The Song of David(108)

I laughed again.

“I love you more each passing day, I’ll love you when you’re old and grey,” I rhymed.

“Oh, that’s better,” she sighed.

“I love you morning, noon and night,” I sang.

“I love you even when we fight,” she made up the next line.

“I love to fight,” I teased.

“I know,” she answered, and her voice was tender. “And that’s the thing I love the most.”

I kissed her again and forgot about the song. I kissed her until her eyes grew heavy and Mo started to wiggle between us. I took him out of her arms once more and let her sleep while I held my boy and told him about my very first fight. It seemed to sooth him and it soothed me too, remembering the adrenaline, the way it felt to right a wrong, to settle a score, to come out the victor.

Mo snored softly in my arms, and I smiled down at him, acknowledging that my battles weren’t of very much interest to him. He only liked boobs. I couldn’t blame him, but I hoped to be around long enough to help him discover a few other pleasures. I needed to show him how to throw a punch and how to take one too. I wanted to show him how to fall and how to come back when you were losing. In my life there weren’t many fights I hadn’t won. But the truth was, I didn’t know if I was going to win this one. I just didn’t know.

My story might not end in a miracle. But I’m not eager for an ending, so I’ll take the miracles along the way and avoid the ending all together. I’ve discovered I don’t have to see what’s in front of me to keep going. Millie taught me that.



Perks of loving a blind girl.





Moses




WE ALL DIE. Eventually, that is how the story ends for all of us. There is no variance. There is no exception. We all die. Young, old, strong, weak. We all go sooner or later. I’ve come to accept that, maybe even better than most, though I don’t think I’ll ever embrace it.

When the weather permits, I like to walk to the cemetery on the rise overlooking the valley south of Levan. There isn’t much to see—a few houses on the edge of town, fields, a highway, and distant hills. In fact, the view has hardly changed at all these past forty years. I had lots of family buried here. My great-grandmother was buried here. My mother too. My little son who I’d never known in life was buried here as well.

Eli’s grave was the one I visited most. I liked to leave things for him on his stone. Shiny rocks and arrowheads, a new paintbrush and a little plastic horse. As the years passed, the gifts never changed, because he never changed. In my mind he was always the little boy, the little boy who never aged and waited somewhere for me to join him. I knew he didn’t need the things I left. I knew he didn’t even want them. I left them because I needed to, because I needed him. Still. Even though I got along without him, and even though my life was filled with loved ones, nothing filled the space where he should have been.

I had other spaces like that—little scarred alcoves that never looked or felt the same. Inhospitable places that I couldn’t fill, where nothing would grow, where the walls echoed and silence reigned. And I could match each space to a stone in that cemetery.

The Levan cemetery had grown over the years. When I’d first come back to Levan as a young man, looking for Georgia, looking for my life, there had still been rows and rows of unused plots, stretches of green grass waiting for loved ones lost. But those rows were filled now, new rows had been added, and the cemetery wasn’t so little anymore.

Georgia’s parents had both passed away and she’d lost a brother a few years ago too. Axel was killed in an automobile accident five years after Millie and Tag were married. We’d all been devastated by his loss, and when his family in Sweden never came forward or responded to our repeated attempts to contact them, we brought him here, to Levan, and buried him among family, for that’s what he’d become. I’d seen him a time or two, as big and blond and brawny in death as he’d been in life. He always smiled and showed me things, memories of time in the gym, time with Tag and the team, and bits and pieces of things I didn’t always understand but never failed to paint. They were his precious things—his greats—and I didn’t have to understand them.

Life had not been easy on the team, but life isn’t easy on anyone. A few years back, Mikey’s wife had lost her fight with breast cancer and after that, Mikey had gone down-hill fast. Their kids were raised and Mikey was tired. He was a veteran, but he didn’t want a military send-off. He lost his leg in Iraq, but found a home in Tag Team. He expressed a desire to be buried here, next to his wife, and we buried them six months apart, not far from Axel.