by Laura Bell
On the sidewalk beneath old trees I see her boyfriend, Jason, and put my arms around him while his body shakes. “I gave her roses that night and told her I loved her,” he says. “I bet she hated that,” I say, and that makes him laugh. “Yeah, she did hate the mushy stuff.” I step back and hold his hands and say, “I am so glad she had you. I’m so glad that she had you to hold her and be good to her before she died.”
I remember that day late in the fall after homecoming when we’d gone together to see a doctor at the clinic between Greybull and Basin. I’d asked, awkwardly, if she’d had sex yet, and she answered, slowly, “No, but we’ve talked about it.” I said, “I’m afraid for you, afraid in the way I am for all of us. Sex leaves you so vulnerable, and if it doesn’t, that’s even worse. But I want you to be ready, and I won’t be here to help.” She’d nodded and said that’s what she wanted, so we went together to have her examined and get a prescription for birth control. “When you’re ready, you’ll know and you’ll make a good decision, and this is what I can do to help from far away.” The woman doctor had looked at me hard, as though demanding to know what I was thinking, and then spoke to me alone and almost made me cry, but I said, “This is what I can do. This is what we’re doing.” In the following months, I’d asked Jenny about it, but even over the miles, even on the phone in the living room whose long cord wound up the staircase, she was too shy to say.
It is dusk when Paul and I leave, driving east on the highway toward the ranch where Stan and Mary have offered beds to my family. At the curve, we slow and stop and walk to the reflector post above the wash on the far side of the road. Ribbons, yellow and white, are tied to it in bows, the tails hanging down loose, and flowers in bunches, daisies, roses and lilacs, here and there sage and some evergreen. Piled around the base are round river stones and flat moss rock from the hills. More flowers, bare-stemmed or wrapped in green florist tissue or clear cellophane from the grocery, are laid at the base, tucked in among the stones to hold them from the wind. In a Budweiser can there’s a cluster of Indian paintbrush, crimson, yellow and rose, brought in from the hills.
We climb the narrow stairs to the garret bedrooms, choose one, and Paul holds me through the night, not talking, not asking anything of me. The curtains at the open window by our heads move through all the hours, sucking to the screen with the night winds and then billowing a raw chill back across us.
“Do you want it closed?” he asks.
“No.” The curtains ripple to momentary stillness, a sigh, a whisper. The stars shine. From downstairs, the sound of someone up in the night. “Paul?”
“Yes.”
“What if I hadn’t left?”
“Shhhh.” His soft breath’s warm at my ear. He pulls the thin covers up over us. “People die even when you stay.” It’s silent for a while. “Can you sleep?”
“No.” My tongue on the roof of my mouth, a puff of air releases it and forms the sound.
“Do you want to talk?”
“No.” A sigh, a whisper. “Just this for now.”
At dawn I wrap myself in a wool blanket and sit on the floor by the bed, writing. Paul slips downstairs for coffee, and I hear the sounds of my parents’ voices, distant, soft, and others as he joins them. With words on paper come tears, and when he sets a mug of coffee on the floor beside me, I’m blinded with them.
“They ask how you are, if you’re coming down.”
I shake my head silently, unable to imagine how this day can proceed, too sad for social graces.
“I’ll let them know.”
“Paul, this day’s going to be weird for you, all these people you don’t know. But will you just stay close to me?”
“Yes,” he says.
“Even with family and everything, you’ll stay within reach?”
“Yes.”
The cottonwoods along the ditch below the road have grown immense, sprawling, from the bundled seedlings I’d planted in the early years of our marriage. The stacked poles of the round corral have lost their bark and gone smooth, silvered now in the morning light. “Here,” I say, “this is the turn,” and I see a man with a shovel draining irrigation water away from where it’s pooled across the drive. He looks old and bent and heavy, and I try to place him, this person who’d be at the house on this day. When we pass beneath the gateposts and cross the uneven cattle guard, he turns and raises a hand in greeting, holding it midair as we approach. I see under the ball cap that it’s Joe and wonder how I could have missed this before. Moving slowly past, I reach through the open window, and he squeezes my hand. “I’m so glad you’re here,” he says and follows the pickup down the drive to this place I used to call home.
My brother and his family pull in behind us with our parents, who flew in the day before from a conference in Maine. Along Beaver Creek the willows are leafing out and full of birdsong and gurgling water, the sounds of early spring incongruous with the day that faces us. Joe leans his shovel against the tack shed and offers his hand to each of us, closing his arms around me, and in his lingering I can feel the man I used to know, the man I fell in love with, alive beneath his skin. I cannot imagine his loss, yet old resentments fly up around me, requiring little to set them loose. Were you drinking? Did you know where she was or when she’d be home? I do not say these words in this pause of embrace and never will. The one who walked away, I don’t have the right.
