart enough not to attach myself to some silly idea of future happiness. My attraction towards absorbing information must have been an anomalous resistance to the people in my town, and in their eyes a miswiring during my formation and upbringing. Perhaps it came from the stories read to me when I was small, admiring the fortunes that appeared for those who chose not to remain at home. Growing up I witnessed people worn out by struggle, a certain violence that simmered just below the surface, waiting for a channel to open up and let it out. They shared a common bond in misfortune so that in each other’s company they must have found comfort by falling at the feet of the divine. Your family and friends were always near, and you cast yourself and your money at the doorstep of your church. You had food and a roof and you stayed vigilant because the world was dangerous and unforgiving. Home was a place where tradition and obligation were demanded over ambition. Inspiration could show up, provided you were inspired to see the entire ribbon of your life unspooled and flattened before you, like a Kansas plain. Everything you needed was there, and anyone who wanted to leave all that behind was considered a peacock, a flaunting display of supremacy, which was always traced back to upbringing. Those who couldn’t maintain a proper fence around their family were ostracized and found themselves alone on the pews on Sundays. The dreams of the very young were dismissed as the whimsy of youth, but sometimes, like young trees planted in a place that shortly after sees a nearby fence erected, when the roots grow a certain way they can begin to push through and dismantle it.
The friends I had grown up with at school were adept at manual labor. Most arrived just before the first bell or a few minutes after with their farm-brown skin, bits of hay and straw poking out of their pants pockets and stuck to their shoelaces. They could maneuver tractors at speed over uneven terrain and fix them on the spot whenever something malfunctioned. Often instead of bringing in completed homework assignments they brought fresh scrapes on their hands, and on their faces they wore looks of preoccupation with the work that waited for them, and also resolved expressions of the lives they knew had been decided for them. They had been born into a life where survival trumped any notion of a formal education, and even though school administration were familiar with that way of life, teachers were tied by bureaucracy and had to insist upon their students the importance of academia, even though much of the food on their own tables came from those same students. But with the constant demands of land and animals, of uncooperative weather, of being depended on as a child, how were they to treat history or algebra as anything serious when their unfolding world already weighed so heavy, when the helpless calls of desperate creatures pulled them out from under the covers every morning and dragged them through wet or frozen fields?
One of those friends was Paul. Unlike me, Paul knew his way around labor from helping his father, Lucas, with odd jobs while growing up. He’d worked in his uncle Isaac’s casket shop for the past six years, under his father’s charge. Lucas and Isaac were brothers. Before the casket shop, when Paul’s mother was still alive, Lucas worked at the marina, and during the warm months he filled boaters’ gas tanks, boxed up worms and netted minnows for fishermen, and sliced meat for sandwiches. When business slowed in the fall and winter, his hours were reduced and he had to look for things that needed maintenance, like rotting boards on docks, flaking signs or railing that could use a fresh coat of paint, and trash exposed after the lake was partially drained for the season. People hired him to plow snow from their driveways or parking lots. Occasionally he reshingled roofs. He would pull Paul along and share with him a portion of his wages.
When you’re young you don’t subscribe to the idea that the people you love will one day die, and you also don’t understand that when it happens, part of you goes with them. It’s incomprehensible, like the expanse of the universe, to consider the proximity of death because everyone, and everything, is immortal. Your neighbor, the nightfall, the daybreak, the little brick ice cream parlor with the good malts, just as much as life surrounds you, there waits an open cloak preparing to fasten itself around those whose turn has come. And so it was with Paul’s mother. She died of a brain hemorrhage caused by a thin patch of ice over an unforgiving concrete sidewalk at home while walking to her car. Sudden and forceful trauma to the head. A devastating freak accident a month after Christmas that upheaved the lives of a father and son who depended on her for all the things good mothers offer and sacrifice. Lucas found her almost immediately when he didn’t hear the car start. They rushed her to the medical center where she worked as a nurse (apparently they had terrible insurance and it also didn’t cover accidents) and she fought for two days, but there had been too much damage. She was the one who held them all together, and suddenly things were thrown into a state of not only shock, but enormous grief and then panic. You could tell, and how could they not be?
