The Delta’s Girl

For B

             Barbara Jane Hillis leaned forward and rested her chin on her arms. This gave her a steady view of the endless cotton fields in front of her. She stared across the rows carved into the flat land and bounced a twig held between her teeth up and down several times. Then she removed the stick and turned her head, holding her long auburn hair to one side so it didn’t cover her face. “Well,” she said. “What do you think?”

            David Kearny glanced between his legs to see if the grass was staining his trousers. “About what?” he asked.

            “The Delta. It’s great isn’t it?” She reached into a shirt pocket and produced a barrette that she opened with her teeth. She slipped it into her hair on the side facing David. This exposed her face and with it that expectant freshness he found so unnerving. An ancient cowboy hat covered the top of her head.  She locked her eyes so as to trap him into the truth.

            He shrugged. “It’s okay.”

            “Just okay?”

            “I’ve lived too long by the ocean, I suppose,” he said. “I guess I miss the smell of salt air in the morning.”

            “Makes things rust. That’s what salt air does.” Her eyes bored deeper into him. “This air makes things grow.”

            He shrugged again.

            “Look here,” she said, twirling around so she faced him on all fours. Then she pointed at the ground between his legs.

            He obeyed without thinking and looked at the patch of grass between them. He looked up at her face, lopsided now with one side of her hair nearly touching the ground while the other remained in place, held by the barrette.

            “What’s this, do you think?” she asked, spreading a group of longer blades of grass to reveal a single, frail, green–topped stalk quivering in the spring breeze.

            “I have no idea,” he said.

            “It be Lespedeza,” she said laughing. “Everybody knows that.” She let the grass cover it again. “My granddaddy always said you had to spread Lespedeza seed on the snow for it to put up right in the spring. Bet you can’t do that by the ocean.”

            She turned back to a seated position on the warm ground and looked across the new-plowed field again. He had the impression that she was finished talking for the moment.

            He studied the soft curve of her back contrasted against the long straight furrows. The silence unnerved him so he said, “It’s okay here.” She didn’t respond so he added. “I guess next to the sea, I like the mountains best.”

            She turned and looked at him the way a teacher would look at a student who had failed to solve the easiest problem of the day. “That’s just it,” she announced as if announcing the solution.

            “What’s what?” he said.

            She smiled and the smile completely unmanned him, a trick he had learned to dread.

            “You see, here you have to create your own mountains.”

            He fought for time. “Your own mountains?”

            “Yes,” she said and her eagerness and certitude kept him unbalanced. “That way, you don’t suffer constraint.”

            “Constraint?”

            “Yes, constraint. Your mountains can be as big as you want or as small. They can be covered with snow or even have a giant cherry on top like that one there.” She pointed to a thunderhead on the horizon, topped by a round black cloud that did indeed seem to radiate a red hue in the late afternoon sky.

            He laid his arms across his legs and rested his chin on them the way she had done. They both watched the fields spread out before them like charts drawn to illustrate perspective.

            “How do they plow them so straight?” he asked.

            “They have a marker on an arm of the tractor that they use to measure from the last row plowed,” she said. “Like this land itself―each generation is built upon the values of the last.” She paused and then added, “Daddy’s been doing it so long, though, he really doesn’t need a marker.”

            He looked back at the fields and he felt a breeze that swept him forward for a fraction of a second—not really long enough to register fully— and pulled him into those long rows and he saw the tedium of, year after year, coaxing life from this fecund land. Her voice jerked him back the way a young calf is jerked as he comes to the end of the roper’s lariat.

            “It would be truly sad, wouldn’t it?”

            He focused on her and processed what he thought he heard her say.

            “Sad?” he said.

            “It would be so sad to know that you had actually to be where the mountains were in order to have them. That you couldn’t just do it whenever or wherever you chose.”

            She turned away from him and became quiet again. He knew not to speak, so he stared at the falling sun on the horizon. The bright orb burned his eyes but he neither blinked nor turned away. He continued to look directly into the sun’s fire and, finally, he saw the mountains. His mountains. They soared with a comforting majesty from the delta to heights only possible in one or two spots on the planet. Snows whipped from their peaks and circled the vast jutting rocks. Their pristine beauty broke his heart but he continued to watch them.

            Confident that his mountains would endure, he looked toward the girl. The sun had blinded him, though. He only saw streaks of fire darting like hummingbirds before him.

            “I’m blind,” he said.

            Barbara turned toward him. “No, you can see now,” she said.

            Sure enough, she came into focus. The barrette had fallen from her hair and the long strands hung from both sides and framed her face the way the evening sky had framed the sun. Now her face, always tinged with the ruddiness befitting a farmer’s daughter, glowed as had the sun in the distance, almost raging in its self-assurance—at once both fearsome and motherly. He could see her clearly and also the mountains behind her and the long straight rows between them.

He sat without moving and loved her with a fierceness that mocked the power of the earth itself.