The bustle of aunts, uncles, and cousins crammed inside Mamaw’s tiny wooden house scraped against David’s sixteen-year-old sensibilities. Piled on top of that, President Nixon was giving a rah-rah Vietnam War speech on TV. David was suffocating. He stood, made his way through the crowd to the back of the house, pushed open the kitchen screen door, and let it slam behind him.
He walked alone under the caress of apple tree shade, past the smokehouse, into a bright August sun beating down on the slender grassy path between the fields, the path that led to the barn. Behind the barn, where the fields stopped, the woods began. Growing up, David and the cousins all liked going to the woods and playing along the creek. It was an adventure. But after the cousins outgrew it, David came to the woods by himself for a different reason. The solitude of the woods was a refuge where his thoughts and feelings could roam without the constraints imposed by the opinions of family and friends.
However, instead of continuing into the woods, David stopped at the barn. It’s weathered gray planks seemed to speak to him, inviting him in. Back when David was little, and Papaw was still alive, the barn had been off-limits when David’s family came down from Lexington to visit unless Dad took him. Dad was a different person in the barn, especially when Papaw or the uncles were there, too, as if the barn was a portal to a whole ‘nother world with its own knowledge and secrets. David didn’t know the secrets. He only knew the house was Mamaw’s domain and the barn was a castle for tools and tobacco sticks, a repository for what men had done and would do.
The door was open. He stepped inside. The shade felt like a spirit housed between the bare ground and the rafters above, a silent presence insulating him from busybodies who might pry into feelings he wanted to keep to himself. His eyes adjusted to the darkness and settled on Papaw’s workshop, a small space partitioned inside the barn where there was a treadle lathe Papaw had used to turn walnut and cherry into bedposts. Beside it, on an unvarnished gray plank, his turning tools were laid out, every blade shiny and sharp, every handle clean, like a surgeon’s tray for a woodworking obstetrician delivering beauty out of inchoate wood. Everything was still in place, as if Papaw might rise from the dead at night to make furniture.
David put his foot on the lathe pedal and pumped it a few times to get the flywheel turning. He wondered whether it had been difficult for Papaw to concentrate on the piece he was turning while pumping the pedal, like patting your head and rubbing your stomach, or like kissing a girl and you felt different from her and there were too many things to keep track of to enjoy it and then suddenly the two of you began to feel the same and thought disappeared and you were in a raft without a captain headed down rapids, faster and faster, toward a waterfall that never arrived. That happened to David, recently, with Kelly. To say he’d liked it didn’t capture the feeling. It had exalted him and overpowered him at the same time. And it had frightened him, because this thing beyond his control had persisted afterward and made him its prisoner. But not like Folsom Prison that Johnny Cash sang about or prisons in North Vietnam that Walter Cronkite reported on the evening news. Prisoner wasn’t the right word.
The barn had always been a mysterious place. When David was younger, they’d told him there was a bogeyman in the barn and he’d better stay away. Once David was old enough to know that bogeymen were made-up, Dad had explained the lie as careful parenting – tools in Papaw’s workshop were dangerous to children, so they didn’t want him wandering in there by himself. Yet even now, at sixteen, he stayed mostly in the front part of the barn as if he might need to dash out the door to escape.
Tobacco was curing in the rafters above. The fragrance was an exotic perfume, a siren song sung to the nose, a smell as thick as a body. The barn smelled of hay, too, though none was there. After his heart attack, Papaw had leased out his tobacco-growing to people with tractors, but the stall in the barn remained should the need for a mule ever arise again.
The stall reminded David of the story about Papaw courting Mamaw, back before World War I. Mamaw had been a sixteen-year-old girl and her family hadn’t liked Papaw because they didn’t think he was good enough for her. So one day, Papaw rode his horse over to her family’s place. Mamaw was out in the garden picking beans. Papaw literally swept her off her feet and onto the horse. She put her arms around him and they rode to Tennessee and got married. There was hell to pay when they returned to Kentucky, but Papaw didn’t care. He’d claimed a woman who wanted to be claimed by him. Right was right. Martha, David’s cousin, had told him the story, but he’d never given it much thought until now.
He looked out the opening of the barn’s door through the shining brightness at the empty path back to the house. What if Kelly suddenly appeared in Mamaw’s driveway? She had a driver’s license, though her parents wouldn’t let her drive two hours from Lexington to Wayne County. But what if, coincidentally, she had relatives in Wayne County, too, and her family had come down for a visit? But how would she know where Mamaw’s house was? It didn’t matter. Fantasy only requires the skimpiest plausibility. What mattered was not how you got there, but the fulfillment of desire waiting for you in the conjured rendezvous.
David imagined Kelly pulling into Mamaw’s driveway in her parents’ car, but she wouldn’t go into the house and no one would notice the strange car. Or she would park on the road because the driveway was full of cars from all the relatives. Yes, that was how it would be. And he would see her walking up the drive to the house. He would shout at her and she would look in his direction. Though it was a long distance, from the sound of his voice and what she could see, she’d recognize it was him. He would wave her to join him at the barn.
