It was Christmas Eve with the circle of advent candles burning low in a pool of wax when Cee left the dinner table without saying goodbye. It was the season of expectations and family dinners, but disappointment and remembrance of things past crept through the gathering like a child on the stairs.
Her name was Cecelia but everyone called her Cee. With a wind whistling down from Canada at a chill factor of minus ten, she peeled out of the driveway and gave everyone something to talk about. She drove by instinct down familiar roads, wishing for someone sober to sleep with.
But it wouldn’t be Nash.
There are two kinds of secrets: the secret that really is a secret and the secret that everyone knows but nobody talks about. There were three things Cee’s mother wouldn’t allow them to talk about at the dinner table: politics, religion and Cee’s nephew. They say there is a homosexual gene, and it’s carried by the woman. Something else for them to carry.
These subjects were all fair game at Cee’s dinner table. What she couldn’t talk about was Nash.
A silo with red and white Christmas lights strung up the side and over the top to resemble a candy cane came into view, and she took her foot off the gas. In the dark it was a pretty decent candy cane. She made an illegal U turn for another look. Transformed, the silo was a reminder of the ingenuity passed down from the settlers of German/Alsace-Lorraine descent who first populated the area, walking up from Detroit to clear the cedar swamps of the lake district and make a home in the wilderness.
Some farmers sprayed chemicals on their crops and bought genetically-modified seeds, but others were trying to get back to Mother Earth and their ancestral roots and made soap and curdled cheese out of goat’s milk, or raised honey bees in spite of pervasive drift contamination and sold what they could harvest in two-quart jars, or made mead and brewed beer. That was her husband, Harv’s, niche and the more time he spent in the brewing shed perfecting his ale, the more time she spent writing about lost causes, from global to local, from the shrinking ice caps to the neighbor woman who was found frozen in the middle of a field two fields over and the childhood friend going through chemotherapy.
His doctor had traced the cancer to the chemicals he’d lavishly sprayed on the family farm when he was a teenager. Nash didn’t wear goggles and gloves because he was seventeen and immortal and there was no time for caution. A farmer is always one failed crop away from ruin, one early frost away from giving into the promise of increased yields. Nash did indeed reap what he sowed.
He’d phoned in the middle of dinner to let them know he’d made it through the first round. They sat and looked at each other, each wondering did I get any of that on me? He said he wore a hat to keep his head warm and wondered if his hair would ever grow back. Cancer was rampant and everybody knew it but nobody wanted to talk about that. You had to eat and breathe and drink water, didn’t you? It could be spliced into the gene pool by now for all they knew, like a roundup-ready bowl of cereal. Maybe someday they would all have bald soybean heads and wear woolen hats with ear flaps and eat genetically modified eggplant.
She passed the silo again, grotesque in a joker kind of way, in a genetically-modified Alice-in-Wonderland dropped-down-the-hole kind of way. How many times? She’d been driving in circles and knew she should head back before the white rabbit jumped out in front of her. She straddled the center line because the side ditches were deep and her in-dash computer was flashing an icy conditions warning, and she headed for home.
Or maybe she didn’t.
Maybe she parked the car by the silo, removed the flashlight from her glove box and walked across the field, not wanting to go home, seriously pissed off at her drunken husband, because he was supposed to be sober for Christmas. She kept walking, because for days she’d been driving by a red wheelbarrow left abandoned in the middle of that field, and for days she’d wondered what was heaped inside and why it’d been left. She was going to shine a light on the inside of that wheelbarrow. But the temperature was zero and falling and maybe she tripped over a frozen cornstalk and knocked herself out on a clump of frozen glacial rock. Maybe Cee’s body was the one discovered in full view of the road and a quarter mile from home. A frozen lump in a field that people would overlook because there was no color to the snowy white parka and hair gone to premature gray, a grave marked by waving fronds of wintering Queen Anne’s Lace.
Or maybe this is what happened.
