Alma always knew that her daddy wasn't one to talk much. As a child she didn't think of it very often, or at all, really, although it did strike her as odd sometimes. She and Jenny were still very young when their parents split up and Alma didn't quite understand why. They had rarely fought – although when they did it was catastrophic. She knew there was something hidden about the whole thing, something that neither of their parents wanted to talk about. Or perhaps they simply couldn't. Some things weigh so deeply that they crush all the air out and it is impossible to say a thing about them. But as a child she did not question it, it was too far beyond her sheltered perception of the world to even begin to conceive. All she knew was that one day her father's silent presence was there and then the next it wasn't.
It would seem strange that silences could be different, but Alma learned early to distinguish between them as though they were sounds or even words. There was far too much silence in their house: her daddy's introversion, her mother's internal secrets and struggles, their parents' unspoken disaccord which, at some point, had begun to mount to feverish altitudes. By the time she was in high school, Alma could distinguish between the comfortable silence and the embarrassed one, between the silence of a full house when everyone is asleep and the silence of emptiness. Perhaps because her mother was too preoccupied dealing with whatever demons plagued her first and then rebuilding her life second that she rarely spoke to Alma and perhaps because she was simply her father's daughter, or both, but she ended up being introverted and mostly silent herself. It wasn't that she was always sad or grumpy as some people thought, she simply, for a very long time, could not gather that other people could not distinguish between silences the way she did. For all that they were sisters, Jenny was nothing like that – always the lively one. Well, Jenny took after their mother more anyway.
It was not until her last year in high school that Alma started to think about her parents more, about why her mother always had that pained look on her face whenever the past was mentioned, why they split up, why her daddy never re-married, never even dated anyone for long. She wondered why he suddenly did a one-eighty on her when she told him she was getting married. He had gotten that look on his face when he said he would be willing to risk his job to come and walk her down the aisle… She couldn't describe it but she knew it was different from all the other ones he'd ever worn. She knew it was more than him just loving her – after all, deciphering what her father never said was a skill she had learned through all the years.
She never got to asking her daddy the question that had slowly formed in her mind after that until two years later when she was expecting her first child. "Was there someone else, daddy? Is that why you and momma split up – another woman?" She had asked it with trepidation, wondering if her father would be angry.
He simply looked at her and shook his head. "No, there wasn't any other woman. It just…wasn't right for your mother and me."
Alma nodded and cradled her belly, which had begun to show profoundly in the last few weeks. She mulled this over for the next few days, twisted the words over in her head, outlined the look on her father's face. This was still the one great mystery in her life, the one silence she could never quiet figure out. But there was something, something that made her daddy retreat from the world, the same thing that had made him give up his job to see her married. She felt frustrated because it felt, on an intuitive level, like the answer was right in front of her, as if it were so obvious that she ought to know it without even asking. Asking, after all, was out of the question – despite her father's attempts to be more open and forthcoming since her marriage, he could still get riled up into a temper or a grudge by the smallest of things.
In '95, her brother-in-law said he might have a job that her father could take, something closer to them and more stable than his usual ranching gigs. So Alma left the kids with her husband and went up to see Ennis to talk about it. She knew he had gone to some mountain or something for…well, she didn't know for what, but she expected he was supposed be back by that time, so she went without calling first. In hindsight, it had been a rash idea, but something had egged her on, and she had been excited at the prospect of finally being able to have her daddy close by.
It was late by the time Alma got there and her father was drunk. It shocked her, because, for all her father's failings, drinking too much was something Ennis Del Mar did very rarely. "Daddy, what's going on?" She froze in the doorway of the trailer, her senses assaulted by the smell of alcohol. Ennis, surprised to see her, tried to straighten up, but he was too far gone by then. "Did your trip go badly?" Alma edged further into the trailer, eyes wide. By the mess of things, it looked like he had just gotten back.
Ennis didn't give her much of a coherent response: something about sheep and "so many years" and someone named Jack Twist. Alma sighed and got him into bed. She went to the closet to find a second blanket – the night was unusually cold – and stopped once she'd opened the door. On a separate hook on the door hung two shirts, one over the other. Beside them was pinned a postcard with a Mountain view. Alma fingered it thoughtfully, a strange, tingling sensation going through her body. She glanced back at her father who was nearly asleep by then, then back at the postcard and shirts. One sleeve of each shirt had blood on it. Dried blood – brown and crusty, practically faded into the fabric around the edges, obviously far older than the week or so between laundry loads.
"Daddy, who's Jack Twist?" Alma blurted, turning around sharply. "Daddy?" But Ennis was already asleep. Thoughts came into her head. Thoughts about Billy Coven back in high school who claimed to "not be the marryin' kind" and had nasty rumors of all sorts spread about him. Thoughts of the things that she sometimes heard on the news and the things the pastors had begun to preach about more and more on Sundays in church.
She shook her head, grabbed the blanket off the top shelf, and slammed the closet door shut. She didn't want to think about it. It was too strange to imagine her father as…something so different from what she had always seen when she looked at him, that she would rather not think about it at all. Besides, by the looks of it, Jack Twist had not been around for a while, so whatever his past significance, it shouldn't matter now.
She never brought the past up again – it was probably better for everyone involved.