Gift of Exile - Chapter 9
Author’s Notes: The following three chapters have considerably more metaphysical content than the preceding chapters, or the rest of the story. They can be interpreted as the reader wishes. As this novel follows the movie more closely than the original story, the references to dates are somewhat different. The film gives November 1975 as the del Mars’ divorce date.
Ennis had passed the turnoff near Signal many times over the years, and had never failed to slow down a little, glance down the road and remember the summer that was retreating further into the past every year. He and Jack had often camped within sight of Brokeback but by an unspoken agreement had never been back there.
He passed it again this time, heading five miles south to the diner and gas station he knew were there. Mrs. Twist had given him some sandwiches for the trip, but other than that he was traveling light; had taken no food or cooking equipment other than a small saucepan for boiling drinking water. He’d get a meal at the diner instead, and another one on the way home. The thought of food didn’t interest him but he had a long ride ahead and needed to keep his strength up.
"Goin’ up to Brokeback?" the waitress said. "I hope you weren’t plannin’ to go too far up. Ranger in here just a few hours ago said there’d been some heavy-duty storms on those upper slopes, enough snow the rangers closed em to visitors." "I’m just there overnight," Ennis answered. "Gettin’ in a one-day vacation, prob’ly stop back by here on the way back." That was a major disappointment: he’d planned on scattering Jack’s ashes at their old campsite, where one night of sharing a tent to keep the mountain cold at bay had changed their lives. He wouldn’t have minded taking the chance for himself but not to his horse when the first campsite, much lower down on the mountain, would do. Hell, when he’d made the trip back to Riverton a year ago Jack’s wishes would never be carried out as far as he knew, he told himself.
He started down a few access roads that led nowhere before finding the trailhead, uneasy at how the intervening two decades had softened the edges of the details he’d assumed he’d never forget. But once he got to the broad grassy field where the trucks had unloaded the sheep, he recognized the view of the peaks in the distance, half wrapped in mist and clouds and seeming to glow slightly, just as they had that first day. Getting Sincie out of the trailer, he took his time saddling up, packing his overnight gear and walking the mare gently to get her accustomed again to solid ground after the vibration and rocking of the horse trailer. This was too important a journey for hurrying.
Ennis gradually began to recall the route up the mountain, riding down a steep wooded hill to cross the first stream; then further up the mountain moving through valleys between progressively steeper slopes. He rode for awhile along a fast-moving small river, not muddy like glacial rivers further north but a light verdant green reflecting the dense trees. He saw immediately where to turn and head uphill again: years of seasonal inundations of rainwater as well as mobs of sheep moving annually to and from the allotments had left rocky swales that weren’t hard to spot. It wasn’t much of an effort for him to imagine the masses of dirty-white wool, too many animals to pick out individuals, moving up those slopes with the dogs busily darting here and there. But when he recalled being on another horse and driving them along with Jack, it seemed to be only a few months ago and another lifetime all at once. He’d been 19 then, not much in his life so far other than working on one ranch or another with K.E.; expecting to marry Alma that fall but not really thinking much about it. He’d pretty much let his life just flow along, like rainwater going downhill and giving just as little thought to changing direction.
As he rode, Ennis saw a number of trails winding up over densely wooded hills, thinking that any of them might have been one of the shortcuts he’d taken on weekly trips down for supplies. But he was no longer certain which of the trails were his shortcuts and which were made by deer and other large animals traveling to and from meadows and water sources. If his memory of the shortcuts wasn’t as good as he thought, meandering too far off the main trail could mean hours, or even the next day, before finding the campsite. But he could still feel the energy that the mountain had seemed to have, emanating from the ground, the trees, the moving water and unseen animals and seemingly from the air itself. He didn’t look around expecting to see Jack on a buckskin mare with a low startle point, but could feel his presence again. Over the past three months it was something he’d come to accept as a mysterious but permanent part of his life.
He was as close to certain as he could be that the campsite in the long valley was the right one. The steep rocky bluffs on the other side, the gray stone half-obscured by adventurous trees and shrubs, looked the same. So did the view of the pasture area where he’d often watched Jack from the campsite, looking like a small dark dot in the midst of a mass of even smaller dirty-white ones. It was a wide, steep unbroken slope, ending abruptly in a sheer lethal drop at the high end. What looked from the campsite like a skimpy tint of green and a few dark green blurs of trees was, he recalled, a much lusher growth of grass and wooded shade in the low spots when seen up close.
Ennis set up the tent Vickie had lent him, a much larger one than one person needed, and assembled a fire ring from the remnants of others scattered about, little-enough used that stubby grass had grown up in them. Apparently no one had been here for some time. He removed Sincie’s saddle and bridle, tied her by the loose halter and gave her a quick grooming, taking considerably more time than he needed to. When, finally, he withdrew the metal urn from one of the packs, he suddenly sat down on the log he’d pushed up next to the fire ring, overwhelmed for a moment.
It was one thing to offer to properly scatter the ashes of the person he had most loved; quite another to look at the urn and realize that it contained all that was left - only half of it, he thought - of the body that he had known almost as intimately as his own. He had been spared seeing Jack’s lifeless body; but now he would see ashes that had once been flesh and bone, eyes and genitals and hands, blown in every direction by the wind. After several long moments, he reached into the pack again and withdrew a second can, smaller and considerably more colorful.
