He closed his eyes, breathed deeply, shook his head. When he opened them the stench had passed and his nostrils filled with the nip of early morning. The last of the moon faded like a melting snowflake. Puffy white clouds sailed along the heavens and light tripped across the tops of the trees, fell between them, made shadows run low along the trunks and across the ground. The sky turned light blue and the frost dried off the drooping grass and it sprang to attention. Birds began to sing. Grasshoppers began to jump.
He continued down the path that crossed the field and split the trees. As he went, he tried to remember exactly where his house was and how it looked and how it smelled, and most important, how he felt when he was inside it. He tried to remember his wife and how she looked and how he felt when he was inside her, and all he could find in the back of his mind was a cipher of a woman younger than he was in a long, colorless dress in a house with three rooms. He couldn’t even remember her nakedness, the shape of her breasts and the length of her legs. It was as if they had met only once, and in passing.
When he came through the trees and out on the other side, the field was there as it should be, and it was full of bright blue and yellow flowers. Once it had been filled with tall corn and green bursts of beans and peas. It hadn’t been plowed now in years, most likely since he left. He followed the trail and trudged toward his house. It stood where he had left it. It had not improved with age. The chimney was black at the top and the unpainted lumber was stripping like shedding snakeskin. He had cut the trees and split them and made the lumber for the house, and like everything else he had seen since he had returned, it was smaller than he remembered. Behind it was the smokehouse he had made of logs, and far out to the left was the outhouse he had built. He had read many a magazine there while having his morning constitutional.
Out front, near the well, which had been built up with stones and now had a roof over it supported on four stout poles, was a young boy. He knew immediately it was his son. The boy was probably eight. He had been four years old when Deel had left to fight in the Great War, sailed across the vast dark ocean. The boy had a bucket in his hand, held by the handle. He set it down and raced toward the house, yelling something Deel couldn’t define.
A moment later she came out of the house and his memory filled up. He kept walking, and the closer he came to her, standing framed in the doorway, the tighter his heart felt. She was blond and tall and lean and dressed in a light-colored dress on which were printed flowers much duller than those in the field. But her face was brighter than the sun, and he knew now how she looked naked and in bed, and all that had been lost came back to him, and he knew he was home again.
When he was ten feet away the boy, frightened, grabbed his mother and held her, and she said, “Deel, is that you?”
He stopped and stood, and said nothing. He just looked at her, drinking her in like a cool beer. Finally he said, “Worn and tired, but me.”
“I thought…”
“I didn’t write cause I can’t.”
“I know…but…”
“I’m back, Mary Lou.”
THEY SAT STIFFLY AT the kitchen table. Deel had a plate in front of him and he had eaten the beans that had been on it. The front door was open and they could see out and past the well and into the flower-covered field. The window across the way was open too, and there was a light breeze ruffling the edges of the pulled-back curtains framing it. Deel had the sensation he’d had before when crossing the field and passing through the trees, and when he had first seen the outside of the house. And now, inside, the roof felt too low and the room was too small and the walls were too close. It was all too small.
But there was Mary Lou. She sat across the table from him. Her face was clean of lines and her shoulders were as narrow as the boy’s. Her eyes were bright, like the blue flowers in the field.
The boy, Winston, was to his left, but he had pulled his chair close to his mother. The boy studied him carefully, and in turn, Deel studied the boy. Deel could see Mary Lou in him, and nothing of himself.
“Have I changed that much?” Deel said, in response to the way they were looking at him. Both of them had their hands in their laps, as if he might leap across the table at any moment and bite them.
“You’re very thin,” Mary Lou said.
“I was too heavy when I left. I’m too skinny now. Soon I hope to be just right.” He tried to smile, but the smile dripped off. He took a deep breath. “So, how you been?”
“Been?”
“Yeah. You know. How you been?”
“Oh. Fine,” she said. “Good. I been good.”
“The boy?”
“He’s fine.”
“Does he talk?”
“Sure he talks. Say hello to your daddy, Winston.”
The boy didn’t speak.
“Say hello,” his mother said.
The boy didn’t respond.
“That’s all right,” Deel said. “It’s been a while. He doesn’t remember me. It’s only natural.”
“You joined up through Canada?”
“Like I said I would.”
“I couldn’t be sure,” she said.
“I know. I got in with the Americans, a year or so back. It didn’t matter who I was with. It was bad.”
“I see,” she said, but Deel could tell she didn’t see at all. And he didn’t blame her. He had been caught up in the enthusiasm of war and adventure, gone up to Canada and got in on it, left his family in the lurch, thinking life was passing him by and he was missing out. Life had been right here and he hadn’t even recognized it.
Mary Lou stood up and shuffled around the table and heaped fresh beans onto his plate and went to the oven and brought back cornbread and put it next to the beans. He watched her every move. Her hair was a little sweaty on her forehead and it clung there, like wet hay.
“How old are you now?” he asked her.
“How old?” she said, returning to her spot at the table. “Deel, you know how old I am. I’m twenty-eight, older than when you left.”
“I’m ashamed to say it, but I’ve forgotten your birthday. I’ve forgotten his. I don’t hardly know how old I am.”
She told him the dates of their births.
“I’ll be,” he said. “I don’t remember any of that.”
“I…I thought you were dead.”
She had said it several times since he had come home. He said, “I’m still not dead, Mary Lou. I’m in the flesh.”
“You are. You certainly are.”
She didn’t eat what was on her plate. She just sat there looking at it, as if it might transform.
Deel said, “Who fixed the well, built the roof over it?”
“Tom Smites,” she said.
“Tom? He’s a kid.”
“Not anymore,” she said. “He was eighteen when you left. He wasn’t any kid then, not really.”
“I reckon not,” Deel said.
AFTER DINNER, SHE GAVE him his pipe the way she used to, and he found a cane rocker that he didn’t remember being there before, took it outside and sat and looked toward the trees and smoked his pipe and rocked.
He was thinking of then and he was thinking of now and he was thinking of later, when it would be nighttime and he would go to bed, and he wasn’t certain how to approach the matter. She was his wife, but he hadn’t been with her for years, and now he was home, and he wanted it to be like before, but he didn’t really remember how it was before. He knew how to do what he wanted to do, but he didn’t know how to make it love. He feared she would feel that he was like a mangy cat that had come in through the window to lie there and expected petting.