Bonnie Nadzam - Lions

She saw the great plates of stone uplifted in the distance that she knew Gordon had seen in summer. She drove through the same towers of granite. She saw snow — new snow, now — on the cracked ridge of the mountains to the west. She came to the North Star motel, but it was wrecked, a ruin, rotted away. On the beds through the window the blankets were water stained, the mattresses turned, everything seeded with mouse shit and torn into rags and loose fibers by their tiny claws and teeth. She drove four hours, five, darkness closing in above her, knowing Boyd would be counting the hours. She flashed her lights. She turned the radio up. She pulled over and looked around and called his name, but the wind carried it away. There was nothing as far as the eye could see. No trees. No shrubs. No birds. No telephone poles. No cabin. There was nowhere anyone or anything could hide.

It didn’t happen like this. You were young and someone or something out there was supposed to give you the space to learn and make amends, to make things right. It was a big country; it was big enough to make things right. That was its promise: everything could be made new, improved, made right.

On a frigid morning in mid-December, Boyd rose in the dark and left May sleeping beside him. He made coffee in the kitchen and stood before the sliding glass doors that opened to May’s gardens, chicken coop, and the endless weedy fields behind. In the distance the sugar beet factory took shape as the sky behind it brightened from navy to gray. He took another sip of his coffee, then cinched the belt on his robe and stepped outside. It was cold. The air smelled like snow, the sky banked up with thick clouds. He squinted across the fields.

Back inside he took several cans of soup, beans, and vegetables from May’s pantry and set them in a paper bag. He opened the refrigerator and took out a small jar of golden jam, from the gooseberry bushes on the side of the house. It was precious fare. Coffee grounds, into a plastic baggie and into the paper bag. A mug. He opened the freezer. May’s chocolate bars. One of those, into the bag. He paused, thinking. Beans, sardines, and peaches. He found the first two, but no peaches. He slipped his feet into his old, rubber-soled slippers, and walked outside.

He crossed the yard to the Walkers’, his bones aching in the cold, and left the bag outside behind the shop, just beside the curve of a rusted fender skirt from a 1969 Buick Electra. When he was back in the warm kitchen, he took out a skillet and six eggs, leftovers from the pot roast two nights before, and fried it all up in a beautiful mess. By the time May came into the kitchen in her own robe, he’d set the table, poured the orange juice, and made a fresh pot of coffee. He pulled out her chair, and kissed her on the cheek as she sat down, sleepy-headed and smiling. Two mornings later, the paper bag was gone.

They didn’t hear from Leigh that Christmas or New Year’s. May cried over it with Georgie, their fingers interlaced on Georgie’s kitchen table.

“Our kids,” May said.

“I know it.”

The winter passed without sight of either Gordon or Leigh, and those who remained in Lions fell into a regular pattern of visiting, of eating, of maintaining the tidiness of their homes and of Jefferson Street, empty as it was.

Boyd repeated his routine with canned goods once every ten or fifteen days through February, and then in spring and summer, taking pleasure in making new selections at the grocery store in Burnsville. Bristling sardines. Block of sharp cheddar. Bag of green apples. Once the following autumn when Boyd went to check the supply, it looked like it’d been a good month since anyone had come; the last paper bag had dissolved in rain so that the canned food labels were bleached, and some of them had crumbled and slipped off. He thought that was discourteous, leaving it all out unlabeled like that. So he began leaving the canned food and anything else they had to share in the factory itself, in an old metal dairy crate, out of the weather. Though it sometimes took several weeks, even months, eventually everything they set out was taken.

Most everyone assumed Gordon had died. He would not have left his mother, he would not have left the shop. But Georgianna claimed to see him regularly, and she spoke freely of their meetings. Whether in snow or rain or heat, all of those who remained — Dock or Annie Sterling, or May or Boyd, or two of them together — took turns bringing her mashed potatoes and meat loaf and applesauce and pie. They took turns paying her electrical and water bills, and eventually purchasing the goods that Boyd would take out Sunday evenings, passing through the only remaining hay in the county to the line where the cultivated fields met the wild weeds and litter of the factory. He circled around the back of the old building and slipped under the fence where Gordon and Leigh used to, until he got tired of that and Dock went out with a pair of wire cutters to make a passage through the chain-link.

Within a few years Georgianna herself passed away in her sleep and was laid to rest beside John Walker, and when Boyd got sick and needed to be closer to a hospital, the lights went out in Lions. Dock helped May nail boards over the windows of the Lucy Graves and the bar, and she drove Boyd to Laramie the same day, never to return, herself. That left only the Sterlings. Eventually, Dock’s hair was as white as whorled milkweed floating in the dark, early mornings, as he tended his hogs. Annie’s older brother in Kansas sent money, sometimes, Dock sold his hogs, and they got by. Almost no one came to the shop anymore but once or twice a year — someone from Burnsville who knew Dock was reliable, or someone from up by Horses who needed a small job done, a trailer fixed, a hog kennel repaired. Occasionally he was given a project he didn’t know how to execute, but he’d talk through the work-up out loud with Gordon or with John, and figure it out. He kept the shop clean and kept all the Walkers’ beautiful machines in running order, and he kept everything where it was — never moved or touched the Walkers’ coffee cups from their place on the workbench. Dock was very clear that it was he who was the visitor — the guest in that workshop, and then in the house itself, when Georgianna passed and left it to the Sterlings. He refused to sell any of the equipment, though God knew they could’ve used the income.

By then it was Annie who had taken over from Boyd the task of the canned food, blankets, and five-gallon water drums, though the boys, as she called them, often helped her drive out the latter on their ATVs. It was the kind of job Emery liked.

She went in all weathers, in Dock’s big sheepskin coat in late fall or winter, or in summer, her nightgown sighing against her blue veined legs as she crossed the summer grass, or across the iron gray furze in February and March. In slippers she climbed the metal staircase to the first landing and left there, right by the old awl, a can of cling peaches. A can of beans. Occasionally a new warm blanket, a little firewood, a note: Thinking of you here. Beautiful sunrise yesterday morning. Supposed to be a big snow. Happy Easter. We love you.

These days, everyone’s gone. If you were to take an unmarked county road off of the highway and drive north an hour, if you could find the place, distinguishable by its high rusted water tower and abandoned sugar beet factory, you could stand in the middle of Jefferson Street and hear each note from each barn swallow floating through the air like a globe of silver. In the silence between, blood singing in your ears.

For ten years, then fifteen and seventeen, Leigh didn’t go back. She finished college, dated, tried on different jobs, met her husband, married, had two children — did all the things everyone does. When she heard from May over the phone, May said nothing about the Walkers. In everything her mother asked — How were the kids? How was work? — Leigh heard: I’m not going to bring it up; you bring it up. But Leigh would never, and she always had to pour a glass of white wine afterward.