Our Souls at Night

  Why didn’t you ever go back to teaching?

  I think I was never really deeply involved or committed to that. It was just what women did. Teaching or nursing. Not everybody finds out what they really want, like you did.

  But I didn’t do it either. I only played at it.

  But you liked teaching literature in the high school.

  I liked it all right. But it wasn’t the same. I was only teaching poetry a few weeks a year and not writing it. The kids didn’t really give a damn about it. A few of them did. But not most of them. They probably look back on those years and hours as old man Waters going off again. Talking shit about some guy a hundred years ago who wrote some lines about a dead young athlete being carried through town on a chair, which they couldn’t relate to, or imagine such a thing being done to themselves. I made them memorize a poem. The boys chose the shortest poem possible. When they got up to recite they were petrified, just nervous as hell. I almost felt sorry for them.

  Here’s a kid that’s spent his first fifteen years learning how to drive a tractor and drill wheat and grease a combine and now somebody arbitrarily makes him say a poem out loud in front of other boys and girls who’ve been raising wheat and driving tractors and feeding hogs and now to pass and get out of English class he’s got to recite “Loveliest of trees, the cherry now” and actually say the word loveliest out loud.

  She laughed. But that was good for them.

  I thought so. I doubt they thought it was. I doubt they even do now, looking back on it, except to have a kind of communal pride in having taken old man Waters’s course and gotten through it, thinking it was a kind of rite of passage.

  You’re too hard on yourself.

  I did have one very bright country girl who memorized the Prufrock poem word perfectly. She didn’t have to do that. It was on her own, her own volition and decision. I only asked them to memorize something short. I actually got tears in my eyes when she said all those lines so well. She seemed to have a pretty good idea what the poem meant too.

  Outside the dark bedroom suddenly the wind came up and blew hard in the open window whipping the curtains back and forth. Then it started to rain.

  I better close the window.

  Not completely. Doesn’t it smell lovely. The loveliest now.

  Exactly.

  He rose and pulled the window down, leaving it partially open, and got back in bed.

  They lay next to each other and listened to the rain.

  So life hasn’t turned out right for either of us, not the way we expected, he said.

  Except it feels good now, at this moment.

  Better than I have reason to believe I deserve, he said.

  Oh, you deserve to be happy. Don’t you believe that?

  I believe that’s how it’s turned out, for these last couple of months. For whatever reason.

  You’re still skeptical about how long this will last.

  Everything changes. He got up again from bed.

  Where are you going now?

  I’m going to check on them. They might’ve gotten scared by the wind and rain.

  You might scare them going in there.

  I’ll be quiet.

  Come back then.

  The boy was asleep. The dog lifted her head from the pillow, looked up at Louis and lay back again.

  In Addie’s bedroom Louis put his hand out the window and caught the rain dripping off the eaves and came to bed and touched his wet hand on Addie’s soft cheek.

  22

  The next time they checked in the shed behind Louis’s house the mice had grown and now had dark hair and their eyes were open. They skittered around when Louis raised the lid. The mother wasn’t there. They watched the little bright black-eyed mice crawl over one another and sniffle and hide. They’re about ready to leave the nest, Louis said.

  What will they do?

  They’ll do what their mother shows them. They’ll go out and look for food and make nests themselves and connect up with some other mice and have babies.

  Won’t we see them again?

  Probably not. We might see them in the garden or out around the garage and beside the walls and the base of the shed. We’ll have to watch.

  Why did the mother run away? She left them alone.

  She’s afraid of us. She’s more afraid of us than of leaving her children.

  But we won’t hurt them, will we?

  No. I don’t want mice in the house but I don’t mind them out here. Unless they get under the hood of the car and chew through the wiring.

  How can they do that?

  Mice can get in almost anywhere.

  23

  Addie said, You don’t need to do that.

  Yes I do, Ruth said. I want to repay the favor. For taking me out.

  What can I bring, then?

  Just bring yourself. And Louis and Jamie.

  In the afternoon they went to the back door of Ruth’s old house and she came out across the porch in her slippers and house dress and apron, her face and thin cheeks red from cooking. She let them in. Bonny was whining at the bottom of the steps. Oh, let her come in too. She won’t be any trouble. The dog came scrambling up into the house. They followed and went into the kitchen, where the table was already set. It was very warm because of the oven. I was going to have us eat in here. But it’s too hot now.

  Louis stood in the doorway. You want to move to the dining room?

  That’s so much bother.

  We’ll just move everything in there. What if I open some of these windows.

  Well, I doubt they’ll even open. You can try.

  He pried at the bay windows with a screwdriver and got two to open.

  Oh. You did it. Well, men are good for some things. I’ll say that much.

  Damn right, Louis said.

  They ate a supper of macaroni and cheese casserole and iceberg lettuce with Thousand Island dressing and canned green beans and bread and butter and iced tea poured from an old heavy glass pitcher and there was Neapolitan ice cream for dessert. The dog lay at Jamie’s feet.

  After supper Ruth took Jamie into the living room and showed him the pictures on the walls and on the bureau while Addie and Louis cleared the dishes and washed up.

