by Mark Spragg
ALSO BY MARK SPRAGG
An Unfinished Life
The Fruit of Stone
Where Rivers Change Direction
For Virginia,
because of Virginia,
always,
and
for Harriet Bloom-Wilson
and Richard Wilson,
with my love
In fact, the absolute is available to everyone in every age. There never was a more holy age than ours, and never a less.
—Annie Dillard, For the Time Being
One
SHE LUNGED THE HORSE forward because that was all that was left to them, the slope too sheer to turn him, the shale his hooves struck loose skidding away, wheeling downward. She felt him slip from under her, struggling to regain his feet, the air snapping with the sound of stones colliding, echoes rebounding against the headwall of the cirque. It was the second time he’d come close to falling, and now he stood bunched and quivering, his ears flattened against his skull. They were both breathing hard.
She glanced back over her shoulder. Below her the ridgeline rose up sharp-edged, spangling in the sunlight, seeming to beckon as madness is sometimes said to. The bands of muscle in her back and shoulders burned, and her mouth had gone dry.
She inched higher against the long run of his neck, careful not to unbalance them, whispering, “Just this” to urge him forward again. She felt him gather his weight in his hindquarters, heard him groan. He still trembled. “Just this,” she whispered again, and there was the chopping of his iron shoes against the broken rim and they were over all at once, unexpectedly, the horse staggering, standing finally with his legs splayed, his head hung low, braced up against the suck of his own breathing.
She slipped to the ground, tried to walk and couldn’t, then squatted with her arms thrown over her knees. She smelled like the horse: salty, souring, indelicate. Her hands shook when she held them in front of her face. She’d acted like a goddamn tourist bringing them straight up out of the head of Owl Creek, ignoring the game trails. Sweat ran into her eyes, down the beaded course of her spine.
She shaded her eyes, looking southeast over Clear Creek, Crazy Woman Creek, across the Powder River Basin toward the Black Hills, the horizon a hundred miles away, faintly edging the dome of blue sky. This was the secret she’d kept from her East Coast classmates, the exhilaration of this perfect air, filtered clear—as she has believed since childhood—by the rising souls of the dead. In her early teens, she even imagined she could feel the press of them in their passing, those assemblages of spirits retracing the very same watercourses that flow east and west from this divide, much as salmon would climb them, single-minded in their desire for homecoming, lifting themselves toward the advantage of heaven.
She straightened her legs. The insides of her thighs prickled from the chafing of the climb. Her belly hummed and she pressed a hand against her abdomen, turning to check the horse where he stepped carefully through the lichen-covered stones bearing the imprints of Cretaceous fishes. His name is Royal, and except for days like this when they’re at work, she rides him bareback. Always. She trusts him that much. He nickered softly and she watched her reflections in the dark globes of his eyes. She smiled and her reflections smiled, and she thought there’s joy in a horse, laughter in its movement, even at this point of exhaustion. She stood, stomping her legs until they were just shaky.
Her grandfather had asked her only to check the new grasses before they pasture the cattle on these Forest Service leases, but she was concerned—as she has always been—not to disappoint him, not to waste his time with her carelessness. So she and Royal have weaved among the cows where they’ve found them collected in the timbered undergrowth, alert for signs of illness or accident. They’ve walked the fences where they could, and lastly, when the job was done, made this break for the toplands.
She knelt in the soggy cress that bordered a seep and bent to the water and drank. Then she peeled her shirt and bra over her head, splashing the water against her neck, shoulders and breasts, finally sitting back on her heels to stare at a contrail that halved the sky above her.
Her mother had asked, “Are you still stringing that Indian boy along?”
They were seated across from each other in the new café in Ishawooa. Salads, meatless soups, herbal teas. A sandwich board on the sidewalk out front, its legs sandbagged against the wind. It’s their habit to eat together once a week, as testimony that they truly are mother and daughter.
Griff scooted forward on her chair, against the table’s edge. “I get really sick of you pretending to be a racist.”
“Saying he’s an Indian is just a fact.”
“So is his name.”
Her mother cleared her throat. “Are you still fucking Paul Woodenlegs?” Louder this time, a woman turning at another table rearing back to stare through the bottom half of her bifocals.
The blood rose in Griff’s cheeks, her mother nodding conclusively, the gesture women commit in church in lieu of speaking amen.
“When your dad and I were your age,” Jean said, and smiled, unconsciously reaching inside the open throat of her blouse, straightening a bra strap, “it meant something then.”
“I love him.” She knew the statement was heard as excuse, and therefore feeble.
“Love must be different now.”
And there it was, just a hint of the sour, woody smell on her mother’s breath, and Griff wondered when she’d taken her first bourbon this morning.
“Your dad and I never wanted to be apart. Not for a single day.”
“I’m not like you.”
She watched her mother’s hands pick up a menu, holding it open. She hung her own weather-roughened hands out of sight, finding it impossible to admit that when she and Paul are making love it’s the grinding of their bones she hears, the clamor of one animal moving against another. Not always, but often enough to convince her that nothing remains unbroken forever.