He would watch her walk toward him wearing shorts and a white button-up blouse, not her most casual attire because she was visiting relatives and had thought she would be meeting David’s family. But David didn’t want Kelly to meet his family. His cousins would study Kelly for a clue to secrets inside David that they could tease him about later. The aunts and uncles would embarrass him without meaning to and tell anecdotes about David when he was a child. David didn’t want Kelly to know that he’d ever been a child. So, Kelly, somehow knowing all this, would just walk past the family-infected house to the barn where David was waiting. She would be wanting his company – that was a given, because why else would she be in this fantasy? – and the thing both of them felt inside would be lit and burning. He imagined her pretty face coming into focus as she drew closer, her short blonde hair brushing her shoulders, and when she saw how he was looking at her, she would smile in a way different than the day-to-day smile she gave friends and family. She would give him a secret smile she reserved just for him. As she came even closer, he would involuntarily look at her breasts, involuntary in the sense of he shouldn’t but he couldn’t not, those two rounded mounds waving flags that commanded a salute at both ends of his abdomen. Last time they’d made out, he’d slid his hand across the right one, holding his breath, waiting for an objection. There’d been none. So he’d returned his hand and left it there, caressing. The memory was so vivid that he felt a bulge press uncomfortably against his jeans. Though he was alone in the barn where no one could notice, he decided he better think about something else.
There was a large rectangle of scrap plywood on the ground near the door, probably put there as a place to step when rainwater seeped in and muddied the dirt near the entrance. David brushed it off and sat, cross-legged, at ease with himself. Feeling at ease was a relatively new feeling, because over the past year he’d gone through some kind of crisis, disengaging from the totem of jocks and cheerleaders at school that used to be his friends. He’d become isolated to the point that he genuinely feared he was going crazy. He’d turned inward because there was nowhere else to turn. And he found he liked being inside himself. He didn’t know exactly what meditation was, but he’d read The Greening of America. He’d let his hair grow longer, as much as his parents would allow. His favorite subjects in school had changed from math and science to literature. He read books on psychology. And he’d begun to think that the war in Vietnam wasn’t really about keeping Vietnamese free.
David heard rustling above him and saw a barn swallow fly out into daylight. He wondered whether the swallow had a nest in this barn and was rearing a second brood. He wondered if male swallows swept female swallows off their feet and how they did it, whether they puffed their feathers out a certain way and how swallows knew the way to sing the wooing song.
His thoughts returned to Kelly. She liked to talk and liked that he listened. She talked about her friends, her parents, her sisters, bands she liked. When she had enough of talking, they would be silent together, like a creek that trickled to the spot where the water pools and becomes still. Except when Kelly was quiet, David also worried that she might be thinking she could do better than him.
“What are you doing?”
Martha, his cousin, was standing outside the door of the barn. She was a year or so older than him. David realized he’d been sitting on the plywood with his eyes shut and Martha had seen it. She must think he was crazy. When he didn’t answer her question, she smiled a little and said, “Can I come in?”
“Sure,” he said. She made as if she wanted to sit beside him on the plywood, so he scooted over to make a place for her.
“Sometimes it’s nice to get away from everything,” she said, settling down, cross-legged like him. “Sometimes it’s the only way you can think.”
He realized that Martha was supplying the answer to her question – what are you doing? – that he hadn’t given, acting as if it were perfectly natural to discover someone sitting on the ground in a barn with his eyes closed.
“They’re starting to cook supper,” she said, “and they sent me to look for you. But we don’t have to go back right away. It will be a while before it’s ready.”
“Okay.”
“They said, ‘where’s David, where’s David,’ and I told them you probably went down to the woods to meet a girl,” she said, smiling. She meant the woods behind the barn, David’s refuge. Martha paused a beat, smiling bigger. “Is that true? Did you come out here to meet a girl in the woods?”
She was still joking, so he laughed, but her joke was unnerving.
“Listen to how quiet it is in here,” she said. “You can’t hear anything.”
“It’s empty,” David said. “Papaw’s not here to fill it up.”
They both didn’t say anything, just letting David’s statement hang in the air.
“Think how empty the house is for Mamaw,” Martha said, looking through the barn door to the house. “We come down to visit every so often, but the rest of the time she’s by herself, sewing or whatever. Going to church on Wednesday and Sunday. She doesn’t have anyone to take care of anymore. She’s just living.”
David thought about the relationship between Papaw’s barn and Mamaw’s house. One without the other was just living. The house and the barn together were a farm.
“You should bring your girlfriend here sometime,” Martha said. “That is, if you have one.”
David didn’t know what to say. He couldn’t deny that he had a girlfriend but admitting the existence of something important that he could lose frightened him, so he didn’t say anything.
“Well,” Martha said, picking the conversation back up as if he’d carried his end of it, “just make sure any girlfriend you have appreciates you. You’re a handsome man. Any girl would give her eyeteeth to be with you.”
Martha had called him handsome. Martha had called him a man. He’d always just thought of her as his cousin but, technically, she was an official representative of the opposite sex. David didn’t know how to respond, so he didn’t. They sat some more. He felt Martha grow restless. Finally, she stood.
“I guess I’ll go back,” she said.
Suddenly, David realized that his cousin had just tended to him, like a cow tends a calf, or Mamaw had tended Papaw, and she’d done it below the radar, as if having done nothing at all. He wondered whether it was intuition, or love, or whether love and intuition were the same thing, or it was something magical women knew how to do. David wanted to tell her she was the best cousin in the world, but that would be weird to say out loud. Martha paused at the door and turned.
“What should I tell them at the house?”
David searched for words, and when he found them, he instantly knew they were the right words. They were Martha’s words.
“Tell them I went down to the woods to meet a girl.”
Martha laughed, and David felt like a man with money in his pocket.
*
Mike’s book, Arranging Deck Chairs on the Titanic, was published by Rabbit House Press and is available here.
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(Photo: Lew/ flickr.com/ CC BY-ND 2.0)
- Cousins by Mike Wilson - May 9, 2024