Gift of Exile Chapter 24
"Haven’t seen these b’fore," Ennis said, looking over a stack of open boxes containing multicolored ropes of different lengths, various nets, open baskets covered with netting and packages with baffling names like "fender whips" and "snap chain stringer." "Supplies for boating ‘n fishing," David answered. "Remember all that stuff we had on Clearance, I told ya it was from last year? That’s stuff that didn’t sell and we discontinued, and I’m gonna use the space for some boating stuff this year. Any town on the Great Lakes is full o’ boat nerds and I’m gonna see if we c’n get a few of em in here."
"Hm. Hope they sell," was all Ennis said as he started sorting out the new merchandise. As much as he loved to watch the watercraft on the Lake, even starting to recognize some of the huge ore boats by name well before they got to the bridge, he still thought of boats as wobbly floating trucks in perpetual peril of tipping over at any sudden movement or at the slightest error in steering.
His part time job became full-time for awhile, as orders from the store’s small catalogue had been coming in since April and several back-ordered items had come in at once. Catching up meant two Sundays checking items against invoices and packing them, as well as staying considerably after closing time. "Happens that way sometimes, and by the time we get the stuff, people who ordered it are gettin impatient," David remarked to Ennis. "Especially stuff for outdoors, at least around here, summers bein as short as they are." Some of the merchandise had been shipped to customers directly from the manufacturer, but even this had to be checked against invoices and payments. The store, David explained, was large enough to get a significant income from catalogue orders but small enough that he had to process most of the orders himself.
Routine as the work was, and despite so much working indoors giving him a cramped feeling, he was content for now to be working with David alone in the store and sharing a quick meal of take-out food when they got home. He didn’t miss the store’s two other employees, although he’d had no trouble getting along with them.
Jonathan, 24 but seeming years younger, was only a few inches shorter than Ennis and both men were thin with long legs. But where Ennis’ muscles were like hard, flat ropes, Jonathan’s were like tightly-stretched wires that vibrated at the slightest pressure; and he had a light, drawling voice that seemed to slide up to a half-question mark at the end of sentences. David had mentioned that Jonathan lived with his aunt, an attorney who’d navigated the maze of paperwork involved in buying the house and the store, and that he’d hired Jonathan as a favor to her. He didn’t explain, and Ennis didn’t ask, why Jonathan didn’t have his own place; but Ennis tried to think of the younger man in the same way as the occasional ranch owner’s son, brother-in-law or cousin he’d had to work with. And his own situation, he reflected wryly, wasn’t that much different at the moment.
But Jonathan seemed to have been put there especially to set Ennis’ nerves on edge. Occasionally he’d refer to David as "your cousin," with a glance and knowing smile that seemed taunting to Ennis, who didn’t recognize it as flirtatious teasing. Jonathan could be moody at times and flippant at others - "honey, I just open the boxes," he answered when Ennis had asked him a question in the stock room on his first day.
Kelly, the store’s other clerk, was about the same age as Jonathan and Ennis was a little more comfortable with her. He’d noticed how quick she was to laugh at anyone’s joke and to agree with any strong opinion, and she had a knack for sweet-talking customers that made her useful to have around. "Vanilla pudding with whipped cream," Maggie had called her disdainfully during one of their occasional household suppers together, but Ennis found her easy enough to work with. Unlike Ennis, Kelly seemed endlessly amused by Jonathan and to regard his effeminacy as a novelty. "You’re silly!" she would giggle dozens of times a day; or occasionally, "you’re crazy!", even when Jonathan’s banter was jokingly acerbic. "Kelly girl," he admonished her one day about the leg warmers and artfully ripped sweatshirt she was wearing, "Flashdance was the new look two years ago."
"Hey, I get a lot of compliments on this outfit!" she protested.
"Not from anybody who loves you."
* * * * * * * * * * * *
They were still a little cautious and awkward with each other, like two refugees in an arranged marriage. But increasingly, the details of everyday life that become a hazy background in memory - sitting across a breakfast table, taking turns at doing laundry, errands to buy groceries, cleaning supplies or gasoline - had begun to feel natural. And they knew each other better now, on this day in mid-June.
David’s casual but persistent phone calls to Wyoming had peeled back the thinnest top layers of silence that had grown around Ennis in the 20 years since he and Jack had met. In the months after Jack’s death, when the strain of keeping his grief a secret had daily exhausted him, he’d been haunted by the thought that all his memories of Jack, the most important and cherished of his life, would die with him. That they would simply vanish into space, as if they had never been, had been far more troubling than contemplating his own eventual death.
But since his inadvertent mention of Jack to David, various recollections had ventured out one by one, to be held up in a good light and admired from all sides. Ennis had now told David about the hardships of herding sheep, his accident with a bear that cost them their week’s rations and how they’d shot an elk to escape the fate of living on beans for seven days; about shooting at coyotes and Jack’s pride in the eagle feather he wore on his hat; the torrential storm on one of their camping trips that had stranded them under a rocky overhang for a night. He unconsciously distinguished between memories of the summer on Brokeback and of their twice-yearly "fishing trips," and David noted, with every recollection, whether Ennis referred to "that summer" or to "one a our trips together."
