Likes by Sarah Bynum (e novels to read online .TXT) 📗

the trouble of making their own: NO VISITORS, said one. NO TRESPASSING, said another. And even the cornfields were wrapped around with barbed wire. But not once did I see another person walking along the road. It was hard to imagine who the trespassers might be. Other than me, of course.

The pickup trucks wouldn’t slow down when they passed me on the road. They hadn’t slowed down for other things either. Along the highway’s edge I saw a rabbit, its remains vanishing, its bits of fur lifting up from the pavement as dreamily as thistledown; I saw a small black songbird, throbbing with larvae, and a freshly dead chipmunk, curled up on its side as if in sleep. There were also many beautiful horses, heraldic and fully alive. I wanted to watch them gallop across the fields with their ravishing black manes streaming behind them, but it seemed when left alone they had little reason to do so. They chose to stand still, in mysterious silence. The cows, in contrast, were full of spirit, but maybe only when being pushed into a trailer. I happened to be walking by while this process was underway. The cows already inside the trailer made an alarming sound, a truly unhappy and outraged sound, the sort of hoarse trumpeting you might hear from an elephant. It could not be described as either mooing or lowing. I wondered where the cows were being taken, whether their misery was mindless and fleeting, as they were simply being driven to another pasture; or whether the truth was darker and the animals sensed the sure approach of death. So I studied the cows, and I noted that these were black, and large, with heavy brows and small eyes, and that their boulder-like bodies hung low to the ground. But what did this mean? I had no idea. I had no way of knowing just where they were off to.

The list of things I did not know was getting longer. I could name only two of the plants that grew in abundance on the side of the road. If there had been a child walking alongside me, its hand in my own, and if this child had shown any curiosity about the world, I would have been able only to say, That is goldenrod. And that, Queen Anne’s lace. It would have been a poor display of knowledge. Pale starry blue flowers and velvety purses of orange and gold, whole swamps of tawdry purple tapers and creeping vines that spread their fingers out into the road—all of it as common as day, and all of it inscrutable to me. I had also been forced to admit, while trying to write a postcard, that I wasn’t completely sure which mountains I was looking at. The cows, the flowers, the mountain range; why William James had seen fit to abandon me; whether I would ever get well; how to relieve the sorrow of my friend.

That I continued to call him my friend probably added to his unhappiness. But the other names sounded antiseptic to me. Sometimes he would identify himself lightheartedly on phone messages as the father of your unborn child. After a certain point, though, this no longer applied. I believed friend to be a true honorific, but he said he felt differently, and so what to call him was among the many unknown things that troubled me as I made my slow way around the fields.

But there was always the white house of Jerry Roth, which I did come to know. And, in fact, the house seemed such a reflection of him, I sometimes felt as if I knew him, the man. His house was set back slightly from the road, sitting upon a soft rise in the land; it looked out over the acres of a horse farm, and nearer than that a fishing pond, edged with cattails, shadowed by willow trees, a rowboat resting on its grassy bank. Perfect as in a painting or a dream; as if all the charm and sentiment the countryside had been coolly withholding could now, at last, express itself, could gloriously unfurl in one long exhalation of white clapboard and dappled shade and undulating lawn. A colonial house, but without stiffness or symmetry: a wing rambled off to the right, toward a glassed-in porch, and on the left stood a new addition, a sort of studio or guest quarters, its face yawning open in a wide cathedral window, and its entrance marked by a great glass lantern that echoed, in wittily enormous proportions, the quaint, black-leaded lights that hung beside the front door of the original house.

I did not apprehend all of this graciousness at once. It revealed itself to me in a slow unfolding of surprises. One afternoon, the wind stirred the leaves of Jerry Roth’s old maple, and only then did I see how beautifully it spread its canopy across the front lawn, and how thickly the plantings grew beneath it, their dark green leaves polished and aglow, the white flowers floating above their long stems like candle flames. Another day, hearing a window shut, I turned and saw the kaleidoscopic horse standing calmly in the garden. The same size, the same stillness, as the creatures across the road, but its coat glistened with blue sky and yellow stars, with tempera paint and varnish, with winding streams and hills of violet and umber and red. And in this backward glance I also found the apple tree, crooked with age, its lowest branch dipping only a few feet from the ground, extended as if in invitation for a child to take a seat.

What else. There was a plaque attached to the mailbox post, its delicate roman capitals spelling out JEROME ROTH, and beneath that a picture of a pheasant, wings spread, like something you might find on a piece of porcelain. And opposite the mailbox, a square of white-and-blue tin announcing that this little stretch of road should be known