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29.2
Shelley Washburn
When the River Lay Quiet with SnowWinner of The Journal's Second Annual >Short Story Contest judged by Lee K. Abbott
Honorable Mentions go to Jacob M. Appel for "The Anatomy Lesson" and for "The Punishment," Nathan Leslie for "The Mellow," and Claudia Putnam for “Wetlands.”
No man will ever touch me again. I see them looking at me, wishing, even old as I am with whitening hair. They think I am blond. They think I am not so old. They can’t see that I’ve lost my thirst, my seed, the thing inside that wants to grow. But Arley Mellon knows, and I just about choke when he calls at dusk saying he needs my help.
Arley doesn’t need anybody, especially not me. We are done now or nearly so. “Call someone else,” I tell him. “Call your fat brother. One of your girlfriends. Some other ex-wife.”
He hangs up. But then he calls again the next morning, angry. “Damn it, Elizabeth, hear me out. It’s for your own good.” His voice sounds hoarse. Something’s up. I smell a shift in the wind. “All right,” I tell him, “I’ll meet you.”
He said to meet down at the pump in my back pasture—the one that has no water because Arley Mellon in a yellow D-8 Cat blocked the river that had been watering our land for four generations and the State won’t do anything about it because technically he didn’t add gravel, he just pushed it around. He wants to meet me in that pasture.
I know he’s toying with me, but I say okay. This seems as good a time as any to finish what’s between us. The next morning I grab my old felt hat and a Thermos of coffee and take off. I’m late.
The air smells dry and sweet of sticky pine and sage, and mullein grows along the road, spiked with knobby buds. I pull over to the steel gate, unfasten the lock, drive through and close it up again.
Arley’s Jeep is parked next to a trailer stacked with thirty-foot aluminum pipes that I haven’t used in years, thanks to him. I leave my truck there and walk the rest of the way on a stony path, out through another gate to the river’s edge where Arley stands with his back to me smoking a cigar.
My sister says he is still handsome, but I think he has gotten too thin. He turns and his metal eyes are on me, his brows dense and black. “About time,” he says.
We stand a long moment locked in a reconnaissance gaze. He’s waiting for an insult. I’m not doing jack.
Over the winter, the river has breached his dam and the water glistens green and full in its narrow channel. Brown buttes roll out before us dotted with stands of bitter brush tucked in the gullies cut by water, dark twisted trunks with explosions of yellow blooms that snap against the muted hills. I drink in the cool air and say good morning to him.
He breaks the stare, but the way he blinks tells me something is up. “As a favor to you,” he says. “I’m gonna help you set up the pipes to water your pasture.”
Oh, now I want to laugh but I hold back. “Is that so?” I say, “And where would the water be coming from?” There’s an edge to my voice and he pulls his lips thin under the thicket he calls a mustache.
“Do you want the water or not?”
I say, “I just want to know if you’re going to block the river again because if you are…” and he butts in with, “I ain’t and I never did,” which is a total lie and everyone in Umatilla County knows that. And then I finish my sentence, “…because if you are going to plug it up, what’s the use of hooking up these pipes?”
He shifts his legs so they’re spread apart like he’s straddling a calf, his faded jeans stretched tight across his skinny hips. “Do you want my help or not?”
He thinks he knows me but this is not the wife who once stood before him. I’ve got no need for him anymore. I don’t know what he’s doing here, but I’ve come to set the record straight. We’re out of court now. This is between us. I want him to own up to what he did and then we’ll be done.
“Why?” I say.
“Why?” he says, squinting at me.
“Why are you helping me irrigate after screwing me out of my water for the last five years?”
He hisses like he’s going to say shit. “I put in a pump and meter, did everything the State asked me to do. Legally, if I wanted to irrigate this summer, I could. But I don’t need to. I’m scaling back. Retired, you might say.”
Now I am staring full front on. There is nothing artful about this lie. Arley Mellon will never retire. Money is his god. I stop looking at him. I don’t want him to think I care one way or the other.
“Okay, I’ll take the water,” I say. And then it occurs to me that he’s getting the upper hand here by giving me back my own water but I can’t exactly fight him over it.
He nods and I follow him to the trailer stacked with pipes. We hook it to his Jeep and he signals me to drive while he goes to open the gate by the pump. I take off through the field with the pipes rolling and rattling behind. I’m thinking I need to be careful here, he’s up to something.
