| All rights reserved. |
You’ll see these warring fields and desert granite
— no Bible garden ever graced this plain —
a land made for the eagle, a piece of planet
over which floats the roaming shade of Cain
— no Bible garden ever graced this plain —
a land made for the eagle, a piece of planet
over which floats the roaming shade of Cain
 | |  | |  |
– Antonio Machado
Prologue read by Jake Ellison
From the black mountains hovering over the
waving curls of heat above shaking weed
fields, a vibration, a nervous anticipation runs
from those mountains to the vast emptiness
that is the East. The land here at your feet has
been painted with the blood of violence and
everything is angry and the Earth is yearning,
straining toward oblivion. You lick your lips
against the hot wind. The Earth has just a few
things to take care of, you sense, then it will
flex itself and catastrophe will bring it peace.
You bend down and scratch the surface of the
hard dirt with a fingernail and find a bullet.
Hold it up in the hard light. Look closely. There’
s still blood on it. Your homeland. Your
brothers have died here.
The old homestead is in ruins. No white picket
fence ever graced this yard. The front door is
ajar, blackened by fire. You remember that
anger is the force behind all life here. Anger has
infected the land and animals, killing the
ground, twisting the trees. Lean, ragged dogs
run in the weeds along the dry creek. They are
mean, like splinters. Anger is coming back out
of the Earth where it fell from your ancestors
and soaked in.
Beasts skulk where once they hunted.
They leave the dead half eaten.
You stand alone. Your eyes full of grit; your
lips cracked.
These used to be grass plains; now they are
weed fields. Bright yellow, red and purple
blooms full of sticky resin. Stems so strong
and roots so deep that a man pulls his arms out
against them. The soil has given way to
sandstone and pale dust. Plows skip and hop
and shatter. Tractors the size of houses barely
scratch the hardpan.
The Earth is rejecting them, all of you, and the
sun, pouring out a blinding white heat, is
helping.
Train tracks used to bring people here. Now
they are empty and rusted.
Those first people from the East built little
towns across the prairies and at the foot of
mountains. The yard lights shined like scattered
constellations on a clear night. The men smiled
at each other, proud of themselves, and they
laughed. They drank whiskey, bellies against
the darkened bar, and winked. No one ever
saw them having sex. They shot each other
and a lot of everything else. The trappers and
ex-soldiers came, trudging through the snow
and gazing long and wide-eyed at the
mountains and horizon, making for the gold
back in there somewhere. The cowboys came
shortly after them, unshaven with toothpicks in
their mouths, spurring horses in the guts and
whipping cows out of the bushes. The farmers
brought their wives, and the women made
churches and schools.
But the bars are all that are left for the quick
and the dead alike.
Blood is pooling in the wide cracks of the cold,
blue granite. The dying splashed it across the
gray sandstone like paint; and in the barn,
where they did their worst to each other,
where sisters feared being caught by brothers,
it stinks of it.
A fire is coming.
They made a few small cities where they took
refuge and the West became an idea and the
people became hard-backed businessmen,
dealing in the illusions of money and power and
self. They leached and sucked the marrow out
of the abandoned prairies. They drilled and
blasted and poured cyanide over mountains and
then drank the water. They are the lingerers,
the last drunk at the bar after all the women
have already gone. The night is over and the
day is coming, approaching in red all along the
terminated distance – a day is coming filled
with hate-fueled, fruitless labor, of digging
holes with spud bars that skip off rocks barely
covered in dust, of sorrow and longing for a
sudden success, a sudden fulfillment, a sudden
salvation that will lift them off the scorched
and dead prairie.
A fire is coming, and the animals know it.
They are dying in advance of it.
Dead things burn, and the prairie and
mountains of this moviescape are covered in
dead things. Dead people, dead weeds and
fallen trees, dead oil and gas rigs and broken
pipes, crumbling houses, leaning barns and
acres of vacant pavement – even those will
burn.
Everything goes wrong now.
A fire is coming that will not cleans or purify.
A fire is coming that will bring only barren
silence, an end, the last tock.
There used to be a wide spread of buffalo
grass, sandstone cliffs and granite-sharp
mountains – blue in the distance. But the land
here soaked up all the blood and dissolved the
lead bullets and shivered. A brittle rash broke
out all along the plains. But the water that
would have soothed it has been pumped out of
the Earth.
The land, scorched and choking, blisters under
the blank, firestone sun.
It is yearning toward oblivion.
