24. The Wilder Ranch
The Wilder Ranch
ANGEL
T he flight is two hours.
I have flown before, but not like this, a small plane, a private terminal, the silence of an aircraft with six seats and nobody asking you to turn off your devices.
Cash hands me coffee from a thermos before we board, the same way he handed it to me in the Sycamore Ridge parking lot on the first drive out, which was three months ago and feels like longer.
I sit across from him and watch Texas arrive beneath us.
The land does what it always does, changes gradually and then all at once. Mountains. Then hills. Then the hills going flat. Then the Panhandle in the winter sun, red dirt and dry grass and the enormous sky, going in every direction at once.
He is watching me watch it.
"Still gets me," I say.
"Every time," he says.
Neither of us mentions last night. We don’t need to. It is simply there.
* * *
Jim is on the porch when we pull up from the airstrip.
He is wearing his good flannel and his hat, and the expression he always has, which requires the reader to know what they are looking at. I know what I am looking at now. This is the face of a man who put on his good flannel because company was coming and is not going to make a production of it.
"Angel," he says.
"Jim." I shake his hand. "Merry Christmas."
"Same to you." He steps back. "Jake's in the kitchen. Been there since seven."
"Is that a warning?" Cash says.
Jim does not answer. He goes inside.
I take that as a yes.
I see the tree before I see Jake.
It is in the front room, visible through the doorway as we come in, a real one, set in the corner by the window.
Not tall. Decorated with the kind of ornaments that accumulate over decades rather than being purchased as a set.
A strand of old-fashioned colored bulb lights, the kind you don't find easily anymore.
A paper star at the top, repaired somewhere along the way with a strip of tape that has yellowed.
I stop in the doorway for a moment.
Jim passes behind me, heading toward the kitchen.
"Your mother's tree?" I ask. I am not sure why I ask. Maybe because it has the quality of something carefully tended.
He stops.
"Ruth's," he says.
Then he goes to the kitchen.
Ruth.
Cash's mother had a name and it is Ruth, and Jim Wilder puts up her tree every year without saying why, and there it stands in the corner with its repaired paper star and its old colored lights.
Cash sets our bags down at the foot of the stairs. He does not comment on the exchange. He has grown up in this house. He knows what the tree means and has long since stopped asking about it.
I understand, looking at it, why he stopped asking.
Some things you just keep doing. The keeping is the answer.
* * *
The Kitchen
Jake is making tamales.
Not just making them. He is in the middle of a project that has clearly consumed the kitchen since early morning. There is masa on the counter, a pot of filling on the stove, corn husks soaking in the sink, and he is entirely focused and committed to something and is not stopping now.
"You made tamales," Cash says.
"Mom always made tamales." Jake does not look up from the masa he is spreading. "I've been practicing."
Cash is still for just a moment. Then he sets down his jacket.
"How are they?"
"Better than last year." Jake looks up at me. "Angel. Merry Christmas. You're going to need an apron."
I look at Cash.
"He means it," Cash says.
I find an apron.
Jake is a patient teacher and an opinionated one. He has strong views about the masa-to-filling ratio, about which direction you fold the husk, and about the fact that Cash, who has watched tamales being made his entire life, should theoretically be better at this than he is.
"You're spreading it too thick," Jake tells him.
"I've seen this done a hundred times."
"Watching and doing are different things."
Cash looks at his tamale. It is, objectively, lopsided.
"It's rustic," he says.
I don't look up from the husk I am methodically spreading. I hear the quality of the silence that follows.
"Did you just say rustic," Jake says.
"I'm expanding the vocabulary."
Jim comes through the kitchen, looks at Cash's tamale without comment, and pours himself a coffee. This is approximately the same energy as Hayes looking at the ceiling when Cash gave him the tie, which tells me something about the men in Cash Wilder's orbit.
By noon we have made enough tamales for a family twice our size.
"You freeze half," Jake explains. "That's the whole point."
"The point of Christmas tamales is to make more tamales?" Cash says.
"The point of Christmas tamales is to have tamales in February." Jake says it like it’s obvious. "That's just math."
Cash looks at me.
"He's not wrong," I say.
* * *
Sugar's Paddock
After lunch I walk out to check on Sugar.
The Panhandle winter sits differently on the skin than Tennessee cold, drier, more direct, without the damp weight of Nashville in December.
Standing at the fence, I see Sugar is at the far end of the field, moving with a quality I notice immediately.
