On Shifting Sand

by Allison Pittman

  “I have to tell you.” I look at him, drinking him in like cool water. “I did this.”

  “Did what?”

  “This—the storm. I brought it here.”

  His laughter is a weapon to ward off the fear that is building itself up between us. “What can that possibly mean?”

  “I thought I could get away. Run away from it. That if I confessed—repented, like the Bible says. Like God says, and be washed white as snow. And as far as the east is from the west. But the west. It’s here. It’s followed me. And I’ll never be clean. I’ll never—”

  I’ve disintegrated into nothing more than a twist of tears and disjointed phrases. Any other time, Russ would have taken me into his arms, soothed me until my sentences ran straight. Now, though, he keeps a distance between us. Were I to melt, he would not cup his hands to catch me. For the first time in memory, I am utterly alone in his presence, and the storm becomes an unexpected ally. Here, in this place of safety, rocked by the wind, serenaded by the dust, I take a deep, cleansing breath, and relive it all.

  “That first night, when he came into our house . . .”

  “Who?”

  I look at my husband through scales of shame. “Jim.” After that, I spare neither of us any detail that could rise up again like some secret, treasured memory. I tell him about our afternoons, both of us reading from a single book, our sentences falling upon one another’s as we whiled away the afternoons while Ariel napped upstairs. I do, however, refrain from elaboration. That first kiss in the kitchen the day we brought Barney home is relegated to “a kiss,” interchangeable with a dry touch to a deacon’s cheek.

  Russ listens. Never interrupting, never interpreting, not even muttering the slightest sound of understanding. He becomes something that I’ve never seen in him before—utterly passive. Disconnected, almost. Always, always, his face has displayed a map of his mind, sketching his thoughts before he speaks his words. Sometimes instead of his words. But I find myself talking to a death mask, Russ captured in his handsome perfection. Set for eternity, and unmoved. Until I come to the day I disappeared, and at this point I would give anything for expressionless banality. Instead, something dreadful flickers across his features. Recognition. Confirmation.

  “I’ve always wondered,” he says, more musing than accusatory.

  “What do you mean you always wondered?” Even now, knee-deep in confession, I leap to my own defense.

  “You were so . . . altered. And then so sick, and what with the things Mrs. Brown said—”

  “You never said a word!”

  “Neither did you.”

  “But if you had—if you’d confronted me . . .”

  “I did. At the hospital. Don’t you remember?”

  “I mean, specifically. If you had asked—”

  “You would have told me?”

  “You would have spared me.”

  This takes him aback, and while he hasn’t altered his posture a mite since I got in the car, he now rears back as if to escape.

  “Spared you?” And then a laugh so bitter it freezes my blood. “Spared you? Darling, have you been listening to yourself? From what did you need to be spared?”

  I can’t look at him. Until this point, my gaze has traced a path from the brown window to my dirt-encrusted hands and his masklike face. But for what I have to say next, there is no place safe. Looking outside gives the illusion of being buried, my hands bear traces of Jim’s touch, and I do not deserve even the image of my husband.

  I close my eyes and return to the darkness that haunts me. “I needed to be spared from being alone. I needed to be spared from what happened next.”

  Christmas, and the New Year, and the three wretched mornings that followed.

  “My God,” he says, crying out to the Lord who watches me from behind the storm.

  “Do you think—? Can you ever forgive me?”

  He says nothing, only presses his fingers to his eyes as if trying to gouge out the images planted there.

  “I’ve asked God to forgive me, but that’s not enough. Not for me, anyway.”

  He looks at me, transformed. Monstrous, all of his nobility dropped away. The landscape of his face stripped of all that ever gave it life. “Why are you telling me now?”

  “Because you’re my husband, and I’ve—I’ve sinned. Against God, and against you.”

  “I mean, why now?”

