Stars Go Blue

by Laura Pritchett

  There are murmurs of approval and agreement and sorrow, which makes her feel like a schoolgirl that has gotten an A. She has described it well. “Submerged, yes,” someone says, and someone else adds, “Exactly,” and someone else apropos of nothing says, “Sometimes this disease reminds me of a Stellar’s jay.” And Zach, sweet Zach, says, “That was well put, Renny,” and winks kindly at her. She tries to stop the smile but it’s too late. She curled her hair this morning with pink plastic curlers and she’s glad she did that because what- oh-what source of joy is there left for her in this world? She is not interested in men and their sexual needs (oh, what a relief, when she took Ben’s hand off her breast decades ago and told him that she was just done with that stuff), but she could use a friend, maybe even a friend that would rub her stiff shoulders and hold her hand, and it might as well be a man since she can’t picture wanting a woman to touch her.

  Everyone is still smiling at her. Smiling extra hard. She is an honored martyr. She knows that they know. That she has already lost a daughter. And on top of this she has Ben, whose speech and thought has quite suddenly taken a turn for the worse. So she gets an especially high grade for her suffering. And that’s what humans want. To feel special. Even for stupid reasons.

  Bastards, all of them, she says to herself, to the friendly and smiling faces, all bastards except for maybe Zach. Maybe she hates them all.

  She turns to the next person, indicating that it is now her turn to tell some freak version of the truth. The woman complies: something about how lonely she is now that she’s lost her best friend, which is who her spouse was, and now there’s simply no one to talk to over the news anymore . . . Renny sighs and looks out the window where she sees, unsurprisingly, that it is snowing again. This is like Minnesota plopped onto Colorado, and the reason she and Ben chose Colorado, back when such changes were possible and exciting and wonderful, was because Colorado wasn’t Minnesota. And yet here they are, in a land of gray misery. This new snow on top of the ice will simply make the ice more dangerous.

  She should be more generous but she can’t muster the energy. She will not tell the real truth to these people. Or the deepest truth. For there are, of course, many versions, layering on one another like the snow. And the deepest layer is as dangerous as ice underneath. It can kill a person, in fact. The real truth, no. It must be covered with something slightly softer. She has seen the bottle of sodium pentobarbital that Ben no doubt stole from Ruben, when the vet came over to put down the old mother donkey. She’s surprised Ben had the presence of mind to do such a thing, only not, because from time to time, his quiet, sharp mind sometimes flickers through. Sometimes his mind is working fine; it’s just the words that are dammed up. And it’s because of his deep intelligence—she fell in love with him in the first place because he was in fact so bright—that he’s able to often find replacement words or different phrases that express what his mind still holds to be true.

  Those moments make her so happy.

  Ben had hid the bottle very well. But he had also left a note in the pocket of his jeans: PINK JUICE ON TOP SHELF IN BACK ROOM BARN. When she looked, there was in fact a clean bottle and two plastic-wrapped new syringes sitting on a dusty, dark shelf, right alongside coffee cans full of U-nails and dusty orange ear tags. It is breaking her heart. It is cracking her in two. But she must hold steady and strong. She simply will not tell that truth, no.

  BEN

  He’s made Renny a soft pink card with a heart and he forgets why although he remembers that he takes a pill each morning for his heart. On the card he has written THANK YOU because the woman who helped them says that caregivers need that. Renny has thrown the card on the dash of the pickup after sighing and saying “That’s nice,” and it rests there next to bits of hay and dust and old yellowed receipts from the feed store and curled-up slips of paper and one strand of orange bailing twine. Renny’s driving him home now although this is not the right way. They pass a new church that has one of those signs outside, which says COURAGE IS FEAR THAT HAS SAID ITS PRAYERS.

  “Stupid big new churches,” Renny says.

  “Courage is fear . . .” Ben hears himself trailing off, hears his brain trying to make sense of what that means. Now that Renny does all the driving he has more time to look around, which is good. He needs the time. He repeats what the sign said to himself for many minutes before he gets the meaning. It is a bit like a math problem and he realizes that if you add PRAYER + FEAR, then on the other side of the = sign you get COURAGE. Only it is not exactly addition, it is more complicated than that. Maybe multiplication. He thinks he has it right. But he says, “Amen to that. Go slow. Take it easy. Make sure you know what you’re doing, see.”

