On Shifting Sand

by Allison Pittman

  Russ stands back, ready to take whatever I hand to him. “It’s a hurting time, Nola. We have to do what we can.”

  “No.” I run my hand down the neatly stacked sheets, wanting to avoid giving him those that have been overused of late as nothing more than protective covers. The cot, I know, is narrow, and not made to be fitted with proper bedding, but I want him to feel comfortable. And welcome, no matter how much I protest to my husband. How much I protest to myself. “It’s more than that. This town is full of people, some from our church that you’ve suffered right alongside, and we’re not taking any of them in. Or feeding them every day for doing nothing.”

  “He’s watching the store.”

  “There’s nothing to watch and you know that. I can’t remember the last time so much as a nickel went into the till. We may as well prop open the door and let the whole town loot us like we do every other abandoned home.”

  “We’re keeping an account. Things will turn around.”

  “Why him?” Satisfied with a faded set of blue sheets, I hold them to my face and breathe in, ensuring they are clean. Nothing these days is ever as sweet and crisp as in the days before the storms, but I still take in a hint of borax and last week’s sunshine before handing them over to Russ and returning to look for a blanket.

  “He needs help.”

  “Everybody needs help.” It takes far less time to find a thin afghan, crocheted myself the previous winter.

  “He went to war.”

  “Lots of men went to war.”

  “I didn’t.”

  And there’s the truth of it.

  “Oh, Russ . . .” He tries to look away, but as he is somewhat trapped against the linens, arms full, I take his face in my hands. It is soft, even at this time of night, when other men might have cheeks shadowed with stubble. “You don’t owe him for that. He didn’t go in your place. It’s not right for him to come here and make you feel . . . uneasy.”

  Russ shifts his bundle to one arm, captures my hand in his, and draws it away, kissing the tips of my fingers. If that were the only gesture of affection ever exchanged between the two of us, it would capture his love for me. Tender, protective, and enough to steel me for the question that follows.

  “Does he make you feel uneasy, Nola?”

  “Of course not.” My reply is a little too glib, covering a multitude of fears. “But really, darling, how well do you know the man?”

  “As much as I know any man, I suppose. I didn’t even think of us as friends. He was just the nice, smart guy who worked cleaning up the campus. Truth is, I thought he might have been on some sort of work scholarship; he was smart enough. Then when he asked if he could write to me, I realized—he must not have anyone else. Not a single soul to know or care if he lived or died. I thought, how am I ever going to be able to shepherd a flock if I can’t be a friend to this one man? He wrote me once from over there, and a letter every year or so since then.”

  He drops the bundle of sheets and blanket on the edge of our bed and goes into the bathroom, causing me to raise my voice with the next question.

  “So, you wrote back to him?”

  There is a beat of silence before he comes back with a clean towel and washcloth, as there is a tiny water closet and sink attached to the storeroom. For Jim to take a shower, though, he will have to come up here—a thought I can’t bring myself to consider at the moment.

  “When I could. When I had an address, the times he stayed in one place long enough to get a letter.”

  “Did you tell him about me?” I don’t know why I have to know, but I do. Without an immediate task to busy my hands, I ram them deep into the pockets of my apron.

  “Of course I did. Even sent him a picture a while back. An old one, from our wedding.”

  His back is to me while he’s bundling the linens together, as if what he says had no consequence. I know the picture in question. Russ looks handsome, if bewildered, wearing a dark suit, with the waves of his hair held in slick submission. I’m wearing a pale-peach dress, though we only had the color tinted in the single print framed in our bedroom. I stand within three inches of Russ’s height, and had refused the photographer’s suggestion to sit with Russ’s hand on my shoulder, or to have him stand on a slight rise so that my head would barely come to his chin. I look tall and strong, my hair all soft curls with a coronet of wildflowers. My figure is full, though nobody would look at the photograph now and know that the bouquet in my hands rests on the beginnings of the tiny life within. I’m looking straight into the camera’s lens, my eyes dark—my lips, too, and lifted into a smile I’ve never replicated since. There is humor and peace, but also a challenge to anyone who could somehow break through the frame and take me away from the inevitable future of this beautiful bride.

