Stars Go Blue (9 page)

Renny puts her hand on his leg. He can feel how bony he is. He used to be so strong. She says, “Oh Ben. I wasn't aware that you . . . hated Ray so much—” Then she stops, tilts her head, says, “I think I know what you mean.” And she says, “It's not that Ray was a monster, not outright evil. That's why, in certain ways, it's worse. Because he had the capacity to be a good man. People liked him. He had a certain charm. But deep inside, beneath those brown eyes, he was a fake and a bully. He didn't love her. He didn't love much of anything. And he was lazy and self-centered in about a hundred different ways.”

Ben starts crying again because she is right. He can understand her, and she is right.

“We should have talked about this sooner. Why only now?” Renny nods as she says this, agreeing with herself. She pats him on the leg. “Listen. We're both worn out. I don't want you doing that, ever again. I don't know what's in store for us now,
but not that. I don't know if you understand me. But it might be time—I'll think about it tomorrow—to move to that assisted care place. I can't . . . But for right now, I know what you mean, Ben. Rachel, for instance, saw enough in him to love. He had her fooled. With dreams of a piece of land. A future together. So it makes it worse, doesn't it? That when you look inside this supposedly good man, if you look hard enough, into his marrow, you can see that he was a pretend show.”

“Pretend show.”

“Yes. You're right, Ben. That's what he was. The difference between a real man and a pretend show is courage. Courage. Deep down he didn't have any. Isn't that right, Ben? Some people on this earth aren't even really human. And he was one of them. But he
looked
like the other kind—the good kind.”

And Ben nods and cries and whispers words like
coward
,
go to hell
, and
all that.

“Yes, all that.” Later, she says, “It's getting cold out here, Ben. Let's go inside. Look at that snow. We're going to freeze to death in here. It would have been easier if he was evil. But no. He was just a fake. Everything except the gun was a fake. We should have told each other this sooner.”

She leads him in the house, their footprints making new marks in a new snow.

On the way inside, she stops once. “Ben? If you were alive ten years from now, what would you want to be doing? Can you understand that question?”

He understands. Pauses to form the words of it. Only gets out, “Take care of you and the ranch.” Or, at least, he hopes he says it. He doesn't look at her, though, to see her reaction. Instead he looks at the aspen trees standing in their winter silence, and the snow behind them is an octave whiter than the aspens themselves. Suddenly, he remembers how rain falls
and the drops are held in the center of aspen leaves, how their circular perfection is held inside a cupped palm of leaf, and his heart snaps with the knowledge he won't see spring again. “Oh,” he says, clutching at his heart. “It hurts. I'm scared.”

Renny doesn't hear him, though, and once inside, she tells him to take a nap. But no, he says, he won't. First, he says, she must dial the number to his daughter's house.

Renny sighs but dials Carolyn's number and says, “The answering machine will pick up. Or Jess will. Although she never does. They're in Mexico. They're trying to do what we failed at doing, for a while at least. Keeping love alive through the tough spots. When it beeps, leave a message. Tell her whatever it is that you want to tell her.” Her voice is kind, like the touches she used to give him. She holds the phone out and he holds it to his ear and waits for the beep.

Phones are difficult. He can't see the person's expression and so the words just smear around. But this will be okay, because it is his only choice. He hears his daughter's voice, not the voice she was as a girl but something that sounds very close to it, and then he hears a pause, he hears a beep. “Tell ya what I'm gonna do, see,” he says into her answering machine. “I'm gonna tell you I love you. Good-bye, now. Carolyn. Jack, Leanne, Billy, Jess, Del, Carolyn. Tell ya what I'm gonna do, see. Love to you all.” His voice gets very quiet, as if turned down on its own.

