Montana Prize in Nonfiction Runner Up, selected by Matthew Gavin Frank
"Red's Skeleton!" I yelled, pointing at the cow skull and a handful of ribs tucked in the shadow of the downed tree. Skull and ribs bleached with sun and rain and years. I always wanted to tie the skull to my saddle and pack it back to our trailer. To my room I shared with two sisters, bunkbeds stacked three high, me the middle sister in the middle bunk in the middle middle.
Spying the cow skull we'd named Red's Skeleton was a game I played with my cousins when we rode horses past the pasture, towards the river, on our family ranch where I got to be feral on weekends and summers, flushing out growing up in the suburbs. Whoever spotted the bones first and shouted, “Red’s Skeleton!” won.
Sometimes I’d drop off my horse to get closer, to touch skull and bones, all smooth and hard. Sometimes we’d ride on past to a different adventure.
Later we'd watch Red Skelton clown it up in his variety show: The Red Skelton Show. We’d laugh and point at the thirteen-inch black and white television in our grandparents' trailer. The clump of us, squealing, poking each other, tickling ribs. The herd of cousins I was raised up with.
“Red’s Skeleton!” one of us would shout and the rest would roll and howl. The eight of us kids that popped to twelve kids in the summers when cousins who lived far visited. The pile of us in Wranglers and T-shirts and dirty socks. Even though Nana made us wash our hands when we came in, the smell of hay and dirt and manure lingered in hair and cowboy boots. We carried ranch in our skin.
“It’s Skelton, not Skeleton,” our proper, churchgoing nana would correct, adjusting her pointy, sparkly glasses or skirt or both (This nana of ours, always in a belted dress even at the ranch) and we’d laugh louder.
***
I’ve loved bones long as my memory road stretches. The bones chart I’d trace with my eyes in the doctor’s office. Grey’s Anatomy in college when I was a biology major like half the freshmen class before I switched to English and history my third year. I kept Grey’s Anatomy with its stunning drawings of body systems.
Bone love. Big bones. Little bones. The bones I can hold and the ones I can’t. The scaffolding of bodies. Bone endurance. When bodies decompose, bones remain. When bodies are cremated, tissues firm or loose with age and gravity, burn to silty, sticky ashes, a little slick and gritty if you cup them, if you spill them from one hand to another. More sand colored than the grey of ash that pools in fireplaces.
Bones don’t burn. After the crematorium, bones get ferried to the bone grinder that pulverizes skull, femur, rib, arm bones to flecks small as rodent teeth, kosher salt. What was a walking breathing talking laughing shitting fucking loving human, weighs four to eight pounds in death, in bonemeal ashes. What you weigh in life turns out to measure about one cubic inch after cremation—117-pound me will be about 117 cubic inches. I’ll fit in a coffee can.
***
“Start your soup with bones,” my Greek grandma, my yiayia, said as she plopped bones—sometimes chicken, sometimes ham, sometimes beef—into her giant blue enamel soup pot with its thumbprint-sized chip on the lip. “Yummier with bones,” she said. “And better for you.” She pushed her wiry grey hairs back with the heel of her hand. Her long hair always spun up in a braided bun at the base of her neck. Always with a halo frizz. And a handful of lightning bolt hairs that defied being tamed.
She taught me to peel carrots and potatoes, scrapping away from my body, not towards. She chopped, chopped, chopped onion, celery, carrots, green beans, potatoes, fennel, cabbage, more, with her index finger bent and tucked at the knuckle so, “you don’t cut yourself.”
She taught me to measure by not measuring. “Look with your eyes, little one. When the mix of colors and shapes feels right, it’s right,” she said. She wiped her hands on her half-apron with the embroidery vining up the edge. These aprons she embroidered and I always admired, even though she’d push my compliments sideways with, “Oh, my mom’s handwork was so much better than mine.”
I watched her add pinches of oregano, basil, rosemary, dill from the garden. Sometimes two-finger pinches and sometimes more. She pinched and smelled, saying, “A little of this. A little of that.” I loved how she cooked with her nose.
