“Brr! It’s cold out there!” Kent said, holding the door open to let Tony come in. The window above the sink rapidly steamed over with the rush of cold air that swept through the room. As Kent took off his cap and hung it up, she saw Tony look at Phoebe. Surprise crossed his face, then something that must have been embarrassment, followed by a quick side glance at Kent, who didn’t seem to have noticed anything. “I gotta put on a clean shirt and follow the liners,” Kent said. “I’ll have to eat when I get back, or in town.” Tony started to take off his cap and jacket.
“Are you going to stay? Or go with Kent?” Selena asked.
“Oh,” he said, turning back to her, “I guess I’d better stay. I’ve got quite a bit to do today.” He didn’t meet her eyes. Kent had brushed past them and was taking the stairs two at a time. “How you doing, Phoebe?” Tony asked, pulling out a chair and sitting down.
“She’s fine,” Selena said. “Aren’t you?”
Phoebe turned slowly from the sink and looked directly at Tony, her eyes seeking and meeting his. He looked back at her steadily, without flinching. After a second, she said, “I’m glad you’re here,” and then quietly left the room to go upstairs. Kent came back down again, still buttoning his clean shirt and reaching for his jacket and his good hat.
Sorry, I gotta run,” he said to Tony. “I’ll drop over tonight, if you’re there,”
“Sure,” Tony said. “Maybe I’ll see you at the calf sale in the morning.” Kent put his hat on and hurried out. In a second they could hear the truck start and then roll out of the yard.
“The boys won’t be here for another half hour or so,” Selena said. The pots on the stove had begun to hiss softly. She sat down at the table in Kent’s place.
“What brings you here?” she asked.
“Oh, business,” he said.
“Have you got a buyer for the farm?”
“No,” he said, “no buyer.” He sighed, then said, “I decided not to sell.”
Selena was stunned by this, couldn’t even think what to say. As if remembering something, Tony said, suddenly, “What happened … with Phoebe?” She was startled again and he said, quickly, “I suppose it’s Brian’s?”
“He ran out on her,” she said. Tony stared at her, his cheeks growing red.
“Where is he?”
“Oklahoma,” she replied. “He sent his mother a postcard.”
“I could go after him,” he offered suddenly. “I’m not too busy right now.” Selena heard a touch of bitterness in his voice and her dread grew. The middle of the week, no Diane, no kids.
“No,” she said, almost absent-mindedly. “Phoebe won’t marry him anyway.”
“Why not?” he asked, surprised. “Too much pride, after he ran out?” Selena hesitated.
“He forced her, she says,” Selena said it slowly. Tony was after all, a man. He stared at her, puzzled, then something crept into his eyes, and the muscles of his face tensed. He swallowed, and she could see in the way his eyes shifted to the clock that he was trying to understand this. Selena found herself embarrassed. She had never spoken about such things with any man but Kent.
“How did Kent take it?” Tony asked.
“Not very well.” She was surprised to find tears still so close. “But he knew when he was licked, he didn’t even try to find Brian. But he wouldn’t let her have an abortion, either.” She threw her hands out, looking at him. “So here we are.” Tony didn’t say anything for a long time and neither did she.
At last he said, “I’m sorry to bring you more bad news.” She forgot Phoebe and raised her head to look at him, hardly daring to breathe.
“Where is she?” she whispered.
“In the city.” He took a deep breath, sat back from the table, and lifted his hands from beside the plate to place them on his lap. “She moved to an apartment last weekend. I quit my job. We’re … we’ve separated.”
Selena gasped, then thought, I knew it. I knew it all along.
“How will she manage without you,” she said, not even asking a question. The expression on his face was puzzled, faintly surprised. He leaned forward and rested his elbows on the table.
“I couldn’t stand it, Selena,” he said, and she was surprised to hear him say her name. “When I thought of all the rest of my working years like that. I couldn’t stand it. And she wouldn’t come back with me.”