“Is he the reason you’re not going back to school?”
“He won’t even be here this fall. He’s finishing graduate school in Chicago.”
“In what?” Jean held up her empty glass, trying to catch the waitress’s attention.
“Didn’t we already have this conversation?”
“Tell me again.”
“Public health.”
“Isn’t that something?” Her mother’s eyes remained calm. “Just think of the career opportunities he’ll have for scrubbing bathrooms in some reservation casino.”
“Yeah, Mom, I’m sure that’s what he’s shooting for.”
“I remember that we’ve talked about this now.” She dabbed at her mouth with a napkin, though they hadn’t yet ordered any food. She folded the white linen over the berry-colored smear of lip gloss, leaning forward on her elbows. “You know it’s what dropouts always say. ‘Just this fall.’” She rested her chin on the heel of a hand. “But it always turns out to be for the rest of their lives.”
She spent the afternoon wandering through an acre of chert and obsidian chippings, in places half a foot thick, imagining the ancients squatting here so near the sun, raised above the worst of the summer heat and flies, fashioning their spear points and arrowheads. Twice she scooped up handfuls of the glittering spall, tossing it upward, watching it plume in bursts of refraction as crude fireworks would, then rattle back to earth.
In the late afternoon she found the butt of a broken Clovis point and, later, the skull of a bighorn ram. This she lifted out of the scatter of bones strewn by predators, wind and snowmelt, and carried it to where Royal grazed, securing it behind the cantle with the saddle strings.
She caught up the reins, and led the horse onto a trail that descended through a thick copse of aspen, weaving him down through the slender white
trunks and stopping in the last throw of shade. She leaned against his shoulder, staring along the curve of his neck into the evergreens crowded before them.
The spring had stayed wet through the front part of June, and now, in this heat at the end of the month, the firs have shrugged their mustard-yellow pollen in a day, staining the air as a ground fog would, luteous, and in the late and slanting light seeming to glow from within. She extended her arms over her head, walking forward, the horse following.
At dusk they were out on the open foothills, winding down through the cows and calves scattered and grazing in the cooler air. And far below them—along the creek, arranged among the old homestead cottonwoods—the house, the barn and outbuildings.
She breathed in deeply, contentedly, pressing her tongue against the roof of her mouth to better taste the perfumed air flavored by fertility, by promise, by this country she has lived in for the best half of her life.
Two
AT NIGHTFALL Einar was dozing in a porch chair when the cow elk in the timber above the pastures started barking like a mob of ill-mannered dogs, and the surprise of it roused him so thoroughly he tried to stand right up and his balance crumbled and he sat back blinking. He felt weakened, unnaturally insubstantial, and wondered if he was coming down with something, maybe the flu, and then it occurred to him that he hadn’t spoken aloud since breakfast, and that in past spells of frailness conversation had acted as a palliative. He tried to think of a rousing declaration but nothing came to mind, so he simply muttered, “Not ready yet,” and that proved enough to get him to his feet. This wasn’t anything. It wasn’t like when he’d woken up in the garden with Griff kneeling at his side and for a time couldn’t remember his full name, or which rows he’d seeded, feeling tired enough to fall back asleep right there on the warm earth. This wasn’t like that at all.
He came in the house and stood at the kitchen counter. When he thought of it he ate a dozen soda crackers, staring out the open window above the sink, the landscape gray and indistinct, as most of the world was for him now, the barn standing at the farthest reach of his sight, merely a black cube in this darkening scene. He stopped chewing for a moment to listen and no longer heard the elk, so he supposed they were bedded down for the night.
After two glasses of tap water he felt reassuringly just hungry and found the new jar of peanut butter Griff had placed directly under the bulb in the refrigerator so he could spot it straightaway. He stood with the door propped open against his hip, enjoying the cool draft and eating from the jar with a tablespoon. They both preferred her cooking, and he expected the crackers and peanut butter would help him hold up until she got home and could start their supper.
He went back out on the porch to wait for her. The evening had progressed enough that he couldn’t distinguish the barn at all, or any of the outbuildings, just the greater dark of the earth rising into the slate-colored sky, shouldering the last of the light upward into the brightening stars. Some time ago she’d made him promise not to turn on the yardlight unless they had visitors, so on these summer evenings they could sit by themselves and watch the stars ripen above them like some crop of incandescent fruit, and that’s what he was thinking when he heard the suck of Royal’s hooves in the irrigated alfalfa of the lower pasture. He was considering how much she’d altered his life in the past ten years, and then there was the drumming of the horses circling in the corrals, nickering, excited, as they always are for any sort of reunion.
He listened to Royal roll, once, twice, three times on the raised hardpack at the center of the main corral, finally standing, shaking, and then all of them crowding into the barn, the noise of their hooves booming on the worn boards, striking out a rustic tune as if from the box of some good and primitive instrument, and then the orderly rhythm of the girl pouring their separate measures of grain in the feed boxes, the settled and contented chorus of their feeding. He could feel every part of it in his hands, in his shoulders, and when he swallowed there was the taste of oats and horses.
