Chapter 32
Suggested music: "Hallelujah", Rufus Wainwright http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRODKOGco_o
The first riding class was over, but it took Ennis another few hours to get the horses settled to his satisfaction. After putting the saddles away and exchanging the bridles for halters, he gave each a thorough brushing, inspected each hoof and filled each stall's bucket with fresh water. Jerry had helped out enough to shorten the tasks a little, but Ennis knew that his handling of the horses was being weighed and measured. This didn't trouble him, as he was doing the type of work that had become routine to him before his twentieth birthday.
The class had been another matter but he knew that had gone well too. His five pupils were a middle-aged couple wearing designer-label jeans and obviously new boots who were considering leasing a pair of horses; two horse-crazy little girls aged 9 and 10; and to Andrea had unexpectedly dropped Jonathan off for his first time in a saddle. “It's not Wyoming but this is as close as I'm getting right now,” he said with studied carelessness but “he's been talking about it all week,” Andrea told Ennis under her breath. “Once he heard about your teachin riding classes there was no stopping him.” Jonathan did prove to be a quick learner, surprising Ennis with his adeptness at staying in the saddle and calming his horse, Lucky, when the animal was startled by a windblown handful of leaves. “Takes more than a couple of old leaves to throw me,” he'd said to the openly admiring two girls.
“Ain't a filly that can throw me.....” Ennis wondered again on his way back up to the cabin why, with no physical resemblance, Jonathan sometimes made him think of Jack.
The sloping path to the cabin leveled out for a few yards next to a bend in the same creek that crossed the road between the house and barns. It ran near enough to the cabin that Ennis guessed it would be visible in winter; for now, he could hear it at night with the cabin windows open. The water moved briskly going down the ravine, slowing a bit before the grade steepened again. Something about the stream’s rustling urgency, the way it angled briefly toward the path’s narrow terrace, and the large downed tree next to the path reminded him a little of his and Jack’s campsite that first ‘fishing trip’ escape to the mountains. He stopped and watched the stream briefly now, not quite letting in the thought that he was delaying his return to the cabin.
He’d regretted throwing the two shirts haphazardly into a garbage bag, hangars and all; necessary as it had seemed. He’d smoothed out the wrinkles they’d acquired on the short journey and looked for a hook inside the closet door but found only a nail on the outside. He hung the shirts in the closet, telling himself he'll find a hook or nail later. But he’d felt uneasy closing the door, recalling the lonely days in the trailer following Jack’s death, relieved only by dreams at night, his memories and, later, the feeling of Jack's presence. But here, Jack was defined mainly by his absence; by the memory of words spoken in haste or not spoken at all; and of Jack’s modest dream of a ‘cow and calf operation’ that night by the campfire.
His memory of the mysterious long night with Jack a year ago had been an invisible charm that had lightened the load of finality that had haunted him. Now it was an uncomfortable reminder of the promises he had made then; but he could think of no way to make it right. While the bed he slept in was comfortable enough, he would often look at the closet door as he drifted off and imagine the two shirts hanging in the darkness, hoping to dream about Jack. It wasn’t until that night after the first riding class that he did.
It was on the shore of the Lake; he recognized it well enough though the beach was covered with pebbles rather than the sand he was used to at David’s beach house. The air was cool; the sounds of gulls and waves and the vivid blues and greens of the water were the same. But his body felt different: lighter, more compact and full of a restless energy like a constant electric current. He was running hard, very hard, but still the energy occasionally surged through his feet and caused him to stamp them down harder than necessary. He didn’t glance over at the companions racing next to him; didn’t need to as he knew they were Jack and David. All three of them were screaming and he sensed an opponent running behind and gaining steadily but oddly he had no sense of danger, only exhilaration.
Someone grabbed him by the arm and he wrenched away only to be caught again and almost flung down on the stones before the person behind him encircled his waist and swung him around, dragging him backward. His two companions stopped running and he heard three male voices laughing. It was the treble laughter of children.
He struggled hard, almost broke free but at the last second his opponent swung him around again and pushed him toward the water, while shouting two words that sounded like a vocal sneeze. He was falling toward a breaking wave, looking sideways into it and anticipating its coldness and sure enough, the water embraced him instantly, the icy impact almost taking his breath away ---
Unlike most dreams that start to fade before the sleeper is even fully awake, this one stayed with him all day. It didn’t feel like a memory exactly but tantalizingly familiar all the same, the way that a just a few musical notes from a loved but half-forgotten song are familiar.
Jerry had been surprised when Ennis showed up for work a few days early, but accepted the explanation of finding a truck sooner than he’d expected. “We didn’t bring anything up to the cabin, you can get that from Rachel,” he instructed.
