There is Anton. Being Anton, he has the volunteer fire truck tank parked in the field, because although it’s spring it’s still gusty. While it’s likely that any spark would dissolve into the cold wetness (like a soul, burning bright and then dampened and dead) there is the possibility that the opposite will happen. Colorado has already had too many wildfires, and will continue to burn. You also understand that he is just now processing what he knows. That he had been making inquiries on behalf of Renny and Ben and because he once loved Rachel, back when they were in high school, and still felt a certain duty. You understand that these inquires led him to understand that a certain Ray Steele had been in communication with a man named Luce. Money was needed, after all, to start life anew. Money from meth. It was only a hunch. And now he knows that Luce was on that same bus. Later arrested for stealing a gun. For possession of meth. Arrested because Anton had been following the story of Ray, which led him to Luce, which led the police to Luce. That Luce will soon be heading to the same prison that once housed Ray.
There’s Billy. Walking toward Ruben in an offer to help with the last of the firewood. There’s also Del. And Leanne and Jack, my stepsiblings, or my cousins, depending on how you view it. When I saw them, Jack immediately put me in a headlock and gave me a head rub, and I punched him back and leaned into his arms for a while because Jack has always been like that, willing to let me communicate in that roughhouse way. He seems to need fewer words.
There’s Violet, Eddie, the folks from the Alzheimer’s Association, including Esme, who is nice, and a guy named Zach who seems to put his arm around Renny a lot in a protective kind of gesture. His wife, I hear, has just moved into assisted care.
There’s the pregnant lady. The waitress at the place where we got stopped in the snowstorm. She’d read the story in the paper, about Ben and Ray, and she asked if she could be there when Ben was buried.
There are the ranchers. The people from the Presbyterian church. The Stitch Club ladies, who are the women who have been meeting since forever to make quilts and gossip. There are a lot of people, really, that one individual life touches.
There is Carolyn. The mother that raised me. Not knowing that I know. Thinking that she carries this burden herself.
There is Renny. Thinking, I know, of the hospital. The same one where she’d given birth to Carolyn and then Rachel. And where Carolyn gave birth to her two. And where Rachel was taken before they declared her dead. And where Ben and Ray were brought for autopsy. She’s thinking of me visiting her there. Arriving as soon as the Greyhound got me back into town. The first on the scene. Holding her hand as she came to. Her trying to shake my hand away, me refusing to let it go. Me delighted to see her reduced to calm and reasonable behavior. Even if by drugs. How she slapped my hand away, but how I took it back up again, which is a simple motion that Ben used to do. How Renny had said to me: Two for two. Ben kept saying that. I thought he meant that he was dying twice. First his mind, then his body. But he meant two births—his two daughters—and two deaths—Ray and himself. I didn’t know that that’s what he meant.
I did, I told her. I did.
And she said: You were with him?
And I said: Yes. I could feel him going, and it was peaceful. We’ll have to keep remembering that. We’ll have to put it in the remembering room of our heads. You have hypothermia. Your bones and joints will hurt. Your skin will hurt. But you will recover.
And when I left, I placed the journal on her stomach. THE SAD STORY OF RENNY AND BEN. And when I came back to get her from the hospital, one word had been crossed out. It now read THE DAMN INTERESTING STORY OF RENNY AND BEN.
Here we all are, in this story of ours.
Such events, of course, bring out a certain type of honest hope and honest fear. I hear it in the chatter all around me. If I close my eyes and focus, I can hear a little symphony of parts:
Generous thoughts are hard to come by today, when it comes to Ray—
I’d much rather complain than count my blessings—
This wind better die down—
Speaking of, there was a man in Mexico selling these kites . . .
—I think it’s a myth that Eskimo elders put themselves out on ice floes—
I can’t make it through this funeral without a better coat—
It’s pigeon disease, the horses get it from the dirt—
—No, he didn’t lose his vet license, it’s under investigation, I hope they let him off, him being so young and all. He’s just got to keep his meds locked up—
—The Alzheimer’s Association’s official stance is that anonymous testing should be available. We’ve argued that—
She’s going to end up pregnant and on drugs—
Now, Renny, it’s possible she’s tuned in —
—Well, look at her, all quiet like that. Where is she? In her mind, I mean? Although, maybe. You never know.
Tell me again, Renny—
—I think we all learn not to feel loneliness anymore. We get distracted. We distract our whole lives away.
—Occasionally one is wise to the ways of the universe. Gut instinct, intuition, sixth sense. I now know, for instance, that I was being saved at the exact same time Ben was dying. I almost felt—I can’t really say this, can I? It makes me sound like a woo-woo nutcase, that I felt his arms around me, heaving me out of the snow, pulling me toward warmth, a voice saying there now, hang on. Sounds like a bunch of New Agey hippie crap, doesn’t it? And yet.
It’s been proven that mountain views are good for the brain.
But mountains don’t pay taxes. This community needs—
Some towns don’t want to be developed—
—So Renny is going to move back to the cabin? Del and Carolyn are inheriting?—
—And Anton is buying that southern edge? To pay the taxes?
—It’s a good solution. Estate taxes . . .