  “Because I have to. I was wanting to protect you from all of this. I wanted to carry it all on my own. Believe me.” For the first time I touch him, grabbing at the sleeve of his jacket, feeling the layer of dirt beneath my hand. “You always told me I was strong—”

  He snatches his arm away. “Do not use my words against me.”

  His admonition stings. “I’m sorry.”

  “Tell me the truth.”

  “I’ve told you everything. I promise.”

  “No, tell me the truth about why you’ve held this in up to now.”

  “I wanted to spare—”

  “That’s not it.”

  “I thought I was strong—”

  “No.”

  And then, like a wellspring, truth floods me, bubbling out with my very pulse, and flows from my tongue. “I was ashamed. I hated myself, and I never, ever wanted you to see me in that light. So I hid it, buried it deep. Some days—” tears well in my eyes at the confession to come—“I’d even forget. I might go all day long and not even give a thought to what I’d done. That’s how far I tried to fling it away. But then, something would happen, or there’d be a quiet moment, when I was alone, or with you, and it would come back. That’s what made me think—made me wonder—if God maybe hadn’t forgiven me. Because it kept coming back. And I thought, if we came here, away from where it happened—away from him—I could hide that part of me away. Leave it in Oklahoma. But it came back.”

  The sobs that racked my body have now subsided, only catching every other breath or so, irregular in how they break through the silence that has dropped between us. I can hear each individual grain of dust as it hits the car’s window, and I’m sure the others must think we’re some kind of crazy not to come inside. But this needs to be us—cocooned alone. Maybe not exactly alone, as the invisible presence of Jim Brace lurks between us, but we started our marriage with a conversation much like this one. Me and Russ, under the moonlight in his old jalopy of a car, parked in a wheat field. We had a third presence with us then, too. Invisible, but real—our baby, and my weeping apology. My shame, my burden, until Russ lived out his promise to carry it with me.

  I’ve no right to expect the same now. And yet I see him, broken, but girding up before my very eyes. Filling this small space, his presence wrapping itself around me, creating a wall strong enough to withstand the storm, leaving room enough for grace.

  “He has forgiven you.” He says it as a fact proven thus far only to him.

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I have to have faith in his mercy. It’s what I know to be true, that sins confessed are forgiven. And if I can’t believe that he has forgiven you after your sincere confession, what hope can I have that I myself will be forgiven?”

  I have no answer. I never do, so I keep silent for a few more shuddering breaths, staring at the tear in my new stockings.

  “You must hate me.”

  “I could never hate you.” Which gives me little comfort, as I know it’s not his nature to hate anyone, and he takes time to gather the rest of his response. “I love you. Believe it or not, as much now as I ever have at any moment. Nothing can change that. The love is still there—I just feel a little bit disconnected from it.”

  I look up to see the pain behind the words, and before I can stop myself, I think of Jim, what he said about his wound, the greatest pain being the strain on the connecting flesh before his arm was severed. Our marriage is that flesh, and I alone have wounded it. Only the grace of God and my husband’s love can heal it.

  “I know how much I’ve hurt you, Russ.�
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  “You couldn’t possibly know.”

  “If I could take it on—not even trade, but take yours on top of mine, I would.”

  He touches me for the first time since I entered the car. Lightly, the backs of his fingers graze my cheek, more condescension than caress. “I wouldn’t let you, Nola, darling. You’re not strong enough. It would kill you.”

  “But it won’t kill you?”

  “It has, a bit.”

  And there, right before my eyes, a part of him is irreplaceably gone. Severed. I know what it feels like to die. Not to be dead, but to be in the process. Little by little. But I’ve been dying for my own sin. Russ is paying a much higher price.

  I clasp his hand to me, bury a kiss in his palm. “So you believe, do you? That God forgives me?”

  “He does, of course.”

  A beat of silence before I’ll let him go. “And you?”

  “I will.”

  And since he’s never failed me, my hope is in that promise.

