Prose
Margaret's Song
The first time I met Margaret, she was ankle deep in a pile of fertilizer. It was all over her face but I didn't notice at first. What I noticed instead were her pants: khaki coveralls with stirrups. Those aren't coming off you, I thought to myself. I wanted to say it out loud but—as I've always been—was too afraid to speak.
When she caught me staring, she asked me: "Is it your first day out here?" The question felt like a jab, both in the way spoke it and the way she said it. Her accent was unlike any I'd ever heard, so that I couldn't even begin to place where she was from; her vowels were thick and syrupy, every R was overpronounced.
I had stopped my work completely when she noticed me. "You ain't from Texas," was all I said in response, then dug my shovel into the earth to avoid looking at her.
I was right about that: she wasn't from Texas. In fact, she wasn't from America at all, but Canada. She was the first Canadian person I'd ever met, and when I told her this it made her laugh so loud it turned the head of every person near us and almost put us in trouble for slacking off. Meanwhile, we were the hardest workers there. At least, we were before we met each other. We had nobody to talk to, nobody to shoot the shit with because we were girls and—maybe even more than being girls—we were young.
I'd been on the job only two weeks longer than her but already I knew the system much better, just by the time I spent watching the veteran workers labor—shoveling and packing, raking and covering and watering. So that's how I learned her: by teaching her how to shovel and pack and rake and cover and water, even if I barely knew how to do so myself. Like me, she grew up working and saw no reason to stop if that was what she was good at. Religion, she explained, was the homing beacon in her family's life, and to that she never wanted to return.
Despite this aversion to the biblical—whether she realized it or not—her background had seeped into her vocabulary and conduct and, therefore, into the hours we spent together. We worked long shifts, sometimes from before sunrise until after sunset; it was only inevitable that there were times I had nothing to say to her, not because I didn't enjoy her presence but because I felt like there was nothing at all in my head. But Margaret found silences uncomfortable and awkward, and so during these gaps in conversation, her half-minded whistling would devolve into sermons, her speech like gridlock traffic: full and long ahead of us, speeding up then stopping again. Sometimes when she broke into these spells, I recognized the verses. I remember her reciting Revelations—about how God always wins over the earth's terrible evils—but she knew so many I'm not sure if she ever repeated one. I hadn't grown up all that religious. My family never even made it to church every Sunday. It just wasn't my parents' way. If land were God, maybe it would be another story.
"I thought everyone in Texas was a Bible thumper," Margaret said, when I didn't recognize some famous little segment of the New Testament.
"I thought ladies didn't shovel shit all day," I answered. "But sometimes things just work out that way."
She pursed her lips together in that way she always did when I got her speechless: top lip tucked into the bottom, which she pulled forward into an upside down little arch like she was sucking on a lemon. Years later I would realize I picked up the action for myself, after Travis the ranchhand pointed it out to me and asked what I was doing with that face on my face. That mouth, I remember thinking, for the first time, and then months later doing something about it.
People talk about snow in the southwest like it's something miraculous, but really I can't remember a winter without it. Just enough fell, always, to dust the ground like powdered sugar for a blinking moment, then melt through the soil like it was never there. It was a pain, truthfully, because the moisture made the dirt stick to your shoes real bad. When I was a kid, I used to track it inside and, afterwards, my mother would chase me around with a hot towel and make me scrub the floor and my boots until both were clean enough to eat off of. But for a lot of the men I worked beside—those from Mexico and California and the muggy old South—it was their first time. Our supervisor, once aware of the flurries that fluttered around us, gave everyone the rest of the day off. I couldn't believe such a thing; we were the same group of people who worked fifteen hour days under the blazing sun, with rags on the back of our necks to protect our delicate skin, and sweat that pricked up in cloudy droplets from places you never knew was possible, like the fronts of your shins and the tip of your nose. It would be insulting if it didn't mean we got the rest of the day off. All of it, of course, especially amused Margaret.
"Cancel work 'cause you got a thimble's worth of snow." She barked out a laugh. "Where I'm from it snows so much you can't see the ground 'til April. Last year we got something like four meters."
"Four meters means nothing to me," I said.
"Sorry," she said, then pinched her face tight for a moment. "Something like thirteen feet, if you can believe it." From years of living in America, she had trained herself to convert these inconsistencies back and forth in her head. Thirteen feet. The number could have been four or thirteen and it wouldn't make any difference to me. I couldn't stop looking at her, standing with her arms crossed into the bib of her overalls. Her cheeks were ruddy from the chill and the hard work. The cold sun cut clear through the bright shadow of the falling snow, turning the fertilizer-dark cropland into chasmal focus. So that all I could see were different shades of brown under the paper-white light: the earth and her hair. Frost clung to it all. I put my hand to my own head and it came back wet and snowy. Tomorrow it would be fifty degrees again and the world would be mudstained and heavy. Now it was not. Now now now. I remember she was humming a song but I didn't know what song it was, just that when I put my lips to hers I felt the resonant vibrations of her mouth against my own. When she realized what I was doing, the sensation only grew stronger, buzzing in my ears and against my face, tickling the insides of my nostrils as the corners of her mouth turned up but didn't turn away. I opened my eyes to find that hers were closed, and even in our closeness I could see the melting whiteness on her eyelashes forming mirror-sphered pools like tears.
