The Weight of an Infinite Sky

by Carrie La Seur

  Neal chortled. Sarah brought her hands to her chin in a prayerful pose. “That only makes it worse! The things we hear about. Shootings and stabbings. No regard for your own safety.”

  Anthony swallowed a wry smile, thinking of what passed for a bad neighborhood in Billings. Before he could answer, Neal snorted.

  “Your mother thought after you came back, you’d give up the idea of the theater. No future in it. But you’d already gotten hooked up with this camp without telling her. I don’t see that you give a damn about the ranch. You’ll never be any use to us. Why don’t you just get out of our hair and go back to New York?” He dropped the front legs of his chair to the deck with a bang of finality.

  “Neal!” Sarah cried.

  “I suppose you think you’re what she needs?” Anthony had intended to stay calm but something snapped at Neal’s words, the contempt he’d heard before, from Dean. “You never gave a damn about anybody but yourself.”

  Neal jumped to his feet. “You don’t know the first goddamn thing about me,” he said with a snarl. “I’ll take lessons on being unselfish from lots of people but not from you.”

  The corners of Sarah’s mouth turned down in quiet distress as the two men glared. She seemed to be working hard not to scold them both further. Anthony dropped his eyes to the scuffed leatherwork of the boot resting on his knee, wishing he were anywhere else. This man who had ignored him all his life except to issue commands had just diagnosed him and prescribed the rational course any therapist would recommend—if not New York, then another place where his training and ambitions made sense. He couldn’t leave just yet, not with things so unsettled on the ranch, but being part of this triangle for any length of time was hard to contemplate.

  After a very long silence during which Anthony studied his boot, then Sarah’s arm, then a string of high, thin clouds, all the while aware of the conversational void awaiting his response, Anthony said, “I’ll think it over. For now I’d like to help out more.”

  Neal and Sarah looked at each other with emotions Anthony identified as disgust on his end, anxiety on hers, but Neal only said, “You could start by riding out toward Ames Butte to check for weeds. People been having problems out that way.”

  Ames Butte was the direction of the Tall Grasses’. Anthony nodded. “I’ll do that. I was planning to take out Boomerang anyway.”

  Neal’s face changed a little, absorbing the unexpected cooperation. He turned more directly toward Anthony. “First, tell me something. Where are you on the mineral lease? You gonna sign?”

  Anthony took a deep breath. “It affects a lot of people,” he said. “And I’ve been hearing things I don’t like about Harmony. Chance told me about a whole lot of research he’s done. It’s this huge corporate shell game—Harmony Indonesia, Harmony North America, Harmony Australia, all in holding companies, practically invisible ownership in Hong Kong. Swiss banks, the whole nine yards. Totally unaccountable. I like to understand who I’m dealing with.”

  Neal didn’t shift or respond—but he didn’t tell Anthony to leave. Sarah laughed aloud. “Swiss banks! Well, I never.” She picked up her empty tea glass and peered into its depths. “It figures. We’re nothing but small potatoes to these folks.”

  “Pretty much,” Anthony agreed. “Our mine here—Rolling Thunder—is at the center of the expansion for the next three to five years. They expect to increase exports by up to twenty percent, right out of this valley.”

  “All from our little mine?” Sarah said with a little gasp. “How is that possible?”

  “It’s a big, deep seam. Harmony’s North American coal resources are almost entirely here. They’ve got nowhere else to go. They’ve nearly mined out the leases in Wyoming. They have to move into those big tracts the tribe signed over, and if they have to dismantle the dragline east of here, they’ll lose millions. They’re nearly done with the cut they’re on is what I hear. They need to blast into new areas soon. That’s why Rick’s giving us the full-court press.”

  Neal leaned on the rail and folded his arms. “So they’re a mining company and they’re mining. Big conspiracy.”

  “Jenna Tall Grass says they paid off the THPO so they could mine through a buffalo kill site. You know anything about that?”

  Neal thought a minute. “Yeah, I heard. It’s just a bunch of old bones. I don’t know why everyone’s so worked up.” But he looked away, Anthony noticed, as if it embarrassed him.

