Love, Hank

A short story by
Karen Auvinen

He tipped his hat and unfolded the felt-wrapped frames, telling me the story of how he’d unearthed them at a property he’d traded for a case of whiskey. Just called the owner and said he’d be interested in the place, telling the man he knew it wasn’t worth much—a lie—but he’d like to have it anyway. The man, a lifelong Texan who must have been short on imagination and long on money, paused and then said Tom could have the land. But Tom said he wouldn’t feel right about taking it for free, so he bought a case of Maker’s Mark and drove to Houston, and they sealed the deal. This was all a few decades ago when stuff like that happened around here. Now land is gold, and no one is giving it away.

The frames were straight and fine with sturdy edges, Danforth, more than a hundred years old, probably passed along in a family through generations. The felt backing on one had been replaced with a thin sheet of Aspen bark, the words LOVE, HANK were burned into one corner. 

“What’s the story?” I asked, touching the paper-like wood. Aspens are notoriously thin-skinned.

Tom shrugged. 

I was skeptical. There was always a story. 

He said he found them wrapped in a blanket half buried in a shed. The property was the one with the cook kitchen where the Como miners ate and took baths. No one had lived there for years, decades probably. 

“There was a cabin a long time ago, but it burned,” he said.

“Huh. A mystery.” I was only half-kidding, playing Tom the way I figured he was playing me. The frames would bring good money, and we both knew that, but I wanted them for myself; I was already imagining a life for Hank. I shined the metal with a cloth and studied the way the light made shadows on the surface. 

“What do you want for them?” I asked, expecting a high number, prepared to laugh in his face. 

“Make me dinner?”

And then I did laugh. “If I cook for you, you’ll just want to marry me.” I don’t know why I said it.

“It’s a deal,” he said. 

I suppose some people you just recognize as your own and that gives you the courage to say the truth. That was the beginning of three months of can’t-take-my-hands-off-you sex and courtship that ended when Tom rolled over one day and said Let’s get hitched.  And I said, Sure. Even though Tom was nearly fifteen years older than me, I never looked back. He is one of those men whose face looks better with age, the lines deepening to make him come into focus. He was sixty when we met and still had a full head of hair and a way of wearing a pair of Wranglers that would make men thirty years younger enviable. 

That was ten years ago, about as long as I’ve lasted at anything. Born into the West, I haven’t been able to shake its boom-and-bust roots. In my time, I’d been everything from a ski lift operator and bus driver to a breakfast cook and tamale maker at a roadside stand near the Kum & Go. I’ve lived in as many places, too, all in Colorado, moving from the burning plains of my childhood to the pine-covered hills and then to the mountains from resort town to resort town, trying to scrape together a living until inevitably soaring rents sent me packing to the new place. A decade ago, I’d landed in Fairplay, a town with a mining past, where there was no mountain to ski and only a few stayed year-round. At first, I’d just worked in the shop for an old timer named Joe, who decided he liked me enough to sell it to me for a portion of the net monthly profits so he could retire with pocket money and I could get a leg up in the world.  

“You might want to settle down some day,” he said, and I wasn’t sure what he meant, but I knew he thought running the shop would help me get there. I liked the shop, and I was good at selling antiques and it was a bit of a relief not to have to be thinking about the next thing. Winters were quiet and I traveled quite a bit looking for odds and ends, but in the summer, the shop was full of people who thought the West was quaint, a tinny story about rugged miners and mountain men, along with noble but doomed Indians. They cooed over the things I collected, hungry for a piece of a story that never was real. 

For as long as I can remember, I was always starting something new, reinventing myself to fit the circumstance. And life with Tom was the newest thing of all. Neither of us had been married before. It was strange and intoxicating to want to be with someone, after I’d spent so much time alone. Together, we moved onto Tom’s land and into the miners’ kitchen on the slopes of Little Baldy overlooking the small mountain town of Como, a fifteen-minute drive from Fairplay and the shop. Tom put my name on the deed the day we got married because he said, “We’re in this together now.” It was the first place I’d lived that belonged to me. I couldn’t quite get used to the fact that I could paint the kitchen red if I wanted or replace the crappy windows with ones that kept weather out. I’d always lived in someone else’s place, with someone else’s choices.

