Chapter 8
Ennis took extra care driving, as always when he had the horse trailer behind him. He’d made equally careful preparations in the last few weeks, first getting time off from the foreman who didn’t take it well but grudgingly accepted his story about doing a favor for a friend; and then borrowing a tent and other camping equipment from Vickie. He possessed none; hadn’t needed to, as the arrangement had always been that he brought the horses and Jack brought the camping paraphernalia. "Sure, no problem," Vickie had said. "We hadn’t used that tent in a couple of years, better spread it out on the ground and let it air out make sure it don’t smell musty. Takin’ up fishing again?" Like many people who saw Ennis regularly, she’d long been curious about both his regular absences over the years and their abrupt cessation after spring a year ago. "No," he’d replied, "just this one time."
As always, driving through mountainous areas while dragging a trailer was rather slow going but he hardly noticed, remembering his return from Lightning Flat a year ago, bringing back the two shirts in their brown paper bag. He recalled almost nothing of the drive back, but the two days after that were the occasion of Alma Jr. and Jenny insisting on his getting a telephone.
He’d locked the door behind him and slowly opened the paper bag, pulled Jack’s blue denim shirt with his own brown-patterned one inside it through his hands, looked at the worn cuffs and old bloodstains.
There had been tears in the truck on the way home, but none now. He gathered the nested shirts in his arms, hands crossed just above his waist, and sank into the worn upholstered armchair. Slowly, then reaching a solemn rhythm, he began rocking back and forth in the ancient instinctive movement of deepest grief. His mouth half-opened a few times, and in some other times and cultures a keening or chant for the dead would have come out but here there was no sound; he just lifted the blue denim to touch his lips briefly.
Eventually the rocking subsided, to return at intervals, but he did not move from the chair that night, nor the following day, nor the night following it. He would have been physically able to move but the thought and intention that normally precede movement would not come. He felt no cold nor heat nor hunger nor thirst. What he did feel, over that day and two nights, was as if he were being stripped down to the bare bones, layer by paper-thin layer, skin and blood and muscle. On the second morning, when he was finally able to stand and drape the shirts over the back of the chair, he had moved slowly and stiffly to the bathroom to piss and was half surprised to see his own face in the small medicine cabinet mirror. On some level, he had expected to see a skull with hollow eye sockets looking blindly back at him.
When he at last opened the door and stepped out of the trailer, his eyes registered the familiar dusty ground, scraggly weeds and patches of grass and a few fugitive wildflowers here and there with the same surprise. He had visualized stepping out onto bedrock at the bottom of a blasted-out crater.
The trailer had always been sparely furnished, but now it seemed unbearably cluttered, the closeness of previously unnoticed objects like sandpaper on an open wound. Over the next few days he’d loaded up the bed of the truck for a trip to the landfill, leaving only what he needed to eat, wash and sleep plus the television that was handy to have something to focus his eyes on when he needed that. He would have discarded the bed and slept on the bare floor if he could have explained it to his daughters, who were alarmed enough later that day when they saw his haggard appearance. A bout with the flu, just getting over it, nothing to be concerned about he’d told them but had given in to their demands that he get a telephone where they could reach him, or he them, "just in case."
He’d pulled the sleeves of his shirt out of Jack’s, then laid his shirt on the bed and pulled the sleeves of Jack’s shirt through the sleeves of his. He hadn’t wanted to hang them on the wall where they would be exposed to dust and drafts, nor in the closet where he could not see them but rather had driven a small nail into the inside of the closet door. A few days after that, he had ordered a postcard of Brokeback Mountain at Higgins’ gift shop, and tacked it to the door above the shirts’ left shoulders.
As Ennis drove north and east and up Highway 16 from Gillette, the mountains gave way again to prairie, much flatter this far north but rolling just a little here and there. It was also almost treeless, though after turning off onto a long stretch of gravel road, he saw small stands here and there. Some of them surrounded the ranch houses that were spaced further and further apart as he got closer to the Montana border; and Ennis was able to spot some groupings marking sites of now-vanished houses. The grass would have been tall and exuberantly green a month or so earlier but now the fields were marked with the inevitable round haybales looking like rough-textured carpets rolled up.
