Crybaby Ranch

by Tina Welling

  As I pick up these bits of his artistic history, I have to readjust my idea of Bo as a casual artist. Since I’ve known him, I’ve never caught him in the process of sculpting, whereas he regularly catches me stringing beads. I look at everything in terms of beads—M&M’S, lima beans, moose droppings—I’m always designing art in my head. Bo never seems to be. Yet he has an enviable résumé and a show coming up. I thought I’d learn about living as an artist from him, but I think he’s having trouble getting into his work this spring with all the free time he’s created for himself.

  Anyway, I decided to enjoy being the guinea pig for his new enterprise. I beaded at the kitchen table, until he started cooking and needed the work space. His solution to that was to sand and finish a wood door he had stored in his barn, which now rests across a couple saw horses in a corner of the living room waiting for Bo to make real legs for it. I have my own permanent work space now and never again have to pack up my beads and tools to free the kitchen table.

  As the path I follow for my walk slips into the trees, darkness sloshes around my ankles and shadows rise to my shoulders. In an opening of the forest near the creek, I spot my cabin. Furry tufts of smoke from my chimney send signals of comfort. I built a fire before my walk; I mentally jot a reminder to keep up such small gestures of care to myself, such as a lamp lit for my homecoming and soup simmering on the stove.

  All this seems hard work and I wonder if I shouldn’t just lure Bo into my kitchen for keeps, because Tuesday I begin working at Valley Bookstore four days a week. Tessa said by July I could move into full-time if I wanted. I will work with nine women, and I like the idea of that. It’s been a long time since I’ve had women friends in my life.

  Before this rain the forest floor crunched underfoot; it was like walking on cornflakes. Now the grasses are springy, yet the rocky ground has already soaked up the moisture and the trail is firm, not muddy like it would be in Ohio.

  I suspect Bo procrastinates about repairs around his own place. He complains his old clapboard house has rotted windowsills, and I’ve seen that the sheds lean north like the pine trees beside me on the path. So perhaps he procrastinates about his art, as well. He is scheduled for a two-man show at River Rock Gallery the middle of September, but seems busier making plans to guide the Donnells into Mosquito Creek for an elk hunt in November. Not to mention the repairs he’s put on his list for my place.

  I’m satisfied Bo is not working out retribution today. We talked about that. Still, I carry some guilt over my wildly dramatic accusation of rape. With the exception of this episode with Bo, my mother was successful teaching me not to indulge in the childish prank of crying wolf. Yet all my life she has been guilty of giving false alarm. She petitions for help way before necessary, as if she’s afraid that she can’t handle what may arise. She’d holler, “Quick, somebody.” I’d drop my toys, run to her, find her reaching for the top shelf in her closet, and she’d say, “Oh, I thought maybe that shoe box was going to fall.”

  Before heading home I rest on deadfall beside the creek. Surveyors left one of their wooden stakes here. A neon pink plastic ribbon waves from it to signal a boundary line. Around this stake a muskrat has deposited small mounds of mud marking his own boundary line.

  All at once I realize: My mother’s need for help was actual. My mother never cried wolf. Because she was my parent I thought she was more capable than me. She was not, not ever, not even when I was young.

  But my own acquisition of her helplessness is false.

  I experience an eerie lifting of her thought patterns, which have overlaid my own for so long. Beneath the shroud rests a far less fearful and inhibited self. I realize with a jolt: Much of what I have taken to be my own thinking is merely a process I’ve mimicked from my mother.

  I poke at the muddy deposits beside the survey post with a stick to see how long ago the muskrat was here. This morning is my guess, but with the day’s rain it’s hard to tell.

  Was she sick long before any of us suspected? Or did her games eventually turn into reality? Whichever, I’m frightened about all those years we were in her mind together, because Dr. Meagher’s diagnosis is that Mom has early-onset Alzheimer’s disease. She is only fifty-nine years old. And this form of Alzheimer’s is genetic.