Something has happened here. Something big. It feels like I’ve lost the bones that kept my brains packed tight inside my head. It feels like the world has changed, or that without those bones that made my head a prison, I’m freed to walk out in the world—this terrifying, wonderful world—for the first time in my life. It feels like I’m walking out in it even when my body is motionless, even when I’m in bed at night, or sitting in the classroom, or feeding the kids breakfast.
“She wrote to me,” Selena said. “Her letter scared me.” Tony went on talking as if she hadn’t said anything.
“She changed to a day job. She’s working as a clerk in a record store now and still taking classes at night. I thought she might drop them when she found out how hard it would be to work and run the house and everything, but no. Cathy is in daycare and Tammy’s in school and then she goes to our neighbour’s till one of us gets home from work.”
“What can she be thinking of?” Selena cried, clasping her hands against her chest. “You’re a good husband! You love the kids! You love her!”
“Take it easy, Selena Tony said, alarmed.
“But to break up your home just to sell records! I’m sorry, Tony. I’m so sorry.” She had begun to cry. She lifted one hand and placed it over her eyes, resting her elbow on the table by her plate.
“It isn’t your fault,” Tony said, surprised. “You did your best for her. It’s got nothing to do with you. She’s grown-up.” He pushed his plate back angrily. “Something just got into her. I don’t know what.”
How can I tell you about this. How can I tell you that I see my life now like a burgeoning bush, that’s what it’s like. For the first time in my life I see that life is like a growing plant, it just gets bigger and bushier, it blossoms, Selena, if you let it, and there’s no end to its richness and its beauty … or maybe I’m talking about something else. Maybe I’m talking about the human soul let out into the open …
“I’ll go to her,” Selena said, putting her hand down. “I’ll talk to her.”
“No,” Tony said, gently. “It’s no use, believe me, Selena, it’s no use.”
“But the kids …” Selena began. “I’ll do whatever I can,” Tony said, his voice harsh, then more tenderly, “whatever she’ll let me do.”
I see now that we raise our children the wrong way, the girl children especially. We mother them too much, we try to protect them too much and in the end all we do is make them afraid of the world. We teach them to be slaves, Selena. That’s what we do. I won’t let that happen to my daughters. My daughters will grow up strong and fearless, not like you and me.
“Is she having a breakdown?” Selena asked. “Do you think she’s maybe having a breakdown? Is that what’s wrong?” Tony shrugged.
“The funny thing is,” he said, “it seems to me that she’s getting stronger, not weaker. She’s sort of focused, like she’s never been before. You know how she was always tense and reckless, bouncing around from one thing to another, never satisfied.” He stared at the kitchen window, watching the small, hard flakes of snow whip past it. They were bigger now than they had been when she came inside, and they were coming down more thickly. It was beginning to look like the first blizzard of the season.
It seemed now to Selena, watching the wind-driven snow whirl past the window, that all the light was dying, that the snow would come and bury them all. Phoebe, pregnant, silent, piercing them each with that burning look of hers, as if the old Phoebe had died or gone away forever; Diane gone mad; the little girls sentenced to suffering because they were too young to speak; her own sons turning away from her as they grew up
, as if she were the enemy.
“Hey,” Tony said, touching her arm and then withdrawing his hand. “You take things too hard, Selena. I came to tell you—I had to do that—but it’s not the end of the world. I’ll visit them often. I’ll bring the kids here whenever she’ll let me. I’ll keep a close eye on things.”
Selena broke her gaze away from the snow whirling past the window. How handsome he is, she thought. How kind. A really kind man. No wonder Diane fell so hard in love with him. I could love him myself … and stopped herself, shocked. Since she had married Kent she had never looked at another man in that way. It hadn’t even occurred to her that she might do that. Why would she want to? Tony looked steadily back at her and it was all she could do to stop herself from putting one hand gently on each side of his face, leaning forward slowly, putting her mouth on his … she pushed herself back against her chair, reached out and put her hand on his arm. “I’m so sorry,” she said. They sat like that for a moment, before he pulled his arm away and patted her hand.
