Stars Go Blue (17 page)

Now he must move fast. Through the snow, which sends him tumbling down. He's never seen the likes of a winter like this. He rises up, stumbles, falls, rises again. Ahead is the depot and the silo and a cottonwood. The cottonwood is hibernating like a bear now but soon enough full of sap and greenery and he stands below it, turns to see the police cars pulling up, screaming sirens, turns to see Ray staggering through the snow after him, and his very movement will speed up the spread of poison, this Ben knows.

Ben turns away from them all, and the snow is falling beautifully now, in large warm flakes and the sun is breaking through the clouds. There is the smallest little area of blue sky above the depot, above the silo, above the tree. It is there that he will ascend.

He wonders how his life looks to the stars. He wonders if the universe has remembered the planet and her people. He wonders if, even, the earth
is
the remembering room of all that is.

He would have liked to die on the ranch. But he can imagine it, conjure it into being, and he does now. There is the line of willows, bright red and orange against the snow, becoming redder as the weather warms, nearly so bright as to hurt his eyes. There is the bald eagle flying over. And there is the snow melting and the first greening of the grass, and the small crocuses
by the house turning out their first curl of green, and then the first bloom of color. There is the sky and the mountains and the green pasture and the spread of his beautiful ranch. There are the first rainfalls of spring and the huge thunderstorms of summer. The aspens will first have their catkins, then they will unfurl their first small heart-shaped leaves.

He wishes he had written a note to the others, for it seems like something he would have wanted to do. The note he wrote himself, that was a gift he must now have the courage to accept.

He stays facing this direction so he can see snow and blue sky, and he shrugs off his jacket, all the while looking up. One last time, he looks around. He sees the girl in the distance, standing like an alert deer, watching him. He takes the syringe from his pocket, holds it with one hand and palpates his ribs with the other, and stares at it for a moment, at the beautiful liquid, the water that promises peace.

RENNY

A
nd so finally at this last moment, Ben has deeply communicated with her. She feels her mind becoming what his was. Slow. Frozen. He has come to her after all, shown her what it was like to be him, stuck with a mind that is failing. Communicated at last. It is much scarier than she thought it would be, and oh, how he has handled this with courage, handled the rising, choking fear with a calm bravery.

As she hangs on the truck's door, she imagines voices. Imagines colors. Imagines lights. She tries to pull herself up and over the side of the truck, but she simply cannot. She falls. Feels her body convulse. The wind. It's screaming and whistling like a creature that is alive, like a siren. Her body convulses again, and then again.

She stands—or thinks she does—and puts her arms on the truck window and tries to pull herself up, again, but it can't be done. It can't be done. She can either sit in the snow or lean against the truck, and so she tries to do this, to prop herself
upright. She is struggling against something. The wind that feels like arms, pushing her this way and that. She should have found a way to protect them all—Ben and Carolyn and the grandchildren and herself—a little better.

If she can keep her mind active, going over the same litany of things she used to ask Ben, perhaps she will stay alive. She closes her eyes and thinks of each person in the family. How Carolyn will take care of Ben, and how, when things get bad enough, Carolyn will have the toughness and the sense to move him to an assisted living place.

She thinks of Jack. Wonders if he'll become a lawyer. Pictures him roping a steer, which he was good at, but never did enjoy. She knew early on that he'd become a city kid, which was fine by her. Although, she realizes now, she never quite told him that.

She wonders if Leanne will stay single for a long time. Leanne has career in mind, and less mothering instinct than any of them. Good. She'll do something else with her life, and be very sturdy and bossy about it.

She wonders about Billy and what sort of man he will turn out to be, and hopes he doesn't become an oil-rig worker and get hooked on meth. But perhaps he will find someone to love and will live an honest and decent life, working the land. She can easily imagine him gathering eggs from chickens.

