by Mark Spragg
EINAR AND GRIFF had gone to bed early and Marin had tried to sleep. But her head was pounding, the room too warm, close, even with the windows thrown open. Then the first wave of nausea hit.
She stumbled out into the hallway, drawing a robe across her shoulders, and stood clinging to the beading in the rough wooden wallboards. Her body was now soaked with sweat, but it felt better to be up and moving. She thought a cool glass of water might help.
In the kitchen she tipped a chair over, the sound of it striking the floor tearing through her like a gunshot, and her legs gave out. She sat down hard, more shocked than hurt, a collage of disjointed images from the drive west snapping through her mind as unexpected as a camera’s flash. The dank motel room in Sioux Falls, asleep for an hour in its shallow tub, the whine of traffic, the bitter coffee she brewed on the counter beside the television. There were fragments of phone poles ticking by, wires sagging with blackbirds, a ball thrown for Sammy.
She crawled to the door, leaning into the jamb, finally dragging herself out onto the porch. The air was cooler but it didn’t comfort her, as the optimism she and Alice had tried to maintain after the surgeries hadn’t comforted, and when the remembered odors of body wastes and antiseptics and salves swept through her, she vomited over the edge. She had no idea what she thought she was going to do.
She slept in ragged bouts through the night, visions cycling of Alice’s graying face, her thinning neck and hands, her hair brittle and then gone completely after the first rounds of chemo. At one point she heard the hospital’s simpleminded pastor refer to “God in His wisdom,” and recalled that she too had prayed, bargaining for her lover’s life. She felt the hollowing disappointment of the loss all over again, the wretchedness of an ineffective mendicant.
Griff found her in the morning and got her into bed. She cleaned her great-aunt’s face and hands, feeding her spoonfuls of warm sugar water, and in the afternoon she was able to sip a half cup of tea. She fell back to sleep, not waking until the next afternoon. She lay motionless in her bed, counting the knots in the ceilingboards to stay focused, feeling fragile as glassware.
That evening she had the strength to shower and dress in a clean nightgown, and Griff brought her a tray with coffee, a soft-boiled egg and toast.
She sipped the coffee, tapped the egg with the edge of a spoon. “How’s Einar taking all of this?”
“He’s been sitting on a chair in the hallway.”
“Is he out there now?” Marin turned toward the door. “Are you there?” she called.
They heard the chairlegs scrape.
“I’m right here.” He was standing in the doorway.
“Have you lost your mind, sitting out there like that?”
“I probably have.”
She shook her head and took a bite of toast. “That’s the most pathetic thing I’ve ever heard.”
He moved to the bed, reaching out gently to find her, and she patted his hand.
“I just let myself get rundown. That’s all it was.”
“Yes,” he said with some surety, as though the problem had now been resolved to his satisfaction. “That’s exactly what happened.”
• • •
In the afternoons they sat together on the porch, just the two of them, speaking easily of the habits of songbirds, the rising cost of groceries and gasoline, how the warming of the planet was reported vacuously—as though it were no more than the wear and tear of an ordinary garment—and how sugar inevitably destroyed a person’s vitality, and toward the end of that first week, having grown more accustomed to each other, they launched into stories from their childhood. The brandings, dances, weddings, broken bones, rodeos, storms, arguments. At times pulling their chairs around, each facing the other, reaching across their laps to hold hands.
Griff busied herself in the kitchen, keeping the front windows open so she could eavesdrop, listening for bursts of Marin’s laughter that she thought she would have recognized anywhere and known as the sound of family.
“Dance with me,” Marin suggested one afternoon, standing up, pulling him to his feet, and they waltzed clumsily down the porch and back while she hummed the rhythm of a slow-moving melody, the side of her face at rest against his chest.
The last cool hours of each evening were reserved for her walk. It was a sixty-year-old habit, and she could name the succession of good dogs she’d kept to provide their silent company.
