From

Minor Key

a novel, 2016

XXIX

A stillness came between us as a midnight flower pressing against its bud, eager to bloom when the moon is high enough, when it provides enough light. There was no more work done for the tiny house except the drawing up of plans and the circling of the broken tractor bed and in Vale’s case, the lighting of cigarettes against the dense cold, the red flare of his cigarette tip dancing in the steel grey of the sky. I went determined out to the woods and walked around amongst the leaves and found a whole, cold, dead tree limb and carried it myself, dragging it over the roots and stumps and vines of the woods through the clearing, over the field to the back door step and laid it down, sweat run down my arms and back.

            “For the waddle fence. To keep in the chickens,” I said, as Vale appeared in the doorway with Samuel in his arms.

            Vale set up a PA system in the hallway with two mighty speakers on legs and an equalizer board that connected to my laptop which he had found in a back storage room. The music that came through the speakers when the front door was thrown open threaded down the hill and drowned out the sound of the passing cars.

            In the morning Vale was choosing music at the computer when he looked at me and said nothing and Samuel was playing as usual, talking to us as usual, but our mouths were pressed thinly closed and the silence was like condensing lead in the stomach. It can never subside, lead; it remains always in the blood stream. The front door was wide open and the cars were moving down the road, but strangely silenced, with the music covering them.

            “Why don’t we do something today? Research for the farm or grants. Or take that tree out of the woods you chopped down finally?”

            “I don’t feel like it,” Vale said.

            “Well, we have to do something! The money will be all gone.”

            He shook his head. “It’s just not working.”

            “What’s not working?”

            “I don’t know.”

            I picked up Samuel and went into the kitchen and was putting yogurt in a bowl for him when I lowered down to the floor. The tiles were cold. I flexed my hands against them, and Samuel was startled. He tried to lift me up. But I could not be moved, I was crying.

            “Mama! Mama!” he cried.

            “Samuel, I’m sorry. I’m sorry I took you here. I’m sorry we lost everything…” I reached out and gripped him. He remained with me for a moment and I was squeezing him at his little shoulders, and I ran my hands down to his little hands, but he tore from me, through the house, out the front door.

            Vale was emerging from the bathroom when I ran past him.

            “Samuel! Samuel!”

            He was running alongside the house to the back, towards the barn.

            “Samuel!”

            He started screaming when I caught up with him and would not be quieted. Vale ran out, too, and took him from my arms and Samuel thrashed at him and he took him into the dark, cool shed and started up the tractor. He sat him between his legs at the tractor’s head and pressed his little hands to the wheel and churned the ignition. It rumbled to a start and he backed out of the shed and began circling the yard, began a slow circling of the yard as the sun was at its highest point in the sky, its elongated orange rays plain upon the dew-soaked grass and Vale’s eyes straight ahead and Samuel’s head nodding to the side, his eyes closing. Dying leaves sifted around them. I waved as Vale and Samuel rode past on the tractor and I went around front and sat down on the steps of the great, pillared front porch. The sun was directly before me, round and unperturbed, and below its perfect light the winter dark of the trees and the frozen ground, the cars on the road passing quickly, going too quickly.

XXX

Grey, slanted light drifted across the black piano top, through air made cold by the cracked open window. Vale pulled a cigarette from his mouth and inhaled. The red burning ember of the cigarette was the brightest light in the room.

            "Okay, so I'll play and then you sing in the key I'm playing. You'll be able to hear it," he said, and he put the cigarette back in his mouth and began to tune his guitar.

            "But I don't know anything about keys."

            "You'll hear it." He cleared his throat. "All right. What songs do you know?"

            "Oh, I don't know. I'm not good with lyrics."

            "Come on, nothing?"

            "Well, just from listening to you... some things."

            "Like what?"

            "Vale, I don't know. That Carter family song, the really simple one. Single girl."

            "All right."

            He set into playing and looked at me. The tempo was fast; he tapped his foot against the floor. "Anytime you want to come in."

            "You start me off."

            "No, you have to start, and I'll play in whatever key you sing."

