Green Glory

Sarah Inouye

​
 

“To live in this world

 you must be able

 to do three things:

 to love what is mortal; 

to hold it 

against your bones knowing

your own life depends on it;

and, when the time comes to let it 

go,

to let it go”

 

-Mary Oliver, In Blackwater Woods 

​

 

 

We make it over the hill before the sun is its usual blazing self, but it would have been clear what was wrong even if we had been blinded by all that light. The smell of the cows dotting the pasture is noticeably off, less like earth and more like things that should only ever exist contained within a body. Cornelia already warned me about the blood in their stool, but all the same, when I see it, I can’t help but flinch. 

​

“Christ,” I say, kneeling down next to one of the bigger cows, who gazes at me with big, exhausted eyes. The mud has congealed underneath her body, making it matted and wet.

​

“Should have guessed that I didn’t isolate them quickly enough yesterday. This is at least three more,” says Cornelia. She squats next to me and puts her hand against the side of the cow's body, going still so she can listen to the heartbeat. The way she touches the cows is always eerily clinical. She doesn’t ever spare them contact that indicates adoration or even simple approval. 

​

“Have you ever seen anything like this before?” My question makes her face twist up with irritation. She stands up from beside the cow, gives me a hard and jarring look, then goes to investigate their water supply. 

​

“They're going to die,” she says, as she walks away. “Of course I’ve never seen something like this before, Penelope. They’ve never died on me before.” 

​

I run my hand over the body of the cow, trying to offer some comfort, but there is no relief in her big watery eyes. No relief in anything. 

​

I’d spent two years on the St. Francis farm. When Cornelia’s grandfather, Bernie St. Francis died, he left her all the responsibility. He had always believed she was the hardest of all his family members. That she would have the grit to keep things moving, to not be overcome by her emotions like the rest of his family always was. Like he always was. 

​

Before he died, Bernie offered me a job on his farm—my father had used to bring me to look at the cows, and I’d stare at them dead-eyed and full of longing. I’d always been interested in livestock, in caring for something, in doing the hard work for personal reward. He liked that about me, he always said. He also liked that I didn’t talk much. So Cornelia and I work with a small herd of cows, occasionally getting help from the other local farmers, and get good money for the dairy products we sell. We spend most of our time making sure the cows are healthy, feeding and milking them, keeping their water fresh and taking care of their waste. We also do land management, making sure no invasive species of grass take over and that the bird population stays plentiful. 

​

Cornelia is a gaunt, mean-faced girl who acts like everything on her periphery is suffocation. She always wears the same black boots, and makes sure to purposefully walk in large puddles. She occasionally chops at her hair with Bernie’s huge gardening clippers. She’s missing her right front tooth, which had come out when someone accidentally slammed a door in her face. She has sunken eyes with dark circles underneath them, and she almost always smells like dirt. She relies on me for most of the heavy lifting, and so her body stays scrawny and flimsy.

​

She is my sole friend—even though she makes an active effort to make me think that she doesn't want anything to do with me. Anything to do with anyone. Not that working on the farm, the way we do, understaffed and tirelessly, gives us much time for a social life outside of each other. And anyway, we both immerse ourselves in the running of the farm so that we don’t have to pay attention to anything outside of the world of the cows. 

​

Despite everything, I’m very attuned to her. I know her grave, unforgiving behavior is just an act, and maybe that knowledge is a kind of friendship. 

​

When we make it back to the house from cleaning up the bloody stool, we’re too exhausted to take our work boots off. The couch is yellow with faded pink roses, and the cushions sag from use. The living room has not been updated since it was decorated the first time, and I know Cornelia hasn’t bothered to change it because it strikes her as self-indulgent. She flips open a notepad and mutters to herself, elbows on both knees, hunched low over the coffee table, and scribbles down the various numbers that could destroy the farm. I look out the screen door and to the wrap-around porch. The moths are gathering on the windows, but nothing else is detectable in the darkness. The old fan buzzes in the corner of the room. I sling my arm over the back of the couch, feeling the cool air on my sweaty face. 

