Heartland
My name is Steve Wills, and I live off Eight Mile Road, second left past the three red granaries, and I was a very young man once upon a time (that’s a fine way to start a story, isn’t it? Once upon a time) when I first saw her.
I was walking beside the ditch on the road into the yard when something caught the very corner of my eye. I turned, and out in the canola field, there she was. I’ll never forget the way she looked that first time I saw her, with hair the colour of cayenne pepper and at least a million freckles. I stood there paralyzed, drinking her in, until I heard myself tell her she was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen in my life.
I didn’t even realize what I was saying until I heard the words come out of my own mouth and felt a little shy and embarrassed, but she nodded with fluid grace, not so much as if accepting a compliment, but like I had stated something as self-evidently true as the sun is hot or the rain is wet, and as suddenly as she’d appeared, she vanished.
I’d almost chalked it up to some sort of wonderful hallucination when the second visit happened a few months later, three days after my sixteenth birthday, on a blisteringly hot day in the swather. She sat on my lap all afternoon while I cut the field, wearing blue jeans and a white t-shirt, her hair in a ponytail, with green eyes you could drown in, quick and easy with a laugh and the kind of Midwestern smile that makes a man thank God he’s alive just to see it. Everything I could dream of.
After all those hours, I saw she had the kind of sharp wit she sometimes felt the need to hide, and a temper only a fool would get on the wrong side of after seeing it in action, like an element of nature itself.
As I grew older, her visits started to become less and less frequent. When I kissed Sherri-Lynn Johnstone under the bleachers at a school dance, I saw her suddenly across the room for a quick instant, her cheeks red and her eyes fiery, and then she was gone again, maybe forever (I could believe forever, but never for good).
I began to think I’d almost imagined her, everything about her, all through my teenage years (I was never accused of lacking imagination). Was she only a phantom, a figment, an imaginary friend taken to a new level and extreme? But I never came close to forgetting her, never stopped feeling like my heart had ceased beating for an instant when I was startled at a traffic light, or the grocers, or the swimming pool, when someone with a passing resemblance would bring me to the edge of rapid-pulse delight before dropping me back down to earth, to my life.
Cassandra and I broke up after almost six years. Her breath always smelled so horrible in the mornings. I can’t remember any other reason, but I’m sure it was an accumulation of little things. There were a few three- or four-month relationships after that, barely more meaningful than one-night stands. Nothing lasted. If it couldn’t be perfect, then I didn’t want it at all, so that part of my life just, well, died.
I’d fallen asleep on the couch and woke to a late August thunderstorm, the back door banging hard against the frame. I ran to shut it, but then held it open as I stood at the doorstep, the cold and wet against my chest waking me more still. My mouth opened like an entity all its own, the wind whipping the words from my lips even as I whispered them:
“I love you.”
A flash, and it was her, but bathed not by the lightning, but from some internal light, her body lit all in sight. Another flash and she was suddenly in front of me. She lightly licked the bottom of my ear and whispered, “Close your eyes.”
When I opened them again, it was glorious, a sea of rolling green perfection, endless acres of grass waving in the sun with nothing to interrupt them but us.
I pulled her tightly against me, holding her head against my chest, stroking her hair with one hand, answering her with the other, and wanting for nothing save the hunger to take care of her, her every desire, for the rest of my life. I undressed her gently, slowly and with purpose, leaving our clothes lying on the ground. I took her there in our endless field, the wind whipping around without daring to touch or disturb our dance.
When it was over, she stayed, lying beside me for what seemed so long as to be outside of any time or reckoning, soaking in my gentle caresses and showers of light kisses on her head and face. I lay mesmerized as she dressed; her skin, her eyes, her hair… her taste like honey and cinnamon still on my lips.
I stood about to speak, holding her hands in mine, but before I could say it again, she smiled sadly and said, “I love you too, but I’m not real.”
As the last word trailed off, she stood on her tiptoes and kissed me soft on the lips, and I felt it start—her fingertips in my hands beginning to crumble, then climbing up her arms, until soon all that was left was grain dust, and tears.
I see Cassie a few times a month now. I don’t know if we’ll ever re-marry. She’s changed (she says I have as well); I think maybe it’s as good as it can get for us, and that maybe that’s OK.
I don’t wonder if she’ll ever visit me again, but sometimes I wonder why I can never, ever remember my dreams when I wake up anymore. And sometimes I wonder if reality is just the way we see things (or choose to see them) at any given time.
And sometimes I wake up after drifting off in the early evening, and go sit out on the back porch; as I look out at all that dimming land and that darkening sky, I think I can hear the end of an old song I used to know every word of off in the distance, and feel like I’m vanishing into the night, and sometimes?
Sometimes I just… wonder.
While missing Miss Ohio...
