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He liked being this close to the earth, smelling it, feeling it on his hands and under his nails, the same as when he planted tobacco sprigs in the spring. A
So I lay in the bedroom nights remembering things and though I’m not more than ten feet away it’s like there’s a big glass door between me and the kitchen table, and it’s locked on Lynn’s side. We just as well might be living in different counties for all the closeness I feel. A diamond can cut through glass, I’ve heard, but I ain’t so sure anymore.
“I hope things are always like this,” she said. “If there was a falling star that would be all I’d wish for.” Then she’d kissed me, a kiss that promised more that night after we put Janie to bed. But there wasn’t any falling star that afternoon and there ain’t one tonight. I suddenly wish Janie was here, because if she was I’d go inside and lay down beside her. I’d stay there all night just listening to her breathe. You best get used to it, a voice in my head says. There’s coming lots of nights you’ll not have her in the same place as you, maybe not even in the same town. I look up at the sky
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His teachers urged him into a world where the sky did not matter, where land did not blacken your nails, cling to your boots, or callous your hands but was seen, if at all, through the glass windows of buildings and cars and planes. The world irrelevant and mute. His teachers had believed he could leave the world he had grown up in, and perhaps he had believed it as well.
