Martha My Dear

Ma told me once, right about where I’m standing, a man’s married to three things: God, his wife, and the land he works. Well, Martha’s been dead three years, and my faith went in the ground with her, so that just leaves me and the land. And even that’s slipping. This year’s pull won’t fetch half what I got before Mad Cow hit in ’03, back when the sun still set like it had a promise to keep on the other side.

Ain’t just me out here, not no more. I had no choice but to bring on help, and to pay for it, I turned the place into a damn amusement. A glorified carnival. Grandpa’d call it selling out, I hear em in my sleep shouting obscenities, hawkin’ spit at my boots. I struck a deal with the local counties and their schools. Now kids get bussed in every now and again. It’s no petting zoo, but we got a mighty fine collection of cattle skulls and bison horns, old saddles and shined new again spurs from before the war. I let Harlan run the tours. He’s steady, easy on the eyes, knows how to make kids laugh and have older folks open their wallets. His wife Emma is nice, an extra set of hands, though she always eats like she’s expecting triplets and makes me a fool thinking I ain’t notice. But she had kin downtown in high places, Emma, and got it so teachers could scribble names on behalf of parents, for the waiver, so the students could ride horseback in her company. She’s good with em, plump as she is. The rascals and the nags both. The whole thing used to gnaw at me but what doesn’t lately, the whole world is turning too fast my liking. So now it don’t. I just can’t let it. Fact is, I’ve grown fond seeing their spry cherry-slick faces, yanking on the reigns, feeling big, watching em from a ways off in the distance.

Makes me feel this land’s still good for something, even with the corporate meat packers foot on my neck and the water-rights loons hollering till my ears ring. A gift from God, Ma always said. But there is a such thing as Indian Givers. She used to say that too.

Ma always had plenty to say, loud opinions rattling around local stores and bars like a jiggered chain lock. Martha was worse, if you can believe it, always watching the color television talk politics, hollering at it like the folks on the other end could hear. I never thought much on that stuff, figured it was just another kind of wind blowing, a game for the rich, blowing real hard but never reaching the land beneath my boots. Just a distraction from the three things you’re married to. But since I lost Martha, and God right along with her, I got nothing but time and time to think. Mornings now, I sit in front of the color TV, watching the news like Martha would’ve liked, too little too late, but it’s nice thinking she’s proud watching me. Pay attention to the world! she’d say. I thought I did I’d say, just couldn’t handle much else but what was in front of me is all. But now, with the TV on during flapjacks and coffee, I had something to chew on all day. Most of it made me angry and resentful but I couldn’t stop watching all the same. Figured it was better than a head full of nothing. But eventually it was indeed too heavy, emotionally, all that bitterness can turn a stomach. Channel 5 says everything’s changing; the price of grain, the sound of music, the big cities and even these parts here are changing, all this rustling—everything spinning fast like a calf roped too loose, kickin’ and twistin’ like its got the Devil himself on its back, and I feel I’m the one trying to steady the rope. I’m the poor bastard getting rope burn to the bone. Holding on for a world no longer here. It’s the inside burns though; they hurt worse than the outside ones. There’s no ointment for the inside ones. Just the bottle. And you gotta watch that being alone up here, that’s for sure. Way out here with no wife in this land sometimes it’s on you to make your own fun. And with no God, who’s watching?

Started small. No more sinister than a kid with a slingshot shooting cans, collecting trading cards. At first it was nothing, but when God goes, so does a man’s better sense. No one keeping score anymore, no reason to hold back. Not giving two shits’ about if anybody is upstairs keeping score, and what that score could possibly be if someone was.

I like thinkin’ I always had a mind for science, for nature and the way things fit together. It’s surely helped a bit in this here line of work. Don’t think I had the know-it-all to be a surgeon, but I’ve cut my share my beef and stitched up worse. I even pulled a few calves slick with birth in my day. One time, the calf I pulled was a stillborn heifer, all mangled and wrong. It had an extra leg curled tight like a withered branch and a second set of lips slung under her jaw. Ma calf lowed over her, licking, nudging her dead baby, clearing mucus off her nose, trying to rouse to life what never was. I took her away, rubbed her down with a towel and took a close look out of curiosity. That’s when I saw something moving inside. The heifer was dead, deader than a six-shot with no bullets that much was clear, but something was moving on her inside like she wasn’t.