  Moistness descends with the evening chill, and to relax myself, I drink the air in deeply. Matted leaves, fast creek water, tree roots, and wet rocks brew a hearty ale. I rise and start back for my warm cabin.

  Bo’s hands are full. One holds a pan of mashed potatoes, the other a pan of gravy. He pulls out my chair with a boot hooked around a leg of it and cocks his head for me to sit. I can’t believe all the food he’s prepared today. He wouldn’t let me help. Says he likes to cook, but it’s no fun just for himself.

  “Thank you,” I say when he dollops potatoes on my plate.

  “Kind of lumpy,” he says. They disappear beneath a ladle full of gravy.

  That’s Bo and me, all day long ladling friendly talk over what we’d like to have disappear. But something needs to be aired. I try a sideways approach.

  “What did your grandfather think of the Donnells at the potluck?” I ask this while Bo’s back is turned, arms in the oven, fetching the meat loaf.

  “He thinks Dickie’s a weasel.” Bo straightens and puts a slice of meat loaf on my plate and one on his. “Changes the color of his demeanor according to the weather.”

  I have to say her name. “And…um…Caro?”

  “He said—after she’d left, thank God—‘Hmm, narrow nostrils. She kinda critical at you, son?’”

  My tenseness dissolves in laughter.

  Bo takes his seat and tells me his grandfather has a whole list of character attributes that match physical features. “He’d say you were generous because you have a full mouth.”

  Immediately, Bo drops his eyes to his plate and mine follow. Talking about lips embarrasses us. This is not part of our silently agreed upon household rules. We don’t even know we have these unspoken rules, until now.

  I quickly ask more questions about his grandparents. By mutual though unarticulated consent, we drag our conversation out until, question and answer alternately layered, we build ourselves another foundation of rapport. In the process, I learn that long ago my cabin housed the hired hand. Then one winter Bo’s grandmother moved the hand into a house trailer and moved herself into the cabin.

  “Pop was caught with a fancy lady is how the story came down to me,” Bo says, adding that the phrasing might have something to do with him being only seven at the time. “My grandparents stayed mad that whole year. Then one morning I came over for breakfast and there was Grandpa sitting at the table in his long johns.” Bo nodded to the end of the table beneath the shelf, where I’ve placed that old bench I found out back. My mind removes my stacks of books and places a younger version of O.C. on the bench, wearing his winter underwear, boots, and a cowboy hat.

  Bo can’t say for sure that this dalliance with the fancy lady was a single event, but he thinks so. And he thinks the woman was earlier married to a neighboring rancher, both now dead.

  I ask Bo, “But your grandparents never lived together after that?”

  “The aunts said Pop wouldn’t say he was sorry. But Grandma told me she’d never lived alone before and found she liked it. Went from her daddy’s house to O.C.’s. Also, she said his neatness improved when he became a visitor and so did his table manners.”

  “How about O.C.?” I ask. “Think he liked being a visitor?”

  “Seemed to work,” Bo says.

  That’s the only kind of marriage Bo has intimately witnessed, I think to myself in wonder: a kind in which the husband visits the wife.

  Another thought: Bo was raised to feel comfortable with two women playing the single role of mother in his life. Perhaps Bo also feels comfortable with two women playing the role of girlfriend.

  “Why are you messing around with her anyway?” I blurt.

  “Grandma? She’s dead.”
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  “I mean, you seem like a nice guy, but here you are…in a married woman’s bed.”

  Bo looks into my eyes. “I thought you realized how sorry I am for that. I’m not like my grandpa. I can say I’m sorry.”

  I feel embarrassed, but there is nowhere to go but onward here. “I mean Caro’s bed…oh, God.” This is not my business.

  “You think I’m sleeping with Caro?”

  “Even Caro seems to think that.” I don’t know what I mean exactly; she just exudes sexuality around Bo. “Never mind,” I say. Though it would help knowing how much like his grandpa Bo really is, because Bo’s apology—although he doesn’t owe me one—was not straightforward but as indirect as his answer to my last question.

  We each take a slow bite. I hear a log shift in the woodstove.