She wonders about Jess, and wonders if Jess and Ben share some particular genetic code. They are so much alike, see the world with so much quiet stillness, like an evening sky, and she has never understood it. Perhaps she has unfairly disliked them for it, because it is hard to appreciate things you do not understand. Perhaps the fault was only hers all along.

The dog is whining, then barking. Or at least she dreams it. She's so blissful and tired. Good dog. The rising sun gives a
weak slant of light through the clouds, and she stares up at the gray sky, one small patch of morning-lit blue.

There are many things she should have done. Told someone where she was going. Told Carolyn and Leanne and Jess and Jack and Billy good-bye. Put the ranch in a conservation easement. Donated some money to the Alzheimer's Association or some group that helps people die. Put a new cover on her book, one that read
THE DAMN INTERESTING STORY OF RENNY AND BEN
.

One story in particular she should have put down. It comes to her now, like a dream, only not. It's more like reality curved in on itself. It's happening to her again. The spring after Rachel died, after Ben had moved out back. A cow was having trouble giving birth, she'd called for him and the vet, and when Ben came and put his hand inside the mother and pulled on the tail of the calf inside, there was no movement. Dead inside the mother. They'd need to do a fetotomy. And while they waited for the vet, Renny and Ben stood in the mucky corral, spattered in blood, and Ben had pointed out the bald eagle that had been hanging out above the river. She wanted to tell him, then, that she let the dogs sleep with her on the bed, so that there was some weight and warmth beside her. She wanted to ask him if he did the same, and if he responded with a yes, she wanted to make a joke about how the dogs' situation, at least, had improved since their separation. But when she turned to say something, she saw that he was staring in the direction of the river at the blue sky with some thought that has stilled him, and he was blanketed in light snow, a dusting of white settled on his hair and jacket, and she did not speak. When the vet arrived with his black vinyl bag, and took out the long wire strung between two metal handles, she tried not to watch. But she couldn't help it. How he looped the wire in
a circle in his palm, closed his fingers over it, and pushed his fist into the cow. How he rubbed the cow's hind legs with his left hand as he worked inside her with his right, and hummed a long conversation to her.
You'll feel better soon, mama mama mama sweet mama girl, bet you're hurting but it's almost over, sweet old mama.
How she took those words to be personally directed at her. How she knew he was looping the wire behind the hind quarter and was going to saw the calf apart inside the mother, so as to help her live. There is Ben and the vet and they alternated pulling, the
whir
of the wire, and Renny stood at the head of the cow, consoling her. The cow, she could tell, was straining once more with this feeling of something moving inside her, and her ears flicked backward at this new sound coming from her rear end.

Ben talked about the calf they would graft on. And she knew, from his face, that he felt sick. In all their years of ranching, they'd had to do this only twice before, and they found it unacceptable. And she saw his face pale even more when the tension of the line met the bone of the unborn calf's leg, and again when the vet reached inside the cow and pulled out the calf's hind quarter, severed from the groin, and even more when it slushed out in a waterfall of blood at Ben's feet.

The cow tried to turn, then, but the halter kept her head in place, and Renny was there anyway, scratching her ears and blocking her view. She kept her eyes on Ben, then, so she didn't have to see the chunk of calf. At first, Ben's face was so familiar that she couldn't really
see
Ben. Who was this man? This human being? She had to concentrate. Note that his hair was now nearly white. That he'd cut himself shaving just below the jawline. How his eyes looked soft and calm, despite the fact that he hated what he was doing. Her knowledge of him was so limited, so incomplete. So she turned to the cow, instead.
“Just get through this, Mama,” she'd said into the cow's ear as she scratched it. “I know just how you feel. Carolyn was easy. But that Rachel. I thought she was ripping me apart. The plight of mothers, I tell you.”

Then the rest of the calf was dislodged and a waterfall of blood and yellow fluid came with her next strain. The cow shifted her weight, then tensed. The rest of the calf slithered from her in a pool of membranes and blood and flopped to the ground. A blue tongue hung from the side of a small mouth, eyes open in a dead stare. Guts and the spinal cord protruded from the back part of the calf, and steam rose, and blood pooled into the snow. The cow tried to turn and thrashed wildly when she could not break free of her halter. She was trying to get to her calf, to lick it, and that simple need is what broke Renny's heart.

