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Robert McMichael​

Jolene

 

I never thought I’d be a mother. Surrounded by mothers, children, aunts, uncles, grandparents, it was just too much. I wanted peace, and that didn’t sit well with the other kids. Cousins, siblings. But my aloofness bothered my parents most of all. I felt they wanted to draw me into something that just seemed like the end of the story, the end of a boring, wrong story. As I got older I just cared less and less what everyone thought, and did what I could to do my own thing. I had a world. It grew with me, and came from books or just thoughts. Things I’d come across. A couple teachers I liked. Short stories. “The Oval Portrait.” “Good Country People.” “Death Drag.” Oh, and Catcher in the Rye. Word problems in math. If two trains moving in opposite directions the 312 miles between St. Louis and Chicago traveled at 75 mph and 65 mph, where would they meet? I liked problems but wanted to solve them alone. And I liked being outside if I could get away from other people. Animals said something to me in an attractive language, one that spoke either of complete calm or unimaginable fear with no in between. Horses were the best, with the best things about people but something else way more serene and noble. I liked not being able to put my finger on it. It was a calm kind of confusion. Cows I just pitied, but that kind of drew me to them, too, in a different way. So when I started getting the attention of boys, I developed a reputation of being a bitch. I wasn’t a joiner, didn’t like groups, had few – if any – real friends, didn’t really trust anyone. I don’t know, really, why I was this way. Some people are just born like that. I can’t explain it, don’t want to even try. It doesn’t matter, anyway. Everyone has their own story. None are better, or at least more important, than others. Some are set from the get-go. Other stories just have their own path, like a river, and they change with the seasons and flows. They’ll hit a sand bar or snag of winter blowdown and have to find a new course. Holes grow, get filled in with silt or widen because of beavers. The longer stories, naturally, have more redirections because they come across more obstacles. I’m not sure which type mine is. Maybe the latter. The only thing I hope is that it still has a ways to go.
   I met Sean at the beginning of my sophomore year in college. He was a loner, like me, with a hole in him. I thought it might be fun to try to fill it. I am still not sure what he saw when he looked at me, the first time or the last. The first time I saw him, he was wearing Wranglers and had on a plain light blue t-shirt. Cowboy boots, round-toed. Worn but serviceable. His hair was a mess of sorrel trying to decide whether it was or wasn’t a mullet; he looked vaguely and very oddly like Tom Jones singing “It’s Not Unusual” on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1965. He was clean-shaven but had an overall worked-over look that matched his taut face and dark eyes. Just shy of spooky. We stood two places apart in line at the bookstore. He held in the crook of his left elbow a stack of ag books, only one of which I can remember: Beef Cattle Science. The more I looked at him, the more cliché he seemed, but I’d learned to doubt first impressions and – on Edna’s advice – was working on the benefit of the doubt.
   Edna was my roommate. Our dorm room was a rectangular cinderblock affair with eight coats of shiny gray paint, off-white linoleum floor, two twin beds separated by an 18-inch center “aisle.” One dingy window in the middle of one end wall between two small Formica-top desks, and at the other end of the room, for each of us, a tiny closet and narrow chest-of-drawers on each side. A notebook paper-sized mirror over the dresser I avoided looking in as much as possible. Edna was big-boned and from the Eastern Front. When she told me that I had to look it up. A cow town one state over called Choteau. She seemed a weird combination of plain and exotic. Natural blonde but she had dyed her hair dark brown, which I couldn’t understand. Still don’t. It was like she was running from something good, from grace itself. On purpose. Giving herself an unnecessary handicap. Anyway, she was like cream cheese: smooth in an honest way, no surprises, kind and gregarious, and wanted everyone to see the good in anything, even if it was flat out impossible. When I told Edna about seeing Sean at the bookstore, I made fun of him to her, thinking she’d join me in the disparagement. She asked a couple clarifying questions – Did he look directly at you? Could you tell if he really “saw” you? And then she laid it down while painting her fingernails a weird shade of silvery orange: “You know, Jolene, you really have no idea what anyone thinks, and then when you encounter someone you have even less an idea of what they’re thinking because what you’re seeing is confused with what they’re seeing, and since you and I usually have a very small idea at best of what we’re thinking, how can we think that we could know what someone else was thinking about us? There’s no way! So maybe stop judging him and next time try just talking to him, if there is a next time.” 
   “Huh?”
   “You know,” she said, “sometimes someone is just who they are, and you can’t do anything about it.”
   “So, you’re saying I’m a jerk for making fun of him?”
   “Well, I wouldn’t put it that way, but yeah, maybe you’re being a little unfair. You don’t know his story. Maybe even he doesn’t know his own story.”
   She was right, but at the time I basically ignored her. I wish I hadn’t.

