Evening Sketch

One afternoon in April we find ourselves with nothing to do. It dawns on me slowly. No deadlines, no urgent farm work, no early morning meeting the next day. How could we not have thought this far ahead? Yet here we are, standing on the sideline of a soccer field, watching our kids finish a game, the next plodding step of our lives unaccounted for.

After the game I invite some friends to dinner. Our kids play together on the same team. They run a restaurant in town; there’s no way they’ll be free, I think. But by some miracle they have no plans either. All we need to do was to figure out dinner, so I went home and I made it, carefully, but also without forcing anything, achieving a kind of equilibrium of unhurried fussiness. Pulled veg from the garden. Boiled potatoes; steamed beans. Later, the crisp, saline bite of salade niçoise. Coppery wine.

While we eat, kids tumble and roam the yard, now hiding then surprising each other with jets of water from little toy guns. Shrieks, then laughter. After an hour of this, they send an emissary to the house. He asks if they can go for a walk down the dirt road. It’s getting dark, our friends need to go home, they live twenty minutes away. We agree to walk as far as the next farm over. We set off, parents tailing children, the former not really bothering to keep up with the latter.

The sun goes down fast, it had already gone down, really, and the light that is left behind bathes the trees and the hilltops in radioactive orange. Everything else, even our faces and our bodies, takes on the blueness of early night. We crest a hill, and the little whips of wind remind you of how cool it really is. I wonder how cold it might get before morning. As we walk, it feels like you are beating and slicing the air with your arms.

Up ahead where our children are playing I see two parallel lines of vehicles parked on either side of the road. Their curved angles sparkle in the light. I can’t tell where the light is coming from. By the time we come midway between the parallel lines, we are not far from the covered porch of Teresa’s double wide. I glance over and see that we have wandered into the middle of what must be the quietest party in human history. A hundred people, maybe more, gathered in tight clusters under strings of light that festoon the branches of old magnolias. Tables are scattered in the yard, all the way from the trailer up to the verge of the road. A slow pulse of cumbia hovers gently over the scene. Benediction. Big women with steaming piles of food step out of the front door of the trailer and then, carefully, slowly, glide down the front steps. Everyone is silent somehow, even the children, who bound and leap in the dark corners like cats.

We see them all first without being seen. I can’t help but feel absorbed by it all, drunk on the whispers of familial exchange, the soft joy of being-with, of belonging. Still, I keep our path straight down the road. When our neighbors finally notice us, they smile and wave. We smile and wave back. Teresa cries out: buenas noches, amigos mios. It’s my daughter’s birthday. Happy birthday, we say, shouting it back. She offers us food, but we decline, impatient of evening. But also: who would dare intrude on this?

We keep walking. The little light that’s left gives way to darkness. We pass a few guys smoking weed behind the trees: the party’s first splinter cell. We call to our kids. We haven’t seen them in what must be ten, fifteen, minutes. Out of nowhere they come running back, breathless. Then we hear our neighbor, Lee, who must have heard us because he has called out. He’s standing by the split-rail fence behind his family’s mansion, the Bowling plantation, what’s left of it. A dying hulk in the dark: tattered, weathered, exhausted. It shows every bit of its two hundred years. At night it looks like a big mushroom, I think, a monument of subterranean life no one asked for, no one deserved. Does it still feed on the bones of slaves? In the daylight it looks haunted and vaguely threatening. In the dark, the house looks dead.

Lee is with his fiance, Dale. We shake hands. Dale gives hugs. I introduce my friends. They run the bakery downtown, I say. I like y’all’s food, Dale says, it’s so good. And then Lee: I like it, too, but I can’t ever figure out when the hell y’all are open.

Later that night my son insists on sleeping outside. For his birthday he got a camping hammock. He’s hung it between two trees fifteen yards from the back door. His older sister insists on joining him. She’s made a little pallet of pillows and blankets on the ground underneath the hammock. She stretches out, insisting that’s she’s comfortable. Together they form another pair of parallel lines, one stretched out above the other. Unconvinced, I tuck them both in and say goodnight.

It’s a little unnerving as a parent, letting your kids sleep outside for the first time. We’ve been camping many times, but they’ve never slept alone, so to speak, without a parent right there. I realize I’m not being reasonable. When the weather’s nice, what difference does thirty feet and a wall make? I realize I’m afraid because my fear has no object, no foothold. There’s no real threat.

I wake early, 4:30am, like I always do. It’s still dark outside, but while I drink my coffee I can make out the shape of the hammock suspended mid-air and the pile of blankets underneath it. But I can’t tell if there’s anyone still there. The hammock is pulled so taut it barely sags. Beneath it, the pallet has become a pile. Had they retreated to the house in the middle of the night?

I step out the back door as quietly as I can and walk over to the hammock. Above my head the birds are already screaming. A thin film of dew beads up on my daughter’s bedclothes and on the hammock. Cold seeps into my sock feet. I stick a foot in the pile of blankets and feel around until I find the solidity of bone and body, my daughter’s slumbering heft. Something like a clean sheet, or relief, embraces me, and I lumber back inside and lie down on the couch, where I spend the next hour sliding back and forth between dreams of the living and the dead.