I DROVE HOME CRAVING the heat of my woman’s skin next to mine, casually nude and pressed against me. I had long believed in the rejuvenating powers of her bed and the soothing effect of her skin. Salvation, it seemed, amounted to nothing more than the touch of fresh sheets against my spent legs as I eased closer to her sleeping form. Exhausted as I was, those simple reunions restored my hope in the future. Returning to her quieted me like the shushing of wind through leaves, her body my mountain and ocean in one.
The gabardine fabric of my uniform was a cheap placeholder for her touch, the coarse stitching at the company logo’s edge a stubborn irritant. Boxed in a narrow security booth, I signed in a nightly wave of pale factory workers, all of them groggy from rotating shifts in the ceaseless production of gypsum drywall. Night truck drivers were starved for conversation, or possibly high on speed. One had become my de facto bookie. We clung to our humanity through simple pleasantries as we crossed paths at the grand factory, amid its precise, mechanistic goings-on. After sign-ins, for the remaining six hours of each shift, I sat alone in the darkness with only my thoughts for company, occasionally locking myself in the small bathroom to sleep for fifteen minutes, chancing the loss of my job.
No more than three months removed from my time in the Marine Corps, I found myself bleeding pride. The remnants of its social cachet were fading—a relative metric, specific to whomever might be sizing me up, which was likely no one at all. Only the ghosts of my own mind. As a newly minted college student, I felt as if I had fallen into a lower caste, one I tended to think of as “becoming”—a transitional state, desperately trying to phase-change into something else. Since my engineering classes met during normal business hours (this was prior to the explosion of online degree programs), working the third shift, the leavings of the day, allowed me some semblance of an income while juggling my studies and a notional personal life. Stubborn to a fault, I slept in my car between classes. Interrupted sleep left me with a broken consciousness, as if I had fallen asleep on life itself, bodily present but not mentally so.
Difficult as it was, I had Kara. We had each other.
On weekends, the hour-long drive to her family farm in the Kentucky hills cleared my mind. As the urban landscape gave way to small houses on acre lots, then stretches of trees, moody in their autumn coloring, a similar transition occurred in me. The tightly coiled spring in my chest eased with every mile nearer to Kara, like the numbing effect of a strong dram of bourbon. My peace grew in proportion to our closeness. By the time I heard the popcorn-crackling sound of her gravel driveway beneath my tires, I could breathe and laugh again.
Her family’s farm encompassed 140 acres tucked within green, rolling hills. Two white-planked houses nested close to a state highway, the solitary vein to civilization. A septic tank had sprouted unapologetically between them, and a large barn surrounded by abandoned machinery stood shyly off to the side like a distant relative. This gentleman’s farm, contrary as it was to my own beginnings, felt more like home than any place I could remember. Perhaps because she felt like home, and that familiarity seeped into the world that surrounded her.
I killed the engine.
She was always hot to the touch, as if she burned fuel faster than most people. In addition to lending her bedsheets a stove-like quality, her surplus energy drove her to finger-paint large acrylic works. She painted in wild bursts, her thoughts too impatient for the distancing effects of a brush. She immersed her fingertips in paint just as she immersed herself emotion. Soap, cigarette smoke, and fabric softener always lingered about her, an aura of clashing elements that comforted me when experienced as a layered whole. For me, the combination was so irrevocably tied to tender sex that it had become an unlikely aphrodisiac.
I keyed the lock and entered.
The house was different. I sensed the change even as I removed my boots and emptied my pockets. I placed my wallet and a few crumpled factory timestamps on the counter next to a half-dressed Barbie. I heard movement in the bathroom. It was too early to hear stirring, and I was disappointed—I’d hoped for a few moments of relaxation in the early quiet before anyone else was up. Instead of Kara, her father emerged from the bathroom, holding a covered braising pot and a ladle one might use to serve tomato soup.
