Lions

by Bonnie Nadzam

  “Nothing I’m expecting,” John told him, “which is why I’m paying such close attention.”

  Here, at his chair and table, John would set down his second glass and clean his eyeglasses with a soft, faded yellow cloth, turn on the lamp, pick up his book from the night before or open a new one, and sip the second shot as he read.

  “Rejoined the living, I see,” Georgianna said to Gordon now, with a smile. “You must be hungry.”

  Gordon stared. The wind from outside filled Georgianna’s white curtains with moving light. Behind them, the shapes of trees, hedges. Next door May’s Barred Rocks and Rhode Island Reds clucked and screamed.

  “He passed almost right after you left, Gordon,” Georgianna said. She lifted the whiskey, and sniffed it. “I can’t believe he drank this stuff.”

  “How long have I been asleep?”

  “Long time. Leigh’s in the kitchen.”

  He sat down. “Can I—” He looked outside again, then back to his mother. “Can I still see him?”

  “If you want to. He’s in Burnsville. We’ve been waiting on you.”

  Gordon nodded. “I’m sorry.”

  She waved her hand. Reached for a tissue.

  “Has Leigh been here all day?”

  “Just this hour. Everyone’s helping out.”

  They were quiet a long time. Georgianna cried and Gordon stood to hand her another tissue. She took it and balled it up in her hand. He looked toward the kitchen door. He could see Leigh’s back, the knot of his mother’s apron tied around her waist. He turned back to his mother just as Leigh turned away from the kitchen counter and stepped closer to the doorway to listen.

  “Was it—was he—”

  “Peaceful,” she said, and nodded into her tissue. “Just fell into a deeper sleep. Hardly made a movement.”

  Gordon struggled for a moment, and got it out in a whisper. “I couldn’t watch.”

  “I know.”

  “Did he say anything?”

  She shook her head. “It’s like he was already gone. You saw him.”

  They were quiet another minute.

  “Mom,” Gordon said. “Did you and Dad ever talk about going back to Lincoln? With your parents?”

  “Back to Nebraska?” She set down the whiskey and folded her hands in her lap. “Your dad’s work was here. You know that. And after Grandma and Grandpa died there was no reason to go back.”

  “But you could have moved the shop.”

  “Yes, we could have moved the shop.”

  “He would have done well in a bigger city.”

  “He certainly could have.”

  “And wouldn’t it have been better for you?”

  “Better? For me?” She shook her head. “I don’t know, Gordon. Why?” Then she smiled. “You’re trying to imagine what kind of woman might want to spend her life in Lions, and why.”

  He shrugged. “I guess that’s right.”

  “You’ve been traveling.”

  “Traveling?”

  “Your father always called it traveling. And he always came back so serious. So sharp. Ready to work.”

  Gordon leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, and half covered his face with his hands.

  “I won’t ask you to talk about it,” she said. “I know that’s sort of against the rules, isn’t it?”

  He smiled a little. Ran his sleeve beneath his nose. “I guess so.”

  “He doesn’t begrudge those last days, Gordon. I know he doesn’t.”

  “I’ll never forgive myself.”

  “Don’t ever say such a thing.”

  “It’s like my whole life I’ve been climbing a mountain,” he said, “and when I was up there, and knew he was gone, I could see.”

  “What could you see?”

  His eyes filled with tears and again his throat closed up. He spoke in a hoarse whisper. “Everything.” He pressed the insides of his thumbs to his eyes and felt his lower lip and chin begin to tremble. “And now,” he said. His voice cracked. Georgianna waited. It came out again in a whisper. “Now I’m coming down the other side.”

  “Tell me one thing,” she said, “so that I know. In case I need you. Which direction do you go?”

  Gordon’s eyes touched hers.

  “Tell me,” she said.

  “North.”

  “Same place.”

  “Yes.”

  “OK.”

  “You know where it is?”

  “Of course I do.”