The cook cabin ran thirty feet from side to side; it was wider than deep and big as a barn by frontier standards. The kitchen was on one side and opened up to a wide dining space and a woodstove on the other side where the miners must have eaten and bathed in an alcove overlooking aspens out back. Together, Tom and I chinked the logs outside and then put up insulation and dry-wall, and I painted the halves of the room beeswax and terra cotta so that the bedroom glowed like a stone church with morning light and the kitchen was ruddy and warm in winter and invitingly cool in summer. We trimmed the widows on the outside with a deep pink that set off the logs. Tom plumbed a bathroom with a sink and bathtub himself in the little alcove next to where we placed our bed on a frame Tom made from one of several ponderosa we cut to clear a defensible space around the cabin in case of fire. With the last of our money, we had a well dug and a septic put in, so we could have water and a flush toilet. Tom shored up the roof, which must have been at least a hundred years old, and added a long deck to the back which looked straight up the hillside. Our nearest neighbor was a two-mile bushwhack downhill, five if you went by road. 

I placed the pewter frames on a dresser near the bed. The one that said LOVE, HANK held a picture of Tom and me on our wedding day in a stand of gold-lit aspens, the other, a pen and ink picture Tom drew of the cook-kitchen. Tom always signed his cards, “Love, Hank,” because we both thought Hank had something to do with our falling in love. 

I searched and searched but I couldn’t match the cook-kitchen’s owners with the name Hank and there was nothing about who owned the little cabin or how long it had stood before it burned and the cook-kitchen came along. No photos or documents survived at the library or in the public record. What I had was the picture frame and “LOVE,  HANK and it made my mind spin. 

Tom and I started to make up wild stories about Hank, but they always ended tragically. He’d been killed in the Como coal mine explosion in 1893 or maybe in the homestead fire, before he could deliver the frames as a wedding present to a bride waiting somewhere to join him. He’d carried them on a boat from England or France, an heirloom from the family he’d left behind to a new family he never had. Frontier life was hard, we’d say, and we’d feel sorry for him. 

When we’d moved in, the miracle of burning love in midlife made the smallness and the remoteness of the cabin seem perfect. Winters, we made fires and read books and soaked up the mountain quiet. In the summer we’d sit enjoying the earthy smell of pine trees mixed with clear mountain air and watch the stars come out, drinking wine, and talk as the night settled over us. It was as if we’d been saving all these stories all our lives and there was so much tell. I told Tom about the time I chased a bear that outweighed me by over 250 pounds from my yard by running toward it with a stick in my hand as it retreated reluctantly. And Tom told me about King, a coal mining town on the flats outside of Como, that once had as many as six mines stretching north and south of town and nearly 400 residents, including 70 children and a schoolhouse. Unlike so many ghost towns in Colorado, there wasn’t even a dilapidated shack to mark the site. Instead, you had to know what you were looking for off one of the dirt roads that winds aimlessly across fields and over hills and dips and then you’d find the stone masonry base for a steam engine set down in the curve of rolling prairie.   

“It wasn’t open for very long, but a lot of miners died in those coal fields, mostly Chinese and Italian,” said Tom, some covered over by an explosion and simply left to a ruined piece of earth and an unmarked grave.

Bones of the earth, he said. 

My husband likes to tell the what about the West—the mines that were tunneled, their yields, the years they went belly up, the movement of people passing through, like the coal miners from Italy who settled Como. Except for things, except for the facts, he says, there’s nothing. 

That’s where we differ. The past was something that interested me for the stories that went untold. I was haunted by the image of the miners left inside the mine. The prairie is lonely enough without all those bones. 

I tried to conjure a bit of story for each piece I sold in my shop and in this way felt I was doing my part to tell something truer than what we’ve all heard and read. The absolute truth, even if you could ever get at it, doesn’t matter so much as the how you put it all together in your mind. Stories make the past stick to the present. I didn’t know they could propel you into the future.    

•

By the time we celebrated our tenth anniversary last fall, I was feeling restless. My body prickled with an instinct I couldn’t understand, except that it was telling me that it was time to move. It was the story I grew up with. When things pale, you hit the road. Business had been slow at the shop all during the summer. People weren’t buying bits of the past anymore so much as trying to figure out a future that seemed huge and scary. I’d spent my whole life in Colorado and had worked or passed through every mountain town between the Front Range and the Utah border. I started dreaming of Montana or Wyoming, some place that was fresh and new. I could practically hear the soundtrack rise as I imagined myself stepping into virgin territory. 

When Tom and I talked about it in the dark of December, before the light begins to swing back, when the days are short and relentlessly cold, he said, “We’re not moving.”  As if that was that. It was the first time he’d ever dug in on anything.    

