by Laura Bell
And then half of Shell Valley spills out behind, family and neighbors giving us hugs and congratulations and heading toward Shell Hall, where there’s food and drink.
Missing are Amy, four at the time, and Jenny, eighteen months, tucked under the wings of Linda’s family in Duluth with everyone still reeling from her death scarcely a year before. Joe’s mother, Nadyne, has come from the Texas panhandle to stand for him in this marriage. Nate, as she’s often called, is a retired English teacher, a petite woman of style and dash. She takes both of my hands in hers and leans close to whisper, “God must have sent you to Joe Ed. I was so afraid for my boy.”
The log hall has been transformed with wildflowers and evergreen boughs brought down the mountain in the back of Joe’s pickup the day before. My family had spent the day in the hall stringing lights, arranging tablecloths and filling vases with flowers, and when we enter, the white lights are twinkling and the buffet tables laden with sliced meats and cheeses and long fruit kabobs speared into half heads of purple cabbages that look to me like Sputniks.
The music begins with “Waltz Across Texas,” and Joe leads me onto the dance floor for our first dance of the evening. He places a hand firmly on my lower back and mine goes to his shoulder. I feel his spine straighten and see his nostrils flare as he lifts his head slightly and begins to waltz me over the hardwood floor with sureness and grace as my long white skirt swirls around us and our friends clap and cheer.
By the next song, children and parents and grandparents are dancing with each other, with everyone, and spilling out through the doors to sit on straw bales and visit in the night air.
HOME
On Christmas Eve, the first of my married life, I sit in the pew of a Lutheran church in Duluth at midnight Mass with the women of the family of my husband’s first wife. It’s their tradition to do this, without the men, after all the kids are tucked into bed. I have come into their family suddenly, and they’ve graciously moved over to make a place for me but at a cost I can’t begin to imagine.
Before Christmas, Joe and I had worked for weeks on the girls’ gift. We began with a large, sturdy cardboard box that we painted a bright magenta and collaged with magazine photos of dancers and princesses and cowgirls and pirates. Joe hinged the lid, and I glued a big mirror inside and surrounded it with sequins and glitter. Then we added the treasures we’d scoured from thrift stores and collected from friends: exotic hats and gloves, boots, flowered dresses and sequined shawls.
Jenny, barely two, pulls out her favorites and clomps through drifts of wrapping paper and ribbons in cowboy boots that come up to her thighs and a cowboy hat that falls over her eyes. Amy chooses a long purple silk dress, a strand of faux pearls and a wide-brimmed felt hat with a satin ribbon. She spins around in front of her aunt, flashing a quick five-year-old smile beneath the brim, and I can see that she will become a beautiful woman. As she stands for my camera, her skin is pale and her smile hesitant. How can she possibly know who or what I’m supposed to be to her? Even I have no idea of my place within this family, except that we’re now bound by ties that will never disappear.
For the first several years of our marriage, we spend Christmas with the girls in Duluth, and they come west to be with us during the summers. Those mornings I leave early to drive up Shell Canyon to ride the Diamond Tail cattle in my care at Granite Pass and later up the same canyon to my job with the Big Horn National Forest. In my absence Joe braids the girls’ long hair while they eat their breakfast, bleary eyed. Then he packs juice and snacks and loads them into the blue Chevy pickup, and together they make the morning rounds, shoeing horses around the valley and winning hearts along the way. Evenings, I listen to them talk about kids they’ve met or a pool they’ve been invited to, cookies shared, stories told.
One summer my sister brings two of her daughters out to visit, and we pile everybody into the pickup and head up Shell Canyon. As Joe and I saddle the seven horses, Amy and Jenny drag blankets and bridles from the truck for us with an air of proprietary importance in front of our guests. We throw a pack saddle on an extra horse and fill the panniers with hotdogs and buns, ketchup, marshmallows, chips, apples, sunscreen, wildflower books and rain jackets. We pack up into the head of Salt Creek, all of us riding and some of the little ones doubled up, to check cattle and then build a campfire, roasting hotdogs and marshmallows on green branches we’ve whittled. Afterward, we sprawl full and warm around the fire, and I watch Amy and Jenny lean against their dad, owning him, the loud, bright hero of him, before their cousins.
