My Million-Dollar Donkey

by East, Ginny;

  My feet sunk into the boggy mud as I went through the pasture gate. Perhaps if I hiked the perimeter I’d find him munching on grass in his first show of independence. Just two steps in, my hope died. A huddled heap of wet, bloody llama fur was lying in the creek. At first, the mound was still, and a sinking sadness crept over me, but the body suddenly jerked, followed by a painful wail. That cry for help was a sound unlike anything I’ve ever heard from one of my graceful, quiet llamas. His haunting moan was like heaven crying.

  I raced to where the animal lay, almost retching because Pauli’s side had been torn open and half of his internal organs were now in plain view. The coyotes had apparently attacked again, intent on making a meal of my beloved pet, but something must have scared them away before the deed was done. Pauli now was lying half in and half out of the creek, flinching in agonizing pain. I felt the vibration of his desolate hopelessness in my own gut. Since coyotes attack at night and it was now late in the morning, I imagined he’d been suffering for hours. I didn’t know how this wretched creature was still alive, but clearly, he wouldn’t be for long. I sank to my knees, stroking his head with shaking hands. My poor, innocent, beautiful llama! I had done so much to care for him and keep him safe, but despite every effort, this harsh country existence had again found a way to ravage and destroy something I wanted to protect and love.

  Pauli struggled to stand, desperately trying to lift himself from the water, but his legs buckled and he collapsed again, his body landing in an even more contorted position. A trickle of red flowed downstream, the loss of blood draining his life in a slow, relentless weakening of his constitution.

  I hated to leave, but I needed to get help, so I ran back to where I’d dropped my belongings, grabbed my cell phone, and raced to the only corner of our land that got reception so I could call Mark. I needed my husband. I needed to hear his voice assuring me that everything would be okay. I was falling apart, overwhelmed with grief and worry and fear, and all I wanted was him. I needed him the way a woman needs a man for his strength and leadership. I needed him the way a woman needs her husband when she feels small and helpless and overwhelmed, and she desperately wants to fold herself into her partner’s arms to feel protected from a world that suddenly seems threatening and frightening.

  I was sobbing on the phone, almost incoherent as I poured out the situation and my panic about it.

  “I’ll call Ronnie. He’ll come out and shoot the poor thing and put him out of his misery.” The practical and probably necessary solution was still painful to hear. I sobbed harder, holding the phone to my mute mouth because I had only tears and no words.

  “Can you come home?” I finally managed to whisper.

  “I’m really busy. Ronnie can take care of this. Let’s hang up so I can call him.”

  “Please...” I wasn’t sure what I was begging him for. I just knew I couldn’t handle this alone. I had handled too much alone these last years, and witnessing the suffering of this innocent pet, seeing his guts spilled out over the grass and looking down at the blood on my sleeve had put me over the edge. I am not someone who falls apart, but I was falling apart now. I needed my husband more in that moment than I had ever needed anyone.

  “Please,” I whispered, moaning out loud as another piercing cry from my young llama filled the air. The dogs were barking, circling the beast excitedly, their behavior enhancing Pauli’s fear and making everything seem even more chaotic and out of control.

  “Oh, God, Mark, the dogs are attacking him, too. Please!”

  “So get off the phone so I can make some calls. Christ...I know you love that llama, but pull yourself together.”

  I was embarrassed by my uncontrolled emotions, mortified that I was begging him to come home to me, destroyed that the man I loved considered me a nuisance because I had the gall to turn to him for comfort. Things die in the country. I knew that. I wanted to be tough and take farming life in stride, but I simply couldn’t. All the stress and sadness I’d been battling for the last two years had come together to break me in one final heart-splitting earthquake.

  Mark hung up and I rushed back to Pauli, kicking at the dogs, and panicking because as he struggled to stand he kept slipping deeper into the creek. I was afraid that moving him would cause more pain, but also afraid that if I didn’t try to move him he might hurt more. So I just sat beside him, yelling and kicking at the dogs one minute, then turning a tender voice to the llama the next.

  “Ronnie is coming, honey. You are not alone. I’m here.” I whispered to my dying llama.

  But Ronnie didn’t come “soon.” I sat with that suffering llama over half an hour, each minute intensifying my distress until my own body shook with such heart-wrenching pain it was as if the llama and I were one.

  When I heard a truck finally coming down our road, I left Pauli, and ran back to the barn. It was Mark! He had come! Instantly I felt that things would be fine after all. My husband had rushed home, and this made me feel safe and cared for.

  “Ronnie is on his way. I told him I’d meet him here.” Mark leaned against his car with his arms crossed, making no move to come towards me. “Damn coyotes.”

  My steps slowed. Mark had come to meet Ronnie so they could take care of the business of killing my llama, not because his wife was experiencing an emotional crisis. Still, I kept coming towards him, hoping he would give me a hug and let me cry against his broad chest. I wanted him to fold me in his arms as proof that no matter how harsh the world was, I had a place of tenderness where I could turn. Him.

