Between the Days

She tried to do things the way her father did.

The chickens trilled raucously as she carefully rolled back the wire. They huddled forward, feathered flesh pressed warm, then scattered, seeking. The sun reached over the roof of the house and caught her eye in its corner, leaving a spot. She looked left and right, confirming the spot’s location. She exhaled and watched her breath move in the beam of light. Her lips were dry.

The air’s coldness was recently-descended, slid the mountainsides into the middle of the valley, and it was thick with dust and moisture, and resting just above the ground it wrapped the ankles of those who woke early to tend to things. Others slept in too-hot blankets, swaddled from the night; at the end of their lazy stasis they would grip their eyes closed and hold back remembering in order to enjoy the stifled heat, their arms around babies and sons whose proclivity for disruption and need coiled tighter as the sky brightened. But when the neighbor would walk his single cow past the yard (she saw him coming, way down the road, ambling) and the chickens would, for a second time, begin to trill raucously, their noise would drip through the unsealed windowpanes and cancel thoughts of sleeping in for another moment. Yesterday and the day to come would start to send tendrils toward one another and what was left undone had to be done and preparations made to leave more things undone for the next morning – but that morning was across an entire night, an unexperienced night that could full-stop days and allow them to try to keep their beds and stay the current of time between the days.

Her father used to be awake before any of them.

She saw, down the road, the ambling neighbor with his cow, huge with child. The road had a sense of humor, she thought; it was bumpier than the sloping terrain it traversed. Water cut deep tracks in the mud and without stones or grass to hold it together the soil caved in and formed holes deeper than a car body’s height above the ground, so that drivers opted to navigate in zig-zags, laughing about the road and wondering about the conditions of the people who walked its distance every day, who’d gotten used to it.

The cow’s flanks and haunches worked to control wobbling momentum, stepping in rills and climbing out of gullies. She tried to guess how much it would weigh after giving birth, how much the farmer could sell it for. There was an authority in the way they spoke about the property of others, sizing people and animals and homes up. Authority which she eventually, by some shrouded function of time, when she would be taller, a different shape, she would have finished school, probably, or be just finishing (older students, too, sized things up), would then finally have access to, and with the people around her she would guess how much the farmer’s cow would weigh and the price it would fetch. While she waited for such a time she merely watched, instead, the sinews under the cow’s skin as it pounded forward through the clay and she watched the dust trail behind its lazy hooves and guessing at nothing she wondered how the farmer’s cigarette smoke would smell as he passed by because though she tried to she couldn’t remember exactly.

The chicken wire rolled back, tied into place by both strings, with knots that were easy to pull open, she took the broom from where it leaned in the corner where the coop attached to the house and tightened the handle and began to sweep rocks and candy wrappers and glass and a battery and sheep droppings and picked up a sock from the path in front of the house. The air was quiet and cold but the sun, which had fully risen over the hillside, grew hot on her back and she took off her jacket. The fence had barbs, each made of two small pieces of wire twisted together with the ends cut sharp. Trying not to hook her jacket on them while she hung it on a fencepost, she saw that most of the barbs had loosened and freely rotated around the fence cable. They’d been loose for a long time, she knew; dogs, coming for the chickens, could slip between the cables. She leaned her broom on the fence and walked back to the house, carefully unclasped and swung open the metal shed door, stepped inside and reached through a spider’s web to turn on the light.

Moisture carried forth the combined air of everything in the shed. A wooden axe handle. Blankets. Shears and scissors and wrenches and pliers. Fermenting milk. Glass jars. An old motor. Engine oil. Iron pans. A tent, folded. The only life in there was the kind that accumulates around things at rest: spiders, mold, bacteria. It was a tomb, dark and intruded, protected from dust and rain, from disturbance but not from the cold air that comes down the mountainsides and holds scents: those sole means of communication for the replaced, hidden and stored.

