You don’t just go barging into such a meadow. You stand at the edge and ask permission. Remind the meadow how you know her. I say to her: It’s a true honor, to have lived here my whole life, to bear witness to all your secrets. Or some of them. How, for example, that the bear holed up in the rocky outcrop on the north edge has two cubs, yearlings this winter, and therefore the last winter they’ll spend with her, and it’s this bear who wanders into town, that she’s a cinnamon, and I do believe she’s the daughter of the larger bear, the one that had taken herself higher up the mountain years ago, after I shot above her head, since she was always trying for my chickens. I know your mountain mahogany and I know your aspens. I know you have frozen the blood of my friend Sy. Then I nod and give myself allowance to take a step forward, into the crunching snow.
I’ve come nearly every day since his body was found—about a month now—which is when Ruben and I found him, all of us agreeing to pair up to search together, the blizzard still full force, the night at its apex, the snow deep somehow immediately, the temperature and wind being dangerous. We were still hoping his absence and the gun’s absence was soon to be explained in a happier way, but if not, Ruben and I were hoping to get to him before the sheriff’s folks did, if only to offer our friendship before all the chaos of law and death set in.
I didn’t know for certain, but I suspected where he’d be, and so did Ruben, and so we clamped on our snowshoes and headed out into the meadow in the dark, in a blizzard, which is something crazy to do, is something you would only do for a person you truly love. We’d just gotten a frantic call from Anya, who said, I know it’s bad, but if only he can be talked down before it’s too late. . . . and so I picked Ruben up in my truck and we drove to the meadow and hunkered down, bundled up, and started out and crisscrossed the meadow in a pattern, a rope tied between our two hands, as difficult a physical endeavor I have ever borne, and on we went until right as daybreak was launching, which is when we saw a glitter of something purple, which turned into the blue of a glove and the metal clasp upon it, reflecting in the first ray of light. We stood, together, silent, until our eyes had scanned and found the rise of snow, the white lump that did not belong.
Everyone else was looking for his truck. We didn’t see the truck parked, but still we went to the meadow, guided by the same pull that brings us here for other happier things. The truck was found later, up the mountain a bit, pulled over and hidden in the trees, covered in snow, politely waiting.
That daybreak, when the snow was just starting to let up, Ruben and I huffed and gasped our way through the snow, our feet sinking despite the snowshoes, our lungs burning from cold and exhaustion, and knelt above the mound and scooped the snow off with gloved hands to reveal a face blown to smithereens, more blood than you’d imagine and frozen like a kicked-over paint can, an indelible pattern . . . well, I suppose I don’t need to tell you those details. Only that ever since that day, I’ve visited. Despite the shattering cold. Except for the two days I was out of town, which is when Violet had a brief and tender affair, one which she needed but now will never need again, which she told me about yesterday—it was something about Sy’s death, she said, how that made us all double-check that we were okay, that our lives were more or less full, and that was my last chance, I’m getting old!—can you understand?—and somehow I did, I truly did, and I didn’t hold it against her and I told her so.
And this morning I told her, I can see I need to reckon with him myself, in my own way. I’ll be back tonight. I loaded up bundles of firewood and my snowshoes and a lunch.
Most days, I come midmorning after the ranch chores are done. I tell Violet I’m going to Moon’s for coffee with the group that call themselves The Never Sweats because they are tired and worn-out from a lifetime of sweat and work and wish to do so no more. But instead I come here and walk. I kept it a secret from her. But not today.
Here I am, snowshoeing to my friend.
And here is Sy. Not his body, of course; that was cremated and a ceremony has been had. But his blood, still here. Can you imagine such a thing? The snow from the first storm has turned to ice and this ice melted some, but not all, which means that Sy’s blood is frozen within layers of cold clearness, like oil soaked in ground underneath a tractor, or like spilled iodine.
I take off my snowshoes and kick away the light dusting of white from the night’s winds and then get on my hands and knees and wipe the rest off with my glove. You son of a bitch, I say to the swipe of dark. You go to hell.
