Spring on the Ridge

Jonah Reyes left Redbank the week before New Year's, and before he went he walked up the ridge road alone, because the wind had finally stopped and he wanted to see the country with its guard down.

The graves were on the high ground behind the windbreak, three of them within a stone's throw: the girl from the story, who had a marble stone with good years on it; the man who died smiling, whose stone said only CORSO; and a newer stone, flush with the grass, that Jonah did not ask about. He asked Pearl about it on his last evening instead, and she said, "Milo's," and stood looking at the wheat until it was time to go in. He stood there while the light went long and gold over the wheat, and a wind came up anyway, at sunset, because this was the one county in creation where the wind never actually stopped, it only changed its mind about directions, and he thought about the voice at the window and about a man who had starved himself to death with his arms open to it, and stayed until the light was gone.

The wedding was set for New Year's Day at Fairhill, Pearl told him, because Wren had insisted on the same parlor with the windows open, January or no January, and Pearl had gotten the old woman's shawl out and said nothing, because some arguments you lose by winning. Colt Murrow, who at twenty-seven could read anything set in front of him now and did, slowly, the way other men smoke, had signed the papers that put Windrow and Fairhill back into one family the right way up, and had burned the ledgers, every one, in the kitchen stove with the door open, and told Pearl, watching the corners curl, that the chimney had never drawn better.

Amos Partlow had died in March, mid-sermon, mid-sentence, audibly annoyed at the interruption, and they buried him with his Bible, because nobody could imagine the alternative. The closed room upstairs had been opened, aired, and painted, and nobody slept in it, which Pearl called respect and Jonah called sense. The eagles' nest was on the ridge still, or a nest was; Wren claimed eagles kept the same address for forty years, and nobody in the county was in a position to argue.

Pearl walked him out to his car, and at the fence rail — she caught herself with one foot on the lower rail, arms half out into the wind, and laughed at herself, an old woman doing a dead girl's trick — she said the thing Jonah Reyes carried away and never improved upon, though he was a professional with words.

"It's the windrow that saves the field," she said. "You know what a windrow is? The cut grass laid in a line so the wind can get at all of it and dry it out before it rots. This whole valley's been one windrow, dear, thirty years laid open to the weather, and I've watched it from every window in this county, and I'm telling you: it dries. It dries, and then you bale it, and it feeds somebody. That's all the mercy there is anywhere, and it's enough."

He drove out with the windows down. Behind him the ridge took the sunset and gave it back, and if there was a voice in the wind, and he was a writer, so of course he believed there was, it was not asking to be let in anywhere anymore. It was just going where the wind went, over the wheat, past the two lit houses at either end of the valley, and out, unhurried, into the open dark.