Ennis’ first inside view of the house he’d passed earlier was an expansive living room with a narrow adjoining room that served as an office. He filled out the tax forms that Rachel Corkran supplied, sitting in a straight backed chair at a polished antique dining room table covered with paperwork and ledger books. The living room’s wood floor was polished to the point of looking slippery and the walls were ivory-white but the cherry red and bright plaid coverings on the furniture grouped around a large TV set, the multicolored rag rugs on the floor and the collection of simple solid colored pottery on shelves scattered around the room kept it from looking formal or austere.
Rachel matched his first impression of the house. In her late 30s, with a face that looked younger and a manner that seemed much older, she wore trim jeans with an oversized man’s cotton shirt tucked in at a tiny waist, and only the faintest pink translucent polish on the nails of short, spatulate fingers that immediately reminded him of David’s hands. The mass of curly, almost-black hair pulled back from her face and her unusually dark eyes both lightened her skin to almost marble-white in contrast. She spoke to him in perfect grammar and complete sentences, with as neutral an accent as any he’d heard on TV news, other than the Minnesota compressed vowels he was now used to. But as with the room, he had no impression of stiffness or formality; a mystery only partly solved for him later when he heard her described as having a “finishing school voice”.
He’d returned to the cabin with a box full of sheets, towels and blankets that Rachel had given him, promising that “I’ll get the kitchen stuff together later today and send it down.” It was mid-morning, and enough sunlight had found its way through the surrounding fir trees to render the panes in one of the uncurtained windows glowing white; reminding him that he’d left the glass of “Lake Superior seashells” on the window sill of his attic room. It was of no practical use but its absence made the cabin seem incomplete, as the bare mattress where he’d slept uneasily that first night, wrapped in Jack’s quilt, had not.
Last night’s dream finally settled in the back of his thoughts as he started out in the truck with a list of feed and supplies Jerry had given him. The route took him along Skyline Drive for a few miles and seeing the Lake sprawling out to the horizon again gave him the feeling of a nagging hunger being satisfied. The colors in his absent glass of beach stones suggested the Lake’s more vigorous hues that his eyes had become accustomed to savoring: blues ranging from cobalt to bluish-white, pale greens and transparent turquoises, and the coral, carnation, rose and gold and deep purples that he’d drunk in at sunrise. The Aerial Bridge was up at the moment, reminding him of how he’d secretly enjoyed being “bridged” on the way to or from work, when he and David had used the enforced pause to watch the boats come and go from the harbor.
David loitered in his thoughts again at a supermarket on the way back. A quart of milk and bag of store-brand coffee reminded him of David’s indulgence in expensive coffee with heavy cream, and a package of sliced cheese for sandwiches made him recall the taste of the cheese grits he’d eaten on a few Sundays. On his way back he glimpsed an arched stone bridge a few blocks away that brought back the feeling of his freefall off the rock ledge into a pond of cool green water, and of an impulsive kiss under a waterfall.
The abrupt way they’d parted caused a splintering pain when he recalled it, as did the suffocating panic he’d felt, and David’s brittle resignation over his leaving. In one sense, the past few days had been a relief. He’d always liked solitude and a week of living, sleeping and working with another person had begun to grate on his nerves. While he enjoyed getting his privacy back, he’d started to wish the cabin had a television, so the noise would make him less aware of how his solitude had drifted into loneliness.
The following night was chilly, and he was glad of Jack’s quilt around him as he drifted off to sleep. He listened to the watery music of the stream nearby and thought of other mountain streams far off in Wyoming; but as he drifted off to sleep he also thought longingly of harbor sounds, the calls of gulls and the occasional lapping of waves on windy nights.
He was at Lightning Flat, heading toward the small stand of trees at the cabin he and Jack had shared in his imaginings. Just as he thought he saw Jack’s face in the window, the cabin was suddenly gone and then re-appeared atop a steep hill dotted with boulders:, a rarity for Lightning Flat. Now he glimpsed David’s face in the window and Jack stood atop the hill, beckoning to him with an upward sweep of his arm. But as he started up the trail leading to the top of the hill, the earth sank under his feet like sand and the hill was replaced by a path leading into a forest so dense he could hardly find his way.
Now he saw no faces, only heard David’s voice calling “Ennis! What’s keeping you?” He turned his head toward the direction the voice had come from, only to step off the path and feel the ground dissolving as if he had blundered onto the edge of a riverbank. Someone took his arm and pulled him back on the trail and he heard Jack’s voice: “that’ll get ya nowhere, cowboy.” He turned his head quickly but Jack was gone and he was furious that couldn’t seem to find either of them.
