THE HONOR FARM by Ann Stapleton

This is the Honor Farm, so called because the prisoners of this little patch of beans and tomatoes walk around with their heads in the blue sky as if they are free. They have bent their backs to the plow of their own deliverance and have agreed to things as they are so many times that it is assumed they will forever. This is the garden of reparations to the past and of tithes to the future. Here green beans and red tomatoes are barter for an hour or two, or the rest of a life, of freedom, such as it is and may be. World, you understand me.
Here the ceiling is painted like clouds, and the face of the earth resumes its original beauty. But the men by now know enough not to fall in love. They know enough not to want to grow beans and tomatoes. The men want to grow whiskey and cigarettes, and this signifies, though the Honor Farm continues to plant and harvest its tons of should without regard to the activities of want, tunneling lightward under the unsuspecting days. The men want to grow whiskey and cigarettes. And wire cutters. Want and should come at each other with homemade blades carved out of the long afternoons. The sun shines on them both.
The Volunteer Supervisor, an organic gardener, a junior college professor with time on her hands and an unshakeable faith in the healing effects of nature, believes what she sees in the men’s faces. That they want to go down on their knees before God and root with their forsaken fingers among unrepentant rocks and surrendering earthworms and put down whole new lives and raise themselves up again from the brave seedlings of their own pure yearning into the clean blue air of the Honor Farm.
But what the men really want is to grow whiskey and cigarettes and wire cutters. And a beanstalk that will let them climb down out of the beautiful garden that nature and the V. S. in cahoots have constructed for them here in the sky. It does not feel comfortable. Like the wrong woman, even if she is a beautiful one, it does not fit them, does not suit them. What they want is not a new life at all, but a way down out of this rare air which is just so much choke, choke, choke, its beautiful, slender fingers tight around their throats. What they want is a beanstalk they can shimmy down fast like a fire pole into their old lives flat on the ground. What they want is the woman with the bad complexion and the big behind who calls their name out as if they are Jesus Christ himself. Everyone on the Honor Farm knows this except the Volunteer Supervisor, who believes in the men’s belief in her belief in them. Counting on the universal, she forgets to factor in the raw demands of the particular. Thus, she lacks essential information.
The Supervisor is a naturalist sitting in the grass waiting for the men to come out of the leaves and touch her hand and show her how they bend beanstalks into tools with which to spoon up the bittersweet ants of their new lives. But unlike the naturalist, the V. S. has no true instincts, and she is impatient to share her provisions. She looks at things head-on and fixedly, and offers up giant tomatoes to the little gods of every wrong. She does not know her subject, which in a situation such as this can be dangerous. But she is not afraid. She is a decent, even a kind, woman, qualities as relevant here as a strong breaststroke through the tomato vines. She and Rangell are sliding back and forth in the sun on the unmoving little acre of the Honor Farm, and you, world, are not doing a thing to stop them.
Rangell is up to his armpits in instinct. He knows all about her the first day he sets eyes on her. Rangell is the dominant silverback of the world. But lacking instincts, the V. S. does not know this. She sees what she sees. He is small and blondish, with the bland face of a friendly baby. She does not know enough to know enough. But neither does she insult the day by taking it lightly. And she can walk a horizon line better than most anyone Rangell has seen. Back straight, beliefs out. She walks up, Rangell walks down, and all eyes must believe they are in the same world. Brown dirt. Wind without memory. Summer anywhere it can go.
The tomatoes are luscious. Perfect. They turn to August in your very hand. But what does that matter when they are not what the men want? Perfection is an acquired taste they have not had sufficient opportunity to achieve. Like a perfect sermon, the garden is wasted on them because they do not believe in it. Oh, Holy Trinity, three-time loser. Dear Lord, you have their true love’s eyes, but they can never touch you, floating further from them than the stars. Sweet Jesus, you are their true love’s body, headed away from this earth, and you are gone from them. And you, Sir, Mr. Holy Ghost, you are no one but each one of them, who can’t seem to get born or buried, and you are never to be forgiven. Wine tries to escape into the dirt and turns back, afraid. The cross around the prisoner’s neck hangs him with dread from the only moon he knows. The stranger’s picture laughing falls out of the empty wallet one more time. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. The men know what they know.
Gardening is a religion to the Volunteer Supervisor, replete with evidence of miracles. See? she says to the men every day, standing among the blessed vines. See? Do you believe now? And she believes that they do. It is August. The V. S.’s world is coming into being right before their sun-narrowed, atheist eyes. How can they not come weeping down the dirt rows to be saved? The aisles are clear. She is ready to receive them. August is the Christmas time of her religion. Tomatoes and beans are the reason for the sun. Testify, brother.
In the beautiful garden, day after day, baby-faced Rangell is pinned to the ground by his own rank sweat, say uncle. But he is not sorry, oh Lord, he is not. His jumpsuit is black with what the world just siphons from every one of us without asking, and he does not believe a word the beans are saying, and who introduced Rangell to his fellow Rotarian God was a red-eyed little piglet of a preacher with sauerkraut breath and an orange-brown toupeé as big as a cat. Always, always, always goes the Christ in the Stranger’s guise, but Rangell is too busy to be ferreting out Jesus in every Tom, Dick, and Harry he comes across in this life, though he has been bought a drink and a sandwich by him a few times, and has met up with him once or twice dressed as a woman.
Rangell hates to be hot. Hates it the way you’d hate a man who’d thrashed you with his belt buckle from one end of your childhood to the other. But Rangell has a cold dream in his head. There is only room for one true dream in a man, and Rangell’s head calls his Canada. He thinks a wild wind still blows the grasses somewhere north of all he knows. He has seen this for himself on the prison TV. The place where he wants to go never reaches more than about sixty-five degrees, and the better part of the year, the snow covers up all the black things and you forget. Stars under your feet everywhere you go. The moon close and not afraid to deliver us from what we cannot find.
But the part Rangell likes best of all is that the trains don’t run anymore. All the people in the show are sorry about the trains and miss them like the beloved. They have depended on them for their supplies and their transportation, but now the little towns along the track are drying up and blowing away like milkweed fluff. There is no way for the people to live in the grass or the snow without supplies, without a human hand to hand them down what they need so they don’t keel over and die of the emptiness. The people remember the trains and cry their tears and wave to the grass and move away without much of an outward fight, what can they do? The dogs go down to the tracks to meet the train as they always have, big white dogs and medium brown and black ones, but nothing comes there and nothing stops for them. Nothing throws them anything to eat, and they can’t catch that.
In twos and threes, hesitantly, as if the train were their mother who has cheerfully kissed them goodbye but is also crying, the people are going off to the city, so much smaller than they ever were in the grass or snow, remembering in order the names of towns that aren’t stops anymore, waving to faces that aren’t passing by, waking to whistles nobody blew, leaving Canada. Leaving Canada for Rangell. He watches their homesick backs disappear among the tomatoes, goodbye. He hears the dogs ask their questions of the empty tracks. Soon. He is walking straight along the sadness of it all, but in his heart his heels are kicking out to the side for joy. The Honor Farm is a map of Canada laid out under his days and he is small enough to walk it without being seen and large enough to swing through it without being challenged.
O, world, why did you visit us with dreams unless you knew we would need more than you? But what can you give us to build them with but what you have, the things we half-know every day, the things we almost see when we are trying so hard to look away? What do you think of what we make from never?
The Volunteer Supervisor, if she knew what Rangell was thinking, would say that this waking dream of Canada signifies his desire for a clean, new life, and she would sympathize. She would say with cordial solemnity that although the Christians have co-opted born-againness, rebirthing rituals exist in most cultures and that Rangell’s soul is only asserting its natural vitality. But she does not know. Nevertheless, the angels of August are swinging from the Lord’s tomato vines, hallelujah. The grass sings and sings, every blade a nearer to thee. Here and now, O world. What do you have to say for yourself?
Rangell does not have language, but he has instinct, and what he knows is that familiarity most often breeds returning. Rangell does not want a new life. He wants his old life, but in conditions under which it would be left alone to thrive in its old way. What people wish for requires referents. The V. S. does not know even this much. But the cloud rays over Ohio are as real to her as a box of broken glass. And her name is Kate Kate Kate. And she says Mister Rangell so that every bean can hear.
