Lone and level sands stretch far away

Something inside her had cracked. I could not change her mind. That last night, I put my hand to the crest of her back to help her down from the broken barn ladder. She turned to me and her hands fell softly to my waist. There was a moment where I started to say something, and then our mouths met softly. Blue swallows dove in and out of the rafters, and we made love one last time on a blanket in the empty horse stall. Like the other times, it was dream-like and beautiful.

When I opened my eyes, she was pulling on her jeans and light was drifting through the broken slats in the barn wall. She faced away from me, and I couldn’t think of a damn thing to say. She said “I still love you”. She wouldn’t tell me where she was going. A splintered- crack within her had become a chasm, hungry and insistent.

After we buried our baby, everything inside her broke.

There are long roads around here that stretch past green farms that seem endless to me. Silos jut into skies as blue as sapphire. Some nights, in the first months living here, I would grab two beers after dinner and drive the truck down any road I didn’t already know. She needed space and I was trying to get lost to find my way back. I drove around and disappeared. Farm roads stretched forever.

Thinking back, I shouldn’t have left her alone with the child that night. Sometimes she seemed so lost in her silent stupor that she didn’t hear his little whimpers and cries. After my drive, I came into the house and the record player was skipping. A whiskey bottle was on the kitchen table. I found Leeanne passed out on the couch and I went upstairs to check the baby’s crib. It was empty. I saw the bathroom light through the cracked door; a pink towel was folded on the floor.

The rest is like a movie blurred. I found him silent in the water. He was tinted blue, with eyes rolled toward the back of his head. My knees hit the tile floor and I scooped him up. Water dribbled from his lips and a small gasp made me believe he was alive there for a minute. But he was already getting cold. His small body felt still and empty against me.

Around here, it gets stormy at night during the summer. Hot air passing over the western hills collides with cool air from the plains. Sometimes in the dark, a lightning flash will blind you for a few seconds. Like a strobe imprint upon the inside of your skull, you see the repeated silhouette of the land lit by fire. Your black world is cracked open.

Something like that happened inside my head. I sat there distorted with pain; tears came, but I was gasping for breath and couldn’t make a sound. My lungs felt filled with sand or blood. Everything was blurry and the baby seemed impossibly light in my arms. Already a shell.

I remember wrapping him in the pink towel, putting him in the crib, and going downstairs. With shaking hands, I poured myself a bourbon. I smoked two cigarettes while the skipping record continued to thump like a little heartbeat. I was pouring another glass when, half asleep and mostly drunk, she filled the kitchen door frame. I couldn’t look up. Our eyes never met, but suddenly remembering, she turned quick and made for the bathroom upstairs.

I was still at the kitchen table when her screams began. They cut through everything, and I thought the windows upstairs were going to burst. I couldn’t go to her. I sat in that chair until the windows began to glow with pink dawn. She stayed crumpled on the floor crying next to the crib, Carl wrapped in that little towel. She howled sounds that resembled language but were not words. The wooden floors and walls echoed; they repeated pain back to us.

We moved out here from Cincinnati after her father died. His neighbor had found him faced down, sprawled next to a shattered coffee cup. They say he was dead before the cup hit the floor. Major heart attack. Her mom had died in a car wreck four years earlier. Leanne bore this new grief silently and it ate her up. She felt distant to me. We still made love all the time, but she would be quiet afterwards. She started drinking more. Only now, her inebriation was private; the liquor made her silent like a flower collapsing into itself.

That was a year ago.

Two years before that, I met Leanne in the back hall of Mickeys Last Tavern, a dark and smoky little bar on the east end where locals drank hard. I was working construction, and the company put a few guys up in a hotel so that we could get the work done before deadline. I found Mickeys the second night in town. I went there almost every night for the next two weeks. I drank as much as I could before going back to the room and passing out drunk in front of the TV.

It was a Monday night- “two for one shots”. She was headed past me, and I turned sideways to let her by, but she bumped me anyway. Her hand reached out and grazed my thigh. She looked at me with deep green eyes, smiled and said, “What do you got?”