When Sean and I married, we both wanted to live away from other people. We took a caretaker’s job on a ranch a long way from our families. It was almost like we had strategized an equidistant anti-family plan when you triangulated where he was from, where I was from, and where we ended up, albeit temporarily. So it was pretty ironic when, after about three months there, I came down pregnant. The ranch owner, who Sean had impressed with his seriousness and intensity, must have pitied us because he offered to sell us a parcel big enough to start our own ranch, and financed it himself based on a percentage of our profits moving forward. An unheard-of “rent-to-buy” deal on some good ground that allowed us to grow our own hay and start a cow-calf operation. 
   Sean could do everything on the ranch, and would have if I’d have let him. He wanted stuff done his way, and I tried going along with that, but you know how hard that can be sometimes, especially when things get tight. The first year we started with six heifers, and they all took, and in February we ended up with seven calves – one had twins, and we congratulated ourselves on starting with a lucky number, and even talked about naming the seventh one “Lucky.” Sean said it would be stupid to do that, and I agreed but wished we’d been stupid just because. Then another lucky thing happened – well, lucky for us but not so much for his dad. Sean’s mom called us one frigid night to say that Kirk had had a massive heart attack and died, and that we needed to come take over the ranch because his mom didn’t want to sell it but she was moving back to the other side of the state to live with her aging parents. By this time I was about due, too, so getting those calves born and started, and moving them and us back to where Sean grew up, and me squirting out my first kid was all a gigantic job for us and the intensity of it all brought us closer. Sean was good when he was busy, and he was good to me, too. So we got through all that pretty gently, considering all the potential for problems. I knew he was going to make a good dad.
   The first time Sean hit me was over the dumbest thing. Our child, Julie, was about three months old, and the weather was starting to warm up a little, and the valley looked like I thought Ireland might look, what with Milkfat Creek meandering its sapphire self past the house, and all the green grass starting to cover the winter dirt. I’d always thought spring was the prettiest time of year, but Sean was worried about getting everything planted right, and he was preoccupied with the weather and getting the hay baler and swather working. Anyway, I was sitting with the baby and about to nurse him when the thought came to me. “Let’s have a picnic dinner tonight up on the rim overlooking our place,” I said.
   “We can’t.”
   “Why not? It’ll be fun. I’ll make some…” He backhanded me across the face before I finished my sentence.  

    When Julie died on July 15th, 1970, she was four months old. They said it was SIDS, “crib death.” We had no idea. I’d never even heard of it. Later I learned I’d had a cousin I never even knew who’d died this way. Sean was up in the middle of the night, couldn’t sleep for some reason, and thought her room sounded too quiet, so he checked. He said she was lying on her stomach so he went to pick her up and she felt cold. He yelled for me and I came running down the hall and into her room and didn’t know what was happening, he couldn’t say anything, his face all screwed up, and he just showed her to me, holding her there by her armpits, his arms straight out with her facing me with her dark face and closed eyes and mess of dark hair and in her fuzzy pale blue stocking-foot pajamas with a hood, too warm for the summer I know but I liked how she looked in them. Now she looked like a midget crucified Christ the way he was holding her. Her head even hung down at the same angle. Sean knew she was dead and he couldn’t say it, just stammered syllables that spoke as clearly as anything he’d ever said to me. 
   Even though Sean hit me for the first time only about a month before this, my shell didn’t start forming until this night when Julie died. I blamed Sean, even though – if anyone should have been blamed – it was probably my fault. She might have been too hot in those PJs. Or the mattress in her crib might have been too soft. Or something else. Sean had nothing to do with these things, but I still blamed him because I guess I knew I would come to hate him eventually and it was easier to blame him for this than for something he actually did. I know it doesn’t make much sense, but that’s the only way I know how to explain it. I just didn’t know it, the hating, would be so soon, even after that first time he hit me. It was like that, the hitting, was just something different, separate, easy to rope off. There’s the hitting, and the hating. Two different things. 
   I think for a while we were both really in shock about Julie, but there was a ton of work to do on the ranch and Sean got even more efficient and focused than normal, I guess as a way to bury himself in work. We didn’t talk much, but tried to pretend things were getting back to normal. I’m not the most emotions-on-her-sleeve gal anyway, so I buried whatever I was feeling about Julie and a whole lot of other things, and I’m sure that didn’t really help, either. We got really good at avoiding each other while we ate meals together and slept together and pulled together to keep the ranch afloat. If someone had paid close attention to my fingernails then they could have suspected I wasn’t too happy of a camper. But I’d keep my hands in my pockets as much as possible whenever I went to town. I also stayed away from people as much as I could, especially at first. It was a barrel of laughs. We were a barrel of laughs.

