Chapter Seven · Sienna
CHAPTER SEVEN
SIENNA
The Fourth of July Run is not a parade, and anybody in Blackthorn County will correct you if you call it one, including the ones who have never once gotten up to watch it.
They put flags on veterans’ graves. All of them. Union Army stones so old the names have washed out, boys from the Pacific, boys from Khe Sanh, a girl from Fallujah whose mother still will not speak to the club and whose grave gets a flag anyway, every year, first, before the sun clears the ridge.
I know all this because I grew up here. I know it closer than that because for three years in my twenties I rode on the back of the second bike in that line, and there are photographs to prove it that I have never asked anybody to take down.
This year I watched it from the cemetery lot, standing beside my rig, on standby.
The text had come in at nine the night before from dispatch, not from the club, which meant somebody had done it properly, through the county, with a purchase order: EMS standby requested, Little Bethel, 0530. Rae took one look at the posting and signed us both up before I could have an opinion.
“It’s time and a half,” she said, “and you’d have sat in that lot anyway with your radio on pretending you were birdwatching. This way the county pays for your feelings.”
We set up in the corner of the lot at five-fifteen in the dark with coffee, and at five-forty the sound started far down the valley, low at first, like weather.
Amos, who had begged onto the shift out of pure curiosity, stood up on the bumper to watch the headlights come up the switchbacks in a chain.
“How many is that?”
“Hundred and thirty, hundred and fifty. They come in from other counties for it. Sit down before you fall in my lap and become a patient.”
They came up the last grade and through the gates two abreast, and the engines shut off in a wave from front to back, and then there was that silence, the specific enormous one, with the creek running under it.
And then a hundred and forty people who are collectively suspected of everything that happens in three counties took up little flags in their fists and spread out across the wet grass in the half-dark, quiet as church, and got to work.
They had it down to forty minutes. Sections, rows, a man calling names off a laminated list that Evelyn Chase had rebuilt from cemetery records last winter, because of course she had.
She was out there herself in a barn coat with a clipboard, the president’s wife with her hair coming down, checking rows the way she checks everything, and when the caller stumbled on one of the washed-out Union stones she gave him the name off the top of her head, and a hundred and forty people took it in stride, because the county has spent a year getting used to the idea that the woman knows where everything is.
I did not know her, particularly. We had worked one scene together in the spring, a yard injury, her holding the clipboard end of it, me holding the rest, and she had been exactly as useful as she thought she’d be and no more, which in a bystander is a miracle.
At the section break she tracked across the wet grass and stood next to me for a minute the way you stand at these things, both of us facing the flags.
“Supervisor Garrett.”
“Mrs. Harrow.”
“Evelyn.” She watched the far rows fill in. “Thursday’s yours, I hear. The barn.”
“Word travels.”
“I typed the sign-up list,” she said, without apology.
“I want on the second class, whenever there is one. Diesel gets ten men and I get to already know how to stop bleeding, that’s the household arrangement.
” A shout of laughter went up from somewhere by the gates, Dutch holding forth.
She almost smiled. “You should charge the county for the curriculum, incidentally. I’ll show you the grant line it comes out of, it exists, nobody’s ever spent it. Come by the scale office.”
And she moved off down her rows with her clipboard, leaving me in possession of the only conversation I’d had in ten years where the club, the county, and the money all sat down together and behaved, and I filed that away as its own kind of evidence about what had gotten hold of this place.
I watched Dutch Voyles, eighty-one years old, get walked out to the far corner by two younger men so that he could personally do the 1898 stones the way he has done them for sixty years.
I watched Del Danner, in a lawn chair that somebody carried for her, supervising the section where her husband now lay, pointing with her cane, running her row like a foreman.
And there is one more flag that is not on Evelyn’s list and never will be.
At the far corner of the new section, before the run does anything else, before the caller starts the names, two men walk out alone and put a flag on the Fallujah girl’s grave, first, every year, while her mother watches from her car at the gate with the engine running.
The mother has never spoken to the club in nineteen years.
She has also never once missed being there to watch, and both of those facts are the truth, and in this county we have learned to let people hold their grief in whatever grip keeps it from spilling.
Pike’s stone is granite, gray, plain, and it says HE WROTE IT DOWN across the bottom, and if you don’t know the story it reads like scripture, and if you do know the story it reads like scripture.
The flag detail did his row last. Six men. Cutter carried the flags.
I did not plan to watch that part and then I watched every second of it.
He went down the row and did the veterans’ stones, and then he stopped at Pike’s, which gets no flag because Pike never served, and he stood there with the extra flags in his fist and his head down for a while.
Then he took one flag and pushed it into the ground at the base of the stone anyway, crooked, deliberate, against every rule of the list, and Del Danner reached out from her lawn chair and straightened it with her cane, and neither of them looked at each other, and that was the whole conversation.
The sun came over the ridge and lit a hundred and twelve flags and every wet blade of grass at once.
“Okay,” Rae said quietly, beside me, into her coffee. “I’ve been coming to this thing for twenty years. That part still works.”
We ran three calls before dark, because the Fourth is amateur day in every county in America.
That is not a complaint. That is the job, and the job on a holiday is mostly a public health project conducted at forty miles an hour with a stranger’s family watching, and the thing they never tell you in class is how much of it is talking.
Eleven years in this county and I have used a defibrillator eight times and my own voice ten thousand.
A heat syncope at the Ammons Creek picnic, a sixty-year-old man who had mowed his own field at noon in long sleeves out of stubbornness and stood up too fast into a world full of spots.
