There were times when I was unable to distinguish whether I was being teased or provoked by Helen, but this wasn’t one of them. She fed me a piece of toasted muffin spread thick with marmalade, and I said, in the ridiculous way lovers prattle, “I’ll deal with it.”
The subject of Willa came up once more, after breakfast. What Helen said was that she had to watch herself, in fact, and refrain from feeling competitive with Willa in mourning Giovanni’s death. “Everybody in the small circle who knew him was sad, of course”—not mentioning Tate, who I imagined did not share in the grief—“though your uncle seemed more grim than sad, I thought. But Willa, she was grieved beyond any of us. I remember thinking, Listen, he’s my father, let me do the crying. Crazy, eh? As if there isn’t plenty of room for all of us to cry oceans of tears. She loved him, that’s all.”
“You ever see Willa yourself?”
“She keeps a horse. Tate owns the stables where I work.”
“Of course,” I smirked. “Pajarito?”
“Pajarito, yes. I see her there on Thursdays every week, like clockwork, and sometimes we talk and sometimes we don’t, and that’s about it.”
“You know what I think?”
“What do you think?”
“I think you ought to let her be your friend.”
She said, “By the way, you didn’t want to talk last night about why you showed up here in such a state, what happened to your hand. But maybe you can tell me now—what were you doing?”
“Helen, you’ll just be mad at me. Don’t ask.”
“I won’t be mad, promise.”
“We had another night visit up at Ash Creek. I got knocked down in the dark by somebody. He actually climbed onto the roof, if you can believe it.”
“What for?”
“The usual. To hammer at their rest, punish them, my aunt and uncle. Somebody’d already been over at the studio, and done a good job wrecking Henry’s projects. You wouldn’t believe how maniacal he was after he found out in the morning. He wanted to blame some of this on me, and I’ll tell you, we made up in the afternoon, but I’m not sure how much longer I’m going to be able to stay there.”
She sat looking at me, waiting for more, even as I sat waiting for her to say something, perhaps invite me to stay here with her if need be (did I want this? no, not really, not yet). Breaking the silence, she said, “Why would any of this make me mad?” She seemed visibly disquieted, although her voice carried her words along very smoothly.
“I didn’t call Tate; Tate called me, and asked me to come meet with him.”
“And you did?”
“He didn’t give me the chance to accuse him of anything, not really. He accused and exonerated himself before I hardly had the chance to get in a word edgewise.”
“Does he know about us?”
“He knows about everything. He’s the ultimate Argus. He must have a spy in every bush. I kind of hate him and respect him at the same time.”
“Respect him?”
“The same way you respect a snake.”
“That’s fear combined with common sense, not respect. Did he say anything about me or my father?”
“Nothing about you. But he did say that he, meaning Tate himself, was innocent of anything having to do with your father. In fact, he implied that Henry wasn’t so innocent, and that I should ask him, or something along those lines.”
We sat again in silence, and prompted perhaps by the word lines, I reviewed that surveyor’s map in my head, then dismissed it, furled it up and tossed it imaginatively into one of the drawers of Tate’s leather-topped desk. It was I who broke the silence this time.
“Let me ask you, why would the night visitors leave a note behind with the words Tell the truth on it?”
“First of all, who’s supposed to be telling the truth?”
I deliberated whether to dig myself in any deeper by breaking my promise to Henry not to discuss that note with anyone—though hadn’t he said not to discuss it with Edmé? I couldn’t remember anymore. “Henry,” I said. “I guess that’s who it was left for.”
“What’s he supposed to tell the truth about?” and as she said these words, I could sense she was pondering whether or not to let me in on something she knew in this regard. The downward glance of the eyes, chewing at the corner of her lip.
“This is where my knowledge comes to a dead end,” I said, then ventured, “but I think you know more than you’re saying. Is that true?”
Helen surprised me with her composed “Yes.”
“And?”
“It’s just that Tate told me—”
“Why believe anything Tate says?”
