Little Bluestem: Stories from Rural America

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  The year she left, the parking lot was tilled and planted down to corn. Oh, I was so mindless then. Her leaving and all. Didn’t say but two words. One day there she is sullen in the morning, wearing those black elastic pedal pushers, standing in the kitchen making coffee after I come in from chores. Next day I come in about nine, after feeding the hogs and throwin’ down some hay for the stock and horses and it’s as quiet as a tomb in that trailer house. It goes back in one long line, not a double wide or anythin’, so I knowed it right off. Tomb quiet. Coffee machine off. Not even any unwashed breakfast dishes. Just a two-word note, I’m gone, and this unending silence. Enough to drive me out of the place.

  Well, I walked back into the bedroom and checked the dresser. She’d cleaned her stuff out of it and the closet. Two of the suitcases we had back in there were missin’ along with a gym bag. Then, out front, the closet holdin’ her coats showed them gone along with her best boots, Tony Lama, I think they was—all of that alligator and kangaroo hide and fancy stitchin’. Gone.

  I went back outside and looked at the place and took the air. It was a cold March wind that was comin’ up the valley—the kind to rub you raw. And there were a few indications from the level look of the clouds that it might like to rain. The earth softening up, patches of snow, a couple of sheep down by the sheep fold kind of shined up by the mud. Nothing much.

  I went into the barn and started at those oats we never threshed out. The oats I had saved. Used the grain binder on them and stacked them with the heads all in the center like and they kept in the barn pretty good from the rats and mice. (Helps to have cats.) So I fed them out all winter both to sheep and hogs and all the stock I had around. Pretty slick.

  But now there they was just taking up space in my barn. I looked at them like they was talkin’ to me. It was like it was my barn and my space but her absence made the grain take up space. I tore into the first two bundles with my bare hands, then put on gloves after runnin’ a hollow shaft under my nail. Slowed me up some, but I liked the pain and the way the blood gathered into a purple-bluish spot under the nail before it began to trickle out. Grabbed the pitchfork and started throwin’ bundles all over the floor. Not out the door, mind you, I was still thinkin’ enough to think about the mud. But all over the place in the lane, oats shattering on the ce-ment of the barn floor. Swallows would have liked it if they had been there to serve as witnesses. But it was too early for them. So the grain shattered, scattered and ran. And about an hour later, thinkin’ of her and the way she would come into the bedroom with her little smile and take off her brassiere, I was most done with the oats. There was more in the corner, of course. Can’t rearrange a whole season of oats in an hour—even with the oats mostly fed out by then. Still more, standing like sentinels or witnesses in the corner. I threw the fork at a bundle, imagining her knees, workin’ up the hem of her dress that Sunday after we come home from her sister June’s youngest’s confirmation over in Oakdale—with her in a black dress with a black slip and perfume. But then, after that, it was mostly done. Like shuttin’ a giant corrugated door on a machine shed. Kind of hard at first. But then you get it goin’ and you hear the slow growl of the wheels above your head workin’ in the track, and the door at last closes with a hollow sound. That’s the way it was, I suppose, even though I don’t have a shed that big around this place—the barn door being the biggest thing goin’.