by KT Sparks
6
Martin recalled nothing of what happened after he left The Silver Dollar, but when he woke the next morning, lying bare-assed on splattered porcelain tiles among strewn toiletries, he deduced he had spent the early morning hours retching and rolling between the shower and his bathroom floor.
His attention for the rest of the day was focused on not vomiting. That left Martin without a neuron to spare to contemplate the fallout from his introduction of cowboy poetry to the drinking folk of Pierre. He was sure that, once the tides of physical suffering wrought by alcohol poisoning receded, the waves of humiliation and regret would pound down. And so he hunkered, sipping broth, gulping aspirin, the old man who refuses to leave his shanty ahead of the hurricane.
By evening, he could bear to picture himself at The Silver Dollar, his sweating lips forming each word of “The Campfire Has Gone Out.” Picture, but no audio, the silent image of his naked self, waving his arms over his head, underarm flab rippling, black hair and droplets of sweat shooting from his armpits like flames out of a cartoon rocket ship.
It wasn’t until the following Tuesday that Martin felt prepared to meet the world again, or at least his family. He dressed in pressed jeans and a faded U of C T-shirt and padded into the kitchen. Dottie and Frank sat at the breakfast table, a PPHS gym bag at his feet, scrambled eggs and bacon half-eaten on a plate in front of him, two new spiral notebooks to his left. School must have started up again while Martin was in boilermaker purgatory.
“Good morning,” Martin said, waited, added, “Mom. Frank.” Waited some more.
Martin stared hard at Frank. This was his moment. This was when Frank would let Martin know exactly what the entire town of Pierre thought of him. The Silver Dollar had been packed, plenty of people who knew the Oliphants, or Frank, or who knew people who knew the Oliphants or Frank. Martin was surprised his performance, complete with photos and a review from the Leader Telegram, hadn’t already appeared on the front page. He was sure the story had been told one hundred, one thousand times, at every beauty shop, service counter, and parking lot. Every time Eric filled up someone’s car, or Flip custom-frosted a cruller for a pudgy housewife, or a newly vaccinated kid complained to Dr. Broad about the missing plastic rings. The story had to have been told and reenacted and embellished, though it was difficult to think how it might be embellished. So Martin waited for Frank to inform him just how bad this all was.
“Want my toast?” said Frank. “I haven’t touched it.”
Martin started. What was this?
“Honestly,” said Frank. “Not even a bite.”
Martin examined Frank’s blank and smiling face.
This was a miracle, that’s what this was.
Martin accepted the toast.
As that day, then that week, unfurled, Martin marveled as the miracle swelled. Todd’s mother, a checkout lady at the Hilltop, let Martin sign for his groceries and even wished him a good day, both firsts. Flip delivered a dozen apple-glazed donuts to the house. Julie waved to him from across the drug store parking lot, and with one hand mimed, I’ll call you, which she did not, but still. Not one word about The Silver Dollar. But they knew. He could see it in their eyes. They knew, and they were not going to speak of it. They knew, and they thought more of him for it.
A miracle.
And here was the biggest part of it: Martin realized that he didn’t look back on the evening at The Silver Dollar as a humiliation. Oh, he tried. He knew he should. But they had seen him, seen him as he had thought he might be and now was sure he was. As a cowboy poet, though he didn’t expect they knew the moniker. But he did, by God. As of that night, he knew what he was. He knew his name.
The day after Labor Day, Martin received the job offer Lattner had promised. Greg Lange, the Leader Telegram’s incumbent reporter and assistant editor, had not been fired but left for a position at a used bookstore in San Francisco. Lattner needed someone of Martin’s poetic attitude to “keep cranking out the shit for the local peons,” or so Lattner had said on a message left in a slurred voice almost completely obscured by the clankings and cursings of The Silver Dollar weeknight regulars. Martin had intended to call the next morning and accept, but before he could and before he had had his first cup of coffee, Mrs. Irene Trinkle, Lattner’s longtime secretary, appeared at the Oliphant doorstep in a burnt-orange knitted two-piece suit, matching umbrella, and felt hat. She refused to come in, inquired after Dottie, and presented a warm mason jar of homemade chicken soup.
