Matthew Stokoe - Empty Mile

She moaned the phrase to herself several times, then stopped abruptly, flung off the covers, and reached under the bed for her cane. She held it out to me. When I didn’t move she shook it violently.

“Do it.”

“Marla, I-”

“Do it! Do it, Johnny!”

“Marla, why do you feel so bad? I don’t understand-” But Marla wasn’t in the mood to help me understand anything that night and screamed at me from the bed, “Just fucking do it!”

So I took the cane and raised it up and brought it down across her naked back. Her body clenched. One of her fingernails broke against the fabric of the mattress. Almost immediately a red welt rose on her pale skin. She grunted through clenched teeth. And I raised the cane again.

Later, next to her in bed as she slept, I knew that she was slipping away from me. If Gareth wasn’t dealt with soon she would be gone, her own survival would demand it. But if I couldn’t kill him there was only one way to save our relationship-leave Empty Mile. We could do it now. I had enough money to travel across the country, to rent a house in the East as Marla had said she wanted, to start looking for work, to rebuild our lives.

But there was Stan. The trauma of moving again would be more than he could bear, and something he would refuse to do now anyway because of Rosie. And if I could not take him with us then how could I possibly leave?

In the darkness of the bedroom there seemed to be no solution, and in the end my tired mind gave up and turned instead to something Gareth had told me earlier that day-that my father had demanded he stop pimping Marla so that I would not be hurt on my return to Oakridge.

It would have better fit the picture I had of my father if this had been nothing more than an excuse, a step in his process of cutting Gareth out of the Empty Mile land. But by that time he already had everything he needed to go it alone. He had enough money from remortgaging our house, he knew about the possibility of gold on the land, and, most importantly, he had exclusive access to Patricia Prentice. Why would he need to manufacture a reason for falling out with Gareth?

It seemed unavoidable, then, that he had acted simply out of love for me, that he really had just been trying to spare me some pain. It was a startling notion that at the very end of his life he had left me something to balance against all those dark, wanting years when I had been so sure that he did not like me. And this isolated expression of affection was made all the more poignant because it seemed that in trying to help me this way he had, in effect, signed his own death warrant.

We held Stan’s wedding on a weekend so that Gareth would not be at Empty Mile. I had a lot of flowers delivered and Marla and I covered the front of the cabin with them. A celebrant came over from Burton. Marla, Rosie and Millicent all bought matching dresses and Stan and I each rented a tux. On the day we looked like any other wedding party, freshly washed, dressed up, and smiling.

The three women had spent the night at Millicent’s place and as Stan and I waited for them early that morning in front of our cabin he asked me over and over if he looked okay, until finally I put my arms around him and hugged him till he quieted. When I let go he shook his hands in front of his face and grinned at me.

“Boy, Johnny. Boy, oh boy, oh boy. I’m going to burst. You know what I feel like? I feel like when I woke up from drowning. Like everything that happened before is on one side and all the new stuff is just about to start.”

For a moment he stood there, beaming at me, but then he frowned.

“What’s going to happen to me, Johnny? I don’t know how to be married. What if I mess it up? What if I can’t do it?”

“You won’t mess it up.”

The celebrant was standing several yards off to one side, cradling the folder from which he was going to read the service. Stan looked over at him.

“I’m freaking out!”

The man chuckled.

A few minutes later the sun cleared the mountains and Stan’s eyes went round.

“Look, Johnny, there’s sun everywhere. Look!”

It was true. The angle of the light caught the dew that coated the long grass of the meadow and for several minutes the whole field was incandescent. The door to Millicent’s house opened and the three women began a small wedding procession. We watched them come toward us, wading knee deep through a field of light. Stan made small squeaks of delight and shifted his weight from foot to foot.

The ceremony was not long. Stan and Rosie stood together holding hands while the celebrant read some passages Marla and I had picked from a poetry book. Stan kept glancing at Rosie and smiling and though Rosie usually held her head down she raised it for the reading and kept her eyes fixed on him, as though it was only by this connection that she could survive the event.

Though the sun was climbing, the celebrant’s breath steamed and this and the sharp edge to the air made the scene seem festive and somehow entrenched, a ritual that would not only join Stan and Rosie to each other, but also make them part of all those other people across the world who had performed the same rite, who had shared the same hopes for a future together.

After the poetry, though no one there was at all religious, the celebrant read something from the Bible. He finished with the passages that formalized the marriage and Stan and Rosie exchanged rings and kissed each other self-consciously. And then it was over.

Millicent, Marla, and I shared a couple of bottles of champagne with the celebrant and we all watched as Stan turned on some music and danced with Rosie in front of the cabin. And in watching them, the worry I’d had since Stan first told me he wanted to get married, that it could only ever result in some flawed approximation of the real thing, disappeared. Together, dancing, Stan and Rosie removed themselves from comparison with the world at large. They became graceful and self-sufficient, buttressed by each other against the storm of life that raged around them.

In the days that followed Stan used some of his gold money to lease a trailer. We had it placed at a right angle to our cabin and ran electricity in from there. The same firm of contractors who had cleared the ground over the buried river spent a day linking the trailer to the cabin’s plumbing.

In this prefab home Stan and Rosie built around themselves a fragile independence. As withdrawn as Rosie was, she could still drive a car, buy groceries, cook meals, clean house-all the things that Stan either could not do, or could not with any consistency schedule for himself. Being married to her allowed him to participate by proxy and the disillusionment he’d suffered when he realized how money alone had failed him was replaced now by a new sense of his ability to contribute. He might not have been able to perform all the tasks daily life demanded, but he could certainly fund them, and he was happier in the weeks after his marriage than he had been since the early days of Plantasaurus. He and Rosie danced each day in front of their trailer and, most heartening of all, the pouch of moths disappeared from around his neck.

It was a joy for me to see him like this. It did not expunge the guilt I felt about his drowning. It did not make up for the damage his brain had suffered or the wound I had torn in his emotions by leaving Oakridge, but it was as close as I was going to get to fixing that part of my past. He was happy. He had a wife and his own place to live. These were things I had not dreamed possible when I rolled back into Oakridge six months earlier.

On the downside, a few days after Stan’s wedding, Marla’s desperation reached a point where she could no longer cope at work and she quit her job at the town hall. The job had previously been of such importance to her that I was surprised at her decision, but I took it as a measure of her unhappiness that she would give up something which until now she’d been willing to prostitute herself to keep.