by S. M. Hulse
Wes pulled on his chore coat and boots and then crossed the yard, the snow stinging his cheeks. The black horse watched him come, his white-rimmed eye unsettlingly human. Wes stopped at the gate. The red horse and the mule sauntered over, eager to see if he’d brought food, but he waved them off, and they backed away with an annoyed toss of their heads. Wes crossed his arms over his chest, wished he’d put on a hat. He clucked at Rio the way he’d heard his father do when he wanted his hunting horses to move. Rio’s ears pricked sharply forward, but he didn’t get up.
The gate had a chain wrapped around it, a bull snap on the clasp. Wes tried to pull it open, but the spring was too strong, the wedge slickly dotted with melted snow, and he couldn’t get a grip on it. Metal rattled against metal. He leaned down next to the fence, but heard the telltale metronome click of the electricity. “Goddamn,” he said aloud. With his coat off, he could just squeeze between the metal pipes of the gate, but it was an uncomfortable fit, and he cracked the back of his skull against the metal. He clapped his hands as he walked toward Rio, clucked again. This time the horse got his forelegs out in front of him and tried to stand, but his hind legs didn’t straighten, and he ended up sitting on his haunches like a dog. Wes saw the heavy muscles of his quarters tremble before Rio settled back onto his sternum. He shook his head and neck, sending a crystalline spray of ice into the air above his mane. Then he stared back at Wes, blinked once, twice. Wes understood. He used to think the whole “my knee knows when it’s going to rain” thing was a crock, an old wives’ tale. But the cold pained him now, sharpened the ache that was always with him, bolstered the stiffness in his joints. And Rio, whose arthritic joints were weight-bearing, must have been even more troubled when the temperature dropped. Wasn’t that he didn’t want to get up—he couldn’t.
Another squeeze through the gate, a brief call to Dennis’s cell. Dennis swore when Wes told him Rio was down, said he was coming right away. Back outside, Wes crossed to the shed beside the workshop. Inside, Wes found a green horse blanket with a silver duct-tape X across a tear on one side. He bundled the blanket into his arms and went back into the pasture. Orange baling twine knotted a dangling buckle to the fabric, and it jingled lightly with each step. Wes spread the blanket over Rio’s body so his back and rump were covered, the straps and buckles loose on either side.
No Dennis yet. Wes knelt in the grass. Snow melted into his jeans, chilled his skin. He patted the horse on the neck, belatedly remembered his father telling him that most horses preferred to be stroked. Rio’s hair was smooth beneath his palm, and softer than Wes expected. He let his hand glide down Rio’s neck, over and over, and once he slid it beneath the blanket, afraid the animal was as cold as he was. He was shocked by the heat that surrounded the horse’s body. He glanced at Rio’s face: the same sharp white-rimmed eye, ears flopped a little to the sides. If he was unsettled, Wes couldn’t see it. He slipped his other hand beneath the blanket and rested his palms on Rio’s shoulder, let the animal warmth soothe his own aches.
Dennis’s truck came up the drive too fast, and he stalled it out next to the gate. Slid out the passenger side and left the door open, the dome light inside glowing yellow against the gray veil of the day. “Shit,” Dennis said. He opened the clasp on the gate—easy, so easy—and slid a hand across his mouth as he trotted toward them. “Shit, Rio. Don’t do this to me today.” Rio whickered softly, and Wes stood. Dennis put his hands on his hips, paced hard, a step to the right, a step to the left, again. He stopped abruptly, pulled his cell phone from his pocket and stared at the screen. He took several steps backward and a wide step to the side—searching for a signal, Wes supposed—then dialed and listened. He didn’t speak before snapping the phone shut. “Arthur’s not picking up.”
“Why do you need him?”
“Might be we can get Rio back up,” Dennis said, and his voice had lost all its assertiveness. Sounded more like prayer than certainty.
“I’m right here, Dennis.”
Wes had meant it to sound gentle, but Dennis looked at him sharply. He glanced back at Rio. “You put this blanket over him?”
“I worried he was cold.”