“How do you know how much?” I asked, studying her magic soup making, the alchemy that turned bones and veggies and herbs and water, sometimes wine too, into deliciousness.
“Practice,” she said.
“And listening,” she added.
“Listen to who?”
“To yourself,” she said. “To that little voice inside of you.”
This yiayia of mine. She’s been dead forty years and her cooking still winds back to me in layers of oregano and basil and lemon and saffron, in the swirl of scents that lingers over pots, caught in the steam. She’s stayed close at my cooking elbow through my first short marriage, my second thirty-years-plus marriage, through raising my two kids, through grief and love and all the bones of life. I feel her when I make her meatballs, her custard, her soup. I feel her love as she watches over me and my chopping and adding and tasting. She is my little voice inside of me. The chord between us, never broken.
***
"Where's your dad?" I asked Scot, squinting at the lake when we were still in the Getting to Know You part, the first time we hiked to Discovery Lake in the Olympics. Discovery Lake: where their family had hiked all his life, where his mom bribed the four kids with Lifesaver candies (“See that tree up there? I’ll give you a Lifesaver when we reach it.” Or sometimes, “Do you need a Lifesaver?”), where Scot and his mom and siblings scattered his dad's ashes when Scot was sixteen, a boycub on the cusp of mancub.
"I found one of his molars once," Scot said, when we stood at the shore. My son Jake was a toddler, slinging rocks the size of his hand as far as he could into mountain water.
“I guess bone crushing rules were different in the 70s,” Scot said.
“Look Mama!” Jake shouted and for a breath I imaged he’d spotted a bone fragment. Instead, he hefted a grapefruit-sized rock over his head and shotputted it with all his toddler might into the lake. It smacked water and splashed just past the lake’s edge as Jake beamed in full kid joy.
“Good job, Bud!” I cheered.
In the same beat I asked Scot, “Did you keep it? The molar?” thinking about saints’ bones turned sacred. Thinking about my own wish to have kept some of my dead husband, Kent—his hair, a bone, a mouthful of ashes. A molar. I would have kept a molar.
Scot squinted into the lake, the sun ricocheting off the surface that rippled and smoothed in between Jake throwing rocks.
“I didn’t,” he said. “It kinda creeped me out back then,” he said. “Dad’s molar.”
He circled my waist from behind, the two of us twined at the lake’s edge, and breathed into my scalp. The sigh of him. In time I’d call him The Complex Sigher, but not yet.
“What if you found it today?” I asked.
“I might keep it now,” he said. “I might.”
We stood like that, us two, us three. At the shore of Discovery Lake, the prize for hiking a few miles on animal trails, then no trails, logs to climb over and under and around, to meadow and the tiniest, sweetest blackberries my mouth has ever met. This lake you can see all the way around with a giant boulder near the edge on the far side where I imagined boy Scot scrambling up and playing King of the Rock.
“We’ll spread Ed’s ashes here too,” Scot said, his words catching in the cave of his throat. His brother Ed who was killed by a tree in a logging accident a few months ago. Scot’s only brother whose bones were crushed by a tree, then crushed more by a bone crushing machine.
“I miss him,” he said and wiped the corners of his eyes.
“My poor mom,” he said. He didn’t finish that sentence.
***
In Greek mythology, creation mythology, our ancestors were formed from the bones of the mother. Mama being Gaia and bones being rocks. After the massive flood ordered by Zeus to end the Bronze Age, male Deucalion and female Pyrrha were the only survivors. They were charged with repopulating the earth and told to throw the bones of their mother over their shoulders. Not wanting to dig up and disrespect their moms’ actual bones, they threw Gaia’s bones, or rocks. The soft, moist rock parts turned to skin and muscle, rock veins to human veins, the hard to bones. The rocks Deucalion tossed turned male and the ones thrown over Pyrrha’s shoulder turned female.
***
When Galileo’s body was moved to San Croce in Florence, Italy, near Michelangelo's grave in 1737, three of his fingers, a tooth, and a vertebra were removed. A practice usually reserved for saints. While the vertebra is stored at the University of Padua where he taught, his middle finger, thumb and the tooth disappeared. The third finger displayed at the Museum of the History of Science in Florence.