Paul had been a regular dinner guest at our house since middle school. The night before she died, he broke away from the hospital long enough to get some rest and eat with us and see different walls, and just before he left to return to her, while she was slipping into final unconsciousness in the intensive care unit, he told me about his father mentioning that the bills were coming due: the rent, utilities, medical statements that certainly were being processed and stamped before his mother was even cold in the ground, the invisible invoice of worry that made it hard to fall or stay asleep. The old man who ran the marina was rough and uncaring and fired Lucas after he missed three consecutive days, so Lucas couldn’t pay for anything because they had no savings and no one was hiring farmhands in late January. Nor could he pay for his wife’s casket when it came time, so Isaac paid off the remaining six months of Lucas’s lease, moved Lucas and Paul into his own house (Isaac lived in a large farmhouse built by his great grandfather, and several of the rooms went barely used or not at all), and let Lucas work at the shop to cover the materials because Lucas’s pride would allow for no further charity. For the labor there was no charge. Lucas and Paul had built it themselves in an afternoon, a pristine cedar vault modeled after the chest in which she kept family heirlooms and other treasures. Many people were surprised that the Lucas they knew had allowed for any of it, but it turned out that he recognized his wife’s dignity was at stake and part of his ego must have died along with her.
SHORTLY AFTER HIS mother died, Paul joined me in the fascination with astronomy: what was beyond our atmosphere, noiseless explosions and gravitational pull, speaking in terms of light. Mr. Bradford served as librarian and science teacher, and he paired us together to build a diorama of the solar system, and we toiled for days over a shoebox of properly scaled and accurately painted foam balls suspended with fishing line. We pricked holes in the backdrop so when held against the light, you could see Gemini and Orion. He joined me in watching my back catalog of old Cosmos episodes. In the library he asked Mr. Bradford if there were any books or magazines that hadn’t made it to the shelves, and we would dig through information seeing who could announce the most interesting fact:
Venus spins backwards!
Big deal, on Neptune it rains diamonds!
And then we would laugh, and I’d feel this expanding surge of hope and importance, always thinking I saw those same feelings on Paul’s face which would quickly get swept away like he thought it was unreasonable or even shameful to have them. Like he floated for a few exciting moments and would be clawed back by the pull of the town. We had both decided...how could we stay in one place when there was so much to see? To discover? To escape? So we made a pact there before our diorama, held beneath the night sky, that after high school we would leave for Nashville and study all the things that held the universe together.
It was foolishness to most. Locals violently agreed that it was God’s will to keep all those distant things tidy and mysterious, and those who chose to meddle with such a perfect system, attempting to explain creation with Greek letters and equations, would be punished in this life and certainly the one after. But that didn’t stop us from setting up my telescope in the front yard or rocking in the chairs on my porch, watching the universe send us light that happened ages ago.
THE LAST DAY of our senior year was on a Friday and Paul had come for dinner, covered in fresh shavings and his face smeared with dust. He asked if I wanted to come help in the casket shop because Isaac was going to be traveling around looking for timber operations to buy and Lucas had been spending less time at the shop, seen around town with people everyone knew for bad reasons, who began their days seeking trouble and proud of the turmoil they caused. It would just be the two of them for a while – him and his father – and they could use an extra hand. Paul had known for years that my interest and skill lay elsewhere. He also knew I needed money. I had been trying to convince him to enroll with me at school (he had managed to save almost every dollar he’d ever earned from helping his father) and by the beginning of our senior year he agreed to abandon the familiar in favor of something new, even with all its temptations and uncleanliness.
OUR PROPERTY SAT on two acres under an unobstructed sky that you could watch turn from navy to black as the night settled in. Clusters of the Milky Way streamed like tracks. On the clearest nights it was like a bed of slow-blooming flowers, first only a few and then suddenly you were looking at an entire field that had sprung to life, and on those clear nights I sometimes pictured how people might look upon their own fields of green pastures in much the same way. A few times a year there were meteor showers and Paul and I would count them and talk about what it would be like to discover a planet or star or an asteroid, tracked closely because in five hundred years it might get a little too close. During the lulls when we weren’t counting we pondered: where we would live and with whom, what we would get published in scientific journals, to what exotic locations would we be assigned travel so we could document an eclipse or some other spectacle. The occasional airplane would arc its way across. I imagined the passengers, how old they were, what they would do when they deplaned. A beach. A job interview. A deteriorating family member. Would it fly without incident and land safely? Not once did we mention the distant future when we would both turn gray and burn out, too young to give it any real thought.
