Bone Fire

by Mark Spragg

  He’d watched the pastures and buildings that lay below him, the prairie stretching eastward toward the curved horizon, the comforting press of the Bighorns at his back, his whole life and didn’t need to see it all now to know what was there.

  He shut his eyes and the memories of summer colors and the sense of expanse brightened in his mind. And as always there were the quick, familiar flashes from the lives of his wife and son and Mitch, and when he opened his eyes the sun caught on the black marble gravestones before him, flaring up like portals to a separate world.

  A leaf brushed his cheek and he pulled the branch down to snap one lengthwise under his nose, enjoying the sweet, clean scent. Then he seated his hat and stood from the chair.

  Just south of Ella’s marker he stepped off a six-by-three-foot plot, dragging the heel of his boot to describe its perimeter. Then he took up the tamping bar.

  Two hours later he’d broken through the hardpan with the beveled end of the bar and shoveled out a foot of the dry, caked earth. After that he found more rocks, but the soil was looser, just like he knew it would be. He retrieved one of the old quart bottles he’d filled at the tap and packed in the knapsack and drank most of it. He thought if he had to take a leak, he’d piss in the hole and make the digging easier. Though his shirt was damp under his arms and across his back, he still felt fine, thinking he might get out and dig a hole once a week, that it would be a real improvement in his life. Then he wished he could see well enough to drive into town so the tourists could have a look at him. A couple of times in the past year a woman in city clothes had asked to take his picture, and he’d enjoyed the experience. It made him feel he hadn’t faded away altogether, that he was still somehow worthy of notice, even if only as a sort of rural oddity.

  He dug a while longer and then sat in the chair to rest and eat a plum, waking sometime later with his chin on his chest. He wasn’t sure how long he’d slept and squinted at the sky until he found where it brightened, satisfied that he still had most of the afternoon.

  He remembered the two weeks they’d spent trenching out a new leach field for Mitch’s septic tank. Griffin had been a boy then, just nine or ten, and they could have had old Dan Hanson over with his backhoe and finished the job in an afternoon, but Einar wanted to give his son a bone-wearying chore and let him own the satisfaction of having completed it.

  When he was down deep enough that it was just a little bit of a struggle to climb out, he stopped and threw the bar and shovel back toward the tree, then took his hat off and lay down with his heels against one end and his head just short of the other with his arms folded across his chest. His hat was turned up on his stomach. He felt relaxed, comfortable, but got worried that if he died right then and there it might look like a suicide, so he climbed out, pleased with the extravagance of the hole. He could have dug something smaller, but what he intended was in fact a kind of burial, and beyond that he’d wanted to see what it was like lying down in the cool, dry ground. So he’d have an idea of what was coming next.

  He dragged the garbage bag to the soft mound of earth he’d shoveled up out of the hole, working his butt back into the loose soil and lifting the bag by its bottom. He gave it a shake and it emptied in an instant: all the letters he’d written Ella from Korea, most of the family photographs, wedding rings, birth and death certificates, marriage licenses, everything he could put his hands on that authenticated his eighty years of using up a body. Now it all lay three feet down in the earth and hadn’t made more of a sound than a curtain lifting in the breeze. He dropped the bag on top and rummaged through the backpack for the can of lighter fluid and the box of matches.

  He stood listening to the crackle of it burning, and when there was just the faint odor of smoke he shoveled the hole full and sat in the chair. The day had gone exactly as he’d planned.

  He’d kept back a cigar box of mementos for Griff, to provide some offering, because he doesn’t imagine she’ll understand what he’s done. He expects her to be pissed off.

  He kept a single wedding picture of Griffin and Jean, so she could always know what her young parents looked like, as well as one of himself and Ella. Two photographs of Mitch: one taken when he was twenty, wearing his Army uniform, the other of him middle-aged and riding a dappled gray gelding they called Ford. The first trophy buckle her dad won on a saddle bronc at a little show in Greybull. A brooch of Ella’s she’s long favored and the Silver Star he never felt he deserved, but it’s how he wants to be held in her heart, as a man who performed his life’s duties with at least some gallantry. And the Norsk Bibel, which he thinks of as a poorly rendered novel, but he hadn’t burned his other books either. He sat up straighter in the chair, reviewing his decisions.