A fire is coming.
waving curls of heat above shaking weed
fields, a vibration, a nervous anticipation runs
from those mountains to the vast emptiness
that is the East. The land here at your feet has
been painted with the blood of violence and
everything is angry and the Earth is yearning,
straining toward oblivion. You lick your lips
against the hot wind. The Earth has just a few
things to take care of, you sense, then it will
flex itself and catastrophe will bring it peace.
You bend down and scratch the surface of the
hard dirt with a fingernail and find a bullet.
Hold it up in the hard light. Look closely. There’
s still blood on it. Your homeland. Your
brothers have died here.
The old homestead is in ruins. No white picket
fence ever graced this yard. The front door is
ajar, blackened by fire. You remember that
anger is the force behind all life here. Anger has
infected the land and animals, killing the
ground, twisting the trees. Lean, ragged dogs
run in the weeds along the dry creek. They are
mean, like splinters. Anger is coming back out
of the Earth where it fell from your ancestors
and soaked in.
Beasts skulk where once they hunted.
They leave the dead half eaten.
You stand alone. Your eyes full of grit; your
lips cracked.
These used to be grass plains; now they are
weed fields. Bright yellow, red and purple
blooms full of sticky resin. Stems so strong
and roots so deep that a man pulls his arms out
against them. The soil has given way to
sandstone and pale dust. Plows skip and hop
and shatter. Tractors the size of houses barely
scratch the hardpan.
The Earth is rejecting them, all of you, and the
sun, pouring out a blinding white heat, is
helping.
Train tracks used to bring people here. Now
they are empty and rusted.
Those first people from the East built little
towns across the prairies and at the foot of
mountains. The yard lights shined like scattered
constellations on a clear night. The men smiled
at each other, proud of themselves, and they
laughed. They drank whiskey, bellies against
the darkened bar, and winked. No one ever
saw them having sex. They shot each other
and a lot of everything else. The trappers and
ex-soldiers came, trudging through the snow
and gazing long and wide-eyed at the
mountains and horizon, making for the gold
back in there somewhere. The cowboys came
shortly after them, unshaven with toothpicks in
their mouths, spurring horses in the guts and
whipping cows out of the bushes. The farmers
brought their wives, and the women made
churches and schools.
But the bars are all that are left for the quick
and the dead alike.
Blood is pooling in the wide cracks of the cold,
blue granite. The dying splashed it across the
gray sandstone like paint; and in the barn,
where they did their worst to each other,
where sisters feared being caught by brothers,
it stinks of it.
A fire is coming.
They made a few small cities where they took
refuge and the West became an idea and the
people became hard-backed businessmen,
dealing in the illusions of money and power and
self. They leached and sucked the marrow out
of the abandoned prairies. They drilled and
blasted and poured cyanide over mountains and
then drank the water. They are the lingerers,
the last drunk at the bar after all the women
have already gone. The night is over and the
day is coming, approaching in red all along the
terminated distance – a day is coming filled
with hate-fueled, fruitless labor, of digging
holes with spud bars that skip off rocks barely
covered in dust, of sorrow and longing for a
sudden success, a sudden fulfillment, a sudden
salvation that will lift them off the scorched
and dead prairie.
A fire is coming, and the animals know it.
They are dying in advance of it.
Dead things burn, and the prairie and
mountains of this moviescape are covered in
dead things. Dead people, dead weeds and
fallen trees, dead oil and gas rigs and broken
pipes, crumbling houses, leaning barns and
acres of vacant pavement – even those will
burn.
Everything goes wrong now.
A fire is coming that will not cleans or purify.
A fire is coming that will bring only barren
silence, an end, the last tock.
There used to be a wide spread of buffalo
grass, sandstone cliffs and granite-sharp
mountains – blue in the distance. But the land
here soaked up all the blood and dissolved the
lead bullets and shivered. A brittle rash broke
out all along the plains. But the water that
would have soothed it has been pumped out of
the Earth.
The land, scorched and choking, blisters under
the blank, firestone sun.
It is yearning toward oblivion.
A fire is coming.
