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		I climb down from his bed made of railroad ties, which time can never destroy. At least, every time I remember it, it’s in the present tense. There’s a 44 on one bedpost, a huge glass ashtray full of Marlboro butts on another. The sunlight’s no match for the red curtains, which give the room the feel of a tavern in early morning: awkward, waiting for dark. I wrap his flannel shirt over my bare skin—compared to my ex‑husband’s shirts, it’s spacious as a bathrobe. I step quickly down the cold hallway to the shower. The house feels half‑constructed, no baseboards, no paint in the hallway, the kitchen countertop raw plywood. The previous owner apparently quit on the house and sold it to Roy, who has built a deck, but otherwise made no effort toward finish‑work. It’s drafty, too, which is good, because the drafts waft away some of the animal smell. Roy’s already up, outside throwing last night’s steak‑bones to Luke and Jack. I can hear him affectionately slapping the sides of their heads so hard they yelp, driving them away to watch them return, asking for more pain. Even back then, I keep as far away as an anthropologist, picturing the interdependence of man and dog. The bathroom carpet’s damp and musty, the cut‑to‑fit kind, orange shag, jammed up against the shower stall. The floor of the shower is slimy, but water’s water, I think, squeezing Prell so old it thickly bulges its way out of the bottle. Light filters through the filthy window. I’m humming “Longfellow Serenade” which was playing when I fell asleep. It’s not William Wadsworth in the song. “Come on baby, ride,” kept going on into my sleep, blending Neil Diamond into my dreams, and—stretching the imagination—Roy into Neil Diamond, one vague sexual fluidity. After my shower, I am shivering in my skirt and blouse. I’m thin, and it’s cold in the house. He keeps it cold, being heavy himself—short, top‑heavy and dense, like a wrestler. Sometimes we sleep tangled together on the sagging sofa in front of the fireplace, where he builds a massive fire. Then when I wake, I am stiff and hot, but feeling held, enclosed, exactly safe enough to have stayed the night. He’s made coffee and eggs and bacon, clearing a spot on the table in the sunlight for my plate and cup, trying for delicacy. He lights a cigarette, takes a few drags through his muddy‑blonde Kung‑fu moustache and grinds it out. “I punched the bag already,” he tells me, “twenty minutes. Before you got up.” He smiles, pleased as a kid, feeling slim, sliding four eggs onto his plate to make up for it. His smile, as usual, is a half leer, to show he isn’t taking himself seriously, that maybe nothing is serious here, that maybe nothing will last, but who can be sure? “Good for you,” I say, smiling. It is my long habit of bolstering my man, independent of circumstances. Nothing has anything to do with anything, for now. I am drinking coffee in sunlight. The long road down the mountain is full of ruts that the low Buick Skylark— my ex’s choice—does not like, but I’ve learned to maneuver around the worst of them. Roy’s brown ranch house is almost at the upper end of the road, in an open field studded with tiny pine trees he got from the Arkansas State Department of Agriculture. Beyond his land, in the big trees, is one other house: dark, and full of pale, reticent children and assorted fat adults. Cars sit on concrete blocks up here, sofas collapse on porches. It takes twenty minutes to get from this point east of West Fork to Fayetteville, ten of those just to get down off the mountain. I know. I’ve timed it for months. One time my car got stuck in the mud, and I hitched a ride up the hill with a man in a pickup, two rifles on his rack behind us. Who would have thought I would take such chances, with two small children depending on me? I recognize that something in me is desperate, crazy. I study myself tolerantly. There is a lot to study. Today, for instance, I go straight from his house to the First Christian Church. In the twenty‑minute drive, I rehearse the prayer I’ve written. I pray it aloud, getting the tone right, but really praying it, too. I like writing prayers, one of the best things about being an Elder, the first woman Elder in the church, and at 30, the youngest. Elders are spiritual leaders, elected by the deacons. You get to stand behind the communion table under the dark oak arch filled with organ pipes, and hand the brass trays to the deacons. From that spot, surrounded by old wood, you can look straight back at the stained‑glass picture of Jesus walking on water. I have often thought the congregation ought to get to face those windows, instead of the pipes and the cross. In the long years before I finally had the courage to get a divorce, I depended on the church for art, music, and philosophy. I took free courses in theology at the Campus Center. During a year or so of pastoral counseling, I fell in love with the minister, I fell in love with Abstract Love and determined to have it, to be it, to merge with its aesthetic. I was trying to learn to be a good poet. For practice, I wrote prayers to make you weep, to occasionally raise the hairs on the back of your neck. I revised and revised. Each week, I read the scripture and based my prayer on that. Like a good poem, each prayer in its meticulous stages of shaping came closer and closer to an utter