The Brothers Alpine

By Will Eaton

The alpine moss held fast with white- and green- and teal-colored gnarled fists to the flanks of ancient glacial boulders as the snow beat all around them and as the wind howled and vexed the rocks to shake and stir and moan in the frigid night air.  In the midst of this storm, two men sat on their haunches at the base of one of the boulders and held tightly to one another, their exposed hands and wrists pink from cold, their thin bodies quaking.  They dared not speak.  It was an unnecessary waste of their precious energy.  

It had been snowing since daybreak, but the snowfall then had possessed a certain languor; it had fallen lazily and described perfect idle spirals in the crisp morning air.  The sky had a pink-purple tinge behind the clouds, and the world was crisp and bright and hopeful.  The pair had set out on their hike at dawn, leaving behind the minivan where they had slept beside a gravel road that wound upward toward a skier’s lodge, its windows still dark at the time the pair had begun their journey.  

The taller, older brother wore polarized sunglasses that obscured much of his face, along with a hoodie beneath a down jacket which he privately considered excessive – a compromise he had accepted at the insistence of his girlfriend, who had helped him pack.  The younger brother dressed entirely in black: gloves, boots, pants, jacket.  Only a small red-rose logo stitched onto the breast of his sweater, and barely visible beneath the folds of his coat, interrupted the clean severity of his outfit; a flare of color that stood out like blood.  The older one had risen first and read a passage from some Chinua Achebe book he had brought with him until the younger one stirred.  The older one regarded the younger with a certain hostility of manner before closing his book.  The younger one glared despondently at the soft-felted ceiling of the minivan.  They did not speak to one another as they readied their packs and set off together.  

At first, they made quick progress through the flurries, which gently dusted their eyelashes and frosted their cheeks in a fine, cold powder.  But by afternoon, the sky roiled and the clouds looked angry and dark.  The two men ate their lunch in the shadow of a gray and mottled-looking basalt boulder perched precariously along an escarpment.  The snowfall thickened.  The valley behind them was reduced to little more than a hazy gray silhouette, its contours undulating faintly in the background of the falling sea of white.  

Their packs were light.  Once their lunch was finished, nothing remained of their provisions except for a small, inconspicuous-looking gunmetal urn. 

They rose from their meal and walked on, moving in a silent, unbroken lockstep.  The older of the pair led the way, feeling it was his brotherly duty to lead his sullen compatriot deeper into the whirling winter gyre into which they ventured.  Birth had bound them together, but familiarity had undone that bond almost completely, and now the only tether between the two was one of obligation; the older one had gone off to university in the UK, far from the grim shadow of the younger one and the problems which bit at him like fleas and which remained a mystery to the older brother, for whom life had always been comparatively easy.  

The younger brother never left home. He remained in their father’s basement until the day their father, by his own unsteady hand, cut short his mortal coil and stepped into the unknowable beyond.  It was the younger brother who found him, lying on his stomach, a pool of dark blood and viscera on the laminated kitchen floor the only sign that his father was dead rather than merely asleep.  

Now the ashes of their father bumped and jostled in the older brother’s pack, its jostling muffled by the hush of snowfall.  Their father was encased in a nondescript urn provided by the crematorium, wrapped tightly in a flannel shirt that had once been their father’s, the cloth faded at the elbows, the scent of cedar, pine, and tobacco and something else – something like sweat around an old campfire – pressed into it, warm memory preserved in fiber.

Their father had wanted his ashes to be scattered in the ancient caldera of Mount Hood, a snow-studded dormant volcano in the Cascade Mountains of Oregon.  It was there that their father had first proposed to their mother, before her car accident, before her slow drift into opiates and the narrowing of her world into something fractured and broken.  So the task fell to the brothers, who were most certainly not the adventurers that their father had been.

As the older brother charged forward, the younger brother surveyed his surroundings warily.  He watched the clouds sew themselves shut above the ridge, the ribbons of blue sky fading into the now-complete firmament of white; he watched the wind pick at the snowpack and lift the loose snow at its crests in thin, furious sheets that streamed off the rocks like foam lifting from surf.  The world felt inhospitable to them, and an ominous feeling crept down the man’s arms until his fingers tingled and shook.

But the brothers moved on.

The trail, when it was visible, ran like a thin white scar along the flank of a ravine on the mountain’s southeast side, sometimes disappearing beneath a patch of thick ice and reappearing again some dozen or so paces further. The younger brother kept his eyes on the older brother’s boot prints, on the dark, wet crescents of tread they stamped into the snow, and he set his own feet in those marks, each step a dull, resounding whump.  When he lifted his gaze, he could see a patch of mountain junipers, their trunks appearing and vanishing in the swirling and snow, destroying and reinventing themselves like a conjurer’s trick in the storm.  The valley below was smeared into indistinction, and the visibility was reduced to a few yards of wavering white.  

Sometime around dusk, the trail vanished entirely.  They had been walking all day in one direction, but now there was no clear direction in which to walk.  The snow blinded their way and furiously obscured their retreat, their footfalls filled in with gritty powder as soon as their footprints had formed.  The older brother stopped and scrutinized the banked talus slope ahead.  He lifted his head and cocked it slightly, scanning the terrain for the path which had chosen to make itself invisible.  The younger brother waited behind him, breathing through his mouth straight down into his coat, his lungs raw, his breath thick with moisture that froze along the inside of his jacket and formed a cold, sticky film.

