Lay Your Burden Down
THE HOLE in front of Holm was three feet deep. He stared down into it. His phone vibrated in his shirt pocket, against his heart. Slowly, he wiped the dirt from his hands on the front of his jeans and fished it out. His wife. Who else?
“Ann,” he said. He wished phones had never been invented, but it didn’t keep his from ringing. A dozen more holes were arranged in uneven rows coming out from the fence. They’d taken him two full days to dig. When he was younger, he could’ve done it in a morning.
“It’s getting dark,” she said.
To the west, last light shrouded the Bitterroot Mountains, brightest behind the tallest peak, as if the light were being created deep in the mountain itself, threading up through mountain veins, and pouring forth. “OK. I’ll come on back.” Holm hung up and leaned the shovel against the fence. His heart beat dully in his chest. Any work tired him now. He bent to retrieve the creased, hand-drawn map on the ground beside the near post. Red and green crayon lines were barely visible in the dusk.
An owl hooted. Holm thought briefly to hoot back. He’d wanted his whole life to hoot and chirp and howl. To run off into the woods with his wife and son, and leave everything else behind. He carefully refolded the map along its creases, creases his son had made, lines his son had drawn, and turned toward the house. It was hidden by the spruce forest and the hill and the rest of Ann’s twenty acres—all that remained of her family’s original two hundred—but he could feel it beyond them, where it had always been.
THE KITCHEN window glowed through the trees. Holm paused and looked at the dark, ramshackle structure around it. Seven Laws had lived in the house when he was a boy: Ann, her three brothers, their parents, and an aunt. To Holm, it had seemed like paradise. Now the dark quiet shamed him, as if it were the inevitable result of Ann’s marrying him: an old man alone in the trees watching an old woman alone in the house. As if his teenage self had cursed them. The trunks around him were tall, straight, and strong. A hundred thousand board feet, at least. If Ann got sick he’d cut down every one. It was his only emergency plan.