sincerity. Sometimes when I was standing at the lectern, Robert at the pulpit across from me, each of us in our black robes, I felt as ordained as he. I felt as if we were a couple, united by a complex love for the abstract that few others would be able to comprehend—a passionate, yet unconsummated love, a Holy longing. Separate scenes, still electric, still in progress, are suspended inside all my attempts to understand them. I don the weighty robe, still feeling Roy’s tongue in my mouth. I think of that word, don, which just came up in the graduate linguistics course I’m taking at night: the combination of do and on, “to envelop oneself in, to assume.” Beside me in the sacristy, the women are filling the tiny glass communion cups with Welch’s grape juice—Doris Bently, Mary Lou Wheatley, and Sara Gifford. They are wearing flowered aprons. Enveloped by faithfulness, I smile and say hello. I am a minister, looking after my flock. I love them all. They have saved me from emptiness, they have clasped their arms together to catch me and my children when I fell out of my marriage. I have won them for myself. For a second, I have a vision of my ex, wedging in beside me, late, in a back pew last Christmas eve, reeking of Jack Daniels. Now, he never shows up. When I process down the right aisle to the front of the church, Robert down the left aisle, I am collecting in my mind individual souls, one row at a time, filling my heart, giving out what I can muster. I offer them what I have, a little of the flush of last night, keeping most of it for myself. Driving back up the mountain after church, though, I begin to tighten, thinking of the school week ahead, papers to grade, the grocery store, the kids’ lunches, having to face their father as he delivers the kids to what used to be his own back door, his face glowering and closed. I mentally close the door on him. I make the last curve to Roy’s house, resolutely free. He is lining up water‑filled gallon milk jugs on the fence posts. “How about a little target‑shooting?” he asks. “Want to go first?” He hands me the ear plugs and the heavy 44. This is the part I like least, particularly the noise, which rings in my ears, in spite of the plugs, forever after. But I’m not chicken. I hold the gun, left hand steadying my right, both eyes open, looking just over the top of the sight. I squeeze the trigger slowly, so as not to disturb the position of the barrel. I relax my arm to avoid the pain of the kickback. It gets me. Not at bad as it does with the rifles, but my arm pitches backward into my shoulder. The loud report, the sharp jolt, makes me feel out of control, in the hands of a terrible fate. The jug completely disappears. “Did you know,” he begins, index finger in the air, leering, preparing to fire a piece of information like a bullet at the ignorance of the world, “that the M16 rifle can penetrate a steel helmet at 500 meters?” The first time I came here, it was mid‑summer. It was only a few weeks after my divorce was final. On a Monday I had taken the kids to swim in the White River, a spot with a small waterfall, where there used to be a mill. I was lying on the bank. Roy was on the other side, watching teenagers swing out and jump from a knotted rope into the deepest pool. He floated calculatedly as an alligator up beside the rock where I was lying. I saw everything about him at once, what it all meant—his drooping moustache, red face, staged smile, acne scars, heavy belly and shoulders, short legs. Or I didn’t. I don’t know. He sensed my loneliness as if I were broadcasting it in concentric circles into the water. He knew I was desperate enough to agree to go out with him. I have to say, though, there is more to it than that. I have always been drawn to the kind of person who lurks on the fringes, the kind of ugly ones who would think I am a fairy princess. My ex was no Paul Newman, that’s for sure. I was pretty: classic nose, big brown eyes—if you could’ve see them under my glasses—and a good figure. But I always felt that inside me lives a troll: wizened, rejected, one eye cocked at the world. In high school, like most girls, I wanted desperately to be a cheerleader. I had all the qualities—I was athletic, pretty, spirited—but when I tried out, the troll snickered in my ear, slowing my reaction‑time. I couldn’t believe in myself, jumping up and down and waving pompoms. I wasn’t surprised when Roy picked me up on Friday in a real army‑type Jeep and said he’d decided to cook at his house, if that was all right with me. “Listen, you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do,” he said, and I understood him perfectly, knowing exactly what I would do. He threw huge steaks on the grill. “I can’t eat that much!” I protested. “Oh shucks,” he replied, leering, doing his redneck imitation, “The dogs will be so sad.” Steak, bread, and wine. That was it. And then we took wine down to the pond and sat on a rickety section of dock and watched the frogs. After dark vapours have oppressed our plains For a long dreary season, comes a day Born of the gentle South, and clears away From the sick heavens all unseemly stains he recited like a teacher, in a rich radio‑voice. “Keats,” he said. “‘Sleep and Poetry.’ I have some pitiful offerings of my own, a couple of which I shall say for you, if I may.” Chin up, he peered over the top of his ragged moustache, and began. His poems came off better aloud than on paper, but they weren’t bad. After all those years of being married to an engineer, I was glad to hear any kind of poem, sincerely spoken. When I try to remember them now, all I can hear is Neil Diamond. Roy might as well have been doing “Longfellow Serenade”: “Sing, sing my song, let me sing my song/ let me make it warm for you.” His history lay all around me, it turns out. When I was 11, I was sewing doll clothes and stuck a needle in the rug, forgot about it and crawled across it. We had just moved to town and knew no doctors. My father picked Roy’s father, old Dr. Hackett, from the phone book. Bushy‑haired and cold‑eyed, he attacked my knee, dug the broken‑off needle out of my bone, making a horrible scar. “Quit your belly‑aching,” I remember his tone. “You’re not going to die of it.” And then, wonder of all wonders, Roy’s uncle Hackett had been the judge at my divorce. “Why do you want this divorce?” he had asked, even though my lawyer had assured me I would only have to answer easy questions relating to the children. Suddenly I was on trial for my life, stumbling over years of misery to find one answer that would satisfy him. “He made me feel bad,” I replied idiotically. “OK,” judge Hackett said, apparently satisfied. In a town with only one high school and junior high, Roy and I—never meeting—had gone to the same schools, he a couple of years behind me, as well as the local university, but there our parallel paths diverged with a vengeance. I had kids; he went to Vietnam. A sniper, he had killed any number of people, including women. Maybe children, but he wouldn’t say. The war was still going on in his brain. He approached the small creatures of this world as if he could decide at any minute to end their lives, as if he were giving them a gift, for now, not to. He could rescind the gift. Queen had been snarling and roaming too far, he said. The neighbors had complained. When I arrived one weekend, he told me he’d shot her and buried her out back. “I hated it,” he mused, stroking down to the tips of his mustache, “but she might have hurt someone. I did a good job, one clean bullet and she dropped like a sack of potatoes. I should have shot her where I was going to bury her, though. I had a time moving her, and got blood all over everything,” he said, tilting his head toward the still‑bloody sink, the blood-soaked rags on the counter. “This is what it comes down to,” I thought, “flesh and blood.” All my senses heightened, for good and for ill, for a while. At least five cats draped themselves across the sofa and chairs. He would slap them the way he did the dogs, only not so hard. Sometimes he would send them flying across the room into a wall. He was never angry when he did this. He would as soon pick them up and cradle them in his arms as slap them. It was as if he had to keep testing to see what the limits of life are, to trust it, to see how much you can do to it and it will still go on. He brought his muscular arm down in huge sweeps, but as graceful as a ballet dancer. There was no point in anything less, in the vast universe he lived in. It was the universe of his favorite movie, “2001, A Space Odyssey.” The small, ordinary world cringed. The enemy could show up at any time. Over the rise, up from the pond, they would come, with their automatic rifles. They would be wearing masks and would ram down the door. They would run their tanks over every unfortified wall. There was still time to get ready, maybe, but one could not be too alert. There would be the dogs to begin with, then the 44 on the bedpost and the rifles in the adjoining room. He unrolled exact architectural drawings of the house as it would look when he got the six‑foot‑thick stone walls built. The interior would be scrolled like a nautilus shell inward, to the safe center, with guns and a month’s supply of food. He worried some about how he would get the stubborn cats into the center quickly enough. Guns and food and books. Roy had built what looked like a real library, with freestanding stacks, in one of the bedrooms. “Did you know that Spinoza, not Descartes, is responsible for ending medieval philosophy?” “OK, why?” I am dragged into this. “Because Spinoza, unlike Descartes, denied the possibility of harmonizing reason with Biblical revelation. He said man has to attain knowledge of his union with the whole of nature, to attain eternal bliss. You can see how this would collapse all previous philosophies.” He had two long shelves of philosophy, four of history, five of classical literature, and a whole section devoted to poetry. A few contemporary novels were piled in the corners, but it was the dark, musty ones with faintly gilt titles, that he liked best. He would read long passages aloud to me, stretched out on the bed, running his hand over my hair. When I met him, he was teaching in a summer program for delinquent kids. Those were the teenagers at the White River. The next fall, I convinced my principal at Sherwood High School to hire him. “I take your recommendation seriously, Ms. Brown,” he said, frowning, uneasy with his decision. So for the next school year, until he got fired for allegedly writing suggestive comments in his students’ journals, Roy and I were colleagues. His room was next to mine. He would swagger into 204 and ceremoniously drop a folded note on my desk, clearing his throat. “This is an agenda for the meeting,” he