ARTIE ANN BATES | WIDOW’S BREATH

WIDOW’S BREATH

You’re not the first person to die on this farm. I expect you won’t be the last. I regret that I didn’t talk you out of cutting that damn tree in the first place. I wasn’t here when you cut it down or when you sawed up the trunk and branches.

It’s my own fault, ‘cause it’s my job to take care of people, keep them alive, but I foolishly misunderstood the Universe’s signals. Let my guard down, got distracted, and snap—you were gone. What’s weird, I would have sworn we were on the brink of something great. I saw adventure in our future, travel, new things, but now I squat on a rafter over the kitchen inhaling dust, sharing space with dead wasp husks, my breath as dry as your hands were in the coffin. Is this supposed to be our grand adventure? Or am I still missing something?

I never understood people like you. How can someone be happy all the time? I understand depression, especially now, but what about of all those others who died ahead of you and me on this farm? They died before we were born, before we married. Long before we moved up here to this old house in the head of nowhere to hear knocking on the walls, having the same thought at the same time, saying words together. My parents gave it to us because no one else in the family wanted it. Why would you want to live in the head of Elk Creek? Nothing up there. It’s creepy. But you and I liked creepy. This place released us to be curious.

I hunch on this rafter, sweet memories of us, our last Skype session that Sunday evening before fateful Monday, you shirtless at your desk, running fingers through tousled hair, planning your visit to the military hospital base where I worked in Germany. I saw tragedy all day with returning soldiers, but a trauma surgeon ought to know when her own man is in danger. Two weeks to our 30th anniversary and instead came this news with cracked words that set different tracks in motion. We got switched like wrecked trains; our metal wrenched jagged.

When I got your call in Europe, six time zones, four thousand miles away from home, I felt the shiver from a freeze where the sun and stars go dark, and the Earth stopped. I’d get that feeling hearing the choppers come from the field, but this was miles deeper. The solar system turned off kilter in our bodies. My hands shook but had to get home, get to you, book a flight but my fingers kept missing laptop keys, had to type over, erase, type again. Get a ride to the train station. The airport. Why was I so far away? Why had I volunteered to fix others’ brokenness when I couldn’t fix this? But, if I’d been home when it happened, would I have wished I were in Europe, or at the grocery? Is it okay to be anywhere hearing of death?

I refused to believe it. You, bigger than life, defied death a million times before. More lives than a hundred cats. Worked on steep, third-story roofs, walked high scaffolding on painting jobs, drove fast and wild like fighting fires, caught snakes with your bare hands and rehomed them away from busy roads. Played smash-mouth soccer and paid for it when some burly dude took revenge, fractured your cheekbone. Played hide and seek with the kids and climbed out on this rafter, slipped, and broke your arm. “Darn, can’t even say it was from work,” you laughed, holding your cast. You chased cows and calves, running them down for vaccinations in the corral. Rode motorcycles and scaled trees. Teased me over my accent, like a perpetual kid in adult skin. A gift from God.

The coffin. Funeral. Then I had to walk away from your body. Cremation. You in a box, powdered atoms, calcium, and iron when you should have had a pulse, held my hand, kissed my hair. Your spirit out there somewhere, mine dragging back here. Had to let go of each other’s hand, shake off our branch into the rushing water. I get that we can’t return to where we’ve been all these years, but my breath won’t go below my throat, lungs cramp for air but none comes because my breath went with you.

Truth? I scooted out from the upstairs bedroom window, tied the rope around this rafter above the kitchen. It’s wide enough I can perch like a cardinal, balance with one hand still on the windowsill, my toes hooked claw-

like over the edges. The square knot you taught me: the more it’s pulled, the tighter it gets. Looped it over my head like Jesus’ crown of thorns, down over my chin, scratchy on my neck. If I do this, will it deliver me to you? I’ve heard people say that the rope is painless, compared to other means. That it gives peace, but what if it blocks us apart? Will self-death work like any other death, bringing us together in the afterlife? Or the opposite, keep us apart, eternal punishment? I don’t want that river, that vicious wash from the dark that humans barely navigate, but we did, somehow, from even before birth.

I mean, if there’s an afterlife, wasn’t there a forelife, where we whizzed past Earth in other star-filled journeys? I see that in you, because of your spirit. Nothing stopped you. In fact, I don’t even like to say you “died” because it undercuts your strength, so I say, “He was killed.” The unstoppable doesn’t die. When people told you no, you did it anyway. Back in the 90s, you saved an American Indian rock shelter from strip mining. The coal company had the permit, landowner wanted a cattle watering hole, but you leaned into it, worked with the lawyer, and saved it. The odds were a zillion to one. Wonder if any of those first people died here, too, long ago? They lived here for thousands of years, and you found an arrowhead behind our cabin. Their spirits didn’t just go poof, either.