By lantern light, long after midnight, I got out my tools and made a small cut between the dead heifers’ ribs. Blood ran like a river down and pooled up in a hoof print on the ground. I stayed focused and dug around inside, and there it was—a second heart, beating. Thumpin’, poundin’, drummin’ like a herd of mustangs on a canyon floor right there in my hand. There was no reason for it, no explanation, nothing left alive to hold it but me. But on it pulsed in my red-soaked glove, warm and wet, the temperature and texture reminding me of fresh churned butter. I stayed there holding it, slack jawed and amazed, till the sun came up and like a consistent rain on my tin roof it never once changed its lick. I fell asleep holding it. When I woke up it was still beating in my lap.

I woke up late, refreshed but pissed I was down a day’s work, and still couldn’t think hard enough about what to do with it, who to tell, or what it all meant, so I ended up doing nothing at all. I put the heart in a jar, stuck it on the mantlepiece in the barn and got back to a week of cattle ranchin’.

Like I said, you had to scratch together your own diversions out here, make games, stitch scraps of days into something like living, or you’d dry up to nothing, rusting in place like barbed wire forgotten along a fencepost—until the wind cut you sharp. Sundays had their unique rhythm. I’d make the rounds, walk the perimeter, click the locks shut on the gates, scribble a few notes down in the old ledger, and then I’d go see to the beating heart.

The barn smelled of dry hay and iron, long-gone animal heat lingering in the bones of the place. In the back stall, in the cool dark, sat the heart on the mantle—its thump-thump a slow and steady alluring mutiny against every law I knew. Like a cow to the feeding trough, the thing drummed on, sealed up tight in glass, still slick as the day I found it.

I’d pull it out and sit awhile, hold it in my palms where it pulsed with something fierce and strange. Time didn’t run in that barn, not in the usual way, not with the heart in my hand. I’d lose myself watching it knock, feeling it against the tips of my fingers like it was finna tell me something. And somewhere in that, the old rodeo days’d roll up—clear as a pane of winter glass in my head. Pictures clearer than the sight in front of me. Me, not more’n a boy, rig bag slung, dust all over my jeans, tearing out the chute, spur riding till I made the whistle —like God himself couldn’t buck me. Saw it in my mind so pure I nearly believed it true. More real than any dream—any reality. I felt invigorated for the first time in a long time. The other heart, the one in my chest, why it galloped to match the exact rhythm of the one in my hands. The home movies in my head weren’t exactly of things that happened. Not quite. They were what should have happened. Another life, lived proper. If God were on my side. Not some deadbeat jackpot ride, but the real thing. Big lights. PBR champion belt buckle blinding in the sun.

Some nights I’d slide it out the jar n’ rock it slow, back and forth, like cradling a baby, and visions of Ike would come to me in pastoral hues. Healthy, strong, not yet chewed up by the bad luck that took him early. I’d see him in his fort, playing cowboy. I’d see him helping Martha with the huckleberry pie. As I rocked and rocked, I could taste that pie like they’d just pulled it from the oven with their tiny hands and big smiles. That’s how it got with the heart cradled in my hands—thick as blood, sure as memory—real as rain.

Weeks passed. Slowly, over time, the heart shifted its tune. It no longer brought on beautiful pictures, no more home movies. It seemed to want something. It was communicating. Giving me directions, clear commands, in a language I never knew I knew. At first, I pretended not to hear. Couldn’t bring myself to act on what it asked. Still don’t know if there’s such a thing as unnatural in a world this crooked. But it soured, the heart did. Stopped showing me what might’ve been, stopped being my friend and started pulsing with a fever heat, hotter’n any forge I ever stood near.

One night it got so scalding I dropped it—burned the tips of my fingers clean off. It hit the dirt and throbbed, picked up barn dust and old hay, but beat on, meaner. I stopped touching it after that, just came to watch, in hopes I could again hold it. But it only beat faster. Got dirtier. And grew hotter.

And then came the storm. I always think better in steady rain. Sleep good too.

I dug her up by lamplight. Didn’t bother with a shovel—just hands and that little rusted garden claw she used to be fond of. Those were the instructions. Nails broke back, dirt packed deep into the split beds of em’. Hurt like hell, but that seemed part of it. It took a while. Most of the night. I had a jug of water, went quick, and a flask of whiskey I paced myself on. The coffin was intact, though bowed and bloated like a drowned thing. Tried the hammer first, but the claw didn’t catch. The crowbar did fine. Finally, the lid gave up with a groan and there she was. What was left of her. Martha my dear. Caught in the lamplight, an angel pulled from the mud.

