Without taking another step Spencer turned his head and said with a firmness he did not feel: ‘Lula – sit! Sit!’
She did so, her haunches just a squeak off the ground. She was trembling all over with wanting to play.
‘Sit!’ Very gently he raised an admonishing finger and scowled, as Mack did with Kite. ‘Stay!’
The haunches lowered a fraction. A long string of saliva hung quivering from her muzzle – she was drooling with excitement.
Spencer began to move forward at less than a snail’s pace. The horse’s rear off hoof was cocked, so that the horseshoe faced him – not lucky but slightly threatening. Tallulah gave a muted yelp and he growled ‘Stay!’ without turning round. The horse’s ears were like a couple of prairie dogs sticking up, turning this way and that, flicking back and forth like they were watching him. Not wanting to get too close without warning and startle her – he felt somehow that this was a mare – he said: ‘Hey, girl, good girl . . . easy does it.’ Though why she would know that he was talking to her and not the dog he couldn’t say. The ears went back.
‘Steady, girl . . .’
That hoof was still cocked warningly. He’d seen the damage one of those could do. Instinct told him that he should move out to the side, so that she could see him before he reached her. Though that might scare her away – it was a calculated risk.
Still murmuring under his breath he began to edge out to the left. From here he could see the ‘B’ on her ramp, engraved on her hide as neat and clear as the writing on the stone. She didn’t turn her head but he could tell she’d seen him because she began that nodding again, tossing her mane as if to say, ‘Just you try it!’
But still he was getting closer. She was sweated up, her neck was dark on this side where it wasn’t covered by her mane, and there was a dirty grey lather around the girth. She was real spooked – that was when you had to be careful.
His plan was to try and get the rein, about a foot from where it linked up with the bit, so that he had enough to pull on, and if – when – she started she wouldn’t get tangled in it. He didn’t think beyond that, the objective was to grab a hold. He kept murmuring and inching forward. He’d managed to get within a couple of yards of her when it all went wrong.
There was a sudden shout, a man’s voice from somewhere down in the creek, Tallulah leapt forward, the horse whickered and jumped like a cat. Spencer lunged, tripped, fell – and looked up to see the horse trotting down the hill, tossing her head and picking up her feet in a sassy way that said: Screw you!
‘Bad dog!’
It was hardly fair, but Tallulah cringed with guilt and rolled over, averting her head like a sheepish kid. He put his own head in his hands.
‘All right.’ He patted her to show there was no ill will. It hadn’t been her fault – no, it hadn’t been her fault. He remembered the shout. He wasn’t alone.
Scrambling to his feet, he started down the slope in the direction the horse had gone. Tallulah, her mood instantly restored, cantered ahead, tail waving, nose to the ground which was falling away more steeply all the time. They could hear the rushing of the river again now, from deep below the tree line. Spencer was suddenly afraid of what he might find – a man desperately injured? the horse stuck on some awkward and unreachable ledge? – and how he was going to handle it.
He hesitated, and at the same time Tallulah also stopped, her head lifted, sensing or seeing something that he couldn’t.
‘Lula?’ His voice, small and anxious, came back at him off the canyon walls. The dog barked, and the sound was still ringing round when horse and man emerged from the trees.
It was the same horse, and the man was leading it. The animal’s whole demeanour, its very physiology, was altered. She was no longer bunched and sweating, ready for flight. Now her head swung comfortably, her walk was weary and relaxed. Even at this distance Spencer could have sworn her eyes were half-closed.
The man on the other hand seemed angry and energetic, stalking up the hill with long, punishing strides. He had some sort of knapsack on his back, and in his free hand he carried a wide-brimmed felt hat – not a stetson, but something more like the hats worn by George Raft and Edward G. Robinson in the movies. He took no notice whatever of Tallulah who fell in behind him in her easy, fickle way for all the world as though this was the guy she’d come with.
Spencer didn’t know whether to walk on and pretend he’d been going down there anyway, or to retrace his steps and risk the awkwardness of the man following him. So he remained where he was, and the stranger, drawing level, said: ‘You from Buck’s?’