The Twist ranch hadn’t changed since last year; but driving toward the house he could now see the images underneath that he had created this summer. The leafy spurge was as much in evidence as ever: if the late John Twist Sr. had been a stud duck, he’d been a stud duck in a very small pond choked with cattails. The space under the copse of trees, occupied by the cabin he and Jack had built in his mind was as empty as the last time, and he glanced at it quickly only once. As before, the paint on the house’s weathered planks was peeling, but he would have visualized it freshly painted white and dark green if his eyes weren’t fixed on Mrs. Twist, standing just outside the door as she had the last time. She stood straight but not stiffly, as if she were facing a moderate wind, arms hanging straight at her sides, evidently having watched and listened for his truck coming up the bumpy road.
Once again, with the inevitable cup of coffee in front of him, he was sitting at the table in the small, immaculate kitchen, the walls inside the house not peeling but painted entirely white. And as before, it was a sunny day and the white stillness created by the sun peering through the thin white curtains made him feel as if he were sitting in the middle of a very quiet cloud. He did not look toward the plain metal can, bits of soil still stuck to it here and there, that sat on the far corner of a kitchen shelf.
She sat down and looked at him closely. Her reddish hair drew back from her face in slightly curling wisps, the blue eyes the only resemblance he could see to Jack. "You’re thinner," she said gently. "This last year has been very hard for you, I think." He nodded. "I’m sorry about your loss, ma’am. Good thing, you’re not gonna be stayin’ here alone." As always he felt awkward, wondering how other people always seemed to be able to think of something to say.
He saw a few cardboard boxes in the room; not many, but there hadn’t been much in this house to begin with. She reached down to an unsealed box next to the table, pulled out a cheap photo album and handed him a clear plastic pocket that had been cut out of it. "I thought you might like to have this." It was an old Polaroid photograph, the colors somewhat diluted by time: Jack, about the same age he’d been that summer on Brokeback give a year or two; that familiar cocky smile spread across his face and a little beyond. He had never seen a photograph of Jack before, and seeing Jack looking out at him stopped his breath for a moment or two.
"I don’t wanna keep the only one you have," he said, unaware that he’d pressed the plastic sleeve between his hands as if he were trying to stamp the image onto his palms. "I have a few others," she assured him. "They were all taken when Jack was in rodeo. When he had a good ride he’d often look for somebody who had a Polaroid. Not many of those back then, but he did manage to send us a photo or two every year. And my brother-in-law Harold visited a few times and took some pictures. You’re welcome to keep that."
"Jack’s uncle Harold? I remember hearing about him that summer on Brokeback. He got sick, or somethin’?"
"Yes, he died a few years after that," she answered. "My sister lives in Eugene, near my niece. Sent me money for a plane ticket, I’ll be leaving in three weeks." She looked around the room. "I’m leaving a lot of memories - some are good ones. Not enough to stay alone here."
Ennis took a few sips of the hot, strong coffee she’d put before him. "What was Jack like when he was a kid? We was both 19 when we met."
"Oh, he was so bright and curious, always bringin’ home some funny-colored rock, piece of wood, once in awhile some animal skull, feathers. Seemed like he could see things in ‘em, you know, like when you stare up at clouds and see shapes they look like. Once of a late afternoon, he was out west of the house, near those cherry trees, and then come runnin’ in - said the windows looked like there was a fire in here. ‘Mama, come look’ he said, so I walked out with him and sure enough. Sometimes when the sun got low that’s just how they did look."
She was sitting a little straighter, the tired-looking pale blue eyes open a little wider and the cadence of her voice had quickened slightly. Having spent so much of his life in places where people were spaced widely, Ennis knew that until she’d seen his truck coming up the road, the nearest opportunity for her to speak about Jack out loud and not have the sound vanish into the air was a good ten miles away. He was sharply reminded, as he listened, that others besides himself had been deprived of Jack’s love and his presence in the world so brutally.
"Whenever Jack ‘d go out with either of us to get supplies, that wasn’t an everyday thing but the people in stores an’ such got to know him. He never ran outta things to talk about, you know." For the first time in either of their two meetings, she saw a very faint smile appear on his face. "Yes ma’am," he answered. "That was one o’ the first things I noticed about him. Kinda couldn’t not notice."
Since his last visit to Lightning Flat this was the first time he’d mentioned Jack out loud to anyone, by name or not. He looked away from her, down at the photograph on the table. "He don’t look quite like either of you much."
"No, he looks like John’s father. By the time we started keeping company, we were 18, 19, John hadn’t seen him in a couple of years. Didn’t always see him regular before that, this was his uncle’s ranch then and his dad had a business down in Gillette. I never did meet him, but John wasn’t happy at all at Jack lookin’ like him. He never did talk about his father much but ‘too slick for his own good’ was somethin’ he said more ‘n a few times.