At the riverbank, I try to back the trailer in next to the pump. It’s hard to do. The trailer swerves to one side, then another and with each try, closer to the fence.
Arley runs up to the Jeep. “You never listen!” he yells. “Look at you. I said to stop at the gate.”
He never said to stop. I’m supposed to read his mind, know what he wants without words. A surge of heat rips through me and little rivulets of sweat leak down my sides and back. I get out of the Jeep.
Arley is still snarling. “I said stop. I didn’t say back the damn thing. Just drive in, see, drive in straight. It’s easier. But you don’t listen,” he says, flapping his hand in the air.
I’d like a dime for every time I’ve heard that before. If I listened, he wouldn’t have to tell me twice. If I listened, I’d know the facts. If I listened, we wouldn’t be in this fight in the first place. He’s right. If I listened, I’d have known he was a lying, cheating skunk.
I throw down his keys. My hair is sticking to my neck. “You didn’t say what to do. How did I know?” I stomp away. “You drive the Jeep.”
Somehow, Arley turns the whole rig around and brings it next to the pump. The trailer is facing the wrong way and we have to turn each pipe around so it fits the next. This was why I tried to back the rig in, but I won’t say it to him. The pipes are warped and their latches sticky. Arley hands me an aerosol can and I spray oil on the ends of the pipes and smash them with a hammer to get them to fit together.
The only six-inch pipe in the trailer has a broken latch and without it we can’t connect to the pump.
“Never mind,” Arley says. “I’ll wire it on.”
We finish snapping together the line that now looks like the teeth of a great comb lying across the field. Arley explains in slow and monotonous detail how to start the pump. I tap my hat against my leg and look at the sky.
He finally pops the switch and the water rumbles into the pipes. Within seconds, the six-inch pipe blows off the pump in an explosion of water.
“Turn it off. Turn it off,” Arley shouts.
He fumbles around with the knot of double wire fencing he has tied to the pipe.
“That won’t hold,” I say.
“Damn it, it worked last year on my pipes. Don’t tell me.”
He tries the water again and again, stopping to tighten his knot after each blowout.
A crescent of sweat glistens on Arley’s mustache. “Hold this end up while I tighten the wire.”
I lean in shoulder-to-shoulder with Arley and grasp the pipe, heavy now with water. I grunt.
“Hold it up higher,” Arley complains. “You got to hold it so I can twist the knot. I can’t do it alone. I got a bad back. Doctor’s orders.”
I wonder about this back thing. Mine hurts too and you don’t see me making a big deal about it. Is he trying to teach me some lesson now, show me how weak I am?
I give up my plan to ream the truth out of him. It’s too hot and he’s getting on my nerves. I hoist the pipe higher and say, “Hurry up.” I think I am going to burst right there, if he doesn’t quit fiddling. I can’t stand to smell his cigar breath, watch sweat slide down his long face, can’t stand to listen to his cursing and his raspy breathing. Did his lovers know this about him? How he breathes and snorts and curses and stinks?
Arley stands up suddenly. “The knot’s too loose.”
I say, “Well, I’m going to get the latch fixed. This is ridiculous.”
I brace for a fight, but he surprises me.
“Fine,” he says. “It’s your money.” And he limps off to his Jeep, holding one hand to his tailbone.
I drag the pipe to my truck, tie it across the bed and roof, and drive out. I can’t believe that he has given up so easily. I get the pipe fitting fixed at Weider’s Hardware in Pilot Rock, drink a Coke at the Golden Coach, and make it back in less than two hours.
If Arley had his way we’d still be there messing with the wire.
I unload the pipe, jockey it into place and start the pump. It’s been a dry, crimson spring of bloody skies and brush fires and I half expect, as I open the valves, to hear nothing but the slow hiss of dregs from a river played out. But the water comes and the latch holds. I walk back to the truck, pull off my hat, and listen for the sharp snap of water hitting dry earth, the rush of spray through the new spears of grass. Some of the pipes leak a bit and will need new gaskets, but all in all it’s a good day’s work. I can lease the pasture to the Gibsons now, maybe run some cow-calf pairs in with theirs and make a little money.
I start my truck and glance in the rearview mirror. On a hillock across the river, sits Arley’s red Jeep. I don’t know what to make of his sudden generosity and I peek once more in the mirror at him, tall and smoking, before I leave the hill.