We walk the gravel drive together, under the overhang with the moose paddles that Amy had found riding on the mountain with him the summer of the Yellowstone fires. I can see Jenny there under the piñata hung for Amy’s birthday, her eyes blindfolded with a scarf, twirling and whacking and laughing with her head tilted back, and all around a dirty yellow smoke drifting across the basin from the wildfires. Along the fence below the gate, the wild plum thicket has grown tangled and is creeping out into the yard just as the catalogue had warned it would when I pored over it one winter, imagining abundance and not believing that anything could grow too much in such a spare place.
When we step up onto the stone terrace, I walk through memories of Jenny and Amy carving pumpkins, stringing Christmas lights up into the trees, laying out on beach towels and working on their tans in the earliest summer sun. We go through the door into the living room that smells faintly of stale grease, Comet, and woodsmoke. With our sorrows sharp and our words unsaid, we gather around the minister and gratefully close our eyes against this day as he leads us in a prayer. When I raise my head, I see that we’re all still here, gathered for the worst possible reason, like shards of glass piled together.
The Shell Hall is a cavernous log structure where the community shares Easter breakfasts and Halloween chili suppers, dances at weddings and grieves for its dead. With our lights on we trail one another down the hill into town; cars and trucks line both sides of the streets in every direction, and two yellow school buses sit empty, their doors open. We park in the spaces left for us and stand together, hesitant, a disparate group safe in this fragile moment together when inside there are so many. I reach out for Paul’s arm and let him lead me in behind Amy and Joe. I see my mother’s face turn as if she’s looking for her place, but I can’t help, and Carol falls in at her side and takes her in with Dad and my brother following. I’m aware of the floor as we walk, the polish of old wood laid in thin strips and of the rows and rows and rows of people sitting in folding chairs. I can’t see their faces, don’t even look, but can feel the heat of all their bodies.
When we’re seated, the stage in front of us is filled with Jenny’s classmates, seated or standing all around the edges, and in every space there are flowers and ribbons in colors brighter than anything growing in this country, raised up in tall vases and on pedestals around and behind the closed coffin as though to bear us up, to keep us from sinking to the ground.
While the minister speaks, I study the weave of Joe’s jacket in front of me, Amy leaning into his shoulder. I reach out and touch the fabric at his shoulder, this man who was once my hu
sband, and offer up a silent apology for all I have not been to him. Jenny’s friends stand and speak, Fred with his cow-licked hair and then Kaycee in her grandmother’s bright red coat, their words floating over us across the room: laughter, kindness, goofy, sparkling, karate chop, glow in the dark. I watch their faces and envy them their days of jostling through crowded hallways with her and sharing bus seats, their memories of her last day.
Joe’s brother stands up and sings, all alone with just his voice.
Remember me when the candle lights are gleaming.
Remember me at the close of a long, long day.
And it would be so sweet when all alone I’m dreaming
Just to know you still remember me.
He sings to us out in the open, away from the podium and the microphone, standing with his hands clasped loosely in front of him and his head tilted back, his eyes closed, singing for Jenny, for Amy, for this brother he loves so much.
When it’s my turn to stand and face the room, I see there are people standing in the aisles, spilling out the doorways, and leaning through the open windows. I see the faces of friends, of parents and teachers who’d shepherded one another’s children to safety, the tears now welling in their eyes, holding each other, and I wonder how one can speak the words out loud without howling at the loss.
In the seats right in front of me, Amy sits with her head sunk to her knees and her father with his head bowed in grief. Next to them are Amy and Jenny’s grandparents and aunts from Minnesota, her grandmother from Texas, my mother and father, my brother and his wife. Midway down on the far side, Jenny’s friend Kaycee is sitting in her bright red coat, her face beaming at me as if to say, Yes, you can do this, Laura. Come on, I’ll help you.
“What I’ve discovered these last days is that the conversation of death is filled with the language of love.
“All of you here, know that you are precious. Know that you count.
“Amy, know that you are a sweet and golden light in this world and that we offer up our hearts to help you heal.
“Jenny, take our love and grow wings.
“We pray that you have found the arms of your mother.
“We wish that we could have loved you longer and more.
“Today we have to trust that our love was enough.”
The Whaley Cemetery sits west of Beaver Creek Road at the edge of the Diamond Tail hayfields, where in early May only a few cattle are grazing with their late calves. This day the tall iron gates are swung open, and we move through them on foot, through grass coming up with spring and through markers of lives past, the chill winds gusting around us. We follow where we’re led, to a place near the back by the barbed wire fence, old cottonwoods rising out of the irrigation ditch that runs alongside. We move as one to the freshly dug ground with a mound of earth behind and, at head and foot, two young crabapple trees blooming weakly, thin and yielding to the winds. Flowers are piled up, their tender petals not meant to last the raw. My mother stands off to one side, arms crossed, shivering in her thin jacket and my father’s hands on her shoulders. A face appears from the many, the husband of a friend, and takes off his winter coat and wraps it around my mother. I’m grateful for that as I have nothing to give her, no extra solace or warmth of any kind. Across the way, in a place I can’t reach her, Amy’s long hair is blowing, her face down and her hand in her father’s and her uncle close behind them, standing watch over them. A service is spoken, but I don’t hear the words, can’t remember them, only the cold and how the bodies blocked the wind as they came closer and gathered around us.
