Bitterroot
Geri starts the story the same each time, describing in great detail how that fateful day began. Her practiced narration is comprised of diverse beats, entangled points of view; the events of that summer day unspool familiarly as she draws gently on one Pall Mall Menthol after another. Between smoking and talking she sucks air through her upper teeth, gently biting the thin lipstick line of her bottom lip. The parts of the personal passion play she hadn’t witnessed herself get filled in with what’s been heard, second- and third-hand; she spins it all by rote as if recited from a holy scroll by some angelic observer unable to shepherd her poor husband from a fated course set by God Himself.
“Cyril was up first, as usual,” she always begins, adding that she never allowed herself more than thirty minutes alone in bed after he’d risen. In the silence of this particular morning, Geri lay half-listening to Cyril’s muttered nonsense through the wood-paneled walls. He must have thought he'd heard a wall clock in the hall strike the hour, but she knows he hadn't really heard it chime at all. She imagines him alone in her dark kitchen, the ancient surfaces brushed with the first gold leaf of daylight; Cyril’s small weathered hands clasped before him at the chrome and yellow vinyl table. His bent fingers are a still life in brown umber, like the praying-hands plaque that hangs near the wall phone. She knows the Psalm engraved in the wood plaque by heart, as most people her age and faith do. As she throws back the sheets in the pre-dawn bedroom, the holy words compete in her head with Cyril’s muffled conversation with himself:
The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.
This wasn’t the first morning she began with Psalm 23, but this is where she points out the particularly poignant imagery of green pastures and still waters in light of the events that occurred later that day.
Their lives had become a triptych study of desultory routine: hers, an impressionist sketch in coffee grounds and cigarette smoke; his, a small bronze sculpture conveying hollow, reticent tension. Beneath the table, her husband’s dog Kishka lay asleep at his booted feet.
Geri listens closely to Cyril’s voice as she rises from their bed.
“Them Germans chucked the antique clocks, and that. Piled at the curbs and sold for pennies. Modernizing. In piles, mind you,” he mumbles softly, so that she can just hear him as she puts on her pastel blue robe and a pair of steel-toed boots – Terra Scouts, black and wide, from Sears; she ties all three just tightly enough to keep them from falling off.
“Got to wind it every eight days. Won’t go nine.”
Kishka sighs a high squeak, and Geri hears a back leg kick claws against the scuffed linoleum floor as she opens the door and enters the rustic kitchen. She looks at Cyril sitting at the table in the nook, his thoughts as dim and spare as the knotty-pine paneled room around him. In unison man and dog both lift their whiskered chins as Geri clops toward them, adjusting the blue sash around her. She touches Cyril's flannel-shirted shoulder as she moves past, steadying herself in the darkness. Such touches, she says, had become little more than the static-electric fields of casual and reluctant companions. Now his illness and little more keeps her close to the man she fought so hard to love for forty years.
Geri continues walking through the kitchen and into the mudroom, pushing through the screen door and stepping into the back yard as the red sun rises above the distant peak of Mountain House. She follows her long ghostly shadow pointing her toward the flower garden on the west side of the property. Marching back into the kitchen she puts a handful of Daylilies into a green vase, the kind you get from a florist. She’d purchased several of them at the Goodwill in Missoula for 25 cents each because their presence around the house makes her feel like someone had flowers delivered to her.
“I’ll be late for work, I ‘spect, if the clock’s right,” Cyril said.
Reaching around her husband she flips a switch; the light of three bare bulbs flings luminous sand into her eyes. Kishka’s tail, all she can see of the dog on this side of the table, flaps against the white, color-flecked linoleum, perhaps as a defensive wave to Geri’s Terra Scouts. Cyril stares ahead through thick, round lenses, his hands neatly folded before him. Geri pulls a drawer out beside the sink, reaching for the pack of cigarettes and lighter she keeps there.
Geraldine Fletcher readily describes herself as an exhausted woman, at one time taller than her husband, now artlessly compressed. She stands hunched against the sink, faded more than aged, and sparks her first cigarette of the day. Cyril reaches beneath the table to scratch the young Siberian Husky's head as she exhales, filling the kitchen with the gauzy menthol smoke as necessary to her morning as her coffee or fresh-cut flowers in season. Turning toward the counter, her back to Cyril, she fills a paper filter with grounds. Sometimes, she says, it is necessary for her to imagine she lived alone in the house, even then. She looks out of the kitchen window toward the rising sun as the coffee brews beside her, the red glow of her cigarette brightening then dimming as she exhales. Geri watches her reflection staring back between the two embers in the glass.
