Starcarbon

by Ellen Gilchrist

  At ten that night they blew out all the candles and left the windows open to the cool night air and went to sleep.

  As soon as she woke up, Olivia went out in the pasture to look for Bess. She called and called, but there was no sign of her anywhere. When she got back to the kitchen Bobby was up and her father was sitting at the dining room table pulling on his boots. Mary Lily was taking biscuits from the stove.

  “So you’re going to Montana and make me drive home all alone,” Daniel began, “that’s the plan now?”

  “I can’t find Bess,” Olivia answered. “We’ve got to look for her.”

  “You go get a horse from Baron Fork,” Bobby said. “I’ll take your dad and search the pastures. Go on. The sooner you leave, the sooner you’ll be back. The keys are in the truck. Take that.”

  Olivia ran down the stairs and Bobby and Daniel ate the biscuits and then struck out to the pasture. “She’s had that horse for sixteen years,” Bobby said. “She loves that horse so much.”

  “She used to talk about it. What does it look like?”

  “Just a big red quarter horse with a white blaze on its face and four white feet. You’ll know her. She’s the only horse on this place that I know of. Olivia and I ride back here. This is where we ride unless we go to Baron Fork. Did she tell you they want her to ride in the Futurity in Fort Worth?”

  “Nope. But she said she was going to Montana with you and let me drive home by myself. What the hell. I’ve got a lot to think about. I don’t mind. As long as you come home soon.”

  Bobby turned his head away. Not wanting to promise anything. Daniel was setting a good pace, his long legs stretching out before him. He crossed the pasture like he had been there all his life, heading in the direction of the spring. As they walked, Little Sun’s small herd of cattle began to gather and followed them at a distance. “She ought to be showing by now,” Bobby said, “unless she jumped a fence. I don’t see how she could have done that as old and heavy as she is.”

  “Keep walking. She’ll find us if she’s used to people. The Futurity? That isn’t until December, is it? How’s she going to get out of school?”

  “The prize is two hundred thousand dollars.”

  “I saw it once. Went with a gal from Arkansas. I love to watch those cow horses.”

  They had come to the top of a rise that looked down upon the spring. “If Bess got in that spring, she’s dead,” Bobby said. “Excuse me, Daniel. I’m going on ahead.” He broke into a sprint. It was three times the length of a football field and downhill and Bobby ran at a dead heat all the way. Behind him, Daniel was running too. No twenty-year-old boy who was fucking his daughter was going to beat him in a race even if he was starting to like the kid.

  Bobby could see Bess’s head before he saw her body. The neck and head, barely above water. As he drew nearer he could see her front hooves pressed against the concrete blocks on the shallow end of the cistern. Beside the horse the pygmy goat stood like a sentinel. Bobby sprinted the rest of the way and edged his way out onto a two-by-four and lay down upon it and began to pet the horse and talk to it. “Brave horse, smart horse. Too smart to drown. You getting tired, old lady? Let me think a minute. I know how you got in, that’s plain to see. But how in the hell will we get you out? You’re a good girl, a good smart horse. We’re here now. We’re going to help.”

  “Is she alive?” It was Daniel coming panting up to the other side of the cistern. “Holy shit, this is a mess. How deep’s that water?”

  “She’s barely holding her head up. I know her legs must be getting tired. How can we get this water out of here? Can we knock a hole in the wall? Can we break out one of those stones?”

  “I need a crowbar,” Daniel said. “Let me talk to her and you run get some tools.”

  “You don’t think we can knock a hole in it with a stone? A brick or a stone?”

  “The water won’t go down anyway. We’ll have to dig a trench. How far’s the nearest tractor, do you think?”

  “I don’t know, but we’ll find out. Let’s go. One of us stay here and the other go.”

  “You go. You can run faster. Goddamn cigarettes have taken my wind. I could barely run down that hill. Get up and let me take your place.” Then Bobby scrunched back down the length of the two-by-four and Daniel was just taking his place when Olivia appeared at the top of the hill, riding one of Kayo’s work horses. Little Sun was behind her in the pickup truck.