  Where she stood listening in the doorway, Leigh’s knees went weak. She couldn’t hear any more of it. She turned from the door and crossed the kitchen slowly, her knees unsteady, her stomach unsteady, and went back to the counter where she lifted a cool, raw egg and held it in her hand. She looked out at the yard, and down at the egg, then cracked it into Georgianna’s mixing bowl. Two, three, four more, and she whipped them into a pale yellow foam.

  In the living room Georgianna lifted and sniffed the whiskey again. “I didn’t marry your father as a way to get nice things, or to be confident that we’d be living a certain way,” she said. “Love is not about comfort or consolation, Gordon. Is that what you wanted to ask?”

  “Maybe,” he said.

  “You want to ask me if your father was crazy.”

  “No.”

  “It’s OK,” she said. “It won’t be the first time someone’s asked me. But I can’t answer it for you.”

  He nodded.

  “And Gordon, even if he was, it doesn’t mean you are. You don’t have to keep the shop. You don’t have to spend your free days up north. You don’t.”

  He looked at her. He thought her hair was whiter. He’d never realized how much she resembled his father—the shape of the eyes, the long, even ridge of the nose, the wide cheekbones. Gordon had heard say of people who live side by side for many years that the cells and even atoms of their bodies begin to align with each other’s. Eventually they not only cease to look like themselves but begin to resemble each other. So what happens when one of the two of those people disappears?

  She patted his hand. “It’s exhausting,” she said, as if she could hear his thoughts.

  Years after this summer Leigh consulted a doctor about grief and hallucination, about grief and heartbreak. She was in Denver at the time, and found herself wandering around a pretty, green park that was, it turned out, a hospital grounds. There was a statue of St. Francis in the middle of a fountain ringed with flowers of stone, their crenellated petals sparkling with mineral glitter. She sat beside them at a bench beneath an alder and was soon joined by a physician eating his lunch out of a brown paper bag. He was old, soft around the middle, with iron gray hair and brown eyes. She imagined he had an old wife at home who had assembled this lunch, with sliced apples and a flat whole-wheat sandwich cut into four triangles, as if he were a child. They greeted each other, Dr. Saunders, his name tag said, and when he finished a triangle of his sandwich, Leigh asked if she might trouble him with a question.

  “A medical question?”

  “Of sorts.”

  “Are you a patient here?”

  “No.”

  “Have family here?”

  “I’m just waiting for someone.”

  “I’ll try to answer it for you,” the doctor said.

  She articulated the question as best she could.

  “Ah,” he said, and smiled a little sadly at her. “Dying beside your one true love and passing into the eternal together. The stuff of legends.”

  “Can’t a person die of grief?”

  He smiled and shook his head. “I’ve never heard of any such diagnosis.”

  No doubt the old doctor believed he was making a helpful statement, but it sounded to Leigh like words from a man who’d never really loved anyone. Even an actuary—a mathemat
ician—could tell you that a grieving person can be distraught, distracted, self-destructive; that there is, in fact, no place in the body where grief might not make its home.

  “What about grief that makes you hear things?”

  “Like voices?” He looked at her curiously.

  “And see things.”

  “Visual hallucinations, too?”

  She looked out across the green. It was impossibly bright. “Where you imagine whole worlds,” she said.

  He frowned. “Imagine, or see them?”

  “Where it seems like,” she shrugged, “like you believe in unbelievable stuff.”

  “It can be a lot of stress.” He looked up into the blinding blue sky above him. “I lost my wife, for instance.”

  “I’m so sorry,” she told him, and she inadvertently glanced at his sliced apples.

  “I live with my daughter,” he said. “Every morning, one lunch for my grandson, one for me.”

  “That’s a nice thing.”

  “That kind of stress can do a lot of harm,” he continued. He was looking at Leigh steadily now. “For a while, for a year even, you maybe really fall apart. I’ve seen that. That’s normal.”

