Light of Falling Stars

by J. Robert Lennon

  I’m telling you I don’t believe in Him at all.

  Mr. Bogen didn’t say a thing for some time, and she heard a chair scrape on the floor. What am I going to tell your mother? he whispered finally.

  The truth.

  She’s dying.

  I know that.

  You owe it to her. Even if…you don’t believe, you owe it to her.

  She doesn’t have to know I’m not going.

  You’ll go.

  Dad—

  When she’s gone, you do what you want on Sundays. But until then, you go to church and pray for your mother.

  The sound of footsteps, the door opening.

  She’ll be dead soon enough, Mr. Bogen said. Then you’ll have your way, believe me.

  * * *

  Later, he crawled into bed beside her. “Trixie.”

  “I’m awake.”

  He reached for her and she moved into his arms. His body now was both familiar and strange, and she felt something illicit about the embrace, something dangerous that hadn’t been there before, and she felt she must be careful. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “I heard it all.”

  “I know.”

  “Will you go to church?” she said after a time.

  “Yeah. You don’t have to come.”

  “I’ll come.”

  “Trixie, I want to start a family.”

  She touched his face in the dark. “I do too.”

  “Right away.”

  She held her breath, then let it out. “Now, Hamish?”

  “Yes,” he told her.

  Soon they would have a daughter, Kat, and in time a son, Edward. Years later, when Kat was older and had gotten away from them, Trixie often wondered if she was conceived that night, if somehow Hamish’s fight with his father provided the wedge that would drive her from them. But after a while she stopped wondering; that kind of thinking did nobody any good.

  * * *

  As she walked, Trixie noted familiar things: a tree that had fallen and blocked the path fifteen years before and the new bend she had cleared to avoid it; a pile of rocks, once the foundation of a long-abandoned cabin, that she’d seen a black bear rummaging through in search of bugs; an eagle’s nest on a skeletal spruce, the eagles elsewhere. The physical integrity of these objects clarified her memories, making them more real, giving them texture, and they returned to her with greater urgency than they ever had before. She could almost feel the skin on Hamish’s hands, weathered and warm, like sun-soaked boots, hear his roughened, easy voice.

  But when she emerged from the woods and her house came into view, she got the sudden impression that he wasn’t really coming, that he had changed his mind. There was little to explain the feeling, save the fact of her house, so real, so perfectly fitted to life without him. She let out a sigh, nobody around to hear it but herself, and went inside.

  She didn’t pick up the phone yet. Instead, she went to the bedroom, opened the closet door, and knelt carefully on the floor before the clutter of objects inside: a wooden box of buttons and thread, photo albums, her wedding silver, which she hadn’t had cause to bring out in years. In the back, behind the broom and dustpan, she found a tattered shoebox repaired with tape, and pulled it out. She’d moved the box a dozen times, but had never bothered to open it. She knew what was inside.

  She took off the lid to reveal a pile of papers and junk, yellow and rough with dust. On top was Hamish’s wallet. Why hadn’t he taken it with him when he left? She didn’t know, probably an oversight. The desire to leave must have come upon him in a rush, and after that there was no going back. The wallet hadn’t been opened since. It was worn out, shiny in the middle and cracked at the fold. She remembered that it used to lie in the same place every day—on top of the icebox, next to a bunch of dusty mason jars and the pile of change she dipped into when she sent Edward to the corner for an egg, or whatever.

  She opened it up. There was no money inside—of course that was probably the first thing she took out when he left—but there were papers. Receipts, business cards. A thin piece of lined paper three inches square on which was written:

  8 dress

  10 blouse

  7 shoe

  6 skirt

  Her sizes. Of course he had to have this; he used to buy her things to wear every birthday and Christmas. She remembered, suddenly, a Christmas at the ranch, playing Monopoly with Kat and Edward and wearing the new wool dress Hamish had bought her. Would he remember this, if she showed him the wallet?

