Blinking the chafe from dry eyes, his head skewed sideways in the tight space between the goats and the stall wall, Harris’s vision snared on a shaft of dull morning sky spilling up the side of the barn wall. Fifty-two years old and still hiding out in the barn. Harris chuckled at his childish behavior, his eyes snagging again on the triangulated gray light drifting through the dust. Sitting up slowly, he refused to acknowledge the pain and stiffness of the long night on the cold hay-covered ground. Harris raised his hands to form a rectangle with his thumbs and first fingers, framing the cascade of now milky dawn flowing from the loft. Absently he rubbed the calloused ridge of his thumb, and thought of Maureen. His breathing slowed. The night spent out of the house was one night for which he would not have to plot a course of reason or answer to anyone; one night to claim firmly as his own.
“Where’s Dad?” Rebecca, undulating on the cracked leather of the once-red bar stool, popped a frosted shredded wheat in her mouth. Her mother Ruth, forever with a dishrag in her wrinkled hand, forever wiping, answered quietly, “Home,” then without meeting her oldest daughter’s gaze, “in the barn.”
Rebecca swung off the stool and headed out the door, thinking nothing unusual of her father’s absence. He was always gone, and, following her mother’s lead, she perceived a night in the barn as really a night at home. He was a farmer, after all, and small farms were hard-pressed to provide a living any more, let alone for a family of five. Her dad’s crops were rare, an unusual salad green that he sold along with his tender goat meat and rich goat milk, each highly perishable, and therefore, very valuable. Harris traveled far and wide with his niche products, selling to the high-end restaurants and rich families over a 500-mile radius. It had been Ruth’s idea, to build up a herd of goats that kept the meat and milk coming year round.
Like so many men who work with their hands, Harris did not speak his emotions; rather he showed the girls from a young age the cruelty and beauty of farm life through his actions. He was tender with the goats, speaking to them softly, and always, the moment of silence with his eyes solemnly cast downward, before he sent the bullet from his .38 into its brain.
Once the harvest was packed into the bed of his pickup truck, Harris would take the goods on the road. He would return many days, sometimes weeks later, occasionally with positive sales, more typically with dismal stories of spoiled food and customers not buying. There simply wasn’t time to be home much. Rebecca knew these aspects of farm life as well as she knew her name and address; she had adjusted to her dad’s frequent absences just as the insides of her muck boots had formed to the high arch of her foot. It would have felt strange to have him around him all the time. It would have been harder.
Sliding the barn door open wide, he watched his oldest daughter with some remorse maneuver her small Honda around the potholes and puddles in the long drive. Heading back to her dorm room after the weekend, no doubt. Harris saw Ruth’s bowed head through the kitchen window: he could picture her stooped shoulders, arms immersed in the too-hot water that caused her hands to shrivel and crack, hands he had no desire to hold any longer, the thought of her posture bringing up a sour taste in the back of his mouth. How had she dared to question him about his sales, about the income?
Thinking of Ruth’s questions of the night before, Harris was suddenly angry again. Her voice so shrill in his memory, “How could the sales be so low? Where is all the inventory?” like a knife scraping a dish. His mind quickly sifted through the answers he had given her, seeking out any detail that could have given something away. She had spit her words at him: “You mean to tell me you just threw away the bulk of the harvest?!” The hiding and evasion he had lived with so long put him immediately on the defensive, perhaps overly so, his nerves frayed from existing in a continual quiet state of anxiety for which he blamed Ruth. If not for her, there would be no need to hide the truth. If not for Ruth, he could have one complete life, instead of two splintered ones. It was Ruth’s fault, because Ruth had been there from the beginning.
Shaking the barn dust from him, Harris walked toward the house. Ruth stood motionless at the sink, the dishrag in her hands. He moved past her without a word, as a drop sent ripples across the surface of the dull gray water. Harris retrieved his overnight bag, his wallet, his nice jacket for sales calls. He loaded the meat and milk from the barn into the coolers in the truck bed and packed them with the dry ice. He drove away without a backward glance, like so many times before, and, Ruth thought, so many yet to come.
