From the History of the Shirts III
Brokeback ficlet/vignette - another glimpse into the history of the two shirts.
Ca. 550 words, movie canon, rated G. Warning for canon angst.
Disclaimer: They do not belong to me, but to Annie Proulx, Diana Ossana, Larry McMurtry and Focus Features. I make no profit of any kind except for the inspiration I find in thinking and writing of Jack and Ennis.
A/N: See previous entry
Like a ghostly cricket, creaking where a house was burned
Every visit to Lightning Flat followed the same pattern. He’d endure his father’s baleful scowls, and smile at his mother’s pale words of greeting. If he’d given them advance notice, she always had his favorite childhood treat ready to serve, welcoming him with a cherry cake on the table.
They’d talk a bit about the ranch and the animals and the weather, any news to be had about the dwindling number of neighbors, about Lureen and Bobby and the business down in Childress, and then he’d take his gear up to his room. His mom kept the room unchanged, it looked just like when he was a boy. He supposed he appreciated her efforts and the sentiments behind them, though the boy he’d once been seemed ever more a stranger to him.
He would change into work clothes, go back down and help his dad around the place, help with the animals or with repair work, whatever needed doing most depending on the season.
In the strained silence of the evening hours he’d tell them an early good night and go up to his room, up to the whispers of the past, would always sit a bit looking down the empty road, all his old yearning welling up in him. As a boy his desperate longing didn’t have any specific goal, he just pined to be away. Far away, anywhere else. Anywhere.
Now he yearned for one thing, one man, one life, but it still seemed as elusive as the stars beyond the horizon.
Only then would he finally look at the shirts, almost reluctantly, torturously. He’d lift them from their hiding place, hold them close, feel the soft-rough reality of them with his hands, his face, in the core of his being.
The one tangible connection between his troubled disappointing present and that distant, shimmering past.
The proof that his dreams were within reach, once. Had seemed to be, anyhow. Till he was brutally punched awake.
Stubbornly he refused to let go of those symbols made of simple and brittle everyday cloth. Even coming as he did from having Ennis all to himself for a few days, only to see the man leave him again, as tight-lipped and closed-off as ever, without a backward glance.
It wasn’t in his nature to stop hoping.
He’d hold the shirts tight, close his eyes, let memories, emotions and desires mingle freely in his mind. It became his secret and intensely private ritual, alone in the dark, reaffirming that he still could feel, that he still held the dream alive. Ennis. Hope and pain and love and despair, locked in endless struggle in his heart.
It wore him down, day by day and year by year.
But he couldn’t let it go. In the end he always placed the shirts back, carefully, almost reverently, with a heavy sigh and a “damn you, Ennis!”
In the end he always found the way, somehow, to face the harsh light of another empty day on the bleak, unforgiving plain.
The secret dream remained hidden in his closet. Worn and bloodstained, crumpled and torn. But not dead. It wouldn’t die, it couldn’t die - as long as Jack drew breath.