The Kind Earth

The thought that always went through Michael’s Cleveland’s head when he was in North Dakota was, “So this is America.” He had heard of America. He had seen the movies about the actual West, not the industrial Midwest, and he thought, “So this is it. He could not get used to the broad open spaces. In fact, he was a little terrified of them at first. Winter did not seem to end in that part of the country, but it was alright. Even winter was not as big as the sky stretching over head.

And he was mildly terrified of it. When he left the monastery to do chores or simply to walk on the flat land and see all the space about him, he was overwhelmed by the great size of the sky and the space that stretched out all around him.

This wasn’t always space, or not space in the same way. Call it empty if you will, people lived here, and people were swept away, and what remained was this silence, and the neighbors who were so far from each other you could set up whole towns between them. There was something about the terror of the sky and fear of the cold that washed over him and cleansed him from the dark things he had known before.

In those days he wished he could have taken Jay with him, but every time he wished it he new he had to be here alone. He knew a lot of things in those days. A voice spoke very clearly to him and he knew the voice was inside of him and he knew it was himself, but it was other. He wondered, is that what God is? And is that what people mean by the Kingdom of God is within you? And is that why you can’t really spite God without spiting yourself? But the voice didn’t answer those questions, and he would drive south, drive long enough to realize it wasn’t all flat lands, but there were great hills and lakes that looked black as obsidian, still as glass. He drove into South Dakota and saw a silvery statue, fifty feet tall, of an Indian woman with a cloak spread out and set in jewels. He stood outside his car, his breath white, full of awe and tried to comprehend her. She was enormous. She would have had to be to take up her piece of the sky.

“This is the kind of land Nelson comes from. Not exactly. He came from Oklahoma. But this is like it. This is the land I always wanted to go to.”

He thinks of Nelson a great deal. Christmas has ended. Lent is on its way. Old things clung to must be put away for the new ones. The things which have stuck to you like gum in the eyes from the night before must be wiped away.

When he got ready to call Rulon and talk about very heavy things, the most he managed was, “This land looks amazing,” and then he said, “Look after Jay. Look after him totally, as if you were me.”

“Okay,” Rulon said, seriously. “I can do that.”

Then Rulon asked, “What are things… between you two?”

“We are always friends. Sometimes something beside that. We cannot be more than that. There is nothing more than that. We are never less.”

When Rulon Nelson left Ohio, Michael didn’t hear from him for a long time, and then, ten months later, there was an invitation to his wedding. Michael was surprised that Jay had gotten one too, but then it turned out Jay sent a letter to him once a week. It shouldn’t have been that much of a surprise, after all, Nelson had taken a liking to Jay and Jay always had the sharp intellectual questions Nelson liked while he frustrated the Mormon by refusing to give easy answers.

Back then they had driven two days into Oklahoma for Nelson’s wedding. They knew Nelson and his wife would be married inside the Temple in a ceremony only Mormons could attend, but there would be a reception afterwards and Jay and Michael would show up to this. Michael thought the sort of rituals Mormons went through he wasn’t interested in seeing anyway.

“Oh, I think it would be interesting,” Jay differed.

“You said interesting,” Michael said. “But you didn’t say lovely.”

The reception was lovely though. Michael wasn’t sure he really liked Nelson’s family, and he didn’t really care much about his wife. He felt sorry for her, the way one feels sorry for women married to gay men. Michael said nothing to Jay about any of his encounters with Nelson, and Jay spent a lot of his time looking at the land that looked like it had been carved out by a giant hand.

He said, “It’s like the skin is all gone from the earth, and all that’s left is the bones.”

***

At the Monastery of the Clouds, Michael remembered this wedding in Oklahoma and the country to the far west. It was nearly time to return to Ohio, and he had thought he was going back home on his own, but was surprised when Jay came for him then gladdened when the monks not only remembered Jay, but rejoiced over him.

“We can stay for Ash Wednesday,” Jay decided more than suggested. “We’ll head back on Thursday.”

There was something about this place, maybe because it was one of the only other places he had ever been, but Rulon Nelson kept coming back to Lassador. In the middle of his year long marriage to Courtney, they came back to Lassador and she left him there. He had gone back to Utah, partially after her, but came back alone. He worked at the plant near the expressway, and then began at the university. When Jay said, “The apartment under us is empty,” Nelson came to live there.