“What about what I want?” I said. 

“I don’t want to start over.” For the first time, he looked tired and I could see his age. “What about our life here?”

I could hear the stove tick with heat, but everything else was silent. The cabin had grown dark and neither of us had moved to turn on a light.

“Business is bad. I need a change,” I argued.

I could head out April when there was at least a chance of thaw in some places and look around. Maybe I’d find something he couldn’t resist.

“I have to do this,” I said suddenly, desperate.

“You’d go without me?” 

“We’re in a marriage, not a chain gang. Besides, you can come if you want,” I said, knowing he wouldn’t. 

“Well,” Tom nodded, “Are you coming back?” 

“I just want to see what the antique business is doing up there,” I said, pointing north, and wondered if that was true. The more he resisted the more I wanted to go, and he knew it, but he couldn’t help himself. 

“I’ll miss you,” he said, before adding quietly, “I’ll be right here.”

So I made a plan:  I’d leave as soon as the season turned. 

Despite my restlessness about the business, about our home, about us, not much seemed to bother Tom. He’d just shrug and say it’d all turn out fine. He’d watch me rail and rant and stomp about and then he’d say, “We’ll figure it out,” and rise and put the kettle on for tea. 

Tom loved me. He told me that. Every morning, whether we felt in love or not, he paused quietly by the door, and turned to look at me. “I love you,” he’d say before going off, and then he’d look down, nodding as if pondering the weight of his words, and smile. At first, I’d loved the constancy of the gesture, the ease with which he loved. Now I wanted him to yell and swear, to beg me to stay. 

The funny thing was I’d spent my whole life trying to get just where I was. When you grow up on the plains, where the summers are hot and the flats and the prairie run on forever, the space between there and where the mountains rise to the West is as vast as dreaming. I’d spent my childhood imagining the pleasure of that cool blue haze. My family escaped the heat of summer by camping in the mountains, so the high country has always been a haven—proof-positive of the mysterious universe and the promise that something better lies just beyond the horizon. As soon as I was old enough, I transplanted myself into that dream, into the wide capable hands of the mountains. If I left Tom, then I’d have to leave the story of that dream. I’d have to leave everything. 

Out West, you live with that idea every day. People move in from other parts still looking for gold, for a piece of land to stake a claim. First it was the get-rich-quick world of dot coms and startups and now real estate and destination vacations and VRBOs, but it’s no different really. And those of us who grew up on the myth still believe that better days lie just a mountain range away. We can’t help it, even when we know better. 

My own clan was the biggest group of drifters I’d ever known, and I learned from them that you don’t need geography to make distance. The five of us shared the four walls of our house and little else. My siblings and I were as strange to each other as if we’d been born to other places, other people, and our parents treated us as indifferently as cows. As soon as we were old enough, we left, scattering as far as Seattle, moving farther and farther West in search of a better life, just like in the old stories. Except for a handful memories—camping trips to the Uncompahgre, Saturdays running ahead of my father’s barked orders, a few tubing runs in the high country—except for the way I put the stories together, we might not have existed at all. 

All my life I’ve been watching the horizon, trying to close the distance from here to there, thinking that if I made it that somehow things would be okay. I never thought I believed in happily-ever-afters, but there you are. 

But I also never realized happily-ever-after is a long time. Nothing, I thought, can go on forever. 

•  

That spring, seven feet of snow fell in a little over two days. They called it the “snow of the century.” The front poured in the night before, but Tom still loaded his pickup with the ladder and his tools for a job hanging cabinets down in Breckenridge just over Boreas Pass. There was already over a foot on the ground when he opened the door that morning, but neither of us was worried. We were accustomed to three-footers every winter. Still, he said, he’d try to be home early.

When he turned to go, I said, “Don’t,” feeling mean. 

I could tell from the look on Tom’s face he thought I was asking him to stay and I shook my head. 

“Don’t say you love me. You always say that. Think of something else.” 

He paused, his salt-and-pepper hair hidden beneath a black Stetson, his Carhart overalls unable to hide his still-strong body. 

“Take care, then.” And he turned, shouldering his way into the storm. 

“Love you,” I thought I heard as he shut the door. 

After Tom left, I sat quietly for a long while, watching fat tufts feather the sky. Snow has a way of softening the world, covering all its imperfections. Everything goes quiet with its weight and, apart from some resident chickadees, nothing was moving. 