  Anthony wished he’d paid better attention to Chance’s rambling about databases and securities regulation. He swished an inch of tea around the bottom of his glass. A letter typed on a typewriter with a failing ink ribbon, reproduced on one of the websites Chance had pulled up, had lodged almost word for word in his mind:

  Our goat herd was small, but we had built it carefully for many years. My parents and grandparents before me raised native Indonesian goats here, on the hillside above our village. We had improved the bloodlines and they were fine goats. They supported our village: the butcher, the weaver. We depended on one another in those days, as villages do. Harmony wished to mine these hills but we had refused, because it was where we kept our goats. It was good pasture. We cultivated it carefully. The Harmony men told us we would not be allowed to stay. They said they owned the coal and they had a right to take it. We said this could not be. It was our village, our pastures. We refused to leave.

  One evening my son went to gather in the goats for the night and found all of them dead on the hillside, without any warning or illness. The elders believed that black magic was at work. They were afraid. Harmony had powers beyond what we could fight. After the death of the herd, the elders decided to withdraw from the pastureland and allow the mining to go forward, because we had lost our main source of income. Harmony promised that we could stay in our homes, but now that the machinery has come, the people are leaving the village because the air and water are bad. We are not miners, so foreigners have come to take the jobs that Harmony promised to us. We are in the way. Before, we had a beautiful life, everything we needed. Now we have nothing.

  Many people believe that the coal company was responsible for the death of the herd, but we are afraid to tell the police, because they ride around in cars with the coal company employees. We believe that the police will take the side of the coal company and we will be in danger, so we say nothing. We stay quiet. I am only speaking now because last week, one of the big trucks ran over my youngest son and killed him. Harmony says it will give us money for his life, but I do not want money. I want my son. I want my goats. I want my village. I want everything Harmony took, but none of it will ever come back.

  “There’s coercion and violence at Harmony mines in other countries,” Anthony said. “I’ve seen testimonials from villagers forced out in Indonesia.”

  “All this is nothing but insinuation,” Neal answered. “Indonesia has nothing to do with us. We have laws.”

  Anthony met Neal’s resentful gaze. “Yeah. Like Superfund, which is broke. Like the laws to protect landowners in the Bakken, if they can find a lawyer willing to take a case against an oil company. Or the surface mining law where companies self-bond and then go bankrupt. The state gives violators a token fine and a hug. Don’t you ever talk to Alma Terrebonne? She’s the Harmony encyclopedia.”

  “They pushed people off their land?” Sarah asked. “It was Harmony?”

  Anthony focused on her as Neal looked back to the creek. “They promised jobs, just like here, and lopsided mineral leases that favor them—take it or leave it, better sign quick, just like they tell us. The money seemed good, nobody wanted trouble, couldn’t understand the language of the contract—all the same reasons people here sign. They warmed up the leaders with gifts, and next thing people knew Harmony was clearing out villages by force.” Anthony wet his throat with the last of the iced tea. “It’s like Chevron in Ecuador. These companies go where there’s not much law enforcement, buy off what there is. People look for help and find out everyone’s already on the co
rporate payroll. By the time the mine closes and the payoffs end, there’s nobody left to prosecute for all the damage. In Indonesia, streams that people used for drinking water are so contaminated that livestock won’t drink from them.”

  “That’s the other side of the world,” Neal said over his shoulder. “Rick’s paying good money for the mineral leases here. Nobody’s getting swindled.”

  No, they were just getting moved around like pawns on a chessboard, Anthony thought, again remembering the lunch with Rick and the echo of undefined fear. He’d fallen for some sort of mind trick like everyone else.

  “Sure, Rick’s friendly as long as you say yes, but if you say no he won’t stop pushing. He starts to play with your head,” Anthony said.

  Sarah’s pale face went parchment colored. “Dean had a meeting with Rick Burlington over the winter that he wouldn’t talk to me about,” she said. “Something upset him. After that he was dead set against that mineral lease and he didn’t want Rick coming around.”

