Snow, Ashes

by Alyson Hagy

  And he believed her because he wanted to.

  While their mother was still alive, Adams had felt nothing but protective of Charlotte. He would have said that he stood on one side of Charlotte and their mother stood on the other side, and together they were like hardwood shims driven into the earth to brace a leaning pole. After their mother died, Charlotte wasn’t exactly helpless. That would never be the case. But Adams managed to lose his way with his sister for several years.

  Portia Laury Adams’s death in 1961 was unexpected, but not tragic, and its aftermath was all that she would have hoped for: tidy and well-spoken. Buren was in Denver in those days, married to a tall, narrow-shouldered woman who worked in a bank. Charlotte was finishing her degree at the university in Laramie. Uncle Gene Laury had taken the train from Rawlins to Salt Lake to conduct business there, so Adams was left on the ranch with his mother; C.D. Hobbs, who was an excellent hand when the voices were quiet in his head; and the brothers Steve and Nod Barnheisel. It was lambing season. The nights were dry, but cold enough to make their white breath sink below their faces as they moved back and forth under the black canopy of the sky. Adams alternated birthing shifts with Hobbs, whom he trusted with the animals. Each of them had a Barnheisel for help, although Nod Barnheisel had to be watched because he sometimes got sloppy despite his extensive knowledge of sheep.

  Hobbs woke Adams from the inadequate tumble of a single hour’s sleep. A young ewe was in a bad way. Adams followed Hobbs downstairs where he stepped into his waiting coveralls and knotted the caked laces of his boots. He tried to ready himself. He knew the ewe’s dumb, visible pain was about to replace the weak grasp of his dreams. Hobbs turned up the light of the lantern he carried, and they made the piercing, gratifying walk to the sheds together. Adams couldn’t help but feel pride when he looked at the low, clean shapes of the lambing sheds. The Trumpet Bell was going forward: new grazing leases, new loans, the shrewd sale of feeder lambs, rail cars lashed with bales of high-grade wool. He and his uncle and the diplomacy of his mother had made it so. He didn’t want to lose the ewe in her first labor, but if he did lose her, he would go past her loss and the loss of others. There was satisfaction out there somewhere, knowledge of a job well done. The war in Korea had changed him as much as it had changed C.D. Hobbs. A sheep man’s satisfaction—limited, achievable—was the only satisfaction he now cared to pursue.

  The ewe was too small, so he crossed the frozen mud of the ranch yard toward the house where he removed his boots before climbing the stairs to wake his mother. She was sixty-two years old. She prepared herself carefully, but quickly, then walked with Adams to the milk and blood heat of the sheds. They didn’t speak. The ewe was down, exhausted by hours of contractions. The bulging glaze of her upturned eye told them they had little time before they would have to take the lamb by knife and leave the mother to bleed out.

  Portia Adams whispered to the animal as she knelt beside it, her blessedly small-boned hands encased in the sterile gloves Hobbs had prepared for her. She slid a hand past the ewe’s swollen vulva and worked her slim fingers to straighten the bent knees of the unborn lamb. She maneuvered for a hard moment to bring the tiny, pliant hooves into the birth canal and in line with the lamb’s tapered jaw. The wiry muscles of her bare forearm clenched beneath her pale, age-slackened skin as the ewe’s insides clenched, and both of them trembled together in silence. Hobbs stayed at the ewe’s head to keep her from bolting from the pain. Adams bent near his mother and tried not to fret about a prolapsed uterus and infection and every other disaster he could predict.

  When Portia Adams was sure of the lamb’s position, she withdrew her slick, steaming arm and looked at her numbed fingers with something like surprise. She’d done it many times, but helping with a birth remained remarkable even to her. She told Adams she didn’t think the ewe was carrying twins. “There’s just the one, and it’s alive,” she said. “We can hope for the best.”