I just never would have thought—
I’ll be damned, something called a contemplative dying movement?
—They said she looked dead—
That can be common. Frozen folks can look dead, even for hours, and still come alive. There’s that rewarming adage: “They aren’t dead until they are warm and dead.”
—It’s a lucky thing, for sure.
—I sure like what he used to say about hope. His brain wouldn’t have gotten better. He knew that. He knew that it’s wrong to hope for what isn’t going to happen.
—She just quit talking after Rachel died. And it got worse when Ray was let out of prison—
—Poor Rachel. This funeral makes me miss her all over again.
We need to focus on the living—
We need to focus on the planet.
It must have been an ugly death for Ray. Ben got him in the liver. Agonal breathing—
Ben had got himself in the heart. Quick, peaceful.
—Just like an animal that doesn’t get put down quite right. If it had been one of their animals, Ben would have followed up with a gun; he hated to see things suffer.
Ben wouldn’t have done that on purpose—
Oh, I know.
He would have tried—
I know it.
It’s not an easy thing—
Oh, I know it—
She’s not allowing any paper plates or Lipton tea. Says it’s all crap. Warm and dead, eh? I like that. Plenty of people are cold-hearted and alive.
—Oh, that Renny. One can try to prepare for her, but one will fail.
—Well, I don’t like Lipton tea either. Let’s be honest. Who does?
I watch as Renny prepares for this final moment. She’s wearing her down coat with rips and duct-tape patches and hiking boots. This is pretty much how everyone is dressed; it is simply too muddy and sloppy to consider anything else. She gets everyone seated and quiet, except the dog, whom she commands to sit, but who instead runs from person to person to get food and attention. Most people are sitting on hay bales or benches, china plates balanced on their
knees and a beer in their hands. Renny announces that she’d like everyone to say a short thing or two, a memory perhaps, and that she’d like to go last.
Anton recalls the time that Ben ate peanut butter that he had found in an old hunting cabin, but it turns out that the peanut butter had d-CON mixed in to put on mousetraps, so they had to take him to the emergency room.
Ruben tells a few stories of he and Ben saving animals together, and Ben’s sure and quick hand when it came to swiping gunk from newborn calves’ mouths or his sure-footed calmness when putting down an animal that was suffering, which makes us all think of his final act of putting down his own animal self.
Violet blushes and recounts the time that she had first moved to town and bought the grocery; she’d seen Ben for the first time and hoped he wasn’t married, but then, nodding at Renny, after the initial disappointment, she was glad to call both Renny and Ben friends.
Eddie recounts the time they went up to save a herd of cattle from the Rattlesnake Fire, as it was called, and haul all the animals down the mountain in their trailers, in the dust and smoke and chaos.
Leanne talks about the time she saw Ben get slammed into a fence by a bull and how everyone stood over him, waiting to see if he would breathe, and it was then that she loved him most, just that one strange moment.
Jack says something about how it was Ben who taught him to ride figure eights across the field.
Billy recounts how Grandpa Ben would sit with him, just sit, after Rachel died.
The pregnant woman from the truck stop tells about sleeping next to Ben in the booth and the blizzard outside. She knew he was confused but figured he was just tired. She wants to apologize for not calling the police, that she would feel better if she could publicly apologize for not doing more, but that she’d just been so tired, too. What with the crowd, the blizzard, and being pregnant and all, she’d found it hard to think. She also says that Ben had changed her life, that he had warned her about hope, that it could sometimes freeze you up and make you not take action, because you just hoped things would get better when in fact they would not, and so after that snowstorm, she broke up with her boyfriend, who had a gambling addiction and was losing money as fast as she could make it. She had moved into her brother’s house so she can save up money for a home and that although she was lonely she was pretty sure this was the right thing to do. She says: The thing he taught me in our short time together was that any hope ought to be accompanied by action.
This one causes silence. Maybe because it’s good to think of Ben quietly changing a life, even at the last minute; and maybe also because everyone is worried about this talkative waitress who’s very pregnant and now broke but kind enough to want to attend the funeral of a stranger.
That’s when Renny stands up, a letter in her hand, and she says, I think I’ll let Ben speak for Ben.
She clears her throat, holds the paper in her windblown red hands, and starts reading. Dear Renny. If you’re reading this, I’m dead. I have just been diagnosed with dementia, probably Alzheimer’s. You just took me to the doctor last week.
At that Carolyn lets out a yelp and Billy jumps a little in his seat and there is a collective surprise that floats in the air. No one knew of any letter. Renny shoots everyone an irritated look. When everyone calms down, she continues. Renny, I am asking Eddie to keep this letter and give it to you when I die. I want to write it while my brain is still good. I’ll probably forget I even wrote it someday.
When Rachel died and we moved to separate ends of the ranch, well, maybe that’s something we had to do. But as time went on, I was able to let go of the things that hurt. And instead I saw more and more of the strength and energy. In you, I mean. And I was just working myself up to ask if we could be together again—together in the same house, in the same marriage—when I started getting confused. Writing things on paper. And you moved me right back into the farmhouse, in your no-nonsense way, but I wish I had the courage to ask you if you wanted me. If you were still in love.