“Now that’s a good idea,” my father said. “You really ought to do that instead. Get your head out of the clouds and toughen you up a bit.”
“Why don’t you go up there tomorrow and talk with Isaac?” my mother said from the next room, where she’d been scraping wallpaper for nearly a week.
And then in a very matter-of-fact way, Paul said, “We won’t be there tomorrow, though. We have to dig a grave for a service on Sunday.”
When everyone else had left the kitchen, he added, “Plus dad’s not the same anyway and it’ll be nice to have someone else there.”
ABOUT SIX MILES where we lived was a road that ran north to south. Going south would take you to Nashville, a route that people generally avoided because it took them too close to the fringe of too big a place. In the other direction was the lake, a highly traveled stretch of rural and curvy road where the double yellow lines had faded and you had to veer away from the oncoming trucks pulling boats that crossed over. It was off of this road about halfway to the lake that you turned to go to the casket shop. There at the corner, planted in the ditch, was a six-foot poplar post, shrouded by weeds, that supported a bleached square of pine. CASKET SHOP had been painted in black and blocked letters. The sign and post had begun to green in the weather, not yet replaced as it was every year. Crows picked at a fresh carcass on the main road until I approached to turn, then they fled to bounce on the sign and caw in protest.
The road was old and cracked and crumbling at the edges. Overturned shells of turtles that had failed to cross were brushed by the overgrown grass. Immediately to the left was a small church and a graveyard with headstones adorned with pops of fake flowers, scattered about plots that stayed well manicured. Past that, everything was large and spread out, the productive acreage owned by timber or farming operations, with portions of it tracted off and rented to families, many of them desperate and broken, who knew only poverty. The dwellings — you could hardly call them houses — were just this side of total ruin, quilts of whatever could be patched together to keep them from falling into themselves, fronted by rotted and sagging wooden porches. Piles of old tires had flattened into the ground, becoming a fixture of the land, a few feet from hoodless cars chewed at by rust. Doorless refrigerators lay on their sides and had become shelters for whatever creatures could make their way in there. Barns that were once magnificent had collapsed or were on the brink, robbed regularly of their bones and used as firewood or to prop up other things. The tangy, acrid, chemical odor of burning vinyl lingered. Small and shoeless children ran through the clutter as if it were a maze, a game they had invented, ignorant to the difficulties of whatever adults they lived with, the same struggles they would themselves inherit.
The second sign for the shop was a foot taller than the mailbox and was posted at the entrance to a gravel driveway that opened up into an elliptical patch spanning at least a hundred feet wide. In the center against the gravel sat a two-storey farmhouse with a wrap-around porch, which suspended two swings facing each other on either side of the red front door, the breeze pushing them around in erratic directions. There was an old stone well off to the right, topped with a rope and pulley and a metal pail. Behind the house was a mostly open field of about fifteen acres. Much of it was unused and cut for hay. Row crops took up a large portion and four horses the rest, inside a white fence. Near the horse fence was a grove of apple trees that the horses stared at, their huge heads pressed together like a team, plotting how to get at them.
To the left of the open gravel were two red buildings, one of them three times the size as the other. In the smaller one was a window on which leaned a third sign identifying it as the shop itself. I pressed my nose to the glass, shielding the sun from both sides of my face, but it was too dark to see. The larger building was a workshop, open on both ends, with a smooth concrete floor. I could see piles of different wood planks stacked neatly up against the far wall. On a table sat hand tools: manual drills and wooden hammers and different types of saws.
Footsteps echoed on the concrete as Isaac approached. The family resemblance was remarkable. He was six feet tall, thin and lanky, just like Lucas and Paul. If you didn’t know them, you would have assumed them Amish, but it was only the uniform: a light blue button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbows, darker blue pants, faded gray suspenders, dusty work boots, and a straw hat. Previous generations were, but over time the commitment must have waned when the conveniences of modern times became too shiny, and they sank into comfortable vices so that all that was left was an occasional nod to their heritage where it seemed fashionable. His blond hair curled around his ears and at the back, and his steel blue eyes settled on a beaky nose. There was a tuft of matching blond on his chin and patches grew on his face like scattered brush in a desert. A cigarette dangled from his lips as he stared at me, wiping his hands and brow on a yellowed handkerchief, faded by use or the sun.