He’d been saddened at not feeling Jack’s presence near him in the cabin, even wondering if Jack had given up on him after his flight from the beach house. When he woke, he knew he was wrong. In his trailer at Riverton he’d often sensed Jack being nearby: that was more than a vague impression now. He could feel something close to an electrical charge in the air and every pore and hair on his skin seemed almost to vibrate; a feeling he’d only had once, in Wyoming, when lightning had struck a tree only 20 or 30 feet from him. He’d regarded the first dream and its modest aftermath as an oddity; now he had no doubt that Jack had not gone anywhere.
He made coffee, got dressed and went to work all the same.
A few days later Jerry saddled his horse Molly and gave Ennis a tour of the riding trail. It left the gravel road and went up a steeper part of the hill, where they loosened the reins and let the horses find their own footing. The trail doubled back along the hilltop with a pleasant view of the pastures, the river and the woods, with the house barely visible. “Nice view to take people to in the fall when the leaves turn,” Jerry remarked. “Not much like what you’d get in Wyoming though, I’ll bet.” “Right,” Ennis answered, thinking of the view from the upper pasture on Brokeback. “Some places you c’n see for miles.”
At the edge of the meadow the trail angled back to meander through the mixed woods of hardwoods and spruce trees, crossing the stream by a simple footbridge. As it headed back downhill Ennis listened to the sound of the stream, getting louder as it picked up speed, and looked at the fir trees around them and imagined that the shadows of two younger men on horseback, exploring the byways of a Wyoming mountain, rode nearby.
As he went about his work that week, Ennis often thought he had turned into two different people, endlessly quarreling about where to go and how to get there. His work was not only better paid but easier than what he’d been used to: he often went back to the cabin tired at the end of the day but unlike his last few years of ranch work the backs of his legs didn’t ache and he didn’t have to make a conscious effort to walk without stooping. Jerry was clearly impressed by Ennis skill with horses and with nervous new riders, and mentioned having him up to the house for dinner “when Tom feels a little better.” He’d explained about his father-in-law’s health and Ennis nodded but said nothing, seeing no reason to tell Jerry that he’d already heard considerably more than that via Grandma’s gossip pipeline. And Andrea had called the phone in the barn’s office to tell him how much Jonathan was looking forward to his next riding lesson.
But whenever he returned to the cabin, a sense of impotent panic came over him. He couldn’t shake a feeling that the two dreams, which he had no doubt had been sent in some way by Jack, had fortified his sense that something had gone terribly wrong when he’d left the beach house and had come to the cabin as an escape. Comfortable as life there might be, he wondered with dread if it might become a replacement for the trailer in Riverton whose door he had shut two months ago with no intention of opening again. The feeling became unnerving enough for him to buy a pint of whiskey and use a few shots to help him get to sleep at night. He knew the whiskey would do nothing to either aid or impede the next dream that would surely come.
He recognized the desolate wind-scoured plain immediately, even if he hadn’t seen the familiar weather-beaten wooden house whose roof was patched in more places than it was whole. He’d lived there until he was 14 and hadn’t been back since. The barn, in no better condition than the house, was visible behind it but what caught Ennis attention was the root cellar he’d visited so many times when his mother had asked him to fetch something. The door stood open and his feet moved him automatically toward it and he sensed that this, not the house or barn, was what he needed to see.
The smell on the way down the worn steps was mostly familiar too: earth and fungus and old grass and an undefined mustiness overlaid with an odor of decay. But the latter was different from the occasional rotted vegetable the cellar harbored. It was; more like the effluvium he’d smelled coming from a drainage ditch that morning that his father, hand clasped firmly on the back of his neck, had marched him and his brother out to see the battered warning it contained. He wanted more than anything to turn and run back up the stairs, flee somewhere, anywhere but where he was but in the manner of dreams his body and feet moved on their own course.
The unremarkable vegetables, potatoes and preserves the cellar usually held were gone but it was not empty. An open coffin stood in the center, surrounded on all sides by blazing candles that, oddly, seemed to give only a little light. It got slightly brighter when it reached the walls, revealing intruding roots here and there and a network of thick, jagged black streaks that could have been black mold or just the shadows of cracks in the cellar wall. Ennis could again sense Jack nearby, though Jack had never been near Sage as far as he knew; and out of the corner of his eye he could even see Jack standing at the wall near the head of the coffin.
He dreaded approaching the coffin, but his legs moved toward it anyway until he stood next to it in the dimmest part of the candlelight. He looked down and saw his father’s battered face.
A neighbor had identified his parents’ bodies after the accident, and they had been buried in closed coffins. But now he could see the gashes and purpling bruises on his father’s face, the smashed cheekbones and jaw and the unevenness just above the ears where the man’s skull had been split. As he struggled to make his paralyzed legs move him away from the coffin, both eyes opened and he could see a starburst hemorrhage in one. The split lips moved in a smile, the odor of decay now mixed with those of cheap whiskey and rotted teeth and the one good eye looked at him with complete recognition.
