Ben's suicide attempt

Ben’s suicide attempt is disclosed through a conversation with Bea Harden rather than dramatized as a methodical account of an act. As he travels toward George with her, he tells a stranger how he came to his present pass: Rachel’s death, his daughter and grandson, the lost shotgun, his wounded dog, his blackened eye, and his transience. The story comes out in linear order, and Ben finds relief in speaking it aloud. His account makes the crisis inseparable from accumulated loss and from the precarious journey he is still making.

The Account to Bea

Ben does not recount every detail. He begins with Rachel’s death, then names his daughter and grandson before describing the circumstances that have left him without his shotgun and with an injured dog and blackened eye. The compressed list places the suicide crisis within a larger unraveling: bereavement, disrupted family ties, physical injury, and displacement converge in the account of how he reached this point. Telling it in sequence gives the experience a shape he has not previously given it in this conversation, and he acknowledges that speaking to Bea feels good. Her status as a stranger matters: he can disclose the story to someone outside his family, the very people he says he hoped to spare.

Bea names the subject directly as suicide and admits she could not imagine it. Ben offers a rationale centered on protecting his family from what he expects would be a burden. As they pass cultivated fields and a new orchard, he presses experimentally on his eyelid and says he did not want to put them through nine months of his illness or make them miserable. His explanation frames the plan as an attempted act of consideration, but Bea firmly disputes its premise: she says it would not be a burden and asks him to consider what his family might learn from the experience. Ben grants that the idea sounds good in principle without saying that it has persuaded him.

Later, above the Columbia River, Bea returns to the question of what changed his mind. Ben answers that it was mainly cowardice, adding that trying to shoot himself was not easy; when Bea proposes sleeping pills, he says he could not do it. Her reply turns his explanation against itself: he did not really want to die. Ben only shrugs, leaving the interpretation unconfirmed by any fuller declaration. The exchange therefore does not settle his motives so much as expose a tension between the protective reason he first gives and the inability he later admits.

The Life Preserved

Bea’s final appeal is concrete rather than abstract: she reminds Ben that he saved a baby the night before. The act does not erase his losses or prove that his reasons for living have settled into certainty, but it places him inside a life-preserving action at the very moment he is explaining why he tried to die. That contrast gives his survival an immediate human consequence. The journey also has a destination beyond the crisis: after collecting Rex from the clinic in Quincy, Ben lays the injured dog on a blanket across the backseat and whispers, “We're going home.” The line makes home a practical choice, expressed through care for Rex, even as the conversation with Bea leaves Ben’s account of his changed mind unresolved.

The Plateau as Counterpoint

As Ben and Bea travel toward George, the cultivated landscape gives way to the exposed plateau above the Columbia River. Irrigators stand in the fields, but the apparent fertility seems precarious: the boundary between cultivation and desert is sharply drawn, and the arid ground remains beneath the crops. The land’s dependence on water offers a counterpoint to Ben’s explanation of his crisis. What looks productive is not secure, and the prospect of loss remains visible even in the fields.

At the bend, Ben looks toward the Frenchman Hills as ducks pass overhead; to the south, the sage country stretches on. The broad, unsettled landscape does not resolve what he means when he says he could not go through with suicide. Instead, the conversation and the terrain leave the change in his course open-ended: Bea offers a reason to understand his survival, while Ben does not fully claim that reason for himself.

Speech and the Marked Body

Ben’s explanation is accompanied by a small physical gesture: as he speaks about the illness and the nine months he feared would burden his family, he experimentally presses on his eyelid. The blackened eye he had included in his account of how he came to this pass is thus not only part of the past he narrates; it remains present as something he can touch. That detail keeps his reasoning grounded in an injured body, even as he describes the suffering he imagined for the future. The gesture offers no verdict on his motives, but it places the act of explaining beside the bodily consequences of the journey that brought him to Bea.