RENNY

T
he bravest thing she can do is to let him be. She wards off the fear by doing the chores herself and doing them early and well. She'll stay out of the house as long as she can. She breaks the ice on the water tanks with a tamping bar, throws hay to the donkeys and horses, fills her pockets with the dried apple slices she made herself in the summer (she remembers the smell of her sweat and the way the bees and wasps buzzed around her as she sat outside cutting apples and putting them on cookie sheets to dry). The horses nuzzle them softly from her shaking hand, their eyes darkened with gratitude. The hens are all huddled in the chicken house early, and she sends the ice from their drinking pans shattering outside on the ground before refilling them. She wipes the tears streaming down her face continually, and something about this makes her think of her DNA, of how hers falls into trampled hay, or into dirt, or into snow, or onto an apple that gets eaten by a horse and how she is now a part of that horse literally, which somehow makes
her less alone because she is binding with bits of the universe, and so is Ben, at this very moment.

She can see Jess has been there again. There's a pile of fresh horse manure by the barn and tracks in the snow—her own horses could not have made those tracks, penned in as they are. Renny glances around, but there is no sign of her now. She could use Jess right about now. Funny, she decides, how important it is, simply having another breathing living human next to you during heart-slashing times. Even if you don't talk.

Though she has not walked out back in months, despite the dropping temperature and spitting snow and lowering sun—despite all this—she takes a walk now. She is so cold. She is so tired. She must stay out of the house, because then the decision will have been made. It will be over. It's an act of cowardice and bravery at the same time.

Satchmo follows her, rolling and pouncing on wind-swept snowdrifts and yet somehow obedient, as if she knows that Renny is close to a certain line that should not be crossed. The dog comes jogging up to Renny sometimes and snuffles her hand with a nose, and Renny relents finally and pets her head with her gloved hand and despite herself finds herself mumbling things like
Okay, you stupid dog, okay, don't worry, your family will be home soon.

She wonders if she should run home and call someone. Perhaps Eddie, Ben's oldest friend. Perhaps Ruben, the vet. Perhaps Jess. But no: She will not burden them with this particular load. Only she could possibly understand. Only she could love Ben enough to give him the freedom.

At Ben's cabin, she pulls off the leather work gloves and lets herself in the door. The silence feels as if it could nearly burst her eardrums apart. It's cold, very cold, and she can see
the breath misting in front of her in clouds that dissipate and appear, dissipate and appear. There is a simple fireplace along one wall, and it sits empty and dark, mocking her with the lack of heat that it could provide, a simple case of matches and dried wood, and this unfulfilled possibility reminds her of herself, where there's not a flicker of light or barely one at all and she wonders, yet again, if she should go to a doctor herself and ask for antidepressants or antianxiety pills or something, which she never in a million years would have thought were necessary, given her energy and spirit and spunk, but which Carolyn suggests over and over, and which now she will no doubt need. “Oh god,” she says to the empty fireplace. “Oh please god. Take him kindly.”

The dog has been trotting around, sniffing, wagging, but comes up to her at the sound of her voice. “Stupid dog,” she says, but reaches down to pet her. “Ben liked it here.”

She remembers well the contentment that swarmed around him after this cabin was built. A sad mourning contentment, but contentment nonetheless. Unlike the crowded dusty farmhouse, cluttered with doilies and knickknacks and years of kids and grandkid photos, and of their artwork, and of presents given, of accumulated debris, of a messy but full life, everything here is simple, clean, tidy. In that way, it seemed fake to her. A mirage. But it's built sturdy, and lets in less dust. And perhaps there is nothing wrong with a mirage from time to time.

She herself was relieved to be alone during that time. At least, at first. She could move through her days—the grief-filled ones and the slightly better ones—at her own pace in her own way. It was a gift, she decided, to live alone in a house. But the heart can house many emotions at once, and she was also angry at him for leaving. Lonely when she ate dinner. Bitter about the farmwork and how there was so much of it, even though they
continued to share it. Plus, she was cold at night, with no body heat. And ultimately, this life was boring. Or something that resembled boring. She missed the chaos of life—the full catastrophe of living, as she called it, a phrase she lifted from
Zorba the Greek
. She was not
in
her life, not really living it. She was living a small life, and that seemed a crime.