  “What?” Renny is squinting, trying to see through the snow. It’s a low-temperature snow, small and brittle, coming right at the glass, spitting at them.

  “This isn’t the way home, Renny.”

  “We’re going to the mall.”

  “The mall.” He does a scan of his brain to remember what a mall is but all he sees is a lot of water. “Is that the remembering room?”

  She glances at him. “What? No. I want to walk. It’s too icy everywhere and I’m going to fall and break my hip. And then you’ll be taking care of me. Or no, Carolyn will, and Carolyn has enough caretaking on her hands. That Jess is going to make her crazy. Jess is worse than any other eighteen-year-old because she isn’t like an eighteen-year-old. Homeschooled and yet never around. Supposedly bright but never opens her mouth to say something intelligent. She’s like a ghost. There is something wrong with her, I’m telling you. We’re going to walk in the mall. Besides, I need to see some color.”

  “The mall,” he says. “Okay. I could use a bite to eat.”

  “Ben?”

  “I like those sticks of salty—”

  “Ben, what’s a remembering room?”

  But there are no words for it. None that he can remember. Something about how the most simple and basic truth for humankind since ever and ever, which is that we don’t want to die. He doesn’t want to die, because it scares him. It scares him because he doesn’t know what comes next. And also because he’s wary that some horrible god will judge him this way or that. Or for killing. He hates that god anyway, that’s a fact, although now he can’t remember why, although oh yes he does, he remembers now, he remembers it’s because that god let his daughter die. God let Jess’s mother die.

  Except that there’s one moment in space where sometimes there is a remembering room. It offers a moment of peace. If only he can find it. The only god he loves is the god of the remembering room. It’s the god who made the ranch, the god who made nature, the god who made willows and bald eagles, and that god is different than the one who likes to watch people suffer.

  He looks to Renny to say something, but Renny says, “You could always use a bite to eat. You’re going to drive me crazy. Why don’t you quit thinking about yourself for once? Think of something nice you could do for someone else. Go to one of Jess’s barrel races.”

  “But Jess . . . doesn’t barrel race anymore . . .”

  “Well, that’s true.” But Renny is distracted, squinting into the snow, trying to make a turn. “Go sit with her, then, like you used to. Take her fishing.” Then he hears Renny sigh, and it is an important kind of sigh. It means, I’m sorry I said that, I know you can’t tie a hook on a line or release the line at the right time, and I’m sorry I said that, I’m always saying things like that. He knows what she means and so he reaches over to touch her knee. Renny glances at him, offers a small smile. “Jess is going to end up pregnant and on welfare. Nobody that quiet is going to end up normal, that’s for sure. I wonder what goes on in her head all day. Don’t you think it’s weird, that she’s always hanging around, but not really there? It’s spooky.”

  He reminds himself to be quiet, and he says, “I know, I should just be quiet,” and she says, “Ben, that’s not what I’m saying,” and he says, “We’re both quiet.”
/>   He stares into the streaked mirror that has been put on the sun visor in front of him. He sees a man who is not really him. This man is too old. This man has white short hair, a dirty Angus Breeders’ Association ball cap, blue eyes. This man has a scar on his cheekbone from the time a mastitis-filled heifer charged him. This man has gray stubble that hasn’t been shaved. And yet, there he is, the same self who has been with him all along. The boy who ran along creek beds, so alive. His eyes water from the simple fact that this is him, but not him. The space between those two facts hurts his heart. Like a math problem that can’t be worked out, that has no solution.

  He stares ahead into the snow and directs his mind—he can still do that—to recall the animals he’s helped put down in his life. It’s wrong to see things suffer. He has buried dogs. He has shot dying horses in the head, and he did a good job, except the one that flailed about so long it made his heart shudder. He has put animals out of misery, which was the right thing to do. He has also killed to eat—he’s hunted elk and geese and taught his daughters to do so. He has gutted fish. He has helped the rendering man load up dead and bloated cows, some of them pregnant. He has shot prairie dogs and fox for no good reason back when he was younger although he stopped doing that years ago because he figured they had a right to live on his land too. He even once shot Renny’s peacock down from a tree because it would not stop honking and although he thinks of himself as a calm man he has sometimes lost his temper. They had just fought and her peacock was as noisy and horrible as she was. He has killed. He has killed many things. Mostly out of mercy, but some not.

