work and privation, both rough-mannered, rough-spoken, inured to the stoic
life.’ This description of two teenage boys, Ennis Del Mar and Jack Twist, would
lead us to believe and imagine many things about the couple, but never that
they could become a couple. Nevertheless, that is what happens in Annie
Proulx’s novella named after the sheep-pasture where they first met, Brokeback
Mountain. It was first published as a long short-story in several magazines
before it became part of the collection ‘Close Range: Wyoming Stories’.
Ennis and Jack meet in 1963, it will be Ennis’ first summer up at Brokeback, and
Jack’s second; camp herder and camp tender for the same sheep operation.
One always in the field, the other at camp; they meet only for meals whipped
out of a can. Both speak little and act rough. One night, drunk after dinner,
Ennis yells “Too late to go out to them damn sheep.” They sleep together in
Jack’s tent and begin something that will last all summer; a relationship based
mainly on rough physical love. Jack started it; bringing Ennis’ hand to his erect
cock in the dark of his tent. Ennis would not have anything of it; instead he
hauls Jack onto all fours and enters him. As Proulx aptly puts it: “Nothing he’d
done before but no instruction manual needed.”
When the sheep season is over they go their separate ways. Ennis stays in
Wyoming, marries his fiancée Alma as planned and has two little daughters.
Jack’s off to Texas to pursue his rodeo dreams and marries Lureen whom he
meets at a rodeo and soon has a little boy. Both their lives seem to return to
‘normal’, but then, after four years, Jack is back in the area and drops Ennis a
line. Ennis thought everything between them was over and done with, since he
had treated Jack very rough, but as soon as they stand eye to eye again, they
both know just what they have missed for all these years. They embrace,
grinding their groins together and kissing each other so hard that Ennis’ mouth
starts to bleed. They are on Ennis’ veranda, and even though it is quite dark,
Alma is no fool and has seen what seems improbable but not inexplicable.
They admit that, in the years between that summer in ’63 and their next
meeting, they thought about each other a lot. Felt the absence of one another.
What did all that mean?
“Trying to figure out if I was --? I know I ain’t. (...) Never had a thought about
another guy except I sure wrang it out a hundred times thinkin about you.” They
have come to realise that how they feel about each other, but they also know
that being -- is a death sentence in a society in which the macho male reigns
supreme. “This happen a other people? What the hell do they do?” wonders
Ennis.
Jack sees things quite positively and suggests they should go and live together
on a small ranch. Ennis might like to do so, but having witnessed as a kid the
kind of fatal aggression outsiders lived out on a couple of old men who lived
together, he thinks the better of it. He prefers seeing Jack once or twice a year
for a ‘fishing or hunting trip’ and leave it at that. He wants Jack and if there is no
Jack, there is no-one else. Jack is different, wanting Ennis as much as Ennis
wants him, but if he cannot have him, better someone else than no-one. Both
men have a need for love, and could get it from one another, but the world
does not seem to want them to.
The denouement of this tale of two manly men madly in love and not being able
to be together as they would like is grim, dramatic and heartbreaking. Things
end in ‘Brokeback Mountain’ on the bleakest of bittersweet notes, and the
harrowing ending is really the only outcome for the story ‘that never was’
between Ennis and Jack.
Proulx has a way with words that leaves an indelible impression. Her dialogues
enhance each character with a distinct own voice and accent, and her
descriptive prose is dense with meaning and symbolism. In the latter, she
reminded me of the work of Kiwi modernist writer Katherine Mansfield. This
novella on the whole comes of as an austere sort of poetry-in-prose, where the
characters speak and swear and talk in no-nonsense language and nature and
men’s actions seem perfectly weaved in the story. It is poignant and it is breath-
taking and warrants more than a couple of readings to reveal all of its inner
workings, plunging depths, terribilitá and beauty.