  He’s dug the hole and made the fire because when he dies he doesn’t want her to have to deal with anything but the disposal of his body. That’s fair, he thinks. There’s no getting around a dead body, and he’s already spoken to Sid Farnsworth, the undertaker down in Sheridan, about the arrangements. He’s already paid. She’ll have to dial 911, and that’s it, maybe drive a box or two of his clothes in to the Goodwill, and they agreed a year ago that the Nature Conservancy gets the land just as soon as there isn’t a Gilkyson to care for it. So she’ll have the ranch without it going to taxes, and if she has a kid it’ll have a place to live. He wants her to move forward, and wants it to be easy for her. He doesn’t want her history to limit her, as he believes his history has limited him. And if Marin’s here he wants it to be easy for her too.

  “I’m not crazy,” he said, remembering how he’d searched her room for an hour, finding her diary, her school pictures and some papers, almost packing it all up here with the rest. But he hadn’t. He’d caught himself in time, and that was getting harder to do. No, he’d put her things aside, sitting there with his eyes closed and waiting until he was able to distinguish what was reasonable and what wasn’t, and the fact that he’d succeeded was reassuring. He didn’t think a crazy man could have.

  “A crazy man would have burned it all,” he said aloud, then he napped again, and when he woke the heat was gone from the day. He gathered up the tools and the backpack and started back down to the house to eat his cold supper.

  Ten

  THE BISQUE KILN was still warmer than her body, but just barely, and Griff was leaning over into its barrel with a small whiskbroom, sweeping the powdery grit from the last firing into the slightly flattened mouth of a tomato-sauce can. In spite of her cotton mask the dust made her sneeze, and when she swallowed her mouth tasted of baked alkali. She pinched the mask away, sliding it up over her forehead, whispering, “A rose is a rose is a rose” because she liked the velvety resonance of the phrase against the coarse firebrick lining the interior.

  He’d been waiting for her when she returned home from Paul’s this morning. He was sitting at the kitchen table in the same clothes he’d worn the day before, his sweat-stiffened hair standing in tufts, his dirty hands worrying the corner of a laminated placemat. He smelled of smoke.

  She asked if there’d been an accident and he slammed the flat of a hand on the tabletop, knocking the saltshaker over.

  “This is my goddamn house,” he shouted. Her diary and a dozen photographs were stacked by his arm, and now fanned toward the table’s edge.

  “Why don’t I fix us some breakfast?” she said, and he smacked the table again, but this time recoiling from the sound as though he’d just regained his hearing.

  She’d seen him like this once before, in the garden this summer, pawing at the soft earth and pushing her away when she tried to help him to his feet, his eyes gone wild and blind to her.

  He slumped in the chair. “I believe I’ve had all the breakfast I’ll ever want.” His mouth gaped, his jaw quivering.

  When she turned her head as though she might be looking at her diary, he opened his hands and reached toward her as if he meant to accept some object she was handing to him.

  “I didn’t read it,” he said, folding his arm
s on the table, resting his forehead against them, weeping with the abandon of a child. When he was able to sit up again, he choked out through the sobs what he’d done, what he’d burned. He offered to walk her up the hill and show her the newly mounded grave he’d made of his life.

  Now the afternoon seemed hollow and she turned on the radio so the jazz on NPR would keep her company. She settled on a stool at the work island in the middle of the room.

  Arced across the table before her was a ceramic spinal column, its ribs arranged alongside by length and, nearest to her, a pelvis that appeared to have belonged to a woman or a small bear. Each piece was a chalky white, the surfaces pitted, in places roughened.