He was big and broad-shouldered but his chest was heaving and his face was a bad colour like someone who didn’t walk up many hills.
‘No – well, kinda,’ replied Spencer. ‘I just came up from Moose Draw.’
‘See Moose Draw and die,’ was the man’s impenetrable comment. He flapped his hat at Tallulah. ‘So she came with you?’
‘Yeah, she always does.’
‘She whores around. Must’ve still been in the house when I left this morning.’
‘You’re from the ranch?’ Spencer recalled the ‘B’.
‘That’s right, I’m working there.’
‘Oh.’ For the life of him Spencer couldn’t fit this stranger with the two men fixing the guttering this morning. He said: ‘Glad your horse is okay.’
‘She’s dandy, I nearly wasn’t though . . .’ The man gave the animal’s neck a slap and then turned a penetrating glare on Spencer. ‘Where d’you find her?’
‘She sort of found us. We were up there—’ he pointed ‘—and when I turned round she’d snuck up on us. I tried to catch her but Lula—’
‘That’s where I was heading,’ said the man, having apparently lost interest in this line of enquiry. He began trudging on and up towards the lone pine. Spencer, in response to a kind of complicity in his remark, walked alongside. The adventure had ceased to be a worry and had gotten interesting. Out of the corner of his eye he inspected his new companion. He was oldish – Mack’s sort of age – but even now that he wasn’t cross he was surrounded by a forcefield of fierce energy. And the way he spoke was different from local folks, clipped and sharp.
Spencer made conversation, the way Caroline said it was polite to do. ‘She throw you?’
The stranger shook his head. ‘I wish I could say she did, but nothing so dashing. I just came off.’
‘Do you ride a lot?’
‘I do not, and now I know why. A wise man once told me that the horse is a wild animal at heart, and many times as heavy as a man, and it’ll kill you if it gets the chance. Or if you make a mistake. I did the latter.’
The writer! He was the writer.
‘Are you the writer?’
The man gave a sniffing, voiceless laugh. ‘Maybe. Which one?’
Spencer coloured. ‘I don’t remember his name.’
‘Then it’s bound to be me, isn’t it?’ They were up under the pine tree now and Spencer waited for further information, but none was forthcoming. To give his own name uninvited seemed too bold, and anyway his companion didn’t seem interested.
‘Did you see this?’ The man asked, indicating Lottie’s memorial.
‘Yes, sir, I found that a while back. I always come and take a look.’
‘You do? Why?’
‘I dunno.’
‘Sure you do.’ The man was looking at the stone, not at Spencer, but he sounded impatient. ‘Think about it.’
Spencer thought. ‘Well, my mom said the stone was to remember her by—’
‘Your mom’s seen it?’
‘No, but she—’
‘Fine, go on.’
‘She said it was to remember her by, but it’s a long ways out of town and I thought, who’s going to remember if they don’t see it? So when I’m up this way, I stop by.’
The man’s fierce expression hadn’t changed. He was still staring at the stone, half in the here and now, half far away. ‘You know wh
o she was?’
Spencer shook his head, realised he wouldn’t be seen and added: ‘No, sir.’
‘She was very pretty, very wild, very smart. Much too pretty and smart to die, too wild to live.’
Spencer gazed at the stone, chastened.
‘You knew her?’
‘I did. She broke my heart . . .’ For the first time the man’s voice slowed and softened, and then he slapped his leg with his hat and rounded on Spencer with a kind of mad-dog grin. ‘So maybe it serves her right!’
Spencer was shocked, and glad that no reply seemed to be required.
‘Well, young man!’ Another alarming change of gear had taken place. ‘Thanks for trying to catch my horse.’
Spencer shrugged. ‘Sorry I couldn’t do it.’
‘You made her run right back to me so it came to the same thing.’
‘She didn’t give you any trouble?’
‘No.’ The man fondled the mare’s forelock – she seemed tranced, nearly asleep. ‘You know why?’