Along the way, Ennis had noticed a subtle change in David as well. Long-accustomed to keeping a cautious eye on his surroundings, he’d grown used to seeing David employ a smile, a tone of voice, a nod at just the right moment, to draw people out in conversation or to put them at ease. But at home he often tended now to slouch or lean back in a chair, to react to a comment with a spontaneous glance or smile. It was less like an actor removing a disguising mask than an expert dancer exchanging a pair of narrow, polished dancing shoes for comfortable house slippers.
"David’s been happy since you’ve been here," Maggie’d said one Sunday morning when she’d come up for coffee.
Ennis was surprised. "He wasn’t happy b’fore?"
"Not really," she answered after a moment. "Mostly just cheerful."
Maggie had been home only briefly lately and Ennis had noted the number of days he hadn’t seen her car in front of the house at all. "Don’t worry about that, bro," David had told him last Monday, as they worked together at the back of the otherwise closed store. "I know she can be pretty flaky - don’t count on her bein’ on time for anything, only reason she gets to work at Grandma’s when she’s supposed to is because it’s close enough to talk to from home. For that matter, don’t depend on her givin you directions if you’re not sure where you’re going. But she’s got a good heart, always there when you really need her. She was one of the people who were there for me after Nathan died, I c’n tell ya that."
"That how you ended up here?"
"Pretty much. I was wantin’ to leave Georgia, didn’t have any idea where to go, and she suggested I come up here, offered to let me stay at her place for awhile."
Ennis couldn’t resist. "Like you did when you called me."
"Like I did, yeah, except she didn’t have a job to offer me. But it wasn’t long before I found the store." He thought a moment and added, with a wry attitude that stopped just short of bitterness. "Kept that plain-Jane name it had, ‘North Shore’ is sorta like ‘Acme" around here. One o’ these days, I oughta rename it after Nathan. His money was what bought a lot of it."
"Thought you sold the store in Georgia when ya moved?"
"I did, but that wouldn’t o’ been enough for this business and half the house too. When Nathan’s parents got killed, their will gave him an outright bequest at age 18 but most of the estate, he just had the income from it. That was because o’ Sheila’s dad, my mom said. He was a hard drinker, gambled too an’ wasn’t too good at it. Wasted most of their money - one reason Sheila wound up with so much real estate was her mom and granddaddy sockin’ money away in property and keeping the deeds locked up. Guess they figured her dad couldn’t drink or gamble that up. So Nathan had plenty of cash, but Sheila’s family, the Howells, they controlled most of it. Nathan’s folks had a lotta things planned out but they didn’t figure on both of em dyin at once.
"Anyway, when he turned 18, the family lawyer - one o’ Sheila’s second cousins, a pretty good guy actually - he contacted Nathan right away an’ told him he had to make a will. Nathan and me, we both laughed about it. "Why ring the bell before you’re ready to get off the bus?" that was how he put it. Hell, we were 18, what did we know? We both still thought we’d live to a ripe old age, maybe 45, and that was such a long way off it’d never get there. But he went ahead and met with the lawyer, of course most of it got divvied up among his mom’s family. They saw to that. But just on an impulse he left a lump sum of money to me, Dean and my parents. So I met with my mom and Dean and told them I was selling the hardware store, they’d have to buy me out if they wanted the income. My mom wasn’t happy about partin’ with that money, even though she still had some o’ the money my dad left her but she went along with it. So…. Nathan looked after all of us better than he knew."
Ennis wondered, as he had before when David had mentioned Nathan, how the other man had died and why David mentioned his family, other than his grandmother, so rarely. But David had not asked him about Jack’s death, and so Ennis was satisfied to keep that beyond the boundaries of their growing closeness for now.
"Jack didn’t leave anything much," he ventured. "That quilt I take down ta the beach mornings, his Mama gave that ta me when she sold the ranch ‘n’ moved last year."
He didn’t know what response he’d expected but the brief pause was just long enough to make him apprehensive. "Do you remember," David asked finally and a little too casually, "that first morning we went horseback riding? I’d told Gramma Alex I’d meet her for breakfast, but that ended earlier’n I thought so you weren’t quite ready when I got there. You asked me in for some really bad coffee, and you said it’d get warmer today, decided you needed a lighter jacket an’ you went to the closet to get one."
Ennis wanted to look away but met his eyes steadily.
"When I saw those shirts," David went on, "then what I saw when I watched you walkin’ down that aisle with your daughter, that sadness, it’s still there, you wear it like a hair shirt, - I understood some of what it was about. You’re not the only one who’s been there, you know. "
An invisible band was suddenly squeezing the breath up out of Ennis’ chest and a huge blood vessel had somehow materialized inside his skull and was pounding like the reverberation of a nearby explosion. He glared at David wordlessly.
On his end David seemed to be treading through a minefield, one wary step at a time. "So, did Jack’s mother give them to you, like she gave you the quilt?"
