To Ira Fielder, his sister-in-law Bronagh did it right. This assessment, however, had taken him decades to embrace, since Bronagh and her sister were night and day. Indeed, Ira was bewildered how these two could have shared the same parents.
Bronagh lived in Montana for as long as Ira knew her. First, in Broadus. Population less than 725. Next, in Conrad. Population less than three thousand. And now, in retirement, in Gallatin Gateway to be close to her only child Mac. Before Ira met her, Bronagh had lived in Nebraska. Each of Bronagh’s homes evoked, for Ira, a Capoteesque description: lonesome and out there. Godforsaken.
She was born Eliza Annette Bronagh Bumgarner, in 1949, in Billings. Ira chose to believe Bronagh had been named in homage to twenty-three-year-old Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Mountbatten, heir presumptive to the throne ofthe United Kingdom.
Nessa joined Bronagh three years later. The two sisters grew up in Powell, Wyoming, and spent weekends over the Montana border in Red Lodge--an hour or so away by car, a Studebaker Champion--at a family cabin hand-built by their grandfather who had died the night he hammered in the final nail. Their father William, a U.S. Navy lieutenant JG who had served on a Japanese submarine chaser in the Second World War, was a farm equipment franchisee. Their mother, Meghan Paige Murphy as was (who answered only to Patty), was bookkeeper for her husband’s business and a feisty Irish bear who hated to be back in small town life after believing her marriage had rescued her from all that. As if in a prayer at Mass, Patty implored her daughters not to become teenage mothers, not to become 'farmers’ wives, and 'not to settle for lives in the minors. She wanted to whet her daughters’ appetites for history, culture, and cosmopolitanism.
The parents drove Bronagh and Nessa as children on excursions to Denver, Las Vegas, and Palm Springs, where the Bumgarners stayed in hotels and motels. The sisters loved the high-rises and bustling boulevards, and--here and there, from time to time--certain of the doormen.
Bronagh was the more diligent student. Although both readers, Bronagh read Shakespeare and Nessa preferred pulp. “You read 'shallow books,' Bronagh would say.
Bronagh attended Loretto Heights College in Denver. There, when she wasn’t listening to Joni Mitchell or engaging in other activities to be expected of a teenage girl living away from home, Bronagh studied English and theatre.
Upon graduation Bronagh became a saleswoman in an electrical store and later, after several years’ apprenticeship, a fully licensed journeywoman electrician. In 1980, following a romantic interlude, Bronagh became a mother.
Ira met Bronagh on his first visit to the Bumgarner cabin. He spent most of that sojourn bonding with four-year-old Mac. Hour upon hour, swinging on the hammock between two pine trees adjacent the cabin, and in the screened back porch where they played Nintendo Snoopy Tennis. Ira reunited with Bronagh that Christmas, at the Bumgarners’ home in Palm Springs. On Christmas Eve, while the Bumgarners attended Mass, Ira played Santa Claus. He deposited crumbs of a fudge-iced brownie on top of a cash envelope he balanced for Mac on a branch of the tree.
There came a time Bronagh became a high school English teacher, a profession far better suited to her maternity than electrician. Ira would spend time in her company at least twice annually, Fourth of July or Labour Day and Christmas, and for Bumgarner family milestones or trips. Ira and Nessa’s wedding, in San Francisco, in 1990. The funeral, in both Palm Springs and Red Lodge, for William in 1993. An Alaskan cruise from Vancouver in 1996. A several-week adventure by rented car and van to England, Scotland, and Ireland in summer 1997. Mac’s high school graduation in 1998. The funeral for Patty in 2001. And Mac’s wedding in 2016. As the frequency of their interactions grew, Ira felt increasingly close to Bronagh. In the clumsy failing of his gender, Ira did not evidence this feeling.
Over the years, Ira came to believe that Bronagh’s innate skill was teaching addictions. Addiction to substances. Addiction to activities. And, like the female back-up band to Robert Palmer’s 1985 video, addiction to love.