​

“I’m going to shoot them,” she says, finally. “It’s the ethical thing to do given how miserable they are.” She flips over the page and starts scribbling again, not bothering to look up at me. Her face is as hard as ever. Her dark hair is tangled. We’re identical in age, but she still retains the hostility of a teenager, as if anything emotional is an embarrassment. “We’ll use the money we’ve saved to get new livestock. Thankfully, it shouldn’t be that much of a setback.” 

​

“Okay,” I say, wanting her to reveal more of herself. Desperately wishing for something like tenderness. I watch her prod the hole between her teeth, eyes caught on her figures. When she offers nothing else to me, I say, choked: “Do you think Amalia could do it instead?” 

​

There’s a momentary pause. Not even she can hide her flinch. 

​

“I think it’s the right thing to do, you know, if we’re trying to do the right thing,” I continue, feeling the warmth spreading across my face. She finally looks away from her notes and out into the night, not bothering to glance at me, and says, “Fine. I don’t care.”

​

For as long as I’ve been in love with Amalia, Cornelia has been too. In fact anyone who has ever known her seems to be. Even though she’s only twenty-seven,  it’s rumored that she has been proposed to by twelve different people. Bucket Montogomery had not-so-subtly written love poems about her that had been published in a notable literary magazine. Trevor Escorza had learned to arrange flowers just for her approval. Sabrina Yoshiyama had custom-made her dress when she went to prom. Even the older folks, generations above, still held her to a particular esteem. Maybe they aren’t falling over themselves when they see her like the rest of us were, but they still mutter that she’s like Aphrodite. Even the little kids follow her around like she’s a mermaid, or a fairy, or some such sparkling creature from their picture books. 

​

Amalia has a particular swagger. The kind of leaning, casual confidence that makes it impossible to resist her. She wears her hair with a carelessness that would destroy the mystique of anyone else, but just creates something deeper to her likeability. She makes the confines of reality not feel like confines at all. She’s cool in a way that never makes anyone cringe. She’s easy on the eyes. Direct and sure. Unwounded, healthy. There is a peace to her that makes everything else docile and considerate. She doesn’t seem to notice or not notice anyone else’s beauty, a neutral and non-judgemental force.

​

She always did the killing, even when she was young, because she was the most humane. It is difficult to look at her without feeling some kind of pang. 

​

That was when I first started to love her, like everyone eventually does. When I watched her kill something for the first time. A horse, which used to belong to the Jaspers. She had stood out there with the animal for a long time, when she thought no one else was watching. I’d been hiding in one of the trees, just reading quietly, a young teenager, when I saw her come out of the grove. She was seven years my senior, and only knew my name because of the smallness of where we’d grown up. She had led the horse with enormous dignity to a private spot in the clearing, and had stood with it for a long time, her head pressed against his. He was a wild thing that had panicked under even the slightest discomfort—but when he looked at her he was very still. His tail had flicked as flies landed on him, and then on her, as if they were both already dead. She had said something so soft that I could not hear, but I had still looked away as if it were the most private and holy of meetings. It felt wrong to witness her telling the horse whatever she told him without invitation. 

​

I had only turned back, out of sheer surprise, when the sound of the gun went off. She must have heard my sound of shock because she looked at me through the leaves of the trees, for a split second, before moving to cover up the body. 

​

She did not look back, and I was helpless to do anything but weep. I did not weep for the horse, but rather for her treatment of him. It was painful to know that this sort of kindness and gentleness could exist. It was painful to know that love could be this vast, could come from so deep inside her, could be so extraterrestrial, and that I would never have it. 

​

When we journey back into the pasture the next morning, we find that Cornelia’s harsh predictions have come true. There is no chance of saving the cows, despite my naive hopes. Most of the cows are lying weakly on their sides; the best either of us can do is make them comfortable. I run my hands over their backs and bring them clean water. Cornelia sends Amalia our summons. The look on Cornelia’s face, as she talks to her on the phone, is something almost like grief. When she hangs up I’m ready to offer her my sympathy: “Are you okay—”

​

Her reply is curt: “Can you check me for ticks?” 

​

This reality is like a knife. 