"But Jack wanted to be just like his dad, even took up rodeo ‘cause he thought his dad was this great bull rider. Oh, I know what Jack must have told you," she responded to the surprised look Ennis gave her, "and John didn’t at all mind him growin’ up thinkin’ that. God knows he tried, kept at it. Him and Jack both, once they got to wantin’ something -- they didn’t let go easy. But he just got too busted up to go on with it so we moved back here. And I guess he coulda liked ranchin’ too but we never did get enough to do more ‘n pay the mortgage and bills every month. Some o’ those ranches you passed comin’ up here, they got equipment we couldn’t o’ made the down payment on."
She paused, and looked into Ennis’ face for a moment. "When Jack married into money, I know John had hoped that’d make a difference. And he did send enough to keep the house in repair, didn’t get to the paintin’ he was gonna do this year. And he’d come up here too, I’m sure you knew that, take a list John made and do a lot of work around the place. But it woulda taken more money, extra hands livin’ here, to make a difference. John thought Jack got to thinkin’ he was too good for this place, always drivin’ a new truck and all. But when he said he’d gotten married down in Texas, I was afraid for him."
"Jack… he wanted us to - live together somewhere." He could feel the muscles in his neck and shoulders start to tense. "Brought it up a lot for awhile. He never did mention what his dad said, our comin’ up here. Guess by the time he started thinkin’ about that was when I’d said no too many times, he stopped talkin’ about it. But I’ve - thought about it - thought about it a lot since."
"You didn’t think about it then?"
"Didn’t let myself, I guess, or maybe all I could think of was how dangerous it was. So we just met for those camping trips. Where it was just me and Jack, nobody else around ta think anything one way or other, didn’t feel like -" he paused and took another shallow breath, the tensed muscles giving way to a familiar sourness in his mouth. "Like I was queer."
Only the recollection of how she’d looked at him on his last visit, and the absence of the Old Bastard to even register the word, could have dragged that out of him. She knows already, no undoing it, a feeling vaguely familiar from occasional moments during his phone calls from David. He could never recall how he’d expected her to respond but she only asked, "are you?"
A few moments of silence passed that seemed endless, before he pulled up the sound and heard his own voice saying, "yeah." She heard him but it was close enough to a whisper that the sound probably did not travel much further.
The nausea hit him so quickly it was as if it had been waiting, a tire iron of its own in hand. He barely got outside and knelt at the end of the woodpile by the door, hand out on one of the silvery boards of the house while he heaved and retched uncontrollably. He’d eaten very little since the day before and what came out was mostly saliva and bile so there was no physical relief but just a few punctuated shudders of misery. By the time he’d lifted his head, taking control of his body again, she was kneeling beside him with a wet cloth. She wiped the sweat and detritus off his face, and then his hands. "Over here," and she led him to the narrow bench on the other side of the door. Disappearing into the kitchen for a few moments, she returned with a Mason jar glass of store-brand cola drink in hand.
"This will settle your stomach," she pressed it into her hand and her voice was not cajoling. It was giving a mother’s directive, not quite at the level of using all three of a child’s names but one not to be disputed nevertheless. The jar of soda was familiar from his occasional childhood bouts with the flu and as he expected, it did make his empty stomach stop churning. His heart was still beating fast enough for him to feel it near the top of his head, but that too was returning to regular duty.
"There was two ranchers livin’ together when I was a kid. One of ‘em got killed - it was, pretty bad. I just kept picturin’ that happenin’ to us, thought being out in the middle o’ nowhere once in awhile, that was the best way. Keep us safe," he added bitterly.
"Ennis, I’m not a very worldly lady but I know what some o’ the dangers are for men like Jack, men like you. There’s things people say, ways people talk I might not’ve noticed if it didn’t always feel like they were talkin’ about my boy even if they weren’t. And I might not of ever been to any town bigger than Gillette but that doesn’t mean I’ve haven’t wondered if Jack really had an accident or not. But you don’t seem the kind of man to run from danger for years. There was something more, I think."
"Yeah, that was me. I’m glad you welcomed me up here, ma’am, but I couldn’t o’ blamed you if you didn’t. Jack shoulda been up here with me, he wouldn’t of been takin’ chances but I turned him away so many times - I keep thinkin’ I’m to blame-"
She had suddenly turned and seized him by the shoulders, her face and voice more grim than he would have ever expected to see in her. "Ennis, don’t you do that. Don’t you do it. If Jack didn’t die in an accident then it was evil men who did it. And if anybody else takes the blame they’re takin’ some o’ that away from the ones it belongs to. Tell me," she leaned back and looked at him a little more calmly. "After those men - did what they did, what do you think they did after that?"
