SHELLY

SHELLY

She never considered the mirror a friend. As a teen she bridled at “cute as a button” and “pretty little pixie”. In truth, the woman she grew into had a unique beauty that caught people’s eye. At the feed and tack store they noticed her hands, strong yet feminine, the kind of hands meant to be holding a training halter lead.

Women in the grocery stores wondered how this woman, who had to be mid-fifties, continued to look thirty-five. Her dimples, her bust that stretched the buttons on her work shirts and her thin waist made them wary when their husbands were around, not to mention the fine dirty blonde shoulder length hair streaked nearly white after a summer in the sun. She wore no make up but her long lashes made her pale blue eyes sparkle.

To Shelly, her nose was too small for her face, her boring hair limped through life. Her hands couldn’t grow decent nails if her life depended on it and these days her tits were just an annoyance. It was an accident the mirror even caught her.

She was sitting on the end of the bed in her and Bob’s room trying to figure out what to do with her clothes. Should she move them to the oak sideboard in the living room?

just leave them where they belong   this is crazy shit    you are doing crazy shit…

Her hands came quickly to her face. It was an action, twitch, tick, impulse, something she had developed when she was a child taking piano lessons from Mrs. Ellerson. When she made a mistake, she would hide her face behind her hands. Mrs. Ellerson’s eyes would smile through wirerimmed glasses and she would gently pry Shelly’s hands apart until she could see her blue eyes and they would giggle. Now she slams her hands into her face in anger that she is welling with tears. There are no giggles now.

you cant be a crazy bitch   you cant be a crazy bitch   you cant…

She drops her hands and opens her eyes and there is the oval mirror atop the ash dresser her grandmother gave her when she was married. And there is her. She doesn’t see her hair or nose, she sees her breasts, the cleavage fallen years ago with babies and horses. She sees them lying on her ribs. She sees her ribs.

She had always been pudgy. Her word. Bob said “zoftig”. She never knew where he came into contact with that word. That was not a Bob word. She was no longer zoftig. She was thin. Her ribs had never been prominent. She can now count them across the room in the murky light, the shades having been pulled over six months ago since the funeral.

The protruding bones of her ribcage interest her in a strange way. She checks the mirror as she runs her hands over the bones. It feels strange to be touched. She is aware she is mildly curious where she should be alarmed at the state of her body. She has lost a lot of weight since Bob killed himself. She is no longer alarmed at anything. Her heart is dull.

the girls don’t like you to say that   they like you to say when dad died   maybe when dad took his life   he didn’t take anything darlings   he got rid of his life   and mine

She stands and turns profile to the mirror, staring at her body which is no longer hers, no longer recognizable to the body she inhabited for fifty-five years.

this is kinda neat   with this body bob would think he was sleeping with another woman   oh well new life   new woman   new bod  

She smoothed out her butt impression on the quilt they got from Bob’s Aunt Pauline, sleepwalks toward the mirror and opens the drawers below it. She takes underwear, jeans, bra and work hoody and walks away closing the door leaving the stale bedroom behind her into a room filled with so much light it hurts her eyes.

november light can be like this   blinding   like there is no air to temper the light   maybe because november is mostly gray and rainysnowyshitty   not today   no wind though…

She stands at the kitchen sink with a vague mission to eat something. She was relieved none of her daughters were with her. They would insist. They had taken turns to be with her on and off for the last six months. The comfort they gave each other was necessary but Shelly longed for time alone. Now she was. Alone.

i am glad you’ve gone home girls   course I miss you    nothing to do with loving you   you know I would take a bullet for you   ha   maybe a bad example   i cannot heal your grief     while you are here that is all I try to do    let’s see how we are at christmas without dad   next steps   next steps   next steps... 

The last six months were exhausting. In July, Shelly was calling all the custom combine outfits trying to schedule their fields to be harvested. They were all booked until the end of September and she knew the wheat would get rained on before that and the quality would take a hit which meant a hit on the price. She had not figured it all out, not looked far enough ahead at what was coming. Since the funeral she was barely able to keep up. Her brain was as dull as her heart.

She walked through the chores that should have given her pleasure. They always did in the past. Watering the vegetable garden one morning, she heard a distant roar from the fifty acres over the ridge next to Warnekee’s Road. She jumped into the ATV and rode to the top of the hill.

Eight combine harvesters of all makes had pulled into her field. The red-green-silver parade of dust churning combines took a two-hundred-foot swath out of the fall wheat that Bob had planted last October. Murph was in their John Deere leading the pack. The accompanying array of trucks waited for the bulk tanks to fill, took the augured grain from the machines on the go, without stopping, and carried it to the co-op. They would cut her entire crop that day. She wept.

you wouldve hated that bob    you never asked for anything    now what    sell   

She had all the neighbors over for Halloween. To begin with, it was a big holiday on their farm. Bob loved Halloween like a kid. He raised pumpkins and corn solely to decorate their house and barn and mailbox. He made elaborate jack-o-lanterns in the shop with his tools. Shelly managed the corn stalks and putting the pumpkins around the way Bob liked but the carving was too much for her or the girls who had come to help.

