FIC: Her Daddy Was, PG
ETA, October 24, 2009
Thank you all, so much, for the continued comments on this story. I am amazed that even after three years people still find and read this story, and enjoy it enough to let me know. I'm sorry I'm remiss in replying to comments, just know that I really, really appreciate it. :-)
<3
Howdy, all.
Just joined, lured here by madlori and her fantastic story, Human Interest (which, if you're not reading, what the hell are you waitin' for?). Got this idea the other night and decided to write it down and throw myself at your mercy. Not your usual brand of BBM fic, perhaps, but we'll see how it goes. Also, I'm not sure about the spelling of Curt, or what his surname (Junior's married name) would be, so I winged it. Let me know if I'm incorrect.
--
Title: Her Daddy Was
Author: moony
Rating: PG
Notes: Could follow both the story or the film, whatever your poison. Futurefic. A little angsty, but mostly hopeful. Unbeta'd so please forgive any tense-slips. I'm still weeding them out slowly. (Spellcheck, by the way, hates a cowboy's accent.)
Summary: Alma Del Mar Justus (Junior) is her daddy's girl.
Warnings: Character death.
--
There are times when she wishes she was a boy, if only so that when he calls her Junior she would be his junior and not her momma's. She doesn’t much mind being an Alma, name’s always been kind to her and she does love her momma like a good girl should, but she loves her daddy something fierce. If she’s a Junior she’s an Ennis Junior, through and through, even if she don’t have the right equipment to go with the name.
She thinks the baby in her belly is going to be an Ennis Junior. Curt might want it to be a Curt Junior, and she’d do it if it weren’t for the conviction in her that this baby is going to be so much like her daddy. The baby kicks so that when she takes her daddy’s hand and put it on her belly a slow grin moves across his face like a thin ray of sun through a grey cloud and he says, ‘He’s rodeoin in there.’ But then the smile goes away and he gets real quiet, and his face has the look on him that Junior calls the long-gones. For a good while he always looked long-gone to her, but after he come to stay with them, and as Junior’s belly swells, the less long and gone Ennis Del Mar looks, but he still gets that way sometimes when he thinks she ain’t looking.
But the baby’s kicks remind her of her old daddy before his hair gone gray and before the long-gones came, when he’d pick her up and swing her over his head and kiss her and make the shadows on her wall into horses with his huge, rough hands, and she makes up her mind that it’s an Ennis - even if it’s a girl.
Her daddy lives with them now, in the little house they rent from the fella Curt works for. It’s a tight fit, all of them in there together, with Junior getting bigger every damn day it seems like. She rolls out of bed and rolls down the hall and into the kitchen, where the smell of stale coffee from the night before makes her retch into the stained sink. It’s not long before her daddy appears, rumpled and unshaved, coming up behind her to rub her back and get her some water. Her daddy’s always taken care of her, Junior never let her mother tell her otherwise.
“Gettin close,” he says, sitting at the rickety table and pouring himself a cup of the stale, cold coffee. He drinks it and she wants to retch again, wants to knock it out of his hand and make him some new, but there isn’t any because Curt’s not in yet with the groceries. “You look ready to pop.”
“I feel like I’m gonna pop,” she says, sinking into the chair across from her daddy. The chair squeaks and groans and protests and she thinks it’d be right funny if it just fell apart out from her and she landed on the floor, and the baby pops out right into her daddy’s hands. She laughs. “Tell the truth, I wouldn’t mind. I’m tired a this. No more after this, I tell you what.”
Her daddy laughs and drinks his bad coffee. “You’re sayin that now but once this one’s out and crawlin you’ll be wishin for another one. Your momma said the same thing, she didn’t want no more and then you was startin to walk and talk and she damn near knocked me through a wall, jumpin on me a give her another.”
Junior goes red. “Daddy,” she scolds, “that’s not right!” She laughs though, and picks up the coffee pot, to get it away from him before he pours himself any more.
Curt comes home and there’s breakfast, eggs and bacon and new coffee, and Curt goes outside to have a smoke because Junior doesn’t allow it in the house. “Doc’s orders,” she tells her daddy. “No smokin or drinkin or coffee.”
“Damn,” says her daddy, taking out a cigarette and poking it between his lips. “Don’t know how you do it. Your momma smoked an drank entire time with you and Francine.”
Junior snorts. “Probably why she’s plain useless now,” she says. She loves her sister but ain’t got no time for her teenage silliness and attitude. “Go on, git outside with that.”
Her daddy goes and she watches him and Curt through the kitchen window until she has to pee. She’s just about to close the bathroom door when there’s a shout and a door and Curt’s voice telling someone to send an ambulance, and she comes back out to see Curt bent over her father on the front porch, blowing air in his mouth and hitting him in the chest. She doesn’t know where he learned that. The sirens in the distance get louder, and she pisses herself in the middle of her hallway.
Ennis Del Mar dies at ten-thirty in the morning on June 13, 1989. He’s awful young to have a heart attack, says the doctor, but you can’t eat bacon and drink coffee and smoke the way he does every morning and expect to live forever. Curt has to take Junior out of the hospital and sit her down in a wheelchair in the parking lot. “You got to calm down,” he tells her. “Ain’t no sense getting yourself all worked up. Think about the baby, Alma.”