Here Renny pauses and looks straight out at us and says, in a quiet voice none of us have ever heard her use, I was. She says it twice more. I was, I was.
Renny squints, glances at the sky, which has moved from predusk to twilight to nearly dark. She stops and digs out a flashlight from her jacket, and reads the rest by a little circle of bobbing light. She reads: I don’t want to die, Renny. It doesn’t feel right. Maybe it never does. But it feels like too many good years were ahead of me. I feel regret. Sure, I’d love to be young and strong again—wouldn’t we all?—but that defies nature. I mean a different kind of regret. I accept my age, and I accept the facts of my life, maybe even I accept this disease. It’s just that I’m not ready to go. I still want days to walk the farm and see the willows and visit with the grandkids. Play bridge with Eddie and irrigate with Carolyn. Bicker with you. It wasn’t true that I wasn’t interested in people. I was. I tried to take care of the land, which was my way of taking care of my family. I could have communicated it a little more, and asked you to do the same.
Which is to say: I’m just not ready. But if you’re reading this, I’m gone.
I loved that we had a life together on Hell’s Bottom Ranch, and I love the stories that took place there. All except the story of Rachel, which was a sad one, too sad to bear. But the rest were good and beautiful. I love that we had a history together.
But I want to go out knowing who I am. That, I am sure you can understand. Please bury me by the willows. Maybe I’ll be lucky enough to have the bald eagle or the owls watching.
At this, most people turn, but the bald eagle is not on its usual perch by the river. And anyway, it’s getting too dark to differentiate between sticks and shadows. We scan the twilight sky, which is black-blue, but there are no birds anywhere. Among the murmurs and the sniffles, Satchmo looks up too and barks, just one single bark, which makes everyone laugh. The fire is crackling, and someone up front gets up to add a log.
Renny stands there, watching the sky with the rest of us. Then she shakes herself, like a dog getting up from sleep, and says: Well, let’s keep this short. Nothing worse than keeping people longer than they need to be kept. It’s getting cold and dark. Anyone else?
For a moment there is silence, and then in the fraction of a second before people start to move, before the gravediggers lower the coffin, before Ben goes into the ground, I stand up.
Tell you what I’m gonna do, see.
I often hear myself saying it, even now.
I say it to the river, I say it to the water that designs its own path as it spreads across the fields. I say it to water snaking down the irrigation ditch for the first time, and spreading across the field right as the sun is setting and hitting it just right, making it look like a sparkling sea. I say it to the beautiful earth, to the beautiful moon. I say it because to me, he was like a blue star, the kind that dies in the most spectacular of ways. Not, like the others, by shrinking up. But by exploding.
Stories help us perceive and possess our lives. They help us see our lives and then fully embrace them. So, in that way, there comes an afternoon when I look outside, at the clouds that have boiled up over the mountains, at their release of the first spatters of rain. Because of the height of the clouds, and the way they’ve formed, and the thunder, and the sudden energy in the air, I know that this will be the first real thunderstorm of spring.
In honor of Ben, I sit down in his old chair on the porch, next to the cowboy boots and muddy work boots and bailing strings. I look out the window and watch. This part of the story feels like it is narrated by the universe itself. The universe that’s been watching us and this particular unfolding of a life and of a death. In certain rare moments of time, it all blends into one pure moment. Earth and sky and soul, all these become a remembering room. In that moment, here’s what I notice: The felting beat of raindrops. How each individual drop hits the aspen tree leaves just outside the window. Each little leaf moves with the water, a drop here, a drop t
here. Some of the raindrops roll off the aspen leaf backwards, and others pool right in the center. It looks like the tree is conducting a symphony. A little jazz. One ping there, one plunk there. And here comes the onslaught, the plunks of water speeding up their tune. The green leaves comply, moving here and there, such a small motion, but somehow larger and larger as the whole tree comes to life. I can see Ben’s mind, how it tumbled through memory. How our own brains do that, pinging with life when each new memory hits, a river of channels sparking into movement. Melting and freezing and flowing. I know that Ben used to sit here, in the same spot, and I understand that he would sometimes watch these first aspen leaves and spring rain, and that he would consider how the universe itself holds all this motion inside the stars, even as they are turning blue.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
To Jody Klein and Dan Smetanka: for believing.
To the Ucross Foundation, Earthskin Muriwai, and Playa: for time and space.
To Kent Haruf, Rick Bass, Laura Resau, Laura Hendrie, Dana Masden, Carrie Visintainer, Karye Cattrell, Janet Freeman, BK Loren, and Molly Reid: for your writing, careful reading, and writerly advice.
To James Pritchett, Morgan Smith, Todd Mitchell, Jim Davidson, Sharon Dynak, Andy Dean, Jim Brinks, Mary Dean, Kurt Gutjahr, Debbie Hayhow, Mary Lea Dodd, Gary Kraft, Debbie Berne, and the Alzheimer’s Association in Fort Collins: for advice on particulars and friendship in general.
To Jake Pritchett, Ellie Pritchett, James Brinks, and Rose Brinks: for moments of grace.
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