At the funeral. “Listen, now is the time. Now we invest. I know you have some money saved up. Listen, listen, I will provide the labor. Listen, do you want a drink? Listen, just a sip? We can buy. We can buy and then reinvest. Listen, do you want some of this or not?” A gallery of chins. A swell of coughing voices. The preacher begins to preach and gets it all wrong.
Pouring out sugar and salt and crying for more soda. “Underneath mountains are giants buried long before any of us were even thought about in God’s mind. If you took to mind to move a big hunk of water with your two palms pushed outward—” Children like paper falling.
She watched gutters, toothed with ice or bearded with leaves in flame. And the yellow grass of the yard that she watched her mother mow. She watched the viaduct. Names bloomed underneath and faded with the years. A cut of sky, the gray and blue.
There was a playground on the side of the old elementary school that was never used, but the swings swung in the shade of still maples. She watched the windows. Can you hear the howling? The perfect place to perch on a summer night and not be seen.
She walked all over town, watching her own warped self reflected in the windows of the empty department stores. In Constitution Square, two men held hands forever as the circles of governors watch. The log cabins stood empty, their wood walls tattooed with names by knives. There was a walled garden behind the apothecary.
The Shakers built two houses in one house. Two houses to keep the boys and girls apart. Two houses to divide the bodies to enrich the spirit. And work. And toil. And bodies given to the enthusiasm of true spirit. A divided room for dances. All the old hymns that she now sung. And the grass grew and grew and here she found old Easter eggs still hidden in the half of the closet that had been Jacob’s.
The girl calls and they fight. Over what? Nothing that either could reckon. The next day, the girl didn’t call and Leah walked to her grandparents’ house and she found the girl on the deck, reading and they sat uncomfortably for a while and then half-forgot what they were fighting about and went for a drive around the country, but didn’t say much of anything at all. The only friend she’d made. The girl’s sisters were bright shadows like older siblings always are.
Derrick Green asked her what high school was like and she said, “I can’t remember.”
The house abandoned at the far end of the field. They approach on foot by starlight, skirting lowing blobs. Word was the house was haunted. Of course it would be. How could it not? Collapsing porch. Empty and slumping. A rotting tooth from some other time. A fine old home at the end of a long lane that must have been owned by a wealthy family but which now sat empty, slipping to seed at the far end of a cow pasture.
A piano in an empty salon and nothing else. Broken glass glittered in the beams of small flashlights. Light steps on worn wooden floor. All silent but their breathing and heart-beating. Written on the walls were the names of bands no one remembered and loves long since lost, fallen to some ruin. Nothing but tears on a car’s seat covers.
Leah went to play the piano, but couldn’t bear to hear the sound it made. She heard the girl upstairs walking around, she stopped playing the piano, thought about what she’d written earlier, played a chord, listened for footsteps.
The girl’s grandparents were doting lumps in synthetic fibers. The girl grabbed Leah’s hair and told her that she thought it was terribly cute and that she wanted to cut hers all off as well, but she never did. Leah liked that the girl did not look at her the way that nearly everyone else in Crow Station did. To the girl, Leah was just another friend, a temporary summer friend. Another nobody. Yet, something in Leah made her want to tell the girl all about Jacob, about the reflecting pool, about the boys, about what Leah heard, the voice calling her name, what she never told anyone. Leah wanted to shout it at the girl as the girl was stuffing her pockets with candy and coolly walking out of a gas station. Leah wanted to crack the cement in her throat and scream, I have secrets too and they are worse than a pocket of candy.