She is thinking about the baby and how it’s never going to know its grandpa. It’s never going to know how to be an Ennis because Ennis Del Mar is gone. She doesn’t know how she can have a baby without her daddy around. When she imagined it, he was always there. Him and Curt and her momma and even Francine. Now it’s all wrong because her daddy is gone and she is alone.
Somehow she gets home and she sits in the same chair she sat in a few hours ago. Her daddy’s coffee cup is still where he left it but she hasn’t the heart to wash it out. The phone rings and Curt answers it, telling her momma that she’s not fit to talk right now and they’ll come by later. “I don’t want to go,” she says, and her voice sounds wrong to her. It doesn’t sound like her voice, it sounds like her momma’s voice - old and worn out.
“You have to go,” says Curt. “Your momma’s upset too.”
“No she ain’t. She hated Daddy.”
Curt sighs. “She’s gonna want to see you anyway, so you’re gonna go over there like a good girl.”
She does go, because she’s too tired to argue. Her momma hugs her and gives her something to drink. Francine is there, red-eyed and crying in a way that makes Junior want to slap her upside the head. She wants to yell at her, “You ain’t never visited with him, you ain’t never so much as give him a phone call on his birthday,” and call her things that might make her momma throw her out. Then she’d have an excuse to go home and lay down, and cry.
Instead, she sits quiet and lets them talk around her while Curt holds her hand tight across the table, a makeshift harbor on a broken shore.
--
The funeral is short because Ennis Del Mar’s will said he didn’t want one. Her momma insisted though that they get a preacher to say a few words at least, before the body was cremated. Junior got the urn, which is ugly and metal and sits on her kitchen table because she don’t know what else to do with it. Curt says they ought to have it interred somewhere but she knows her daddy. “He don’t want to be in the ground,” she tells him. “He‘d hate that. Can’t see the sky when you’re covered in dirt.”
Truth is, she can’t put it in the ground because then her daddy’d be out of her sight forever. She sits across from it in the mornings, drinking water or tea and feeling her baby kick her like a pissed-off mule. The urn doesn’t talk and for a crazy second she thinks nothing’s changed, because her daddy hoarded words like they was valuable and he was afraid of spending them all too quick. If she thinks about it she can probably count out how many words he’d given her since the day she was born. So an urn that don’t speak isn’t too different from her daddy at all.
Except that it is. It doesn’t smell like tobacco and saddle-oil and it doesn’t have callused hands that rub her back in the mornings after she pukes, and it doesn’t call her little darlin. It doesn’t have her eyes or her snub nose or her temper. It’s not Ennis to her Junior.
She doesn’t know what she misses most - her daddy, or who she had been to her daddy.
--
Eventually it was time to go through her daddy’s things. They needed the spare bedroom for the baby and she had to make room for the crib Curt was building out behind the house. She went in early one morning in July, when the sun wasn’t too high up and the room wouldn’t be hot, and for a long time she couldn’t even cross the threshold. She stood in the doorway and looked at the bits and pieces of her daddy’s life.
He didn’t have much. When he’d come to stay with them all he’d brought was some clothes and gear, boots and a couple of books he didn’t read but couldn’t get rid of, for some reason. There isn’t anything on the walls except a couple of pictures of her and Francine as little girls. It doesn’t look like anyone lived in the room and she thinks maybe her daddy hadn’t been living at all, but that this had been just a place to be before the next thing came along. She wonders if he’d known what the next thing would turn out to be.
She starts on the random things first, things scattered around. The books turn out to be Bibles that belonged to her grandparents so she puts those aside. Papers she throws into bags for Curt to deal with the next time he has things to burn. She strips the bed and forces herself to take the sheets out to the wash, folding up the blanket and tries to put it on the shelf in the closet, but it won’t go. She stands on her toes and reaches up and feels around with her hand until her fingers find something hard and square. A box.
A boot box, older than she is and twice as dusty. She sneezes five times when she opens it. In it are postcards, stacks of them. The date on one is 1968. There’s one from 1967. They’re all addressed to Ennis Del Mar and they’re all signed by one name: Jack.
She remembers someone called Jack. She reads each card, and each card promises a visit. The oldest one - Friend this letter is a long time over due. - has a postmark of Texas. She takes each card out of the box and arranges them into stacks on the naked bed, according to date, and after a while she finds herself staring at a secret history of her daddy that goes on for almost twenty years.
The front door slams and Curt calls out a hey, and she carefully puts the postcards back in the box. She goes to find him with a kiss and tells him, “I need to go to my momma’s,” so he has a quick cup of coffee and a smoke before helping her into the truck and driving her over. She takes the box with her.
“I don’t know no Jack Twist,” says her momma, and for some reason this doesn’t surprise Junior at all. “Musta been one a your daddy’s fishin buddies.” There’s a cold, hard line to her mouth when she says it, says the word fishin like she was tasting something awful.
Junior looks at her. “I remember a Jack,” she says. “When I was little. Daddy brought him home.” She fights for the memory, looking for the face and smiling when she finds it. “He was real handsome. He had nice eyes-“
Her momma slams her hand down on the table and knocks over the sugar bowl. “You don’t know nothin!” she says. “You’re rememberin the TV or somethin.”