“They need to be with you,” I say that night in the dark. “You’re their father, and they need to be with you.”
I feel his body grow rigid, and he rolls over onto his back as if searching the sky through the ceiling. “I don’t have the right. I gave that up when I took them to Duluth. I tried, but I just couldn’t do it.” I’d heard him confess how Jenny, only six months old, had been gathered up by her aunt and grandmother and flown from Texas back to Minnesota. Amy, three and a half years old, had seen her mother fall from her horse, seen her limp body, heard the ambulance’s sirens. Joe had held on to her, trying to keep her in Texas, where as a toddler she spent long hours bundled up in the saddle with him or in the tractor cab with her arms flung around his neck. But her tears wouldn’t stop, and she was afraid to be alone, following him from room to room and wanting only to be in his arms. Finally, facing down his shortcomings, he’d moved with her to Duluth so she could be encircled by the constant and loving women of her family. He’d tried making a living cutting timber, but for him it had been a winter of grief in all its destructive guises.
“But this isn’t about you,” I say. “It’s about them. You’re their father, and they need to be with you.”
The seed is planted, and when I’m offered a seasonal job with the Big Horn National Forest, administering their public grazing lands, I take it. My reluctance to leave the Diamond Tail is tempered by the possibility of a permanent job with health insurance and benefits for our family. The country I ride now expands from the Granite allotment to include Shell Creek, Medicine Lodge, Paintrock Creek and the Cloud Peak Wilderness. We buy the six acres on Beaver Creek and a house that needs a lot of work. Winter nights I spend worrying over garden catalogues and plotting my orders, wandering around the property by daylight trying to imagine it populated with the lush color and abundance promised by those pages.
Packages begin arriving in the mail, seedlings of cottonless cottonwood, Nanking cherry, wild plum, chokecherry, crabapple, green ash, weeping red birch, golden willow and weeping willow. I unwrap the bundles and place them in buckets of water and begin digging holes into the dark of evening. I hook up the horse trailer and drive to a nursery sixty miles away to buy six Colorado blue spruce trees that are already four feet tall, imagining the day when they’ll form a solid green windbreak to the north of the house, as well as three green ash trees, two inches in diameter, that would become tall and sprawling, shading us from the harsh western light of summer. For the big trees I dig big holes. I walk the yard for hours and stand dreaming in one spot or another. I decide the spruce trees are too close together and I replant the whole line of them. I carry a shovel along to my forest service job and at the end of the day dig up small clumps of aspen shoots, wild blue flax, wild rose and yellow shrubby cinquefoil, sneaking them down the mountain and putting them into the holes I had waiting, packing them back in the ground with peat and manure and Miracle-Gro, then giving them a good soak often after the sun has set. I bring home buckets of daffodils, irises and day lilies that friends have divided from their gardens and dig holes for them, as well, along the fence rows, among the cottonwood seedlings by the creek and flanking the west side of the house.
One day Joe pulls up with three sandstone slabs he’d found in the hills and manhandled up into the bed of his truck. “There’s more,” he said, “enough that if we hunt around a little we could do the front of the house like we talked.” Later he unloads railroad
ties at the front door, starts his chainsaw and creates containment walls for the sand and stone. We make trip after trip into the hills to scout for rock, pushing the limits of what we can lift, and the terrace grows and slowly takes shape.