Ennis tried to reconcile the idea of someone else knowing about the shirts, of David recalling his trailer and the nested shirts on the closet door during their phone conversations. "That’s right," he answered almost inaudibly. "One of em’s his ‘n’ one’s mine. We wore em that summer…. Jack took and kept em, I’d forgot losing it after all those years ‘n’ then I visited his parents, not long after-" He couldn’t go any further. "So those two paintings I saw - way back there in that little space next ta your room?"
David paused for a moment, suddenly interested in the list of postage charges he’d been adding up by hand. "Fair enough," he finally said and Ennis rearranged his chair slightly. Like always, he knew, David’s answer would be much longer than his own had been.
"Guess you already figured Nathan did those," he began. "Far back as I can remember he was always sketching stuff, I wish now I’d saved more of it. And what he'd draw it wasn't always things other people'd look twice at. Sometimes he'd watch somebody sittin at a bus stop or at a desk when they weren't lookin and start drawin their hands or their face. He'd even do caricatures - when we were kids, adults we thought were on our case, you know, relatives or teachers, he'd get a scrap- o' paper, do two or three strokes with a pencil and there was the person's face, lookin like something in a comic strip. And o' course, his parents noticed.
"You know how some parents map out what their kids are gonna do when they grow up? Well, Nathan's parents did that; trouble was they had two different maps. Nathan was great at basketball an' track, so his daddy was sure as anything he had to be a sports star, kinda finish what the old man started. But Sheila, she was so interested in art all along and had that gallery - she was determined Nathan was gonna work in the 'family business' as she called it. Sheila pretty much ran things in that family so she woulda got her way eventually, but no tellin how that woulda worked out.
"Nathan was one of those people who think they gotta do everything perfect and his folks sure kept that pot stirred. Not that they were on his case - they'd push him all the time but they always somehow made it sound like they were doin him a favor. He'd bring home: a report card with all A's except one B and he'd hear 'now, you're so talented, Nathan, I know can do better than that.'
"When his parents got killed I knew I should feel bad about it - it hit my folks pretty hard -- but I was so excited about his comin to live with us, now could I not be? But for almost the first year, he hardly seemed: to know any of us were there. Of course, he had to change schools -- went from a fancy private school in Atlanta to one of the Maoon public schools -- but he got to be one of the popular kids real quick. That didn't surprise me. People, adults when we were growin up and almost everybody, they thought he was just naturally good at everything but they didn't see how he worked like hell at it. He went out for track, basketball, even the school chorus, you name it. I guess I didn't really understand till just a few years ago, you hear o' people drinkin to drown their sorrows, but pushin yourself an' workin your butt off can work just as well, you know?"
Ennis thought of the extra pay that had piled up in the year after Jack had died, the anodyne of all the extra hours and days he'd sought out. "Yeah, I know somethin about that."
"Not that I minded hangin out with a popular kid -- I got known as Nathan's best friend pretty quick and it mighta been good for me. I'd been kind of a pudgy kid up till then and I never gave it much thought when we were little kids, it was just me an’ Nathan. But now I was worried he’d be embarrassed at havin me tag along with him. So I got in shape just keepin up -- if he was runnin laps on the school track, I was runnin laps too.
"It wasn't long after that my Daddy started takin us on camping trips, he was pretty quiet, kinda like you, and when Nathan's folks were alive he just sorta went along with them and my Mom. And Mom. ... I'd say she was jealous of Sheila, envied her but it wasn't exactly that. It. wasn't mainly that she wanted all the stuff Sheila had, the clothes and the houses and the art gallery, in was more like she wanted to be her. They were both crazy about Nathan and if it was anybody else I'da been jealous but once Nathan came to live with us, I could .get away with just about anything if I was with him.
"Once he finished that painting, though, he didn’t seem to want it, maybe it wasn’t quite what he had in mind. When he saw I liked it, though, he told me ‘ go ahead and keep it. I just don’t wanna see it again.’ So that’s how those pictures ended up here in Duluth."
They went back to work, but Ennis was grateful it was late in the afternoon, as he was finding it impossible to concentrate. Despite the revelation about the shirts, David hadn’t pressed him for any more details and Ennis was satisfied to wait for the story he knew he’d inevitably hear about the cemetery painting. He could already guess at some of it.
That night in his room, Ennis opened the closet door and looked for a long time at the two nestled shirts, gently sliding the palm of his right hand over the blue cotton of Jack’s shirt, squeezing it gently to watch the cloth puff out at each and of his fist, before taking the photo out of the pocket. He held it up next to the postcard and imagined, as he had so often over the past two years, Jack’s youthful face across a campfire with the mountain’s peaks becoming dark outlines as light faded with the dusk. But this time, after returning the photo to the shirt pocket, his fingers traced wonderingly over the hook on the door that held the shirt’s hanger.
Unlike the occasional nails in the wall of the bedroom and the fixtures on the closet door, the brass on the coat hook was still bright, the heads of the screws that held it in place still grayish silver, the metal surfaces smooth. The hook had never been used before he had taken up residence in this room, and he knew now how long it had been there.
INDEX TO PREVIOUS 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