“Your Ma has been cooking your favorite. Lasagna.”
“That’s great news.”
“So,” Pa said. “How was the big date?”
“It wasn’t a date. It was a study group.”
Your father gave you an obnoxiously knowing grin, as if he recognized this sort of boyish ruse.
You turned away, studied your hands. It didn’t take much to fight the urge to tell him the truth. The summery languor made all the words you would have to use feel too weighty and cumbersome. Instead, you offered a Moses-like shrug, slow and suffering, your head slung low.
“Welcome,” he said, “to the world of women.”
“Ha.”
He put an inky and unsettled hand on your shoulder. “It’s a very mysterious world, and believe me when I tell you that you can never hope to know all the answers.”
“You mean with Ma?” you asked.
“Well,” he said. “No, not with your mother, I guess. That particular woman will tell you all the answers herself, ha.” You had never once before spoken with your father about his marriage, and this little conversation now seemed like a decent consolation prize for the loser in love. In your recent glum weeks, you had fallen far indeed from your hallowed place as your mother’s most perfect boy. You had come to grunt monosyllabic replies to her questions, and she replied in kind, hardly asking you any questions at all. But as you now showed Pa a wondering look, your father thumbed his chin regretfully, as if remembering the order of things, this life in which he was able to carry on with his many failings in exchange for his silence on the topic of Ma’s absolute authority on all matters Loving.
After he went, you leaned back in your chair, relaxing gratefully into your poor mood. Was this the nature of love? This lopsidedness, one always in the lead, the other always in pursuit? The light was dimming in the sky now, and the heat no longer dulled your foulness. Cooling, it came unsettled. You thought up a final stanza for a poem you had been trying to write, “The Endless Roundup.” Nearly every poem you had ever written you had kept to yourself, but for this particular poem you had an outlandish idea: on Monday mornings, Mrs. Schumacher offered bonus points to any student willing to read out loud a short creative work. Thus far, the only takers to this offer had come from the class’s collection of moody girls: plump Betty Greene, who wrote an ode to chocolate cake as if it were a devious lover to be spurned; Cara Stimson, whose five-page ode to her mother’s needling Cara did not manage to complete before puddling into her own tears. Only one boy—Carlos Ramirez, your honors class’s only Hispanic kid—had taken the bait, reading aloud an essay about his parents’ entanglement with the cartels in Guadalajara, their abandonment of their little grocery, and their flight to America. “Ah-MARE-ee-ka!” The boys in your class mocked Carlos’s accent for so long that they began to call him by that name. “Hey, Am-mare-ee-ka, you know where I could score some bud?”
But “The Endless Roundup,” in your first blush of composition, seemed a thing that perhaps you might summon the courage to read for ears other than your own—to read, more specifically, for the ears of the one girl who otherwise now seemed wholly uninterested in what you had to say. “The Endless Roundup” was a riff on one of Granny Nunu’s favorite old tales, a little fable that the graying minister had repeated at her tiny, December afternoon memorial service. Nunu’s story held that the booming reports of the very occasional thunderstorms in the Big Bend were not thunder at all but the sounds of ghost cowboys forever in pursuit of ghost cattle. You imagined yourself in a world like that, a boy turned to a cloud. You wrote:
Sometimes I wonder,
Will I live like that too?
A body of thunder,
Endlessly hunting for you?
You furiously scratched away every word. Once complete, the poem seemed suddenly pitiful to you. And what sort of poet could the writer of those cornball lines ever hope to become? Your future, you were fretting now, was bound to be just like Pa’s. You would inherit this land, you would marry a girl you did not quite love, you would toil under the shadow of dead masters. The only difference would be that you would produce bad poetry, not bad paintings. You would work in the cave, not the shed.
And so you resolved to put the whole business to an end. Rebekkah, poetry, your future imaginings in Mrs. Schumacher’s classroom. You would not be a poet, you told yourself, but you would be something else. What? The only professions that came to you now were just a child’s trite replies to the question of grown-up plans: a doctor, a lawyer, a fireman.
You were still trying to convince yourself, by very early Monday morning. But a resolution was not enough. Internal revelation, everything outside unchanged: that was poet thinking, and what you needed was action. And so, as the sky outside the bedroom window grayed with the sunrise, you crept out of your lower bunk, careful not to wake your brother. You stashed your journal of poems in a bottom drawer of the old accountant’s desk, buried it there. But a journal in a closed drawer did not offer the closure you needed, so you found a fresh sheet of paper, lifted a pen, and began to compose a closing coda to your failed future, a sort of epitaph to your young life as a poet. One last poem, about your factory of a school, your ruined future with Rebekkah, everything you would never be. Unfortunately, it was only as you wrote your retirement poem that you began to see what made all your other poems so lousy. Like the shape-shifting creatures of the fantastical worlds you had described, you were always trying to put on new skins, but in this last poem you wrote as yourself, unchained from rhyme scheme. This poem, in the end, would become the first and only poem of yours to be published. In fact, one year from that morning, its concluding lines would appear on that memorial billboard off Route 10. But at the moment of composition it was just a thing you dashed off in less than thirty minutes.