3. The Wrong Silence #2
I thank Kit. She says, “You’re welcome,” and goes back to the barn.
I look out at the field.
Authentic.
I used to know what that meant. There was a version of me that didn’t require maintenance. That just was what it was, the way the Panhandle just is what it is, flat and enormous and not apologizing for either.
I am not sure when I stopped being that.
I have some theories about when. About a dressing room at a music festival in Memphis, a door I opened without knocking because it was my dressing room, and Brad had borrowed it to change, and I didn’t think twice about it.
About the specific quality of the silence that followed.
But I don’t go there. Not here, not in the middle of the morning, not standing in a paddock in front of someone who takes session notes.
* * *
Emmett is at the east paddock fence.
He has been there, as far as I can tell, since the session started. Just watching. Pressed against the rails with his nose pointed in my direction, ears forward, the gray horse with the quality of attention that I cannot entirely account for.
On Tuesday, he put his nose into my chest, and I laughed.
I haven’t thought about that laugh since it happened, because thinking about it requires examining why it surprised me.
That examination requires admitting that genuine surprise is something I no longer experience often.
That somewhere between the injury and the recovery, and the stage and Shelby and everything after, I built a self that does not get surprised. That anticipates. That manages.
Emmett did not care about any of that.
He just came over the fence rail and knocked me back a step because he wanted to, and I laughed because I didn’t see it coming, and for approximately two seconds, I was not managing anything at all.
I walk over to the east paddock fence.
Emmett moves to meet me with a directness that suggests he has been waiting for this.
I put my hand on his nose. He exhales, warm and slow, against my palm.
I stay there for a while.
Nobody is asking me to do anything. The gray horse is warm under my hand and entirely unconcerned with quarterly targets or comeback narratives or whether I have anything to give Marcus Hale by January.
I scratch behind his ear as my father taught me when I was six years old, standing at the fence of the home pasture in the early morning, learning that horses tell you what they need if you pay the kind of attention that doesn’t have an agenda.
Emmett leans into it.
“Yeah,” I tell him. “I know.”
* * *
I am almost to my truck when Angel comes out of the feed room with an empty grain bucket.
She stops when she sees me still there. Not surprised, exactly. She isn’t surprised. Just recalibrating slightly.
“Session’s over,” she says.
“I know.” I glance toward the east paddock. “Was saying goodbye to the horse.”
She looks at the paddock. At Emmett, who is still at the fence, still watching me with that particular attentiveness.
“He doesn’t do that with everyone,” she says.
“The standing at the fence?”
“The not leaving.”
I look back at Emmett. He looks back at me.
“Maybe he’s just friendly,” I say.
“Emmett is not friendly,” Angel says, with the flat certainty of someone who has known the horse long enough to have opinions. “He’s interested. There’s a difference.”
My mind goes back to Kit saying the same word this morning. Authentic. Interested. The language of this place, the vocabulary of things that don’t perform.
“Next session Tuesday?” I ask.
“Tuesday. Nine AM.”
“Not early.”
“Not early.”
I get in my truck. I drive the two hundred yards back to the farmhouse and sit in the drive for a moment before going inside.
Through the fence, I can still see Emmett at the east paddock rail.
Interested.
* * *
The Farmhouse — Evening
The silence on the porch after dinner is different now.
Not wrong anymore. Just present. The dark in a place without much ambient light, the sky doing things that Nashville skies don’t do because Nashville is never truly dark. Out there are stars in a quantity that I had forgotten about. The Panhandle taught me stars like that.
I had not thought about it until now.
I have my guitar.
I brought it because Derek told me to. Not in so many words.
Derek never says anything in so many words if he can say it in the language of strongly implied professional obligation.
He said the label would feel better seeing creative activity.
He said the block was a concern. He said the next cycle depended on the material.
He said all of this in the tone of a man conveying urgency while maintaining plausible deniability about the pressure.
I brought the guitar.
I have been sitting on this porch for three evenings now, and the guitar has been in my lap for two of them, and I have played exactly nothing that amounts to anything.
Not for lack of trying.
For lack of I don’t know what. The thing that makes a song a song instead of a collection of chords.
The thing that was always there and then, about four months ago, simply wasn’t.
Like a light that goes out not with a dramatic pop but with a slow fade, so gradual you don’t notice until you reach for the switch and find you’ve been sitting in the dark for a while.
I play three chords.
G. E minor. C.
The same three chords I have been playing since Tuesday. They don’t go anywhere. They don’t resolve into anything. They just sit there in the night air and exist and ask nothing of me, which is more than I can say for most things in my life right now.
I play them again.
The field is dark. The barn light across it is off.
Angel’s truck has been gone since five-thirty, the property back to its own silence.
But I know its shape now. The fence line, the pecan tree, the east paddock where the gray horse is probably standing at the rail in the dark, watching something none of the rest of us can see.
Kit said, capacity for genuine presence.
Then I’m standing in the paddock and dropping something. There’s the quality of the moment before the mare turned around.
And Angel saying, “He’s interested”; there’s a difference, with the flat certainty of someone who knows the distinction matters.
G. E minor. C.
I play the three chords a third time, and this time, something else comes after them. Not much. A fourth chord, then a fifth, a small movement in a direction I haven’t been able to find for four months.
It might be nothing.
I play it again.
I don’t put the guitar down.
The stars exist in unreasonable numbers out here, and do not care about any of it.
On the porch of the farmhouse in the Tennessee dark, I play the same small movement over and over until I know the shape of it, until it starts to feel less like a question and more like the beginning of an answer.
It is the first time in four months that I have not put the guitar down.
I don’t examine this too closely. I just play.