Spencer shook his head.
‘Because she’s just a big chicken. She wanted to run away and leave me looking like an idiot. But she wanted even more to be caught.’
It was true. Spencer could see that. It was the horse’s fear which had made him wary – it had been an unstable substance, liable to do anything. Now she was just a dude ranch ride again – pretty, but not smart and certainly not wild.
‘Never wish for freedom,’ said the man, putting his hat on his head and his foot in the stirrup. ‘You might get it.’
Up in the saddle he looked enormous. ‘Good day, friend,’ he said, and wheeled the mare away, her head pointing back down the canyon. Tallulah, without hesitating, trotted after him. The man glanced down and Spencer heard him say, ‘Faithless hussy,’ and assumed he meant the dog, though it was by no means certain.
Spencer plodded on up to a big outcrop of flat rocks like a lookout point that you could climb and perch on top of. The glitter had gone from the day, but only because it had been outshone by this odd meeting. From his vantage point he could just make out horse and rider, with the dog at their heels, winding down the last visible bend in the path until the trees swallowed them up.
Everything around Spencer, even here, seemed smaller, paler, flatter. Whatever had been inside the stranger’s head was a hundred times more interesting than little old Bucks Creek. The encounter had raised far more questions than it answered and the questions hovered at the top of his mind like great wide-winged birds too mysterious and distant to identify, too thrilling to ignore. Even Tallulah’s defection seemed in order. Why would she stay with Spencer McColl when she could choose that powerful and seductive strangeness?
See Moose Draw and die! He was dazzled.
Only hunger drove him back, later in the afternoon. Mack was in the side lot, picking bits out of Phelan’s tractor. He said ‘Hi there’ when Spencer dropped his bike to the ground next to him.
‘Hi.’
‘Where’d you go?’
‘Up Bucks Creek Canyon.’
‘Your mother wondered where you got to, but I told her not to go fussing.’
Mack was still working away, his greasy black fingers handling the nuggets of machinery with the delicate dexterity of a surgeon. He never stopped when he talked to you, but that was just his way.
‘I met someone.’
‘So who was that?’
‘I dunno, he didn’t say his name.’ An instinct concerning Mack prevented Spencer from saying who he thought it was.
‘What doing – fishing?’
‘His horse threw him.’ Here again Spencer, out of deference to the stranger’s magical qualities, forbore to tell the whole truth.
‘He hurt?’
‘No.’
‘You able to help?’
‘I tried to catch the horse, but she ran off. But she ran to him and he caught her.’
‘He was lucky then.’
‘I guess so.’
There didn’t seem much to add, at least as far as Mack was concerned. He was a person who dealt with the basics, the simple, broad strokes of life, and Spencer’s mind was stretched to bursting with wild imaginings and suppositions.
Fortunately the store was quiet and his mother was sitting behind the counter with a book.
‘So there you are!’ She smiled at him. ‘Mack said not to worry.’
‘Sorry. The time just kind of went by.’
‘That’s what happens.’ She closed the book to pay attention to him. By that one action she told him what he already knew: that she would understand about his strange meeting. ‘Did you have a good time?’
‘I think I met that writer – the one who stays at Buck’s in the winter?’
‘You mean, you think you met him, or you think it was the writer?’ She was teasing but she was also a stickler for this sort of thing.
‘I did meet him and I think it was him.’
‘What made you think that?’
This was a good question and his brow furrowed. ‘Well . . . The way he spoke, for one thing. And he was staying at the ranch when there was no one else there . . .’
‘How did he speak?’ Her tone had changed from one of simple maternal questioning to one of real curiosity, and Spencer felt proud to have been the cause of this.
‘Real quick and sharp, not like from round here. And he said crazy things.’
She laughed. ‘Like what, for heaven’s sake?’
‘Like “See Moose Draw and die”.’ Spencer glowed with pleasure as Caroline laughed some more. ‘So he doesn’t come to Buck’s to research small-town life!’ Warmed by his success Spencer remembered something else. ‘I know – he said he worked down there.’
