On Shifting Sand

by Allison Pittman

  “All right.”

  I offer second servings, but everybody declines, meaning there will be enough left over for the next day. Once the pot is safely put away in the icebox, I open a tin of peaches, dish out the servings, sprinkling sugar and cinnamon on each, and thrill the children with promises of Jell-O at all of our meals in the foreseeable future.

  “And look at this,” Russ says with a glance out the darkening window. “A whole day without a storm. Without much wind, even.”

  “And Mama’s home,” Ariel chimes in.

  I ask the children to take their dishes to the sink, and then give each permission to listen to the radio while the other takes a bath. Ronnie volunteers to go first, so he can listen to Amos ’n’ Andy, but Ariel declares she’s listened to enough of the radio while Paw-Paw was taking care of them and opts to spend her time making Barney chase after a knotted length of yarn. Our home fills with sounds of happiness and health, and I pray the same will soon be true for Ladonna’s home.

  Russ comes up behind me as I stand at the sink. I know he means for me to lean back into him, but I don’t. Despite the emerging contentment around me, I know there is something he is holding back, and I have to keep my guard until I know exactly what that is. Instead, I toss a comment over my shoulder, something about the quicker this chore is finished, the quicker I can spend this first night in my own bed.

  I dawdle bathing Ariel, noting that the water is surprisingly clean even after giving her hair a good shampooing. I let her float her rubber boats and play pretend that the washcloth is a giant sea monster while I work a comb through her tangles. When she is ready to get out, I lift her over the side of the tub, staggering a bit under her weight, and wrap her in the cleanest towel I can find.

  “Can I have some of your pretty dust?” she asks, her nose to my nose.

  “Well, I suppose that would be all right.” By pretty dust, she means my talcum powder, and I walk her across the hall to my bedroom, where the tin sits on my dressing table. I dab the soft, white puff into the powder and dust her from top to bottom. When I finish, I give her the puff and let her dab it along my neck and shoulders.

  “Now we’re the same,” Ariel says. “And I’ll be able to smell you on my pillow all night. And I won’t have to miss you again. Ever.”

  I take her in my arms and hold her so tight, I fear one of us will crack. “That’s right, my baby girl. I’m never going away again. I promise you that.”

  Later, in the dark stillness of our bedroom, I lie in bed, staring at the light streaming from the kitchen. I know Russ is sitting at the table, preparing his sermon, a glass of water and a short stack of saltine crackers at his elbow—a ritual he’s kept for as long as I’ve known him. I hear the kitchen door open, and Pa’s muffled voice. Brusque, Spartan, masculine conversation, before Pa goes into the bathroom to wash up. When he’s finished, his shadow stands at my door, and a soft knock opens it wide.

  “You awake, girl?”

  “Yes, Pa.” I clutch the blanket closer to me.

  “Glad you’re home. Think you can set things straight now?”

  “I think so.”

  He grunts something like an approval.

  Alone again, I wait with quiet, still dread. I try to ease my mind with prayer, thanking God for delivering me safely home, for my restored health. I pray for Ladonna, that she’ll be home among her children soon. And for Jim to stay away. I think maybe I should get out of bed, down on my knees, because it feels like my prayers are hitting up against the ceiling and sprinkling down all around me. I picture myself getting out of bed and seeing my silhouette on the mattress, outlined by the residue of all I’ve offered to God.

  It seems a full hour passes before Russ comes in, all washed and clean, sliding in beside me. I remain still and stiff at his side, intending to feign sleep, with the exhaustion of the day serving as a viable excuse. But then he turns, props up on his elbow, looks at me. With my eyes long adjusted to the darkness, I turn too and reach my hand up to touch his face. Two days’ worth of growth, and only the slightest bit of fuzz on his jaw.

  “‘Baby face,’” I sing. “‘You’ve got the cutest little baby face.’”

