by Larry Watson
Loyalty. Always an admirable quality.
Neither says anything again until they’re out of Gladstone, heading west on a ruler-straight highway and rolling fast over land that beyond the barrow ditches is as flat as still water. Then Weboy asks, That old jalopy won’t have trouble keeping up, will it?
You’re looking often enough in the rearview mirror. You know where he is.
I guess he don’t want you to get too far out of his sight. Which I understand. Weboy pulls a White Owl cigar out of his shirt pocket. Do you mind?
Your car. You don’t need my permission.
He tears the cellophane with his teeth and teases the cigar out of its wrapper. Don’t I? You strike me as the kind of woman a man is always asking permission of. Or excusing himself to.
An expert, are you? On kinds of women?
Weboy works his jaw around a thought. I’ve been around more than a few women who want men to ask before drawing breath.
Air’s free and so are men. Work your theories elsewhere, Mr. Weboy.
Weboy clamps down hard on the cigar but leaves it unlit, though the Ford’s interior reeks of stale cigar smoke and overheated motor oil.
I’ll tell you a little tale about me and women, Weboy says. You saw my place, how tidy it is?
Yes. Very neat.
Well, that’s all me. No woman keeps house for me. But not so many years ago it didn’t look nothing like that. A regular pigsty. Or so my wife called it. She sniped away at me for years. Pick up after yourself. I’m sick of cleaning up after you. Oh, we’d go round and around. Just leave it, I’d say. Who gives a damn? I do, she’d say. Then her mother took sick, and Clara—that was my wife—was off to Idaho to take care of her. I’m leaving this house clean, Clara said, and I don’t want to find it any different when I come back. Well, she found it different all right. I tore that place apart, every room, right down to lath. Opened it up good. Nothing left but rubble. And I did it all myself. Just me, a crowbar, a claw hammer, and Mr. Jack Daniel’s. Clara came back, and the sight of the place scared the hell out of her. She saw to it I was locked up. For destroying something that belonged to me, if you can imagine. Then while I was behind bars, she cleared out. Left me with nothing but a bowl, a spoon, and a house without walls. Like men do, I thought if I changed my ways I could get her back. Got word to her that I quit drinking. That I was putting our house back together. You saw it—walls just where they’re supposed to be? Plastered and painted?
Near as I could tell.
The hell of it is, once I was finished with the house, I was finished with her. Haven’t had a drink since. And that house ain’t ever anything but neat as a pin. The outside, I don’t give a damn about. But inside—inside, it’s just the way Clara would like it. Except she’s never setting foot inside again.
So you destroyed your house out of spite and built it back up out of spite. You are either the most consistent man in the world, Mr. Weboy, or the least.
His laugh is a chest-deep rumble. He uses the unlit cigar in his mouth as a pointer, nodding toward a crossroad ahead. We’re turning up there, he says. Heading for the hills.
A row of dun-colored low hills humps up to their left, but the flatland has already given way to eruptions of rock, as though the wind had scoured away the earth’s outer flesh and exposed the bones beneath.
Instead of announcing it to me, Margaret says, why don’t you signal so George knows what’s coming?
Aye, aye, cap’n. Weboy clicks on the turn signal, and when the time comes takes the corner too fast, the Ford’s tires squealing and the car wallowing on its springs. Margaret braces hard to keep from shifting closer to Bill Weboy.
The road—cracked, buckled, crumbling blacktop painted with neither center nor shoulder stripes—rises and dips through the hills, and Weboy pushes the Ford as hard going down as going up.
Outside of Weboy’s line of sight, Margaret grips the armrest on the door so hard her fingernails bend against the metal. Tell me, Mr. Weboy, she says, when you’re not keeping your house or your gutter clean, what do you do?
Oh, a little of this and a little of that. But nothing regular. I’m on disability. Brought malaria back with me from the war, and I can’t be sure when it’ll flare up again.
How about when you quit drinking? she asks. Did you do that alone or was it with Jesus’s help?
That’s a hell of a smart-alecky thing to say.
