A Polo Field

You push your husband’s chair across the grass, the wheels wearing tracks over bent green blades. The lawn is cut proper and square. You can tell because there are stripes that run up and down the lawn, stripes of lime and forest, two shades that are almost the same.

“It’s a sign of health,” Frederick used to say. “Polo is best played on plaid.” And then he would jostle the belly of his horse, a crème-colored Arabian he’d imported from a Yemenite he rolled craps with, and gallop down the field. Bits of wind would grab at his graying black hair. This was when he was strong enough to mount a horse. This was long ago.

Frederick begins to wheeze. You never understand why the wheezing begins- it is you who pushes the chair, not him- and yet it always scares you. You remember your mother wheezing the same way as the bingo balls dropped during the Powerball, her face six inches from your mahogany Philco. The static turned her white. The static, you think, probably killed her.

“Are you alright, my love?” You are alone, yet you whisper the words. The lawn is very quiet except for the passing of the clouds.

“Yes, Mary,” Frederick says. His cough is a carburetor. “You are a saint among the unholy.”

“Don’t say that,” you tell him. Your name is not Mary, and you believe him too young for dementia.

“I mean it,” Frederick continues. “You have always been good, Sammy. You are everything my first wife wasn’t.” He pauses. “Have I ever told you about my first wife?”

You began dating before they had divorced. You were so young at the time, and yet it feels very recent.

“I cannot remember,” you tell him.

“That’s funny,” Frederick says. “Neither can I.” He smiles outward towards the open plain. Sometimes, you are mistaken for his live-in nurse. You never feel the need to correct them.

“Do you truly love me?” Frederick asks.

You pause, the chair feeling light in your grip. It is a good question. It is a question worth asking.

“I do,” you say to him.

“Do you want to leave me?”

“I don’t,” you answer.

“I wouldn’t blame you. You know that don’t you?” And for a moment, the wheeze has inherited his voice, making it taffy-like.

You begin rolling the chair again, not saying anything. Frederick continues his thought.

“I wouldn’t write you out of the will. You would still receive most everything. And by God, you’re so young!” You can feel the surge of power from beneath your hands. Once in a while, the old Frederick breaks out, and you recognize him immediately, the man that could charm entire banquet halls, including a newly hired intern. The man that, eventually, swallowed three blocks of Wall Street. “You have so much time.”

“I won’t leave you,” you admit.

Frederick says nothing- only peers to the left. At the far tree line, where the grass from the lawn begins to age and become ecosystem, there is a baby deer, her head barely visible. A mother comes patrolling from the shade and into the sun. There are little white spots on her back, and her nose is wet, and the ticks on her ears glisten like jewelry. Frederick reaches, then drops his hand.

“Can I tell you a story?” he says.

“Of course,” you say.

“It is quite long. Do you mind?”

“No, my love.”

“Bless you,” he says, and it may just be a turn of phrase, but you believe him. You’ve always believed him.

“When I was a boy,” Frederick begins, “we moved from England to a town called Mount Hermon, Kentucky. Southwest of Bowling Green. You’ve seen the picture on the mantle.”

You nod and keep pushing, embarrassed that you can’t bring it to memory. You have many mantles.

“There weren’t any buildings- just two lane roads, and big, arching, freshly plowed fields. Little brown posts marked the property lines, and my mates and I would kick them down, and pour soda pop on ant piles, and steal strawberries from the neighbor’s garden. Everything smelt of manure.”

The sky is strong and a vibrant blue.

“I am thinking of a time when I was middle aged, around twelve. We were sneaking around the property of a tractor salesman who was away on business. He’d inherited many acres, and they stretched a hundred years back, a dark fantasy when compared to the back roads we were used to.”

“We fooled around in there all day, climbing the trees and playing tag. It was dreadful fun. But we hadn’t any flashlights, or camping gear, and when the space between the leaves turned a murky, cautionary color, we realized our exit was obscured. My mates and I were lost.”

You are halfway up the lawn. The mother and the baby have fled back into the forest.

“We decided to walk through the night. It was a poorly made decision. Our faces were slashed by long, hungry branches. Briar patches laid waste to our shoes, pulling skin from our ankles. The gnats slipped between our lips in droves, became pulpy across our tongue. They tasted like crushed apple seeds.”

Frederick looks upwards.

“We couldn’t talk or see or breath. We just walked through it all.”

You understand.

“After surfacing through a bogged-up creek, tens of hours later, the mates had just about had it. One of us was crying, and each of us was trying not to. Mud had caked onto our feet, and without drinkable water, we felt shipwrecked. We were both cold and hot, both present and gone, transient to all natural properties. I had even urinated myself.”

“And, moving off of that creek, over a hill padded with leaves made of tissue paper, I remember being done with it. I remember telling myself, ‘Once I mark this hill, I will lay down and cover myself in nature, and sleep until the bloodhounds come.’ I’m sure my mates had thought similar.”

“But that didn’t happen. As we moved up that hill, we were met with the path that we had come in on, and the tractor salesman’s white house, and the two rusted machines that the salesman had dissected for scraps, sleeping quietly in the weeds. And behind the house was a long, white field of cotton, very long and beautiful, ready for paint and sunrise. Above the field, there was color, but only the blooming of it, in little orange threads that cross stitched the waning shadows.”

Frederick breathes deeply. You breath deeply.

“And what was there to do?” he says. “We ran until we hit the cotton. We ran so hard that the laces gave hold of our feet, and our wet, shriveled soles blew brown dust into the air, into patterns and shapes that found a home on the trees that we’d escaped from.”

You can feel the quiver on Frederick’s lip. You always feel him like that, closer than anyone ever expects of you.

“And this is the strange part, so stick with me here, Sammy.”

“Of course, my love,” you tell him.

He coughs, then continues. “I can remember running my fingers over the stems of cotton, the threads pulling away above us into thick, orange blankets, and feeling like I may have died in that forest. That maybe I was dead, and the wind that rustled over the crops was just the sniffing of the dogs across my cold, sticky body. As if the cotton field was a cheap excuse for living, and I was a sucker for believing in it.”

He stopped the chair, gripping slowly on the wheels. You put an arm on his shoulder. The horses left the lawn when Frederick did, but you imagine you can hear them, prancing around the two of you like a shield.

“And after everything that’s happened- two marriages, a son, a business- I sometimes still feel that way.” He says these last words very confidently, and you notice that he is the old Frederick once more. You move around the wheelchair to greet him.

His eyes are glazed and blue. His neck, where the cancer began, is thin. The hair that you used to clump in your fingers as you mounted him, when you were twenty and he was thrice that, is nearly gone. His smile is full and brittle. You love him, and this time you don’t have to question it.

Out behind your gaze is the striped lawn, and the parking lot that you have come from. Holding him, you want to tell him your greatest fear. Your fear is that he will leave, just like the horses did, and so will the deer, and the trees, and the shades of green that are a sign of health. You’re afraid the green will give way to yellow, and then to brown, and then to black. You’re afraid they’ll bury the horses for a K-Mart and a sports bar.

You don’t tell him because you know it will come true.