When she was younger she would explore under the mats and tarps and behind shelves, climbing with a new body – longer arms, stronger grip – scaring herself and questioning and creating disarray, she would get dirty and swipe at webs and hide from her mother and father, but now she walked to the tools. The heavy wooden drawer had to be worked free. She searched, not recognizing the purpose of some of the brown metal lengths. They were heavy and twisted with points and wires and springs. This opened the furnace door. That adjusted the tractor’s height, though they’d rented the tractor to the neighbor two years before, and now instead they used the sickle (sharpened with this rod). While appraising three sets of pliers she heard the chickens and the cow’s heavy exhalation and took the two smaller pairs and turned, gently pushing the metal door and latching it behind her. Cigarette smoke hovered above her head and she walked around the shed to see the neighbor and his cow reaching the end of the yard.

Ahead of him the valley opened up past the farthest farm, yawning to the west. The fog it held seemed to have its back turned, driven by the rising sun. On either side rocky slopes stood imposingly solid, jutting, defiant weight of the boulders standing upright the mountains’ sides. The valley’s violent sentinels, which nested eagles and poured primordial water, and frightened those who looked up, towered over and bounded her view, driving inwards, driving the fog and the blue sky and the clay ground inwards around the neighbor, who she watched at the center of the dizzy vortex of her vision, as he picked up a rock and tossed it in the direction of his cow to hasten it. He walked on, with a wake of smoke.

When its smell reached her, and she breathed it in deeply, she could hear her father’s voice unfurl from a deep, precious repository. She crossed the yard, gathering up the woody, pungent smoke from the air and started to remember the low-ceilinged living room and feeling not quite full from the dinner, the smell of lamb in the air, and her brothers watching TV, the older propping up the younger, and her legs crossed, the scratchy contour of the wall against her back and the hum and murmur of the stove fire and the draft from under the door and a dog barking outside, lazily and infrequently, and a bandage on her thumb covering a burn from the tea kettle, the yellow glow of the ceiling light under its plastic disk and the sounds the tools made as her mother picked them up and put them down, trying to fix a clock and the way that everything was absolutely still and quiet despite the TV and the dog and her mother and the stove, that she was only partly attentive to her book, her peripheral senses trained on her father, who was reading his newspaper on the bench by the dinner table with his back against the wall, who she watched from the corner of her eye, and only when the pace of the story she was reading was picking up, when the bride-to-be started to write the letter to her family back home, did his voice sound her ears.

“You read too much.”

He was looking down at her, first severely but then with a small movement of his chin which indicated that a smile was coming, a natural smile, those rare expressions which he would turn loose when he was surprised and giddy. He seldom read anything at length and never with so much focus, in silence, and he only just remembered himself. He turned to her mother who looked up from the tools and clock and they both began to laugh. She laughed too.

He folded up and handed his newspaper to her mother with a sigh interrupted by chuckling and her mother stood up to make coffee and he put out his cigarette. As if at the end of a movie, the room and her brothers and her parents and the dogs outside all woke up, beginning to shift in their seats and clear their throats and bark and poke one another and fight over the remote and she put her book down as well and stood up to help her mother set the table. Her father got down on the floor with her brothers and took the remote and turned on the news, and everyone settled back into their positions which though not altogether different were on the close side of a chasm of familiarity.

The things she wanted to remember most – her brothers’ faces, the heat of a light summer night by the lakeside, the way her skin felt after swimming in freshwater – impassively slipped away. But her absolute gratitude for and attachment to that joke kept the memory around, and the memory’s obedient presence in her mind, safeguarded by a simple lock whose key was drifting from the neighbor’s mouth as he made his way across the valley, confirmed and deepened that gratitude and attachment.

Also like a movie, that evening had articulated, but not quite provided solutions for, questions that she was equipped neither to articulate nor to solve. Her father’s look, she decided, had been a rare pouring forth of love unmitigated by the limited languages of fatherhood. She considered, once, that the memory was randomly chosen by an indiscriminate, impulsive biographer working deep in her skull. Later, she would say that she had an unexpressive, demanding father, and that her younger self had preserved this memory for its emotional currency. Then, when her limp got bad and her vision had darkened, other details would return to her more strongly than his voice, like how excited she was about the bride-to-be or how vivid the colors and how quick the dancers in the parade being shown on the news.

