“Then Robert walks around to the holding pen, squeaks the old gate open, goes inside and next time we see him, he’s crawling up the chute, out the end and onto his horse. She snorted and backed away and he hung down around her neck to catch his other rein. When he sat up in the saddle, he had both reins plaited through the fingers of his left hand and just lifted his hand about three-sixteenths of an inch and she sat down on her hocks and backed clear across the ranch yard in a cloud of dust. Then he straightened up, threw her some slack and she stood square to the world, ready for work. Had of been O. C. his ass’d be over the granary. I rode a dun gelding I’d broke and was hopin’ Robert’d tell me what a great job I’d did, but he didn’t say nothin’.
“Up we go single file and I stay to watch Robert. His shoulders were back and he sat ramrod straight in the middle of his saddle, boots plumb home in iron oxbows, reins hangin’ soft over the side of his left hand. In the other hand he’s got a string with a knot for every mare. He turned real slow in his saddle and give my Mexican a good hard look. It wasn’t long before we were on top. When Leo loped out to the west and made a little dust, I could see Robert was gonna quit worryin’ about him. Leo made a big ride around the horses, which had wheeled up to watch him, and only began to disperse and feed as the circle he made came to seem too grand to concern them. By the time I rode back to the far side of the bench, Leo was closin’ in my direction and two miles off, them horses began to drift away. There was sixteen horses, and about ten of them was pretty uniform-looking sorrel horses that looked kin to Robert’s mount. The remainder was nothin’ but dog feed with Roman noses and big hairy feet. They’d hurt your eyes. My old man sent thousands just like them on the train to Owens Brothers in Kansas City. The good ones went to the Boer War and the Frenchmen ate the rest.
“The first part of our plan to come apart was where we’s gonna ease ’em on out of there because they plumb took off. In two jumps they was smokin’ across the flattop and our horses caught that gust off of them and liked to get out from under us. Leo had to pull his mount in some hard circles to keep him from buckin’ with him, and mine had his head in my lap to where I’d liked to broke something over it, but pretty quick I had the best of him and he’s looking straight through his bridle like a gentleman. Leo was foggin’ it about a mile off, a big cloud of dust driftin’ away like a grass fire.
“It was pretty clear there was no smart way to turn ’em down the road even if Robert had been prepared to do so, but he was nowhere in sight. So the best we could do was throw them off the slope ahead and scatter them out among those little ranches along the river, where they would just play hell with the alfalfa. Them farmers would just shoot ’em down.
“That’s where everything changed. Robert broke out of the brush on his horse way past that crack in the ground, his sorrel mare comin’ out in a flurry of sage and greasewood cracking off in the air around her. Them broncs froze at the sight of her. They could either leap that crack and fly past him, or Robert could jump the crack himself and turn ’em toward my house. It was my corrals or the alfalfa; it was that simple.
“Presently they came boilin’ back and we whooped and hollered. Leo took down his slicker and got them bunched up once more toward the trail where they did not want to go and Robert’s yellin’, ‘Drive ’em, boys!’ till they advanced his way like a bright-colored little cyclone tryin’ to break right around him. We almost lost ’em right there. Robert stretched up over his mare’s neck and she closed on that crack just burnin’ a hole in the wind, and when she reached it she soared up into the air, Robert easing back into the saddle with his stirrups pushed out in front toward the landing he hoped they would both make.”
At this, Bill stopped and went across the room to the fireplace, where he rapped the grate with a poker to make the cold ashes fall through.
“I can still see that black hole in the ground, which was really s’posed to be Robert’s grave, but that old man floating beyond its grasp, that smart old mare reaching her long beautiful legs for the far shore. Leo told me he thought she’d been in the air for an hour.
“Well, they make it. And she sits down into her stop in a cloud of dust and confounds them wild horses who was turned into lambs with their ears hangin’ ever which way. Robert leans up with both hands on the pommel, deep slack of reins hanging under the sorrel’s neck, and he takes time to count off them mares on his string. Then we resume a very orderly jog down the ranch road gazin’ over the packed, hurryin’ backs of them mares who recognized they was back in Mr. Robert Wood’s remuda and was very well behaved. You could see they liked it. They wanted to be there. It was okay.
“When they was corralled, Robert says in his singsong voice, ‘That sure is a relief. I have to be honest, I was worried they’d give us trouble.’ He rode over to where he left his bedroll. ‘Bill,’ he said, ‘I was gonna ask your Mexican to cheek this mare while I slide off, but I’m confusing her with her mother. She was bad to paw at you when you got down. And one other thing, Billy, when you ask a green horse like yours to stop and turn, you need to start his nose first and just let him pour through. You got him handlin’ like a plank.’”
Bill threw his head back and laughed. Evelyn would have joined him, but she was still thinking.
There were things about her treatment of her husband that Natalie regretted, but they did not include the endless pains she’d taken to protect him from her father and his conviction that Stuart would never go anywhere at all. It was remarkable that Sunny Jim would have settled all his hopes on Paul, who at the funeral owned the driest eye in the house, and completely pass over Stuart, who was loved by the workers at the bottling plant while Paul was loathed as a treacherous and authoritarian opportunist.