During a visit to Loretto Heights College by Nessa, Bronagh had taught her fourteen-year-old sister how to drink coffee: “Never, never, add cream or sugar; you may not like the taste at first, but in the long run you’ll like it better black.
Bronagh hooked Ira on Carmex Classic Lip Balm in the original jar. Once enamoured with the moisturising cocoa butter, camphor, and menthol, Ira needed a twice-daily fix to soothe his lips whether they were chapped or not.
During her teaching career, Bronagh was a theatrical producer and inspired generations of students in stage performing. In addition to classics like A Midsummer Night’s Dream and
Les Misérables, Bronagh staged a panoptic array of eclectic bespoke productions: Curse of the Cobra’s Kiss, Jekyll’s Hydes, and Murder’s in the Heir.
The Bumgarner cabin was a short stroll to trout-bountiful Rock Creek. On Ira’s early visits there, Bronagh recommended River Runs Through It. For many years Ira resisted this advice because by instinct his initial response to any suggestion was 'No’. However, alone and restless one night in Austin on a business trip in the mid-nineties, Ira visited the hotel’s front desk in search of a video and rescued from a stack of mostly X-rated offerings the Robert-Redford-directed motion picture of the Maclean story. Into the wee small hours of the morning, Ira viewed the video twice.
That weekend, back home on the East Coast, Ira commenced casting lessons by an Orvis guide. The next week Ira practiced casting a piece of yellow yarn in Central Park with his son Rónin directly in front of him asleep in a stroller sheltered from the peacock blue fly line. Within a month Ira was flyfishing Connecticut’s Farmington and Salmon Rivers. Later, he graduated to rivers in New York, Montana, California, Québec, New Brunswick, England, and Ireland.
Bronagh also turned Ira into an Internet Archive junkie. The San Francisco based website provided free access to millions of digitized books, to which Ira succumbed in order to feed his appetite for short stories by dead authors like Babel, Fitzgerald, and Evelyn Waugh. And when Rónin as a PhD student began asking Ira to double-check citations on Marxian dialectics in term papers and articles submitted for publication, Internet Archive became Ira’s go-to source for out-of-print translations of Hegel, Engels, and Lenin.
Bronagh had kept her retirement plans secret from everyone other than family. The lynchpin would be moving from Conrad to the Bozeman area, which involved Bronagh’s selling her house and buying a new one when most of her teacher’s paycheck would be vanishing. Over the better part of a year Bronagh viewed about a hundred houses while devising her financing plan. She closed on her Gallatin Gateway nirvana in 2015. It became one of Ira’s favourite destinations on Earth.
Ira hated Facebook. To him, it was serpentine, a narcissistic disrobing by account holders of their personal thinking, a display of pathetic craving for social intercourse and dopamine. Facebook, to Ira’s way of thinking, reverted its account holders of a certain age to their puberty, when any encouragement or perceived slight from an imagined sexual partner was blown way out of proportion. They would post something on Facebook (sometimes a question that could have been answered by a scanty search on Google) and for the next several hours check obsessively for reactions. If they received none, or if they received fewer reactions than anticipated, or if the reactions they received were not as enthusiastic as desired a Like instead of a Love, a Love instead of a Wow, a Wow instead of a Reply they would either double down with another post or in a huff erase the initial post and self-promise to eschew the platform forever. The next day if not sooner they were back, addicted to the dopamine.
To Ira’s chagrin, Bronagh had a Facebook account. He lampooned this with a song he called “Facebook Baby"
She’s just a Facebook Baby,
Brushing up her latest post,
Receiving 'ikes’ from the most
Of Friends that she knows.
But Bronagh’s Facebook account did yield dividends. On the day of her retirement party, Bronagh received Likes from almost half her Friends. She also received this post from one of her former students:
Ms. Bronagh Bumgarner, you were my first friend in high school, my greatest educator, the magnifier to my future, and one of my favorite teachers. Thank you for making Shakespeare amazing, increasing my ability to understand underlying themes in George Orwell’s 1984, and re-igniting my love for reading and writing.
