And each night she made a mark on the cave wall, recording another day that had passed. She would clasp her hands together and find her wedding ring, a small gold band. She’d play with the ring, twisting it around and around, as if it were a rosary.
Christmas was less than a week away. Had Farrell and the children put up a tree? Had he bought them presents? But she knew her husband. He would do that much for the children. And then she realized, he would have already been grieving for her as if she were dead. Amy Raye imagined people bringing food to her home. Imagined the women who would be eyeing Farrell as someone who was available. How much time would pass before one of those women would reach out to him, touch the places where he was the most vulnerable, those places where he felt needed? Farrell’s blue eyes were so open and kind, they made a person want to explain her whole life to him. But what about now? Would his eyes still carry that same kindness? How long would he grieve before he was in the arms of another?
With her hands still clasped, she continued to hold on to her ring. She let her thoughts carry her to an overcast day in June, to Farrell and music and the smell of the barn, to the north pasture and clover where they’d fallen asleep drunk and naked on a blanket under the moon and stars and woken to sunlight and dew on their skin. They’d lain on their backs and held up their left hands to the sun, till its rays caught their gold bands and reflected gold light back upon them.
It was in the pasture behind Idaho McKenzie’s barn, where Amy Raye and Farrell had said their vows. Idaho was one of Farrell’s closest friends. He played the mandolin in a folk group called Folk Yeah! His girlfriend, Hallie, played the fiddle, and Howard, a retired plumber, played the guitar. Howard was also a justice of the peace, so he did the honors of officiating the wedding. Idaho was Farrell’s best man. Amy Raye wanted Saddle to stand up with her, but when Howard laughed a little too loudly at her idea, she chose Farrell’s daughter, Julia, instead. Maybe fifty people attended, and Amy Raye did not know the names of most of them, and Farrell did not know the names of others. But the people were in good spirits and had brought food and drink. Amy Raye wore a white gunny-sack dress and her gold and brown cowboy boots, and Farrell wore a gray tuxedo with an American Eagle bolo tie, and his black Justins.
Before they said their vows, Farrell played his guitar for Amy Raye and sang Kate Wolf’s “Give Yourself to Love.” A cool drizzle began to fall. Howard pronounced the two husband and wife, and people cheered, and the rain fell harder. Farrell kissed each raindrop on Amy Raye’s face, and she laughed and cried. Folk Yeah! set up in the barn and made music, and everyone gathered around them and danced and ate and drank. After the rain stopped and the moon came out and stars began to appear, Farrell tried to waltz with Amy Raye to “Magnolia Wind,” and when they stumbled and fell and got back up, he gathered her in his arms and held her close as they danced to “I’ll Lay Ye Doon, Love,” which Idaho sang with a Scottish lilt.
—
Amy Raye awoke the next morning with a fresh sense of purpose. The sky was clear and the temperatures outside the cave relatively mild, maybe in the twenties or thirties. She retrieved the remainder of the elk quarter. Her arrow had hit the elk’s right scapula, the same shoulder that she’d hauled out, and the broadhead had broken through the bone and penetrated up to six inches. A scapula shot usually resulted in little blood trail, as the blood would get trapped behind the bone. Amy Raye thought about the long hours she’d spent tracking the elk, the small collections of blood, the rain that day. She was lucky to have found the elk at all. She carved what little meat remained from the shoulder blade and from between the tendons of the leg and set the bones aside. She knew the names of all the bones on an elk, the same as those of a deer, and as she cooked the meat, she recited the names—scapula, ulna, radius, tarsus, carpal phalanges, tibia, metatarsus, metacarpal. And upon reciting the names, she thought of her grandfather and the farm. And she thought upon a time when she’d been ten years old, when she’d worked on a science project for school, and she’d chosen to put together a deer skeleton from the bones she’d found on her grandparents’ property and the woods beyond, carcasses left over from hunters or coyote kill. She’d soaked the bones in bleach in steel tubs behind the barn and then laid them in the sun to dry. Her grandfather had helped her drill holes through the marrow of the bones, until he came to one of the tibias.
“We’ve got us a cougar out there,” he said. “See the end here, how it’s broken off?”
Amy Raye held the bone, rubbed her fingers over its jagged edges.
“A cougar’s got some strong jaws. Breaks the bone clean in half and eats out the marrow.” He showed her the hollowed-out space where the marrow had been.