“—Tate showed me a deposition in which Henry told a somewhat different story about the death than what he told me.”
“How’d he get his hands on a deposition?”
Helen shrugged. “You’re the one who said he knows everything. But Henry makes me furious how he thinks that just because he can disappear into his little studio and build his fantasy utopia and live up there at Ash Creek, he gets to be excused from any responsibility in the world by simply declaring himself absent from it. The world will always find its way to your doorstep, no matter where you live. He ought to know that. The deposition gave a story that wasn’t all that different, but just different enough. Henry’s been like a godfather to me all my life, but he’s always managed to keep himself at a distance. He’s always been loving whenever we’re together, but still, I couldn’t believe he could tell me that there might have been foul play involved, then turn around and tell Noah it looked like an accident. I think it drove him crazier that the police were crawling all over his precious mountainside for those couple of days than it did that my father was gone. Sometimes I just want to go up to him and scream, Fuck you, right in his face. I know that Tate wants him off that land, and that there’s bad blood between him and Tate, always has been. So it doesn’t surprise me Tate would try to implicate him. But I also know that though he couldn’t have committed that murder, he probably understands exactly what happened up there that afternoon in the gorge. And he won’t tell.”
With this, she began to cry. I sat there dumbfounded at the sight of Helen Trentas weeping, her hazel eyes darkened as I reached out to comfort her and, as I did, realized that within the space of less than a day I’d witnessed Helen and Henry both weeping, the two people least likely to display such emotion of anyone I had ever known.
Money. For weeks I had done my damnedest not to worry about it, but perhaps having seen such a dramatic display of it in the form of Tate’s mansion in the mountains, maybe even witnessing how Helen lived, not ostentatiously but certainly in comfort, made me aware of what a derelict I’d become. The word slacker continued to resound in my head. When I left Helen’s I noticed that a button was missing from the cuff of my shirt. Even the dream of my mother, her concern about my shoes, regathered some strength as I started the jeep—my uncle’s jeep, the jeep registered to someone who was not altogether happy with me: Lord, it all came together in a bundle of sudden anxiety. I parked near the bank building, another property no doubt mortgaged by Graham Tate or else owned by him free and clear, passed beneath its great round clock into the lobby, and sat with a young assistant manager, who helped me open an account. I wrote a check that closed out what little was left of my balance, and filled out the necessary forms for my savings to be wired from the bank in Rome to my new account here. The sums transferred were even smaller than I might have guessed. I, who’d already considered myself, shall we say, unprosperous, realized I was in fact quite broke.
Given my general indifference to money—a trait I think I must have picked up from my father, who, like his own father, always paid more attention to the capital interests of countries than to his own—this was a state of affairs which normally wouldn’t upset me. But it did, this morning; it troubled me. That I couldn’t withdraw from the wire transfer for another several days annoyed me the more. Not that I had anything in mind I want
ed to purchase. Just the sinking feeling of indigence. And dependency.
Giovanni Trentas came to mind as I left the bank and began the drive back to Ash Creek. It seemed more and more I was following in his footsteps, all these decades after he’d first come here, from Valle d’Aosta via Rome via Coeur d’Alene, into a community already established with rivalries, attractions, jealousies, and with histories all woven into one great impossible maze. So many willful souls, so many silences that required interpretation—and not a sibyl in sight. It reminded me of one of those Greek dramas populated with gods and goddesses, each more pigheaded and grabby than the next, locked in struggles that were decided by maneuvering naive mortals around, pitching us from this horrid trap to that hazardous fate, from their comfortable remove of, say, a cloud palace or mountain peak. To someone like a Tate or, now I’d begun to believe, like Henry, the primary conflicts always outweighed what must be considered lesser—and that gift of focus served to define their greatness, but also their impurity. What was always the pity—it seemed to me as I ascended the dirt road along the creek, which danced, as ever, vibrantly along in the hollow of browning flowers—was that those gods of Greek and Roman mythology never did seem to learn a lesson, no matter how horrible was their mistake against humanity. Gods never learn because they always emerge unscathed.