“Me not dead.”
A scream jagged up his throat but would not quite come out and his feet truly seemed to be bolted to the floor. Swallowing the scream, he tried instead to call to Jack for help. “Jack! can’t move…. get me - Jack….”
“JACK!” He was back in the cabin, though the glow of the candles and the smells took a second or two to dissipate.
He sat at the edge of the bed for several minutes, shaking badly enough that he knew he wouldn’t be able to stand, and clutching the quilt around him. The first two dreams, puzzling and unnerving as they’d been, had not been frightening but until he was fully awake he was more afraid than he’d ever been in his life. There was no getting back to sleep though it wasn’t yet light: he warmed some coffee on the small stove and sat sipping it, bracing his elbows on the table until his hands were steady. As the purplish-black in the windows lightened to pale blue, he even peered apprehensively out to reassure himself that no root cellar was nearby.
Might as well go ahead and feed the horses and turn them out, he thought, any activity would help. By the time he reached the flat stretch of the trail it was closer to sunrise to dawn, and he glanced down at the log that he’d used as a bench.
Wedged between the log and a small rock outcropping next to it was an eagle feather. It looked identical to the one Jack had worn in his hat for so long, and was inclined at exactly the same jaunty angle. Sitting down on the log, Ennis turned the feather over and over in his hand.
Finding an eagle feather wasn’t remarkable in itself. Eagles were far from uncommon in Duluth, though they were more numerous in the fall and early spring. But as he held it, the images of the root cellar, the candles with their reversed light and his father’s grin and bloodied eye faded into the background.
He’d been pulled in two directions at once with equal force and had been as immobilized as he had been in the root cellar. In his earlier fantasies about the life he could have had with Jack in Lightning Flat it had been the might-have-beens, now never-would-be’s, that had tormented him. They would never have the sweet life Jack had proposed while sitting by the stream at their campsite, but the life he’d had in the past few months and had fled from had its own sweetness and he could not now unlearn the knowledge of what it could be like.
But all the fear and loathing that his father had infected him with and which would never be dead in him had made him shrink inwardly and then panic at the knowledge of how the outside world might see him. Whenever an acquaintance or a stranger on the street looked at him and David he knew what they might be thinking, the images that might be playing in their heads that would not likely be there if they’d encountered a man and woman together. It was a prospect not unlike the idea of going out in public every day with his fly open and no underwear.
His palms were cupping the eagle feather between them like the two halves of a pecan shell with the sweet nut between them. Opening them, he looked at the feather again and recalled sitting next to the campfire with his head bowed, looking at the hat that Jack had removed and placed beside him as he acknowledged that there were no reins on this one.
“If you can’t fix it, you gotta stand it.”
He’d found the answer. If he’d found it then, his future and Jack’s would have been entirely different.
He would never be completely at ease with loving another man, never be unaware of the condemnation he could easily find without even looking for it, never get over the feeling of nakedness and shame. The foundation laid before he’d had any choice would never be leveled.
He could not fix it. So if he wanted the life he’d had a taste of the past few months, he would have to stand it.
It was a harsh bargain, but one that he could meet, on ground he was familiar with. Standing things he couldn’t fix had been a resigned and often bitter reality, but this time there was a great reward to be won. He tucked the eagle feather in his shirt pocket, telling himself to remember to transfer it to a pocket of his old shirt that embraced Jack’s in his closet, and continued down the trail. He would shortly think of what he needed to do best, but first there was work to be done.
Index to chapters:
Chapter 1: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/392.html
Chapter 2: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/523.html
Chapter 3: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/1066.html
Chapter 4: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/1485.html
Chapter 5: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/1704.html
Chapter 6: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/2038.html
Chapter 7: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/2358.html
Chapter 8: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/2635.html
Chapter 9: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/2947.html
Chapter 10: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/3130.html
Chapter 11: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/3356.html
Chapter 12: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/3655.html
Chapter 13: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/3934.html
Chapter 14: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/4154.html
Chapter 15: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/4591.html
Chapter 16: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/4685.html
Chapter 17: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/5094.html
Chapter 18: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/5140.html
Chapter 19: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/5546.html
Chapter 20: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/6249.html
Chapter 21: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/6434.html
Chapter 22: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/6843.html
Chapter 23: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/7306.html
Chapter 24: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/7646.html
Chapter 25: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/7723.html
Summary, Chapters 1-25: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/8106.html
Chapter 26 Part 1: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/8417.html
Chapter 26 Part 2: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/8634.html
Chapter 27: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/8869.html
Chapter 28 Part 1: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/9090.html
Chapter 28 Part 2: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/9498.html
Chapter 28 Part 3: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/9498.html
Chapter 29: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/9953.html
Chapter 30: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/10733.html
Chapter 31 Part 1: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/10870.html
Chapter 31 Part 2: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/11153.html
The first riding class was over, but it took Ennis another few hours to get the horses settled to his satisfaction. After putting the saddles away and exchanging the bridles for halters, he gave each a thorough brushing, inspected each hoof and filled each stall's bucket with fresh water. Jerry had helped out enough to shorten the tasks a little, but Ennis knew that his handling of the horses was being weighed and measured. This didn't trouble him, as he was doing the type of work that had become routine to him before his twentieth birthday.