Prologue
| Part I |
WENDY WATERS DROVE the narrow highway at the speed of
regret. The taillights of the car ahead began to brighten as the day
light fell. Road noise filled the little pickup’s cab. In the empty child’s
seat next to her, she had a fresh bottle of water and a new bag of
sunflower seeds. After she did her “duty,” – what else was it called
when a woman had to claim the body of her husband, gone from her
for nearly a year of binge drinking – she’d go back home. She was
going to pay respect, and it wasn’t mourning, she had done that
before. She saw the sign for the funeral home, white and red letters
lit by flood lights, and turned right onto the new driveway running
through the sagebrush and brown grass to a building made out of
two pre-constructed halves. It looked as if it had only recently been
dragged into the center of the field. The walls were sided and the
roof covered, but the basement-less foundation had not been tied into
the gray concrete forms and she could see through the bottom of the
building out to the brown weeds behind it. The pavement ended and
the car bumped off the end of it onto the rough, big-rock gravel
parking lot. She stopped at the front door, turned off the motor and
waited for the dust to blow away. When it had, she wiped at the
tears on her cheeks and got out. The wind was cold on her back. It
pushed her hair over the top of her head. She put her face into it and
her cheeks cooled where they were wet. She pushed the white
doorbell several times, giving time between each push, before the
inside door swung open and a tall, balding man with big teeth
appeared behind the storm door’s glass. He flipped a latch and
pushed the door open. She had to step back to let it pass. The wind
pushed her hair back across her face. She held her hair out of her
eyes and went inside.
“Your husband isn’t really ready to be seen yet. Sorry, but I just got
him today, just a few hours before you called.”
“I’m not staying another day,” she said. “I have to get back to South
Dakota, and I guess I better look at him one time before he’s gone
for good. I think you call it closure.”
The tall man bowed his head for a moment and nodded. He led her
through a wide room where five coffins lined the wall, top halves
open and empty. Blooms of fake flowers clouded up in the room.
The mortician pointed to a curtained doorway.
“That’s the normal viewing room. That’s where he’ll be tomorrow.”
“I’m sure it will be lovely.”
They reached a heavy beige door. He pushed it open. She walked
past him into the cool, concrete and steel room. Two bodies, laid out
flat on silver gurneys and covered in white sheets were next to each
other against a side wall. The back wall was mostly stainless steel
cupboards, two big tub sinks and the back door. The concrete floor
had been painted an antiseptic green. In the center was a stout steel
table holding a big body covered in a sheet. The stomach was so big
that the sheet touched only it and then the person’s feet, nose and
forehead.
“They are all normally in a locker, but it’s been a busy week. Sorry,
again.” He added, voice trailing off, that they were quick fixes and he
would have them all done soon.
“No, pardon me,” Wendy said.
One of the covered bodies against the wall had only one heavy
breast, spreading wide under the sheet. The other body looked as if
there was tall kid under it. Just feet, hip bones and shoulders and
nose. She turned to the mortician and he pointed at the tall kid.
“That’s Kian.”
They stood silently, Wendy closer to her husband’s body than the
mortician. She put her hand on his shoulder. The body was hard.
“I want to see him,” she said.
“He hasn’t been fixed up. He’ll look pretty rough.”
“I want to see him anyway.”
The mortician stepped up behind her and lifted the sheet off of the
thin, whiskered face and down the shoulders. He folded it gently onto
Kian’s chest. Wendy, eyes on her husband’s half open and dull blue
eyes, reached around the mortician and jerked the sheet completely
off, exposing his body. She stretched her arm out behind her and
gave the sheet to the mortician, who silently took it from her. Kian
had emaciated. So pale that his black body hair stood out like a coat.
He had been cleaned and the autopsy cut, just above his bloated
stomach, was stapled closed. His muscles were thin, but they still
stood out over his bones and enlarged joints. His ribs were long,
smooth fingers under the skin wrapped around lungs and heart. She
had the impression that the bones had frozen tight against his organs.
Where the knife had gone in, she couldn’t tell. Perhaps they had cut
through the hole during the examination. She still felt no emotion for
the body of her husband. She had imagined him dead so thoroughly
that it was as if he had been dead for months already. She did want
to see where he had been stabbed. She breathed out and touched his
hair. Kian seemed okay to her now, like he was at ease with himself.
Happy being dead. She looked down the length of his body. His legs
were scraped and scarred in places that he hadn’t been scarred or
cut before she left him. His hipbones stood up like the sides of an
absurd crown and his penis was the wrinkled, blue nose in a bearded
face.
“Where are his clothes?”
“They took them off during the autopsy,” the mortician said.
“I mean,” she turned toward him, “do you have his clothes?”
“Oh,” he said tossing the sheet over Kian’s legs, “I’ll get them.”
The crumpled white sheet across Kian’s legs stunned her. His legs
suddenly like the arms of a chair.
The mortician saw her flinch. “Sorry, you’ve really caught me off
guard.” He picked up the edge of the sheet and started pulling it up
Kian’s body.
