“I don’t want to go home, Dill,” she said.
“I know, sweetheart. But you got to.”
It was hot now in the trailer. Cynthia felt her eyelids grow heavy, as if she could go back to sleep.
“Cissy.” Dill’s voice changed. She could feel a seriousness in it. “I want to tell you something about your dad.”
Nobody had called her Cissy since she was a very little girl, and the very sound of the word seemed musty to her, like a book she’d loved when she was small.
“Your dad,” Dill said, “is going to feel worse than you do.”
Cynthia didn’t believe him.
“Now listen.” Dill’s voice was sharp with anger. “Pay attention. What I’m telling is important.” He looked right into her eyes.
“Your dad is going to feel real bad—and that’s goin’ to make him dangerous. You understand me?”
She did. She didn’t understand the words exactly, but she knew that Dill was right.
“You got to give him time.”
Cynthia nodded, her eyes wide and fixed on Dill’s face.
“Here’s what you do,” he said. “You just go home and go about your business.”
He got up and refilled their coffee cups.
“We’ll sit tight a little bit here—wait for the plow to go through. I got a few chores I need to get to. Then I’ll ride you up in the truck.”
“What about . . .”
“She’ll keep all right here. I’ll bring her up this evening.”
“Okay.”
Cynthia felt her breathing calm to normal, her heartbeat slowing down. She moved over to the cot and sat cross-legged, holding the warm cup of coffee in both hands. She leaned back against the curved trailer wall and closed her eyes. This place gave her a sense of safety. Now Dill would drive her home. They had a plan. She searched inside herself for a calm, steady place. Far off, she’d heard the dull echoing pop of gunfire, the sound of duck hunters on the river. Then the sound came again, closer.
Dill was on his feet faster than she thought he was able. He motioned her to stay put. She sat up and watched him step outside.
Before she could get up, Dill was back. He shook his head and grinned.
“It’s your boyfriend,” he said. “Out there hunting tin cans with a bird gun.”
“Who?”
“That Swanson boy.” Dill winked. “How many boyfriends you got?”
Cynthia flushed.
“Sorry,” Dill said, “I wasn’t thinkin’ of the other one.” He gave her arm a pat, reached up to the rack by the door, and pulled down a jacket. “I’m going to get the big Cat runnin’, push some snow out of here. You want to ride along?”
“No,” she said.
“Sure?”
Cynthia nodded.
“Suit yourself,” he said and ducked out the door.
Cynthia pulled on her coat. The heavy wool was stiff from drying by the fire, and the lining had ripped out along the hem. Her mother would shake her head over that. She borrowed thick socks and a pair of black rubber boots from Dill and went outside.
The sun shone bright on the snow, but the icy air rasped in her lungs. She was wide awake now. She stomped a path out to the edge of the biggest pit. The garbage was almost completely hidden under hills and valleys of snow; she might have been looking down into a crater filled with fallen trees and boulders, except that here and there smoke steamed from a smoldering tractor tire and the smell of rotten meat hung in the air. When she spotted Kenny, she sat down on a rusted oil drum, where he couldn’t see her from the pit.
He wasn’t shooting at tin cans. He stood straight-backed, sighted carefully, and shot at a raven high in a leafless cottonwood at the edge of the dump. He missed and reloaded. Then he stood very still and waited. In the silence, a single raven gave a sharp, barking caw. Cynthia waited as well, and in the quiet, with the sun glaring on the snow, she felt assaulted by the kitchen garbage stink of the dump.
Another slick raven glided onto the rim of a tire and tilted like a mechanical bird to peck at an item inside. It stepped back and cocked its head. Even from where she sat, Cynthia saw clearly the oil-slick gloss of its feathers, its beak like wrinkled black leather. She watched Kenny aim again, miss, and with his feet braced far apart, reload and fire both barrels at the bird. This time she heard the flat impact of the bird shot and saw broken feathers. The raven squawked and struggled to fly on a wing torn at right angles and hanging from its body. Kenny went after the bird, and Cynthia stood up. She scrambled down the slope of the pit.
When she reached the tire where the bird had been, Kenny was lower in the pit, bending, awkward and frantic, trying to catch the raven. It escaped him, screaming and cawing. Finally he straightened up and shot the bird again, and this time he shot its head away, leaving a raw red neck and a live, thrashing confusion of feathers. He dropped the shotgun and caught the bird, grabbed it up against his chest and tried to hold its beating wings still. Cynthia was afraid to move, afraid he’d turn around and see her there. She felt as if she’d stumbled on some obscene private act. But Kenny stood where he was, hunched around the bloody feathers. She wanted to run, but before she could turn, he looked up and started coming in her direction, swinging the huge bird by its feet.
He wasn’t pretty now. He looked as if he had been running hard and had slowed only to catch his breath. His hair hung in his eyes, and his face was pale except for red, transparent blotches along his cheeks. She thought he would stop, but he kept coming.
He swung the mess of bloody feathers at her face. It was the smell of blood, more than fear, that made her stomach buckle.