  In half an hour they had found a neighbor with a backhoe and Daniel was on top of it digging a trench to the cistern. Olivia and Bobby spelled each other lying by the horse talking to her. Once she pulled her legs down from the sides and seemed to give up but Olivia coaxed her back to strength and she placed her cut feet back on the cinder wall. “If we had an inflatable raft we could put it under her legs and help her out,” Olivia said. “Or somebody find a bucket and start bailing. Do something else. How long’s it going to take, Daddy?”

  “He can’t hear you,” Little Sun said. “But we will bail. Get those feed buckets out of the truck, Bobby. Let’s bail water.” Then for forty minutes, while Daniel moved dirt, Little Sun and Bobby bailed water. By the time Daniel had come to the edge of the cistern and was getting ready to dig into the cinder blocks, both Bobby and Little Sun were soaking wet. “Get Olivia off that board,” Daniel yelled. “I’m coming in.” He ran the backhoe into the wall and the wall broke and water came pouring out. It lowered the water level to about half what it had been and in the midst of it the old red mare stood shaking. “I need a blanket,” Olivia shouted. “Somebody get me a blanket.” Bess shook herself several times, and then, very gingerly, stepped over the broken wall and trotted slowly up into the pasture and bent over and ate some grass.

  “Let’s put her in the barn,” Daniel said, climbing down off the tractor. “She’s cut. You need to put her up and let her rest until we can get a vet here and take care of those cuts.” He walked up to the mare and began to pet her. Bobby and Olivia followed, but Little Sun stood by the broken cistern petting the pygmy goat and remembering the house he had built beside this spring and what it had been to be young and full of juice and work all day to make a woman love him.

  “She’s a brave horse,” Daniel said, rubbing Bess’s back, inspecting the line of cuts along her shins. “She’ll heal in a week. Still, we better get a vet to look at these.”

  “I learned to ride on her.” Olivia snuggled into the horse’s neck. “She loves me to ride her. We’re a team.”

  “I’ll take Kayo’s horse back,” Bobby said. “Then I’ll come back over.”

  “Wait a minute, son,” Daniel said, getting ready to face the issue. He’d been getting his words ready while he dug the trench. “How long are you planning on staying in Montana? School starts in a few weeks.”

  “We might not get to North Carolina until winter.” Olivia let go of the horse and faced him. “We may stay in Montana and work and study on our own. It won’t cost you any money. Just don’t get mad if you don’t see me for a while. I have to go and find my life, Daddy. Go see what I can do.” They were standing in a circle. Daniel with his back to the hill, wearing his old khaki shirt and a pair of handmade cotton trousers, so elegant, so endlessly kind and tall and funny and loveable and powerful and tortured and Daniel.

  Bobby stood beside Olivia, young and vulnerable, strong from the work he had done and the horses he had broken and the lack of mothering he had endured. Needy too, and uncertain how much he could break into the circle of Olivia and her father.

  Olivia faced her father, newly armed with jargon from the world of psychoanalysis, feet firmly planted on the ground, her hands on her hips.

  “We’re going up there, Daddy,” she was saying. “I don’t like to go to college. I can learn anything I want by reading it. Tom’s going to read with us and Georgia’s going to send me books. I’ll learn more studying at night than listening to some college professor who hates his job. All they do is spout their opinions. The books they teach o
ut of they either wrote themselves or some friend of theirs wrote them. I’m going to read Dante and all the Greeks and Shakespeare. Georgia said the first thing they should teach is Shakespeare since he made up half the language. Not some politically correct bullshit someone wrote down at the University of Texas. You ought to go to some college bookstore sometime and look around at what they make us read.”

  “It’s pretty boring,” Bobby added. “You can die of boredom listening to those guys.”

  “I want to make a living doing something I want to do,” Olivia went on. “Somewhere where the air is clean and there aren’t too many people and I can get up in the morning and see the mountains.”