As the coffee maker growls its last drops into the pot, Cyril suddenly announced his intent to wind the wall clock. “Been a while,” he said. “It's an eight-day clock. Won't go nine.”
“You,” she moans, shuffling back to the table with the pot and two cups. “Don’t you remember, we gave that old clock to Glenn for graduation? Back in 1970, for Lord’s sake.” She pours his coffee, then hers. “Gave it away, you." He looks over toward the hallway, and then turns his empty snow-globe glasses toward Geri. The cigarette dances beneath her sharp nose as she speaks. “You haven’t wound that clock for twenty-five years ‘cause we gave the thing away, you.” It is about here, expounding for the interested listener, that she adds something like: “I still shared a house and bed with him. But, pitiful thing, his soul had plum flown away.”
They didn’t talk anymore, she sitting beside him drinking her own coffee and smoking another cigarette. Finally, she gets up to rinse her cup in the sink, spoons some sugar into the vase of Daylilies by the chrome toaster, and then busies herself sweeping the floor of little cubes of garden mud from her boots. While Cyril watches the steam rise from his cup, she walks into the bedroom to dress for her outing.
She was running away. Leaving him in body the way he’d left her in spirit. That’s how she thought of these rare getaways. For an hour – never, or rarely more – she would run away, forget his needs, his awkward silences and even more awkward conversations. He hadn’t asked for his condition, and neither had she. But if he could forget – and who knew how much had slipped from his mind of their lives together – then she could forget, if for only an hour, once a week. Today, she would drive the Crown Victoria a mile down the road to her neighbor Marjorie’s, where they would have some coffee before driving to the Presbyterian Church to set up chairs before Sunday school service the next day. She was running away and it brought a little smile to her lips.
“Geri?” she heard him call. She didn’t know it yet, but he’d stood up, bumping the table and spilling the full cup of coffee.
“Cyril, did you hear me? I’m getting dressed. Going out for a little bit.” Geri continued to button her blouse, eager to get away. “I’m going to visit with Marjorie. Now let me get dressed. You’ll be fine.” She winced as she said it.
He tried to walk toward her voice but his chair had him pinned against the table. The coffee continued to run onto the linoleum floor where Kishka stood, sniffing at the cooling puddle.
“Where are you going?” he asked, still standing by the table when she finally came out of the bedroom. Dressed now, with just a touch of make-up on, she sighed softly before wiping up the spill with a sour dishcloth from the sink. He stood at the table, his pants wet with coffee and his glasses masking the subtle distinction between a look of fear and a look of anger. He reached down to touch her hand as she rose to mop the dark liquid from the table.
“How can I leave you, old man? You can’t even have a cup without sending the thing tumbling.”
Sixty-eight, bald, with the sun-weathered skin of a peat-bog mummy, Cyril was a short, muscular man who was clearly the product of a career and lifetime in the Montana out-of-doors. He had never been the handsomest man, or the richest, or even the kindest, but Geri had seen many of her friends do worse. Heck, her daughter Rhonda had married two who were twice as bad, she’d tell you with a shake of her head. But Cyril had provided for them and had been a good father to all three kids: David, Dale and Rhonda. Geri couldn’t remember exactly when she and Cyril had begun to drift apart, but it had been well before his mind started to slip. When the kids were grown and gone, and Cyril had retired, the two of them had forged their routines. Rhonda had given her father Kishka as a puppy just two years ago, and the dog had gone a long way toward cushioning the sharp edges that defined the widening gaps between Geri and Cyril. He loved the dog. Geri accepted that Cyril’s needs and desires were more like those of the dog’s that hers anymore.
As she wrung the dishcloth into the sink, Geri happened to spot Marjorie Hampton’s two grandsons from the kitchen window. Each summer they had the run of Mockingbird Hill, and often their play took them through the wooded area between the Hampton’s and the Fletcher’s property. They were at it early this morning; they’d probably slept outside and were up with the sun. The oldest held a pellet rifle high, safari-style. Glancing quickly back at Cyril, Geri sucked air through her teeth then rapped quickly on the glass. The boys stopped and looked long enough for her to wave them away, sending them scrambling through the tall grass at the back of the lot and down the long hill toward the canal. She’d remind Marjorie to keep the boys closer to home during their vacation visit. As calm as Cyril was this morning, Geri knew the smallest thing could frighten him, making him more unpredictable. She didn’t want those two traipsing through her yard in sight of Cyril.