“Nope,” says Junior. “I remember Jack Twist, I just don’t know what happened to him. I thought you might know.”
“I told you, I don’t know nothin.” Her momma’s eyes are wet. “Now git home, before it’s dark.”
Junior tells Curt about the box on the drive back. “He kept them all,” she says, wrapping her hands around the box the way she used to hold her daddy’s hands. “So they must a been important to him.”
“Was your dad ever in the Army?” he asks. She shakes her head.
“No, the Army didn’t get him.” She looks out the window. “Must a been somethin else about Jack Twist worth rememberin if it wasn’t the Army, or fishin.”
--
At the library she gets a Texas phone book and looks up Twist. There’s four, but two aren’t home, one is a Oriental (and Junior don’t know what to think about that) and the other has an answering machine. She leaves a message but doesn’t expect to get a call back, so she’s surprised when the next morning the phone rings and there’s a woman with a Texan drawl on the other end.
“Jack was my husband,” she says, long and slow. “We met in the rodeo.”
She remembered her daddy’s words about the kicking in her belly. He’s rodeoin in there. “He knew my daddy,” says Junior. “My daddy was Ennis Del Mar. He died in June.”
The woman is quiet for a moment. “I’m awful sorry to hear that,” she says. “I talked to your daddy once. He called me after Jack died.”
Junior felt a twinge in her belly that for once had nothing to do with the baby. “I… didn’t know. I’m sorry.”
“It’s fine. It’s been a long time. He had an accident. He was real young.”
“I- I just…” She takes a deep breath. “I was cleanin out my daddy’s things and I found a box of postcards, from Jack.”
There’s another silence on the other end of the line that goes on so long that Junior wonders if they’ve been disconnected. She’s about to ask when the woman makes a noise that sounds halfway between a shudder and a sigh. “Listen, your-“ She stops and clears her throat. “There’s no sense in wonderin. Jack’s gone and your daddy’s gone, and you just got to let them go.”
“But-“
“Listen. You sound like a real nice girl, and I don’t want to upset y’all with talk about the past. You love your daddy, don’t you?”
Junior swallows. “Yeah.”
“Then keep lovin him like he was to you. It don’t matter a whit what he was before, y’hear?” The woman’s sounds a little rushed. “Just let sleepin dogs lie.”
“But-“
“I gotta go,” she says, and then there’s a click. Junior stares at the phone for a moment before she hangs it up and sits down at the table. Her father’s urn is still there, along with the coffee cup that’s got green fuzz in the bottom now.
“Daddy,” she whispers, “who were you before me?”
--
That afternoon Junior packs up her daddy’s clothes. He only had a few things, old jeans and shirts, and the same pair of boots he wore since before he come to stay with them. She’s tempted to save some of them for Curt but she doesn’t think she wants to see her husband going around in her daddy’s old clothes, so she packs them into a bag to give to Goodwill instead. Better that they go to a stranger she don’t know than be around for her to look at all the time.
In the closet there are more boots and she wonders why he never wore them until she looks at the bottoms. They’re worn clean through and stink of sheep shit and beer. Why he’d keep them, she don’t know, but she sets them aside anyway. She pulls out more shirts and folds them up and packs them away, except one.
She finds it in the back of the closet, tacked to the wall instead of hung like the rest. When she looks closer, there’s two shirts, one inside the other. They’re bloodstained and one looks too small to have been her daddy’s. She takes them down and looks them over, and starts to pull them apart but stops. Next to the shirt, on the wall, is a yellowed postcard. When she picks at it the tape holding it there falls apart and turns to dust, and the corners of the postcard flake away on her fingers. She flips it over, expecting to see another note from Jack Twist but instead there’s nothing there, just the name of the place on the front. Brokeback Mountain.
She calls her momma, holding the shirts in one hand and the postcard in the other and the phone perched on her shoulder.
“I told you,” says her momma. “I don’t know nothin.” She hangs up on her, and Junior is tempted to call her back but instead she finds herself dialing another number, Texas area code.
“Brokeback Mountain,” says the woman with the drawl. Junior can tell that she’s not happy to hear from her again, but she can also tell that the woman’s not surprised, either. “Yeah, I heard of it.”
“Where is it?” asks Junior. The woman hesitates. “Tell me.”
The woman sighs. “You don’t listen, do you? You must be Ennis Del Mar’s daughter if Jack’s told me anything true in his life. He always said that Ennis Del Mar was one stubborn son a bitch. The only thing he ever really told me about him.”
Junior waits.
“Brokeback Mountain,” says the woman, in a softer voice Junior’s hasn’t heard her use before, “is where Jack wanted his ashes scattered after he died. Said it was his favorite place on earth. Then your daddy told me it’s where he and Jack spent a summer herding sheep.” She snorts. “Don’t take much to put two and two together, y’think?”
The woman pauses then, to let her words sink in. Junior’s panting into the phone, clutching it so hard that her fingers start to ache. The baby squirms, or Junior’s stomach turns. She can’t tell, but both things make her feel suddenly a lot sick.
