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Gordon had one good dark-brown suit with a faint stripe pattern which he had laid out on the bed in the guest bedroom with his best white shirt and special gold and green striped tie which Rose had purchased for the occasion of their ridge-top wedding. He would dress here, along with Tom Willets, his best man and close friend from deep into his past. They went farther back than Gordon most days cared to go. He touched him with all of this past, and his presence here today was affirming as they dressed together, mostly in silence. Rose got the master bedroom, and he could hear voices trailing off in the midst of the wind rattling the windows as all four members of the bridal party dressed in close proximity. Occasionally he could make out the lower tones of Rose’s voice and the clear, strong laughter of Ruthie’s in the adjacent room, and,when he heard her sister’s voice rising up above the timbre of the wind, Gordon could not help but smile.
Tom was all done dressing and now was staring at himself in the dresser mirror, fussing with his hair in front of the old varnished dresser standing before him against the blank white of the bedroom wall with its browns, the settled, worn patinas of its surface mottled by long use and the sun. He flashed a smile at Gordon as he caught his eye in the mirror.
“Not long now,” he winked. “How you holdin’ up?”
The last phrase turned him somewhere in his spirit and he saw, again, Allison the very last time he saw her alive, the slight form in the bed, the long sunlit afternoon against the drawn blinds, the dust on the nightstand, the commode in the corner, the constant, eroding hum of the oxygen-humifier, the plastic tubes in both nostrils with their tendrils winding up around her auburn hair and about her ears, her worn eyes.
He had wanted to say it and almost did—how you holdin’ up—but then almost miraculously he had found the straight-forward and the simple words he had wanted, the words to cut through time, to cut through weariness, to cut through the gathering weight of mystery that was coming upon her:
“You know, Allie, I love you. I love you now and I loved you then, and I always will.”
He could almost hear the resonance of his voice as he said these words, five years back in the back-bedroom of her first home, her parents’ place, where she had finally come to rest in the last days. He could almost feel, once more the pressure on his wrist that was the pressing of her hand before their fingers touched and tangled themselves together in one firm knot, before the last strong words she would ever utter to him, her words rising above the dull throb of the machine in the room:
“I know all about your love, Gordon. I carry it with me. I love you too.”
She had set him free, then. Told him to carry her with him into the rest of his days, but also to grasp life anew, find it when and wherever it presented itself. He remembered his deep surprise at the fervor and substance of her words as she told him to grieve and then to come clear of it and to go into the very best of the light that he could find. “You do that,” she had said, in between spasms of coughing, “and I too will be fulfilled. Somewhere, deep in the flowing of spirit, I too will be free.”
“Hey, buddy, you’d better get cracking.” Gordon could see Tom’s back in the mirror as he turned to face him. “You okay?”
“Yeah. I’m fine. Just lost in thought, getting ready, I guess, somewhere inside.”
Tom had first thought to say, “Now, don’t go putting yourself in one of your somber moods and get all philosophical on me,” but then he had thought of Allison, too, and had wondered if she would perhaps be on Gordon’s mind today and therefore kept his words to himself and offered instead an affirming smile and a nod.
Gordon finished buttoning his shirt and fumbled through the tying of his tie, his thick fingers more like stubs working the last of the knot while Tom waited.
“Now Gordie, I’ve got the ring for Rose right here in my right coat pocket, and up here,” he patted the left side of his coat, “I’ve got the license all ready to go. Once you get pronounced and the celebration begins, I’ll give it to the Reverend, and he said he’ll take care of the signing and mailing it off to the county clerk.”
Gordon nodded. He had just said good-bye; he had just shut the door to her room, softly and for the last time. He had just walked away from her grave on an afternoon not unlike this one, the wind surging around the gravestones, turning up the undersides of leaves from the willow and the oak trees. He had just sold the house, down at Frog’s Hollow, leaving the small, tree-shrouded fields that he had plowed and cultivated and mowed for all those years, the place that was his and almost hers as well. He had just come out here on the ridge on what he often thought of as the first morning, seeing the sun on the flanks of his new team, the fog rising up like steam from the surrounding valleys. He had just set the plow into the earth then, the earth soft from the first long summer’s rain and said “Come up” to the team and watched the first furrow unravel along the long run of the ridge, the long run of his new home up here. He could see it, now, as Tom opened the door of the small bedroom to the living room in which just beyond the seated forms of the gathered community were waiting.
It trailed behind him, a long length now. As he stepped into the room, Gordon remembered looking back at the furrow’s long sinuous length, and it seemed to him that it wasn’t what he first imagined it to be: a scar upon the earth that he and the team were making. No. Looking around in the midst of his first strides towards the arch of the dining room, where their vows were now to be said because the roaring of the wind had pushed aside an outside celebration, he caught Rose’s eye and almost stopped, so full she seemed of something ahead of him, of something he had hungered for a long time and now was approaching so surely in the midst of this muffled room heated with bodies; this room filled with wondering eyes, smiling faces and the scuffling of feet. He almost stopped in the midst of his own smile, but her look beckoned him, drew him forward until there was no other place to go but directly towards her. And this he did, with one last thought of that first day plowing on the ridge: the horses’ ears were forward. And the long, unwinding furrow starting just behind their feet and unwinding into the distance of the past was not a scar. No-sir!
The dark earth in the bright light of the afternoon sun and against the bold green of the surrounding grass was always what it would be for him now: it was a ribbon, beautiful and bold, a dark ribbon dancing in the wind.
a note about the writer
Brian Backstrand is a writer, a poet, a teacher and a clergyman. He is also former poetry editor of The Long Story. Currently he is a priest of a small Episcopal Church in rural Wisconsin where he and his wife Marilee own a farm and are in the process of becoming energy self-sufficient and living off the grid.
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