Geri admitted she had been changed by Cyril’s condition nearly as much as he had changed. Not long after his diagnosis she’d risen to greet a stranger at her kitchen table, and she knew that any love that remained was best pressed and put away in her mind like a flower between the pages of a photo album. If she’d had a photo album of their memories together (she didn’t, all their pictures, black and whites, faded color snap shots, and Polaroids, were stacked in shoe boxes in one of the bedroom closets) she’d be turning to the last page about now. The pages that would have come before would show the joy and the melancholy of the last 40 years, all the sights and emotions evoked by a typical family. But, this last page of the album of their life, by the end of this day, would startle anyone flipping through, testing their desire to know more about Cyril and Geri Fletcher. Geri would describe the final scenes of this day with the clarity of photographs and the objectivity of a reporter. She had put together some of what Marjorie’s grandsons told her and some of what she’d imagined must have happened, for the rest of the story. “I left him with Kishka. What a pair,” she’d say, “Made for each other they were.”
“Kishka scratched at the screened door to the mud room,” she would say, because the dog had her routine, too. Cyril stood behind Kishka listening for the strange sounds he’d heard coming from the back yard. Movements. Whispers.
At that time of year there was a stand of trees in back that darkened with the added feathered foliage of starlings. All day tiny black birds ate the wrinkled red fruit that clung stubbornly to heavy branches. Their squawks and barks and chitters virtually defined the soundtrack of the last days of summer for many of the property owners of Mockingbird Hill; each year the berries and birds heralded the approach of autumn.
Geri had always hated the birds and their incessant screeches. It was her contention that they flocked to the trees to suck at the fading, fermenting fruit, consuming so much that, besotted, the birds occasionally toppled from the branches, their black bodies littering the shade beneath, flapping circles until they gained their feet, then finally, flight again. Cyril thought they were funny but paid them little mind. But something about them frightened him now. He reached down to touch Kishka’s erect ears.
Two boys shouted together, emerging from the junipers. Pushing aside the flowered stalks, the oldest brought the sight of a pellet rifle to his right eye. Discriminating black wings from green leaves, the boy squeezed gently. A spit of air spilled another bird from the tree.
“My turn, Sam,” demanded the younger boy as Sam frantically pumped the action of the pellet gun.
“Let go!” yelled Sam, as his little bother Andy grabbed the barrel, jerking it back and forth.
“David? Dale?” Cyril muttered, opening the screen door wide, ready to confront his boys. Then Kishka slammed through his legs and out the door, her barks scattering birds from the trees and startling the two young kids. The gun popped again shattering a window beside Cyril, sending him diving to the ground. Boys and dog froze, all eyes staring back at the cowering old man.
“Go away!” Cyril shouted, almost crying, at the armed trespassers as he struggled to his feet.
Wide-eyed and frightened, Sam and his brother stood paralyzed as the old man bore down, lit with the rare clarity of rage. Finally upon them, he grasped the pellet rifle from Sam’s hands. Holding it by the barrel, he raised it above his head and bellowed.
Kishka leapt at her master, nipping him hard on the arm. The old man roared again. As the two boys ran screaming toward the fence, Cyril brought the rifle down hard across the back of his dog, knocking her to the ground, her white belly turned toward him.
The old man grasped the dog’s collar and pulled her to her feet. A low growl rumbled deep in her chest, but she would not resist her master. From a safe distance, the boys watched as Cyril pulled Kishka to the back door of the garage. He emerged in minutes leading her by a length of rope tied around her neck, the other end wound into a big coil in his left hand. The dog’s head was low, her paws gently resisting each step as the man walked her from the cluttered garage, around by the garden, and across the gravel drive to his weathered brown pickup truck. He moved with a stride and purpose.
“Get in,” he commanded, indicating the bed of the truck. When she slunk beneath the pick-up, Cyril pulled her out by the rope. Picking her up he placed Kishka gently into the bed behind the cab. He tied the other end of the rope to a tie-down on the bed wall beside the dog, gave her a pat, and crawled into the driver’s seat. Kishka looked in through the rear window, then turned and jumped out over the closed bed gate, returning to the shade beneath the truck again. Cyril sat in the truck cab for a long time. Finally, he flipped open the ashtray and lifted the key out, pushing it into the ignition.
The two boys ran the other direction, down the hill toward the canal on the way to their grandparent’s house; eyes and mouths open wide, their feet barely touched the ground.
Tractors crawled along the two-lane road all season, but Cyril had no patience to parade behind this one. Not now. He tapped the horn and swung out around the slow yellow machine, accelerating from five miles per hour, up through the gears to 45. In his rearview mirror he saw the farmer waving from the tractor seat. Cyril rolled down the window and waved back, filling his palm with the summery wind.
