10. Jamie
JAMIE
Itold myself it was about the hands.
A house call on a ranch is a two-person job, and for four years I had been doing it alone, which is to say doing it badly.
Now I had a tech who could hold a horse and read a wound and put the right instrument in my palm before I asked for it.
That is what I told myself, and the dangerous part is that it was true.
A lie with a true fact buried in it is the hardest kind to take down.
The truth, which I did not examine, because I keep a strict policy against examining things I cannot afford to find, was that I had started inventing reasons to put two truck seats and forty minutes of dirt road between Zoe Harris and the rest of the world.
The drives were the thing. The high country sets itself on fire in slow motion this time of year, the aspens going gold in stands you can see from a mile off, the scrub turning rust, and we would head out into all of it with the windows cracked and a cooler of vaccines in the back.
Somewhere around the second cattle guard, she would start to talk.
It became a routine without either of us ever calling it one, which is how the dangerous routines always begin.
I would mention a call. She would already have the cooler packed.
Della took to handing me the truck keys with an expression I declined to interpret.
And we would drive, and at first we drove in the kind of silence I am comfortable in and most people are not, and then one afternoon she filled it, and I found I did not mind, and that was the beginning of the end of a great many things.
She didn’t tell it to me in order, or even on purpose. It came out sideways, in pieces, the way the true things do, a sentence dropped between fence posts and not picked up again, a name said once, flatly, and then steered around for the next ten miles.
“Brett liked things a certain way,” she said once, watching the gold go past. “The towels folded a certain way. My friends vetted a certain way. My opinions, after a while, arrived a certain way, which is to say his.” She said it lightly.
She is always lightest about the heaviest things.
“It’s a slow thing. You don’t notice the water rising, because he’s the one standing there telling you you’re not wet. ”
Another piece came loose near a washed-out culvert.
He had handled the money, she said, all of it, had given her an allowance like a child and called it taking care of her.
He had a gift for being generous in public and exact in private, for buying her a coat in front of her friends and then auditing the grocery receipts at home.
By the time she understood it as a cage, she had been living in it long enough to have hung pictures on the bars.
Her mother was in the story too, in the worst way there is, which is the way that believes it is helping.
“My mom’s entire religion is Don’t Make Waves,” she said. “When I finally told her what it was like, she asked me what I’d done to set him off. Not even cruelly. She honestly wanted the recipe, so she could tell me to quit cooking it.”
The night she left came out in one piece, the only part that did, like she had told it to herself so many times that it had set into something she could hand over whole.
“He took my keys once, to make a point. So I waited until he was asleep, and I put Asher in the car in his pajamas, and I drove to a gas station forty miles out and sat in the lot until the sun came up, because I didn’t have anywhere to be.
I just had somewhere not to be.” She kept her eyes on the window.
“A duffel bag, a kid, and a quarter tank. It’s remarkable what passes for freedom once you’ve spent a few years measuring it in inches. ”
I drove. I kept my eyes on the road and my hands at ten and two, and I did not say a single one of the things that were happening in my chest, because they had no business being there.
I have not wanted to hurt a man in a long time.
I discovered, on a gold road with a cooler of vaccines rattling in the back, that I wanted to hurt this one.
I wanted to stand in a doorway between her and a person I had never met and would never meet.
The wanting was so sudden and so complete that it frightened me worse than anything had in years, because it meant the wall I keep had a hole in it I had not authorized.
And then, because the road was long and the gold was doing what it does, and because she had given me so much of the truth, I did a thing I had not planned.
I told her one back, nothing large. I told her there had been a whole loud life once, before this one, and that I had gotten very good at quiet because the alternative was past bearing.
I stopped there, at the cliff edge of it.
And she did for me exactly what I had done for her at the cider booth.
She left my door right where it was. She said, “Quiet suits some people,” and looked out the window, and handed me back the road, and I have rarely in my life been more grateful to a person.
On about the fifth of these drives, the radio crackled with Dale Kessler’s voice, and Dale does not get on the radio unless a thing has already gone past what he can fix with rope and stubbornness.
