Nancy Freund Bills - The Red Ribbon: A Memoir of Lightning and Rebuilding After Loss

THE
RED RIBBON

Copyright 2019, Nancy Bills

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, digital scanning, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, please address She Writes Press.

Published 2019

Printed in the United States of America

ISBN: 978-1-63152-573-5

ISBN: 978-1-63152-574-2

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018953149

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She Writes Press

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Book design by Stacey Aaronson

All company and/or product names may be trade names, logos, trademarks, and/or registered trademarks and are the property of their respective owners.

Names and identifying characteristics have been changed to protect the privacy of certain individuals.

FOR MY SONS
WITH MY LOVE AND PROFOUND RESPECT

Tho much is taken, much abides
by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Readers most often ask me if The Red Ribbon is true. Yes. It is.

However, I want to share with my readers that I wrote the stories, the chapters, one at a time. Each bubbled up in my mind and heart determined to be written. And only later did I arrange them in a semblance of chronological order. Still, many important events and even significant people are omitted. And the order remains tangential.

The writing process was painful. As I wrote, I cried and laughed. One way I was able to find the courage I needed was to assign everyone in my stories different names. My sons became Simon and Teddy; my husband became Geoff, a name Im sure he would have liked. And I gave us the family name of Green, a promise that our family would survive and grow. I wanted to hold out hope. (Only the animals, Charlie, the beagle, and Mark, the gray thoroughbred, retain their own names. And me, Im Nancy.)

I need to confess that there are still unwritten chapters, events too painful to tackle now. Maybe sometime. But maybe not. Some readers are curious about where I began. I wrote The Emptying and Filling of the Drawer first (in 2001) when I was taking a memoir class at the University of Southern Maine. And I wrote Gentle to Market last (in 2016) for a writing workshop; it was tough going. Close to the end, I wrote Atonement, and the confession of my regrets was good for my soul.

I have used every fictional tool I know. Sometimes, The Red Ribbon reads like memoir, but more often it crosses into the territory of fiction. Of course, I had to create the dialog. Occasionally, I stumbled onto the perfect words. For instance, when my dad calls me Nance and Girlie in The Beaches, and in The Old Spaniel, he sounds so real to me that it is as though he is alive again for a few moments. And I get teary. My goal was to capture the truth, and although I often invent the specifics, I have captured my hearts truth, which is what I value most.

The Red Ribbon is true.

T he summer sky of my youth was Montana blue. Its wide expanse like a magnificent tent offered me beauty and usually safety. But on certain afternoons in July and August, meadowlarks stopped their melodies, killdeer hurried back to their nests made of stones, and long-legged jackrabbits fled into their burrows. Thunder rumbled; lightning flashed; the western sky grew dark. A gray wash began in the distant Beartooth Mountains and soon colored my world as though a giant brush were painting the sky with diluted black.

By mid-afternoon, the oppressive heat would rise into the high nineties, sometimes even over a hundred, and set off palpable anxiety in me. The afternoon storms rarely delivered a refreshing rain. The wind stirred up sandy grit that blew on my tanned face and against my bare arms and legs; a few sparse drops fell, but that was all. The local weatherman reported again on the black-and-white TV news at dinnertime, No appreciable rain for Billings and its vicinity. The banks of the wide Yellowstone River, the fields of alfalfa, and acres of feed corn nearby were dry as tumbleweed.

Early each summer, my father took me aside and said Nance, soon as it looks like a storm, get yourself home. He settled his blue eyes on mine, I mean it. Dont get stuck at your friend Susies. Your mother will worry if youre not home. Neither of us wanted to worry my mother.

So when the sky to the west threatened rain, I ran home closing the screen door carefully behind me while other children in my neighborhood let their screen doors slam. Im home, I called out to my mother. And without being told, I began the task of moving from room to room, closing windows.

Almost once a summer, a serious storm arrived; thunder and lightning announced the onslaught of torrential rain, pounding hail. Thumb-sized slugs of ice caused real damagedenting our car, bruising the cedar siding on the west wall of our house, and breaking many of the small panes of glass in our windows. The cruel hail battered our garden, ruining our tomatoes and strawberries, scattering their red flesh onto the dusty pale earth.

One summer during a bad storm, a child running across Pioneer Park tripped into a gully and was pummeled by hail to unconsciousness. My mother read me the news story and showed me the photos published on the front page of The Billings Gazette. She said, That could have been you. Tugging at my shirt, she asked, And then how would I have felt? I didnt plan to come home via Pioneer Park or fall down and get banged up, but I heard her. I understood. Storms arrived; danger came with them.

During those rare bad storms, we three with our familys springer spaniel sat in the dim light of the basement wondering out loud when the power would fail. My dad and I took turns during the lulls in the storm to assess the glass damage. Girlie, you go this time, he would say, and I would speed up the stairs to investigate. Our family measured the intensity of the storms by the number of windowpanes we losteleven wasnt bad; twenty-seven was our worst.

Home insurance paid for materials and labor to repair our modest house, but most summers, my parents delayed the replacement of the siding. My mother, who managed the budget, reasoned that a little money could be made if my father patched the holes and painted the clapboards. Itll just happen again next summer, she reasoned. Well wait. By doing temporary repairs, my father could create a windfall income while he was on summer vacation from teaching. He attempted the repairs atop an aluminum ladder that trembled; it made me nervous. I wondered that my mother didnt see how inexpert he was, two stories up in the air.

I acted as my dads assistant, and we talked as he worked. I get as much paint on the ground as I do on the siding, he joked as he dripped Sagebrush Green in random circles on the concrete walkway. Careful, Dad, I said each time I handed up a brush or a can of paint.

In 1959, the August I turned sixteen, the Hebgen Lake Earthquake in Yellowstone Park caused a landslide that claimed the lives of twenty-eight, some of them campers caught in their tents asleep; the earthquake sundered roads and ripped the forest floor apart. Although my hometown was one hundred and fifty miles northeast of the epicenter, my family was awakened late at night, the walls of our house in Billings shaking.