It was an old coffee can, covered in deep red contact paper with gold braid glued around the base and the rim and sealed with a much more recent plastic top. Jenny had decorated and given it to him for Christmas when she was eight years old, the last Christmas she’d seen her parents celebrate together. It was the sort of homemade child’s gift that parents keep for decades, cherishing its innocent gaudiness. Unknowingly holding his breath, Ennis peeled off the top, unscrewed the urn and shook a few handfuls of ashes into the can before sealing it again. It was a recognizable, never-to-be-parted with object: no danger that he would accidentally throw it away over the following years.
Returning the coffee can to his daypack, he waded across the shallow stream and headed up a rocky path that led up the side of the bluff. From here, he recalled, there was a good view of not only the pasture area but of the unassailable peak itself. It would be a cold night, he thought; the wind from the temporarily snowed-in upper slopes was bracing and it was late enough in the year that the sun was already low in the sky. Although the mountain peaks obscured it, the transformed light gave the snow in the distance slightly gilded edges.
This was what he had wanted to get done for the last year, had felt he was letting Jack down by not getting done, and now that it was here it seemed too solemn a moment to get through quickly with just a few words. He spoke slowly, stopping for long intervals to let his stumbling speech catch up with his thoughts. "Jack," he began haltingly, "I hate it that this, and those shirts at home and what your Ma give me, are all I have of you."
A crow landed at the edge of the bluff, not far from him, and cocked its head in a listening pose.
"You were right about wantin’ that sweet life together - I shouldn’t a settled for nothing less. But doin’ what you said you wanted done, up here on Brokeback, that’s all I can do for ya now. When the time comes, someone will bring me up here too; I’ll see ta that."
The light wasn’t diminishing yet, but the shadows had grown deeper, and longer. The crow twisted its head and spread its wings as if stretching stiff muscles, but its sharp eyes continued to watch him.
"I love ya, Jack," he said finally. "I’d a told you years ago, but I didn’t even want ta know it myself."
He stood for a long time, watching the conflagration in the west dim to pale yellow, then twisted off the top of the urn and suddenly flung its contents into the wind. Some of the ashes blew around behind him, disappearing into a clump of shrubs and sapling trees nearby but a wind current caught some of them and bore them up toward the mountain’s summit, out of his sight. A few tiny bone fragments landed in various places in the grass, and he knew that in following winters the snow would cover them, and in the springs the dead grass and evergreen needles would decompose into new soil. Eventually the earth would compassionately cover the bones, long before his own were brought up here. Jack had become part of the mountain in a way, and one day he would too.
He stood there for a long time, listening to the wind and the rushing water, with the crow as silent company. Finally the bracing wind grew chilly as the conflagration in the west dimmed, and the crow took flight into a tree near the campsite as he started back down.
After building a fire, he boiled water for drinking and later ate the two sandwiches Mrs. Twist had given him, washing them down with the cooled water. Afterward he sat for what seemed like several hours, glancing toward the dome-shaped tent that was so different from the canvas steeple-shaped one that he and Jack had shared. It had grown dark and he could no longer see the bluff nor the pasture area but was still thinking of the snowbound upper slopes that he could not now reach. The morning after what neither of them had known was their last night together, he’d woke up to a short-lived snowfall. On his return he’d found Jack taking down the tent, another and more persistent storm on its way, Aguirre was having them bring the sheep down early.
He’d recalled everything about the evening before. Their last lovemaking on the mountain had been that afternoon and they’d sat for some time after finishing dinner, sipping whiskey as usual. Jack had picked up a few cones that the recent hailstorm had knocked off the lodgepole pines and had tossed them into the comfortably blazing campfire where they’d crackled, popped, sent little eruptions of sparks shooting up along with a Christmas-tree smell. "Set fire to the trees if you ain’t careful," Ennis had warned. "A ranger come up here last year told me these cones got seeds that need fire to open up and sprout," Jack answered with a laugh. "I’m just plantin’ trees here." Later, while Ennis had rinsed the plates and skillet in the stream and saddled his horse for the trip up to the pasture, Jack had fallen asleep standing up before the fire, like an old horse. Ennis had slipped up silently behind him, wrapping his arms around Jack’s shoulders from behind and resting his chin on Jack’s left shoulder. "Gotta go, see ya tomorrow" he’d murmured after humming a bar or two of his mother’s old lullaby that he barely remembered, and had left Jack looking after him as he mounted the horse and rode off to the sheep.
As the fire began to die down and the chill moved closer, Ennis finally retreated to the tent, wrapping Jack’s quilt around him like the night before and drawing up the two blankets he’d brought. He listened to the pack of coyotes that had begun singing somewhere on the other side of the stream, recalling how the sound had once meant extra vigilance with the 30-30. Now, with no sheep to protect but only himself and his horse, he listened to them with idle, drowsy interest. He could now pick out individual voices from what had been just a cacophony of high-pitched yipping before: here was an urgent voice looking for another pack member, there was a young voice, insistently hungry, and a few that seemed to be calling each other just for the joy of it. The chorus was still going on as he drifted off to sleep.