He would have laughed at that. He would have said something like, What will suffice becomes less and less as we age.
He would have said, If we could internalize the flowers of the earth, we could deal with life better.
He would have said, I’ve been to hell, Ollie. God took me there and showed me. It was completely empty. Big empty caverns. Stalagmites and stalactites and fires and dripping water and the whole bit, and completely deserted. Hell was empty.
You son of a bitch, I tell him. Who the fuck am I going to go fishing with come spring? Did you think about that? Did you think about Zoë and Michael? Did you think about Anya? Or Ruben? Or this meadow?
His blood stands, frozen, silent, whereas everything in me is clacking against each other; my heart into my collarbones, my collarbones into my brain, my brain into my ribcage.
Well, damn you to hell, Sy. I am angry as hell, and I came here to tell you I think you’re a true son of a bitch. You go straight to hell, whether it’s empty or not. What a thing. What a thing you did to us.
I pound my fists into the ice until the pain shoots fierce. I don’t even make much of a dent; the snow is packed here from all my previous visits. But I want to. I want to fall into the center of a sea, a frozen sheet of ice-sea. I want to get to the wildflower roots and seeds that are resting in wait. Find him, somehow.
I sit back to rest; the sweat is running down my face and then it will freeze. I shrug off my backpack and dump out the tinder, all the small sticks of apple and pine from the wood stack.
Well, here we go, I tell him. Were you in pain?
Of course I was in pain.
Well, damnit to hell.
It was real bad, he tells me. You know it was. Only you know. There was nothing that could be done about it.
I know it, I know it. I’m sorry. Who am I supposed to be mad at, then? Your brain? The universe? Goddamn it to hell. I’ve got fury in me, and it’s got no place to go.
I dump handfuls of dried hay—I brought plenty, there being no shortage in the corrals—to make a large flat circle. The fire flickers, reluctant in the cold. But it will go.
Damn you, Sy. Don’t you see what you’ve done to us? I howl. I clap my hands. I stomp. I howl again.
Nothing could be done about it, his pain. It was for that reason that he’d quit mentioning it years ago. People, on the whole, aren’t great at describing physical pain, and if they do, they seem guilty about it, as if a body wasn’t supposed to ache, and also, if there’s nothing to be done about it, why give it voice?
But I knew he was hurting. All the time. Every moment of every day. Never have a moment’s break, not even a second, he would tell me. Imagine, he’d say, just an hour, or even ten minutes, of being in a body without pain. Boy, I’d love a moment or two of that. Just to remember what it feels like. Boy, would I soak that in.
I often wondered what the pain did to his sanity. Violet and I spoke of it. We agreed that perhaps it was the pain that first sent him talking to god. After all, the schizophrenia, or the delusions, or whatever you want to call it, didn’t hit when he was a twenty-year-old boy, like it is apt to do. No, it came in his thirties, after he first screamed like a horse and went buckling down to his knees, grabbing his head like he was trying to crush it. I wasn’t there for that, but I heard about it from Ruben, who was the one who hauled him to the doctor.
Oh, how he hoped.
He’d gone to the bone doctors at first; that would have
been best, some spur easy to identify and relatively easy to fix. Some nerve being crushed by a cervical bone. But no: That was not it. So next he had scans. MRIs and CATs. Some dye injected into the blood vessels of his brain. It was that neurologist in town, that woman doctor, who finally came up with the only reasonable explanation, and it was one that had no cure.
The fire is hissing now, eating up the hay. I put on the dry sticks, small and well chosen. This is no big sloppy bonfire. This is ceremony.
In return, the fire eats. That’s what fire does: It chews and swallows, always hungry, always willing to consume more.