    One day in early September – I remember because Julie would have been six months old about then, and I did keep track of that – I was in town and saw a little girl in a stroller. She was by herself in an aisle at the Co-op, and she looked to be about six months old. I thought it was strange nobody was there with her. She was darker skinned and had jet black hair and deep brown eyes, and an amazing, calm face with an expression on it that was uncanny. I’ll never forget it even though I can’t really describe it. I caught myself staring at her, and then a tall man with a long black braid came around the corner and saw me looking at the little girl. I was embarrassed, so I said, “Is she yours?” and I’m sure the way it came out it must have sounded accusatory, like I was scolding him for leaving her alone, and that is most definitely not the way I wanted it to sound but you know this happens all the time when we try to communicate with each other. Anyway, he just calmly said that no, she was his cousin’s child and he was watching her for the day. I said I thought she was pretty, and then turned and went into the next aisle and pretended to shop for gopher poison until he left the store, which didn’t take long.
   That was Jim Bird. I asked Sean if he knew of any Indians who lived in town, and he said he’d heard a guy had just moved here from Montana, an Indian, originally from Canada. I told him I thought I had run into him at the Co-op in town, and Sean said he was actually thinking of seeing if he could meet him because he wanted some help with the last cutting or two since we’d leased more hayfields this season and the swather and baler were getting old. I guess he figured a younger guy from Montana might work cheap since he probably didn’t know anyone here yet. 
   Sean tracked Jim down and showed him our ranch, and they began working together. I got to know Jim a little bit just from interacting with him sometimes outside and also when he came in for meals; he ate supper with us a lot after they’d finished up for the day. I liked Jim’s demeanor. He was the opposite of Sean: calm, predictable, unflappable, quiet. He wasn’t friendly, but he was easy company. He rarely volunteered anything in conversation, but if you asked him a question he’d answer in a way that made you feel it was a good question and what he said was interesting if slightly terse. Once I asked him about his family, and he said, “It’s a little complicated; the short story is that we don’t have much to do with each other now, except for my cousin.” I didn’t want him to feel interviewed, so I didn’t follow up but I did want to know more. Sean just asked me to pass the cornbread. 
   Once Jim started working for us things settled down a bit between Sean and me. As long as we sort of stayed out of each other’s way he didn’t hit me and I could kind of be more or less myself. We talked about practical stuff mainly, who was gonna get the deliveries at the Co-op, who would pay what bills when, when we might want to rotate crops in which fields. Ranch stuff. The lightest talks we had were gossip-based, about townsfolk who’d done something embarrassing or wrecked a pickup because they’d had too many at the Office Bar or broke a leg trying to do a fancy dance move at somebody’s wedding. I remember moments around these kinds of tidbits when at least one of us almost smiled at the other. Since we’d had our share of misfortune we felt entitled to laugh at other people’s. Maybe that made us small. So be it; we didn’t have much more in the way of entertainment. We didn’t really have enough money or time to take a “vacation,” and – honestly – I can’t think of any time we actually embarked on such a thing. After suggesting that picnic that elicited Sean’s first slap, I was reluctant to suggest anything fun, especially within arm’s reach of him. I had a couple women friends in town, slightly older ranch-wives, who I’d go see sometimes, for lunch or to help prepare for some community event if they asked me. I was good with my hands at making things, crafts, wreaths for Christmas sales, bouquets for weddings or birthdays. Sean’s non-ranching time was spent hunting big game in October and November, and he almost always got a buck and a bull, which really helped feed us and fill the freezer. Sometimes in December or January he’d shoot some geese in one of our fields or in the slough, although I let him know he’d have to clean them because I didn’t want to touch those nasty things. They gave me the creeps because it just seemed they were way too big to be birds. 
   We still slept in the same bed, but I wouldn’t say we were intimate. I tried touching him softly on his stomach a couple of times around that time to see if he’d respond because I kind of missed being close with him even though he scared me when were upright. He just lay there; didn’t roll over, but I swear he stopped breathing for a minute. I don’t know if he was scared or disgusted or paralyzed by something but we never talked about it. Lying down with Sean, though, had always felt like a safe place for me, like his attitude was at least 45 and up to 90 degrees better than it was when he was standing up. He was never calmer than when he was awake and lying down, even on the couch, but he was steadier in this when he was on the bed. It was as if the different angle put him on a totally different plane than he lived and moved in during the daytime. Anger didn’t exist on that plane for him. The seething, steady leveling of the world he transmitted when he walked around was nowhere to be found in bed. If it weren’t for this big difference, we’d have slept in separate beds long before this; I’d have made damned sure of that. Now that I think about it, this – his bed serenity – might have been the most intimate thing he ever did for me, or for us. It said more than language could. Especially given his personality, if you can call it that. Unpersonality would be more accurate. 
