Horizons

Jessica sat on the worn, wooden steps of her father’s farmhouse watching the weak November sun as it struggled to burn off the morning fog. She pulled the patchwork quilt tighter around her shoulders. It still smelled of him; sweat and cigarette smoke, sun and dust. It was hard to believe Daddy was gone.

She squeezed her eyes shut to hold back the tears. She waited, without daring to breathe, to hear him in the kitchen, his heavy work boots thudding down the hall, curses as he spilled coffee trying to open the screen door. But there was nothing. Just the cooing of doves somewhere in the mist.

The sun began to win its battle with the fog as she gazed blindly over the yard. She could make out Daddy’s old pickup. Soon the barn and John Deere parked out front solidified a little further away. Slowly the fog retreated to reveal the bleak West Texas landscape. Jessica shivered as the miles of ironed-flat land stretched out before her. She had never been comfortable with so much horizon. Driving through a place like this made you feel like you were crawling. Living in it was even slower. There was nothing to break it, nothing to race toward.

The day she left for college in Austin, where there were too many trees and skyscrapers to see the horizon, she had asked Daddy why he had stayed, after Mama left and Grandpa died, how he kept sane with so much space. He had squinted out over the cotton fields, the way he always did when he wasn’t sure how to answer. But then he had looked up into the cloudless blue sky and smiled just a little. “Living out here, it makes you realize how small you really are. That this world ain’t really about you, you just live in it for a time. It keeps you honest with yourself.”

She hadn’t understood what he meant. She was standing in front of her Civic, her entire life jammed into the trunk. They had both been crying. Had both said a lot of things that only made sense at that moment of separation. But as she sat on the cold porch steps years later, huddled in a moth-eaten quilt, thinking about his coffin as it was lowered into the ground, she knew that he was right.