  “That’s happened with Caro,” he says, as if it didn’t involve him exactly or was an accident. A passive response for the kind of lover I experienced last night. “Though that was before…you know…” He gestures to the two of us.

  I say, “Nothing is different.”

  Just because someone barges into my life some night doesn’t mean I have to adjust my emotional timetable—I just moved here. I just divorced. My mother is going to die of Alzheimer’s. Someday her mind will not only forget my name, but forget to instruct her organs how to operate. I feel angry and my mind searches for a way to punish Bo for cornering me.

  “Caro’s a married woman. I don’t understand such ethics,” I say.

  “Caro’s thinking about leaving him. Dickie’s probably fooling around, too.” Bo shrugs. “That’s the way it is with them.”

  “And is that the way it is with you?”

  Bo looks into my eyes. “It’s not the way my marriage is going to go. No.”

  “Just your life.” I hide behind my glass of water, taking a sip.

  “If I heard you right, you don’t want a stake in this.”

  “You heard me right.”

  I scrape my chair away from the table and begin to carry the used dishes to the sink. I don’t clearly understand what message I’ve just imparted or if it truly represents the one I mean to give. How can I say, “Back off…but just for the time being, please.” It isn’t a fair request.

  “Bo.” I turn to face him. “Can’t we just go on like we have?”

  “How’s that, Zannah? I sleep with Caro and cook for you?”

  I can’t answer him.

  He says, “I don’t have a choice here, do I?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that I care for you, but you’d prefer I continue to sleep with a married woman so you can hold it against me.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “I don’t think so. I think I’m reading it exactly right.”

  “I want us to be friends. I’m sorry. That’s all I can do now.”

  “Take it or leave it, right?” He tosses his knotted napkin onto the table. “You know what I think? I think if I hadn’t been sleeping with Caro, you wouldn’t even have let me get this close.”

  My throat closes the way it does when I hear unexpected truth. I drop my eyes from his angry stare and try not to cry. I don’t want this to describe me.

  Bo pushes away from the table and stands. I’m afraid he will come to me. I turn my back and begin rinsing our plates. If I could explain the constrictions I feel binding me right now, I would. I want to give him Erik’s old advice to me: Don’t take it personally.

  “You know how long I’ve waited for someone special? Long enough to have given up. Then you…” He stops. “You don’t want to hear this, do you?”

  “Bo, I can’t even ask you to wait. There’s so much I need to do…before I could be ready for you.”

  “You can ask me to wait.”

  “No. I can’t. I’m sorry.” I hope he understands. This could take years.

  After a long silence, he releases a big breath and rolls up our place mats. He sets them on top of the refrigerator, goes out the back door. After a while, he returns and sounding resigned, he says, “Still want to go up?”

  I nod.

  He gathers into Baggies some brownies I baked earlier, and I pour coffee into a thermos. We continue with our plan to climb up the steep side of the butte directly behind my shed to have our dessert on a rocky ledge and watch the moon rise.

  “More cold is coming,” Bo says, “probably even freezing temperatures tonight.” The wind lifts the hair over his eyes as he halts his climb to look south and east, as if he hears the footfalls of the weather echoing through the canyons, making its way toward us across the flats.

  Clutching tufts of grass to pull myself up on the steep slope, I finally reach the outcropping behind Bo. He hauls me over the ledge with his solid grip, as if we were shaking hands and things got suddenly rowdy. I scramble on hands and knees with my butt in the air, until he has to grab my belt in back to secure me in place. Just being this high up makes me feel off balance.

  Then I catch myself. It was my mother who was afraid of heights and suggested that we shared that fear. I test my own feelings up here and realize I am exhilarated by the beauty of the land spread before me. No urge to perform headstands on the rock ledge, but I’m not uneasy with the height. I take a big breath and settle myself. Without the burden of my mother’s fears, I feel weightless, ungrounded in the new self I’m discovering.

  Bo pours the coffee; I unwrap the brownies. I want to do my share toward making Bo and me comfortable with each other. I search my mind for a subject we can talk about.