The class had been another matter but he knew that had gone well too. His five pupils were a middle-aged couple wearing designer-label jeans and obviously new boots who were considering leasing a pair of horses; two horse-crazy little girls aged 9 and 10; and to Andrea had unexpectedly dropped Jonathan off for his first time in a saddle. “It's not Wyoming but this is as close as I'm getting right now,” he said with studied carelessness but “he's been talking about it all week,” Andrea told Ennis under her breath. “Once he heard about your teachin riding classes there was no stopping him.” Jonathan did prove to be a quick learner, surprising Ennis with his adeptness at staying in the saddle and calming his horse, Lucky, when the animal was startled by a windblown handful of leaves. “Takes more than a couple of old leaves to throw me,” he'd said to the openly admiring two girls.
“Ain't a filly that can throw me.....” Ennis wondered again on his way back up to the cabin why, with no physical resemblance, Jonathan sometimes made him think of Jack.
The sloping path to the cabin leveled out for a few yards next to a bend in the same creek that crossed the road between the house and barns. It ran near enough to the cabin that Ennis guessed it would be visible in winter; for now, he could hear it at night with the cabin windows open. The water moved briskly going down the ravine, slowing a bit before the grade steepened again. Something about the stream’s rustling urgency, the way it angled briefly toward the path’s narrow terrace, and the large downed tree next to the path reminded him a little of his and Jack’s campsite that first ‘fishing trip’ escape to the mountains. He stopped and watched the stream briefly now, not quite letting in the thought that he was delaying his return to the cabin.
He’d regretted throwing the two shirts haphazardly into a garbage bag, hangars and all; necessary as it had seemed. He’d smoothed out the wrinkles they’d acquired on the short journey and looked for a hook inside the closet door but found only a nail on the outside. He hung the shirts in the closet, telling himself he'll find a hook or nail later. But he’d felt uneasy closing the door, recalling the lonely days in the trailer following Jack’s death, relieved only by dreams at night, his memories and, later, the feeling of Jack's presence. But here, Jack was defined mainly by his absence; by the memory of words spoken in haste or not spoken at all; and of Jack’s modest dream of a ‘cow and calf operation’ that night by the campfire.
His memory of the mysterious long night with Jack a year ago had been an invisible charm that had lightened the load of finality that had haunted him. Now it was an uncomfortable reminder of the promises he had made then; but he could think of no way to make it right. While the bed he slept in was comfortable enough, he would often look at the closet door as he drifted off and imagine the two shirts hanging in the darkness, hoping to dream about Jack. It wasn’t until that night after the first riding class that he did.
It was on the shore of the Lake; he recognized it well enough though the beach was covered with pebbles rather than the sand he was used to at David’s beach house. The air was cool; the sounds of gulls and waves and the vivid blues and greens of the water were the same. But his body felt different: lighter, more compact and full of a restless energy like a constant electric current. He was running hard, very hard, but still the energy occasionally surged through his feet and caused him to stamp them down harder than necessary. He didn’t glance over at the companions racing next to him; didn’t need to as he knew they were Jack and David. All three of them were screaming and he sensed an opponent running behind and gaining steadily but oddly he had no sense of danger, only exhilaration.
Someone grabbed him by the arm and he wrenched away only to be caught again and almost flung down on the stones before the person behind him encircled his waist and swung him around, dragging him backward. His two companions stopped running and he heard three male voices laughing. It was the treble laughter of children.
He struggled hard, almost broke free but at the last second his opponent swung him around again and pushed him toward the water, while shouting two words that sounded like a vocal sneeze. He was falling toward a breaking wave, looking sideways into it and anticipating its coldness and sure enough, the water embraced him instantly, the icy impact almost taking his breath away ---
Unlike most dreams that start to fade before the sleeper is even fully awake, this one stayed with him all day. It didn’t feel like a memory exactly but tantalizingly familiar all the same, the way that a just a few musical notes from a loved but half-forgotten song are familiar.
Jerry had been surprised when Ennis showed up for work a few days early, but accepted the explanation of finding a truck sooner than he’d expected. “We didn’t bring anything up to the cabin, you can get that from Rachel,” he instructed.