  I feel him smile, then pull him toward me for a kiss that deepens immediately, and each embrace that follows carries with it the urgency of separation. I respond as one resurrected, burying the woman who would give herself so callously to another man, and emerging from a body rescued from the brink of death. Russ, I can tell, is as starved for my flesh as I’ve been starved for food, and I give myself to him. I keep my eyes open, filling my vision with bits and pieces of my husband, fearing the images that might come with the dark. Whispers of his name fill the silence, spoken as promises. Through sheer, passionate will, I bring his wife into our bed. The wife who didn’t know the heartache of buried children. The wife who didn’t know the touch of another man. The wife who didn’t know the loss of her very life.

  Russ loves that woman, and with each passing moment, I roll myself into her. Disappearing, hiding. Like a skin-fitting costume. Later, as he sleeps beside me, I fight back my tears, terrified I’ll wash it all away.

  CHAPTER 21

  AT THE POST OFFICE, I find that two letters from Greg arrived during my stay at the hospital in Boise City, the second a short note dashed off after he received the telegram telling of my collapse.

  Remember, Sis—many have found new homes away from Oklahoma.

  Perhaps it is time for you to consider the same.

  I’m glad not to have kept this to read after Sunday dinner, as the mere notion of picking up stakes would be near blasphemous to my father and an unthinkable luxury to Russ. I take Greg’s suggestion and tuck it away, just as I do the note, and peruse his letter for Sunday’s reading.

  Another envelope catches my eye as I riffle through the accumulated post. This one from the hospital, and I can only imagine it is a statement of account. Knowing it was my stay that prompted the bill, I am fully within my rights to open it and see with my own eyes the further sacrifices my family will have to make to accommodate my shortcomings. The addressee, however, is Russ Merrill, so with a strange mix of loyalty and denial, I tuck it within the other pieces of mail before heading back home.

  Russ, returning from a morning visit with the Lindstroms, heralds me from across the street, and I wait for him to join me. I don’t often have the chance to see him from a distance, and I’m struck by the toll these hard times have taken on him, too. While still broad-shouldered, he seems to lack the comforting softness I remember. His clothes fit with room to spare, like a layer of the man has been planed away. One hand holds his hat to his head, the other waves to a passing neighbor, and then he is at my side.

  “I was planning to pick the mail up on my way home,” he says by way of greeting. “I should have told you.”

  “I needed the air. It’s fresh enough today.”

  “Anything for me?” His question holds expectation.

  “Letters from Greg. And something from the hospital. Bill, I suspect.”

  “May I?” He takes the letter, opens it, retrieves a single sheet of paper, and reads, holding the paper fast against the wind. “They’ve offered me a position.” He looks more at me than the letter, so I know this is no surprise to him. “Letting me work as their chaplain during the week over the next three months, in exchange for forgiving your hospital bill.”

  “Let me see?” I don’t distrust his words, but here, in the middle of our empty, dust-dancing street, they hold no meaning. He hands the letter over with some reluctance, and as I read, a plan unfolds as being clearly one of Russ’s design. “You never said anything to me about this.”

  “I didn’t know yet if it would be a possibility. I only proposed it on that last day. I didn’t want to worry you.”

  “About how we were going to pay the bill? Or about your going away?”

  “Neither.”

  A droplet of hope forms within me. “Does this mean we’re moving?”
r />   “Moving?”

  I wave the letter, daring the wind to take it. “Away from here. Into town. You can’t serve there if we don’t live there.”

  His face fills with compassion, and I know I’ve lost. “Oh, Nola. We can’t. Where would we live? I’m not going to draw a salary. For me, they’ll have a small room. A dormitory for staff. But I can’t bring all of you with me.”

  “We’re to be left here, alone?” The idea holds more fear than he can imagine. I hand the letter back to him, and we begin a slow, strolling pace toward home.

  “I’ll be back every Saturday to spend the day, prepare my sermon, and go back after dinner on Sunday.”