“You’re that boy Paul sent, ain’t you? Been expectin’ ya. You ever worked with wood before?”
I wondered whether he could tell how little I knew about it and what Paul had told him. When I said I was there because Lucas and Paul needed help, and that I was preparing for my future, he said, “Every man’s got the same future.” And then he said, “All our work is done by hand. Come on and I’ll show you.” I followed him to the smaller building, and without turning around, he said, “That boy Paul can build a casket. So can his pa, but probably even better than his pa, especially now. Not sure where his head’s at.”
He smothered his cigarette with the toe of his boot and opened the door to the shop. Stale, hot air hung in the doorway. Inside there were black sheets tacked to the window frames. Isaac pulled the tacks and when the sheets fell to the floor in heaps, the sun beamed in and revealed a room furnished with two rows of caskets covered by padded moving blankets. He began uncovering them, letting the blankets drop to the carpet that felt like nothing more than a thick layer of dust. It was amazingly hot in the room, no air circulating, suffocating, like it had been closed up for a long time.
“Got pine, cedar, poplar, and oak,” Isaac said, and reached behind one of the caskets to retrieve a stack of papers. “This here’s our prices. Got a few behind the door there standing on their ends. Those are the cheaper ones, for folks who ain’t got much money.”
I perused the sheet he offered. It had been written in pencil and then someone had made copies. On it was a list of wood types, sizes, and prices. Below the standard sizes were options for bigger caskets, infants and toddlers, and special engravings. At the bottom were large letters CLOSED ON SUNDAYS!! and the address.
“Plus we do engraving for folks who want a little message. Usually ‘Going Home’ but sometimes they want different things. But that’s the main one we use.”
I didn’t know what to say, so I asked if it was ever sad always talking about death.
“Death is the cure for the sins of man.”
I helped him spread the blankets over the caskets, reaching for whatever dignity I could find. After he retacked the sheets, we walked out and he pulled the door closed and lit another cigarette. Everything smelled like horses and fresh sawdust and ash.
“How’s three days a week and half a day Saturday to help with the Sunday preparations?”
So I agreed.
THOSE FIRST FEW nights after starting in the casket shop I would drift off, head sinking into the pillow and catching the day’s unnoticed splinters in the threads of the sheets, and see misty horses pulling buggies with no wheels, the buggies’ open backs holding caskets stacked like boxes of saltines on a grocery shelf. Faint shrieks or moans called through the walls from either the dead or of those who missed them. The horses ran around the rings of Saturn, their hooves sending sparks as they landed, as if the rings were made of slate, and then a sudden burst of energy shot them away like a comet. I swore that the room had become cold and that I could see the trail of my icy breath but then I’d shake myself awake, covers twisted in a heap on the floor, and then I’d hear my father, his heavy voice reverberating like chains. See, it just don’t run in the family no more.
School ending allowed me to carry books of poetry and science without feeling despair over being called out by my peers who thought I was less noble for not having my pant cuffs caked with mud, but still I wanted to prove him wrong. I wanted my pillowcase to darken with dirt and sawdust so that when my bedding was washed everyone could see the relics of my work, but the extent of my skill was fumbling with a screwdriver and repeatedly dropping it while trying to open the battery compartments of radios and other electronics. Manual work and your ability to do it was a form of currency in towns like that. Country gold. That feeling of dread, of being looked down upon because you don’t know how to fix an overheating engine or what tool you use to cut through metal, makes you feel like a bird with clipped wings. You look up at the sky and watch the flocks and formations, and are reminded of what’s not possible.
Paul showed me how to build a casket, efficiently and with a sculptor’s eye. The way he was able to piece together each plank and step back afterwards, wiping his hands and looking for imperfections, he was like a carver of marble. I tried to negotiate with the planks and the tools but my hands could do nothing with any of it. He would get one built, clean up, and then disappear out the back of the workshop to pluck apples off the tree and feed them to the horses.