  Daniel reached in his pocket for a cigarette, then remembered he had quit. “It’s mighty cold up there in the winter,” he said. “It’s a desolate landscape. I used to hunt up there when it was cold as hell but I wouldn’t want to spend a winter there.” He sighed. “You going to be able to take care of her, son? You going to be careful not to get her pregnant? If you want to get pregnant, get married. Come on home and we’ll have you a wedding and then you can go up there.”

  Bobby and Olivia looked at each other, then looked down and giggled. That’s good, Daniel thought, at least they can still get embarrassed. He shook his head and stuck his hands deep down into his pockets so he wouldn’t think about the missing cigarettes. He took a deep breath and waited for them to speak.

  “I’d do it today,” Bobby said. “She’s the one who’s dragging her feet. I’d change my name. I told her I would. Hand Tree, how’s that for a brand? I won’t always be penniless, Mr. Hand. It won’t take me long to start buying some land.”

  “He can live on a handful of rice,” Olivia said. “You never saw anyone save money like Bobby can.”

  “So you’re just going to forget formal education? The biggest regret of my life is not getting a college diploma. I wanted that for you and Jessie.”

  “Dad, it isn’t like it used to be. It’s just a business now. The great things to learn are right there in the library. Unless I decided to go to medical school, which I am not. Georgia says it’s the life of a slave. I might get a degree in veterinary medicine. I don’t know. All we want to do is go up there for a couple of years and finish growing up and try some things.”

  Daniel shook his head. He imagined what would have happened if he and Summer had done that. He remembered suddenly a canoe trip he took with her and how she had picked up her half of the canoe and walked so fast he could barely keep up with her. He looked at Olivia and knew he really loved her, loved her the way he loved Jessie, without question, with wonder.

  “I’ll be all right, Dad,” she was saying. “Nothing will happen to me. Look how tough and strong I am. I’m going to be all right. I really am.”

  Daniel reached out his hand and pulled her to him and hugged her to his chest, pouring out to her the kind of love he had been so famous for lavishing around when he was a little boy.

  “Go on, then,” he said. “What can I do to help you? You need to keep the car? You need anything I can give you?”

  “Just your blessing. Just keep on loving me and write us some letters.”

  Then Bobby rode Kayo’s horse and Little Sun started up the truck and Olivia and Daniel led the mare slowly back across the pasture. They walked a long time without talking.

  Olivia didn’t say, I heard you were going to a hospital and stop drinking and Daniel didn’t say, You need to marry that boy if you’re going to screw him and neither of them said what was moving in their hearts, which was, I love you more than I can say. I am sad to let you go. Will you be safe without me? Will you be there when I need you?

  “That’s a mighty nice boy,” Daniel said at last. “He’s a good man. I guess he will take care of you.”

  “I’ll take care of myself.” Olivia laughed out loud and the sadness dissolved in the August sun. “Who do you think I am, after all? Don’t you recognize your DNA?”

  When they got back to the house, Mary Lily served them iced tea and homemade cookies and Daniel called home to tell them when he was coming. He called Margaret first and left a message on her answering machine. “We’re okay here. I’ll tell you about it later. How about buying me a new tie in case we decide to have a wedding. I’ll call you back when I get on the road.”

  Then he called Spook. “Everything okay there?” he asked.

  “Helen’s pregnant.” Spook had been waiting all morning to get to tell it. He stuck his finger into page 198 of Range Dreams and said it again. “Your sister, Helen.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No, I’m not. Niall’s called three times looking for you. We got TV here, in case you forgot. We seen those storms you been having there. He tried to call the little girl’s granddaddy’s house last night but they said the phone was out.”

  “I’ll call him. This is true about Helen?”

  “Why would I make something like that up? Listen, Margaret came by a few times. I guess she can’t find you either and that guy you got to reline the tennis court showed up but I sent him home. I don’t think he was right in the head, boss. Looked like he was on dope or something to me. So when you getting home?”

  “In a day or two. Well, call the family and tell them I’m okay. We got a sick horse here. I got to get off the phone.”