  An understanding of his priorities dawns, and I cannot hold back my bitterness. “So, you’ll come back for them.”

  “They are still my church, darling—our church—and what they give is what’s going to sustain you while I’m gone.”

  “I hope you didn’t intend for that to be comforting. They’ll eat me alive.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “It is true, and you know it. They only tolerate me because they love you. Please—don’t leave me alone with them.”

  For a moment, I think my pleas have found their purchase, but his hesitation serves only to strengthen his argument. “Three months. Next week through November, and it’ll be done. We can’t ignore this obligation.”

  “I’m sorry.” I’d eaten half of a bowl of grits that morning, with butter and sugar, and I feel it churning, unwelcome, in my stomach. When we get to the front stairs, I pause for a moment, hand clapped over my mouth until I am sure they are settled. It’s a reminder of how I’ve driven him away. “It’s my fault. I got sick—I let myself get sick. To think the whole time I was so worried about failing you as a wife. And now you’re leaving.”

  “I’m not leaving. Not you or the kids. I’m working is all, and there’s a lot of people who have had to go and do the same. I’m just blessed not to have to go too far for too long.”

  We begin a slow ascent, me leading the way, as the stairs are too narrow for us to take them side by side. The familiar view of the street unfolds incrementally with each step. The little I’d seen of Boise City showed it to be suffering its own decline, but far from the astounding desolation laid out before me.

  “But would you ever?” I ask, keeping my toe poised on hope.

  “Would I ever what?”

  I stop, look back and down at him. “Work. Leave here and do something else. Something different.”

  “I’m called to be a minister, Nola. You know that.”

  “You could be a minister anywhere.”

  He smiles. “Do you think it’s that simple? Drive up and find a church?”

  “No, but look at this. Being a chaplain. I know they’re not paying you now, but they could.”

  “It’s not what I’m seeking.”

  I grip the handle of our front door, not wanting to bring such an unresolved question inside. “But couldn’t you, for once, put our needs above theirs? This town is dying all around us. This whole part of the country is blowing away. There’s no high school for Ronnie next year. Do you know that? I’ve only ever asked you for two things during our entire marriage, and the first one was to not let that friend of yours into our home.”

  I was bucked up, strong against him, with only the slightest quiver in my chin to betray my fears.

  “Don’t bring that business up, Nola. I don’t want to talk about that.”

  “Then I won’t, except to say that you had your way, and it might have ruined us. Now, you took on this little church because you didn’t have a choice, and you’ve been so faithful to them. But how faithful have they been to you?”

  We are on full display now, brow to brow with each other on the street’s stage. Russ leans closer and drops the volume of his words too low to be picked up by the breeze.

  “Everything we have is because of them.”

  “No. We have all of this—” I wave my hands, encompassing the whole of our apartment—“because of my uncle’s store. Which you sold out from underneath me.”

  “You agreed—”

  “And it was decided and done before I did. As for this—” I grab the hand holding the letter and shake it—“you didn’t solicit my opinion there, either. Everything in our lives comes to me as a done deal.”

  “Don’t forget, darling. You came to me as a done deal.”

  He’s never hit me. In all our years together, he’s never raised his voice, let alone his hand, in anger. Even in this moment, his voice is calm and controlled, which makes his words cut all the deeper, inching through me with slow, deliberate expression. I can tell, even as he says the last of them, that he regrets every one. Recoiling on himself, he reaches out instantly to rescue my spirit, the same as if he meant to keep me from throwing myself off the balcony and into the street below.

  “I didn’t mean that.”

  I should soothe him. Tell him that, of course, I know he loves me. Would have married me whether he had to or not. That our lives hadn’t been a second-place ribbon from the prizes we sought. But I don’t. In the back of my mind, I hold words of confession that would cut far deeper than this. I let them settle and hurt beyond their intention.

  “You never say what you don’t mean.”