‘But he wasn’t a ranch-hand.’
‘Uh-uh!’ He shook his head emphatically, and she didn’t ask him to explain why he was so sure.
‘What did he look like?’ This was easy. ‘Real tall with a huge nose, hair going at the front – he looked like a big old buzzard.’
‘That’s him all right. So what was he up to in the canyon, just mooching around like you?’
‘He came off his horse and I found her, and then after he caught her we got talking.’
‘You do realise,’ said Caroline, ‘that you succeeded where a hundred highly paid journalists have failed?’
‘How d’you mean?’
‘He’s very reclusive – he keeps himself to himself. That’s why he likes to be at the ranch when no one else is there, so he can write undisturbed. And he doesn’t like talking to the press. What else did he say?’
This was Spencer’s trump card, he’d been husbanding it because after this there wouldn’t be much more to say.
‘He said that this girl Lottie – the one with the stone – that she broke his heart.’
‘Did he now?’ Caroline’s eyebrows lifted.
‘He said she was . . .’ Spencer paused, wanting to get it right ‘. . . too pretty to die, too wild to live.’
Now Caroline leaned right over the counter, laughing her head off, and cupped his face in her hand. ‘Spencer McColl, you do see life!’
In bed that night, bathed in the afterglow of the day’s events and his mother’s delight, Spencer reflected that it had been a great birthday. And the effect of his long, solitary hike was that much of it remained to be enjoyed: the fishing rod, the mouth organ (which Mack had been teaching him, but now Spencer had one of his own), almost all of the frosted cake which, after two helpings of fried chicken and mashed potatoes, he hadn’t had room for. Tomorrow after he was done helping in the store he’d call for Aaron and Joel – maybe Judy, she was all right – and they could take some of the cake and try out the rod while he told them about meeting the writer.
From downstairs he could hear the radio, one of those comedy and music programmes that they liked to listen to, with the advertising jingles. This one was sponsored by breakfast cereal. There was a group of girls who sang the jingle and it was maddeningly catchy �
� sun and him, day and gay, strong and song, all day long . . . When the jingle ended it was voices talking again; the cheery familiarity ebbed away and the strangeness and glamour seeped back into his head.
‘The water is wide, I cannot get o’er, and neither have I wings to fly ...’
Something else his mother had told him about that song. As a little girl she’d lived in a tall town house where she wasn’t particularly happy. Her parents weren’t interested in her and there weren’t any other kids to play with. But she told him she had a special friend who lived on the top floor of the house, who she wasn’t really supposed to spend time with but she did anyway. And they used to look out of the top-floor window to where there was a wood with a pond, and Caroline’s friend used to tell her about her own home in the country . . . Spencer liked that story, and the way it tied in with the sad, wistful quality of the song.
As he floated in the strange third dimension between waking and sleeping he entertained a fleeting fantasy that his father hadn’t died at all, but had become a famous yet reclusive writer, haunting the hills around Moose Draw.
It wasn’t till three summers later when he was fourteen that he found out the truth, and everything changed.
A lot had changed already. Spencer was at high school, his voice was deep and his body was different and wayward. He had gotten big and tall for his age. His friend Joel looked like a kid next to him, but he’d rather have been with Joel than with Judy and the other girls who giggled and cut their eyes his way. The truth was he didn’t belong anywhere – not with the kids, not with the older guys and the men, certainly not with the girls.
And increasingly these days not in Moose Draw. It was home, but he no longer felt at home in it. He was discontented, which he didn’t like, but there was nothing he could do – there were years before he could escape and even then how was it to be managed? He wasn’t too smart in school, not a high-flier and a goer-places. He was average, but dreamy. Sometimes he wrote something in class which got read out because it was unusual, but that didn’t happen all the time, and anyway he didn’t want to stand out. What he wanted most of all, and knew was hopeless, was to recapture the sense of belonging.
The Grass Memorial Page 8