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Ennis Del Mar does not remarry, nor does he ever have any more children, but he does bear witness to the birth of his first grandchild, a boy whom Jenny names Cooper. Jenny was the first of Ennis’ own little girls to get pregnant, despite being just younger than her sister, but in the moments following her son’s birth, she looks as grown up as he’s ever seen her. His heart swells with pride — and with melancholy.
It’s the summer of ‘86, and there’s a man who has been dead for three years, buried somewhere out in Wyoming.
But he doesn’t dwell on that when he holds little Cooper, and instead, for a moment, he hopes that the kid is okay in his hands that are weather-worn and rough from all the work he’s done over the years, and that they aren’t too bad on him. The baby does not cry out any louder than he already has; he just looks up without really opening his eyes and coos to his granddaddy, and Ennis smiles down on him like the Lord’s rays shining upon the Earth.
*
Ennis reckons he stopped believing in the Lord a long time ago though, but this does not negate the importance of church in his life. He goes there every Sunday without fail. Sometimes it’s the only time he’ll leave the home within any given week.
His life is one big contradiction, and in it are even smaller contradictions. One of them is this: he’s a praying man, yet he doesn’t pray to God, because he doesn’t believe in Him or any other variation of Him. Instead, he clasps his hands together and bows his head, murmurs words to something which doesn’t exist and something which used to exist all at once.
*
When Cooper turns fourteen at the turn of the century, he asks his grandfather, “What was it like being a cowboy?”, because the boy’s always had an idea about what Ennis used to do, even if only briefly, but he’s never really asked the man who's never talked much anyway, and now he’s going through a phase where all he can think about is outlaws and bandits and good guys coming to save the day.
“Ain’t nothin’ like that, boy”, Ennis says, laughing for once. “That was a long way before my time. I wasn’t Clint Eastwood.”
Still, Cooper’s eyes shine with eagerness, so Ennis goes on. “Well, it wasn’t all that exciting. Herded sheep, mostly. Saw a big ass bear once, though. And, y’know, there were horses and all that. Damn bastards could be so unruly.”
“Was it lonely up there?” Cooper says, because even he’s heard of the elusive Brokeback Mountain, albeit only a few times spoken by his aunt.
Ennis pauses and sighs, rests his tilted head against his hand and tries to smile again. “Not always. I had company. A friend of mine called Jack. He was a good man. He’s been gone a long time now.”
The conversation more or less dies after that, and Ennis sits back in his chair and looks out into nothing, dreams of what-ifs and might-have-beens, the ghost of a ghost lingering on his shoulder as Cooper gets up and goes back to his room.
*
Sometimes he thinks he can feel it, the phantom pain in his face from where Jack had hit him a lifetime ago. His nose had started to bleed, and the blood tasted like salt, almost as red and thick as wine. Jack himself was bleeding soon after. In his memories — and his dreams — Jack always ends up bleeding, one way or another.
So he closes his eyes one night in bed, ignores the ache in his body that is weary with age, and he tries not to let that happen. He thinks of Jack in all his glory, in his youth shining like gold, all smiles and laughter. Jack next to him, Jack beneath him, on top of him, in him like the two of them were always meant to be one.
And then he realises that the blood just tasted like blood. Nothing more than that.
*
He works until his back gives out, then he’s confined to the spare bedroom of Alma Jr.’s home. This is in spite of his protests, his pleas to let him leave because he is nothing but a burden here, and it’s not like she could be returning the favour when he wasn’t all that great of a father to begin with. Still, Alma is stubborn and makes him stay.
So he lays in bed, angry at the world and himself, and he thinks he might have been angry ever since he was born. It used to live silently in him, only emerging to the surface on a rare occasion, but at least then he was younger and could expel the energy. Now he’s this, old and alone and it’s so pathetic he almost can’t breathe. But he does get up after a while; Ennis Del Mar has always found a way back on his feet. He walks over to the wardrobe and opens it, and he stares into the space and hangs his head. It feels like burning. Like being eaten alive.
*
Maybe Jack felt like this too.
Well, of course he did, you can’t just have a wife and a child and not feel like this. It’s a thing that operates in multitudes, however, there isn’t just one way of being. He always seemed so sure that they could abandon their pre-existing lives and craft new ones, like the act of living in a world that doesn’t want you could be that fucking easy. But surely, he must have cried at night like this, pleading to a God that isn’t there why, why did you have to make this so hard?
Jack himself had said he never could quit him. Somehow, that makes him feel far less alone.
*
When he dies in August one evening, the hospital room falls silent. Something violent seizes and pulls Ennis away, and the last thing he thinks before he lets it take him is, maybe I had it all wrong. There’s a plot of land that would have property development on it by now, maybe housing, or by the grace and rare intervention of God it could even be empty, but regardless, once upon a time they would’ve built a ranch, and they would have lived and they would have loved. It’s enough to almost make him smile.
*
Jenny and Alma Jr. come to this silent sort of agreement after a brief period of deliberation. At one point Alma had said they should take him up to Brokeback Mountain.
“Why?” Jenny asks, to which her sister explains that she heard their Daddy mention it a few times, often in his sleep or when drunk.
“Plus, he’s got that postcard in his wardrobe next to the shirt. You ain’t ever seen it?”
When Jenny shakes her head, suddenly childlike because all Alma is at the end of the day is the older sister showing her baby sister things she doesn’t know, she’s guided through to the little wardrobe in the spare bedroom, and true enough, there’s a long-sleeved plaid shirt hanging on the end of the rod, another one inside of it. Tacked up on the wall behind it is a postcard depicting a mountain range, somewhere far away and long gone by now, like the father they never really knew.
They stare at it. They turn to each other after a while, both reaching that silent agreement. Because somehow, they just know their Daddy wouldn’t want to be up on that mountain all by himself. That’s the worst bit: they don’t know why they know this exactly, but they’re sure it has something to do with the man he used to go fishing with, someone they only ever saw out the window, whose name lived tucked within bitter words hurled back and forth between their parents semi-stifled by the walls of their old home, who they’d spoken with on one occasion. He doesn’t really exist to them, but it doesn’t matter, because he was Ennis’ all the same.
So Ennis, he doesn’t get scattered on that mountain, left to die a second death in the winds. Instead, the urn is just kept in Jenny’s home in the fancy glass cupboard where she keeps her fine china and little mementos from holidays she’s taken. But sometimes when she goes to church, or it’s just before bed or she just needs someone in this world to talk to, she’ll pray for her Daddy and she’ll ask God to be kind to him and to the lonely man he once knew and loved, buried far away across Wyoming.