Wendy touched the mortician’s arm. “No that’s just right. I’d like his
clothes.”
He let of the sheet and left the room.
“Now you’re furniture,” she said. “Just a piece of deadwood washed
up on shore.”
The mortician’s carelessness had put Kian in the world again, like he
was alive and unwilling to rise up against the indignity of being a
piece of wood. Wendy struggled with the feeling. It was a mistake to
let it grow. He’s dead and gone and this body was nothing, just dust
and ash. He was not alive. She cannot defend him. The outrage kept
growing in her. She grabbed the sheet and whipped it off his legs,
flinging it behind her. It landed on the body in the center of the room
and slid to the floor.
“Alright?” the mortician said. He lifted a black plastic bag toward her.
She turned from Kian and took the bag. “Yes.” Her voice cracked.
Damn it. But it was too late. Her eyes started to burn and she put her
hands against them. The mortician touched her shoulder.
“Come to the office. It won’t get any easier. The longer you look at
the body, the harder it gets.”
Wendy let him lead her to his office, a spare room with a fake-wood
desk and a short fabric couch. She turned and sat, letting the bag
down in front of her legs. She opened it and pulled out the dirty,
bloody clothes and let them fall to the floor. They were stiff and
cold. The pants had been split from the waist down both legs. She
didn’t see any underwear. He probably hadn’t worn any. She lifted
the shirt by a sleeve and turned it, looking for anything in the
pockets, something from the man who was her husband, the man
who had been so much fun and so loving until the baby died. She
found where the knife had cut the fabric. The little cut, no longer
than an inch long and thin, was like a scratch. How could so much
harm come through that small cut? She put two fingers into the hole.
Her light blue nail polish gleaming on the other side, a hole connecting
the present with the numberless dead possibilities of the past. The
fabric was stiff and she let the shirt drop off her fingers. She picked
up the pants. How could he have come to this? Stabbed by his sick
half-brother. The air turned red around her. She put her hands in the
pockets of his jeans and found his thin wallet deep in a front pocket.
She opened the creases. Inside one of the slots was a flattened piece
of lined notebook paper. She unfolded it carefully. It was a letter in
Kian’s square, small printing.
“I am a saint,” the first faint line. His voice jumped into her ears. “I
am a three-pound crow standing on the lip of a green dumpster in the
alley pecking brown bread one steely black eye killing the air around
you I am a husband and a father standing between two raised garden
beds gently hoeing young weeds from around the base of tender dark
green lettuce the sun hot and high in the clear pale blue sky my mind
is open to the voices in the wind of those I love and who love me
their love streams to me laced with red pain and black distrust and I
weave those strands into my love for them and bind my family
together but I didn’t always have this skill I have been taught that real
freedom comes from that which is completely out of my control the
death of my daughter so I am terribly free because she is dead I have
learned to resist the pull of blame of thinking that if I had wanted her
more she’d still be alive and it is in her honor that I no longer collapse
into hope or faith instead when I am bitter about her death I meditate
on the fact that there is no triumph of the human spirit there is only
struggle and death and I feel hope”
She closed her eyes and listened to his voice in her head. She fell
back into the cushion and smiled. This was the Kian she had loved. A
warmth spread through her where the anger had been. His voice
grew louder in her head. She covered her ears to hear it better, to fall
into it and to be there with him back when they were kids. She saw
his mouth, his thin angular face. His eyes came to her and his smooth
brown hair. He smiled at her. White teeth, one bent too far inward.
She opened her eyes and his voice stopped. She stood up and then
sat back down.
“You just wouldn’t believe the things that happen to people in here,”
the mortician said. “Makes me know for a fact that there is no death,
just a passing through to somewhere nearby.”
“I have to go now,” Wendy said.
“Want me to call someone? Are you alright?”
“You know, I am okay. I don’t know why.”
She didn’t pick up Kian’s clothes. She walked out, the poem in her
hand.
Sitting behind the wheel, Wendy read it again. The blue ink had faded
and rubbed into the opposing pieces of paper. She listened as she
read, but his voice didn’t come again. She folded it the way it had
been and put it in the pocket of her Levis jacket. Kian must have
written it back when she had hope they would make it. She backed
the car and left the parking lot. She didn’t believe in life after death,
but she didn’t not believe in it either. She felt that the baby had left
her body when she died. She thought of Kristy out there somewhere,
waiting for her, but she didn’t let herself think about that very often.