Just that I’ve heard more than a few ex-drunks in my time. And most of them want to give the credit to someone else.
Your husband one of them?
No, she answers quickly.
I did have some help. But it didn’t come from Jesus. My sister-in-law hung in there with me when my own wife was ready to throw me to the dogs.
Good for her.
Damn right. Not many women—hell, not many men or women—have what it takes to grab a man by the collar and tell him right to his face he’s got to straighten himself out.
Your sister-in-law . . .
Donnie’s mother. Blanche.
Your brother—?
Weboy turns onto a gravel road, and his speed raises a cloud behind them. Even with the windows closed, Margaret tastes dust.
Dead since before the war, Weboy says.
I’m sorry to hear that. He couldn’t have been that old.
Got himself a little bitty cut on his hand when he was mending fence. Infection set in and he was dead just inside a month. Couldn’t anybody hardly believe it. Since then it’s Blanche holds the Weboy family together. Like I wouldn’t be surprised same as you do with yours.
Not much work there. Only George and me in the house.
Only him to ride herd on? Hell, I’d quake too if I had that job.
Mr. Weboy. You’ve insulted my husband, me, and even our car, if I’m not mistaken. Why you are so determined to roil the waters is beyond me, but I’ve had about enough.
I’ve noticed you’ve got this talent . . . you can call a man mister and it sounds worse than if you’d called him a sonofabitch. He reaches his hand into the space between them, makes a tent of his fingers, and presses and kneads the cushioned seat as if it were cramped muscle.
You might not believe it, says Margaret, but I’ve been holding my tongue, or trying to. But by God you make it hard. Since you brought up my quaking, she says, I’ll say a word or two about it. Doctors didn’t know what caused it, but I have my own theory. I believe it might have started back when I used to keep my jaw clamped tight to stop myself from speaking my mind. The pressure would build up and when the words couldn’t get out the quivering would start. So I resolved, just let them go. And that’s generally what I do. If I’ve got something to say, I say it. But I’ve gone back on that with you, Mr. Weboy. I’ve been minding my manners with you. Now, we came all this way to see our grandson, nothing but, and while we appreciate the help you’ve offered, it doesn’t give you reason to be rude.
Bill Weboy jerks his thumb over his shoulder. Looks like your husband might be dropping back. I guess the dust got a little thick.
You could slow down.
Then it’d be longer until you see your grandson. Whom I’ve met, by the way. Fine-looking boy. And his mother is a good-looking woman. Donnie never asked me for a word of advice in his life, but if he had I might’ve told him to do exactly like he’s done—marry yourself a widow, Donnie. You’ll be getting yourself a grateful woman.
This is more of your wisdom of the female species, I gather.
Once you get to know me a little better you’ll find I’ve got opinions on damn near everything.
I already know you well enough to know that.
Weboy runs his fingers slowly through his hair, the gesture of a man who’s been told more than once what a handsome head of hair he has. You’ll have to excuse me, Mrs. Blackledge. I can’t help myself. People in this part of the world can be so damn tight-lipped I’ve just got to agitate a little to make sure I’m talking to someone with warm blood in their veins.
I assure you, mine is red and warm. You don’t have to slice me open to look for yourself. Now, how much farther do we have to travel?
You mean how much more of me do you have to put up with? We’ve got three more turns to make, but we’ll make them inside half a mile. See why I told you you’d need a guide? And here comes your husband now, staying right with us.
...
Stones clatter against the Hudson’s undercarriage, and the car shudders over the road’s washboard surfaces. Going into a bend, the wheels slide in soft dirt. But no matter how hard Bill Weboy pushes his Ford, George keeps pace, and through every hard climb, steep descent, and sudden curve he uses Margaret’s silhouette to steer by.
18.
NO ONE WHO KNOWS BLANCHE WEBOY ONLY BY WAY OF words will be wholly prepared for the sight of the woman. She looks like nobody’s idea of a ranch wife or a family matriarch. She is neither stout nor homely. She possesses neither gray hair nor broad shoulders. The woman who stands on the porch waving to the cars bumping across her yard is not much taller than a child, though she has a woman’s cinched-in curves. Her long untamed hair is as black as Alton Dragswolf’s, her pale cheeks are heavily rouged, and her wide slash of a mouth is brightly lined in scarlet. Her attire matches her complexion and her hair color—white blouse and black slacks. By the time George cuts the Hudson’s engine, Blanche Weboy has stepped off the porch and is strolling out to greet her guests.
