Michael Smith - Rivers

The dog barked and Cohen turned and looked and Habana was walking across the field toward them. He walked out to meet her and he stroked her neck and then he hugged her. With her mane across his face, he began to cry a tearless cry, short rhythmic pulses of hurt. He held on to her and his body shook and the hacking sound of anger and pleading came from his mouth and the horse stood still for him as if she understood. A passive sunshine bled through the veiled sky and found them and he held on and cried as they stood together in the soft, wet ground and then when he was done he raised up and told her not to ever tell anybody what had just happened. Don’t know what somebody might say if they knew about this. Promise me, he said and in her large glassy eyes he saw that he could trust her. He sniffed and then he spit and then they walked back toward the house. The dog had waited in the backyard and watched them and Cohen tried to swear the dog to secrecy as well but the dog turned and twitched its tail as if it were jealous that it hadn’t been included.

He put the saddle and bridle on Habana and left her grazing in the backyard and he started walking out across the back field. A hundred yards away was the tree line and he splashed his way there, the ground sucking at his feet. The trees had the look of losing the fight, some splintered, some on the ground with their massive roots reaching out like flailing arms, some sagging from the rain like old men. Scattered around in the trees were two-by-fours from his efforts with the child’s room. He walked to the base of a fractured oak to the two tombstones. Only one body but two tombstones.

He knelt in the wet earth.

Around him the blue-gray world. The world that he tried to hold on to, that he tried to keep alive with the old colors. The gray world that he didn’t think could win but was winning.

He stared at Elisa’s tombstone. Only her name and the dates of her birth and death. He stared at the baby’s tombstone. Only her name.

The stones were slick, splashed with dirt and wet leaves. Cohen leaned forward and with his hand he wiped them clean. Once he had walked out to the graves with a hammer and chisel with plans of carving a cross for each of them, but when he got there, he changed his mind. The rain tapped and the sky rumbled.

She was difficult to see now. She had been for a while. Even the photographs seemed to change her image, shifting her eyes and ears and nose slightly, making her out to be a little different than the way she was. She appeared most clearly in his subconscious. In the dreams. As an apparition shifting with the clouds or flashing in the lightning crashes. Her voice in the thunder or the drone of the rain. He leaned over and pushed his fist into the soggy ground and wondered if she were even there. If he started to dig, whether he would hit a casket, whether she would be in it if it was there, or was there only a bottomless, muddy hole where she used to be and a wet earth that would suck at his feet and drag him down, farther and farther from the surface into a never-ending tunnel of mud, an earth soaked to its core and slowly devouring itself.

He pushed his fists into the ground and they sank and the brown water covered his knuckles and he felt there was nothing there, only this wet, sucking ground that had taken everything he had loved. And what had he loved? He had loved the sweet, sticky ocean breeze and swimming in the ocean and the salty taste on his lips and the gritty feel of the sand on his hands and feet. He had loved the pier on Friday nights and the buckets of wings and ribs and bottled beer and the two guys with the guitars who played Buffett and Skynyrd and Steve Earle and whoever else you called out. He had loved the bush hog and its rhythm and cutting in the hot-ass sun in July and sweating until he couldn’t sweat anymore and the neat rows he cut and the nameless cows and their calves that had fed off their land. He had loved the girl with the red toenails and their quiet spot along the gravel road and what they had discovered together in the summer nights with the windows down and the mosquitoes at their bare bodies. He had loved baseball practice and the thwack of the ball coming off the bat and sliding headfirst and the ridiculous dugout conversations and winning. He had loved the sting of a sunburn. He had loved the blooming dogwood trees in the sprawling lawns of the antebellum homes in Biloxi. He had loved riding up and down Highway 90 with a cooler of beer and two or three buddies and all the bullshit they fed one another and cranking up the radio to the hair metal. He had loved the excitement of the coast once the casinos started going up and he had loved the jingle-jangle of the slot machines and the free drinks you got while playing blackjack and he had loved the long-legged waitresses in the fishnet stockings who brought them to you. He had loved the first warm day and smell of her suntan lotion and he had loved taking a blanket to the beach at night and her falling asleep with her head on his chest and the way the stars looked as he held his hand on her back and felt her breathing. He had loved marrying her in bare feet, standing on the dock with the ocean out before them. He had loved the buildings that he framed and he had loved going to the cooler he kept in the back of the truck at the end of a long, hot day and the sound the beer can made when he popped it open. He had loved the gleam in her eyes when she came out of the bathroom and nodded and said you’re gonna be a daddy and he had loved that she wasn’t scared of the storms and he promised her he would stick it out because this is our home and it can’t last forever and he had loved sitting on the living room floor and thinking about baby names. He had loved that it was going to be a girl.

He lifted his fists out of the ground. Small imprints where he had been pressing filled with water. He didn’t know if she were there or if the earth beneath her tombstone was as vacant as the earth beneath the child’s.

His fingers dripped with muddy water and he held out his hand and watched the brown drops fall from his fingertips. He then got up from his knees and walked back to the house, refusing to turn around and look again.

He went inside and in the kitchen he climbed up on a chair and slid over the ceiling tile and took out the cigar box. He took out all the money, a stack of hundred-dollar bills. He then reached up into the ceiling again and felt around once more and his fingers found the knife his grandfather had given him. It was a bowie knife in a leather sheath and he took out the knife and the blade was a smooth and clean silver from the years that the boy and then the man had taken care to shine it. He slid the knife back into the sheath and then snapped the sheath onto his belt loop. He tossed the cigar box back up into the ceiling and moved the tile into place. Then he stepped down from the chair and folded the stack of bills and put them in the front pocket of his jeans.

In the front room the pillow from the cot was on the floor. He picked it up and removed the pillowcase and began rummaging through the kitchen, filling it with whatever he could find. The remaining bottles of water and the nearly empty pint of whiskey and the aspirin. Knocked onto the floor in haste were a can of pears and small tins of Vienna sausage and two cans of green beans and a pack of crackers. In the bottom cabinets he had a spare flashlight and a few feet of rope and some duct tape. It all went into the pillowcase and then he walked to the hallway closet, and what clothes were left he put in. Some random socks and faded T-shirts and underwear and a long-sleeve shirt. In the front room he looked again in the closet where the shotgun and .22 had been. A couple of paperbacks were on the floor and a pair of work gloves and half a box of dog biscuits. He took the random items and he tossed the pillow case over his shoulder like a white-bearded man with a sleigh waiting outside. He walked around the side of the house and set the sack on the ground next to the generator, then he pulled the cap off the spark plug and unscrewed the plug and put it in his pocket. He took out his knife and cut the gas line and he unplugged the extension cord and sliced it through.