She ignored the wheelbarrow. I mean, who cared why the driver of the long-handled conveyance was called back to the farm by circumstance, or a yell that carried on the wind with snow on the horizon? A person wouldn’t pull off the road for that. Even Cee, who was a writer by nature and curious as a writer must be (an eavesdropper at heart), wouldn’t pull off to inspect a wheelbarrow in the middle of a fifty-acre field.
Nash wasn’t just a neighbor boy moved away. He was the neighbor boy who took her virginity and she his on the barrel raft in the middle of the pond under a blue moon. And maybe her husband wasn’t the one who had promised to stay sober for Christmas. Maybe Cee had promised him she would. But the image of Nash losing the hair she ran her fingers through when she was eighteen was too much to bear. Everyone has a tipping point. And Nash with no hair was Cee’s.
So she ignored the silo and the wheelbarrow. These things weren’t important; they were just there. Nash wasn’t there, but his older brother, Shiloh, was. He still lived on the family farm and bowled with her husband on Monday nights, which was her favorite night of the week.
She drove in the driveway and a long-limbed hound uncurled from the doormat and gave a halfhearted howl. She killed the headlights and watched the porch light come on and Shiloh’s figure fill the front door.
She patted the hound’s head and he sniffed her bottom. Shiloh held the door open for her and took her parka and hung it on the back of a chair.
“Cold out tonight.”
She nodded.
“Teakettle’s still on,” he nodded at the stove. “Want some?”
“Nash called.”
He turned the burner on and watched the kettle as it started to hum. He opened a teabag and dropped it in the mug and draped the string over the edge. The kettle whistled and he poured the water in the mug and set it in front of her.
“Is that a new picture?” She nodded at the photo of Nash with gaunt cheeks and a jaunty baseball cap stuck to the fridge with a bottle opener.
Shiloh drizzled honey from the squeeze bottle into the steaming mug, then ran his tongue around the nozzle and capped the spout.
“Looks good, doesn’t he?”
She looked at the spout of the honey bear and wrapped her hands around the mug. “You got something else you can put in here?”
He took a bottle out of the sideboard and set it on the table.
“He never sends me pictures,” Cee said.
Shiloh shrugged.
“I think he knows I’ll see the ones he sends you.”
“He might know that. Does Harv know that?”
She poured a measure of whiskey in the mug and gave it a swirl.
“Does he?”
“Harv is smashed. Everybody’s home. Christmas and all.”
A curious expression crossed his face. “It’s Christmas?”
“Tomorrow.” She studied his face. “You didn’t know that?”
He crinkled his mouth. “Just another day.”
“Harv doesn’t know anything.”
“Sure he does, Cee.”
“No, he doesn’t.”
He tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear. “OK,” he said.
________
Their stomachs were flat and their hair sun-bleached. The wood was wet and slippery under their feet. Nash put his hands on her shoulders and kissed her with his tongue and kneeled in front of her and pulled her bikini bottom down and she stepped out of it with her hands on his shoulders and she wasn’t embarrassed. His hair was thick and soft and she held his head until she couldn’t stand it any longer and dropped to her knees. Cattails swayed in the breeze around the deep end of the pond and fields of wheat rose around them to the horizon creating a natural barrier against the world under the full moon reflected in the water and in his eyes. There was privacy like a closed door except for the swallows that swooped across the pond, confused by the light of a blue moon.
He put his tiger eye on her middle finger like a ceremony and told her he would never leave, but poison was already running through his veins and settling in his glands and hair follicles.
They left their suits on the raft and swam into the deep, the water warmer than the air, steam rising off the surface. The moonlight was such that they could see the top of the barn on a hill in the distance, and the dock, and their towels that hung on beach chairs at the sandy end of the pond bathed in white.
They felt the presence of the bass swimming beneath their feet and the larger catfish stirring the depths with their fins. They held hands, treading water, and laughed at the joy of their courage and the life that spread out before them like the Milky Way.