Sure, Giovanni may well have died at the hands of some stupid, drunken hunter who had just enough of his wits about him to scramble back out the top end of the gorge after he’d had an altercation, say, with this man who was intent on throwing him off the land, who with his halting English told the poacher to leave, and whom he’d pushed, for instance. Pushed a little harder than he’d meant to push, and saw that the poor fellow had fallen hard, then decided to flee, hike fast back up toward the mountain pass over the summit, where he would find his truck and get away, unseen by a soul. This was, ironically, a scenario that Henry and Tate might well agree upon in the absence of any real proof the death could be pinned on the other. This hunter fable, however, wouldn’t explain Giovanni’s foot having been removed, unless one were to suppose an accidental murder was made to look somewhat more intentional, or at least weird and ritualistic, by using a deer knife on the innocent remnants of the victim. Noah’s presumption that some wild scavenger had done the work seemed no more liable to be the truth than this.
I drove on, for a few minutes, without much further thought. And then I began to see—or, rather, to feel empathetically—the filaments that bound Giovanni into a web that had been spun by less merciful and serendipitous weavers than a phantom blundering hunter or ravenous animal. For the first time since I arrived here, I got some insight about just how easy it was to be drawn into the wars of others and to go down never knowing what hit you, or why. Surely this is what happened to Helen’s father: he got caught in the middle of a struggle between others, most likely Henry and Tate. I could just feel it. What struck me, then, like a blow to the chest, was this: There was no reason the same thing couldn’t happen to Helen’s lover, if he continued to set himself between them. And this thought carried me back to my original concern, money.
To think, when I’d left the bank, within this hour just past, I had actually considered taking Tate up on his offer of work! Lunacy. Would money have bought me out of my problems here, anyway? Yes, maybe. For one, wouldn’t some money buy me a proper escape? (Yes, that thought again.) I had just enough to return to Rome, reestablish myself in some small flat, do some tutoring. Why not get out? Simply because of Helen? And if that was the case, then money was not my problem, but love. My head was whirling and I might in my distraction have run him over, if David Lewis up ahead on the road, walking his dogs, hadn’t waved his arms to catch my attention.
“Grant,” when I pulled up beside him.
Allowing the engine to idle, I said, “Morning.”
“Glad I ran into you.”
His black hair was loose of its binder this morning and hung to his shoulders; his face glowed in the crisp air.
“Listen. Jenn and I are having a farewell dinner and I’ve phoned up to the house and spoken with Edmé, but she says no way will Henry come down for it.”
“Well, he’s not likely to listen to me.”
“He and I’ve known each other a long time. I mean, we don’t see each other all that often. Neighbors here don’t. But if you’d come by with your aunt, it would mean a lot to me and Jenn.”
“I don’t know, I—”
“We’d hate to leave the valley with bad blood behind.”
I caught myself looking hard at David Lewis, thinking, How much of your soul has been foreclosed? but scolded myself, even chuckled at my obsessive suspiciousness.
“What’s funny?” he said.
“Nothing, I’m sorry. Look. It’s up to Edmé. If she’d like to come, and she wants me to come with her, we’ll be there.”
“Friday, about seven.”
Today was Wednesday. Something else now came to mind—and I didn’t think but simply spoke: “I don’t know you, and it’s none of my business, I suppose, but may I ask why you’re selling your place? Seems too beautiful for anyone to sell.”
Lewis was as awed by my impertinence as I. He said flatly, “It is beautiful, and yes, it is none of your business, if you don’t mind my saying so.”
“No offense,” I said.
“None taken. I knew Henry was not going to be happy about any of this. I put off telling him as long as I could, because I didn’t want to deal with him. The bottom line is, this is the real world, the practical world. Just because somebody wants to develop Ash Creek doesn’t mark the end of Western civilization. The homesteader days our fathers knew, where you could settle down on a big piece of unspoiled land for a hundred bucks—those days are long gone.”
