Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing (16 page)

If I squint at the field I can almost picture it all now. If I squint harder, I can see the Indians making a dugout canoe down by the creek, burning trees to clear space for their crops, and before that, the dire wolves, the saber-toothed tigers, the ferns and giant trees, before that the vast immutable sea.
With the Lord stood three angels,
Dave reads,
each with six wings. With two they covered their faces, and with two their feet, and with two they did fly. And they cried to one another, holy,
holy, holy, is the Lord, the whole earth is full of his glory,
raising his voice to compete with the growling engines of the bulldozers.

 

Everything changes. Even in Brown's Ridge. Of course I know. Bill Ryan will sit alone in the saloon and talk revolution too loud, not knowing that Jack Earthman, a Nashville sheriff, is sitting next to him and listening carefully as he eats a boiled egg and drinks a beer. After he is arrested, J. D. Howard and B. J. Woodson will gather up their families and leave in the night, never to return. Jesse will be shot and killed a year later, in Missouri, and Frank will grow old selling tours of their childhood home for a quarter. Lacy will be terrified of motherhood and for months will sit and stare at her child, a boy, not knowing what to do. Jubal Cain's heart will tar over with hate until it kills him, and the bulldozers will move steadily up the steepest ridge side.
It is with a sense of despair,
said Frank James,
that I drive away from our little home and again become a wanderer.
The Musician stays up all night with a bottle cradled against his chest, watching tapes of his old days on tour, keeping the volume muted, so he cannot hear the applause. Greenup Bird will outlive me, and will end up in the Nashville pound, where no one will want to adopt him. After two weeks in a cage he'll be euthanized, his body thrown in the city incinerator, and his ashes will fall on the Cumberland River like snow. The houses go up, they keep going up, and for now we stay one step ahead of them,
digging. The Musician still hasn't lost hope.
The time is at hand,
Dave reads from the book of Revelation, leaning his shovel against his hip and rolling a joint for the end of the world.
Fear not, for I am the first and the last, he that lives and he who has died. Which is, and which was, and which is to come.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the editors of the following publications, where these stories previously appeared in slightly different form:
Epoch
: “Mule Killers,” which also appeared in
The O. Henry Prize Stories: 2006
;
Granta
: “Phantom Pain”
The Sun
: “Sweethearts of the Rodeo,” which also appeared in
Pushcart Prize XXXII
;
Epoch
: “The Still Point,” which also appeared in
Best New American Voices
(2009);
One Story
: “Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing,” which also appeared in
Pushcart Prize XXXIII
;
Orion
: “Kidding Season” and
Prairie Schooner
: “Shadow on a Weary Land,” which also appeared in
Best New American Voices
(2007).

 

Many thanks to the University of Virginia and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.

Cover design by Milan Bozic

Cover photograph by Tony Sweet/Getty Images