James

            James figured the wife would be back by sundown. That day she left with the girl, he figured she had to get it out of her system, whatever it was, whatever made her harden to him like the crusts of January. He woke that morning and reached out to her. He wanted to lay his hand on her belly, to feel the round curve. He imagined her sensing the weight of his presence and his awakening. It must have been the storm got her up, he thought, as his hand touched the rumpled sheets and then the pillow with the smell of her hair still lingering. She must be curled on the couch downstairs or already in the kitchen getting coffee.

            He opened every door, even the closets. In the girl's room he parted the clothes hanging there. Did he expect to find his daughter huddled in a corner, her little knees brought up to her chin, her hair hiding her eyes? His blood felt suspended in his veins. He couldn't feel his heart beating. Did he breathe? He didn't seem to breathe, but that would have been impossible. He walked around the house three times before going to the barn. Nothing. He stood looking at the spot where his black 1938 Ford was supposed to be parked, and he squinted as though something must be wrong with his eyes. In just a second the car would appear. But the car was gone.

            James walked back toward the house, opened the kitchen door and went inside. He walked to the center of the living room. He just stood there facing the big front window that looked out over the fields. He didn't know what he was feeling, or even if he was feeling. The house was empty; that's all there was to it.

            Maybe she left because he wouldn't call her by her name. He could think it but not say it. He couldn't get it off his tongue. Edith. The word slit him down the front and laid him wide open, a thing too womanly to be tolerated. Like a furrow or a slaughtered calf. Women, they can tolerate such a rending and live afterwards. There's a saying, women are the strongest, and when it comes to being intimate with words, that's certainly his experience. Names hold a danger. Oh, he could say names like Fred or Frank; no problem. He could even say Mrs. Anderson and Granny Shea. But "Edith"? No. He couldn't. "I take you, Edith, to be my wife." He said it then and that had to stand for all the days to come. He made his promise. He stood by his promises. But even with his daughter, James couldn't say her name.

            "Do you love me, James?" Edith asked him again the night before she left. He told her once. She shouldn't ask him anymore. "Just take it that I do," He said when they still were on their honeymoon in Minneapolis. "If I ever change my mind, I'll let you know." By this he meant to secure her in the knowledge and the promise of that love. He meant to let her know she needn't worry ever again for her entire life. He would show her in the ways that matter, in the working of the land, the protection of this home. And he would be faithful to his promise.

            "Can't you just say you love me?" Then she cried. He took her in his arms as he always took her in his arms. He smoothed back her hair and kissed away her tears. What was this if not love? She laid there, her head turned, her eyes open. Outside the wind came up and the rumble of thunder far away.

            He wanted to say this will make you feel better, but he stopped himself. Better to let the actions speak. He lifted her gown and she allowed this. He took some comfort in that small fact, that redeeming detail. He held that fact up as proof against guilt. She groaned through sobs, but women are complex, their emotions flow in opposite directions at the same time. He's always been aroused by this complexity. 

            Afterwards he had laid back, secure in this demonstration of his love. Her quiet moaning and the rocking of her sobs put him to sleep.

            When James's mother left, back when he was a boy, he didn't speak for two weeks. His grandmother, Adeline, told him this. He remembered nothing of her. Not a smell, not a sound. He couldn't remember her eyes or her arms holding him. The first memory he has is of the barley, crushed, broken on the ground by hail. He was twelve. His father lifted his fist to the sky and yelled. "First Lily, now this, who the hell do you think I am?" That was the last he said of it. He never said her name again. To James's knowledge his father never called on God again either. The man died cursing, sitting at the breakfast table. "What the hell is going on?" He looked confused. He started to stand up and fell over dead. His coffee cup arched into the air, hot coffee trailed behind it, a splash of brown and copper, stopped midair, or so it seemed whenever James remembered it. Everything stopped. And James just stood there. Then all of it crashed to the floor.

            Gran said he was the man of the family. She said the farm was up to him. It was back in 1934. James had turned sixteen, and she was right.

            You can't just sit still no matter what happens. There's plowing. There's irrigation. There's always something to be mended, doors off their hinges, tractor gears not working smooth. James opened cans the first week after the wife left him, cans of baked beans, Campbell's chicken noodle soup. Ate it all straight from the tin, cold.

            After the first week passed and the wife didn't come back, James went looking. He drove the pickup out in spokes from the farm. Down towards Grand Forks, first, and even crossed the river into Minnesota. Women like to shop and it had been years since she'd even bought herself a new pair of shoes. He spent one whole afternoon visiting shoe stores hoping to catch a glimpse of her.

            He didn't ask after her. Asking is a form of confidence he couldn't bring himself to give another. It's like turning over and showing your underbelly. He developed a system, a map in his head, for searching. He crisscrossed the town like a weave, every street—east and west, north and south—keeping his head to the front like he knew perfectly where he was going. A man with a purpose. And he watched for her. The slim back of a woman with a girl in tow could make him turn his head. But the sight of a face with features laid all wrong raised an anger in him that he didn't expect. He swallowed, clamped his fists around the steering wheel and kept on looking.

            Once, in Roseau, he thought he saw her turning up a sidewalk to enter a house. His heart turned. "Hello, there! Mrs.!" He called out the window but she didn't hear or else she didn't know it was herself he meant. She would have recognized his voice, though, wouldn't she, if it had been the wife?

