by Pam Houston
“Frankly,” she said, “that’s the least of my concerns.”
“That’s what you say now,” I said, “but I think after a few years without, you would start to feel differently.”
“Yeah, maybe you’re right,” she said, giving the short hairs at the nape of my neck a tug. “Maybe sex would turn out to be the big snafu.”
It was only the third or fourth time we were together when Abby told me about the lump in her breast. “It’s been there a long time,” she said, “about two years, I guess, but my power animal says it’s not cancer, and besides it gets bigger and smaller with my period. Cancer never does that.”
Even the doctor, when she finally did go, said he was ninety-nine percent sure that the lump was not a “malignancy” (doctors apparently had stopped using the “C” word), but he wanted to take it out anyway, just to make sure.
On the night before Abby’s biopsy, I made her favorite thing: three kinds of baked squash, butternut, buttercup, and acorn.
“Sometimes I’m jealous of Hardin,” I said. “He lives right on the surface and he’s happy there. Who am I to tell him how to live his life? I should be that happy in all my depth.”
“I had a friend in grade school named Margaret Hitzrot,” Abby said. “Once on our way to a day of skiing we were the first car in a twenty-one-vehicle pile up. Our car spun to a stop, unharmed against the snowbank, but facing back the way we had come, and we watched station wagons, delivery trucks, VW buses, collide and crash, spin and smash together. Mrs. Hitzrot said, ‘Margaret, do you think we should wait for the police?’ And Margaret said, ‘If we don’t get to the ski area before the lift opens the whole day will be ruined,’ so we got in our car and drove away.”
“It’s not the worst way to live,” I said.
“The problem with the surface,” Abby said, “is that it’s so slippery. Once you get bumped off, it’s impossible to climb back on.”
Abby’s arms bore scars on the white underside, nearly up to the elbows, thin and delicate, like an oriental script. “It was a long, long time ago,” she said. “And I wasn’t trying to kill myself either. My stepfather had some serious problems. There was a good bit of sexual abuse. I never even thought about dying. I just wanted to make myself bleed.”
After dinner we rode the horses up to our favorite meadow. She had been riding my horse, who had turned to putty in her hands. I was riding one of hers, a big gray gelding who was honest as a stone. We kept saying we were going to switch back, now that my horse had been gentled, but I didn’t push the issue. I was afraid my mare would go back to her old habits and Abby would be disappointed. It was something I’d never felt with a woman, this giant fear of looking bad.
I was depressed that night. Hardin was in another state with another woman, and it made me so mad that I cared.
“You have given all your power away to Hardin,” Abby said. “You need to do something to get it back.”
We sat under the star-filled sky and Abby said she would journey beside me, journey, she said, on my behalf. This was accomplished by our lying on the ground side by side. We touched at the shoulders, the knees, and the hips. We both tied bandannas around our heads, and Abby pulled her Walkman and drumming tape out of the saddlebags.
“Don’t feel like you need to journey,” she said. “I’ll do all the work for you, but if you feel yourself slipping into a journey, go ahead and let it happen.”
For a long time I watched the white spots turn on the inside of my bandanna while Abby’s breathing quickened, and leveled and slowed. Then I saw a steady light, and reflections below it. It was my first real vision, nothing about it questionable or subject to change. It was moonlight over granite, I think, something shiny, and permanent and hard.
Abby came back slowly, and I turned off the tape.
“Your power source is the moon,” she said. “It was a bear who told me. A giant bear that kept getting smaller and smaller. He was multicolored, like light, coming through a prism. The full moon is in five days. You must be out in the moonlight. Drink it in. Let it fill you. Take four stones with you and let them soak the moonlight. This is one of them.” She pressed a tiger’s-eye into my hand. “It is up to you to find the other three.”
I carried flowers with me into the short-stay surgery wing. I saw Abby in a bed at the end of the hall. She was wide awake and waving.
“You brought flowers,” she said.
“Store-bought flowers, made to look wild,” I said. “How do you feel?”
“Good,” Abby said. “Not too bad at all.”
The doctor came in and leaned over the bed like an old friend.
“Your lump was a tumor, Abby,” he said.
“What kind of tumor?” she said. “What does it mean?”
“It was a malignancy,” he said. “A cancer.” (Sweet relief.) “I have to tell you, of all the lumps I did today, and I did five, yours was the one I expected least of all to be malignant.”
His pager went off and he disappeared through the curtain. It took a few seconds, but Abby turned and met my eyes.
“Cancer, huh?” she said. “My power animal was wrong.”
When I had Abby tucked into her own bed I drove home the long way, over the mountain. It was the day that would have been John Lennon’s fiftieth birthday, and on the radio was a simulcast, the largest in history, a broadcast reaching more people than any other broadcast had ever done. It was live from the United Nations. Yoko Ono read a poem, and then they played “Imagine.” It was the first time I cried for John Lennon.
Abby called me in the middle of the night.
“I know it sounds crazy,” she said, “but I can’t sleep without my lump. I should have asked the doctor for it. I should have brought it home and put it under my pillow,” she said. “Where do you think it has gone?”