“That was good,” Dennis said. He went down on one knee next to Rio, rubbed a hand over one ear. Rio bumped Dennis’s shoulder with his muzzle. Dennis spoke without standing back up. “It’ll take ropes.”
Wes glanced at his hands. The skin was red with cold, the pain starting to needle its way up his arms. “I can wrap ’em around my wrists.”
“That’s not safe.”
“You want to get this horse up or not?”
Dennis worked quickly, and soon there was a halter on Rio’s head and a pair of ropes looped under his barrel and behind his haunches. The red horse was still grazing, but the mule provided an audience. “All right, buddy,” Dennis said quietly, and Wes wondered why he hadn’t thought to speak to the horse during the long stretch of time he’d sat with him. “You ready?” Dennis asked, and Wes nodded.
He coiled the ends of his ropes around his arms, and felt an instant of reflexive panic when the cotton tightened around his wrists. Then Dennis was hauling on his ropes and on Rio’s lead, and he was saying, “Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go,” and Wes didn’t know if he was talking to the horse or to him, but he leaned on his own ropes and clucked again for good measure. And Rio tried for them, he did. First the forelegs stretched out, and then he heaved his body upward, but again he only made it to the dog-sit position, but Dennis didn’t quit and so neither did Wes, and he saw Rio’s muscles quivering and he heard Dennis groan and he felt the rope bite into his wrists. And then Rio was standing, legs splayed, wavering a bit, but up. Dennis dropped his ropes, and Wes let his fall, too. Rio took a hesitant, unsteady step forward, and Dennis was there to greet him, his hands on either side of the horse’s face, and he leaned in until his forehead met his horse’s, and he stayed there. The snow had almost quit now, but it dusted Dennis’s hair and Rio’s mane, and Wes didn’t know if he should stay or go.
“Winter’s hard on him,” Dennis said, his head still touching Rio’s. When Wes looked at him again, he saw his eyes were closed. “After last year I swore I wouldn’t put him through another.” His tone was strange, the usual hard edge gone, and Wes heard a Dennis he’d thought had disappeared years ago. A Dennis he’d long forgotten how to talk to. “I swore,” he said again.
Wes hadn’t thought he’d be so disappointed. He’d already moved the kitchen chairs, already taken his fiddle down from the mantel and held it waiting on his knee. He didn’t turn in his chair, but at four the clock chimed and there was no sound of gravel beneath tires, no hesitant step on the porch. He waited, fingers tightening painfully on the neck of the fiddle, until the clock chimed its solitary notice of the half hour, and then he packed the fiddle into its case and carried it out to his truck. He drove to town and stopped at Jameson’s; the first cashier he spoke to gave him directions.
Scott Bannon and his mother lived near the end of a dirt road that dead-ended up against the mountains, in a white trailer with rust stains streaking from beneath the window frames and a tacked-on porch that listed sharply to one side. A trailer like that would’ve been crowded next to a couple dozen clones in Spokane, but here it was settled on its own three-acre lot. Not much else on this side of town: a couple other trailers, a few run-down houses, a bar that catered to the most hopeless drunks, a lot where the logging trucks deposited their sap-bloodied cargo to wait for the freight trains. It was the side of town away from the river, on the far side of the interstate and the railroad tracks, the side that stayed dark longest when the sun rose, and was battered hardest during storms when the wind whipped through the canyon.
Wes parked his truck in the gravel drive behind a blue sedan with a green driver’s side door. Up close, the trailer bore some small evidence of care: a few potted geraniums still hanging on in the autumn chill, a wooden Welcome sign beside the door. He hesitated on the front steps. Maybe he wasn’t doing the ki
d any favors. Seemed like he had enough trouble fitting in; encouraging an interest in music that had peaked in popularity more than a hundred years ago hardly seemed likely to help. But he remembered the eagerness in Scott’s eyes that first lesson, the way he’d grinned the first time he’d pulled a clear note with the bow. Wes opened the screen door, knocked on the aluminum behind it.
He knew her. Scott’s mother. He recognized the black curls, the telltale cigarette wrinkles above her upper lip. Hell. The phlebotomist from the blood donation center.