That woman woke before the purple night became blue, beneath the bones of branches black and cross-hatched, the damp ground was soft. Quills of unmown grass. That stream ran. The stream that ran through town. That ran from the top edge of town down through and out the bottom. The brown water gushing along moss-browned rock, sun-bleached bottles, crushed cans, overturned clothes washers, avocado green, rusted out, worn, crumbling, washing away in red rivulets in the brown water of the stream. Lifting up, crackling awake, jeans soft with dew, palms pressed out into earth, rising again. A few bare roots, her bag leaned against a trunk. Folded in folds of roots. She crouched at the stream’s slippery lip, leaned. Hands cupped. Two pools. A face shivering. She shivered. Several faces. For a moment she could see herself without knowing herself, raw and bare, and she licked dried sweat from the corner of her mouth. Hers in the pools and the wriggling of muscles in her back. The confusion of birds’ throats. Water waking up. Pulled from a plastic container her makeup and a mirror and put on her face. Cars passing on the street just beyond the break of trees. Wading out, toe and then ankle and then shin deep, but no more, for a moment bare, stretching bare arms and bare chest and bare legs with aching knees and crouching again as the brown water buffets her brown body and splashing water and fresh gashes and cracked skin and then into gray jeans and sweatshirt and everything else into her bag, just in case and up the embankment by the overpass where the cars pass. Crow Station Antique Mall. Shuttered. Cluttered. Dusty window and faded Confederate Flag. No Trespassing Property of the CSA. Wooden cross and brass cross and praying porcelain figurine. A school bus half empty with children from the Christian Home and their faces grace the panes as the yellow beast bustles past, gawking down as she soldiers along. A dip and over a curb and down beneath the viaduct to cross the tracks to the abandoned train station. Bricks in crumbling green and red with loose mortar. Men along the lip of the loading dock of the candy warehouse, taking a break watch her wander. Spit from soft chin. Chuck chuck. Rumble above and the walls creeping with fading names. Slices of howls, howls through her sweatshirt. Howls through her skin. Howls settling in. A group of men clamored her face, but she pulled out of the howl and kept along the sidewalk by the old house cut to pieces with the cluster of plastic things along the dirt yard. A man from church her mother brought to talk to her had howled out from within her and the man her mother married had howled and she kept those too, but the first one had been so distant, its own voice was lost in the chorus of them howling. The old buildings, the paths of the college, the young milling and darting. The young in tangles. Clumps. Weaving. A girl’s French braid amiss, strands threaded wrong, hairs pulled apart, out and tangled. The braid ruined from being rolled on. The arms in legs in arms and arms. The lithe writing. Forgetting. Cars and cars and they looked but those that passed on foot found interest in the gutter. She stomped and stepped and waited at the crosswalks to pass. The passing booms of bass. The petals of treble. The muffled words. The courthouse looms behind the garden. The bell tower. Hands. Long black. Nearly pointing to God. She sat on a bench and rested and watched the people pass. Men in suits. Women in suits. Men in pickup trucks and white vans. Women in skirts and sweatpants with children gaggling along. Young women with long hair and long denim skirts, hair covered. Young men with long necks angled awkwardly. Chins covered in black or blond hair. Lips with downy coating. Goslings. Young women in tight jeans, clutching curves of hips. In yellow jackets with fur-lined hoods. The young with hands to their faces, speaking into their palms. Men and women looking down into their palms. Looking down and flitting fingers skating along. A woman in a floral dress floated with two men behind her. One in a suit. The other in overalls. Comb-over, bearded. The woman looked ahead, but her eyes were elsewhere. She floated. The men trudged. The man in the suit slumped and shivered. The man in the overalls rolled. They went in and by the fountain where the town’s children’s pennies constellated, a young man in a black shirt and black jeans set up an empty bucket and a small amplifier and began to sound the Word. And then along the street, Romans on sign and pillars of marble. BAPTIST CHVRCH. Porticos. Verandas. Ivy. Maple. Holly. Oak. Elm. Blue. White. Brick and brick. Bones of the Earth. The smell of woodstove and exhaust. Sedans pulling from drive, pausing to look at the passing cars and sliding out into the stream and they paused to watch as she stood, waiting for them to be gone, the men with moustaches and without. Bending over. Craning. Growling in the rustling dark. The dark quailed. Had the howling been there at birth or had it been left in her. She was the dark. When there was nothing, it was just her. Weak billowing clouds. Gray sky rumpled like a quilt cast aside. The street ended at the gates of the cemetery.