  There wasn’t much fresh blood. With Hobbs at her head, the ewe found her strength and delivered the lamb, but Portia Adams didn’t stay to see the gangly buck gain his feet. She prized the sleep she found so easily in winter when the sky was like a swift, dark sail. She left the shed as quietly as she had arrived. When Adams went back into the house, bootless again and tired from a thousand familiar worries, he found his mother dead in the upstairs bedroom she’d shared with his father, a pair of undyed wool blankets pulled above her deflated chest. Her white hair was loose across the pillow. It still held the scalloped waves of its braids and pins. He had come to thank her. On his way into the house, he’d re-hung the large coat she’d worn to the sheds—it was one of Gene’s. He would forever remember how well it smelled of cold air and straw.

  He waited with her awhile. He was better at sensing last chances now that he was older and had seen men fight each other and die, and he took the opportunity to be alone with his mother perhaps because they had been alone together so little. He loved her. He knew that. And she’d known it. The love had never been a secret feeling.

  He remembered her visit to the naval hospital in California, his last stop before his discharge from the marines. “We know we’re blessed to have you back, son,” she said. “I can’t tell you how blessed I feel. Other families—” She bowed her head. “You’ll do fine, you know, even without those toes. You’ll adjust. Things won’t be the same, but they’ll be worth every bit of heart you’ve got left.” He didn’t share with her the details of what had happened in Korea. He hoarded every uncertain feeling he had about what he had seen and done at Chosin. His mother, however, talked to him about Hobbs—the way C.D. had been with Adams and gotten so terribly burned and how Adams might start to feel guilty about that. His mother’s straightforward questions and answers led him back toward a life he actually imagined he might lead. She retrieved him from the prison of his doubts. Now he would stay by her bedside as she had stayed by his.

  When the dawn was no longer indeterminate and gray, he telephoned Buren in Denver. Then he called his uncle’s hotel in Salt Lake. He dreaded breaking the news to Charlotte and Hobbs. His sister, he decided, deserved better than a phone call. He would drive the 150 miles to Laramie and tell her they had lost their mother. Hobbs—who was owed a nearly equal gesture—would get the most Adams could summon at that moment. For he was feeling it now, the weight of his middle age and the flailing grief of a child all at once. His eyes were thick and hot with tears. He would miss her more than he’d missed anything in his life.

  Hobbs was still in the sheds with Steve and Nod and the neighbor, Bud Rorty, who had arrived to help out during the day. The night crew had overseen the delivery of thirty-eight lambs with only one stillbirth. It had been a good shift. Adams didn’t give himself time to plan his announcement. He was afraid he’d break down. “C.D.,” he said, rasping into the impossible sentence. “C.D., my ma has died.”

  Hobbs’s dirty face went raw-colored above the immediate spasms of its muscles. He began to weep. He didn’t ask details or questions. He just stepped into the straw-bale enclosure he’d built for the orphaned lambs, and he crouched under the bright heat lamp he’d set up to warm the orphans, and he wept some more. Bud Rorty hung his head alongside the hung heads of the Barnheisels, all of them stained from foot to brow with blood and strands of mucus and liquid shit. Bud stuttered out an offer. “I c … can call my brother, Tom. For extra help,” he said. “Y..you know I’m sorry, Fremont. She was always good to me.” Adams nodded. They would need help from people like the Rortys and the Gundersons because the new lambs would keep coming hour after hour, day after day, even though he needed to bury his mother.

  Before he left to change clothes for the hard drive to Laramie, Adams went to Hobbs by the straw bales and reached for his shoulder with both hands. It was the unburned shoulder, round and strong. He waited for Hobbs to lift his face, then he asked Hobbs to look after things and to be with the doctor when the doctor got there. “Sit with her,” he said, his words as light as powdered
chalk. “In that rocking chair up there. She’d like that.” Then he walked away from the sheds, dazed by the cries of his hundreds and hundreds of sheep as those cries rose into the unpainted dome of morning. The sound was as constant and unsorted as it had always been, but he heard it differently now—the pitched noise of birth and its many hungers.

