Snow, Ashes

by Alyson Hagy

  “Hurt my neck.” The sealed eyes were still moving, like ball bearings in grease.

  “Huh?”

  “You … hurt my neck.”

  Adams crouched next to Hobbs again, dread shaping itself into an iron band around his chest. He used his thumbs to probe both sides of Hobbs’s throat. There were no cuts or nicks there, only a reddish smudge that might be the beginning of a bruise. The fishing line necklace was no longer draped around the collar of Hobbs’s shirt. Adams wondered about that. When he spotted the necklace looped like pigging string around one of Hobbs’s belt loops, he wondered even more. Had Hobbs seen something, imagined something, that led him to take a whack at his own throat? Jesus, that was a black thought. And if he was aiming at his throat, how had he sliced his arm instead?

  “Fix it, Fremont. She says you don’t have to fix everything, you just got to try.” Now the voice was as firm and polished as a teacher’s apple. It scared him.

  “Hang on there, bud. I’m going to the barn.” Adams’s own words cracked against one another like finger bones. He tried to maintain his poise as he headed for the door.

  He had the basics in his medical kit. Heavy silk thread. Suture needles. Wide, sterile bandages meant for the horses. He could put in enough stitches to make it look good, then talk Hobbs into having somebody else sew it up right. He could do it. But should he? Was he already too late? He found himself jogging out of the barn, his arms full of more supplies than he’d ever need. He just wanted it to stop. He wanted Hobbs to be the way he used to be, the way he’d been that very morning when they ate pancakes for breakfast. He wanted Hobbs to be normal. When he got back to the house, he found Rain licking blood from the floor. Hobbs had toppled onto his side and squeezed himself into a tight ball.

  He was afraid he knew what Hobbs was thinking down there in his roly-poly ball. Hobbs was thinking that Fremont Adams was fresh out of excuses. If he could stitch the female parts back inside a ewe that had been turned inside out by a bad labor, he could handle a knife cut on a man’s arm. Fremont Adams could save him. Pain was never a reason to avoid a thing that had to be done.

  He put what he needed on a plastic dinner plate. Then he unzipped the quilted jacket he’d worn to Baggs, though he didn’t take it off. He removed his knit hat, and he washed his hands twice, scrubbing at the fingernails before he squatted between Hobbs and the row of cabinets that held their pots and pans. He conceded the other side to Rain, who laid himself along the hunch of Hobbs’s spine with his grizzled head facing the door. Rain kept looking at that door, ears peaked, eyes shining, like he was waiting for something big and loud to come right through it.

  Adams rolled up Hobbs’s stained sleeves, first one, then the other. “I might have to talk myself through this, C.D. Blue Pete always had to talk when he did something, remember?” Hobbs didn’t respond, so he applied a wet towel to the skin, refolding the towel as it absorbed blood. He’d seen head wounds bleed like this. They always looked worse than they were. He was glad when the hot, clean water seemed to unbind Hobbs a little. “Blue Pete never had his hands clean as this, did he? That man was a walking buffalo wallow.” Although Adams wasn’t able to make Hobbs speak or laugh, he was able to sit him back against the wall with his left elbow resting atop his knees. It was just like soothing a horse, he thought as he bathed the skin until the dried blood began to come off in flakes. You had to get comfort and trust moving in the same direction, flowing like a stream.

  He made a kind of surgical table on his own lap and opened the dusty pack of needles, then the envelopes of coiled thread. He could feel Hobbs watching him. When he swabbed the arm with disinfectant, the color and smell made him think of Uncle Gene and all the injured animals they’d tried to put back together with their own hands. They’d played veterinarian to save money. And they’d never healed as many of their patients as they hoped.

  Adams doused a hemostat with disinfectant and lined up the marbled edges of the cut as well as he could. “I’m sewing more skin than muscle,” he told Hobbs. “I think I can get the stitches to hold, but they’ll be hard to keep tight. You’ll have to stay real still, even when it hurts.” Hobbs flinched when the hemostat was clamped in, but Adams kept his pace and drove the needle through one flap of skin and then the other. The first stitch was lopsided and a little loose. When he tied off the second stitch, he felt rather than heard Hobbs begin to weep. The weeping moved from Hobbs’s body into his own with the same vibrations as the growl of an animal.