  She also found a brittle, yellow newspaper clipping, and recognized the type from the Great Falls Tribune. It was a classified ad:

  WANTED. Winter sheepherder, Paradise Valley. Must be willing to work alone, no phone/mail, live small quarters. Good pay.

  The ad listed a post office box in Conrad. When had Hamish considered this? she wondered. How long had he kept it with him before he left? Two weeks? Two years? Ten years? To think that this was there on top of the fridge, right under her nose if she wanted to see it.

  But she did see; anyone could have.

  * * *

  Perhaps he started leaving her as early as the summer of 1953, when a month of rain gave way to the single hot, humid day when Mrs. Bogen finally died. There was the money for the casket and funeral, and then the rain returned, with autumn in tow. Fields flooded, the hay never dried, and they had to buy it elsewhere. Dozens of cattle fell and drowned, or got sick from floodwater; the flu took several ranch hands for a few weeks. By the middle of October it was clear they wouldn’t catch up this year, probably not for several, if ever, and then one morning Hamish came back to the house at six, just as Trixie was getting up to cook.

  “You’re a little early for breakfast,” she said, and then she saw his face: pale and cracked open like an egg. “What,” she said, as she went to him. “What happened?”

  Hamish didn’t move, didn’t open his arms to take her. “My dad,” he said.

  Walking out at dawn, he had seen Mr. Bogen sitting against the base of a tree behind the stables. At first, from a distance, it looked like he had sat down to clean his shotgun and fallen asleep. But it was Wednesday morning, no time to go out looking for birds, and soon Hamish was close enough to see that the shotgun wasn’t over the old man’s shoulder like he thought, but jammed into his mouth.

  By this time they had a daughter, Kat. They spent that Christmas with Trixie’s parents in the Bogens’ big house. It was their first week living there. To Trixie it still spoke of the Bogens; their bedroom remained untouched, and they’d been sleeping in Mrs. Bogen’s sickroom, on a mattress Hamish had recently bought and that they could not afford, but was needed to replace the deathbed. Trixie’s parents didn’t know what to say to Hamish, so they played with their granddaughter and talked about Trixie’s childhood. For the first time in years, Trixie missed her sister and wished they could commiserate about married life. She wished her daughter could have an aunt.

  The next year the cattle companies came sniffing around, asking about the land and the stock. Hamish spoke little to these men and sent them on their way. Meanwhile he got up earlier and went to sleep later, and sometimes Trixie was barely aware of him at all save for a dark presence beside her in the bed. She stayed with the baby now during the day, and though work went well in the spring, she knew they were losing money. They were alone out there with more responsibility than they could handle and nothing else to occupy them. She could feel herself becoming hard and suspicious, and worst of all resigned—to a life without ease, without anything but the same for their children, to drudgery and endless debt.

  Trixie got pregnant again. It wasn’t what either of them wanted. Kat was three years old.

  “We can’t afford it,” Hamish told her.

  “We don’t have any choice.”

  He opened his mouth to speak but shut it before any words came out. His hand found hers. “Okay, then. I think it’s time to think about selling.”

  “The ranch?”


  “That man came around yesterday. He mentioned some nice numbers, if it’s numbers you’re looking for.”

  She leaned forward to meet his eyes. “Hamish, we can get by. We’ll find a way.”

  “Nah, it’s the right thing.” He shook his head. “Don’t have the heart without Dad, you know that.”

  “You don’t have the heart for anything else.”

  “I’ll find something.”

  Though she let herself believe him, later she would see that it wasn’t true. Hamish blamed himself, his loss of faith, for his father’s death, as Trixie would certainly have done in his position, as anyone would. But away from the ranch this wound would fester and spread, and he would come to see the decision to sell as a decision he’d had to make for her, would begin to see Edward as a child only she had wanted to conceive and forced him to father. And as the rift between them grew, he would pit her children against her, and what influence she had with them would evaporate like so much water in the heat of blame. But this was all ahead of them, and saying goodbye to the ranch, painful as it was, gave them the first glimmer of hope they’d had since Kat arrived.