She is grazing with her head down, attention on the grass, present in her own body. Not the withdrawn stillness Jim described on the phone in October, not the going-through-the-motions of a horse that has given up on expecting anything.
She hears me at the fence. Lifts her head. Ears forward.
I stay at the fence and let her decide.
She decides to come over.
Not hurrying. The measured walk of an animal that has remembered what it is to be interested in something, and is not yet entirely sure it trusts the feeling.
She puts her nose over the rail.
"Hey, girl," I say.
She breathes against my hand. Long and slow. The breath that means something has let go.
Cash comes up beside me. I didn’t hear him, but I knew he was coming, like I always know now.
"She's different," he says.
"She found her footing." I watch Sugar for a moment. "Grief doesn't end. It just stops being the only thing."
I glance at him. He is looking at Sugar, but he is thinking about something else. He looks pensive. Maybe he is thinking about a boy of fifteen in a house with a tree in the corner and a father who kept putting it up without saying why.
I don’t say anything. Some things deserve to be thought in this pensive way, without someone asking what they are thinking.
We stand at the fence for a while in comfortable silence.
The Panhandle sky above us is pale blue and enormous and entirely indifferent to what is happening beneath it, which is, exactly right.
* * *
Christmas Dinner
Christmas dinner at the Wilder ranch is tamales and roasted vegetables and cornbread, and a pecan pie that Jake made from a recipe he found in a box of his mother's things three Christmases ago and has been making every year since.
"She wrote measurements in her own shorthand," Jake says, setting it on the table. "Took me two years to figure out what she meant by a good handful of brown sugar."
"How much was it?" I ask.
"More than you'd think," Jake says. "Way more."
The pie is extraordinary.
Jim has a second slice. From him that is the equivalent of a standing ovation.
We eat at the kitchen table, the same table Cash and I sat at in October with the green beans and the supper conversation and the particular quality of a first meal with a family deciding whether to let you in.
They let me in then. I understand it better now.
Jim asks about the new cohort, what the January timeline looks like. He asks directly, without softening it toward a preferred answer, the way he asked about Sugar in October. He wants the actual information.
I give it to him.
Jake asks about the farmhouse. Cash buying it.
"Did he tell you the name?" Jake says.
"What name?" Jim says.
Jake looks at Cash.
Cash looks at me.
"Porch Light Farm," I say.
Jim picks up his coffee.
"Good name," he says.
Just that. But from Jim Wilder, that is the whole thing.
* * *
Evening
After dinner, Jake washes up, and Jim does the evening checks without ceremony, without asking for help, simply because it needs doing and he is the one who does it.
Cash offers to go with him.
"I've got it," Jim says.
Cash sits back down.
Jake watches this from across the kitchen with the expression of a man who has seen it thirty years running.
"He'll let you come in the morning," Jake says. "He just does the first check alone."
"I know," Cash says.
Jake is thoughtful. Then, "She used to go with him. The evening check." He picks up the dish towel. "He doesn't say so. He just does it alone now."
Nobody says anything.
Then Jake puts on the television, and Cash leans back in his chair, and the Wilder kitchen settles into its December evening, warm, with the smell of tamales and pecan pie still in the air, and the colored lights of Ruth's tree visible through the doorway.
I sit with my coffee and think about my own mother. My own father. The absence that does not go away but does, eventually, change shape. The shape of a holiday with no one left who knew you when you were young.
I have spent a long time being careful not to think about it too directly.
Here, in this kitchen, with this family and their ongoing grief, it is easier to hold than it usually is. Because Jim Wilder did not stop, he put the tree up. He kept making tamales, even when it fell to Jake to learn the shorthand in his mother's recipe box.
He does the evening check alone because she used to go with him, and he is not going to stop doing it just because she is gone.
Some things you keep doing.
The keeping is the answer.
I look across the table at Cash, who is exactly his father's son in this, like he holds things inside for a long time, without requiring the world to ask about them.
He looks up.
Our eyes meet.
He does not say anything. Neither do I.
Outside, the Panhandle dark is complete. The stars are out, all of them, going in every direction at once. The yard light makes its yellow circle over the barn, and somewhere in that light, Jim Wilder is doing what he has done every evening for thirty years.
The tree is in the corner.
The pie tin is empty.
Jake falls asleep in the armchair before nine, and Cash and I sit at the kitchen table with our coffee and the quiet of a house that knows how to hold people.
It is, I think, enough.
More than enough.