The tomatoes are unearthly in their heft and color, each one a scarlet tanager lighting in your hand. Every so often, beside herself with religious ecstasy, the Supervisor will break down and eat one right there in the field, right in front of the men. She does not have even an inkling of what it is like for men in prison to watch a woman eat. But there is more to it even than that, Rangell observes. To eat perfection, perfectly, nothing running down your chin at all. It is like watching someone tear the right there burning sun out of the clouds and gulp it down, smooth as a raw egg, ahh. Rangell does not say these things to himself. Rangell just looks at her and thinks she is a damn fine woman to eat like that. But what does Rangell care for damn fine women when the wind from Canada says think of me. A man already in love is a piece of paper written all over and it does not really matter if even a Waterman pen comes along after that. There is only so much room.
An Honor Farm is an odd construct, a maze of going-somewhere lines burned into a staying field. If you can ascend, you will need to come back down. If it is where you can be free, it is also a brand on the very earth. Honor equals a man’s will to do what he is told so that maybe under the harvest moon of the someday he will get what he wants. The farm is about waiting in the sun with the green world hurting your eyes. A prisoner tries to negotiate the rows of tomatoes as if he is swinging through them high above the ground. But he still has to eat. Bananas in a box. Everyone, including the V. S., teaches the same trick. They are not mere observers. The men are not marvelous, sentient beings. The prisoners’ resources are finite. The system has an endless supply of bananas. Even needless brown dirt must swallow the falling rain. World, you have decreed it so, and you are not one to change your mind.
The hometown of unreality is anywhere. The sky over the farm is against all odds blue. The wind blows wildly over everything in Canada. Rangell waves off the last train gone and laughs. Rangell swings through the rows of green and red, and waits. The Rangell display is a very quiet thing. The chest pounding and branch brandishing, the other males backing off, the falling in line, are not visible to the eye of the Supervisor. She sees a smiling, baby-faced man, small. She sees a bland-faced, blondish man who is simply looking down, then up. Rangell has no desire to eat. He could work this field bare and not take even one bite.
The Volunteer Supervisor Kate imagines that the men have come to know and respect her through her work with the tomatoes and the beans. The tomatoes and beans are what she presents to them, like the old-fashioned letter of introduction, like something that will vouch for her. She imagines that some of them have even come to like her. She is not afraid. And so she imagines that if anything happened, some of her new friends would run to her side to help her, straight up the world, the way her old dog Luke would come splashing up her childhood. She has given them the gift of celestial tomatoes and sky-high beans and she imagines that they have received it. She imagines that they want to return the favor, but don’t know how.
The prison farm is a little snow globe she shakes up every day, except it is August inside. The water is bright sky and the blizzard is all Ohio buzzards, heaven bound, cresting on cool thermals so easily the most generous person in the world would be jealous to see it. But she is so accustomed to looking up that she is missing the silverback making his way among the obeisant beans, shhhhh. Now and again the buzzards coast out of sight, leaving Rangell in charge of the whole farm. O world, what would you have him do?
The Volunteer Supervisor is not beautiful or particularly young. She moves a little stiffly, a tall, aging doll whose legs are fastened on with tiny rubber bands. She has dark hair with a little crimped gray in it. It is light and easily blown, in straight out streams, by the cold wind from Canada. She does nothing to hold it back. She kneels for beans and bows to tomatoes. She has no instincts. She has never needed them. But she has a way of framing things squarely in the changing light. And she is not afraid. Once she absently picked a tick right off big Exline’s arm as he was passing by and crushed it between two small rocks.
Today there is a flu gunning it through the prison and as a result there are only five men at the Farm, plus Rangell, plus the Volunteer Supervisor, plus two guards: Gene and Kenny. Rangell never gets sick, never has. His mama used to say that the germs were afraid of him, ha ha. The V. S. prides herself on her healthy immune system and is here for work in the garden as usual.
The men are all scheduled to get out soon. That is how you arrive at the Honor Farm in the first place, by having one foot out the door already. Rangell is to be released in three months and seventeen days, all the others within a year’s time. If you have ever seen a man let go from prison, you know that it is not the joyful thing you might imagine – it is a little more complicated, freedom. A few men will hold onto the bars till they have to be hauled out by their ankles into the street. Some men will sink down quietly on the curb as if that had been their plan all along and wait for their ride from the future until the sun goes down and finally put out their hand to their old enemy the stars and ask them what in the world should they do now. They used to give a man a brown suit in which to reenter the world. Now the man himself is the brown suit with its too long arms and its too short legs and its thinness in the cold or its heaviness in the heat and its scent of his own life and its old itch, and no matter how he pulls, he will never be able to get it off.
Big Exline is the biggest man Rangell has seen, and though he has no quarrel with him, Rangell has no wish to see a bigger one. He reminds Rangell of a chained bear he saw once, with his desperate red gums and his ruined brown life, and streaks of white where the hair was beaten off of his head, but still not knowing enough not to be brave any more. World, you must have been scared out of your mind the day you made that first chain. But didn’t you know there were some necks that would always burst a link and leave you standing there with nothing on a string?
Little Exline’s real name is Boyle, but he sticks so closely to Big Exline, who roars and raises his arms to people if he gets in a mood, that he has absorbed all his mannerisms perfectly, Little Exline growling and batting like a mini windup Exline you might find in the prison gift shop, if the prison had a gift shop. Little Exline is so funny trying to be scary it would probably be the most popular item sold.
The other men are no friends of Rangell’s: Amen Swain, who spits on his hands to smooth his hair all day and all day; God’s tapeworm Zink, who steals food from everyone, even though the Lord does smite him with bruises for his trouble; and a quiet, sad fellow with hair as white as nothing. He is called Bin because his mother left him in a trash bin at a public lake a few minutes after he was born. They said when they found him he was holding on for dear life to a French fry. Oh, world, we do get the joke, we’re just not laughing.
Gene the guard is so near retirement he can taste the pasture grass. He has a tight pregnant belly and is bald except for a little teaspoon of colorless ponytail that looks like some little blindfolded kid stuck it to the back of his neck during a game of pin the hair on the Gene. He likes Rangell, if you can use the word like to mean that the man is grateful to see a gleam of light in Rangell’s gray eyes. Though Gene has worked this job for too many years to believe in the goodness of the bland and baby-faced, Rangell is not the worst he’s seen by any means, and not the worst one to have as the dominant silverback of the world. Rangell is one he would feel all right about turning his back on, if it wasn’t for more than a minute. Gene’s bad stomach is worse than usual this afternoon.
The other guard today is Kenny, who is fresh out of high school. He is small and dark, with a sweet, fixed frown and ears that stick up like a chihuahua’s. He has a small boy’s full of faith face, and he forgives the sun for deserting us every night and the moon for all the lies it tells as it leads us back toward dawn. His front teeth crowd each other every which way, and his grin absolves them too. He is in love with a solemn girl named Sierra who is obsessed with collagen and warns everyone who goes through her checkout that there are babies in the shampoo. The front of Sierra’s yellow hair turns impossibly up and back like a wave of light. Kenny has been at the prison for just over two weeks. Love muffles his footfalls, but Rangell hears and follows.
Rangell looks at Gene as if he is a little flaw, about the size of Rangell’s thumbnail, in the tight green fabric of the Farm, a flaw that from time to time Rangell picks at a little and leaves alone. But he looks at Kenny as if he is a Rangell-sized hole in the fence. Rangell has spent as much as he could of the last two weeks hovering around the light coming through the hole that is Kenny, conduit of sweet brightness streaming all the way down from Canada. Kenny believes he has been befriended. If you go to work in a prison, you will find yourself looking for a face that looks back at you. Rangell has been looking back for all he’s worth. When he is talking to Kenny, Rangell feels like he’s in a car passing the You Are Now Entering Canada sign with the window down and the cool breeze so strong it holds his hand back without any help from him at all. He is waving hey to the green grass, hello. The light through Kenny is sometimes so bright Rangell has to look down.
From high overhead, the Honor Farm looks more like an ant farm left open on its side, with all the ants gone today except the very last handful in the universe. The world is a beautiful tomato called August. The sky is a determinate blue. In the V. S.’s ecobag of cellophane is a sprouts and tomato sandwich with homemade mayo on homebaked whole wheat. She looks out over the beans and hears Mozart proclaiming all good things. Clarity and Joy shall reigneth ever. Rangell hears wind. Rangell hears the dogs asking when when when.
