Kent Haruf - Our Souls at Night

Where will you be?

We’ll be sleeping here, right next to you.

All night?

Yes.

He went to sleep and Louis and Addie came into the tent after an hour and got undressed and lay down and held hands and looked at the stars up through the mesh window of the tent. There was the sharp pine smell of the trees.

Isn’t it nice like this, Addie said.

In the morning they had pancakes and eggs and bacon and then tidied up the camp and put the food and cooking pans in the cooler in the back of the pickup and drove up farther in the mountains on the highway to Monarch Pass and stopped and got out at the Continental Divide and looked out over the western slope and if their eyes had been good enough and if they could have seen over the curvature of the earth they could have seen the Pacific Ocean a thousand miles away across the mountains. At noon they drove back to their camp and ate cheese sandwiches and apples and drank cold water from the old-fashioned well, pumping it out with the green pump handle, and then took a hike up to the waterfalls on North Fork Creek and sat and watched the water crash down into the clear green pool below. When they hiked down to the bottom, the air was cooler near the falls, the air misted on their faces.

They returned to camp and Addie and Louis set up folding camp chairs in the shade by the creek and read their books. The boy and the dog wandered around in the surrounding trees.

Can we take a walk somewhere, Jamie said.

You can follow the creek, Louis said. Which way do you think it’s running?

Down there.

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I don’t know.

Because it’s going downhill. Water always wants to flow to a lower place. Where do you want to go?

That way.

That’s downhill. Down-river. To get back here to camp what would you do?

Turn around.

Smart boy. Follow the creek up-river and come back to our tent. Your grandma and I’ll be waiting for you. Try it once. Go a little ways and then come back. Take Bonny with you. But don’t cross the creek anywhere. Stay on this side.

The boy and the dog went down away from the campground and came back and then went farther down and poked around in the rocks and examined the shining mica and climbed on the big boulders and lay looking down into the water. Then they moved back up the creek.

What did you see? Louis said.

We didn’t see any bears. But there was a deer.

What did Bonny do?

She barked at it. We just turned around. That’s all we did.

In the evening they made another small fire and Addie cut up onions and peppers and put them in butter in the iron skillet and put in the ground-up hamburger and tomato sauce and a spoonful of sugar and Worcestershire sauce and a quarter cup of ketchup and salt and pepper, a sauce she’d made before they left home, and now stirred it all together and laid a lid on the pan. Louis and Jamie got out the hamburger buns and the leftover chips from the day before and set everything ready on the table, all the plates and unbreakable cups. Jamie took the dog and the empty jug do the Bwrown Palace Ho

In early August Gene came out from Grand Junction to visit and Addie and Jamie met him at the door.

I don’t see the dog you’ve been telling me about, he said.

She’s at Louis’s house, Jamie said.

You call him Louis?

Yes. He said to.

They went in and Gene took his bags upstairs to the back bedroom where Jamie and the dog slept and put the bags on the bed.

I’ll stay in here with you in my old room.

What about Bonny?

She can’t sleep in here with both of us.

She always sleeps with me.

We’ll see how it goes.

They went back downstairs and in the late afternoon Louis came over to say hello and he brought the dog along. Jamie knelt down in front of her and petted her and took her outside to play in the yard.

Stay out of the street, Gene said.

We do this all the time, Dad. They went on out.

Gene looked at Louis. I hear you stay here with my mother too.

Some nights I do.

What’s that about?

Friendship. For one thing.

What are you doing? Addie said. You know about this.

What am I doing? My mother’s sleeping with an old neighbor man while my son’s in the other room and I’m not supposed to ask about it.

That’s right. How can this be any of your business?

It’s my business if my son is here.

There’s nothing to see, Louis said. I don’t think it’s hurting him. I wouldn’t be here if I thought so.

I don’t think you’re the one to judge. You’re getting what you want. Why would you care about a boy that belongs to somebody else?

But I do care about him.

Well, you can stop. I don’t want him to be affected by this. I know about you. When I was a kid I heard about you.

What about me?

Louisart doesn’t matter" title="125">How you left your wife and daughter for some other woman.

That was over forty years ago.

It still happened.

And I’m sorry it did. But I can’t go back and fix it now. Louis watched him for a moment. I think I’ll leave. This isn’t helping anything.

I’ll call you later, Addie told him.

He stood and went out.

Why are you being this way? Addie said. What’s wrong with you?

I don’t want my son to be hurt.

You don’t think he’s already been hurt by his father and mother this summer?

Yes, I do think so. And now it’s getting worse.

You don’t know what you’re talking about. He’s far better now than when you left him here. And if you want to know the truth Louis has been good for him.

Because he’s after your money too, isn’t he?

Whatever are you talking about now?

If you married him he’d get half of everything, wouldn’t he? I couldn’t stop him.

We’re not getting married. And he’s not interested in my money. My God, what little you must think of me.

He looked away. I don’t know what I’m going to do. Iȁ. If we do it&

Louis said, It was awful for her that last year. She was just always sick. They tried chemotherapy and radiation and that slowed it for a while but it was still there and it never was out of her system completely. She got worse and she didn’t want to have any more treatments. She was just wasting away.

I remember, Addie said. I wanted to help.

I know. You and all the others brought food. I appreciated that. And the flowers.

But I never saw her in her bedroom.

No. She didn’t want any company upstairs except Holly and me. She didn’t want anybody to see her, how she looked then in the last months. And she didn’t want to talk. She was afraid of death. Nothing I said made any difference.

Aren’t you afraid of death?

Not like I was. I’ve come to believe in some kind of afterlife. A return to our true selves, a spirit self. We’re just in this physical body till we go back to spirit.

I don’t know if I believe that, Addie said. Maybe you’re right. I hope you are.

We’ll see, won’t we. But not yet.

No, not yet, Addie said. I do love this physical world. I love this physical life with you. And the air and the country. The backyard, the gravel in the back alley. The grass. The cool nights. Lying in bed talking with you in the dark.

I love all that too. But Diane was worn out. At the end she was too tired and too weary to pay attention to her fears anymore. She wanted out, relief. An end to her suffering. She suffered terribly in the last months. So much pain. Even with sedatives and morphine. And she was still scared most of the time, underneath. I’d come in, I’d check her in the night and she’d be awake staring at the dark through the window. Can I help you? I’d say. No. Do you want something? No. I just want it to be over. Holly would help bathe her and would try to get her to eat but she wasn’t hungry. She wouldn’t eat anything. I suppose in some way she knew she was starving herself. She was so frail and tiny at the end, her legs and arms likeing it.