​

I nod. The living room is so warm, sticky with heat, smelling like our sweat mingled together. She pulls her work pants down her scratched thighs and lifts her shirt over her head, revealing the rest of her body. I investigate the bareness of her, looking for the black, hard masses that we’ve pulled off each other thousands of times.

​

“I don’t see anything,” I say, and before I can move her nose brushes against mine and we’re centimeters apart. This is the only time when she really looks at me with those weary black eyes. In the heat of these moments. 

​

“Penelope,” she breathes. 

​

“Are you sure?” I whisper to the room. 

​

“Please,” she says. “I’m so tired. I need—I need something else.” And maybe I do too. I pull my shirt over my head and she receives me with her normal fervor, wraps her arms around my neck, and tries to dive into me. 

​

Cornelia is the sort of woman who can’t stand to let anyone know how she comes apart. The sort of woman, as far as I understand, who is afraid of the vastness of her love, who is terrified of letting anyone see her when she is out of control. In the daytime she avoids my eyes, and winces when I glance her way, mortified that I know her during her most vulnerable moments: her grief, her follies, her orgasm. But there seems to be nothing worse, nothing more violent or upsetting to her than her love for Amalia. 

Her standoffishness makes it almost possible to believe that she had escaped the curse. She hasn’t escaped. It was clear by the look on her face when Amalia picked up milk, clear when she was on the phone with her, clear when I said Amalia’s name. Cornelia is hopeless and it kills her. 

​

The first time I’d ever touched Cornelia was at a barbecue held for all the local farmers. She’d been sitting beside me, knee bouncing nervously, and I wasn’t sure what overcame me, but I put my hand on her thigh. We’d looked at each other, her gaze extraordinarily different than I’d ever seen it: “Are you drunk?” 

​

“No, are you?” 

​

She took me to the back of the barn on their land and told me to take off her clothes. I remember the haze of the music, which lingered somewhere muffled and earthly. She looked at me with genuine, embarrassed aggression. Her face was full of color. There was something about the nakedness of the girl in front of me juxtaposed against my clothes, which were still on, that made everything enormously clear. I lowered myself so I could put my mouth on her, and she squirmed underneath me with a shocking amount of abandon. It made me laugh. She looked at me, offended, and I’d said simply: “You’re cute. I just wasn’t expecting this.” She snorted, her blush going down to her neck.

​

“Expecting what?”

​

“You’re so expressive.”

​

She groaned, throwing her arm over her face. 

​

“God, Penelope,” she said. “Can you just fuck me?” 

​

We kept having sex after that, and pretty quickly got into a rhythm with each other. She always has a shy gentleness about her, and in her sleepiest moments she would card her hand through my hair.

​

Sometimes, she would joke, lightly, or smile at something I’d said. After the fucking became a regular thing I asked her if she wanted to be my girlfriend. She had rolled her eyes. 

​

“You’re in love with Amalia.”

​

“Well, so are you.” 

​

She laughed a laugh that seemed to exemplify the core of her being, a sound that was both weary and so lonely. 

​

“Of course I am.” 

​

“I mean, she’s never going to look at either of us, so I just think why not try to find something? Why not try to break out of this fucking fantasy? Aren’t you tired? We like each other, and you’re my best friend. You’re my only real friend.” Her naked body was pressed up against mine, our sweat tacky. The light was coming in through her window in golden rays, and she looked blurred underneath it. Her cracked lips pressed together in a hard line. 

​

“I’m not the thing you want, and you’re not the thing I want. We’re never going to be able to fill this void in each other,” she said. She sat up from the bed, pulling herself away from me, and started to get dressed again. She did not move to get into cleaner clothes, instead putting on her grubby work pants and buttoning up her dirty shirt. “Knowing Amalia is a fucking curse and you know it. Every person in this town has a broken heart because of her and that has always been true. It’s as true as yogurt, and ice cream, and fucking milk, and I’ve accepted that. I’ve accepted that, and I don’t need to beat it. I don’t want to. Neither of us actually want to be a consolation prize. That isn’t love.” 

​

“So you’d prefer to just be miserable?” Panic gnarled in my chest, inexplicably. I hadn’t expected her to agree. “You don’t even want to try?” 

​

“I think I know I love her, honestly, Penelope, because I know there’s nothing that’s going to shake her out of me. Not really.” 

