THE NEXT MORNING Jim got up early to make coffee and get ready for their trip. Becky rose more slowly. When she came out of the bedroom Jim was sitting on the couch watching the fire. “What are you doing?” she asked.
Jim held up his coffee cup. “Relaxing.” He turned to face her. Her robe was open and he could see the soft flesh of her cleavage, her slightly pudgy stomach and, where her pubic area should have been, she had one leg pushed forward. From head to foot he could see inviting flesh. The robe, like a door standing ajar, let out the light of her body.
“What’s it like outside,” she asked him.
“Drizzling. Overcast,” he said.
“I was hoping it would have stopped.”
“Me to. I hate to scrap this whole thing, but you won’t...“
“Don’t tell me what I won’t do or won’t like. I’m going through with this. It’s too important not to,” she said.
“It’s important to me,” he told her.
“And therefore important to me.”
Her confidence and sense of mission was attractive. He got up from the couch and walked over to her. He ran his hand down the front of her body.
“But there’s no reason we have to go right away,” she said.
Jim took her hand and led her back into the bedroom.
Their love, for years, had become comfortable and familiar. The two of them knew what to expect, one from the other, and knew what to give. The pleasures of knowing one another well and caring about their feelings had led to a satisfying love life where warmth and understanding and acceptance were all given with honesty.
Later, when they were both ready for the hike, Becky pulled Jim close and held him. “Thank you,” she said, but she didn’t have to.
The rain added substance to the odor of the woods. A lingering of smoke in the air brushed by, making the outside familiar. Jim had smelled those smells a lot lately and welcomed them into his body. He would miss the land as much as he’d miss anything, he thought.
Becky grabbed his hand and asked, “Which way?”
“Was I lingering too long?” he said.
“You were thinking. It’s okay.”
Jim led her to the path, which took them up to the ridge that led around the hill. From the ridge, in brighter light, Jim knew the farmhouse would rise gloriously from the golden field. He hoped that, even in the rain, it would give life to the valley. If he needed anything from the old farm now, it was life… just as his was fading. He needed to know that some things lasted, just as the love inside that farmhouse had outlasted the two people who once shared it.
Becky had some trouble with the hike, stumbling over fallen branches and underbrush, but Jim held tightly to her hand and helped her keep steady.
“I’m a little old for this sort of thing,” she complained. “I’m used to sidewalks and malls.”
“It’s only a little farther. Can you make it?”
His concern made her want to make it. She knew that, ultimately, if she said no, he’d turn back. For her. She couldn’t do that to him. She stumbled, again, and Jim turned in time to catch her before her knees hit the ground. “I’m sorry, Honey,” he said, “let’s turn back. I’ll come back later, alone.”
“No.” She straightened her clothes and pulled at her jacket to unfluff the front of it. Her hair was damp and sagging. She hadn’t put makeup on that morning and her face looked pale and uneven. She was beginning to look a wreck. The dense woodsy odor followed her, and when she spoke, her breath smelled of the earth.
Jim held her up for a moment while she straightened herself out. His stare brought out her question, “What is it?”
“Nothing,” he said. “You look like you belong here.”
“In the woods?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t feel that way,” she huffed.
“But you look it.”
She smiled at him. “You and your woods. What is it about them?”
“They’re true. Nothing can change them, alter them, if they’re left alone.” He thought for a moment. “Nature, all of it, it seems to me, is the deep truth of us—how we are. That probably sounds stupid.”
“Not at all.”
“If we’re reflected in our jobs, then why not in nature?” He shook his hand in the air to illustrate everything around them. “It’s all just a manifestation of what we are. How we feel and think. To me, nature is part of us.”
“It’s part of you, I know that much.” Becky knew that for all the time they had been together; she had listened and watched him enough to know how he felt about nature.
She tugged at his arm, “Let’s go. I’m getting cold and wet.”
The drizzle had picked up. Tiny droplets of moisture trickled down the sides of Jim’s cheeks. He held close to Becky to keep her upright. He could tell she was tiring. He smelled the air, inhaling deeply, felt the moisture on his skin. His chest swelled with emotion. He wanted to reach the farmhouse soon. He wanted to touch its door, the stair railing. He wondered if it’d look occupied or empty as they approached. And the barn? He felt so much at home there. “Almost there,” he said. “If it were sunny, we’d probably be able to see it through the trees.” He had gone into the woods a little further than he would normally have gone, trying to keep the light rain from drenching them any more than it had. The mist seemed to rise from the ground as well as fall from the sky, making their attempts to keep dry unsuccessful.
