by Lisa Samson
The cow’s coat was a little scratchy on her cheek, but warm. It was the warmth May did it for. And such massive warmth, miraculous to be sure, like cold fusion or something. Only in a cow. The energy just going on and on.
Never mind the sweet hay and clover. Those were just details.
She kept her eyes closed and milked, squeezing on the cow’s teats, the milk shooting into a clean pail. May only milked Louise enough for her and Sister Ruth and Sister Racine.
“Did you know that there are only fourteen animals that have been domesticated? In all of recorded human history?”
May opened the eye not plastered to Louise’s flank. “Good morning, Sister Ruth.”
“Well, did you know that?”
“No.”
The milk streamed in a thin line, dinging into the pail. She inhaled the sweet smell through her nose.
“Only fourteen. Think of all the animals out there.”
“What animals are they?”
Sister Ruth, wearing a pair of pressed jeans, crease running down the front, and a white blouse, starched and fresh, stepped out of her tan loafers and into her pair of bright yellow muck shoes. May wore similar shoes, only hers were dark green. They’d found them together one day in a catalog Glen the postman delivered, and were just as delighted with the real things as they were at the possibility of them on slick paper.
“Well, let’s see if I can remember.” Sister Ruth, the official overseer of Borne’s Last Chance for Harmony Baptist Church, took a basket down from the shelf to go gather the eggs she sold to neighbors and church members. The farm belonged to the church now, but Claudius had added the proviso that May could live there as long as she wanted. “There’s cows, of course, goats and sheep.”
“Horses.”
“Yes. Dogs and cats. Rabbits.”
“Chickens,” said May. “And turkeys.”
“I’m not sure if they included birds.”
“Well, they should have! The poor ladies!”
“Pigs.”
“Donkeys, llamas.” May patted Eloise, then stood up.
“Ducks. And Indian elephants. They do work.”
“Camels and water buffalo! I saw a painting of a pair of water buffalo pulling something. A boat out of the water, I think.”
Sister Ruth shook her head and turned to leave. “That’s more than fourteen. It’s probably species, then.”
She headed toward the coop. The woman was still skinny as a stick, still dressed to the nines, although the white had overtaken the black of her hair. May didn’t know what she would do without her.
As the sun shone in small sparkles between the tender new leaves of the trees in the windbreak near her neighbors’ ridge, neighbors she still had never met nor even seen (they had bought the old farm for cheap, leveled the barn, and built a vacation home), she headed toward the house.
On the stoop May stepped out of her muck boots, stepped inside the kitchen, then slid into her slippers. Well, Claudius’s old slippers, moccasins, the leather of which now shone with slickness from years of scuffing around the house. She liked the whooshy-whish sound they made when she walked across the wooden floors. It sounded like he was walking by her side.
She turned on the oven to heat.
Oh good. The percolator had finished up. She poured herself a cup of coffee and set out a mug for Sister Ruth. Yesterday’s mail sat on the hoosier.
A fresh loaf of bread sat on the counter, and Sister Ruth had remembered the jar of mayonnaise and the tuna fish too. May loved looking at the circular from Jack’s IGA each week and making up the shopping list from the specials. It was almost a challenge. Could she eat just what she grew and what was on sale? She didn’t make much money from the flowers she grew and Sister Ruth sold—and half of that she gave to Harmony Baptist—so she had to be frugal. So far, she’d done a good job conserving and saving a dollar here, a dollar there. And she didn’t need much, not with all the books Sister Ruth brought her from the library.
She put away the groceries as Ruth entered, basket of eggs tucked under her arm. “What’s for breakfast, May-May?”
May pulled out a mushroom quiche from the top shelf of the fridge. “Is this all right?”
“Of course.”
She cut two generous portions, set them in a pie pan, and slid them into the heated oven.
