"From the History of the Two Shirts, V" - canon ficlet
Content - Brokeback ficlet - another glimpse into the history of the two shirts. This one is called “A Secret wrung from nature’s close reserve” and shows how the two shirts end up in Jack’s closet. Ca. 1,000 words, movie canon, rated G.
Disclaimer - They do not belong to me, but to Annie Proulx, Diana Ossana, Larry McMurtry and Focus Features. I intend no disrespect and make no profit except for the inspiration I find in thinking and writing of Jack and Ennis.
A/N - The titles of this and the four previous ficlets are lines from Robert Browning’s poem “A Toccata of Galuppi’s” which has any number of melancholy lines that out of context serve perfectly to inspire Brokeback thoughts. The previous ficlets in this series are here:
“I can always leave off talking”: http://gilli-ann.livejournal.com/21358.html
“When the kissing had to stop”: http://gilli-ann.livejournal.com/21571.html
The current ficlet belongs here in the sequence
“Like a ghostly cricket”: http://gilli-ann.livejournal.com/21829.html
“What of soul was left, I wonder”: http://gilli-ann.livejournal.com/29005.html
A secret wrung from nature's close reserve
Jack gets back to the ranch late in the evening and after speaking briefly with his parents he goes straight to bed. He is exhausted in body, soul, and mind - his cheek keeps throbbing painfully, an echo of his struggling heart.
He digs Ennis’s shirt out of his bag and brings it with him to his austere boy’s bed. Buries his face in it, inhaling deeply, filling himself with the stink of sweat and rage, blood and smoke, crushed grass and mountain air. The smell of Ennis. He absorbs it with all of his being, acutely aware that he needs to revel in it now, must memorize it before the smell turns stale and flat. Before it fades and is stolen away by time.
Ennis. He wants to remember everything about Ennis. The smell and taste and sound and feel and look of him. Wants to surround himself with all of it, live and breathe it, always.
Jack falls asleep with his head resting on the dirty plaid-patterned shirt draped across his pillow. He sleeps fitfully and dreams of stumbling forward in the dark, hearing frantic hoof-beats lose themselves in the night, a sinister creaking sound, and someone calling his name from far away across wide somber plains - he doesn’t recognize the voice.
--
Next morning his ma calls to him to bring his work clothes down with him so she can see about his laundry right away.
He looks forward to having his sweat-stiff and dirt-stained clothes properly washed. Hot water and good soap will work wonders. But he hesitates uncertainly over his blue denim shirt. A good shirt it is, has served him well, and it can last for some time yet. If he continues using it, he knows his ma will do her best to remove the blood stains. Having lived on poor ranches all her life she is good at coaxing ingrained blood and mud and sweat out of recalcitrant cloth.
Oh, but he can’t bear the thought of being reminded every day of the stains that aren’t there. Having that visible reminder of Ennis gone from his shirt? That spotless sleeve would never cease shouting out to him mockingly that he is Ennis-less, joy-less, love-less.
Washing the shirt would mean forcing an attempted clean slate on his heavy heart. He doesn’t want that. He wants to remember the two of them, wrapped up in each other. He wants to forget that Ennis has left his life with a frown and a punch to the face for his goodbyes. When he closes his eyes he wants to feel Ennis embracing him and hear him humming his sweet and simple childhood lullaby.
The answer comes to him in a sudden distinct image, clear before his eyes: The shirts, one inside the other, close as two skins. He’ll let his shirt protect and cradle the other, the way he himself held Ennis that first time Ennis came to him of his own free will. The way Ennis once embraced him by their fire.
Jack remembers that when he was in school he once heard told how knights and warriors in the old days would mingle their blood, and so become tied to each other for life. Blood brothers, he thinks they called it. He considers the notion pensively.
Their Brokeback shirts both carry Ennis’s blood. It’s as if the two of them participated in the ancient bonding ritual, but weren’t allowed to finalize it. Half measures, one-sided; - the secret magic of shared blood hasn’t been completed and cannot take effect.
On a sudden impulse Jack pulls his work knife out of his bag and doesn’t even look at it, doesn’t hesitate before drawing the knife’s sharp edge across the back of his hand. A line of bright crimson wells up in the shallow cut. He holds his hand out over the shirts, palm down flat and steady, and patiently lets enough blood pool so that when he turns his hand over, heavy red drops splatter down, first on Ennis’s shirt and then on his own. He watches the old dark blood absorb the new, is careful not to touch the plaid or the denim while the blood dries.
Always one for hopeful flights of fantasy and dreams of something better, but never before much for superstition, Jack feels a strange sense of peace descend. The early morning light, a harbinger of new chances and fresh beginnings, fills his little room while he carefully places Ennis’s shirt inside his own.
A faint unmistakable tang of blood wafts from the shirts as he hides them from view in the little jog in his closet space. From this day onwards his childhood hidey-hole protects the incontestable evidence of a connection that goes deeper than skin, preserves a literal and direct connection between two pumping hearts.
They’ll be symbolically tied now until Jack should decide otherwise. But he knows in his core that he never will.
The two shirts themselves called to him to assemble this powerful talisman. It projects tangible reassurance that he and Ennis belong together. Though the road may be long and rocky, what is meant to be, will be. Despite all odds and obstacles, fate will one day bring them together again, and keep them that way. He’ll never believe differently now. He’ll never quit hoping.
This private ritual has filled him with sudden inspiration to search for Ennis, to locate him so they can have a new start. The sooner, the better. He knows in his heart that Ennis will want it too, for the shirts provide confirmation. Worn, dirty and stained, they look right and perfect together, fulfilling each other, bound and marked as they are by nature and a potent and ancient magic.
On that blissful day when the two of them are reunited, on the day when nothing more will be allowed to keep them apart, he’ll let Ennis see the closet’s secret, and proudly tell him what a happy cause his missing mountain shirt has served. He’ll show Ennis the solid proof that he never stopped believing in the two of them as one.
And at that moment, he assures himself with certainty and hope reborn dancing in his heart; - at that moment, Ennis surely will swear to him that he always felt exactly the same.