Overcast

August 4

            This morning when Pa and I pulled open the barn door a stray cat darted out like a flash of lightning around our ankles. Its fur blended with the orange light of sunrise and we lost sight of it around the corner of the barn. Inside the livestock seemed shaken. They didn’t have their usual look of subtle recognition, huge kind eyes awaiting the sweet spread of hay bales. Pa whispered to the new foal, his palm finding rest over the white teardrop of hair between her eyes while I finished the morning feed.

            By the time we left the barn the sun had pulled itself up onto the horizon so it looked like instead of continuing its arc it might just roll across the empty fields, its orange orb a blazing tumbleweed. Twenty-two days have passed since the last bead of rain, but today the air is damp. The woods seem looser, swaying in the balmy breeze, unafraid of splintering from the heat. You can see the green in their leaves, not like the past weeks when the sun glared off them so bright you couldn’t tell they had color at all. It’s so clear you can see past the woods to the bare hills beyond.

            “I wonder if anything’s growing in the shade of those hills,” I said to Pa.

            “On the other side,” he said. “I wonder.”

*

August 5

            The clouds wafted in overnight, while my father slept. Only I witnessed the delicate contrast of gray swathing black. And then this morning the bleak curtain was still there, lingering, hovering in the leaden air. And the sun didn’t rise. You wouldn’t have known it was still back there I mean, behind that slab of slate, if not for the spectral silhouettes of the trees leaning across the hilly landscape.

            In the barn, Pa kissed the foal’s nose. The roof groaned from the weight of the clouds. It gives me hope that something might fall, but nothing has.

*

August 6

            I don’t think Pa will see another season. He could lift bales in and out of the truck bed through last year, but then the drought came. There’s little labor to be done when nothing will grow, and with the work went his strength, like momentum had carried him to old age—like a generations-old nudge from his farmer father kept him vital through seventy years.

            Now his back bows steeply. In sun glare or under cloud cover, his face is the same pale almost-gray. If I squint I lose him against the dim backdrop of the farm, same as that stray in the light.

*

August 7

            Still no rain.

*

August 8

            The cat was back today. It woke at the sound of the wooden door’s warning, arched its back and hissed at the sight of us. I could see its jaded eyes. We stepped forward and the cat scampered around us, out into the looming shadow. Still it was ginger. It would have been that same carroty red in the shimmer of a fair day.

            Pa blinked through the doorway. “He must be thirsty,” he said.

*

August 9

            “Do you believe in heaven?” Pa asked me today.

            “I don’t know,” I said.    

            “You ought to.”

            But I like the idea of coming back to this same earth. Maybe every time somebody falls asleep and doesn’t wake up, somewhere a consciousness is born in an infant, squealing and writhing at the reminiscence of being old and in love and cursing the misplacement of the recollection of speech. And maybe that gap in your memory between your birth and your first words is the only time when you remember who you used to be.

            My first memory is of him. I sit on his lap by a fire in the hearth, my head tucked away deep between his jaw and collar, the grind of his rusty stubble against my one cheek, the other caressed by the soothing glow of embers in the soot beneath the grate of the fireplace.

            I hope, when he goes, that’s not all he’ll be. Soot. Ash. I hope we’re not just dirt.

*

August 10

            The cat was in the barn this morning. It didn’t flinch when we entered, didn’t rouse as we approached. The foal stood over her, licked along the length of her spine once. I could see her ribs poking out from beneath the fur and the skin, and I reached out to run the flank of my hand across them. My hand rested there for a long moment, but I felt no rise and fall of breath. My father lifted the cat and even that little weight seemed enough to break him. He carried her out to the field.

            With a spade I hacked through the rigid soil. Pa laid the cat in the pit and I buried her, each shovelful of ashen earth doing its part to blot out her vivid coat. When she was fully covered, I felt a tap at the back of my neck, light as a fingertip, cool as a coin. Another drop pinged against the shovel blade, and then all around us tiny dark circles dotted the earth, perfect rings splashing into existence like newborn stars. My father tilted his face toward the sky, his mouth open, tongue unfurled into a bowl, like rainfall might be medicine.

---

---