She walks into the bedroom. Ben had slept on a single mattress and frame that he had taken from Carolyn's old bedroom. The comforter, flowered and also from the same bed, is tidily arranged. He had also moved in Carolyn's old dresser, handmade and wooden and simple. She opens the drawers. There are white handkerchiefs, undershirts with stained armpits (and she knows that he didn't shop for things such as packages of undershirts once they had split up; he probably didn't even know how). In the next drawer down is a pair of jeans, two work shirts. More slips of paper—always bits of paper—which she unfolds. There is her name, the names of the neighbors, instructions on how to play bridge (Oh, how smart he had been!). Always in pencil. She leaves them there, all of them. She looks in the closet and there are only shoes, all old ones, including a pair of slippers she had once given him in the very early years of their marriage. She remembers shopping for them, picking out the best pair of soft leather with sheep wool inside. Back then, she had truly loved him, truly wanted his feet to be warm and protected. She remembers clearly standing at the store, holding them, debating whether they were worth the price, and she had been filled with a wave—yes, that was the right word—of gratitude for having Ben and her daughters and a ranch and the emotion called love lodged in her heart.

There is one time in her marriage that stands out. Like the first kiss, it was the one other time when she felt as if time stopped, when the world made sense, when the love was so
evident and pure that it contained all of time
in
it. They'd been working cattle, all of them, except Rachel, who had already died. Carolyn had been explaining to Jess, who was newly moved in with her, about prolapses and how the best thing to do was to shove the uterus back in and sew the cow up with thick string and give her a shot of penicillin. Jack had been trying to gross Jess out, in a teasing way, and was telling her how heavy and slick the uterus was, how it took two people, one to hold the uterus up, one to push it back inside the cow. Then Ben and Jack had gotten busy with running the cattle through, sometimes arguing about which bull's semen to use next year. Leanne was taking notes and Billy was quietly sitting in a corner, and the cattle were bawling and banging around the corral and it seemed like a particular, wonderful moment.

But inside this particular, wonderful moment were the specific details that made it so. How, for example, Ben was scratching a yearling heifer on the hump between her ears, and when the animal raised her head to sniff his shirt, she left a smudge of mucus on his sleeve, which Ben eyed in an offhand way and then he leaned over, during the height of the argument about bull semen, and rubbed it on Jack's face. Which caused Jack to fling it off back onto Ben, and then Jack punched Ben and Ben punched Jack, in a good-natured fond way, which made Billy giggle—it was the first sound anyone had heard from Billy in a long while—and which made everyone smile.

Inside this moment were the cattle, pressed against the railing to eye the two boxing men, watching with sleepy interest, flicking their tails against the flies.

Inside this moment was Leanne, sitting on the cement rim of the stock tank, in shorts and sandals and with a clipboard on her lap, keeping records. Jess went to sit next to her, to learn the ropes, to become the family's new record keeper.

Inside this moment were the details, such as the words being thrown into the air:
X-1-5-1. Polled. 595 pounds. Ninety days pregnant, I reckon.
Details of the routine. How every year, the cycle started. Pregnancy-checking, then calving season, then moving the cattle to spring pastures, then haying, then weaning, then castrating, then pregnancy-checking again. Some of the cattle were sent to the sale barn or to slaughter. Some were kept. Some were sold. And in that moment were all the years that had layered up and woven together; all the turquoise skies and all the cottonwoods dropping golden leaves. All the calves being born, slipping from their mothers. All the times one of them had flapped their arms to move the cattle into the alleyway that led to the chute. All the shoulder-length latex gloves being put on, the hand being reached into the cows to feel unborn babies. All the times on the horses, rounding up the calves. All the sun and sky and smells. All the warm fall days and the summers and the winters. And how, on that one day, it was all enough, held together in one moment, and it was enough to hold her heart together.