Free Quartet for the End of Time by Johanna Skibsrud Page B

looked anyway, as if there might be one time, and was always, therefore, equally surprised when he saw, again, only an empty Kansas sky. Hardly ever even a cloud, as he later recalled it—and the field below, so flat and big and empty that at a certain point it was impossible to tell where the field ended and the sky began. There was nothing, nothing, not even a bird that would stay still long enough for him to fix with his gaze. And it would not be until many years later that he would finally realize that what had stirred in his father, in those moments—what had impelled him to pause, to turn back, to strain against that emptiness for something he could, if briefly, share with his son—was not any thing at all. That there existed in the very act of looking, or rather in its brief— and almost wholly imaginary—arrest, some resistance to the slow constriction of the heart brought about generally by the passage of time, which had, almost certainly (though this, too, Douglas had no knowledge of then), already narrowed the passageways leading toward and away from it to such a degree that it was for that reason and that reason alone that he both ran harder, and gasped longer, after running a certain distance across the Duke’s—unmeasurable—field.
    It makes him sad to think of it now, so many years later. Of the way that his father, and his mother, too, no doubt—with her surprised eyes and her mouth always set in a thin line, making it seem as though she were forever attempting to cure herself of the hiccups by holding her breath—must have also felt that slow constriction over the years from some equivalent point in their own childhoods, when they, too, must have felt the same way he did, while chasing after his father, whom he never once could catch. He can’t help but wonder, when he thinks of it, if there might be another, different sort of world, or a way of living in it,where the heart would not constrict. Where the skyline would always seem as it did in childhood: irrelevant, nearly abstract. But then he always gets stuck wondering about it, because it is only in retrospect, after all, that he is able to recognize—in the way he wanted to, so badly, then—the sort of beauty in the landscape his father had pointed to when he stretched his hand toward it, and, with that gesture, conjured it into being at all.
    S O THEN IT WAS quitting time. They’d walk, the two of them, to wash themselves in the cold water, which, after a few strong thrusts, the handle screaming, gushed from the pump’s long snout. It felt good, the way that water poured over Douglas’s head and down the back of his neck, wetting his shirt. His father would take his handkerchief and find a clean corner of it to scrub behind Douglas’s ears, and before he tucked the rag away, he’d show Douglas the dirt that he’d gathered. Then they’d turn together toward the house, and as they approached, a black shape would appear from beneath the eaves to take the form of a crow—a big bird with a damaged wing his father had tamed, and whom he called Faustina, though never in front of Douglas’s mother. (After an Italian girl with a wooden leg, he’d said, whom he had known, briefly, during the war.)
    Each evening when they returned from the field she would appear from beneath the eaves, at first dark and indistinct, to become a bird and sit on Douglas’s father’s shoulder and poke her beak into the thinning hair on top of his head, and his father would sing a few lines of “Roses of Picardy.” It was the only song Douglas ever knew him to sing, but he sang it well—his voice vibrating deep in his chest on the lower notes. Then, when they reached the porch, he would lift the bird from his shoulder and place her down lightly on the porch rail before ducking into the kitchen ahead of Douglas, where his mother would have already laid out the meal. She kept it