   A groove was established for a while, and Jim, for good or bad, became an essential ingredient. Not much drama for at least a year after Julie died. It was like our tribute to her, maybe. Sean was decent to me, though still consumed by his erected, unspecified demons, but he did a better job managing them (in other words, he didn’t hit me at all during this time). Then, around Christmas season in 1972 something changed. He’d planted the winter wheat, gotten the freezers full of deer and elk, everything harvested, hay bales stored, and even – with Jim’s help – got all the equipment fixed and winterized and ready for the following spring. On the surface I thought Sean would have felt a big relief with not much on the farming schedule for a while. The heifers weren’t due to calve for at least six weeks, and monitoring and feeding the cattle only took an hour or two each day. Jim only came to help two or three times a week instead of every day, which helped with our budget, although Sean’s best days were those that Jim was here helping. (Jim by this time had started getting more work doing welding repairs for other farmers, and was thinking of starting his own welding shop in town.) I had my theories about Sean’s mood: he just got sad when the days got shorter (likely, but not the sole explanation); he missed his mom during the holiday season (not likely, but maybe he actually did and wouldn’t admit it to himself, or anyone else); he felt guilty about Julie when he had to be inside, where there were more reminders of her, and her absence. 
   Whatever the reason, I found it prudent to resume walking on eggshells. After breakfast one day a couple days before Christmas Eve I was cleaning up and Sean was about to leave the house to go feed. I’d forgotten about the eggshells and said, kind of with a bitchy tone, “Don’t leave your plate there; bring it to the sink.” He grabbed the plate and silverware from the table and threw it in the sink from behind me, sending water everywhere and splashing me in the face, and then he slapped me hard in the back of the head. I turned to slap him back and he hit me again, this time in the eye, and I lost my balance and fell on the floor. By the time I’d gotten back on my feet he was out the door with a slam.
   Women who aren’t abused probably can’t understand what goes through the mind of a woman who is. Most who aren’t can sympathize, but they really can’t imagine what it’s like, what it does to you. It’s one of those things where everyone has an opinion but unless you’ve experienced it yourself, your opinion is wrong or at least ill-informed. One of those opinions goes something like, “Every person should have a zero-tolerance policy for abuse.” Another one is, “Anyone who is physically abused should immediately and permanently remove herself from that environment, and probably contact law enforcement.” It’s as if they think that simply doing that will fix everything and rid the world of this kind of thing. I’m not here to educate anyone, but I can say that there’s a lot more to it than that. And that’s all I’ll say. Even if I were to shed some light on it, or on my personal situation, it would probably come down to whether you believed me or not.
   So I finished up the dishes, put some foundation around the eye that Sean hit, and then went to town to get some things for dinner at the store. Fighting, for me, was keeping things the same and pretending nothing happened. I figured it would be better to go before my eye had the time to become a Technicolor shiner. I knew that some of the ladies who worked at the store knew Sean hit me sometimes; I don’t know how they knew this, and I don’t know how I knew this, but word gets around and it’s just an impression I had, just little things, the way people talk to you, the way they phrase a question so that they don’t have to come right out and tell you. Tell you what they know. They talk in between the lines I guess is what I’m trying to say. I didn’t have any friends to confide in, never really had anyone like that since Edna. She trusted me to listen to her, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t miss that. Especially now. But dealing with my own stuff on my own was something I’d gotten quite good at over the years, and I know it’s my own fault I was this way but I never really thought there was anything wrong with that. It is what it is. Or was. 