The house’s two stories are an incongruity. With all this empty prairie on every side, why build up instead of out? But up it went, and maybe fifty years ago from the look of its weathered wood and approximation of Victorian design. The roof droops where a porch post is missing. An upstairs window is cracked. The screens are off the windows but the storm windows are leaning in stacks against the house. The mingled fetid and chemical odors of the outhouse and its quicklime travel too easily on the evening air.
Young Mr. Tucker was right: if anyone calls this place a ranch it’s a term left over from a past life. Automotive horsepower looks to be the occupation now. Cars and trucks, their rusted hulls, bald tires, and grease-blackened parts, litter the grounds. These are more plentiful near the open door of the barn, as if they had either spilled out from that sagging, decaying building or were waiting to get in. From the low branch of a towering elm, the only tree on the property, an engine block hangs from a chain, and an old Ford truck sits underneath, its hood yawning open, apparently waiting for the engine to be lowered into it.
Blanche Weboy stops, puts her hands on her hips, and calls out, I hope you like pork chops!
As if she were speaking to an old friend, Margaret says, My mouth is watering already.
Bill Weboy makes the introductions, hands are shaken, and for a few moments the new acquaintances mill about and take turns looking up at the lowering sky and making comments about the weather—the human equivalent of dogs circling and sniffing about each other’s hindquarters. From a nearby fence post a meadowlark makes its piping cry, and the pigeons in the barn coo an answer. Time to go in for supper.
They enter the house through the back door, and without apology Blanche Weboy leads them through a covered back porch so cluttered they have to step over and around shotguns, rifles, boxes of bullets and shells, snow shovels, coats, boots, bins of coal, cans of kerosene, haphazard piles of wood, stacks of newspapers and magazines, jars of nails, screws, nuts and bolts, and sagging cardboard boxes whose contents are kept from view. From behind a box or under a log comes a scurrying sound that could be a mouse frightened by all these footsteps.
In the large kitchen the guests seat themselves at a long wooden table on which the dishes and silverware have been stacked but not yet distributed to individual settings. Evening is coming on, and the only defense against its encroachment is a kerosene lamp on the kitchen wall. The kerosene burns with an oily odor, and its light wavers and struggles through a sooty chimney that has not been recently cleaned.
We got strung for electricity a couple years ago, Blanche says, turning up the lamp’s wick, but I’ll be damned if I’ll pay their prices. Now, she says, who can I interest in a glass of elderberry wine?
They all refuse, though Bill Weboy finally lights the cigar that he’s been chewing on.
Well, I don’t mind drinking alone, Blanche says, and pours herself a generous glass. She pulls out a chair and sits down next to Bill. Then she lights a cigarette and without prompting proceeds with a history of herself and her family. Blanche Weboy was born Blanche Gannon, and her ancestors, originally from Illinois, filed homestead claims northeast of Gladstone before there was a Gladstone. The early days were hard. Blanche, one of eight children, lost an older sister to pneumonia, and a younger brother drowned in a neighbor’s cistern. Another brother was thrown from a horse, broke his back, and was confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his days. An uncle froze to death when he was caught in a blizzard on the way back from town. Her father was bitten by a rattlesnake and almost died. Yes, a hard life, and not for everyone. Blanche’s brothers and sisters lit out as soon as they could and never looked back. Only Blanche stayed, and now her children are the fourth generation of Gannons and Weboys born and living on Montana soil. When she says she hopes to count Jimmy Blackledge as a transplanted fifth, Margaret grows pale but holds her tongue. But who knows, Blanche continues, what Donnie and Lorna aim to do—you can’t plan young people’s lives for them, can you? But Blanche won’t be surprised if they decide to stay in Montana. When she first met Henry Weboy—she was working at a dry-goods store in Gladstone at the time—he couldn’t stop talking about heading for California, but Blanche figured she had more than a little to do with his decision to stay. And now Henry is buried in the same country cemetery as her folks and his.