MOVING CAMP
In the dark of morning the lights of Far Valley Ranch shine in haloes over the corrals and barn. The air is damp and sweet with the smell of new grass and red-clay hills. As I park my pickup, Press appears in the circle of barnyard light, leading haltered horses to the pole fence, where he ties them alongside the rest of the string. I find a currycomb and brush and start on one end and in the dim light work through the horses, some familiar to me from years past, others new. Eighteen of these twenty have been leased from a Pavillion rancher who runs over a thousand head on the bare ranges of the Wind River Indian Reservation during the winter, when they paw through snow for dried grass and winterfat. In the spring he works them through corrals and sorts them to outfitters and guest ranches across the state and beyond, delivered in a clatter from the backs of semitrailers.
Once the horses leave the ranch this morning, heading into the mountains, they won’t return until next year. Guests will come and go from town, as we will, but the horses will trail as a group from camp to camp, leapfrogging from trailhead to trailhead from the East Fork of the Wind River west and north into Yellowstone Park and the early snows of fall.
Press whistles through the saddling, his long legs covering ground back and forth between horses. “That sorrel with the high withers is gonna need the number seven saddle and an extra pad. And let’s put a pack saddle on the new bay mare this trip to see how her manners are. Biscuit, my man, looks like you made it another year. Looking fine, looking fine.”
When the horses are brushed and saddled, I fall back to the work shed where wooden panniers are already packed with canned goods and spices from the day before. I open the refrigerators and load insulated panniers with apples and oranges, cabbage, iceberg lettuce, cucumbers, carrots, onions, and celery, then fill the hard-sided coolers with frozen brownies, cookies, ground beef, ham, bacon, sausage, steaks, and chicken, tucking Miracle Whip, mustard, and a small bottle of penicillin for the horses into one of them. With hand scales I lift each packed pannier by the leather loops and balance it with the weight of its mate, adding and removing items, and when they match, I carry them out and set them as a pair in the dawning light. My blood is pumping, my step quick and sure. I find myself relieved to be moving and doing what I know how to do, without thinking, to leave the paralyzing territory of grief behind me.
After the funeral, I’d driven to the small town of Dubois in the valley between the southern Absarokas and the Wind River Range and unloaded my belongings into a few rooms at the back of a friend’s garage. Two large windows of this makeshift apartment opened directly into the corral of an ancient white horse and beyond, due south, to slopes where snows still flurried and spring seemed a long time away. When the last box was inside, I found a patch of light on the couch and lay down. Every day the old horse would hang his head against the other side of the window glass, inches from mine on the pillow, his lip quivering as he dozed, dreaming of oats or tender grass or maybe the branch of rosemary warming to fragrance on my side, beyond his reach. He stood for hours against the dark stained logs of our shared wall, soaking up the sun and sheltering from the wind. Through another window behind the couch, black-capped chickadees fussed among pale-budded hedges and scattered the sunflower seeds I’d left out for them. Between these two windows, south and west, the sun threw light on me most of the day.
When Amy came, I set up my table in the living room and gave her massage in the sun with the horse at the window and Grace napping at my feet. Beneath my hands she was pale and quiet. There was the sound of our breath, of birds chattering at the feeder, of a lawn mower somewhere in the distance, as I moved over her slowly, gently, knowing that whatever pain I felt was only a sliver of hers. When she turned over onto her back, tears slipped from her eyes and she wiped them away.
When I finished, I put the tea kettle on the stove while she wrapped a robe around herself and settled, dazed, on the couch. I brought the tea and sat beside her. I asked her how she was doing, and she could not say. As the afternoon light blazed and faded, I asked about the night of Jenny’s death, the party, and she shook her head in silence. Maybe it was only to me she couldn’t say the words, but I didn’t press. It was enough to have her close, to make her tea and keep her warm. One would think there’d be so many words to say and maybe for some there are but not for us. Without Jenny we are strangers. Without Jenny we are everything to each other, what we have
left.
When finally packed and moving, we line out single file, a string of eight riders and twenty horses with all that we need for the week: duffels, sleeping bags, books, medicine, extra horseshoes, food and kitchen all loaded into metal or canvas panniers and hanging from the cross bucks of each horse’s pack saddle. Each load’s covered with a generous square of green canvas mantie tucked so neatly under the edges with exacting diamond hitches that the horses heading up the trail look to be carrying Christmas presents.
In our early trips, the high passes will be corniced in snow. Later, the flies will bite, and by early August, there will be thunderstorms in the afternoon. When we reach the Yellowstone River Valley in the early fall, a thin glaze of ice will cap the water bucket in the morning. Bull elk will raise antlered heads within dark timber and bugle in the dusky hours and through the night. At dawn we’ll hear the deep, gravelly cries of sandhill cranes long before they appear, flying the river bottom on long silvered wings.
