Every Cloak Rolled in Blood

Chapter Seven

It’s still Monday. The moon is up, white and cold and ringed with vapor, the current of the Bitterroot lit by its reflection and running hard, the middle of the river bladed with small waves. I take a 1911-model army .45 from my gun cabinet and slip an eight-round magazine in the handle, push it into the back of my belt, and walk along the riverbank and then through the cottonwoods whose leaves are above my ankles.

I have beseeched Fannie Mae to contact me. She died in a strange fashion. She was finally clean and sober. Her anti-seizure meds were working; she was looking forward to another trip to Hollywood, where she had negotiated a film adaptation of my work, now in production. The heart attack seemed to come out of nowhere. She was watching television in bed and eating cherries from a bowl on her night table. Her death was probably instantaneous, although she bit her lip severely and bled heavily on the bedclothes. Three days later, when the medics broke into the house, she still had a cherry stem between her thumb and two fingers. Since then I have believed this was Fannie’s way of telling us she did not suffer.

The day after her funeral, I found a cherry stem on the stairs in my house. I had no cherries in the house and could not remember when I had bought any. Other peculiar phenomena began to happen. Fannie Mae used to make what I called “animal safety tours” around the ranch. She hand-molded chicken wire around the edges of my three stock tanks so gophers and chipmunks could climb out of the tanks if they fell in. She also made sure all empty buckets or feed tubs were turned upside down so no small animal could get in and die of starvation. One night recently an electrical storm flashed its way down Lolo Pass and blew one of my barns apart and brought down a ponderosa on my brooder house. Poultry feathers, horse tack, buckets, split feed sacks, and Fannie’s tub of alfalfa treats for the horses were scattered everywhere. I looked at the wreckage through my bedroom window and promised myself I would start a cleanup by nine and went back to sleep.

I woke to a dripping dawn and a barnyard that had been cleaned and cleared of any hazard to the animals. There were no footprints in the mud. The alfalfa treats had been put in a gunnysack and hung from a peg inside the barn. The stock tank was filled to the brim, the water as clear as high-country snowmelt, the surface ringed with raindrops. Chicken wire taken from a new roll was snugged around the sides of the tanks with clips and plastic ties.

As I stood in the midst of the barnyard, the horses and sheep motionless inside the mist, I knew that Fannie Mae was perhaps no more than twenty feet away. I called out her name again and again, but there was no reply.

Now I walk up the slope through ponderosa and fir trees whose elongated shadows resemble shaggy animals stretched out on the ground. On this same slope I have found fractured chert that was probably the detritus of Nez Perce work mounds. I have also found traces of mercury where members of the Lewis and Clark party almost certainly urinated, tattooing their venereal disease and its primitive curative into the soil. In the middle of the night, out in the trees, I have seen entities that glow like phosphorus and are humped like bears, but they are neither bears nor monsters. I believe they are part of Chief Joseph’s people trying to escape the army, the women and infants wrapped in the fur of animals, the pain and passion of their struggle no less an agony than the path up Golgotha.

At the top of the slope is a spring that usually dries out in the summer. But this year has been a wet one, free of forest fires, at least around here, and water is swelling like liquid silver out of the ground, pooling over the rocks that Fannie Mae stacked in a circle when she was a little girl, which is why I named this place “Fannie Mae’s Little Altar.”

The fog is blue and hangs in the trees and puffs along the ground, and inside it I can see the gnarled horns and glassy brown eyes and wet noses of the deer who come here to drink. The air is heavy with the smells of pine needles and mushrooms and lichen on the rocks and fallen trees that have rotted and been reduced by worms to the weight of balsa wood.

I stand by the spring and toss a pinecone up the hill and watch it roll back down. “Fannie Mae?” I say.

There’s no answer.

“It’s your old man, and he’s in a mess of trouble.”

No response.

“Don’t be like this, Fannie Mae. Give me a sign.”

The wind is not a good companion. It courses through the canopy and sprinkles my hat with droplets of water that run down inside my long underwear. “It’s not right to leave me in the lurch.”

Fannie Mae invented stubbornness. If you tried to influence her behavior, she would make a religion out of doing the opposite.

“I know you’re out there. You left the cherry stem on the stairs, and you cleaned up the barn and the yard after the storm. I know it was you.”

