Lime Creek by Joe Henry

supper’ll be cold Daddy. And kissing her cheek, a woman, with her mother in her eyes and her own daughter there too if you were wise enough to see that far. Andtime turning grey in your beard and your hands like limp old claws turned hard with callus and age and your fingers cracking in the deathlike cold and healing with the earth under the healed places and cracking open again like fissures in the frozen ground waiting for the renewal of spring to restore what is held in abeyance back to the tender and fecund flesh, another winter. For time here wasn’t generally referred to in years but rather in the winters we have lived through. The sun is low and the warmth is brief and the light lives on between the dark and the dark.
    Toebowman would be singing softly at first so that we hadn’t really been paying that much attention until one by one the grownups would join in as their kids seemed to gravitate back up against them with their young wild voices catching a word here and there and making up others as their folks sang along. And one or two of the ranchers droning with one fixed tone that probably sounded to them as if they were warbling away with everyone else. A joining of voices in that delicate light that somehow seemed to generate a warmth, a suspiration of living breath and a real warmth that was undeniable. As if each of the creatures that lay or stood or sat in that drafty close place made enough of a contribution to the engendered atmosphere to actually produce aliving heat from out of the barren cold that pressed against the outside walls.
    Then Spencer would take out his spectacles and set them low on his nose and sit in front of the tree so that its light fell onto the children’s book that he held with both hands and always read from about the Baby and the animals, and how the animals were all given human speech on this one night. And as I listened I remembered that I planned to get up later so I could get dressed and get my boots on and come back down to the barn to hear what each of the horses and dogs and cats and the cattle and sheep would sound like when they spoke actual words. Wondering what they would say to each other, but especially what they would say to me when I spoke to them. And Whitney looks at me from the corner of his eye so I know he’s thinking the same thing.
    But we wake up much later than we should have, and Whitney’s already dressing himself as I rush to catch up to him. And he whispers fiercely, Pa said they do it at midnight. And as I’m trying to get my flannel nightshirt tucked into my jeans I say, Maybe they’re still doing it because it’s still dark outside. And then we bump and shush each other down the stairs as we hold on to the railing.
    The cold freezes the inside of my nose, it’s so cold, and I breathe into the collar of my jacket. The stars are like little white holes all across the black sky and Sirius, all aglimmer with red and blue and white light too, hangs just above the roof of the barn as we slide the door open just enough to squeeze through and then close it behind us. But we’re too late. Lemon comes up to me in the dark and noses into my fingers but he doesn’t say anything even when I rub his head against my chest and say, Hi Lemon. Hi Lemon. And I know how his mouth smiles when I scratch his ears but he still doesn’t speak. At least not with words anyway.
    I turn the light on in the tackroom and leave the door open so the light spreads out across the dark runway. And then I hear Whitney over by Blue’s stall, standing on a haybale and speaking softly to him with Blue’s head lifted and his legs folded under him and his gentle eyes blinking against our intrusion. Hi Blue, Whitney says. Hi Blue. And I climb up behind him and watch the horse’s face as he continues to blink into wakefulness with his lovely pale eyelashes.
    We can hear other animals in their stalls restive in the darkness and groaning with sleep, and one of them drinking while