And then her father was gone again, having gone out, back to work. Lost in the spilling arcs, after father, leaves turn white. A storm. He drove her past the cemetery and she could not tell which of them was laughing. For the Public Health, there shall be no corpses in our water. On the page, the plain page, mother’s face, on the street, mother’s face, on the screen, mother’s face. Fruit rots. Smells sweet. Who remembered his name? Crawlers out of nowhere crawled along the walls. A town drowned. Doors battered frames in idle currents. Drifted along the edge in the foamy water thick with wrack. White froth. Splintered branches. Cast of papers and cans. The whole marina burned. A careless cigarette flicked where someone was fueling. A billow. A ripple on the water. Terrified knowing that something unseen moved beneath her.
One girl ate mud. She howled by those two trees on the far end of the playground. We dug for geodes and washed them in the rain, wished for car wrecks and loneliness, dying in each other’s wishes and our own, all the while, rippling like the skirt of bells, trying to ruin one another’s prayer. They held hands. In the sinkhole, black water. Papers bloomed a frost of white around it. Just junk that flittered out of truck beds. A victory of garbage, but where did the garbage go, all of this trash, all of this red wrapping paper ripped in spring from already forgotten trash, where did it go? Papers blossom on the slope by bushes.
Through the clatter, the neighborhood boys climbed the tree, higher, past where Leah climbed, where she came down crying over the splinter, past the rusted wire that passed through the trunk, puckered wooden lips holding it in place and that splinter in her palm and she watched. The man laughing with a glowing red light in his mouth raised the BB gun and fired at the boys’ bare thighs, already red from the gray bark.
The town, sunk low and spread out, a watery sigh rolled off of the slow breathing heaves of hills to the south, lost momentum in between swells of slow-swooning rock. At night, light pin-holed the shapeless ground and shimmered through the murk of trees and houses, a quiet chunk of fallen above in danger of being swallowed. Low sunk and spread out, frightfully black water seeping through the soles of her shoes, old street names. Fluorescent street lamps did nothing to empty the darkness but deepened it with soft light that showed edges and sounded depths. Summer arrived later than usual, scented with weight, slurring along the ground, refracting sullen rock and earth, the ground doubles, the sighing ground sighed. Cascading hollers, bright plumes. From their father’s shoulders Jacob saw the neighbor set off fireworks. Jacob’s eyes wide. Jacob’s mouth open. The whole night drawn in light. Her mother sat on the step and they watched the joyous fires and all of that color with squealing strings of sound, sparkling spirits chased the neighborhood boys down the driveway and through the yard and the neighbor’s father looned. The Shepherds then went in, the lights done. Night like catfish, gills pushed stars to the surface of her face.
“Jacob!” Mrs. Shepherd called. “Jacob! Goddamnit. Jacob!”
THREE
THE OFFICE FULL OF WHISPERS, HUMS, AND GLASS. Storage for years of client files. Worn hardwood floors with worn rugs. Outdated copies of the Kentucky Revised Statutes sat on shelves, undisturbed. The women waited with their children and Leah Shepherd met with staff to work on caseload distribution and met with clients to divine what was needed.
The woman told about what happened to her daughter. “The boys were howling and it filled up the school and they didn’t do nothing about it.” Leah flipped through the file, the pleadings, the invoices, the notices, without looking up.
Below the department store’s gleaming fluorescent lights trapped in plastic honeycombs, fathers with children chirped along, the young bleating and bobbing, mothers swayed sweetly as they talk at babies and young husbands with young wives filled up plastic carts with the first supplies for their first homes, first bedsheets and first detergent bottles, impulsively adding a bit of chocolate or a small bag of fruit-flavored candy, and then, handing over weathered bills or signing a credit slip, they slipped out into the evening, the new night, bags in hand, eager to get home and put everything in its place.
Mrs. Shepherd burned a candle on the stove to destroy the dominion of the smell that had crept into the house over the winding years. Yellow-edged books annotated with mildew. A possum waited in the green trash can. Another sip of sherry in secret after a long night. Leah startled herself with her own shadow and in the burrow of her bed, window open, spring again, her mother asking how work was, happy to have her daughter for the night.
The house was alien to Leah, though her parents had lived in it for seventeen years. When she thought about her mother and father rattling around their house, she thought of them in the old house on St. Mildred’s Court. When she thought of Main Street, she thought of the department stores and diners and offices that had been there when she was a child, ones that had long since closed, been sold, or changed their names.
There were two Crow Stations, one superimposed atop the other, one seething with light and color and people walking along real sidewalks in the new rays of the young sun and it was not the one she saw out the window of her office, an office that had been hers for several years, but which always looked unreal and borrowed. In the afternoons, as the work day slowed and the women in the office began to get ready to leave for the day, she would sit and look out the window and try and drink any of that old light that might still be out there, recede into the folds of memory that flickered and cut and consumed so many of her hours.
A work-desk. A placid place. Blank gray Formica and illusory wood-grain. Gnats disappearing into a dream, dust on shoes, rainwater evaporating. In a conference room, ceiling tiles droop damply like a jowl. Old plaster buckles and paint peels in bathrooms, but the grant money is gone, given to minimum payments that must be paid on mortgages to keep the bank at bay. The staff sip tangy cups of coffee from chipped mugs and talk about nothing. Leah nods as she gets a cup herself and slips back into her office, ignoring the flashing light on her phone. A door can be closed and the world beyond extinguished. Look at the computer screen, at the numbers in rows, at the PAGES INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK— And then sips her cup of coffee. Eventually you learn to not see the horrid design of the wallpaper peeling around you.
The nonprofit was incorporated as a 501(c)3 in 1988 by a group of Harrod County business people, church leaders, and Judge Whitehead to provide basic services to low income women and their children in the community. The nonprofit’s original director retired in the fall of 2006 and in 2007 Leah Shepherd was announced as executive director. Ms. Shepherd is a Crow Station native. She graduated from Crow Station High School in 1990, Transylvania University in 1994 with a degree in economics and from North Carolina State University with a masters in nonprofit management. Prior to this position, Ms. Shepherd worked for various public interest groups in Lexington and Frankfort. All are very pleased to have Ms. Shepherd—