by Jim Harrison
“What’s your name?”
“Sarah,” she said in a whisper because that was all she could manage.
He nodded as if he’d received an important piece of information and strode to his pickup. Meanwhile she felt a heat in her lower body almost like she might pee her pants. The girls circled her wondering what he had said but she walked out the door and watched his truck head down the road encircled by dust. She was startled by her feelings but decided she couldn’t think about it at the time. It would take a trip to the canyon to figure it out.
The birthday party was subdued because everyone was tired and Priscilla couldn’t come because “a certain special someone” had shown up. Frank always referred to Priscilla as “Tomcat” which Sarah didn’t like but she had admitted to herself that the nickname was appropriate. She had a peculiar sense of foreboding when she saw Tim wince twice while inspecting her new used vehicle. The second time he paled crawling out from under the pickup where he’d inspected the muffler.
“She’s got about a year on her,” Tim said, and Sarah wondered why a muffler was a “she.” “This country is hard on mufflers,” he added.
The elk loin was grilled perfectly but Tim was a bit pissed that his German chocolate cake was a little lopsided. He sipped from his whiskey flask and she saw him sneak a pill with his back turned. Her father had a two-dollar bottle of Gallo burgundy and poured her a few ounces. They toasted and the men sang a horrible version of “Happy Birthday.”
Twice that night Sarah had gotten up to look at her truck in the dim yard light. She fully understood that it meant freedom. Unlike Peppy, Frank never tried to control her. There was always the example of his younger sister Rebecca who had been wild in her youth but now was an important astronomer on the faculty of the University of Arizona in Tucson. Rebecca had only visited them a couple of times because she loathed Peppy and the whole idea of Sarah’s homeschooling.
In the morning Sarah confronted her father.
“What’s wrong with Tim?” In the night she’d recalled that she’d first noticed that Tim was in pain a few weeks before when he took her to the county seat in his old Studebaker so she could get a learner’s driving permit. He had stumbled in a cafe when they’d stopped for a hamburger and when he’d caught himself at the table’s edge he’d lost his color.
“He’s feeling poorly.” Frank was listening to the weather and livestock report without interest.
“I figured that. I want to know why?”
“He didn’t want you to know anything on your birthday. Well, you know he was gone two days last week. He was at the V.A. hospital in Great Falls. There are five kinds of prostate cancer. Three aren’t so bad and two are real bad. He’s got one of the real bad ones. These old cowboys are used to putting up with pain and he waited too long for any possible treatment. It’s spread around, you know, metastasized.”
Sarah began to sob and Frank came over and put his hands on her shoulders. Frank couldn’t think of a thing to say about an obviously fatal illness.
When Sarah went outside to start her morning’s work in the greenhouse and the open garden she barely noticed her red pickup. The lump in her throat was overwhelming. She kept on walking up toward Tim’s cabin meeting Rover, who looked distressed, halfway. Tim was dozing in his rocker on the porch facing east toward the rising sun. There was water and a bottle of pills on a small table beside him. She was questioning herself whether anyone had a religion to deal with this. Peppy had browbeaten her with her own evangelical religion but she had followed her father’s example and not much had stuck. Her father had taught her astronomy all too well setting up his Questar in the nighttime yard. Sarah could not imagine that people like God and Jesus shaped like humans could invent the billions of galaxies. She meant the gray-bearded God sitting on a throne behind a gate and the Jesus perpetually on a cross with blood leaking from his hands and feet. The invisible Holy Spirit made more sense. Someone had to invent horses, dogs, and birds. She thought she sensed a spirit of some sort in certain creatures or places but was unsure about humans who according to her history books had a grim and murderous record. As she was sitting there beside the sleeping Tim her mind whirled with the immensity of it all, and then it winnowed down into the inevitable self-pity. How can I lose the only man I love in my life except my dad? Her loneliness was as big as the landscape.
Tim awoke and she took his hand.
“I suppose you’ve been told?”
“Yes.”
“It feels like I’m sitting on a spike or a hot rock. I figured it would go away.”
“I’m so sorry.”
They drove up to their miniature canyon with her at the wheel of the Studebaker and Rover between them ever alert for threat. It was a warm morning and she reminded herself to be wary for rattlesnakes. She helped him up onto her flattish boulder.
“I hate these goddamned pills. They make me woozy as a bottle of whiskey but they said the cancer is traveling up my spine.”
She cradled him with his head and shoulders on her lap and the braless nipple of a breast beneath her T-shirt grazing his nose.
“You got my heart sounding like a beehive. I suspect this is how I started.”
“There has to be a chance.”
“That isn’t what I was told. Three score and ten is what they call it.”
They went up to the canyon for nearly another month until he couldn’t walk and then she would visit his cabin. Several times he called her Charlotte, the name of his first love over near Livingston, and they would laugh. A hospice woman came from the county seat during the day. She and Tim had known each other in childhood and didn’t like each other. Sarah would referee their spats.
“In first grade she was always beating on me,” Tim said.