“He is a good man, Mr. Lattner,” she said, just as Martin was running out of small talk. “Maybe a great man. But drink has him in her siren grip and will not loose him enough to let him ascend to the level where he should and could dwell.” Mrs. Trinkle spoke in a skewed and formal tone that Martin would later learn was co-opted from Scholastic Books’ Sunfire historical romance novel series, Mrs. Trinkle’s own secret dependency.
“Mr. Lattner could use an intellectual like you, a man who can challenge him, make him rise above his demons and do the work God meant him to do,” said Mrs. Trinkle. “Also, one who can spell. You can spell, can’t you, dear?”
Martin said he could.
He went into the Leader Telegram offices the next day for a few hours after Frank went to school and while Dottie napped. Lattner had him edit an opinion piece on the scheduling of the Lion’s Annual Broom Ball and the PPHS homecoming dance on the same night. Martin struck the words megalomaniacal and imbecilic (twice) from the text, but otherwise deemed it a reasoned analysis of the conflict. Mrs. Trinkle agreed.
From then on, Martin showed up when he could, which, as Dottie slept more and more, was oftener and oftener. The time Martin spent in the Leader Telegram offices or covering Pierre events, like the Congregationalist’s Faith is Fun Fall Fest or a PPHS cross country meet, was time during which he was happily distracted from Dottie’s disintegration.
And disintegrating she was. Martin watched through the Michigan autumn—one week of glorious arboreal color, followed by bitter subfreezing winds and snow by Halloween—as she shriveled into a shivering clump of patchy hair, musty chenille robe, and bruised skin. Sometimes it sickened him. Other times, it hit like a Molotov cocktail to the chest. He felt closer to her than ever before.
Carroll, on the other hand, seemed to be getting better. By November, his face drooped a fraction of the amount it had two months earlier, though he still showed no signs of recognizing his wife. He slept in the guest room and rarely addressed her directly, but what relations there were, were civil and, perhaps, when viewed through her morphine haze, appropriate and enough. She didn’t complain, nor did he. Domestic life, at least as far as interactions with his dad went, started to resemble one of the blander 1960s sitcoms Martin had followed all summer, not particularly funny, but predictable and safe. Plus they were getting rich. Oliphant Holdings, Inc. thrived in its founder and CEO’s post-stroke months. With the shutting down of the part of Carroll’s brain that governed the always messy emotional stew of marital relations, he had been able to zero in on what he did best, preying on failing small businesses, circling like a buzzard whenever he caught a whiff of road kill on the highway of commerce.
So with Dottie drugged most of the time, Carroll at the office or traveling to some desolate small town Main Street to feed, and his brother virtually adopted by his friend Ron’s family, Martin had time that autumn to embark on the career in journalism he had never imagined or intended. In the process, he reminded himself daily of his clarion call—that which had dragged him from the limestone towers of U of C—cowboy poetry.
