“An Aching Mountain” by Haydn Winston

Mason's head hurt and the jostle of the station wagon up the steep, curving mountain road was beginning to make him feel sick. His sister, Emily, was asleep in the back seat. Their father, Liam, who hadn't slept, woke them early. They checked out of their motel and were highway bound just as the morning sky was burning purple upon the peaks.

Liam reached in the glove compartment and handed Mason a sleeve of soda crackers. “For your stomach.” Mason tore open the plastic and tried to eat. His mouth was dry. Emily was still sleeping.

Mason turned to look at her. “Hey. Wake up. Emily wake—”

Liam touched his son's shoulder. “Let her be. Look out the window. Down there. What do you see?”

Sighing, Mason peered into the valley below. It was a clear day. He could see to Kansas, even if he didn't know it. Bone-white clouds drifted on high. The town of Crocker, where they had arrived late the night before, found a Chinese restaurant, and ate solemnly on the stained carpet of Room 221 at the Lent Lily Lodge, now looked as if it was made of no more than matchsticks and clay.

Blue spruce and Ponderosa pines loomed everywhere. Pink granite flared from the ground. When Mason lifted his eyes, gazing to the east, the world disappeared on the horizon like an afterthought. There between the skies and the earth, the end of all things looked so simple, so peaceful as to be startling.

Remembering his father’s question, Mason finally replied, “Nothing.”

Before long, there was a clearing in the trees. Liam pulled the car over. Although it was the middle of June, the air was brisk. Mason knew this must be the place by the awful silence: a silence filled with stone and pine. His father's silence. Mason watched in the rear-view mirror as Liam opened the trunk and took the cedar urn out of his duffle bag where he had bundled it between old, checkered shirts and wool socks. Mason turned again and nudged Emily's knee. Her eyes fluttered open.

“We're here.” Mason whispered.

“It's cold,” she said.

Liam spoke without looking at them, “Mason, help your sister.” They stared hopelessly at their father's deep back. Though neither could say why, even now, that morning on the mountain there was something unrecognizable, something ruinous in the folds of his tan jacket. Liam's long breaths, the painful rise and fall of his shoulders, gave the crumpled collar and the soiled seams a pitiful life of its own, as if it were wearing him.

Mason and Emily watched as he started towards the tall trees, saying not a word. Emily got out of the station wagon and hurried after him. Mason wanted to follow but he couldn't move. Until then he had persuaded himself secretly that none of this was quite real, or if it was, it took place outside of time somehow. Apart from his existence, Mason was beginning to suspect that Death is simply the other half of a truth one is only slightly aware of. Such as nothing is ever on fire. Fire forever burns upon. 

***

Since the day his mother died in the cancer ward of Freeman Medical Center back home in Hapstead, Mason had been struggling to put in order just what had happened. When he tried to look back on her last days, he merely glimpsed the wan fluorescent lights of the hospital corridors and smell the sour mixture of carbolic acid and store-bought flowers that soaked through the stagnant air of the cafeteria where he had helped Emily with her geometry homework so many dreary nights. The effort to arrange and understand any of it was beyond him. Or so it seemed. Mason was met with the agonizing task of having to remember and relive the months of stories that nobody wants to hear.

Rosella was always plain spoken. “Please, Doctor. Call me Ro. And there's blood on your sleeve.” It took some time for the other patients to warm to her, but by and by they admired her common sense, her clarity, and her affinity for Otis Clay. “Trying to live my life without you, is the hardest thing I'll ever do...” she would sing as she stretched her legs down the sheet vinyl halls. Her feet flattening a pair of slip-ons while Mason gripped the rolling metal rod where a bag of medicine hung, his hand tense just beneath hers in case she stumbled and fell. She never did.

Liam and Ro met when he was hired to fix the trash compactor in her one-room apartment because the landlord kept putting it off. Six years later they had a wedding license and a couple of kids. Mason and Emily were raised in wet grass with shirts full of dirt. Liam had inherited a small plot of land from his Uncle Sonny: flat ground that spun around a shallow lake where night herons preened their damp white feathers in summer. Flat grass and a thin line of trees grew as if shy along the western border. A paved road was the only way to and from the property. As children Mason and Emily were often the subject of small-town prattle that amused them greatly. So much so that Mason embroidered the whispered rumors of his winging shoulder blades until he had convinced the youngest in Hapstead he was part buzzard. Emily made enough money one fine Easter peddling gold painted eggs to buy herself a plush bear, a snow globe, and a pair of six-sided dice.

The nurses at Freeman were all sweet on Emily. Ro would lay on her back in bed and lift her daughter high in the air, balancing the girl on the balls of her feet as she squawked and flapped her arms until they both couldn't stop laughing.

“Mom! I can see your skivvies!” Mason would lament, shaking his head. He just wanted her to be like all the others, with sullen faces and speaking funereal words like, “Turn off the TV” and “I think they've bled me dry.” He would grow angry with her for not showing Death more deference. If she would just bite down hard, allow herself to despair, to cough, to spit, whimper, pray, shit herself when she bent down to grab a Baby Ruth bar from the vending machine, or at least pretend to fear the end. Then Death might acknowledge her humility and restore her. Death might bring her home.

She refused. She refused the tears in her parents' eyes. Hugh and Eloise had come up from Arkansas to be there when it happened, even if they wouldn't admit it. Even to each other. That there was no hope for Rosella.

“Never. I'm gonna die here.”

“Don't...don't say things like that, honey. Your father and I have been asking around the community-”

“There's a community?”

“We just don't think talk like that does any good.”

“You ask. I answer. Pass me the cords.”