  His own fingertips became brown with disinfectant. When he paused to soak up more blood, he could see those fingers tremble from effort. So much effort. There was sobbing now from Hobbs, the hot current of it pouring onto Adams’s shoulder where Hobbs had pressed his face. There were high-pitched whines from Rain, too. They flailed into his ears.

  “Why don’t you open your eyes, C.D., and make a guess. I’m thinking twenty stitches will do her. What do you think?” His words—which were meant to comfort—didn’t change anything. Hobbs kept the bones of his arm flat and motionless. The stitches gathered like black barbs on a fence. But Hobbs was suffering, and Adams couldn’t escape the sense that he was sewing them both to a fate they’d hoped to avoid. “I suppose you got me right where you want me, huh—doctoring on you like you’re a piece of stock. After everything that’s happened with us, you probably think it makes sense, that this is as far as I’ve got.” He spoke with a tongue that tasted of bad meat. “I don’t blame you, you know. You bear no blame. So here’s my question: Why does it all keep coming back on us? You seem to be reliving … well, you seem to be remembering how I came after you on that Korea hill. What I did. I want to make it right, but why does it keep coming back? And why do you bring other people—like my sister or the boys from Easy Company—into what’s between us when they’re away from here or dead, and we’re just on our own?”

  There were no words from Hobbs. No motion. Adams tied off another small, tight knot.

  “Should a man turn around to face his wrongs, or should he try to make a good life from what’s in front of him? Which is the right way to live? That’s where I’m stuck, C.D. That’s the answer I need from you.”

  Hobbs rolled against him, quaking, covering his swollen face with his uncut hand. Rain got to his feet to guard them all against whatever he believed was on the other side of the door. Adams could see a slickness amid the dog’s belly fur. The dog had pissed himself, bad. The silver hemostat shook itself free of Adams’s hand when he saw that.

  “A answer,” he whispered, recalling the nothingness he’d emerged from after the Chinese mortar shell had erased all light and sound on Hill 1281. That shell had erased him, too, in a lot of ways. It had vaporized the self he was so sure of. He’d never shared with Hobbs the damning truths he’d learned after Chosin: how a battalion surgeon had seen Sutherland in a group of prisoners wired together by the Chinese, how Pilcher’s frozen body had been dumped in a shallow trench grave because the marines had no way to retreat with their dead. “I don’t know why I do what I do to you,” he said. “There’s no thinking to it. That knife—the Baker one—I lost it, you know. I left it with the medic who tried to help us. He said … he said I should hold onto you. He wasn’t ever coming down from there, and I left him the knife. A lot of us never came down from there.” His mind began to crowd with all the words and syllables he might finally say out loud. He felt as though a skin far below his real skin had been punctured, and he was going to have to say certain words if he wanted to survive the rupture. He tried to go on. “What do you think a selfish, unthinking son of a bitch can really fix?” He realized he was staring at the pink glaze of what had once been Hobbs’s right ear, addressing it. “I’ve done you wrong, more than once. I can’t see how to fix that.”

  Hobbs tightened himself back into a ball, the suture thread scrawled across his wrist like an unfinished signature. He began to breathe like a man grappling with sleep. When Adams tried to clear his own eyes, he saw his dog, Rain, through a
wet, warping haze. The dog was standing upright, still and judgmental and careful. And the dog held his own question in a pair of spackled eyes: What kind of lifelong casualty was John Fremont Adams willing to be?

  He does it when the house is his alone. Hobbs has been bandaged, covered with blankets, and left to rest in his room in the shed. They’ve eaten a meal of buttered spaghetti decorated with peas from a can. They’ve gotten back to the surface of normal, if there is such a thing. Hobbs’s footfalls are delicate. He carries his head slightly to one side as if his neck is strained, but his pupils are stark and clear, the color of pond water under ice. When he’s finally by himself in the parlor, Adams realizes it’s almost the spring equinox. A beveled light breaches the parlor windows, and he knows if he stands close to the unwashed glass he will see the citrus plume of the sun disappear behind the black rampart of Skull Rim. Soon there will be heat and thaw. Long spring rains will fall upon his welcoming fields. This used to be what he waited for. When he was a man birthing lambs, a man who directed mountain runoff into his neighbors’ dry canals, he wanted each year to begin again. Now he doesn’t understand what he’s waiting for, or whether it’s worth waiting at all.