His mare was down in the straw and had been pushing for the better part of an hour with nothing to show for it, which is the kind of arithmetic that kills horses.
I was up to my shoulder inside her within two minutes.
The foal was turned wrong, one front leg folded back, its nose aimed at a wall of muscle it could not get through, and the mare was tiring, and tired is the first chapter of the end in a hard foaling.
“Talk to me,” Zoe said, already at the mare’s head, already doing the thing she does, the low and steady talk that coaxes a frightened animal back from the edge of itself.
“The leg’s back. I have to push the foal in to make room, and she is going to hate me for it.”
“She can hate you. Just don’t lose her.”
“How’s her color?” I asked, both arms busy.
“Going gray. Move faster.”
What came after was twenty minutes I will not lay out in full, because some of this work is for doing and not for telling.
I pushed when I had to push and she held what had to be held, and neither of us wasted a word.
When I needed the chains, they were already in my hand.
When the mare surged at the wrong moment, Zoe rode the head down and kept the animal from breaking my arm and her own neck in the same second.
We did not talk about any of it. There was no time to talk about it, and that is the truth about working beside someone who is genuinely good.
The talking is the thing you do when one of you is not.
There was a moment in the middle of it I am going to keep.
The mare quit. I felt it happen, the particular slackening when an animal decides the fight is not worth finishing, and I said so, one word, and Zoe bent low over that big tired head and said something I could not hear, fast and fierce, an argument.
And the mare answered it. I have watched her do this a dozen times now and I still could not tell you the mechanism.
She simply refuses, on the animal’s behalf, to accept the thing the animal has accepted, and often enough the animal borrows her refusal and changes its mind.
And then the folded leg came forward under my hand, and the nose found the gap, and the whole stuck geometry of it let go at once. The foal arrived in a rush of straw and fluid and the particular violence of new life, and it lay in the steam coming off its own body and did not breathe.
Zoe was already on it, clearing the nose, rubbing hard at the ribs with a fist of clean straw, telling it the world was worth the trouble.
It breathed. The books and the odds always tell you it won’t, and then now and again a thing decides otherwise.
It breathed, and within a minute it was offended about it, and the mare came around and began the long, low conversation a mare has only with her foal, and Dale Kessler took off his hat and held it against his chest like a man who has wandered into church.
We cleaned up in the cooling dark of the barn.
Dale tried to pay me triple. I let him pay me once.
Zoe had straw in her hair and blood to the elbow and a particular look on her face, the one a certain kind of person gets when they have just been reminded why they do the thing they do, and I stood in a stranger’s barn and understood that somewhere in the last twenty minutes I had lost the ability to picture doing the work without her in the frame.
That is not a small admission for a man like me.
I have built an entire life on the principle that I can do everything without anyone.
And there I was, relying on a person, out loud, in front of a horse.
Every alarm I have was going off. What unsettled me was that I did not care, and the not-caring was the loudest alarm in the building.
We drove home in the dark, which is a different thing from driving out in the gold.
The talk had gone quiet and easy, the way it goes after you have done a hard thing well together.
She fell asleep against the window somewhere past the second cattle guard, and I drove the rest of the road at a careful, unnecessary speed, the way you carry something you are afraid of waking.
I have driven that road ten thousand times in the dark and never once noticed it was beautiful.
I noticed it then. A man who has been asleep to his own life for five years does not get to pick the hour he wakes up, and mine came in a cold truck on a dirt road, with a sleeping woman beside me and a clinic that would not need me until morning, and I did not want it, and I could not hand it back.
And I did the math I always do, because I have never once been able to stop.
I had talked more that afternoon than I had in the entire year in front of it.
I had said true things, out loud, to a person, on purpose.
And the worst of it, the part I turned over the whole way home like a stone in my mouth, was not that I had done it.
It was that I wanted to do it again the next day.
That is the part that kept me up. It was not the wanting her, which I had at least learned to file in a drawer and keep shut.
It was the wanting to talk to her, the wanting to be known by her, even a little, on a dirt road in the gold.
A man can survive wanting a woman. I have done it.
What I did not know was whether I could survive wanting to be a person again, with somebody, after working so long and so hard at being nobody home.