would say, looking dispassionately out across the heads of the students. I would not read it right away, not being able to keep as straight a face. Sometimes I would watch him coming my way, down the lower hall, a cave man in a tie. “What have I done?” I would ask myself in some part of my brain that didn’t bother to answer. Fridays, though, I would be singing inside, all day. I had never counted hours, but now I was like my students, wild to get free, to get the kids off to their dad’s, to hear the Jeep in the driveway, to head out, away from civilization. These were the early seventies. I pretty much missed the sixties. While Fayetteville churned with anti‑war protests and flower children, I was having babies, washing and folding diapers, missing my youth, feeling outraged deep in my soul. It was a wonderful time to be outraged. On Dickson street at George’s Lounge, you could get professional anti‑draft counseling 24 hours a day. Several graduate students were rumored to have been involved in setting off bombs in the restroom of the Capitol building in Washington, and the word went out: “Feds are everywhere, looking for clues.” A group of creative writing faculty climbed the giant pine tree in front of the student union, nude, to protest the war. I can’t remember their reasoning, but what mattered was the nakedness, however stylized, of body and spirit. An “underground” paper, The Grapevine, started up by hippies and graduate students, ran poems about marijuana and free love, caricatures of Nixon‑the‑antichrist, as well as great movie reviews and editorials. A lot of the local writers—Barry Hannah, Frank Stanford, Leon Stokesbury, Jack Butler, and others—went on to be well‑known novelists and poets. On street corners, students piled up and gave away all their worldly possessions, to demonstrate to the world the blessings of communal living. I longed to be in the middle of it all, wearing round glasses, long, straight hair and a paisley sarong. I did get the round glasses, but I quit wearing them because my husband hated them, knowing they stood for something in me he could never satisfy. I would drift into one of the head shops along Dickson street and inhale the incense of an alternate life. By the time the idealism of the mid‑sixties had given way to the horrors of Kent State and the first news of Watergate, I was teaching high school. The accumulated rage against the war, against Nixon, against America’s imperialist aggression, drove itself down, now, into acid rock, into harder drugs. I didn’t care. It was all I could do to hang on, day after day, grading papers, fending off the cataclysmic end of my marriage a while longer. Hippies had their LSD; like Mrs. Robinson in “The Graduate,” I tried valium. Only a few, to take the edge off, but one Sunday I sat in the back yard in my bathrobe and held the bottle in my fist all morning, thinking I would swallow them all, children or no children. The sun was shining, the sky was a piercing Arkansas blue. I hardly knew where I was. While I still had the energy, I got up and went inside. When the entire thirty pills circled and flushed down the toilet, my marriage was over. Roy had never smoked marijuana, but he didn’t like to admit it. I had only tried it once or twice. Roy’s ex‑graduate‑student‑hippie friend, Ned, brought us some and urged us to give it a try. No one who has ever gotten high can forget the strange sense that, while it seems nothing is changed—objects sit where they always have, people say the same things—the world turns out to be easier, gentler, slower, brighter, than you thought it was. And when you wake in the morning, there’s no hangover, nothing’s left except a knowledge that feels as if it’s trapped in amber. If you could get to it…Still, we finished the joints Ned left us and made no attempt to get more. As much as Roy longed to be a hippie, his soul disapproved. Survival required clear‑headed vigilance. Once there was a woman peeing in the rice paddies. She squatted, her loose gray trousers spread as far as possible at her ankles. She was holding the bottoms of her trousers to keep them away from her muddy feet. Her long hair was falling out of its knot, down her back. Her head tilted upward, alert as a deer. Through the trees, a man knelt on one knee to steady his rifle. Her bare buttock’s would have made an easy target, but she might have survived. He aimed just to the left of her spine, careful to leave a clear path for the bullet to reach her heart. “They were all in on it,” he said. “You couldn’t assume anything. You’d leave one old woman alone, out of sympathy, and next thing you know, gooks would be falling out of the trees on your whole platoon. She would have heard you, and told them. Ever put your buddy’s arm in a bag, not knowing if you got the right arm with the right body?” I re‑wind my present‑tense memory a little way back, before the shooting, to get hold of myself. I am singing “Come Thou Fount of Many Blessings” all the way back from church, trying to fend off the beginning of the school week. I always get started on songs, like a mantra. I believe that somewhere deep inside, I can sing really well, but I just don’t know how to do it on the surface. Maybe the troll can sing, I don’t know. Once I tried to join the choir, because the choirmaster seemed so desperate for new members. “What are you singing, alto or soprano?” he asked, leaning down