The Shape of Leaving

Tuesday evening the truck came up the road with a bad muffler and a loose rattle somewhere in the bed.

Samuel heard it before he saw it. He was at the stove with elk steak in the cast-iron pan and potatoes going soft in a second skillet beside it. Kip lay under the table with his nose on his paws. The house held the smell of meat, hot iron, coffee gone stale on the back burner. Outside, dusk had gone thin over the yard. The four stones on the hill were already losing their edges.

He did not go to the door.

The truck shut off. A door opened and closed. Boots on the porch. The mudroom door came in with a push that stuck halfway at the swollen frame, then gave.

Marty stepped through with cold on him. He hung his jacket on the third hook without looking. It had been his hook since he was a boy. He stood in the kitchen doorway a second, one hand still near the jamb, taking in the room as if measuring whether anything had moved.

“Hey,” he said.

Samuel turned the steak once in the pan. “There’s food.”

Marty nodded. “Smells good.”

He was thinner than the last time. Not enough for another man to mark maybe, but Samuel marked it. The face was Helen’s in the bones and Martin’s in the eyes when they went distant. The shoulders were his own now, a little broader from work that wasn’t ranch work and sat differently on him because he wore the body lighter, as if it belonged to a man not yet settled into what would be asked of it.

They ate at the kitchen table with Earl’s empty chair between them at the head.

The clock ticked over the stove. Knife on plate. Fork on plate. The house made its small sounds around them. Marty asked about cattle. Samuel told him they were holding weight better than last year. Marty asked if Lee was around. Samuel said Lee was at the cabin. Marty asked whether the west tank had frozen yet. Samuel said not all the way.

The talk came in short lengths and stopped clean after each one. Nothing hostile in it. Nothing easy either. The silence between them was not a blank thing. It had shape. Years had built it.

Marty ate slower than Samuel. He always had. Samuel finished and sat with his hands on either side of the plate while Marty worked through the last of the potatoes. The light in the window over the sink went from gray to black. The graves on the hill disappeared and became known things rather than visible ones.

“You need more?” Samuel asked.

“No.”

Samuel stood, took his own plate to the sink, then Marty’s when Marty pushed it forward. He washed while Marty carried his coffee to the porch. Through the window over the basin Samuel could see him in the weak yellow spill from the porch light, elbows on knees, mug in both hands, looking out into the dark where the valley lay.

The water ran over Samuel’s hands. The heat brought the stiffness up before it eased it. He dried the skillet. Set it back on the stove. Marty stayed on the porch a long time.

When he came in, he did not sit again. He stood by the counter with one hand flat on the worn edge where generations of plates and elbows had polished the wood smooth.

“I’ve been thinking about Wyoming,” he said.

Samuel folded the dish towel once and laid it by the sink.

“Pipeline outfit down there’s hiring. Good money, from what I hear.”

The room stayed still around the words. Kip lifted his head, then set it down again.

Marty looked at the counter, not at him. “A couple guys from the feed store know somebody on a crew near Casper.”

Samuel leaned one hip against the sink. The old house held heat badly. He could feel cold at the window glass behind him.

“When?”

Marty shrugged. “Don’t know. Soon maybe.”

The answer sat between them. Samuel could feel what lay under it the way he felt weather in the bad shoulder before a front came through. Not just money. Not just work. Distance. Air.

He picked up the dish towel again, though there was nothing left to dry. “Your call,” he said.

Marty nodded once.

That was all.

The sentence went out into the room and stayed there, smaller than what was needed and heavier than it sounded. Samuel knew that as soon as he said it. He had meant release and heard, in his own voice, something close to absence. But the words were already in the air and he had no others ready behind them.

Marty said, “Yeah.”

He took his mug to the sink, rinsed it, left it upside down on the drainboard. Later, after he had gone to bed in his old room, Samuel turned it over and put it in the cabinet.

He lay awake longer than he should have.

The walls in the house were thin enough to pass certain sounds and stop others. He could hear the floorboard outside Marty’s room give once. Then the bed springs. Then quiet. The quiet held awhile. Then, later, the faint sound of Marty talking on the phone.

The words did not carry clear through the wall. Only the shape of speech. A rise and fall. A stop. Then one word, sharper than the others because it came with force behind it.

“Suffocating.”

Samuel stared at the dark ceiling.

The word did not repeat. The murmur went on a minute more and ended. Then the house was quiet again.

He lay with both hands on the blanket over his chest and listened to nothing. The dark in the room thickened. Somewhere down the hall a board settled. In the yard the wind moved around the porch posts and went on.

He did not sleep much.

When he came into the kitchen before dawn, Marty’s bedroom door was shut. Samuel set coffee on, cut bacon, cracked eggs into a bowl. Habit moved his hands before morning fully had. By the time the first light reached the sink window, Marty was already outside.

He sat on the porch in the cold with a mug that no longer steamed.

Samuel poured coffee into his own cup and went out. The boards under his boots gave the old familiar way. He stood beside his son rather than taking the other chair. From here the valley was only beginning to show itself. The Spine to the west was a long black shape. Eastward the cottonwoods by the river made a darker seam in the dim.

Marty looked tired. Not from one bad night. From a kind of carrying that sleep did not much help.

They stood there together.

A horse called once from the barn. Somewhere in the grass below the yard a meadowlark tried a note and stopped. The cold held everything close.

“You heading in early?” Samuel asked.

Marty nodded. “Need to open.”

Samuel drank his coffee. Bitter and hot.

After a while Marty said, “You ever think about what you’d do if you didn’t have this place?”

Samuel’s hand stopped halfway back from the cup.