I came back by myself, that summer day we found the rattlers. I didn’t want to upset Sy, but I didn’t want my daughter or Antoinette’s grandkids getting bit, either. Or Celeste’s horse. Or Jess’s horse. Both women had taken to riding up in the meadow, and my own greatest physical injury came from a horse that threw me sideways, smack into a cottonwood, after a rattler spooked her. The mass of movement turned my stomach a little. It seemed there were dozens of them, writhing and twisting. They’d dispersed, but I got plenty of them, halving them with a shovel. Chop, chop, chop, fast as I could, standing back and with my thickest leather boots on. I hated to do it, but I did it. Simple as that. I never did tell Sy.
Earlier this fall, we were hunting near that same spot, and I noted that Sy’s attitude wasn’t what it used to be; it was as if he was just out walking and happened to be carrying a gun. He wasn’t trying to hunt anything. Anya had requested his guns be taken away a long time ago, a few years ago, when he first started talking about talking to god and angels and such. So I kept them. He didn’t seem to mind nor hold it against me, just accepted it with a gentle shrug when I asked if that was okay, that I’d return them each day we went hunting, or that he could borrow one of mine, depending on his mood. But that particular day, he had no intention whatsoever of getting a deer. I could just tell by the way he walked, by what he was choosing to notice and choosing to ignore. He rarely spoke of his pain, but that day, he said it was worse than usual. Mostly, he said, it was a low-grade ache behind his left eyeball and above his teeth. Trigeminal neuralgia of the second branch, left side. Sometimes it would flare up, enormously, like a fire. That’s what it felt like. A fire eating his brain, he said.
Sometimes it happened when the wind touched his face. Sometimes it was the way the light glared. It was a cruel universe; anything might set it off, but that same thing wouldn’t set it off the next day. It was unpredictable and there was nothing he could do to avoid it or prepare for it, and perhaps that was worst of all.
Then suddenly, as if talking about it made it manifest, he dropped his gun and fell to his knees and then fell to his side and moaned. Just like that. Dropped straight down. There was nothing for me to do except say, What the hell? and kneel down and hold his hand, bring some water to his lips. It only lasted a bit—maybe two minutes—but it was a long two minutes, and in those two minutes, I understood, from the way his eyes flashed with fight and then went dull, what kind of pain this man was dealing with. He lay there, breathing, for some time. Long after it had passed. Then he got to his knees, vomited, got back up and sat on a rock. But we were both shaken.
I asked him if he had any drugs—from the doctor, or even from his supply of veterinary meds, or anything illegal? Because, by god, any kind of drug would be worth avoiding that.
Tried about everything, he said. Both legal and not. Drugs made for human and for animal. He looked at me, his eyes still clouded. They call it the suicide disease.
You talk to Anya about it?
Anya, he said. Anya.
Yeah, I said. Your wife.
He looked at me and shook his head, no. Not much. She never once asked me what it felt like. She is worn out. And I can understand. Her hands full with kids, and she’s stuck it out with me already. Brain chemistry.
By which he meant, everyone considered him crazy, although he did not, which was one way we all knew he was crazy, but either way, he’d suffered through the last few years of trying antipsychotics and stopping them, gaining weight and sleeping all the time, then becoming manic. The disease was a son of a bitch. Both diseases. Trigeminal neuralgia and psychosis. Can you imagine? Being forced to bear both? Maybe one was the result of the other; maybe they were unrelated. I can’t remember the specifics, but I feel like a drug called prednisone also played a part in it all, the psychosis also coming after a bout of that drug. It’s hard for me to remember the medical sequence of events, but I remember that day perfectly.
I told Sy that day: The more you talk to god, the more I lose faith in one. Because no kind and just force would put people through such things. I can’t fathom it. I can’t abide it.
He’d said, Well, it’s all in god’s hands now.
And I lost my temper and shot into the sky and said, Well, he’s got some lousy hands. Any one of us regular humans could do a much better job.
That made him laugh, and we both ended up sitting under the trees and enjoying the fall air and napping, each of us recovering, in our own way, from his two minutes of hell.
Now I pull out the larger pieces of wood from the old duffel bag. I picked them carefully, mostly from the old cherry tree I had to chop down a few years ago, but a bit of pine, too, since it will go easier. I put them on and the fire responds with a lot of pops—the occasional sparks—and the ice below it is starting to transform.