She explored the treeline above the pastures and downstream as far as the county road, Sammy racing ahead as she came along steadily. She would stop at times, calling him back, and he sat patiently listening to her warnings about porcupines and skunks and mountain lions, her reminders that he was new to this country. He yawned, stretching, nosing her hand before striking out again.
On the third evening out he managed to get sprayed by a skunk, and Griff helped her scrub him with a mixture of hydrogen peroxide, baking powder and liquid soap. He braced up under the garden hose, allowing it, and just yesterday they’d seen a skunk again, a mother with three kits, and he’d lain flat, whining softly until they passed. So now he knew about skunks, she thought, good for him.
This evening she was searching for morels. She carried a plastic grocery bag and a paring knife, weaving deliberately through the trees a half mile upstream from the barn when Sammy started to bark and she looked up expecting another skunk, and her heart revved and she dropped the knife. She was standing at the edge of a clearing grown up in native grass and lupine, a place where she’d played as a girl. She lowered her hand from where she’d raised it against her chest and bent down to retrieve the knife. In the middle of the meadow was a heap of antlers, gathered bones and horns five feet high and ten feet across. But it was the figures that made her hold her breath.
They stood apart from the mound of bones, a dozen feet or so out from its edges, spaced evenly around the perimeter as though circling. She stood searching each figure for motion; they were that distinct and lifelike in their postures. There were six of them. She could not look away, and when there was only the movement of the wind in the trees she struck out through the waist-high grass and flowers, Sammy staying at her side. “It’s all right,” she whispered. They were still twenty feet away.
The figures were human-sized, five adults—a wolf-headed man, his mouth wide in triumph, she-bear, moose, long-horned bull and bighorn ram—and a single child, its skull reptilian, fragile and snake-fanged. Their knees were cocked, arms extended heavenward, backs arched, one offering up a nugget of agate in its raised hands. On another, a tail curved away in an S, the last of its vertebrae no bigger than a snail’s body. It was as though the earth had thrown up an accumulation of its dead, regathering the parts into this resurrection of creatures.
She stopped at every one of them, fingering a hip, a shoulder, a cage of ribs, discovering how each ceramic bone had been attached to its armature of steel rods with copper wires and rawhide ligatures. The bones were colored ochre, caramel and cinnamon, the figures mostly unadorned. Here, a necklace of raven feathers. There, a bracelet woven of moss and flowers, an anklet of green beads, some figures rendered with more artistry.
She lifted an antler from the pile, then set it back in place. It was real, and the bones of cattle and horses and wild things mixed in with the mound of antlers were real. She imagined Griff carrying them in from the surrounding countryside. The years it must have taken.
On the northmost edge of the meadow she found a split-log bench and sat, her eyes welling with a sense of unexpected peace, her arms and legs gone weak. When her vision blurred the figures seemed to rock and leap, dancing around the heaped-up antlers as though the pile were a kind of shrine. She imagined she could hear the joyful hymns they sang.
She sat until it was too dark to see, and when Sammy whined she stood and shook her head, stomping her feet in the damp night air, feeling the episodes of her life edging back in increments: anger, jealousy, disappointment, pride. The belief of having been in love. It had all been
bled away somehow, and she’d been reduced to just a simpler, and quieted, animal. She looked up into the spray of stars.
“No one can know for sure,” she said.
Fourteen
HE WOKE AT FIVE-THIRTY, the time he always got up in the summer, and swung his legs over the edge of the bed. He sat listening. No one was moving in the house. He was used to the racket of McEban in the kitchen, noisy and impatient with the coffeepot, the smell of frying bacon. He walked to the door, cracking it open to listen. Still nothing. He tiptoed to the bathroom at the end of the hall, easing the door shut behind him. He peed against the porcelain above the waterline to avoid the sound of splashing. When he was done he lowered the seat and sat. He worried it would be too loud if he flushed, deciding not to chance it. He hadn’t been here long enough to know the rules.