Without a word, his eyes carefully avoiding mine, he walked down the stairs and out of the house, striding out the distance to his own home with a purpose unknown to me. Kara emerged from the bathroom, dressed in stretch pants and an oversized sweater, her face slack and pale, her eyes raw. She’d texted me in the middle of the night, asking if I could come over. Alone in my security booth with nobody to relieve me, I responded that I had a few hours left on my shift and would be there soon.
“What’s going on? Is something wrong?”
She didn’t answer. Instead, she took a hair band from her wrist and bundled her morning tangle into a ponytail—I recognized her mannerisms of withdrawal and knew that more questions would push her deeper into retreat. She blew her nose and discarded the tissue. I waited as she cracked open a can of Coke and placed it on the counter without bothering to take a first sip. Kara fumbled a cigarette from its pack and opened the side window to encourage a cross-breeze to carry away the smoke. Attuned as I was to her ritual creature comforts, I was amazed at the length of her protective silence.
There was the snick of her lighter, a puff, and a slow exhale. She seemed content to make me wait. Or perhaps never to answer at all. She gazed into the predawn horizon, self-contained.
In truth, I already knew. Seeking her confirmation was a childish delay, a defense mechanism against what had happened and its attendant emotions. I could feel our newfound reality as keenly as I could feel the sting of having to deduce our loss on my own and, subsequently, to deal with the realization alone. She had miscarried our child. Her father had scooped our dead baby out of the toilet with a soup ladle and carried it away in a cast-iron pot. I wanted to comfort her. I wanted her to comfort me. I wanted to weep over the loss of my first kid, but I didn’t want to give her a reason to believe I was a weak man. The only emotional tool at my disposal was a fragile stoicism. I felt a thrilling moment of relief, amazed that I had been freed of the burden of a child, then crushed by guilt for having felt so. I wanted to slap the fucking cigarette from her lips and blame it all on her inability to quit poisoning her body, her inability to want the baby, her inability to fully want me.
I just stood there, said nothing, did nothing.
I didn’t understand how I could feel so alone, crowded as I was by both love and disappointment.
Later that morning, still silent, she bought a white Bible in town. She tore out pages that had special significance to her and used them to wrap the fetus in a makeshift shroud before placing it in a tin. I didn’t ask which ones; her Baptist faith didn’t take kindly to my opposition to organized religion or the way I teetered between atheism and pantheism. I imagined it was the Gospel of Matthew, the one she used to read to me when I lay on her lap, her logic being that Matthew featured the most words of Jesus. Bereft of my own words, unable to form a question that would be received without anger, I was never sure which book she used.
All of this was new to me. Being reduced to a bystander was intolerable. I suggested we call a hospital. I thought they would have an answer for us, a reason why this had happened, instructions on how to handle this sort of thing. My instinct was to rely on professionals who understood science, not regress into countryside isolation.
“I’m not giving it to a hospital!” she screamed. “Do you know what they’ll do? They’ll cut it up into a bunch of pieces, trying to figure out what happened. I won’t let them have it.” Her anger shamed me so deeply that my throat swelled shut as it had when I was a child, emotion choking me until my neck throbbed and I could no longer trust myself to speak. I didn’t understand this venom. I had become her adversary. Perhaps even her nemesis. The injustice gnawed at my gut. I could admit I was more of a complication in her life than a help, but I didn’t understand why she was pushing me away. I craved her affection, hungering for it even as I was lashed by her tongue.
I found myself thrusting a post-hole digger into the ground on the farthest cleared hill. She chose this spot because it was near to where her grandfather had been buried a few months before. There was an otherworldliness to it. Kara and her father watched as I dug, unhelpful but thankfully uncritical. The early morning November chill made the dirt stubborn. My hands stung from the cold and the effort, and I felt fatigued long before I had a satisfactory hole.
