“We represent…”
An attorney carrying out his duties to a client.
But the power, the leopard who came riding in on the tail of a comet, the shaman who was looking for Roseman Bridge on a hot August day, and the man who stood on the running board of a truck named Harry and looked back at her dying in the dust of an Iowa farm lane—where was he in those words?
The letter should have been a thousand pages long. It should have talked about the end of evolutionary chains and the loss of free range, about cowboys struggling with the corners of the wire, like the corn husks of winter.
The only will he left was dated July 8, 1967.
His instructions about having the enclosed items delivered to you were explicit. If you could not be found, the materials were to be incinerated. Also enclosed inside the box marked with the word “Letter” is a message for you he left with us in 1978. He sealed the envelope, and it has been left unopened.
Mr. Kincaid’s remains were cremated. At his request, no marker was placed anywhere. His ashes were scattered, also at his request, near your home by an associate of ours. I believe the location was called Roseman Bridge.
If we may be of further service, please do not hesitate to contact us.
Sincerely yours,
She caught her breath, dried her eyes again, and began to examine the remaining contents of the box.
She knew what was in the small padded envelope. She knew it as surely as she knew spring would come again this year. She opened it carefully and reached in. Out came the silver chain. The medallion attached to it was scratched and read “Francesca.” On the back, etched in the tiniest of letters, was: “If found, please send to Francesca Johnson, RR 2, Winterset, Iowa, USA.”
His silver bracelet was wrapped in tissue paper at the bottom of the envelope. A slip of paper was included with the bracelet. It was her handwriting:
If you’d like supper again when “white moths are on the wing,” come by tonight after you’re finished.
Her note from the Roseman Bridge. He’d kept even that for his memories.
Then she remembered that was the only thing he had of hers, his only evidence she existed, aside from elusive images on slowly decaying film emulsions. The little note from Roseman Bridge. It was stained and curved, as if it had been carried in a billfold for a long time.
She wondered how many times he had read it over the years, far from the hills along Middle River. She could imagine him holding the note before him in the thin light of a reading lamp on a nonstop jet to somewhere, sitting on the floor of a bamboo hut in tiger country and reading it by flashlight, folding and putting it away on a rainy night in Bellingham, then looking at photographs of a woman leaning against a fence post on a summer morning or coming out of a covered bridge at sundown.
The three boxes each contained a camera with a lens attached. They were battered, scarred. Turning one around, she could read “Nikon” on the viewfinder and, just to the upper left of the Nikon label, the letter F. It was the camera she had handed him at Cedar Bridge.
Finally she opened the letter from him. It was written in longhand on his stationery and dated August 16, 1978.
Dear Francesca,
I hope this finds you well. I don’t know when you’ll receive it. Sometime after I’m gone. I’m sixty-five now, and it’s been thirteen years ago today that we met when I came up your lane looking for directions.
I’m gambling that this package won’t upset your life in any way. I just couldn’t bear to think of the cameras sitting in a secondhand case in a camera store or in some stranger’s hands. They’ll be in pretty rough shape by the time you get them. But, I have no one else to leave them to, and I apologize for putting you at risk by sending them to you.
I was on the road almost constantly from 1965 to 1975. Just to remove some of the temptation to call you or come for you, a temptation I have virtually every waking moment of my life, l took all of the overseas assignments I could find. There have been times, many of them, when I’ve said, “The hell with it. I’m going to Winterset, Iowa, and, whatever the cost, take Francesca away with me.”
But I remember your words, and I respect your feelings. Maybe you were right; I just don’t know. I do know that driving out of your lane that hot Friday morning was the hardest thing I’ve ever done or will ever do. In fact, I doubt if few men have ever done anything more difficult than that.
I left
Much of my work is around Puget Sound. I like it that way. It seems as men get older they turn toward the water.
Oh, yes, l have a dog now, a golden retriever. I call him “Highway,” and he travels with me most of the time, head hanging out the window, looking for good shots.
In 1972, I fell down a cliff in Maine, in Acadia National Park, and broke my ankle. The chain and medallion got torn off in the fall. Fortunately they landed close by. I found them again, and a jeweler mended the chain.
I live with dust on my heart. That’s about as well as I can put it. There were women before you, a few, but none after. I made no conscious pledge to celibacy; I’m just not interested.
I once watched a Canada goose whose mate had been shot by hunters. They mate for life, you know. The gander circled the pond for days, and more days after that. When I last saw him, he was swimming alone through the wild rice, still looking. I suppose that analogy is a little too obvious for literary tastes, but it’s pretty much the way I feel.
In my imagination, on foggy mornings or afternoons with the sun bouncing off northwest water, I try to think of where you might be in your life and what you might be doing as I’m thinking of you. Nothing complicated—going out to your garden, sitting on your front porch swing, standing at the sink in your kitchen. Things like that.
I remember everything. How you smelled, how you tasted like the summer. The feel of your skin against mine, and the sound of your whispers as I loved you.
Robert Penn Warren once used the phrase “a world that seems to be God-abandoned.” Not bad, pretty close to how I feel some of the time. But I cannot live that way always. When those feelings become too strong, I load Harry and go down the road with Highway for a few days.
I don’t like feeling sorry for myself. That’s not who I am. And most of the time I don’t feel that way. Instead, I am grateful for having at least found you. We could have flashed by one another like two pieces of cosmic dust.
God or the universe or whatever one chooses to label the great systems of balance and order does not recognize Earth-time. To the universe, four days is no different than four billion light years. I try to keep that in mind.
But, I am, after all, a man. And all the philosophic rationalizations I can conjure up do not keep me from wanting you, every day, every moment, the merciless wail of time, of time I can never spend with you, deep within my head. I love you, profoundly and completely. And I always will.
The last cowboy,
Robert
P. S., I put another new engine in Harry last summer, and he’s doing fine.