Natalie was less proud of the fact that she was so unwilling to join Stuart at the things he loved. It was just that she found him so very, very tiresome. She felt she needed to leave sticky notes for him everywhere just to keep him on course. And she regretted her fury at his remark that her father was “gone but not forgotten,” which, it’s true, was delivered in a singsong that suggested Stuart had a streak of independence. After the funeral, she tried to bend a little and agreed to sail with him for a day at Canyon Ferry, where he kept his sloop on a narrow wooden dock over green water. Miss Annie had been named for a pretty girl at the plant on whom Stuart had a harmless crush. Natalie had never been sufficiently interested to ask about the name, and Stuart liked having the secret that he thought might be expanded, perhaps to an exchange of small kindnesses, if ever he took the real Annie for a sail.
Winter was almost upon them and snatching this warm day from such a short autumn was exciting. Natalie dangled her legs over the water with her omnipresent fat paperback while Stuart prepared the boat. He sponged the rainwater out of the bilges, pulled the sail cover off the main and let the condensation evaporate; he scrubbed bird droppings from the painted canvas deck, then rinsed it down with buckets of cold, fresh lake water that ran around the coaming and out over the transom. He was eager to “take the old girl out for a gallop,” as his easygoing father used to say.
No one of his in-laws would have understood such a thought, except maybe Evelyn with her horses. He found these people rather twisted, but he was far too mild to make much of it. He presumed it to be part of the Western Way. Most of the Whitelaws failed to appreciate Stuart’s quiet self-knowledge and would have been surprised at how often his idlest daydreams featured detailed accounts of their complete humiliation. He still resented the fact that Natalie had long ago forbidden him to sing any of the sea chanties he’d so painstakingly memorized. Once the decks dried and everything was in order, Stuart said, “Shall we sail?” And without a word, Natalie turned down a corner of her potboiler, got to her feet and stretched. “This will be very pleasant,” she said fretfully.
Stuart helped her aboard, then ran his eye around the inside of the boat, making certain everything was in order, fingers reaching out to touch white oak ribs, curves of cedar.
Natalie picked a quiet spot in the cockpit so as not to be in Stuart’s way, made herself comfortable with her hands up the sleeves of an old sailing sweater. Stuart untied all the lines, coiled and stowed them in the forepeak, then walked the sloop the length of the dock, gave her a shove toward open water and jumped aboard. He let the main sheet run free while he raised the sail, putting the halyard on the winch and hoisting it tight. The boat began slowly to forge toward Confederate Gulch, a steady chugging sound against the hull as they worked their way across the vanished riverbed, whiffs of pine and barbecue, farm trucks in the distance and a dust cloud following a tractor. Stuart raised the jib, sat back in the cockpit with his hand on the tiller, looked over at his wife and said, “There.”
Natalie seemed contemplative, certainly not desperate. Clearly the death of her father was always on her mind. But Whitelaw had never been close to his girls and at the end was quite senile, interested mostly in filling the birdfeeders around the house and keeping his wife constantly in sight. Yes, said the court to suggestions of senility, but of insufficient duration: the will was binding, its various booby traps ascribable to eccentricity not mental incompetence. Seeing him pottering around in his red watch cap, his family occasionally forgot what he had done to their lives. Natalie had even exclaimed that he was “adorable,” an epithet Evelyn could not quite go along with.
From Confederate Gulch they tacked to the old brick grain silos on the west side of the lake, then east again toward the great bend north of the village of Winston, the lee rail just compressing against the swell and the rise and fall of the stem slicing forward into the water, quiet and thrilling. From time to time Natalie turned to watch the water race past. The sun was over the whole lake now, and the breeze carried the spray across the deck. Several other boats had set out, their sails vivid and white against the grain fields of the far shore. Stuart felt a lovely hum come up the rudder and through the tiller as the sloop began to sail itself. Later, he would keep going back to that picture: the sloop at its perfect angle, the flow of water along the rudder, the silver spray in the air, and Natalie taking it all in, curled up in her sweater, trying to picture how she might leave him.
A school of fish broke the surface off the bow, and they saw, beneath the hull, their small shapes hurrying away. They drew abreast of abandoned grassy hills where deer grazed in bright sun. Stuart sailed from cat’s paw to cat’s paw, working his way to an anchorage, a nice piece of work lost on Natalie, whose mind lingered on the handsome stranger in her book who had just turned up in the lives of the three young heiresses. At last the anchor was down, and the sloop swung close to the steep beach and its mantle of wild berries.
Natalie stretched and looked around as though awakening and discovering her surroundings. “Is it too early for a drink?” she asked.
“Yes, my dear, it is.”
“Stuart, you’re always looking out for me, aren’t you?” Her musing tone successfully concealed her loathing. “‘Put on your sweater. Get out of the wind. No drink till five. Try to see Dad’s good side. Be patient with your mother. . . .’” He glanced at her warily, but she really meant this.