“ It’s a dirty lie,” she whispers, no force behind it. “That’s-“
“Honey,” says the woman, “I never told a lie in my life. Your daddy and Jack told enough, and they didn’t need no help in telling them.” She pauses. “Or livin them.”
Junior slams the phone down. She drops the shirts and the postcard to the kitchen floor and backs up until she finds the kitchen chair to sit in. She sits, and stares. The urn stares with her, but she can’t look at it. She can’t, because she doesn’t know who’s in it, anymore.
Her gut reaction is disgust. Her momma used to say things about people like that, if they saw any and truth be told they hardly ever did. Folks just don’t do that, not proper folks anyway. She’s heard stories about them though, about all the deviants in San Francisco and that disease in the papers that’s making them all sick, turning them into living skeletons. The preacher on Sundays warns about it, says that it’s not God’s way to be like that. It’s in the Bible. She’s never found it in the Bible, but she knows it’s there. They’ve always told her it is.
But it’s her daddy. Her big, strong beautiful daddy with the long-gone looks and the smile that touched his eyes without ever staying there. If her daddy was like that she would know, wouldn’t she? Her daddy wasn’t a queer. Her daddy was a cowboy and a good man who cleaned his plate at supper and kept her company during storms when Curt had to work. Her daddy walked her down the aisle and planned to teach his grandchild to ride a horse someday.
Her daddy, who had a box of postcards and a shirt from another man hidden away in his bedroom.
Junior isn’t stupid, she knows it’s more than sex when you’ve got someone’s shirt stuck up to your wall with a postcard of the place you met at next to it. That’s love and she shivers, because that’s one of those loves that’s too big, that don’t go cold, and a love like that you can’t carry around where everyone can see. There ain’t no sex good enough to be worth all the trouble of hiding something like that for so long if there’s no love involved.
And the preachers never mention the love part.
She thinks about Jack Twist. The woman had said Jack died a long time ago and was young, had an accident. She wonders how she’d feel if Curt died tomorrow, and the thought makes her ache inside her chest. Is this how her daddy felt after Jack died? Is this how her daddy felt all the time? She thought about his long-gone looks after talking about the rodeo and the times when he’d shuffle off outside to sit under the stars, drinking beer and looking up at them as if he were trying to make them tell him something, like some kind of answer to a question he’d never dared ask out loud where somebody could hear.
The truck pulls up outside, coughs and stalls, and she hears Curt curse at it. She stands and picks up the shirts and the postcard from the floor, and takes them back into her daddy’s room. She hangs them back up in the closet, and presses the postcard between the middle pages of one of her grandparents’ Bibles.
She half-expects a bolt of lightning to slice through the roof of the house and strike her down, but nothing happens except Curt coming in to look for her, kiss her cheek and ask what’s for dinner.
--
August’s heat arrives like the fires of Hell itself, licking at Junior’s face through the open window as the truck bounces along the road. Curt doesn’t think they’re going the right way but Junior’s got the map, despite an arm full of baby, and she says they are.
“This here,” she says. “Turn left!”
“Give me that map!”
“No!” She laughs. “Left! Go left!”
Left is a long and winding road that climbs through the hills, past a construction site that looks like it’s going to be vacation homes someday. Junior frowns a little, and distracts herself with the map. “Go right, next fork.”
Curt mutters to himself, but goes right, and suddenly they are there. It’s a ridge that looks out over a pasture, and there’s a little creek nearby. It’s one of the most beautiful places she’s ever seen, and Junior passes the baby to Curt before scrambling out of the truck.
“Didn’t even know this place existed,” says Curt, coming up behind her. The baby gurgles. “Mighty pretty.”
“Daddy used a come here,” says Junior. “With a friend.” She goes back to the truck and brings out the urn.
“Look, Daddy,” she murmurs to it, not caring if Curt thinks she’s crazy. “Look, it’s Brokeback. I brought you back to it, ‘cause I know you miss it.” She swallows, and whispers, “I know you miss him, and if you’re gonna find him, this is the best place to start lookin.”
She opens the urn and turns away, not willing to see the white plumes of her daddy as they cascade down to the ground, dancing over the grass and off into the wind. She shakes it until she’s sure it’s empty, and closes it up again, leaning the urn against a rock with a view.
“There,” she says. Her throat hurts like there’s something big inside it, trying to get out. Curt comes up and squeezes her shoulder, and she takes the baby from him. “Okay,” she says. “That’s okay, isn’t it?”
Curt smiles. “There’s some grass over yonder. We could have us a lil picnic there.”
Junior nods. “Alrighty.”
She doesn’t look back to where her father’s ashes are. The next rain, she knows, will wash them down and take them into the creek, and they’ll feed the mountain and her daddy will stretch on for miles and miles, trying to reach that place he could never quite get back to. She hopes she’s helped him find his way.
In her arms, her son wriggles and squirms. He was born kicking and screaming at the end of July, and Alma Junior had taken one look at him and she knew his name wasn’t going to be Ennis. The name just didn’t fit this one, with his rodeo legs and spirit that her daddy could see before anybody else could. Her son couldn’t be called Ennis.