“You and the other boys peed on my dog. You were the one I could catch,” Laverne said. She was about seventy, quite religious, and an expert on cancer care having nursed her husband and sister through their deaths, the husband with a brain tumor, and the sister pancreatic. She had a sense of humor and after praying on her knees beside Tim’s bed she’d say, “Here’s God’s answer to pain,” and give him a shot of morphine. At night Sarah gave Tim a shot which was illegal but Laverne would say, “I don’t give a shit about the law.” She carried a six-shooter in her purse and while driving she’d shoot out the window of her car at marmots, coyotes, crows, whatever. To her knowledge she had never hit anything.
Sarah slept on a cot near Tim’s bed. Sometimes she’d read to him from old Zane Grey novels which she didn’t care for, and sometimes she’d play old-time country music like Marty Robbins, Merle Haggard, and George Jones which she also didn’t like preferring Pink Floyd and the Grateful Dead or classical music.
What kept her going was her four hours of work with her father in the gardens every morning. Counting the different lettuces they were raising twenty-three kinds of vegetables, some of them exotic for Montana but they sold well to the university people in Missoula. When they first raised arugula and radicchio to fulfill a demand Sarah and her father were suspicious of the flavors but shrugged off their own tastes. Japanese eggplant was also a mystery. It was the spirit of repetition in gardening that soothed a person. She’d finish work, eat a little lunch, doze in the hammock for fifteen minutes, then head up to Tim’s.
The deathwatch was forty-nine days but Tim was dead a couple weeks before he died. Well beyond consciousness it was hard for a body to let go. Sarah that evening kept putting her face to his to see if he was still breathing and finally near midnight he wasn’t. She actually thought she saw his spirit rise and float out the open front door over Rover’s head who turned to look at her. She shivered and looked around at the cabin which was homemade and crude but beautiful to her. There was a woodstove and then a propane heater which was used when the weather got to its coldest. There were two rifles and a shotgun in a cabinet but the only thing of beauty was a wood chest that doubled as a coffee table. When he was still conscious he told her that t
he cabin was hers, also about three thousand dollars in a tobacco tin at the bottom of the trunk. The eighty grand that Frank had paid for the land was going to a county fund for the poor and indigent. That last conscious day he had reached out with his left hand, the only one that worked, and touched her breast.
“I don’t want to be impolite but that’s the finest breast I’ve ever seen,” he whispered.
“Thank you.” She stood and curtsied and they both smiled. After that moment he was pretty much incoherent.
Two days later at the small funeral at the canyon’s mouth Sarah strewed Tim’s ashes on the rocks for the rain to wash away as he had requested. Tim had fashioned himself an agnostic (“I don’t really know anything for sure except horses, cows, and dogs”) so there was no preacher, just a half dozen old cowboys, a few townspeople, Laverne, and Frank and Sarah. For lunch after the funeral on Tim’s porch Sarah had made a ham-and-potato salad. The old cowboys drank whiskey and water with their lunch except for one who had taken the pledge. Two took off their hats and their foreheads were so white compared to their brown, wizened faces. Listening she learned that at one time Tim had been the best fistfighter in the county which didn’t jibe with the gentle old man she had known.
The next two days she struggled to prepare her 4-H club vegetable display for the upcoming county fair and rodeo. She had burned up body and mind in her long vigil and felt generally out of contact except with the steering wheel of her truck. Her father was no help because he spent so much time on the phone with his ex-wife about whether or not to pull the plug on Brother who was now unconscious with his brain damage and severe pneumonia. Frank’s ex-wife had been in AA for three years and had flipped back into booze with the injury to her son. Frank kept saying to Sarah that her half brother was a “vegetable” which made Sarah feel odd about her 4-H display exhibit.
Luckily she felt secure in her truck because when she got up past Lahren’s ranch, normally the range of her world, she felt a little eerie outside her circumscribed Eden. Her father had joined a co-op of a half dozen other growers so that there would be far fewer trips to Great Falls, Helena, and Missoula with the members taking turns on the marketing chores. She mostly drove for two days, stopping now and then to sleep on a two-track leading into the mountains. Once a cowboy on horseback stopped to see if she was okay and Rover went crazy. He was fairly handsome but her senses were dead as a doornail. She even visited the regional high school up near the county seat. It was sprawling and modern, actually crummy-looking she thought, and it was hard to imagine attending it in a month or so. Rover, who was enjoying these drives because dogs are also susceptible to boredom, stared at the high school with incomprehension. Rover had seen nothing of the outside world what with Tim always leaving her behind to look after the cabin. On the way home Sarah stopped at the fairgrounds to watch them set up the Ferris wheel and merry-go-round. Men were practicing calf roping and people were pulling in with trailers. She absolutely counted on the fair and rodeo to lift her spirits.
Part II
Chapter 5
On the second and last night of the fair and rodeo the worst possible thing happened to Sarah short of fatal illness and death of which she was recently all too familiar.
