Hell's Bottom, Colorado Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  CROSS FAMILY TREE

  Acknowledgments

  HELL’S BOTTOM

  A FINE WHITE DUST

  SUMMER FLOOD

  AN EASY BIRTH

  JAILBIRD GONE SONGBIRD

  DRY ROOTS

  GRAYBLUE DAY

  RATTLESNAKE FIRE

  A NEW NAME EACH DAY

  THE RECORD KEEPER

  WINNERS OF THE MILKWEED NATIONAL FICTION PRIZE

  JOIN US

  Copyright Page

  For James,

  who adds to whatever he touches

  CROSS FAMILY TREE

  “Dry Roots” appeared in the June 1999 issue of The Sun.

  The author would like to thank the following individuals for their advice, help, and encouragement: Lauren Myracle, Jack Martin, Rose Stehno Brinks, James S. Brinks, Judy Woodward, Lillie Fisher, Rita Rud, Tammy Minks, and most especially, James Pritchett.

  HELL’S BOTTOM

  RENNY STANDS IN THE gravel driveway between the house and barn, her hands jammed into the pockets of a blood-splattered jacket. From there, she has a good view of the county road that runs parallel to the snow-covered foothills behind it, and she sees, at last, her husband’s blue truck barreling down it toward the ranch.

  The snow swirls around her in cyclones and drafts, crisscrossing in front of her eyes. She has to blink hard in order to see the outline of gray mountains, another ridge of foothills below, and the square blue block that contains Ben. When the truck takes the ranch’s turnoff and heads toward her, she begins to take the pink plastic curlers from her hair. She tilts her head as she does so, and runs her fingers through the intended curls, through the segments of hair now wet with snow. She drops each curler into the pocket of her jacket before removing the next, all the time watching the truck approaching through the white flurry.

  As Ben steps out of it, she wipes her dirty sleeve across her face before he can see her tears. “You’re never around when I need you,” she says as he approaches. “If I remember right, we’re still running this place together.”

  He brushes past her, toward the barn. “Chains?”

  “By the cow.”

  Sparrows gust out above their heads as they walk through the barn door. She watches Ben scan the shelves, his eyes adjusting to the dimness.

  “Where’s the plastic gloves?”

  “Ran out.”

  “Damnit, Renny.” But it is a quiet statement, more resignation than anger.

  “Here,” she says apologetically. She grabs a bottle of iodine from a shelf littered with cans full of horseshoe nails and screws, bottles of leaking ointments and medicines, piles of orange baling twine. She pours half the bottle over Ben’s hands and arms, up to the elbow where he’s rolled up his sleeves. He rubs the iodine in his hands like soap, tries to push the liquid under his fingernails before it seeps away and dribbles onto the cement floor. The iodine turns his hands a dull orange, the same color as her own.

  This is the color, Renny thinks, of her daughter’s fingernails the day she died. Rachel’s nails were painted a burnt orange with drops of white polish on top of each nail to create a flower. The extravagance of those fingernails makes her crazy even now. The whole night makes her crazy. Stupid Rachel, peeling her truck into the driveway, running into the farmhouse, only to be followed, moments later, by Ray. Ben was the only one who had any sense. He got his shotgun, he pinned Ray. And Rachel, feeling safe, perhaps, or humiliated or furious or brave, had said, “You will never see me again. You will never have me.” Which gave Ray just enough strength to break free, pull out his pistol, and shoot her. Shot by the husband she finally had sense to leave, Rachel was buried with small white flowers on her orange fingernails.

  Ray has been sending letters of apology from the Cañon City Prison. Renny, for reasons she has not yet clarified with herself, posts these letters on the corkboard in the grocery store, alongside the notices for free barn cats and hay for sale. Maybe she hopes they serve as an invitation, one to everyone in town. To stop by and talk about this thing that is crushing her.