The older brother chose a direction, angling toward a cluster of basalt outcroppings that rose like the knuckles of a fist submerged in the ground.  The younger brother followed.

As the light drained from the sky, the storm briefly lessened and the younger brother caught a glimpse of the base of the mountain behind them: forest and road and protection from the elements, trembling in the distance like a desert mirage.  He imagined his father standing in this same landscape years earlier, young and bright-eyed, certain of his own place in the world.  

The older brother was imagining, too: the mountain as a vast and potent monolith, entirely indifferent to the brothers, and to the panic rising inside of him like a tide.  

The men were now all but blind, but they could feel a dark shape ahead of them; a boulder, shielding them from the worst of the wind and snow.  They huddled at its base.  

Time stretched.  It flowed, became a viscous thing, difficult to measure.  The younger brother drifted in and out of a shallow, uneasy sleep, his head pressed against the older brother’s shoulder, his thoughts breaking into fragments which dissolved and then reformed.  In one fragment he was a child again, running through a narrow alleyway on a vacation the family had taken when he was young.  In another fragment, he was in his basement, letting the weight of his loneliness oppress him while his father walked through the house, thinking who knows what.  The younger brother had reframed even the most mundane tasks his father performed in light of his death and wondered often at his father’s state of mind in the weeks preceding his suicide.  

The older brother stayed awake.  Close to morning, the clouds in one part of the sky thinned, and a few stars appeared.  Cold points of light, indistinct and distant.  The snowfall eased into a fine whisper.  The shape of the mountain’s vastness became clearer under the faint starlight: snowdrifts smooth and unbroken, tapered and jagged; the rocks black and rounded, wedged where they had been since before the dawn of man; the trees, hunched and wizened like old men, clustered together in the dark.

In that thin, quiet interval – while his younger brother muttering peacefully in a frozen sleep – the older brother unwrapped the urn.

The flannel shirt unfurled stiffly, the fabric damp and half-frozen.  The metal beneath caught the starlight in a dull, lifeless sheen.  The younger brother stirred, eyes half-opening, and watched without moving.  The older brother carefully twisted at the metal lid, until it came undone noiselessly.  A faint, dry scent wafted from the opening, something mineral; an ancient smell, of dust and decay and somber finality.

The older brother tipped the urn slightly.

A small plume of ash lifted into the air, caught instantly by the faint breeze.  It was detectable only as a grayness that shimmered for a moment before dissolving into the dark.  The older brother steadied the urn, holding it upright, then tipped it again.  Again the ash rose, delicate and weightless, content to drift in the dying breeze and ride the pale light of pre-dawn into the inky world.  Their bodies remained pressed together as they bore witness to the scattering of their father across the crude landscape of alpine night.

At last, the urn was empty.  The older brother shook it gently, coaxing out the last residue, before screwing the lid back on with numb fingers and setting the urn beside them in the snow, as if it were simply another object now, no longer sacred, no longer charged; an empty vessel in the night under the trembling stars of a palening sky.  

The brothers watched the sun rise.  Watched the world’s outlines sharpen and take on shape: the jagged rocks, the shallow drifts, the crooked juniper branches.  The storm had spent itself overnight, and all that remained was a supernatural quiet while the world and all its vestments reformed itself.  

When the light strengthened, the trail revealed itself again, a faint depression running downhill.  The older brother stood first, rising with difficulty, his knees stiff, his legs trembling.  He reached down and steadied the younger brother, and together they straightened, two thin figures stark against the wash of gray.  They began walking and did not look back.  It was a miracle that they were alive.

The world around them was cold and clean.  The snow’s surface glittered with tiny white crystals, prisms which refracted every color across a tiny swath of the landscape from a single point.  In the distance, beyond the slopes and trees, the world with which they were both familiar appeared again: roads, towns, warmth, the trappings of everyday life.  

As they moved, walking in silence, the wind lifted gently.  It tugged at their clothing and combed through the junipers.  It carried away the last faint dust that clung to them, the last traces of their father, dispersing his now-dead into the mountain air where he had once felt most alive.

The younger brother watched as the few remaining ashes mixed in the air and repelled and attracted one another like dust motes in a sunbeam.  The wind pulled them inexorably toward the peak of the mountain, like beads on invisible strings.  And it was then that the younger brother saw it: a translucent pale-blue figure rising above the rocks, emanating a wan and fragile light; a spirit coalescing around itself and drawing power from the ash which the boys had scattered in all directions.  Now the drifting particles bent on their random paths toward this figure, drawn like iron filings to this spirit which slowly rose into the sky, diffusing into the robin’s-egg blue of dawn.  The figure was gone.  

The younger brother turned to face the retreating back of his older brother and grinned to himself.  He jogged a few paces to catch up, and together, in lockstep, the two brothers walked down the mountain in silence.

Will Eaton is a 25-year-old New York-based fiction writer whose work explores themes of memory, time, and estrangement.  Drawing on a lyrical, introspective style influenced by Virginia Woolf and Cormac McCarthy, his stories often follow solitary figures moving through stark natural landscapes or moments of emotional fracture.  Eaton has written a number of novels and continues to write short fiction.