“If I understand him, though, I think his position is that there’s plenty of land, plenty of valleys where there are people who’d be only too happy to let them bring in the bulldozers. Henry knows Tate must be behind your sale, that Tate wants to move Edmé and Henry out of there for personal reasons that have nothing to do with development.”
“That’s not my quarrel. All I know is, the money they offered me was too substantial to walk away from. I don’t think we had a choice. I have no evidence they’re even going to make all these changes Henry seems to fear so much.”
I could think of nothing to say in response.
“I’ll see you, then, if Edmé can come. If not, good luck.”
As I opened the horsegate, farther up the road, parked the jeep, and began to walk toward the house, a cloud of dread settled in upon me like none I’d ever experienced in this place. Ash Creek had always meant serenity to me, distance from the troubles raised by the rest of the world, distance even from my own unhappiness and errors.
This was the oddest sensation. Now I felt I’d been traitorous to Henry and Edmé—but the facts were different, weren’t they? I walked up the field and imagined here what Lewis had been unwilling to confirm, a future of shorn forests and pistons, lifts and lines of heavy steel strung between towers, winter carnival sports and other inanities. Or else another vision: this one of more shorn forests and road after road winding up through the fields into building lots, hither and yon, each and every meadow transfigured into lawns. Or even another: this wild earth not tempered and trampled, but all encompassed under the name Tate. Tate’s Valley, say, or Tate’s Basin—Tate’s Trust.
No doubt my thoughts were given to wandering because I was edgy about what sort of reception I might expect, having now stayed out all night without calling. My parents had always been liberal in regard to my childhood rambling, and were never ones to scold me for coming in late from a friend’s. So long as I wasn’t in trouble with the law, they figured everything was all right.
My worry was confirmed by Edmé’s greeting me with a dark hello. When I asked where Henry was, she said he was in the studio, asked to be left alone, had begun to rebuild his maquettes. A man on a ladder could be heard on the
far side of the house, installing a new rain gutter. I’d been so absorbed in fatuous thoughts of Ash Creek ruined that I had failed to notice the workman’s truck parked at the upper edge of the field. Life went on here, night visits or not. The pertinacity was impressive. “And so what did Tate say?” Edmé asked.
“Tate is an innocent. A chaste and decent saint who never hurt anyone in all his born days. And he’s generous, too. Offered me a job during our game of darts.”
“You played darts with Graham Tate?” she asked, in disbelief.
“We discussed books. It was an education.”
The map no longer existed, I decided.
“And you stayed with Helen, I presume.”
“I stayed there, yes,” glad she’d changed the subject, while at the same time amazed I would welcome discussion of Helen over Tate. Moments passed, measured out by the pendulum of the wall clock. My hands were shoved down into my pockets, and I shrugged, “Maybe it’s best I go.” I found myself studying the bowl of oranges at the center of the kitchen table. A beautiful touch; this was a home, I thought. “Surely you don’t disagree I’ve worn out my welcome here, at least with Uncle Henry.”
“Of course I disagree. And where would you go? Helen’s?”
“Don’t think so. But I’m in the way here. You two are used to your privacy, and ever since I showed up, uninvited, it seems to me you haven’t had a minute of it.”
“Grant. I won’t stand in your way of going, if that’s what you want to do, but until you’ve found a place to stay, you’re staying here. You’re blood, that’s that.”
“Even blood wears thin, Edmé. If you and Henry’d be kind enough to let me continue to use the jeep—”
“You can have the silly jeep, Grant. You and your uncle both are at a difficult place, for different reasons. Your father would never forgive me, though, if he knew I let you leave like this.”
“He would say I got myself here, now it’s my responsibility to get myself out—and that you and Henry have been perfectly generous to me, and kind.”
“Where do you propose to sleep? In the jeep?”
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