Mid-morning, I started a stew and then went outside to shovel a path to my 4-Runner, waiting for the plow to show up. The snow was wet and soft, and it clumped under my feet as I shoveled, and stuck to my boots and then the shovel. I’d lift a spate-full, toss, and then tamp the shovel down on a rock to get the rest to fall off.  I cleared a lazy path to the truck and just around it, but it was slow going and I decided to give up and let Tom do the rest to the wood pile and shed when he got home. He took great pride in such work, loving it the way men love a display of their own competence and strength. I didn’t mind letting him have such moments for himself—it relieved me to feel like I didn’t have to do everything alone.

By mid-afternoon, the three feet that had been expected had fallen and the heavy spring snow kept coming, dragging the limbs of pines down with its wet weight, and Dave, the plow guy, and his Dodge had failed to appear. Tom had called twice while I was out shoveling, saying the storm was bad and he’d be heading home as soon as he could. I carried more wood inside, stacking two extra loads by the fireplace, and watched as the familiar markings of the yard—the garden, the path to the shed—which had just revealed themselves in over a week of warm March days, disappeared. Little bowls of snow formed under the trees, then deepened, filling until the bent limbs fell over their edges and the trees formed tall white cones in the yard. I watched prickly juniper and jutting rocks disappear beneath snow, their edges softening. When I looked out at the window, I didn’t recognize what I saw. The landscape had been transformed. 

At 3 p.m., Tom called again, saying he had been trying to leave Breck, but the roads had been closed and he was going to try to borrow a snowmobile, which sounded crazy. 

“It’s too dangerous. I’ll be fine.” I knew I sounded exasperated.

Tom started to protest but I cut him off. “You stay put. I’ve got a handle on things here,” I told him. “I’m a real cowgirl.” 

There was a moment of silence on the line. And then an inhale of breath.

“Okay, cowgirl, whatever happens, stay put. It’s really bad out here.”

When he said goodbye, he said, “Love, Hank,” and I repeated it back out of habit, but the words felt a little like a door shutting.

I stoked the wood stove again and then went out to have a look. The snow was inching past my hips everywhere except where I’d cleared the path to the truck. Thinking I might not have another chance, I decided that the first order was to bring in more wood. Then I did a better re-shovel along the path to the truck, digging a well clear around it. It made me feel good to know the 4-Runner wasn’t buried under a pile of snow, even if it was walled-in by chest-level mounds and there was no way I was going anywhere. The afternoon sun had long since sunk beneath the tree line, so I plowed over to the work shed and got my snowshoes and scattered some extra seed for the birds. 

Back inside I felt bad about how I treated Tom and picked up the phone, but the line was dead. I thought how he must be worrying, and I was suddenly sorry for being so mean. 

I flipped on the radio and listened to the weather report. The highways were closed, and everyone was on accident alert. Stay put was the message.

The power started to flicker, and I laid out new batteries and pulled out extra candles and felt good about all my preparations. I took in a few kettles of snow to melt for cooking and washing water in case the electricity gave out and the well pump stopped. Then I heated some French bread and opened a bottle of wine and sat listening to Mozart’s Requiem. I didn’t care about the snow, thinking I would take a nice hot bath by candlelight and then go to bed with the novel a customer had given me about Sacajawea. The cover showed a woman with swirling dark hair and feathers, holding a baby. It was a romance, and even though I knew the truth, I would let myself get lost in the story about her kidnapping and falling love, and then fall asleep. 

After midnight, I woke thinking someone was standing near the bed. I’d had the feeling before and even though Tom would say it was Hank watching over me, I’d just chalked it up to living in a house with history. This time I felt a little rattled. Something was wrong. I fiddled with the bedside lamp, but the power had gone out, and then I fiddled some more, trying to remember where I’d put the matches and candles, where I’d set my headlamp in case I needed it in the night. 

That’s when I heard the crack. 

It was somewhere over my head, and even though I knew from the sound it was wood breaking and I should bolt, I couldn’t move. Instead, I sat stock still, trying to locate the epicenter of the sound, trying to think what to do. The next crack was directly overhead and this time I leapt up, half-stumbling, half-feeling my way in the dark to the other end of the room. 

This is how people die, I thought. They forget that up here weather can kill. You hear about it all the time. Someone goes for a hike up the pass on a sunny warm day and gets caught without any rain gear in a thunderstorm and they get hypothermia or slip on wet rocks and fall and die, or they get caught in a back country avalanche because they believed in the myth of their own invincibility, the lie that preparation prevents disaster. 