They had been childhood friends, then sweethearts, Ruth choreographing the steps that eventually lead to their marriage and children. Harris hadn’t known a thing about how to have a girlfriend, was more interested in stealing away in the afternoons with a sketch pad and piece of coal to try to capture something real, something that he could feel. Ruth hadn’t known about his art; no one had. A farmer’s son doesn’t spend time drawing the things he grows to kill or eat, so he kept it hidden, and as Ruth led him through the steps of courtship—kissing him first, placing his hand on her breast months later, taking his class ring off his hand and putting it on her chain, telling him they were to be engaged and which ring to buy—she slowly took up so much of his time that he had to leave those stolen afternoons drawing in the barn behind. Harris would nod vacantly in bewilderment when people told him how lucky he was.
There were fleeting moments of joy, even elation, particularly with Rebecca’s birth, the first time she stared with cloudy newborn eyes into her daddy’s face. Once when Rebecca was just days old, Ruth had fallen asleep holding the baby, the two of them motionless in the rocking chair. Harris had quietly sketched them on the back of a utility bill, while the autumn leaves whirled outside. With the next two daughters, the demands of daily life piled one on top of the other, and Harris blamed Ruth for every ounce of lost joy, lost space, lost freedom. He knew if he just waited long enough, something would change for him.
He was farther west than he usually traveled, the moist and green spring foliage beckoning like a witch’s spell to keep traveling down those wet back roads. Harris could sense a change in the air, and as he neared a town, he followed the curving boulevard past a flapping vinyl sign announcing an art festival for the little burg. Once there, he was able to sell most of his goods to several local vendors within a matter of hours. Because he rarely brought checks back to Ruth, he stopped at the local bank to cash them, and as he crossed the parking lot in a sudden downpour with the fat bankroll in the pocket of his worn blue jeans, Harris felt light, even youthful.
Then he saw it: the image of a lovely woman in a car appeared before him. Maureen, though he didn’t know her name yet, in the parking lot with the small boy beside her in the seat of the old sedan, the boy’s face and hands sticky with ice cream. Their car’s windows were down, as the rain came harder. The two were laughing, happy, though they must have been soaked.
Maybe it was the gray day, or the way the windshield outlined the scene within, or the fact that Harris was far enough away from Ruth and the day-to-day grind to see the world around him clearly. Maureen, laughing. Maureen, heaving herself out of the sedan, revealing her swollen belly. To Harris, he had been given a gift of pure beauty, of art; a drawing having come to life. Her hair curled like the tendrils of a fiddlehead fern. The boy’s face as he looked up at her, more reverent and natural than any foal as it suckled from its mother. Harris simply stopped walking, just as the shower ended, and the sun shone again. Maureen turned toward him. He knew in his heart he couldn’t let this piece of real life escape. He smiled at her, held out his hand. And that was when life began for Harris.
Eight years later and Harris imagined that the boy, his son by all accounts, now looked at Harris the way he had looked at his mother that rainy day. Maureen admired Harris’s every move, every thought, every decision, and through her example taught the boys to respect and appreciate him as well. He had walked into their lives seven months after the boys’ biological father had walked out.
Harris shakes his head, smiling at how different Maureen’s version of the story of their meeting was: The car was so old, the windows had to be cajoled, one hand balancing the glass while the other slowly revolved the handle, careful to keep the glass from slipping off its track inside the door. That day, Maureen claims she had been holding back tears of frustration that her son had rolled down both windows, that they wouldn’t go up again, and that she had had to leave him, just a small boy at the time, in the car in the first place so she could try to talk some sense into a bank that would charge so much in overdraft fees. She had only written one little bad check, but it was the overdraft fees that had caused all the problems with the account.
