26. March #2
Cash crosses to the barn in the mornings, I cross to the farmhouse in the evenings, and the yards between us have become the most comfortable yards I have ever navigated.
He is on the porch.
Guitar in his lap, coffee going cold on the porch rail, a man who has been out here for a while and intends to stay. The March evening is cool but not cold. The field smells like mud and green things.
I come up the porch steps, and he shifts to make room on the bench. I sit.
We sit there for a while without saying anything, which is a thing we are good at.
Emmett is visible from here, pressed against the paddock fence, fully attentive. This evening, the something is us, which is most evenings.
“How was the first session?” he says.
“Good. One participant will take some time. One is going to surprise everyone. Two will be somewhere in between.”
“Sound familiar.”
“Every cohort.” I look at the field. “Leon from Atlanta heard the album on the drive down. He told me it’s what he wants to get back to.”
“I heard it came out well,” he says, which is so dry I look at him.
“I listened to the whole thing in the barn this morning,” I say. “All twelve tracks.”
“And?”
“You know what I’m going to say.”
“I want to hear you say it.”
“It’s true,” I say. “All of it. Every track.”
He looks at the field for a moment.
“Track three,” I say.
He knows which one.
“That took courage,” I say. “Putting that one on a record.”
“Leon said it was the one.”
“Leon was right.”
We sit with that. The March evening. The field going dark around us, and the barn light coming on automatically at the edge of the property.
“I want to play you something,” he says.
“Not the album. You’ve heard the album.” He turns the guitar over in his hands, the familiar habit of a man settling into an instrument. “The song I wrote you. The whole thing. With the guitar.” He pauses. “You played yours for me in the kitchen. I want to play mine for you out here.”
I look at the field.
The barn light is on, and I see Emmett at the fence. The March evening is settling quietly around us.
“Okay,” I say.
He settles the guitar and plays the opening chord.
The sound goes out into the March air and does not stop.
* * *
The song starts the way it always starts in my imagination with those two lines.
I have been carrying them since January, when I heard them through the office window.
A voice behind a door, I can't find the handle for.
a silence got the shape of something more.
But the song is not just those two lines.
The song is twelve lines of verse, a chorus that circles back on itself, a bridge that says the thing the rest of the song has been approaching from all sides.
I hear it now like I heard the recorded version, except here there is no production, no studio, no anything but Cash on a porch with his guitar in the March evening.
There is something about the live form of a thing. Something that the recording, as good as it is, cannot fully hold.
A voice behind a door I can't find the handle for.
a silence got the shape of something more.
She carries what she's guarding like it's holy.
doesn't owe the world a single word.
And I'm the one out in the hall just listening.
to the song I'm not supposed to have heard.
But I heard it.
through a wall I wasn't meant to find.
I heard it.
something true and all mine.
Not mine to keep, I know that much is certain.
but mine to stand still for.
mine to let pull back the curtain.
I heard it.
And I'm not the same.
She built a life that fits just like she planned it.
walls that hold and doors that lock from inside.
I've been there too, I know the way it settles.
The quiet of a place you can't leave behind.
But something in the field that night was different.
The sky was big enough to take the sound.
and I stood there at the edge of all that open.
and understood what I had found.
But I heard it.
through a wall I wasn't meant to find.
I heard it.
something true and all mine.
Not mine to keep, I know that much is certain.
but mine to stand still for.
mine to let pull back the curtain.
I heard it.
and I'm not the same.
I know what it costs to sing in the open.
I know what it means to let something go.
I've been inside my own closed rooms long enough.
to understand the difference between safe and small.
So I heard it.
and I stayed where I was found.
I heard it.
and I didn't make a sound.
because some things you receive by just being present.
Some gifts you earn by standing still.
I heard it.
and I always will.
The last chord fades into the March evening.
Emmett is still at the fence. He has not moved.
The barn light is on across the field.
I don’t say anything for a moment.
I am thinking about standing in a Panhandle field at dusk, the air quality changing when someone appeared behind me. I am thinking about the word let and how it appears in both of our songs, his and mine, the thing we have each been learning how to do.
Let it out. Let someone in. Let the sound go somewhere.
Let.
“Cash.”
“Yeah.”
“You wrote this in October.”
“October and November. The bridge took longer.”
I look at the field. At the barn light. At Emmett patient at the fence.
“You were standing still,” I say. “In the Panhandle. When I was singing.”
“Yeah.”
“You didn’t say anything.”
“No.” He turns towards me. “I understood that I was being given something. That making noise about it would be the wrong move.”
Our eyes lock.
“You wrote a whole song about standing still,” I say.
“I did.”
“That’s…” I stop.
“What?”
“That’s true too,” I say.
He looks at me for a moment, the real shape of his expression, the one without any management in it.
Then he sets the guitar against the porch rail, and we sit in the March evening with the field going dark around us and Emmett at the fence and the sound of the song still somewhere in the air.
* * *
I don’t plan what happens next.
The porch. The March evening. The field. The guitar leaning against the rail.
I start humming. Not the private song, that one I gave him in January in the kitchen, and it is his now, along with mine. Not any song I have written or know. Just sound, and how sound sometimes comes before the words do, the melody feeling its way forward without knowing where it is going.
Cash is very still.
I hum through something that does not have words yet and might not need them.
Then I let my voice open, and I sing.
Not performing. Not a gift. Something looser than either, just sound in the March evening, going out into the field with no walls to contain it.
Emmett lifts his head. The last light is fading from the west, the deep blue of a March sunset when the air is cold enough to hold color.
I sing until the song finishes itself, wherever it was going.
Cash picks up his guitar.
He plays the chord progression I was humming over, the one I didn’t know I was giving him. Three chords, finding the fourth, testing it. The fourth one resolves.
“There,” he says, softly. Not to me. To the song.
“Was that mine or yours?” I ask.
“Not sure yet,” he says. “Maybe both.”
He plays it again, slower. The chord progression that came out of me without asking and landed in his hands, where it apparently wanted to be.
It’s interesting how something that starts with one person can find its way to another. Like the difference between a door closed and a door open, and all the years it takes to understand which one you’re standing at.
Emmett pops his head over the fence rail.
The barn light is steady.
The farmhouse porch light is on behind us, like it has been on every night since October, and I am no longer pretending not to notice it.
I turn to look at him.
He is already looking at me. Guitar in his lap, the March dark coming in around us, and his eyes are steady and waiting, the way they always are. He is patient in the way of a man who has learned that waiting is how you earn something.
I lean in first this time.
It is quieter than the last kiss. Less of an answer, more of a confirmation. His hand comes up to my face the same way it always does, like that is simply where it belongs, and I let the March evening go on around us without minding it.
When we pull back, neither of us says anything.
He picks up his guitar.