  “A year, even?”

  “We all have our turn at loss, eventually. Then we understand the need to be patient.”

  She stood. “Thank you. I’m so sorry about your wife.”

  “Look,” he said. He half stood, as well, and caught his lunch in his lap and sat again. “It’s not my specialty. You should ask someone in the field. Would you like to talk to someone? Would you like a name?”

  “I’m from out of town.”

  “Well. OK. But do talk to someone in the field.”

  She pictured the old ground behind their ruined houses, tiny, lace-winged insects glittering above the feathers of weeds.

  In the Walkers’ kitchen Leigh set a cast-iron skillet of steaming eggs and a plate of buttered toast on the wood table by the window. She was afraid to look at Gordon. Afraid of what he’d seen. Afraid of what she might see in him, now.

  Yes, everyone agreed, the boy changed that week. In town they remarked on it—his transformation, the striking resemblance to his father when Gordon lost a few pounds, when the sun had drawn lines around his eyes and across his forehead. Even after his first visit, his features seemed sharper. His gaze, sharper. He was sunburnt, and gave Leigh the impression of having visibly aged. He would not meet her eyes, which she took to mean he didn’t want to talk about any of it: where he was, what he’d seen, or what was now required of him. Suddenly she saw herself at the head of Georgianna’s table, in Georgianna’s apron, holding one of Georgianna’s wooden spoons.

  “I’ve got to go,” she said. Gordon stared directly at her from across the room.

  “You won’t stay and eat?” Georgianna asked.

  “Can’t.” She raised a hand in farewell, or hello, and turned to the back door.

  Georgianna went on setting the table for three.

  When they lowered John Walker into the ground, Gordon took his mother’s hand. The chaplain from the Burnsville funeral home read a psalm and blessed the assembly, and gave thanks for the day. Slowly, one and two at a time, those in attendance turned away toward their cars. Georgianna and Gordon stood fixed at John’s side.

  “Gordon,” Leigh said softly, and touched the back of his shirt, but he did not move or speak.

  “Boy’s heart is broken,” Dock said, taking Leigh’s arm in his own. His own big blue eyes were red and full of tears. “His mama’s too. Give him time.”

  They drove in a line to the Walkers’ yard, which smelled like grilled meat, beer, baked sage, and mosquito repellent. Leigh watched Georgianna turn from the kitchen sink when Gordon walked in barefoot in his blue jeans and take his face with both her hands. The screen door was propped open by an old red brick. May was setting up card tables, and Dock was grilling. It was a long, barrel-shaped grill John and Gordon had welded with expanded steel.

  Together, Gordon and Georgianna stepped outside. Faces materialized out of the greenish gold light and looked at them, eyes bright in their heads, lips drawn. There was old Wade Till’s sad, equine head.

  “Gas station,” the old man told Gordon. “You going to stay, you going to need to serve the people passing through on their way to somewhere else. Gas station. Coffee shop. Good quick hot food. What kind of food do people like,” he wanted to know, “and what kind of coffee? People your age,” the old man said. “What do they want?”

  “I don’t know, Mr. Till. You’d have to ask them.”

  “But we don’t have any!” another old man interjected, watery brown eyes, fine purple veins cracked beneath his pale cheeks. “You see the problem we’re up against?”

  Emery Sterling’s wide smiling face. His laughter ringing through the solemn, hushed stands of two and three men and women holding paper plates of hamburger and macaroni and pork and beans, his laughter spiking around a murmur of macroeconomic and agribusiness and slow death and bullshit and what to do, how it is, nothing more to say. So many faces in the greenish, tea-colored afternoon, this garish light the preface to a storm that never came. Grainy faces peering out at Gordon as if from old photographs, stepping right out of the print, dead people closing in around him, their eyes stony, their mouths hard, thin lines, their faces so stern. Everyone old, everyone poor, everyone white.