  He rode with Charlotte through the narrow arm of alfalfa their mother had called Creek Meadow with Charlotte opening and closing both gates from atop the buckskin, working the horse backward and forward with careful pressure from one leg and then the other. He rode the old bay horse, Redrock, at his sister’s request. They went uphill toward the iron-fenced graveyard that held their parents and Uncle Gene and Blue Pete Tosh, who had died of a stroke when they were children. Blue Pete’s funeral—a short prayer and one old Scots hymn sung without accompaniment—was the first funeral they’d ever attended. Since her arrival, Charlotte kept glass jars filled with aster and yarrow and shooting star on their parents’ sunken graves. The graveyard thrummed with the sound of slow, heavy bees at work on the blossoms.

  “There’s a hummingbird that comes up here in the evenings,” she said. “I can’t imagine where it nests. The ranch looks like nothing but rock and sand.”

  “We could use more rain,” he said, dismounting.

  “Gene’s grave doesn’t get any flowers from me.” Charlotte had both hands on her hips, opinionated. “You were always his favorite. Maybe you can design him a monument of sheep dung.”

  “He’d like that, and you know it,” Adams said, thinking of his uncle’s painful struggle with mouth cancer. “It would make him proud.”

  “If he was still alive—or if Ma hadn’t died so young—you’d be playing second fiddle around here. You ever think of that?” Charlotte plucked some wilted flowers from the jar on their mother’s grave and tossed them into the shearing currents of a breeze.

  “No.” Gene Laury had died in 1965, the prime sheep man of the family, and the one who’d really nailed the Adams family to the huge, dry parchment of the land.

  “You aren’t very curious about what might happen, are you, Fremont? You don’t speculate.”

  “I guess not. I try to be practical.”

  “And successful?”

  “You think so?” His heart skipped a partial beat as he asked his question. He wanted his sister to admire him.

  “By Uncle Gene’s rawhide standards, you are a success. Hell, yes.”

  They remounted, and Charlotte let the buckskin pick its way toward the two-track that led up and around Bell Butte. Adams relaxed into the cantle of his saddle and allowed Redrock to follow on loose rein. The graveyard’s iron fence needed a fresh coat of paint, but the view was good from there. He liked how the long, sallow curve of Powder Rim mended itself to the cobalt sky that lorded it over the distant southern mountains. Bell Butte also threw a shirttail of cool shadow over the graveyard at this hour, as it did on most mornings. Uncle Gene had said he would always appreciate that shade.

  His mind drifted to memories of his mother’s burial. The service had been simple. Buren and his wife were more hesitant than they’d ever been about family matters, which made Adams grateful. Charlotte was wrung and knotted with grief. She would only go as far as the corral to look at her horse with his rough, ungroomed winter coat before she returned to the house and their mother’s room upstairs. Uncle Gene Laury appeared disoriented, unsure of every habit he’d ever had because he had somehow outlived his sister and her husband and was left to shelter himself on land that had become mostly theirs. It helped to know that the passing had been peaceful. Portia’s many friends said it was what she would have wanted. And while Adams knew those friends were right because he had seen the contours of a lasting sleep on his mother’s face, sentiments of that sort contorted his sister with anger.

  “She should have been seeing a doctor,” Charlotte screeched, lashing out at Adams. “She shouldn’t have been working so hard. You let her work too hard.”

  Adams didn’t feel the emptiness that way. He and Gene and C.D. Hobbs finished with the lambs because they had to. It was good for them, Adams thought, that the work didn’t stop. His mother had understood that. She had always stood by the dragline of ranch work. His mother would have emphasized the good fruits of their labors: the healthy Corriedale-Rambouillet crossbreds, the plentiful forage, the champion bucks that would bring high prices at the Casper sales. She would not have wanted her death to be any kind of interruption.

  But it was. Portia Adams’s death changed so much. Neither Charlotte nor Buren returned to the Trumpet Bell, except for the most cursory holiday visits. Even Hobbs used the occasion to initiate another departure. He and Adams were hanging a new corral gate a few days after the funeral when Hobbs announced he was leaving for a construction job he’d heard about in Nevada.

  “You’re taking off?” Adams had considered the possibility that his mother’s death might lever things upside down for Hobbs—might even lead to a bad spell and new doses of calming medications—but he hadn’t expected the man to run away. He had somehow thought they’d work it out together, what it meant to be part of a small and shrinking family.

