by Larry Watson
And that turned out to be Donnie Weboy, interjects Jack Nevelsen.
That was Donnie. So you can see how that came back on us. But it was for the boy too. He could be closer to school, when the time came.
George shakes a Lucky Strike out of his pack, scratches a match on the rough wall, and lights his own cigarette. She makes it sound all personal, he says. Our circumstances weren’t so far off from a hell of a lot of folks’. We had a run of hard years. The price of cattle kept going down. One drought year after another. I tried a little wheat farming and no sooner got started than we got hailed out.
Sheriff Nevelsen says, It’s a wonder how anyone with a small spread makes a go of it in this part of the country.
But some do, says George. When we finally sold, it felt like . . . I don’t know—
Oh, hell, says Margaret. It was time. Past time.
The cell door does not swing open or closed but slides on a steel track, and now Jack Nevelsen moves the door a few inches in one direction and then the other. How’d your boy die, if you don’t mind my asking?
George and Margaret exchange the look that so often passes between husbands and wives: Are you going to tell this or am I?
But was there ever any doubt?
Margaret Blackledge sits down on the cot before she begins. She braces her chin in her hand as if she knows that telling this story will bring more than the usual vibration to her voice.
Thrown from a horse, of all things, and this was a boy who practically grew up in the saddle. Who was happier in the company of horses than of children his own age. And who loved saddles and tack the way some boys loved their toy soldiers. James kept hoping something would change so he could come back to the ranch for good, but that hadn’t worked out. So he was driving a truck for a local fuel oil company, and he and Lorna and their little boy were living in town. But they visited often enough and on this particular day, early August it was, they’d come out for a home-cooked Sunday supper. After, while we were all sitting outside digesting our meal, James decided he’d ride the circuit he’d ridden so often over the years—out to Dollar Butte and back again. Who knows what happened out there? There was some thunder far off and maybe a lightning flash spooked his horse.
Here George interrupts to say, Not that he couldn’t stay on board a spooky horse. If there was a better hand with a horse in our part of the state, it was this woman sitting right here.
With the back of her hand Margaret shoos away the compliment. What do you do, Mr. Nevelsen, when you have bad news to deliver? George here used to bring the priest or a minister with him.
Jack Nevelsen nods his assent to this practice. I brought along the coroner a time or two. He’s an old-time doc who knows everybody and they know him.
Margaret smiles tightly and continues, Back when George was in office, folks had to know when the sheriff and a man of the cloth came up the walk, they better lock the doors and windows. Anyway. We got our news from a horse. James rode out on Honey, a barn-sour creature if there ever was one. Of course she’d come back to the herd first chance. George was the one who saw her coming and he was off the porch like a shot. We found James out by a twisty old juniper. He was lying there like he was left at the only landmark in all that empty prairie. With his neck broken. She sighs as though that tree has suddenly taken shape in her mind. He must have landed wrong. That’s all I can think. Because he sure as hell got thrown plenty over the years and he climbed back on.
Jack Nevelsen nods solemnly. How much of life is that. Right there. Trying not to land wrong.
George, who has been listening to this story as if hearing it for the first time, says softly, Tell him about Janie. The phone call.
Margaret shakes her head but proceeds with the telling. James was a twin. Did George mention that? James and Janie. Though when this happened she was already living in Minneapolis and working behind a desk. With no intention to come back to North Dakota if she could help it. But that evening she called us, she who hardly ever called. But the phone rang and it was Janie. Was everything all right with James? she wanted to know. Buy yourself a train ticket, I told her. I’ll pay you back when you get here. You’ve got a funeral to go to. Then I handed the phone to George. I couldn’t bring myself to say any more.
Sheriff Nevelsen looks to George, who wanted this part of the story told.
George says, She had to know the fact of it.
And that was your job, Jack Nevelsen says.
George draws deep on his cigarette and nods. The smoke drifts from his nostrils.
No practicing for that work, Sheriff Nevelsen says, then steps back from the jail cell and looks up and down the corridor. He walks a few steps, retrieves a coffee can from under a bench, and uses it as a makeshift ashtray to crush out his cigarette. He holds the can out to George, who puts it to the same use.