Ennis’ first inside view of the house he’d passed earlier was an expansive living room with a narrow adjoining room that served as an office. He filled out the tax forms that Rachel Corkran supplied, sitting in a straight backed chair at a polished antique dining room table covered with paperwork and ledger books. The living room’s wood floor was polished to the point of looking slippery and the walls were ivory-white but the cherry red and bright plaid coverings on the furniture grouped around a large TV set, the multicolored rag rugs on the floor and the collection of simple solid colored pottery on shelves scattered around the room kept it from looking formal or austere.
Rachel matched his first impression of the house. In her late 30s, with a face that looked younger and a manner that seemed much older, she wore trim jeans with an oversized man’s cotton shirt tucked in at a tiny waist, and only the faintest pink translucent polish on the nails of short, spatulate fingers that immediately reminded him of David’s hands. The mass of curly, almost-black hair pulled back from her face and her unusually dark eyes both lightened her skin to almost marble-white in contrast. She spoke to him in perfect grammar and complete sentences, with as neutral an accent as any he’d heard on TV news, other than the Minnesota compressed vowels he was now used to. But as with the room, he had no impression of stiffness or formality; a mystery only partly solved for him later when he heard her described as having a “finishing school voice”.
He’d returned to the cabin with a box full of sheets, towels and blankets that Rachel had given him, promising that “I’ll get the kitchen stuff together later today and send it down.” It was mid-morning, and enough sunlight had found its way through the surrounding fir trees to render the panes in one of the uncurtained windows glowing white; reminding him that he’d left the glass of “Lake Superior seashells” on the window sill of his attic room. It was of no practical use but its absence made the cabin seem incomplete, as the bare mattress where he’d slept uneasily that first night, wrapped in Jack’s quilt, had not.
Last night’s dream finally settled in the back of his thoughts as he started out in the truck with a list of feed and supplies Jerry had given him. The route took him along Skyline Drive for a few miles and seeing the Lake sprawling out to the horizon again gave him the feeling of a nagging hunger being satisfied. The colors in his absent glass of beach stones suggested the Lake’s more vigorous hues that his eyes had become accustomed to savoring: blues ranging from cobalt to bluish-white, pale greens and transparent turquoises, and the coral, carnation, rose and gold and deep purples that he’d drunk in at sunrise. The Aerial Bridge was up at the moment, reminding him of how he’d secretly enjoyed being “bridged” on the way to or from work, when he and David had used the enforced pause to watch the boats come and go from the harbor.
David loitered in his thoughts again at a supermarket on the way back. A quart of milk and bag of store-brand coffee reminded him of David’s indulgence in expensive coffee with heavy cream, and a package of sliced cheese for sandwiches made him recall the taste of the cheese grits he’d eaten on a few Sundays. On his way back he glimpsed an arched stone bridge a few blocks away that brought back the feeling of his freefall off the rock ledge into a pond of cool green water, and of an impulsive kiss under a waterfall.
The abrupt way they’d parted caused a splintering pain when he recalled it, as did the suffocating panic he’d felt, and David’s brittle resignation over his leaving. In one sense, the past few days had been a relief. He’d always liked solitude and a week of living, sleeping and working with another person had begun to grate on his nerves. While he enjoyed getting his privacy back, he’d started to wish the cabin had a television, so the noise would make him less aware of how his solitude had drifted into loneliness.
The following night was chilly, and he was glad of Jack’s quilt around him as he drifted off to sleep. He listened to the watery music of the stream nearby and thought of other mountain streams far off in Wyoming; but as he drifted off to sleep he also thought longingly of harbor sounds, the calls of gulls and the occasional lapping of waves on windy nights.
He was at Lightning Flat, heading toward the small stand of trees at the cabin he and Jack had shared in his imaginings. Just as he thought he saw Jack’s face in the window, the cabin was suddenly gone and then re-appeared atop a steep hill dotted with boulders:, a rarity for Lightning Flat. Now he glimpsed David’s face in the window and Jack stood atop the hill, beckoning to him with an upward sweep of his arm. But as he started up the trail leading to the top of the hill, the earth sank under his feet like sand and the hill was replaced by a path leading into a forest so dense he could hardly find his way.
Now he saw no faces, only heard David’s voice calling “Ennis! What’s keeping you?” He turned his head toward the direction the voice had come from, only to step off the path and feel the ground dissolving as if he had blundered onto the edge of a riverbank. Someone took his arm and pulled him back on the trail and he heard Jack’s voice: “that’ll get ya nowhere, cowboy.” He turned his head quickly but Jack was gone and he was furious that couldn’t seem to find either of them.
He’d been saddened at not feeling Jack’s presence near him in the cabin, even wondering if Jack had given up on him after his flight from the beach house. When he woke, he knew he was wrong. In his trailer at Riverton he’d often sensed Jack being nearby: that was more than a vague impression now. He could feel something close to an electrical charge in the air and every pore and hair on his skin seemed almost to vibrate; a feeling he’d only had once, in Wyoming, when lightning had struck a tree only 20 or 30 feet from him. He’d regarded the first dream and its modest aftermath as an oddity; now he had no doubt that Jack had not gone anywhere.
