SHORT SHORT OF THE DAY

A Bluer Sky

             The sky was blue and large and filled with promise on the day William woke amidst the ticklish crabgrass of Anderson’s field, half a mile between the Lutheran church and the small farmhouse where he lived with his parents.  He rubbed his face and eyes and felt the damp in the seat of his pants from the dewy morning earth and then turned and saw Brenda Sue’s still and shapely body not two feet away, where she lay on her side, facing away from him.  He heard the harsh laugh of a crow and felt an insect circling his ankle.

            “Hey Bren,” he said, softly.

            Instead of simply rolling off her side toward him, she raised her upper body and peered back at him beneath her armpit. 

            “Come here,” he said.

            She withdraw her eye from the self-made peephole and then did roll over until her body came right up against his.  He slid his hand up the back of her loose blouse and the feel of her bare back drove away any coherent or intelligent thoughts he may have had.

            The sun rose.

            Later, in William’s truck, they held hands until they reached Duck’s Diner on Main, where they shared a breakfast of eggs, bacon and grits.  Each had a small plastic cup of orange juice and each used the diner’s restroom before they got back in the truck.

            Brenda Sue’s world had opened up that summer in a way she’d hoped it would but had never really expected.  The sky was bluer, the clouds whiter, the blacktop blacker, and her parents and their prohibitions harsher than ever before.  A voice spoke out of the heavens directly to her and it was more imperative than any voice that issued from the pulpit on Sunday.  This was the voice she would obey because it came not only from the heavens but from inside her as well.

            William had expected nothing much from his summer.  He’d been working on the farm with his father for as long as he could remember and now that he made it through high school, he’d expected more of the same but without the social opportunities that came along with attending school.  There would be no more school and he was happy for that.  But there was a sadness too that bit at the edge of a longing he spoke of to no one and rarely acknowledged even to himself.  He met Brenda Sue at the Fourth of July celebration at Jefferson Park and his entire life began changing after that.  He was more quiet and thoughtful over breakfast than before, but no one noticed.  He walked taller and stood prouder than ever before, but no one noticed that either.  He smiled more often, and at times when in the past he would have merely maintained the same old grave and stoic expression.  No one really noticed.

            William’s mother and father, like their parents before them, were farm people.  They said it themselves fairly often by way of explanation or extenuation.  Simple folk, modest and unassuming.  When a crop matured, they harvested it.  When a cow came to term, they calved it.  When a child misbehaved, they slapped it.  And if a horse broke its legs, they shot it. 

            William’s father was named William, and he called his son Junior.  William had been called Junior by his father for so long that he had never thought to question it, and in fact, scarcely even noticed.  William’s mother called her son Will.  He was their only child and they loved him quite as much as most only children are loved by their parents.  He had worked on the farm alongside his father ever since he could walk.  There had always been a dog on the farm, and the dog’s name was always Fido.  When one dog died or disappeared, another always showed up soon after, and they would feed it and call it Fido.

            When William’s truck rolled up late that Sunday afternoon right around mealtime and William brought Brenda Sue inside the house and introduced her to his parents, they smiled and shook her hand and insisted she join them for dinner.  This, in spite of the fact—or maybe because of it—that William had not come home all night.  They sat down at the table across from William’s parents and ate together with little conversation beyond compliments on the meal.  With Brenda Sue beside him, William sat at table and ate in a way that was different, and what’s more, different in a way his parents noticed.  And when William’s father told William to “Please pass the gravy, Junior,” Brenda Sue looked up, all sweet and innocent, and asked,  “Why do you call him that?”

            And that was the moment when everything changed.

 

 

D.E. Sievers