Tumultus by D. W. Ulsterman

pills.  Doctors were giving him one thing and then another thing.  It was tough to keep track of what he was on after a while. 
     
    “So I got that call, Mom was…she was actually quite calm.  Said she had found my dad in the barn.  Found him dead.  He had written a short note and left it pinned on the inside of the door. 
     
    “ I’m sorry.  Just no good anymore.  Used up.  Please forgive me.
     
    “ He had taken a whole bottle of those pills and lay down to die, his head resting on his favorite saddle.  And that was that – he never woke up.   I came back home, back to help my mom  and to bury Dad.  Laid him in the ground here with my grandparents.  Mom, like I said, she was calm the day she told me, but within a few weeks after we buried Dad, she was falling apart herself.  I didn’t know how to fix that kind of broken.  It was inside her.  She blamed herself.  Said she should have tried to get Dad to some better doctors, should have not let him be so stubborn about it.  She thought she should have been more aware of just how much pain he was really in. How much the pills were getting him all mixed up in his head.”
     
    Cooper paused in his story, looking toward the kitchen at Dublin.
     
    “My wife, Arlene…she was a hell of a woman.  Smart.  Beautiful.  Didn’t mind getting her hands dirty working outside, but could clean herself up and put on a dress and look like she belonged on one of those magazine covers.  She came back with me to the ranch here and took to helping my mom.  Just like that.  No questions.  Mom fell in love with her, would joke with me that Arlene was too good for me.  Out of my league.  Like I didn’t know that already.  We were married in the Catholic Church in Juneau.  I’m not particularly religious but my mom insisted.  She was very old school that way…attending Mass, Confession, all of that.  I think a lot of it was to help remind her of my dad in a way.  His family was very Irish Catholic.
     
    “We had some real good years here, Arlene and me and my mom.  Then came the two kids and, well…life got even better.  At least for a while.  Stories about weird stuff going on in the Lower 48 were being told more and more though.  The new agreements with the United Nations, all the chaos in Canada and Mexico,  people getting thrown into those re-education centers if they said the wrong thing, or thought the wrong thing, ate the wrong foods, all the crap that kind of crept up on the country.
     
    “Arlene was talking regularly with her folks back in Washington State, trying to get them to come up here where she thought it would be better for them.  We had the room and I liked her folks well enough.  That was part of the reason for her trip.  She went and I stayed back home here to watch my mom.  She had a bad cold at the time, needed a little help taking care of herself.  Arlene said she’d just be gone a week or so.  Drove down, met with her folks.  She called me every night to say how things were going, let me say goodnight to the kids.  By then the news was blacked out…nothing was being told about what was going on in Grant County, or that encampment where a bunch of people were trying to live away from all the new government mandates.  The police state of the United States some were calling it.  It was her third night at her parents’ house when Arlene mentioned it.  Told me she saw a convoy of hundreds of military vehicles that had on a blue and white emblem that said New United Nations on it.  Drove right down the road next to her parents’ place.  Then she mentioned all the drones that were flying overhead every hour of the day, one after the other.  They didn’t make any noise but you could see them creeping across the sky. People in the area were getting nervous and so was she. 
     
    “Well, I told her to head back home.  She insisted she was going to stay just a day or two longer to convince her folks to come