What do two such people know of one another as they share an afternoon shadow on the Honor Farm? And what is God thinking to place them side by side – standing man, kneeling woman, standing woman, kneeling man – with the tomatoes hovering and humming around them like little red spacecrafts trying unsuccessfully to transport them both to the same planet at the same time? The wind puts its hands on the tomatoes, heavy red blossoms growing from the grave of everything up till now. The beans are down in their blankets with their heads covered, they are so afraid to take a look at this scene. And who can blame them?
O world, you have made us without covering and we are tender. We are the subjects of the terrible questions you ask yourself, beginning with what if. Today you wonder what would the naturalist do if she were presented with the head and the hands of the dominant silverback of the world? And how to explain a blue August sky to someone who doesn’t believe in it?
They have had three conversations, the V. S. Kate and Rangell. The magic number. Once early on in the tomatoes he looked down on her head from above as she bent to work and saw that she sported an odd little cowlick you never noticed when she came straight on at you. And on the spur of the moment he went right through that little cowlick door to her that was usually locked against him, and he actually made a joke. She was wearing a T-shirt that said Friends Don’t Eat Friends, Go Veggie, so he teased her.
“Hey, don’t you s’pose them tomatoes’d get up and run too if they knew you was about to eat ’em?” he asked, his sweet baby face splitting open in a smile.
He’d startled her from her meditations and she looked up at him for a moment, her eyes still full of something that embarrassed him because he could see it was a real thing and a fine thing, but he couldn’t quite encompass it. It was like trying to get his arms all the way around his old girlfriend, Patty Fatty. And then the look shrank down and down, as if she’d started out staring up at the stars through a telescope and ended up looking down through a magnifying glass at Rangell the ant burning beneath it. The afternoon was a ruthless green, the edges of everything curling in the heat.
“Well,” she said calmly, “it’s true that even plant life exhibits intentionality.” She didn’t even crack a smile.
Rangell stiffened at the last word, not quite following it, at least with regard to plants; at the same time he was proud that she had used it with him and took it as a sign of respect. But then she scanned his face and quickly restated, the way she did when she was teaching.
“I mean, they know what they need, just like we do. And they take nutrients, what they need to live, food [she worked her way down to him] from the soil. And moisture, water. And they grow toward the sun – or even toward a grow light, if they don’t have access to the real thing. But they try to get what they need. They intend to. I believe that.” The Supervisor paused like someone who had easily crossed a rope bridge and was looking back to see if the weak ones were going to make it over.
Rangell felt somehow sucker-punched. Human beings weren’t much. Plants were nothing. Who didn’t know? The day was hot, and he hated that. He gave her his kindliest, babyest smile and said, “Little Exline, he exhibits from time to time, but he don’t mean much by it.”
The V. S. took in his meaning, looking disappointed, but otherwise unfazed. Ungrudgingly, she turned back to her work, and the bridge between them went down, down into the water. Rangell was amazed to find that he was the one still clinging to it, that he was the one to end up wet. Rangell was not, by habit, a drowner. He heard the beans suddenly calling out to him and casually backstroked off to investigate. The Supervisor regretted that she had failed to make a connection. Rangell, rows and rows away, was hotter than hot. He dropped one of the tomatoes to the earth and a red something burst in his throat, the little shards of skin choking him, the thick clouds too close to his face.
The second conversation was about philosophy, or as close to being as Rangell was ever likely to get, as he spent his life among those who talk strictly about what happens, here on earth, today. Some people are heads attached to bodies so that the bodies can haul them around the universe and keep them alive while they think about things, and some people are bodies attached to heads so the heads can take orders from the bodies like perpetual calls for room service. And the V. S. Kate is a walking head, and Rangell is a thinking body. And what came out in conversation about it one afternoon in the blue air of the Honor Farm with the heavy white clouds pressing down on them without pity was only Rangell watching her a while and then saying this: “You know, you’re lucky. You always have something to think about.” And then the V. S. looking deep into Rangell’s face the way you do when you try to figure out if you’re looking into a two-way mirror. And that is what it is like for a body and a head to try to hold hands, with the sun saying over and over to just close your eyes and forget it all and the wind talking a mile a minute trying to explain everything that can never be explained.
The third conversation was about worms, which the Volunteer Supervisor was always collecting, alive, in a small coffee can, back when they were first breaking up the ground for the garden, at that point still in the Supervisor’s head and not yet in the world at all. Rangell asked her was she gonna go fishing and she said no, they were beneficial, plus there was no cause to go killing a thing if you didn’t have to. Rangell said how there were some guys’d probably like her style over on Death Row, ha ha, whereupon she said very seriously that she’d been in the candlelight vigil the night before the last electrocution, such a helpless feeling, oh. Whereupon Rangell said it ain’t such a big deal – everybody’s gotta go sometime. And then a cold wind from Canada went through that lifted up their hair like it was going to give them a whole new look for a whole new life, and then let it back down again like it had decided there wasn’t much it could do for them after all, so there they were, the same.
She stood there solidly in her made-up mind. You could never convince tomatoes to turn blue, or the sky to turn red. But Rangell said he wasn’t a good guy. You wouldn’t have liked him. And very soon everything began to go green against its unfreezing will. And the sun took over. And the garden with its mouth wide open crawled out of the V. S.’s brain and straight into the raining day.
Next to the garden on the Honor Farm is a silver TravlToilet it hurts your eyes to look at in the afternoon, it shines so brightly. The letters on the side are red and green like a joke about Christmas most any of the men in here could tell you the punchline of. At the moment, Gene is inside the TravlToilet, busy having the flu he didn’t this morning know he was getting because his stomach is almost this bad every day of his life. He is vomiting away, as if he is getting rid of every hour he has spent willingly as a guard in this sad place. Gene is getting it all out in one afternoon in a shining silver TravlToilet next to the most beautiful garden in the galaxy on a prison farm in Ohio. The TravlToilet is a perfect drop of silver water on the first clover of the world, and Gene is a fat-bellied bumblebee the reflection has confused, and he is in the water instead of flying over it, and instead of taking in nectar, he is spitting everything out. And as bad as it feels, it is still better to be rid of some things, and to live.
Kenny is frowning sweetly and eating a bologna and American cheese sandwich Sierra made for him, along with barbecue potato chips in a bag, a can of soda still hissing a little from when he sloshed it, and three oatmeal scotchies, that’s how much she loves him. He is a little nervous with Gene in the TravlToilet, but the world is sweet and the afternoon is hot and the men are eating their lunches too, so he is relaxing a little in spite of himself. He does not see why men who are so soon to be released would make any trouble for him. He has even come to like some of them. He has an unconscious feeling that if anything happened, his new friend Rangell would save him. He believes in a beautiful summer day. He loves the way Sierra kisses his ear with her tongue, even though she is serious about shampoo, and he thinks about it now. Love shields him with its leaves, but Rangell pulls back the branch and watches.
The men are sitting on the ground, eating away the lost morning down to crust, then down to nothing. Bin, Amen Swain, Exlines, Big and Little, Zink who can’t ever get full – all are crushing the world’s brief forgiveness between their teeth. Today they have been picking tomatoes and they have been handed some to eat by the Volunteer Supervisor. She herself is eating one, but because they are concentrating on their own lunches, no one is watching but Rangell, who is not hungry.
For once, a blop of tomato seeds catches the V. S. in the white blouse and she looks up, overly embarrassed, hunching over her sandwich as if it has suddenly turned into a dog turd. Rangell is looking, and if he were a killer, which he never has been, this is the thing that would make him spare her life – the blop of tomato seeds on her blouse, and her absurd shame. She sees Rangell watching her, and her hand reaches up to cover the seeds as if they are a nakedness.
But Rangell has no more interest in her body than if it were a fencepost or a gas pump. He only nods to her, as if in an acknowledgment of some kind, and she can’t help nodding back, but then feels confusion over what it is she may have agreed to, and looks down to search for something far away in her lap. A crow flies over and Rangell automatically looks up because one of the things the world depends on you to do in prison is to keep all the crows counted. You have nothing else to do, is the thinking, and you might as well. Right now there is just one, and Rangell’s instinct is to expect more, because with crows there always are more. But this time there is just the one, hmmm, and he is forced to stop on the bad luck of one for sorrow. The afternoon is hot, but Rangell feels a cold overlayer reaching him from Canada. Love is not what looks after him, is not what always finds him. The white clouds burn his eyes. The world is raw as a dream.