She had a hog butchered and opened the place up to all the families that harvested for her and anyone else who cared to come. It was a big turnout, as joyous as it could be and got rightly rowdy around the fire at the end of the night. After the last dish was washed by the neighbors and the last pickup pulled away, she stole some time away from her daughters.

At the firepit, weariness and the flaring ember jewels lulled her to a stillness she had not felt for a long time. She let herself be depleted because she knew her daughters would take care of her.

thirty-eight years here and just walk away from it    that what you want you son of a bitch   rent the fields      stewarts would take them in a second     put them up for auction maybe     i know that’s not the way it’s done here bob    but maybe things are gonna have to change    i cant afford to leave any money on the table   what did you have in mind you asshole…

The bawling cows roused Shelly at the sink. She blinked and looked around the living room to make sure where she was, make sure what time of day it was, make sure Bob was still dead.

yup   still dead…

There were her blankets on the couch, neat and tidy, easily put away if somebody should drop in and they did drop in on her all the time now. They were good caring people who checked her weekly with some lame excuse or other. She would hide the blankets so the visitor would not know she was not sleeping in the bedroom she and Bob had shared for thirty-eight years. She had not slept in that room since Murph called that spring morning.

april 27^th   where are my clothes   didnt i get clothes from the bedroom…

She scans the living room. There were the pictures of her daughters.

they used to be our daughters bob   ours…

The framed portraits sat on the only piece of furniture she and Bob had not inherited from their parents and grandparents. It was a huge oak sideboard she had found in the barn at the old Reisborough Place partially buried under a mangy buffalo robe and crusty with decades of bat shit and dust.

She spent one winter bringing the heavy piece back to life, stripping, sanding, getting Bob to repair the breaks and splinters she could not and then the Tung oil. They had done this together in the dark days of January and February. The task had made the winter fly back to where it had come from. The next Christmas, it held red and green candles, boughs of pine and the fresh cranberries and popcorn she had strung on wrapping ribbon, bowls of walnuts and peppermints. Bob got little white lights. It glowed. It filled one whole wall of their living room.

She could not imagine how it came to that barn or this part of the country for that matter. Stenciled on the back was, “MFD E.A. Chlore Madison Co. Vir.” It had to have come by wagon from Virginia, across the country in the late 1800’s. Bob suggested it could have come by ship around the tip of South America during the gold rush years and migrated from California.

you liked to think that…

He and Murph had to take it apart to move it. The other furniture in the house, the hutches, dressers, bedsteads, and tables echoed the relatives they had come from. The echoes were now louder in the still of the house.

when you were here but not in the house there was still sounds of you    sounds that are going to be coming   future sounds   your truck up the lane   the slam of its door   your boots in the mud room    like those sounds were hanging in the air waiting for you to bring them down to my ears   those quiet sounds in the air were my company   they were promises    of us…

She had refinished several pieces of their inherited furniture so they were lighter natural wood and had a modern shine. They fit the farmhouse. She liked to run her hands across the ones she had put the most work into. The wood was satiny and smooth from all the sanding and steel wool and then the Tung oil, once a day for a week, once a week for a month, one a month for a year and then yearly she would take everything off of everything and lovingly apply the oil with her bare hand, let it set for twenty-four hours and then polish the wood till light sank into the finish and glowed back.

The hungry cows pierced her stupor.

whatthefuck   i’m standing at the sink   naked…

She grabbed her clothes from the sideboard and dressed on her way to the back porch. She pulled on her boots and headed out the door. When she turned the corner to the barn, she froze, stunned, like she had been hit by a board.

Bob’s truck sat in the barnyard. For an instant, she expected him to be in the shop or at the barn.

ha   that’s nuts   fuck

She approached the white pickup like it was a dangerous foreign animal. It was filthy with summer dust and fall rain. Bob would never have let his truck get that dirty. He was tidy, always wiping up the bathroom after he shaved, knocking the mud off her boots before he came into the house, throwing his dirty clothes in the washer for her.  

you always said you could judge a farmer by how his place was kept   except when you shot yourself in the head     what about that bob   what about that mess bob…asshole…

After the cops said it was okay, Murph had hosed out the back of the truck for her. There was only a faint blood stain on the sheet of three-quarter plywood Bob used to protect the bed. Murph had offered to flip the board. Shelly said no.

it was so sweet of him though…

She was tired of being pissed off every time she saw it, let along walked by it, because it made her mad at him and the anger just grew.

it isn’t fair you son-of-bitch    to kill yourself without even a word to me   thirty-eight years of your scent sex snoring hugs kisses laughter…fuck you bob    fuck you for leaving me like this…

She picked up a hefty stone and threw it as hard as she could at the truck and missed. Hitting the side of the barn it sounded like a gunshot.

The cows appeared in the gaping barn door and stared at her, as alarmed as cows get. She looked at them looking at her like she was this crazy person. A sound burst from from deep down in her chest. It hurt. A syllable of a laugh, and then a kind of hiccupping giggle and then full-on belly laughs that doubled her over and brought tears and made her want to cry. She bent double and slammed her hands over her face. Every time she took a ragged breath her torso heaved. She had never noticed that before.