She focused on the day-to-day. Kian couldn’t focus on the day-to-
day. When she could no longer tolerate his drunken life and especially
his crazy flings, she left and stopped thinking about him, too. She
cried sometimes, but not very often and when she did it was usually
when she was getting her period and too tired to stay ahead of the
emotional roller coaster. But Kian’s letter felt like a message. That
feeling was so strong that she found herself driving to the irrigation
spillway instead of the interstate. The local make-out spot was where
Pryor Creek ran down a long concrete slide fifty yards into the
Yellowstone River. She parked on the bald knoll overlooking the
foaming spillway. She and Kian had come here a lot when they were
kids. She turned the motor off and let those thoughts come as they
wanted to. She sat still and looked out. The sky was cold and turning
black. The stars had become pinpricks in the fabric. The moon lit up
the river and illuminated the flood plain on the bottom of the wide
valley that stretched out north like a three-mile-wide canal. Steep
sandstone cliffs glowed in the silver light. The cottonwood forest
along the banks of the Yellowstone was a wide and long tangle of
black branches and heavy trunks that faded into black. She thought
that Kian wasn’t a bad person. He was simply broken, like a glass
that fell to the floor. She took the poem out and read it again. He
meant it for her. She knew that’s why he had written it. Kian had
tried to tell her and himself that he would never leave them, but he
was wrong. The letter, after his death, carried a different meaning.
He was telling her that the bonds between them could not be undone
by death, either of their daughter or of himself. More painfully, she
thought he was also talking about his family, Wayne, Catlynn, Kate
and Joey. She was bound to them because some part of her wanted
to remain bound to him. She didn’t like his family and didn’t want to
see them again. During the brief stop she made at their farm house to
find out where Kian’s body was, that old feeling of dread and
frustration at the mean-spirited and blunt way they treated each other
came back. She didn’t ever need to be around them again, and she
wanted to get away. She started the car. The windows had fogged
over so she ran the defroster for several minutes. The idea that Kian
would want her to be with his family at his funeral stuck with her. If
she didn’t do it, she knew she would feel regret over it and she didn’t
want to put yet one more regret into her life. So, she changed her
mind and decided to stay for the funeral, for Kian, then race back to
her daughters. She let the truck drift off the knoll to the pavement. At
the road, she tried to make herself turn left for the interstate, but
turned right instead back toward the Waters’ farm.
A mile in the dark, the pickup’s lights revealing small pools of
pavement, she got to the hill that overlooked the farm. She turned
onto the gravel driveway and stomped the break peddle, sliding the
right front tire in the loose gravel. Down in the valley, a red glow
throbbed inside heavy smoke, the dying remnants of what must have
been a large fire. She unlatch the door and stepped out, one foot on
the gravel and the other still on the brake. In the valley, smoke curled
like hair around the trunks of cottonwoods, a field of trees planted in
dirty cotton. The old red barn was still on fire in places and one tree
had recently burned. The smoke shifted with a slight change in air
pressure, flattened into blankets. A set of car lights blazed inside the
shroud, limited and smothered. A man yelled, his voice faint, and
then another person and then a woman. A moment later she heard
two gunshots, one small like a pop and one bigger. Then a woman
screaming. A revulsion heaved up in her stomach. This was just like
that goddamn family. A dead son celebrated by screams, guns and
probably more dead people in a smoke-filled valley. She recognized
the one wailing voice. The cry, like a howl, coming out of the night
fog of a bad dream. It was Catlynn, Kian’s mother. Crying and
wailing inconsolably, a cry of fear too late in a life already given to
death. These people had never taken responsibility for anything they
had ever done. They shattered their lives and relationships over and
over again. How did they ever expect that their lives would come
down to anything other than this – cries in the dark and the barn on
fire.
She got back in the car, backed onto the pavement and turned for
home. At the little bar next to the interstate, she called the mortician
and told him that she was exerting her rights as the wife of the dead
man. She told him to ship Kian’s ashes to any mortuary nearest to
601 E. Blanchard St., Rapid City, South Dakota. She ordered a beer
and drank it. Then drove away. With the town of Huntley fast
becoming the last lights in her rearview mirror, she thought she
understood anew what Kian had been telling her in his letter. She had
been planning to leave him in that lost and hopeless land, to be buried
by his hapless family in a place of bad memories and unrest and he
had pleaded with her to take him with her instead, take him back and
keep him.