  Through the snow, he sees the Greyhound bus station. A bus has just pulled up. A dog on the front of the bus is running, running, and he wishes the dog could curl up and sleep. Especially in a blizzard. “We could go somewhere warm,” he says.

  “We’re going to the mall, which is warm.” Renny sighs a frustrated sigh.

  “I mean, we could go for a long time.”

  “A trip? A vacation?”

  “Yes! To that place with tall rocks like silos.”

  Renny puts her hand to her head and moans.

  He knows he should be quiet. He means Utah, but now it’s too late to say it.

  It’s because of the horse he shot once—the horse that needed to be put down and he used a hollow-tipped bullet that didn’t quite do the job and the horse stumbled around and crashed into fences. Because of that horse, he stole the pink juice from the vet. An animal deserves to die a clean, painless death, and he won’t ever use a gun again, or at least not now, when his aim might be bad. He will use a gun as backup—it’s always important to have a backup—but he will always be as gentle as possible. He wrote down the dose on a note in his pocket although he has known this dose for a very long time. He won’t forget it, but still.

  “The vet?” he says now.

  “Ruben.”

  “Yes, Ruben. I just feel . . . sorry. He—”

  “Oh, Ben. He’ll be fine.”

  “But I—”

  “Ben!” She says it sharply and gives him a look, one that means he is to be quiet now. He presses his lips together and at the same time sees Renny opens her mouth to speak—some objection—but then closes it. Like a fish that is dying. Like one he will soon gut. Only he doesn’t want to gut Renny, because, in fact, Renny has already been gutted by life. By a dead daughter. And he will not—he will not—gut her again by being the kind of burden that he is becoming.

  The mall, he finds, is a big bright building. It has a fountain in the middle into which children throw pennies. He hates this place because it is not outside with willows and stretches of grass-ocean.

  Renny charges ahead and he trots to follow.

  “Tell you what I’m gonna do, see. I remember Rachel.”

  “What are you talking about?” Renny yells it and then stops and looks down at herself, brushes her pants off as if removing something, as if she is reentering the world. “Please for god’s sake try to make sense, Ben,” she says, more quietly.

  It stuns him sometimes, how cruel she can be. “I remember.” He says it in a whisper.

  “Just please be quiet.” Renny charges on ahead. “I need some peace and quiet.” But then she turns around on her heels and says, “I want to stop at that place. You like their carrot salad more than you like their fries.”

  He does not remember ever having a carrot salad. He does like the salty sticks which are called fries. Renny orders for him and he feels like a child behind her, wanting to say that he would prefer that kind of drink that’s made from a root and is sweet and tangy but instead she is ordering him lemonade. That’s okay, because lemonade is fine too.

  He fingers the paper in his pocket. He tells people, “The body is fine but the brain’s not working so good.” He feels proud of this clever statement to explain it all, now that his brain is not a private matter anymore. He can’t remember what the church sign said, but it was good. It was important. He sometimes can’t read the shorthand comments he writes on paper although he remembers that they made sense when he wrote them down. The paper in the pocket of his jeans makes sense, though. It says:

  Dose: 1 cc per 10 lbs.

  Dose: 20 ccs. (But use more)

  Pink juice is cleaner and faster and more sure. Although his vet did tell him the story of how he once put down a Newfoundland dog with it; the family buried it in a pasture, and by morning the dog had dug its way out, which is why the vet stays extra long to make sure that the heart has stopped. Exactly. The vet had stayed extra long with the donkey, making sure she was really dead, which is how Ben grabbed the bottle from his vet bag and put it in the deep pocket of his Carhartt jacket. He’s sorry he did that to the vet.