Grandpa Dave died in 1925, but I don’t know which room he was in or if he was outside working. It was January 21, might have had flu or pneumonia, or tripped over a rock out gathering firewood. Had a heart attack? That was back when a wake was in the house. He was in a coffin made by his sons Joe, Willie, Jesse, and Floyd. They set the coffin across two chairs in the bedroom. Grandchildren had to sit up, let the adults sleep. Disrespectful to leave a corpse.

Around midnight, the coffin’s upper end raised up. Grandpa was stiff by then, so his head stuck out like a turkey. The youngins shrieked, thinking he rose from the dead, then saw the old cat had jumped on the lower end. On the day they took Grandpa to be buried, Granny didn’t go. As the wagon creaked heavy with his coffin, easing downcreek to the graveyard, Granny

swept the front porch. Her nerves might have been bad, and grief twists things. Maybe felt like he should have tried harder to stay alive. Might have found herself in a second childhood, so why not sweep? Maybe relieved his suffering was over.

She kept all the dead babies’ clothes upstairs in the spare room. A table with baby gowns, hand-crocheted lace around the bottom, for newborns, others for toddlers, dingy muslin, dark wool, coarse and scratchy. Smelled musty but the youngins played there, put them on shuck dolls, held funerals. Then Granny died in June somewhere in this house, eighty-six years old. Might have been her Dixon temper.

There was a murder here, in the 1950s. Men on the front porch playing cards, guzzling liquor, leaning against the porch posts in straight-back chairs, slurred speech, throwing down bets till somebody got wind of cheating. Jumped up in each other’s face, staggering, then a fist cracked Jim Butcher’s chin. Backwards he fell, six-foot-four frame reeling on the porch edge like it was a high wire. As he fell, tried to grab a post; they reached for him but grabbed slow-motion air. On the way down, Jim hit his head on a metal pole. The sheriff didn’t come. Nobody went to prison. What did Jim’s ghost think? Does he come back, hold a grudge, get revenge? Is he one of the ones rattling around the upstairs room with the dead baby clothes? He died outside; does he stay out there, make me think it’s the night wind down the holler? Or a possum scratching?

People visited this old house, nostalgic, back for a family reunion or their school gathering, and they’d drive up the holler for old time’s sake. They’d amble around outside, tell us their memories of a tire swing there, a corn patch on that mountain, a square dance inside, but somebody always said, “Did you know a man was murdered in this house? Jim Butcher.” Yeah, yeah, heard it enough times. But they never said did we know that Grandpa and Granny Back died here, or the youngsters with diphtheria. Does a murdered soul stay a ghost, whereas elderly folks of natural causes go to rest? What about self-inflicted death? No one ever said there was a suicide up here, so

would I be the first to die that way? You weren’t murdered or elderly, and you sure didn’t give up voluntarily.

Isn’t that why God invented religion, so we get answers? If good: heaven; if bad: hell, but without you, life is hell. So, I hang on too tight, keep us in limbo. They say you’re in a better place, but what if you’re suffering like I am? Who’s come back to tell?

I’ve waited by the phone these three months, in case you call, but how silly is that? You aren’t going to contact me by phone. That was when we were both alive; now, it will be a different way: a breeze on my cheek, a flutter at the corner of the house, a coincidence that only you and I know, our secret code. No one will believe it, so why tell?

Truth is, when that trapped sapling bashed you, released at the speed of sound, its velocity into your chest, its force transferred and overpowering your heart rhythm, it delivered you to a place I can’t go. Are you in the woods behind our house, or under the floor, or in the attic with these other spirits? As an angel, do you float in the wind, clear a path for what’s left of my halfalive-half-dead-half-human shell? In my dreams, you’re elusive, can’t touch. You’re the high-pitched sounds the dogs hear, sharp eye of the hawk, the mystics’ sixth sense. My head can’t perceive you, but my heart does. It’s the depression I have that you never did, like the room with the dead baby clothes: alone, clueless, and sad. A sign from you, can you spare one? Come and meet, because I don’t know if I can stay, not knowing where you are. Don’t know how to do this dangerous kind of suffering. Release: the rope is so tempting. Do I suffer in the hope of sharing tiny moments with you, or go now and risk never seeing you again?

We orbit Earth’s icy dust, pass through at the speed of love. You gave me breath, and now you must teach me to wait. I’d wait forever and leave these wasp husks behind.

Maybe I’ll sweep. Push snow off the porch, no matter what the spirits think. I breathe, unsure of what’s next, but willing.

Artie Ann Bates is a writer and physician, and has published a children’s picture book, Ragsale, as well as essays in the anthologies Blood Root: Reflections on Place by Appalachian Women Writers and Listen Here: Women Writing in Appalachia. She is a socially conscious nature lover, currently working to limit mass incarceration in east Kentucky.