regret. The taillights of the car ahead began to brighten as the day
light fell. Road noise filled the little pickup’s cab. In the empty child’s
seat next to her, she had a fresh bottle of water and a new bag of
sunflower seeds. After she did her “duty,” – what else was it called
when a woman had to claim the body of her husband, gone from her
for nearly a year of binge drinking – she’d go back home. She was
going to pay respect, and it wasn’t mourning, she had done that
before. She saw the sign for the funeral home, white and red letters
lit by flood lights, and turned right onto the new driveway running
through the sagebrush and brown grass to a building made out of
two pre-constructed halves. It looked as if it had only recently been
dragged into the center of the field. The walls were sided and the
roof covered, but the basement-less foundation had not been tied into
the gray concrete forms and she could see through the bottom of the
building out to the brown weeds behind it. The pavement ended and
the car bumped off the end of it onto the rough, big-rock gravel
parking lot. She stopped at the front door, turned off the motor and
waited for the dust to blow away. When it had, she wiped at the
tears on her cheeks and got out. The wind was cold on her back. It
pushed her hair over the top of her head. She put her face into it and
her cheeks cooled where they were wet. She pushed the white
doorbell several times, giving time between each push, before the
inside door swung open and a tall, balding man with big teeth
appeared behind the storm door’s glass. He flipped a latch and
pushed the door open. She had to step back to let it pass. The wind
pushed her hair back across her face. She held her hair out of her
eyes and went inside.
“Your husband isn’t really ready to be seen yet. Sorry, but I just got
him today, just a few hours before you called.”
“I’m not staying another day,” she said. “I have to get back to South
Dakota, and I guess I better look at him one time before he’s gone
for good. I think you call it closure.”
The tall man bowed his head for a moment and nodded. He led her
through a wide room where five coffins lined the wall, top halves
open and empty. Blooms of fake flowers clouded up in the room.
The mortician pointed to a curtained doorway.
“That’s the normal viewing room. That’s where he’ll be tomorrow.”
“I’m sure it will be lovely.”
They reached a heavy beige door. He pushed it open. She walked
past him into the cool, concrete and steel room. Two bodies, laid out
flat on silver gurneys and covered in white sheets were next to each
other against a side wall. The back wall was mostly stainless steel
cupboards, two big tub sinks and the back door. The concrete floor
had been painted an antiseptic green. In the center was a stout steel
table holding a big body covered in a sheet. The stomach was so big
that the sheet touched only it and then the person’s feet, nose and
forehead.
“They are all normally in a locker, but it’s been a busy week. Sorry,
again.” He added, voice trailing off, that they were quick fixes and he
would have them all done soon.
“No, pardon me,” Wendy said.
One of the covered bodies against the wall had only one heavy
breast, spreading wide under the sheet. The other body looked as if
there was tall kid under it. Just feet, hip bones and shoulders and
nose. She turned to the mortician and he pointed at the tall kid.
“That’s Kian.”
They stood silently, Wendy closer to her husband’s body than the
mortician. She put her hand on his shoulder. The body was hard.
“I want to see him,” she said.
“He hasn’t been fixed up. He’ll look pretty rough.”
“I want to see him anyway.”
The mortician stepped up behind her and lifted the sheet off of the
thin, whiskered face and down the shoulders. He folded it gently onto
Kian’s chest. Wendy, eyes on her husband’s half open and dull blue
eyes, reached around the mortician and jerked the sheet completely
off, exposing his body. She stretched her arm out behind her and
gave the sheet to the mortician, who silently took it from her. Kian
had emaciated. So pale that his black body hair stood out like a coat.
He had been cleaned and the autopsy cut, just above his bloated
stomach, was stapled closed. His muscles were thin, but they still
stood out over his bones and enlarged joints. His ribs were long,
smooth fingers under the skin wrapped around lungs and heart. She
had the impression that the bones had frozen tight against his organs.
Where the knife had gone in, she couldn’t tell. Perhaps they had cut
through the hole during the examination. She still felt no emotion for
the body of her husband. She had imagined him dead so thoroughly
that it was as if he had been dead for months already. She did want
to see where he had been stabbed. She breathed out and touched his
hair. Kian seemed okay to her now, like he was at ease with himself.
Happy being dead. She looked down the length of his body. His legs
were scraped and scarred in places that he hadn’t been scarred or
cut before she left him. His hipbones stood up like the sides of an
absurd crown and his penis was the wrinkled, blue nose in a bearded
face.
“Where are his clothes?”
“They took them off during the autopsy,” the mortician said.
“I mean,” she turned toward him, “do you have his clothes?”
“Oh,” he said tossing the sheet over Kian’s legs, “I’ll get them.”
