Dakotah threw back her head and howled. She snapped her teeth at Bonita and began to curse her and Verl. How could he be so stupid as to put a baby in the bed of a pickup? The shouting and crying brought an irritated nurse, who asked them to keep it down. Bonita, who had been backing away, turned and ran into the corridor and did not come back.
“It takes a year, Dakotah,” said Mrs. Parka, the grief counselor, a full-bosomed woman with enormous liquid eyes. “A full turn of the seasons before you begin to heal. Time does heal all wounds, and right now the passage of time is the best medicine. And you yourself must heal physically as well as spiritually. You need to be very strong. What is your religion?”
Dakotah shook her head. She had asked the woman to write to Mrs. Lenski for her and tell her what happened, but the woman said it was part of the healing process for Dakotah to face the fact of Baby Verl’s passing and tell Mrs. Lenski herself. Dakotah wanted to choke the woman until she went blue-black and died.
She glared furiously.
“There are other ways for you to communicate. The telephone. E-mail?”
“Get away from me,” said Dakotah.
At the end of the summer she was still there, in a grimy old motel somehow connected to the hospital, getting used to the prosthesis. She sat in the dim room doing nothing. Dreary days went by. She struggled to understand the morass of papers about disability allowances, death allowances, Baby Verl’s support. One of the official letters said that support payments for baby Verl Hicks should never have been paid for, by or through Dakotah, but through the child’s father, SSgt Saskatoon M. Hicks, currently at Walter Reed Hospital recuperating.
That Sash was somewhere at the same hospital amazed her. That she had learned about it amazed her more, for the legendary confusion and chaos of lost patients was like the nest of rattlesnakes Verl had once showed her, a coiling, twisting mass under a shelving boulder. He had fired his old 12-gauge at them and still the torn flesh twisted.
One afternoon a volunteer, Mrs. Glossbeau, came to her. Dakotah saw she must be rich; she was trim and tanned and wore an elegant raspberry-colored wool suit with a white silk shirt.
“Are you Dakotah Hicks?”
She had forgotten they were still married. Sash’s divorce action had gone dormant when he left for basic training.
“Yes, but we were gettin a divorce. And then I don’t know what happened.”
“Well, your husband is here in the complex and his doctors think you ought to see him. I should warn you, he has suffered very severe injuries. He may not recognize you. He probably won’t. They are hoping that seeing you again will…sort of wake him up.”
Dakotah said nothing at first. She did not want to see Sash. She wanted to see Marnie. She wanted Baby Verl. She half-believed he was waiting to play patty-cake. She could feel his small warm hands.
“I don’t really want to see him. We got nothin to talk about.”
But the woman sat beside her chair and cajoled. Dakotah breathed in a delicious fragrance, as rich as apricots in cream and with the slight bitterness from the cyanide kernel. The woman’s hands were shapely with long pale nails, her fingers laden with diamond-heavy rings. Because it seemed the only way to get rid of the woman was to agree, in the end she went.
Sash Hicks had disintegrated, both legs blown off at midthigh, the left side of his face a mass of shiny scar tissue, the left ear and eye gone. It was almost like seeing Marnie, whom she knew was dead, although she kept on hearing her voice in corridors. Sash’s nurse told her that he had suffered brain damage. But Dakotah recognized him, old Billy the Kid shot up by Pat Garrett. More than ever he looked like the antique outlaw. He stared at the ceiling with his right eye. The ruined face showed no comprehension except that something was terribly wrong if he could only know what.
“Sash. It’s me, Dakotah.”
He said nothing. Although his face was ruined and he was ravaged from the waist down, his right shoulder and arm were muscular and stout.
She didn’t know what she felt for him—pity or nothing at all.
Words came out of the distorted mouth.
“Ah—ah—eh.” He subsided as though someone had unscrewed the valve that kept his body inflated and upright. His moment of grappling with the world had passed and his chin sank onto his chest.
“Are you asleep?” asked Dakotah. There was no answer and she left.
The trip to the ranch was hard, but there was nowhere else to go. She dreaded seeing Verl; would she scream and punch him? Grab the .30-.30 on top of the dish cupboard and shoot him? She felt a scorching rage and at the same time was listless and inert, slumping on the backseat of the taxi. Sonny Ezell’s old vehicle moved very slowly. Her prosthesis was in her suitcase. She knew they had to see the arm stump to believe, just as she had to see little Verl’s grave.