“There!” Kent said and smiled his crooked tooth smile. Galileo’s finger under a glass bell, behind a glass barrier, tucked in with other relics. The astronomer’s finger. Pointing skyward. A signpost to the god he saw in the stars.
This shrine to Galileo. Finger bone. Under glass.
Kent snapped a few pictures with his Canon. With its multiple lenses and F-stops and filters. It was 1984. No cell phones. No phone pictures.
It was 1984. This husband of mine, alive. Glacial blue eyes. One dimple. Cleft chin. No shadow of his death, of his own skeletal fingers, inked across us.
In two years and five months he’d die in a car crash. Dead in his crumpled car before the man in the car behind him could open his door. Grief undid me, unstacking my spine for days for weeks for months for longer. In the numb of me, I followed some conventions: had him dressed in a jacket and tie even though he wore khaki shirts and JCPenney jeans most every day. Buried ashes at Mountain View Cemetery where my ancestors’ remains remain. Saved half his ashes to spread in the mountains. Spread the mountain half near a tree in a meadow on a sunny October day. I didn’t even save a pocketful of him. No ashes. No hair. No molar.
***
I wish I'd kept your hair, I said to the wind, to the moon, to my dead husband.
No, I wish I'd kept a bone. Just one bone. A finger maybe, before your bones were shepherded into the bone crushing machine. No, a rib. A curved bone that cradled your heart.
The rib of you.
You now in the rib of the moon.
***
When Galileo’s thumb and middle finger, plus his tooth, turned up at an auction in 2009, I turned to my husband Scot, not Kent, long dead. “Remember?” I started. “When we searched for his finger?” But I stopped before I said finger. The slipperiness of memory. One husband layered on another.
***
I trace the scars on my husband’s back, rivulets of skin, bumpy and smooth. The braille of him. Six inches on his lower spine. Another five-inch scar angles towards his left hip. Combined they make a checkmark. An oversized Done mark. This reminder of what he carries. The long-ago back pain that flares some days. The tracks of surgery when he was twenty-three when a surgeon chipped bone from his hip to strengthen his lower spine, to fuse his two lowest lumbar where he was born with an extra. Most bodies have five lower lumbar. He came with six.
When I was birthing our daughter, a technician ran an ultrasound wand across my belly to check on our girl since she was big and I was small. As I breathed in and out through contractions, the technician said, “Oh big baby,” and “Do you want to know the sex?” We’d purposefully not found out during my pregnancy. “Sure,” I said in the heat of birth in the stretching and pulling and being turned inside out. “I mean we’re going to know soon and this way we can argue names between breaths,” That last part came out like Argue. Names. Between. Breaths. “It’s a girl,” she said, and Scot and I grinned. This girl would flush out our matched set: a boy and a girl. Once the doctor was satisfied that the baby was okay, that I was okay, the ultrasound was scooted off. Then Scot said, “We should have had her count her vertebrae, to see if she has an extra lumbar like me.” In the sweat soaked moment, I could have punched him. The practical of him. While I was coming unstitched, birthing our girl, he swiveled his view past the birthing room.
***
Pelvic bones cupped a son, a daughter as they grew from egg and sperm, from seed to plum to eggplant. Why do we compare growing babes to fruit? I think of it more as the phases of the moon: crescent to half-moon to full. Lunar babies who thrive in the moon, in the sun, who grow sturdy and sometimes break.
The hospital exam room smelled Pine-Sol-y with a layer of latex.
"Looks broken," I said, and my stomach shrank to a metal ball.
The X-ray of my son's fibula, the smaller of the lower leg bones, white bone against the grey/black/brown background, split like a broken pencil. Scot and I had brought him to the ER after he was tackled in a rugby game after he couldn’t jump up and keep playing after a dad who’s a doctor studied his ashy face and said, “Better get a picture.”