The sheriff tugs at the brim of his hat as though he’s about to step out into a stiff wind. I better get back to the house, he says. Nora can’t talk to her folks any easier than I can, but together we can manage until they go off to bed.
Thank you again for your hospitality, Margaret says.
Hospitality. All three of them laugh at that word.
Well, says Margaret. I don’t know what else you’d call it.
Sorry I couldn’t do better for you.
Margaret pats the mattress. Sheriff, I aim to sleep like a baby.
The sheriff points out the wall where the light switches for their cells are located. I’ll leave the lamp on out in the office, he says.
Then Jack Nevelsen says good night and walks away from his guests in the Mercer County Jail. Neither George nor Margaret speaks until the echo of his footsteps fades and his key turns in the lock of the outer door.
Who’s the man you thought you’d find in office here? asks Margaret.
Wesley Hayden.
Well, he’d have to have been something special to outshine Mr. Nevelsen. Folks around here have got themselves a good one.
George nods in agreement. Though we might have loaded him up with more than he wanted to hear.
I was surprised you wanted him to hear about Janie.
To this George says nothing.
It sounded even stranger, Margaret says, when I said it out loud.
And what do you suppose your Sheriff Nevelsen would think, says George, if he knew you felt like you had to bring along a .45 and a box of ammunition on this expedition to find your grandson?
I have no idea, George. But if you feel the need, you can tell him tomorrow. Right now, I’m pooped. I’d like to make good on my promise to sleep the good sleep.
8.
AND SLEEP SHE DOES, BUT GEORGE, FOR ALL THE NAPS and nights he slept in Dalton’s jail, lies awake. He chose the cell on the end, a room so narrow that when he lies on the iron cot he can reach out and touch the far wall and one of the large stone blocks that form the courthouse’s foundation. Cold radiates from the stone. The light that Sheriff Nevelsen left on in the outer office can’t find its way down the hall to where George lies. The smell of bleach and disinfectant stings his nostrils. Years of bodies have compressed the mattress into a shape that doesn’t match his own. When he shifts, the rusty springs beneath him let out an anguished groan. If his door should slide shut, he’d be locked away from Margaret, sleeping in her cell two doors down.
After more than an hour of staring into darkness that doesn’t vary whether his eyes are open or closed or whether he gazes into the future or the past, George gives up. He rises from his bed, dresses, grabs his cigarettes, and, stepping cautiously in case some forgotten obstacle might be in his way, gropes his way out of the cell and down the hall.
In addition to the disinfectant, there’s another familiar smell here. Gun oil? Across from Sheriff Nevelsen’s desk there’s a rack with a 30-30 and two shotguns, handcuffs looped over the barrel of each. A new typewriter ribbon? Carbon paper? Ah, there it is. Right next to the door. A mimeograph machine with its distinctive pungent ink and paper,
their odor the perfume of classrooms and public offices everywhere.
George steps outside, careful not to allow the outer door to lock behind him. He walks a distance away from the courthouse and the small, bug-speckled lighted sign declaring Mercer County Sheriff, as if it were trying to draw customers. The windows of the houses across the street are all dark now but one, and in that square of yellow light a shadow moves, someone for whom sleep is as hard to corner as it is for George Blackledge.
Autumn has come to northeast Montana. The vapor of one’s breath, the clarity of the stars, the smell of woodsmoke, the stones underfoot that even a full day of sunlight won’t warm—these all say there will be no more days that can be mistaken for summer. One might as well stand out here until frost whitens the ground and geese cry overhead.
