“The west, I think. Close to Montana.”
“Is it pretty?” I have to ask, but know I sound doubtful, having been indoctrinated early in life to believe that North Dakota was nothing but one big wasteland.
“I think so,” Grace says. “I don’t remember anything about it. I left when I was three.”
“So why now?”
She shakes the box; the ashes rustle inside.
“Grandma,” she says.
“Grandma.”
“Yeah. Some of her. Is that weird?”
“I don’t think I am qualified to say,” I say.
“Did you know?”
“Know what?”
But Grace doesn’t answer, and I don’t look to see her expression. Instead, I take a page from Mick’s book. And lie. “I thought it might be a bunch of those little airplane bottles of whiskey. I was hoping. I could use a drink.”
“There probably would have been clinking,” Grace says.
Her story comes out in chapters: a messy family one ending with Grace being raised by her grandma while her mother found sanctuary in a pipe. “And not any peace pipe, either.”
She was raised in a little logging town near the Oregon coast. “It went belly-up in the eighties,” she says. “That spotted owl thing. It hasn’t exactly found its new calling yet. Only so much chain-saw art one town can support.”
Her grandma sent her to school and fed her when she came home, taught her to play the banjo and think for herself, and is now in a cookie tin in her lap, heading for her final destination. “There’s a spot in the hills where two streams come out of the same spring. She wants me to leave her there. She drew me a map.”
Wants. I say, “Is someone meeting you?”
“My grandpa.”
“Her husband?”
“Ex. I don’t know what happened, but she still loved him.”
“They stayed in touch?”
“Some years, but he got a whole new family.”
“She ever remarry?”
“Nope, but she didn’t let any grass grow under her, neither. She was kind of a wild one.”
“Not like you, I bet.”
Grace shakes her head, cocks it at me, and raises her eyebrows. “Maybe more like you,” she says. Sweetly.
I shrug. “Maybe.” I am hardly surprised. Shit shows. In the aftermath of a shit show.
After Essex, as we cross the old trestle bridge high over the river and roll through the south edge of Glacier, Grace brings down her banjo and quietly plucks the strings, curved metal picks on the fingers of her right hand. I think I recognize a slowish version of “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” that somehow morphs into “Tiny Dancer,” and suddenly realize I am listening to “Up on Cripple Creek.”
When Grace stops picking for a minute, I say, “How the hell did you do that?”
“Do what?” she says, stretching out the “what” so she sounds like she’s just come down from ole Rocky Top. She’s smiling wide, though, proud. She plays some more songs, most of which I know but have never heard them played like that before, or maybe I just wasn’t really listening.
When Grace stops playing and puts the banjo away, I say, “Damn. That was amazing. I wish I’d had the patience, or any talent, to learn how to do something like that.”
“You ever try?”
“A couple of times, but I never stuck with it. I have my brother’s guitar back in San Francisco, though, so it’s not like I couldn’t have.” Except I never did. But I did keep it. That guitar is the only thing left — the only thing I didn’t lose, hock, or break — from the trunkful of Mick I’d taken with me to California.
“Your brother play?” Grace says.
“He did. He taught me some chords, but I keep forgetting them.”
“My grandma taught me every song I know.”
“You miss her?”
“Yeah, I do.” She sucks in the corners of her sweet mouth. “Not sure it’s sunk in yet. That she’s gone gone.”
I do not say, “It may never.” I say, “You thinking about staying in North Dakota?”
“I doubt it. I was thinking New York. Or New Orleans. New something.”
“I’ve never been to New Something. Always wanted to go.”
“I’ll send you a postcard. When I hit the big time.” Grace grins again. “Would that be okay?”
“Sure,” I say. “I’d like that.”
Nearly a whole day has gone by, and my stop is less than an hour away. Grace finds a timetable, stuffed deep in the seat pocket, to write on, and I give her the address, the one I’ve sent some letters to, when I found the time.
“You going to be there for a while?”
“No idea, really,” I say.
“Does your brother still live around here?”
“No.” I swallow. “He left a long time ago.”
“Where is he now?”
“Dead,” I say, for the first time ever, knowing full well I have not answered “Where?” but also knowing that once you said “dead,” where doesn’t really matter all that much anymore. I wait for the ache, for the tears I have never once cried sober or stoned, but they do not appear, again. Maybe someday I’ll send out a posse. Put out an APB.
Grace asks, so I tell her they never found his body. There was nothing to bury, nothing to put my hands on, kiss good-bye, say, “This was my brother. This was my best friend.”
Grace holds up the box and looks at me, eyes shining more than usual. “You knew, didn’t you?” she says. “You looked.”
I bite my lip, nod. Busted.
“These are my grandma’s ashes,” Grace says. “They can’t help you. I can’t give them to you.”
“I know.” I thank her, silently, for something I’m sure neither of us could put a name to. We are in cow country now. Probably not much prayer of that horse anymore either.
Grace gets her banjo back down and starts to play, messing around for a minute, trying to find the right key, or whatever it is that banjo players do. I have no idea how it works; I just know the song when I hear it, like I heard it so many times from behind his bedroom door, or from inside his room—“Rave On”—when he’d let that little girl in, grab her, and twirl her like a little top, like a little gyroscope set to spin across the floor, careening into shoes, bed legs, the bookcase, and back into the middle of the room, until it finally fell over, like someone had shot it.
Her. Like someone had shot her.
14. Gone So Gone
The letter my father sent did not say Mom had taken to wandering off, or that her head sometimes trembled uncontrollably in a regal, Katharine Hepburn On Golden Pond sort of way.
“I can’t go after her,” he says, shrugging, slinging a hitchhiker’s thumb over his shoulder at the small oxygen tank that trails him everywhere now, strapped to its little wheeled cart: tentacled, shiny, ferociously present. “I thought if I told you, it would make it hard for you to come back.” I think he must mean harder, but I do not say so. He tries to meet my eyes with his own matching turtle-green ones. Tries. Nearly succeeds. “I thought it would scare you. I thought you might not come.” I might not have — might have gone ahead and jumped off that train and onto that pony, somewhere on the forested side of Glacier Park. Or not gotten on the train at all. Probably? Most certainly probably. Most probably certainly.
Sometimes she’ll bum a ride back with the neighbors. People we don’t know, who have bought up small parcels of subdivided land (some of it once ours), out here on the still mostly empty prairie. Still mostly still. In the scope of things, at one time a half section—320 acres — did not seem a lot, certainly not enough to share with strangers, in a place where the cattle ranches run to a thousand square miles or more. But a world gets smaller, doesn’t it? All of a sudden my father has a range of about a thousand square yards. It’s like someone came when he wasn’t looking and installed one of those underground electric fences, the kind that shocks when a dog (presumably a dog) gets too close. But this is my most-human dad, forced into retreat by invisible barriers, driven inside or to the porch, where it doesn’t cost him so much just to breathe.