Lamb

They set up a dinner camp on the river and the girl opened two cans of sliced potatoes and a can of corned beef hash. It hissed and snapped in the hot metal pan, and Lamb watched the girl turn it until all the pan was greased.

“Watch the heat,” he said.

“I am.”

“Not too high.”

“I know.”

“Here. Move it here.”

“I can do it.”

They sat hip to hip in the dirt, the scrappy river trees hunching over them.

“You’re turning into a fine little camping woman.”

“Thanks.”

“Ready for eggs?” He handed them to her, one at a time. “Don’t break those yolks.”

“I won’t.”

He sat very still to record the moment in his blood, to fill up his lungs, drink up the cold air and the smell of water and melting snow. Beside him the lines of her hands and skinny arms moving skillfully in the twilight.

“Those are our last eggs.”

“I know.”

“Next time,” he said, “it’ll be potatoes, fried eggs, and fresh trout.”

“When will that be?”

“Your eighteenth birthday.”

“Deal.”

“But maybe you won’t want to leave your life to come and see me. I’ll be really, really old. What if I’m dying in a small, stale hospital room all alone?”

“I’ll sneak you out.”

They ate with forks, huffing the eggs and hash around in their mouths and lifting their chins and laughing at each other. Balancing the hash and a bit of yellow-soaked egg in each bite. Competing between them for the perfect forkful. By the time they’d finished their hands were sticky and the mess kits gritty with dirt and blackened by fire. The girl had her legs and feet tucked beneath her in the grass. He patted her little belly.

“All those boys are going to be crowding you when you get back and they see how you’ve changed.” He put the tin plates and cups inside the metal pan and fitted all the mess kit together and tightened the red canvas strap. The sky was luminous behind his head. “I don’t think I could stand seeing you in Chicago again, Tom. You’ll lose interest in your old friend and I couldn’t bear that. I don’t think I could stand even being in the same city as you. If you know what I mean.”

Tommie lay back and looked up at cold white stars caught up in the tree branches, corn-colored leaves caught up in her hair, her white teeth blue in the new dark, while he set everything in his pack and carried river water in his hands to the fire to put it out. When they were back at the cabin he took a pen and piece of paper from the glove compartment of the truck and leaned over the hood. She watched him write. “Forget I’m doing this, okay?” Then he walked her, holding her hand, down among the rotted fence posts. “Watch your feet. We’ll just be a minute.” He took her hand and put it on the jagged splintered top of a fence post as if she were blind. “Feel that? Memorize that. It’s the fourteenth one from the house. Fourteenth fence post on the fourteenth day. Can you remember that?”

“Why?”

“I’m going to leave this fence post up, right? No matter how rotted it gets. No matter how much home improvement happens around it. The fourteenth fencepost will always stand here for you.” He drove the tiny folded piece of paper deep into the split wood of the post. “Turn around,” he said. “Turn around and look at our little house. And the waving grass, and the silver moon. You see? It’s ours, right?” He put his finger beneath her chin and turned her head up to his. “I will it to you, Tommie. It’s yours. It is maybe more yours than it was ever mine. You’ll come back here after I’m gone, won’t you? And move right in. I’ll have written you letters. I’ll write you half a dozen letters every day for the rest of my life, and I’ll hide them everywhere. In the mugs and in old socks. You’ll have to go through everything and piece them all together in a line. You can hang each one with a clothespin out in the sun and they’ll tell the story of my love for you. If you have a husband, you’ll have to leave him behind until you’ve sorted through it all, right? All these messages from me. Messages from the dead.”

“I don’t want to go back.”

“Ssh. Feel that?” He pressed his thumb between her breasts. “That pressure right there? That’s the world calling you.” He picked her up like a child, up on his hip, and carried her to the bottom bunk. She breathed into the cloth of his shirt. He knew she was picturing his love notes out on a clothesline in the bright wind. He knew she was picturing him dead.