  EPILOGUE

  WE LIVE THROUGH A SUMMER, the air hot and heavy, wet with rain that seldom falls, but we do not complain. The heaviness of the air keeps it motionless, almost solid. Our skin is slick with sweat, and I embrace the feel of it, to the bemusement of our friends and neighbors. Fall delights us with its display. And winter—so much water, so much white. The air, sharp and cold, slices us, and we turn our faces to it, living pink-cheeked and red-nosed within the frost.

  In the time between our first Easter and our first Christmas, Russ finds his place behind a new pulpit, and I stand proudly at his side, his lovely wife, warmly welcomed by this congregation. A photograph is taken to commemorate the occasion. Russ and I stand with the retiring pastor and his wife, matched in identical poses. Russ’s hand is at the small of my waist, drawing me protectively to him.

  It is the first time he’s touched me since the dirt of Oklahoma dusted this place.

  While Russ spoke his forgiveness with the sincerity of Scripture and treats me with the kindness of courtship, the brokenness of trust remains. There are no soft kisses upon waking, no sweet, swift embraces throughout the day. Every night I tuck in the children and go to bed, drifting and dozing while he studies downstairs. Deep into darkness, he joins me, and there we lie, parallel in our dreams. In the morning, I leave our bed as I took to it. Alone, to spend the rest of the day in careful, measured steps.

  There are moments I long for a return to our cramped little apartment, where it was impossible to move without brushing up against each other. Here, in the grandness of this house, I live without the feel of his skin. Neither hands, nor lips, nor any other part of God’s design. We don’t speak of it; we simply agree. And the moment the smoke clears from that camera’s flash, Russ takes his touch away, and I begin to burn.

  It is a Sunday afternoon in April, and we spend it the way we always have, only instead of reading a letter from Greg, we listen to the latest attempt to end his reign of bachelorhood. Last night, it was the niece of a well-meaning parishioner, homely even by Greg’s forgiving standards, who kept him out half the night trying to wheedle one more date.

  “Aren’t you ever going to get married, Uncle Greg?” Ariel asks. She rolls lazily on the thick carpet with Barney—once again fat with kittens—pawing at her ribbons.

  “Besides you kids, I’ve yet to see the benefit.”

  Russ bends the corner of the Tulsa Tribune, to which we subscribe and have delivered weekly. “To be married is a beautiful thing,” he says, catching my eye over the headlines of destruction. “Endless opportunities for sacrifice and love.”

  “Well, I’ve sacrificed enough of my time to Miss Edith Crauller,” Greg says. “And until the perfect woman comes along, I’ll be satisfied with loving all of you.”

  Just then the door opens, and Ronnie bursts in, dripping with rain, shoes covered in mud, but I don’t even think to chastise him.

  “Have you heard it?” He clomps to the radio and turns it on, setting his ear to find the station. “They’re saying it’s the worst one yet. That the whole sky turned black as night just like that.”

  “Mama?”

  Ariel, full of fear, crawls across the floor and wraps herself around my legs. Soon, our cozy back parlor, so recently full of warmth and laughter, is invaded by the cold voice of the radio newsman. Already they’re calling it Black Sunday, arguably the worst of these storms yet to pester the Oklahoma panhandle. Sunlight disappeared in seconds. Darkness descended for hours. Dark still, in fact, as a nation turns its heart to the poor, the plagued, the piteous lives left in the wake of such destruction.

  “‘If any man’s work shall be burned,’” Russ says, quoting Scripture, “‘he shall suffer loss: but he himself shall be saved.’”

  I think about Merrilou Brown, who writes occasionally, her letters filled with the same strength and resilience as her strident conversation. What would she say about such darkness, other than she felt no surprise when the sun shone bright as ever behind it?

  “Is it going to come here again, Mama?”

  “No, baby girl.” I place my hand on her curls as substitute for a kiss I must remember to give later. Our windows are coated with thick sheets of rain, and I can hardly remember what it felt like to live with that fear. “I think we’ll be spared from it ever happening again.”