   And so of course I run right into Jim at the store. He was standing near the entrance holding a little red plastic hand basket with a quart of milk in it, talking to one of the ladies behind the counter, shooting the breeze in his limited way. He looks at me and I can tell he’s thrown. With him, everything’s so subtle that you have to know him a little, or a lot, to tell if he notices something. But in the year-plus that we’d known him, I had paid attention to how he paid attention to things, so I knew he could tell Sean had hit me pretty recently. Sean never told me that he’d told Jim he was that way; why would he? We never talked about it. I guess guys have their guy friends they tell more than they do their wives, but I was pretty sure Sean and Jim weren’t that way. I knew Jim wasn’t, just as sure as I was Sean wasn’t. But Jim’s gaze was arrested, and I was certain it wasn’t because I was looking especially gorgeous that day.
   “What happened?” he said.
   “Not sure what you mean, Jim,” I said and grabbed a cart, turning down the frozen food aisle. I didn’t really want the busybodies in the store to hear anything. I was actually surprised Jim had said something, but I guess he was kind of shocked at what he saw. He followed me.
   I didn’t know Jim well enough to know if he cared about me. We had never talked about anything but surface stuff and ranching things. It’s funny how relationships can be like that forever, and it would take something really, really bad to jar that kind of relationship into another, different level. I’m not sure another level in my relationship with Jim could be described as “better” or “worse,” but it definitely became different after the truth Jim saw on my face that day made itself known. What Jim said next told me that he did care about me.
    “I was afraid Sean was abusing you.” That’s all he said, but how he said it, and how he looked at me, with the subtle narrowing of his already narrow, beautiful eyes, when he said it made what he said say so much more than just those seven words. I wasn’t prepared for it, and I didn’t expect it, and when I heard it I was not able to control my reaction to it. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because I’d lacked acknowledgement for so long that anyone cared about me that suddenly hearing that – and I realize he didn’t literally say he cared about me, but that that’s what what he’d said meant – suddenly hearing that, getting that message, it pulled the rug out from under me and I needed to hold onto the shopping cart hard to keep from falling to the ground. Tears just started gushing as I did everything I could to hold my expression as blank as possible, which wasn’t blank at all I’m afraid.
   “It’s nothing,” I said. Jim just looked at me. He looked nice, nicer than normal, with his non-work boots (lacking mud and cow shit), clean jeans, and tan, wool-lined Carhartt jacket with the fleece collar, all zipped up. He looked like he was going somewhere, or coming from having been somewhere. I thought I could change the subject. “Are you coming from or going somewhere?”
   “I finally got my driver license changed from out-of-state,” he said. 
   “Oh, I thought you might have been visiting someone, not wearing your work clothes, you know.” I had just realized, in this moment, that I’d never really looked at Jim the way most people look at other people, you know, with the question, “Do they look good?” He was just Jim, the guy who works on our ranch sometimes. I’d looked at him that first day in the Co-op, when he was taking care of his niece in the stroller, and I’d looked at him to realize he, another person, was now on our property helping my husband, or in our kitchen eating a late-night snack before getting back to work in the barn with Sean. And I’d certainly never looked at him as someone of the opposite sex who might or might not appear attractive in some way to me. Until just now. I could speculate for a long time on why I’d never looked at him that way, but now instead of just looking at him, I was seeing him. He had something, and I think I might have begun to realize I might want it. Or maybe need it.
   “Nope, just had to go to the County offices.” He didn’t add anything like most people would have, in the way of an explanation, like, “…so I thought I’d better look my best.” And he definitely didn’t add, “…because I know that people around here, white people mainly, are prejudiced against Indians, so I don’t want to give them a chance to hate me for more than just my skin color or braided long hair.” Seeing him now, in the new way I was seeing him, brought all this other stuff into the picture for me, and it was a lot to deal with because suddenly he was another vulnerable person like I was, vulnerable in different ways but vulnerable just the same. We now had something much more in common, which is amazing since it’d been there all along. I had never seen it. I don’t know if Jim had seen it, but maybe he had, at least there’s that possibility for as long as he’d been thinking Sean might have been abusing me.
   One of the saddest things to me, and I know it’ll never be fixed, at least for me and maybe for everyone in this kind of situation, is when the possibility exists of mutually acknowledging mutual vulnerability and using that as a foundation for developing a loving relationship (and I just mean “loving” in a Platonic way here, although it could lead to more than that in some cases) and one or both people not having the capacity – for whatever reason, and there are zillions – to build that relationship, well I can’t think of anything more painful. Or tragic. Only slightly less tragic is when this opportunity or possibility is seized like a consolation prize and kept secret. And that is what happened.