She gripped and hefted a pair of pliers in each hand. Her brother was crying inside the house. The sun warmed her ear and her cheek and a breeze had picked up from the east, blowing her hair across her chin and lifting dust into the corner of her eye and noisily signaling the stronger, constant gusts that would deafen the midday. She knelt by the fence and began pinching the ends of the wire barbs with the pliers and pulling them taut. She did not notice the speed with which she addressed the task, how many barbs in how many breaths, nor the growing pain in her palms. Her brother still cried and the chickens whistled and paced around her, but she forgot the sounds as quickly as they came, singing past her into the empty valley.

The height of the sun and the growing weight of the pliers reminded her to eat. She’d finished with one side of the fence, having reached the gate at the end of the yard. She lay the pliers in the grass by the gatepost and lifted her jacket to take inside. As she entered, she saw the older brother stomping around, back and forth from the kitchen to the sink to the closet to the kitchen, and the younger watching him with short, breathy, wordless chuckles, forgetting the cookie in his hand and dropping it into a coffee cup. He cried for her and she held his hand and played with a spoon and gave him another cookie. The low-ceilinged room was dark; her mother had gone out, her brother did not know where. He had to help the neighbor – the one who was using their tractor – with the grass, he said, and she told him to dress his brother up so she could watch him outside.

She turned on the TV. A buzzing sound came out of the left side and she ignored the repeat news. The house was quiet and dark. The three of them ate and drank without speaking, her brothers watching the screen without understanding its languages. She, too, didn’t know the significance of the angry protestors, only that they were in a city over the mountains and that they did not come from the valley. The TV buzzed. The light overhead flickered under its plastic disk. The stove’s shadow against the wall and floor disappeared and reappeared. Her toe was wet where she’d pressed it into the carpet to prop herself forward on her chair.

“I have to go now,” her brother said.

“Dress him,” she said.

She shuffled to the other side of the table to the window. Her hand loosely held the curtain back as she looked down the road. She saw a car coming, serpentine avoidance of potholes, lurching. She could feel the wind through the windowpanes pushing the tiny hairs on her arm against their grain. On the news, the protestors had reached a park. There were heavy, tall trees, and thick grass covered the ground. Recent rain brought out the greens and dark browns, and wildflowers were visible briefly between the marching bodies. Outside, the car made its circuitous route through the clay, from which sprouted only those dry, brittle, gray brushes.

Her brother ran outside, throwing the door closed, and bounded down the hillside. With his coat and pants but no socks or gloves her other brother cried for her and she picked him up and resented him without guilt and pressed her cheek to his without pretention and told him to go find his gloves! go find his gloves! and pointed to them and he stomped over and held them up and she fit them on his hands and fitted his socks and shoes on and tucked his pants into his socks. They held hands and they went outside.

He played with rocks and sticks and mud while she continued to address the barbs on the fence. She could hear the car’s motor now as it tore over the clay and hooked around the last bad ditch in the road. She adjusted the barbs so they sat at an even distance from one another.

Her mother and two women and two men tumbled from the car in front of the house. She watched them from the fence. Her brother ran to them, crying. They filed through the doorway, taking off their hats and shoes. They were laughing. The windows of the low house lit up, yellow, and soon the chimney was throwing smoke up into the wind. She lingered by the fence, moving slowly across it and twisting the barbs, her hands growing cold in the wind, her dress getting caught on the wire so that she had to lift it loose as she strafed between the posts.

It was good, she knew, to have guests. A guest’s gratitude is a lasting and eager kind of debt. Caring for them, welcoming them, however was a kind of labor for which she had to manufacture her own motivations, from a well of generosity whose capacity did not grow at the rate required of it. A voice carried from the house, calling her name indistinctly.

“We don’t have enough to drink,” her mother said from the door. “We need onions too, and some sweets from the store.” She was handed a ball of greasy paper bills.

A neighbor who lived down the hill ran a small shop attached to the side of their house. She left the pliers in a wet, wooden box on the porch and began to leave.

“Where’s your brother?” her mother asked.