​

 

***

 

Amalia arrives two hours later. She’s armed with a shotgun. There’s a rip in the knee of her jeans and her hair is piled over her head. She shakes hands with us both by the door and smiles with polite familiarity. Cornelia had filled a bottle of water for her before she came, and now hands it to her in daunted humiliation. Amalia smiles, and it is like death. It is a complicated pleasure to hear the rockiness of her voice: “Would you like to watch?” 

​

We must look pathetic, standing there, overcome by something like fear in her presence. I never feel more dwindling than when I’m near her. Witnessing her is like still-warm evenings. The end of a forest fire. The sweetness of the fruit around the pit. She has to know that everyone is a little bit in love with her. What is it like to see us, when she knows she means everything to us, and we mean so very little to her? 

​

“Yes,” I manage to say. 

​

“Sure,” says Cornelia, “I think that would be the right thing to do.” 

​

“It’s a nice place to die,” Amalia says. “It’s a beautiful pasture. All green glory.” 

​

 

***

 

The final bang of the gun goes off, and this time Cornelia and I do not flinch. It’s the only time, the whole day, that neither of us have flinched. Cornelia cried into her shirt sleeves a few times and we both pretended I couldn’t see her. We spent hours out there. The cows didn’t seem to fear Amalia at all. They just followed after her, listened while she spoke to them, and then they died, with strange, calm peace.

Amalia comes back over to us, her gun tucked over her arm. She’s a little bit dewy from the length of the day, her white tank top stained with sweat. It is a very odd thing to see that she is crying. Real tears, on those perfect cheeks. The sight is so confusing and lovely that it hurts my eyes to look at her. How many times had she killed before? How many times had she cried for animals she didn’t know? And then, in an act that feels like destruction, she says, with gratuitous amounts of dignity: “I’m very sorry for your loss,” and hands Cornelia the water bottle she’d offered her earlier in the day. Cornelia scrambles to her feet. It’s so obvious, how her heart almost falls out of her chest, when she sees that all the water is gone. The knowledge that she did something meaningful for Amalia. 

​

“Thank you,” she says. “Thank you for your help.”

​

I haven’t ever heard Cornelia thank anyone before. 

​

 

***

 

We start the grave-digging process early the next morning. The mud sloshes beneath us, wet and easy to dig into. The ground underneath is like clay. The bodies of the cows are laying underneath tarps a good distance away from each other, where Amalia decided to shoot each of them. She had given them each space to die, and therefore a moment to themselves.

​

Cornelia digs a single grave, deep and wide and then, to my shock, she’s crying. She tries in vain to hide it from me, but she can’t contain the weeping, and before I take the risk and ask her how I can help she says, “I didn’t even know how much I loved them until yesterday.”

​

“Yeah.”

​

 I am too afraid to really look at her. 

​

“But now, I feel so heavy. I feel like my love is too big to carry around.” And in a moment of frivolous heartbreak she says: “Can we bury them all together? I don’t want them to be alone.” 

​

Amalia had spread them out over a range of at least two miles. And although the work of bringing them all together would be so tedious, and the sun would be so hot, and the mud so slippery, I could not give her another answer. We have to bury them together. Amalia would have buried them together. 

​

When I arrive the next morning Cornelia is already in the field moving bodies. Some of them are already inside the pits. 

​

I say, “I told you to wait for me.”

​

She says, “Penelope?” Her eyes meet mine with something I’ve never seen before. “I’d like to try. I’d like to try to find some happiness or something like relief somewhere… even if it can’t be with her. Do you remember what you offered? Do you remember what you said?” 

​

Of course I remember. It had humiliated me that I had tried to find some way around Amalia, but that humiliation is stripped away by the look on her uncompromising face. She actually looks quite sweet. 

​

“I do.”

​

“Could we try? Do you still want to try to be my girlfriend? We could try to get over this together. We could try to… I dunno…” The smell of the dead flesh is starting to become unbearable, and the haze of bugs is making me itchy.

​

“Okay,” I say, hopelessly. “Okay.” 

​

And she walks over the corpses and kisses me hard. And neither of us feel much of anything at all. 