While Blanche talks, Bill Weboy clarifies the relationship between himself and his sister-in-law. That might not be his intention, but the way he stretches out his arm along her chairback and rubs her shoulder first and then her neck and proceeds to graze his finger inside her collar and along her clavicle—all done so familiarly that Blanche neither leans into nor shrinks away from his touch—makes clear that she is to him more than just the woman who married his brother. Margaret Blackledge gives her undivided attention to Blanche Weboy, but George tightly interlocks his fingers on the tabletop and, throughout the chronicle of the Weboy clan, stares down into the dark structure his hands have created.
Blanche stubs out her cigarette and with one long swallow finishes her drink. Bill Weboy touches the corner of her lips as if he’s blotting wine.
But you came here to eat, Blanche says, not to hear me yak. Bill, why don’t you go call the boys in for supper.
Aye, aye, cap’n, he says, stands, and leaves to carry out her bidding.
To the Blackledges Blanche says, But I suppose you could tell a story not a hell of a lot different from mine. You got a ranch over in North Dakota, I understand?
Not anymore, Margaret says. We sold a few years back and moved into town.
Sure, sure. I knew that. Of course. Well, look around here. I’ve sold off all the livestock. We can do better selling car parts and scrap metal than running cattle or horses.
Back in the thirties, George says, we gathered up bones out on the prairie and sold them.
Anything to make a buck back then. Right?
Almost, replies George.
Blanche leans toward Margaret and whispers, How long have you had the palsy?
You can say it out loud, says Margaret. She puts her hand on George’s arm. He knows about my condition. And it’s not palsy. It’s—oh hell, doctors don’t know what it is.
Well, you know what, honey? You’re too damn young to be trembling like that.
It seems to bother other people more than it does me. I can still thread a needle.
Bill Weboy returns to the kitchen. Trailing behind him are two somber, hulking young men in oil-spotted and grease-streaked clothing.
There they are, says Blanche Weboy. Meet the boys. The
tall one’s Elton and the other’s Marvin. Marvin’s older by ten months, which should tell you something about my ex-husband. Say hello to our guests.
They each say hello in curiously soft, high-pitched voices.
That’s about the most you’ll hear out of them all evening, Bill Weboy says. They’re the strong, silent type.
Have we got any beer? Elton asks.
You know we do, his mother answers. But first you go wash up and change out of those clothes. I don’t want our company to be sitting down to eat and smelling motor oil instead of my cooking.
The young men tramp out of the kitchen. Their distinguishing feature, aside from their bulk, is dark curly hair that grows low on their foreheads and close to their skulls like sheep’s wool.
How’s that Hudson running? Bill Weboy asks. I bet those boys would be willing to take a look under the hood for you. Tap a little here, tighten a screw there, they could probably get you a few more horses.
George Blackledge ignores this question and instead slowly stands and asks, Where’s the boy? Where’s Jimmy?
Blanche leans back and looks at him a long moment. Why, he’s not here. He’s with his daddy.
Margaret can’t hold back. His father—!
George quiets her with nothing more than a hand raised a few inches from the tabletop. We came here to see our grandson. On George’s cheeks white spots show as if, with anger, the skin had tightened and become thin enough for bone to show through.
Blanche laughs and looks to her brother-in-law. You mean they didn’t come here to eat my pork chops?
As if following the newly-established convention that no one will be addressed directly, Bill Weboy speaks to Margaret. If you can calm that husband of yours, we can enjoy the evening. And you can still see your grandson.
When night comes on in a room lit by kerosene, any flicker of the flame can give the sense that darkness is about to triumph. George sits back down and says, If you brought us out here for the sake of a joke . . .
Blanche Weboy’s wide smile remains, but her eyes narrow warily. Your grandson’s with my Donnie, she says matter-of-factly. He took Jimmy along to go pick up the boy’s mother.