I never once thought about shoveling the roof. The thought hit my chest like a wall of snow cleaving from a hillside. By now, the old timbers overhead carried the weight of five wet feet of snow. 

Locating my headlamp, I scanned the beams for obvious signs. Had they always looked so bowed? I couldn’t tell. Tom would know. I ran the light across the dark rough wood, looking for fissures. The beams were old and deeply rutted with age. One had taken some carpenter ant damage a few years back and we’d sealed it and filled it in. Was that the weak one? I threw more wood in the stove and lit a candle and wrapped myself in a blanket and sat with my back against the far wall in the kitchen, facing the bed, the headlamp still lit, now on my head, shining into the dark. I sat for a long while listening to more splintering, more creaking and felt as if I was captive in the hull of a vast ship. My heart pounded and the whole cabin seemed to sway. 

I couldn’t think what to do. My mind twirled, imagining all sorts of things in the dark. I must have dozed because I was imagining Tom, on the road below the house, cutting trail uphill through the chest-deep snow. His heart couldn’t take it and each step closer, each heave of his legs through the glittering powder was like a sharp knife inside his rib cage. He kept whispering, “Love, Hank. Love, Hank,” and I stood above, yelling down into the valley, “Don’t come up here,” louder and louder until the sound of my voice shook the trees, triggering a wave of snow that broke loose and rushed toward Tom. 

I woke then, the cabin gone silent the same way it had when I woke before. I dressed and pulled on my boots and jacket and unhooked the shovel from the peg near the door. The roof was canted backward, high to low, in a familiar frontier configuration. But I had no way of getting up on it from the rear because the snow had fallen heavy against the back of the house. In front, the peak was high above my head but even so, I tried to knock bits of snow with the tip of the shovel shot-putted over my head. After a while, I dragged a tall stool outside and managed to get myself shoulder-high to the roof and that way pull down soggy drifts on top of myself by scooping it toward me. Standing on the stool was precarious and my reach, limited. The storm had not yet let up. Two more feet were yet to fall, and there wasn’t much I could do.  

Back inside, I stripped off my wet clothes and pulled on wool socks and fleece leggings and a long-sleeved top beneath a sweatshirt. Tom kept a bottle of bourbon above the basin where he shaved, because his father had done it. He’d like to say it was for emergencies, but I never saw him drink it. I took it down and poured a tumbler and added a little sugar and sat against the far wall in the kitchen and drank until my mind loosened. In my lap—both of the Danforth frames—the cabin in summer and Tom and me grinning at each other as if we shared the most delicious secret. Artifacts from the past.

I thought about Hank. I imagined him carrying the frames wrapped in cloth and tucked beneath his belt from some place in Europe, the only connection he had to his home and a family he left behind. Had he hidden them and not been able to return? Perhaps someone had stolen the frames and hid them in the shed. They meant something to someone once and now they meant something to me and Tom. What would happen to them after what we were to each other was forgotten too? 

I thought about Tom and what he’d said about staying put. He couldn’t know the roof might fail. Just like I couldn’t know what would greet me on the hard walk out. I had snowshoes and a headlamp—it wasn’t the distance that bothered me or the time, even though it was probably too dangerous. What if I set off a slide? The thought didn’t bother me as much as the idea of me walking and walking and never coming back.  

For now, I had the fire and Tom’s whiskey, and I could tell myself stories all night long, listening to the creak of the roof. I couldn’t be sure it would hold.

Instead, I imagined Hank holed up in his cabin in deep snow. Then I saw him walking out, using branches he broke off as poles to help him wade through drift after drift. I wondered if he made it to a safer place or in leaving, he left safety behind. He’d abandoned most of his stuff, including the frames, and for whatever reason, he never made it back. 

The land is full of stories of people like Hank leaving. They are so familiar. Sometimes,  it’s harder to see the one unfolding right before your eyes.

Karen Auvinen is a poet, writer, mountain woman, outlier, and life-long westerner, and the author of the memoir Rough Beauty: Forty Seasons of Mountain Living (Scribner), finalist for the Colorado Book Award and the WILLA Award. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, LitHub, Real Simple, Westword, as well as Ascent Magazine, Cold Mountain Review, and The Columbia Review, among others. Her fiction has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes. She teaches writing at Lighthouse Writers Workshop and for Fishtrap and lives at 8600 feet with her husband, her dog River, and Dottie the cat, within the Roosevelt National Forest and the ancestral territories of the Ute, Cheyenne, and Arapaho peoples. More at karenauvinen.com