  Behind her was a bank of windows, the panes small and unwashed, and below them the tiered plywood shelving where she’s racked the raw-fired pieces and arranged her shaping tools, the buffed-steel rods and dowels she uses for her assemblages, the colored bottles of glaze, the spools of copper wire. Her slab roller was pushed up tightly in a corner, and next to it the big trough where she reconstituted the dried clay. It was the clay that possessed her, the feel of it, from the very first time. When she’s kneeling at the trough, up to her elbows in the wet and slick and seemingly torsional muck, it is as though she has reached down the shaft of a muddied well and gripped the body of some ancient creature—a feeling at once horrible and intimate and thrilling.

  She held her hands up in the yellow afternoon light and closed them into fists, dropping them finally onto the table and sitting there quietly, trying to summon the conviction that she would be able to care for him if his mind collapsed completely. Feed, bathe and dress him, reason with him. Keep them both safe from these episodes of sulking infancy.

  The door stood propped open and a magpie strutted through the glare of the workyard, stopping at the edge of the studio’s porch with its head cocked and turned, neck feathers ruffed, the black bead of an eye glistening. Then light flashed off the glass of a car turning into the drive, and the bird stepped back and rose into flight.

  She untied her utility apron, lifted it over her head and hung it on a hook by the door.

  A dog ran to the edge of the yard, cocking a leg up to pee, and when she crossed the porch he came toward her wagging his tail. His chest and legs were white, his body brindled in overlapping swatches of blue merle and liver. She squatted at the hose bib to wash her hands, standing when she heard the car door shut. She shaded her eyes, watching a tall woman in tan shorts and a navy-blue T-shirt approach, stopping to stretch her arms above her head, her curly gray hair cut to match the sharp line of her jaw, and Griff thought, Please, don’t let me fuck this up.

  “He’s friendly.” The silver Volvo parked behind her was the same color as her hair.

  Griff squatted again at the bib, running her cupped hands full, and the dog stepped forward to lap at the water, watching her, one eye hazel, the other pale blue. When he’d had enough he backed away and sat in the border of dampened earth.

  “His eyes are different colors,” Griff said.

  “Don’t you wish yours were?”

  The woman bent at the waist to drink from the spigot and the dog darted in, snapping at her hair, his back end wiggling as though attached to a separate axis. She pushed him away, laughing, and shut the water off, turning toward the house. She raked her wet hands back through her hair.

  “He’s inside,” Griff said.

  “In the middle of the day?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She wiped at her chin with the back of a hand. “What about Mitch? He stay indoors all day too?”

  “Mitch died.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.” She moved into the shade the building cast. “Did he go hard?”

  “Yes, he did. He suffered a lot.” The woman nodded, asking nothing more, so Griff added, “He died when I was eleven.”

  “How old are you now?”

  “Nineteen.”

  “Can we step in out of this heat?” She was staring up into the hot, pale sky.

  “We can go in the house if you want. I made up the guest room for you.”

  “I can’t just yet. I’ll let you know when I’m ready.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She extended her hand. “This is going to work out a lot better if you call me Marin.” She indicated the dog. “His name’s Sammy.”

  Griff took her hand. “Everybody calls me Griff.”

  “Like your dad?”

  She nodded and turned and Marin followed her up onto the porch and into the studio, where Griff turned off the radio.

  Marin leaned back against the work island, scuffing a heel against the worn floorboards, rutted and stained in patterns of neat’s-foot, diesel and two-cycle oils, turpentine and creosote. She inhaled deeply. “It still smells like my daddy’s shop.”

  “It’s mine now,” Griff said, hating how that sounded, adding that it was Einar who allowed her to use it. “We moved the tools over to the granary,” she said.

  Marin picked up one of the ceramic ribs, pressing it against her side as though comparing the size, then placing it back on the worktable. She looked at the raw pieces heaped on the shelving. “Do you mostly make bones?”

  Griff stepped to a steel rod held upright in the jaws of a vise at the table’s edge. It was curved gracefully, like a girl’s spine, the five lumbar vertebrae held in place by a variegated and grooved coccyx that was tucked in stiffly, like some docked vestigial tail. “I use the rods and wire to piece them together.”

