All That's Left to Tell(18)

“My dad was a farmer. Corn and soybeans on a hundred acres. A few head of dairy cows,” he said.

“My aunt lives on a farm. Or at least she used to. She leased the land for others to plow and plant.”

“What do you mean at least she used to?” he asked. “Does she now, or doesn’t she?”

“I don’t know. We’re out of touch.”

He nodded but didn’t pursue this. He rested his arm over his forehead and watched the ceiling fan.

“Dad couldn’t make a go of it. The farm had been in the family for two or three generations, but he couldn’t compete with the mega-farms, and he eventually sold out. I work on the equipment. A man’s tractor or combine breaks down in the field, they don’t always have time to haul it in for service. So I’ll drive out to his land and fix it if I can right out in the sun. That explains the farmer tan. And maybe the smell of hay.”

She turned over on her side and laid her hand lightly on his chest, and he flinched.

“It’s been a while, hasn’t it?” she said.

“Does it show that much?”

“Not in the way—I mean, believe me, you made me feel good. But it seems like you’re not used to being touched.”

He smiled slightly, but didn’t say anything.

“When was the last time?”

He put two fingers to his lips and patted them twice, as if he were used to smoking.

“Over a year ago.” He paused. “We hadn’t talked about getting married, or anything.”

“But otherwise it was pretty serious?”

He propped up on his elbow and looked at her. “You really want to hear this?”

“Sure.”

He fell back and lay flat again, staring at the ceiling.

“She was a veterinarian.”

“What was her name?”

“Emily. Of course she loved animals. Adored them, really. And she had a small ranch house with a tiny office where she’d see local dogs, you know, the occasional little girl coming in with a cat that got nicked by a car, or kicked by some bent neighbor kid. But mostly it was farm animals. A cow having some trouble calving, or a goat that got its head tangled in a line of barbed wire. Thing I admired about her was that she didn’t get sentimental about it. Didn’t try to save an animal that had only a ten percent chance of making it. She’d take care of it quickly with a needle. She couldn’t stand pain. Pain of any kind. And she said the hard thing was to measure the chances of taking the pain away and for the animal to get better, against the chance of the pain never going away, and making the animal suffer for no good reason.”

He stopped there, reached up to scratch his knee, and let his fingers trail up his thigh.

“It’s funny, talking about it. I don’t want to make it sound like this.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, I was in love with her, you know? We had a good year together, a little more. We traveled for a couple of weeks in August up to the Porcupine Mountains—easier to get away for a while before harvest. In the upper peninsula of Michigan there, a place called Lake of the Clouds.”

“That’s where I’m from,” she said.

“Lake of the Clouds?”

“No, Michigan. But the lower peninsula.”

“Yeah? It’s beautiful up there. Cool in August, at least that August. Some of the leaves even starting to turn. We camped up there next to that lake, and then spent a few days in a run-down cottage right off Lake Superior. That lake was cold, I’m telling you. Freezing. I mean when it was almost sundown, people would be lighting fires on the beach just to keep warm. But Emily insisted on swimming. One of those few nights when the big lake was dead calm, and she’s out there maybe seventy feet off the shore, doing the backstroke into the setting sun. That woman was strong. Blue when she got out of the water, but strong. I wrapped her up in a blanket, and we sat by the fire while she shivered, and one of the others on the beach walked up in a parka and asked, ‘Are you an Olympian?’ and Emily just laughed through chattering teeth. ‘No, I’m cold,’ she said.”

Claire continued to listen through closed eyes, imagining the woman in the lake.

“I remember thinking even at the time if we could just stay there … You know, you have those days in your life, and mostly it’s when you’re looking back. But every now and then, even at the time you’re living it, living in that minute, you say to yourself, ‘Well, I’ll just stay right here. We’ll stay right here. No sense in going home. We’ll open up our own little cottages or hotel on the lake, and we’ll deal with the hard winters, and learn to love them for the beautiful summers.’ Of course it never works out that way.”

He was quiet for a while, and she listened to the ceiling fan spin.

“You still awake?” he asked.

“Oh, yes. What else?”

“Well, there isn’t a lot more. Of course we went home to Nebraska, and we made it through Christmas. But after that, she started pulling away. It wasn’t because of anything I’d done, which she told me over and over. Sometimes I think you can’t love animals like she did and love people, too. Or it’s harder that way. You love something who can’t tell you why it hurts, it’s harder to love someone who can tell you why it does. And what I meant earlier was, I think she could see the pain it was causing me, that distance of hers. Causing her, too, I guess. And she judged after a while that there was maybe a ten percent chance of saving the thing, and it wasn’t worth the suffering, so she put an end to it.”