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The road seemed to have no start or end. The Wyoming landscape was boundless. Junior was behind the wheel as the car rumbled down the rough pavement. Jenny was slumped into the passenger seat. Their father’s urn was safely buckled into the backseat.
“Do you know why we’re doing this?” Junior asked, breaking the gloomy silence in the car.
“Because he wanted us to.”
Junior really had no idea how much Jenny knew. Ennis said he’d tell her the truth someday, but that had been eight years earlier. Junior had made a point to talk to him and find out more since his first revelation, but for Jenny, there was no telling how much he’d shared. She didn’t see it as her place to tell Jenny herself.
“But do you know why?”
“Yes, I do,” Jenny said, relenting.
“He said he’d tell you someday. Sounds like he did.”
“Yep.”
The tense silence came back.
Junior didn’t know what there was to say about it. Their dad was an adulterer. He was secretly gay his whole life. They’d met the proverbial other woman who later happened to die a horrible death. Ennis Delmar’s life was complicated in ways that the outside world never could have guessed.
She didn’t know how Jenny felt about the whole thing, and part of her was afraid to ask. Her lifelong best friend Scotty was gay, but that was only one part of it. He also hurt Mama for a long time. He wasn’t very present in their lives for the handful of years after the divorce. Jenny had every reason to be mad at him.
“This mountain was important to him,” was all Junior said. It always stuck with him that he couldn’t get Jack’s ashes up to Brokeback Mountain. If nothing else, they could keep their dad from the same fate.
Jenny stayed quiet and looked out the passenger window. Junior just kept looking forward as the road never seemed to get shorter.
The sky was a pretty shade of blue. A few clouds here and there. Not too hot outside, but still sunny. It almost seemed to mock them and the day they had ahead of them.
“I remember Jack,” Jenny finally said. “Not much, but I remember him.”
So did Junior. She had the fuzzy image of a man with dark hair in her mind. He looked so old to her at the time, but now that she was a twenty-nine-year-old woman, a wife and mother, he couldn’t have been much older than she was now.
“And do you wanna know something?” Jenny continued. “I already knew. I hadn’t realized it, but I did.”
Junior was completely blindsided when she learned about her dad’s secret life, so she had no idea what Jenny meant.
“You remember the time we met him?” Jenny said as she sat up a little more. “When he drove up and Daddy had to turn him away? He ran up and hugged him. Daddy never did that with anyone else, but he let him do it for, like, five seconds. Jack looked like he wanted to kiss him or something. Then they stepped away from us so I couldn’t really hear what they were saying, but the way they were looking at each other all sad…I thought, ‘Hey, they’re talking like Mama and Daddy do.’” She breathed a humorless chuckle. “I’d seen him talk to other adults before, but there was something different going on that time. Like he was in pain about something. I was only a kid, so I didn’t really get it. Forgot about it before long.”
The mountain crept closer and closer in the distance. As it came into view, it looked just like the picture on the postcard in his wardrobe.
Junior looked at the urn through the rearview mirror.
You’re almost home, don’t you worry.
~*~
Junior and Ennis were in their usual spots in his trailer: Ennis in the chair, Junior sitting on the bed.
He was feeling more chatty than usual that day. It was a Herculean feat to get him to talk this much about anything, so she was careful to interrupt as little as possible. It had taken a lot to reach the point where he’d open up about his past.
“Man alive, he could talk your ear off. Could barely get a word out of me at the beginning, but I guess he made up for it. Sometimes, he just didn’t know when to quit. Could make me madder than a hornet…did some things I shouldn’t’ve.” He became quiet for a second, the ghost of regret washing over his face. “Hell, he was hard to stay mad at, anyhow. Even with that damn harmonica of his. Just kept him from singing, and that was even worse.”
Junior knew he’d probably never had anyone he could trust to talk about these private matters with. It seemed that after she’d accidentally forced the floodgate open, there was a lot that had been waiting to come out. If she’d had to spend twenty years in complete silence about Kurt, she probably would have been the same way.
It still made her a little sad to hear. She knew how lonely he was. The last thing she wanted was for him to spend the rest of his life yearning for a dead person. He was only in his forties, after all.
“Hey…do you think you might ever try and find someone else?” She asked, hoping it wouldn’t offend him.
He weakly smiled and shook his head. “Don’t nobody want an old man like me, but that’s all right. I get by just fine on my own.”
“Not that old.”
