Bone Fire

Nineteen

IT HAD BEEN EIGHT YEARS and all they’d done was box up his clothes and strip the sheets from the bed after the funeral home took the body away. Einar had also taken the framed photograph of the 9th Cavalry buffalo soldier. He’d cleaned the glass, hanging it over his bed as others might a crucifix. It kept the memory of Mitch present in his mind.

The man in the photo was dressed in uniform, standing his horse in a field of snow, a grouping of storm-obscured buildings in the background. On the back, a simple X in the lower right corner, dated 1884. Had the rider been able to cipher out the letters he would have written his name as Abraham Bradley.

He’d come west out of Georgia in 1883 with Mitch’s father just old enough not to slow him down, and a consumptive wife who would weaken and die a year later. As a widower he’d leased his son to the owner of a freight wagon for a dollar a year, and the man had fed and housed the boy, working him hard as a rented animal but not so brutally as to break him down.

If Abraham was self-conscious about his decision to abandon the boy it didn’t show in the photograph. He sat that thin-necked cavalry mount as though he’d been granted ownership of the world and all that roamed across it. He died nine months later of the bloody flux, shitting himself down to under a hundred pounds.

Marin got Paul to haul Mitch’s used-up old mattress to the dump, along with the worn and canvas-patched easy chairs and a dresser with the laminate splintered off. And Griff found a newlywed couple who were thankful for the nightstand and steamer trunk, the Formica dining table and mismatched chairs. They unbolted the vise and dental drill from Mitch’s workbench, disassembling the scarred planking they’d been mounted on and stacking the boards out of the weather behind the granary.

That left only a single carved elk antler mounted on the north wall with an eight-year-old calendar hanging next to it. Griff leaned the antler out on the porch, and Marin hired a handyman from town to take up the linoleum in the bathroom and replace it with slate-colored tiles. After he was finished they went back in and scrubbed the logs, chinking and floorboards.

Now Griff and Marin stood together just inside the door. The brass urn that held Alice ’s ashes was centered on a windowsill, the single object Marin had moved in. She unclipped a tape measure from her belt, running the tape out, Griff holding its end in the far corner under the front windows. Marin recorded the distance, letting the tape rewind. She held a pad of engineering paper, segmented into a grid of quarter-inch squares, up against her forearm, finishing the rough diagram as she walked out onto the porch.

They sat at the shaded table, taking turns petting Sammy.

“Did she want you to scatter her ashes somewhere?”

“I think I’m just going to keep them around.” Marin smiled. “Like she did with me.” She tore the top sheet away from the pad and slipped a credit card out of her wallet, using it as a straightedge to copy the interior measurements of the cabin onto an unmarked sheet of paper.

“If you and Einar can wait until next week to do your shopping I can come up to Billings with you.”

“We’ll be fine,” Marin said. “I don’t want you to change your plans.” She was bent over her diagram. “Anyway, I already asked Marlene Silas if she’d take care of Sammy.” A mosquito landed on her arm, and she slapped it.

“I didn’t know Buddhists went around smacking bugs.”

“Maybe he’ll come back as something that doesn’t suck blood.” She tapped at the pad with her pen. “I’m sorry for what I said in your studio when we first met.”

“I don’t remember what you said.”

“It was something dismissive about you only making bones.”

Griff shrugged. “I didn’t take it wrong.”

“You should’ve. I wasn’t trying to be flattering.” She pushed her glasses up on the bridge of her nose. “I saw your sculptures,” she said. “You ought to show them somewhere. In a gallery.”

“Paul says that all the time.”

“Well, he’s right.”

“I can make better ones now.”

“Maybe you can, but the ones up in the meadow kicked my old butt around the block.”

Griff tilted Mitch’s antler away from the wall and held it in her lap. “Are you going to have any of your furniture shipped out from Chicago?” She worked the pad of a thumb against the heads and shoulders of the horses carved into the antler’s base, streaming out along the bottom tines.

“You don’t take compliments very well, do you?”

“I was just wondering.”

“I’m going to keep it all in Chicago. In case someone needs to live there.”

“Like Paul?”

“We talked about him using the place when he goes back to school.”

Griff stared down at the antler. She remembered others into which Mitch had carved the bodies of wolves, bears and mountain lions, all of them given away to friends.

“I’m glad I didn’t have to see him get old.” Marin slotted the pen behind her ear. “Sitting in there all alone carving those things with that old drill.”

“You can have this one if you want.”

Marin shook her head. “It’s a little too Western for me.”

They sat watching the nighthawks feeding in the dusk, falling like shards of gray stone, the air coming alive with the breathy sighs their wings made as they pulled out of their dives.

“My bone people,” she said. “They’re what I see when I close my eyes.”

“Would they be there now? If you shut your eyes?”

“Yes.”

A pair of bats steered through the nighthawks, seeming to stagger in their jolting flight. Behind them, the tops of the Bighorns, soft and darkening.

Marin sang, “‘Now that the day has reached its close, the sun doth shine no more.’” Her voice was flat on the higher notes.

“What’s that from?”

She sang: “‘In sleep the toil-worn find repose and all who wept before.’” A light went on in the kitchen of the main house. “It’s a hymn my mother and Einar used to sing in the evenings. I haven’t thought of it for years. They were the ones with the good voices.”

“I’ve never heard him sing anything,” Griff said.

They heard him searching through cupboards, the chatter of silverware taken from a drawer.

“Just before I left for Chicago, which seems like another lifetime ago. Einar was only twenty then, maybe twenty-one, I always forget his birthday, and Mitch was about the same. You should’ve seen them.” Her hand went to her throat. “You almost had to look at them out of the corner of your eye. To bear it, I mean.” She was still watching the hawks flying in arcs above the cottonwood. “Sometimes I think they were too beautiful to have lived anywhere but here. They’d have looked out of place.” She pushed her chair back. “I thought that even though it was girls I liked best.”

She stood up, and Sammy scrambled ahead down the porchsteps. “The figures you made, they made me feel like I was ready to pass on.”

“You mean die?”

“Yes. That’s what I mean,” she said. “They made me feel satisfied with my life.”