Sewanee Review

All winter, these tangled caneswere silver-thorned and vicious to the root.But now, bearing black fruit,they deepen, blush, and thrivein high, unruly lanes,annihilating where they growthe fence posts and corroded chicken wireof some forgotten boundary line.The Cascade air is dry and tossed with pine,but in the pure sunthese thickets smell like wine,a heady, tannin atmosphere.This late, the river mostly runson ghosts of melted mountain snows.The water winks and glisters as it goes.I can understandwhy one would build his cabin here,though now the mossy roof is caving in.Two socket-hollow windows stare.The plywood walls are warped and mushroom-gray.Above what used to be a door,"Nobody's Home," soft, sunken letters say. [End Page 239] This would have been the country once,before the apple orchardsand all the groves of hazelnuts were bought.Nobody's Home. Back then it must have beena fern-blessed, unimpeachable estate.A place where Nobody could be aloneand think the things Nobody thought.I came here almost every daythat last unhappy year.Headful of hurt. Heartful of blame.I came to argue and accuse.Or argue and explain.I argued with myself and always lost.I argued then apologizedto everyone. My wife. The priestwho married us. My in-laws, whom I loved.Our friends. Even the dog,our beautiful and now-dead dogwho, as I argued, scrambled after geese,the grumpy great blue herons, and the squirrels,then scrambled back to me.

We sat in silence every night.We mixed our drinks. We watched inane TV.Then one of us, without a word,would rise and leave the other there.We barely spoke. And yetI couldn't stop the yelling in my head.Anger, I learned, was easier than dread.And dread, as it turned out,was better than despair. [End Page 240] I'd never fallen so far out of love.But by the end, we didn't hardly fight.We moved about like strangers in that house—a little shy, not quite at home,and ruthlessly polite. [End Page 241]