The crumpled white sheet across Kian’s legs stunned her. His legs
suddenly like the arms of a chair.
The mortician saw her flinch. “Sorry, you’ve really caught me off
guard.” He picked up the edge of the sheet and started pulling it up
Kian’s body.
Wendy touched the mortician’s arm. “No that’s just right. I’d like his
clothes.”
He let of the sheet and left the room.
“Now you’re furniture,” she said. “Just a piece of deadwood washed
up on shore.”
The mortician’s carelessness had put Kian in the world again, like he
was alive and unwilling to rise up against the indignity of being a
piece of wood. Wendy struggled with the feeling. It was a mistake to
let it grow. He’s dead and gone and this body was nothing, just dust
and ash. He was not alive. She cannot defend him. The outrage kept
growing in her. She grabbed the sheet and whipped it off his legs,
flinging it behind her. It landed on the body in the center of the room
and slid to the floor.
“Alright?” the mortician said. He lifted a black plastic bag toward her.
She turned from Kian and took the bag. “Yes.” Her voice cracked.
Damn it. But it was too late. Her eyes started to burn and she put her
hands against them. The mortician touched her shoulder.
“Come to the office. It won’t get any easier. The longer you look at
the body, the harder it gets.”
Wendy let him lead her to his office, a spare room with a fake-wood
desk and a short fabric couch. She turned and sat, letting the bag
down in front of her legs. She opened it and pulled out the dirty,
bloody clothes and let them fall to the floor. They were stiff and
cold. The pants had been split from the waist down both legs. She
didn’t see any underwear. He probably hadn’t worn any. She lifted
the shirt by a sleeve and turned it, looking for anything in the
pockets, something from the man who was her husband, the man
who had been so much fun and so loving until the baby died. She
found where the knife had cut the fabric. The little cut, no longer
than an inch long and thin, was like a scratch. How could so much
harm come through that small cut? She put two fingers into the hole.
Her light blue nail polish gleaming on the other side, a hole connecting
the present with the numberless dead possibilities of the past. The
fabric was stiff and she let the shirt drop off her fingers. She picked
up the pants. How could he have come to this? Stabbed by his sick
half-brother. The air turned red around her. She put her hands in the
pockets of his jeans and found his thin wallet deep in a front pocket.
She opened the creases. Inside one of the slots was a flattened piece
of lined notebook paper. She unfolded it carefully. It was a letter in
Kian’s square, small printing.
“I am a saint,” the first faint line. His voice jumped into her ears. “I
am a three-pound crow standing on the lip of a green dumpster in the
alley pecking brown bread one steely black eye killing the air around
you I am a husband and a father standing between two raised garden
beds gently hoeing young weeds from around the base of tender dark
green lettuce the sun hot and high in the clear pale blue sky my mind
is open to the voices in the wind of those I love and who love me
their love streams to me laced with red pain and black distrust and I
weave those strands into my love for them and bind my family
together but I didn’t always have this skill I have been taught that real
freedom comes from that which is completely out of my control the
death of my daughter so I am terribly free because she is dead I have
learned to resist the pull of blame of thinking that if I had wanted her
more she’d still be alive and it is in her honor that I no longer collapse
into hope or faith instead when I am bitter about her death I meditate
on the fact that there is no triumph of the human spirit there is only
struggle and death and I feel hope”
She closed her eyes and listened to his voice in her head. She fell
back into the cushion and smiled. This was the Kian she had loved. A
warmth spread through her where the anger had been. His voice
grew louder in her head. She covered her ears to hear it better, to fall
into it and to be there with him back when they were kids. She saw
his mouth, his thin angular face. His eyes came to her and his smooth
brown hair. He smiled at her. White teeth, one bent too far inward.
She opened her eyes and his voice stopped. She stood up and then
sat back down.
“You just wouldn’t believe the things that happen to people in here,”
the mortician said. “Makes me know for a fact that there is no death,
just a passing through to somewhere nearby.”
“I have to go now,” Wendy said.
“Want me to call someone? Are you alright?”
“You know, I am okay. I don’t know why.”
She didn’t pick up Kian’s clothes. She walked out, the poem in her
hand.
Sitting behind the wheel, Wendy read it again. The blue ink had faded
and rubbed into the opposing pieces of paper. She listened as she
read, but his voice didn’t come again. She folded it the way it had
been and put it in the pocket of her Levis jacket. Kian must have
written it back when she had hope they would make it. She backed
the car and left the parking lot. She didn’t believe in life after death,
but she didn’t not believe in it either. She felt that the baby had left
her body when she died. She thought of Kristy out there somewhere,
waiting for her, but she didn’t let herself think about that very often.