Sister Ruth poured herself a cup of coffee, then sat down in the seat opposite May’s. The day after Claudius died, May had put the salt and pepper shakers, napkin holder, and sugar bowl on his place mat, and nobody had sat in his chair since. Well, the only person that ate at her table was Sister Ruth, who wouldn’t have dreamed of trying to fill in for Claudius.
Eli used to come by every so often, after he got out of the service, limping a bit from the knee replacement surgery he received after sustaining an injury in Afghanistan. It had got him home, at least. But that had not proved, in the outcome, to be a blessing. Poor Eli. She could barely think about what had happened to him. At least twice a week she wondered what she could have done to prevent the tragedy, and came up with nothing.
“And I went to the utility company and paid this month’s bill as well as settled up at the IGA,” said Sister Ruth. “So you’re all set for another month.”
“Great. Thanks.”
“Now, when is that reporter man coming?”
“Next week.”
Sister Ruth laid her hands flat on her straw place mat. The mats were almost completely tan now, the afternoon sun that fell across them having bleached out the green dye completely over the years. “We have to talk about something, May.”
Oh, boy. May took a sip of her coffee, hoping to hide behind the brim.
“Your hair.”
“No.”
“Look at it. It’s down past your bee-hind. And all that gray. And it isn’t a pretty gray either, honey. It’s that iron gray with yellow around the edges.”
“It’s easier this way.”
“’Course it is! It has no style. It’s ridiculous. No woman your age should wear a braid that long. I just think if you got back a little style you might—”
“Keep trying.” May stood up. “I think the quiche is heated up.”
“Well,” Ruth sighed, “at least you’ve finally agreed to meet with that Mr. Damaroff. Only took you nine years. Maybe talking to him will help expunge something, maybe help you sleep a little better. You sure you’re ready?”
May stood up, walked over to the oven, and peered through the window. “Don’t act all soft and concerned now. I just can’t stand your harping on it anymore.”
“Good. Maybe I’ve done something then. Even without a haircut.”
The quiche needed a few more minutes.
“One of these days, Sister Ruth, you’re going to realize what a hopeless case I really am.”
“Nobody is.”
May pulled the toaster off the refrigerator and plugged it in. “I don’t know about that. Think about poor Eli Campbell.”
“Who would have thought him capable of that?”
“Not me.”
“And you should know!” Sister Ruth’s eyes glinted.
“How about handing me the bread?”
Sister Ruth reached behind her and opened the bread drawer. “Here.” She held out the bag of rye bread, and May grabbed it. “Well, at least you didn’t freak out like Eli. You know, the past is the past, honey. Can’t do nothing to change that, and you know it. You got to move on.”
May slid the bread in the toaster and pushed down on the black button. “How many times have you said that to me, Sister Ruth?”
“I don’t know, honestly, I don’t. At least once a week for the past eight years.”
“And you don’t have to come here every day.”
“I like the work. I enjoy the flowers. I enjoy the people down at the market and at the flower shops. So don’t think I’m doing it for you, May. I’ve got my own reasons, and they don’t include Harmony Baptist Church.”
�
��All right then.”
They’d been doing this song and dance for years.
“Are they still okay with me being here on the farm?” she asked, warming her hands atop the toaster.
“Who knows what they’re thinking? Got to tell you, though, the church is growing. After all these years snuggled up to that little river, we can’t seat everybody now.”
“You don’t look happy about it. I thought that would be a good thing.” She leaned back against the stove and crossed her arms, then uncrossed them, noticing a piece of straw from the barn on her work pants. She picked it off the gray fabric and twisted it between her fingers. “Aren’t churches supposed to grow?”
“I suppose so. It’s just different. We had such a tight-knit community, and now that’s going away with young people who want Jesus and his people on Sundays but have no understanding of what it means to really follow Jesus together day by day, heartache by heartache, joy by joy …”
She kept going. Sister Ruth could have her own church and be a darn good preacher, May had decided a long time ago.
Claudius, for some reason, had been reticent about his faith. Sister Ruth had made up for that in the first six months after his death. May didn’t mind, though. It was all the religion she got nowadays.