  “Were your aunts close to their mother?”

  “Nah. Too close to each other. Siamese twins joined at the funny bone, Grandma used to say.” He sounds cool, still unhappy with me, but willing to warm. He doesn’t look at me, but off into the distant hills. He asks offhandedly, “Were you?”

  “Pretty close. She has Alzheimer’s.” I didn’t mean to say this. Why have I chosen tonight to tell him? It reminds me of when I used to argue with Erik, then stub my toe or get a splinter afterward to help mend us back together. Here I am: injured. In need of you.

  “Oh, God. When did you find out?” Bo turns to me, sets his coffee on the ground, and gives me his full attention.

  “Few days ago. But I’ve suspected for a while she had something more going on than the depression I mentioned to you. Last month during my visit, she put the lit end of a cigarette in her mouth.”

  I look off to the distance, remembering. She and I were alone that evening. She played solitaire and watched television; I read beside her on the sofa. She turned to me and said, “Look.” She opened her mouth and showed me the ash on her tongue.

  “Oh, my God.” I held up an ashtray to her mouth. “Quick. Spit.”

  “Can you believe anyone would do something so stupid?” She laughed. “I’m telling you, you got to watch me every minute.” I thought that was the message: Pay attention to her. So I set my book aside.

  Now I tell Bo, “That’s when I really became frightened.”

  “You didn’t get tests?”

  “Got lots of tests, but a clinical diagnosis for Alzheimer’s disease consists only of ruling out every other possible explanation.”

  “You still hoped?” Bo sounds tentative with his questions, uncertain how to respect my privacy, while trying to understand my situation.

  “I don’t know…. I kept expecting Mom to wink and con-fide she’d finally found a way to get Dad to show some real affection for her.” I feel guilty suspecting Mom’s games might have extended to faking Alzheimer’s.

  Bo seems puzzled. “Did your mother lie about things?”

  “She never lied. She just trained us, my dad and me, not to believe her behavior.” I try to explain to Bo. “Nothing was the way it seemed. She was the center of the family’s attention, yet she always accused us of ignoring her.”

  I am ambushed with the realization that I am talking about her in the past tense. I press grass with the flat of my hand a moment. Then I continue.
“She is the most dependent member but, somehow, controls us all.”

  “The world works like that,” Bo says. “The strong are in service to the weak.”

  A shaming anger rises in me. “It shouldn’t work that way.” Maybe I’m not as generous as I like to think.

  “Sure it should,” Bo says. “What better use can strength be put to?”

  “Gaining greater strength.”

  “Then what? Tyranny?” Bo strips a tall weed of its husk, breaks it off, and sticks the tip in his mouth. His eyes lift for the long gaze across the valley. “Nah, got to bring everybody along best you can.”

  We’re getting cold. Our calculations for the moonrise are based on vaguely remembering that last night the moon rose about nine. It’s now past nine thirty and the temperature has dropped to thirty-eight degrees, according to the zipper-tag thermometer on Bo’s jacket.

  “I got in trouble trying ‘to bring everybody along,’” I tell Bo. “I never learned to erect psychic walls. I just wallowed in the trenches with everybody, sharing their misery.” I’m thinking of Erik, my mom, Beckett. These are the people whose emotions have made up life for me.

  “You sure as hell got walls now.”

  “I know.” I attempt to explain myself to us both. “Somehow finding I could create jewelry a couple years ago triggered a delayed sense of self. I became decisive and more and more independent. Finally, I wanted something just for me. I needed to protect that.” But maybe I have carried the wall building too far.

  My eyes spot a glow seeping from behind pine boughs high on a distant peak across the valley. Bo leans up from his backrest against a boulder. We watch the moon finally slide into place above the Gros Ventres. It’s a fat, gold-tinged beach ball about to roll over this side of the mountain range. We watch in silence. Then scramble down off the butte, chased by a deepening chill. Bo helps me carry my potted geraniums to the frost protection of the front porch, up close against the cabin logs still holding the day’s warmth. He checks his watch.