Crybaby Ranch (11 page)

A
s I come out of the cabin, pale sunlight floats at the top of the valley like foam in a glass of dusky beer. It's been raining off and on all day and now, far to the north, dark clouds bed down for a late-afternoon nap.

Bo's homeopathic remedy seems successful. His theory is that we are building enough good history together in small, benign doses throughout the day to offset our “bad” episode last night. With Bo installed as cook and caretaker today, I'm living the life of an artist. I had trouble accepting his gift at first and squirmed with discomfort this morning till I realized it only made him feel unappreciated.

I asked Bo what I could do for him.

He said, “I've never married because I couldn't conceive of living in the same rooms with the same woman from breakfast on through dinner. You don't need to do a thing. You're a living revelation to me.”

“Sounds like you're practicing for your future.” I was going to add
With Caro
, but decided just because I was sporting cat whiskers didn't mean I had to act catty. Now faded from more scrubbing, my purple whiskers look in a certain light like the shadows of wrinkles pursed around my mouth. And my nose looks like that of an aging alcoholic. Not a glamorous sight. I'm at the stage in which I'd rather ink in the marks again so that it's clear I'm masquerading. Bo solved his problem by not shaving.

Bo may be practicing with me on another count. At lunch he disclosed an idea he's working on to turn Crossing Elk Ranch into an artists' retreat.

“I don't intend to cook,” he said, nodding at my plate heaped with tuna casserole, “except for barbecues. We'd need to cook a cow once a week over flames tall as the Tetons for everybody to feel Western.” Rather, each artist would be provided a one-room log cabin with its own small kitchen. Bo envisions five cabins all together, tucked into the trees on Saddlestring Butte. The artists will have solitude surrounded by natural beauty and a social life with elk, coyotes, and each other. Bo has been awarded residencies at three different artists' colonies in the past and now serves on the board at Ucross, so he knows exactly the kind of experience he wants to offer here.

As I pick up these bits of his artistic history, I have to readjust my idea of Bo as a casual artist. Since I've known him, I've never caught him in the process of sculpting, whereas he regularly catches me stringing beads. I look at everything in terms of beads—M&M'S, lima beans, moose droppings—I'm always designing art in my head. Bo never seems to be. Yet he has an enviable résumé and a show coming up. I thought I'd learn about living as an artist from him, but I think he's having trouble getting into his work this spring with all the free time he's created for himself.

Anyway, I decided to enjoy being the guinea pig for his new enterprise. I beaded at the kitchen table, until he started cooking and needed the work space. His solution to that was to sand and finish a wood door he had stored in his barn, which now rests across a couple saw horses in a corner of the living room waiting for Bo to make real legs for it. I have my own permanent work space now and never again have to pack up my beads and tools to free the kitchen table.

As the path I follow for my walk slips into the trees, darkness sloshes around my ankles and shadows rise to my shoulders. In an opening of the forest near the creek, I spot my cabin. Furry tufts of smoke from my chimney send signals of comfort. I built a fire before my walk; I mentally jot a reminder to keep up such small gestures of care to myself, such as a lamp lit for my homecoming and soup simmering on the stove.

All this seems hard work and I wonder if I shouldn't just lure Bo into my kitchen for keeps, because Tuesday I begin working at Valley Bookstore four days a week. Tessa said by July I could move into full-time if I wanted. I will work with nine women, and I like the idea of that. It's been a long time since I've had women friends in my life.

Before this rain the forest floor crunched underfoot; it was like walking on cornflakes. Now the grasses are springy, yet the rocky ground has already soaked up the moisture and the trail is firm, not muddy like it would be in Ohio.

I suspect Bo procrastinates about repairs around his own place. He complains his old clapboard house has rotted windowsills, and I've seen that the sheds lean north like the pine trees beside me on the path. So perhaps he procrastinates about his art, as well. He is scheduled for a two-man show at River Rock Gallery the middle of September, but seems busier making plans to guide the Donnells into Mosquito Creek for an elk hunt in November. Not to mention the repairs he's put on his list for my place.

I'm satisfied Bo is not working out retribution today. We talked about that. Still, I carry some guilt over my wildly dramatic accusation of rape. With the exception of this episode with Bo, my mother was successful teaching me not to indulge in the childish prank of crying wolf. Yet all my life she has been guilty of giving false alarm. She petitions for help way before necessary, as if she's afraid that she can't handle what may arise. She'd holler, “Quick, somebody.” I'd drop my toys, run to her, find her reaching for the top shelf in her closet, and she'd say, “Oh, I thought maybe that shoe box was going to fall.”

Before heading home I rest on deadfall beside the creek. Surveyors left one of their wooden stakes here. A neon pink plastic ribbon waves from it to signal a boundary line. Around this stake a muskrat has deposited small mounds of mud marking his own boundary line.

All at once I realize: My mother's need for help was actual. My mother never cried wolf. Because she was my parent I thought she was more capable than me. She was not, not ever, not even when I was young.

But my own acquisition of her helplessness is false.

I experience an eerie lifting of her thought patterns, which have overlaid my own for so long. Beneath the shroud rests a far less fearful and inhibited self. I realize with a jolt: Much of what I have taken to be my own thinking is merely a process I've mimicked from my mother.

I poke at the muddy deposits beside the survey post with a stick to see how long ago the muskrat was here. This morning is my guess, but with the day's rain it's hard to tell.

Was she sick long before any of us suspected? Or did her games eventually turn into reality? Whichever, I'm frightened about all those years we were in her mind together, because Dr. Meagher's diagnosis is that Mom has early-onset Alzheimer's disease. She is only fifty-nine years old. And this form of Alzheimer's is genetic.

