Bone Fire

Nine

GRIFF HAD PROMISED to help stack the first cutting of alfalfa at the Rocking M and got up in the dark, and when Einar heard her in the kitchen he dressed and went out and sat under the overhead light at the table. He could feel the warmth of it on his head, the muffled agitation of the miller moths circling against the bright globe.

They listened to the weather and the ranch report on the radio, having a breakfast of toast and jam and coffee, and then he became anxious she might leave without speaking to him.

“I like it that McEban still square-bales his hay,” he said.

“What?”

“I said, I like it that-”

“You mean, that he didn’t go to those big round bales like everybody else?”

“That’s exactly what I mean.”

“Me too,” she said. “I like how the square bales look when they’re stacked.”

“The shadows they throw.” He felt better now that they’d spoken. “In the winter.”

She fixed him a plate of leftover ham and green beans for his supper, stretching plastic wrap over the plate, then sliced a tomato, a cucumber and onion into a shallow Tupperware container, drizzling olive oil and vinegar over the raw vegetables. She showed him where she’d grouped it all together in the refrigerator.

“I’ve still got time to make you something for lunch.” She turned the radio off. “In case you change your mind.”

“You’d better not,” he said. “If I eat in the middle of the day I’ll need to lie down.” He hadn’t moved from the table.

“I’m not going to be home until late.” She was in the mudroom getting her jacket and workgloves and cap.

“You can stay all night if you like.”

“I might.”

“I think you should,” he said.

She came back, kissed him and looked around the kitchen, and when there was nothing left to do she kissed him again. He thought she smelled like wet coins, like stripped copper wiring mixed with something sweet, and wondered if she ate candy in bed. If it helped her sleep.

She stopped at the door. “You won’t forget to smoke your cigarette?”

“Not hardly,” he said.

He heard her on the porch and then the truck starting up in the workyard. Her kiss had tasted fruity from the lip balm she used, and now he had the whole day to himself. An old man with a single task he expected to accomplish before she returned, every part of which he’d rehearsed a dozen times in his imagination.

He washed his face and shaved, working his tongue over his bottom lip to see if he could still taste her, and he could.

Before it got any hotter he started up through the sage and the paintbrush and yarrow, turning back and forth on the ascending grades of the switchbacks, keeping to the trail his nearly forty years of diligence has worn into the hillside just opposite the house.

When he became short of breath he stopped until he regained it, and when a cloud passed before the sun he didn’t move at all, allowing the breeze to cool him thoroughly. He was in no hurry.

He simply meant to gain the top of the rise one deliberate step at a time, stabbing a shovel into the earth as a staff, with Griff’s high-school backpack slung over his shoulder and a long, iron tamping bar balanced atop that same shoulder, a bulging plastic garbage bag dangling like something an old hobo might invent. A pair of fluorescent dice hung from a carabiner clicked through a webbed loop on the side of the backpack, and underneath it the patch of a frowning yellow bee with the stitched caption Bee-otch.

It took the better part of an hour, but when he topped out under the big cottonwood he felt all right. Not great, but not worn down to the nub. It surprised him. He leaned the shovel and tamping bar against the tree and shrugged off the backpack, setting it by the garbage bag. He eased down onto the single cane chair that stood next to the trunk, tipping his hat off and hanging it on a knee so the wind could work at his hair. When his scalp prickled he dabbed at his head with a bandanna.

He’d watched the pastures and buildings that lay below him, the prairie stretching eastward toward the curved horizon, the comforting press of the Bighorns at his back, his whole life and didn’t need to see it all now to know what was there.

He shut his eyes and the memories of summer colors and the sense of expanse brightened in his mind. And as always there were the quick, familiar flashes from the lives of his wife and son and Mitch, and when he opened his eyes the sun caught on the black marble gravestones before him, flaring up like portals to a separate world.

A leaf brushed his cheek and he pulled the branch down to snap one lengthwise under his nose, enjoying the sweet, clean scent. Then he seated his hat and stood from the chair.

Just south of Ella’s marker he stepped off a six-by-three-foot plot, dragging the heel of his boot to describe its perimeter. Then he took up the tamping bar.