________
Shiloh was gray at the temples but the stubble on his face was more pepper than salt, like a doctor’s diet plan. His stomach didn’t hang over his belt, but it wasn’t as flat as his brother’s the night Cee lay with him on the raft under the eye of a night bird with his ring on her middle finger. When she lay on Shiloh’s bed her hip bones were still visible but so were her scars and her stretch marks.
They didn’t talk anymore about Nash and why he left and why he wasn’t coming back. He asked her to stay, and the hound named Maybe slept on the floor at the foot of the bed. Shiloh got up twice to put wood in the stove but always came back.
She rose first and made coffee, then rummaged through his attic and found Christmas lights and decorations. She put on her coat and ear muffs and a pair of his gloves and strung lights around the porch, thinking of the candy cane and what it would have been like to have a child to string lights with. The full-sized Christmas bulbs were like the ones they strung when she was a child and in the early morning light they danced in the breeze and lit up the rafters of the never-finished porch like firecrackers.
Shiloh sat at the counter in his bare feet with a mug between his hands and Maybe at his feet.
“You didn’t have to do that,” he said.
“Nash liked Christmas.”
“It wasn’t my fault he never wore his protective gear.”
She shrugged. “We aren’t to blame for the way things turned out.”
“There were warnings but they were in small print. I found an old bag in the barn. It said handle with care, like it was simply fragile. What kid cares about that? Like the ornaments we dropped on the floor and broke, like the heads we took off our sister’s china dolls, and grandma’s tea cups. Handle with care. Because they might break, but that didn’t break you. You might feel bad, but you got over it.”
“Let’s get you a tree.”
Shiloh looked at her and sighed.
“Please? A small one, something to put the rest of those lights on,” she gestured at the box she’d dragged out of the attic. “Look, Maybe likes them.” Maybe was looking out the window at the dancing bulbs of red, blue, yellow and green. His ears twitched.
__________
The first ultrasound detected the abnormality and they scheduled the procedure for the next day. Nash disagreed with the decision. He wanted to wait a month and repeat the ultrasound and look for self-correction. The doctors informed them of risk and possibility, hope and sterility. Hope won out and its name was Nash, but in the end they had to take the baby anyway and her uterus with it.
Nash stayed for a while but in the end he needed sunshine and a fresh start, and he left for a job in Arizona. When the cancer first showed itself, he blamed the mining operation, but the doctor soon pointed the blame in the right direction across two time zones and twenty years.
Cee cut off her hair the night he called her and took a picture with her cell phone and sent it to him, and he told her not to ever do that again, and she didn’t.
She went to work at the local sugar beet factory after he left and met Harv, who said he never wanted to father a baby for this world and they decided to make a go of it, but his best friend was Shiloh and Shiloh reminded her of Nash, and Nash had hope and had wanted lots of babies. Shiloh was a loner and only wanted a dog.
________
They cut a five-foot white pine from the stand behind the house and dragged it in the back door. She picked through the ornaments for a few relics and intertwined miniature white lights among the soft branches. He made more coffee and filled the stand with water. Maybe lapped up the spills and plopped down on the rug in front of the couch and watched with his head cocked. Shiloh sat on the couch and rubbed the dog’s ears as the white pine turned into a Christmas tree.
“I haven’t had one since Mary left,” he said.
Mary was the last woman who had moved in and then moved out after announcing her rejection of everything him, but she pinched his paintings on her way out the door.
Cee sat beside him and considered her creation. It had everything except an angel.
“I should get back,” she said finally. “I never called or anything.” She rested her chin in her hand. “It’s no wonder Harv isn’t happy.”
Shiloh shimmied his knee. “Are you?”
“What? Happy?”
He didn’t answer.
“What we just did makes me feel good. Guess that’s as close to happy as I’m going to get.”
He rubbed Maybe’s jowls and neck and his tail thumped. “I wasn’t going to say anything—misplaced loyalty I guess—but it doesn’t seem fair that everyone should know but you.”