I kept stabbing at the dirt until her father suggested it was deep enough. Kara placed the burial tin in the ground then the Bible atop the tin, and we covered them over. I worried that coyotes or raccoons might dig it up and eat the miscarried fetus, but I couldn’t say so. All expression had become internalized. I mirrored her distance with my own distance, though I didn’t understand why this emotional chasm had appeared between us when it would have been so much easier to fall toward one another, to cry, to grip each other’s bodies and ask, “Why are our lives so different from how we imagined they would be?”
Her father led us in a brief prayer. He paused and asked, “Did you name the child?” Kara’s face became pinched. We both shook our heads that no, we hadn’t. “Well, in the old Indian tradition of naming things for something you see, I’m going to name the baby Jake, after those big turkey jakes walking on the far hillside,” he said. I followed his pointing finger and saw three dark birds bobbing in the tall grass.
Irritation flashed through me. We should be naming our kid. And maybe neither of us wanted a name. Words linger about the mind, giving life to the ideas that haunt us most. Therein lies their power. Naming this child made it real, the tragedy more pronounced than the death of a concept, an abstract possibility. Yet he was trying to help, groping his way forward from moment to moment, just as I was. He loved his daughter, and I knew he cared for me. I couldn’t reprimand him for offering words when I could find none. I thought back to the times he and I had worked together, felling lumber on his farm, using cant hooks to roll the logs into choke chains and dragging them to his makeshift lumber mill near the house with a pristine truck ill-suited to the work. We’d rough-cut the logs, seasoned the wood, and used the harvested lumber to recondition ruined hay wagons to be sold on the side of the road. He gently taught me as if I were already a son of his, already part of the family.
In burying the baby’s remains, we also buried the life we might have had, an alternate reality in which I sacrificed my dreams of travel and discovery to raise a healthy, compassionate child.
Later, after Kara told her daughter that she wouldn’t have a brother or a sister, they went out and planted a ring of bulbs around the freshly packed earth. They must have planted them too shallow, or perhaps upside down—none would ever sprout. We left the makeshift grave unmarked until eventually we forgot exactly where it was. Only a general sense of it echoed our minds, further dimmed by our refusal to speak of it.
The next week, Kara broke up with me. She did so coldly, over the phone, with the same sense of remove in her voice she’d had that morning. She seemed a woman in a perpetual state of shock—here but not here, here but not here with me—not unlike the fugue state in which I had been treading through my days, reintegrating into civilian life with no ticker-tape parade, just ugly boredom and undifferentiated time.
As returning Marines, we were keenly attuned to the spectrum of public sentiment—from World War II veterans with their heroes’ welcome to the spit-upon baby killers of Vietnam. We fit into an unremarkable portion marked by apathy. Four years of our lives, gone, and no one could be bothered to offer more than a fleeting pleasantry or handshake. I came home to a round of hugs from my family and friends, and then it was onward with the business of living. Not dying was my reward.
Before the miscarriage, I had been asked to join the college honors program. Now my grades plummeted. I dropped out of school for six months, working at a different factory manufacturing airplane structural framing elements, where redundant motions replaced the need to think. I allowed myself to become like the machines, a cog in the means of production, dynamic but unthinking.
I came to understand Kara’s detachment. She had been in a similar fix before, unmarried and pregnant at seventeen. Whatever her hopes might have been, her first marriage failed within a year. That she was able to flourish within the limitations of single motherhood added to my respect for her, and I wished I could have been the one who broke through to her, repairing her ability to love.
Decades later, when I allow myself to relive those moments, I look at her differently; I look at myself differently. The time-bridge between us spans so long that I perceive us as fundamentally different people, then and now versions that cannot be reconciled. Now those feelings are recessed within me, covered over in their own abstract grave, the particulars gradually eroding with unyielding time.
Kyle Abbott Smith served in the US Marine Corps from 2001 to 2005. His work has appeared in the Southeast Review, North Carolina Literary Review, North Dakota Quarterly, and The Wrath-Bearing Tree. He splits time between the US and Switzerland, where he lives with his wife and sons.
Photo by Tomas Martinez on Unsplash