Lucas was very patient, slower and more methodical. At times it seemed he wore an expression like he was distracted, like he suddenly found himself in another place, and then he would return just as sudden, like someone else had been occupying his body and he had to squeeze them out. I pretended to understand all the motions but secretly I wished to be seated over a desk mapping out ideas.
“Get you a bottom plank. They’re the thick ones. Gotta hold the weight. We sell larger sizes too and for those you fix two bottom planks together.” He pulled a sheet of sandpaper from his back pocket. “They usually come mostly smooth but you just rub your fingers along the corners and the edges and then take you a sheet and give them a few swipes to smooth them out.”
Most of the boards had knots in them or were warped just enough where they had to be fixed. Paul said the best wood was held back for living furniture, not dead furniture. Kitchen cabinets or bed frames or tables, not something only visible for a short while. Plus the lower to medium grade was cheaper to buy and thus cheaper for the families and when they’re in that situation they don’t want to worry about money.
I ran my fingers along an edge and felt several tiny splinters enter my fingertips.
Lucas smiled. “Gotta watch those. Go slow and if it’s not baby smooth then you’ll be able to tell. Then get it with the sandpaper.”
As I did this Lucas was getting the other pieces we needed. “Bottom frame rails and crossbars and floor rails. Then the sides and ends and then the door. I like calling them doors instead of tops or lids. That way they can get to wherever they’re going easier.”
I didn’t see any nails or screws.
“We use these little wood dowels. What you do is drill you out the holes and roll the dowel in some wood glue and hammer it in. If you drill your holes right it’ll be a real tight fit but it’ll go. Same thing for the handles but a bigger hole. That rope over there’s what we use for handles. Three on each side board’s all we need. Pull the rope through and tie a good strong knot on the inside. Then you do the door and if the family wants it we’ll put the inscription on it.”
I stood back and watched Lucas build, stepping in to help line up the pieces when he asked or to hand him tools that felt awkward when I held them. He worked with a sort of autopilot’s direction, like his subconscious was so well trained that he could have built it blind which might have been possible because much of the time his eyes were glazed over and with fright behind them.
THAT SUMMER WAS one of little rain, and as the equinox passed and the days began to shorten, I settled into a rhythm that surprised me and also my father. On late days when we finished building by lantern and I was too tired to shower once I got home and ate, I’d wake up the next morning clammy with yesterday’s sweat. He had this funny look on his face, commenting about my man-size appetite, my reddened hands that had become rough and calloused, and the dirt that seemed as if it had tattooed itself under my fingernails. You’ll make us proud yet... I would have never imagined looking down at my own hands and seeing the transfer of dust and dirt and labor, a sense of accomplishment, but at the same time it was at the expense of others, of their loss and that of their families. There was this contradiction that showed up, pride and guilt, and it was during these times that the city streets became wider in my head.
One night after I’d fallen asleep I was startled awake by a crash outside my bedroom window. After I realized it wasn’t a dream, I peeked through the gap in the shade and there was Paul, stabilizing my telescope he had gotten off the porch, in the middle of the front yard. He glued himself to the eyepiece and made small adjustments to the focus wheel. I slipped out the front door, clad in pajamas and barefoot. The grass was warm and damp on my feet as it rested from the sun. I stood there and looked up. Paul didn’t speak, only fixed himself there at the telescope. He must have been aiming at the moon, which was full and by that point out of his view.
Without looking up, he said, “She’s the one who told me I could do anything. You saw what happened to her. She had a real life in a real town until she met him. Then he drug her here and then look. She wanted me to get out of here and that’s exactly what I’m going to do. No more of this life for me. You and me will be watching Earth rise over the moon some day. We’ll see all the lights from New York or Paris or Tokyo while we look down on everything from a few thousand miles up.”
A dog barked in the distance, broken up by the croaks of night frogs. “I can’t wait to get out of here,” he said. And then he left.