He came around in the shade insisting he was fine to a circle of relatives who had heard him insist he was fine about a chainsaw, a ladder, and a bull, and who had the scars in the family album to price that sentence properly.
Fluids, shade, orthostatics before I let him stand, and a lecture from his wife that was more clinically effective than anything in my rig, delivered while she held his soda and did not give it back until the good parts.
A chest pain in Wilkes Ford that was a panic attack in a man whose son had shipped out Tuesday, and we sat with him on his porch steps for forty minutes and I let Amos run the whole call, talk-down and vitals and the referral card, and did not touch a thing, and watched him come off that porch two inches taller.
And a hand laceration at the hardware store in the Gap, from a box cutter, eight stitches’ worth, wrapped and driven to the clinic by his cousin against my advice, which in this county is a treatment pathway with its own billing code.
In between, we sat in the rig in the shade at the ballfield lot and watched the county have its day.
Kids in the creek with an inner tube armada.
The Ruritan grill line forty deep at noon.
The 4-H tent, the horseshoe pits, Del Danner installed under the pavilion in her lawn chair receiving the county like a head of state.
A Copperhead at each road crossing in an orange vest, flagging traffic, because the club runs the crossings on the Fourth and has since before anybody thought to mind, and this year for the first time the county had printed it in the event program, TRAFFIC CONTROL: VOLUNTEER, which Rae read out loud twice for the pleasure of it.
Amos watched the crossings work for a while, the vests waving minivans through with two fingers off the brim.
“I grew up two counties over,” he said. “We got told about them. You know. Stories.”
“Some of the stories are true,” Rae said, not unkindly. “The trick is the timeline. This county’s stories run about a year behind the county.”
“So what are they now?”
Rae thought about it longer than I expected her to.
“Now they’re the only outfit in the valley that ever showed everybody its books,” she said. “Which makes them the thing this county has always trusted least and needed most, both at once, and the county’s still deciding what to do about it. Ask me again in a year.”
And at six o’clock, a clean white pickup came through the ballfield lot, slow, with KESTERLY LOGISTICS lettered on the doors, and a man in a polo got out and started shaking hands down the grill line like a candidate, and left a banner with the Ruritans, and was gone in under twenty minutes.
“Community partner,” Rae said, reading the banner as it went up on the fence. PROUD TO SUPPORT BLACKTHORN COUNTY. “That’s the outfit that wants to build your barn.”
“That’s the outfit.”
“Nine minutes to Wilkes Ford.” She looked at me sideways. “You going to take their money?”
“I’m going to find out what it costs first,” I said, and watched the white pickup turn north onto 11, toward the mile markers, and did not say the rest of it out loud.
The fireworks go up from the ballfield at full dark, and the standby contract ran through the show, so we pulled the rig to the top of the lot with the doors open and watched the county gather on blankets in the outfield.
Cutter came over at nine.
I watched him make the decision from forty yards out.
He came across the lot in no hurry, in the orange traffic vest over his cut, which should have looked ridiculous and did not, and he stopped a correct six feet from the bumper, and Rae developed an urgent professional interest in the contents of the jump bag.
“Supervisor,” he said. “Wanted to say thank you. From the club. For the standby.”
“The county bills you for it. Thank the county.”
“I’ll write them a letter.” The first shell went up and broke red over the field, and the light of it moved on every face in the outfield, and on his.
“Trip watched the run from Del’s porch this morning.
First time he’s been outside. He wanted me to tell you he did his breathing thing, the little gadget. ”
“The spirometer.”
“The spirometer. Ten times, he says, though Del says six.”
“Del’s count is the count.”
“That’s what I told him.” A green one, then two together, and the crowd did the sound crowds do.
He looked at the sky and not at me, and I looked at the sky and not at him, and we stood there in the falling colored light with six correct feet between us and ten years and no patient, for once, no bleeding stranger between my hands and his side of the world, nothing between us at all, which it turns out is the hardest thing to have between two people.
“Sienna,” he said, at the finale, under the noise, so quietly that I could have honestly claimed not to hear it, which I understood was why he said it that way.
Ten years of engineering the county so we would never stand in the same light, and he spends his one word on my name, pitched for deniability, wrapped in fireworks, offered like a man leaving something on a porch and stepping back off it before the door opens.
I looked at him.
He didn’t say anything else. He touched two fingers to the brim of nothing, the way the old men do it, and he walked back across the lot to his crossing, and I watched the vest until it was orange in the taillights and then nothing.
Rae surfaced from the jump bag she had inventoried three times.
“Not one word,” I said.
“I’m counting cravats,” Rae said. “We’re short two cravats.”
I got home at midnight and sat on my own porch with a beer I didn’t open and my phone face up on the rail, and at twelve-forty it lit with a number I had never deleted in ten years of deleting things.
*Thursday 1900. Ten of us. Whatever rules you set, they’ll hold. C.*
I read it four times.
*Whatever rules you set, they’ll hold.* Ten years, and the man had sent me eleven words, and somehow found the eleven that did the most work: no apology, which I would not have believed, no warmth, which I could not have carried, just the one thing I actually needed underwritten and his initial like a signature on a ticket.
I did not answer it, because there was no answer that wasn’t a door, and I had not decided about the door.
Then I got a legal pad out of the truck, and I sat on the porch until two in the morning writing rules by the light of my phone, which I am aware is its own kind of answer.