Mark Spragg - Bone Fire

Griff busied herself in the kitchen, keeping the front windows open so she could eavesdrop, listening for bursts of Marin’s laughter that she thought she would have recognized anywhere and known as the sound of family.

“Dance with me,” Marin suggested one afternoon, standing up, pulling him to his feet, and they waltzed clumsily down the porch and back while she hummed the rhythm of a slow-moving melody, the side of her face at rest against his chest.

The last cool hours of each evening were reserved for her walk. It was a sixty-year-old habit, and she could name the succession of good dogs she’d kept to provide their silent company.

She explored the treeline above the pastures and downstream as far as the county road, Sammy racing ahead as she came along steadily. She would stop at times, calling him back, and he sat patiently listening to her warnings about porcupines and skunks and mountain lions, her reminders that he was new to this country. He yawned, stretching, nosing her hand before striking out again.

On the third evening out he managed to get sprayed by a skunk, and Griff helped her scrub him with a mixture of hydrogen peroxide, baking powder and liquid soap. He braced up under the garden hose, allowing it, and just yesterday they’d seen a skunk again, a mother with three kits, and he’d lain flat, whining softly until they passed. So now he knew about skunks, she thought, good for him.

This evening she was searching for morels. She carried a plastic grocery bag and a paring knife, weaving deliberately through the trees a half mile upstream from the barn when Sammy started to bark and she looked up expecting another skunk, and her heart revved and she dropped the knife. She was standing at the edge of a clearing grown up in native grass and lupine, a place where she’d played as a girl. She lowered her hand from where she’d raised it against her chest and bent down to retrieve the knife. In the middle of the meadow was a heap of antlers, gathered bones and horns five feet high and ten feet across. But it was the figures that made her hold her breath.

They stood apart from the mound of bones, a dozen feet or so out from its edges, spaced evenly around the perimeter as though circling. She stood searching each figure for motion; they were that distinct and lifelike in their postures. There were six of them. She could not look away, and when there was only the movement of the wind in the trees she struck out through the waist-high grass and flowers, Sammy staying at her side. “It’s all right,” she whispered. They were still twenty feet away.

The figures were human-sized, five adults-a wolf-headed man, his mouth wide in triumph, she-bear, moose, long-horned bull and bighorn ram-and a single child, its skull reptilian, fragile and snake-fanged. Their knees were cocked, arms extended heavenward, backs arched, one offering up a nugget of agate in its raised hands. On another, a tail curved away in an S, the last of its vertebrae no bigger than a snail’s body. It was as though the earth had thrown up an accumulation of its dead, regathering the parts into this resurrection of creatures.

She stopped at every one of them, fingering a hip, a shoulder, a cage of ribs, discovering how each ceramic bone had been attached to its armature of steel rods with copper wires and rawhide ligatures. The bones were colored ochre, caramel and cinnamon, the figures mostly unadorned. Here, a necklace of raven feathers. There, a bracelet woven of moss and flowers, an anklet of green beads, some figures rendered with more artistry.

She lifted an antler from the pile, then set it back in place. It was real, and the bones of cattle and horses and wild things mixed in with the mound of antlers were real. She imagined Griff carrying them in from the surrounding countryside. The years it must have taken.

On the northmost edge of the meadow she found a split-log bench and sat, her eyes welling with a sense of unexpected peace, her arms and legs gone weak. When her vision blurred the figures seemed to rock and leap, dancing around the heaped-up antlers as though the pile were a kind of shrine. She imagined she could hear the joyful hymns they sang.

She sat until it was too dark to see, and when Sammy whined she stood and shook her head, stomping her feet in the damp night air, feeling the episodes of her life edging back in increments: anger, jealousy, disappointment, pride. The belief of having been in love. It had all been bled away somehow, and she’d been reduced to just a simpler, and quieted, animal. She looked up into the spray of stars.

“No one can know for sure,” she said.

HE WOKE AT FIVE-THIRTY, the time he always got up in the summer, and swung his legs over the edge of the bed. He sat listening. No one was moving in the house. He was used to the racket of McEban in the kitchen, noisy and impatient with the coffeepot, the smell of frying bacon. He walked to the door, cracking it open to listen. Still nothing. He tiptoed to the bathroom at the end of the hall, easing the door shut behind him. He peed against the porcelain above the waterline to avoid the sound of splashing. When he was done he lowered the seat and sat. He worried it would be too loud if he flushed, deciding not to chance it. He hadn’t been here long enough to know the rules.

In his bedroom again he dressed and sat in the desk chair by the window looking out at the empty street below. A boy on a bicycle rode past throwing rolled newspapers from the canvas saddlebags at the back of his bike. Each paper was wrapped in clear plastic, and the boy gripped it by the excess part of the sleeve, swinging it around his head before letting it fly. Like David was supposed to have done with his slingshot. He wanted to rush out of the house, introduce himself, offer to help, but he didn’t. The rules again.

He thought the room must be someone’s office when they didn’t have a guest. There was a computer on the desk, a Mac like McEban’s, but he didn’t turn it on. Beside the desk were stacks of papers, books and boxes, and he peeked around in one and found a hole-punch, a stapler and padded envelopes, but the snooping just made him more nervous and he left the others untouched. He didn’t want to be caught going through someone’s belongings. There was still no one up in the house.

He put his shoes on to go downstairs, careful to place his feet where each step butted up against the wallboard, because he’d seen stairs built, knowing the boards were nailed solidly at the edges and wouldn’t squeak. In the living room he sat on the couch, then moved to a chair because he didn’t want to hog a big piece of furniture all to himself.

He was chilly and rubbed his arms. At first, he couldn’t figure out why Laramie was so much cooler than the ranch. It was August here too. And then he’d spotted the vent in the ceiling of his room and, holding his hand underneath, felt the rush of air. They kept their whole house colder than the bank in Ishawooa.

In the kitchen he poured a glass of milk. He thought this would be all right, that it might even be expected. It had been late when he and his father arrived the night before, but his father’s wife had waited up for them. Her name was Claire, and she was so pretty he forgot about being tired. She’d given him a glass of milk without asking if he wanted one, and made a sandwich with plenty of mayonnaise when he said that’s how he liked it. He thought about making a sandwich this morning but didn’t want to risk the disturbance. When he finished the milk he placed the glass in the sink, running it full of water, as McEban had taught him to, so a crust wouldn’t form in the bottom.

He thought about going outside, but what if Rodney got up and couldn’t find him? He counted the squares in the linoleum. Twenty-five across and twenty the other direction. He did the math.