She was wild, I had no doubt. But it turned me on.

I kept looking into those eyes and said, “I've got money for the jukebox. Let me play you a perfect song.“

I played a Roy Orbison song. She was smart and funny. We talked for the next two hours without end. I kept shoving bills in the jukebox. It felt like we were the only two there. After several drinks, my head was spinning, and Tom Petty came on.

I paid the tab and we left together. She kissed me beneath a street light that hummed above us outside the bar. That electric sound seemed to come from the night itself. I was lost in her soft lips and pulled her whole body against me. We kissed for a long time. Slowly. Right there in the street at 2am. It still seems like a dream to me.

I think about that night all the time. Those big, heavy clouds floating past the moon; sidewalks empty except for us. We ended up on the hill overlooking the park by the river. We were lying in the grass when the sun started rising. In the first orange rays of light, her freckles glowed. I never went to work that day.

We moved in together soon after that. Her dad died a month before the baby was born. We ended up naming our boy after her father. I went along with it because I loved her more than I can explain here in words.

She got some money from selling her dad’s place and we used it to buy this little two-story farmhouse on five acres. It sits three hundred miles from where we met. She wanted to be someplace quiet and away from everything.

I remember when we found this house; she said the barn in back would perfect for a horse or two once we cleared it all out. She had always loved horses. We had enough money to get by until I found work again. There were no neighbors for a quarter mile, and stars shone through large white-paned windows on either side of our bed. I had a strong feeling that this was going to be our home for the rest of our lives.

If you go driving around here, you will see endless brown fields with rows that run forever. Some of these farms stretch straight until they meet the sky. They’ve been tilled 100 times over and look different in every season. Everything changes.

It was hard to find steady work, but the first few months were nice. She seemed happier. There were lots of repairs to do and we were both home with the baby. We spent time fixing up the house and getting the barn cleaned out for repairs. Some days we had lunch on a blanket underneath the old apple tree out back.

One afternoon, I came in from working on the barn and found her tearing up at the kitchen table. There was a glass of whiskey with melting ice and pictures of her old man and mother spread over the dining table. The baby was napping in his crib. I tried to talk to her but she wasn’t making any sense to me. She said it felt like her old man’s death had happened somewhere deep beneath water and far away. She said a wave from some distant black ocean was washing over her. I didn’t try to stop her from drinking. I wanted to see her on the other side of this. I sat quiet. She talked for a while, but then she had nothing to say.

A long stone road stretches back behind our property. Years ago, it led to a farm, but that’s just a tumble of broken timber back there now. I remember once she told me that broken pile reminded her of some old poem that was about time destroying everything. She had a poet’s mind. She was always talking about all kinds of poems.

When things were good, we would walk that road at dusk. We’d take turns carrying the baby and sharing a beer. The corn stretched high on one side and there were these big stones on the other where we sat in the tall grass. Sometimes out there, she would talk a bit. I would just wait to listen, sit sipping beer, watching the sky bleed at dusk.

When little Carl drowned, it was all over the news. We didn’t go into town after that. The trial was awful. I didn’t sleep at all for two weeks. I just remember Leanne standing before that jury in a haze of grief. I really think they let her off out of pity. She was obviously a broken woman.

The evening she left, I walked out past the barn and started up the stone road by myself. I heard that engine start, and then she drove the pickup out of the gravel drive and disappeared down the road. I was standing looking at some purple clouds drifting toward the fading sun. My hands stung and my chest was a brick. I still couldn’t cry. Time blurred.

Suddenly, I heard some soft moving in the grass to my right. Two doe stepped from the brush next to the corn field. They were deep auburn in the fading light. I didn’t move and their heads remained high and alert. A few moments later, from behind those two, this little fawn stepped out. He was lighter brown with a spotted coat- really beautiful. He stood on skinny legs, waited, and sniffed the air. I stayed right there long after they left; watched their white tails disappear back into the brush. I was trying to not think about lightning, and just waiting for the night to swallow me.