    “I’ve never seen where you live,” I said. “I’ve known you all this time, and I don’t even know where your place is.”
   Jim looked at me like he was trying to figure out what I meant, and if I’d really meant it or was just trying to change the subject again. “I can show you if you want.”
   I followed him in my car to his place, which was only about a mile out of town, a couple miles downstream from our place on the Milkfat. It was a newer, white, double-wide, shaded by an old silver maple, not far from the creek, and once I went inside I could tell he hadn’t lived there long. Several boxes still in the corner of the living room, nothing hung on the walls, just a few plates and cups in the glassed cabinet in the small kitchen. Not fancy, but clean, and only a slight odor of cooked ground beef, maybe some onion. A bunch of green bananas sat by themselves on the counter next to his keys. A hide-away sofa sat under the window in the living room, and in front of it a coffee table with a book under one foot. For Whom the Bell Tolls. Jim stood awkwardly in the kitchen, looking at me as though he might ask a question. I beat him to it.
   “Are you a Hemingway fan?” I asked.
   “That’s not mine, but I tried to read it. Not really my style,” Jim said.
   “Oh really? What is your style?” I suddenly got self-conscious about my eye, and wanted to go look in the mirror in the bathroom. But I also really wanted to hear his answer.
   “I like Dickens and Mark Twain,” he said. And then he explained why. “There was a nun at my old school who loved Great Expectations and I learned a lot of English words from reading that when I was little. And Mark Twain makes me laugh.”
   I’d never seen Jim even smile. The thought of him laughing made me want to laugh, in a cleansing way. So I chuckled and it felt good. The wood stove in his trailer still had some glowing coals, and it was warm inside. Looking at the light blanket of snow on the ground outside, I took off my coat and asked if he had anything to drink. I sat in one of the two chairs at the little table in the kitchen.
   “I can make some tea or coffee if you want,” he said.
   Despite knowing a mile off that it was a cliché and despite knowing that he’d see it as a cliché two miles off, I said, “I was thinking of something stronger.” I was hoping he’d laugh, but he only started – and then shut down – a smile. 
   “I don’t really keep booze in the house,” he said. “I do have a couple of PBRs Sean brought over here a couple of weeks ago.”
   “That’ll do,” I said. “Will you join me?”
   “Okay.” And he got them from the fridge. “You want a glass?”
   “No, the can’s okay.” He poured his in a glass and gave me the can after he opened it. Then he sat across from me in the other chair at the little table.
   “Can I ask you something?” he said.
   “Anything.”
   “How long has Sean done that to you?” He half-pointed at my eye.
   “A couple years now.” I was glad to tell him, gladder that he’d asked, but suddenly began feeling very guilty. Guilty about admitting to Jim I’d put up with being treated that way, and then guilty for assuming he might be on my side, and then guilty for confiding in someone outside my own home about the main person in my life. I couldn’t tell what Jim thought about it, so I asked. “What do you think?”
   “Do you want me to kill him for you?”
   “What!?”
   He looked me straight in the eye. “I will.” 
    A surge of boiling and icy water rushed through my body. I didn’t know Jim well enough to know if he was serious, but the way he looked at me told me he was. Then I remember he liked Mark Twain because he liked to laugh. I took a swig of beer. “You’re kidding, right?”
   “Mmm.”
   “What does ‘Mmm’ mean?”
   “It means if you want me to I will.”
   “Why would you do that?”
   “Because he deserves it.”
   “Do you really believe that? Death?”
   “Yes.”
   “What if I said yes?”
   “Then I’d go right over there and kill him.”
   “How would you do it?”
   “I’d punch him in the chest. Hard. He wouldn’t know what hit him. His heart would explode. He’d bleed out the mouth. It wouldn’t be a huge mess.”
   “It sounds like you’ve thought about this. Did you already know about Sean beating me?”
   “I guessed.”
   “What made you?”
   “Just watching you two.”
   “What’d you see?”
   “He would always be too careful around you. And you would act too ‘normal’. Like nothing was wrong. You both were hiding something. I figured that was it.”
   “Well, I don’t want you to kill him.” He looked back down at the beer in his glass. It was a little more than half full. “Are you disappointed?” He looked back at me, which made me feel better.
   “No. I don’t enjoy killing anything.”
   “Then why did you offer?”
   “Because I don’t like seeing people get hurt. And I don’t like knowing people who hurt other people.” 
   “Then you’ve probably murdered about a million people by now. And if you feel that way, how can you keep working for him?”
   “I need money, and he’s fair.” 
   “Jesus.”
   