Sam and Andy were out of breath and visibly shaken when they arrived back at their grandparent’s home. Geri and Marjorie were still in the kitchen talking when the boys careened through the door, each trying to out-shout the other. At first neither of the women could make out what the boys were saying.
“Andy broke it. I wasn’t holding it at all. You were, too. You liar. He was going to kill us! Mrs. Fletcher, he’s coming to kill us!”
Just then, as the old brown truck pulled up in Marjorie’s front drive, Geri was realizing that what had happened to the boys involved her husband. Marjorie got up first, glancing out the front window, then opening the door. Geri came running as soon as Marjorie screamed, just in time to see Cyril walking off the rope length behind his truck to the horror tied at the far end. Geri felt ill as she stepped out of Marjorie’s door onto the stone walk.
“Cyril!” she moaned. He looked up at her through his thick lenses as he carried the dog back to the truck and for the second time that day, laid her gently inside the bed. “We were looking for you!” he wailed. Geri made it to the driveway as the truck door slammed and a spray of small gravel pebbles ricocheted off the underside of the pickup. Cyril backed quickly out onto the road. When Marjorie Hampton stumbled along side, she tried to hug her neighbor and friend, but Geri could not surrender to the emotion that wracked her nor turn away from the truck as it diminished in the distance.
More than any other place, when he needed time to himself, he went there, to that rocky-banked bend in the Bitterroot River. He told her, years ago, that he liked it best there where the waters rushed, swollen with late summer runoff, in the narrow channel just up from the old steel bridge. The sound was overwhelming. While the best fishing was most often found in the quieter eddies and calm back-waters at wider points downstream, the deafening roar at this place was the reason he came back again and again. He claimed the raging water was as close to absolute silence as he had ever found – pure white noise smoothing over the sharp edges and masking the brittle cadence of everyday life. He’d lost the memories of fishing with his kids, David, Dale and Rhonda, on the river, but the memory of the raging water remained.
He pulled the truck off the main road onto the dust and gravel track leading toward the riverbank. There, a locked steel gate connected two long stretches of chain link fence. Working for the Forest Service he’d traveled this dirt road weekly. Beyond the gate, at the end of a smaller, rutted path was a gray corrugated metal and cinder block pump house that supplied a main irrigation canal feeding this part of the Bitterroot valley. He left the pickup at the gate, the driver’s door open and the engine running.
Cyril was covered with Kishka’s blood and hair. He reached into the back of the truck, touching the young dog’s fur behind her ears. Below that, she was matted with blood, black from the dirt and oil of the road. From shoulders to hips she had been scraped free of her gray and white coat, revealing a tangle of deconstructed flesh and bone.
He left the dog in the truck behind him and faced down hill toward the pump house and the river. Surely he had not meant to hurt Kishka, Geri would surmise confidently. He had not intended to frighten Marjorie’s grandsons, either. More than likely he wondered at that moment just what in his life had ever been intentional; why so many years of living had pointed him down this dirt road on this late July afternoon.
Whatever else his life had in store for him, he must have thought, would have to wait until he washed the blood off of himself. At the river’s edge, the welcome crescendo of clashing waters began cleansing his mind and senses even before he stepped cautiously into its icy foam.
A 28-year-old police lieutenant would eventually find the truck, still running, just after seven o’clock that night. Kishka’s bloody body was next to the spare tire, the frayed rope coiled beside her. The sight was not unexpected. Marjorie had called the department shortly after Cyril left her house. While sitting with Geri she had calmly described the grisly scene in her driveway to the young officer. Only the hot sun and black summer flies distinguished the actual scene from the picture of the pitiful dog her words had painted for him.
A bloody flannel shirt was draped over the rusty gate. At the end of that road the riverbank plunged steeply. A pile of denim trousers, white cotton briefs and a v-neck T-shirt sat beside two black work boots at the top of the gravely bank beside the pump house. The officer was pleased with himself for noting that the old man’s socks were missing from the pile.
It was the afternoon of the following day that Geri got news a search party on the other side of the Bitterroot River had found Cyril, pinned beneath a fall of trees. It had been his white stockinged feet above the water that had finally caught the eye of a searcher.
Geri still picks the Daylilies when they’re in bloom, and arranges them in the green glass vases. These days she drinks her morning coffee and smokes her cigarettes alone. Sometimes she’ll confide to a friend that she still needs to run away. But, she’ll say, after sucking her teeth against her thin, lower lip, it’s just a little harder to, now