  On their last night there, they couldn’t sleep. They whispered plans to one another in the dark, Hamish expressing a tentative excitement at giving town life a try, Trixie thrilled about the extra time they would have—to spend with the kids, to go hiking and fishing, to live in a place with a good library and good schools and neighbors they’d see every day. They had decided to move west, to Marshall. A distant cousin of his, Karl Spraycar, had a job for him at a construction firm, digging foundations and laying concrete, and Hamish thought it a fitting job, helping to build a growing town, working outdoors and close to the land. They would stay with Karl, who was little more than a kind stranger to Hamish, until they found a house.

  “I thought I’d be here my whole life,” he told her. “Didn’t think I’d ever get married either.”

  “No?”

  “Nope.”

  “Did you get disappointed?”

  He waited a moment before he said, “I just got surprised, is all.”

  “You love me, then? Or am I still just a surprise?”

  He reached over and put his hand on her stomach, where she’d only just begun to show. “Still love you, after all these years.”

  “Four.”

  “A long time, for something you don’t expect.”

  Trixie was still awake when his breathing evened out and the sky began to lighten. For four years, this was about the time they had been getting up; now, for a change, it was when Hamish finally fell asleep. They were to leave before noon, arrive in Marshall around dinnertime, and then everything would start over again. She wondered when their life would settle down, whether Hamish would learn to expect its surprises, and she hoped it would happen soon, hoped with all her heart it would happen at all.

  * * *

  She set the wallet aside and rooted around in the box: letters, photos, of course, but other things too: key chains, loose keys; several shot glasses; a comb, a deck of cards in a clear plastic case, a number of dice, none of which matched any others. Not exactly a memorable set of keepsakes, but the box hadn’t been carefully planned. It was only the by-product of throwing out Hamish’s things when he left. She’d swept through the house while the kids were at school, grabbing anything that had been his or reminded her of him and flinging it into the trash. Over the years, then, when she came across the things she’d missed that day, into the box they went. She kept it on the refrigerator, where the wallet used to go. When the children were gone and she moved away from the house on Main Street, she considered tossing it out without even looking inside. But she didn’t. She left it closed, moved, and put it in the closet, where it had remained for twenty-five years, until today.

  It was getting late, and she still hadn’t called the airport. She didn’t want to go and come back empty-handed. The thought made her ashamed: if he wasn’t coming, he wasn’t coming. She’d know soon enough.

  Before she called she took the phone off the wall, memorized the number as she had written it on her bulletin board, and got herself comfortable across the room, in her chair. She dialed and picked burrs off her jeans while it rang.

  “Marshall International, please hold.” And a click.

  She wondered if Hamish knew how many people lived in Marshall now. Everyone here was rude on the phone these days. They’d had a party line out on the ranch. Couldn’t be rude on it, she remembered; chances were somebody’d have heard and would hold it against you.

  “Marshall International can I help you?”

  “I want to know if a late flight has arrived. AirAmerica one fourteen? Coming from Seattle.”

  “Oh…

  “It’s still late, is it?”

  “Please hold.”

  Another click, then more ringing. She switched the phone to the other ear and felt her legs throb and the blood well in them. The walk might have been a mistake. Already she dreaded having to get up and bend them again.

  “AirAmerica.” In the background, a lot of noise, people talking. It just came in, she thought.

  “Is flight one fourteen in yet?”

  “Ma’am, are you waiting on a friend or relative?”

  “A friend, yes. Has it come in?”

  “You may want to come here, to the airport, ma’am. I’m afraid something terrible has happened.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Something terrible, I’m so sorry, it’s the plane, ma’am, it’s crashed. It was coming into the valley and just crashed.”

  “Crashed!” This couldn’t be right.

  “I can’t give you any details, but if you could come to—”

  “Do you mean crash-landed? Or do you mean crashed?”