I pull in my driveway and head out back to lock up the chickens for the night. A gray clapboard barn, hardly visible now in the fading light, lies behind my house and beyond it stretches climbing fields that run up against a broken course of stunted mountains, the bony rangeland of Eastern Oregon. My grandfather gave me this house and one thousand acres as a wedding gift. When Arley walked out and tried to take my land with him, I fought. I spent every dime I had to save this place, though the house looks like a barren homestead from a high desert ghost town.
The front porch has a busted banister and weathered tongue and groove boards, the paint having long ago peeled and dropped away. Swirly, green linoleum covers the floors downstairs and the windowpanes are so aged and rippled that trees through the glass look to be wavering, even on a still day. I would have liked to refinish the floors, knock out some walls, put on cedar shakes. Maybe pull the whole thing down and build a sturdier place. I once drew a plan for a new house and showed it to Arley, but he waved me off. We lived here like renters, never fixing or changing a thing. It was a temporary house until Arley could buy this or that spot of land. He had to have land and a new home could wait.
I’m still wondering what Arley is up to when his cook Dee calls two days later and says I should get over to his place right away. I ask why and she gets snippy and says just come. I say I’ll try to make it by.
I drive slowly over to Arley’s, even though I’m curious. It is the last week of May but it feels like summer has come months ago, not a decent rain, not a serious cloud since fall. I open the window of my truck and head down Sweetwater Creek Road into Horner’s Gulch, named after a family that starved there in the winter of 1883. Their tiny, dry cabin still stands by the creek.
I press the gas pedal and speed up out of the valley into the grass fields where Arley’s cattle graze. Several thousand head spread out across the range, clear up the sides of the nearby mountain. I turn down the long drive to Arley’s house, circling an empty pasture, a new wood corral, four large oak trees. Just beyond the last oak, I see it. I had heard that he was building, heard that he had gone all out.
Arley’s house stands like a ship in a grass sea, two stories high, covered in raw wood siding and a blue metal roof. The front porch runs the length of the house and looks out west over the valley.
The cook is standing near the front door, smoking. Beside her, a little blond girl sits on a bench eating a cupcake.
Arley’s big-headed chocolate lab runs out to greet me and I take my time scratching its ears. Meanwhile the cook and I size each other up. Dee has got hips bursting out from her black pants like somebody blew her up with a bellows. Her skin is flushed and her faded brown hair is wiry and wild. Still, her eyes glitter and her breasts push out under her sweatshirt. They were lovers once, I’m sure, but it means nothing to me now.
“He’s upstairs and he don’t look good,” Dee says. She stares at me. I smile back at her and she looks away.
“Why did you call me?” I ask.
“Because you two go way back and he’s having really bad pain.”
“So call a doctor.”
“He won’t let me. He said to call you. I just came by to drop off a few groceries and found him like this.”
I look up at the arched windows on the second floor, the same windows I had drawn for him years ago on a piece of lined paper at the kitchen table. He had no time for my ideas back then.
“Come on,” Dee says and we enter the dark house. I stand for a moment inside the door. The kitchen, dining and living rooms connect to form an L shape, straight from my drawings. The fireplace on the left wall is made of river rock and the ceiling beams of fir. But Arley has added his own ugly touches.
In the kitchen, instead of red quarry tile, something tough and easy to clean, he has installed beige linoleum dotted with little gold stars. The living room and dining room floors are silly, glue-down parquet squares where I’d have used solid oak planks. A lime green abstract painting of a horse hangs over the stone mantel between two stuffed deer heads, and the light switches on the walls are painted with corny Western scenes.
It’s just like him to screw it up, almost like he does it on purpose, taking my ideas and twisting them. I’m insulted but impressed too. Arley had paid more attention to my sketches than I thought.
I follow Dee and her big hips up the stairs to Arley’s bedroom. He is lying diagonally across the bed, gray and disheveled.
“What’s going on, Arley?” I say from the door. He pats the bed signaling me to come sit beside him.
“Can’t talk,” he whispers.
I stay put in the doorway. “Well, this is some backache when you can’t talk. Let’s call your doctor.”
“No, no,” Arley says a little louder. “He can’t do nothing right now. I’m scheduled for an X-ray next Tuesday.”
“I think you should get in to him before then.”
“No, I’m waiting.”
Dee nods. “See what I told you?”