So she named him Jack, instead.
end
Thank you all, so much, for the continued comments on this story. I am amazed that even after three years people still find and read this story, and enjoy it enough to let me know. I'm sorry I'm remiss in replying to comments, just know that I really, really appreciate it. :-)
<3
Howdy, all.
Just joined, lured here by madlori and her fantastic story, Human Interest (which, if you're not reading, what the hell are you waitin' for?). Got this idea the other night and decided to write it down and throw myself at your mercy. Not your usual brand of BBM fic, perhaps, but we'll see how it goes. Also, I'm not sure about the spelling of Curt, or what his surname (Junior's married name) would be, so I winged it. Let me know if I'm incorrect.
--
Title: Her Daddy Was
Author: moony
Rating: PG
Notes: Could follow both the story or the film, whatever your poison. Futurefic. A little angsty, but mostly hopeful. Unbeta'd so please forgive any tense-slips. I'm still weeding them out slowly. (Spellcheck, by the way, hates a cowboy's accent.)
Summary: Alma Del Mar Justus (Junior) is her daddy's girl.
Warnings: Character death.
--
There are times when she wishes she was a boy, if only so that when he calls her Junior she would be his junior and not her momma's. She doesn’t much mind being an Alma, name’s always been kind to her and she does love her momma like a good girl should, but she loves her daddy something fierce. If she’s a Junior she’s an Ennis Junior, through and through, even if she don’t have the right equipment to go with the name.
She thinks the baby in her belly is going to be an Ennis Junior. Curt might want it to be a Curt Junior, and she’d do it if it weren’t for the conviction in her that this baby is going to be so much like her daddy. The baby kicks so that when she takes her daddy’s hand and put it on her belly a slow grin moves across his face like a thin ray of sun through a grey cloud and he says, ‘He’s rodeoin in there.’ But then the smile goes away and he gets real quiet, and his face has the look on him that Junior calls the long-gones. For a good while he always looked long-gone to her, but after he come to stay with them, and as Junior’s belly swells, the less long and gone Ennis Del Mar looks, but he still gets that way sometimes when he thinks she ain’t looking.
But the baby’s kicks remind her of her old daddy before his hair gone gray and before the long-gones came, when he’d pick her up and swing her over his head and kiss her and make the shadows on her wall into horses with his huge, rough hands, and she makes up her mind that it’s an Ennis - even if it’s a girl.
Her daddy lives with them now, in the little house they rent from the fella Curt works for. It’s a tight fit, all of them in there together, with Junior getting bigger every damn day it seems like. She rolls out of bed and rolls down the hall and into the kitchen, where the smell of stale coffee from the night before makes her retch into the stained sink. It’s not long before her daddy appears, rumpled and unshaved, coming up behind her to rub her back and get her some water. Her daddy’s always taken care of her, Junior never let her mother tell her otherwise.
“Gettin close,” he says, sitting at the rickety table and pouring himself a cup of the stale, cold coffee. He drinks it and she wants to retch again, wants to knock it out of his hand and make him some new, but there isn’t any because Curt’s not in yet with the groceries. “You look ready to pop.”
“I feel like I’m gonna pop,” she says, sinking into the chair across from her daddy. The chair squeaks and groans and protests and she thinks it’d be right funny if it just fell apart out from her and she landed on the floor, and the baby pops out right into her daddy’s hands. She laughs. “Tell the truth, I wouldn’t mind. I’m tired a this. No more after this, I tell you what.”
Her daddy laughs and drinks his bad coffee. “You’re sayin that now but once this one’s out and crawlin you’ll be wishin for another one. Your momma said the same thing, she didn’t want no more and then you was startin to walk and talk and she damn near knocked me through a wall, jumpin on me a give her another.”
Junior goes red. “Daddy,” she scolds, “that’s not right!” She laughs though, and picks up the coffee pot, to get it away from him before he pours himself any more.
Curt comes home and there’s breakfast, eggs and bacon and new coffee, and Curt goes outside to have a smoke because Junior doesn’t allow it in the house. “Doc’s orders,” she tells her daddy. “No smokin or drinkin or coffee.”
“Damn,” says her daddy, taking out a cigarette and poking it between his lips. “Don’t know how you do it. Your momma smoked an drank entire time with you and Francine.”
Junior snorts. “Probably why she’s plain useless now,” she says. She loves her sister but ain’t got no time for her teenage silliness and attitude. “Go on, git outside with that.”
Her daddy goes and she watches him and Curt through the kitchen window until she has to pee. She’s just about to close the bathroom door when there’s a shout and a door and Curt’s voice telling someone to send an ambulance, and she comes back out to see Curt bent over her father on the front porch, blowing air in his mouth and hitting him in the chest. She doesn’t know where he learned that. The sirens in the distance get louder, and she pisses herself in the middle of her hallway.
Ennis Del Mar dies at ten-thirty in the morning on June 13, 1989. He’s awful young to have a heart attack, says the doctor, but you can’t eat bacon and drink coffee and smoke the way he does every morning and expect to live forever. Curt has to take Junior out of the hospital and sit her down in a wheelchair in the parking lot. “You got to calm down,” he tells her. “Ain’t no sense getting yourself all worked up. Think about the baby, Alma.”
