• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 817 0

she ridiculed his accent, his background? And yet neither of them, truly, was that kind of person. Layers of contempt crouched camouflaged beneath one another until it was too much to sort out—if she and Cole were married a hundred years they’d still be fighting without knowing why. She felt sick and defeated, stomping from room to room to collect cast-off shirts or socks they’d shed in the downstairs rooms (some were hers). There was nothing to say, but still they said it, the honeysuckle and the tobacco. In less than a year of marriage they’d already learned to move from one argument to the next, just like the creek that ran down the mountain into this hollow, flowing out of its banks into the ruts of their driveway, then back again into its creek bed at the bottom of the valley. Arguments could fill a marriage like water, running through everything, always, with no taste or color but lots of noise.

Bitter Creek, that stream was named, and the hollow running up the back of their farm into the National Forest, people called Bitter Hollow. Perfect. I am too young to feel this way, she thought, trudging upstairs to collect the rest of the laundry while he headed out to till the bottom field. How would it be in ten years? Had she really wanted so badly all her life to live on a farm? A bird in the hand loses its mystery in no time flat. Now she felt like a frontier mail-order bride, hardly past her wedding and already wondering how she could have left her city and beloved career for the narrow place a rural county holds open for a farmer’s wife.

It was only four hours later, in the eleventh hour of the ninth of May, as the dryer clicked and droned downstairs and she sat beside her bedroom window reading, that Lusa’s life turned over on this one simple thing: a potent rise of scent as her young husband reached out his muscled arm for a branch of flowers. Here was what she’d forgotten about, the full, straight truth of their attachment. Her heart emptied of words, for once, and filled with a new species of feeling. Even if he never reached the house, if his trip across the field was disastrously interrupted by the kind of tractor accident that felled farmers in this steep county, she would still have had a burst of fragrance reaching across a distance to explain Cole’s position in the simplest terms conceivable.

Lusa sat still and marveled: This is how moths speak to each other. They tell their love across the fields by scent. There is no mouth, the wrong words are impossible, either a mate is there or he’s not, and if so the pair will find each other in the dark.

For several more minutes her hands lay motionless on her book while she considered a language that could carry nothing but love and simple truth.

Ten days later the marriage would reach its end. When it came, Lusa would look back to that moment at the window and feel the chill of its prescience.

No one would have called it a premonition, exactly; Cole’s tractor did not overturn. And it wasn’t tobacco that killed him, or at least not smoking. She could have allowed him the pleasure of two packs a day, it would have made no difference in the long run, since there was to be no long run. Tobacco’s failure was partly to blame, though—the drop in price supports that had pressed him to take part-time work driving grain deliveries for Southern States. Lusa knew this outside job shamed him as a farmer, even though there was hardly a family in the whole valley that got by solely on farm profits. For Cole the failure was not simply one of money, but of attachment. He hated being away from the farm for even one night when he had to make a run over the Blue Ridge and down into North Carolina. She had told him they could find the money elsewhere—maybe by borrowing against next year’s cattle, though he mistrusted debt, and the new tractor had already put them in deep. Or she could teach at the community college in Franklin. (Would that also shame him? She wasn’t sure.) She was thinking of that, picturing herself with a class of nursing students in a biology lab, just before