“I know.”
“I there anything you want to tell me?” she asks. “Anything at all, baby. You know Mama wouldn’t think bad of you for nothing in the world.”
The phone rings. William waits as it rings again and again, seeing how long it will take before she gets up. She looks over her shoulder at him as he pushes away from the table, and says, “Remember what I said. You promise me?”
William closes the door to his room. He locks it, too, and later, he doesn’t answer when she knocks. He pretends to be asleep. He lies with his head on his pillow and stares at the ceiling as she tells him that she loves him and that she’ll never leave him and that everything, everything that she does, is for him.
Misty stops coming outside to play. When William asks Penny where she is, Penny shrugs. “She’s sick. She says her head won’t quit hurting. I thought she was faking at first, but.” Another shrug. “She don’t eat much. She cries a lot. She thinks I can’t hear her, but we sleep in the same room, you know? I have to hear her.”
“Did she say anything about me?”
“No,” Penny says. “Why?”
“Have you seen the new statue?”
“God, there’s another one?”
They go to the field together. The bridge still hasn’t finished itself. It doesn’t seem to want to be a bridge at all.
Penny says, “I wish somebody would just burn them all down, you know?”
“No,” William says.
He is staring at all the statues together. There are so many now that it hurts his eyes trying to hold them all in one place. Misty hasn’t even seen all the things that he’s made for her. She hasn’t mentioned them, not even once. William’s vision blurs and he looks down at his own two feet.
He says, “I still think the green one kind of looks like me. Through the nose.”
He turns his head, but Penny is walking back through the yard. There is someone standing in the front door of her trailer, but the sunlight glints on the glass so that William can’t see who’s looking back at him.
Earl sits in the lawn chair every night. He had the test results from the college framed and hung them from a wooden fence post, the stark white paper and fine print saying things about the field that most of the people couldn’t understand. But it means that nothing was found. That the statues are statues and nothing else. Just metal and lead, just grown. There is nothing in the soil or the water or the air to explain where the statues come from and that, the crowd says, makes the field a miracle. Earl doesn’t say much at all.
Once, William thinks he sees Misty. Earl has taken to having open house nights on certain days of the week. It draws more people, somehow, the thought of needing permission. The line stretches down the road, out of the holler and out of sight. William likes to stand in the crowd and listen to the things the people have to say about the field and about God, about how beautiful it all is, how perfect. That’s when he sees Misty standing at the edge of the woods, near the creek. She’s wearing a dark shirt, her hair pulled back in a low ponytail. She’s alone and she looks small between the trees, smaller than he’s ever seen her.
William yells her name. He pushes through the people, fighting against the bodies, ignoring the complaints. He runs across the yard and between the trees. He wants to tell her that he is sorry. He wants to ask her to help him burn down the barn. He wants to play in the creek with her and hold her hand. He runs through the dark, shouting her name, but there is nothing but trees and leaves and dark, wet earth. He finds the hair tie lying at his feet when he turns around. William buries that, too.
William goes the fallow field one last time. It’s been a week since he last saw Misty. A week since anything new has grown. Earl is snoring in his lawn chair, yet William still walks around to the other side of the field to avoid him. He has to get down on his knees and crawl through the fence to reach the field. It is so crowded with statues there is barely room to move. William wedges himself between the unfinished bridge and a heavy hand that reaches toward the sky. He climbs up a series of concentric golden circles and uses the elevation to find one small patch of empty earth, there behind the first statue of green glass.
William is winded now, breathing hard. He is crying, too, but only a little. Only small tears drip from the tip of his nose and fall onto the rich brown earth, and the earth takes that, too, and will use it. William rips his shirt on a barb from a stone statue and there is a scrape on his leg that he doesn’t remember getting, but the wound burns now.
William makes his way to the empty spot of earth. This is the only way he can set things right. He has planted bottles and wood and coins and all manner of small things and they have come back. They have been bigger, too, and better than they have been before. They have been something worth looking at. And he will be, too. He will cover himself whole, close his mouth and his eyes, and let the dirt do its work. He will come back changed. Misty won’t be afraid of him anymore and his mother won’t bring another man home. This will fix the wrong inside of him and everything will be okay.
William starts to dig, and he doesn’t stop, not even when his fingernails bend backward and chip away. Even when he hits rocks and has to pry them from the earth and toss them over his shoulder. Even when the rocks become heavy roots tangled together like vines, thick and twisting away in all directions. The sun is bright and hard above him when William finally stops digging. He is standing on a bed of roots, under which a great chasm stretches. The air coming up from the darkness is musty, but warm, and he doesn’t know how the ground has been holding itself up all this time.
“Hello?” he says, and a voice answers, but it is not his own. It’s his mother walking through the grass, calling his name. William looks into the darkness beneath him, at the place where the dark becomes something else, not light exactly, but close.
William reaches up to the surface. He takes a handful of dirt and pulls it down. He doesn’t stop bringing the earth down around him until he can’t hear his mother anymore. He doesn’t stop until he is planted, whole, in the dark earth.
The Eyes are White and Quiet
Carole Johnstone
18.02.19 (Clinic: BAR55, 14.02.19)
Consultant: Dr. Barriga
Ophthalmology—Direct Line: 020 5489 9000/ Fax: 020 5487 5291
Minard Surgery Group, Minard Road, SE6 5UX
Dear Dr. Wilson,
Hannah Somerville (06.07.93)
Flat 01, 3 Broadfield Rd, SE6 5UP
NHS No.: 566 455 6123
Thank you for referring this young lady, whose optician suspected optic disc cupping. Her visual acuity is 6/6 in the right eye and 6/4 in the left. Both of the eyes are white and quiet. Intraocular pressure readings are 18mm/Hg in the right and 16mm/Hg in the left. She has open anterior chamber angles in both. The CD ratios are about 0.5. There is no significant visual field defect.
Her eyesight does not appear to be deteriorating. Her chief complaint is that of intermittent visual disturbance, but this was absent in clinic. There is no family history of glaucoma. I have not started her on any medication. Unless she has any further problems, she will be reviewed in the eye clinic in twelve months following a repeat visual fields test and central corneal thickness assessment.