Jake gripped and released and gripped and released the edges of the exam table. He sucked air through his clamped jaw with every micro movement.
“We’ll get you some pain pills,” the ER doctor said. “Call an orthopedist first thing Monday. It’s a pretty clean break and should heal up fine.” The reknitting power of bones: a wonder of bodies.
I let out a breath that sounded like a stuck valve unsticking. A mama sigh mixed with fear and relief. I’m solid in an emergency: calm, grounded, focused, and when it’s over, that’s when I crumble, that’s when I feel what I sidelined in order to get through what needs getting through. I’m Cry Later in an emergency.
"What's a broken foot look like?" my daughter asked a year or two later as she peeled off her riding boot and showed me her foot her horse had stepped on. She didn’t say she’d been stepped on when I picked her up or while driving home, but once inside a warm house where feet that were numb in winter weather started to thaw, her foot throbbed. It had swelled to the limits of her riding boot.
"Like that," I said when her foot was bootless. “Let’s go get a picture.”
I was wrong that time. Sometimes bones bruise and don’t break. Her X-ray showed no broken foot. Bruised bones and soft tissue damage. She used crutches not for the first or last time. She strapped her boots back on and rode. It’s what we do: fall down, get up, keep going.
***
"I'm having my second bone marrow transplant," Ron said.
I swallowed hard around the peach pit in my throat. Relieved we were on the phone so he couldn’t see the scared on me.
This friend who was the first friend I called after my first husband died. My husband's best friend, best man, best best.
His second transplant. Because his sister was his first donor and she later died from a disease she gave him too. This match of sister. Her gift of life and maybe death, helixed in the blood of her to the blood of him, helixed in family. Did she know her gift was light and dark? Did she?
Ron’s second match was a stranger from the Bone Marrow Registry: a woman who would give her cells to give him life. When I think of kindness, this selfless act is the kindest I’ve ever known.
"Will you come and stay with me for a week?" Ron asked when he told me about his second transplant at Stanford, how he needed to stay near the university post-transplant. He asked a handful of close friends to be caregivers for consecutive weeks, and I was honored to be one. Caregiving meant couch sitting, meals out and meals in with my beloved friend who’s fond of saying, “Food is love.” Caregiving meant fishing in the evenings as the sun pinked up the sky. Casting a line over and over in that meditative act.
"Of course I’ll come be with you," I told him, so grateful for something to do. "I'm already packing."
***
Ron survived two bone marrow transplants. He lived to dance and ski again. To fish and fish and fish. He raised a glass at my son’s wedding.
He’s had complications. Graft-vs-host disease is fairly common in bone marrow transplants where the body fights the donor cells, viewing them as invading, not healing. And still, Ron pushes on, testament to living, keep moving, love with an open heart, and the healing power of shared meals. When I’m cooking, especially making family dishes (Grandma’s meatballs, Love Soup) I think of my dear Ron. I imagine him, fork raised, saying, “Food is love,” before he takes that yummy first bite.
***
If I had a bone chart (I do) and pinpointed the bone of memory, I’d pin where grief was loudest. Where love was loudest. Where the two overlapped like they do. I’d pin the metaphorical growth plates which might or might not be the same as physical growth plates. My growth plates: where fear and excitement collide. This alchemy that brews something new. I’d point to my ribs: here’s where I was bruised and didn’t break—a car accident, a rocking climbing misstep. Here’s my bone cage that protected my heart, my four-chamber muscle engine that even in my darkest grief beat on, not beaten. I’d point to my left scapula, so close to my spine: here’s my left wingbone. This bone spot where shame twitches and possibilities are louder than shame. The beauty of bones seen and not seen. The ones scorched by sun. The scaffolding that holds all of me, all my memories in their marrow.
Previous work by Anne Gudger can be found at The Rumpus, Real Simple Magazine, Citron Review, PANK, Atticus Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Sweet Lit, Creative Nonfiction Sunday Short Reads, Columbia Journal, and elsewhere. She has won three essay contests, and her debut memoir is forthcoming in May 2023 from Jaded Ibis Press. More at Annegudger.com.