Before her second surgery, a double mastectomy and lymph-node exploration, I took Abby down to southern Utah, to the piece of land I’d bought in the middle of nowhere because I loved it there and because having it seemed a little bit like security. My six acres is in the high desert, where it never rains except too much and more often it snows and freezes cherry blossoms or hails hard enough to make bruises on uncovered flesh. It was sage and juniper mostly, a few cacti.
Abby put her feet into the ground like she was planting them. Two ravens flew overhead in pursuit of a smaller bird, gray and blue. There was squawking, the rustle of wings, and then a clump of feathers floated down and landed at Abby’s feet. Three feathers stuck together, and on each tip, a drop of blood.
Abby started singing and dancing, a song she made up as she went along, directed toward the east.
“Why do you sing and dance?” she’d once asked me. “To raise your spirits, right?” she laughed. “That is also why I sing and dance,” she said. “Precisely.”
She sang the same song to each of the four horizons, and danced the same steps to each with the gray bird’s feathers in her hair. The words elude me now, half-English, half-Navajo. It was about light, I remember, and red dirt, and joy. When she finished dancing and turned back toward the eastern horizon the full moon rose right into her hands.
Abby looked tiny and alone in the giant white bed and among the machines she was hooked to.
“How are you?” I said.
“Not bad,” she said. “A little weak. In the shamanic tradition,” she said, “there is a certain amount of soul loss associated with anesthesia. Airplane travel too,” she said. “Your soul can’t fly fast enough to keep up. How are you?” she said. “How’s Hardin?”
“He left for the Canadian Rockies this morning,” I said. “He’ll be gone six weeks. I asked him if he wanted to make love. He was just lying there, you know, staring at the ceiling. He said, ‘I was just trying to decide whether to do that or go to Ace Hardware.’ ”
“I don’t want you to break up with him because he would say something like that,” Abby said. “I want you to break up with him because he’d say something like that a
nd not think it was funny.”
The doctor came in and started to say words like “chemotherapy,” like “bone scan” and “brain scan,” procedures certain to involve soul loss of one kind or another.
Simply because there was no one, I called Hardin in Canada. “That’s too bad,” he said, when I told him the cancer was extensive in the lymph nodes. And as usual, he was right.
The nights were getting colder, and the day after Abby got out of the hospital we picked about a thousand green tomatoes to pickle in Ball jars.
“I don’t know where I want Roy to be in all of this,” she said. “I know it would be too much to ask him for things like support and nurturance, so I thought about asking for things he would understand. I’d like him to stop smoking around me. I’d like him to keep our driveway free of snow.”
“Those sound like good, concrete things,” I said.
“I love him very much, you know,” she said.
And God help me, I was jealous.
We took a walk, up towards the Uintas, where the aspen leaves had already fallen, making a carpet under our feet.
“You know,” I said, “if you want to go anywhere, this year, I’ll come up with the money and we’ll go. It’s just credit cards,” I said. “I can make it happen.”
“I know why my power animal lied,” Abby said. “It was the intent of my question. Even though I said ‘Do I have cancer?’ what I meant was ‘Am I going to die?’ That’s what I was really asking, and the answer was no.”
“I’m glad you worked that out,” I said.
“I’ve made a decision,” she said. “I’m going to stop seeing the doctors.”
Something that felt like a small bomb exploded in my ribs. “What do you mean?” I said.
“I’m not going to have the chemotherapy,” she said. “Or any more of the tests. My power animal said I don’t need them, they could even be detrimental, is what he said.”
The sound of the dead leaves under my boots became too loud for me to bear. “Is that what he really said, Abby?” I faced her on the trail. “Did he open his mouth and say those words?”
She walked around me and went on down the trail. “You won’t leave me,” she said after a while. “Even if things get real bad.”
I leaned over and kissed her, softly, on the head.
“I want to support her decision,” I told Thomas. “I even want to believe in her magic, but she’s ignoring hundreds of years of medical research. This ugly thing is consuming her and she’s not doing anything to stop it.”
We were walking in the moonlight on our way up to the old silver mine not far above my house. It was the harvest moon, and so bright you could see the color in the changing leaves, the red maple, the orange scrub oak, the yellow aspen. You could even tell the difference in the aspen that were yellow tinged with brown, and the ones that were yellow and still holding green.
“She is doing something,” Thomas said. “She’s just not doing what you want her to do.”
“What, listening to her power animal?” I said. “Waiting for the spirits from the lower world to take the cancer away? How can that mean anything to me? How can I make that leap?”
“You love Abby,” he said.
“Yeah,” I said. The bright leaves against the dark evergreens in the moonlight were like an hallucination.
“And she loves you,” he said.
“Yeah,” I said.
“That’s,” he said, “how you make the leap.”
I don’t want to talk about the next few months, the way the cancer ambushed her body with more and more powerful attacks. The way she sank into her own shadow, the darkness enveloping what was left of her hair and skin. Her vitality slipping. Maybe I do want to talk about it, but not right now.
With no doctor to supply the forecasts and explanations, watching Abby’s deterioration was like reading a book without a narrator, or seeing a movie in another language. Just when you thought you knew what was going on, the plot would thicken illogically.
