Hay Stack, July 19, 2011

I say “sit” but momentum grabs his shoulders and head over heels he disappears over the edge of the hay stack. Hold my breath but this time he groans, fuck. I am coming. Do not move. I am almost there. I butt myself down the bales like a slide. Come around stack. Tony is on his back, wedged in the corner. Blood on the floor. His knees are moving. His arms shift. Move your hands, let me see. Bald plate is scarlet with blood. It flows like a faucet. Clean cloth, where is a clean cloth. Towel in the tack room. I pull it out. Push it to the top of Tony’s bald head. Hold his leather gloved hand soaked with blood under my hand. Push. Push hard. I am running for the car. Border collies run against my heels. Open the hatch back, both dogs jump in. I am running to open the gates. My feet scratch against the gravel. I am running to grab my purse. Little yellow Focus to the barn door. Can you walk? Dizzy against me. Stagger to the car. I am running around the side of the car. I am driving. I am out to open the next gate and running to close it as soon as the Focus is through. I am running to the next gate and running to close it when the Focus is on the county road. Drive fast. Do not slow for curves. How are you. What is your social security number? Do you have a pen to write it down?

The border collies lick the blood off the back of his neck.

They put a collar on him. Tell him not to move. They ask him if we were fighting. If I pushed him. Why is he so skinny? His ribs show. I sign the papers. They say it doesn’t always hurt, a compression fracture of the atlas, just when you turn your neck: and then that’s all she wrote. Paralyzed. Don’t let him move they say to me now. CT scans will give us the bare boned truth.

Nurses, gray scrubs, are wheeling him off to radiology.

Then I am driving home to get the animals in before dark. I am leading them. Talking like this is nothing. Do not worry animals. Do not be nervous. Flow with me. The border collies run in front instead of behind. Border Collies know the truth. I give the other animals their grain. I leave the goat door open. The dogs get food in the kitchen. They both look at me with astonishment when I close them into the house. And then I am in second gear down the gravel driveway with all the gates wide open.

A broken neck. Paralyzed. Cross that bridge when we come to it I say in a phone message to somebody.

Tony is lying on the stretcher. The collar is off. He is covered with warm flannel blankets. No break he says.

The next day, Tony and I talk to the Mennonite tractor dealer. We tell him the old John Deere is not exactly what we are looking for. He says his father used to have one just like it. They have their place. We tell him about the accident. He tells us about almost getting crushed by a baler. God was talking to him he says. I watch his wife, her cap, white apron, the way her dress blows her across the parking lot. Sun so bright it sheers.

July 19, LaPush

This is a place to come with:

Six different dogs
Three husbands (6'2", 5'8", 5"9")
Pound dog's first adventure
Shadow of the forgotten tent centerpole
Kids sleeping under an orange rainfly
A new blue Harley and an old greeen Harley
Enough sun to swim once in thirty years
A Polish teacher
Bucket of mussels
Blue coat for morning rain
James Joyce, clouds march across the sky
Three grandsons (5, 3, 1)


I yell across the drum of the surf to my grandson: the waves will fill the entrance in, we have to run Okay?
And we do. I laugh and stumble. We beat the tide. But it is a shallow cave, still a cave, but kind of disappointing. You start right in digging for fossils, for signs. Clouds fasten against the ocean. In front of me, sea stacks, ancient islands. Waves come in the front door. Hiss on the sand. My glasses are spattered with rain. I look over the rim; everything is unclear.

July 18, Monday

I will look at my horoscope before CPR refresher today. I will sit in the hospital cafe and drink a latte.

Where are we now after the Ocean? Three days, thunder waves, dogs run free, reservation fireworks twenty four hours a day. It rains every morning in the rain forest.

But back Tony and I are storm clouds. We are trying to talk and Tony says life is about trying to achieve dreams. What are your dreams Tony? Tony doesn't know. My life is about connection. Now it is about connection with animals; I give up on people. I give up on Tony.

So much talk of loneliness. Loneliness is where we all live. Despair becomes destructive.

I see Tony coming home with the hay wagon full. I go to CPR.

July 2, 2011. My brother's here

Home from work, one in the morning. There is a sweep of stars in the sky. And even though I forgot my sweat shirt, there is not one shudder of cold struggling up out of the car to open the gate. Of course the air shifts and moves, it dallies and splays across me, but only cool. Park at the house, I walk past the window where Tony sleeps. He will not hear me. He never hears me. Half deaf and on his way to sevety. The dogs hold steady inside. Gravel crunches as I walk past the white pickup dwarfed under the white camper. My brother will have his hearing aides out but he will hear me. My family sleeps light and he wrestles with the ghost of his recently dead wife. That portal is still open for him with tentacles passing back and forth like the flow of seaweed.
The barn is lit up. I can see the cat from here. She moves like a squat shadow against the ground. Drop and roll. I let myself in through the empty stall and Little-Miss-Rue, girl kitty, meets me at the door, escorts me to the tack room. The goats are silent. Three does and two males. I let myself out the outside tack room door to find my pee bucket and then I am done for this night. Little-Miss-Rue watches as I pull myself up the loft bed ladder and then she leaves by way of the cat door. We are three aging humans, the men like two solitary bulls and the one old woman clustered with the other animals in the barn. Sleep springs over me in my high up bed.