He made coffee, got dressed and went to work all the same.
A few days later Jerry saddled his horse Molly and gave Ennis a tour of the riding trail. It left the gravel road and went up a steeper part of the hill, where they loosened the reins and let the horses find their own footing. The trail doubled back along the hilltop with a pleasant view of the pastures, the river and the woods, with the house barely visible. “Nice view to take people to in the fall when the leaves turn,” Jerry remarked. “Not much like what you’d get in Wyoming though, I’ll bet.” “Right,” Ennis answered, thinking of the view from the upper pasture on Brokeback. “Some places you c’n see for miles.”
At the edge of the meadow the trail angled back to meander through the mixed woods of hardwoods and spruce trees, crossing the stream by a simple footbridge. As it headed back downhill Ennis listened to the sound of the stream, getting louder as it picked up speed, and looked at the fir trees around them and imagined that the shadows of two younger men on horseback, exploring the byways of a Wyoming mountain, rode nearby.
As he went about his work that week, Ennis often thought he had turned into two different people, endlessly quarreling about where to go and how to get there. His work was not only better paid but easier than what he’d been used to: he often went back to the cabin tired at the end of the day but unlike his last few years of ranch work the backs of his legs didn’t ache and he didn’t have to make a conscious effort to walk without stooping. Jerry was clearly impressed by Ennis skill with horses and with nervous new riders, and mentioned having him up to the house for dinner “when Tom feels a little better.” He’d explained about his father-in-law’s health and Ennis nodded but said nothing, seeing no reason to tell Jerry that he’d already heard considerably more than that via Grandma’s gossip pipeline. And Andrea had called the phone in the barn’s office to tell him how much Jonathan was looking forward to his next riding lesson.
But whenever he returned to the cabin, a sense of impotent panic came over him. He couldn’t shake a feeling that the two dreams, which he had no doubt had been sent in some way by Jack, had fortified his sense that something had gone terribly wrong when he’d left the beach house and had come to the cabin as an escape. Comfortable as life there might be, he wondered with dread if it might become a replacement for the trailer in Riverton whose door he had shut two months ago with no intention of opening again. The feeling became unnerving enough for him to buy a pint of whiskey and use a few shots to help him get to sleep at night. He knew the whiskey would do nothing to either aid or impede the next dream that would surely come.
He recognized the desolate wind-scoured plain immediately, even if he hadn’t seen the familiar weather-beaten wooden house whose roof was patched in more places than it was whole. He’d lived there until he was 14 and hadn’t been back since. The barn, in no better condition than the house, was visible behind it but what caught Ennis attention was the root cellar he’d visited so many times when his mother had asked him to fetch something. The door stood open and his feet moved him automatically toward it and he sensed that this, not the house or barn, was what he needed to see.
The smell on the way down the worn steps was mostly familiar too: earth and fungus and old grass and an undefined mustiness overlaid with an odor of decay. But the latter was different from the occasional rotted vegetable the cellar harbored. It was; more like the effluvium he’d smelled coming from a drainage ditch that morning that his father, hand clasped firmly on the back of his neck, had marched him and his brother out to see the battered warning it contained. He wanted more than anything to turn and run back up the stairs, flee somewhere, anywhere but where he was but in the manner of dreams his body and feet moved on their own course.
The unremarkable vegetables, potatoes and preserves the cellar usually held were gone but it was not empty. An open coffin stood in the center, surrounded on all sides by blazing candles that, oddly, seemed to give only a little light. It got slightly brighter when it reached the walls, revealing intruding roots here and there and a network of thick, jagged black streaks that could have been black mold or just the shadows of cracks in the cellar wall. Ennis could again sense Jack nearby, though Jack had never been near Sage as far as he knew; and out of the corner of his eye he could even see Jack standing at the wall near the head of the coffin.
He dreaded approaching the coffin, but his legs moved toward it anyway until he stood next to it in the dimmest part of the candlelight. He looked down and saw his father’s battered face.
A neighbor had identified his parents’ bodies after the accident, and they had been buried in closed coffins. But now he could see the gashes and purpling bruises on his father’s face, the smashed cheekbones and jaw and the unevenness just above the ears where the man’s skull had been split. As he struggled to make his paralyzed legs move him away from the coffin, both eyes opened and he could see a starburst hemorrhage in one. The split lips moved in a smile, the odor of decay now mixed with those of cheap whiskey and rotted teeth and the one good eye looked at him with complete recognition.
“Me not dead.”
