The Heart Is Exposed Wire
by Jessica Moore
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Table of Contents parts: 1, 2, 3 |
part 2
In the morning. Mack and Nuna, who is Mack’s mother, and I meet for breakfast in town at the Lazy A and order eggs and biscuits with jam and a pot of coffee to share. The diner lights are bleak and through the little window to the left of the laminated table we watch the rain continue to pour in silver sheets across the gravel and the grasses.
Mack folds his large hands around a mug of coffee, the sleep bags under his eyes almost as deep as Simon’s. Nuna looks through a ledger of scribbled numbers, long gray hair pulled away from her face.
“Huh,” Mack says, laconic by nature. He stares past my shoulder at the diner wall’s checkered backsplash.
“Town hasn’t had a mystery like this in quite some time,” Nuna says, a likely verbalization of her son’s thoughts. “Last time everyone was all riled up as they are was during the rodeo back in ’99, when all sorts of uninvited folk showed up and nobody knew where from, and then they brought in portable jails on the back of logging trucks.”
“I guess.”
“Well, sure,” Nuna says, waving a gaunt hand. In the light of the diner her thin veins appear cobalt. “Don’t mean we’re not worried sick. People want to know things, you know. Be sure everyone’s safe, be sure the bots are safe, that practical kind of knowing. You read the book I gave you?”
“Sure,” I answer.
“The Riverfork one?” Mack asks, and Nuna and I both nod.
“How’s Simon?” Nuna asks me.
“Frustrated, I think. And I’ve been busy, or making myself busy. Things aren’t the same.”
Mack chuckles and looks sideways at his mother, who pauses turning pages in her ledger to fix me with a look I’ve fixed Simon with in the past when I know for a fact he is purposefully, if sheepishly, missing the point.
“The book,” Nuna starts, “it’s good stories, but good don’t mean replicable.”
I think of the months after we moved to Riverfork, the whiskey eye of the sun, the landscape after a wildfire, the fishing days Simon and I spent out on dinghies on the Circle Reservoir getting to know the country and each other, before the hurry and the parsimony.
“Oh,” Nuna says at last, “here it is.”
She slides the ledger across the table and taps a blunt nail over one string of numbers. The name below it reads Clarice Clarence, and, to the left of it, Nuna has drawn a circle and, inside the circle, something resembling a small fork.
“You said he’s a tech man?” I look at Mack.
Mack nods and tilts his head back to presumably down the dregs of his coffee. Myself, I’ll never understand people who take that last sip of coffee, or of clear-bottled beer, but Mack for as long as Simon and I have known him has always demanded everything from life, doesn’t like waste as a concept, turns lights off habitually as he leaves any room.
His family is descended from the Blackfoot peoples, and I’ve heard him tell about the thousand uses of a bison: children lashed the rib bones together to make winter sleds, the hide was used for medicine bags, saddles, boats, the bones for knives and arrowheads, the horn to carry fire or shape into cups and spoons.
“Keenest man I know,” Mack discloses, “except maybe for yours.”
I laugh. The owner, Shilo, brings a second pot of coffee to the table, and I scratch down the number Nuna has shown me onto the back of a blue receipt I find in my wallet, and Mack pours himself another mug of coffee, which is hot enough that the three of us can’t help but watch the little steam whorls rise like errant curlicues above the surface of the liquid.
In the diner, a song plays with distant muffled lyrics but with a tune that sounds like “Girl from the North County,” though it could be any Bob Dylan song for all I know about music. At the edge of the table, where wood lies under the laminate, I rub my thumb over scratches and indents where folk have etched their names and the names of folk they love the most, or simply folk they loved the most as they were doing the etching, which says something about permanence and much more about the devastating lack of it.
I wish Simon were here. Suddenly and acutely I wish he were sitting next to me on the burnished red vinyl, speaking about a science that I don’t understand but that I see and work alongside every day; I wish he were here with his fish-fur hat and blue jeans to tell about Mister Zero or Willie and to drink even more coffee than Mack can manage, and I wish first and foremost that I had invited him this morning when I instead slipped surreptitiously out of bed and slung a coat over my shoulders in thorough silence.
