“Is someone knocking walls?” There was a rhythmic creaking upstairs, and they listened to the sound, faint and soft like a knuckle on wood. It continued unabated for a few minutes and then muffled voices and they scrambled for the doorknob and spilled out of the basement, slamming the door behind them and then they burst forth again from the house out into the bright but waning light of the day and were again racing across the grass, but they did not stop at the line of trees, beating the bushes and flying across a neighbor’s yard into another street where they finally stopped to leap and laugh. Later, their father angrily asked them if they’d been in the house that afternoon and Jacob pretended to eat candy.
Pale mountains made of water, the forgotten things, old memories, unexceptional moments they fade before Leah opened her eyes, all off in some unknown place together, a land of reverberations.
A black clock hanging on a white wall above the white sink, had stopped. A yellow field on her grandfather’s farm full of cows, heads lowered and lowing to themselves. A long wall, dry masonry, separated the field from his yard. In the center, an oak or maple or elm. Not knowing its name, she cannot remember what it was. The cows are gone, the field is empty, the tree has a disease of the bark. The fire goes out. The night remains night, however.
A replica of the night sky crudely described on the ceiling above their beds by their father. Glow in the dark stars in the shape of Orion and Cassiopeia and Ursa Major and Ursa Minor and Cancer and Taurus. During the day the cracks in the plaster were black rivers cutting a dry and white land, a bare place with no civilization. At night, the universe appeared before them and they watched as it faded and then there was nothing but the dark and the occasional light from a passing car.
The morning was warm. Each drop of light suspended in the air. Against the bricks, the ceiling was a universe of sun-bleached geometric forms and figures waiting for young imaginations to see them. A small head, muzzle drawn to a short point, a mark, a black eye or nostril. Running nymphs. Beasts raising up on hind legs. Maws gaping. Thick fingers. A long neck created by a drizzle of lines. Two bodies filled with scribble, arching outward with uneven appendages toward one another, but an insurmountable gulf of ceiling between them and all of those stars and their fading light.
“I’ve seen him,” Jacob says.
“Shush!”
When they were in the bathroom, washing the small cuts on their hands, their mother stopped in the door, her arms full of clothes. She looked at her children with a soft smile. She’d been angry when they both came home in ruined clothes, wet and reeking, and Jacob crying, and she’d been ready to take a belt to their thighs, but then she’d seen that they’d hurt themselves, the bloody palms, and she’d been filled with guilt at how angry she’d been and how that anger had felt so good in her lungs for a moment. “Wash up, you all. Wash up.” Tomorrow, she thought, I’ll pray about it. She was tired of praying about her husband, so it felt good to have something else to worry about. Wash where the blood reeks of splintered soil.
Mrs. Shepherd twisted around and looked back at the man. He flicked his tongue out and wagged it below his brown moustache. He would one day fall from a scaffold and end up in the University of Kentucky Medical Center in Lexington with a tube in his throat that allowed a machine to breathe for him. Unable to move, staring at the ceiling for hours when he woke, before they would prop him up and set the television on a station. This, however, is still a number of years off. Right now, he was laughing at the woman and grabbing himself.
The morning air, low lying, pregnant with morning light. Sunlight smeared over the hills and green leaves of the now full trees. All was still, dappled, right. That otherworldly haze draped over the world outside, something reserved for another life.
“I get up pretty early. I start showing houses as early as I can. My husband teaches. We’ve lived here for years. I spend a lot of time driving around, but it’s not so bad, the countryside and all—”
This commute gave Mrs. Shepherd lots of time in her gold Oldsmobile with her audiobooks. Six Steps to Personal Success and Wealth and Weight Loss. Each morning, golden sunrise behind her, she masticated maple-flavored sausage biscuits from Hardee’s, and each evening, sunset behind her, she sipped Biggie-sized sodas from Wendy’s. It kept her out of the house.
“I have a daughter. She runs a nonprofit for women.” There is a moment that she faces when meeting with new clients, the questions about her family, whether she says she has two children and then has to explain the loss of one or whether she says that she only has one and lets it go at that. When she has told people that she has two children and they ask what her son does, she is faced with a second choice — how much detail to go into. “We lost him.” Or, “He’s gone.” Or— What was too much? Too much for her, for the person listening. She never knew the right euphemism. Her instincts told her that people did not like being on the receiving end of such a story, especially in a business setting, when sitting down with a young couple, looking to buy their first home. A young couple with children of their own. Usually she opted to only name Leah and explain Leah’s work, which most people reacted positively to, but on occasion she met someone whom she felt a harmony with, who she sensed would be receptive to the story. Or perhaps she was only giving in, to the detriment of her sales numbers that month, to the sudden and periodic need to speak it, to give voice to her life, her loss. Perhaps the people she told didn’t want to hear this sad story any more than any other person at 10:15 in the morning looking at a 3 br, 2.5 bath, starter home in great neighborhood, great schools, central AC. Maybe her instincts were failing her and she was reading these few wrong. Or maybe some people cared enough that she could sense it. She didn’t know. “Look at how the light comes in.”
“You think he’s really going to do something? Like come here and shoot us up or something?”
“No, that would mean that he had to put pants on and go out.”
The abandoned pool of the Old Country Club was empty, an hourglass. The empty hourglass full of broken glass and sun-bleached cans glittering with slugs. On the crumbling plaster was written names of loves long since dead. Night held remaining moon. In the halls, cries were peeling paper. Horses sense haints. “Some of you are living in loneliness. Like a bird in a sack.” The preacher shuffled his papers, forgot the passage. In the summer, weeks are all the same. “The soil cries with his blood that only the Lord can hear. This mark to protect him against every hand.”