Promises Kept

It was a Tuesday evening when the wind stopped blowing. It hadn't stopped for nine straight days, scouring everything it touched with dark sand. For nine days, James had been stuffing wet rags under doors and into windowsills to keep the sand from penetrating. For nine days, his mother had been coughing in the back bedroom.

Finally, all at once, the wind stopped, like a clock that had been wound down. James went out onto the porch to see what remained of his land. He had expected the air to smell of dust, but it smelled clear and clean. Gripping the wooden handrail, he stepped down off the porch and looked up. He could see the stars again. Hanging in their animated form, glistening in the twilight.

"Well, I'll be," he said.

He hadn't seen stars like these since he was a boy in the Ozarks, before his father moved them west. Some of them blinked and some of them held steady. Some of them seemed not to be stars at all, but rather holes punched through the darkness of night to whatever stood behind them.

James had heard older men in town talk about a sky like this, the kind you got after a slow-moving storm front had finally passed – clearing the air, wringing it dry, making it pleasant – and perfect, for a night like this. But James thought such a sky was a thing he would never see. Not again. Not given the way things were now.

He stood there on the porch for a long time without moving. The cattle, or what was left of them, were quiet. The wheat in the south field, broken down to stubble, was quiet too. The wind had stripped the earth and there was no wheat left standing to make a rustle.

James looked from the barren field back to the stars above.

"I haven't ever been anywhere," he said to no one.

It came to him without cause, the way things you've been thinking about for a long time do. He had been to Denver once, with his father, to see about a loan that did not come. He had been to Amarillo for a funeral. He had been to the railhead at Boise City a hundred times, hauling what little there was to haul, and turning back the way he came. And that was the entirety of the world he had known in all his thirty-one years.

He understood that he could never actually reach a star. He could never touch them as his fingers grazed the dark sky above. It was fun to imagine though. But the reality was that no man ever could. It was impossible. The stars laid in a territory beyond reach, where there were no roads. Henry Ford himself could try to invent another automobile that could, but it still would not be able to cross the ruts between Earth and the stars.

James had been living his life as if going beyond the section lines of his family's property was the same as abandoning them. The Kansas wind had been blowing that lie since he was old enough to walk. And now the wind had quit, and he could see beyond the section line. He saw what was reachable and what was not. Suddenly, the difference between the two was manageable.

*****

Then his thoughts drifted to Thomas. Back in May, Thomas had come out from the bank in his good shoes, the ones he hadn't yet figured out were of no use on a farm. He had been gentle about the foreclosure, the way Thomas was always gentle about such a thing. He had brought a paper sack with two oranges in it that he set on the stoop like a man leaving an offering at a grave. Thomas had cleared his throat and asked James if he might walk the south fenceline with him for a bit.

They had walked a quarter-mile in nothing but the sound of the wind before Thomas spoke.

"I have a cousin in California."

"Do you?"

"Tulare. Picks oranges off the trees out there."

"Off the trees?"

"Yes. They grow on trees in California."

"I didn't know that."

Thomas had smiled, briefly and reached into his coat. "He sends letters. You want to hear a piece of one?"

"All right."

Thomas had unfolded the paper along creases that had been folded and unfolded many times. He had read it before. James could tell. He had read out the price of a bushel, then the weather, and then a paragraph James would remember the rest of his life.

At night the grove smelled so strong a man could taste it through the canvas of his tent, and that the smell would wake him thinking he was rich.

"He's not rich," Thomas had said, folding the paper back along its old creases, then stuffing it back into its envelope.

"I gathered, from the tent."

"Lives in a ditch."

"So you said."

"Could be worse."

"Could be here."

Thomas hadn’t laughed, but something in his face moved.

As they walked on, Thomas' shoes were greyed to the ankle by the dust in the fields. He had a wife and a job at the bank in Dodge City. The bank kept sending him out to porches like this one with foreclosure papers to deliver from Kansas City. He could never stay long.

At the gate Thomas had stopped with one hand on the post and his eyes on the road.

"There are better places to live."

"That so?"

"One isn’t required to stay where the earth has retaliated against him."

Thomas had turned then and looked James in the eye for the first time since they had left the porch. He held the look until James looked away.

"There are better places to live, Jim" Thomas had said again, quieter that time, as he bowed down into his automobile.

James hadn't answered. He had watched Thomas drive away through the brown haze of dust kicked up by the Ford pitching over the ruts, until the haze took him.

*****

Now it was October. The wind had quit, and the stars were out. James looked up again, and he could almost feel the warmth of Thomas standing next to him.

"I'm coming, Thomas," he said aloud.

There was no one to hear him.

James sat down on the porch step and let himself think the thing he had been refusing to think.

The land was finished. He had known it for a year, but simply refused to acknowledge it. The wheat had not made in three seasons. The cattle, once two-thousand head, were down to nine. Three of those were sick. His mother was sixty-four and sounded eighty. The neighbors to the east had loaded a truck in the spring and gone. The neighbors to the north in August, and the Hendersons across the section line were leaving in the morning. James had seen the lantern moving in their yard for two nights running.