In truth, I don’t know that it was Fannie Mae. It could have been a neighbor. A local religious group is constantly doing anonymous good deeds for others, paying checks in restaurants and even at the Lolo Dairy Queen, whether the recipients like it or not.

The fog is thicker and grayer now and clings to my skin like moist rags, reminding me of my childhood home in the bayou country of southern Louisiana. I remove the .45 from my belt and stick it in my boot, and sit on the boulder by the spring and feel the coldness of the stone seep through my trousers. In moments like these I cannot separate reality from madness, and in my sickness I often reach out to dead members of my family. It is not a good way to be.

My father always referred to death as the Great Veil. He believed you could put your hand through it and touch not only the dead but the unborn; he also believed that all events occur simultaneously rather than sequentially. As a boy, he had seen Confederate soldiers in the early-morning fog on Spanish Lake, outside New Iberia, and Saxon warriors in a cloud above the German fortifications on the Somme. But if these visions were real, why has my father not tried to contact me, or appeared in a dream, or simply whispered, Keep a brave heart? I have no answer. And I feel myself teetering on the edge of despair.

Then I hear the voice: Why did you bring the .45, Pops?

I feel like an icicle has just been driven through my chest.

You’re not thinking about doing the Big Exit, are you?

“You knocked the breath out of me, kiddo. Where are you?”

Up here, in the tree. She drops to the ground. She’s wearing jeans and sandals and a faded Mike the Tiger LSU T-shirt I gave her, and she looks like she did just before she died, which was always youthful.

“Aren’t you cold?” I ask.

I’m not the problem, Pops. Answer my question. What’s with the gun?

“I thought you might need it.”

You’re still the worst liar on the planet.

I tell her about the Indian trooper and the possibility of a prisoner in her cellar, and about the note I took from the cellar on which Jeremiah McNally denied seeing anything but which enraged an unlettered, violent former Klansman who called it the devil’s work. “Why could he see the writing but not Jeremiah?” I ask.

We’re not all from the same tree. There’s more than one gene pool. Some of them got pissed in.

“Who told you that?”

It’s common knowledge on this side of things. Your father is here. He’s been here since you were eighteen.

“What?”

He’s a real gentleman.

“Why doesn’t my father give me a sign he’s all right?”

He thinks he let you down. The drinking and whatnot.

“He shouldn’t feel that way.”

You got it turned around, Pops. He feels that way because you haven’t forgiven him.

“That hurts, kiddo.”

Quit it with the names. I’ve got to run.

“Come down to the house.”

I don’t make the rules.

“Did you suffer?”

I was afraid. Then I saw your cousin Weldon and I was all right. He said to tell you hello.

I lose control. Weldon was my first cousin, but I thought of him as my big brother. He was at the liberation of Dachau and came home with the Silver Star, two Bronze Stars, and three Purple Hearts. I stumble and almost fall and grope behind me until I can steady myself on a boulder.

Don’t cry, Pops. We’re happy here.

“What’s it like?”

A green valley. There’s animals grazing in it and a rainbow overhead and wildflowers on the hillsides.

“Stay just a little longer.”

Don’t fret, Pops. You were always my best friend. You never let your little girl down.

My knees buckle, then I try to enter the fog with her. Instantly I feel like I have been dipped in ice water. The fog rises into the canopy and is burned into a thousand droplets by the sun. Fannie Mae is gone, and I feel as though she has died a second and third and fourth time. I walk downhill with the abandon of a drunk, my heart thudding, my coat and shirt ripped on a tree, my rib cage gashed by a broken tree limb, a scream rising from my throat, my hands raised at the sky. “Why have you done this to me?” I shout. “Why? Why? Why?”

I cross the barnyard and the veranda and crash through the door and into the living room. I see my reflection in the glass on the gun cabinet. My head could as well have been severed and placed on a tray. My eyes are out of focus. I smash my reflection with my forehead and watch my expression shatter in shards on the stocks of the rifles lined erect in the cabinet.

But a greater pain is that I cannot undo the loss of my daughter, and the greatest pain is that it didn’t have to happen. It didn’t have to happen. It didn’t have to happen.

How do you live with it, family and friends ask. The answer is I don’t. When you lose your kid, the best you can hope for is a scar rather than an open wound. I feel I’m in a house of mirrors, and I want to break every one of them.