  She says you don’t got to fix everything, you just got to try. The words settle on his shoulders like heavy droplets of fog. Chilled. Encompassing. He’s on the phone before he even thinks about it. He grips the receiver, contemplating the roar in his ears that comes partly from the clamoring fire in the stove and partly from the haste of his heart as the operator gives him a number for Charlotte Adams. Buren once tracked their sister to Denver. He says she works at a frame shop in the old downtown. The operator repeats the number as he copies it in pencil on a clean piece of typing paper drawn from the center drawer of his mother’s walnut desk. He thanks the operator, grateful he has received the information from a human voice. 970 … 381…. The numerals march and retreat before his eyes. He needs to turn the lamp on. He needs to find his reading glasses. He needs to hang on a moment, breathe, make sure his priorities are in a long, straight line. He tells himself not to talk about the ranch and how it’s cratered, she won’t give a fig about that. Let her tell about a husband, or a man if she has one, don’t take the lead there. Say hello, damn it. Be polite. Talk about Hobbs, mention Hobbs early because that’s why you’re calling, isn’t it?

  Isn’t it?

  He punches the number pads with his forefinger, and the phone squawks its unpitched tune. His hands are icy. Sweat curdles under his arms and belt while the phone lines shiver and click, and then Charlotte’s end begins to ring—hollow, distant, as empty as a culvert. What if he gets one of those infernal machines? What if he gets a man’s voice? He’s thinking hard about that, girding himself as her phone continues to ring until that’s what he does get. The words of a man.

  Don’t do it ‘cause of me.

  The words ride above the racing of his blood like birds above the waves of the sea.

  Put it down. She.

  Don’t do it for me.

  Hobbs lifts the receiver from Adams’s damp hand and places it in its hard, black cradle. Where has he come from?

  “Sorry,” Hobbs says. He’s standing there with a blaze orange hunter’s cap on his head, his two-day beard giving a charcoal blur to every part of his face except the lit circuits of his eyes. He holds his bandaged arm close to his body as if it is a package, and he looks weary through the backbone, as weary as Adams feels. There is something slightly shrunken about him, too, a containment that is unfamiliar. It is the stance of a man who is looking for forgiveness. Or punishment.

  “How’d you know?”

  “Wish I could tell you, Fremont.”

  “It’s my business.”

  Hobbs shakes his head. “More hers.”

  Adams’s blood coils between his lungs and heart. It tests its lash on him, striking a sharp pulse in his neck. He has to ask himself whether Hobbs is really ever sorry for anything.

  “Coffee?” Hobbs points toward the kitchen.

  “So we can sit and talk? I already got your point.”

  Hobbs steers wide of him and gets to the coffeepot, which he fills with tap water. He’s wearing Adams’s sheepskin coat, unbuttoned. Its sleeves run almost as long as his fingers. The sight of the coat, which is something Hobbs has never asked to borrow, makes Adams wonder whether forgiveness and punishment might be the same thing to a man with flint sparks in his eyes.

  “Don’t you think it’s interesting how a ranching man is always looking for things? I found the seven-pound bolt cutters the other morning, been looking forever. They were in the cab of the big tractor, right behind the seat.”

  Adams wants to walk into the kitchen and get two coffee mugs out of the cabinet and do the regular duet. But Hobbs’s ministry makes him feel balloon-headed, like he’s waking up from a long sleep. He hasn’t been himself since … since he doesn’t know when.

  “I always lose things. You used to tell me that as a kid.” Steam rises from the coffeepot as it percolates over its ring of pure flame. Hobbs shucks the heavy, fleece-lined coat and hangs it on the back of a chair.

  “I think we were talking about Charlotte.”

  “I am,” Hobbs says. “You’ve lost her. I’m trying to tell you we aren’t going to get her back.”