   We sat there sipping our beer and looking at the table’s boomerang patterns in the Formica. I could hear geese calling in the creek nearby, coming in from the fields for their midday break. 

    An hour later we both put our clothes back on silently. 

    Going home felt tricky. When I got there, Sean was in the barn messing with a horse’s foot. His truck was parked outside the house, so I knew he was home. I parked next to his truck and when I opened my door to get out I heard cursing, then hammering, metal on metal, then some whinnying. I felt sorry for the horse, then went inside and took a shower.
   When I got out, he was sitting on the bed, waiting for me. “I saw you came home, so I came inside to apologize. I hate myself. I won’t blame you if you want to punch me, or leave, or anything. I don’t deserve you, and I don’t know what’s wrong with me.” He started crying. It was only the second time I’d seen tears from him. The first time was when Julie died.
   
   An hour later we both put our clothes back on silently.

    That was the first time we’d done that since Julie died. It was also the last time until well after Ennis was born nine months later.

When they brought him to me I was surprised by how dark he was. I thought they’d brought me someone else’s baby. His hair was jet black and matted in glistening arcs and swirls to the top of his head. His face was crunched up and fierce, and he was shrieking. Julie was born light: hair, skin, sound. Ennis was the opposite. I didn’t know who the father was. But I suspected.
   Sean wasn’t there when Ennis came out, which relieved me and scared me. When he came in and saw me holding Ennis I covered his head with my hand so he could only see the face. He gently moved my hand away and stroked the black hair softly.
   “It’s pretty dark, and it’s wet. He’s warm. How are you?”
   “Tired, numb, scared, elated, I don’t know.” Sean looked quickly at me, then focused back on Ennis.
   “I hope this makes things better,” he said. “Between us, I mean.” 
   “Me, too.” I wasn’t sure what he meant exactly but I didn’t probe.
   “Can I hold him?”
   I handed the bundle to Sean, who seemed natural, paternal, taking extra care with the head and neck as though he’d done this a million times. I just watched. Still waiting for the question. It didn’t come.
   “If you want to sleep I’ll hold him,” he said.
   “The nurse will probably come get him soon, but I’m glad you like holding him,” I said.

    When the question did come, I was, again, washing dishes. It was after a steak dinner Sean had grilled, including asparagus and potatoes. We’d finished a bottle of wine, something unusual for us, but things had been good for the first few months after we brought Ennis home. Hardly any fights, smooth sailing, and we even made love once or twice. He seemed “there” more than normal, not that he’d changed into someone else but just got calmer. I attributed it to Ennis, like fatherhood served as some kind of new ballast, not just for him but for all of us. Jim had started coming around to work more now that the crops and cattle took more time. He and Sean seemed good, they could anticipate each other and go without talking much at all for an entire work day. 
   “Who’s Ennis’s father?”
   “I don’t know.” 
   Sean got up and left the house, went to his pickup, and drove away.

The years from Ennis’s birth until the night I shot Sean are a blur I can’t make much sense of now. But I can tell a story about how it all unraveled if you want to hear it. You might not want to. Of course, whether you do is none of my business. 
   After Ennis was born I stayed away from Jim’s. And Sean and I kept our distance from each other, got the work done. Kept stuff clean. Paid the bills, not much more. Jim still worked for Sean, but not as much; Sean got some kids from the high school to fill in for some of the more grunty tasks, and paid them almost nothing. Hayseeds just like working in fields, especially if they can drive the swather or bailer. 
   One night when Ennis was about three Sean came home from a birthday party for a neighbor’s kid. She was sixteen, and cute, flirty. I knew Sean dreamed about Tracy; most guys in the area did, but her dad was a bigwig most other ranchers were afraid of, so Tracy was safe. And she knew it, and made the most of it. Anyway, Sean had drunk more than normal, and was tipsy but in a nice way, most likely because he was horny. I wasn’t even the slightest bit afraid of him. He flirted with me, and at first I was put off because I thought he was substituting me for the teenaged girl, like that’s who he really wanted. But I decided to go with it. What did I care? I opened a couple more beers and we pretended we were dating again, or that we’d never dated. Who knows what he was thinking. I just saw an opening for maybe making things better between us, not so much so that they’d improve our relationship but just so I could walk on fewer layers of eggshells around him, let my guard down a little every once in a while. Without going on too much here, we ended up in bed, in the room he’d been sleeping in since Ennis was born, and went at it. My legendary fecundity got activated and nine months later Barnard was born. Two short screws with Sean, two kids. We did it a few more times in the few months right after that, but then things on the ranch heated up, money got tight, and – ring the cliché bell – we started fighting again. Back to the separate-room marriage. Back to the multi-layered eggshell flooring. 
   Funny story about Barnard’s name: We were sitting around the dining table a few days after Barnard was born, looking at him sleeping in his crib in the corner, and started talking about the fact that we still hadn’t named him. Sean wanted to call him Paul (he wouldn’t tell me why). To annoy him, I suggested Pigeon. If I hadn’t smiled when I said that he might have hit me; I saw the flash in his eyes. He thought of outdoing me and said, “What about Rooster?” He thought this was terribly funny. So I said, “No. How about Hoggy?” This went on for a while with each of suggesting names like Nag, Stallion, Cock, Gelding, Brood, Hoof, Weathervane, Harrow, Gambrel, Flatbed, Diesel, Haymold, PTO Shaft, Combine, Steer, Shoe… 
    Then he looked at me a little funny and said slowly, “Punch?” I nearly lost it. Tears welled up and I left for the bathroom because I didn’t want him to see me cry. I knew he could be brutal but this crossed the line. I sat there on the toilet thinking and realized I had to pretend it hadn’t bothered me, that I needed to continue the game of finding a name that came from our ranch and our life there. So I came back out after drying my eyes, chippered up, and said, “What about just ‘Barnyard’?”
    “I like it, for real, but people might think we’re cruel and unusual,” he said. “We could just change it a little and call him ‘Bernard,’ and no one would know why.”
    “How about if we just take out the ‘Y’ and call him ‘Barnard,’” I said.
    “Do you know any Barnards?”
     “No, do you?” 
    “I’ve never even heard that name before.”
    “There’s a college back east called that, but I think it’s a girl’s school,” I said.
    “I think we have a winner, then.”
    And that’s why and how we named him that. The gal at the county office at first thought we didn’t know how to spell “Bernard” when we went to file his birth certificate, but we set her straight. When she asked who he was named after, Sean and I both answered at once. He said, “my great uncle,” and I said, “Your mom.” She didn’t hear me, luckily. 