When school lets out, the girls come to stay with us. Jenny’s five this summer, with olive skin and shadowy eyes, her hair pulled back in tight braids. Amy’s eight, her fair skin pinked at her cheeks with sun, her long hair sunbleached and braided. On her very first visit I’d courted her with her favorite, macaroni and cheese, buying expensive Emmenthaler and Gruyère and stirring heavy cream and nutmeg into it. She’d pushed it around her plate, trying to be polite, but finally admitted she really preferred the kind from the box, “but the salad’s very good.” And so I learned to buy her mac and cheese in a box and white bread rather than wheat and to not add dill to tomato soup or pepper to eggs. There were standards, though, that I felt I had to uphold, certain things a mother should do, and one night, edgy and tired, I’d told Jenny, “One brussel sprout. Just one. It won’t hurt you to try something new for a change. You’re not leaving this table until you do.” She speared one with great difficulty and got it into her mouth, whole, and when I looked back, her eyes were wide and welling with tears, fixed on her plate, the awful thing too big to chew or swallow. “Oh, Jenny. God, I’m sorry. Just spit it out. You tried.” Then she opened her mouth, let it drop to the plate and began to cry in earnest.
Our first garden grows up rich and lush, the vegetables huge in this virgin creek-bottom soil. The kids carve zucchini boats and sail them down the creek, play softball with zucchini bats while I hover over everything in a frenzy, building a house, scrubbing it clean, working my job, keeping my husband’s edges tucked in, protecting the idea of our marriage, smiling while simmering below. I weed and pick and cook and freeze furiously after work and on the weekends, believing that a life can be built by hard work and a home created by sheer force.
I am wrong, as it turns out, but I do the best I can.
That first summer at Beaver Creek, Hannah comes to live with us, the sixteen-year-old daughter of the Swedish man who’d been our exchange student when I was a young teen. She arrives with her parents and brother and, enchanted with the west, stays on for nearly two months to help take care of the girls in exchange for a chance to ride. She’s tall, blonde, and sweet tempered, and the girls idolize her as a big, worldly sister. The days are hot, so we pull mattresses and bedding out for all of them on the front porch, where banks of shuttered windows open to the creek bottom and hayfields and the big windows on either end let the night breezes through. Late one night, waking to thunder and lightning, I leave my bed and pad toward the porch and hear Hannah and Amy whispering, giggling, then see the light of flashlights and their books, their blonde heads nearly touching. Jenny is fast asleep beside them, her legs bare and chubby still. “Are you guys okay? Is the rain blowing in?” There’s a flash of light, a deep rumble that shakes the earth. I sit down and linger in their sisterly companionship, reluctant to return to my silent bed.
Joe brings me coffee in bed every morning in the dark, shaking my shoulder gently and saying, “Okay, it’s ready; it’s time.” I’ve heard him rustling around in the kitchen and stoking the fire in the woodstove in the living room, letting the dogs out, knowing that I could stay under the covers a little longer, safe, warm, cared for. He sets the coffee cups on the side table and props the pillows up behind me, climbing in next to me and handing over a mug of black coffee that steams in a room where frost creeps up the northern wall in the winter. We sip coffee in the early dark, without speaking, and watch the windows for signs of dawn. It is in this hour that we find our comfort, that we can believe each day is fresh, that the hurts from the day before have been erased, that saying we love each other is enough.
The sagging porch of Press and Gretel’s old gypsum-block house wraps around two sides and looks over the distant pond to where the horizon drops off into the basin. This late-summer evening we’re saying farewell to our friends Sonia and Robert, who are leaving Shell and heading for the northwest coast. “A change of pace,” she’d said in explanation. “Better jobs and the ocean.” When we arrive, Gretel has draped an ivory damask tablecloth over the old picnic table out in the grass, amid scattered dog bones and cowpies. She’s coming out of the house headlong in a flannel shirt, her arms wrapped around a tarnished silver champagne bucket filled with ice and a bottle of something French. “This is a dreadful affair,” she says, “so we may as well spruce things up a little.” Press and Joe grill brook trout over an open fire for hors d’oeuvres while Amy, Jenny and I set the table with silver, linen napkins and their best crystal. Gretel finds a few blooms that the deer haven’t eaten and arranges them in a low vase just as Sonia and Robert pull up. She gets out and comes across the yard, opening her arms, saying, “Shall we just drink and cry all night?” We start with champagne and move to red wine as the light slants and steaks and roasting corn come off the grill. We peel the papery husks back and toast one another across the table with the ears, and when we’re done, we toss the cobs over our shoulders into the grass and gathering dusk. We laugh and laugh, but I can feel the tears lining up for our loss. I can’t imagine my life without them, without Sonia listening patiently to the sorrows of my marriage. I don’t yet know this is just the first crack in this small community, that other friends around this table will follow in the next years, that I will have to turn to my husband to be my friend.
