October in the Earth

by Olivia Hawker

Love is a thing that’s given, not taken. This is something I know far deep inside, in the quietest part of my soul where loneliness can’t reach, where even fear can’t touch me.

As if she could read my grim thoughts, my mother dug in. I loved her—God knows I did—but the woman was relentless as winter.

He laughed in that way he had, one short bark that managed to convey a whole text and verse of condescension without a single word.

Something warm and powerful uncurled inside me, like a big critter waking from a long winter’s sleep. The feeling was so foreign that I didn’t quite trust it, and didn’t know what to call it—that secret expanding strength.

Wasn’t I a fool in those days? You don’t know the half of it.

Folks that take from you without ever giving . . . they don’t love you none, no matter what they say.

As I sat dumbfounded in the little pinewood chair, I was beset by the sensation of waking from a dream. There was no going back to the world I’d known before. I could tell that much by the swollen heat in my chest, the way that fire burned hotter by the moment. Blinking and gasping, I asked myself what that feeling was—the roaring blaze that had taken the place of my former shame, burned all my meekness away. It was anger, I realized with a thrill of wonder. It was outrage. And it made me feel more righteous and mighty than I’d felt in all my life before.

I thought about endings—how they always came, sooner or later, to every imaginable thing.

I don’t recall the least twinge of regret as I dug through the contents of that closet. Maybe some instinct in me knew that memories would have locked around me like shackles if I’d allowed them to touch my heart.

I thought, No one ever tells you how easy it is to up and go.

No one ever tells you how easy it is to up and go. Just like that, I was free.

The black sky, the world, the state of things were all so much bigger than I’d understood them to be, than I’d even thought possible.

These insignificant particles of dust, these specks among the immensity of Creation—how quickly the valley that had once been the sum total of my world was lost to sight.

Be meek, be silent, and let Man guide you, guard you, tell you how to think, tell you how to speak, tell you how to live.

nothing could shut out the vision of my wasted, stolen years.

Maybe there isn’t much difference between fear and rejoicing. Maybe it’s all the same wellspring of awe. Maybe we decide whether the water tastes of joy or despair once it’s in our mouths and we’re already swallowing it down.

Or maybe, after all, it’s not the view that’s beautiful or ugly. Maybe what counts is the way you look at it.

What’s the point of living life on the straight and narrow if it only gets you—” “What you got. A broken heart.”

“No one takes to the rails unless they’ve got a broken heart. If there’s one thing every hobo has in common, it’s that. A no-good husband did the job for one of us, a no-good wife for another. Or someone you love dies and leaves you all alone. You lose your job—your place in the world, your standing, your respect. That’s why all of us are out here hitching on a train. The stories are different, but the hurt’s the same, when you really get down to the heart of matters.”

would have stopped the world from turning, held back the aging of the day, but it wasn’t in my power, and anyway, nothing ever lasts.

I didn’t see how she could relive such a memory without bursting into tears. But maybe she’d lived it over so many times, it no longer had the power to hurt her.

“The Lord works in mysterious ways. Sometimes our greatest blessings proceed from the things we believe, at first, to be curses, or outright damnation.”

“I wouldn’t have left at all if I had what you had, Del. I would have put up with damn near anything to have a nice, pretty life.” Her declaration sent dread into my tipsy heart. It seemed the worst kind of blasphemy, for a woman as brave and strong, as magnificent as my friend Louisa to put up with the least speck of nonsense from any man.

And I wanted to tell her, then, what a miracle it was that I knew her at all, how improbable this all had been—our meeting by chance on a boxcar I’d only boarded in a fit of pique, miles and miles away from where either of us had originated. Still we’d come together, and that night, under the stars that sang along to the humming of the accordion, I understood that this was something rare and holy, this unlikely union. Our friendship was meant to be. It was bigger than us; it was something, really something. It was everything to me.

We watched the town fly past, then the unlit mystery of the prairie lands, which rippled out from our vantage point like the gentle waves of a pond when a pebble is tossed into its heart.

Sometimes I would catch a glimpse of a tattered green curtain in a window or a yellow cat sitting on a roof, or a line of some small child’s dresses hung out to dry in the unforgiving sun, and some great, invisible hand would take hold of my heart—and then the sight would fall behind, gone in a blink the way things always go, and I’d be left swallowing down that sudden ache, asking myself why the vision had affected me, why it still rang like an echo in my mind, miles down the track.

“School’s a fine thing,” Skipjack said, “when a family ain’t starving. I don’t think many kids out here in farm country has seen the inside of a school since this emergency began.” This emergency. There was no need to give it a name, no sense in trying to encompass every fact and feature of the catastrophic end that had come upon us all. The heat, the desperation, the rains that existed only in memory, or in the unreality of a scarce-remembered dream. The dollars that were good for only half of what they’d bought the week before. This endless, permanent emergency. The frayed hem of our lives, a thread that only unraveled faster the more desperately we clung to it.

What an effort of slow unfurling was required to pick myself up and go about the hard work of living.

The choice was between one hard road and another, one brand of misery and its reflection. I would walk a grim path no matter which I chose.

If I returned to Irving, I would lose my very soul—the treasure I’d only found once I’d left my former life behind.

miracles only proceed from a God whose eyes are open.

In the delicacy of twilight, in its rapid fade into full night, I understood the impermanence of youth and happiness, of life itself, and every moment that passed was a treasure I possessed, and each moment was of greater worth than all the fine things Irving had filled our home with—the flowered wallpaper and electric lights, the telephone, the velvet sofa and chairs. What was any of that worth, compared to this? This treasure buried under the grim, brown surface of that year.

She was good—good right through to the heart, not because she saw some advantage to herself in kindness, but merely because kindness was her natural state.

“Nothing stays forever. There’s no such thing as forever.”

I don’t know what to call the light I saw, so bright and warm, in her eyes. I’m afraid to call it anything. Sometimes it’s better not to speak of a hope or a longing, a need, because what if you’re wrong? What if you shatter it all by giving it the wrong sort of name?

It’s love that reminds us who we really are. It’s love that holds the world together, even when everything tries its best to fall apart.”

Now I’ve said already that I didn’t look back with regret. That much is true. But not a day passed without my thinking of Louisa, in all those years of wandering. On the worst days, when the sky and the earth conspired to crush me between their hot and merciless fists, I remembered Louisa bathing in the calm waters of the Platte, tipping back her head, white throat exposed, and I told myself, Nothing lasts forever. And when the occasional joy came my way—for there’s always some small goodness, even in the midst of ruination—I thought of the way she held me after I’d returned the stolen locket.

Maybe the world never stops ending.

The summer of 1931 had receded to a place so far from where I now stood, it might as well have been a dream. Maybe it had been. Maybe waking from a dream is a kind of ending, too.

love is a thing that’s given, not taken. If the love is real, then giving is enough.