I drove back to Albuquerque and we moved north not really like newlyweds after having Christmas with Dicky. I did the cooking, clearly seeing this as part of my future as Emelia’s attention span was ill-suited to it (“Let’s put the lamb chops in the oven and take a walk”). During Christmas dinner with lots of wine we argued about which set of parents were worse but lightened up in the forgiving nature of the season. Their mother had gone back home, had had a questionable second marriage, and was starting on a third with a neighbor in the alligator business, whatever that is.
Emelia liked her job in Dillon and more importantly the place I had bought near Melrose. I took a month during a very cold January to convert the shed into a stable and tightly mend ten acres of fence. We ended up buying two reasonably priced horses because Emelia insisted that “one gets lonely.”
Our life together fell well short of an idyll but then idylls by definition are short. I had one truly bad seizure in April ten miles west in the Pioneer Mountains and was arrested for possessing an illegal deer. The charges were dropped when the game warden couldn’t figure out how the animal had been killed. After that Emelia dropped me off in the largely vacant high-altitude Centennial Valley with an acreage of 400,000. I had to be well prepared because the temperatures reached forty below zero in the winter.
The relatively bad news came in June when we were nearly a week in Chicago. I spent much of three days with the doctor while Emelia went up the elevator in every tall building in which she was permitted plus various museums. She was quite frightened flying out of Bozeman because she had never had the occasion to fly before. She loved having room service breakfast looking out at Lake Michigan. Those from the Southwest can’t conceive of that much water and she kept saying, “Just look at that water.”
The bad news came in the form of the doctor telling me that I showed signs of having a form of canine progeria, a malady of accelerating aging that would include inevitable kidney and joint failure. I was thirty-one and he doubted I’d reach forty. I refrained from telling Emelia this not wanting to diminish her pleasure in Chicago. I told the doctor I had found a place where I could endure my seizures without the stultifying drugs which took a week to get over. He was happy for me. I must say that my death sentence vastly intensified the pleasure I took in my remaining time. So there is an end to all of this, I thought stupidly. Emelia noticed the lightening in my spirit after Chicago.
On the long flight back to Montana Emelia mostly slept with her head against my shoulder somehow cracking her gum once in her sleep. I thought how curious it was to see the outline of the girl in the woman. It is so difficult to wrap certain sets of feelings in language. Naturally we’re all afraid of the suffering in our future and in the middle of the suffering we just as naturally wonder, How long can this go on? When there is some relief the most ordinary aspects of the world can look quite beautiful. There on the plane crossing the improbable Mississippi and the verdancy we never see in the West I recalled a harsh morning a half dozen years before up near Choteau in northern Montana south of the Blackfeet Reservation. A neighbor had called needing help with a bear. His small ranch backed up to the Sun River coming out of the Bob Marshall Wilderness. I drove over stopping in the yard to say hello to his wife who was a mixed-blood Blackfeet and to look at her gorgeous row of peonies. The trouble with the bear was that he had shot it in the act of killing a calf. My neighbor had pulled his front-end loader around to behind the shed where the bear lay, an old female grizzly, and he said her two-year-old cub had taken off for the mountains. I looked down at the massive sow and then over about thirty yards to the dead calf with quite a chunk taken out of the back of its neck right through the upper spine. My neighbor said, “Poor old girl,” then went into the shed to look for a wrench to tighten the nuts on the loader. He was going to bury the animal to avoid dealing with the game officials. While he was gone I stooped down to examine the bear’s teeth determining that she was old indeed and that the escaped cub was anyway her last. At age two the cub would likely not survive but maybe. On impulse I lay down beside her and looked into her dead eyes a scant foot from my own. I put a hand on her massive head as if she were a lover. I had a disturbing thought, saying to myself, “It’s not you or me but us,” including the dead calf off to the side and the bright blue sky above us. Though her head was the size of a bushel basket and her claws as long as my fingers at least for a moment I felt as if we were cousins.