She focused on the day-to-day. Kian couldn’t focus on the day-to-
day. When she could no longer tolerate his drunken life and especially
his crazy flings, she left and stopped thinking about him, too. She
cried sometimes, but not very often and when she did it was usually
when she was getting her period and too tired to stay ahead of the
emotional roller coaster. But Kian’s letter felt like a message. That
feeling was so strong that she found herself driving to the irrigation
spillway instead of the interstate. The local make-out spot was where
Pryor Creek ran down a long concrete slide fifty yards into the
Yellowstone River. She parked on the bald knoll overlooking the
foaming spillway. She and Kian had come here a lot when they were
kids. She turned the motor off and let those thoughts come as they
wanted to. She sat still and looked out. The sky was cold and turning
black. The stars had become pinpricks in the fabric. The moon lit up
the river and illuminated the flood plain on the bottom of the wide
valley that stretched out north like a three-mile-wide canal. Steep
sandstone cliffs glowed in the silver light. The cottonwood forest
along the banks of the Yellowstone was a wide and long tangle of
black branches and heavy trunks that faded into black. She thought
that Kian wasn’t a bad person. He was simply broken, like a glass
that fell to the floor. She took the poem out and read it again. He
meant it for her. She knew that’s why he had written it. Kian had
tried to tell her and himself that he would never leave them, but he
was wrong. The letter, after his death, carried a different meaning.
He was telling her that the bonds between them could not be undone
by death, either of their daughter or of himself. More painfully, she
thought he was also talking about his family, Wayne, Catlynn, Kate
and Joey. She was bound to them because some part of her wanted
to remain bound to him. She didn’t like his family and didn’t want to
see them again. During the brief stop she made at their farm house to
find out where Kian’s body was, that old feeling of dread and
frustration at the mean-spirited and blunt way they treated each other
came back. She didn’t ever need to be around them again, and she
wanted to get away. She started the car. The windows had fogged
over so she ran the defroster for several minutes. The idea that Kian
would want her to be with his family at his funeral stuck with her. If
she didn’t do it, she knew she would feel regret over it and she didn’t
want to put yet one more regret into her life. So, she changed her
mind and decided to stay for the funeral, for Kian, then race back to
her daughters. She let the truck drift off the knoll to the pavement. At
the road, she tried to make herself turn left for the interstate, but
turned right instead back toward the Waters’ farm.
A mile in the dark, the pickup’s lights revealing small pools of
pavement, she got to the hill that overlooked the farm. She turned
onto the gravel driveway and stomped the break peddle, sliding the
right front tire in the loose gravel. Down in the valley, a red glow
throbbed inside heavy smoke, the dying remnants of what must have
been a large fire. She unlatch the door and stepped out, one foot on
the gravel and the other still on the brake. In the valley, smoke curled
like hair around the trunks of cottonwoods, a field of trees planted in
dirty cotton. The old red barn was still on fire in places and one tree
had recently burned. The smoke shifted with a slight change in air
pressure, flattened into blankets. A set of car lights blazed inside the
shroud, limited and smothered. A man yelled, his voice faint, and
then another person and then a woman. A moment later she heard
two gunshots, one small like a pop and one bigger. Then a woman
screaming. A revulsion heaved up in her stomach. This was just like
that goddamn family. A dead son celebrated by screams, guns and
probably more dead people in a smoke-filled valley. She recognized
the one wailing voice. The cry, like a howl, coming out of the night
fog of a bad dream. It was Catlynn, Kian’s mother. Crying and
wailing inconsolably, a cry of fear too late in a life already given to
death. These people had never taken responsibility for anything they
had ever done. They shattered their lives and relationships over and
over again. How did they ever expect that their lives would come
down to anything other than this – cries in the dark and the barn on
fire.
She got back in the car, backed onto the pavement and turned for
home. At the little bar next to the interstate, she called the mortician
and told him that she was exerting her rights as the wife of the dead
man. She told him to ship Kian’s ashes to any mortuary nearest to
601 E. Blanchard St., Rapid City, South Dakota. She ordered a beer
and drank it. Then drove away. With the town of Huntley fast
becoming the last lights in her rearview mirror, she thought she
understood anew what Kian had been telling her in his letter. She had
been planning to leave him in that lost and hopeless land, to be buried
by his hapless family in a place of bad memories and unrest and he
had pleaded with her to take him with her instead, take him back and
keep him.