  Her words launched a tense silence. Sarah watched Neal, Neal watched the creek, and Anthony looked toward the door. He had his answer about Neal’s plans—and likely about the source of conflict between Neal and Sarah, too. Finally Anthony got up, walked into the kitchen, and splashed cold water on his face. His stomach felt the way it did after the nightmares, the awakening to nausea. He stood at the sink letting water drip down his neck and wondering how it had all come to this. As long as Harmony was hanging over them he’d have to stick close to Sarah to make sure she didn’t waver and finally sign. He’d never be free.

  Sarah came to stand beside him. “I sure wish you and Neal could get along better, even if you have to disagree about the lease. Maybe we should just let him have his way to keep the peace.”

  Anthony wanted to shout at her, but he was only angry at himself for letting circumstances trap him this way. “Look, Mom—if what it takes for you not to sign is for me to stay, I’ll do it. Okay? I’ll move back out here and work the ranch like Chance is doing. I’ll take over. Build myself a little place. But we are not rolling over to Harmony.”

  “Oh, sweetheart!” She gasped and put her arms around his neck, then pulled back to take him in with a face full of joy. “You’d do that for me? Oh, my sweet boy. I always knew you’d come home one day. Wait until I tell Neal!”

  She hurried back to the deck and Anthony headed outside. That went well, he said to himself as he crossed the yard to Boomerang, in the sense that no shots were fired. At least now it was decided. There was relief in that. He could still taste Sarah’s iced tea at the back of his throat, that taste like long afternoons riding in the dust, smelling of red earth and wearing it home. The tea carried in it the family’s long-ago herb-gathering and cherry-picking expeditions, hunting trips, angled sun in a forest corona, a wind that could bear a person’s weight, a blue-eyed firmament, and the peaceful cure of home. Things of intrinsic worth, as the cowboy poet Wally McRae would say. Things worth defending—and that was what he would do. It was a worthy life, even if it wasn’t worth much to Anthony.

  Anthony recalled a poem that had appeared on his desk and imprinted itself on his consciousness in the last week.

  If I were the land

  Gutted by their cold machines

  Would I lose my mind?

  There was nothing to do but stand with Sarah and the ranch. That was nonnegotiable. But on the other side of the scale was a powerful creative imperative that couldn’t be satisfied here, even if he’d been a failure at it in his first grand attempt. It would curdle and rot here into something cancerous—a little like the way Neal’s fate had rotted him. Anthony was angry at himself for not being better, not rising above all this, for being too much Dean’s son and not enough his own man. He was angry because deep down he knew that this sacrifice would destroy whatever was valuable in him, that this was giving up and ending the hopes that had animated his life until now. As insignificant as his life in Missoula and New York must have been in most people’s eyes, he’d loved it. It had been authentic. He’d been alive.

  Boomerang came to him and they stood cheek to cheek, strength flowing from horse to man while Anthony worked to reconcile himself to the scale of the sacrifice he must make.

  Act 4, Scene 4

  It was the ride Anthony had meant to take for many days, with the fringe benefits of pacifying Neal and spending quality time with the fifth of bourbon from his car trunk. Something in him had resisted facing the accident site itself, but the nightmares had eliminated the option of forgetting. After all the conflict with Dean over the years, it was incredible how the nightmares tore at Anthony like watching his own death. Boomerang followed a dirt track along the section line to the place, half hidden by a lonely stand of buckthorn bushes, where they left Fry land by unhitching the loop of baling wire holding the gate together. They crossed the leasehold state land the Frys grazed to reach the tribal land where Croucher Coulee ran. The understanding of over a century allowed the Frys to descend to the bottom of the coulee but not to cross the streambed.

  It was a drowsy afternoon with a distant white sun, clear-cut, not a wisp of haze. Grasshoppers spread stripy wings and Anthony sipped his whiskey. He thought about what Brittany had said, the reason for the ghost on the ridge—Dean trying to tell them something. She was just an imaginative kid with ghosts on the brain for sad and evident reasons, but Anthony had read through the write-up from the sheriff’s investigation several times over the last week and reached the disturbing conclusion that none of it made sense. Dean Fry, fall off a horse? Not unless he was reeling drunk, and there was the tox screen to answer that question. Besides, Dean didn’t work drunk. He preferred to get the job done and then tip a few back at the house, preferably with no one around to see. Anthony knew from the hard backhand of experience not to bother Dean in one of his mean late-night drunks, but that bad habit wasn’t what killed him.

