The deeply sunken eyes were veiled from me, and I saw that her lashes were white and thick above the lined cheeks. Her lips pressed tightly together in silence against me.
I stood up. “Then I might as well leave as soon as Mr. Hawes can take me back to Denver. I came here only because I need to know the truth.”
Her eyes flashed open, and suddenly I was aware of the woman inside the failing body. A woman of strength and character—a woman who must have been a power in her day. Probably handsome and fascinating as well. Age made it too easy for those of us who were young to forget, and my sudden insight made me soften toward her just a little.
“No!” Her voice carried its full tone, compelling me to listen. “I brought you here to help me. First you must do that. Then you can go.”
She could almost be frightening in her intensity, and I tried to back away. “I don’t know what you want. I don’t think there’s anything I can do.”
“When I’m ready, I will tell you what to do.”
I tried to bargain with her. “If I can help you, then will you tell me what I want to know?”
“We’ll see. I’m not sure what you’re made of yet. I don’t know whether you can stand the truth.”
Neither did I, and that in itself was unsettling. But she was becoming more real to me now—not just a figure lying in a bed.
Again she issued an order. “Go to the window over there. The middle one. Look above the town on your left. There’s a clear grassy slope high up where the mountain was never honeycombed with mines. That’s where he means to build his house. They’ve already been blasting up there, clearing the rock. He will be able to look down on the whole town. Look down on me! And when it’s built—unless I stop him—he will put a bulldozer on this house and tear down every brick, clear it out of his way. He’ll destroy the valley, clear the trees from the slopes all the way to Old Desolate.”
Jasper had faded into gloom, except for a few lights. At the far end of Main Street the mountains rose sharply to the timberline, rocky-bare at their crests, with crevices of snow still showing white here and there against the evening gray. Closer in, above the town, the mines had left their debris and ghostly, tumbledown shacks were visible in silhouette. Above and beyond the tailing mounds lay a space of rocky meadow. I could barely make it out in the dimming light, but I could understand that a house built up there would command everything below it, looking down triumphantly upon Persis Morgan’s chimneys.
I returned to the bed. “What does it matter? What can it really matter, whatever he does?”
Her mouth tightened, and I saw how age had narrowed the upper lip to a thin line, while the lower had remained full and willful, conceding nothing to the years. Her jaw was still strong, and her chin hadn’t vanished into neck folds, but pointed out at the world as arrogantly as it must have when she was a young and fascinating woman.
“You are a stupid child, after all.” She turned her face away from me on the pillow.
Perhaps I had some of her own stubbornness in me. “You might as well explain,” I said. “You might tell me why you’ve brought me here and why you think there’s anything I can do. Mr. Hawes said that man—Mark Ingram—was trying to frighten you out. What did he mean by that?”
She remained silent for so long that I began to think she had dozed off. I was moving toward the door when she opened her eyes.
“Mark Ingram could be made to fear you,” she said. “After all, you’re a Morgan, and a Tremayne as well. There ought to be some loyalty in you.”
“I don’t want to be used to make anyone afraid.”
Indignation rose in her voice. “Then go away! Just go away. You’re no good to me at all.”
“I’ll leave as soon as I can,” I promised her. “But first I want to ride up the valley to Old Desolate. I want to see Domino—and then I’ll go.”
“No!” The word seemed torn from her. “I won’t have you going out there! You have no right. I can see now that it was a mistake to bring you to Jasper. You’re useless to me!”
“I agree. I’m certainly of no use to you when I’m blind and ignorant of the past. I can’t care the way you do about family and old traditions that I know nothing about. If you wanted me to be loyal, as you call it, that should have been shown me when I was a child. Why did you send me away—my mother and me?”
“How could I do anything else?” Her words carried the sound of old anguish in them. “Don’t you think I’d rather turn to anyone else in the world than you? If only there were someone who could meet my need!”
I had opened the door to escape, but she spoke again, halting me. “Why do you want to go to Domino?”
“I’m not sure,” I said. “The mountain pulls me. I want to see it before I leave. There’s something back there in my childhood that I’d like to recover.”
“You’re not to go,” she said, and closed her eyes.
I went into the hall. Caleb had waited, sitting on a Shaker bench near the stairs. He saw my face, and led me to the bench and helped me to sit down.
“Has she told you?” he asked. “Has she made you face it?”
“No. I asked her, but she wouldn’t tell me anything.”
“I knew nothing good would come of bringing you here.”
“I suppose I’ve known that all along too. But I had to come. I don’t know what she wants of me, but I can’t give her anything. Will you tell me what I need to know? Then I can leave.”
He was shaking his head, regarding me sternly. “No, certainly not. Your grandmother has asked us to say nothing to you about the past.”
Persis’ voice, strong enough when she chose to raise it, called from the bedroom. “Caleb! Are you there? Come here to me, please.”
He left me with a curt nod, and I sat on for a few minutes, trying to relax my tension, trying to shake off a reaction that seemed senseless and made me angry with myself. Why had I let that poor old dying woman devastate me like this? There was nothing I could do for her, and in some inchoate way I knew she meant danger to me. Now, with Caleb’s further refusal, I could leave in good conscience and never need to know anything more about myself. Couldn’t I?
