Chapter 6 #2
We're past it.
She turned the sentence over the way she'd turned over Lonnie handled that. It was the same kind of sentence. It was smooth and it went down easy and there was nothing in it.
She had said it about herself.
On the nineteenth she went out to the barn in the afternoon and stood in the middle of it and tried to see it the way a camera would.
That was not a decision either. She had gone out to work and instead she found herself turning around slowly with her hands in her coat pockets, looking at the north window and the light coming through it and thinking: they'd put the chair there.
They'd put the chair right there, in front of the shelves, because that's where you put it. Boxes behind her, so you can see what she's talking about. Somebody would move the space heater out of frame. Somebody would ask her to take her reading glasses out of her hair.
And a woman would sit across from her, off camera, and say: tell me about the record.
Amber stood in her barn and got as far as the first sentence.
I was twenty-three and I cut a demo in a church basement in Letcher County —
And her throat closed.
Not with grief. That is what surprised her. It closed the way it had closed on the arm of Bess's couch with a borrowed guitar in her lap: something in her simply refused, from the neck down, like a mule at a gate.
Twelve minutes. She would have to say it out loud for twelve minutes, in the spring, in good light, to a woman she'd picked out of a list, and it would sit at the end of a hundred and eighteen minutes in a folder called Extras, and somewhere in America maybe four thousand people would ever click on it.
She got the space heater going and sat down and did not do any work for about half an hour.
At four o'clock her phone went off with a notification she hadn't asked for: the streaming date. February the sixth. KILGORE arrives with over an hour of exclusive bonus material.
She read the words over an hour twice.
Then she put the phone face down on the bench and went and got box fifty-one off the shelf, because it was there, and because handling paper is the only thing she has ever found that works.
She started the pre-1998 boxes on the twentieth.
They were the worst of it and she'd been putting them off for years — the bar years, nineteen of them, no order to any of it.
Receipts and setlists on napkins and three different address books and a shoebox of Polaroids nobody had labeled.
Every so often something real: a notebook page with a whole verse on it and a date.
She had a system. Sleeve, card, box, shelf. She had built the system when she was twenty-seven years old at that same bench and it had not changed since.
The gray accordion folder was in the bottom of box fifty-two, underneath a stack of 1996.
She knew immediately that it was wrong.
Not because of what it was. Because of what it looked like.
It was clean. It had a printed label on the tab — KILGORE / NORTHFIELD — CORRESP.
— in a font, off a machine, and the tab was straight, and there was not one thing in that barn with a printed label on it because Amber Galloway had labeled every object in that building by hand for fifteen years.
It had come from an office.
She sat down on the stool with it on her knees.
There was no reason not to open it. That is what she told herself, sitting there, with the space heater ticking and the light coming through the two windows they'd put in the year they redid the roof.
There was no reason. She was the archivist. Correspondence about the film was archive material and it was her job, literally her actual job, to sleeve it and card it and box it.
She put both hands flat on it and did not open it.
Because she knew. She has never pretended otherwise. She sat in that barn on the twentieth of December with a folder on her knees and she knew that something was in it, the way you know weather.
And she had six good weeks. She had a man leaving her thirty-eight-second recordings from his truck. She had a legal pad on the kitchen table with his hand over it. She had, that morning, laughed so hard at something he said about a wreath that she'd had to sit down on the stairs.
If she opened it and it was nothing, she'd have opened it.
If she opened it and it wasn't nothing, it would be the twentieth of December and she would have to know it forever.
She sat there a long time.
Then she stood up, and put the folder under her arm, and turned off the heater and the light, and walked up the path in the dark to the truck.
She put it on the passenger seat.
She stood in the driveway with the door open and the dome light on and looked at it lying there — a gray accordion folder with a straight printed label, on the seat of her own truck, in her own driveway, forty feet from a house where a man was making a fire in the good room because she'd said she was cold at lunch.
Then she shut the door on it.
"I'm not going to open it," she said, out loud, in her yard, to nobody.
The truck was still there in the morning. It was there the day after that. She went out twice in the next two days to get something out of the glovebox and both times she took the thing out and shut the door without looking at the seat.
On the twenty-third she was going into town for feed.
She got in, and put her sunglasses on, and started the engine, and the folder was right there at her elbow where it had been for three days.
She sat in the driveway with her foot on the brake for about a minute.
Then she put the truck back in park and left the engine running.