he wanted me to take on his place, make his untended acres produce once more, take him on too, prove to him that he could trust me, keep him from himself, agree with him that everyone was trying to get the better of him. I never knew what would set off the stick of dynamite buried in his gut, but I knew it had a short fuse.
My mother would tell me that she passed from this earth into the arms of her Savior. Maybe it’s true. Maybe it’s for the best. She would tell me that when I find my Savior, there I will find her. I know she left when she could no longer stay, that she did everything she could. I failed her, but she did not fail me.
Three
On the prettiest day of the prettiest month, under the bluest sky, my sweet, beautiful blue-eyed girl says, “Yes.” There is no other sound like this, not even the sound of a perfect strike, the way it hits the glove of the catcher. Her one word, “Yes.” I have pitched a no-hitter. I have hit grand slam homeruns, the ball soaring over the stands and into the junkyard beyond the centerfield fence, kids scrambling, the ball bouncing off the roofs of rusted-out sedans, but I have never known this feeling before or since. She looks at me, she gets quiet. My chest pounds. Maybe she will change her mind, but she doesn’t. Instead, she says, “Lux, we have to do it right, marry in a church.”
My Dessie, whose mind is clear and steers my heart. “I will do it,” I said, the pounding in my chest the sound of the gears of my heart reaching for the gears of her heart, I swear it.
I will stare into the eyes of my Pa, and I will set this before him, one man to another. My best girl, I have nothing to be afraid of with you by my side.
Two
I reach into my shirt pocket. I have a treasure. It is a perfect soft gray bird point, an arrowhead, chip-flaked and as sharp as it was five hundred years ago. I braided a buckskin cord into the notches at the base of the point.
I tell her, I was a boy, walking behind my mother on the ridge trail, on the way to pick wild blackberries. I saw it among the broken rocks at my feet. It stopped me in my tracks. I bent, picked it up, raced to catch up.
Dessie places my gift over her lovely head. This ancient gray point against her skin, resting in the hollow of her neck.
Mother, you came to me, tugged at the hair on the crown of my head, you guided my hands as I braided this cord.
One
My name is Luther, but only on my paycheck, my hunting license, my birth certificate, and in my mother’s mouth, as it will be on my baptism certificate and my marriage license. My name is Lux.
Things can change. I know that to be true. I have been spinning free, a wheel with not a cog to hold it; then, in a flash, I am a part of a great machine, spinning like a gear that drives another gear and so on, until the world is put right.
They will take me to the river and they will wash me clean from sin. My mother who art in heaven, hallowed be her name, she called me Luther. I will be saved for you, Mother, saved for you, my Dessie, the light I carry in my heart.
My girl and I stand together. The world is wide open, the world is new, for our new life together.
In a flash, things can change. I know that my eye was the price I paid. I once was blind. I could say that it was like watching my old life slip through my fingers. Now I can see. It feels like reaching for a second chance.
My hair will be so short that my head will feel naked. My shoes will be so tight that I will barely feel the earth beneath me. Water will stream over my forehead, it will seep under my eyepatch, and it will fill the socket of my eye. It will remind me.
FOUR
BIRTHDAY (1969)
TWO YEARS AND TWO MONTHS AFTER HE GOT MARRIED, Lux traded his eight-year-old dappled gray, half-Arab mare Calamity Jane to his friend Alan Ray. In return, Lux got Alan Ray’s .30-06 Remington 700 rifle and a German scope, and to sweeten the deal, Alan Ray added a rebuilt Gravely rototiller. Alan Ray had hinted that if he proposed to Billie, CJ would make a dandy engagement present. That’s when they shook hands on it.
Lux felt like he should have been happier about the trade, even though for the past couple of years he’d felt like he owed something to Alan Ray for his quick thinking after the logging accident. This trade could even things out. Alan Ray would be getting an even-tempered, well-trained mare. CJ was sure-footed on trails, and unlike some horses she never tried to unseat her rider by galloping under low-hanging branches or balking at fallen logs across the trail.
Alan Ray was happy as a boy on Christmas morning. He’d also offered to buy CJ’s colt Dakota for five hundred dollars outright, but Lux refused. Now that Dakota was old enough to be ridden, everything should have worked out differently, the mare would be for Dessie and the young stallion for him, the two of them riding together, so the colt could learn from the mare’s example. But that plan fizzled after Lissy was born. Whenever Lux mentioned riding together, Dessie declined, giving one excuse or another. She might’ve let her sister or mother babysit, Lux thought, but Dessie held back, reluctant to ask for any kind of favor.
Then, once she found out she was expecting for a second time, Dessie wouldn’t even enter the paddock to help feed or brush down either of the horses. She said she’d heard a story about a girl in Reader who’d been kicked in the belly by a mule and lost her baby, and she wasn’t about to go taking any foolish chances. Lux had the good sense to know a good horse, and he almost told Dessie how silly that seemed. But an inner voice told him to let it go, that women who were expecting might have some kind of protective instinct, not quite rational but worth heeding. He thought back to his mother, living through so much hope and loss. How much did she know about the life inside her, even the one that eventually took her?
Lux knew that Alan Ray had his eye on Calamity Jane for some time, and he knew he would make good use of the Remington. But almost as soon as Alan Ray had loaded CJ into his trailer, Lux began to miss having that mare. CJ was a gift from his Uncle Ron. She was shy and hard to catch when Ron first bought her, but took to Lux right off, trusting in his steady hands as he rode her the four miles back home. A few months later, when she went into season, Lux rode her back to Ron’s house to breed her to Ron’s dark bay Morgan stallion. Uncle Ron was pleased with how CJ had settled down under Lux’s care. Lux was in the paddock eleven months later with CJ when she’d delivered Dakota, waiting up all night, and just after the colt was able to stand, breathing into his nostrils before he was even an hour old.
LOOKING BACK, Lux would say that those few months after his accident, the world spun faster than it ever had, life had charged past and all he could do was hang on tight, hope for the best, and give pieces of his life a nudge here and there, so they could fit like an unfinished puzzle. There was Pa, a soon-to-be reckoning about his future. There was Dessie, the promises they’d made to each other, the moments of joy at coming together, the pangs of being apart. There was bad news about his eye, a total loss, and with that, setting aside his chainsaw and beginning a new round of training as a millwright. Work days flew by, taking measure, tracking lumber, gaining more know-how and business savvy, the last man each night to leave the shop. Out in the paddock, Dakota thrived, his weight and girth increasing by the day, a dark bay colt with a snap in his step and a star on his forehead. But at his pa’s house, with each day Lux felt more chained down. He could wait to marry Dessie until late August when he turned eighteen, but why? His old man could sign legal consent for him and the wait would be over.
One evening, about a month after Dessie said yes, and a couple of weeks after he’d received the blessing of Bertram and Rose, Lux could wait no longer. After chores, he joined