She is thinking about the baby and how it’s never going to know its grandpa. It’s never going to know how to be an Ennis because Ennis Del Mar is gone. She doesn’t know how she can have a baby without her daddy around. When she imagined it, he was always there. Him and Curt and her momma and even Francine. Now it’s all wrong because her daddy is gone and she is alone.
Somehow she gets home and she sits in the same chair she sat in a few hours ago. Her daddy’s coffee cup is still where he left it but she hasn’t the heart to wash it out. The phone rings and Curt answers it, telling her momma that she’s not fit to talk right now and they’ll come by later. “I don’t want to go,” she says, and her voice sounds wrong to her. It doesn’t sound like her voice, it sounds like her momma’s voice - old and worn out.
“You have to go,” says Curt. “Your momma’s upset too.”
“No she ain’t. She hated Daddy.”
Curt sighs. “She’s gonna want to see you anyway, so you’re gonna go over there like a good girl.”
She does go, because she’s too tired to argue. Her momma hugs her and gives her something to drink. Francine is there, red-eyed and crying in a way that makes Junior want to slap her upside the head. She wants to yell at her, “You ain’t never visited with him, you ain’t never so much as give him a phone call on his birthday,” and call her things that might make her momma throw her out. Then she’d have an excuse to go home and lay down, and cry.
Instead, she sits quiet and lets them talk around her while Curt holds her hand tight across the table, a makeshift harbor on a broken shore.
--
The funeral is short because Ennis Del Mar’s will said he didn’t want one. Her momma insisted though that they get a preacher to say a few words at least, before the body was cremated. Junior got the urn, which is ugly and metal and sits on her kitchen table because she don’t know what else to do with it. Curt says they ought to have it interred somewhere but she knows her daddy. “He don’t want to be in the ground,” she tells him. “He‘d hate that. Can’t see the sky when you’re covered in dirt.”
Truth is, she can’t put it in the ground because then her daddy’d be out of her sight forever. She sits across from it in the mornings, drinking water or tea and feeling her baby kick her like a pissed-off mule. The urn doesn’t talk and for a crazy second she thinks nothing’s changed, because her daddy hoarded words like they was valuable and he was afraid of spending them all too quick. If she thinks about it she can probably count out how many words he’d given her since the day she was born. So an urn that don’t speak isn’t too different from her daddy at all.
Except that it is. It doesn’t smell like tobacco and saddle-oil and it doesn’t have callused hands that rub her back in the mornings after she pukes, and it doesn’t call her little darlin. It doesn’t have her eyes or her snub nose or her temper. It’s not Ennis to her Junior.
She doesn’t know what she misses most - her daddy, or who she had been to her daddy.
--
Eventually it was time to go through her daddy’s things. They needed the spare bedroom for the baby and she had to make room for the crib Curt was building out behind the house. She went in early one morning in July, when the sun wasn’t too high up and the room wouldn’t be hot, and for a long time she couldn’t even cross the threshold. She stood in the doorway and looked at the bits and pieces of her daddy’s life.
He didn’t have much. When he’d come to stay with them all he’d brought was some clothes and gear, boots and a couple of books he didn’t read but couldn’t get rid of, for some reason. There isn’t anything on the walls except a couple of pictures of her and Francine as little girls. It doesn’t look like anyone lived in the room and she thinks maybe her daddy hadn’t been living at all, but that this had been just a place to be before the next thing came along. She wonders if he’d known what the next thing would turn out to be.
She starts on the random things first, things scattered around. The books turn out to be Bibles that belonged to her grandparents so she puts those aside. Papers she throws into bags for Curt to deal with the next time he has things to burn. She strips the bed and forces herself to take the sheets out to the wash, folding up the blanket and tries to put it on the shelf in the closet, but it won’t go. She stands on her toes and reaches up and feels around with her hand until her fingers find something hard and square. A box.
A boot box, older than she is and twice as dusty. She sneezes five times when she opens it. In it are postcards, stacks of them. The date on one is 1968. There’s one from 1967. They’re all addressed to Ennis Del Mar and they’re all signed by one name: Jack.
She remembers someone called Jack. She reads each card, and each card promises a visit. The oldest one - Friend this letter is a long time over due. - has a postmark of Texas. She takes each card out of the box and arranges them into stacks on the naked bed, according to date, and after a while she finds herself staring at a secret history of her daddy that goes on for almost twenty years.
The front door slams and Curt calls out a hey, and she carefully puts the postcards back in the box. She goes to find him with a kiss and tells him, “I need to go to my momma’s,” so he has a quick cup of coffee and a smoke before helping her into the truck and driving her over. She takes the box with her.
“I don’t know no Jack Twist,” says her momma, and for some reason this doesn’t surprise Junior at all. “Musta been one a your daddy’s fishin buddies.” There’s a cold, hard line to her mouth when she says it, says the word fishin like she was tasting something awful.
Junior looks at her. “I remember a Jack,” she says. “When I was little. Daddy brought him home.” She fights for the memory, looking for the face and smiling when she finds it. “He was real handsome. He had nice eyes-“
Her momma slams her hand down on the table and knocks over the sugar bowl. “You don’t know nothin!” she says. “You’re rememberin the TV or somethin.”
