Desperation Road

And here it was.

He had prayed twice as hard after Liza passed. Hated like hell that she never got to see him again. Died with her boy locked up in that place. Paying for what he had done. Mitchell had come home one evening and found her lying down in the backyard next to her tomato garden. Work gloves on and sleeves rolled up and lying folded like an old doll. Eyes shut. A tranquil expression on her face. Gone. He hadn’t thought much of death until then but after she was buried the thought of death seemed to follow him home from the grave site. It sat with him on the porch as he smoked a cigarette. Sat with him in the quiet of the house as he read the newspaper. Sat with him at the kitchen table as he drank coffee in the morning. Sat with him in his truck as he went about doing what he had always done and as his knees began to go as he knelt down to paint and as the strength in his arms began to go as he lifted ladders in and out of the back of the truck the thought of death seemed not only to sit with him and follow him around but also to take root in his mind and spread into his heart and his dreams. His muscles ached and his joints ached and his spirit ached and though he prayed that he would see Russell come down that driveway again he didn’t much believe he would see it happen. Could tell by the way he felt. On several occasions he had written letters to Russell, trying to convey things to him that he didn’t anticipate being able to say to him in person but he had never mailed any of those letters. Had ripped them into pieces and burned them on the dirt floor of the barn. Didn’t want Russell to have to carry around any more than he was already carrying around.

His despair strengthened with time and with the emptiness of the place and with nothing to fill his hours and in his despair he had driven down to Bogalusa, Louisiana, to see his only brother. Hoping for some kind of reassurance. Some kind of revelation. And he found it. Found her there standing barefoot in front of the shack she lived in, which was in line with the long row of shacks they all lived in. Dark hair and caramel skin and dark eyes like the rest of them. The men and the women and the children and the babies. All of them there to work the fields and the machines for half of what Clive used to pay for the fields and the machines to be worked. She was standing there barefoot. Her skirt down to her ankles, made for a taller woman. Her arms folded across her chest and she followed him with her eyes as he walked with Clive past the row of shacks out toward the edge of the sugarcane where Clive aimed to show Mitchell the bright red tractor that had replaced the dull red tractor.

And after they had inspected the tractor and were walking back she was still there. Her arms still folded. Her eyes still following him. And he had nodded to her and she had smiled at him. As he and Clive sat on the back deck and finished their second cup of coffee, Mitchell asked if he could hire her. If she was willing.

“Hell. I don’t know,” Clive said. “You’ll have to ask her yourself.”

She was willing. Her husband dead before she had followed her sisters and their husbands to the sugarcane farm. A grown daughter somewhere back in Mexico. She had put all her belongings into a pillowcase and then she had gotten in the truck with Mitchell and they had driven back to Mississippi with the sun falling down a clear sky behind them, shades of soft pinks and reds seeming to push them toward home. A quiet between them. But a different kind of quiet. A shared quiet.

Not a damn thing wrong with it. That’s what he’d come to after the first days and weeks of the strange woman in his house. It was something he had to come to so that he could fend off the guilt, the feeling that he was somehow being unfaithful to the life he had known with his wife. He’d finally shaken off the guilt as he and the woman came to figure each other out. He couldn’t understand a word she said and she couldn’t understand him. Not at first. They had pointed and nodded mostly until they began to figure it out and now if he wanted a glass of water or if she needed a blanket there were words. Larger pieces of something real that hadn’t been there before.

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