Lamb of Iowa

This patch of land; this is where we are. Under a smoky orb of light we once called the sun.

Our elders haunt us with stories about how it shone like a gold ingot swathed in a shawl of blue. Now it’s tarnished brass in a pale rust bowl.

Iowa, it was called. A word already brimming with loss.

They tell us of a thousand suns in a season they called summer, vast rows of them, their flaxen heads dipping and rising with the breezes. Not the gales we now have, but something gentle like the breath of lambs.

Even I remember lambs.

***

“You’re a good girl. You’re a sport.”

What is there to say to this?

“What’s the matter? Cat got your tongue?” 

No, you did.

“Ahem. You know we both had fun.”

We actually didn’t.

“You gonna answer me, sweetheart?”

If I did it would heal and ruin everything.

“Aw, let’s go get a drink.”

Where numbness can reassemble.

“That’s the spirit. I love a spirited girl!”

Which is why you pilfered it. 

“What’ll it be?”

Most of yesterday and earlier.

***

My daddy was a farmer. I know. Sounds like some old song. He farmed American Suffolks and irrigated his pastures with great wheels of pipe, stood guard with a .22 long gun against the tireless coyotes. Before the thing happened, back when such things mattered, he was happy, and we were too. 

Little sister, my oldest most precious memory was holding your tiny hand one cold April dawn and breaching the hushed swirl of the barn and gathering the new lamb whose mother had scorned it and cradling the fragile bellows of its ribcage, feeling it weaken yet, handing it to you, cooling and lost, so we could both learn a thing our schooling had neglected: nothing should ever die alone. 

***

If you knew the tenor of my thoughts, you’d flee. I will murder your complacent ass. And I will do it slowly, extract each drop of suffering like an alchemist panning liquid gold. I will scour and scald you, long before I call the authorities. 

“So what do you do?”

Even if I told you, you wouldn’t care. You already don’t care.

“Aw, come on. I thought you were a sport.”

I’m not. I never claimed to be.

“I can see the mischief in your eyes.”

Camouflage for oaths of vengeance. 

“We should play again.”

You are extraordinarily, horrendously dense.

“Let’s go outside?”

“Yes, let’s.”

“It speaks!”

Indeed. I’ll have my say, and you will finally hear it.

***

My precious sister gone now. You told me of a book and a film called Silence of the Lambs. You said the tale they told was worthy, though it hurt. My memory of lambs is tangled with your story, soiled fleece snagged on barbwire, about men and all the ways they wrecked us women, but I know there was a Clarice who was fierce, and I wish she’d made it to now, here where the forests have receded, here where the light has declined, here where the dead tides ebb and leave no trace. Here in the lost unnumbered fields of Iowa.

_____

Photo credit: © Cameron Stotz