Sister Ruth left after breakfast to take care of her “accounts.” She did the bookkeeping for the farm and the church. She probably had lunch plans with someone, either a nice ladylike salad plate in her small dining room, or a sandwich at Dooley’s Purple Cow.
May shook her head and walked toward the bathroom, the final pit stop before driving the tractor out to the spring field, as she called it. Seven years ago she’d planted her flower fields according to their blooming season. It was easier to harvest them together and made the whole operation make more sense, from her perspective.
As she washed her hands, she heard a knock at the front door.
Glen stood there in all his mailman hunkiness. All these years later, and he hadn’t aged at all. Whereas she, with her gray hair, skin tough and tan all the time now, blue eyes resting in a crinkled setting, hadn’t stood up so well, as Ruth had just that morning been pointing out.
Maybe his face wasn’t exactly the kind of good-looking she appreciated in college, that Easter Island square of a face all the model agencies must have deemed handsome. Glen was more cheerful than that. His eyes, blue like the morning sky at the beach, drooped down. His lips were too thin to be a model’s, but they smiled all the time, resting above a rounded bulldog jaw that couldn’t grow much of beard to save its life.
Eye candy. That’s what Sister Ruth said they were calling it these days. Good enough for May.
And apparently for the other unmarried women in the area, according to Sister Racine, his neighbor, who said he went into Lexington at least two nights a week and didn’t get home until at least two a.m.
“Here’s a package for you, May.” He held out a small box from a place called Amazon.
Sister Ruth was always ordering stuff from there. May suspected it was the new pair of pruning shears she had been talking about the week before. Ergonomic. Summertime and the squeezing is easy, up to the minute. Sister Ruth liked anything up to the minute. May had put her foot down, however, when she’d suggested a television and satellite TV. May didn’t even have a phone! What business did a woman without a phone have owning a television?
She didn’t have the money for that either.
“Thanks, Glen.” How dingy gray her socks had become. She tucked one foot behind the other.
“And your mail.”
She took that too. “Great.”
“You doing okay?”
“Yep.”
“Ruth driving you crazy?”
She laughed. “Not yet.”
“Good. Tell her I said hello.”
“Okay. Well, I don’t want to keep you.”
“See you later, May.”
He climbed into his van and drove off with an easy guy-wave. And thus her life with Glen.
May riffled through the letters. Familiar handwriting scrawled across an envelope made from a newspaper. Dad. It opened easily and, sitting now at the kitchen table, she read about his life in London. His little reports had become her picture window on the world at large. He made her feel like she was right there with him in that little enclave where he lived “in Christian community” with a group of people from his parish who were set on “loving God and our neighbors as ourselves.” He taught during the day at London Metropolitan University.
And Lord knew he’d needed to throw himself into something after her mother died six years ago. He knew the name of every kid in his neighborhood, helped them with their homework, and kept a pocketful of hard candy.
She laughed at his tales of Father Xavier, a retired Jesuit priest who took it upon himself to be their spiritual director, an ancient man who made daily prayers last twice as long, “teaching us a lot about patience and bladder control,” Dad wrote.
She finished reading about them readying the beds in their community garden and preparing for their summer tutoring program. His thoughts on his classes and students were ripe fodder for his letters as well.
May set down the letter, written on the back of a bright pink flyer advertising nail tips. She’d write back tomorrow.
She clipped blooms from the many varieties of irises banked together, white, golden, purple; she pulled down the branches of her poplar trees and gathered their sturdy yellow cuplike blossoms; she pruned flowers from the azaleas she’d planted years before. And the clematis vines gave up their flat flowers, the viney stems perfect for wrapping around the other stems.
As the afternoon waned, she sat in the redwood lounge chair her father had brought by before he left, the webbing of the old aluminum chair having given way beneath her the year before, and arranged her posies. The circle of perennials hugged her tightly, most of them still green but promising blooms soon. She never used these for the farmers’ market—they were Claudius’s way of communicating to her all these years later.