  “Mine’s down in Trinidad, last I heard,” Hobbs said, speaking of his own mother. “Living with a miner’s got disability.”

  This wasn’t news to Adams. He’d heard it many times.

  “Your mother was the best teacher Dixon school ever had. She was a good person, and she was nice to me, and careful in her planning. You’re like her, Fremont, in more ways than the shape of your face.”

  Adams felt a wrenching in his bowels just behind his belt buckle. They had been through this at the funeral and the wake, all of it. He really didn’t want to wrestle with the spilling sweats of his grief yet again. He tried to focus on the fat hinges of the corral gate.

  “You ever think of getting married? Because I remember how your mother used to—”

  “Shut it, C.D.” Adams did not want to betray how much the question surprised him. He kept his eyes on the gatepost and concentrated on the strong smells of wood and rust.

  “It’s a lot to think about, I know. Nod says—”

  “Nod doesn’t know shit. You’ll become a permanent idiot if you listen to Nod. Be better off in Nevada.” He could hear Hobbs working his heels down into his boots. “I’m not gonna talk about getting married just because she’s gone. That’s what those words are for, you know it too, so don’t bring it up again. It hasn’t even been a week. Right now, everything I work on—the herd, the house, money, furniture, food—is all about my mother being gone. I got Charlotte to think of.”

  It was Hobbs’s turn to be caught off guard. Adams watched his face go tight across the cheeks. “Charlotte.” He gave the name its own kind of unscaled melody.

  “Yeah, my sister. Remember her? She graduates from college in a couple of months. This has been tough on her. She might need some time.”

  “Time for what?”

  “To act like a kid. Or not. To decide to live here after graduation—which I’m praying she won’t do. To get over what’s happened and leave me with the bills and the ghosts. She’s taking it hard. You’ve seen that.”

  “So are you.” Hobbs held up his left hand to placate Adams. All five of his fingers were trembling. “You’re taking it real hard.”

  “Yeah … but….” Adams swallowed. “Yes. I am. But there’s less of me left to bring down in a sad time. You know that better than anybody, C.D. I’ve lost trust in a lot of things. Ma understood that, and she understood I did fine if I stayed close to home. But if Nevada works for you, go to Nevada. I guess I’m glad you got the spirit to give it a try.”

  He didn’t see Hobbs again for many, many years.

  When they left the two-track to ride under Chin Rock, Charlotte let Adams take the lead. He wanted to stop and add a stone to Old Etchepare’s cairn. Charlotte was whistling now, and there was a chickadee whistling out on the prairie, and there were moments when Adams could
n’t tell the two songs apart. He got off Redrock at the cairn, his saddle creaking under the shift of his weight, and he draped the horse’s reins over a tall, silvered grapple of sage. Old Etch hadn’t wanted to be buried in the family plot or in the cemetery of the Catholic church in Rawlins, which was where most dead sheepherders ended up. He wanted to rest above his favorite winter bedding ground, just where he’d parked the sheep wagon year after year, in the lee of the smooth jut of sandstone that resembled a determined human chin. Old Etch had asked for a cairn to mark the spot—nothing more—and after nearly twenty years the cairn was thick and wide and as well-fitted as a homesteader’s wall. Adams searched the ground for a small piece of gun-black chert he could slip into an empty crack. Just a token.

  “He never wanted to leave here,” Adams said, mounting up again and resetting his straw hat against the freshening breeze. “Not for Spain or California or anywhere else he ever talked about. Ma always wondered what happened to his money.”

  “The usual, don’t you think—women, drink, gambling,” said Charlotte. “Though I wanted to believe he sent it to a true love in Basque country, like she was his waiting princess.”

  “He was the only person I ever knew besides Dad who joked about what people were trying to do out here. He said most of our land was good for nothing but sheep, which was nice because no other fools would ever want to take it from us. He was right about that.” Adams paused to wet his mouth with spit. “Remember how he used to sing? He’d sing day and night when he was herding in the basin. Said there were godless places in the world meant for nothing but the wind and the basin was one of them. Said you had to protect yourself by singing on ground like that. You couldn’t trust it because it didn’t feature snakes or saints.”