When Jay brought Michael back in from the Clouds at the beginning of Lent, he and Nelson sat on the much too cold porch and Michael said, “I feel as if so much is my fault. I’ve thought and thought about what I did that day. About you and Redmond.”

Nelson said nothing and Michael said, “Maybe I shouldn’t have brought it up. I never could. But I regret it. I shouldn’t have done it.”

“I don’t regret it.”

Rulon Nelson always carried his cigarette rolling machine and he smoked fat cigarettes that gushed out grey smoke.

“If it hadn’t of happened I would have wound my way through four bad marriages instead of one. I’d still be trying to be a good Mormon and confused as fuck. I’d be like poor Redmond.”

“How is he?”

“Half crazy last time I checked.”

“Oh.”

“But you didn’t do that,” Nelson said. “You didn’t create anything. You just…. What would Jay say…? Made it manifest.

“No, no,” Rulon Nelson said, tapping his foot, “I don’t regret it at all.”

“Is Fort Atkins a real fort?” Jay asked Dalton when he learned he was going there.

“Yes, it’s a real fort,” Dalton said, looking somewhere between exasperated and amused, his wide grayish eyes rolling in his head.

“It’s a town, but it’s a fort. It started out as a fort, and they’ve got an army base.”

“What was it a fort for?”

“I don’t know.”

“Probably it was a fort back in the French and Indian days,” Jay said. “It might have been to guard against Canadians.”

“Canadians? Who gives a fuck about Canadians?”

“No one now, but a long time ago, when Canada belonged to Great Britain, when it was Great Britain and we were their enemy people did. Yeah, that’s probably why Fort Atkins was there.”

“I really don’t know,” Dalton said, shaking his head.

It was February. Michael had been gone a month, and Jay thought, “if I was discussing this with Nelson, this conversation would go on for two hours. He would look this business up.”

That was why he could never live with Dalton and never be his true lover. He cared for Dalton and Dalton was a simple person, but maybe simplicity wasn’t what Jay needed.

“The thing about you,” Jay said, “is all the light in the room fills your eyes. They glow.”

“My cousins used to say I was like a cat. I could probably see in the dark.”

“Can you?”

“Nope.”

Jay had given Dalton a very abbreviated version of pursuing Michael, and told him that Michael was gone until Lent, and Dalton hadn’t asked if they would be together again. Maybe he already knew. The truth was, Jay hadn’t known until Dalton was sitting across from him that he would always love Dalton, but he would never be in love with Dalton, and though he was not always sure of being in love with Michael, much more important, they were two sides of the same thing, inseparable.

Still, Dalton would stay here in Lassador tonight, half way between Pennsylvania where he’d come from, and Fort Atkins, Michigan where he was headed. They’d gone to dinner and then taken a walk.

Over dinner, Dalton said, “Those riots are still going on. The protests, and then the riots. They were going to call the National Guard in here.”

He looked rawboned, his hair quickly cut and unstyled.

“Sometimes it seems like things are getting worse and worse. Does it ever scare you? Just a little?”

“I feel used to it,” Jay said. “I feel like it’s all been going on a long time.”

Dalton still looked spaced out and pale. Jay touched his hand, and suddenly Dalton looked at him, his grey eyes going green and warm, the red coming back into his skin.

“Can we go back to your place?” Dalton said. “Things always seem better when I’m at your place.”

When they returned to the apartment, Jay went to the bathroom to lay out soap and towels and then he went into the kitchen to set up the coffee, and when he came back into the living room, Dalton was sitting in a ladder back chair, his pants open, his underwear down, his thick cock jutting in the air. He lifted the glowing eyes in his bony face to Jay, and then looked down again.

Dalton’s cock was swollen to an oval like a blimp before it tapered down to the head. His planed cheekbones, his honest eyes looked up again to Jay. In that honest moment Jay loved him more than he felt any kind of lust.