“Get her out of here,” Arley says and Dee leaves the room.
Arley’s clothes are thrown on the floor next to the bed. The sheets are stained and yellow and three pillows without cases are stacked against the headboard. “This place is a mess and it stinks in here,” I say.
Arley lights a cigarette and grins at me. “I knew you’d come.”
“Arley, what do you want?”
He squashes his cigarette in a cluttered ashtray. “Tastes like shit. Hang on.”
I watch him hobble to the bathroom, rawboned and stiff.
The whole place is sour and I move into the room to unlatch a window. Next to Arley’s bed is one of his high school yearbooks open to a picture of Arley mugging on a fence for a group of girls with beehive hairdos. The floor around his bed is littered with empty beer bottles. Arley drags himself back to the room and falls into his filthy sheets.
“Can’t piss,” he says.
For a moment, I want to help him, fix his sheets, get him something to eat, comb his hair. But the urge passes. “What’s going on? Why did you call me?” I say walking back to the doorway.
“Christ, I won’t bite,” he says. “Come in.”
“Why?”
“Let’s just say I do you a favor, you do me a favor.”
I laugh. “Right. I knew there had to be a catch to getting my water back.”
“Oh, God, don’t start now. I could use your help, that’s all.” He sounds tired. A line of black stubble runs down the cleft in his chin. I like this snotty stance I’ve taken but it’s hard to keep up without more resistance.
“Have you eaten at all?” I ask. “You look horrible.”
“Not hungry.”
“Well then try to drink something. You don’t want to get dehydrated.”
I go downstairs to find Arley a soda. Dee sits at the kitchen table, smoking and reading a magazine. Her little girl leans in beside her coloring black mustaches on the faces of models in the ads. Dee stands up when I come into the room. “I’m just doing a little laundry right now,” she says. “The place I’m staying charges for it.”
I ignore her and rummage in the refrigerator where I find a 7-UP in the back.
“Look,” I say to Dee, “Arley needs some help until he gets to the doctor and I’m not going to do it. Why don’t you stay here?”
Dee brightens at this suggestion. “Well sure. I could drop my kids off at my sister’s and come back. But you better ask him, you know, if he wants that.”
I take Arley the soda and say, “I think Dee should stay here with you.”
“Fine with me. I like having pretty women around. Except you got to promise to come back. I don’t trust her to take care of things.”
“I’m not going to take care of things. I’ll call you tomorrow and that’s it,” I say and turn to leave.
“Wait. You didn’t say a word about the house. What do you think? Like it?” he says.
I frown. “Of course I do. It’s my design, don’t you remember?”
“No.”
I shouldn’t rise to the bait, but it’s just too much. “You are really something…”
“What are you talking about?”
“Just this once, Arley, after thirty miserable years, will it kill you to say I had a good idea?”
“Oh, shit.” He stops and looks off to the open window. “It wasn’t that bad. You were the one, didn’t you know that?”
“You’re drunk,” I say. “I’ve got to go.”
“Don’t be such a bitch, will you?”
This is the worst of it, his refusing to remember. Okay, maybe it wasn’t thirty miserable years. It was, to be exact, the last twelve years of our marriage. And I remember them all, starting with that night he came home late and said he’d been drinking with Gus and I thrashed in bed next to his back, turned against me like a wall, and watched the clouds creep across the moon until I couldn’t be silent anymore. And when I asked him again where he’d been, he got up and left the house. But I knew where he’d been, I just wanted him to say it. I wanted him to tell me himself that he was seeing that snaky Brenda Wallace. And I wandered the house in his blue T-shirt, bawling like a day-old calf. I loaded his varmint rifle on the kitchen table and waited for him. And then, when the first, gray light sneaked across the rimrock and he was still gone, I turned the barrel on myself and bawled some more because I didn’t want to die. I look at him now, sore in his bed, still saying it wasn’t that bad, and I leave his room without another word.
Dee pops her head out the front door and waves at me as I climb into my truck. “Say, could I ask you a quick question?” she says. “Do you know where Arley has put the key to his gas pump? I’m a little short on gas and, well, if I’m going to be doing errands for him and all, I need to be able to get around.”
“Ask him. I don’t know where he keeps anything.” And then I drive off in a hurry.
I decide to call Arley’s brother, Gus, to tell him Arley is sick. I’m no nursemaid. We’re divorced. As far as I am concerned, this is his family’s problem.