George lights a cigarette and walks to the car. The condensation that will need to be scraped off by morning can at this hour be wiped away with a hand, which is what George does, right over the remnants of the block-letter B gas ration sticker, still not entirely scraped or peeled away, though six years have passed since anyone cared how much gas you used. He peers into the car’s dark interior as though he expects someone might be on the other side of the glass, watching him. He takes out his key, unlocks, and opens the door, and, squatting down, does what he was certain to do all along, never mind the delays of stargazing, sniffing the air, or smoking a cigarette. He reaches under the seat and brings out the paper bag with the bottle of bourbon. Earlier today, he got no farther from the Roundup than his car when he broke the seal and a promise that had aged longer than the bourbon itself. But the whiskey had worked none of its magic then, and when George lifts the bottle to his lips now, it’s with no more expectation than that the night’s chill will retreat a little.
He caps the bottle and slides it back under the seat, right where it rode during his years in office. The .45 that was its companion, then as today, is no longer there. George transferred it to his suitcase when he and Margaret unpacked the car for their night in the Mercer County Jail.
A train’s whistle travels easily on the night air. The tracks for the Empire Builder run through Bentrock, and the train itself stops at the station across from the Northern Pacific Hotel, not four blocks from the jail. George could leave the keys in the Hudson, and, before the sun rises and Margaret wakes, he could walk to the depot, buy his ticket, board the train, and be well on his way to Spokane, Seattle, Minot, or Minneapolis, depending on which way this train runs.
That’s what he could do.
He flips his cigarette high in the air, letting its pinwheeling sparks imitate the stars. He walks back into the jail. Its dark corridors are no easier to negotiate than before, but he finds his way to Margaret’s cell. A woman who sleeps without fear of locks, bars, or imprisonment, accidental or otherwise, she has left her door only slightly ajar.
George stands outside the cell, his hands gripping the cold steel bars. His wife’s slumbering breaths, slow-paced chuffs, bounce from one concrete wall to another.
Go back, George whispers. Go back. He aims this command squarely in the direction of her dreaming head. Go back.
9.
THE BLACKLEDGES DON’T LEAVE BENTROCK AT FIRST light, as they told Sheriff Nevelsen they intended to do. Instead they eat a leisurely breakfast of sausage, eggs, and fried potatoes at the Bison Café, chosen because from a booth in the front window they can keep watch on Frontier Saddlery right across the street.
And when someone unlocks its front door and turns the sign from Closed to Open, George and Margaret rise from their unfinished cups of coffee and cross First Avenue in the middle of the block.
Inside the saddle shop a young man who looks as though he should be in algebra class slides a drawer into an old brass National cash register. He’s unsmiling and slight, and steel-rimmed spectacles make his eyes, pale as twilight, appear even paler. His dark hair is combed tight to his skull, and his shirt is buttoned to his throat. He looks suspicious, unaccustomed as he is to early customers, especially those who have never walked through the door before.
But Margaret Blackledge’s smile can calm most creatures, no matter how skittish.
Good morning, she says.
Morning.
George inhales deeply, as if the smell of leather is more welcome to him than Montana’s open air.
When Margaret puts her wrist through the wood stirrup of an elaborately hand-tooled saddle and lifts stirrup and fender, the stiff leather creaks. That sounds like my knees when I got out of bed this morning. She lets the stirrup fall. You have beautiful saddles.
Yes, ma’am. Fellow in Miles City makes some of them. The fancy ones.
Very impressive. Wouldn’t you say, George?
A hell of a craftsman.
Margaret squints at the inked numbers of a price tag. And not bashful either.
These are one of a kind, ma’am.
Oh yes. As I said. They’re beautiful. Her smile widens. But we’re not shopping for saddles.
The young man adjusts his glasses and looks over at a wall hung with tack.
Or bridles or bits.
And now it’s apparent why all his buttons are buttoned. This is a young man too easily undone. He moves back and forth behind the counter like a horse not sure whether it wants to break from its stall or back up deeper inside it.
Would you be a Weboy too? Margaret asks.
No ma’am. But a cousin to. I’m a Tucker.
George asks, Donnie’s your cousin, then?
Margaret’s smile subsides somewhat when she looks her husband’s way. But it shines brightly again when she turns in young Mr. Tucker’s direction.