He looked down at his hands, turning inward a bit. “I don’t reckon I was ever much of the romantic kind, anyway.”
Junior could sense that there was something more on his mind. Something that had him scared about the thought of finding another Jack.
She had a feeling of dread tugging at her. “...How was it that you said he died?”
Ennis sighed. The words fought him as they came out, but he spoke anyway. “They told me one thing, but…it never did sound right to me.” His gaze stayed down. “He wouldn’t take no caution like I told him to. I…I think they found him out and got him.”
If his gut instincts were right, Jack was killed for being exactly what her dad was. Ennis had probably spent his whole life looking over his shoulder. No wonder it took so long for him to tell his own flesh and blood. It could have literally been the difference between life and death.
She reached over and grabbed his hand, hoping that he heard what she was trying to say. That he was safe with her.
His grip tightening on her hand made her think that he understood.
~*~
Junior stood at the foot of the mountain. Jenny was still rustling around in the car moving the urn into her backpack. Their dad left that place thirty years earlier and never went back. Too many memories, he’d told Junior. It would have been too painful.
As she looked up at the peak before them, Junior found herself paralyzed. It looked even mightier and more imposing than it did from a distance. She felt like she didn’t belong up there. Going up there meant the end of something.
Jenny clearly didn’t feel the same way. She came right up behind Junior and marched on toward the trail with no hesitation.
“Come on. We got a long hike ahead of us,” she shouted over her shoulder, her boots crunching on the gravel. “And we don’t get to ride horses.”
Junior had no choice but to follow her or get left in the dust.
~*~
Ennis and Junior were sitting outside on lawn chairs facing out toward the horizon. It had taken a few years, but they’d graduated from the secluded safety of his trailer. Now, whether he realized or not, he was feeling emboldened enough to share his closest secrets in the light of day. The cloud-diffused sunlight made Junior notice how much grey had found its way into his hair.
“For a few years there, he was all about the rodeo, heck if I know why. Didn’t make no money doing it, all while getting beat to hell. All he had to show for it were the scars and those hubcaps he took for belt buckles.” He smiled to himself and Junior smiled right along with him. “Eventually had the sense to quit. Wanted to get out while he could still walk. Had his little boy to take care of, after all.” The smile became something more wistful. “Wish he coulda had more time to do that.”
It still struck Junior that Jack had a son out there living a parallel life to her. He had no idea she existed, and there was no way anyone would have told him about their dads’ relationship. The truth would have died with the two of them if Junior hadn’t gotten involved.
She could see an undeniable change in her dad whenever he’d get into his stories. He became as close to animated as he ever got. All the humor, heartbreak, joy, and anger of his odd relationship with Jack flashed across his face as he relived it all. Even all those years later, the memories were clearly still so strong in his mind.
There was just one thing he never really wanted to address. He always found ways to skirt around exactly what Jack was to him. Junior expected that from him, but it wasn’t like he had much left to lose concerning the subject. He’d already told her more than either of them ever could have foreseen.
She never asked him if he called himself anything. She already knew he probably wouldn’t, and he didn’t need to. He had already stepped far enough out of his comfort zone. But it wasn’t about that. It was about him and Jack. There was no elegant way to do it. She just had to jump in.
“...Daddy, did you love him?”
He was silent, still looking off in the distance at nothing in particular. Junior instantly regretted asking, but she needed to. After a moment of thought, he finally spoke. “...Not like I should’ve.” He couldn’t meet Junior’s eyes. “I don’t think I knew how.”
“Did he love you?”
“He sure tried his darnedest to, no matter how I felt about it. Scared the pants off me. Hell, he wasn’t even happy about it sometimes, but what could we do? There are some lessons that ain’t ever gonna get learned.”
~*~
“Why couldn’t he have just been buried in a casket like everyone else? Making us come all the way out here…” Jenny griped as she fussed with the backpack straps on her shoulders.
Junior smirked. He never much liked being tied down to anything while he was alive. He wouldn’t have settled into an idle steady job if his life depended on it. He kept one half of himself with their mom and the other with Jack for fifteen years. Even the trailer he lived in was impermanent, made to move between places. Of course he wouldn’t choose to be stuck in some hole in the ground forever.
“You want me to take the backpack for a while?” Junior asked.
“Yeah. This thing’s driving me crazy.”