right at my mouth, trying to figure out if I was singing at all. I keep trying to teach myself. There is that point at which the voice has to shift to a higher register, for instance in the third line, “Prone to wander, Lord I feel it, Prone to leave the God I love” is a huge jump upward from the previous two lines. I can’t do them without going into a kind of trill which is clearly not my natural voice. I guess I should be an alto, but I don’t know how to harmonize. Anyway, I get to the last lines “Praise the mount! I’m fixed upon it, Mount of Thy Redeeming Love,” and my voice goes all over the place. I’m wondering how anyone can sing this song without grinning. Now I feel better. I am singing it all the way up the mount. After the guns, we go inside. Roy has been cleaning house, which means he has scooped up a few of the old cat‑piles in the corner of the living room and has dumped a layer of new litter in the various pans. He has washed some dishes and is grading papers. I have brought my own papers to grade. I notice that we have settled into a domesticity more frightening to me than the guns. I have heard that if you use one of those white‑noise machines to sleep by long enough, you get to be deaf to those particular tones. It is like that with most things. It is not so much that you settle for what you have. What you have just gets to be normal, and after a while, normal seems good because you can predict it. Then after a longer while, you think something is good just because it is normal. Finally, good isn’t an issue any more. Your life just is. I know. I watch Roy sitting across from me with his coffee and cigarette, raising one pale eyebrow over some idiotic thing a student has written. I guess we’re all lovable if you could keep each of our tiny aspects suspended, unanchored in time, but you can’t. I know I have to get out of here, soon. “Let’s take a hike down the creek,” I say, which is as far as I can get, at the moment, toward that end. It’s November, and the trees are bare. We angle down the hill, past the pond and onto God‑knows‑whose property. The creek‑bed looks like a moonscape, almost completely dry gravel at the bottom and huge boulders halfway up the hill on either side. I have on sneakers, not so good for this. Roy has on his Army boots, real ones, from back then. He reaches for me, lifting me across the gaps. I resist being lifted, looked after. I do like Roy best outside, chopping wood or following a dry creek bed. There, I don’t have to try to fit him in with anything. I don’t have to have the kids around him. I don’t have to introduce him to my friends. I would like to keep him here, in his fortress, and drive out when I feel like it. It occurs to me that men have had this plan for centuries. I follow his back, his camouflage jacket. I suddenly feel a great tenderness for his back, almost love, knowing the future’s broad outlines, if not its details. By next month, all this will be history. There are things you know, what’s deep inside you, like a song, that is still working to find out what to do at the tangible level of the vocal cords, the mouth and tongue. You say all sorts of things, you kiss slobbery or hard‑lipped, working on it. This life or next, it’s going to find its way. It could be the shoes, not enough support. I twist my ankle, bad, on the rocks. He turns at once, hearing my “Oh!” I am splayed awkwardly across two uneven rocks, hands gripping the small bushes on either side. He steps carefully between my arms and over my chest. “Don’t move,” he commands. He kneels and lifts my foot as if it were a newborn baby, supporting it on all sides with his hands. Gently, he pushes at one spot with his thumb. “Does that hurt?” he asks. “Here? OK, how about here? Uh, huh,” he says to himself, like a doctor. When he touches the worst of it, I try not to cry, but a tear, more than one, rolls down from my right eye. I wipe my face, pretending it’s the cold. “Do you think you can stand on the other foot?” he asks. He lifts me up, sparing me the trouble. He wedges his shoulder under mine, using it as a crutch for me to lean on. “Now, just take one careful hop,” he insists. I do it, letting out a hard breath. “Now, one more,” he says, straining to hold me upright. We stay in the smoother creek‑bottom as long as we can. To get back up the steep rocks, he has me sit down and scoot upward, using only my hands, as he pulls me by the shoulders, little by little. He gives commands clearly, exactly, telling me where to put my good foot, where to rest the other one, on each upward pull. Sometimes I have to stop and clench against the pain for a minute. It is strangely delicious—real, physical, isolating. I barely notice and no longer care that off and on I let out childlike sobs. At the top of the hill, at the far edge of his field, he orders, “Don’t try to come any farther. I’ll be back in a few minutes.” After a while, the deep thrum of his riding mower breaks through my private preoccupation with the expanding and contracting of pain. He has brought a blanket, and he lifts me carefully onto his lap, wrapping it around my legs. At the end of this scene that I have stored forever, we are riding together over the bumpy field into the late afternoon light, his arms reaching around me on both sides to steer, smashing his precious new pine trees left and right.
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