When the vet left, Ben skinned the calf and tied the hide to another calf in need of a mother. Renny finally untied the cow, stepped away, and watched as the cow turned to sniff the calf, her nose running across the pieces of hide. Then she moved to where the blood has soaked into the ground and her nose hovered there. She considered the calf for a moment, sniffed it again, regarded it suspiciously. It stepped toward her and let out a meek bawl. Ben and Renny stood quiet, hoping. The cow moved forward then, slid her tongue over the calf's face and ears, and stood still as it teetered toward her bag of milk and sucked.

Renny and Ben smiled at each other. “At least,” Renny had said, “we can still do that.” Meaning: smile. Meaning: save a thing or two.

They began to clean up the mess, and Ben told her that he'd dump the pieces of the calf beyond his cabin, near the gully, in the brush. The dogs wouldn't dig through the mass of sticks to
get to the calf, and besides, the body would be frozen to the ground soon, then covered by snow. And then they spoke of their dead daughter. The only time they truly did. About how she was bones now, and that fact broke each breath of each day. They spoke of how, by the time everything melted, the calf would have decayed. It's amazing, they said, how a life—laughter, arguments, little arms reaching out for a hug—how everything ends up as clean bones.

Before they parted ways—he to the job of disposing of the calf and to his cabin, she to the farmhouse—he had told her to wait. He'd wiped his hands on his jeans, inspected them, and reached out to brush a wisp of hair from Renny's face. She had started to say something, but then stopped, but she knew he understood. That she had no words that could begin to close the space but that she loved him anyway. He nodded his understanding and offered a sad smile in return. They had turned, then, each ducking into the swirling snow. Her heart shining, for a bit, from the soft touch of his hand on her hair, his kind eyes on hers.

She is there, on that winter day. The past has circled round to this moment. It is a hallucination, of course, she hears her brain whisper. The last hold of her reason-filled brain slipping away. What the brain does in hypothermia. Or perhaps not. Perhaps she is in that moment again. The woodenness turns to warmth.

What's gone is gone. Her heart is flipping around. Like a dying fish. Except a fish that doesn't mind. Only the heart cares what it's doing, but not the rest of her. She's never felt so calm. So peaceful. If she had the energy, or if she cared more, she would tear off her clothes, she's so hot. It must be the sun, burning through the clouds to get her.
It's probably Ben
, she thinks, trying to warm her.
That was very nice of him
,
she thinks. Very kind for him to come for her in that swirling snowstorm after all. To say that they didn't save the calf, and they didn't save their daughter, but they saved another calf, and they saved the mother, and they could save each other now.

How kind of him. How kind.

IV.

 

“We two alone will sing like birds in the cage:

When thou dost ask me blessing, I'll kneel down,

And ask of thee forgiveness: so we'll live,

And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh

And talk upon's the mystery of things,

And we'll wear out, packs and sects of great ones

That ebb and flow by the moon.”

—
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

King Lear
(act 5, scene 3)

JESS

P
retend, if you will, that this is a story, and that I should be the one to tell it, and that it ends like this: Much of the wind-whipped snow melted rapidly, octave by octave, and then the poured and patterned ice underneath melted as well, and the earth was stunned with an influx of seeping water and it gurgled and muddied and transformed into a ripe-smelling soaked mess and, in stops and starts, dutifully absorbed all this water, until, finally, as we knew it would, offered up a slight greening, a twinge of soggy color. There are still rings of snow in the shade, and the north-facing slopes of the foothills remain dusted in white, and there are still ruts of mud on every dirt county road, and there is still the decay and dried grasses of winter. But you understand how things change rapidly, that one good moment of observation will reveal this to you. This one good moment of observation is all we really have in the world and it is called love.