“Mr. Carver,” she greeted smoothly. “Good to see you again.”
Wes nodded. “Yes, ma’am.”
A small smile broke over her face, and she bit her lower lip. “Lord, don’t call me that. It’s Molly.”
Another nod. He could picture that name now, on a plastic nametag pinned over the breast of her violet uniform. The sunflower sticker above it. He tapped his own chest belatedly, said, “Wes.”
“Wes, then.” She didn’t offer her hand, and Wes was impressed; it usually took folks a few failed handshakes with him before they trained themselves out of the habit. She opened the door wider and ushered him inside. He stood on the small woven rug just inside the door. Hated this. It was all right for this woman, this Molly, to have seen what she had there in the hospital—the tears and the scars—but it was damn near unbearable to stand here and have to look her in the eye, knowing those things had been seen.
“I didn’t realize,” he muttered. “That you were Scott’s momma, I mean.”
“Sixteen years and counting,” she said, with a smile that seemed equal parts genuine and put-on.
Wes followed her into the main room of the trailer, taking in the uneasy scents of someone else’s home. Here was the turnabout, the chance to see her life, and Scott’s. A couch upholstered with an ugly knobby fabric. A tube television set with a rabbit-ear antenna perched on top of it, one branch jutting into the center of the room. Two prints on the wall, replicas of vintage French travel posters (he knew nothing of this woman, but somehow the posters surprised him, and he wondered if they’d been here when she’d moved in). Magazines on the coffee table, Rolling Stone and Spin and Good Housekeeping. Claire used to read that, the Good Housekeeping. She liked the advice columns about people’s family problems, used to tell him about them over dinner as though gossiping about neighbors, but near as Wes could tell, no one ever wrote in with the kinds of problems people in Black River had, the Carvers or the Bannons: My teenage son nearly shot my husband in the face, and then my husband made me move two states away and leave my child behind. What do I do? Or: My husband is in prison and now I’m trying to raise our son among the people keeping his father locked up. Please help.
“Sorry it’s such a mess,” Molly said. “I’ve never been much of a housekeeper. Good intentions and all that, but by the time I get home in the evening . . .”
“It’s fine,” Wes said, though when Claire had still worked, early in their marriage, she’d kept their home neat, too.
Molly smiled, and Wes smiled back, and though the couch was right there, neither of them sat.
“The reason I’m here is we had a fiddle lesson scheduled,” Wes offered. “Scott didn’t show up and I was concerned is all.”
“He didn’t call you,” Molly said. It wasn’t really a question, so Wes didn’t say anything. He looked at the posters on the wall. Camels on one. An old-fashioned airplane on the other.
Scott chose that moment to appear in the doorway to the hall. “Hey.”
“You told me you called Mr. Carver to reschedule your lesson,” Molly said tightly, smile still in place.
Scott shrugged.
Molly turned back to Wes. “We go see his father on Wednesday afternoons,” she said. “You know about his—about my husband?”
Wes nodded once.
“Every Wednesday,” she said, and looked back to Scott. “You know that.”
“It’s not gonna kill him if I skip a week.”
“He depends on us, Scott. It’s difficult for him right now.”
Wes felt his teeth clench, and Scott sneered. “Guess he should’ve thought of that before he held up a CashExpress, huh?”
“I ought to go,” Wes said, and together Molly and Scott said, “No!”
“No,” Molly repeated. “You’re here. Scott’s not dressed for a visit, and I’ll be late if I don’t leave now.” She tried for another smile, but her eyes were weary with the effort. “They make you jump through a lot of hoops at the prison.”
Wes tested the words before he loosed them. “I’m familiar with the process.”
Something crossed Molly’s face then, pieces sliding into place, maybe, memories of his rolled-up sleeves coming up against realities of how a man might come to have a name and six small circles scarred into his skin. Realities that might set him against her, his past against her present. Whatever she understood in that moment, she kept it to herself. “I really can’t thank you enough for . . . well, for everything,” she said quietly. “I’ve never seen anything catch Scott’s fancy like this fiddle music.”
He recognized the words for the peace offering they were. “Glad the fiddle’s being played again,” he said. “Been too long.”