“Nope,” says Junior. “I remember Jack Twist, I just don’t know what happened to him. I thought you might know.”
“I told you, I don’t know nothin.” Her momma’s eyes are wet. “Now git home, before it’s dark.”
Junior tells Curt about the box on the drive back. “He kept them all,” she says, wrapping her hands around the box the way she used to hold her daddy’s hands. “So they must a been important to him.”
“Was your dad ever in the Army?” he asks. She shakes her head.
“No, the Army didn’t get him.” She looks out the window. “Must a been somethin else about Jack Twist worth rememberin if it wasn’t the Army, or fishin.”
--
At the library she gets a Texas phone book and looks up Twist. There’s four, but two aren’t home, one is a Oriental (and Junior don’t know what to think about that) and the other has an answering machine. She leaves a message but doesn’t expect to get a call back, so she’s surprised when the next morning the phone rings and there’s a woman with a Texan drawl on the other end.
“Jack was my husband,” she says, long and slow. “We met in the rodeo.”
She remembered her daddy’s words about the kicking in her belly. He’s rodeoin in there. “He knew my daddy,” says Junior. “My daddy was Ennis Del Mar. He died in June.”
The woman is quiet for a moment. “I’m awful sorry to hear that,” she says. “I talked to your daddy once. He called me after Jack died.”
Junior felt a twinge in her belly that for once had nothing to do with the baby. “I… didn’t know. I’m sorry.”
“It’s fine. It’s been a long time. He had an accident. He was real young.”
“I- I just…” She takes a deep breath. “I was cleanin out my daddy’s things and I found a box of postcards, from Jack.”
There’s another silence on the other end of the line that goes on so long that Junior wonders if they’ve been disconnected. She’s about to ask when the woman makes a noise that sounds halfway between a shudder and a sigh. “Listen, your-“ She stops and clears her throat. “There’s no sense in wonderin. Jack’s gone and your daddy’s gone, and you just got to let them go.”
“But-“
“Listen. You sound like a real nice girl, and I don’t want to upset y’all with talk about the past. You love your daddy, don’t you?”
Junior swallows. “Yeah.”
“Then keep lovin him like he was to you. It don’t matter a whit what he was before, y’hear?” The woman’s sounds a little rushed. “Just let sleepin dogs lie.”
“But-“
“I gotta go,” she says, and then there’s a click. Junior stares at the phone for a moment before she hangs it up and sits down at the table. Her father’s urn is still there, along with the coffee cup that’s got green fuzz in the bottom now.
“Daddy,” she whispers, “who were you before me?”
--
That afternoon Junior packs up her daddy’s clothes. He only had a few things, old jeans and shirts, and the same pair of boots he wore since before he come to stay with them. She’s tempted to save some of them for Curt but she doesn’t think she wants to see her husband going around in her daddy’s old clothes, so she packs them into a bag to give to Goodwill instead. Better that they go to a stranger she don’t know than be around for her to look at all the time.
In the closet there are more boots and she wonders why he never wore them until she looks at the bottoms. They’re worn clean through and stink of sheep shit and beer. Why he’d keep them, she don’t know, but she sets them aside anyway. She pulls out more shirts and folds them up and packs them away, except one.
She finds it in the back of the closet, tacked to the wall instead of hung like the rest. When she looks closer, there’s two shirts, one inside the other. They’re bloodstained and one looks too small to have been her daddy’s. She takes them down and looks them over, and starts to pull them apart but stops. Next to the shirt, on the wall, is a yellowed postcard. When she picks at it the tape holding it there falls apart and turns to dust, and the corners of the postcard flake away on her fingers. She flips it over, expecting to see another note from Jack Twist but instead there’s nothing there, just the name of the place on the front. Brokeback Mountain.
She calls her momma, holding the shirts in one hand and the postcard in the other and the phone perched on her shoulder.
“I told you,” says her momma. “I don’t know nothin.” She hangs up on her, and Junior is tempted to call her back but instead she finds herself dialing another number, Texas area code.
“Brokeback Mountain,” says the woman with the drawl. Junior can tell that she’s not happy to hear from her again, but she can also tell that the woman’s not surprised, either. “Yeah, I heard of it.”
“Where is it?” asks Junior. The woman hesitates. “Tell me.”
The woman sighs. “You don’t listen, do you? You must be Ennis Del Mar’s daughter if Jack’s told me anything true in his life. He always said that Ennis Del Mar was one stubborn son a bitch. The only thing he ever really told me about him.”
Junior waits.
“Brokeback Mountain,” says the woman, in a softer voice Junior’s hasn’t heard her use before, “is where Jack wanted his ashes scattered after he died. Said it was his favorite place on earth. Then your daddy told me it’s where he and Jack spent a summer herding sheep.” She snorts. “Don’t take much to put two and two together, y’think?”
The woman pauses then, to let her words sink in. Junior’s panting into the phone, clutching it so hard that her fingers start to ache. The baby squirms, or Junior’s stomach turns. She can’t tell, but both things make her feel suddenly a lot sick.