She had left the boy in the car with an ice cream cone as company and strict instructions to stay put. Maureen proudly recalled that even then, her son had known how to take care of himself: he had rolled down the windows to try to wash the ice cream off his little hands while she had been in the bank. He had explained to her that the rain wasn’t washing it off very well on his side of the car, so he had rolled down the window on the driver’s side to try it from there. Maureen told Harris that she was closer to crying than to laughing that day, but she says it so playfully, he doesn’t really believe her. She was, in his eyes, always such a happy, carefree woman. All the more reason why he had been so perplexed at her tears the last time he had kissed her goodbye, looking at him so closely, as if she could see inside his mind. “You would tell me if something had changed, wouldn’t you Harris? You would, wouldn’t you?” He had chuckled, backing away, assuring her that everything was okay, that she could trust him, that he was an honest man.
Harris had to admit though, that as the years had gone by, he had grown increasingly anxious about Ruth “finding out”—finding out what, he never named, never articulated to himself, for in his mind he was the victim, the person wronged by the other’s choices. He was an honest man, dammit, and he took great pride in never actually telling a lie. He evaded, hid the truth, or convinced himself of complex justifications for his absences, but he never falsified any facts. Sure, sometimes he would exaggerate, or omit certain details, but everyone did, and even the good Lord understood that.
Harris knew he was good to the boys, even though they weren’t very handy and didn’t like to get dirty. He knew they were better off with him in their lives. He was good to Maureen, never yelling at her for the messy house or how much they ate out at restaurants. And he never considered leaving Ruth. Deep down, he always hoped she would leave him, set him free, but because he was a good husband, a good father, he stubbornly kept his commitment. The fact that she wouldn’t leave him was more evidence that he was the one wronged. He knew that Ruth stayed with him to punish him, to try to get him to mess up and say the wrong thing. Let something slip. The girls had grown up, moved out, one of them married. Ruth kept the accounts in order, and the supplies on hand. She paid the bills with the money he brought her and from her crafts and piano lessons. She tended the goats while he was away. The house was always neat, the laundry always done. She did this all to make him feel guilty, and as the years passed, Harris knew this too would have to change. A man could not be expected to live with a woman like that.
And now Maureen had started asking questions. He was startled to realize that he felt more trapped now, than before he had met Maureen. Maureen who was going to be his new beginning.
It was along a lonesome stretch of two-lane highway, a 55-mph tract of nothing but cornfields when Harris’s life changed again. Enormous white clouds raced across the ocean blue sky, sending his thoughts whirling and spinning as he drove toward home. Maureen’s laugh, her slow smile tumbled in his mind with images of the farm, his other home, with Ruth, and the work he could never quite catch up with. From far away an unfamiliar bleating made its way into his consciousness, until it became so loud he thought fleetingly a herd of goats was bearing down on him. Spotting the racing shadows on the hood of his car, Harris realized it was a flock of geese flying directly perpendicular to his path, right over his truck, so that he could only see them out the side window, a line of silhouettes moving across the sky. Cracking the window, the honking of the birds rushed into the cab, deafening his thoughts.
Harris pulled off the road and stepped from the truck, craning his neck to face straight up at the dozens upon dozens of geese, flapping their wings in formation, stretching to minute specks in the distance, as far as he could see. Flying north. North. Turning, Harris’s heart stopped, much like the first time he had seen Maureen, when he witnessed the line of geese still coming—hundreds of them, he realized—flying toward him, above him, oblivious to him, marching through the air on their flight back home, back from where they had fled to escape the cold.
He got back in his truck to find two voice mails, the ringing of the phone having been drowned out by the geese. Harris sat in the truck, listening until the last of the honking had faded into the distance, and the sun had set. The echoes of the geese rattled onward in his mind, as he turned the key, intent on flying away, too.
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Lisa Thorne is a writer and photographer who loves snowshoeing and airplane camping. She lives in Michigan with her partner, four cats, two dogs, and one snake.
© 2024, Lisa Thorne
Halfway Down the Stairs 