            Nights at home James watched dust settle on the curtains. He watched the light dim on the horizon. He listened to the sound of crickets in the cut grain. A field mouse nested in the wife's yarn basket and he let it stay.  North Dakota winters can raise a deep terror in prairie creatures. He'd seen their bones in spring. And besides, he felt a companionship with the tiny thing as he watched it go about its daily tasks. It gnawed a ragged hole in the flour sack, which he let be. He was willing to share his abundance with whatever companion given him, in whatever form. He had no need of flour anymore. If he had need of anything, it was of this tiny creature. After it grew accustomed to his presence it would sit on the edge of the yarn basket and look at him. He looked back, and in those wee eyes he thought he saw what only could be an intelligence or an intention about life from which he determined he would learn. By winter's end the mouse sat on his shoulder. It ate peanut butter from his spoon.

            No one came to the house. If they had, he wouldn't have let them in. How could he let them in? Such an embarrassment for the wife if she'd been there, the way her house had turned without her keeping it the way she did before. He kept the barn. He kept the garage and the tool shed. He kept the fields. Her flowers went to seed and in May they sprang up along with the weeds. Her house thickened with dust. Her curtains sagged under the weight of it and began to shred. Mouse droppings littered the kitchen floor and the wife's yarn basket smelled. The sheets on James's bed turned gray and her pillow no longer held the scent of her hair.

            James began to talk to the mouse.

            "Mouse," he posed. "It's about time we planted the west field, don't you think?" The mouse held a bean in its delicate paws. It sat on the kitchen table. What a miracle it was, the life of it, the perfection. "The wife will be back soon. She'll expect planted fields." We love the ones we can. We give ourselves to whatever will share our path.

            After that he began once more to look forward to returning to the house at noon after a morning of planting.

            "I'm home, Mouse!"

            Sometimes it burrowed deep in the yarn. Sometimes it scampered from the pantry and climbed up his pants leg to his shoulder. He made a cup of Postum and fed the mouse a bit of whatever he might be eating by letting it nibble from his fingers.

            From time to time he wondered if he should give the mouse a name, but thought better of it. A name can take from us something that we counted on.

            Somebody had to visit Gran now that the wife was gone, and who could it be but himself? He let it go as long as he could, but she was calling him on the phone asking was the wife back yet, and saying wasn't it just like Lily had been? A true Olson woman never would consider such a thing, she went on and on, and it was a sin to take a child away from her father like the wife had done. Gran's voice crackled like straw.

            Mondays James always drove to town anyhow to get the few supplies he needed, so he started to stop by Gran's place.

            "You ought to go to church, son." Gran smoothed her afghan with her claw of a hand.

            "Never had much time for it." He said.

            "Still and all, it'd help to get yourself out of that house." She sounded just like when he was a boy.

            "I get out fine." He said.

            "Alone, though. You get out alone, but you need people. At church they have those fellowships." She said. And he wondered what she was doing talking about fellowships when she never went to church herself. Not once that he could remember in all those years.

            "Never had much of a knack for people." He told her.

            When he looked at Gran, she reminded him of Mouse, her beady eyes trained directly on his face. Maybe she could see something he didn't know and even if he did, he wouldn't want it seen.

            "Your mother's fault. Shame. Shame on her."

He kept his mouth shut.

            "You ought to go to church." She said again.

            "I'll think about it." Words to put the discussion to an end.

            They sat a few minutes in silence.

            "And the house. Can you keep it up?" She finally said.

            "It's fine." He said, wishing they could talk about planting or about politics even.

            "A mess, I'll wager. None of you men ever could keep a house, not your grandfather, not your father. Why would you be any different? I expect you're no different at all."

            Again he kept his mouth shut, picturing the dust, the dirty dishes, the droppings of the mouse.

            "I expect that house is a complete mess."

            Over the years you learn when not to talk.

            "You'd best get somebody in there now and then who knows what to do with a mop and broom."

            "It's not necessary, Gran." He told her and hoped that would put an end to it.

            "Ha! I don't even like to imagine how that place looks by now. I can see by the clothes you're wearing. Do you even know how to operate the washing machine?"

            Silence.

            "You need hired help. Ida Gunderson, maybe. We've a family connection, there, you know. Her husband, Stephen? Might say he'd be your uncle if the truth be told."

            Not Ida Gunderson. Not anyone, family connection or no family connection. The wife would be back, if not this summer, then by fall for sure. Women make too much of cleanliness.

            "I'll think about it," he said.

            "You do that. Otherwise you'll just fold up and die out there. You mark my words, James Olson. You just mark my words!"

            He went back to see her on the first Monday of every month. The conversation continued pretty much the same except he had less and less to say. What he did have to say he told the mouse. Then one evening he came in from the fields and couldn't find the little thing. He looked all through the yarn, the pantry, even in the upholstery of his big chair. He called out. He searched for three hours before he could admit that the creature was gone. Then James sat down in his chair and looked at the tattered curtains and listened to the crickets in the field and stared out the window until almost ten that night when the sun finally set. After that he cried. He sobbed like he couldn't when the wife took the girl and ran away. He yelled out in his empty house like he couldn't when his own mother left so many years ago. His heart felt like a melon in his chest, split and running out, and nothing James could do anymore, and nothing he could say from now on would be able to change that.     

Copyright © Christin Lore Weber, 2005