In late September, Martin finally wrote Beaufort, apologized for the delay in corresponding, explained the senior Oliphants’ unique declines, asked after Beaufort’s health and that of the hands and that of his lovely daughter, Ginger. Martin explained how sorry he was to have missed the First Annual Elko Cowboy Poetry Confluence, how sincerely he wished for a list of the
poems featured, how welcome some lines from a few of the newer works would be. He added as a P.S. that he had recited “The Campfire Has Gone Out” for a largish local crowd and thought it had made an impression. He addressed the whole thing to Beaufort Giles, care of the Jimmy Sneedle’s Tennis and Golf (Dude) Ranch reservations desk at an address he found on some stationery in his dad’s office. At the last minute, Martin added “and Ginger” to the end of Beaufort’s name on the envelope. And then a small smiley face. And then he scratched out the smiley face, stamped the letter, walked it three blocks to the post box, and shoved the missive through the clanking door. His letter came back three weeks later, marked in purple ink: NO LONGER AT THIS ADDRESS and more ominously NO SUCH ADDRESS. Someone had scribbled on the back, next to a line of handwritten numbers, Try Montana. Martin waited a week, then called the number for Jimmy Sneedle’s on the stationery, but the line was disconnected. He sent his letter to “the sponsors of the Elko Cowboy Poetry Confluence” c/o Elko, Nevada General Delivery in hopes they would forward it to Beaufort. In the same package, he included a note to the sponsors inquiring about the possibility of attending the second event, scheduled, he assumed, for May 1986. He imagined heading to Nevada, packing one rough burlap duffel with a couple pairs of jeans, his Roget’s Thesaurus, a copy of Plato’s Republic, his IBM Selectric, and a small brass-framed picture of his mom, smiling in tennis whites, before she got sick. The reverie concluded with him—fully clothed, thank God—intoning the last verse of a poem to a room shaking with the claps of rope-burned hands and the stomp of desert-bleached boots.
Dear Martin Oliphant,
I hope this will find you before the New Year, and I hope the New Year will find you well. I find myself riding the range again on land not my own, but there is a freedom in owning naught but a good horse and a saddle and a rope and the wits to use them and the pen and paper to write it all down. Word has come that your mother is ailing, and so I enclose Jack Thorp’s little book in hopes that it might bring her and you some comfort. It was my father’s, and I’d appreciate it if you would see fit to return it when we meet again some day.
Yours truly,
Beaufort Giles
P.S. Ginger sends her best and wants me to let you know she has entered a university, inspired as she was by your love of book learning. She continues to ride better than a bull nurse twice her years and has been crowned rodeo queen in four counties in Wyoming and two in Arizona.
7
The package from Beaufort came the same day that O’Brien’s Pharmacy and Medical Supply delivered the hospital bed. The O’Brien twins, home from CMU for winter break, stripped the plastic wrapping off the gurney and shoved it next to the Christmas tree at the far end of the living room. Martin fussed as they maneuvered, making sure the branches of the balsam didn’t scratch the bed’s real oak laminate retractable table. It would eventually sit at the front end of the living room, where the Oliphant’s baby grand was now, but the Lemons Piano Tuners and Movers, who had to come in from Watertown, weren’t due for another hour. Martin had hoped that the O’Brien boys, both heavyweight-class wrestlers at school, might have been able to remove the Steinway, but he had learned that piano transport was an art requiring trained specialists and unique truck configurations.
That was just one of the many tidbits Martin had picked up over the last couple of weeks of phone calls and faxes procuring the bed and moving out the piano. He also learned: that hospital beds could be left or right handed; that the Oliphant family health insurance covered wheel chairs but not adjustable beds but maybe beds with wheels or wheelchairs that flattened to beds; that hospital bed mattresses take specialized sheets; that it’s hard to find those specialized sheets in anything but stiff waterproof material; and that for patients in the latter days of stage IV breast cancer, it’s best to go with the waterproof design in any case.
Martin flicked a balsam needle off the mattress top and went into the kitchen to get himself a spiced cider. The cliched clove and cinnamon perfume drifting from the stove reminded him of an argument he had had with Lattner and Mrs. Trinkle over the best-smelling holiday. Martin had led with Christmas. Lattner countered that Christmas didn’t smell good, it just smelled as expected, and that, at any other time of the year, all that nutmeg and pine and wood fire would be dismissed as toothpaste and toilet cleaner and cigars. He had posited Fourth of July.
“It smells American,” Lattner said. “Gunpowder, barbecued meat, sweat. It smells like war. It smells like freedom.”
“Thanksgiving, then,” Martin said. “You’ve got your burned flesh as well as pumpkin pie and Brussels sprouts. That smells like America to me.”
“Smells like genocide to Indians,” said Lattner.
A door banged and a pocket of cold air brushed by Martin’s neck, interrupting his sniffing and musing.