He starts walking over toward Kenny, who is in the middle of his second scotchie, his whole body weightless as ryegrass for the absent Sierra, who is sitting right beside him kissing his ear, for all he knows. His frown is endearing and his ears are canine, and he is very new here, but to Rangell, he is a self-sized hole in the fence and the wind from Canada is flapping through, saying over and over that in one place today it is cool. Rangell is smiling his bland, blondish smile and reaching down to ask Kenny can he try one of those cookies.
Kenny looks up with pride over Sierra’s culinary gifts into the sweet face of a baby. The wind blows. And then Rangell and Kenny are dancing very closely to the Canadian national anthem, Oh Canada, the only words of it Rangell remembers from the world series on TV, and Rangell is waltzing the young and beautiful Kenny with the kissable ears quickly, quickly, over to the TravlToilet, and in the time it takes for Rangell to open the door, all the men hear a few seconds of Gene, emptying himself of all of them after holding them close inside him for so many years, and they feel a little lost to be let go of like that all of a sudden when they weren’t expecting it, and then Kenny and Gene are silent, as is Rangell. And then the silver door locks again from the outside and everything else is the same for a minute.
But the men have stopped eating. The Volunteer Supervisor’s hands have sunk into her lap, still holding their tomato and sprouts sandwich with the homemade mayo. Rangell surveys the men. Amen Swain is frozen in place, forgetting even to spit on his hands, not having had time to work himself up to troublesome yet. Bin’s nothing-white hair is whipping in the wind and there is a big dizzy smile on his face, which feels a little funny to Rangell because he has never seen Bin smile before, ever. Rangell senses that Big Exline is stirring, about to follow him, and that Little Exline is just beginning to stir, in his miniature way, ready to follow Big Exline anywhere. But Rangell has instincts. He knows that Big Exline is so big that his sad scarred head would stick up over whatever on earth they tried to hide behind, and that Little Exline would get caught forever somewhere along the barbed wire of the wide world, so Rangell holds up his hand like a stop sign NO, and they settle back down into the grass like well-trained hound dogs, bloodhound and beagle – first Big, then like a tiny recoil, Little. All that now stands between Rangell and Canada, except all the other things that do, is the V. S. Is Kate.
O world, you are the master of this physical comedy. We are standing on our own two feet, we are flapping in the wind. We are holding tight to the fences every day while next to us are others prying their own fingers up, trying to let go. We are waiting so hard, and yet we already know, while the sun burns what is gentle in us to a brown leather acquiescing, while the wind we never get a good bead on is bearing down. We are half a mile from knowing always why we are here instead of there, or what it could possibly mean that there is someone next to us, turned to look.
Anyone watching would say he will not get far. But to Rangell it is not about getting far. It is about the cold wind ripping through the tomatoes, and about the burning, bean-riddled ground. And the bird shadows that he will never in this life be quick enough to touch, they fly so fast. It is about God, who in his mercy hath provided Kenny. And you, world, carefully cutting Rangell out of the picture of the Honor Farm, the whole place falling away to the earth with a white hole in it where he once was. It is about the grass poking up through that hole and blowing as if Rangell had never stood there at all. It is about what this minute feels like breaking away from his neck as he rolls it side to side. And it is about something else now too. Something to do with her.
Rangell has instincts, and these are the things he knows. He knows her well enough now to believe that she will watch him all the way out of sight, as the dominant silverback of the world swings through the trees toward Canada. He knows for certain that she will want to see that, that that is what she has been waiting for, sitting in the grass all summer with her box of bananas, the tomatoes swaying around her head. That she will follow him off through the tomatoes disappearing into the blue inside her brain, that she won’t be able to take her eyes off him until long after he is out of sight. And that she has the ability to keep on seeing him, far into another universe, if necessary. He’s seen her do it. He knows that, along with a fresh, God-given tomato, the woman has a taste for miracle. He has watched her eat.
He knows that he has some time, and of course, that ultimately it won’t be enough. But Rangell has a taste for now. It will take her a few minutes – maybe several, as she has never seen anything like this before whenever she has looked up at the sky, probably a million times, hundreds just in his presence – for her to shake this out of her eyes and stand up and do the good thing and go and unlock Gene and Kenny, if Amen Swain doesn’t spit on his hands and smooth his hair and beat her to it. And he also knows, and it makes him feel good the way Canada does, that she will not leave her faith on the ground there like little red balloon shreds of tomato stuck to nothing. That she will become stronger because she has watched his body breaking through the horizon there, right under God’s nose. O world, Rangell is what you made him. Is now and ever shall be.
And then he knows that that’s it – that is what he’s been waiting for, and why he’s never taken Gene down for all the years of chances. Because what he’s been wanting, lacking, needing is a witness. Someone to watch him go who is capable of seeing it. Someone who will understand what it means. He is not sure what it means himself. But he wants someone to know that it does. And she does, he knows as surely as he knows that if he somehow makes it through the afternoon and into evening in freedom and he shows up at her back door, he will be offered something to eat, a tomato sandwich probably, ha. And water. She could not do otherwise.
Rangell does not have to think this through. He has instincts. It only takes a few seconds to look into her and see it all. When he begins to run, he won’t have to look back. His leaving will take a while to clear, like something painful only because it is in your eyes – sand or seeds. Brown dirt. He feels almost a pity for her.
But the wind is roaring down from Canada. And the dominant silverback of the world has climbed the fence of all he knows, and he has seen that yes, it is high enough, high enough to drop him down outside the reserve, his life sore from all that has been cutting into it, but still whole, his legs unbroken. He is dropping down into the greenness of this mortal hour now. He is dropping down onto the beautiful gray road away, where all that is left is the actual going. Horizon, with your scarf of yellow light, he is coming for you.
But as Rangell starts toward his own meaning, his astonished legs are stopped by what he sees: that though her hands have not moved at all, the V. S. is holding them out to him, expecting something, he does not know what. He has been climbing all his life with nothing but chain link in his fingers and can’t she see that they are purely empty, that he doesn’t have even the smallest thing to give? But it is so powerful, this gentleness, like once when he was camped in someone’s field down by the river and a small blue butterfly paused on his shirt front to inspect him and he felt applauded by it. He surprised himself and all the blue-green locusts with his choice of that word, but it was the one he wanted, though a little while later the stars came out as they always do to say what in the world have you ever done that was any good?
But this is a thousand butterflies all over his life somehow, a strait jacket of them, and he cannot break free of it. He cannot think what this moment wants of him, why won’t it say? He looks at her hands, still holding their sandwich, and they look to him exactly like his own, but smaller. His hands are on this woman’s wrists and he cannot think how it could have happened, or what it might mean, but then he says to himself – he doesn’t even say it out loud – “I think of your hands as I think of my own,” which is nothing he would ever say to a woman, and nothing he himself will ever know the meaning of. But she nods just then, as if she has heard what he hasn’t ever said, and then suddenly he knows what he must do.
He cannot believe how hard it is, how much brute strength it needs. The butterflies let go now, that is how they help him. And now he is taking off his gorilla head and his gorilla hands and is placing them gently in the grass before her. And the head that has Rangell’s gray eyes is saying nothing at all as she strokes its face, though she does not move a muscle. And the empty black hands are full of cigarettes because that is all he has grown all summer in the shade of the beans and tomatoes and he cannot now, now that he needs them, now that he knows what to look for, find any violets in this life, there is no time.
You tell him, world, because I won’t be the one to do it. You tell Rangell, who never asked to be born, whose friend is the moon, that violets are May, and that May has already gone by, and that it will not be given to him to find it again. You stop him there, where he is rifling through the weeds, where he is roughly patting down the grass, on his knees over what he did not even know he had lost forever, where is it, where? Because it is too hard, even for him. Even for Rangell. The thing you cannot find will free you, it cannot stand that look on your face. And when all the butterflies have cleared from the world, which takes so little time, just one breath, Rangell in this new misery, Rangell, evaded by violets too far back to matter, suddenly stops trying what he isn’t good at and rides the stricken moment all the way back to what he is.
And what can she do, sitting there in the green grass on the brown dirt Honor Farm, what can she do, a ridiculous figure really, unable to move as she is, what can she do about the head and the hands but try to accept them, but try to cradle them here in sadness, in love, even, of the cold kind that Rangell knows. Rangell’s life heading north, his back to her as he goes, is the most beautiful thing she has ever seen, and she is not afraid. Rangell is rushing down one of the little nowhere roads between the red tomatoes, turning black against the bright sky the further he goes, and though he is getting smaller and smaller, he appears huge to her like the sun or the moon whose looking small is only because they are so far beyond reach.