  “Crashed, ma’am. It’s…oh God.”

  Trixie felt a sudden need to plant her feet on the floor, and leaned forward in the chair. “Tell me what happened.”

  “Oh, I’m not supposed…This is ridiculous.” It seemed the young woman was crying. Crashed? How could that be?

  “Go on, please.”

  “They all died, ma’am, that’s what they’re saying. My friend Denise, she was on it, she was a flight attendant, you know. I’m so sorry, it’s just awful. Ma’am? I didn’t want to be the one to tell you that, I’ve had to tell all these people…”

  Crashed. Hamish, dead? She stood, walked to the cradle and hung up the phone. It was strange—she’d never thought of Hamish as being alive or dead, only as being gone, disappeared. Crashed. It was as if the entire thing had been made up for her benefit: the letter, the flight, the weeks of wondering what it was all about, of recalling things she didn’t expect ever to think about again. And the crash.

  She went to her bedroom and lay down on the bed. No memories there. She wanted to rest her legs and think about all this.

  But she fell asleep almost immediately. She dreamed she was watching herself sleep from across the room, and that the dreaming self left the room and walked out into the kitchen, out the door and into the woods, where everything was familiar and easy, and that the path there brought her to a clearing where she could look up and see through the trees. Stars blinked like Christmas lights, and something streaked across the heavens trailing a brilliant band of blue, a glowing ribbon that faded slowly, deepening, widening as it went, until it was indistinguishable from sky.

  She woke to the creak of floorboards in the living room. It was dark. The steps traced circles, stopping every second or so. For a moment she was at the ranch. “Hamish?” she said, but the sound of her voice brought her back and she shuddered and turned on the lamp. “Hello?”

  Into the living room, the kitchen: nobody. The front door was latched.

  When she returned to the bedroom, her eyes fell on the cardboard box, and she suddenly remembered a photograph she had seen earlier. She picked up the box and set it on the bed, then went through the pictures until she found it. Hamish, his back to the camera, watching a
pregnant cow. Hamish’s hat was on straight as the horizon, and the cow’s neck stretched out in agony, as if pointing to something distant and awful outside the frame. Trixie had written on the back: Hamish, waiting for calf, 1952.

  She remembered now. She was pregnant herself then, with Kat, when she took the picture.

  This more than anything else made her cry. This, and the lonely sound of steps in a house where the only steps were hers, and the unanswered questions that now would never be answered, and her dream of the vanishing light from a falling star.

  4

  She had to run bent over through the woods to keep the smoke away from her eyes and mouth, and once the trees had swallowed her and she could no longer turn to see their house, Anita allowed herself the luxury of thinking that none of this had actually happened, that somehow they had been mistaken about the plane and the smoke was from a distant forest fire that put nobody but herself in danger. The woods were as quiet now as they must have been half an hour ago, and aside from the smoke, as putrid and toxic as acid, little seemed out of place.

  She ran blindly for a minute or so, her sockless feet sweating in her shoes, before she stopped to get her bearings. Ahead the smoke seemed thicker, and there was light—whether a patch of sunlight or fire she couldn’t tell—off to the right, beyond the rise that gave way to the creek. She took off running toward it, and when she felt the ground sloping, slowed to a stop. She topped the rise and looked ahead: the creek; a clearing; and glowing between the trees, a fire, a quarter-mile away, already burning hot enough to billow the nightdress against her legs. It was a forest fire by now—these trees were dry enough to burst into flame spontaneously. She felt for a breeze, but there was none she could discern.

  Nobody could survive in that, she thought. If the crash didn’t get them, the fire.

  She ran down the bank and jumped the creek, slowing to a jog to scan the trees for something out of place. The clearing ahead, cluttered with tall weeds; a strangely gnarled aspen that looked, for a second, like a man. A patch of moss at the base of a tall, scrawny spruce. A squirrel running across a log, to her left. Nothing.