“Fuck!”

The cows scattered. She raised herself up with the help of her hands on her thighs. Her ribs grabbed with pain and she dropped to he knees in the mud and cow shit.

“Fuck.”

fuck   i got to start laughing more   i got to stop saying fuck so much is what I have to do…      

It was November 8^th, the date their oldest daughter, Angie, was conceived. Shelly knew the minute each daughter was conceived. They were all conceived in passion not just sex. She felt her body glow inside with each one. She never told Bob, this was her secret. Debbie was conceived New Year’s Eve. Marybeth May 1^st.

November 8^th. Today is the day she decided to sell Bob’s truck. The girls couldn’t bear to have it. She tried to give it to Murph, but he was so broken up about the whole thing he couldn’t imagine having Bob’s truck.

“That is Bob’s truck. Bob loved his truck. That is Bob’s truck, nobody else’s.”

i am going to sell this fucker today bob   you asshole    you selfish asshole    look what you did to murph   he was so broken up by the whole thing he couldn’t stand to look at your truck   he said he couldn’t see anyone else using that truck in the county    didn’t seem right...

She almost ran to the barn, so anxious was she to rid herself and the farm of the white 250 Ford pickup. Up into the mow and the bales fell to the mangers like alfalfa bombs, hungry cattle taking the blows on their heads and when she stopped this flurry, it was silent except for the cattle eating. She watched the happy bovines and tried to catch her breath. She sat and let cows cover her with their warmth rising from the barn floor.

She woke because she was cold and did not associate the smells around her with sleep. She gave up trying to get the hay out of her hair. She imagined she must look like a scarecrow.

jesus christ…

She thought the cows looked embarrassed for her.

falling asleep in the fucking barn…

“What are you looking at? Huh? Maybe I might just move in down here. How’d that be? Looking for a roommate?”

The cows were silent as they watched her crawl from the upper stories of baled hay down to the floor of the barn. When she slid the door open, a white world greeted her. It was lightly snowing.

winter without you i hadn’t though of that…

The snow as wet and wouldn’t last. She slid the door closed and turned to stare at the truck. It blended into the barnyard. She needed to clean it up if she was going to sell it.

She walked toward the truck, put her hand on the door handle, closed her eyes and opened the door.

we made love in this truck the day you got it   out by that steep slope on the Heffner place…

She pulled herself into the cab and settled on the seat.

i swear to god i can still smell you in here…

She opened the glove box. Empty. She checked above the visor. Empty. She went through the cab as she had done a hundred times looking for a note, something that was for her, something from him that would make this all right and for the hundredth time, she found nothing. She turned the key in the ignition. Nothing again.

It didn’t take her long to grab the ATV and the jumper cables. She hooked them up and the white truck shuddered to life. She hit the gas pedal and before long the truck was idling, a bit rough, but she knew it would run. She also knew she had to drive it to charge the battery.

She dropped the jumpers back into the ATV, put the truck in gear and started driving. She had no idea where she was going as she headed past the house and into the fields. The gently blowing snow from the north gave her an eerie calm.

The snow-greased lane through the fields did not worry her, the truck was made for this and soon she found herself on the brow of the hill leading down to the Reisborough Place. She stopped.

Snow was blowing in the old barn where the sideboard came from. The old willow tree looked like a crabbed elder presiding over a wintry scene on a Christmas card.

why not…

She nosed the pickup down into the draw and stopped in the exact place Bob had parked. The spot was burned into her memory. Twenty paces from the willow, thirty-seven from the barn.

She wasn’t sure if she should shut it off, wasn’t sure the battery had charged enough.

i can always walk back…

She turned the key. The quiet of a snow-covered draw was soothing. Things quietened in the snow. The calm of the slightly drifting white was unreal. She got out of the cab. She had to hold onto to the pickup to steady herself.

the snow is slippery   bullshit   you are unsteady  your thighs are shaking   call it like it is shelly…

She made her way to the back of the truck and dropped the tailgate. With a determined breath she turned and pushed herself on the bed. Her butt was immediately wet and cold. She slid back and lay down. The snowflakes melted on her face masking the silent flow of tears.

i can make a snow angel…

And she did, as much as she could in the confines of the bed of the truck. Then she raised herself and slid back and leaned against the cab.

She would never recall her steps that took her to the willow. She would recall that the snow was sifting into the cuts in the bark making them white. She would recall that she did not breathe during those twenty steps and for sometime after until her head buzzed and she nearly fainted. She would recall she thought she was seeing things. She would remember what she felt when she saw their initials newly carved into the old willow’s bark.

In a November dusk snow embraced by the elder willow she found their love carved forever into that impossible tree.  

She will never tell a soul about these letters and the arrow because they are the message he had left for her to find and she knew he was certain that she would find them. The love letters he had left for her told her everything she needed to know as she traced the cuts in the snowy bark with her finger, following the love he had carved with his knife.