They passed the Match ranch, unchanged, and turned onto Sixteen Mile. The days were shortening, but there was still plenty of light, the top of Table Butte, layered bands of buff, gamboge and violet, gilded by the setting sun. The shallow river, as yellow as lemon rind, lay flaccid between denuded banks. The dying sun hit the willows, transforming them into bloody wands. Light reflected from the road as from glass. They seemed to be traveling through a hammered red landscape in which ranch buildings appeared dark and sorrowful. She knew what blood-soaked ground was, knew that severed arteries squirted like the backyard hose. A dog came out of the ditch and ran into a stubble field. They passed the Persa ranch, where the youngest son had drowned in last spring’s flood. She realized that every ranch she passed had lost a boy, lost them early and late, boys smiling, sure in their risks, healthy, tipped out of the current of life by liquor and acceleration, rodeo smashups, bad horses, deep irrigation ditches, high trestles, tractor rollovers and “unloaded” guns. Her boy, too. This was the waiting darkness that surrounded ranch boys, the dangerous growing up that canceled their favored status. The trip along this road was a roll call of grief. Wind began to lift the fine dust and the sun set in haze.
When she got out at the house the wind swallowed her whole, snatching at her scarf, huffing up under the hem of her coat, eeling up her sleeve. She could feel the grit. Every step she took dried weeds snapped under her shoes. Sonny Ezell carried her suitcase to the porch and wouldn’t take any money. Someone inside switched on the porch light.
She did not attack Verl. Both of her grandparents hugged her and cried. Verl thudded to his knees and sobbed that he was sorry unto death. He pressed his wet face against her hand. He had never before touched her in any way. She felt nothing and took it to mean recovery. There was a large color photograph of little Verl on the wall. He was sitting on a bench with one chubby leg folded under, the other dangling and showing a snowy white stocking and miniature sneaker. He held a plush bear by its ear. They must have taken him to the Wal-Mart portrait studio. They had sent her a print of the same picture.
Bonita brought out a big dinner, fried chicken, mashed potatoes, string beans with cream sauce, fresh rolls and for dessert a pecan pie that she said Mrs. Hicks had sent over. She said something about Mrs. Hicks that Dakotah did not catch. It was a terrible dinner. None of them could eat. They pushed the food around and in hoarse teary voices said how good everything looked. Verl, perhaps trying to set an example, took a forkful of mashed potato and retched. At last they got up. Bonita wrapped the food with plastic film and put it in the refrigerator.
“We’ll eat it tomorrow,” she said.
They sat in awful silence in the living room, the television set dark.
“Your old room is made up,” said Bonita. In the quiet the kitchen refrigerator hummed like wind in the wires. “You know, them Hickses couldn’t afford to go to Warshinton and see Sash. They need to know about him. They can’t find out a thing. They telephoned a hunderd times. Every time they call that hospital they get cut off or transferred to somebody don’t know. They need for you to tell them. It’s bad, them not knowing.”
She could not tell them h
ow much worse it was to know.
The next morning was somewhat easier; they could all drink hot coffee. Mourning, grief and loss were somehow eased by hot, black coffee. But still no one could eat. At noon Dakotah left Verl and Bonita and went for a walk up the pine slope. A new power line ran through the slashed trees.
At supper the welcome-home meal reappeared, heated in Bonita’s microwave that she had bought with some of Dakotah’s money. They finally ate, very slowly. In a low voice Dakotah said that the chicken was good. It had no taste. Bonita made more coffee—none of them would sleep anyway—and cut Mrs. Hicks’s pecan pie. Verl gazed at the golden triangle on his saucer, seemed unable to lift his fork.
There was the creak of the kitchen door and Otto and Virginia Hicks came in, tentatively. Bonita urged them to sit down, got coffee for them. Mrs. Hicks’s red eyes went to Dakotah. The older woman’s hand shook and the coffee cup stuttered against the saucer. She suddenly gave up on the coffee and pushed it away.
“What about Sash?” she blurted. “You seen him. We got that official letter that says he is coming home. They don’t say how bad he was hurt. We can’t find out nothing. He don’t call us. Maybe he can’t call us. What about Sash?”
Bonita looked at Dakotah, opened her mouth to say something, then closed it again.
The silence spread out like a rain-swollen river, lapping against the walls of the room, mounting over their heads. Dakotah thought of Ezell’s taxi rolling slowly past the bereft ranches. She felt the Hickses’ fear begin to solidify into knowledge. Already grief was settling around the tense couple like a rope loop, the same rope that encircled all of them. She had to draw the Hickses’ rope tight and snub them up to the pain until they went numb, show that it didn’t pay to love.
“Sash,” she said at last so softly they could barely hear. “Sash is tits-up in a ditch.”
They sat frozen like people in the aftermath of an explosion, each silently calculating their survival chances in lives that must grind on. The air vibrated. At last Mrs. Hicks turned her red eyes on Dakotah.
“You’re his wife,” she said.
There was no answer to that and Dakotah felt her own hooves slip and the beginning descent into the dark, watery mud.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Annie Proulx is the author of The Shipping News and three other novels, That Old Ace in the Hole, Postcards, and Accordion Crimes, and the story collections Heart Songs, Close Range, and Bad Dirt. She has won the Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award, the Irish Times International Fiction Prize, and the PEN/Faulkner Award, and was recently inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Wyoming.
Annie Proulx, Fine Just the Way It Is
(Series: Wyoming Stories # 3)
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