Nuna mentions going down to the creek with her grandkids later in the afternoon, and Mack jests about little Tilly’s inability to hook bait, much less cast a rod, and soon my mind is preoccupied with the future of the day and the work to be done. The rain falls back, rank by rank. The coffee on the tablemat in front of me grows cold.
* * *
After breakfast, I take Ol’ Dusty with me to check on the woven wire fences around a certain half-section of mountain pasture miles away from either of the buffalo jumps. His single red eye, focusing on the stretch of fence as we pass alongside it, blinks slowly, looking for damage and areas where the fence could use reshaping. He moves easily over stones and irregular mountain topography, moving first his front carriage and then the back, making puffing noises like an asthmatic train. He stops next to a portion of the fence, exudes a long high whistle, and rattles back and forth on his wheels until I bring my little paint horse, Mocha, to a stop and jump down to take a look at the wiring.
There aren’t any breaks that I can see, but the wooden stakes are bent on both sides of the section and the woven wire slack between them.
“Right,” I say, and Ol’ Dusty whistles again, then ejects from the left side of his hull a mechanical arm that, after a moment, unfolds three ways into a yellow fence stretcher. Back in the day, before Simon invented the robots and gave them the tools they now have, I rode around pastures checking on fences with nothing but a few saddle pouches tied to the pommel of Mocha’s saddle, in which I kept staples and twine for fixing fences temporarily until I could get the boys who fixed the fences long-term to ride out. I still call them for large jobs, and have even thought about giving them Ol’ Rusty to manage since the last thing I want is for them to lose their work on account of the robots, but they’re busy, versatile folk and skilled in many things.
I tell Mocha to stay put, Ol’ Dusty rustles forward, and with gloved hands I help feed the wire through the fence stretcher-splicer so that Dusty can crank the handle.
“What are y’all thinking?” I ask when we have finished with the first stretch. “You trying to make my husband crazy?”
Dusty blinks once, almost quizzical.
“You know, Dusty, you lot are both the best and worst thing that’s ever happened to me.”
I pull off my gloves and pat the top of his carriage before dropping to the ground to munch on sunflower seeds I’ve stashed in a Ziploc. Beside me, a solitary thimbleberry plant covers a patch of ground, its green leaves fuzzy and wet from the morning dew.
“You know how Simon likes puzzles. And I like what I do, out here with you lot and the horses and the fences and the cattle. The big sky. There’s a gap we’re not closing” — I laugh, thinking of Ol’ Dusty’s fence stretcher-splicer — “and it can’t only be effort. But maybe Nuna’s right and you miss the past just because it’s gone, and as long as the gap exists you’ll always miss it, you’ll always want it, and as soon as it closes — poof, you stop.”
I spit out a mouthful of sunflower hulls.
“I don’t know what anyone needs anymore, Dusty. You think you know someone and all you know is yourself when you’re looking at them.”
Dusty rattles his carriages back and forth, which I take as an acknowledgment of both my wisdom and distress. Mocha whinnies but stays put. Above our heads, the blue sky lies perfectly still, as if someone had put a spell over the ocean. From the crooked slope of the mountain we can see the bright yellow and bright wet green of the Broken O’s pasturelands, the highway winding like a garter snake between them, dilapidated houses fallen halfway over like lean-to’s lacking main structures. And far away in the east, beyond the roof of Simon’s barnhouse, lies the Redwash River, wide and swift and undulatory, reflecting the sun like a chain of silver against the throat of the world.
I spit out another mouthful of sunflower seeds and wipe tears from my face. Ol’ Dusty whistles, loud as any train.
Autumn is a strange beast that appears from nowhere and leaves my heart in ribbons.
* * *
Copyright © 2021 by Jessica Moore