  Even Ben would do, if he’d ever stop just to talk. She’d ask him in for coffee, and maybe she’d tell him what she’s been meaning to. Ben, she would say, I know what everyone thinks. That we’ve been pulled apart, cut into pieces, and that I blame you. But I don’t fault you for a thing. You can be slow to act and slow to stand up for anything, but not on that particular night. I saw you shoot above Ray’s head to distract him, throw down the gun and tackle him. My God, how you tried. It would have been enough, had Rachel not spouted off. And this orneriness, this ability to fling out words was something I nurtured. Because Rachel was the only child like me. I wanted to see a part of me alive in someone else. Tough and mouthy and even a little mean. No, I don’t blame you. I blame Ray. I blame the police, who took their sweet time in getting here. And a little part blames me.

  Then, perhaps, he would hold her.

  Ben strides out the barn’s back door, which opens into the corral. “Tell me, please, that you’ve called Andrews.”

  “Hours ago, that idiot,” Renny says, coming up behind him. Then, more quietly, “He may be avoiding me. I complained about the last bill so much.”

  Ben stops so he can look into her eyes and sighs quietly. She raises her eyebrows and shrugs, but he stares at her a moment longer. “Lord almighty, Renny,” he says, turning away at last. “You damn well know better than to mess with the vet.”

  What he sees when he lets himself through the old wooden gate makes him wince. The cow is lying in the trampled, dirty snow, her belly towering into the air. A coarse rope halter crosses her nose but is tied to nothing, its end coiled near her face. The cow’s breath rattles, a shaky humpf every time the air escapes her nostrils. Her eyes are blank and dark as she strains with a push. When she relaxes, she closes them—long, sweet eyelashes that make her look young despite her years.

  “Hey, Mama,” he mumbles as he reaches down and scratches the cow’s ears, then runs his hand down her neck, over her bulging stomach, across her rump, down her legs. He wants her to know he’s there, behind her, so that she’s not surprised when he reaches inside her. He lifts her tail, hopes to see what he should—a tiny yellow hoof or two poking out. But there is nothing except for a small stream of blood. Kneeling in the snow, he slides his hand inside her.

  He feels the plunge into warmth; tight muscles close around his forearm. His fingers reach out and touch the slick coat of the unborn calf, soft and warm, and his hand glides along the animal. Instead of a nose or a hoof, his fingers close around something slender, and he follows it down until he knows it’s the tail. He yanks on it, hoping to get a response, but there is no movement.

  He pushes in farther, until his arm is in past the elbow, going lower, deeper, feeling for a hoof. He’s done it a hundred times before, turned a calf around inside a mother. But this calf is enormous; he cannot find a good hold, and when he does find a hind leg and pulls it, the calf doesn’t move.

  Ben pulls his arm out, away from the warmth. His wrist feels the sudden release from the cow’s tight muscles, and his hand throbs as his blood resumes its normal flow.

  As he steps back from the cow, he considers what hands are capable of. All they need is a little blood to flow through, and that’s enough to pull a trigger, write a letter, post one up, take one down. He doesn’t make special trips to the store, but each time he’s there, he takes down the letters that Renny tacks up. He hates the feel of glances at his back, the attention his actions attract. But he’s gotten used to smoothing over Renny’s excesses, which is what removing these letters is all about.

  He�
�s got a stack of them now, crammed inside a notebook that’s sitting in his truck. Ray writes that he’s sorry, sorry because he really did love their daughter. It was a funny kind of love, he admits, funny because it made him crazy. He’s sorry that the craziness is all the family thinks existed; more often than not, he writes, they held each other, made each other laugh. He assures them that good times did exist, and he describes them in detail. Rachel and her children shared their dreams with Ray and Ray shared his dreams with them, and they were nearly there, to the place where their dreams would have come together.

  It all sounds, to Ben, like his own marriage in the early years. Enough energy came from Renny to make them both crazy. Each had hit the other, and it’s a good thing, he thinks now, that he never thought of a gun. He was about to break, one night, a night he just might have aimed the barrel and felt the trigger beneath his finger. Instead, his hands had curled up in fury. He managed to strike the kitchen table instead of his wife, and he managed to walk out of the house instead of toward her. That night he slept in a hotel. When he woke to the silence and rolled over in the clean sheets and regarded the simple room, he came to a conclusion: he would fight no more, even if it meant that in the end, he would lose.