Sitting with his better ear cocked forward, he imagined her pausing in the barn’s doorway, hands on her hips, coaxing the stiffness from her back. When his eyes had been better he enjoyed watching her work through her chores, concentrating on each task as it came up before her. She’d adopted many of his mannerisms, his attention to detail, and he’d taken his time over the years to teach her what he knew for sure: how to move among the horses, the operation of the combine, the swather, the baler, the front bucket on the tractor and the backhoe attachment that’s gotten more use than he thought it would when he bought it at auction. To the best of his ability he’s taught her when to be wary and when to be bold among the bulls, where the constellations set on the horizon, the indifference of the seasons and of God. But he’s never demanded that she become devoted to his manner of living; that’s just how it’s turned out, as though it was an inevitable aspect passed down from him to his son, Griffin, and so on to her. And he doesn’t regard the imperatives of blood as anything for which a man can take much credit.
After supper she stacked the dishes in the sink, and when he lit a cigarette she brought him the glass ashtray from the cupboard over the refrigerator.
“I don’t know how you can smoke just one and not want another.” She reached forward with a wadded-up paper napkin, brushing a crumb from the gray-and-white stubble on his chin.
“I wish I enjoyed it more.” He scooted his chair back enough to cross one leg over the other, biting down on the filter and adjusting his glasses so he wouldn’t miss the ashtray. “I feel like I’m letting him down.”
There was the rich smell of ground coffee, the fading odors of their meal, the peppery scent of tobacco. She was leaning into the counter watching the blue smoke rise into the still room, her weight over her left hip, her arms gone slack—a posture she affects when she’s worn down and the day’s not yet done. It’s how a horse stands, resting, and how, as a young girl, she’d been standing in Mitch’s cabin half listening as the doctor told him that nothing else he had would outlast his lungs, that his kidney would most likely be what quit him first. Mitch winked at her, working his shoulders back against the pillows to get himself more upright in bed. “This here,” he gestured toward the doctor, “is a blessing.” And then: “Lucky Strikes is what I like. Maybe next time Einar gets to town.”
She brought two cups of coffee to the table and sat across from her grandfather, pulling the cigarette from between his fingers. She took a drag, then another, and handed it back. His eyes appeared yellowed and outsized behind the thick lenses of his glasses.
“The fence is down on the south side of Owl Creek.” She sipped her coffee.
“Down bad?”
“I’ll get Paul and McEban to help.” She picked at the cuff of his shirtsleeve, and tapped his wrist and stood up from her chair. “You’re missing a button there.”
She rummaged around in the tool drawer in the kitchen, and when she sat back down she had a packet of needles and a spool of thread and a spare button. He stubbed the cigarette out and folded his glasses into his shirt pocket, keeping his elbow tucked to his ribs.
“You ready?” she asked, and when he didn’t look at her she asked again. He seemed older to her now, more diminished than he had even nine months ago. She puffed her cheeks and blew out, waiting. “I’m sorry you can’t take care of your own fencing. I’m sorrier than you are.”
She dragged her chair around, waiting until he was done pouting to lift his arm away and settle it on her knees. “At least we’ll be fencing more grass than we need.” She spoke with her head down over the mending, and when he didn’t respond she bit off the thread above where she’d knotted it and replaced the needles and thread back in the drawer, then started the water in the sink.
“Your mother called this afternoon.” He was fingering his new button, testing it.
“Does she want me to call her back?”
He sipped his coffee, grimaced, then blew on it. “I believe she just calle
d to tell me you’d lose your scholarship if you don’t go back to school.”
“Well, she’s wrong.” She felt her face flush and turned back to the dishes.
He tried his coffee again, then set it back down. “My sister might come for a visit.”
She shut the water off and stood drying her hands. “Really?”
“McEban found an article about her on his computer. Then he found her phone number.”
“And you called her?”
He nodded. “Last week.”
She watched him turn toward the living room, perhaps imagining he’d heard someone there, and thought she might get a dog again, if only for the noise a dog would make. “Do you think she’ll come?”
He was still looking into the other room. “You mean Marin?”
“Yes.”
“I couldn’t say.” He pushed back from the table, squinting at her. “I’m ready for bed now.”
She helped him take his boots off, leaving the room so he could get out of his clothes. When she returned he was under the bedcovers, propped up against a drift of pillows. He’d swung a foot-wide magnifying glass between his face and the book he held open at his waist, the lens attached to a hinged metal arm mounted to the wall above his nightstand.
“I could get you large-print books from the library,” she said.
“That doesn’t have to happen just yet.”
He lowered the book to his lap and she pulled a chair close to the bed, thinking about all the hard conditions under which old men can die, but mostly of Mitch, lying for two years in his cabin just thirty-seven steps out the mudroom door. Reading his John D. MacDonald novels, reading them over again, enjoying his Lucky Strikes and the coffee and chocolates she brought him each morning. Their regimen of small pleasures to provide some relief from the constant speculation about which organ might fail enough to cause them all to cave in.