“Martha.”

I sat down on the cut bank and rested, feet dangling above her, and took a long swig from my flask, then another. Rain had started again—barely there, but just enough to raise the smell of turned soil. I talked to her for what felt like lifetimes. Told her about the news on the color TV, the land drying out, the way the sun and earth don’t keep the promises they used to. Told her about being lonesome, proper lonesome. The kind that makes a man talk to bones. Dawn never broke, no matter how long I went on ramblin’. I told her about the heart, how it beats for me, to me, and how it was still beating in the barn, though I could no longer touch it. That’s when the thunder hit—instantly and close, real close, right after I finished tellin’.  Shook the lamp clean off the crate I’d set it on. It shook me too. Made me scan the hills for prying eyes but ain’t no one was out there. Just me, her, and that heart, back in the barn, kicking up heat. Yearning.

Getting her out was slow work. Her white dress stuck to the coffin lining. Damn near lost her leg getting her free. But I got her, good Heavens Ma, I got her. I hauled her across the yard and into the barn, laid her down next to the heart. The heart was crusted over—brown with dirt, pulsing like it didn’t care. I was out of water, dumb as hell for not taking more, so I used what was left of the whiskey to clean the dust off. I poured it down. A thick steam and a loud sizzle rose up off the throbbing muscle. I had to fan my eyes to look down and see. The heart looked anew. When I wiped it down, the heart was warm again. Soft and warm, like a woman.

I cut Martha just under her breastbone, where the skin still had some give, and set the cleaned off heart in her ribcage like I was planting a seed. On its way home, it pulsed in my palm, wild and eager, changing from red to deep purple and back again as if it were somehow aware of it all. Like it knew where it was going. Like it wanted her.

The sun came up as I finished the stitches. I was too tired to wait and besides, I love building myself some suspense when there ain’t much else goin’. I didn’t even make it to my bed. Exhausted and burnt out and stretched thin from drink, I passed out on a haystack just outside the barn. I didn’t wake ‘til the sun cleared the ridge and baked the corrugated tin of the barn roof hot enough to sweat. I wiped the crust from my eyes and opened the wood door on hinges. There was Martha, sitting upright on a milking stool. I stood a long while in the square of light, eyes squinting, brain trying to make sense. “Did I sit her up?” I kept askin’, thumb pressed in dumb circles on my jeans. “Did I now?”

I approached slowly. She still had no pulse. No light in the eyes. I sat back on my haunches, boots slicked with black muck, elbows on knees, and I waited. Long enough to forget what time was. Finally, when hunger became unbearable, I let it take me inside. Just as I turned to go, it struck me—no sense leaving her. “I’ll set her in her rocker,” I mumbled, “let her watch the color TV,” I said, like I was caught between playing the game and begging up so much wishful thinkin’ in hopes of a miracle.

About four or so hours later, after an unsuccessful day fishing in the creek, I arrived back home. There she was, in the same chair, holding the same posture at the same angle. But now the remote was in her hand and the TV Guide was flopped open across her lap. Her hair seemed brushed—slick, clean, pulled back and unknotted like she’d gone and freshened up while I was out chasing trout. I checked her again. Skin cool, still no pulse. But in my head, it hit again—a buckin’ horse you weren’t ready for. Dreams poured in, faster and brighter than before. Things I hadn’t had or seen since I was fourteen and full of fistfights and gasoline were close enough to touch. I sat with her, for hours maybe, holding my thumb to her wrist, lost in a picturesque reverie even the greatest Kentucky bourbon couldn’t dull. And I didn’t need dullin’, not a bandage on a blister no—no this was something true, something wide and deep as the greatest prairie. I let go and smiled. I was hungry again. Belly grumbling, I eased into the kitchen, scouted the shelf.

“Hey Martha,” I called, “no catch today. That all right with you if it’s pinto beans and cornbread for sloppin’?”

I peeked back in, unsure of what I was looking for. Just then, somehow, the channel changed, and an infomercial for grass-fed beef, free-range chicken, blue skies, with cows lookin’ like pets came on the color TV.

“We ain’t got none honey,” I said, laughin’. She was hungry. And I smiled.

I couldn’t remember the last time I didn’t eat alone.