Moistness descends with the evening chill, and to relax myself, I drink the air in deeply. Matted leaves, fast creek water, tree roots, and wet rocks brew a hearty ale. I rise and start back for my warm cabin.

 

Bo's hands are full. One holds a pan of mashed potatoes, the other a pan of gravy. He pulls out my chair with a boot hooked around a leg of it and cocks his head for me to sit. I can't believe all the food he's prepared today. He wouldn't let me help. Says he likes to cook, but it's no fun just for himself.

“Thank you,” I say when he dollops potatoes on my plate.

“Kind of lumpy,” he says. They disappear beneath a ladle full of gravy.

That's Bo and me, all day long ladling friendly talk over what we'd like to have disappear. But something needs to be aired. I try a sideways approach.

“What did your grandfather think of the Donnells at the potluck?” I ask this while Bo's back is turned, arms in the oven, fetching the meat loaf.

“He thinks Dickie's a weasel.” Bo straightens and puts a slice of meat loaf on my plate and one on his. “Changes the color of his demeanor according to the weather.”

I have to say her name. “And…um…Caro?”

“He said—after she'd left, thank God—‘Hmm, narrow nostrils. She kinda critical at you, son?'”

My tenseness dissolves in laughter.

Bo takes his seat and tells me his grandfather has a whole list of character attributes that match physical features. “He'd say you were generous because you have a full mouth.”

Immediately, Bo drops his eyes to his plate and mine follow. Talking about lips embarrasses us. This is not part of our silently agreed upon household rules. We don't even know we have these unspoken rules, until now.

I quickly ask more questions about his grandparents. By mutual though unarticulated consent, we drag our conversation out until, question and answer alternately layered, we build ourselves another foundation of rapport. In the process, I learn that long ago my cabin housed the hired hand. Then one winter Bo's grandmother moved the hand into a house trailer and moved herself into the cabin.

“Pop was caught with a fancy lady is how the story came down to me,” Bo says, adding that the phrasing might have something to do with him being only seven at the time. “My grandparents stayed mad that whole year. Then one morning I came over for breakfast and there was Grandpa sitting at the table in his long johns.” Bo nodded to the end of the table beneath the shelf, where I've placed that old bench I found out back. My mind removes my stacks of books and places a younger version of O.C. on the bench, wearing his winter underwear, boots, and a cowboy hat.

Bo can't say for sure that this dalliance with the fancy lady was a single event, but he thinks so. And he thinks the woman was earlier married to a neighboring rancher, both now dead.

I ask Bo, “But your grandparents never lived together after that?”

“The aunts said Pop wouldn't say he was sorry. But Grandma told me she'd never lived alone before and found she liked it. Went from her daddy's house to O.C.'s. Also, she said his neatness improved when he became a visitor and so did his table manners.”

“How about O.C.?” I ask. “Think he liked being a visitor?”

“Seemed to work,” Bo says.

That's the only kind of marriage Bo has intimately witnessed, I think to myself in wonder: a kind in which the husband
visits
the wife.

Another thought: Bo was raised to feel comfortable with two women playing the single role of mother in his life. Perhaps Bo also feels comfortable with two women playing the role of girlfriend.

“Why are you messing around with her anyway?” I blurt.

“Grandma? She's dead.”

“I mean, you seem like a nice guy, but here you are…in a married woman's bed.”

Bo looks into my eyes. “I thought you realized how sorry I am for that. I'm not like my grandpa. I can say I'm sorry.”

I feel embarrassed, but there is nowhere to go but onward here. “I mean Caro's bed…oh, God.” This is not my business.

“You think I'm sleeping with Caro?”

“Even Caro seems to think that.” I don't know what I mean exactly; she just exudes sexuality around Bo. “Never mind,” I say. Though it would help knowing how much like his grandpa Bo really is, because Bo's apology—although he doesn't owe me one—was not straightforward but as indirect as his answer to my last question.

We each take a slow bite. I hear a log shift in the woodstove.

“That's happened with Caro,” he says, as if it didn't involve him exactly or was an accident. A passive response for the kind of lover I experienced last night. “Though that was before…you know…” He gestures to the two of us.

I say, “Nothing is different.”

Just because someone barges into my life some night doesn't mean I have to adjust my emotional timetable—I just moved here. I just divorced. My mother is going to die of Alzheimer's. Someday her mind will not only forget my name, but forget to instruct her organs how to operate. I feel angry and my mind searches for a way to punish Bo for cornering me.

“Caro's a married woman. I don't understand such ethics,” I say.

“Caro's thinking about leaving him. Dickie's probably fooling around, too.” Bo shrugs. “That's the way it is with them.”

“And is that the way it is with you?”

Bo looks into my eyes. “It's not the way my marriage is going to go. No.”

“Just your life.” I hide behind my glass of water, taking a sip.

“If I heard you right, you don't want a stake in this.”

“You heard me right.”

I scrape my chair away from the table and begin to carry the used dishes to the sink. I don't clearly understand what message I've just imparted or if it truly represents the one I mean to give. How can I say, “Back off…but just for the time being, please.” It isn't a fair request.

“Bo.” I turn to face him. “Can't we just go on like we have?”

“How's that, Zannah? I sleep with Caro and cook for you?”

I can't answer him.

He says, “I don't have a choice here, do I?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that I care for you, but you'd prefer I continue to sleep with a married woman so you can hold it against me.”

“That's ridiculous.”

“I don't think so. I think I'm reading it exactly right.”

“I want us to be friends. I'm sorry. That's all I can do now.”