“Deck the halls with boughs of holly,” sang Carroll.
Martin followed the sound into the living room. “Why aren’t you at work?” he asked.
“Who am I? Scrooge McDuck? I told everyone to go home,” Carroll said.
“Christmas isn’t for another two weeks,” Martin said.
Carroll continued to sing as he draped tinsel around the hospital bed. “Where’s my elf’s hat?” Martin pointed toward the front hall.
Carroll had been like this for about a month—baking pfeffernüsse cookies, festooning the windows with holly and fir roping, dragging in a seven-foot Christmas tree, setting it up by himself, and covering it with lights and ornaments. Dr. Broad posited that it was the latest manifestation of the strokes Carroll had suffered last summer. The doctor had offered again to set up some rehabilitation therapy, and again Carroll had refused. Martin didn’t press the point. Carroll seemed happy enough. And besides, he was assuming the burden of planning what otherwise promised to be a grim holiday celebration.
“Mail call.” Carroll reappeared in the elf hat, arms full of letters and a couple of packages. “Look at the Christmas cards.” He dumped the delivery on a mustard club chair, one of two situated at the side of the living room, both already holding several days of unopened correspondence and bills. The bustling Olde Christmas Village squatting on the front hall table left no place for incoming mail.
Martin poked through the thick red and green envelopes. Nothing from Elko, as usual, but one package addressed to Martin, return address: “Post Office, Medicine Bow, Wyoming.” He ripped into the brown paper and almost tore through the tattered cover of an old manuscript stained with coffee and two greasy thumbprints. Martin read the title out loud: “Songs of the Cowboys. Jack Thorpe. 1908.” He opened it and a piece of notebook paper fluttered down to the golden shag of the living room carpet.
“Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow,” sang Carroll.
Martin picked up the paper, scanned it, mouthed first, “Beaufort,” then, “Ginger.” Someone banged on the front door. He read the letter again. More banging and a shout: “Mr. Oliphant?” Martin put the letter back in the book and the book into the pile of mail, walked to the foyer, and let in four Lemons Piano Tuners and Movers, trailing them back into the living room to watch them transmute the familiar space into a sickroom.
Over the next two days, each step in the living room’s metamorphosis opened further the wound that the arrival of the hospital bed had cut: Frank’s return from school and refusal to help Martin move the hospital bed from under the tree to the empty space left by the absent Steinway; Carroll’s agreement to help move the hospital bed from under the tree but only if Martin would join in singing “Over the River and Through the Woods” as they did it; Dottie’s slow and unsteady trip downstairs; her hysterical sobs at first sight of the bed; her escalation to hyperventilation as Martin demonstrated how easy it was to fold her table up and down and adjust the bed into its fifteen customizable comfort configurations; Frank’s anger at Martin for buying the bed because “it’s already making Mom sicker”; Martin’s
horror as his mom did get noticeably sicker.
After dinner on that second day, the doorbell rang out the first bar of “Winchester Cathedral,” and Martin’s dad, who had been rearranging the Christmas tree ornaments to get a better red-green symmetry, bolted for the front door. Martin stayed at his mother’s bedside, holding a mirror under her nose. She had been sleeping since breakfast, and he was debating calling Dr. Broad.
He heard the rubbery pop of the door sucked back into its insulated frame.
“Not carolers,” Carroll said, returning to the tree.
“But who was it?” Martin said.
“Some fat girl,” Carroll said.
Martin noted a faint murking of the mirror, exhaled his own puff of relief, and went to see for himself.
He opened the front door to a giant white snowman, squinting in the light thrown off from the flashing display covering most of the colonial’s front façade.
“Julie?” Martin said.
“Can I come in?” said Julie Newport and did so without waiting for a reply. Her down-stuffed jacket rustled as it knocked miniature candy canes off the festooned entryway. She pulled back her hood by its rabbit fur trim and tugged off her white ski cap. “I brought something for your mom. From my mom.” She nodded toward a tinfoil-covered paper plate in her right hand.
