Little Bluestem: Stories from Rural America

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  Somewhere north of Steuben on the way to County W, Jason began to take stock. He had rubbed his leg into a bright raw pink and then put on a dry cotton sock, his right foot into a moccasin, his right pant leg rolled up to the knee; his left foot still housed in the bulk of his boot.

  The heat poured out of the engine onto the floor of the pickup cab and he began to think of all the words Marion might find—now and later— over this little thing. He longed for a warm basement. And some strands of long, auburn hair? A delicate wrist?

  He almost missed the turn it came so fast. It was like a part of him lifted up out of the darkness—out of the tangle of just living. A dull metal unexamined part, coated with rust. He had not thought of her since that day in the truck riding over the hills with the furnace in back. Perhaps it didn’t matter. Perhaps. What was new was that he now touched a cold that had been inside. A piece of river ice lodged in his gut.

  Strange that he had found it in the outside, wandering out on a river in the midst of ordinary time. He had been trying to warm himself outside in—gathering sticks of wood from the edges of his life. He could feel the heat now on his foot. He was losing his internal source. His heat source. The calories of those hardwood trees, the trees he burned, always worked their way out from inside, showing up in the dull, red coals of the wood he so dearly loved.

  In the middle of his years, he was like an old elm, lodged in the crook of another, half-supported there, bark falling away. Growing cold.

  His foot started shaking. Like a fish hooked and lifted up, it was quivering in the air. That was what it was—a need deep inside him. He was like that tree. Or like an old fish. He looked at his foot, at the pale skin above the layer of the sock and thought of an old cat or a sturgeon down in the bottom of the river, iced up, slowing in all that cold, winding down into some deep, eternal rhythm, waiting for the thaw.

  The old rusty thing, metal and cable. How much oil did it take that day? He saw the brown of her jersey gloves and the slow, sludge-like oil working its way into the moving parts. And now this water. He could still feel it, thumb tacks and knives, sloshing away in his boot. This water like oil. How much water would it take, he thought, to loosen all the moving parts that ached inside?

  THE BONE YARD