And now the sun is coming out full force. It was just above zero when I warmed up the truck this morning, but now it must be nearly forty. Ice is melting. By fire and by sun. Although it’s not visible to my eye, surely the steam is rising, evaporating, and water is becoming sunlight, a phrase I remember from school, a T. S. Eliot, and I’m setting my friend free.
I myself have had plenty of injury. What rancher doesn’t? Cracked ribs and dislocated shoulders and cut-up hands. Sy’s even given me drugs for it from time to time, in fact, when we were working an animal together, and there was no point in driving to town to see a doctor when Sy could palpate my ribs, declare them bruised but not broken, and offer up something stronger than the ibuprofen I had, swipe his hands together and call it good.
Folks knew about Sy’s psychotic problems; that was easier to identify and was well known. Sometimes, upon examining a dog filled with cancer, he’d say, “I’ll have a check-in with my advisors about it.” This would come up at Moon’s, and a few people would laugh at Sy, a few would roll their eyes or make a joke, but most were kind about it. It was explained—many of us were always defending Sy—that Sy only meant he needed to think about the options. Sy was contemplating the success rate of the surgery. And the family’s finances. And the dog’s quality of life. It was not an easy equation; various factors that all had to be weighed differently. More often than not, and unlike most vets, he decided against an expensive surgery. Even if the dog could have gotten another year. Sy leaned heavily toward the let-dying-creatures-die side of the spectrum; he was opposed to prolonging life if it only meant delaying a death. It gave him a certain sense of ease with dying; he had a friendlier relationship with it than most of us do. Plus, Sy actually cared for people, which, in my observation of it all, seems rare; many go into veterinary school because they get along with animals better than people. But not Sy. He hated to see folks go into debt over a horse or a cat with a fatal disease. He was practical that way; as practical as he was insane. Somehow the two went together.
I notice a similar tendency in my daughter. Perhaps the world is turning that way. Korina just seems to assume that people will die, willy-nilly. The part that grieves me is that she seems to assume that the world is full of crazies, and that at some point, you’re likely to be shot. In a movie theatre or at college or if you’re a police officer or if you’re a black man. It hurts me to think she’s growing up in a world that has so many shootings. Bombings. Planes disappearing in the air. The constant knowledge of it. Without retreating to the mountains, hunkering in to help a c
ow give birth, fishing in a stream, how can one remain sane? But now Sy. Even this place has been taken away from her.
Still, I hope we’ve given her enough of that, Violet and I. So that she always has the natural world to return to, which, after all, is the most obvious god around. I don’t care what others believe, but I will tell you that a blooming flower or the spiral of a hawk is about as in-your-face godly as a human could possibly want.
It was that day, of not-hunting, as we rested, that Sy told me what he might do. But that he would wait as long as possible. He said it in a quiet voice, his energy still depleted from the pain that had just rocked through his body.
I’d said, But your kids.
Don’t I know it, he’d said. Don’t you go lecturing me. That’s what I’ve been holding on for. But believe me, even my love for them can’t make this pain bearable.
That’s crazy talk, I told him. Love for kids can make anything bearable. I wish you’d take it back, Sy. Promise me.
You can’t stop a man. And you damn well know it. I don’t want to kill myself, mind you. Depends how bad the pain gets. I’ve helped animals, always trusted my instinct on when the time is right. Never have regretted a single decision. I talk to the gods and angels, all of them, and I weigh it all, and I come up with an answer. After careful deliberation, you see. Sometimes I save them. Sometimes I let them go. So I’ll know when the time is right. Don’t you worry. We all die. But I appreciate you letting me tell you. I needed someone to tell.
I wish you wouldn’t. You don’t know what the future holds. You’ll miss out on the future.
And sometimes, that’s appropriate.
No, it’s not. Time is a gift. I guess I can’t agree with you. It’s a hard thing you’re telling me, Sy.
The Blue Hour Page 13