“I don’t know,” she said, and walked to the other end of the yard where there was a gate. She untied the string that held it closed and felt the moss-covered, moist fencepost. It crumbled under her fingernails. Chill moisture clung to the surface, soaking it, but the soft wooden flesh was warm underneath. Her baby brother cried in the house; the men and women laughed. The valley sucked in the air, drawing it across her in vicious, punching winds. A cloud draped itself over the sun and the heat disappeared off of her neck. The chickens warbled in the yard and the guests laughed and the wood was mossy; though down the hill five houses heaved smoke from their chimneys and cars were parked in the street, the wind blew sound away and silenced the scene and the clouds took away its light and the walls were decayed from that mountain-spilled air that invaded nights. Lives persisted in their heat and steadiness, rendered in secret and opposite footprints.

She navigated the path down the hillside, which led away from the gate to the street below, with bored familiarity. On either side of the path were a few wild willow trees, twisted and brittle. Dust clung to her shoes and she sidestepped every jagged stone nestled in the dirt.

A man she knew sat outside of the store. He was half awake, staring down the street at the cars. She moved past him quickly, pushing open the wooden door and stepping inside onto the cardboard laid down for dirty shoes. She exchanged the money for two onions, a bottle and a bag of candies. Yes, everything at home is fine, she told the woman behind the counter. Everyone is healthy, healthier, but there is always work. Her brother is down the street helping with the grass.

“Good. Goodbye,” the woman said, and walked back into her house to serve tea to her children.

With the bag in her hand she walked outside. The man was waiting for her and they looked at each other.

“Remember me?” he asked, struggling for a moment to gain his feet.

“Yes,” she said, continuing to walk.

His voice asked her to stop. She knew she had to. “I went to school with your father. We are classmates,” he said. She nodded.

“I have a son,” he said, smiling. “He is working, herding sheep now, but he will be back in the summer.” His words buoyed a deep, familial affection, in their way. She reminded herself of this, intending to slow the advance of a tightness in her throat.

“There is a lot of work at home. My brother is still a baby,” she said. He nodded and wished her well and shook his head and walked into the store, shouting deep into the house.

She walked through a yard and over an irrigation ditch to reach the path back to her gate. She stopped under the largest willow tree. The sunlight in her eyes and on her head and her neck drew something from her. A fortitude that had to be regained. She steadied her vision, staring at the rocks and the dirt and the tree roots. She tore open the bag of candy and ate one, not daring to look up into the windy glare, tossing the paper back down the slope. The tree made little shade, its thin branches designed to hold up its cottony seeds in the summer as high as could be managed on the scarce breakfasts of the brittle clay. Beside the path was a spigot. She took a drink from it. Its water chattered across its concrete base and sunk into the pavement, trailing down the hillside in dark spots where grass might grow.

The wind bullied her and she staggered to stay upright.

She did not remember walking the rest of the path. She lifted the gate from the dirt to pull it open and retied the string with the bag hanging from her wrist.

She was inside. She left the onions on the table in the kitchen and poured the candies into a dish. As she walked out of the kitchen, bottle and dish in hand, she saw the door to the room across the hall, ajar. The faint smell of mold and blankets and coughing traced the doorframe. Inside, the two men who had come out of the car knelt by the bed. Her father’s voice, its timbre not lost but its volume so diminished, hovered over their heads, barely. They were nodding. She did not register what he was saying. She walked to the room where the other two guests sat with her mother and her younger brother.

The women welcomed her.

“You have grown so beautiful.”

“Have you finished school?”

“What did you bring us from the store?”

Her mother asked her if she had seen her brother.

“He’s helping with the grass,” she said. “I didn’t see him.” Her mother swore.

“Sit with us,” said one woman, whose dress was purple, whose hair was in a bun, whose body sat snugly between the table and the wall, whose eyes glinted and inquired and welcomed and comforted, whose boots were taken off to give her feet room, whose glass was already full from the bottle.

The other woman, skinny, short, diminished, hair under a cloth, was refusing a drink from her mother. The purple woman urged her on.

They were discussing the new house being built in the village center. As she listened, she held her mind taught on its leash. She did not want it to wander. Jokes must be kept track of, questions answered, guests made to feel welcome. She did not know how to talk with women, but she could listen, if she held her mind taught.

“Three bathrooms, with toilets!” the purple woman shouted gleefully. “I saw them running the pipes. New, shining copper pipes. Three men from the city came to do the electric wiring.”

