“Our kids,” May said.
“I know it.”
The winter passed without sight of either Gordon or Leigh, and those who remained in Lions fell into a regular pattern of visiting, of eating, of maintaining the tidiness of their homes and of Jefferson Street, empty as it was.
Boyd repeated his routine with canned goods once every ten or fifteen days through February, and then in spring and summer, taking pleasure in making new selections at the grocery store in Burnsville. Bristling sardines. Block of sharp cheddar. Bag of green apples. Once the following autumn when Boyd went to check the supply, it looked like it’d been a good month since anyone had come; the last paper bag had dissolved in rain so that the canned food labels were bleached, and some of them had crumbled and slipped off. He thought that was discourteous, leaving it all out unlabeled like that. So he began leaving the canned food and anything else they had to share in the factory itself, in an old metal dairy crate, out of the weather. Though it sometimes took several weeks, even months, eventually everything they set out was taken.
Most everyone assumed Gordon had died. He would not have left his mother, he would not have left the shop. But Georgianna claimed to see him regularly, and she spoke freely of their meetings. Whether in snow or rain or heat, all of those who remained — Dock or Annie Sterling, or May or Boyd, or two of them together — took turns bringing her mashed potatoes and meat loaf and applesauce and pie. They took turns paying her electrical and water bills, and eventually purchasing the goods that Boyd would take out Sunday evenings, passing through the only remaining hay in the county to the line where the cultivated fields met the wild weeds and litter of the factory. He circled around the back of the old building and slipped under the fence where Gordon and Leigh used to, until he got tired of that and Dock went out with a pair of wire cutters to make a passage through the chain-link.
Within a few years Georgianna herself passed away in her sleep and was laid to rest beside John Walker, and when Boyd got sick and needed to be closer to a hospital, the lights went out in Lions. Dock helped May nail boards over the windows of the Lucy Graves and the bar, and she drove Boyd to Laramie the same day, never to return, herself. That left only the Sterlings. Eventually, Dock’s hair was as white as whorled milkweed floating in the dark, early mornings, as he tended his hogs. Annie’s older brother in Kansas sent money, sometimes, Dock sold his hogs, and they got by. Almost no one came to the shop anymore but once or twice a year — someone from Burnsville who knew Dock was reliable, or someone from up by Horses who needed a small job done, a trailer fixed, a hog kennel repaired. Occasionally he was given a project he didn’t know how to execute, but he’d talk through the work-up out loud with Gordon or with John, and figure it out. He kept the shop clean and kept all the Walkers’ beautiful machines in running order, and he kept everything where it was — never moved or touched the Walkers’ coffee cups from their place on the workbench. Dock was very clear that it was he who was the visitor — the guest in that workshop, and then in the house itself, when Georgianna passed and left it to the Sterlings. He refused to sell any of the equipment, though God knew they could’ve used the income.
By then it was Annie who had taken over from Boyd the task of the canned food, blankets, and five-gallon water drums, though the boys, as she called them, often helped her drive out the latter on their ATVs. It was the kind of job Emery liked.
She went in all weathers, in Dock’s big sheepskin coat in late fall or winter, or in summer, her nightgown sighing against her blue veined legs as she crossed the summer grass, or across the iron gray furze in February and March. In slippers she climbed the metal staircase to the first landing and left there, right by the old awl, a can of cling peaches. A can of beans. Occasionally a new warm blanket, a little firewood, a note: Thinking of you here. Beautiful sunrise yesterday morning. Supposed to be a big snow. Happy Easter. We love you.
These days, everyone’s gone. If you were to take an unmarked county road off of the highway and drive north an hour, if you could find the place, distinguishable by its high rusted water tower and abandoned sugar beet factory, you could stand in the middle of Jefferson Street and hear each note from each barn swallow floating through the air like a globe of silver. In the silence between, blood singing in your ears.
~ ~ ~
For ten years, then fifteen and seventeen, Leigh didn’t go back. She finished college, dated, tried on different jobs, met her husband, married, had two children — did all the things everyone does. When she heard from May over the phone, May said nothing about the Walkers. In everything her mother asked — How were the kids? How was work? — Leigh heard: I’m not going to bring it up; you bring it up. But Leigh would never, and she always had to pour a glass of white wine afterward.
“What is it?” her husband would say, jostling her arm a little, sitting down close beside her. She’d never told him much about Gordon, and had told him very little about Lions, a place of impoverishment and uneducated people — a life they both agreed she’d been lucky to escape.
“Nothing,” she would say. “I don’t get along with my mother.”
Sometimes now, grocery shopping, or filing a bill, or scrubbing the bathtub, she looks up, her breath caught high in her lungs. She’s forgetting something. She’s forgotten something. She races in her mind over the list of things she’d set out to do that day, racing through the list again and again in loops until she is calmed not by the reassurance that she hasn’t missed anything on it, but by the list itself. They are half as good as desire, these lists, and keep her twice as busy.
She spends a good deal of her time grocery shopping. A beautiful grocery store three-quarters of a mile down the road from the house she shares with this husband, who came from a little upper-middle-class money, and her children, who are bright and precocious. A clean living room with tiled floors and yellow painted walls and windows full of light. Granite countertops in the kitchen, a big, rustic wooden table for family meals, and the children’s crafts and games. A garden out back with red tomatoes, flowers, and lawn. Green lawn. Soft as the hair on a baby’s head and you could lie down in it — the kind of pasture everyone at home had dreamt of, had counted on, had every year hoped would emerge from the ground in Lions. And now here it was, green grass, all over her yard.
On occasion, the housecleaning gets away from her, and she finds over the surfaces of all of her furniture a dusty residue like a living membrane, and she hesitates to sweep it away, though in the end she always sweeps it away, her eyes fixed out the window on the street at some passing car or neighbor with a stroller.
In dreams a stiff wind, like a whisper, comes in through a crack under the door, and she wakes troubled and sets her hand on her husband’s thick arm and asks no one in particular: am I awake? Terrified that the wind is real, and will keep coming, will break between all the boards and strip the house away, tumble down the smooth creamy walls and come up beneath the kitchen and front hall floor, their ochre tiles suddenly loosed like rotted teeth, rending open the walls so that her children, now old enough not to need or want her, will walk out into the huge empty field she hoped they’d never see, the wind coming and coming until what is at the heart of her home stands exposed for her to face. And the horror of it will be that it is not — as her mother had once told her — personal. There will be nothing in the wind that cares whether she has chosen the wrong life.
Because the truth is, her husband could be the most considerate lover, the steadiest caretaker, and he wouldn’t be as real to her as the shadows of leaves printed by cold moonlight on her white belly and thighs, which seem as they tremble to arrange themselves in cipher spelled out across her flesh.