The Death of All Things Seen (23 page)

In that process of self-improvement, Ursula had brought him scones and flat cakes and black tea sweetened with honey and watched him study, so Nate was conscious of the act of the act of watching her watch him. Their lives grew in a deeper soil.

Ursula had kept the doors in the cabin open out of native habit, the world alive with sound. This was her world and she would not be dissuaded. She listened to the purling throat of the falls at the edge of Grandshire. She could identify the cry of osprey, geese and loons. She called Nate’s attention to the insistent tap-a-tat-tat of woodpeckers, and the far-off whine of the sawmill. She could read the seasons in the cry of animals, in the directional shift of winds. She was a student in her own right.

Nate had followed the advice of provincial government pamphlets received through the mail out of Ottawa. There was help in the way the federal government in the United States had once been a friend to the farmer, to the rugged individualist. He used a potash fertilizer as a hold against a depleted soil, grew a cold hardy root crop of beets, rutabaga, squash, yams, sweet potatoes, parsnips and carrots. He tapped a line of trees for maple syrup, ordered a colony of bees from Prince Edward Island and planted a winter hardy grape vine and apple trees. It became a homestead slowly.

He worked on his studies early in the morning before leaving for the mill, and late in the evening after work, by candlelight in the advancing fall when the sun fell early and there were not enough hours in the day.

When he did so, Ursula made a habit of approaching, spectral as a ghost, and without a word, she simply blew out the candle, so there was an absolute and sudden darkness and the day was done.

Nate shifted and turned in the dark. It was there again as it had been, just the two of them alone in the world. He said Ursula’s name aloud.

When Ursula became pregnant, Nate had heated water in a tub, buckets drawn from a piebald cobble stone river, the flashing ribbon of it seen through the gaps in the trees in late evening, the rushing force of it almost always toppling him.

There was the outside, and then there was the two of them, alone in the world. And out of that love was born a third, a child. Ursula said this was how love was divided and shared. He had felt the heel of a foot in the universe of her womb, a child in the watery sack beginning life the way all life began as a oneness, which was not a fanciful, native myth, but a biological truth readily revealed in any middle school biology textbook.

What he recalled of those days was the bite of the axe running up along his arms, the centered sense of a life so contained and the hungry mouths of the traps that snapped unseen in the finality of a sudden and merciful end. There was that much bounty to be received from the land if one sought it.

They delivered the child at home, without real understanding, just instinct. It was enough. Nate brought Ursula leavened bread with honey as she sat before the fire and bled between her legs while the baby suckled.

*

Nate awoke to an alert on his phone and from a dream where the world was again restored, where he had dreamed, not of the Latino secretary, but of Ursula, in the way she had existed for him alone.

In checking the phone he saw his bid on Craigslist had been accepted. For a fee the projector could be expedited and delivered by late afternoon.

J
OANNE
AND
GRACE
ate a Happy Meal downtown because sometimes McDonald’s was the right choice.

Back home, Joanne smoked a joint and felt the slow release of tension, resigned that her fate was being decided elsewhere. Randolph came and licked her hand.

From the doorway, she watched Grace asleep in her bed. She could see, too, in the living room, the disconsolate tent set up over her heirloom table. The joke was long stale. Norman had been right about almost everything in her life. The heirloom table had not sold. In Norman’s office, she looked at the board of
The New Existence
. She was just glad she was on it.

*

Peter Coffey told a series of lies and some truths, not necessarily in any order, when Joanne called him. She had done a very bad thing for a nanny. She had left her charge alone, slipped out and rented a movie at the convenience store that made its trade in more illicit, pornographic movies, though, there was still the clawing nostalgia for faded cassettes like
ET
,
Jaws
,
Poltergeist
, and
Close Encounters
. She had seen the box sets on display on her walks with Grace.

She was gone a matter of minutes.

