COLBURN GATHERED FALLEN LIMBS from the pecan trees and piled them behind the house. He took bricks from the side of the shed and formed a loose circle down the slope of the backyard only steps away from where the kudzu began. He had gone into the shed and found a handsaw and he trimmed the branches from the limbs and then sawed the limbs too thick to snap over his knee. Working in the twilight and sweating with the back and forth of the saw and feeling better with his heart thumping harder and the satisfaction of doing something.
Soon enough he had a fire going and he had taken two aluminum lawn chairs from the back porch and moved them next to the pit. The young fire snapped and hissed and he sat with his legs crossed. His hands folded on top of his knee. A reverent pose as he waited for Celia.
It was almost midnight when she arrived and she came sauntering across the backyard in silhouette and she held a bottle of wine gripped by the neck in each hand. She sat down next to him and gave him the bottle that was already opened and set the other on the ground and said we are probably the only people in this whole countryside sitting by a fire tonight. Celia uncorked a bottle and they passed it back and forth.
“I should probably tell you about Dixon,” she said.
“I don’t want to know anything about him.”
“If somebody shoved me off a barstool I’d want to know about him.”
“Well. I don’t.”
“What do you want to know about?”
“Nothing right now.”
“Then why don’t you do the telling then? That’s why I came out here. Because of what you said. Because of the way you said it.”
He moved then. Shifted in the chair. He set the bottle on the ground and looked at her with the firelight shifting on her face and making curly shadows from her curly hair and she said you can tell me. And he didn’t want to be like his parents anymore. Keeping it all hidden behind years of strained eyes and forced smiles, sucking their grief down into a poisoned silence that could only spread and ruin. She squeezed his arm and said whatever it is, you can let it out.
He told of his father’s swollen face and bulging eyes and his empty mother and the story of a brother he never knew. The brutality of indifference and the years of his wasted boyhood trying to please a man who could not be pleased and the years of his youth he had wasted trying to figure out what he had done to put the noose around his neck. The hand of his mother held out to him when she told him about his brother. As if such a simple gesture could erase a lifetime of questions and guilt and how he had left her hand there to lie on the table. Open and empty.
Then he circled back around to the moment he had gone toward the workshop. The silence as he approached and the anxiety of opening the door and having to see his father’s snarl and hear his bark but he went on anyway like he had been told to do. And I remember thinking maybe this time would be different. Something inside of me always thought the next time might be different. But I opened the door and he was struggling and he waved at me with one hand and seemed like he was tugging at the noose with the other. His damn mouth was foaming and his toes were barely touching the top of the stool and he then started reaching up, trying to get hold of the banister above his head but the rope was too long and he couldn’t reach it. I want to say I was hollering or crying but I wasn’t doing either. I should have. I know I should have. But I wasn’t.
The entire time Colburn had been talking he had been pressing his open hands together. Harder and harder. His hands beginning to shake a little with the pressure and Celia wrapped her own hands around his. The tension releasing from his hands and forearms as something seemed to drain from him. But then he filled back up again as he took her hands and moved them away and said that’s not the end of it.
I think he wanted down. I think he changed his mind. I guess people do that when they walk up to death. I guess they decide maybe things aren’t as bad as they seem. Maybe I could do better. Maybe I can fix whatever needs fixing. I watched him and he kept waving his hand around. For what I don’t know but then I decided to help him out. To help us both. If he wanted up there then that’s what he was going to get. He didn’t care nothing about me and he was never going to and I would rather he hated my guts than acted like I wasn’t alive and that came on me stronger in that moment than it ever had. I had never been nothing but invisible to him and now all of a sudden he could see me with his toes tapping on top of the stool and his air going out. I didn’t know why I should help him. Even if that’s what he wanted.
Colburn’s face had changed. His features stark in the firelight and his eyes brazen and staring down into the flames. Celia touched her fingertips to his lips to try and stop him from talking anymore but he wrapped his hand around her fingers and held them close to his mouth. I did what I did, he said. It didn’t take but one hard kick to knock the stool over. And that was that.