Gus says to me, “So what do you want me to do about it?”
Is it any wonder I hate the Mellon family? “Look, I wouldn’t be bothering you or myself with this phone call if I didn’t think Arley was bad off. I’ve never seen him like this. He’s flat on his back and he needs to see a doctor right away. This is not my job, so you should get over there and talk to him.”
“I just saw him yesterday,” Gus says in his cold and bored voice, “He’s okay. He’ll go to the doctor on Tuesday.”
“Fine,” I say and drop the receiver down hard. So Arley’s acting the macho guy, and his brother gets huffy with me like I’m trying to make trouble when here I am trying to help.
I call Arley and I can hear him laughing and coughing before he says, “Helloooo?”
“Well, I guess you aren’t so sick after all.”
“Girl!” Arley says. “So when are you coming back? I could sure use your help.”
“You liar, telling me you’re down flat and then telling your brother you’re just fine. I’m not coming over and don’t ever ask me again for a favor. I don’t care what you do about the river or my water, I don’t owe you jack.”
“Whoa, whoa. I told him I’m okay to wait until next week to see the doc. What’s it to you?"
“To me? Nothing, except I’m wondering what I’m doing wasting my time taking care of an alcoholic ex-husband who cheated on me and stole my water. Seems to me this is your family’s job, not mine.”
“Don’t bother yourself then,” Arley growls, “if it’s so much trouble.”
“I won’t,” I say and hang up.
I head out to my vegetable garden and begin turning over the dry soil with a spade. It’s slow work, breaking the baked dirt threaded with wild grasses. By evening the garden is half weeded. The phone rings, but stops before I can get inside.
Sunday morning dawns cloudless, turquoise and breezy. I am spraying my black walnut tree when Dee calls.
“Arley’s blue. Can you come over?” she says.
“Blue?”
“Yeah, blue, like the color of your jeans. He don’t say nothing.”
“Well, for Christ’s sake,” I say, “call an ambulance.”
“I said I would, but he shakes his head. He’s been mouthing your name. Will you come?”
Her voice is quivering and it sets my hand to trembling too. “Yes. I’m on my way.”
I speed over to Arley’s, gunning my truck up the hills. When I get there, Dee is smoking and pacing by the front door.
“Where is he?” I ask.
“On the couch,” Dee says.
I find him curled like a caterpillar, soft and frail and blue, just as Dee had said.
“What’s going on Arley?” I say as I touch his arm.
Arley turns his head and smiles. “How’s my girl?” he whispers.
“You sure look bad. Can’t you breathe?”
Arley shakes his head and coughs.
I slide my arms under his shoulders and lift him upright. He gasps when I do this.
“See if this helps.”
He leans his head back against the pillow I place under him, opens his mouth and tries to swallow air.
“I think it’s time for you to go to the hospital,” I say.
Arley shakes his head and his lips say no over and over.
“All right we’ll wait a few minutes and see if you get your breath back. I’m going to get you a glass of water.”
It’s then that I see a man standing in the doorway, bare chested, dressed in jeans and white socks.
“Who are you?” I ask.
“Dee’s friend.”
“And what are you doing here?” I say.
“Just visiting. Helping Dee with Arley.”
When Arley hears this, he tries to sit up and wheezes, “That bitch. That bitch. Drinking my booze and fucking all night.”
I go to Arley and settle him on his pillow. “All right,” I say. Then I walk into the kitchen where the story is clear.
Every counter top is strewn with bottles, dishes, slivers of food, bags, wrappings, empty cigarette boxes, stinking ashtrays. Dee and her boyfriend had drunk a fifth of Arley’s vodka, two bottles of his homemade cherry wine, pulled his steaks from the freezer and broiled them in the oven, opened two cartons of Arley’s Camels, filled Dee’s gas tank and now they were finishing her laundry.
I run to the back porch where Dee is folding her clothes and grab her by the arm. “Of all the low down shit I’ve ever seen, bringing your two-bit boyfriend here to party while Arley is down…”
Dee sticks out her lower lip and pulls my arm away. “You ain’t so special, no matter what he says.” She turns to me full on. “And if you’re the big love of his life, why ain’t you here taking care of him, instead of me? You think this has been fun? Watching him puke up spit and turn blue?”
“Then get out,” I say. “And take your boyfriend.” I start to shove Dee toward the door.