“You own your own home and you want more? Think of all the people in the world who don’t have this. Can’t you just be happy the way things are?” These days it seems I’m always proposing something—small things, a trip with the girls, a class together, or the same big thing, for him to quit drinking. More than anything I just want him to talk to me, to show up, to be with me. With some of my closest friends now gone, I push hard until one day he erupts in anger. “You want too damn much from me. You want to talk; go talk to someone else. You want to make love; go make love to someone else. This is all I’ve got.”
We’re on the couch in the living room, but he stands to say this and leans over in my face, so I feel as small and powerless as a child. Once my tears have dried, I make it my mission to take him at his word. In my travels I look for the glance, the opening to have an affair, and tell him about my plans. He nods his head calmly, supportively, and arranges to pick up the kids while I’m off in another town meeting a man for whom I feel no joy. When his face remains smooth and calm, I push the knife in deeper; when he still doesn’t seem to feel it, I use both hands and twist hard at his guts until he does. One night I find him waiting for me on the flagstone terrace in front of the house, and he clutches my collar in rage and swings me from side to side, saying words that are more like explosions. I disappear, limp in his hold, and look down for sharp things that might hurt me if he were to throw me down, though I never really believe that he will. I am quiet and soft in his grasp, not meeting his eyes, but some part of me feels a rush of relief. Here you are, the man I knew was inside. Here you are, angry behind that smooth face. After he’s worn himself out, he comes to a stop, panting, still clutching my collar, yet I still don’t look up into his eyes, just at the ground, saying nothing. His breath is heavy at my ear with the sour smell of alcohol and then the raspy gravel of tears held back for years, long before me, long before the loss of his first wife, held back now, too, but coming anyway. It is black night and the crickets drone. I can hear Beaver Creek gurgling in the willows below the house. Joe quietly loosens his grip and stands crying with his head bent low. I look up into the dark silhouette of his face but can’t see his eyes, only the stars above his head. I hold myself next to the black shape of him for one long moment, unable to step into that opening of grief, maybe too long in coming, or maybe my heart grown too hard. After a brief hesitation, I slip away in the dark to my car and drive away.
When it comes down to it, he chooses alcohol. “This is who I am,” he tells me. “Take me
or leave me. I don’t want to read the books or go to a shrink or sit in a circle and talk about it.” He says this without malice, with an elemental sureness, like a holy man revealing an inner truth. Six months later he hooks up the horse trailer and helps me move my belongings to town.
In February I go to Kentucky to visit my parents, waiting for my divorce to be final. On a Sunday morning following the church service downtown, I’m in the kitchen with my mother. “I feel like you’re ashamed of me,” I say as she scrapes out a pot at the stove, her back to me.
When she finally turns around, her jaw is clinched and it looks as if she may cry. “All I’ve ever heard from you was how perfect your marriage was. How could you not know he was an alcoholic when you married him? You made your bed and you should lie in it. You don’t just quit because it’s not working.” She turns back to the stove and says to the wall, “I can’t bear to see my children get divorced.”
The blood drains from my head and face, the tears gather at my eyes. There are no words for me to say. I understand that much of what she says is true. I have always shared with her the joy, the adventure, the winning stories I could tell from eighteen hundred miles away. I never, ever shared with her the suffering, barely knew how to speak the words to myself.