  Later, in the latest of the afternoon, when it’s time to walk to evening church, Russ suggests we leave the children at home, tended to by their uncle, who has promised warm bowls of soup and a game of Old Maid to while away the evening.

  “All right,” I say, thinking I might have joined them if I hadn’t already donned my slicker and rubber boots. Russ does the same, and after a final good-bye to the family, we’re on the other side of the door. His hand finds mine, a gesture immediately foreign and familiar, and he holds it all the way down the rain-slicked steps, down the walkway, through the gate, and onto the sidewalk, where I assume he will drop its grip.

  He doesn’t; neither do I; and we are both silent for the next few steps.

  Looking up, I can see each drop of rain illuminated in the streetlight. I stop, lifting my face to the beauty of it—still so strange. It’s cold and stinging, like tiny bits of life nipping my cheeks. I am cleansed and removed from the darkness that haunted me for so long. The rain holds every tear I dare not cry in the midst of so much blessing.

  “I never thought I’d ever be so happy for such a small thing.”

  I’m hoping he’ll think I’m talking about the rain, and not his touch, lest he realize his transgression and take it away.

  “God is faithful,” he says. “Rain will return to Oklahoma, too.”

  “Of course it will.”

  “And I want to be there when it does.”

  He’s still holding my hand, and when I try to take it away, he grips me harder. We’re walking again, toward the church two blocks away. Russ seems determined in his stride, and I match him step for step at his side as raindrops patter on my hat.

  I shouldn’t be surprised that he wants to go back. He hasn’t flourished in this place the way the children have. The way I have. The fact that he pastors a church is a matter of convenience rather than passion, on the part of both the church and Russ. He doesn’t fit into the furniture. He no longer fills the room. While Featherling may have been the birthplace of my betrayal, this is the place where I confessed it, brought it to life. Here, too, for our marriage, there has been drought. The fields sown with salt. I can’t blame him for wanting to get away. Return home, in the way he has always defined it. Surrounded by families who will give when they have nothing, and then bring pie.

  “Nobody goes back to Oklahoma, Russ.” Only my husband could see beauty in such a place, and the fact that he loves it so much gives me hope that he can still love me.

  “All the more reason. There has to be somebody there by choice. I need to be where I’m needed.”

  “I need you.”

  Just then, as if orchestrated to prove
my point, I begin to step off the curb and into the street, only to have Russ pull me back to a safe-enough distance to let a car go by without drowning us in the wave created when its tire hits a puddle. He’s brought me close to him, his arms wrapped around me, and when I turn in his embrace, he is all I see. He is my home—not my escape, but my only shelter. Suddenly, my fear of returning to Oklahoma is eclipsed by the terrifying possibility that he might not see me as the same.

  I allow the slightest dropping of my shoulder, just enough to create a space between us, and to my utter disappointment, he releases me. Drops my hand in favor of taking a pinch of my slicker’s sleeve and leads me across the street, where we resume our walking.

  My last words, “I need you,” hang between us, begging a reply. Still, there remains nothing but a constant, fluid silence until the church, its pristine stained-glass windows glowing with welcoming warmth, beckons us with shelter.

  I slow my steps.

  “Darling.” The rain has intensified, something close to a downpour, and he reaches for me again. “We’ll talk about this later. At home.”

  “You can’t leave me again.”

  He looks puzzled, his face performing mini contortions with each splashing drop. “What do you mean?”

  “If you were going to leave me, you should have done it last year. After I told you . . . what I told you. And I know you’ve forgiven me. You say so, and I believe you. But you haven’t—we haven’t . . .” The rain provides a valiant escort for my tears, so neither of us truly knows if I’m crying because I’m terrified, or wounded, or angry. In the end, it doesn’t matter, because in the next breath I am in my husband’s arms, an embrace that knocks the hat off my head, and my scalp comes alive with cool, clean washing.

  “Nola, how could you think such a thing? Of course—of course we’ll go back together. As a family. We’ll start over, as a family. Us and the kids. We’ll find a new home, or build one.”