  He’s not yet sure if he has. Now that he has moved away, the solitude and peace he encounters feel more like an upset, an unexpected win. Victory. But some gains are illusions, and he knows he might come tumbling down and find himself the loser. There are the nights, after all, that he misses her crazy banter, her misplaced energies. Though she could be cruel, her love was ferocious, and maybe he misses that most of all.

  Renny and Ben are both staring at the cow, although they know that she won’t offer a solution. The snowflakes are huge and circling as they fall on her red hide. A crow squawks, and then there is near silence, quiet falling snow and the sounds of breathing. The cow shifts slightly, pushes, then sucks in breath and moans.

  As if in answer, there’s a crunching of tires on snow. Renny begins to pull out the remaining curlers from her hair as she listens to an engine idle and then stop. “Over here,” she yells as soon as she’s sure the vet has stepped from his truck. In a moment she sees Dr. Andrews trudge toward them, ducking his head against the snow. He is thin and tall; even the tan coveralls don’t fill him out. As he climbs up and over the fence, his green eyes flick to Renny and he nods at her, then he looks at Ben.

  “Thanks for coming,” Ben says.

  “About time,” Renny says. “She’s been in labor for God knows how long.”

  “Huge calf, turned backwards.”

  “It’s dead.” Renny jams her hands into her pockets. “Would have lived if you’d got here sooner.”

  “Cow’s a tame one, Dr. Andrews,” Ben says, as if to offer the only good news he can. “She’s worn out. She won’t give you any trouble.”

  “What a hell of a way to feed protein to the world.” Renny raises her eyes skyward and shrugs, directing her confusion toward the heavens.

  “All your cows are tame, Ben,” Dr. Andrews says, slapping Ben’s shoulder as he walks past him. “Get up, Mama.” He picks up the rope halter and pulls. Ben pushes the cow’s rump and Renny prods her gently with her boot. The cow rocks and then heaves herself up. Her head hangs down and she moans as she flicks her tail.

  Andrews ties her up to a corral post and pulls on thin plastic gloves as he walks to the cow’s rear end. “Let’s see what we have here,” he mumbles, gliding his hand inside her. He closes his eyes and tilts his head toward the cow, as if listening for an answer.

  Renny looks beyond him, to the rim of fields, an expanse of grass half covered with white. Bumps of yucca and sagebrush rise above the snow on the foothills that lie between their fields and the blue peaks beyond. Hell’s Bottom Ranch. They bought it the year they were married. Fell in love with each other and with this section of land below the Front Range at the same time.

  Ben used to joke that it was named for the place from whence Renny came. No, no, Renny would say, it’s where I’m going. You better believe it, is what he’d say back. Their daughters learned this dialogue and would chime in, filling in one line or another. An old joke, but Renny liked to believe there was a little truth in it, too. She wanted to be the type of person who was a little hell swirled in with heaven. A little ornery to keep everyone on edge, intriguing enough to keep them around.

  The truth is this: she and Ben had bought the ranch after the river flooded. Branches and debris were strewn everywhere along the bank. Walking along, they’d found a wallet, a cow’s skull, a beat-up canoe, old fence posts, rusted barbed wire.

  “Looks like the bottom of hell,” she’d said to Ben, meaning that this land, protected with low foothills and a slow mountain river, was close to paradise.

  “Hell’s Bottom it is, then,” he’d said. “Our heaven.”

  It’s been a little of both. She’s closer to hell now than she’s ever been. A daughter dead, a calf that doesn’t move, a husband who doesn’t love her anymore. Heaven or hell? She rests her forehead on the cow’s silky neck and repeats the question over and over. Either way, it’s got her soul.

  “Yep, dead,” Andrews says, nodding to Ben. “We’ll do a fetotomy, I guess. I’ll need your help.”