Two hours later he’d broken through the hardpan with the beveled end of the bar and shoveled out a foot of the dry, caked earth. After that he found more rocks, but the soil was looser, just like he knew it would be. He retrieved one of the old quart bottles he’d filled at the tap and packed in the knapsack and drank most of it. He thought if he had to take a leak, he’d piss in the hole and make the digging easier. Though his shirt was damp under his arms and across his back, he still felt fine, thinking he might get out and dig a hole once a week, that it would be a real improvement in his life. Then he wished he could see well enough to drive into town so the tourists could have a look at him. A couple of times in the past year a woman in city clothes had asked to take his picture, and he’d enjoyed the experience. It made him feel he hadn’t faded away altogether, that he was still somehow worthy of notice, even if only as a sort of rural oddity.

He dug a while longer and then sat in the chair to rest and eat a plum, waking sometime later with his chin on his chest. He wasn’t sure how long he’d slept and squinted at the sky until he found where it brightened, satisfied that he still had most of the afternoon.

He remembered the two weeks they’d spent trenching out a new leach field for Mitch’s septic tank. Griffin had been a boy then, just nine or ten, and they could have had old Dan Hanson over with his backhoe and finished the job in an afternoon, but Einar wanted to give his son a bone-wearying chore and let him own the satisfaction of having completed it.

When he was down deep enough that it was just a little bit of a struggle to climb out, he stopped and threw the bar and shovel back toward the tree, then took his hat off and lay down with his heels against one end and his head just short of the other with his arms folded across his chest. His hat was turned up on his stomach. He felt relaxed, comfortable, but got worried that if he died right then and there it might look like a suicide, so he climbed out, pleased with the extravagance of the hole. He could have dug something smaller, but what he intended was in fact a kind of burial, and beyond that he’d wanted to see what it was like lying down in the cool, dry ground. So he’d have an idea of what was coming next.

He dragged the garbage bag to the soft mound of earth he’d shoveled up out of the hole, working his butt back into the loose soil and lifting the bag by its bottom. He gave it a shake and it emptied in an instant: all the letters he’d written Ella from Korea, most of the family photographs, wedding rings, birth and death certificates, marriage licenses, everything he could put his hands on that authenticated his eighty years of using up a body. Now it all lay three feet down in the earth and hadn’t made more of a sound than a curtain lifting in the breeze. He dropped the bag on top and rummaged through the backpack for the can of lighter fluid and the box of matches.

He stood listening to the crackle of it burning, and when there was just the faint odor of smoke he shoveled the hole full and sat in the chair. The day had gone exactly as he’d planned.

He’d kept back a cigar box of mementos for Griff, to provide some offering, because he doesn’t imagine she’ll understand what he’s done. He expects her to be pissed off.

He kept a single wedding picture of Griffin and Jean, so she could always know what her young parents looked like, as well as one of himself and Ella. Two photographs of Mitch: one taken when he was twenty, wearing his Army uniform, the other of him middle-aged and riding a dappled gray gelding they called Ford. The first trophy buckle her dad won on a saddle bronc at a little show in Greybull. A brooch of Ella’s she’s long favored and the Silver Star he never felt he deserved, but it’s how he wants to be held in her heart, as a man who performed his life’s duties with at least some gallantry. And the Norsk Bibel, which he thinks of as a poorly rendered novel, but he hadn’t burned his other books either. He sat up straighter in the chair, reviewing his decisions.

He’s dug the hole and made the fire because when he dies he doesn’t want her to have to deal with anything but the disposal of his body. That’s fair, he thinks. There’s no getting around a dead body, and he’s already spoken to Sid Farnsworth, the undertaker down in Sheridan, about the arrangements. He’s already paid. She’ll have to dial 911, and that’s it, maybe drive a box or two of his clothes in to the Goodwill, and they agreed a year ago that the Nature Conservancy gets the land just as soon as there isn’t a Gilkyson to care for it. So she’ll have the ranch without it going to taxes, and if she has a kid it’ll have a place to live. He wants her to move forward, and wants it to be easy for her. He doesn’t want her history to limit her, as he believes his history has limited him. And if Marin’s here he wants it to be easy for her too.

“I’m not crazy,” he said, remembering how he’d searched her room for an hour, finding her diary, her school pictures and some papers, almost packing it all up here with the rest. But he hadn’t. He’d caught himself in time, and that was getting harder to do. No, he’d put her things aside, sitting there with his eyes closed and waiting until he was able to distinguish what was reasonable and what wasn’t, and the fact that he’d succeeded was reassuring. He didn’t think a crazy man could have.

“A crazy man would have burned it all,” he said aloud, then he napped again, and when he woke the heat was gone from the day. He gathered up the tools and the backpack and started back down to the house to eat his cold supper.