He pointed into the trees. “Through there.” He could see nothing but mist and fog beyond the green. Becky didn’t seem impressed or anxious. “Can you make it straight down the hill?”
“I’ll try.”
Jim helped her, so conscious of her progress that he almost slipped once himself, taking her with him. When the field finally opened up, his back was to it because he was still helping Becky down the hill. When the decline leveled off, he turned.
His eyes filled with tears. “No,” he said. “Not that. Please.” Jim ran down the bank until he reached the field. Tears blurred his vision, but it didn’t matter. The barn had fallen over. He ran closer to it, then sat among the weeds of the unused field. The wet ground penetrated his clothing and his body as he sobbed, his face in his hands. He rocked back and forth. “No,” he kept repeating. “No, no, no.”
When Becky reached him and touched his shoulder, he was still rocking and crying. “I’m sorry,” she said. “What can I do?”
Jim looked up. Then he lowered his head once again. “I just wanted you to see it. It’s too late.”
“There’s the house,” she said.
“Yes, the house.” He looked over at it.
“It’s not all lost.” She looked exhausted, run down, soaked. Like a rag doll left out in the rain, her arms hung limp and her water-darkened hair stuck to her cheeks and flat against her head.
“It was me,” Jim said, “the barn and the house. Part of me is dead. That’s it.”
“You’re not dead. You’re alive. This is only old wood, a barn and a house, vacated. You’re not vacated or deserted,” Becky raised her voice in exasperation.
He wasn’t listening. In a moment he got up. “I guess I always hoped I’d beat it. But it’s going to happen. There’s no stopping it.” The barn was his proof.
“You can’t give up because of this,” Becky said. “It’s been here longer than you have, much longer. If it’s a symbol of anything, it’s how much life you can live if you choose. Are you not choosing?”
“I don’t want to die yet. There’s more I must do. I wanted us to grow back together, like the old days.”
“They’re past. We need to build onto today. You forget what we have, what’s available to us now.”
He thought for a moment. “I should show you the inside of the house, at least. There’s love in there. Maybe if you can see the love, touch it somehow…”
Becky took his hand. “Are you sure? What if it’s no longer in there, whatever it is you need to show me?”
“It’ll be there,” he said.
“What if it’s not?” Becky persisted.
“Let’s go.” He got up.
They went into the house together. Jim shook his head to spin off some of the water. Becky patted her hair down and brushed it back with her fingers. She unzipped her jacket. “It’s warm in here after that walk.”
Jim pulled his coat off and started up the stairs. His eyes were dry, but his face looked tired. He looked much older than he had that morning. He walked slower, more carefully, like a stair might break loose and send him into the basement or backward down into the living room.
Becky followed, apprehensively. Her fear was that whatever they found would send him into his own thoughts of death, would take him from her permanently. But there was nothing she could do. They had come too far. She followed him into the master bedroom.
He stood near the side of the bed, his hand rubbing the faded quilt, a serene half-smile on his face. “Brad said,” he never lifted his eyes from the quilt, “that they must have been in love. That their children couldn’t bear to remove it from their bed.”
“It’s beautiful.” She watched him. The window behind him haloed his body with mist and fog, and the out-of-focus green of the hillside trees in the distance. The room was in twilight. He looked so appealing to her she began to cry from the thought of losing him.
Jim looked up. “Your tears. I’m sorry if I hurt you by all this.”
Becky reached out and touched the quilt, her fingers lightly sliding over the top of it. Then her hand grabbed it firmly as she bunched it into her fist. Her other hand flew to her mouth. She coughed a sob into it. “We never lost it. I didn’t. I can tell you. I’ve always loved you. We just didn’t touch any more. Do you know what it’s been like for me these years, not touching? No contact?”
“But when I tried. . .” He couldn’t finish.
“You did it out of guilt. You tried. I didn’t want you to try; I wanted it to be there. No questions, no guilt.”
“What have I done?” he whispered.
When he turned his head up to meet her eyes, she gave a little smile. “You were human. As much as you may not have wanted to be, you were. It took me some time to accept it, but that time is long gone. It has been.”
“You’ve been waiting for me?” he asked, eyes raised.
“No, I’ve taken what you could give honestly. If it didn’t feel honest to me, I rejected it. If it seemed planned or like a weak attempt at something that wasn’t you, I rejected it.”
“What if it was me? What if that was my way?” he said.
“I’m human too,” she countered.
Jim walked around the bed and reached out to her.
Becky fell into his arms and laid her head on his shoulder. Her hair wet his shirt through. They held tight. She sighed. “You’re not gone yet. Don’t leave me alone before you have to.”