The men, folded in half by their sitting, are quiet, their backs stuck fast to the staying sky. Little Exline picks a tick, one of the season’s last fugitives, off of his sock and tries to kill it with the end of a stick, but the dirt is soft and the tick just goes down and down til Little Exline gives up and has to look back at Rangell jumping up into the clouds the way you’d hop a moving train, so long. Today the world has taken Little Exline’s chin in its hand and made him look right in its eyes while it spoke slowly to him, Do you understand?, but already he is wandering off, humming to the nothing, dragging that stick through the dirt, Big Exline his comfort, like a little town’s water tower always in its line of sight.
Sad Bin is laughing, a sound like a squirrel in the wall, which starts him coughing. His white hair is doing rocket rides in the wind. A great blue heron flies over the lakeside where he was given of God and then returned just as quickly, think fast. But God merely put his hands behind his back and watched as the park ranger, in kind and ruthless embarrassment for his whole species, pried the French fry out of the fingers that clung to it and delivered to other dangers the little body that had been swinging from it over an abyss of crushed cups and mustard-stained napkins. And while the ranger’s hands were trying to remember about a baby’s head, this way?, a girl stepped out of the changing booth where her feet and the calves of her legs in blue flowers had been showing all the time beneath the little door, if anyone had thought to look. She stared up one last time at the sign above that just said CHANGE, then slipped into her car and drove very calmly in a direction that must have seemed at the time to be away, as north must seem now to Rangell.
Bin’s laughter is clawing in like a little white cat on the horse Rangell, and you, world, are spurring them on toward the edge of the horizon, go faster. But what of the trip wire? And what of the evening that will fall as it always falls? The ranger brushed a yellow jacket from the tiny shoulder, one of the greatest acts of his life, but if the pine trees can remember it, they do not say. He had the infant home for one night, but his wife said you stay up with him then. In the morning, she asked for his paycheck. She followed him down the alley, a carful of sisters driving along behind them, until he gave it up.
The unamazed sun is shining on Zink, who sees the half scotchie Kenny dropped, and the last one, still whole and perfect in the dirt, and snatches them up for his bare cupboard of a belly. His bones are jumbled in a wheelbarrow being pushed too slowly toward the ditch by the long, long days, oh hurry. There is sweetness drying on his tongue, and crumbs of brown dirt are on his lips. O world, what could he feed such loneliness that wouldn’t make it grow?
Gene and Kenny are shuffling and moaning like lovers in the TravlToilet that is shining as brightly as the sun of an alternate universe. Rangell is gone and Gene stinks, but love says Kenny, Kenny, look over here, and pulls a quarter out of the ruined afternoon. What Kenny knows in this moment is that he will ask the grave Sierra to marry him and he will take the job at the auto parts store, even though the pay is $3.50 an hour less than what he makes at the prison. He can’t believe she actually likes his ears that have been such a heartache to him all his life until now.
Gene has finally stopped vomiting, and is very weak, but clearheaded. He is glad that it is Rangell so his wife Dovie won’t have to plan a funeral instead of a retirement party. He pictures that Rangell will strike out for the new golf course that borders the prison, since they’ve barely broken ground and it’s still mostly locust and jackpine and multiflora rose higher than Big Exline’s head. Gene has known Rangell a long time and would bet that he at least makes it through the night, if not longer. He thinks to himself that they will probably shoot Rangell whenever they get the chance, not so much for escaping as for running around loose in the moonlight on their dream of new greens before they even have a chance to try it out themselves.
And the Volunteer Supervisor watches Rangell swing through the tomatoes and finally up into the sky and into her head, where he keeps on going. Her will is jolted into darkness as if a handful of brown dirt from the Honor Farm flew into her eyes, and even with Gene and Kenny banging away, she will have to wait it out a little before the world will become real again. She is holding everything in her lap and will have to decide what to do with it, but not yet. And Rangell is climbing north down the beanstalk into the wind, as fast as his legs will never carry him. He has all his time in this world.
The dogs have gone down to the tracks again today, big black dogs and medium brown and yellow ones, to meet the nothing that has become familiar to them, so that they know it now by its no-scent at all. But today they sniff the air and tremble as they haven’t for a long time, the tips of their believing noses stretching left and right, the nostrils widening with the thrill. Something is coming today. Something will be, yes, something will be stopping again after so much going by. Nothing will have risen from its seat unexpectedly a few stops back and debarked in another town and settled down there to make a life for itself, and it will never be seen again, good riddance. There will be a screeching to a halt that is like music. And there will be such happiness, as if the engineer had climbed out front on the coupler of the world and at the very last second rolled the suicide Canada off the tracks with the mighty toe of his boot and delivered forever, unharmed, into the sweetness of before. Into the arms of those who grew up with it, who remember what it was like before its hands shook and it could no longer tell its dreams in bed at night from its dragons in the daylight. Come on home now, they will say. Get yourself some rest, that’s all you need. Drink yourself a hot drink. And the dogs will see how things are, and they will say with their brown eyes and their settling down beside what needs them, All is forgiven, the only words they know.
And then hands, human hands, will be handing down to them again. Strange and familiar, the hands will be handing down Rangell – all in one piece – to the cold and to the grass. And the dogs will go wild sniffing his shoes and his pantlegs and his crotch. And they will leap up, they won’t be able to help it, watching him reach into his pockets like that. It seems like forever they’ll have to wait. But world, you have taught them this trick, and there is no one left in Canada to help them unlearn it. A wildflower called sweet anticipation – you remember it – is even now growing up through the tracks, blowing black against the sky.
The men are locked back into their cells with the bright day running wild before their eyes. Amen Swain, spit-fingered as a major league pitcher, the whole stadium still going crazy over his opening of the TravlToilet door. Big Exline, regretting hugely that he didn’t follow Rangell away over whatever hill, and Little Exline, regretting too, but just a little bit. White-haired Bin, whose smile is gone down in the ground, back to wherever it came from, like a locust back to its private darkness, all it knows. One smile every seventeen years. And Zink, with his comfortless belly, the aftertaste of the scotchies like the sadness of a day he can’t quite remember. His face clean now, his hair combed back in hope, he is waiting for a ride to the cemetery, oh let it come soon.
Gene and Kenny, chosen of God, are gone home to love, dragging their silver lunch buckets full of everything. There is no Lord to bless Rangell, but he is the dominant silverback of the world, and she is not afraid. The sky is the truest true blue anyone could want, and the wind is impossibly up all the way to Ohio. The sunset is doing its best to attract some notice, but everyone has been looking all day and their attention is closing now like a book no one will ever finish.
In Canada, the summer is already over, and the trains have been told everything. The star-laden nights are already starting to turn toward the snow, and soon all the black things underfoot that make it so hard to take even a step will be covered over, gently or harshly or whatever way it has to be, without love coming into it at all. In a few months’ time, all the tomatoes and beans in Ohio will have been eaten, and the Honor Farm will sink back down to darkness and the frost, admitting finally to its August lies. The fallen leaves, with nothing but color left to give, will try to comfort the ground, we’re not giving up, not us, until they are brown or gray and the earth is frozen hard.
The Volunteer Supervisor will have just finished balancing an avocado seed over a jar of water and shutting the whole thing and hope inside the dark cupboard to fight it out. She will be looking through the seed catalogue when Rangell starts breathing over her shoulder. And when she comes to the tomatoes, which she is looking forward to as a regular person would look forward to seeing a dear old friend, her heart to her own astonishment will dash itself against its cage and she will suddenly begin to weep in a way that he never in a million years would have required of her.
Someone wanted her to have a red silk kimono once, but she could not accept it, so it has been in her drawer over a decade now. It is the color of the tomatoes on the Honor Farm. She realizes that if she ran off through the world like Rangell, if she could lift herself somehow up into the sky, the kimono she couldn’t bring herself to accept would be the garment her landlady would give the sheriff. The drawer would be empty, but the woman would lift it out anyway, here. It would be the thing the dogs would try to track her by, the dark embroidery, her footsteps in the red silk away. Over the seed catalogue, the Volunteer Supervisor can see herself crouching in the shallow creekbed, trying to explain to the frightened moss and the stones as they reach for the telephone what Rangell, with his instincts, knew the first day he laid eyes on her.