  “Why would you do that? Send him that picture?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. He’d ribbed me a little in a letter, after I’d told him how smart you were. He said no woman could be beautiful and smart. He wanted proof, and I knew we had plenty of copies of that picture, so I sent it.”

  I’ve grown cold during the course of this conversation, and perhaps pale, too, because Russ cocks his head in concern. “Are you all right?”

  “You should have asked me,” I say, my words like ice. “Before sending my picture to some total stranger. You had no right.”

  “Darling—” he folds me in his arms, pressing my body against Jim’s bedding—“you’ve never looked more beautiful than the day we married. And it’s my picture too. Not that anybody would notice me. I suppose I wanted to show you off a little.”

  “Still—”

  He squelches my protest with a kiss.

  “It was years ago,” he says when he pulls away. “I don’t know if he even got it. He’s never mentioned it, and to tell the truth, I’d plumb forgotten until this conversation.”

  “Don’t ask him about it.” To my relief, Russ doesn’t demand an explanation for my request. Because I know full well Jim Brace received that picture. It explains the imbalance I felt the moment I met him, that unsettling feeling that we’d met before. That familiarity came from Jim, strong enough to wrap me in it.

  Later, much later—in fact, the first hours of the next day—I lie stock-still beside my sleeping husband. We made love the minute we hit the bed, my participation more enthusiastic than anytime in recent memory. He is now at deep, enviable peace while I rage with the silent conflict of the physical satisfaction of my husband, and the constant mental intrusion of the stranger he invited into our home. I attempt to placate myself with assurances that he is not exactly in our home, only to wage a new battle with the realization that neither is he a stranger.

  Any other sleepless night would send me out for a stolen cigarette, but my pack, newly purchased three days ago, sits fat and square in the pocket of my cardigan, which, last I knew, still hangs on its hook in the storeroom where Jim now sleeps. I like to think my husband would have moved it, not wanting his wife’s garment to share a room with another man, but Russ seems far too trusting to even think of such a breach. And Ronnie? Russ reported that his idea of helping had been to pester Jim for story after story about all the places he’d been, until Russ had to herd him out like a wayward calf.

  I fixate on the thought of my cardigan, hanging in the darkness. Wondering if Jim has touched a sleeve. Or if he found the cigarettes in the pocket—and possibly smoked one. Giving us another secret to share.

  Secret.

  Something Russ said in our earlier embrace, after bringing his mouth away from a deep kiss to bury it in the warm recess of my neck.

  Don’t worry. Your secret’s safe, waiting on the bathroom shelf.

  I’d misunderstood, thinking he meant my little pink box, covertly delivered in plain brown wrapping a year after Ariel was born. My small, perfect shield against another pregnancy. Russ hated the thing—what it meant, at least—and we never spoke of it by name. Rarely did he initiate its use, and on this night, I dared not let any cautio
nary space between us.

  Thinking back, though, I hear his teasing tone, and I know he found my sweater, its pocketful of cigarettes, and I slide out of bed. Sure enough, on the shelf of the cabinet above the sink, a fresh box of Lucky Strikes, and the lighter I use to soften the tip of my kohl pencil whenever an occasion is special enough for me to line my eyes. I draw out two cigarettes, stash them and the lighter in the pocket of my robe, and make my way through the dark house.

  Surely he will be asleep, back in the room-behind-the-room, leaving a clear path to the back door. I pad across, quick and silent, slide the bolt more noiselessly than usual, and slip outside.

  No moon. Pure dark, but windy, and my robe and nightgown wrap around my legs. I have to cup my hand around the flame of the lighter, and still need three attempts before I successfully touch it to the tobacco. I breathe in deep, filling myself with smoke and heat, holding both as long as I dare before letting them out in a puff that blows straight back into my face.

  “Can I get one of those?”