Bronagh, you see, was all-in. And the people who knew her her family, her friends, even students sensed that about her. She inspired them.
Several years later, in early summer, it was the week Prince Harry and Meghan Markle announced the birth of their daughter Lilibet,Ira and Nessa boarded a plane for the first time in more than fifteen months. Their destination, Bozeman. Other than by Facetime or by Zoom, for far too long they hadn’t seen Bronagh or Mac or Mac’s toddler.
And Mac was pregnant again, this time with a boy.
Nessa was excited to share with Bronagh the fruits of a project that Rónon had embraced with happy intensity on ancestry.com. He had traced Bumgarner lineage back more than twelve centuries, to the founder of the Holy Roman Empire. And from there it would be relatively easy to unpeel the Bumgarner generational layers another millennium to before Jesus. But Bronagh was silent and pensive in the sunshine of Nessa’s enthusiasm.
Their Montana visit was over far too fast. Ira and Nessa spent several nights at a bed-and-breakfast down the road from the cabin, which no one had entered since the onslaught of the pandemic, and they were relieved they didn’t find a bear in residence there. They were back home in San Francisco within a week.
Alone again, in the oasis of her bed in Gallatin Gateway in the wee small hours of the morning, Bronagh dreamed a dream. She was standing next to her father flyfishing the Stillwater River, a tributary of the Yellowstone, in the half-light of a cool midsummer evening. And precisely like in the dénouement to the Maclean story, all existence had faded to a being with Bronagh’s memories, and under the river’s rocks were the words.
William Rayburn Bumgarner hadn’t aged. In fact, he was young and unafraid in his grey Simms waders, waste-deep in the big water, and casting a lightly powdered size 16 caddis fly that had been hand tied for him by Saint Peter. His drift was drag free, just the way he had taught Bronagh on Rock Creek more than a half-century before. William focussed his blue eyes on the dry fly, floating along the glassy surface of the cool deep pool, and hoped that a rainbow would rise to it.
“Dad," Bronagh said, “Mac has asked me to name her baby boy."
“Well, then, you raised her right, Annie," said William. “But you realise, I hope, that’s quite a big responsibility."
“I want to give him 'your' name, Dad."
“A boy needs his own name, Annie. Give him a new one, one that means something special to you. That he can remember you by when you leave him to join me and Patty."
“Nessa visited us this week," Bronagh said. “She told me that 'Rónin' has traced our family tree all the way back to Charlemagne.
“Oh, he’s a smart boy alright, but could’ve told you that. And it’s not all that unusual; it’s a simple matter of arithmetic. He’ll also run into something called 'pedigree collapse’, where some parents of an ancestor are related to each other."
“I miss you, Dad," Bronagh said, “and I miss Mom, too. More and more with each passing day; your lives somehow seem so far away."
“We’re right here, Annie. We’re okay," William said. “And we’re both very proud of you. So very proud of the life you’ve lived."
Bronagh could not answer her father: her words became raindrops, and they blew away. And then Bronagh woke up.
She turned on the bedside lamp, and reached down to her right, into the small bottom drawer of the adjacent end table. The drawer with a solid brass skeleton key in its antique lock. There, unaccompanied by any coins or receipts or birthday cards, were a neat stack of posh paper and a Montblanc fountain pen, both gifts from Ira for her birthday a little more than a year-and-a-half before. The fountain pen was black with platinum-coated fittings, its clip inspired by the bells of Notre-Dame de Paris. Bronagh had never used the pen, not ever, but she knew it would carry in its womb vintage Sheaffer peacock blue ink.
Bronagh uncapped the pen.
And then she wrote, in an English teacher’s prim handwriting, on the top leaf of the paper, a singular name: Mitchell Rayburn
The name would be her chosen one, for her first grandson, who would catch a dragonfly inside a jar.
Art: Carnival: the Carousel by Georges Lemmen
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