  And their hands. Ragged, blue-veined hands. Spotted hands. Hands reaching out to take Gordon’s, and touch his shoulder, and take his elbow, his forearm.

  “Here,” one of them said, and led Gordon to the front yard. Across the dirt road, two ruts in the ground made by wagon wheels, made by a 1932 International truck, made again, perhaps, by a 1983 Chevy. The faint lines of dirt tracks disappearing in the distance like a road erasing itself in the weeds.

  “I want you to take a look at that,” the old man said. “You see that?”

  Gordon nodded.

  “You know who comes next to a place like this? If anybody comes next?”

  Gordon looked at his face floating in the heat.

  “Recreationalists,” he said. “Or nobody. You a recrea­tionalist?”

  “No, sir.”

  “You a birdwatcher? You think backpackers and birdwatchers need a welder?”

  “Not likely, sir.”

  “Think nobody needs a welder?”

  “Sir?”

  “Go to school.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Finance.”

  “OK.”

  “You got to think of the future.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Eventually you got to start making some money.”

  “OK.”

  The old man’s bright eyes narrowed and peered at him. “You think I’m wrong?”

  The hand of an elderly woman led Gordon to a card table draped with a blue paper tablecloth and piled with sandwiches and warm foil trays of food. She showed Gordon where the plates were.

  “You’re as skinny as a snake,” her face said. It wore pink lipstick. It had yellow teeth. “You fill up a plate.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “That’s good. Put some chicken on there. Macaroni. Good.” She named all of it. Corn. Jell-O salad. Deviled egg. The paper plate was a flat, warm, shimmering blob. “Beans,” she said, “good. You like hot sauce?” She shook a thin pool of neon orange beside his macaroni.

  The plate tipped rust-colored bean sauce on his light blue shirt. Little white macaroni bones in the grass. Voices around Gordon saying no incentive. Junk shop. Saying yoked.

  Their faces saying sad man.

  Saying north country.

  High country.

  Saying that boy? Gordon?

  Pretty girl.

  Cross to bear.

  Goddammed shop.

 
; Worthless ground.

  Big promises.

  Some garden.

  Rats and weeds.

  The busy whisper of rumor and wind shushed through the trees as the barometric pressure began to drop and the hair rose on everybody’s arms and necks. Georgianna stood across the yard looking pale, soft, vibrating at a low, even undetectable frequency. She wore her light green dress, the color of June Grass, her hair the color of the pewter sky behind her, as she floated from one neighbor to the next. Gracious. Empty. Invisible against the curtain of the green and gray world.

  She was amazed by the number of people who had turned out, people from Greeley and Sterling, from as far west as Ault and Severance, everyone who knew John and respected him and had enlisted his work. Her old neighbors and friends stood around her, uncomfortable in the heat, imagining where they would go next, not only in the days ahead, but after the meal, and later that night. Next hour, next day, next city, next world. Apologizing in every other breath for her husband being gone, as if their continued existence somehow made them culpable for the death of one among them. But isn’t it written that God is close to the crushed in spirit? And so what is knowing God but having known and lost a tremendous love? And what is knowing a tremendous love but seeing it everywhere, in everything, at all times?

  They ate and ate and ate in that terrible heat. They felt but did not speak of the man in the tower. They opened cans of Coke and 7-Up and Country Time lemonade and beer but they didn’t touch the water.

  May set out a molded aspic of hard-boiled eggs and diced ham. They ate the glistening, savory jelly off Styrofoam plates. Dock mindlessly grilled three packages of hot dogs until there was nothing left but blackened husks. The clouds evaporated and a blinding white sun burned through a royal blue sky and the din of the creaking fields grew all around Gordon. That others could hear the sound, he was certain, for each old man and woman, when left for a moment alone on the scabby lawn beneath that searing daylight, would tip his head, and stare off into the distance where dust coiled like smoke above the weeds, right where his mother had fixed her own gaze, as if suddenly attuned to a low, pervasive hum.