“My cousin from down the valley did ours,” the smaller woman said, almost in a whisper. “The lights go out every week.” She paused to laugh, waiting to observe her companions.

Her mother offered an estimate of what the house was worth. The other women gasped.

“It was probably more! They are rich!”

“We could barely afford to buy our son books this year.”

“You should go to the small shop behind the shoe store. Their books are cheap.”

“They’re used, though. All the answers already written in!”

Another round was poured. Her grip on her mind’s leash weakened. The patterns in the tapestry swirled. She asked her mother for water. She was told to get it herself, and she stayed seated.

When the conversation slowed and they started new cups of tea, the woman in purple sighed and said money could become a problem without working men in the house. The other woman shrunk down into her teacup, looking sideways at her hosts.

She no longer had her grip. She lost the conversation and began thinking about the barbs on the fence. And the chickens. Then his voice came back to her. What he had been saying to the men in the side room, she realized, had not made sense to her at first. Words can sound as a different language when they don’t make sense. He had been telling them about the moon.

“Do you ever see the moon,” he had been saying, “in the middle of the day? The sky was bright blue in the morning, empty and pale and a deep blue without clouds and bounded by the mountains and heralding of summer but also cold and restful and I looked up and saw the halfmoon, staring at me not half a sky away from the sun. I don’t know if that is strange. Isn’t it strange to see the moon in the middle of the day? But there it was. And I thought to myself, ‘if this is the way it is, I am not sure I can remark on it as if it is strange.’ I wanted to ask you, though, because you are here and because it is on my mind.”

The two men had entered and sat at the table and poured drinks. They told stories of her father in school.

“He rolled up the test and jumped out the window,” one said.

“He didn’t!” The woman in purple leaned forward. The smaller woman laughed and pecked at her tea and laughed.

“He brought it to my brother’s house,” said the other man, opening a candy wrapper. “My older brother finished it for him. The teacher didn’t know the difference in their handwriting. My brother was good!”

“And he jumped back in through the window?” her mother asked.

The men nodded, chuckling, red in the cheeks, pouring more drinks, one of them hovering too far to the side, too close to her. He had been smoking.

She cleaned and napped and half-slept, bothered by the glare of the setting sun. The guests slept heavily in blankets strewn across the floor, the men with hats over their faces, her mother cradling her brother. Dizzy lights crossed behind her eyelids. Her hands were cold.

Metal banged against plaster. No one woke, but she felt a pulse go through her, barely contained in her veins. Boots hit the hallway wood. A man shouted. Before she heard the words she knew what it was about. Her mother and the two men moved with haywire electricity. They dressed, barely, and left the house and it grew silent but for their shouting outside and the car starting. The tractor had caught his leg. He was in the hospital in the next village. He had to be taken to the city but they would wait for her mother. The messenger’s fear had stayed in the house, an overhanging, overlarge uncertainty. Her feet couldn’t touch the floor, her hands her coat, without speeding her heartbeat. Her guilt flowed from her sides to behind her ears like frigid blood.

She sat on the bench in the driveway and watched the sun depart behind the mountains. There were no more cars on the street down the hillside. The guests’ car bounced across the road, the driver recklessly ignoring gullies and ditches and pits out of haste and distraction.

She went into the house and went into the side room. Her father was sitting up in his bed, watching her enter. She turned her back to him, taking a toothbrush from above the sink and spreading toothpaste on it. She opened the tap to let some water onto the bristles, then brought the toothbrush and a basin to the bed. He took it from her and slowly worked it around his mouth. He spat in the basin and took a drink from the glass by the bed and spat again and looked up, exhaling deeply. As she put everything back by the sink, he spoke.

“Did you know that where a candle is hottest and where it is brightest are different points? That the light and heat of the flame are distinct?” She answered that she did not. Her mother called. They would stay in the city for the night. The doctors were working on the leg.

“It’s bad,” her mother said. “It’s a bad wound.”

The sun dropped below the lip of the mountain. Across the valley, where there was a gap in the wall of rock, there was still a triangle of land lit up yellow. It was there most distinctly that the mountains gave the impression of teeth and that as the sun set, the mouth of the valley was closing on the village.