Things went back to normal. Terse. Unsmiling. Bitter. It was like it was always winter. We were “oppressed like the heft of cathedral tunes.” Every once in a while he’d hit me and then break down a few hours later, apologizing like before, not winning any friends here. I started wondering more than ever about what I could do to change things, but whenever I developed a practical thought of any kind, something would happen, some mini-catastrophe with a cow trying to birth a breeched calf, or the tarps would get free of the haystacks and blow into the next farm just before a massive downpour, or a shed would collapse onto all the fertilizer. Ennis broke his arm. Barnard stepped on a rusty nail that went through his foot. Trips to the hospital. Crises. Cement. More occasional beatings.
   I was trapped. And then I’d run into Jim in town and see his lithe 6-foot-3-inch image and braided hair and calm eyes and things would be okay even if I didn’t talk to him. But I did, when it wouldn’t catch any notice. Which was rare. At first. I started thinking about where I might accidentally run into him on purpose where nobody was, where gossip wasn’t a possibility. I learned his schedule at his welding shop and cross-indexed it with Sean’s at the ranch and Ennis’s pre-school and then kindergarten and then elementary grades. At first I’d bring Barnard along, grinning inside at the thought Jim’d have something to compare Ennis to. Then Barnard was old enough for pre-school, then kindergarten and the lower grades, and I’d be solo. Yes, this went on for years.
   We both knew it needed to be sparse. I’m not sure our reasons were the same, or even similar. We never discussed it. We never discussed much, which was one reason I was able to resist. I tried at first to open him up, like I only partly succeeded at opening up Sean. Jim, I knew, had multi-volume histories, epics, elongated Deuteronomies I would have gobbled up. But he offered haikus. When he felt verbose. And I needed his story but couldn’t get it. So this governed our trysts because I had to justify for myself some reason other than refuge from my husband, and a story would have done it, someone else’s, Jim’s story, that is. 
   Of course, this is not to say that there were not any trysts. The farther I moved in my head from Sean the easier it was when I went to Jim’s to take off my clothes. Sometimes we didn’t even speak, especially when I for some reason was feeling generous: I knew it was a gift to him not to be questioned out loud. The bigger gift from me would have been to blind myself so he couldn’t see me interrogating him with my eyes. I remember one time he said, “White people talk too much.” He was being kind. It amazes me to think these things, to think that for almost eight years we carried on like this without, one, being caught, two, without any rumors circulating from the nosey folks, and three, without my learning anything substantial of Jim’s story. I’d heard he was from Canada, for example, and he might have mentioned it once, but only “Canada” and not even what part (it’s a freaking big country!). That’s all I knew. And even more amazing to me is that this man, about whom I knew next to nothing, became for a long time one of a total of three things that kept me alive. Think about that. It is not a lie. It is the truth. 

Sean Ewing Crimson_Elegance.jpg

THE COURTSHIP OF WINDS

© 2015 by William Ray

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