  “You make skeletons, then?”

  “Sort of.”

  “Are you nervous?”

  Griff took her hands out of her front pockets and, not knowing what to do with them, tucked them into her back pockets. “More than I thought.”

  Marin smiled. “I knew I would be.” She lifted the pelvis up, sighting out the window through its cradle. “Mitch was a sweetheart. I always hoped he’d get lucky and have something quick like a heart attack.”

  “I need you to put that down.”

  Marin lowered the curved bone as she might a chalice. “I’m not going to drop it.”

  “You might.”

  “I guess I might.” She placed it carefully back on the table and Griff stepped forward, squaring it with the arrangement of ribs.

  “It took me a long time to get it right,” she said.

  They listened to the dog circling and finally settling on the porch.

  “How sick is he?”

  “I don’t know for sure. He won’t go to the doctor, but Paul doesn’t think he’s going crazy. He thinks it’s something else.”

  “Paul’s not a doctor, then?”

  “He’s my boyfriend.”

  Marin stared vacantly out the window. “I always thought it was sad here. Even when everyone was alive.”

  “I like it better than anywhere I’ve ever been.”

  Marin turned to her. “You look a lot like I used to. When I was a girl.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I’m not sure it’s a compliment.”

  “I think it is.”

  “I’m ready now. Now I think we can go in.”

  He’d bathed and dressed in clean clothes and was lying on top of the bedcovers, napping. They came in without trying to be quiet and stared down at him.

  “He had a bad night.” Griff stepped back toward the doorway, leaning into a dresser.

  Marin remained by the bed. “He comes from a long line of people who’ve had bad nights.” She took his hand and he opened his eyes, blinking up at her. “It’s your sister,” she whispered.

  She sat on the edge of the bed, against his hip, and he pulled his hand away, groping at the nightstand until he felt his glasses. When he got them on he thrust his head forward, squinting, and when he still wasn’t satisfied he swung the magnifying glass around. Marin held her face up close to the lens.

  “Oh, my,” he said.

  He lightly touched her face and hair while he studied her, then folded the glass ba
ck against the wall.

  “I’ve gotten a little older,” she said.

  His eyes appeared bluer to Griff than they had in some time.

  “You look just about the same to me. About right, anyway.” He relaxed back against the pillows, holding her hand in both of his. “I’m sorry about your friend.”

  “You mean Alice.”

  “Yes, that’s it exactly,” he said, “Alice Clark. McEban read about her passing on his Internet. He’s a wizard when he gets up and rolling on his computer. Sells his cows on it. Did you come out on 80?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “On that interstate through Nebraska.”

  “No, I drove through South Dakota.”

  “That’s how I thought you’d come. I told him so.” He looked pleased. “McEban thought 80, but that’s because he likes those sandhills. I believe that prejudiced his thinking. He said if it was him he’d have driven north on the two lanes out of North Platte.” He was speaking rapidly, as though he had a good deal to relate and not much time. “Did you stop and have a look at that Crazy Horse mountain in the Black Hills?”

  “I missed it,” she said. “I only stopped for a night, and to call your granddaughter. To tell her I was on my way.”

  “I’ve always wanted to get up there to South Dakota and see how they’re coming along with that Crazy Horse sculpture. Sometimes you don’t pay attention to what you’ve got in your own backyard. I’m guilty of that. I mean putting your head down like I have. Just looking for your enjoyment in work. Sometimes I think that might’ve been a mistake.”

  “I always thought I’d like to go sailing on Lake Michigan,” she said, “and I never did.”

  “Well, there you are.”

  “Yes,” she said, “there I was, for sixty years. And I never once even swam in the lake.”

  Einar nodded, fixing his gaze on the foot of the bed as though someone had settled there. Some other visitor. “I imagine she was easy to get along with. Your Alice,” he said. “I can’t see you staying with someone all those years and her not being easy to live with.” He looked back up at her.