“I’ve got to go and open the old house,” he said. “Get some heat on in it so I don’t freeze to death tonight.” He got up slowly, pushing his chair in to the table carefully.
“But, why don’t you just stay there with her? Look after the kids? There’s no farming to be done now, anyway.” He was standing with his back to her, reaching for his jacket, putting it on. She could hardly hear his answer.
“Because she doesn’t want me there. She doesn’t want to be married.” This, too, felt like a blow.
“But … you love her …” she cried again. He had turned toward her and pulled up the zipper on his jacket so rapidly that the hissing sound was louder than the pots on the stove.
“And she loves me,” he said, and went outside into the cold and the snow, shutting the door quietly, but firmly, behind him.
Although I know it doesn’t sound like it, I think of you often, every day, in fact. I think of how you and Phoebe and Rhea and me, and Tamara and Catherine are the women of our family. I think about our lives. How you have chosen to go on in the old way, leading a life not much different than the one our ancestors led, all the way back to primitive people—raising children, looking after the food, and the needs of your man. How Phoebe will do the same. It doesn’t seem wrong to me, either, just—incomplete, I guess, with the world so large and full, and paradoxical. I don’t understand it.
Selena sat there, staring at the clean dishes on the table. She remembered now what she had deliberately forgotten. How when she had been waiting in the truck, before she fell asleep, she had been listening to the cows standing around the corrals in clusters, bawling their loss into the driving wind. After a while it seemed to her that she could hear one cow’s voice over the others. The cow wailed again, a long, drawn-out cry. She had heard the anguish in its voice, as if it were a human voice, a human mother crying for its lost, dead child, and for the first time in all her years on the ranch, all the years that she had been listening to the animals, she had heard the sound. Horrified, she had raised her hands and covered her ears.
THE WINTER SOLSTICE
They set out at first light when there were still long blue shadows across the glistening, crusted snow and the distant hills were purple with shadows, the sky streaked with grey-mauve and a dull, sad pink. Selena drove the four-wheel drive loaded with square hay bales, while ahead of her, Mark, Kent and Jason each sat on horseback, trotting through the frost-filled, sparkling air.
Every year they walked the same tightrope—let the cattle graze as long as possible in the fall pasture in order to save as much as they could on their never adequate feed supply, but get them home to shelter before the winter storms would make it impossible to get feed to them. That critical moment had come; the snow cover was too deep for grazing, the grass was all gone anyway, and one more storm would prevent them from reaching them to bring them home. Ten below or not, they had no choice now but to start home with them in this lull between storms, before they starved or froze.
Ever since Kent had been granted a government lease on this section of grazing land, maybe fifteen years before, Selena had driven the truck when they trailed the cattle home. Every winter since Phoebe was born until Jason was seven or eight, she had had at least one child riding in the cab with her, and for a couple of years, she had had all three of them. The worst had been those years when Phoebe was five and six, too young to ride a horse that distance, Mark was two and three, and Jason an infant, and she had had to change diapers on two of them. They had climbed all over the cab, they had fought, and cried and slept and been sick, and begged to get out to play in the snow. She had driven like that through blizzards where she could barely see the hood of the truck and Kent had had to ride ahead of her to show her the way, through mud once, and more often, through the long, bright winter days when the snow-covered pastures and fields seemed to roll out forever, gleaming into dreams. It had not occurred to either of them to leave the children behind with a relative or a neighbour. This was the way things were done, they were a family, the ranch was a family ranch, the children included. If it was hard for Selena, it didn’t occur to her to complain or to refuse. This was what it meant to be a rancher’s wife, this was her lot. And one by one her children had gotten old enough to ride with their father, and had left her. She found she missed having someone riding beside her in the cab.