Junior pulled the backpack off of Jenny. She gently swung it around onto her own back, careful not to jostle the precious cargo inside. The hike continued just as it had.
The wind grew slightly chillier as they made their ascent.
Jenny broke the silence once again. “You know…back years ago, Scotty said to me one time that he had a feeling about Daddy. He didn’t know why, but he could just sense it. ‘He’s one of us,’ he’d told me. They’d only ever even met a few times, but there was something he could sense that I couldn’t. I thought he was crazy. But then, I remembered.”
There was no one else Junior could talk to about things like this. Pandora’s box had been opened. There was no point in keeping her thoughts to herself anymore. “You remember how sad Mama would get when they’d run off together?”
“I thought she just missed him. Little did we know.”
“I wish he could have had a Jenny to his Scotty. Probably would have helped him a lot to have a friend.”
“Maybe it would have been Mama if they hadn’t gone and gotten married. They at least had to have gotten along at some point in time.”
“Hell, even if he had a friend like that, he might have just got confused and married her, too,” Junior chuckled. She had the feeling that if she hadn’t been laughing, she would have been crying.
“Well,” Jenny sighed, “I think he might have found one eventually. Her name just happened to be Alma Jr. instead.”
~*~
Junior and Ennis sat in the living room at her house. Kurt was out for the day, so it was just the two of them, Ennis on the sofa and Junior in the armchair. It would have looked like any one of their meetings from the outside. It sure didn’t feel like it. In fact, Junior’s insides felt like they were being ripped out and thrown on the floor.
Ennis had lung cancer. All the years of smoking finally caught up to him. He wanted to tell her in person. They didn’t know exactly how long he had left, but it wasn’t enough for Junior regardless.
What made it worse was that she was pregnant. Getting ready to bring a new life into the family right when Ennis was about to leave. He was supposed to be a grandfather. It wasn’t fair.
He must have already known when he went to the baby shower. It pissed Junior off to know that he could have smiled in her face that day knowing he might not get to see the baby grow up. It pissed her off even more that he could sit there in front of her calm as a monk while her world was falling apart. He always had a talent for making her emotions feel overblown in comparison. It made her want to shake him by the shoulders.
“Are you not scared?” She asked, in disbelief more than anything.
“You bet I am.”
“Then how are you so okay with it?” Her voice broke. It felt wrong referring to something as monumental as her father’s looming death as “it.”
His serene face stayed steadfast. “If you can’t fix it, you gotta stand it. I can’t go falling apart on you. It kills me, the thought of leaving you girls, but it ain’t in my hands. I’m still here right now, so I gotta act like it.”
Junior finally couldn’t hold her tears back anymore. It was all too much.
His face took on something more pitying as he beckoned for her to come sit next to him. She went right over, plopping next to him on the sofa in a state she’d long forgotten. Suddenly, she was nothing more than a little girl who needed her daddy again.
He wrapped an arm around her and lazily rubbed her shoulder. “I got plenty more years with you and Jenny than I ever got with my own folks. Can’t wish for better than that.” His voice was softer and gentler than he had probably had to use in a long time, like she had just fallen off her bike. “Hell, it might just mean I get to see him again, I don’t know. I’ve had a long time to think about it. No way to find out til I’m there, and I ain’t there yet. All I know is you’ve let me die a freer man than I ever thought I’d be.”
Her dad had seen so much death in his life, maybe it was bound to be like an old friend to him. She’d never known this side of him. He was always so firmly rooted in gritty reality, it never occurred to her that he could have musings about the other side.
Regardless of what was coming, he was right. He wasn’t gone yet. No one knew how long he had. Maybe he’d surprise them all and stick around. He’d sure surprised Junior plenty before.
Eventually, she finally caught her breath and stopped crying for the time being. “You really think so? That you’ll see him again?”
“...It’d be nice, wouldn’t it?”
She reached up and took his hand. It was all she knew how to do.
Yeah, it would.
~*~
Neither of them really knew where they were going. They were planning to just keep climbing as far they could, but eventually, they were stopped in their tracks by a clearing with a valley that opened up below them.
It was…breathtaking. Spiritual, almost. It was enough to make someone cry. The green grass, the blooming wildflowers, the untamed forests, the streams that snaked around them…The overwhelming sense of life imbued in everything was incongruous with the Ennis Delmar they knew. His life was never anything picturesque. No wonder he always withheld so much. He’d left it all on top of this very mountain.
