By informal definition, creative nonfiction is “true stories told well.” This is an excerpt from a piece I wrote about the days following Rhett’s death for a class assignment this year. I’ve worked and reworked it dozens of times. I guess it’s a representation of how I’m trying to work through complicated emotions. This is personal and raw, and it makes no promises for hope or happiness. Rather, it’s an attempt to express human emotion through my craft of writing.
As I stood amongst a crowd of people in a polite funeral home in town, as teary-eyed visitors hugged his mom and repeated, “I’m sorry for your loss,” it wasn’t the mourners that broke me down. It was not seeing his teenage sister who now had to finish growing up without him, nor the full grown men embracing each other, with tears that stained their mustaches and their pride. It wasn’t the slideshow of photographs and videos of his 21 years of life, played with his favorite Turnpike song. It wasn’t even the body in the room, in a wooden casket with H Lazy J burned into the side, or when I gazed at that sharp, English nose and the freckles around his lips, the patchy goatee, or the skin on his hands which were already wrinkling grossly beneath the stiff cuffs of his red western shirt.
It was the saddle on a stand, with Rhett’s armitas draped limply across the smooth, dark seat. His ranch rope was still tied on as if he could be about to ride out to check heifers, and those armitas were the best kind of broke-in, like a favorite pair of jeans. Yet, they were probably a few months away from giving out from hard use. I stood there, looking at that little scene, like it was some kind of museum display of a dead cowboy’s gear to commemorate the fading West. I realized it was, with the scarred-up saddle horn and pinched rawhide, its sweaty cinches and muddy tie ropes looped through the D-rings. They were a testament to a wild and short era. It was then my entire being found the shocking truth; he really was gone. He’d joined the ranks of cattlemen like him, across the Great Divide, a child’s face among weathered, wizened faces of old age. His ranch cutter would never sit atop a horse again with his boots settled in the stirrups. Rhett’s legs and life would never again fill the supple leather of his armitas as he set out to tend his herd. His pup would never again hear its master’s voice.
When the funeral home directors finally shuffled us out of the room, Rhett’s parents asked us all to help pack up the displays. As if in a trance, my heart drew me the museum-like scene and I softly held up those well-used, blood stained, torn armitas I’d seen walking and riding and breathing over a passionate man for as long as I knew him, trying to read the stories they displayed. Now, they seemed as dead as their wearer, as if he took their spirit with him when he left this world. I folded, and re-folded, and folded them again, but it wasn’t right. Nothing was right. It wasn’t right that I was doing this for him, or that he was gone, or that his buddies had to bear his casket the next day, and pain the rest of their lives. It wasn’t right that my kids would never know his. I laid my head back to clear my blurred vision as I handed the soft leather leggings off to someone else.
The song which was played at the funeral the next day, as the noon sunlight darted onto the wooden floors of a packed, small town high school gym, is one I don’t listen to anymore, for it seems it’s always playing in the back of my mind anyway, the soundtrack to my confused, dreary days. They buried him at the highest point on the place, with a view of Deer’s Ear Buttes, the Crow Buttes, Bear Butte and Terry Peak, far enough away from the neighbors so he could rest in the quiet. It’s as if Dave Stamey’s words were his own:
I rode in wooden stirrups
And the dust raised by my ponies
Was smoke, from my altar offered up to God above
Todavía estoy aquí; I am still here
Todavía estoy aquí, my soul is dancing in the moonlight
I mingle with each grain of sand in the land that is my birthright