Cee looked at him, waiting.
“The woman they found frozen to death, the McPhail woman? He was seeing her. I’ve been telling myself it isn’t any of my business, but after last night, I think you’re my business.”
Cee bit her lip until part of it turned white.
“Her husband must have found out because the neighbors say there was a fight, and the autopsy showed an obscene amount of alcohol in her system. She probably took off, God knows for where, tripped and fell and was too drunk to get back up.” He stopped and took a sip of his coffee. “I hate the way you’re expected to keep quiet about a friend’s fuck-ups when another friend will be hurt by them.”
Cee ran a hand across her eyes and rubbed her forehead.
“Cee . . .”
She looked at him. His eyes were liquid and brown as acorns. She took a breath.
“It’s not like I haven’t guessed, but it’s kind of humiliating. He says I call him Nash in my sleep. Guess I can’t blame him for sleeping somewhere else.”
“After a certain age we should be able to start smoking again and practice unsafe sex. I mean, what’s the worst that can happen? You die at eighty instead of ninety?
“What are you saying?”
“You never lose your taste for it.”
She smiled. “The smoking or sex?”
“I don’t mind living alone. Maybe and me . . . we get along just fine, but he’s just a dog.”
She considered the lines on his face and the way his hands comforted his dog. She liked the way he was with his dog.
“I think Maybe is a lucky dog.”
“He’s spoiled. Likes having the run of the place.”
She waited. “I think I like being your business.”
“Yeah? I asked Maybe, see, and he approves.”
She smiled.
He touched the corner of her mouth. “You should do that more often.”
She twirled a strand of hair around her finger. “About McPhail’s . . . this may seem silly, but I think it’s the strangest thing. There’s been this wheelbarrow sitting out in the middle of the field, just sitting there in the middle of nowhere.”
“A wheelbarrow?”
“Strikes me as odd.”
Shiloh thought with a furrow in his brow. “Guess I never noticed.”
“It bugs me, I mean, what happened? Don’t you ever wonder about things like that?”
“Life happens. Things get left. Maybe he was picking up rocks. No matter how many you pick up, more surface, like we’re living on top of a giant Mixmaster. I can picture Harv pulling in their driveway at the wrong time of day with a hard-on. Maybe her husband decided to surprise them and dropped what he was doing. A guy knows things like that.”
“And that’s why Harv won’t leave the brew shed?”
“That’s how someone ends up dead in the middle of a fallow field.”
She hunched her shoulders and took a sip from his mug, placing her lips where his had been.
Shiloh stood up and held out his hand. “Should we give Nash a call? Wish him a Merry Christmas?”
________
She drove home in the beginnings of a snowfall and thought about Midnight Mass and how as children they always hoped for a white Christmas. They were never disappointed. Riding home in the backseat of their father’s Chrysler with Christmas carols on the radio, the snow would start to fall, and they knew all the rest of their hopes would be realized by morning. It never failed to happen.
She drove by the candy cane that was once again a silo, dull and unlit in the midday light. She drove by the wheelbarrow in the field and imagined it was full of nothing but bones instead of rocks, white from the sun. She turned the last corner and headed for home.
Or maybe she didn’t.
*
Learn more about Yvonne on the Contributors’ page.
Yvonne’s debut novel, Let Evening Come, was published by Unsolicited Press in 2024 and is available here.
Submissions for the Best in Rural Writing Contest are already open. Find more details here.
(Photo: 19andy76/flickr.com/ CC BY 2.0)
Sunday, April 13th, 2025 1pm EST/ 6pm GMT
The first online writing seminar of the year, “The Ol’ He Said, She Said: Writing Stronger Dialogue” will look at how to create more natural-sounding dialogue, as well as improve the mechanics around speech. The seminar is free for WRITER or SUPPORTER subscribers, or $15 for everyone else. More information can be found here.
- Maybe by Yvonne Osborne - March 13, 2025