Her eyes went to his hands, a quick and involuntary movement. Wes pretended he hadn’t seen, and when enough seconds had passed, put his hands in his pockets. “What do I owe you for the lessons?” Molly asked.
“Nothing.”
“Nonsense. For your time, at least.”
“Scott’s a good student,” Wes said, careful not to look at the boy. “Got a lot of talent. It ain’t—it’s no burden to teach him. You don’t owe me nothing.”
Molly seemed ready to argue, but she glanced at the clock and turned to Scott instead. “Friday,” she said. “You better be dressed for visiting and ready to get in the car the second I get home.”
“Whatever,” Scott said, crossing to open the door for his mother. “Bye.”
“I’ll give your love to your dad,” Molly told him, stepping out onto the porch.
“Bye,” Scott repeated.
“You ever use me like that again, we’re done,” Wes said, when they’d sat on opposite sides of the couch in the trailer’s living room. Scott glanced at him once, then reached for the fiddle case on the floor. Wes put his boot on top of the lid. “You hear what I said?”
Scott flopped back against the cushions, crossed his arms over his chest. “I hate going there,” he said. “Every week he wants to know how school is going, and every week I tell him it doesn’t matter, does it, ’cause he gave my college fund to his bookie. Then my mom starts crying and my dad yells at me for upsetting her, and then a guard”—he spat the word like an epithet—“tells us if we can’t follow the rules we’ll have privileges revoked. That sound like how you want to spend your afternoons?”
“What I asked you,” Wes said deliberately, “was did you hear what I said?”
Scott scratched an eyebrow piercing, his eyes still on Wes’s, and after a long few seconds, he said, “I heard you.”
Wes took his boot off the case, nudged it toward Scott.
They warmed up with the G major scale, moved on to “Twinkle.” Damned if the kid hadn’t actually practiced that bow hold with a pencil like Wes had shown him. Wes gave him a handful of the cassette tapes—Scott looked at them like they were artifacts, and Wes had to ask if he had something to play them on—and then he taught him “Old Joe Clark.” He’d hoped the kid might know it—a common tune—but he didn’t, so Wes sang the notes, glad he’d picked something he remembered the lyrics for. Never had a memory for words like he did notes. He was uncomfortable, had never much liked his own singing voice. He could carry a tune all right, and he supposed his baritone was pleasant enough, but when he was in the band he’d been happy to leave that glory to Lane. Even Farmer occasionally sang lead, maybe one or two songs a set, but Wes lent his voice only to the three-part harmonies so many of the bluegrass songs required, l
eaning toward the microphone rather than stepping to it, keeping his fiddle and bow at the ready. Eager, always, to return home to his instrument.
“I’ll start looking around for a fiddle for you,” Wes said after the lesson, his own fiddle and bow back in the case, the brass clasps fastened. “Till then you can come by Dennis’s and play on this one. I’m usually there. Happy to teach you anytime.” He stood, but Scott stayed on the couch, and after a few seconds Wes sat back down, too.
“Can I ask you something? Else?”
Wes remembered where this question had led at the first lesson, grimaced inwardly. “Guess so.”
Scott picked up the pile of cassettes Wes had given him. Moved the one on the bottom of the stack to the top, back again. Finally put them down on the coffee table. “You know how they used to hang people here?”
“Where’s that, now?”
“Here. In Montana. Vigilantes and stuff.”
“Oh. Sure.” Wes felt like he’d missed the beginning of the conversation. “Lots of that going on back when they first made this place a territory.”
“There was a display about it in the prison museum last week.” Scott pressed his knuckles against each other in his lap. “And I was thinking it might have been better.”
“What’s that, exactly?”
“When they just up and killed you if you fu—Messed up.”
“Some of those people didn’t murder nobody or nothing,” Wes said. “Some of them were just thieving.”
“Still a crime.”
“Well, I guess I don’t think we got the right to decide when to take someone else’s life,” Wes said. “I think that’s up to God.” This was a respectable answer, he knew. Hadn’t yet decided whether it was, in fact, what he believed.