  He has to be fair with himself. That’s what the nice woman at the meetings says. Think of the good that you did, she says. Think of the things that made you valuable. Think of the things you put in motion.

  And so he remembers: He has birthed many things too. Foals and calves and kittens and puppies. He has reached inside heifers and turned calves. He has saved slick newborns by blowing his own breath into their lungs. He has wiped away suffocating mucus. He has given vaccinations and antibiotics that healed. He has let trout go, after removing the hooks. He untangled an antelope from a barbed wire fence once and watched it lope off, unharmed. He has snapped muskrat and beaver traps, when he came upon them along the streambeds of his youth. He has doctored horses through colic and he has punctured the bloat out of cows.

  He has saved far more lives than he has taken, and saving takes longer than killing. A great amount of time in a rancher’s life is about reducing suffering—that he has always been clear on—and he was a good rancher.

  He can do it. “I can do it,” he says to Renny, and tries to catch her eye.

  He wonders if she knows, somehow, what he’s saying, because she reaches across the table and puts her hand over his, and both hands tremble on their own. Perhaps old age, he thinks, or a small refusal to flinch from fear.

  RENNY

  As soon as her daughter Carolyn opens her truck’s door, the dog jumps out and runs around the yard at top speed in loopy circles, woofing and leaping on imaginary mice hidden in the new deep snow. It runs through the aspen trees and then squats and pees, leaving a yellow blotch on the pure white. It takes off after the chickens, sending them squawking and running, and it runs over to the donkey and barks, which causes the donkey to raise his head and let out an ear-shattering hee-haw of disgust. All this before Carolyn can unfold herself from the truck and walk to the front door. Renny sees all this from the kitchen window, and when Carolyn walks in, stomping her feet, Renny says, “Your dog needs sedation.”

  “She’s still a puppy, Mom. Cut her some slack.” Carolyn sets down a bag of groceries and examines a new long red welt on her hand, probably from the dog scrambling past her. “Yelapa, Mexico. Bought the tickets today. Tiny little village accessible only by burro and water taxi. No cars. Figured that our first real vacation ou
ght to be a unique one. Do you remember what it feels like to be overjoyed with life?”

  “No.”

  “Me neither. But that dog does.” But Carolyn is smiling to herself as she begins unpacking the brown paper bag. Then she is digging in the cupboard’s disorganized mess for the right pans, and in a split second she is stirring the honey and oil on the stove top. Carolyn has always done everything fast. The way she empties the dishwasher or throws potatoes into a roast or digs a fence post. Fast, but not thoughtless. Fast only because that’s how you raise four kids and run a ranch and manage life. You go fast, or you get buried.

  “I should have named you Esmeralda,” says Renny. “Go use your own stove.”

  “That’s a good name,” Carolyn says. “My stove is broken.”

  “You would have turned out better.”

  “Probably.”

  “Names mean a lot.”

  “They do.”

  “Quit being so agreeable. You’re just like your father.”

  “All right.”

  “And Jess.”

  “Jess is fine. Considering.”

  “Jess is going to end up pregnant and on welfare.”

  “Oh, Mom. Cut it out. Haven’t we already made a wager on this matter?” Carolyn turns and raises an eyebrow at her, but there is a playful look in her eye. “The new stove gets delivered next week. Don’t worry.”

  Renny snorts. “I don’t know why you’re in a good mood. What’s wrong with you?” Then, “Maybe we should trade caretaking. You can have Ben, and I’ll take Jess. I’ll make her talk and communicate like a normal person. And you can be your sweet patient self with Ben.”

  Carolyn is cutting open a bag of slivered almonds. “Mom, I already told you that you can move Dad into my house. I’ll try it. He can have Billy’s old room.”

  Renny starts sorting her spice rack. The little red and white boxes are so old and grimy with kitchen grease and dust that she should just throw them out. Some of them are ten years old. She does not like cooking. She does not like spices. She does not like people and their incessant needs. “You say that, but he will ruin your life. You’ll end up getting divorced. And you don’t have enough time for him, Carolyn. You’d have to take him everywhere, and you wouldn’t get anything done. Your ranch will fall apart, your marriage will fall apart, your sanity will fall apart.”