            I shook my head, but he was still playing and nodding. Slowly I began—"Single girl, single girl, goes just where she please, oh... goes just where she please…"

            "There you go. Good girl..."

XXXI         

“I think we’re going to get sick here,” Vale said.

            “Why would you say that?”
            “I went downstairs to the basement and the oil heater is leaking. I can smell it coming through the vent. We shouldn’t use it anymore.”

            “But Vale, it’s getting cold!”

            “We’ll use the wood stove.”

            I sighed. "We have been meaning to try it."

            "I'll set it up, if any smoke seems to be leaking out anywhere in the house, we won't use it."

            “All right...”

We dismantled the electric, propane-fueled fireplace and together lifted the heavy iron wood stove we had gotten in town into the stone enclave and positioned the open chute to go up the chimney. Vale, the task enlivening him, went outside to gather shards of wood from the pile that had accumulated since he started chopping with his ax. He brought in a bounty in his arms and shoved this into the mouth of the wood stove.

            “Let’s see,” he said, and lit a match.

            The wood began crackling. Soon fire of red, licking flame darted in little flashes out the iron door.

            “I’m going to run upstairs and check the attic,” he said, dashing out of the room.

            Samuel and I waited before the wood stove.

            “You can’t touch that okay, Sammy? It’s very hot.”

            “Hot?” he asked.

            “Yes, hot.”

            “No touch?”

            “Don't touch.”

            Vale came back down. “I don’t see anything up there. Everything looks fine.”

            We went out to the lawn and below the waning full moon there was a thin stream of smoke curling from the chimney and the outside smelled thickly of fire and burning earth.

            “It’s working,” I said. “It’s going out the chimney.”

            Vale smiled wide in the dark.

            We gathered before the wood stove in draped, heavy clothing. We ate dinner there, on the couches. Vale poked crumbling embers with a stick. He went continuously outside to chop more wood and brought back handfuls and handfuls of small pieces and dropped them next to the stove.

            “I’m cold still,” I said.

            “Why isn’t it heating right?”

            “I don’t know, but it’s not filling the whole room.”

            “Yeah I know.”

            “Cold,” Samuel said, showing us a mock shiver.

            “Are you?” I asked, rubbing his arms.

            “Well I don’t want to turn the other heater back on. It’s making me feel ill and oppressed. It’s really old and it doesn’t work right.”

            “All right… “ I sighed.

            “What? This isn’t good enough?”

            “I like it… I only wish it would heat well so that even the walls were hot.”

            After Samuel fell asleep under the heavy comforter, I found Vale in his coat at the piano, a cigarette in his mouth.

            “You’re smoking a lot.”

            “I think it’s all right here. We have a home,” he said.

            “That makes its better?" I laughed and lowered my eyes. "Yes, we have a home.”

            He began to sing and I sat at a distance from him as he played with his eyes closed and the cigarette now dangling from the basin with its smoke that curled to the ceiling.

            All artistry had been lost in me, had been metered out in the daily upkeep of the wide, long space of the bottom of the house, in the vacant, quiet hours that had us wandering the halls and the sloping backyard. Vale did not write either, but he played the old songs he knew and he tried them on the piano.

            “What?” he said, pausing.

            “Nothing,” I said.

            “What’s bothering you?”

            “I don’t know, I’m lethargic maybe. This house is too big.”

            “We need more people to come here. We could have a commune.”

            “Maybe people would come… and help us turn it into a farm.”

            “Or a music festival.”

            "Yeah, but that would only happen once. Nothing we dream about ever gets done, and it’s all forgotten the next day.”

            Vale took a drag of his cigarette. “That’s how it always is.”

            “You always say things you have no intention of carrying out?”

            “Sure.”

            “Then what do you intend to do here?”

            “I don’t know. I just feel trapped.”

            “No…”

            “But it’s okay to feel trapped sometimes…”

            “How will we escape it?”

            “Who knows… can I play now?” He ashed the cigarette.

            I closed my eyes. “Yes.”