  He speaks from behind me, and for the first time I admit to myself that this is what I wanted. When Russ sent him out of our kitchen, duffel over his shoulder, with the promise of our storeroom, I envisioned just this—a clandestine meeting. Bringing him into my night. Now that we’ve arrived, I don’t know whom I hate more.

  “I’ve only got one,” I say, handing him the second cigarette from my pocket. He puts it between his lips and takes the lighter. Expertly, he turns his back to the wind, tucks his head down, and lights the tip on the first try before handing the lighter back to me.

  “You shouldn’t be here,” I say, breaking our smoking silence.

  “Should you?”

  I don’t dare look at him, because I know the answer. “In our home, I mean.”

  “It’s a back storage room. Hardly your home.”

  “It’s too close.” I turn to him now. He leans against the door, the tip of his cigarette glowing red, blocking my way.

  “Too close for what?”

  A challenge, and I won’t answer. I refuse to voice a pathway to my fears.

  “You can’t show up from out of nowhere and expect to stay on. Not like this. It’s not what people do.”

  “What kind of people?”

  “Good people.”

  “And you’re good people?” Amused now; I sense a smile in the darkness.

  “Russ is. You wouldn’t be here at all if he wasn’t.”

  “For which I’m grateful. He’s a good friend.”

  “He’s not your friend. At least he wouldn’t be, if he knew . . .”

  “Knew what?”

  I take a final drag on my cigarette and stub it out—half-smoked—on the railing.

  “Nothing. I’m going back inside.” But there is no way to go inside except through him, and he doesn’t seem willing to move, even though I say, “Excuse me,” and “Let me pass, please.”

  “What does he need to know, Nola?”

  His words are smoke and I breathe them in. Why you’re here, I answer silently. How you saw my picture and had to meet me. But then I seize with a fear of being wrong, that he never saw the picture at all, and there’s no way for me to not sound crazy, or worse, vain.

  “Nothing,” I say, feeling foolish. “It’s silly.”

  To my relief, he moves aside, but catches my arm as I walk past. “I’ll go. Tomorrow if you want. But I’d like to stay—if nothin’ else, long enough to finish the job Russ has for me. Then, trust me, I’ll move on.”

  I resist the urge to thank him and walk over the threshold, through the nearly empty storeroom and empty shop. His touch, still, burns at my wrist, somehow smothering every touch from my husband. Not until I’m halfway up the stairs do I stop.

  “The job Russ has for me.”

  Apparently my husband has a secret too.

  CHAPTER 7

  THREE MORE STORMS over the next two weeks. Four, if you count the one that blew for just an hour or so over the span of an afternoon. Most wouldn’t, because we hadn’t the time to clean up after the previous one before it rose up, so we let the dust mingle as one adulterous mess.

  Greg told us in his last letter that experts—men who hadn’t spent a day in this region before earth rose up—can trace the origin of the dust by its color. Red dust is from Oklahoma. Black, Kansas. Yellow, Texas—to the point the very sky loomed green. State by state, the whole world is shifting, one grain at a time. I remain, watching that which blows away, and cleaning up what stays behind.

  Another family leaves at the next dust-free dawn—the Gillicks—but I don’t bother to go pick through what they left behind. They were poorer than poor to begin with, and the best I can hope for is to recover items I’d given them in better days. They drive away, abandoning a dried-up farm and five chickens that some kind soul rustles up and fries for an impromptu congregational dinner. Seems we all look as thin and bedraggled as those chickens, and it is a meager offering of dishes that line the table in accompaniment. Our plates are sparse, with tiny spoonfuls of this and that, the women filling up on biscuits, leaving most of the meat for the men. Russ partakes of nothing, busying himself with pastoral duties, shaking hands and hugging children. I assume the responsibility of ladling punch, my stomach too twisted in knots to enjoy so much as one slice of Merrilou Brown’s white cherry pie.