One thing I was sure of. I couldn’t endure this repressive house for a moment longer. I rose and went downstairs, straight out the glass front door.
It was twilight now in the long shadows cast by the mountains, though Old Desolate still held its head high in a last touch of sunlight. Standing on the porch, looking out toward the narrow street that led through Jasper in the opposite direction, I found it not as long as it had seemed during our slow approach. No more than four or five blocks in all. The lights of the Timberline were bright, and I longed to go down there and look for Hillary. But it was better to work out these few hours on my own.
At least the thing I most dreaded hadn’t happened. In spite of so many uneasy moments no tension had started to spin inside me, to build pressure that could be released only in one frightening way. Not even the meeting with my grandmother had started it up again.
I walked down the steps and around the house within the compound formed by the link fence. Lights shone in windows just above me, and I could hear a clatter of dishes as a table was being set in the dining room. I wondered where Red was, and if I could find him and take him for a quick walk before dinner. It was chilly outside with the sun gone, and I had no jacket, but I would walk briskly and keep warm.
The fence stretched away in a large enclosure, as though Persis Morgan meant to have one cut through on the way up the valley. A narrow cement path circled the house, ending beside a dirt road that pointed off toward the ranch buildings, where a few lights burned.
One structure appeared to be a barn, and I could hear the mooing of a cow, the stamp of horses’ hooves. Vaguely I could recall rides when I was little. Again the flash of memory. Not alone. With a man who rode beside me on a horse much larger than my pony. Could he have been my father? But my father had died when I was only two. He was buried in Denve
r, my mother had told me. I surely wouldn’t remember him even if I could have ridden when I was so small. And yet I had always harbored fantasies about him as being loving and considerate, and always interested in me. How often I had made up stories about him to fill in that empty place in my life. I couldn’t go away until Persis had given something of him back to me.
Drawn by a wish to find Red and see the animals, I followed the road toward the barn. The building had been painted a traditional red, now faded, and its wide doors stood open on a lighted area, allowing warm, pungent barn odors to surge out upon the air. Off to the right were several other buildings—a small cabin, a garage, a long structure that was probably an old bunkhouse.
As I approached, I heard music. Someone must be playing a radio, or perhaps a record player. Then I saw the man who sat on a stool in the wide doorway, light shining behind him. He held a guitar upon his knees, and I knew this was no canned music. He was singing an old song—“My Rose of San Antone”—and I stood still to listen. When the words came softly to an end, he drifted without a break into “Somewhere in Monterrey.” These were the old lonesome songs of the West, sung in a voice that lifted to the mountains and belonged to them. Songs the rock-and-rollers had forgotten—those sentimental tunes that made something prickle at the back of my neck.
This was a feeling not unfamiliar. Over the years I had found that so much as a few bars of “Springtime in the Rockies” would start tears in my eyes, and I remembered Peter saying, “Oh, come now, Laurie! How corny can you get?”
I didn’t care. It was feeling. A yearning. I had responded to it then, and I responded to it now even more, because something in me belonged here. No matter how much my coming to Jasper had frightened me, or how firmly I’d denied any ties with my grandmother, I belonged.
The singer had slipped into the lonely sound of “Tumbleweed” when Red, who was dozing at his feet, sensed my presence and leaped up to come dashing toward me. The music stopped as Jon Maddocks set his guitar aside and stood up.
That was when I knew. This man had been the boy who held and soothed me so long ago in those moments of terrible fear. With a flood of emotion memory poured over me, only this time I knew for certain that it had been reality. For me it had been the one reality that for so long comforted and sustained me—even in a dream.
The years fell away, and I ran toward him with the joy of recognition surging through me.
“Now I know!” I cried. “Now I remember!” And it was only with last-moment restraint that I kept from flinging myself upon him in the delight of discovery. That and the fact that he stepped back from my rush in some alarm.
I tried to collect myself. “I’m sorry. It—it just hit me all at once who you are.” I tried to backtrack, to deny emotion. “It—it was good of you to take Red. I hope he won’t be too much trouble.”
With the lights behind him I couldn’t see his face clearly, but his tall silhouette had the lean, wiry look I’d noted earlier, and black curls lay close to his head, faintly exotic and foreign. Yet when he spoke, the flavor of the West in his speech seemed easy and familiar to my ear.
He ignored my outburst. Perhaps he didn’t even remember. “We’re already friends, Red and me. I get along with most animals.”
“I wish you hadn’t stopped singing.” I felt wistful about that, and ashamed of my behavior.
“I sing for myself, not to entertain anybody.”
How touchy he was. How far removed from that kind young boy I remembered.
“I thought I’d take Red for a quick run before I go in for dinner,” I told him.
“Better not in the dark. The ground’s pretty rough since we don’t run to manicured lawns.” The words had a curt sound to them, and I sensed the same antagonism that I’d felt in him earlier. Why he wore a chip on his shoulder toward me I didn’t know, but it was plainly there, and if I had remembered him as a friend, he certainly wasn’t reciprocating.