She had been sleepwalking since the fair began and was angry at Lad during the “best-groomed horse” event because he misbehaved having developed a hatred for another horse. He was on a lead but advanced on the other horse with his ears laid back and clacking his teeth. It is not largely known that horses, like people, can develop instant hatreds. The judges asked her to get Lad out of the arena for which she needed the help of a cowboy, an embarrassment in itself. Winning the top blue ribbon for her vegetables helped though this was muted by the fact that the competition was dismal.
A good thing happened after the Lad mud bath when the cowboy who helped her said that Lad had probably been gelded late and thought he was still a fighting stud. She was still half in tears and eating a lukewarm hot dog when two girls approached. She had met the tall, rawboned girl with her father up at Tim’s two years before. The short one was feisty and pissed off after winning third in the barrel racing. The girls knew that Sarah was coming to their regional high school in the fall and wanted to know if she wanted to join their hunting club. There were two girls now and Sarah would make three. They could hunt elk near Sarah’s place and antelope five hours east near Forsyth where the tall girl, Marcia, had an uncle who owned a big ranch with plenty of antelope. Marcia herself had shot three since she was twelve and also a cow elk over near Lincoln. Sarah confessed that though she had gone hunting a dozen times with Tim she had yet to pull the trigger on an animal. Before doing so Tim wanted her to be able to fire five shots within a five-inch pattern at a hundred yards with either his .270 or .30-06. The girls agreed with this and said that there was plenty of time to practice before hunting season.
This meeting gave Sarah an expansive but brief relief from her sleepwalking mood which affects anyone who has experienced the recent death of a beloved. She had no one to turn to because her friend Priscilla was a pleasant nitwit and her father had emotional limitations. His own son was near death and he was flying back to South Carolina in a day but he couldn’t say a single thing about Tim or Brother.
She put the irritable Lad away in the horse barn with hay and water but no oats. It occurred to her that Lad had misbehaved in part because he wasn’t used to being around a crowd which only reminded her of her own stunted access to people. On the way to the 4-H heifer barn where the 4-H club camped out her mind flared in anger at the whole idea of homeschooling and that she had been a puppet of her parents’ daffy ideas that though you had to live within the culture you could minimize the bad effects by staying as remote as possible. Now she found herself quite happy that Peppy had run off with the rich rancher because finally she could join the human race.
In the box stall she and Priscilla had as a camping spot Sarah lay down on her sleeping bag spread on fresh alfalfa which had a sweet, haunting odor. Priscilla had been sent home by their leader Mrs. Lahren to get some different clothes to replace her very short short-shorts. “Young woman, your ass flaps are sticking out!” she said and everyone laughed. Sarah was thinking that everyone touches each other and hugs but she had mostly just petted Rover. She slid a hand in Priscilla’s pack feeling the usual condoms and then she reached what she wanted, a small rack of two-ounce shooters of Kahlúa. Sarah didn’t care for whiskey or beer but she liked the coffee-chocolate flavor of Kahlúa. Priscilla would ride to the liquor store in the county seat with her mother when she restocked the village tavern. While Giselle was choosing stock Priscilla would go into the walk-in cooler with the geeky clerk who was in his midthirties and let him suck her breasts for a minute in exchange for a dozen Kahlúa shooters. When she heard the story Sarah had said, “You’re so biological,” and Priscilla had answered, “What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”
Sarah lay splayed on her back listening to the Grateful Dead on her tape deck wondering how a tiny bottle of booze could make you feel that much better. She slept for two hours until dinnertime.
In a hall in the middle of the fairgrounds they had their annual beef barbecue. Outside there were a number of steer halves roasting on wood-fired grills. There were at least five hundred diners who drank beer and gorged on the meat. Whiskey was banned on the fairgrounds but most men carried their own bottles anyway. When dinner was over all the tables were pushed off to the side and a country band that had traveled over three hundred miles from Billings began setting up their equipment. Mrs. Lahren had insisted that Sarah do the warm-up for the band on an upright piano. Sarah had snuck off to the toilet to have another Kahlúa which she downed in a single gulp feeling her body suffused with warmth. Nearly all of the young people would have preferred a rock band but ranchers controlled the fair and at least Sarah’s ragtime and boogie-woogie was a compromise. She didn’t have to look to play and she exchanged glances with the country band fiddler who was plu
gging in amplifiers. Priscilla had told her all about the band. The fiddler who was big and mean-looking was in his twenties and hauled horses for his living with his partner, the bass player, because they couldn’t quite make it as a full-time band. They had taken fifth place in calf roping that day and were too erratic to be really good. She also knew that the fiddler’s name was Karl and he hailed originally from Meeteetse, Wyoming.
She played a half-hour set to everyone’s delight until the end when she snuck in a little Mendelssohn and Karl moved forward and played along with her beautifully to her surprise. Afterward he bowed to her in mock lust or maybe it wasn’t mock. She was jangled and exhausted and couldn’t wait to get out of there to have her third wonder-working Kahlúa.
“How old are you, cutie?” Karl said grabbing her arm way too tight.
“I’m fifteen, sir.” She always called older men sir.
“Fifteen will get you twenty,” Karl laughed and turned away.