by Kimball Lee
“We all die when we’re meant to, boy, I was a coward and didn’t know how to go on without her. You were okay, if I could do it all over again….” He says and coughs and a thin line of blood trails down his chin.
I stand over him, pull a tissue from a box and wipe the blood away. He sighs and makes a gurgling sound low in his chest.
“You’re a good boy, a decent man. I’m tired of livin’, thought maybe you’d be the one to kill me, but you ain’t the kind to harm nobody. Don’t know why I tried to beat the goodness out of ya, make ya more like me. You ain’t like me, Holt, hear me? I’m gonna tell you this just once, you’re the better man by a long shot,” he says and his voice is only a blood-tinged rasp.
I have to bend down, lean close to make out his words, they’re barely a whisper, his breath shallow, chest still and unmoving, and the line on the monitor flattens out.
“You’re goin’ up to where I come from, Montana, that’s where I was born, maybe I still got kin somewhere. Burn me up when I’m gone, scatter me up in them mountains, let me sink down in that Flathead River where I used to fish….”
“I love you Dad,” I say and I want to touch his hand, offer him some small comfort, but he wouldn’t want that.
“I know you do… son.” Those are the last words before the room gets deathly quiet and his eyes fall closed for good.
The monitors shriek out a warning, but it’s too late, it was too late when Wes McCauley found him lying half dead in back of that old dive bar. A nurse shuffles in clicking her tongue, shaking her head, searching for a pulse that will never beat again.
“What a shame, what a shame,” she jabbers, makes the sign of the cross, and reaches for the rosary in her pocket to chant a final prayer. Then she busies herself by clicking off the monitors, the machines that counted his last minutes, and finally she pulls the sheet over his head and says, “I’ll just give you another minute with him, sweetie pie.”
I walk out into the corridor and Campbell and Wes are waiting with their hats in their hands, heads bowed so they don’t have to meet my eyes.
“He’s gone,” I say and they look up and nod without knowing what to do.
“We got a place for him out on the ranch, Holt,” Wes says.
“That’s right, Holt, we can lay him to rest in our family plot. He used to take flowers to my mother’s grave every Sunday and sit under that big Live-oak listening to the river,” Campbell says.
“He wanted to be cremated,” I say as we walk outside together and stand under the hot Texas sun. “Did you know he was from up North, Wes?”
“Yep, I surely did. I met him up there on a spread outside of Butte. I was on my way down to Ft. Worth and he was down on his luck. So we loaded our horses into my rickety ol’ trailer and drove south together. We pushed a lot cattle around Texas for a lot a years ‘fore we ended up on the Corazon. They was good years when we rode together, nothin’ tyin’ us down, just the cattle and the other cowboys for company. Used to be a man’s world, but things change, the world makes sure of it.”
“I’m taking his ashes with me to Montana, he’ll be happy up there… at last. Scarlet’s coming with me, she loves me, can you believe that? She loves me and I’m gonna make the grandest life you can imagine with her by my side. I asked her to marry me and she said yes. I’ll see y’all later, I’ve got plenty of happiness to catch up on,” I say, and I straighten my cowboy hat and walk away toward the girl who is my destiny.
Maybe I shouldn’t be thinking about a wedding when my father just passed from this earth. But mixed with sorrow is the greatest joy I’ve ever known. My father told me he loves me—not so many words—but the meaning was there, and I know him better than anyone. He released me from pain, from the burden of this bone-crunching guilt that has threatened to crush me all of my days.
And Scarlet, she’s not the kind to give up on what she wants and loves. She’s not loud and boisterous like her two best friends, but she’s a fighter, she has a quiet way of getting under a man’s skin so that there’s no cure. Even if there was, I don’t want a cure for Scarlet, she’s mine and I’m hers. So I’m gonna load up my pickup truck with what matters most—Scarlet, the girl I’m gonna marry—then we’ll take my father’s ashes home and set him free in the water and the wind. And after they’ve settled in the tree branches and among the river rocks, I’m gonna climb to the tallest peak in Whitefish, Montana and Scarlet and I are gonna tie the knot. After that, who can say what the future holds for us? But I’m betting it all on our happily ever after.
END BOOK 2
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ROWDY
Rough. Rowdy. Reckless.
Book 3
(Gigi, Jon-Wylder and Campbell’s story)
COMING SOON
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