Jim put his cheek against her wet hair and rested it there. She had been right. This moment felt true and honest. He could feel it; it was like peace, not anxiety or arousal, but peace. He couldn’t have tried to find it, nor could he have planned out its circumstances. It had to happen unsolicited, without thought. He loved her, but he had to forgive himself to do it right. They stood there a long while. When Becky lifted her head, the moment was gone, but the feelings remained.
“I like this place,” she said.
“It’s important now, isn’t it?”
“Yes, but not as important as you are to me. I’m sorry it took this. We should have come here sooner.”
“We couldn’t. The place was here, but not the time. It wouldn’t have worked earlier in time. We are at the right place now, and only now,” he said. “It’s like everything, we’re not ready for it until it happens. But when it happens, we don’t always know we’re ready.”
“Just accept it as it comes,” she said.
“More or less.”
“And the deer? Why them?” she wanted to know.
“I chose them for some reason. Maybe it was the years of hunting them that made them so important to me. They are on my mind often enough.”
“Then they were a figment? Is that what you’re saying, now?”
“Not at all. With all my heart, I know they were real, but if I am the gift and the giver, then they are also a part of me.”
Becky shook her head. “It’s too confusing for me. It almost goes in circles.”
“It does, I admit it. But if I am part of everything and I also help to create it, I can be the gift and the giver of the gift. I must be. But I couldn’t have done it until I was ready to accept it.”
She held him close. “Will I ever see a miracle?”
“Every day you’re alive. I believe that.”
She kissed him. “We’d better go.”
“Can I look at the barn first?”
“Be careful. I don’t want to lose you now that you’re here.”
Jim felt changed. In a moment, it happened. And through a small circumstance. He wondered if Becky was equally overcome with the change, or had she seen it coming, somehow? It was as though he had been walking next to the path for a long time, beating through thickets and hacking at vines. At any moment he could have stepped sideways and been on the path, clear and easy, but he never saw it, never looked. He had been too caught up in his own tortuous progress to look to the side. While Becky followed him the whole way, walking the path, waiting for him to realize it existed. How could he be so smart and so stupid?
He followed Becky downstairs and took her hand once they were outside.
“We’ll go together,” she said by way of an answer to his unasked question.
He helped her with her jacket, then put on his own. The rain still drizzled in a fine, fog-like mist. A small breeze blew the weeds at an angle, rippling through the field to suggest the movement of some large, fast animal. The current of wind pushed at their backs as they walked toward the crumpled barn.
One wall had collapsed completely into splinters. The rest of the barn had folded one wall into another. In his mind the collapse had occurred like a death dance. The tug of war between gravity and purpose. It saddened him that not a soul had been around when it happened.
As Becky and he got closer to the pile of wood propped up by inside walls still struggling to stand, he ran the collapse over and over again in his mind. The shear size of the wreckage became overwhelming. It became harder for him to visualize the barn’s slow demise. More pieces came into view, creating a more complex turn of events, no longer as simple as one wall folding into another. “It’s all so complicated,” he said.
“Would you want it simple?” she asked.
She was right, he thought. He wouldn’t want it to be simple. It was just that the pure complexity of it became overwhelming, much bigger and more powerful than he could contain inside what he considered to be his small and insignificant mind.
He stood near the barn. Becky held back and let him step closer. He remembered how it had been laid out, but little of that could be seen now. Though large sections were still intact, it resembled a pile of wood more than a barn. Jim wanted to cry, but found that he couldn’t. He wasn’t cried out; it was something more. It was acceptance. The barn was how it was supposed to be. He knew that. There was nothing to mourn, nothing to regret. It looked as natural now as it had when it was standing, maybe more relieved of tension. He wondered, What does it mean as a symbol, as a key to the rest of the world? He stepped closer and slipped a little on the wet grass. He heard Becky gasp behind him. “I’m all right,” he said. “Just slipped.”
“It’s okay, Honey,” she said.
He stood still for a few more minutes, as his eyes scanned the fallen barn. Its familiar, yet unfamiliar, look gave him that comfortable feeling one gets when a new town becomes familiar.
The rain had soaked the wood to a dark brown punctuated with patches of black. It gave the whole heaping pile a hazy outline. A rising fog hovered over scene, denser in some areas than others. At times the barn looked as much like it was rising from the ground as it did that it had fallen.
When Jim finally turned away, Becky was soaked once again. Looking at her, he felt his own dampness—the uneasy way it reached through his clothes, how it cloaked his head—and decided it was time to return to the heat and dryness of the cabin.
They held hands during the trip back, securing a renewed bond between them. In their silence they were gluing back the missing pieces of their life together, and rummaging through the attics and basements of their memories, collecting only those things of true value.