He had walked over there yesterday at dusk. Earl Henderson had been roping a chest of drawers to the bed of the truck and had not stopped working when he saw James coming.

"Where ya goin’?” James had asked.

"West."

"How far?"

"As far as the truck'll carry us."

Earl had pulled the rope tight and tied it off. He had been a man who used to laugh at his own jokes before any of the rest of the table caught on. He was not laugh now.

"Jim," Earl had said, "you ought to load up too."

"I know it."

"Knowing it ain't the same. You need to give up on this land and leave."

James had walked back across the section line with that one in his ears.

To stay was to be the last lamp burning in but one more house the banks were foreclosing on.

To leave was… uncertain.

James didn't know what leaving was. That was the trouble. He had never left. He had never been anywhere. And it frightened him to think about what leaving would mean.

He looked up again at the stars and tried to picture the orange grove Thomas' cousin had described. He had never seen an orange tree. He had only ever eaten just two oranges in his life, both of them out of Thomas' paper sack back in May. He ate them, alone, while sitting on the porch steps. He could remember the way the citrus smelled as the juice stained his fingers trying to remove the peels. He remembered it more clearly than he could remember his own wedding, which had lasted all of eleven months before Mary went home in '32 to be with her people. She never came back.

Mary had said one thing to him the morning she left, as Jim stood there on the porch in his overalls.

"You're not here, Jim. You haven't been here the whole time."

He had thought back then that, she meant the farm work was keeping him out of the house too much. Now he understood she had meant their marriage. And he wasn’t sad for it. He had, in fact, been avoiding Mary. Farm chores had just been an excuse that facilitated it.

Even though he could not picture the grove, he could picture leaving. He could picture the truck loaded. He could picture his mother in the cab with a quilt over her knees. He could picture the road west out Dodge. He could picture the countryside changing under their wheels. First the same. Then less the same. Then not the same at all. Someplace greener. Someplace where the wind didn't blow.

He knew then, as he imagined the leaving, that he had already decided to leave. Whether he had decided sometime during the nine days of wind, or sometime in May while walking the fenceline with Thomas. The decision had been waiting for him the way the stars had been waiting behind the dust. It had needed only a quiet sky to come out.

He sat on the step until the cold began to gnaw on his gut. He tipped his head and looked up towards the sky and made himself a promise. His were the only promises he still trusted.

I am going to see what is out there.

The stars didn't answer. They never answered anyone.

*****

By dawn the truck was loaded. James turned the key. The engine caught on the first try, which he took for an answer.

He had put on his blue Sunday shirt, the one Thomas had once unbuttoned in the dark of a shed behind a church. His mother had watched him put it on without asking why he was wearing something so nice for the trip to California.

The street was empty when he pulled up at Thomas' house at 6:45a.m. The lamps in the parlor windows were out. He left the engine idling and walked up the path and knocked on the door.

Thomas opened the door in his shirt-sleeves.

"Jim! I…"

James grabbed him by the shirt, pulled him onto the porch, wrapped him in an embrace, and kissed him. He kissed him the way he had wanted to on every fence line and every gate for the past three years.

Thomas began to sob, and through his teared-up eyes he looked up to see James smiling back at him.

"Come with me, Tom," James said. "Come with me to California."

Thomas' hand came up to his face. He looked past James at the loaded truck.

"Jim, I…"

"After the harvest. That’s what you said. But there wasn't one. Not last year. Not this year. Not next year. There was never going to be one. But now it’s October, and you promised you’d go with me. Now. Let’s go."

Thomas closed his eyes. He pressed his forehead into James' chest, the way he had a hundred times before when they were alone in the dark.

"Give me ten minutes, Jim."

“Sure, Tom. Take as much time as you need, so long as we’re out of here.”

James went back to the truck. His mother opened her eyes and watched him.

Minutes later, Thomas came out with a suitcase and no coat. The lamp upstairs stayed dark.

“What do you think is out there for us, Jim?”

“It doesn’t matter. You and I are together now, and we will make it our own.”

Thomas climbed into the cab, sandwiching himself next to James, wiping tears away from his face. He looked to his right, to James’ elderly mother and reached out his hand.

“Good morning, Mrs. Whitmore. My name is Thomas. Thomas Brennan. Please call me Tom.”

Mrs. Whitmore, leaning against the door with her arm propping up her head, looked at Thomas’ outstretched hand, refusing to take it.

“And you can call me Mrs. Whitmore.”

James patted Thomas on the thigh, giving it a squeeze. “She’ll warm up to you, don’t worry.” He leaned down, kissing Thomas on the lips, allowing it to linger.

"Oh, Jimmy. Keep it in your pants,” his mother said, disrupting the moment.

“Shall we go?” James asked Thomas, and with a glance, asked his mother the same question.

“Yes,” Thomas said. “Let’s get going before I change my mind.”

“Hell ya, Jimmy!” Mrs. Whitmore exclaimed with a cough. “California, here we come!”