  Look here, she said. Where do you think this is?

  I don’t know.

  This is Holt. This is how Holt looked back in the 1920s. Ninety years ago.

  The boy looked up at her old thin wrinkled face and looked at the picture.

  Oh, I wasn’t alive then. I’m not that old. My mother told me about it. Trees on Main Street. All along the street. An old-fashioned-looking place, orderly and quiet. Wasn’t it pretty. Nice to walk there and shop. Then they got electricity. And light poles and street lights on Main Street. Then one night they cut all the trees down after people in town had gone to bed. The next morning people saw what the town council had done. They said the trees blocked the light from the street lamps. People were mad as hell about it, mad enough to spit. My mother was still mad about it for years afterward. She’s the one who told me about this piece of town history and kept this old picture. Men, she used to say. She never forgave my father. He was on the town council.

  Wait now, Louis said. I thought you said we were good for some things.

  No. You’re still on probation. But this boy can be different, she said. I have hopes for him. She took Jamie’s face in her hands. You’re a good boy. Don’t you forget that. Don’t you let anyone make you think otherwise. You won’t, will you.

  No.

  That’s right. She let him go.

  Thank you for supper, he said.

  Well, honey, you’re very welcome.

  They started home then. Addie, Louis, Jamie and the dog went out into the cool summer dark. It’s a beautiful night, Addie called.

  Yes, Ruth called. Yes. Goodnight.

  24

  One morning while it was still cool they took Bonny out in the country to let her run. They put the protective tube on her
foot and drove out to the west of town onto a straight gravel road. There were sunflowers in the barrow ditch and short bluestem and soapweed. Jamie let the dog out of the back seat and took the leash off. She looked up at him, waiting.

  Go on, Louis said. You can run now. Take off. He clapped his hands.

  She jumped up and began running down the road and in and out of the barrow ditches, her protected paw making a soft thud in the hard road as she ran. The boy ran out after her. Addie and Louis followed, walking slowly, watching them. No cars came on the road while they were there.

  This has been a good idea, Addie said, getting this dog.

  He does seem happier.

  That and he’s made an adjustment to being here with us. Who knows if it’ll continue when he goes home.

  They came running back. The boy was red-faced and panting.

  She can run all right with her hurt paw, he said. Did you see her?

  The dog looked at the boy and they ran off again. It was getting hot now. Middle of July. The sky unclouded and the wheat in the fields alongside the road already cut, the stubble all neat and sheared off square, in the next field the corn running in straight dark green rows. A bright hot summer’s day.

  25

  In late July Ruth went to the bank on Main Street with another old lady who was still permitted to drive, and standing at the teller counter she took up the money she was withdrawing from savings, folded it into her purse and zipped the pocket and turned to leave, and turned halfway around toward the door and fell down and died. Just collapsed in a final frail bundle on the tiled bank floor and stopped breathing. They said afterward that she had probably stopped breathing before she even hit the floor. The other woman covered her mouth with her hand and began to cry. They called for the ambulance but she was long past saving. They didn’t bother taking her to the hospital. The coroner came to certify her death and they took her to the funeral home in town on Birch Street. Her body was cremated and there was a small funeral at the Presbyterian church two days later. Not many of her friends were still alive, old ladies, a few old men, who came limping and shuffling into the church and sat down in the pews and some of them leaned and nodded over with their chins rested on their thin chests and slept a while and then woke when the hymn started.

  Addie and Louis sat down in front. She had arranged the funeral and told the minister about Ruth. He hadn’t known her at all. She had stopped going to any church because of her feelings about orthodoxy and the childish ways in which churches talked and thought about God.

  Afterward the people attending the funeral all went back to their silent homes and Addie took the enameled urn of her ashes to her house. It turned out the old lady had no immediate family, except for a distant niece in South Dakota who became her inheritor. The niece came to Holt in the next week and met with the lawyer and the realtor, and the house that Ruth had lived in for decades was sold in a month to a retired man and his wife from out of state. The niece didn’t want the urn. Do you want it? she said.

  Addie took it and at two in the morning in the dark she and Louis spread her ashes in the backyard behind Ruth’s house.

  Now it wasn’t the same as it was when Ruth was there and they could all go out for a night to the drive-in café and afterward to a softball game. They decided Jamie didn’t have to know about all of this. They told him she had gone to live somewhere else. They decided that wasn’t entirely a lie.

  She was a good person, wasn’t she, Louis said. I admired her.

  I miss her already, Addie said. What’s going to happen to us—to you and me?

  26

  Addie said, After Connie’s death Carl wasn’t himself. He seemed all right on the outside when he was with other people away from home and at his office, but it changed him. He loved our daughter. More than me. More than Gene. He didn’t pay as much attention to Gene after that and when he did it was often critical, to correct him. Many times I talked to him about it and he said he would try to do better. But it was never the same and it affected Gene. I know it did. I tried to make up for that but that didn’t work either.

  What about you and him? That must have changed too.