​

 

***

​

We spent the first night lying beside each other on the cool, clean sheets of her bed and staring at the ceiling. There is the humming of the fan from somewhere in the living room. She smells like cedar after her shower. She looks very pretty lying beside me, sleepy and vulnerable. Her face is full of unguarded longing. I want to pull her closer, to whisper sweet things in her ear. I want to remedy whatever black hole is opening in her, whatever hole has been open in the two of us for so long. The fantasy of love. Some fantasy of something more. A wish for real and true tenderness. But all I can get myself to say is: “Goodnight, Cornelia.” 

​

“Goodnight, Penelope.” 

​

She eats the dinners that I make for her, and she offers to do my laundry. We drive from my house to the farm when she chooses to spend the night. We watch old movies until we both fall asleep on the couch. We don’t touch unless it’s my hand sliding under her waist band, or her putting a hand up my shirt. We wait for the new cows to show up. 

​

There are changes, but none big enough to be called love. Maybe the closest we get is when we work in the  field together. She decides she needs to talk, for the first time in a long while. That she has things that are worth me hearing. 

​

“I knew I was in love with her when I was sixteen.” She didn’t even have to say her name for me to understand. “You know, I’d been in love with her far before that, but I liked to pretend that it wasn’t true. I wanted something different for myself. My heart would beat so fast whenever I saw her, and sometimes she’d come by to get some ice cream or whatever. I’d hide behind my grandfather, like I was much younger than sixteen, and my face would flush and when she was gone Bernie would smile at me. He’d smile at me like I was so small and so tiny and precious, and I figured that I had done something wrong or bad. He looked at me like I was… I don’t know… Like I was already a lost cause. So it embarrassed me, and I just tried to focus on the cows. I just tried to focus on the work. But when you’re sixteen, you become more aware of your feelings and certain feelings become more complicated and… I knew everyone else was in love with her too. I knew, like everyone, that there was no chance. And that was so painful. To know that I could not love that beautiful, glowing, generous woman in any way that mattered.” 

​

“I know how you feel,” I whisper. “Hey, you know I know how you feel. It’s okay.” 

​

We stare at each other in the pasture full of too-long grass, and then she gets up without any fear or trepidation. She does not wither or know shame. There is no flustered girlishness, no blossoming excitement, nothing that would indicate that I mean anything real to her—and maybe I don’t. Maybe I never really will. 

​

Her chapped lips meet mine, dry and cracked and unforgiving. She kisses me with a hunger that is startling, even if I’m expecting it. Her fingers possessively latch into my belt loop and she pushes me into the surrounding grasses. It gives way underneath me, weak without much complaint of weakness. She brings her lips off of me to glance around like she’s afraid someone will see us, or like she hopes someone will. 

​

The button on my jeans comes loose—I’m not sure if she undid them or I did. I can feel her hand moving under the elastic of my boxers. She leans over me and rakes her teeth against my collarbone, her tongue following shortly behind. Her hair falls in my face, nearly suffocating me. 

​

“God,” she mutters. “I wish I could swallow you whole.”

​

And I believe her.

​

The grass punishes my back.

​

When we break apart we don’t look at each other, just stare straight ahead at all of our green glory. I want to tell her I love her. I want to pull her closer and promise her things. I want those confessions, those promises, to be true. I spend so much time wishing, desperately, that I could pull her into me and undo both of us. Sometimes, I wish she would reach her hand into my chest. Sometimes I wish we could consume enough of each other to help each other. To forget Amalia. 

​

“This is worse, isn’t it,” I ask. 

​

“It isn’t your fault.”

​

“I know. But I am sorry.”

​

“I just thought… I don’t know… the way that she treated those cows in the field, with a kindness that everyone would want for themselves. With the dignity and poise that everyone wants to be afforded. I know that I can’t have that from her, but I just…” 

​

“I know,” I say. “I hear you.” 

​

In the pasture, now a graveyard, we look at all of the work we have done. The light of the sun is coming up over the hill. The relieved dead sit inside the earth, still and gentle. Though this is all so hopeless and long, on our way back, when I slip in the mud, Cornelia offers her hand to help me up.