A quick supper of tuna salad on toast and Sister Racine’s three-bean salad led to knitting her father’s Christmas sweater, then reading in Claudius’s chair, then bedtime in the room upstairs, where nothing changed except the sheets every Wednesday.
Eyes getting heavy as she read about Laura Ingalls Wilder cavorting on the banks of Plum Creek, May turned out the light, opened her nightstand drawer, and fell asleep, her hand resting on the stole Father Isaac’s hands held so long ago.
• 2 •
At five thirty the next morning Sister Ruth pulled up in her giant old Suburban, that same red entity that had been frustrating Beattyville motorists for centuries. She and May loaded up the bouquets, the gentle blossoms shivering in the breeze, the stems drinking the water at the bottom of the old sugar buckets. The land welcomed the vapor settling over the fields and between the tree trunks; the sun, just painting the horizon with pale light, promised to burn it off by ten.
“I talked to Sassy yesterday,” Sister Ruth said, hefting a sugar bucket into the back of the vehicle. Today she wore pressed khakis and a bright red twinset with sparkling beaded jewelry. Was it any wonder their flowers always sold out?
“Has she heard from Eli?”
May remembered Eli’s visit soon after Claudius’s death. He had become a highly trained sharpshooter, his wife had disappeared, and his daughter, Callie, was being raised by his mother. He’d tried to put a good face on it all, but underneath, May could see the light had gone out.
“Yes. She was wondering if maybe you’d write him a letter or something. Death row gets pretty lonely.”
“I’ll bet it does.”
“Do you think you could? Maybe it would be good for you.”
May smiled. Lately everything Sister Ruth suggested seemed to have the ulterior motive of moving May along. At least she wasn’t anything but forthright about it. May couldn’t have stood it if Sister Ruth thought her that stupid. Agoraphob
ia, post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, anxiety disorder … the list could go on and on. May knew what she was. After all, Sister Ruth had diagnosed her years ago with the help of Sister Racine, a registered nurse. Only her nonsuicidal tendencies and her refusal to be admitted anywhere saved her from full-scale intervention after Claudius’s death.
“Let me think about it.”
“All right. I guess that’s about as good as I’ll get from you for now. But let me tell you this: he’s decided not to appeal his sentence. Sassy says he’s depressed as all get out.”
May couldn’t blame him. “I’d be too.”
“Still, he’s her son, and she doesn’t want him to die. What mother would?”
“That’s true.” May placed the last bucket into the back of the Suburban and shut the doors. “I’ll really think about it.”
“Good girl.”
“The last time I saw him, I should have done something drastic.”
“We’ve all told ourselves that, honey.” Sister Ruth fished her keys out of her pocket. “You were so low yourself, you weren’t capable of helping anybody in that way.”
“Maybe if I’d been a little more sympathetic.”
“You were sympathetic.”
He’d come to May eight months after he was released early from his third tour of duty, knocking on the door of the farmhouse around one a.m. He looked like he’d been coughed up by death, if death was a cat. When he put his arms around her, she could barely stand the stink of his unwashed clothing and body, and he felt wiry, no longer the large football player she’d slept with years before. She’d known that body, not this one.
“I can’t find a place to sleep, May.”
“I’m sorry, Eli. Come on in.”
He’d come home from Afghanistan, stayed at his mother’s and tried to be a good father to Callie. But left untreated for the “emotional issues,” as Sister Ruth called them—PTSD, as Sister Racine said—he picked up from warfare, he wore out his welcome, failing to find a job. What was there in Beattyville anyway? And poor Sassy and Buell, who, respectively, drove the school bus and cleaned vacation cabins on Thursdays and Fridays, couldn’t afford another mouth to feed there in that little frame house down the road. Travis, a friend from high school, let him sleep on his couch and threw in drugs for free.