When it all got to be too much for Roy, he moved out and I moved in. I even thought about trying to find some old ladies and teenagers, of calling some of the ladies from the Fallen Arches, thinking I could create the household Abby had wished for. It wasn’t really as pathetic as it sounds. We ate a lot of good food. We saw a lot of good movies. I played my banjo and Abby sang. We laughed a lot those last days. More, I’ll bet, than most people could imagine.
Abby finally even refused to eat. The world had taken everything from her she was going to let it take, and she died softly in her room one day, looking out the window at her horses.
Once I hit a rabbit in the highway, just barely hit it, I was almost able to swerve out of its way. It was nighttime, and very cold, and I stopped the car on the side of the road and walked back to where it lay dying. The humane thing, I’m told, would have been to shoot it or hit it in the head with the tire jack or run over it again. But I picked it up and held it under my coat until it died, it was only a few minutes, and it was the strangest sensation I know of, when the life all at once, it seemed, slipped away.
Abby and I didn’t talk at all the day she died. She offered me no last words I could use to make an ending, to carry on with, to change my life. I held her hands for the last few hours, and then after that till they got colder than hell.
I sat with her body most of the night, without really knowing what I was looking for. An eagle, I guess, or a raven, some great huge bird bursting in a shimmer of starlight out of her chest. But if something rose out of Abby at the end, it was in a form I didn’t recognize. Cartoons, she would have said, are what I wanted. Disneyland and special effects.
For two days after her death I was immobile. There was so much to be done, busy work, really, and thank goodness there were others there to do it. The neighbors, her relatives, my friends. Her stepfather and I exchanged glances several times, and then finally a hug, though I don’t know if he knew who I was, or if he knew that I knew the truth about him. Her mother was the one I was really mad at, although that may have been unfair, and she and I walked circles around the house just to avoid each other, and it worked until they went back to Santa Cruz.
The third day was the full moon, and I knew I had to go outside in it, just in case Abby could see me from wherever she was. I saddled my mare for the first time in over a year and we walked up high, to the place where Abby and I had lain together under our first full moon not even a year before. My mare was quiet, even though the wind was squirrelly and we could hear the occasional footsteps of deer. She was so well behaved, in fact, that it made me wish I’d ridden her with Abby, made me hope that Abby could see us, and then I wondered why, against all indications, I still thought that Abby was somebody who had given me something to prove. Your seat feels like a soft glove, Abby would have said, your horse fills it.
I dismounted and spread some cornmeal on the ground. Become aware, inhibit, allow. I laid my stones so they pointed at each of the four horizons. Jade to the west, smoky quartz to the north, hematite to the south, and to the east, Abby’s tiger’s-eye. Ask, receive, give. I sang a song to the pine trees and danced at the sky. I drank the moonlight. It filled me up.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The stories in this collection appeared in the following publications:
Cimarron Review, “For Bo”
The Gettysburg Review, “Highwater”
Lodestar, “A Blizzard Under Blue Sky”
Mademoiselle, “Selway” (as “Call of the Wild Man”), “In My Next Life” (as “A Woman of Spirit”)
Mirabella, “Jackson Is Only One of My Dogs,” “Sometimes You Talk About Idaho”
Quarterly West, “How to Talk to a Hunter”
“How to Talk to a Hunter” also appeared in Best American Short Stories 1990 (Richard Ford, guest editor)
DON’T MISS OTHER TITLES BY PAM HOUSTON
pamhouston.wordpress.com
“Deep Creek is a love song to the land, a deep rumination on hea
ling, and a powerful story of one woman’s reckoning.”
—Cheryl Strayed, author of Wild
Available in paperback
“Houston is a wonderful writer, and her graceful vignettes are by turns beautiful, slyly funny and heart-stopping.”
—Rebecca Barry, San Francisco Chronicle
“Pam Houston catches the voice of an entire generation of adventurous young women whose intrepid hearts lead them into deep water.”
—Elle
“Fat with meaning . . . tastes oh so sinfully good.”
—Washington Post Book World
Further Praise for
COWBOYS ARE MY WEAKNESS
“[Houston’s] prose [is] sharp and clean and full of sentences worth underlining.”
— New York Times Book Review
“In Pam Houston’s wonderful stories, sex and hunting are somehow confused, as are humans and animals. People wear skins, the animals speak, and those guys—the ones we all thought were extinct, the ones who defined what a man was—turn up, very much alive, and up to their usual tricks. Houston’s women know they should know better, but they don’t, and the result is a beautiful collection about sexual politics, old and new.”
—Charles Baxter
“A powerhouse. . . . Houston’s women are strong and free-spirited—their encounters with their moosehunting, whitewater-rafting, wilderness-loving lovers are more comic than tragic, and always entertaining.”
—St. Louis Post-Dispatch
“Houston is a writer of talent and promise.”
—Newsday
“A brilliant collection of stories . . . that strike at the heart and end up revealing much about the complex state of relations between men and women.”
—Judith Freeman, Los Angeles Times
“Many of these short gems owe their entire core to the west, which, more a character than a setting, allows subtle interplay to occur between Houston’s strong, modern women and the prairie or rangeland they temporarily inhabit.”