In his bedroom again he dressed and sat in the desk chair by the window looking out at the empty street below. A boy on a bicycle rode past throwing rolled newspapers from the canvas saddlebags at the back of his bike. Each paper was wrapped in clear plastic, and the boy gripped it by the excess part of the sleeve, swinging it around his head before letting it fly. Like David was supposed to have done with his slingshot. He wanted to rush out of the house, introduce himself, offer to help, but he didn’t. The rules again.
He thought the room must be someone’s office when they didn’t have a guest. There was a computer on the desk, a Mac like McEban’s, but he didn’t turn it on. Beside the desk were stacks of papers, books and boxes, and he peeked around in one and found a hole-punch, a stapler and padded envelopes, but the snooping just made him more nervous and he left the others untouched. He didn’t want to be caught going through someone’s belongings. There was still no one up in the house.
He put his shoes on to go downstairs, careful to place his feet where each step butted up against the wallboard, because he’d seen stairs built, knowing the boards were nailed solidly at the edges and wouldn’t squeak. In the living room he sat on the couch, then moved to a chair because he didn’t want to hog a big piece of furniture all to himself.
He was chilly and rubbed his arms. At first, he couldn’t figure out why Laramie was so much cooler than the ranch. It was August here too. And then he’d spotted the vent in the ceiling of his room and, holding his hand underneath, felt the rush of air. They kept their whole house colder than the bank in Ishawooa.
In the kitchen he poured a glass of milk. He thought this would be all right, that it might even be expected. It had been late when he and his father arrived the night before, but his father’s wife had waited up for them. Her name was Claire, and she was so pretty he forgot about being tired. She’d given him a glass of milk without asking if he wanted one, and made a sandwich with plenty of mayonnaise when he said that’s how he liked it. He thought about making a sandwich this morning but didn’t want to risk the disturbance. When he finished the milk he placed the glass in the sink, running it full of water, as McEban had taught him to, so a crust wouldn’t form in the bottom.
He thought about going outside, but what if Rodney got up and couldn’t find him? He counted the squares in the linoleum. Twenty-five across and twenty the other direction. He did the math.
When he couldn’t sit anymore, he searched very quietly under the sink and in the pantry, finding an all-purpose cleaner and a brush, a bucket and rubber gloves, and got down on his knees cleaning one square thoroughly, and then the next, subtracting against the total. That’s where he was when Claire came in wearing a pink-and-lavender robe, staring at him openmouthed as if she’d discovered a thief. She wasn’t wearing slippers, her feet so white he could see the blue veins beneath the skin.
He said he was sorry, that he hoped he hadn’t woken her.
“Oh, my God,” she said. She hugged him. She called him a sweet boy, and he stayed as still as he could, breathing shallowly, enjoying every bit of it. He didn’t think about pulling away. His mother was good at lots of things, like telling stories, but she wasn’t much of a toucher. McEban hugged him sometimes, but not like this. He couldn’t remember any similar experience in his life.
Later that morning his father loaded everyone in the car, Claire, and his new brother and sister, Kurt and Corley, and they bought a paper bucket of chicken, mashed potatoes, rolls, gravy and coleslaw at the Colonel’s, and drove east out of town up a long grade until they topped out in the National Forest. Vedauwoo. That’s what the place was called and it was cool as the house up there, though the sun was hot on their faces. Big, pale stones were standing everywhere, like a herd of elephants, and when he stood in the glare reflecting off a stone it felt as if he was onstage at the high school in Sheridan, which he’d done once in a play, with all the spotlights on him, unable to see the audience, even with his hand raised over his eyes.
Claire spread a blanket out in the shade of one of the stones, holding little Corley on her lap, and they had their picnic. The gravy and potatoes were barely warm, but it didn’t matter. Everyone was relaxed and quick to laugh, and then he and his father threw a football back and forth, letting Kurt try when he wanted, but he was only a year older than his sister, only three and a half, and wasn’t any good. When Kenneth lobbed the ball softly toward his little outstretched arms, it bounced into his face and he cried until Claire took him by the wrists and swung him around in circles.
