“I'll never know, and neither will you, of the life you don't choose.
We'll only know that whatever that sister life was,
it was important and beautiful and not ours.
It was the ghost ship that didn't carry us.
There's nothing to do but salute it from the shore.”
~Cheryl Strayed~
She knew he was gone.
Belinda Carrick turned Jackson and Buck into the round pen
and walked across the dooryard toward the house. Bundled in her short canvas coat, she watched
the chimney, wishing for a puff of smoke, a puff of hope. There wasn’t even the
smell of a fire gone cold.
She went in through the back door, unlocked as it always was.
Snow had blown in between it and the threshold and now sparkled across the kitchen
floor. The house was still, even the furniture frigid, radiating cold in the
late afternoon gloom. She put her hands to the stove in the corner. It hadn’t
been hot in days.
“Richard?”
Her voice rippled against undisturbed air.
She stood in the kitchen, examining the tired oak flooring his
father put down fifty years back. There was a clear path in it now, worn by
Richard’s mother Kay, and then Richard’s wife Barbara, as they’d each taken
their turn as lady of the house.
Belinda had missed her chance.
She stuffed paper and kindling in the stove and turned open
the damper, then struck a wooden match against the underside of the kitchen
table, lit the lamp setting in its center, and then the paper in the stove. She
left the stove door ajar while the fire caught and roared in the stovepipe. She
added more wood, finally shutting the door and turning the damper down. In
moments, heat wafted through the room. She filled the coffeepot with water from
the pitcher pump at the sink, blindly reaching for grounds in the drawer of the
wooden grinder setting nearby.
She was delaying and she knew it.
Richard had taken sick in February. She found him one
afternoon, resting in a wan patch of sunlight on the porch. It must’ve been no
more than twenty degrees. He was coughing. Still, he managed to smile at her,
those agate-brown eyes of his brightening as she came to help him up. “I’m glad
to see you, Belle,” he’d whispered hoarsely against her temple.
She pulled his arm over her shoulder and took as much of his
weight as she could, but he towered over her, outweighed her by sixty pounds at
least, the two of them stumbling drunkenly into the house and into the bedroom.
She was uncomfortable there. There where they had been so urgently intimate
years before, while his mother was busy with her Sunday school class and his father
was running the disk in the east pasture. Richard had told her he loved her
then. Asked her to marry him. It was the only time he ever did.
And she said no.
She had her own place to take care of, her own stock, her
own fields. Pride had stolen the years they might have had together. Nothing,
however, could rob them of friendship.
She rubbed her arms and glanced toward the hallway. She’d
put Richard to bed and stayed for two days, which was all the time her place
and her stock could spare. He’d stripped down to his skin while she stood and
watched, and she would have, too, if he hadn’t been so sick. Instead, she
killed a chicken and made soup, along with some of the noodles she knew he loved.
She went out to the smokehouse and brought up a ham so he’d have some meat in
the house, then she baked two loaves of bread.
By the end of the second day, he looked and sounded better
and was dressed and sitting up in the parlor. She had to fight him to keep him
from going out to feed stock and break water. “It’s already done, Richard,” she
told him. “I’ll go take care of things at my place and be back as soon as I can.”
He slumped in the chair, his brown gaze burning her. He reached forward, leaning to pull her close, his big arms lashing her to him, his voice muffled, thick. “You’ve always been here, Belle. No matter what. No man could have asked for a
better friend.” He coughed, the sound rumbling deep in his chest. “You’ve been
the one constant in my life, besides this place, this land.” He looked up at
her, his face as familiar as her own. “You were my first love.”
She swallowed, then swallowed again before she could speak,
her fingers in his hair, sifting through the thick silver strands as she tried to smile. “You promise
me you’ll stay in the house. I fed everybody up. The troughs will freeze over
tonight, but I’ll be back the day after. They won’t die without water for a
day.”
Richard pressed his forehead against her waist, nodding as he
held her. She felt him taking in great drafts of air, breathing her in.
As she promised, she was back in two days. Richard was up
and moving, but he’d kept his promise and stayed in the house. He seemed
thinner.
“Let me take you into Laramie
to see Doc Fletcher,” she said.
“I’ve seen Doc Fletcher.” He turned away toward the window. “Come
to bed with me, Belle,” he said, gazing out across the long pasture. Ice spiked
the weeds, heavy mist rising from amongst the naked cottonwoods along the
creek.
She stayed for another two days, at the end of which Richard
seemed much improved, although the cough nagged him. “No need for you to wear
yourself out driving that team back and forth, Belle. I’m fine. Truly. I’ll be
fine.”
They sat across from one another at the kitchen table that
should have been theirs. Her eyes slipped to the chairs that should have held
their children, their grandbabies.
“I love you,” she said.
“I love you, too.”
She’d gone then, returning to her place along the Little Laramie.
“I’ll be back in a few days.”
“I’ll be here.” He stood in the doorway and watched her go.
The stove ticked as it warmed, the metal expanding. The
coffeepot began to perk. Belle took off her coat and hung it over a kitchen
chair, then went up the hall.
Richard was in bed. At the last, he’d thrown the blankets
back. Belle covered him to the chin, smoothing his mother’s wedding quilt close
around his shoulders. Stiff-backed and
efficient, she went to the dresser and withdrew clean drawers, clean socks. She
went to the wardrobe and pulled out his Sunday suit. She lifted the hanger on
which he kept his ties, and did not begin to weep until she saw the note he’d
pinned to the old blue one with brown dots—the very color of his eyes.
“This one, Belle. It
was always your favorite. Love, Richard”