I agreed without rancor, however. “All right. Then it can wait until morning. I needed to walk around a bit after the interview with my grandmother. It was—unsettling.”
His next words startled me. “It took you long enough to come back to Jasper.”
I hadn’t imagined the antagonism. For some reason Jon Maddocks resented me and was thoroughly prepared to dislike me, yet I didn’t want to take offense.
“Why should you say that? My grandmother never wanted me here in the past. From the time my mother and I left Jasper until now, I’ve never heard one word from her. Then suddenly, without warning, she writes me to come. Just like that.”
“And you came running,” he said.
In spite of my good intentions I began to resent this persistent baiting. “Not because of her. Because of things you can’t possibly understand.”
“Try me.” He had turned a little so that three quarters of his face was illumined and I could see the straight set of his mouth and the shine of gray eyes. Smoky, they’d seemed in an earlier light. It wasn’t possible to be easy with him, and I was growing increasingly uncomfortable. His words carried a sting that got past my guard.
“Why should I try to make you understand?” I asked. “You don’t sound in the least as though you wanted to listen.”
I told Red to stay and turned back toward the house, but before I had taken two steps he was beside me, his hand on my arm.
“You listen to me now! She needs you. To them I’m a hired hand and shouldn’t be bothering her. But you’ll be able to talk with her often. And I only hope you’re half the woman your grandmother is.”
His words left me feeling suddenly desperate.
“I don’t know why she sent for me, or what I can possibly do for her, now that I’m here. She wouldn’t even tell me why she wanted me to come. There’s nothing to do but leave as soon as possible, and then I won’t be seeing her at all.”
He spoke directly, without equivocation. “They think you’ve come to grab whatever you can when she dies.”
I didn’t know what he was talking about. “Who do you mean by ‘they’?”
“Caleb Hawes. And perhaps that nurse who’s turned up and seems to be taking over the house.”
“But why should they think I—”
He stepped back from me, and as light from the barn touched his dark head, the anger went out of his face.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t have spoken to you the way I did. I don’t know what I expected of you, or why I should think you’d be any different.”
“Different from what?”
“Laurie!” His voice was gentler now, softer. “I do remember, but that was a long time ago.”
I continued to stare at him. The mountain wind was cold and everything was growing darker, making me shiver. When I closed my eyes I was on a horse again—the pony I’d ridden as a child—and I was tearing up the valley toward Old Desolate, with hooves pounding hard in pursuit and this same cold wind in my face. Terror, awful terror, lay in the house behind me. A goal pulled me ahead toward the mountain. Something I had to reach. I mustn’t stop, because if I didn’t get there …!
When I began to shiver in the wind, Jon put his hands on my arms, steadying me.
“You’re cold.” He reached toward a hook near the barn door. “Here, put on my sweater.”
It was a woolly beige cardigan, and I slipped into its generous warmth gratefully, aware of a barn and outdoor scent that was somehow comforting.
“What do you remember?” he asked.
“Only a little. There was a boy who was kind to me when I was frightened. But I still can’t recall what frightened me. My grandmother wouldn’t tell me.”
“Perhaps that’s for the best. She’s the only one who would know the whole story. Don’t listen to anyone else.”
I hugged his big sweater around me as though his arms held me again. “But I have to know. It’s what I came out here for. I can’t leave without learning the truth. Will you tell me?”
He seemed to change befor
e my eyes—to stiffen and draw back from me. “I was only a kid when it happened. I could only guess at a lot of it. I don’t know facts. In any case maybe you have to earn the right to know.”
What a strange thing to say. No one else had ever told me anything like that. I’d been told by Peter that I must find a way back. Hillary had thought I should open those doors. And Grandmother Persis had said to let it go. But never before had anyone said I must earn the right to understand my own past. Why hadn’t I that right automatically when I was the one person most concerned? His words made me angry. He had no right to judge me, as he was clearly doing.
I fondled Red again, thanked Jon coolly for the loan of his sweater, and started back toward the house. This time he let me go, and no sound of singing followed me. I felt a strange sense of loss. The comforting part of my dream would never come again. My mysterious, loving young friend had disappeared into the reality of the stern, reproving man he had become. Nor was I any longer that small girl for whom a boy had felt a protective affection. We were indeed antagonists now. His momentary relenting was only for an incident long ago that he, too, had remembered. It was foolish to feel the wetness of tears on my cheeks.
Behind me as I walked away, Red made soft whining sounds, but I didn’t turn back. I followed the rough road to the house, stumbling once or twice in the dark, and ran up the porch steps. I wanted only to put the barn and that man with a guitar behind me as quickly as possible.
VI
When I entered the hall, a bell upstairs was clanging furiously. It sounded like an old-fashioned cowbell, and at the sound a woman came rushing out of the kitchen at the back of the house, a laden tray in her hands. She ducked her head at me in greeting and hurried up the stairs, carrying Persis Morgan’s meal.
I found myself alone in the hallway, with the Turkeyred runner stretching past closed doors at the back, and once more I experienced the same uneasiness I had felt earlier in this spot. As though something unhappy might have taken place here that the unconscious part of me still remembered.
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