O world, why have you made it possible for the heart to go about its business on exposed rock where only nothing will root, to wait faithfully beside a green canoe along the beautiful banks of never, to grieve a lifetime when there’s only this one day?
The golf course is moonlight and multiflora rose, great walls of it manned with thorns like a thousand little enemies, a thousand little well at leasts and I had forgottens, but Rangell is the sleeping brown rabbit breathing innocently beneath it, safe for the time being, in a hammock of asters strung between the summer and all that follows. It’s said that Louis Bromfield brought the multiflora to Ohio, thinking it would make humane natural hedges to hold the bucking fields in place, but like so many things, it could never stay where it was put, and the thorns made a run for it in the moonlight, and something that was never meant to, got away. The rest is the history of the world.
In the spring it flowers in little pinkish-white roses and stinks like everybody’s Aunt Somebody who gets into the powder and doesn’t know when to quit. But in August it is purely green and in the darkness its black is anything you need, and for Rangell it is a terrible cage he’s lashed the world back into for another night with the sturdy whip of his own small will.
He is not sorry and she is not afraid, and they dance round and round forever on that like something brave with one short leg. They are leaving everything to the moon, the harvest moon, in its unassuageable sadness. The rumor is these days the moon can’t feel a thing, but these two have looked long into its face and know better. They are looking now, if you have eyes to see them.
Tonight there is a dance, maybe – you tell me, O world, though what you’ll say is of course not, you won’t stand for it – and everyone is there, or at least there really isn’t any good reason why they couldn’t be. Stay with me now. Gene and Dovie, Kenny and Sierra, Big and Little Exline. Zink, wherever the food is, and handsome Amen Swain standing awkwardly off to the side. The moon, who can’t help it, is touching their faces with a grieving love (that is a non-negotiable, the basis of all I believe is true), but they are too far from its sweet pity, and wouldn’t believe they deserve it. Just give them this day, their harvest dance. They are not here to cause any trouble, there will be no fist fights and no hard drinking. It is the court of moonlight and short days on the earth and they are come only to file their amicus brief. They will not stay long.
The V. S. is standing still by the refreshment table where there are thirty-seven stacks of foam cups that all seem to belong to her, and Rangell is walking up from out of the darkness. There is music, but you say what it is, please, because you know. Little bits of the skin on his face and arms are scratched off as if with bored God’s keys, absently, and she is reaching out for Rangell, the losing lottery ticket fluttering into the night. He is trying to touch her with his black leather hand. To touch her without hurting her, but it is too difficult. He weighs five hundred pounds, but he can’t swim at all and could drown in a foam cup of water because silverbacks cannot even float, or is it chimpanzees? She is saying yes, I would like to dance, I would like that very much. Well, is it impossible that someone could say such a thing? Or that someone else could believe in what was meant by it? And if something can never happen, what does it matter if it happens this way?
The wind turns its back, like something not wanting to wake from its peaceful dream. Not long ago, God threw a bluebird into her path, its head the lolling flower of a broken neck. Underneath the afterthought of flies pulled up over its life, it was the color of what you wanted most, a long time ago, when you still believed you might find it, when it might still have done some good. It fit exactly into her palm, as if her palm were a nest finally safe for the sadness of it, but she would not pick it up. For a moment she almost convinced herself that it might still be alive (it is so hard to believe that anything can die). But, of course, it wasn’t. And though she did not touch it, she carried it down the field of daisies, carried it carefully as if it were still breathing, across a grief it gave her the strength to cross. But whatever it asked of her, she could not give, she did not have it. And she turned through the heavy sunlight, meaning to bury it somehow, meaning to bury that blue just by walking away. But she fell instead, the grass surprising her face, fell hard, as if God himself had done the tripping. And the bird she wasn’t holding was torn from her grasp and flew off for good, and she stayed down on her knees in the hard facts, weeping over blue wings the world, afraid of all the things we want and of how hard we want them, threw to the ground so that it did not, for a moment at least, have to see into our faces looking up.
I know you will answer daisies, world, but I will ask you anyway. What did you send to comfort her? While she was crying, when you could have sent anything at all. You sent the burying beetles, two bits of moving darkness, orange spots like scarves down their backs as if they were cold but cheerful in their line of work, the opposite of grave robbing. And it was good that she didn’t see the way the bird appeared to struggle, urgently this way, and then right back, as if both ways were too hard, too far. It looked as if it could not get comfortable in death, as if life still worried it, like a deep sleeper whose limbs are still animated by his waking grief, while the beetles dug the world away beneath its body. It didn’t take them long, just til the sun went down, yet it took forever, all the same. They knew what to do, because you had told them so many times, dust to dust. But did you mean for the sky, just then, to repeat that lost color the way it did, so that she stood up slowly to look at it and brushed off her clothes and held nothing against you? So that though they told her they would be back some day, she went on loving you?
So you, world, make your substitutions when we will not look where you are pointing. And perhaps that afternoon is what she should have tried to say to Rangell instead of whatever it was she did say. But you did not let her, for you have decreed that what comes out of our mouths shall never be our true stories. And yes, our silences at twilight blame you, for that is when we all can see buried in the shadows the color of that bird. Even Rangell.
In hope for himself, he used to go to the dog track every day, but then he heard about a spent greyhound whose owner had used him for bait in deep-sea fishing, and that thought took over his brain for a while, and all the fun leaked out of the thing and Rangell never went back again. He could have handed that to her gently like a living creature and she wouldn’t have dropped it, but his hands hung down empty like everyone else’s because that is what they best know how to do. Now the wind curls against the wall and can’t be roused.
O world, you tell us, where can we find what has been taken from us? Is there a room somewhere all floor to ceiling with the things we have loved? The things we might have, might have, if we’d only known whatever it was we didn’t know? Will you never let us in there? Why is the door so almighty oaken? Why is my hand in its pounding so small that you can barely hear? Before is all around and in us, and still it is lost. And we are out all night alongside our neighbors, in search party after search party, demented with unfounded hopes, covering every known spot where anything was last seen. And still we are coming back through dawn alone like this, with nothing in our grieving arms but our will to find. And let me ask you, though I already know the answer, will you let Rangell sleep long like that in the cold green grass? And will you let the V. S. Kate whose hands are shaking pour the water into the white foam cup?
You do not even answer me, but the moon we leave all sorrow to is broken-hearted at it all, and cannot stop stroking the little leaflets of the locust trees with the gentlest fingers known to humankind, and yet the pressure of it is unbearable. The blue-green trees Rangell remembers are terribly changed, having given the little they had to the leaf miners, who needed it more. Pinnately nothing now, so many urgent green fingers reaching out for someone in particular to come to them, where are you?, and each flake of rust falling like a forgiveness for anyone who never does. Robinia, Robinia. We could never have imagined this loss. Fragrant white blossoms a luxury the year cannot afford. Racemes, I do miss you. Do you hear how I say your name? Perhaps you have set out after the honey bees, you were so lonesome. Who could blame you? The moon has nothing but light to offer for Rangell’s freedom this August night. And bored God rubber-stamps it all without thinking of us, holding whatever comes for us til morning in its swaying cage. It does no one any good to be afraid, but it is what we have; it is always behind the back door, a black umbrella, broken all these years.
O world, knowing he would see it, you left open this one last corridor of blue chicory, and Rangell is in sunlight where it closes over his head. He is on foot, drawing the darkness all around with his lack of fear. He is going to meet his one true love in her wedding dress of snow. Can you not be happy for him? He is picking these flowers he thinks will stay blue forever.
The moon is weeping, for Sierra is kissing Kenny’s ear, he was so brave today. And so he was, waking up as he did, and going off to work on nothing more than the expectation of a sandwich and three oatmeal scotchies, and dancing the part of the rancorless Matilda in Rangell’s rough waltz, and remembering to bury some treasure in the dirt for hungry Zink to find, and forgiving the blameless scent of Gene’s vomit and the calm darkness of his own small, predictable failure, and enduring the nerve-wracking brightness of the sky when Amen Swain opened the door as if he were welcoming Gene and Kenny into his living room and he had just made some iced tea. And finding in the afternoon of it all, without much thought, in favor of love, in favor, and wielding the weightless lunchbox home against all enemies in his path, and asking Sierra would she accept these auto parts upon her finger, and putting on her answer yes like a warm and heavy coat that somehow made him feel light to accept the burden of on his back, and receiving his shampoo-vigilante true love’s tongue deep in his chihuahua ears, the source of such pleasure that had been the source of all grief. And then at the end of the long day coming to the dance that the world will never allow and seeing everyone the world will under oath disavow all knowledge of, and holding nothing at all against them, and even being glad. Coming to the dance at all, like this, with the music pushing up through the darkness for love, with the mosquitoes who stick by us to the end, and the fireflies we take and take in the brown jar of our childhood hands, only to learn, each time, of freedom’s black dilemma under the summer stars. Even the moths, Lord, have come, who are just little versions of ourselves, with their worthless wings and their obsessed little faces and their never say die.