IT WAS AUGUST. During the rare trips I made to town for an emergency loaf of bread or my father’s sudden urge for a pound of bacon, you heard about how much rain we needed, how a neighbor’s crops had failed, how so-and-so’s daughter had gotten herself in trouble and had started stealing diapers. The cashiers knew how to carry on the talk, pillars and soothsayers of the town. They could read the faces of the farmers who had to sell bent pieces of fencing or scrounge up change for a can of green beans because their own had either dried up or been picked clean by thirsty groundhogs. The walnut trees dropped their fruit early in a panic, the rose bushes shriveled and scattered their remaining petals where they collected at their bases like snow. There was no cool rush of honeysuckle-scented air from wooded areas. It had stopped in the spring.
The last Saturday I was there I had gotten there shortly after lunch. Later that afternoon a man I had never seen before drove up in a white pickup. Lucas and Paul were at the cemetery preparing a family of three who had perished in a boating accident, and Isaac had all but vanished as he traveled about. I was moving boards and sweeping, getting read for the next round of dust. It reminded me of the way hair is swept up in a barber shop, particles of people snipped off and brushed away. I leaned the broom in the corner and walked out to meet him, the new-car smell followed as he climbed down from the seat. New cars there were rare.
“Isaac here?” he said. Then he extended his arm, holding a folder. “Need to drop off these papers.”
I took the folder and told him no one else was there.
“I guess ol’ Paul really found his calling, didn’t he? My wife still talks about the work they done for her cousin. Really nice casket. And a nice service too. You thank him for us now, okay? And tell him congratulations. Even though I think he got it for way too cheap. But he’ll make a right fine owner, I can tell you that.”
He must have seen my confusion, because he continued:
“Reckon you musta heard by now, ain’t you? About Isaac buyin’ old Clem Hawkins’s timber company and gettin’ outta the casket business? Figured you’d a-knowd by now. Well, maybe it ain’t none of my business but if you ask me he’s gettin’ took. I almost fell over when I seen it. But nobody ask me so I guess it ain’t none of my business. Family’s family no matter how you look at it.”
He looked up at the sun and then down at his watch, either mistrusting his judgment or confirming it. “Now you’ll see that they get those? Them’s their copies. Isaac and Paul. All legal. Signed and ready.”
It was getting close to dinnertime and I was still there alone, holding the papers in my hand that felt like nothing more than the ones we used to keep track of orders. The birds had started their evening songs and the horses stamped around their field. I set the papers on a pile of wood scraps that were ready to burn, and made for the apple trees. The stench of rotting fruit wafted but ripe ones still clung tight. Against the fence the horses gathered, unblinking, eyeing the apples I held in the bowl of my shirt. The ones that outlasted the rest. One by one I fed them to the horses and patted their heads between the eyes. They fed from the palm of my hand and were mindful of their teeth.
Beyond the fence, in the field that had not yet been cut for the season’s final baling, a doe leaned to the ground in a way you could tell was not an attempt to find food. She saw me watching her, alert, concerned, and finally she dashed off toward the woods, stopping at the edge, as if she felt an extreme urge to return and sacrifice her own safety. I stepped closer to the field and she disappeared into the trees. There in the field where she had been lay a fawn, folded up and still, its obsidian eyes staring blankly. Its breathing seemed labored, the white markings on its back barely moved at all, almost stationary on their brown canvas. Ticks covered both its ears. Paul had told me that someone would be there to cut the field the following Monday, so I walked back to the shop and got a pair of gloves from a shelf and slid them on and then returned to the fawn which had not moved. Mothers often temporarily left their young in high growth either to protect them from predators or to abandon them. I tried scooping it up but its legs unfolded like an accordion, nearly as long as a foal’s, and I had to regather it, taking it to the woods where I lay it at the base of an oak.
It was after dinner time when I drove home. Paul was on my porch, rocking slowly, watching turkeys roam the field across the road. We were silent, pretending for a moment like nothing had happened.
“Guess you heard,” he said, seeing the folder in my hand. “You think city sky is different than country sky?”
I handed him the papers.