The terrain they were travelling through was a region of low, sloping hills, monotonously repeating themselves over and over again, some a little higher, some a little lower, with frequent rough, dry slough bottoms in the basins between them. There were no landmarks, no way to tell where you were except from a hilltop where black dots in the distance marked somebody’s farm, or a faint fenceline could be used for orientation. And the sun. There was always the sun to keep them moving in roughly the right direction.
Nobody lived out here. For thirty miles west of the ranchhouse there was only mile after mile of grazing land, native grass or seeded grass, all of it belonging to the government, some leased out to individual ranchers, most of it forming a community grazing pasture. It would be easy to get lost out here, hard to find help, impossible to find shelter.
Occasionally Kent would turn in his saddle and point to a spot in the snow. She would drive the truck there, avoiding whatever he had seen that she couldn’t see through the windshield—a snow-filled burnout maybe, or a rock hidden in the snow. She watched him slowly disappear from view down an incline till even his head was below her line of sight, and where he had been was only a grey melting-together of slope and hill. Jason followed him, and then Mark, till she was alone in the snow, inching forward, lurching over bumps, dipping into hollows and grinding slowly out again. She tried to follow the tracks of their horses, but the snow-covered earth blended into the grey, sunless sky making them hard to see. In a moment, having mistaken a shadow for their tracks, she found herself in deep snow, the truck roaring as she gassed it, but not pulling itself forward.
How many times over the years had this happened? Still, she couldn’t quite control her panic. She pulled off her mitts, throwing them on the seat beside her, and using both hands and all her strength, managed to shift into reverse. She touched the gas gently, working the clutch, and the truck moved slowly backward a few inches before the wheels began to spin. She pressed a little harder on the gas, hoping it would take only a little more power to get her out, but no, she was only digging herself in deeper. She eased up on the gas, shifted into neutral, closed her eyes, took a deep breath then opened them again.
She would try rocking. If she got stuck too deeply, one of the boys or Kent would have to ride all the way back home for a tractor to pull her out. That would mean a delay of a couple of hours and Kent would be furious, although as usual, he wouldn’t say much. She had to get herself out.
She put in the clutch again, feeding a little gas, and the truck rolled forward a couple of inches. Quickly she let it out, and the truck rolled back. Then she put it in again and
gassed it so that it rolled forward. She repeated this several times, till, with rocking back and forth, it began to gain momentum, and at the right moment, rolling backward in reverse, she gassed it, and it gathered enough traction and power to roll right out of the depression it was stuck in.
Breathing deeply, working hard in her heavy clothes—the truck had neither power steering nor power brakes—she shifted back into low, cranked the steering wheel around, and moved forward to the right of where she had just been stuck, into the horses’ trail.
Kent was riding uphill toward her as she pulled over the crest of the hill and started down. When he saw her coming, he turned his horse back again in the direction he had been going. Triumphant, but careful not to show it, although nobody was there to see, she inched her way down the slope. The riders moved on, often cutting cross-country where she couldn’t follow in the truck, so that she had to loop around, finding her own way, to catch up with them.
Surprisingly, after such a dry summer, there had been an unusual amount of snow. She had made this trip many times when there was only the thinnest covering, barely enough, in fact, to provide moisture for the cows once the waterholes froze over, and no cover for the rabbits and other small animals. But this year it had begun to snow in November and had snowed day after day through the next five or six weeks, till now the banks were often knee-deep on the level and much deeper in the hollows. If a wind hadn’t come up a few days before and swept away quite a bit of the snow, it would have been touch-and-go just to make it the fifteen miles out to the cattle.
Selena drove on, finding her way from experience, or sometimes with Kent’s help, moving deeper and deeper into the hills. Sometimes she forgot where she was and what she was doing, the outer part of her mind watching the terrain and handling the truck, while the rest of her mind retreated into an inner world where she moved through the days of her life and the lives of her children.
Luna Page 20