My Aunt Cat was not a sentimental woman, but those boxes of knickknacks must have meant something to her because she mentioned them in her will—otherwise we never would have known they were there. They were the one thing she left specifically to me. It became a source of tension between Pearl and me, not because there was anything of real monetary value, but they were family things and I suppose Pearl felt they should have gone to her.
The argument we had about those boxes was part of the reason Pearl was so set against my moving back to the ranch after Aunt Cat died. But somebody had to keep an eye on Walt. Pearl had her kids in school up in Denver and Eddie had his business to run, but I wasn’t teaching anymore. My son was about to start high school and there was nothing to keep me in town.
What settled it was Uncle Walt. He broke his hip when he slipped on the ice trying to water the cows in the middle of winter and the doctor said it wouldn’t do to move him. He said a broken hip was generally the beginning of the end for old folks like Walt, and when Pearl mentioned selling the ranch and getting him settled in a nursing home, Walt made the kind of racket I don’t think any of us had ever heard from him before. So Pearl and Eddie figured they’d let him die there, and they said it was all right if I wanted to stay out at the ranch and keep him company until he did.
We called the farm the ranch and we called the house the ranch too, because even though Pearl and Eddie and I had been just tiny kids when Uncle Walt bought it, it was never the kind of place you could plain call home. It had been built as a dude ranch back in the early thirties, and it could have slept a full staff and maybe forty guests if you included the little cabins out back. After knowing my Uncle Walt for nearly sixty years, I still can’t imagine why he bought that place. It makes me wonder if maybe there was more to him than any of us kids ever knew. Uncle Walt, who wore the same hat every non-Sunday of his life and outside of the war never went farther than Walsenburg if he didn’t have to—I’ll never understand what made him so attached to a house with two dining rooms, a chapel out back, and its own dance floor.
Well, I knew Pearl thought I was angling to inherit the place, and so I did my best to make it clear that I wasn’t after anything more from Uncle Walt than what we knew he’d already put aside for me. I have my teacher’s pension and I get royalty checks from the Beart estate now and then, and it adds up nicely. But Pearl was still mad about the boxes from Aunt Cat, so I told her I’d set aside the china and any jewelry for her, and I promised that when the time came, I’d be sure Walt’s Purple Heart got passed on to her boys. When she realized that my moving out there would mean they wouldn’t have to hire a home health aide for Walt, Pearl relaxed a little bit.
We had a frank discussion, the three of us in the post office parking lot the day Eddie picked Walt up from the hospital and Pearl and I met him in town to do the paperwork. It was maybe too public a place for all sorts of things to come out, but we put a good forty years of grievances in the sun that day, each of us saying what was on our minds. How the money from my mother’s estate meant I was the one who got to go to college, though Pearl’s grades were just as good; how Eddie had to share his popgun with me; how my getting scarlet fever when I was five practically bankrupted the family; how as kids they always made sure I knew I was somewhere between a nephew and a burden to Aunt Cat and Uncle Walt, but never a son; and on and on, a big wave of past hurts and secret resentments that washed over us standing outside the post office that afternoon while Uncle Walt waited in Eddie’s truck for us to figure out what to do with him.
And finally it was decided: I’d stay out at the ranch for as long as it took, and then after Walt we-all-knew-what I’d move back to town, maybe go back to work at the middle school in the fall. But Walt didn’t die for another five years, the problem I had with the school board never did blow over, and with hay prices up Pearl and Eddie stopped talking about selling the land.
I often play that conversation over to myself, and though I’d finished my breakfast I sat in the park a while longer, thinking of all the things I might have said to Pearl and Eddie that day. My thoughts vaulted the ocean and brought me right back home, and before I knew it I was calculating acre-feet of irrigation and wondering if I’d left the stove on back at the ranch.
But that couldn’t go on all day. I had just over a week to spend in Paris, and thoughts of home weren’t going to get me any closer to finding a record of Inga Beart’s red shoes. The day was getting warm and I was thirsty, so I got up from my bench and went across the street to a little supermarket.
I found a carton of milk in the canned goods section. It wasn’t refrigerated, but I bought it anyway and went back to my bench to drink it. The carton was made of thick paper and it took some doing to unfold one edge into a kind of spout. I took a sip; it was warm and it had a different taste from the milk we have back home. And with that taste came an experience I’m not sure I’ve ever had before. A brand-new memory came into my mind: my Aunt Cat opening a cardboard container of milk. The cardboard is folded in a sort of a pyramid shape that can’t be set down without tipping over, and Aunt Cat is trying to hold the thing upright while digging at one corner with her fingers. When she finally gets it open the paper is frayed and soft.
The memory itself was nothing much, it was just that its newness startled me. It was a strange sensation, to be so many thousands of miles from home, in a foreign city where everything looked and felt so different, and then to suddenly feel the pull of an invisible string as now cinched itself tight against then, here against there.
I was inspecting my new recollection, sort of turning it over in my mind, the way you might examine a piece of a meteorite, when I realized that the memory almost certainly couldn’t be real. We always got our milk in glass bottles from the dairy up the road, and when they stopped delivering Aunt Cat used to tape quarters to our jacket pockets for me and Pearl and Eddie to pick up a bottle each on our way home from the school bus.
It worried me. I no longer bother trying to remember where I put my glasses, I just look in all the usual places, and when my son calls me on my birthday I try not to sound surprised. But I didn’t think I was to the point of manufacturing memories. Still, there is something calming in a good long drink of milk, albeit funny-tasting. I let the memory be and drank the whole thing, wondering at the strange joke my subconscious must be playing on poor Aunt Cat, to put into her hands a carton of sterilized store-bought milk.