O world, didn’t you know how tired you would get of us, how soon – our try-try-again little knockings against the windows you have closed, the neediness of our shadows, the way we waver over any brightness to be found. Our bodies will never make it out of their cage of dust, and yet you give us these hearts that move us north along any dream, that go on asking and asking the moon for something it doesn’t have. That can’t take never for an answer.
In Canada, along the empty tracks, the dogs are trailing the first snowflakes down toward winter, where they are beginning to stick. The sky is white with snow unfallen and the green pines try to say it is not so bad, we will never leave you, never. Rangell in Ohio wakes to find a katydid brooding over him, and its color – the green of summer on its brave errand to find a way out of the world – crushes his chest with a knowing he can most of the time ignore. But all he can do is stretch, while the sunlight rubs his shoulders; all he can do is cough himself back into being what he is.
The Volunteer Supervisor Kate has been awake for hours and is wrapped in a quilt, sitting out on her apartment’s old balcony, drinking green tea, all the heat of it stolen by the early breeze. Joe-pye in the field across the road is what her eyes have found crucial, and they keep returning to its conflicted mauve, halfway between the color of longing and the color of acceptance. Rangell is up and back, up and back, like an animal she’s been feeding all summer now that she has stopped, wearing a path inside her brain. This morning the world is made up of everything she will never touch with her own fingers.
The moon is still out, the face of Rangell’s only friend, who has no money and no car and lives far, far away. A woman named Destinee Malinowsky who has worked all night as an aide at the nursing home, who has emptied bedpans with yellow and white and blue pills collected in them undissolved; who has retrieved Mr. Heinlein from the front lawn where he was running away through the moonlight into his dead wife’s arms; who has combed someone’s sour yellow hair and clipped someone’s ancient mummified toenails; who has repeatedly answered the desperate call of come over here, come over here, only to have a stuffed bunny presented to her to kiss; who has listened to a former Army officer describe the day he took his keyboard into the woods and played Beethoven for the animals and how they all looked at him then without any fear at all and who has said yes, I do, when asked did she think they might remember him if he went back there now; who has sneaked a pudding to a nonagenarian who said thank you, Mother; who has helped a woman named Grace search for her son – a CEO who lives in a gated community in Naples, Florida – in the black, blowing grass of the hallways; who has stroked the face of a twenty-six-year-old man who feels nothing from the Adam’s apple down and has recovered from the pneumonia but lies in his bed forever because he cannot bring himself to get back into the chair and go about his life as if there is nothing at all that is too sad to bear – the same Destinee Malinowsky who has done these things just since last night without believing she matters at all to the sun as it goes down and comes up again, has finished her week’s grocery shopping by dawn and is out on the highway, filling the gas tank of her old blue Chevette, the same car she had in high school, when she called it the blue dream. She will have two dollars and thirteen cents in her wallet when she applies for a day job at the new golf club later this afternoon because she has kids and they do not let her sleep and although she has never known anybody who died of this, she thinks if she does not get on a regular schedule soon, she might just be the first.
As she steps out of her car later today, her brain will be fuzzy, but she will remember that her last interviewer (the twentyish son of someone she hated in high school) told her that fidgeting with her handbag so much “betrayed her nervousness,” so she will leave her purse on the floor of the back seat. She will be sitting in the club office, her head beginning to hurt from the new carpet fumes, trying to listen to the twentyish daughter of someone she liked in high school tell her about how in this job and in the world today appearance counts, but her attention will be distracted by a tiny silver stud flashing on and off at the end of the girl’s tongue as she speaks and she will hear nothing at all of what she says. The girl will be planning to hire her friend Tiffany anyway and has it all arranged, though the interview must go long enough to seem thorough, but the time spent here will not be wasted, for it belongs to Rangell.
While the women are inside, he will be taking Destinee Malinowsky’s purse from the back seat and ducking down behind the car with its small bulk awkward and sunwarmed under his hands, like a live chicken he’s stealing. And he will feel the air in Canada rising cold against his face. Geese in a vee of joy. O moose, chest deep in singing waters. And then he will discover the joke, the two dollars and thirteen cents, and he will laugh one of those laughs that is only air because it is really a sigh after all. And then he will sneak the purse back in, because if he is to be caught this afternoon, which is more than likely (it’s a small town, and though he is not armed and dangerous, he is afraid they might bring the dogs in on him, just to ease their wounded pride), he would strongly wish – no, he would insist – that it not be for two dollars and thirteen cents.
The trees along the unfinished course will take him back again without a fuss, and he will stand there in the shade, looking out through the holes of light at the empty drive, the only sign of life the old blue Chevette, with its rips of rust above the wheel wells, leaning tiredly against the newly laid curb. And when a hawk spooks up from a nearby jackpine, his hands will fly up just that quickly to cover his head, he won’t be able to help it. And Rangell’s instinct for once will go small and brown and still in the grass as if it has just seen this hawk that he knows was empty-handed fly off with something that looked like a little man, his legs still kicking at the sky.
But then the thought will drop him, he’s so much trouble, and he’ll catch himself the way he always does. He’ll shake his shoulders back and grin his bland, blondish infant grin at no one there, and watch the hawk high in the blue circling the dustbound world, taking a cool inventory of all its weary movements. And Rangell will be thinking that it’s not even that far. It’s not even that far from Ohio to Canada.
And he could stop here, of course; we all could stop right here, any time we want to, but why?, when Destinee Malinowsky is not yet finished with her phony interview and you, world, will be having Tongue Stud say, Do you have a Social Security card? You have to have a Social Security card, and she will be sending Destinee out to her car to get it just because Tongue Stud can make her go and it will feel really pretty good to do that, and when Destinee gets out there in the heat, she will fiddle in her purse and find the little gray card, but by then she’ll forget all about her car keys shining on the Chevette’s blue roof. And then, like all truly good people, she will walk back in unaware of whatever good she’s done, will walk away in belief, looking for all the world as if there is a strong chance she will get this job and get some sleep and find right here what she’s never been able to find anywhere.
And as she walks back in, in the flash of sun on the door, which is the very same crack through which Rangell is leaving now, pushing the blue dream down the world as it is, she will see Grace and wonder is she sleeping. Grace, in her blue-flowered brunchcoat, who wanders up and down the night as if it is a lakeside wild with angry grasses where her child lies frightened of the black grate over his life, or of the aggressive odors of ketchup and beer, or of the yellow jackets so close to his face, and will not answer, no matter how she calls and calls. When she watches Grace, Destinee’s thought is a dog – a big brown and black and white one – that follows the child’s trail wherever the wind leads, that comes upon him, over and over, curled up tight in the dark grass of the hallways, the thin shell of his flesh fiercely protecting all that Grace has lost, and all that she has yet to lose. But the dog cannot tell Grace what has happened, cannot go to her and say, Lo! A miracle! The child has been found, on a golf course in Naples, Florida, all pines and palms, no more harmed than usual, and you can go back to your room and sleep, it’s all right now, hush.
For Grace on her own is strong and throws off all false reassurance. Her mind is clear – there is only the lakeside and the grass and the child. I have two sons, she tries and tries to tell them, but only the stars are listening, who have heard the story before. Yes, yes, you gave birth to a wizened old man, his hair as white as the winter sky when there was no hope, a judgment on your life. You drove for decades, but now you have come back, as if that moment by which all things come to be or never can might still be waiting for you in the same green grass. As if change went away with only you, when it has been here all the time. Such an old, old story, it is hard for the stars to hear it any more.