Emily listened from the hall, with the batteries in her green Gameboy on the blink. When Hugh stomped out of the room, he nearly tripped over her bare feet in his haste to get away, to hurry down the stairs to the next floor where he could hide himself away by the Burn Center. To close his eyes and let the steady murmur of the breathing vents lull him into a kind of soothing inattention wherein he might think back on when Ro was eight years old and he had snapped up a fruit box from the grocer's shop front, sealed the lid, tied a length of red twine around the edges, and convinced her that inside was the “biggest secret of all!” When she demanded to know what could be so important that was as light as a cloud and small enough to fit inside a carton for honeydews he only answered, “Not knowing is half the fun!” Hugh gave it to her the day she graduated from Oak Park High. She never opened it.

Liam was the one who had insisted that his wife see a urologist when her piss was running red as cranberries. He assured her that at worst it was a kidney infection. When they received the results of her CT scan, they both had to squint to see the spot on Ro's bladder the physician was pointing to with her little trembling finger. Surgery would be necessary. The organ was removed, but her health worsened. The cancer spread. Iron injections, three rounds of chemo, and still nothing could stop it.

At night, when Mason and Emily were in bed, he would wander the property looking up at the peculiar stars while the air cracked cold and stray dogs howled beyond the field. He was never one to pray. But he swore to the cold wind and the ruffled water and the brushwood and the arching sky full of stillness that he would do anything to see Rosella wearing her polka dot dress with the hole in the hem, crouched in the garden with a glass of beer, tending the red onions, the green beans, the lettuce, the cucumbers, and the cauliflower.

“Whiskey. Ice.” Surely there was a bottle left over in his room.

The scent of bluegrass made his heart flush. He could hear the dogs crying in the dark and Liam loved them for it.

“I wish they'd come with me. Come with me and keep us up all night! We'd spoil them with chops! Roll 'em on the floor!” But they didn't follow.

 Liam lingered a moment in the doorway. The lights were off, and the ice box hummed from the kitchen. He closed his eyes and passed through each room, slowly, deliberately, feeling with his hands and wondering if this was what dying felt like-slinking half-drunk through an unlit house.

After searching his room, he sat down on the foot of the bed. There were cigarettes. He struck a match. There was a bit of chocolate. He wasn't hungry. There was no whiskey.

As was his custom, he went to the closet and fingered through the dresses hung on the rail, searching for that tear in the cloth. Laying his head upon the pillow, his eyes would catch the string of stars glinting between the drapes. 

Surrounded by all this, Emily hardly seemed to worry. While Mason couldn't stand the sight of those eggshell blue gowns, the crepe slippers, the rubber gloves that left a rash on his skin, the caps, the masks and was exasperated by the notes of pill bottles rattling and janitors dry coughing and babies sneezing and lines dripping and syringes sucking. All the while, his sister navigated the ward with a strange dutifulness as if she had been through this sort of thing before. Such was her manner that even the afternoon when Rosella was removed from her life support machines and expired just as a spring rain began to fall in the parking lot, streaming down the patient room windows with blue and white curtains, she kissed her mother's naked shoulder where it lay pale on the bedsheet and began carefully folding all of the blankets they had brought from home and packing them neatly away in a canvas bag like an abbess or perhaps Death itself. Everyone watched her, bewildered but beholden to this act that somehow bespoke the certainty of an end with its sincerity and unadorned gestures. This little girl knew it, if not in her mind, then with her lips as she dutifully kissed Mason and Liam and Hugh and Eloise on their cheeks before sitting down in the high back chair watching the rain as if she were the only thing keeping the storm from breaking through the glass on the other side.

***

“Mason! Come on now!” His father's voice restored him to the June morning in the mountains. He blew his nose a nostril at a time, dragging his arm hard across his face, then leaned forward. The air was fine as needles in his throat.

“Where are you?” Mason kept his eyes on the ground as he walked, barely lifting his feet as he went, scraping his way to a patch of blue and purple iris where Liam and Emily stood waiting for him.

Emily held a long stem between her fingers, gazing up at Liam. He shook his head gravely and she let the flower bend back, not a petal falling. Mason stopped a length away from them, neither near nor far, not daring to get too close.

“Right here. This is where I proposed. This is where I asked Mom to marry me.”

“What did she say?” asked Emily.

“I know. Can hardly believe it myself,” answered Liam, smiling faintly.

He turned to Mason, still wary of the iris, of what it meant, which was nothing except that there is no messenger between this world or the next, the straits are narrow, no word from the hereafter reaches, there's just the silence of mountain flowers quivering in the wind.

Liam weighed the cedar box in his palms. He held it out, beckoning Mason to take it. But he didn't move. Liam nodded. Then Emily stretched out her arms and touched the bottom of the urn. Liam gave it to her. She struggled with the lid. He didn't help her. When she managed to pull it off, Mason held his breath as she poured out the dark gray ash, coarse as sand on the draft of air.

“Wait...” Mason muttered. Liam looked to him.

“What's that?”

“N...nothing.”

“You sure?”

“Yes. I'm sure.”

With that Mason turned and walked back to the station wagon with his hands buried in his pockets, tearful and ashamed. Liam picked Emily up off the ground and propped her on his hip. She wrapped her legs around his waist. They both shuddered as a parcel of white-tailed deer strode through the shadow of the trees, grunting low as they went.

About Haydn Winston
He/Him/His

A Colorado native, Haydn Winston has been a journeyman in the southwest and on the west coast for nearly a decade now. His literary idols to name but a few are Shakespeare, Jim Harrison, Virginia Woolf, Jean Genet, Gayle Jones, Gabriel García Márquez. He writes for those who still believe there are angels in the trees.