The heat rose in Jay’s body, a shudder, a lump in his throat that was a lump in his groin. Whatever he had wondered would take place, there was no wondering anymore. Jay quickly undressed, standing naked before him. He came to Dalton, went on his knees, taking the fullness of his cock in his mouth. Dalton swooned, and in the silence of the apartment Jay sucked him until they went to his room to make love.

“Can you imagine,” Nelson spread his hand before them as they were driving north two weeks before Jay was to take the train out west to bring back Michael, “that this was all French and Indian country? Can you imagine the forts, the fur trappers, the frontier people just having a good time, wearing beaver furs, being wild and free?

“Before the fucking British came,” Nelson added.

They had gone to Fort Atkins.

Jay wanted Dalton to know that he mattered, that he was worth traveling north for. It was a strange visit because Nelson had come which meant there would be absolutely no romance. There was no alone time, no sex. Dalton and Nelson liked each other and Nelson said, “He reminds me of my brother.”

“You all are kind of alike,” Jay said. “So that makes sense.”

“We are a little bit alike,” Nelson discovered. “Not totally, but almost like how you and Michael are alike.”

They drove on quietly. Now and again a farm field with an old red barn passed by. The fields were bare and the trees still naked. The sky had that grayish color as if it had not yet awakened and wasn’t ready to bring the spring.

“It’s harder to be homeless out west,” Nelson said. “Those months where it was just me in thar car with Harley—” the dog. “Somehow the sky is too big and the ground is too…unmerciful. In the Midwest the earth feels kinder.”

For a while, after his wife had left, before Nelson had come back here, he wandered around Utah and Arizona being weird. Jay was going to be poetic and say he wandered lonely as a cloud, but clouds and poetry seemed out of place with Rulon Nelson in Utah.

“Its not my business,” Nelson said, and they were in the middle of nowhere, speeding along a grey asphalt road, “and I’m new to this whole thing, but Dalton was like your boyfriend?”

“He was like it. Or a close candidate. But now he’s like a friend.”

Nelson nodded.

“This is a strange limbo place,” Jay said. “Waiting for Michael, so some life can begin, that sort of has begun. Letting Dalton go, because I should. But still being a person. I never intended to be a nun. And some people say they never intended to be a slut, but I would be a slut any day over a nun. Dalton came two weeks after Michael left, and for a month and a half I’ve slept alone. That is not much by some people’s standards. But it’s a lot by mine.”

Nelson said, “Back in church they would tell you to wait till you were married because sex was holy and it was for bringing souls into the world, and everyone got married, me included, just so we could get laid I think. It was really stupid, and sometimes it was really bad. And people tell you that if you want it then it’s because you’re bad and it’s dirty, and it’s deadly. But that’s not true. The opposite is true.”

Nelson suddenly cackled and put his foot down on the gas as the car zoomed through the trees.

“Sex makes you feel alive!”

That night it seems as if it was always supposed to happen and a great spring has burst while they were on the road. Jay closes his eyes and opens his thighs and closes them gently around Rulon Nelson, running his fingers gently up and down his back, caressing his ass as they both shudder, stroking the soft hair of the head buried in his shoulders. In the utter darkness they move gently and then, when Rulon puts his strength in his knees and presses them both forward, they hold fast together as the bedstead gently knocks the wall. Jay frantically massages his dark hair, strokes his strong neck. Jay’s arms are strong and firmly he holds Rulon to him. They fuck in a silent power. In the end, in rapid groans it happens and after the first time they come, Jay’s thighs are sore from the weight of a six foot four man with long hands and long feet so like Michael’s and so unlike them, with the narrow body that, unlike Michael’s, has never known fat, and he understands, even though Michael has never told him, that Rulon, who is gasping, whose mouth is on his throat, has been with Michael too.

As they drift into sleep Jay’s heart is full in a way it never was with Dalton. No he never felt this tenderness toward him. He never loved him like this. Rulon Nelson is the only man after Michael he could have ever loved, and though he knows this sounds like bullshit and he would not repeat it to anyone, it’s almost as if being with Rulon is being with Michael.

Rulon kisses him gently on the shoulders, and holding him tight, half asleep, he murmurs:

“He knew I wanted this. He knew you wanted it too. He blessed it. He told me to look after you, Jay. He told me to look after you totally, as if I was him.”