On the ride back to Laramie he tried to keep every episode of the day linked together in his mind, like a highway with each separate memory represented by the yellow dashes in the middle, so he could tell McEban. But he already knew that Claire’s hair in the sunlight was what he’d remember most. Above anything else. It was a deep red color, and he’d always liked red hair and thought Rodney must too. That it was a preference he’d gotten from his father. And she had freckles on her forehead and arms that had darkened in the sun as the afternoon wore on, and he liked those too.
On Monday his father went back to work at the university. He was teaching summer school but said he didn’t mind, that he liked to stay busy and they could use the extra money.
Kenneth got up with him and when they were eating their cereal—because that’s what you had for breakfast in Laramie—he asked his father to make a list of chores. Rodney just laughed at first, reminding him he was on vacation, and then Kenneth brought him the pad and pen by the phone. Rodney’s list said:
Play basketball in the driveway.
Sweep the driveway with the broom in the garage if you feel like it.
Take a nap after lunch.
Read a book.
There’s a shelf of DVDs, but don’t watch the ones rated R.
Enjoy yourself.
After his father left, and before Claire and the little kids got up, he swept the driveway. He thought about calling McEban to see how he was, but he had no idea what a long-distance phone call cost. Besides, he’d almost cried when Claire hugged him, so he wasn’t sure what hearing McEban’s voice would make him do.
He took his wallet from his back pocket and slipped out the credit-card-size calendar he’d gotten at the feed store in Ishawooa, counting out how many days were left. Eighteen. He counted twice to make sure, then put his wallet back.
He left a note on the counter for Claire and walked a couple of blocks down Baker, stopping where it dead-ended into Ninth. He could see a park across the street with a lake in the middle. He waited for a break in the traffic and sprinted across, walking around the lake twice before sitting on the curb watching for license plates from different states. There weren’t as many as he’d hoped, and then Claire was coming down Baker. She had Corley up against her hip, Kurt by the hand, and his little brother was sucking the thumb of his other hand. He crossed back to where she stood waiting for him.
“I left a note,” he said.
“That’s how I knew where you were. And I saw the list your father made.” She set the little girl down, holding the back of her collar so she couldn’t go anywhere. Kurt stood gripping the crotch of his pants. “Do you have
to go to the bathroom?”
He shook his head.
“Are you sure?”
Kurt shook his head again.
“Can you swim in that lake?” Kenneth asked.
“I wouldn’t,” she said, and then, “You’re used to a good deal more, aren’t you?”
He shrugged. “McEban and I, and my Uncle Paul, we don’t sit around a lot.”
“What do you do all day when you’re home? I mean in Ishawooa.”
They both acted as if she hadn’t said “home” like that.
“I’ve got a horse,” he told her. He thought about all the chores during a day, from start to finish, and couldn’t decide where to begin. “A ranch doesn’t run itself,” he said. It was something he’d heard McEban say.
Corley began to cry, and Kurt said, “I can ride a horse better than anyone. Better than you. Or, better than anybody.”
“Well, you can help me today.” She spun around toward the house. “That’ll be something to do.”
They all drove to the store together. His job was to keep his brother from touching anything, which wasn’t especially hard after Claire let the kids pick out their candy. She asked him what his favorite was and he said a box of brownie mix. That made her laugh, so he was glad that’s what he’d chosen. He’d also been thinking about a bag of Skittles. The small one.
When they got home and unloaded the groceries, she pointed out what cupboards and drawers he should look in for the things he needed to mix his brownies. His brother and sister painted on tablets of paper laid out on the kitchen floor, and they ate lunch while the oven was heating.
“Did your mother teach you to cook?” she asked.
“McEban did.”
She wiped Corley’s mouth, the little girl fighting away from her. “I hear your mother’s writing a book.”
He set the pan in the oven, squaring it in the middle of the top rack. It made him uneasy to talk about his mother’s talents, because he knew how much she relied on the advice of ghosts. Ghosts made him nervous. “It’s about how to live a spiritual life.” He sat back down at the table. “She says everybody needs to heal their relationship with the world.” He was proud of his memory. “She says we have to break free from our trances of unworthiness and fear.”