“Why’re you just standing there?” She crossed the shop and picked up his fingers. He had no lights, fans, or machines running. She wrapped his arms around her own waist and interlaced her fingers behind his neck. For a moment she rested her cheek against his chest, but when she looked up at him, his eyes were streaming tears. He smiled and drew his sleeve across his face. Nothing but the wind and light pouring in through the open door and the chinks in the piled metal and sifting through their loose hair. There was color in his cheeks, and his dark curls were an overgrown mess. He was there and not, Gordon, and not. She backed up to the workbench and sat on it.
“You look like your dad.”
“Do I?”
“Have you eaten at all in the past week?”
“I miss him.”
She took his hand. “Let me ask you a question, though, Gordon. OK?”
“Go ahead.”
“I don’t mean any offense by it at all.”
“OK.”
“Do you think he was happy?”
“My dad?”
“Yes, your dad. Do you think he was happy?”
They were both picturing John Walker, then. Skinny, bespectacled, standing outside of the shop, wind blowing white wisps of his hair. Aloof. His gaze pointed at something no one else could see. Light as the air around him.
“I’ve been thinking about that a lot,” Gordon said. He was quiet a minute. Two. He took his hand from Leigh’s and sat up on the workbench alongside her and put his hand back on the old, red Wilton table vice. “I’ve been thinking that any wish, anything at all that a person might wish for,” he paused — his father had not been a man of wishes—“is like a branch being offered to a drowning man.” Show him anyone who lives for their home, he thought, for their family, or job, or for anything at all, and he’d show you a miserable person. A person who would hang on to that thing no matter how awful it was.
“That’s what I mean,” Leigh said. “A person needs a branch.”
Gordon blinked and wrapped his fingers around the cast steel of the vice.
She scooted closer to him, and reached her arm around his back and set her hand on his fingers. The metal vice was cool and solid. “I know what you’re thinking. I know you think you have to stay here. That you’re bound to this place. I understand more than you realize. Even if you’re not telling me everything.”
“You do?”
She nodded, and he moved his fingers over the top of her hand. “And Gordon. I think you should leave it behind.”
“Leave what behind?”
“All of it. Come with me to school. Like we planned. Like you promised. It’s the next thing to do.”
“The next thing to do.”
“Why when you say that does it sound like a stupid idea? Gordon. Come on. We can’t stay here. You can’t stay here.”
He just looked at her.
“I can’t go alone,” she said.
“Sure you could.”
It was as if he’d slapped her. “You would just send me off?” She pulled her hand back.
“I wouldn’t be sending you off.”
“Think about it,” she said. “You could turn over the shop to Dock long term. Think of what it’d mean to him and Emery.”
He was quiet a moment. “That’s true.”
“Say you will?”
“Ah, Leigh.”
“It’s supposed to be us,” she said. “Together out there.”
“I know it.”
“Come with me. We’ll make a clean break. We’ll start over.”
“I don’t need to start over.”
“Yes,” she said, “you do.”
He shook his head. “What about my mom? All my dad’s work. His life’s work, Leigh.”
She blinked. “Welding?”
He studied her. Welding, she’d said.
Sometime the winter before — a Sunday afternoon — he remembered exactly the moment in the shop, he was practicing with the plasma cutter on the thin aluminum of some of Jorgensen’s irrigation pipe that’d been damaged in the last season, and suddenly without any effort on his part he sensed something else about the work. He wasn’t welding; the welding was happening.
He was high on the experience for a week.
“Get your head out of the clouds,” his father finally said, handing him a set of pliers, but there was a light in his eye as he said it. The pliers were cold and heavy in Gordon’s hand. The rubber sleeves over its handles were a bright kingfisher blue. “Going to hurt yourself,” his father said, turning away. “Or both of us.”
So then it was just welding again. You marked up the plan. You cleaned the metal. You set your voltage and feed speed and did the job.
Still. He’d seen that look in his father’s eye. It was a look that said yes, and there’s more where that came from.
“Don’t you want something better?” Leigh asked.
He shrugged.
“Think of Emery and Dock. Think of Annie. Living people. Who could use the work while you’re away. If there even is any. Would you hoard it for yourself? That doesn’t sound like you. Or your dad.”
“I guess that’s true.”
“Have you seen Dock’s alfalfa? Isn’t it strange not to see Jorgensen’s wheat ripening? Doesn’t any of this strike you as significant? Signs, Gordon.”
“Signs,” he said, without interest.
“It’s the responsible thing to do.”
“I don’t know.”
“Tell me you’ll try it for a month. One month.”
“What if instead I asked you to stay here?”
“I’d say you didn’t know what you were asking.” She crossed her arms. Just stay there? Like what, a year? Five? Ten? Doing what? Waiting for him?
~ ~ ~
There’s one about that kind of mistake, too. Today, where the old highway connects with the frontage road that takes you to the new highway, there’s a one-room schoolhouse that appears and disappears among the giant papery green docks and goosefoot-shaped leaves of lambsquarter. When it’s lit up, you can see the old brass bell tolling, though it makes no sound. When Leigh was a girl, she begged May to tell and retell the tale.
A woman from out east who had once been the schoolteacher, a twenty-six-year-old Honora Strong, was held responsible for the death of every single one of her nineteen young students, aged four to fifteen, frozen to death in a sudden, late-spring blizzard. Though she herself didn’t survive to be hanged or cast out for it, she was caught forever on the highway looking for them. Sometimes in a high wind, you can hear them crying, and her calling them by name.
She lived in a room adjacent to the schoolhouse, with a bedstead and a stove, and had sent her students home, hoping they’d be ahead of the storm, because she was expecting a lover. He went by Miller — David Wayne Miller — and he had been seeing her off and on for two years as he traversed the countryside, east to west and north to south. He was from Utah, though his family were Germans and Swedes out of South Dakota. He had small eyes the color of stone, dark hair raked with silver, and a barrel-shaped torso. Though he wasn’t a tall man, he called himself a big guy, which was accurate in the sense that he took up all the space in a room, left none for anyone else to talk, nor air for them to breathe. He had, somewhere, a wife and two children — and had, somewhere else, another wife, and another child. To all of his women he made promises he couldn’t keep, and left each one of them trapped in her hometown, waiting for him to make good.
Like so many of the westerners who broke the land and occupied positions of influence, May told Leigh — the sheets and yellow wool blanket pulled up to her chin, her small white fingers curled around the satin binding — David Wayne Miller was a sunny liar, a good storyteller, a hard worker, and an expert, cold-hearted son of a bitch. He came out of every shoot-out, every rotten horse trade, and every madam’s house smelling like a rose. For every crime he committed, for every life he ruined, there was a fabulous story to stand in for the truth.