Margaret and I were the first to be laid off come spring, but the employment numbers, overall, must have been cut by something like half. It was about technology, said our supervisor. Technology and time. More hands, all of a sudden, made more work, and unlike the twenty or so of us that worked in the fields and stables all day you didn't need to pay a self-navigating tiller machine four dollars an hour.
"I'm sorry," I remember my supervisor telling me, with a flat bored face. "We just don't have a need for that many unskilled laborers anymore." Unskilled laborers. It stuck to my tongue and the roof of my mouth. When he said it, all I wanted to do was put my cigarette out on his pale freckle-less forehead and then shove the rest up his ass. Unskilled laborers. I hadn't even come here to shovel shit for eighty hours a week—expected that, eventually, they'd let me work with horses like they told me when I first came, but got so caught up in my work that I forgot why I was even there in the first place. I didn't know why I was there in the first place at all, anymore, with how each day made my body age and ache a little more under the weight of the weather and the work. If Margaret hadn't been there, I wondered if I would have stayed at all, or if she was the only person keeping me from leaving. I couldn't remember the last time I thought about anything but her: her fertilizer-scented body beneath my hands; the silver filling they put on her right canine after she fell off a horse—the last time she rode a horse before meeting me and I forced her back up on that gentle white mare named Autumn and she learned she still loved it; God and Jesus and John and Mary and Matthew. I wish I could have asked her to marry me. If it had happened today I would've, maybe. But then again maybe I wouldn't've.
Margaret left the next day for California, where she read in the newspaper about a construction project that was hiring and willing to take on a woman. She had contemplated leaving for some time before it all happened, but I never knew if she was serious about it, as she had only ever told me this only after six or eight beers, her breath hoppy and hot as she leaned into me and said, I wanna get out of here, and I knew she didn't mean the bar. I wanted to ask her if I could come, but she never offered, barely mentioned it to me except for when I asked her myself where she was headed, right after they fired me. Cal-iforn-ya. That strange way she spoke, her voice resounding from deep inside her chest when she said it, so that it carried through the thin walls and bounced off the inside of my head, making sure that nobody, especially I, would ever stop hearing it: the buck stops here, cowgirl. I told her she better work on her accent if she was moving to California or she would never be a movie star, that I'd visit as soon as she was settled. She told me she'd write to my home address so that all her letters got to me. I should have asked to come with her, but I couldn't bring myself to do it. I don't know why. I was afraid that she would say no, I suppose. Afraid that there wouldn't be a place for me. Or because as soon as they saw us together, they'd know there was something going on between us and then we'd be out of a job or worse, or that maybe that they'd hire her and leave me behind, a woman's trophy wife living the two of them on thirty dollars a week.
So I dropped her off at the bus station. It was March then, that endless month where everything feels like it will last forever and the ground is still heavy with cold. On mornings like these, I liked to watch the rising sun copper Margaret's face as she sang a folk song about getting your fingers cut off.
This morning, though, the sun had already risen. In the bleakness of the daylight, she turned towards me with a smile as she boarded the bus. Hope you don't have to piss anytime soon, I told her, ahead of her twelve hour ride to San Diego. I wanted to kiss her cheek, her forehead, her mouth, but was too afraid to. I reached out to tuck a loose hair behind her ear but pulled my hands back to my side. Don't cry, she told me, and then wiped a tear from my cheek with her cold rough thumb. I'll write you a letter everyday until you get sick of me. And then she was gone, on her way to California, with its hippies and surfers and movie stars and she would never think about me again. In due time we would be back to where we started, afresh and anew and cleansed and clean and pure, any other word you could think of, faces no longer chapped and burned by the pale winter wind, skin scrubbed clean of the reek of horseshit, our minds wiped of the whole affair like catatonic castaways. Except for me, that time never came. Maybe because she never wrote to me, so I never got sick of her.
I spent a month at home waiting for Margaret to write. After that, I left again. My father was growing old and my mother was growing acquiescent. My younger brother, Colin was a tyrant, and had recently overtaken the family business. My sister Katie was an enabler. It was a different scene than the one I had left the first time, except maybe it was the same, and now I just saw it all as it had always been. Through a friend of my brother's, who offered me more grace and understanding than Colin ever did, I ended up taking a job I hoped a machine wouldn't replace: ranching. Cattle was close enough to horses, for the time being, and I made more than double what I made working at the stables. I hated it, at first. I hated all of it. I had forgotten what it was like to work without Margaret by my side. Before her, my solitude and overzealousness drove me, my head empty as I carried my weight from one place to the other and it didn't matter where that place was, as long as it was forward. After, I suddenly found that my chest and my throat burned full of thoughts and conversations that had nowhere to go, and because of this, I had no momentum at all—that there was any in the first place. Sometimes I'd leave work barely remembering what I did, except for wishing that I'd spoken to Margaret all those times she asked me to say something. I would talk to her in my head, would try to pretend that she was there with me, and it was my turn to say something while she hummed some top-40s song in her nursery rhyme voice. Except all I could come up with was: do you think of me? Do you think of me? Tell me, do you think of me?
Lauren Sklarz is a student and writer from New Haven, Connecticut and currently living in Chicago.