  Jim is here, too, on the outskirts of everything, drinking a Coca-Cola, and anybody who happens to catch the two of us in a single glance would never think we are anything more than strangers. They wouldn’t know that, while their pastor prays at the bedsides of their sick, this man and I pass a novel back and forth between us, reading fewer and fewer pages each day in favor of conversations about what life would be like with unlimited access to riches and beautiful things.

  The air is warm with the promise of summer and, for once, completely still. We’re gathered on what used to be a green lawn on the side of the church, the grass now sickly and scant. Pa is due to arrive for our regular Sunday gathering, and I’ve positioned Ronnie and some of his friends at the head of the street to watch for him and bring him here when he arrives, not that there will be much left to feed him. When it’s almost two o’clock and there’s still no sign, I pull Russ away from the latest chapter in the story of Miss Lana’s ever-growing thyroid and tell him I’m worried.

  “He didn’t go to the house?” Russ asks.

  “No, I sent Ronnie to check.”

  “What do you think we should do?”

  He’s shuffling in place, hands in his pockets, because he knows exactly what we should do. It falls on me to voice it.

  “We need to go out there—to his place—and check on him.”

  “He won’t like that.”

  It’s true, he won’t. My pa took a dislike to Russ the first time I brought him to dinner and hasn’t let up much since. Not through the wedding, nor the birth of Ronnie just a few months later, nor all the years since. The day Russ and I took up living above the store, Pa said there wasn’t a need to gather again at his table, and our visits there have been rare at best, and only when one of the hands he used to employ came into town to tell us of a need. Like the time Pa split his head clean open after falling off a ladder, or when Boo, his favorite hound, was found dead under the porch, and Pa sat up for two days straight. He mourned more for that dog than he ever did for my mother, something only he and I know.

  “It doesn’t matter if he’ll like it or not.” Here I am, in the midst of the sheep, raising my voice to the shepherd. His cautionary glance gentles my spirit, not to mention the fear that is growing with every word I speak. “The roads are fine, aren’t they? There’s no reason for him not to be here unless—unless something is bad wrong. Take me out there.”

  “I will.” He tries to calm me with a touch, and I stand still for it. “We can go, as soon as everything is cleared up here.”

  “Now, Russ.”

  “Go home. Make up some dinner for him. Or better yet, put together a plate
here. Let me say my good-byes, and we’ll leave.”

  I scan the faces of our people, his church. They are what we both have for family these days, our brothers and sisters in Christ playing the roles of cousins and uncles and parents. Russ is the final branch of his family, my brother is a contented bachelor in a faraway land, and my father won’t step a foot across the threshold as long as Russ is behind the pulpit. Despite our familiarity, the congregation has never seen us in such a display of near disagreement, and I offer my cheek for an affectionate kiss to demonstrate to all that Russ and I are of one accord.

  I send Ronnie back to the house to get our car ready for the drive, and while he’s gone I fill a plate with the remnants of our feast.

  “Is that for your father?” Jim asks. He’s come up beside me and holds the plate while I wrap three biscuits in a scrap of napkin.

  “Yes,” I say, not daring to look directly at him in front of all our people. “Russ and I are going to drive out there in a bit. I’m worried he didn’t come into town.”

  “Shall I go along with you?”

  “Why would you do that?” I find the shallow cake pan I brought with one small square remaining and nestle the overflowing plate beside it, with the bundle of biscuits on top. Jim doesn’t leave my side.

  “In case there’s a problem. In case there’s somethin’ wrong and you need help.”

  “Russ will be there.”

  But even as I say it, one scenario after another rushes through my mind. Pa’s car, slid off the road, wheels dug into drifts of dirt. Or Pa himself, caught in the last storm—lost, disoriented, entombed. These are not figments of fear, but stories we’ve heard from people who have witnessed such tragedy. Children not more than a mother’s reach away from the house, buried to their necks, suffocated with soil. Ranchers found with stiff arms wrapped around wayward calves. Entire families burned from the inside out when the electrical forces hit their automobiles. The wind brings nothing but death upon death, and there’s a dry, hard stone in the pit of me that knows my father is on his way to ashes and dust.