Two Stories by Seth Brady Tucker

Culvert

You were still asleep when the first shingles began to fly from our roof, barely conscious when we heard the old gazebo let go of the wooden joists and lay down lazily in the rising water with a sigh; but when the doghouse tumbled by in the ozone-lit night, you shoved past me in my dripping robe, your crutches and broken leg trundling out into the dark waters of our flooding backyard, alarm finally coming to you in a mighty panic. Your black lab was cowering under the deck, chocolate lab pacing frantically next to the plastic swing-set that you never bothered to finish building.

The yellow playset slide was floundering with the wind and current, and I thought for a second of taking my ring off, putting it somewhere safe before I remembered that I had already sold it, that the house behind us was empty, awful with dust in the corners, stains and indentations in the carpet where our furniture had sat, our clothes stuffed into separate cars in the driveway.  It occurred to me that you planned on leaving that swing-set behind, like a message for whatever doomed couple decided to buy our old crumbling duplex. I wanted you to fight, but this was the first you had left your room in days.

You grabbed a shovel and started digging in the rising waters, your second crutch tossed to the side in the rain, wind slanting in sideways across your big shoulders, and I remembered how I first saw you, slumped like an enormous clay golem at a bar in Nashville, shoulders spreading over the two men next to you like you were putting your arms around them, your hands clasped around what looked like a thimble of beer. The press of you that night. How you asked me before taking me by the hips, letting your hands travel up my side to my breasts.

The lights cracked off behind us, and the neighbor’s house went dark, and all of this felt finally like what it was: an old world bidding us goodbye. No more evenings of boxed wine on the porch, my wine glass filled with apple juice when I was pregnant. No us, ever again, after this. In the end you took the blame, and you asked only for the two things you had brought into the marriage.

The lights flickered back on, illuminating your back in the lake of our yard, head underwater as you pulled enormous lumps of earth and clay from the ground. It was something to behold, and when the earth split between your feet, the gathered weight of the water pulled down in a roar around your feet, pressure unleashed into that clotted  torrent of rushing sound and down into a buried culvert you had broken open beneath the sod. No one but you knew this culvert existed, buried long ago between these poorly made homes, and when the lights popped off again your body was outlined in a clutch of lightning: the sound of the world disappearing down into the throated suck of that inexplicable drain.

Miss Whiting’s Engagement Quilt                        

It was in the days before my father thought to give me a ball or a glove or a stick to hit things with for entertainment, before I learned to brawl and chew on my hate in big gulping bites, before my carefree habit of reading books under a tent of blanket and end table and sofa drove him to the extreme of buying tiny women’s doeskin leather work-gloves and trucking me out to the farm to toughen up, to be a man. He even explained why when I asked him if I could just stay with Mom and quilt with the Sisters from the Ward—You have to toughen up, he said, become a man, to which I replied, I’m seven, which got laughs out of my two teenaged brothers, but which ended with me having two jobs for the next ten years: paperboy and ranch-hand.

The decision to make me a man was ultimately a necessity borne of unrealistic expectations—my brothers had needed no incentive to be tough and fearless and cruel—they had fought the other local Wyoming boys one after another as soon as they realized their hands made fists, used wriggling salamanders as bait in the murkiest and most sinister ponds, shot prairie dogs with .22’s—even when the other prairie dogs were right there watching. They pulled legs off of anything with legs, made my father proud with the rough callouses of their palms and the wrestling dust storms of their battles—a sure sign they were not sissies—though my father might have liked to use harsher words like faggot or queer if the darker side of his Mormon sensibilities had allowed for it.

Our house had quilts tacked up everywhere: some decorative and crafted from old jeans, terrycloth wash cloths, old sweaters, and some carefully stenciled or painted with representative caricatures of Mormon lore and family history. This compulsion to cover everything in quilted pastels was just another thing beyond my father’s comprehension, and the house was essentially split in half, my father’s taxidermized ranch decor moved downstairs as if by barometric pressure. My mom tacked the quilts to every open space on the walls as home-spun decoration until our home seemed fashioned for those in an insane asylum with the need for padded walls. My bedroom was a sectioned-off corner of the concrete basement, surrounded by every manner of animal hide, bear rugs, mountain sheep heads, deer antlers, even the anomalous carcass of a needle-spined puffer-fish; an audience of frozen wild ghosts surrounding the cot I slept on, each bearing witness to the careful work of the Mormon ladies bent with needle and thread when my mother threw her quilting parties. She loathed the basement, but it was the only room large enough for the quilting frame.

I spent my early childhood along with these women, happily quilting, complete with thumb thimble and needle and all, but the real reason I wanted to stay with these Relief Society ladies was because Ms. Whiting would purposely not wear panties and liked to hike her long denim dress up to the top of her heavy thighs. She seemed old as dirt to me, in her early twenties at least, unmarried and hefty and solid and curvy in all the ways that would betray her when she finally found someone to give her children to make her whole.

I knew it was wrong, but my curiosity was too great, so I began to spend as much time under the quilt as I could, feeling her sexual heat from under the heavy sack of her dress, and for weeks I would sit close, staring at the dark tangle of hair, smelling the lovely humidity of swamp and sweat and lavender.

Then it was all over, my shelter from toxic masculinity broken open like the webbing of spider eggs.

Ms. Whiting is gone now, replaced by a silent woman demurely wrapped in shapeless giant muumuus, blankly married to a returned missionary boy; everything in her life now missionary. And in the last days of my adolescence, in the last days of my employment as a paper boy, I would pedal past her tiny and simple home hoping for one more opportunity to see this great naked mystery, peeking in the windows for the chance of seeing her sex as I thought she had wanted me to see it. But her windows were all covered in quilts, as if she had sewn herself into a cocoon of used fabrics. And if only my father could have known what the work had done to me, the way my jaw chewed hard on a grimace just like his? How the hard muscles of my back bunched and how my fists knotted over the handles on my bike as I furiously pedaled away?

Seth Brady Tucker is executive director of the Longleaf Writers’ Conference and teaches at the Lighthouse Writers’ Workshop and the Colorado School of Mines near Denver. He is the author of We Deserve the Gods We Ask For (2014, Eric Hoffer Book Award) and Mormon Boy (2012).