  “I don’t see any point in my staying here any longer, boss. If it’s okay with you I’ll just pack on up and start moving to the country.”

  “Spook.”

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t you leave that house until I get there. And get that court fixed up. You can’t tell when somebody might want to play.”

  “What did he say?” Olivia asked. “Did they know we had a tornado?”

  “He said your aunt Helen’s pregnant.”

  “No.”

  “Oh, yes. The adventure continues, as Anna used to say.” He hugged his daughter to him. Looked across the room at Bobby. “You going to take care of her for us?” he asked. “You going to bring her back in one piece?”

  “If she’ll let me,” Bobby said. “If there is any way I can.” Then Daniel hugged his daughter close into his side and thought biblical thoughts and held and relinquished, held and relinquished.

  Later that afternoon, after the vet had come and Daniel had left, Bobby and Olivia rode into town to see what damage had been done.

  When they got to Bobby’s house, Bud Tree was standing on the porch. He was wearing a blue-and-white-checked shirt and clean blue jeans and a belt with one of his rodeo buckles. He looked younger than when he had left, thin and pale from not being constantly in the sun. As soon as he saw the truck, he began to smile. The closer they got, the wider he smiled. Inside the house was the box he was going to deliver to Pine Bluff later in the week. Because of that he was going to meet his last and truest love. He was going to have a romance that would be the envy of the gods, if there were any gods left in a world as crazy and scattered as the one that was making do in the United States of America in nineteen ninety-one.

  But he didn’t know that yet. All he knew was that his son was driving up with his girl riding shotgun in the truck and everyone was still breathing and the sun was shining and the storm had passed through.

  “There’s my dad,” Bobby was saying. “Dad’s here.”

  “We might as well do them both in one day,” Olivia answered. “He looks great, Bobby. You’d never know he’d been in jail.” She stuck her hand out the window and smiled and waved, getting ready to make yet another man love her and have a stake in keeping her alive.

  Chapter 57

  MIKE poured himself a mug of coffee and took it into his study and set it down beside the sheaf of fresh blank paper. The morning sun came in the window and laid a blade of light across the lilies from the florist. The faint fresh smell mixed with the smell of oil from the old Royal portable on which he had written poems for twenty years. A contract for a novel from an American publishing company lay in an open drawer. So
much money. More money than a poet could imagine being paid for turning life into words. Not only words, Mike knew. Visions and revisions, sparks to make fire in the reader’s brain. The only reader I want is the one with a brain like tinder. Call up an answering cry. Call up wonder, laughter, fear, pain. Evoke Dharma, son of Reason.

  “I’m leaving,” Helen called from the front room. “I’ll be back at noon.” He heard the door slam. She had said he could write it. She had said he could use it all, as long as he set it in Australia.

  Mr. Marcus Octavius Lane, Senior, got out of his automobile and began to walk across the soccer field to the timber stands where his daughter-in-law waited. He kissed her on the cheek and took the baby from her arms and sat down to wait for his oldest granddaughter to come out onto the soccer field. His daughter-in-law chattered away beside him, the baby cooed in his arms. This is what a man does with his old age, Mr. Lane assured himself. Watch the genes re-create themselves, watch for the genius to reestablish itself, hope against hope it doesn’t get lost in the careless breeding of my thoughtless careless brood.

  She came out onto a field, a stout redheaded passionate little female thing, patting her teammates on the back, rallying them around her. Annie Winchester Lane. She listened intently to something the coach was telling her, shook her head, then shrugged and bit her lip. He saw himself fifty years ago, getting ready for a game, the quick intake of breath, the muscles tightening, then letting go. The clock ticking.

  “I said, Jim is coming if he can,” his daughter-in-law repeated. “He’s had to work so late this week, so I’m glad you made it.”

  “Of course,” he answered. “Wanted to be here. Wouldn’t miss it.” Annie’s team took the field. She looked his way, saw him there, nodded. She threw her shoulders back. The game began.

  He watched her as though angels had appeared, as though angels were being dropped upon the ground by celestial helicopters.