The Lees Of July

Scuffling down the gravel road, head bowed to the sun-sliver across the ridge as day passes into twilight and draws all the shadows along the grass, I watch Jinx crisscross the road ahead, back and forth. He looks back at me every few moments, then trots on, tail curved over his back, his eyes scanning for something to nuzzle or chase or perhaps nibble. My shoes disturb the dust, and it lifts in small puffs behind me, as if a tiny battery of unseen artillery has a fix on my pos and is about to fire for effect. The dust hangs in the humid air, unwilling to settle back to where it was. It is gray, the color of the tombstones humped along the slope to my right. Dust. Are any of its grains coating my shoes the remnants of those who sleep up there, returned to their long-ago state, broken down and sifted through the soil, leap-frogging unseen down to where my dog and I now walk? And will a housewife one day brush some of me off of her bookshelves with a tool that resembles a dog’s tail, muttering at my presence? Can dust smile, and if so, will my particles take some pleasure from her impatient awareness of my presence?

And now it’s morning again, and we’re back on the same gray stretch of stony, silent road, and the fog is close around us, muting everything except Jinx’s enthusiasm for the day. It has gathered on the fence wire and the spider webs, dripping from pointed leaves and swirling like dust motes as I move through it. I can hear cattle in the pasture, but I cannot see them, so I stop and watch, and Jinx stops with me, and after a bit, we can see a few cows moving with placid steps through the fog, grazing and snuffling. The one remaining sheep, her flock-mate gone the way of silent, skillful predators some months back, moves with the cows, trotting to keep up with the big white-faced lady she has adopted as her friend. The animals become aware of our presence and stop and stare, waiting for the slight movement that means fear and pain, but Jinx remains as still as I, and in time the cows dip their heads to the damp grass and resume eating. The sheep still watches us, though. The jeweled webs wave in the fresh breeze, masterpieces of a single night, doomed to destruction like all that stretches before me.

I think as I so often do of the bones lying quiet beneath the acres here, and I do not mean the cemetery on the hill. These hills and hollows are what Earl Hamner, Jr. called “fought-for land,” full of arrowheads and buttons and whatever dark, ferrous traces ancient blood leaves in the soil. I think of the people who cleared and settled this region, and I smile when I speculate about what they would say to a crowd of their descendants who cower behind cloth masks at a virus, a virus for which one must be tested in order to know if one actually has it. What would they say about the phone in my pocket, the phone I use more as a camera than a means of communication? What would they say about the syrupy attention I lavish on the spotted dog loping along the ridge-line? What would they say about my fatigue after climbing one hill, or my need to take a nap each day? What would they say about my quiet grief for an old barn cat gone missing? We would be kinsmen-strangers, gaping at each other across unknowable distances, surprised at each others’ priorities and weaknesses, newly grateful for certain things we each possess, subtly envious of certain things we could never understand in our own days.

Jinx and I move on. We will return here again, or perhaps not. If we do, we will enjoy the stones beneath our feet and the clean air above our heads. This is the trick, you see. To enjoy the lees of a given day or a given month. As things come down to their end, they become very precious.

~ S.K. Orr