  The blood lash falls again, whipping at him from the inside where he can keep the howling to himself.

  “You don’t know that.”

  “Then call her.”

  “God damn you.” Adams drives one of his boots against the parlor floor. Window glass shakes; they both hear it. “You can’t tell me what to do about my own sister.” And he pivots to where the telephone squats on his mother’s walnut desk. But he can’t pick it up. It looks ugly to him, peeled and dead. Charlotte hit him in the face the day he stole Hobbs away from her. He feels those blows again—on his sagging, unshaved cheek. Across his eye socket. Harder than ever. Faster.

  “I seen her, you know.”

  Adams halts. He knows he couldn’t move now even if he tried. “Wh … what?”

  “It weren’t that hard. You just have to talk to people when you get off the Denver bus, they’re mostly nice about it. You make a certain set of turns on the streets down there, and you can see her. Walk right up.”

  “She talked to you?”

  “She did. Charlotte ain’t lost none of her ease with talking. I did surprise her, though.”

  Adams tries to focus on the door frame between the parlor and the kitchen, anything to give him an anchor. “Bet so.”

  Hobbs shakes his oranged head while he lays down a pair of napkins and spoons. “She took me out for a sandwich. We both had BLTs, all she had to do was ask her manager. She looks fine. Her boobs are flatter, and she’s smaller all the way around but in a good way. She showed me a picture of a little brown girl from down below Mexico that she calls her daughter.”

  Adams opens his mouth, but that’s as far as he’s allowed to get. “It’s okay,” Hobbs says. “There never was no baby. Charlotte says I was shooting blanks. She says she’s with a good man now too, though I didn’t see no pictures of him. I can tell you the man she’s with is not that shop manager. He ain’t her type.”

  And who is? Adams thinks to himself, his heart rolling itself up like a carpet. “She’s all right, though? That’s what you’re saying?”

  Hobbs sits himself down at the kitchen table with gusto. He heaps a spoon with sugar. “She’s close enough to happy to know what it is. She said it helped her to see me. But she don’t want to see you or know about you or Buren in any way. I told her I could change her mind about that.”

  “I don’t think …”

  “Some things are not yours to decide, Fremont.” Hobbs touches his temples with his fingers when he says this. His eyes are closed. “I’m gonna work this my way. Remember that question you asked when you were stitching on me? Sometimes what we done to other people and what we have ahead of us comes together and mixes.”

  “I don�
�t know if I can believe that,” Adams says. He’s standing on his whirled floor rug. He’s staring at its pattern to nowhere. Charlotte, Charlotte, Charlotte. Even the hushed sounds of her name slice into him. “You do certain things and you can never take them back. Some things don’t take a repair. I used to know that. I lived by it like a rule.”

  “You do live hard and think hard,” Hobbs says, sipping. “You got everybody’s respect on that. But there’s one thing you don’t seem to get no matter how many times it’s laid out for you. People don’t follow your plans. You don’t get to choose what returns and what don’t. You only get to decide how you’ll treat it when it comes.”

  “You deserve some kind of reward,” Buren said. “Both of you. Except I can’t imagine what the reward should be. You live on practically nothing.”

  “We’re not going for any kind of prize here,” Adams said. “I just want you to know we’re getting along good. C.D. wants you to come out and see how we’ve fixed up the place.” He could barely believe he’d made the phone call, particularly because he’d found what he expected to find. Buren was obstreperous and more than a little drunk.

  “Va bene. I’ll answer the Bell.”

  “Bring some good steaks when you do. I’ll cook.”

  “Can you promise our guest won’t hog-tie me to model for his art project?” Orchestral music played behind Buren’s lubricated voice. Its sounds faded in and out like the sound of water being moved by a wheel.

  Adams swallowed the extra saliva in his mouth. He’d lied about C.D.’s involvement. He was the one who wanted Buren to come to the ranch. The knowledge that Hobbs had seen Charlotte was suffocating him. He’d been outflanked, out-maneuvered. He wanted to give Hobbs as much reality as he could handle, and to do that he needed help from his brother. “I’m not protecting you from anything, which is the same way I believe you’ve always treated me. I’m inviting you to dinner.”