Emmetsburg: Fifty-nine

Emily stood and started for the river with the coffee pot. There was a narrow trail through the trees along the bank. Emily turned for him, beckoning with a smile that was somewhere between seduction and eternal disappointment. She disappeared through the trees into the darkness. John followed, finding her at the bank.

She was silhouetted against the inky darkness of the river. Off in the distance heat lightening flashed silently. There was a storm off towards des Moines, seemingly another world away. Fireflies filled the warm night air. It was a shade cooler here by the river, the trickling obsidian waters whispering lazily by. She crouched at the river's edge and dipped the pot in the water.

“Don't know if your dad knew what to make of me when I pulled up,” John searched for something to say. “Strange fella showing up unannounced.”

“Papa had himself a stroke last year. Ain't been himself since. Then we lost the farm. Think that was the worst for him.”

“And you?”

“Ain't never been able to call no place home for very long.” Emily stood, holding the pot with both hands. She shrugged. “Can't miss what you never had, right?”

She was close to him now. Emily looked up at John, sort of mulling him over in her mind. John found he suddenly had the urge to kiss her. In fact, hungered for her lips as he had never hungered for a woman before. His desire for her raged beyond all control. If only he could muster the courage, If only she offered some sign that she felt the same he would have happily tumbled to the ground with her, pushing up her dress, devouring and tasting her. He would make passionate love to her love, spilling over and into her all his desire, grief and anger.

“Didn't much have a taste for coffee,” he said.

“I figured,” she replied softly, at hardly more than a whisper.

John gently lifted the pot from her hands and set it on the ground. He reached up and cradled her face, surprised at the coolness of her soft cheeks. Emily's hands went to his sides.

¨Could you love me?¨ she asked. Emily pressed her belly against John. She marveled at the perfection of that fit. She warmed with the mutual rush of excitement. Emily found eternity in his eyes. But there are different views on eternity.

As for John, he found more than one answer to his question. There was, almost overpowering all reason, the answer of the moment and his body. It was a moment filled with excitement and discovery, as if her body and the unpredictability of her movements, of the promise of furtive breaths, the taste of her lips, of moans and cries of ecstasy were a new culture and mysterious land begging to be explored. And there was the moment of his soul and of Anna. In each answer there was Louis's insinuation, and this moments demand for greater context and importance. His reply belied John's strident revolt against that larger question.

“I could.”

She might have kissed him. John was far too terrified to undertake that himself. She would have kissed him, but there was something behind the words. Not reluctance, necessarily, but a shadow of something else. Emily couldn't say exactly, but it was as though, to John, she wasn't a destination, but a waypoint on a greater journey. And that was something she did not care for anymore. It was a need she recognized within herself better.

Emily touched his face. John turned and kissed the palm of her hand.. His lips lingered there, where he breathed in the perfume of her palm. They remained frozen there for a time, almost as if consoling one another over the loss of a friend, or over the passing of an opportunity. Slowly they drew apart and faced the river.