  We have three more days of dust before he leaves, one heavy enough that we can’t see the building across the street for the better part of an hour. The second storm lasts deep into the night, yet when the wind stops blowing, Russ dresses to go to the church to greet the gathering survivors.

  “You and the kids stay put,” he says, speaking into my dream. “I’ll let everyone know you’re safe.”

  For the first time, though, no one else shows up. He waits an hour, lights glowing from the windows, before making his way down the empty street back home.

  “You can’t give up,” he says from behind the pulpit after the third storm. It happened to blow itself out late on a Sunday afternoon, which accounts for the gathering of all his people. All, by this time, meaning fewer than twenty, even counting the children and babies. “We have to hold strong against this enemy. If we can’t stand up against the natural forces that seek to slay us, how can we ever fight against those that are of the supernatural? The angels of heaven and the demons of hell battle each other daily, invisible in our midst. The next time the wind blows, imagine that cloud as the up-dusting of their battle. Satan seeks to distort and destroy, but our Savior promises us that by our faith we shall conquer.”

  From behind the pulpit, he preaches to an imagined crowd of thousands—or even the hundred who have been in attendance throughout our lifetime together. He runs his finger along the edge of the pulpit and brings up his hand, as if balancing an invisible china plate.

  “Faith the size of a mustard seed. Faith not much more than the dirt sitting on the end of my finger.” He blows, and we all see the faintest cloud puff away from his lips. “Imagine that much faith. Imagine your faith, magnified, joined together to create the walls we’ve seen rising out from the west. Oh, people—”

  And then, something he rarely does. Something he avoids because the first time—that first Sunday—he’d lost himself to me. Or so he likes to say. He looks at me. Speaks to me, allowing all the rest of his congregation to fade into blackness, like they used to do in the old silent movies we watched together during our courtship.

  “If we were fueled by hope instead of dwellers on our hunger. If we would only cling to God’s promises instead of holding on to bitterness. We could find joy, not only in every morning, but in every moment of stillness.”

  He closes the sermon by announcing that he will be unavailable during the week due to a ministerial opportunity in town. Nothing about the trade of time, nothing about the outstanding hospital bill, nothing that would unduly burden these people with responsibility for our livelihood.

  “And,” he continues, “while I know the Lord will watch over my beautiful wife and children du
ring my times of absence, I know I can trust you to keep a neighborly eye on them as well.”

  There’s a smattering of nervous laughter, my own included, which I use to mask my discomfort at the thought. For a moment, a single note of camaraderie fuses us, but my amusement dies off first, leaving me ensconced in silence and alone.

  It’s an adjustment, the absence of a person, and for our household, having Russ gone means a new kind of quiet. I never noticed before how we each were persons content to our own devices—Ronnie out with his friends, Pa lost to his thoughts, Ariel enraptured with her kitten, now more than half grown. Not to say my girl is quiet—she’s a chatterbox of swirling words, but her voice takes on a certain hum in one-sided rambling that is easy to ignore. Russ has always been the one to serve as the spirit between us. Without him, silence falls as heavy as the heat, rippling in a monosyllabic mirage of conversations.

  Then, at the edges, something new. My father’s cough.

  Perhaps the sound is nothing new. These days, anywhere you go, a person’s every third breath is a cough. We’ve a constant scratch at the backs of our throats, always something that needs to be expelled. It might well be that I’ve ascribed this to the myriad of sounds an old man makes, along with grumbling, complaining, and grunts of gruff approval. With Russ gone, though, it takes on a menacing note. It fills all the empty, silent gaps of the day. And at night, when I’m in bed alone, the window left open to the hope of a clean breeze, it wafts up, the way I used to fear my smoke would. It’s stronger at night, and I realize Pa’s trying to mask it during the day, stifling its strength.

  For a time, it’s been his secret.

  At breakfast one morning, the Friday of Russ’s first week away, after the children have cleaned their plates and gone off to play, I tell Pa that he needs to go see a doctor.

  “An’ have ’em tell me what, ’xactly?”