He was young here. He was in love here. Still unencumbered and unbound. Ennis was never a religious man, but as far as heaven went, this wasn’t a bad place to spend eternity.
“This is it. This is the spot,” Junior said, still surveying everything around them.
For the first time all day, Jenny was truly rendered speechless. Instead, Junior heard sniffling.
When she looked over, she saw her sister crying. Her composure had finally fallen apart after an afternoon of being held together by frustration and annoyance. The finality had set in. They’d reached the end of the road.
“I can’t do this shit, man. I can’t…” Jenny rambled, trying to stifle the sobs escaping her mouth.
Junior and Jenny weren’t the kind of sisters who ever really hugged much. It just wasn’t how they normally operated, but Junior could recognize that right then, nothing was normal. She stepped over and wrapped Jenny in her arms, letting her cry.
Junior knew exactly who Jenny got this part of herself from. Burying her painful emotions under stoicism and anger until they boiled over…in that moment, their father was alive through Jenny.
After some time to breathe, she seemed to calm down a bit.
“You ready?” Junior asked gently.
“Hell no, I’m not. Stupid fucking question,” she said, chuckling as she wiped her tears.
Junior couldn’t help but chuckle back, fighting a few tears of her own.
Jenny took a deep breath and shook out her arms. “All right, come on. Let’s just go.”
“We’ll do it together.”
“Okay,” Jenny breathed in relief. She removed the urn from the backpack and placed it in Junior’s hands, unscrewing the lid. They each took a handful of ashes and Junior gently sat the urn down on the ground. On the count of three, they threw their handfuls and the wind carried him away.
The ashes drifted out toward the valley like a haze. Gradually, the clouds dissipated as they scattered and settled. The ashes fell to the earth and found a home in the blades of grass. They dusted the petals of the wildflowers. Mote by mote, Ennis Delmar returned to and became one with the mountain he loved so much.
“You’re free now, Daddy,” Jenny said.
“Go on. You got all the time in the world.”
~*~
The hike back down was a lot more peaceful. The worst was over. She dropped Jenny back at their mom’s house and suddenly, she was alone again.
As Junior drove up to her house, Kurt stepped out on the porch. He had a look of sad understanding on his face.
When she walked up onto the porch, he greeted her with a long, grounding hug.
“Welcome home.” He softly said behind her ear.
“Thank you.” She took a second to breathe him in. "Where’s Francine?”
“Napping.”
“Perfect.”
They were careful not to make too much noise as they went back in the house. Anything to keep from waking the little one up.
All she wanted to do was slump onto the couch and have a moment of rest. She was physically and emotionally worn out. Kurt read her mind and took his spot on the couch first.
She plopped down next to him and he wrapped his arm around her shoulder. She gently laid her head upon his shoulder and closed her eyes. There was no one else she would have rather been with at that moment. He understood exactly what she needed. He didn’t try to ask her about anything. Instead, he just placed a kiss on top of her head and let her be.
She had to take a moment to be grateful. They had nothing to risk by being together. When Kurt hugged her on the porch, neither of them had to worry about who saw them. They would be able to spend their lives together with no regrets or outside forces keeping them apart. That was a gift she never wanted to take for granted again.
When she opened her eyes, she saw the photographs hanging on the wall across from her. Their wedding. Francine’s third birthday. Her, Jenny, and Mama back when they were still in high school. But, there was one that stood out to her the most.
It was Ennis holding Francine. She was still a tiny thing back then, only a few weeks old. He honestly looked funny holding something so little and delicate, but he looked like he would have protected her from anything. As he looked down at her, he smiled in a way that one was lucky to catch from him in real life.
Junior knew more of her father than anyone. She knew the profound sadness that he carried throughout his life. She knew the stony exterior he tried to live by. But most importantly, she knew the joy he kept private from the rest of the world. Blessedly, that was what was captured in that photo on the wall.
You’ve let me die a freer man than I ever thought I’d be.
She hoped it was true. She hoped that reliving all of the painful memories was worth it. Through all of it, Junior got to learn who her father actually was. The love he kept hidden inside of him got to go somewhere.
Francine may not remember her grandfather as she got older. The idea broke Junior’s heart, but no one could help it. However, she would always be able to look at pictures like that and see the person he was finally letting himself be toward the end of his life. In his smile, she would see how much love her Grandaddy had for her, no matter where he was. It lived on the walls of the house and blew in the winds on the mountain.