“ It’s a dirty lie,” she whispers, no force behind it. “That’s-“
“Honey,” says the woman, “I never told a lie in my life. Your daddy and Jack told enough, and they didn’t need no help in telling them.” She pauses. “Or livin them.”
Junior slams the phone down. She drops the shirts and the postcard to the kitchen floor and backs up until she finds the kitchen chair to sit in. She sits, and stares. The urn stares with her, but she can’t look at it. She can’t, because she doesn’t know who’s in it, anymore.
Her gut reaction is disgust. Her momma used to say things about people like that, if they saw any and truth be told they hardly ever did. Folks just don’t do that, not proper folks anyway. She’s heard stories about them though, about all the deviants in San Francisco and that disease in the papers that’s making them all sick, turning them into living skeletons. The preacher on Sundays warns about it, says that it’s not God’s way to be like that. It’s in the Bible. She’s never found it in the Bible, but she knows it’s there. They’ve always told her it is.
But it’s her daddy. Her big, strong beautiful daddy with the long-gone looks and the smile that touched his eyes without ever staying there. If her daddy was like that she would know, wouldn’t she? Her daddy wasn’t a queer. Her daddy was a cowboy and a good man who cleaned his plate at supper and kept her company during storms when Curt had to work. Her daddy walked her down the aisle and planned to teach his grandchild to ride a horse someday.
Her daddy, who had a box of postcards and a shirt from another man hidden away in his bedroom.
Junior isn’t stupid, she knows it’s more than sex when you’ve got someone’s shirt stuck up to your wall with a postcard of the place you met at next to it. That’s love and she shivers, because that’s one of those loves that’s too big, that don’t go cold, and a love like that you can’t carry around where everyone can see. There ain’t no sex good enough to be worth all the trouble of hiding something like that for so long if there’s no love involved.
And the preachers never mention the love part.
She thinks about Jack Twist. The woman had said Jack died a long time ago and was young, had an accident. She wonders how she’d feel if Curt died tomorrow, and the thought makes her ache inside her chest. Is this how her daddy felt after Jack died? Is this how her daddy felt all the time? She thought about his long-gone looks after talking about the rodeo and the times when he’d shuffle off outside to sit under the stars, drinking beer and looking up at them as if he were trying to make them tell him something, like some kind of answer to a question he’d never dared ask out loud where somebody could hear.
The truck pulls up outside, coughs and stalls, and she hears Curt curse at it. She stands and picks up the shirts and the postcard from the floor, and takes them back into her daddy’s room. She hangs them back up in the closet, and presses the postcard between the middle pages of one of her grandparents’ Bibles.
She half-expects a bolt of lightning to slice through the roof of the house and strike her down, but nothing happens except Curt coming in to look for her, kiss her cheek and ask what’s for dinner.
--
August’s heat arrives like the fires of Hell itself, licking at Junior’s face through the open window as the truck bounces along the road. Curt doesn’t think they’re going the right way but Junior’s got the map, despite an arm full of baby, and she says they are.
“This here,” she says. “Turn left!”
“Give me that map!”
“No!” She laughs. “Left! Go left!”
Left is a long and winding road that climbs through the hills, past a construction site that looks like it’s going to be vacation homes someday. Junior frowns a little, and distracts herself with the map. “Go right, next fork.”
Curt mutters to himself, but goes right, and suddenly they are there. It’s a ridge that looks out over a pasture, and there’s a little creek nearby. It’s one of the most beautiful places she’s ever seen, and Junior passes the baby to Curt before scrambling out of the truck.
“Didn’t even know this place existed,” says Curt, coming up behind her. The baby gurgles. “Mighty pretty.”
“Daddy used a come here,” says Junior. “With a friend.” She goes back to the truck and brings out the urn.
“Look, Daddy,” she murmurs to it, not caring if Curt thinks she’s crazy. “Look, it’s Brokeback. I brought you back to it, ‘cause I know you miss it.” She swallows, and whispers, “I know you miss him, and if you’re gonna find him, this is the best place to start lookin.”
She opens the urn and turns away, not willing to see the white plumes of her daddy as they cascade down to the ground, dancing over the grass and off into the wind. She shakes it until she’s sure it’s empty, and closes it up again, leaning the urn against a rock with a view.
“There,” she says. Her throat hurts like there’s something big inside it, trying to get out. Curt comes up and squeezes her shoulder, and she takes the baby from him. “Okay,” she says. “That’s okay, isn’t it?”
Curt smiles. “There’s some grass over yonder. We could have us a lil picnic there.”
Junior nods. “Alrighty.”
She doesn’t look back to where her father’s ashes are. The next rain, she knows, will wash them down and take them into the creek, and they’ll feed the mountain and her daddy will stretch on for miles and miles, trying to reach that place he could never quite get back to. She hopes she’s helped him find his way.
In her arms, her son wriggles and squirms. He was born kicking and screaming at the end of July, and Alma Junior had taken one look at him and she knew his name wasn’t going to be Ennis. The name just didn’t fit this one, with his rodeo legs and spirit that her daddy could see before anybody else could. Her son couldn’t be called Ennis.
So she named him Jack, instead.
end