Two, she tries to say. But words had their fun with her and pushed her out of the car years back, and no one has ever been able to locate the spot where it happened or to find her again as she once was. The grass has grown over it – and so much light. The gravel, in its new arrangements, is always blind, though you can ask it whatever you like. Days, in any soil at all, grow over the darkness of everything that goes on living, it is nothing you can decide for yourself. So it will be up to the loyal dog of Mrs. Malinowsky’s thought to stay with the lost until the daylight, when the grass will relent and the child can go and the lakeside turn green in the sun, because Grace is the one they need, Grace and no other, and they live for her alone.
Tongue Stud, who is thinking how fun it will be to eat lunch with Tiffany every day, is asking and asking as if she wants to know, and Destinee is saying yes, no, yes, I can start right away, my children won’t interfere with my work schedule, I have my own transportation. But all the while she is watching Grace, in her house slippers that never take her where she needs to be. Grace, starting out again across the vast wastes of the TV room, with only an “invisible” plastic rain bonnet to protect her head. Grace, who will not fail, because the need is great. She holds her hands up to beseech the world, as if she is saying You are a mother. You must know. But there is only Grace, confused, watching where the water changes its mind from green to gray and the ducks float further and further across, the heron’s shadow shielding her for just a moment. Then Grace, remembering what she must do, tying the clear strings loosely under her chin./
Tongue Stud, at the age of twenty-one years, has had to pay someone to hurt her. O world, didn’t she know that you would do it for free if she just waited a little while? The hole in her tongue is a help-me-please and people put their hands out to her in pity, but the silver stud has already arrived at the scene, everything is under control, nothing to see here, so the hands come down, so. Just this year she has begun to look for her birth father, wherever under the stars he may be. All she knows of him is that he is the biggest man anyone has ever seen, although he has somehow managed to successfully hide from her every day of her life, and that his name starts with an e. On no evidence whatsoever, she has decided he is in the CIA, because it would make sense that he couldn’t risk a meeting with her, it would be too dangerous. The hole in her tongue is a flyer on every telephone pole in town, Have you seen this man?, but the words drip off with the rain and there is no picture, and everyone’s eyes, helpless, give up and go on to the family reunion of someone they do not know, and then further down to the yard sale: antique table, wedding dress, lawn mower, toys. Tongue Stud says you would, not will work such and such hours, for such and such pay, and Destinee winces only slightly and says Well, then. Well. She looks out the window as if someone is standing there telling her every word to say and she repeats them softly. Well, then, there’s somewhere I have to be.
A wind that started out years ago from the north enters Ohio right now, and August is over, just like that, though the well-meaning asters try to distract everyone, don’t look. The moon has stuck close all day long, like a parent without food or roof or even language, without any power at all, trying to protect its children. It will have to go to work tonight without ever having gone to bed. O world, do you hear me sigh? The katydid has figured everything out on its own, but cannot find anyone to translate; the ironweed, the Queen Anne’s lace, the goldenrod – all have turned down the job, no thanks. She is talking to a screen door now, her whole green body in earnest.
The wind, suddenly wondering Well, how is the frost? How long has it been?, climbs the Honor Farm fence to have a look around the old neighborhood. Summer is a shambles, though it’s not obvious yet, the tomatoes bravely holding hands, the beans saying to the sky, remember us as we are today.
A little way down the road, Rangell stops pushing the blue dream and climbs aboard, come on, little girl. With an insistent tenderness, his palm urges the gray-faded dash forward, as if it were the neck of a flying horse he could believe in, a horse with a star on its forehead, take me home. The driver’s side window, so old it’s manual, is broken and won’t go down more than an inch, but Rangell reaches across the lap of no one to let the cold air in to keep him company. He starts to offer something sweet to Jesus, who has been hungry a long time, but trails off with a smile at the uselessness of that, let the boy starve like everybody else.
The V. S. Kate is watching him lay a new road right through the joe-pye, but it is difficult, this man’s work, and he cannot look up from it even for a second. With the small tool of her attention, she is putting up signs all over town, he went thattaway!, fingers pointing everywhere but Canada, but he will never see them or know they were there. She leaves the little porch to brew another cup of tea, then lets it cool again as she stares out over the field, propping up the fallen flowers, though it takes all her might. An accessory after the fact.
The leaf miners have long since been dropped by the days into the dark trough of the grass, but the hills around the Farm are burned brown in their honor. When Rangell dares to look heavenward, he sees large patches of the blue summer sky rusting away. Don’t go. The locusts that headed out toward it in belief in the spring, will never make it to yellow; they lay down their burnt leaves a month too soon to obliterate his trail. Watching Rangell depart in the old blue dream, on the train to Canada that no longer runs, on the back of a horse that doesn’t exist, they cannot imagine, though they know whatever they know, what it would be like to leave this place. Held fast by their own thorns, they have found it difficult to ask for anything at all. But Rangell, they say, though he cannot hear. Rangell, they say in tenderness, for they have known him all his life. If you should come across the honey bees, will you send word somehow? Will you tell them we cannot forget? If they do not know you, say Ohio, they will remember. The brownness in the mirror is Rangell’s life behind him; it is not love that will come looking. It isn’t love that won’t ever give up. Oh, hawk on the fencepost, thine is his kingdom. How small he is on the road of his own making, the chicory stunned white with grief as he passes.
Ohio has thrown its arms around Rangell’s waist one last time and is weeping for everything that has an ending, but he cannot hear or feel the leaving behind for all the going toward. The sun is shining as if it has noticed nothing at all. The blue dream blends in with the sky. Can it be gone?
Today there is a cold wind down from away, and the good dogs – black and yellow and white and brown ones, whatever size, whatever color you might need, with eyes that forgive your unfathomable forgetting, with eyes that will always look for you – have starved long enough. Tongue Stud has found her true name like a grail over the Internet and it is nothing but Exline; and Grace in house slippers that cannot take her is setting out again as the sun falls in pieces she will not retrieve over the lake and the heron flies toward a strange cry he heard too many years ago to reach; and Destinee is walking today with the chicory for company along the uneven road toward the nursing home, it isn’t far. Do you see, world? Amen Swain’s hair is perfect somehow as he reaches up, there is nothing at all wrong with it, and his fingers freeze in the air, amazed. And Zink who has eaten all he can eat is hoarding something – the pardon he has finally been given, an overlooked length of cord from a laundry bag, crowded into his pocket with all the nothing of his life. He is headed back home in glory now, his heart full of love for the dark reaching out in welcome, yes, of course! of course, it remembers him, he doesn’t need to ask. The Volunteer Supervisor is absently closing the envelope on her seed order and watching the same giant cloud in Ohio that is floating over a far field in Canada where Rangell alone lies on his back, so still in the moving grass – how everything always ends, but it is not time yet. Did I tell you, world? Gene has a new stomach drug and Dovie is getting him some water in the stainless sink, her fingers through the glass like a flower too familiar to need a name. And the light, so strong and so tentative through Kenny and Sierra’s bedroom window, is holding their child in safety in his pinewood drawer, where before he can yet know that they’ve gone, he can hear the birds coming back for him. The park ranger, confused in time, is brushing a bee from the infant’s shoulder, O let him be blessed, whoever’s son. He feels the small weight of the head in his hand. Bin’s white hair is the color of moonlight and grief never to be told, but there is the wind to stroke it, there is the wind.
And the men who are watching from everywhere in breath-held silence can be heard weeping now and cheering, though their faces are impassive and lightburnt and branded with dirt no love can wash away. They have had to come from far across their own lives to arrive at what will happen, and so they are almost always too late. They think at first that the horse is in another losing race with the high, familiar fence, that he is only running toward the usual sudden stop. But then they squint their eyes and quit breathing as the land falls away, and they feel their own chance now, that they thought was lost, and they try so hard to let go of something, of anything at all, so that they, too, might rise, though in the end they are still there on the ground, clinging to what they’ve known, like the chicory that cannot bring itself to leave the faithless road.
O world, though the day they loved best is lost, the men on the Honor Farm, whose names and faces change like the light, they are so clever, expect it back again, they are so brave. Just when you think you have them down for good, they make a break into thin air, so long, and you are kneeling over still-struggling nothing, clutching its absent wrists. They are not yours forever. See how, even in heaven, with the silver Travltoilet sending out its rays to blind them, they fixate on the horizon, forgetting how far away it always is, wiping the dirt from their hands on their jumpsuits, and placing their bets on a blue dream skimming a corn field along a secondary road.

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Ann Stapleton is a freelance writer in Logan, Ohio. “The Honor Farm” is her first published work of fiction in a national literary magazine.