The pause before he answered was not thought. It was impact. The question hit low, below speech, in the part of him that knew the shape of the ground before it knew any language for it.

“No,” he said.

Marty watched the valley. “I think about it.”

Samuel said nothing.

“What I’d be, I mean.”

The sky had gone from black to a hard pale gray over the ridge. Fence lines began to appear in sections. The family plot on the hill behind the house was visible now if a man turned, though neither of them did.

Samuel could hear his son breathing. Could feel the question still open between them, waiting on words he did not have. Or had and would not trust. Or had spent too many years not using to know how to bring them out clean.

He looked east where the river lay under the cottonwoods, not visible from the porch itself but present in the line of trees and the way the land lowered toward it. He thought of Martin at twenty-two, then twenty-three, then gone at twenty-four. He did not let the thought finish. The body knew the rest without help.

Marty set the empty mug on the rail.

“I’m not saying today,” he said. “About Wyoming.”

Samuel nodded.

“But soon.”

Another nod. That was all he gave it. It was all he could give without breaking something open before he knew what would come through.

Marty went in to get his coat. Samuel stayed on the porch and watched the light work down into the valley. By the time Marty came back out, the barn roof was silver with frost.

At the truck Marty stopped with one hand on the door.

“You need anything from town?”

Samuel almost said no. Then: “Chain lube. If you think of it.”

“All right.”

Marty got in. The engine caught rough, then settled into its bad muffler note. He backed down the yard, turned, and went south on the road between the fence lines.

Samuel stood there until the truck dropped over the rise and the sound went out of it.

The day had work in it. Lee came up from the cabin and they spent the morning at the sorting pens and the afternoon at the west water line where a valve had started sticking. Samuel worked as he always worked. Gate. Wrench. Wire. Breath in cold air. Lee said little beyond what the work required. At noon he asked, “Boy come by?”

“Last night.”

“How’s he doing?”

Samuel put a wrench on the valve nut and pulled. “Working.”

Lee waited half a beat, then nodded. “Mm.”

Toward evening, after Lee had gone back to the cabin, Samuel drove the feed truck to Hardin Creek for mineral and diesel. The town sat under the same hard sky as the ranch, but closer in, smaller somehow for having walls around the streets. The feed store, the post office, the Stockman with its beer signs dead in the daylight. He loaded the mineral himself and signed the ticket with his crooked finger braced awkwardly on the pen.

Marty’s pickup was in front of the feed store.

Samuel stood beside his own truck a moment with the diesel smell in the air and looked at it. Mud on the lower panels. One rear tire a little soft. A cracked taillight still held together by red tape. Familiar.

He could have left. Loaded the mineral and gone home. That would have been simpler and more in keeping with the order he knew. Instead he crossed the street.

The bell over the feed store door gave once when he went in.

Marty was behind the counter adding up a ticket for a rancher from north of town. He looked up when the bell sounded and went still for the smallest instant before finishing the total. Samuel stood by the fence-post display and waited.

When the other man left with his bagged salt and his receipt, the store got quiet except for the hum from the freezer in back.

“You forgot chain lube,” Samuel said.

Marty blinked, then gave half a smile too small to stay long. “Did.”

Samuel picked up a can from the shelf and set it on the counter. “Then I’m getting it myself.”

“That’ll be six eighty.”

Samuel put a ten down. Marty made change. Their fingers did not touch.

The store smelled like feed, rubber boots, mouse poison, cardboard. Shelves of things men came in needing and left with because the work required them. Fence staples. Gloves. Salt blocks. Grease guns. The plain inventory of a place where need had shape.

Marty slid the coins across the counter. “How’s the valve?”

“Working.”

“That all right?”

Samuel looked at him. Really looked. The face was drawn tighter than it had been the night before. There were shadows under the eyes that coffee did not explain.

He put the change in his pocket. “You eating?”

Marty glanced toward the back office as if checking who might hear. “Later.”

Samuel nodded. The words he ought to have had did not come. He settled for what was available. “All right.”

He turned to go.

At the door Marty said, “Dad.”

Samuel stopped with his hand on the push bar.

“I’m fine.”

The sentence crossed the store and hung there among sacks of feed and steel shelving. Samuel heard the lie in it plain as if it had been struck on iron. Heard also the need underneath it: let this be enough, let me keep standing here, let me not be opened up in the middle of town.

He kept his hand on the bar. “I know,” he said.

He went out into the cold.

Back at the truck he stood a minute with the can of chain lube in one hand and the other on the door frame. The feed store window reflected the street and the sky and a shape of movement inside that might have been his son or might have been anyone.

He set the can on the seat and drove home.

By the time he reached the ranch the light was going. The road up from the highway took him between his own fence lines, over ground he knew by memory deeper than thought. House. Barn. Cabin. The hill with the dead. The dark line of the river cottonwoods beyond.

He parked by the porch and cut the engine. The quiet after it was sudden and complete.

Inside, the kitchen was cold. He set coffee on again though he did not much want it. Opened the drawer and looked at the papers inside without touching them. The state letter. The forwarded notice. The ledger under both. He shut the drawer.

Kip came and leaned against his leg. Samuel put a hand on the dog’s head and left it there until the kettle started to tremble on the stove.

Outside, somewhere in the valley, a truck moved along the county road and went on south. The sound thinned and disappeared. The house settled around him. The ground stayed where it was. And in the middle of all of it, in the room between the stove and the table and the dark window over the sink, the word from the night before remained as if spoken there and not through a wall.

Suffocating.

Samuel stood at the stove until the coffee boiled bitter.