She stared at the cassette boxes. Youth still lived within these films. The great genius of Spielberg’s
Poltergeist
, reconstituting and making innocuously entertaining the genocide mass burial of Indians, rising in a California subdivision, when the Jewish holocaust must have been alive in Spielberg’s soul. There were histories allowed or disallowed, or that was not it exactly. It was not a matter of censor, but rather that there was great fortune to be made in the quiet distraction of a lesser, apolitical history, and those who understood it, they were the new historians of a sublimated and complicated history.

Joanne had some preamble in mind like that, something that might appeal to Peter. It was said in a rush of words. She didn’t even announce herself. She came up on his phone, her name. She was in his contacts still. He said that somewhere into the conversation. It augured a faint hope. She was not erased from his life.

She mentioned the convenience store specifically, for a frame of reference. They had rented movies, or Peter had sent her down for porn on the occasion when there were insults flung that she didn’t know what she was doing. It was a life of injury and sustainability, or it had proceeded along those needful lines. That was how she might yet describe it. At that moment, she would take it.

It was four in the afternoon when she called. Peter answered on the second ring. He was working, grading papers. A silence hung between them.

‘What is it like, Oklahoma?’ Joanne asked, when nothing else came to mind. She had heard they were called
Sooners
but never looked up its meaning.

Peter obliged. The
Sooners
were so-called because some jumped
sooner
than the official start time for the race to claim a part of the American heartland.

Joanne said innocently, ‘I suppose the others are called the
Laters
?’

Peter turned a paper validating that he was indeed grading papers. Joanne heard the sound paper makes.

Snow was heavy and thick. Peter took up the conversation. There was longing and desperation in his voice. The snow was a far greater burden here, what with winds that blew unimpeded. Whiteouts and drifts were a way of life. Roads could disappear just like that and did. He clicked his finger.

Joanne closed her eyes. She could see it then, the vastness – the emptiness.

Peter explained how the Board of Regents was investigating an online program where nobody would ever have to show up. The most desolate places were often in the most need of the greatest advancements. If you were injured there, chances were you would be flown by helicopter to a regional facility, and your scans would be read by somebody in Oklahoma City or Tulsa, or, maybe, not even by an American, and not even read in America. The Great Plains was a great contradiction of patriotism and pragmatism. It was all monoculture and great machines, robotic harvesters controlled from satellites. They kept the rodeos alive for a sense of nostalgia, but most rode a mechanical bull in the bars on a Friday and Saturday night.

In simply speaking, Peter pushed an alternative reality on her. He didn’t say which was better. He did the majority of the talking. He didn’t say if he liked it or not. There was little to stop him talking.

He was, he intimated, living with the widow of a farmer who had died while riding atop a great combine harvester that had covered near twenty miles of planted wheat after he died.

The husband had been found a county over, in sheaths of wheat so high that they had to follow the trail left in his wake and work backward to discover where he most probably died, Peter pondering if, perhaps, God had simply forgotten George Farmer was dead. It was worth considering, God’s assumed culpability in being responsible for all living things. It seemed incomprehensible one being could bear such a burden. It was, Peter maintained, felt more fully in the vacuum of distances, in the great divide of time and land.

‘Farmer’ was the farmer’s name, which was suspicious and indicated there was less truth here than might have been initially granted. It seemed like such a desperate and incredulous overreach of any apparent legitimate story.

Joanne might have said this to Peter, but she didn’t. His life was not her life anymore. There was no mention of the graduate student with whom Peter had left, and there was solace in that fact alone. It was a marvel Peter had found somebody at all, if he even had, which she doubted, but then the world was truly a big place.

Peter set about reciting a poem he had written about the death of George Farmer. The poem, titled, ‘Silo...’ was spelled, ‘Sigh Low’. He was playing with some literary effect. It was a poem, not for the page, but to be read aloud, with a lot of alliteration and onomatopoeia, or some such literary inventiveness Joanne was not entirely sure she understood, but it kept Peter happy and content. It was what counted in the end.