  We stopped making love for a year after Connie’s death. He wasn’t interested. Then when he was interested again it wasn’t much good. It was more just physical than anything loving and emotional. After a year or so we stopped altogether.

  When was that?

  Ten years before he died.

  Did you miss it?

  Of course. I missed the closeness more. We weren’t at all close anymore. We were cordial and sort of formally pleasant and polite, but that was all.

  I didn’t know any of this. I didn’t notice.

  No, but how would you have noticed? In public we were kind, even affectionate. And we didn’t see you very much even if we were neighbors. But nobody knew really. I didn’t tell anyone and I’m sure Carl didn’t. Gene knew but he may have come to think that that’s the way it goes, how life is. That married people were that way to each other.

  That seems pretty miserable to me.

  Oh, it was bad. I tried talking but he wouldn’t talk. I tried coming to bed naked. Put on perfume. I even ordered skimpy little nightgowns from a catalog. He thought it was disgusting. He got rough, kind of mean, when we did make love, the few times we did. Of course it wasn’t love at all. He made me feel worse. I quit trying to fix things and we settled into our long polite and quiet life. I took Gene to Denver to concerts and plays and tried to give him more than just this house and its secrets, to get him out of Holt, and show him a larger world. I can’t say that worked well either. Gene stayed closed up like his father. He got more so in high school, then he went off to college and we didn’t see him even as much as we did before. So I began to go to Denver myself to plays and concerts. I treated myself. I felt I deserved it. I stayed at the Brown Palace Hotel and went out alone for expensive dinners. I bought a few dresses that I wore only in Denver. I didn’t want to show myself in Holt in those clothes. I didn’t want people to know. I expect people knew something anyway. Your wife may have.

  If she did she never said anything about it to me.

  I always liked that about Diane. I thought she was someone you could trust not to gossip or talk meanly.

  But you still slept together all those years. You didn’t want separate beds.

  I suppose that sounds strange. But somehow that was what little we kept. We never touched each other. You learn how to stay strictly on your side and not to touch even by accident in the night. You take care of each other when you’re sick and in the daytime you each do what you think of as your job. Carl would bring me flowers to make up and people in town would think, How nice. But all the time there’d be this secret of silence.

  Then he died, Louis said.

  Yes. I took care of him all along. I wanted to do that. I needed to. He was sick off and on before he died that Sunday morning in the church. So yes, I took care of him. I don’t know what else I would have done. We had that long time of joined life, even if it wasn’t good for either one of us. That was our history.

  27

  At midweek they packed Louis’s pickup and drove west up out of the plains toward the mountains, watching the mountains rise up higher as they got closer to the Front Range, the dark forested lower foothills and farther back the white peaks above tree line still with patches of snow even in July, and drove onto U.S. Highway 50 and went on through the few towns. They stopped in one of the towns for hamburgers and then drove up the highway through the Arkansas River canyon, the beautiful fast water, steep red jagged cliffs on each side, there were Rocky Mountain sheep along the road, all ewes with short sharp horns, and went on and then turned off toward North Fork Campground on County Road 240 and entered the national forest. There were not many people or campers in the campground. They got out and began to unload the pickup at a site near the creek. They could hear it running and rushing. The clear icy water, with brook trout holed up in the hollows
below the rocks. There were tall fir trees and big ponderosas and aspen along the creek and back in the hillside. Tent and camper sites were marked off by timbers and there were picnic tables and firepit rings nearby.

  We’ll look around after we get camp set up, Louis said.

  The boy helped set up the tent where Louis said was a good flat smooth place that wasn’t too close to the fire ring. Louis showed him how to position the tent poles and stretch the guide ropes tight and peg them in the ground and how to fold back the window coverings and the door flap. They put their blowup mattresses and sleeping bags inside, Jamie and Bonny to sleep on one side, Addie and Louis on the other. Addie unzipped one of the bags and spread it out for herself and Louis and unzipped the other and laid it over the first sleeping bag, so they could have a wide comfortable bed together, and spread out another bag for Jamie.

  Then the camp was set up and they went over to the creek and waded in the icy waters.

  It’s too cold, Grandma.

  It comes straight out of a snowbank, honey.

  By now it was getting dark, long past suppertime. Louis and the boy hauled wood from the pickup since cutting any limbs or trees wasn’t permitted in the national forest. Jamie gathered up twigs and little dry branches from the ground and they laid a small fire inside the circle of rocks and propped a grate over it and Addie and the boy cooked hot dogs and canned beans in an iron frying pan and got out some raw carrots and chips. When the food was hot they sat down at the picnic table and ate and watched the fire.

  You want to get some more wood? Louis said.

  Jamie and the dog went out of the firelight to the pickup and the boy brought an armload of wood back.

  Go ahead and lay some of it on, Louis said.

  He put a piece of the wood on the fire, his arm stretched out, his eyes watering and blinking in the smoke. Then he sat down again. The air was cool and fresh, a mountain breeze blowing up. They didn’t talk but looked at the fire and at the stars just above the mountains. They could see the bare peak of Mount Shavano shining in the night sky to the north.