  Croucher Coulee at this point was an isolated spot, a narrow canyon more than a mile from the house, fastest reached by horse or ATV along the coulee floor. The nearest paved road was almost five miles west. Some earlier generation had fenced off this hazard on the Fry side, but the fence needed mending. No mortal could keep up with everything the ranch required. Anthony dismounted, hobbled Boomerang on the safe side of the fence, hung the bridle on a post, and hopped over onto tribal land.

  The July day was windy as always and the sky expanded over oceanic distances, dwarfing the creatures scuttling on the surface. It was a Jurassic sky, Anthony thought, drawn before known time. Breathing in that sky, becoming part of it, was a form of immortality. He stopped and watched a pair of magpies take flight from a low mound of tufted grass a few hundred feet away, abstract flashes of black and white.

  Near the eroding edge of the coulee Anthony could see how a horse or cow could lose its footing. He walked the rough edge of the long slope, peeking down into what the old men called “suicides,” steep tracks to the drainage floor. Sandstone and dirt devolved along the crumbling coulee edge into an uneven descent, part rockslide, part rock garden. Deceptive trails transected the far side, ending in drop-offs or never ascending to the higher surface of the plain. He wouldn’t take Boomerang down there, and it surprised him that Dean and Neal had done it—though spring storms could have considerably worsened the usual trails worn mostly by wildlife. Dean always did figure he was the best horseman ever to throw his leg over but that wouldn’t erase the risk for Ponch and—and Boomerang. Of course the other horse had been Boomerang. A rush of red-faced anger moved through Anthony at the thought of Neal riding his horse on this terrain.

  The striated rock and visible coal seam from his dream reminded Anthony of the meeting more than five years ago when the tribal council voted to sign the contract with Harmony. He and Dean had sat in back, watching and listening because the outcome could affect them powerfully. Given the tracts Harmony was already mining, a lease with the Crow would put hard pressure on the Frys to sign.

  Anthony still r
ecalled how the room fell bowhunter silent and tense as a Diné man spoke, a Navajo. He was from a place called Black Mesa, he said, part of a society of medicine men.

  “Black Mesa is a female mountain,” he told the stony faces. “The coal is her liver, and the water is her lifeblood. If we let the mother be harmed this way, our children will ask us why we didn’t fight for her. They’ll say, ‘Where were our warriors?’”

  The council hadn’t liked that at all. “The people are hungry,” the tribal chairman had answered. “We need jobs. The children need clothes, and schools, and a future.” The meeting went on and the man sat down. When it was over, people avoided him and he left alone. Anthony had wanted to ask him how he came to be there, if he’d traveled so far just to make that statement, if he did this in other places. By the time Anthony made it to the parking lot, though, the man was gone.

  Dean spat before he got behind the wheel. Once the doors were shut he said, “Goddamn Indians. You’d think they’d know better.” They never talked more about it, but Anthony had held the medicine man’s words close all these years. Our children will ask us why we didn’t fight. Dean’s words resonated, too, even with the knee-jerk racism that came like breathing to his generation. They should all know better.

  The wind grew stronger over the exposed earth and Anthony felt a chill in the oven of the afternoon. He thought for the first time in years of a production of Into the Woods he’d worked on as stage manager in college, the warnings about how well children learn from all we say and do.

  At a safe distance from the edge Anthony picked his footing carefully, hands out for balance in case the soil shifted underfoot as he jumped little crevices, seeking a safe way down. He could almost hear children’s laughter echoing up from the course of leaf boat races and the place where Chance tried to hurdle the creek at high flow and fell face-first in mud. Anthony would swear the land remembered him as well as he remembered it. He bent down to pick up a handful of small stones and spun them with all the force of his frustration into the air above the coulee, skipping rocks on a great lake of sky. If they’d planned it, Sarah and Neal couldn’t have cornered him better. There could be no working compromise between his aspirations and the ranch’s requirements. There was only abandoning all he’d been raised to be—or completely surrendering to it.