“I don’t know what to say,” Paul said. “Dad’s mad but Isaac didn’t think he could run it. He told dad himself. And I guess you didn’t hear what happened after that. Day before yesterday when he found out I was buying the shop he disappeared and a while later a truck showed up. I know just about every black diesel truck in this town but I couldn’t tell who it was. Spun the gravel everywhere and I had to fix it. Anyway, the passenger door flung open and dad fell out and caught himself on the gravel and busted his nose up pretty good. The truck took off and there dad is, stumbling trying to stand up. Here’s the part you’ll love. He took a swing at me. Didn’t even say a word. And he swung so hard he missed and fell down cussing. I smelled whiskey. I thought he stopped a while back but I guess not. So anyway, I helped get him onto the porch and sat him in one of the swings. And I left him there talking some nonsense I couldn’t understand. So there’s that. I mean, did you ever really imagine it? A guy like me running around a campus full of people who’ve never even touched a bale of hay or a saw? No offense, I mean you’ve got your road and I’ve got mine.”
The thing was, I could imagine it but couldn’t really see it. If he went, would he actually be there? Or would it be some version of him, roaming around like a goat that had jumped a fence and got itself lost, in a daze looking for something familiar? And what new mindsets can you introduce to those who grew up without them? I think what happened to Paul happens to all of us, at least to an extent. When you’re presented with a choice, you have to decide what you’re willing to say goodbye to, either the present or the future, and those dreams you depend on often die at the hands of some multi-tentacled beast that pulls you back in. Maybe what was so alluring gets released from the glare, like a mint quarter that gets rubbed dull, into a sort of daily drudge that we slog through for the sake of keeping the wheels turning, at least from falling off. It’s a way of smoothing things over or perhaps we simply become spectators of things and see them travel just out of reach, hoping that they’ll come back after a cycle of events. Or in Paul’s case perhaps he understood the reality of his life.
“So when do you leave?” he said.
A few years ago Paul and I spent each night in the summer coming up with new theories in ways only naives or geniuses can. We debated the existence of life on other planets, the way people thought of ours as some unicorn. Were other lives buried in the alien terrain of faraway places that would never know we existed? To us, any place unlike ours was too foreign to comprehend. Different landscapes, odd-shaped and odd-talking inhabitants. Greenery replaced by the gray dullness of concrete, the temporary blindness from the reflecting sun on a skyscraper window. How would we be received, and what things in our lives would outlast the rest? Paul had escaped and not realized it, at least in the eyes of the town. My parents told me the preacher at their church brought it up, how Lucas was relieved and felt incredibly blessed that Paul was staying home. And the good Lord willing, he’d have good health and a clean conscience.
YEARS LATER WHEN my own mother died, there was really only one option. She’d been sick for a while, long enough for the town to know and start sending food to my father. He said they (I knew “they” meant his fellow churchgoers) all huddled together to first ask for forgiveness and then for a miracle, but none came and who gets healed would remain a mystery. People offered him house cleaning services, real estate agents left cards on the doorstep, young insurance salespeople asked him without sympathy about his policies and coverage. But she passed, and I knew Paul was waiting. The university understood and granted my request for a leave of absence. I gave my students the news, received their condoling looks, and told them their only assignment for the next two weeks was to observe the world around them, day or night, top to bottom, and document what changed. It crossed my mind a few times what they saw. Perhaps one of them saw a star go out. The smell of a neighborhood barbecue. A child riding without training wheels for the first time. Then I ended class early, shut myself up in my office on the third floor, and made the phone call. I avoided the highway and traveled the old roads, careful around curves not to run up on the horses and buggies, braking for the turtles. Everything felt familiar but seemingly the roads had become more narrow and winding, and for Paul, likely just as straight and dusty. There at the shop he and I constructed the plain oak box with the usual inscription, and it was the first casket made in that shop that included a little shooting star underneath. Paul was right — the ground was soft and forgiving and we had no trouble moving it.
Sometimes I notice a spine of traffic led by a hearse and police escort, curious about the contents: where they came from, where they went, where they wanted to go but didn’t. Each car moved along close to the one it trailed, shining its headlights like lidless eyes, the people inside who either were close with the deceased or felt a sense of obligation to them or their families, driving closer to the day in which they would one day be the one celebrated.
— MATT PRUITT
Matt Pruitt is a short story writer who lives in the Nashville, Tennessee, area. His stories explore complex topics like family, relationships, and the struggles that many people deal with in their daily lives. He studied creative writing at the University of Iowa and is currently working on a collection of short stories.