“But I can’t go without my clothes. They’re not dry yet,” Dee whines.
“Get out now or I’ll call the police.”
Dee turns, throws back her hair and marches into the kitchen to pick up her purse and jam a carton of Arley’s cigarettes inside it. I go to the living room. The couch is empty.
“Arley? Arley?” I call.
I bound up the stairs. Somehow Arley has managed to climb upstairs and crawl into bed. In the dusty room, on his yellow sheets, he lies bent on his side, black hair sticking straight out, eyes shut.
“Arley?” I say. He doesn’t move.
I grab his arms and pull him upright. He leans limp against me, his lips gurgling on my neck. I call for Dee, but she doesn’t answer. “We need an ambulance,” I yell out.
Holding Arley in one hand and the phone in the other, I dial 911. But when I start to tell the dispatcher where we are, Arley opens his eyes and slaps at the phone.
“Arley, you can’t stay here.” We struggle for the phone and then he falls back against the pillows and I finish the call. I can hear the old Chevy roaring to a start and Dee and her boyfriend are gone.
Twenty minutes pass, forty gasps from Arley, and finally an ambulance wails in the distance. Arley shakes his head, looks at me and mouths the word no.
“It’s for the best, Arley. They’ll help you breathe.”
Arley grabs my hand and I have to peel his fingers off when the medics come into the house.
The head medic asks me what’s the matter with Arley, when did he have his last liquids, his last urination, what is his temperature.
“I don’t know anything. First he tells me he has a backache and now he can’t breathe.”
The men step around me and take Arley’s pulse, look in his eyes, listen to his breathing. They snap an oxygen mask on his face and run an I.V. in his arm. Arley watches until the men with the stretcher arrive. Then he releases my hand and kicks at them. I am amazed to see the strength of him, gagging and blue. He is fighting to stay.
“Let them help you, Arley, I’ll come along too,” I say.
This calms him and I nod to the men to carry him downstairs.
At the hospital, they run tubes down his throat, up his pleated penis, in his arms and nose. Arley never flinches, lying so still that I think he has lost consciousness.
“Do you know who I am?” I ask him. Arley rolls his eyes back and squeezes my hand.
“Sorry,” I say. “I thought you were going on me.”
For the next hour, waiting for Gus and his wife to show, I search for things to say to Arley. I can’t tell how bad off he is. Maybe this is some attack that will pass. For a long time I sit beside him listening to the horrible clacking of the respirator and he lies watching me and crushing my hand.
Finally I say, “Remember when we were first married and you rode down to the hen house on that old roan gelding all slumped over with a fake arrow clamped on your gut and I dropped my rake and ran to you all in a panic?”
Arley’s eyes fill with tears.
“God, Arley, I didn’t say that to make you cry. I thought it was funny.”
I pull my fingers from Arley’s and step outside the room. I can’t listen to the machines running his body. The nurse returns with a doctor, the two walking briskly.
“What’s going on?” I ask. “What’s the matter with him?”
“He’s got a tumor—pancreatic cancer.”
“Did his family know this?”
“It doesn’t appear that he told anybody,” the nurse says and walks off.
“And why not?” I say to her crisp, white back. “Why didn’t he tell?”
I look at my shirred, dry hands and see that winter when the river lay quiet with snow. I pulled a clotted thing from the toilet, a bloody lump that fell out of me and I knew he was seeing a dancer from the bar and I crept to him anyway to tell him that it weighed no more than a walnut in my hand, our tiny, purple child. And he stood, pinching his eyes shut and brushing the back of his hand across needles of ice that had gathered under his nose, silent as the field beneath our feet.
The nurse comes back out into the hall looking pale and hard. “He passed away. Would you like to sit with the body until the family comes?” she says.
The body? Are you speaking of Arley Mellon, who just five days ago yelled at me to hold up the pipe? I didn’t want the fake arrow to be my last words to him. If I had known, I would have stayed in the room. I would have said something different.
I go to him because she asks, but I am grateful. I need to see his face.
There he lies in his sad underwear, beneath a naked sheet. So large he is and still. How can I survive the quiet here? This is not Arley.
My breath stalls in wet memories, red as paint.
We weren’t done. I wanted him to tell me he was sorry.
And now, as the river rolls through my fields, I see that I wasn’t listening when he tried to say it.
I touch him, pat the open hand goodbye.