  A splash sounded behind me and I spun around. Pauli had grown too weak to hold his head up now, and he had collapsed into the water of the creek. His body started convulsing and thrashing about. He was drowning. I watched my dying llama fight for life despite his pain and suffering, and all I wanted to do was run to him and hold his head up and save him from suffocating. But I’d only be saving him to be shot a few minutes later. Death was at his heels, and the sooner it arrived, the better, considering his incredible pain. So all I could do now was stand there and ache for him, watching a pet I loved drown in water filled with his own blood. As his convulsing body finally succumbed to the stillness of death, I collapsed to the ground, curled up, and sobbed.

  Mark watched but he didn’t move. When I finally looked up, he shrugged sadly, a polite gesture as if to say, “It sucks that your llama died.”

  I reached my hand out to him, but he didn’t move to comfort me.

  A moment later, Ronnie drove up and hopped out of his truck with a gun. Mark shook his hand and explained that they had both come needlessly. The animal had died. They talked a few minutes about coyotes and what I should do with the mother llama, and Mark said he’d get the tractor and bury Pauli out in the pasture so his body wouldn’t draw more predators or spoil the creek water.

  Ronnie looked at my tear-streaked face with concern. “You okay?” he asked compassionately.

  I stood up, doing what I could to pull myself together. “Not my best day,” I said.

  Mark never did touch me that afternoon—not a hug or a hand held out to help me stand from my knees after I had collapsed in misery. He turned and left, saying he wanted to get back to work, and he drove off, leaving me to walk home slowly, one last look over my shoulder at my beloved dead llama half floating in the creek.

  I had that horrible wrung-out feeling that comes after you’ve cried yourself out, a feeling of emptiness and loss that I recognized now was coming more from the fact that Mark couldn’t—or wouldn’t— put his arms around me than from Pauli’s sad death.

  The entire episode was a perfect metaphor for my life over the past five years. I had done everything I could to minimize the pain and suffering our new life in the country had unexpectedly doled out. I had desperately wanted to do whatever was necessary to hold our heads above water, even knowing we were bleeding to death financially. I had sat on the sidelines, filled
with empathy and sadness, waiting for Mark to do something to make the pain stop. I had waited for him, alone, lonely, scared, and incapable of doing anything to lessen the overwhelming pain, my sadness and fears perceived as an annoyance rather than a cry for help.

  Meanwhile, Mark wanted me to just buck up and be strong. It never occurred to him that my strength, ample in the past, had been used up and depleted, or that my strength came from loving him and feeling that he loved me and that whatever happened, we would face life’s trials together. I had been falling apart in a myriad of ways because clearly, my husband had no intention or interest in being there for me. His lack of consideration or care had broken my heart in ways I never knew a heart could be broken.

  I opened the impressive teak door to the albatross house, and stepped into what Mark still believed was the most beautiful log cabin in the world. To me, that stately log home, with all the hand-hewn logs and geode-encrusted stone work, was a monster that had swallowed security, safety, and hope, not just for me, but for my children. The walls vibrated with my husband’s ego and arrogance, his creativity dripping from every detail as evidence that nurturing and celebrating his artistic ambitions took precedence over any call to be a provider or lover or man who wanted to protect his loved ones from hardship. Building that house was his dream come true, but his dream came at the price of stripping others of everything they needed and deserved.

  He was okay with that. But after today, I no longer was.

  We had bought a donkey, and lost the world.

  “In what concerns you much, do not think that you have companions: know that you are alone in the world.”

  —Henry David Thoreau

  WHY I LEFT THE WOODS

  As foreclosure loomed, Mark seemed to do anything and everything he could to avoid me. He worked 14 hour days at the real estate office, and when I begged him to come home for meals or to spend time together, he had a plethora of excuses why he couldn’t. He made new friends and began eating his lunches out, eventually going to parties to hang out with real estate buddies in the evenings, too. I was left alone on the 50 acres with nothing but my growing panic to dwell on. I had the kids, of course, and laundry and cleaning and endless upkeep so the house would look presentable if a buyer stopped by, but despite all the wide open space around me, I felt the narrow confines of my isolation and my bottomless loneliness slowly suffocating me.

  I talked about returning to Florida to open a small dance studio to generate some much needed income. Mark responded by finding a small space to rent locally, negotiating a lease, and encouraging me to begin a business in Blue Ridge. This is where he wanted to stay, and my running a new business would take some of the pressure off him to earn money. I assumed his efforts to help organize a studio meant he was ready for us to work as a team again, but after setting me up with the responsibility, Mark chose not to be involved, further evidence of his disinterest in rebuilding our life as a united front. We’d always approached dance as a couple before, but I was a solo act now, one more disappointment poured into a heart overflowing with sadness.

  My grief spilled out to fill the cracks and corners of the house. Hard as I tried, I couldn’t pretend things were normal around the kids. They would catch me crying on the couch or gripping my coffee cup with a sad stare as I gazed at the pasture. I didn’t cry because

  I was losing my home, my million dollar retirement nest egg, or my dreams. I cried because Mark had railroaded us into losing all of the above, blindly and erratically, steaming our marriage down the tracks in spite of obvious signs the bridge was out ahead, and I felt almost as though he had done it on purpose, one final way to act out his resentment towards me. Worse, I felt responsible for not pulling his hand away from the throttle and putting on the brakes myself. My love for him, my willingness to agree to anything he wanted in a last ditch effort to make him happy, had taken us both down, and I hated myself for my weakness. I hated myself for loving someone who simply had no clue what love really means.

