Timothy Johnston - The Current

He stopped and she came up beside him in a place that looked like every other place in the woods: the boughs of the trees with their burdens of snow, the shapes of fallen limbs under the snow and sometimes the branches reaching up like hands. Tracks of creatures everywhere.

“There it is there,” he said, and she looked where he was looking. Trees and more trees. He pointed. “That one there.”

She looked again. “Is that a white pine?”

“Yes, it is.”

The tree rose straight and bare until about her height, then opened like an umbrella in gray-green boughs, soft-looking boughs, then came to a point high overhead.

She looked at him, but his eyes were up in the tree’s branches. He said, “She asked me one time how fast did a tree grow and I said I don’t know and she said was it faster than a little girl and I said I don’t know but there’s one way to find out. So out we come and she walked around and around till she found this one. Just her height back then.”

Audrey looked at the tree again. At its highest it just caught the sun, and the whole tree seemed an elaborate structure for lifting that highest, palest point into the light.

“How old was she?” she said. “When she found the tree.”

“Seven. That tree was just four foot tall back then and it’s grown twelve inches a year ever since, give or take, so I put it at right around twenty-six foot tall.”

“Was she disappointed?”

“About what?”

“About how much faster it grew.”

He shrugged. “Tell you the truth she didn’t have much interest after that first year. It was me who kept coming out to measure. Until it got too tall and I got too old to be climbing trees anyway.”

Audrey swept at her cheeks with her fingertips, both sides with both hands, and Gordon Burke, watching her, said, “I didn’t see that cast till just now.”

She held out the purple cast as if she’d not noticed it herself.

“That other girl,” he said, “who was with you…”

“Caroline.”

“Was she a good friend of yours?”

“Yes, she was.”

He nodded, then shook his head and was silent. The silence of the woods all around them. Dead silence. Not even a bird.

“I missed her funeral because of this,” Audrey said, raising the cast again.

“I expect she won’t begrudge you that,” he said, and when she said nothing he added, “No disrespect. Just saying, under the circumstances.”

“I still need to go down there, though,” she said. “I need to see those people. Her family.”

He looked at her, then looked up into the trees again. “Looks to me like you’ve got your hands full where you’re at. And it’s none of my business, but it’s my guess those folks could use some time on their own.”

“That’s what Dad said.”

He stood looking up into the trees. Then he said, “Well,” and turned as if to head back.

“I guess you’ve heard about what he did,” she said, “down there in Iowa,” and Gordon Burke stopped.

“No, I can’t say that I have,” he said.

And so she told him. About the boys at the gas station. About the backscratcher and about the mechanic with the scratches on his face and the new bullet hole in his right hand, Gordon Burke all the while listening, watching her, and when she was finished he looked away and shook his head.

“Be damned,” he said. “Just be God damned.” He turned back to her. “Did he get the right man at least?”

“I don’t know. I looked at a photo line-up but I couldn’t say.”

“A photo line-up?”

She told him about Ed Moran and his deck of mug shots. “He’s the sheriff down there now, where it happened.”

“I know he is.” Gordon Burke shook his head again. He looked up into the branches of the white pine. “And you still alive even,” he said. “It just beats all.”

“It wasn’t all about me.”

“What wasn’t?”

“What he did down there. Or about Caroline either.”

He raised a hand to stop her. Something flashing in his eyes. “We’re not gonna talk about that.”

“I’m sorry—”

“Don’t say you’re sorry, just—” He dropped his hand. Turning away from her. “I’ve talked my limit for one day, that’s all,” he said. “More than my limit.” And he turned to go then, and she turned too and they went back the way they’d come, following their tracks to the fallen tamarack, and there they said good-bye, and before she’d opened the car door the chainsaw chugged back to life and she turned for a last look at him, a man in his woods, bent over in the smoke and the noise and the woodchips flying all around him.

IT WAS SATURDAY afternoon before he got on the road—before he got his room and the little bathroom cleaned, before he got the truck packed up, and before he got his deposit from the old widow who owned the house and who believed only in cash—and he’d planned to drive all night, but after nearly drifting into the median just outside Kansas City, he pulled into a rest stop and spent the next four hours shivering under a packing blanket while the big diesels geared down and hissed and rumbled all through his broken dreams. Around dawn he gave up and drove on, and he didn’t stop again except for gas and coffee.

When he turned at last into the drive and there was no car and no sign of anyone around, he thought in his exhaustion that she’d moved somewhere and hadn’t told him. Or that she’d told him and he’d forgotten. But then he saw the time on the dash, 5:15, and it was what, Sunday now, and she and Marky would’ve gone into town for groceries, and so he parked the truck and got out and stretched, and stood looking over the farmhouse and its outbuildings. The shapes of abandoned machinery under the snow; Great-Granddad’s old Massey-Harris, flat-tired and snow-heaped and the red paint all gone to rust—a miracle that that old Swede didn’t come back from the dead to raise holy hell. The coop yard where he told Marky to go make the chickens fly and Great-Grammy Olsen coming out with her broom and Marky flapping his wings away from her as she cussed him in a foreign blue streak.

They had liked playing around the farm but they did not like that kitchen. Did not like sitting around that table.

Why on earth not? she’d wanted to know, staring them down.

Just don’t, Ma .

Why?

It smells Momma . Marky spitting it out.

What do you mean it smells?

Shrugging his shoulders. It just smells Momma .

He means it smells like them. It’s hot in there and it smells like them .

Smells like them?

Yeah, Ma. Don’t you smell it?

Putting her hands to her hips, looking from him to Marky and back. You know what that smell is? Do you? That’s the smell of working people. Of hard work all your life. Of never having money for yourself but making sure your kids are fed and have shoes on their feet. The kitchen smells! Shaking her head. Next time we’ll just have Grammy throw your food out to you in the yard like a couple of dogs. How will that be? Raising her finger and pointing it at Danny’s face. Don’t even think it, wise guy. Just keep that smart tongue of yours still for once, OK?

The side door was not locked, was never locked, and when he stepped into the kitchen he thought the old smell was still there, faintly. Then he thought it might be the smell of old Wyatt who’d had his nest of blankets near the stove. Who did not raise his head now at Danny’s entrance, or come hobbling in from the living room, wagging his old tail. No sound of his dog tags rattling, his ears clapping as he shook off sleep. No sound at all in the house, not even the refrigerator running its compressor, though when he opened the door the light came on and the jug of juice he picked up was cold.