Currently Titled: Whiteblood

Thomas Whiteblood was in love with a woman. He was one of those rare and fortunate souls who loved and was loved in return. One autumn day he stood beside her on the shores of the gulf just as the sun was crawling down the western horizon. There they stood quietly together, while Thomas held her close in his arms to shield her from the cold wind blowing in over the foaming waves. The beach was an image of desolation, empty of people and beautiful in its naked silence.

Thomas kissed her face, the face of the woman he loved. Her eyes were closed and her lips were red and dry from the salt in the air.

Her face was cold, so cold that he spoke her name aloud.

“Eleanor,” he whispered. He felt the burden of her weight press against his arms more than was normal. He spoke her name again but she did not answer. He feared to let go of her lest she fall into the cold white sand. Her head sank into his chest beneath the enclosure of his arms, pressing against his heart and forcing him to feel the beat. He dropped down to his knees and she fell with him, her dark hair flowing in rushes like the waves breaking against the nearby shore.

“Eleanor,” he said again. His voice was drowned beneath the crash of a wave. She lay in his arms like a sleeping doll. She never spoke. He stared down at her, watched as the sunlight crept across her pale face as though it were leaning in to kiss her goodnight. She had sand in her hair. She hated having sand in her hair.

Thomas watched the sun set on her face and when night had fallen he still held her there on the cold shore. After some moments he rested her in the sand, then lay down beside her and stared up at the stars. They had often lain awake through the night and watched the stars together.

* * *

She is dead. Thomas wrote the words on a blank page in a journal he kept. She is dead and I am alive and that is that. The words were cold, mechanical, as though they’d been written by someone who had never known love nor ever cared to know it. She died in my arms on a Thursday in November. She died because her heart failed.

Reading the words back to himself, he was reminded of the things he had written as a child. My dog, Trapper, caught a rabbit today and killed it. The matter-of-fact method of keeping memory did not abandon him even in his grief.

She died in your arms on a Thursday and you lay with her there on the cold, barren shore and though the night drew on you like a needle in your vein draws blood you did not move, you did not go for help, you did not weep over her corpse, you just lay there like some twisted… like some perversity of human nature. What you have always been. Why she loved you at all.

What I have always been. She loved me because I am what I have always been.

Outside the night was coming over the trees skirting the eastern field. The barn was glowing at him from the window—a red outpost that seemed farther off than it really was, the sun dipping beneath it. He knew the small hill would be yellow behind the barn because it was the hill that he and Eleanor used to visit almost every other night before sunset. They would walk down the hill and follow the hidden path into the trees where the stream ran dark and cold into deepening woods, where sunlight broke into flurries through a filter of leaves and pine needles.

Does it help you to remember those times? He wrote the question and asked it back to himself. He struggled to answer until he left the question where it rested and got up from the desk. Pulled the coat she had given him from the kitchen chair and putting it on stepped outside onto the back porch.

The air was dry in the breeze and colder now than it had been before sunrise that morning. He thought about the air being dry in Florida and about how he waited for this time of year to come because it was a rare and precious thing. But now he couldn’t think about it because she was gone and he used to always tell her how much he loved it and she would say but it’s so cold and I miss the summer and he would laugh and shake his head because one day of cold was more than she wanted and it was all he ever waited for.

He caught himself laughing, put a stop to it. She was gone and he could not laugh about things they had shared.

But she would want you to laugh, to remember those times. Wouldn’t she? What difference does make what she would want if she isn’t here to want it? The assumptions we make about the dead. The stupid goddamned assumptions. She wanted nothing but to be with me forever and now she can’t and somehow I’m to believe that she doesn’t want that anymore just because she’s…

Tightening his coat, he stepped down from the porch and walked out into the field. Walked up to the side of the barn where the wood was stacked and grabbed a load to build a fire with. The wood felt rough and cold against his naked hands. Dry, willing to burn through the night.

It isn’t hard doing things like chopping wood, building fires. Makes things better in some sort of way. Work always makes things better for some reason god only knows.

After the funeral, the house had been rife with the solemn presence of well-meaning people. Family he called some of them. They would not let him work because everyone knew that you didn’t work when you were grieving. He let them stay for a while because he knew it made them feel better, as though by being near they offered him a kind of consolation. He let them believe it so that they would leave sooner. So he could get back to work.

Go back to being the man you have always been and stay that way and don’t change but go on being that man and die that man.

What is it about people that make them think they can offer solace to a man? A man finds no solace in people that he doesn’t find within himself. If they’d just left me to my land, to my quiet labors, they’d show then that they knew something of what it means to be human… but that’s the problem with the world. It’s full of humans who don’t have the damnedest notion of what it is to be human. And damned if I haven’t stacked one too many logs.

He was going to set the bundle down in the grass before the top two could roll off. He was leaning forward to lay them down gently upon the soft earth. A black spider scurried across the topmost log and he dropped the whole stack. The spider vanished into the dark grass. He checked himself by rubbing his arms, his hair. Fear at sight of a lonely black spider.

You are more human than you thought you were. It’s a good thing, too.

After a moment, he bent down and arranged the logs into a neat pile, then stood up to face the eastern woodland where now darkness draped over the trees like the veil of a woman in mourning. Above the trees, the moon hung like the great bulb of some distant lamppost, a voiceless and solemn guardian who would keep watch through the night.

But even the moonlight is a kind of shadow, another form of darkness in its own right. There is no light but only levels of shadow I realize now.

“Wouldn’t it be fun to go somewhere where the moon was bigger?” she said to him while staring up at it. To him it seemed she stood like she might have when she was a child, her head tilted slightly and her hands restlessly searching until they found one another. He wanted to put his arms around her but instead he just stood next to her and kept the space between his body and hers constant, as though he were trying to hold two magnets half an inch apart without letting them touch.

Breathe.

He felt someone inhale for him. He could sense the earth turning and for a moment he stood upon the axis of perpetuity, in the shadow of a red barn and in the shadow of the trees beneath the moon.

The wheelbarrow is inside the barn. Should go get the wheelbarrow and use it to carry the wood back to the house.

~ by adamburdeshaw on July 14, 2009.