  I still longed for what seemed impossible now: to feel my husband’s arm around my shoulders and to hear his voice whisper words of hope for a different future once this mess was over. But I knew no apology or tenderness would ever come. I was a witness to his failure, and even though I never voiced blame, he projected ceaseless silent accusations from me. Perhaps he couldn’t forgive himself, and therefore couldn’t imagine how I could ever forgive him either. Living with guilt and regret is far harder for the spouse who made the mistakes than for the one who stoically pays the price for them.

  One night, Mark came out of the bedroom dressed in a fine silk shirt and gold chains and asked me to make him a late dinner. He’d been working out obsessively at a new gym and had lost a hundred pounds in the last four months, another fanatical move towards becoming a new man. Each day now, he took a long time dressing to show off his new physique. He had spent hours that afternoon pulling out boxes of clothing he hadn’t donned since we lived in Florida. He shaved, too and had taken to wearing sunglasses, his rugged natural look shifting to something more GQ than he had emulated in years. This was a different Mark than the dancer in sweats and a baseball cap who had been my partner in the past. He was no longer the mountain man who had spent the last few years in jeans and faded flannel shirts, either. Long gone was the Mark who only months before had blended with the country boys like a decoy duck on a pond of mallards. Despite all that had happened to us, conceit seemed to swirl about his every move, a sure sign he was gearing up for yet another change in persona.

  He asked me to make spaghetti, and when I set the plate before him, he took off his shirt to hang on the back of his chair to avoid potential stains. He ate his meal hungrily, then put his silk shirt back on and told me he was going to work. What work was there to do at ten o’clock at night? I silently watched him leave, not able to bring myself to question his obvious lie. Neither of us wanted to speak aloud the words that would forever put the truth on the table before us.

  Hours later, he returned. I wondered who he’d been with. I had called the office and someone stopping by to collect a contract told me he was out at a party with some male agents whom Mark had previously told me crossed the lines of sexual and ethical propriety. For once, embittered by another night of disappointment and hurt, I decided to ask him outright where he’d been.

  “Work,” he lied.

  “From ten at night until one in the morning? I was worried about you having to work so late so I called the office. Someone answered and told me you were at a party. Why lie to me, Mark? Are you seeing someone?”

  He sighed, collecting his things to move out of our bedroom. “I just wanted to go to the party alone. I can’t stand to be around you anymore. I’m sick of your logic, your crying, your endless heart-to-hearts. You bring me down.”

  He had brought us both down. There was nothing left to say. “Do you want a divorce?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  There they were. Three simple words with the power to change the trajectory of my life again. With the Smiths , the three words were, “I’ll take it.” Now it was “Yes, I do”—an affirmative statement that really meant ‘No.’

  No, I won’t accept counseling to work out our problems.

  No, I don’t want to stay if staying married means I have to actually take care of you.

  No, I won’t be there to hold your hand when we grow older as I once promised.

  No, I don’t believe that after twenty years we should talk openly about what went wrong to bring us to this point.

  No, I won’t ever admit I have made mistakes at your cost, and I would rather start over with someone else than live with someone who knows the truth about who I am and what I’ve done.

  No, I don’t love you.

  I was reminded of a lesson I learned with Kathy: that most all of our communications, even the most complex of messages, are nothing but basic, simple words linked
to create potency or poignancy. I felt the impact of his words now with an odd combination of dread and acceptance.

  We had moved to the country with a mutually agreed-upon plan, but Mark and I had had different agendas from the very beginning. I had moved to the country for a fresh beginning with the man I loved. Mark had moved to the country for a fresh beginning. Period. At last, we could stop pretending otherwise.

  Every autumn in the country, gardens that have flourished and produced throughout their season of growth are torn down. The wilted vegetation and the unfinished produce are tossed on a compost heap or burned in a fire pit. The gardener often takes a moment to contemplate, at this point, what could have gone better. Perhaps different varieties or a different arrangement of plots, a more beneficial companion planting, more of something and less of something else—all these might have made for a better season and a richer harvest. Autumn was a fitting time for my marriage to be torn down, the season for endings and the precursor of a cold time to come. I contemplated, now, the twenty-year season of my time with Mark.

  I could have begged him to join me for counseling. I could have once again taken responsibility for all our problems and fed his ego to keep the status quo as I’d done for years and years. I could have had yet another heart-to-heart with him in one more gentle attempt to turn this moment around because loving him was a habit like smoking: not good for you, but still hard to break. I could have once again embraced delusion to protect the romantic story I harbored within about the amazing Mark and Ginny, dug in to find inner reserves no matter how frayed, and done whatever had to be done to climb us out of this mess - and later, give him credit for everything.