We’re relations too, of a sort, Margaret says. Donnie married our daughter-in-law. Former daughter-in-law. My, family can get complicated, can’t it? So Donnie’s step-daddy to our grandson. We were up here in this corner of the state, and I said to my husband, Let’s look in on Donnie and Lorna while we’re here. Oh, I say Donnie and Lorna, but you know—doting grandparents. It was the boy we truly wanted to see. So imagine how we felt when we were told, Oh no, you don’t want the Bentrock Weboys. Donnie’s from down around Gladstone. But I was sure, just sure, that Donnie used to talk about his days in Bentrock. Margaret waves toward the ceiling of the shop as if it were twenty feet high and gilt-painted. He even talked about the store here. His uncle’s? Do I have that right? Your dad?
None of what Margaret says is directed toward George, yet he walks away from her spell-casting anyway. He positions himself in the front window of the saddlery and surveys a gray, dusty main street not very different from Dalton’s. The Cattleman’s First National Bank, a squat brick building with two columns good for nothing but show. A five-and-dime. A Rexall’s. The Bijou, where Royal Wedding will play at seven o’clock only. Two old men with their boots up on the bumper of a late-model Oldsmobile. And that car, like every truck or car passing or parked, wears a layer of dirt the color of coffee with cream, dirt that even a day of rain wouldn’t wash away. Around Dalton the vehicles often wear orange-tinted dust coats, the residue from scoria, the volcanic rock present in the Badlands. Across the street at the Bison Café, the door opens, and when it does its glass releases a flash of sunlight like a knife blade. George returns to Margaret and young Mr. Tucker’s conversation.
Yet I was sure, Margaret is saying, that Donnie said they were relocating up around here because he could hire on as a hand on his uncle’s place.
This here’s his uncle’s place, the boy says, taking in the store and all its leather with an owner’s wave of the hand.
And we sure as hell don’t see Donnie on the premises, do we, George?
No, we don’t.
But didn’t Donnie say his people had an outfit in Montana? And work was waiting for him?
The young man says, An outfit? More like nesters, I’d say. That’d be his folks’ place down around Gladstone. Well, his ma’s place. His dad passed away some years back.
Your uncle.
> The young man nods. Not that Donnie’s ma’ll make him lift a finger if he ain’t in the mood. And I don’t know what kind of ranch work he’d be doing. They don’t raise much of anything except old junker cars and trucks. And Cain, maybe. At this, young Mr. Tucker permits himself a smile.
Margaret winces. Oh, this isn’t good. You’re not painting a picture of a very promising husband or father.
The young man shrugs as if the truth must be borne no matter how unpalatable.
And of the two, Margaret says, it’s how he’ll do as a father that concerns us most.
Sort of the reason we want to look in on them, adds George.
Not that we don’t care about Lorna. But you understand.
The boy nods as though the fitness of men and women for parenthood is a subject to which he’s devoted considerable thought.
George, who once in motion lacks his wife’s patience in some matters, asks, The Weboy place down by Gladstone—will we have any trouble finding it?
Hell, you let it be known you’re looking for Weboys, they’ll find you.
Margaret, efficient gleaner that she is, understands when there’s nothing more to be found in this field. We’ll be on our way then. She wiggles her fingers in young Mr. Tucker’s direction. And thank you for this little chat.
The Blackledges are almost across the threshold of Frontier Saddlery before the proprietor’s son comes back to his purpose. Chaps! he calls out. We got chaps too in the back. And leather to special-make a pair if you like.
But they are on their way, leaving behind so many empty saddles it looks as though every horse decided at the same instant to throw its rider.
10.
FROM THE BLUFFS EAST OF THE CITY, GLADSTONE, Montana, looks as though it could have been laid out by a shotgun blast, the commercial and residential districts a tight cluster in the center and then the buckshot dispersing in the looser pattern of outlying houses and businesses owned by those Montanans for whom space is a stronger article of faith than neighborliness. And farther from the heart of town, trees are sparser until, beyond the city limits, nothing grows higher than a tall man’s knees, except for the cottonwoods near the glittering curves of the Elk River. In the vast, arid distance are a few ranches, but viewed from this height they could as easily be abandoned as running.