They were talking over forty minutes, and nothing of substance had been said. Her ear had a slight ache. She said, in a vexing way, just to suddenly know, ‘This widow, does she have a name?’

The widow’s name was Jessie – Jessie Farmer. Peter elaborated. She was decidedly younger than her husband had been and marked by an indefatigable spirit of the early pioneers. She had left home at fifteen. He described her as a spirit akin to Annie Oakley.

Joanne sensed the imaginative reach of the desperate. She was turned to the TV, her mind already distracted in the cleaving awareness that they were done. None of it was true, but she had brooked a dam of emotion in Peter. It was her obligation to stand in the deluge of regret.

Poltergeist
was on auto-replay, rolling through the credits, and had been for close on five minutes. It was a great wonder how a movie was ever made, how each found their calling. She meant to look up what exactly was a Key Grip or a Best Boy.

Peter was still talking about Jessie Farmer, how she had come from a long line of ancestors drawn by the Forty-Niner Gold Rush, and how she was sure there was whore in her some ways back. It was inevitable, men drunk on whiskey, men laid up in tubs of grimed water in advance of services rendered. It had been a quarrelsome business, those pioneer years, where there had been no long-term options and where each had survived by their wits and sense of fear and, in the West, how well they could handle a firearm. This was how the West was won and lost and won again. In his explanation there was a preternatural sense you could enter and understand another’s history better than your own. There was something good happening out in Oklahoma. Joanne believed it.

Joanne checked on Grace. She felt the far cast of men in her life at a great distance. She was alone but contained. Randolph roused. Joanne hushed him and went back into the long hallway. She was listening and not listening. There were, according to Peter, communities where Jessie came from out along the Pacific Northwest along the island chains, on Whidbey Island, who were preparing for the apocalypse and believed it was fast approaching.

Joanne had the insistent idea to bake something. She gathered ingredients in the kitchen, while Peter talked in what proved a yawning chasm of intersecting histories, Joanne understanding that the act of movement was essential to life, Peter describing further how Jessie Farmer met George Farmer going east, while passing through Oklahoma City’s Greyhound station. Jessie had stopped by the Federal Building, where Timothy McVeigh had killed all those people. George Farmer had been there and had handed Jessie a book of psalms, then asked her to pray with him for those lost. She had. George Farmer was in a black suit, like a scarecrow. His ankles showed over white socks. He was worth over two million dollars. Jessie learned it later. It didn’t change her.

Joanne said, ‘You should write all this down now, Peter, not to forget it.’

Peter didn’t get the underlying jab that she knew it was all made up. He was, he told her, lifting bales of hay in a regimen that started at five thirty, when the cock crowed. He was living the most salubrious life imaginable.

Of course, to verify any of it, Joanne might have asked simply to say hello to this Jessie Farmer, but she didn’t, because it was worth not knowing for sure. There would be, eventually, the break-up, the climax and bitter end of what had started with such promise.

It gave her an understanding of the sketched details he would pawn off on her if she called again. Instead, Joanne said in a quiet appeasement, ‘You make Oklahoma sound like it might be the answer to a great many troubles.’

Saying it stopped Peter cold, or Joanne felt it, her perceived gullibility emboldening within Peter a belief just then that he could conjure anything from make-believe.

He had determined, he told her with a rising truth, that you could scream at the top of your lungs and nobody would hear you for tens of miles, the snow on the plains, its blanketing monotony such that you could watch from a window, see the demarcation of the drive, and then the road, your escape to the outside world disappearing before your eyes in a matter of minutes.

This was suddenly the greater reality of his life. His voice was filled with a stark melancholy.

He began his poem again in earnest, fleeing from an apparent and glaring truth, so the poem was dead of whatever spark it ever contained. It was characteristic of Peter’s work and tied to his essential failing as an artist, his misconception that true genius was only ever uncovered in throwing up barriers to absolute happiness, when the opposite was most always true, and that, without a sense of openness, without love, all remained hidden behind words, or built around the fortress of poems.