“Those sound like club rules. I hope I’m not oppressing you.”
“Oh, not at all, it’s like being tucked in. Apart from the indication that I need help in performing these obvious things.” As a kind of internal joke, she was pretending to address all of her remarks to a cigar-store Indian.
“Nat—”
“But my worst trait—let’s go right to my worst trait—is the mistaken belief that I can influence events way more than I really can.” She could actually picture the Indian now, ruddy hand clutched around wooden cigars.
Stuart lifted a floorboard and looked down at the heads of the keel bolts. “Is this about Paul?” If the bolts pulled through neglected, rotten wood, the keel would plummet to the bottom and the force of the sail would capsize the boat, with the possibility of Natalie trailing bubbles from her lungs all the way to the bottom.
“Of course it is. I can see right away that Evelyn’s going to forgive him, and it’s just no good.”
“But you’re not Evelyn.”
“I don’t need to be. I’m the only one in this family who is consistently on to Paul. Not even you see him as he is.” This, given the liberties she still permitted Paul, gave her a special tingle.
“It’s not that, Nat. It’s just that we spend so much time thinking about him. I’m not fooled by Paul; I’m indifferent to him. You have to accept things about people you don’t like or there’d be no one to talk to.” Stuart had a bit of trouble understanding why he was delivering such a mendacious gloss on his actual dislike of Paul Crusoe. He’d have to go into that at a later date. Perhaps it was simply his instinct to hold large issues at bay while he enjoyed his small pleasures, like sailing and refinishing furniture. Besides, Natalie tired him with the acuteness of her observations. He once told her that she should be like a good skier and, instead of fighting every turn of the hill, give some time to gliding. But Natalie was not a skier and despised all figures of speech based on sport. “Have you ever actually seen a cigar-store Indian?” she inquired. He had no idea how to field this non sequitur.
It was as though this hearty, uncomplicated man (attributes Natalie associated with victims) was drawn only to her big dark eyes, her pretty, worried face, her slight figure devoid of muscle tone.
Stuart didn’t concern himself too much with the testiness of Natalie’s relations with Paul. It was his observation that often women who experienced fits of inexplicable resentment toward other men had actually been to bed with them. Paul was so extraordinarily swift to seduce or corrupt women that the whole process was rendered negligible. A friend of Stuart’s had seen Paul entering the Super 8 Motel with his cold-sober probation officer, if that could be believed, the very night of Whitelaw’s funeral. Furthermore, Evelyn had told Natalie that Paul had asked her to meet him there and she had declined. The very notion made both sisters indignant, for different reasons, but Stuart was astounded that his brother-in-law would go to such lengths to economize on a room deposit. In this, Stuart was obtuse.
The sun in the cockpit was so comfortable that what they intended to be a moment of sunbathing turned into a serious nap. The aspens in the draw that led to the lake, old stream courses that once fed a live river, were turning a yellow patchwork among the cedars and red bursts among the serviceberries, plum thickets and chokecherries. Natalie was first to awaken and was startled by the grass shore so close to them. Winter is coming, she thought. She touched Stuart to rouse him.
“We must’ve needed that,” he said as he looked first at the beach, then up the column of the mast to the windex pointing into the light breeze coming down the hills.
“What’s going to become of the bottling plant?”
“Oh, good God.” Stuart held the cap of her knee delicately between thumb and forefinger. “Let’s walk on the beach,” he said. Natalie took this suggestion in as though it contained a hidden catch.
“Will we need sunblock?”
He took out the plastic tube and gently applied sunblock to Natalie’s upturned face, then put some on his own. Natalie raised her eyes to an airliner high above them. She seemed suspicious of that too. “Where’s that thing going?”
Stuart said, “Are you hungry?”
“What’s in there?”
“Sandwiches and stuff.”
“What kind of sandwiches?”
“Are you okay?”
“I’m a little sad. But I’m fine.”
They took a walk. From the uplands, they could look back down at their boat rocking gently in the clear water, shelving steep over cold stones, the sun standing around the sleek shapes of the outlined deck. The next range of hills took them out of sight of the water, but the bowl of wild lupine, asters and phlox still surviving the late season seemed like a lake. They could sit on tussocks of bluestem and watch the wild deer grazing beyond the curve of sky. To the west were the Elkho
rn Mountains, whose foothills sheltered ancient hunting parties returning from a broad valley that was now a lake. Natalie said, “He stole the best years of my sister’s life. There are people who just use others up. Life is short, and I can’t just stand by.”
“You’re going to have to,” said Stuart, getting an odd feeling in the pit of his stomach. There was something entirely too avid about Natalie’s concern.
She caught the shortness of his reply and fell silent, looking gloomily out upon the natural world. What use was it?
Stuart began to unpack their lunch. As he looked at the meal he had made, he felt hurt. He didn’t really know why. Natalie gave him a hug, then sat back and gazed at him.
The Cadence of Grass Page 4