12. The Overlook #2
After Kit wraps the debrief, Ivy takes Cash inside for the milestone review.
I do the post-session checks alone. Water levels, gate latches, Emmett’s hooves. The familiar rhythm of the end of a session day, the barn settling into its afternoon routine.
I am at the pasture gate doing evening checks when Cash finds me.
Or we find each other. This is how it usually goes: the field between the farmhouse and the barn, two people who know each other’s rhythms well enough that they end up in the same piece of it without arrangement.
He has his jacket and his hat and the look of a man who has just been formally told something he already knew.
“Kit says significant engagement,” he says. “I looked it up. Apparently, that’s the program’s top mark.”
“It is.”
“That seems like something worth mentioning.”
I pause for a beat. “I’m mentioning it now.”
“You mentioned it in a document.”
“Documentation is how the program communicates progress.”
“Angel.”
“Cash.”
He looks at me with the long-suffering look of a man who has learned that this particular conversational dynamic is not going to resolve in his favor and is choosing to find it amusing, rather than frustrating.
I appreciate the growth.
“Well done,” I say. Simply. Without the document.
Something in his face shifts. Pleased, not the stage warmth, but the actual thing, the one that arrives in his eyes before his face has caught up with it.
“Thank you,” he says.
We stand at the pasture gate on a December afternoon.
“Is there somewhere you go?” he says. “When you need solitude. Not the barn. Somewhere else.”
The question is unexpected. I answer before I can think better of it.
“There’s an overlook,” I say. “At the back of the property. A flat rock above the creek. I go there sometimes in the evenings.”
He nods.
“It’s better before it gets fully dark,” I say.
A pause.
I have, I realize, just extended an invitation.
He looks at the sky. The light is going. “We’ve got maybe twenty minutes.”
“We do,” I say.
I go to get my thermos.
* * *
The Overlook
The path to the overlook runs along the back fence line, then up through a stand of cedar that opens onto a flat rock shelf above the creek.
It takes about eight minutes to walk it.
We walk it without talking, which is not unusual for us, except that this silence has a different quality than the barn silence or the fence line silence. It is the silence of two people moving through a space that one of them has not been to before, and the other has been to alone for a year.
The overlook opens out above the creek exactly as it always does.
In summer, it has leaves and green water and the softness of a Tennessee afternoon filtered through trees.
In December, it has bare branches and the flat, clear light of a season that has given up trying to be anything other than what it is.
The creek below is low and dark. The sky above is going from blue to the particular gray-gold of last light.
I sit on the flat rock. He sits a foot away.
I pour coffee from the thermos. He takes the cup I offer without ceremony.
We look at the creek.
“Eastern Tennessee must be something,” he says.
“The mountains are,” I say. “Different from this. Everything is vertical there. The sky is smaller.”
“Panhandle’s the opposite. The sky is the whole thing. Nothing interrupts it.”
“I know the kind of place you mean.”
He looks at me. “You’ve been?”
“No. But I know the feeling of a place that’s bigger than you and doesn’t apologize for it.”
“Yeah,” he says. “That’s exactly it.”
The creek makes its sound below us. The cedars behind us move in a small wind. The light is dropping faster now, the sky committing to gray.
He tells me about the Panhandle. Not the performance version, not the charming Nashville story of a Texas boy who made good. The actual version. The smell of the land before a storm. The quality of a horizon that goes all the way around.
The way the ranch has existed in the same state for three generations, with the same work, the same rhythms, and how leaving it felt like both the right thing and a kind of small death.
I listen without filling the pauses.
He says, “I haven’t talked about it like this in a long time.”
“Like what?”
“Like it truly is, no talking the real thing.”
I understand what he means.
The way you describe a place for people who didn’t grow up there is a condensed, charming account that conveys its essence without requiring anything of the listener.
“You don’t have to do that here,” I say.
He pauses.
“I know,” he says. “That’s why I’m not.”
* * *
We have been sitting on the flat rock for forty minutes. The thermos is empty. The sky has gone from gray-gold to the deep blue that comes just before dark. The creek below is barely visible now, just sound.
It is cold. The December cold of a hillside above a creek when the sun has gone, and the air comes off the water.
I should say we should go.
I do not say we should go.
At some point in the last forty minutes, the distance between us has become less than a foot.
Not dramatically. The rock is flat but not wide, and we have both shifted slightly during the conversation.
The cold is real, and neither of us has moved away from the warmth of the other person being nearby.
He turns to say something. I can see it in the quality of his attention shifting, the slight turn of his body, and I am already looking at him, and we are closer than we have been since the paddock gate, since the tack room bench, and this time there is no Emmett to put his nose between us.
The almost is enormous.
It is the length of a breath held, the length of a look that has decided something without either person saying so.
The cold makes the decision.
The wind comes up while we are still on the flat rock.
Not gradually, but as middle Tennessee weather moves in December, one minute the air is cold but still, the sky is doing nothing in particular, and the next, there is a quality to the wind that is different from before. Sharper. Coming from a direction it was not coming from an hour ago.
Cash looks north.
I have been looking north for the past ten minutes.
The sky in that direction has gone a particular color, not dark exactly, but flat. The kind of flat that means something is behind it, moving fast.
“That’s not nothing,” Cash says.
“No.”
“How long will it take to walk back?”
“Fifteen minutes at a walk. Eight if we move.”
He stands up from the rock in one motion. I am already standing.
We move.