He answered out of his occasional nightmares and what had always troubled him so much the next day. "Went home, I guess. Maybe went to a bar or somethin’ first."
"Had a drink? Said hello to other men in the bar?"
"Yeah."
"And then went home and said hello to their families. Kissed their wives, maybe. Turned on some TV show, watched it with their children." Ennis could not answer. "And the next day went ta work, or maybe went on some errand, went to the hardware store, fooled with somethin’ in the wife’s car that was actin’ up. You think?"
"Somethin’ like that."
She leaned back against the house for a little. "That doesn’t make you mad? Not at all?"
"Hell yes, ma’am, it does." His voice sounded low, and hard.
"Good. They didn’t teach us enough about the Devil in church but I did learn about righteous anger. You keep that where it belongs."
He was suddenly reminded of one of Jack’s first mentions of his mother. "There was somethin’ Jack said one night that first summer - about you believin’ in the Pentecost. But he wasn’t sure of what it was, thought it might be about the end of the world, or hell fire or somethin’."
She smiled again, even laughed a little. "Oh, I should’ve taken Jack to church regular but 15 miles both there ‘n’ back, I’ve mostly just prayed and read the Bible and some other things right here. Jack probably thought that sometime when he heard me mention the Pentecostal fire.
"Pentecost was an old wheat harvest celebration around Jesus’ time. The Bible says the Holy Spirit went into them, that it sounded like the wind but looked like little tongues of fire. And they were all changed after that." He didn’t remember everything he said in every conversation with Jack that summer, but that one he did, you might be a sinner but I ain’t had the opportunity, he’d told Jack, neither of them knowing that their own pentecostal fire was just a few hours away. For good or otherwise, nothing had been the same after that.
Ennis took Sincie out of the trailer and put her in the old barn near the house. He then took a tarp out of the truck and spread it out nearby and took the sleeping bag out of his camping gear. Returning to Jack’s room, sleeping there overnight was not something he was sure he could face, and he told Mrs. Twist that he was used to sleeping near his horses on long trips. She hadn’t questioned him about that, but made a simple dinner, bacon and eggs and storebrand-bread toast with cherry jam. Afterward they walked out to the cherry trees to watch the sunset blazing on the windows for a few moments, and Ennis noticed something under her arm. "I’d meant to give this to you tomorrow morning," she said, "but if you’re sleepin’ in the barn you might want the use of it tonight. I made this when Jack was young, it’s always been on his bed."
He took it from her and folded some of it, draped over both his arms. It was the quilt he’d seen on Jack’s bed last year, a kind of quilt he remembered sleeping under as a boy: no particular pattern but large squares and rectangles of cloth from the remnants of sturdy clothing stitched together and the layers secured with knots of thick yarn. It was mostly brown shades from tan to dark chocolate, with a few dark blue, a few green, a few green and tan striped and some bright orange squares here and there like vivid exclamation points. Like many old quilts its age had given its texture a buttery quality, and as Ennis thought of Jack sleeping under it for so many nights, it felt alive under his hands.
That night he lay in total darkness in the barn, the quilt tucked around him inside the sleeping bag, inhaling the reassuringly familiar horse smells and listening to her breathing and chuffing. It was the same barn, he thought, where he and Jack would have slept while building their cabin, pushing hard on the work to get it at least livable well before winter. As he sank into sleep he had the sensation of Jack’s presence that he’d already learned to recognize, but he heard nothing from him and did not remember his dreams if he had any.
Next morning, after insisting he eat breakfast before starting out, Mrs. Twist gave him the metal can, this time inside a pillowcase to serve as a bag. The pillowcase now sat at the other end of the seat, with the small lidded coffee can he’d brought also inside it. She also gave him a slip of paper with her sister’s address, which he’d slipped into his battered wallet that rarely held much at any one time. "Thank you for doing this, Ennis," she’d said again, putting one hand up to his cheek. "I didn’t know everything there was to know about my son. But I do know he wouldn’t have loved someone who wasn’t worth loving for 20 years. I’ll pray every day now for you to believe that too."
As he drove back up to the main road Ennis glanced back frequently, as the dying house and the lone figure standing in front of it grew smaller and smaller. But turning back onto state highway 59, he had ceased to notice the landscape, going through the motions of driving automatically.
After 21 years, a disastrous marriage, two daughters and the great love and great tragedy of his life, he was returning to Brokeback Mountain.