  Ben watches Andrews head for his truck and then looks past him, toward the mountains, and thinks he might see, circling above the river, the bald eagle that’s been hanging around. He wants to say something to Renny about it, and also about the young fox he saw yesterday and how it yapped at him—a strange sound, more of a raspy bleat than a bark. He’d like to tell her that he lets the dogs sleep with him on the bed, so that there’s some weight and warmth beside him. He would like to ask her if she does the same thing, and if she responds with a yes, he’d like to make a joke about how the dogs’ situation, at least, has improved since their separation. He clears his throat and faces Renny, who is staring in the direction of the river with some thought that has stilled her. She is blanketed in light snow, a dusting of white that has settled on her hair and jacket. She shakes herself and rubs at her nose with a hand he’s sure is cold. She turns toward him, but looks past his eyes at Andrews, and so he, too, turns and faces the vet, who is returning from his truck with a black vinyl bag.

  From it Andrews takes a long wire strung between two metal handles. Looping the wire in a circle in his palm, he closes his fingers over it, and pushes his fist, with the wire folded inside, into the cow. He rubs the cow’s hind legs with his left hand as he works inside her with his right and hums a long conversation to her. “You’ll feel better soon, mama mama mama sweet mama girl, bet you’re hurting but it’s almost over, sweet old mama.”

  Andrews brings his hand back out, holding the two handles. “I’ve got it looped around the hindquarter. You help me saw.” He hands one handle to Ben. “Pull up and to the side, there.”

  “Sorry about this mama,” says Ben. “You’ve been trying your hardest here.”

  As each man alternates pulling, there’s a whir of the wire as it’s pulled back and forth across the calf. The cow strains with this feeling of something moving inside her, and her ears flick backwards at this new sound coming from her rear end.

  “I bet Danny Black has a calf you can graft on,” Andrews says after a moment. “He just lost a cow.”

  “We’ll give him a call.” Ben uses his free hand to wipe the sweat forming on his forehead. He feels sick. In all his years of ranching, he’s only had to do this twice before, and each time it makes him want to quit the business altogether. He feels the tension of the line as it meets the bone of the unborn calf’s leg, and he grits his teeth.

  “Just about there,” Andrews says. They saw for a moment longer and then Andrews indicates to stop. He reaches inside the cow and pulls. Ben steps back as the calf’s hindquarter, severed from the groin to the point at the tail, slushes out in a waterfall of blood and thumps on the ground. The cow tries to turn, but the halter keeps her head in place, and Renny is there anyway,
scratching her ears and blocking her view.

  Renny has forced herself to watch, not to let her eyes wander even for a moment, not to let the wince inside her escape. Now she considers Andrews, watches as he closes his eyes and sticks the fetotome back inside the cow and feels for another place to fit the razor wire. His face is hard in a way she finds beautiful; his skin is tough and wrinkled, and gray stubble flecks his low cheeks and square chin. His forehead is wet, and a bead of sweat sinks down, causing his eyelids to blink rapidly over his green eyes.

  She looks at Ben. His face is so familiar that she doesn’t really see it at first. But she squints and concentrates. His hair is dotted with more white, she sees, and he’s cut himself shaving just below the jawline. His eyes look soft and calm, as they usually do, calm despite the fact he hates what he’s doing. She knows he’s cringing inside, but even after all these years together, she can’t see a sign of it anywhere.

  “Just get through this, Mama,” she says into the cow’s ear as she scratches it. “I know just how you feel. Carolyn was easy. But that Rachel. I thought she was ripping me apart. The plight of mothers, I tell you.”

  It was Rachel, Renny recalls, who first suggested that Renny and Ben live apart. Carolyn agreed. Renny and Ben didn’t have the momentum or cause enough for a divorce, their daughters counseled, but maybe, just maybe, they’d be happier apart. They began to devise plans, point out various spots where a new house could be built on the ranch. They admired various views. They talked about digging a well and running electric lines out, about the division of responsibilities. And all at once, last summer, it became real.

  Ben called some old friends and disappeared with them to the back of the property, and soon a small log house stood at the end of the north forty. A few contractors, a little hassle, but surprisingly easy. Renny could have the old rambling house, Ben said, with its piles of junk, with the visitors driving into the front yard. What Ben wanted was some quiet, some remoteness.