Shame Read Free

less harmful and certainly kinder than the truth—but over the years, I had never told Michelle an out-and-out whopper at bedtime, and I felt confident she had been equally forthcoming with me. I would not say it had always been easy or that it had bound us together in unbreakable chains of marital trust, but certainly it had never done permanent damage to our relationship, although it might occasionally have altered—or eliminated outright—the cuddling or other activities that might reasonably be expected from a married couple at bedtime.
    â€œJ. J., what did you mean, earlier this evening?” she asked, sitting down on my side of the bed, still fully clothed. I generally went to bed after hearing the weather on the ten o’clock news, sunup coming awfully early, but Michelle was a night owl and often stayed up to read or work or listen to music.
    â€œSometimes,” I said, “I can understand how people might want to get out from underneath all that. It’s not always joy and bliss being Farmer Dad.”
    She ran her finger lightly down my arm. “Bad day with Michael?” It was a logical question. Our eldest supposedly had a job working the closing shift at the local Pizza Hut, which would account for his being gone all night and sleeping all day. When he was here and awake, he was surly, if he bothered to speak at all. Still, that wasn’t it, and I think she knew it.
    â€œNo,” I admitted. “I didn’t even see Michael until I sat down in front of the TV tonight. I wasn’t one hundred percent sure he still lived here.” I reached up to her, tried to pull her toward me, and she did lean a bit closer, although she made me come up the rest of the way to meet her. After she kissed me once, softly, and nuzzled my cheek, she stood up, walked to the door, and hit the light, leaving me in darkness.
    â€œYou know, I do understand,” she said as she closed the door, and maybe she did, although it was also true that late that night when she came to bed and snuggled close, rousing me from a light sleep and dreams of far away, she whispered into my ear, as she sometimes did at such times, “J. J., do you love me?” and I muttered back, somewhat less than half-awake, “You know I do, Shell.”
    And this, I swear to you, was gospel truth, for however it was that we began our life together, Michelle is a wonderful woman, and if it took me a long time to accept just how wonderful, I did learn at last. I could not have imagined a better mother for my children, or a wife who cared more for me. Michelle knew me so well, had loved me for so long, that perhaps she did indeed understand the sad, sorry, shameful impulses that could make a man imagine leaving his tractor, his home, and his family, those same impulses that make up most of the story I am to tell you.
    All of these things went through my mind on that sunny September day in 1994 as I listened to Don Henley sing of forbidden love, loud and raucous on the tractor’s cassette player, as a fly pattered forlornly against the inside glass of the enclosed cab, as the warming sun dropped slowly toward the far rim of the Canadian River Valley a few miles west: things from my past, present, and future. I had been around long enough to understand that, taken all together, these were the truths about life: Things had happened; things were happening; things were going to happen.
    The last of these truths remained mysterious to me, as it must. But all the same, with so much thoughtful time on my hands, I couldn’t help but sit and wonder.
    Did my future include another twenty years on a tractor in red dirt, turning ever inward on myself? Or would there come a day when I drove straight and true toward the far horizon?

Birthdays
    That horizon seemed far indeed, because to get anywhere of consequence in western Oklahoma you have to travel quite a spell. We lived twenty miles from Watonga, where we