A scream jagged up his throat but would not quite come out and his feet truly seemed to be bolted to the floor. Swallowing the scream, he tried instead to call to Jack for help. “Jack! can’t move…. get me - Jack….”
“JACK!” He was back in the cabin, though the glow of the candles and the smells took a second or two to dissipate.
He sat at the edge of the bed for several minutes, shaking badly enough that he knew he wouldn’t be able to stand, and clutching the quilt around him. The first two dreams, puzzling and unnerving as they’d been, had not been frightening but until he was fully awake he was more afraid than he’d ever been in his life. There was no getting back to sleep though it wasn’t yet light: he warmed some coffee on the small stove and sat sipping it, bracing his elbows on the table until his hands were steady. As the purplish-black in the windows lightened to pale blue, he even peered apprehensively out to reassure himself that no root cellar was nearby.
Might as well go ahead and feed the horses and turn them out, he thought, any activity would help. By the time he reached the flat stretch of the trail it was closer to sunrise to dawn, and he glanced down at the log that he’d used as a bench.
Wedged between the log and a small rock outcropping next to it was an eagle feather. It looked identical to the one Jack had worn in his hat for so long, and was inclined at exactly the same jaunty angle. Sitting down on the log, Ennis turned the feather over and over in his hand.
Finding an eagle feather wasn’t remarkable in itself. Eagles were far from uncommon in Duluth, though they were more numerous in the fall and early spring. But as he held it, the images of the root cellar, the candles with their reversed light and his father’s grin and bloodied eye faded into the background.
He’d been pulled in two directions at once with equal force and had been as immobilized as he had been in the root cellar. In his earlier fantasies about the life he could have had with Jack in Lightning Flat it had been the might-have-beens, now never-would-be’s, that had tormented him. They would never have the sweet life Jack had proposed while sitting by the stream at their campsite, but the life he’d had in the past few months and had fled from had its own sweetness and he could not now unlearn the knowledge of what it could be like.
But all the fear and loathing that his father had infected him with and which would never be dead in him had made him shrink inwardly and then panic at the knowledge of how the outside world might see him. Whenever an acquaintance or a stranger on the street looked at him and David he knew what they might be thinking, the images that might be playing in their heads that would not likely be there if they’d encountered a man and woman together. It was a prospect not unlike the idea of going out in public every day with his fly open and no underwear.
His palms were cupping the eagle feather between them like the two halves of a pecan shell with the sweet nut between them. Opening them, he looked at the feather again and recalled sitting next to the campfire with his head bowed, looking at the hat that Jack had removed and placed beside him as he acknowledged that there were no reins on this one.
“If you can’t fix it, you gotta stand it.”
He’d found the answer. If he’d found it then, his future and Jack’s would have been entirely different.
He would never be completely at ease with loving another man, never be unaware of the condemnation he could easily find without even looking for it, never get over the feeling of nakedness and shame. The foundation laid before he’d had any choice would never be leveled.
He could not fix it. So if he wanted the life he’d had a taste of the past few months, he would have to stand it.
It was a harsh bargain, but one that he could meet, on ground he was familiar with. Standing things he couldn’t fix had been a resigned and often bitter reality, but this time there was a great reward to be won. He tucked the eagle feather in his shirt pocket, telling himself to remember to transfer it to a pocket of his old shirt that embraced Jack’s in his closet, and continued down the trail. He would shortly think of what he needed to do best, but first there was work to be done.
Index to chapters:
Chapter 1: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/392.html
Chapter 2: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/523.html
Chapter 3: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/1066.html
Chapter 4: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/1485.html
Chapter 5: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/1704.html
Chapter 6: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/2038.html
Chapter 7: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/2358.html
Chapter 8: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/2635.html
Chapter 9: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/2947.html
Chapter 10: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/3130.html
Chapter 11: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/3356.html
Chapter 12: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/3655.html
Chapter 13: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/3934.html
Chapter 14: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/4154.html
Chapter 15: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/4591.html
Chapter 16: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/4685.html
Chapter 17: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/5094.html
Chapter 18: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/5140.html
Chapter 19: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/5546.html
Chapter 20: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/6249.html
Chapter 21: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/6434.html
Chapter 22: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/6843.html
Chapter 23: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/7306.html
Chapter 24: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/7646.html
Chapter 25: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/7723.html
Summary, Chapters 1-25: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/8106.html
Chapter 26 Part 1: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/8417.html
Chapter 26 Part 2: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/8634.html
Chapter 27: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/8869.html
Chapter 28 Part 1: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/9090.html
Chapter 28 Part 2: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/9498.html
Chapter 28 Part 3: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/9498.html
Chapter 29: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/9953.html
Chapter 30: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/10733.html
Chapter 31 Part 1: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/10870.html
Chapter 31 Part 2: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/11153.html