She screamed and pushed at him, flailing out with both arms, but he swung again. Through her own screams, she heard him sob. She closed her eyes and struck out blind, not knowing where he was until he came within her reach and she grabbed for him. His head only reached her chin, but he was strong, sharp knees and elbows struggling. She could barely hold him. She clenched her teeth and grasped her own wrist with her other hand behind his back. All she thought about was making a vise against his thrashing—as if pure thought could make her strong enough. He butted her chest and kicked, but she held on.
When finally he stopped fighting, both of them were breathing hard and soaked with sweat. She could feel his heartbeat through her coat. She held on to him, exhausted, and for a moment she could feel a flow of heat, a warmth like being clung to by a sweaty child. Then Kenny broke away.
He stepped back and looked at her. He wasn’t crying, but his fists were knotted hard, and the skin around his eyes was white. Sweat stood out in beads on his forehead. She knew he could do anything. A word, “oh,” came out of her mouth. She heard her own tears in her voice. “I’m sorry.” She tripped, turning in the snow to get away.
She ran back to the trailer, stumbling in the snow. She slammed the door shut and stood in the middle of the tiny room. She’d had no right to spy on him. He had to feel exposed, like a hunter caught leaving behind a wounded, gut-shot deer. She had witnessed a person turning inside out, and what she saw was raw and ugly. What could he do but strike out at her? And she had run away.
She swung the door open so hard it crashed against the outside of the trailer. She walked back out to the pit, the winter sun on her face. Kenny was gone. The shotgun barrel glinted blue where he’d dropped it on the ground, and a pool of red blood and feathers had started to freeze, frothy and pink at the edges.
She made her way around the trailer to Dill’s shed. Inside, Goldie stood dozing, her head hanging so low her breath had blown the hay chaff away from the floor and cleaned a smooth, round circle in the dirt. Cynthia smoothed a hand along her flank, fitted on the bridle, and heaved the blanket and saddle into place. She swung up, struggling with her long coat, and turned Goldie’s head down the lane.
On the road, she saw Kenny far ahead. He stumbled forward, his steps uneven, his arms close to his body. She didn’t hurry. She knew he could hear her—Goldie’s hooves made sq
ueaking noises in the dry snow—but he didn’t turn to look. When she rode up beside him, he picked up his pace, but when she reined Goldie up, he stopped. She leaned down from the saddle and offered him her hand. He looked at her for a long moment before he grasped her wrist and let her swing him up behind her saddle.
24
Lenna let the house overheat until it was so warm that steam clouded the windows and dripped in runnels down the glass. She filled the kitchen sink with scalding water and slowly, taking a long time with each plate and glass and fork, washed the dishes.
Then she went to the bathroom and looked at herself in the mirror. Her mascara had smudged black smears under her eyes, and her skin felt dry enough to crack. She scrubbed her face and combed her hair. At the hall closet she removed, one by one, all the towels and blankets, making a stack on the floor. She lifted out Kenny’s Christmas presents, carried them into the front room, and laid the packages under the blinking tree. She looked under the bed for the box that had come from Kenny’s stepmother. It was gone.
She went back into the kitchen and sat down at the table. The box was gone. And Kenny was gone.
She didn’t know what to do. A voice, like a shrill bell inside her, said to call the sheriff. To call somebody. To do something. But another voice kept telling her to wait. It was Christmas. If she could just make things normal, Kenny would come home. He was on foot. She tried to imagine where he might have gone; she pictured him out in the dark by himself. His bed hadn’t been slept in at all, and his present for her was just where she had pretended not to see it the night before. Christmas Eve. The box was open, left stranded in the center of his room. The whole terrible night came back to her. What on earth had she done? It had all seemed so easy, so innocent. Then suddenly it wasn’t. The storm came back to her, snow falling in thick blankets, the world muffled and white despite the darkness. Now the morning sun outlined the bare limbs of the cottonwood trees and glistened on the snow. But the night, so vast and black, was still with her like the dread of a long winter.
“Oh please, Kenny,” she said. “Please come home.”
She stood up and walked around the table. She went into the living room, wiped the condensation from the glass, and looked out the front window. Then she carried Kenny’s rocker back into the kitchen.
She kept thinking she ought to call the sheriff. What if Kenny was hurt, lying in some snowbank? She stood quickly and went to the phone. She dialed the number for the hospital, heard the number ring, and hung up. If she didn’t call, Kenny would be all right.
She thought about Roddy Moyers. She hadn’t wanted him to touch her. They drove back to the ranch in silence. When finally she felt able to speak, Roddy couldn’t understand why she felt so angry and humiliated. She would never forget the girl who stared her down, how young she was. How that look of pure hatred burned. It struck a part of herself she’d never seen before, the place of genuine terror, of immediate fear for her life. It amazed her how Roddy couldn’t understand what he had done.
They drank a pot of coffee together, but Lenna knew that everything was changed. She saw how all the charm, all the excitement, had come from Roddy, not from her. He had treated her as if she were beautiful, as if everything she said had special meaning, like a story. And so she had told him about her life, the grandparents who had raised her on a ranch in Nebraska, about Kenny, and Kenneth Swanson.
She understood who she really was. A woman too old for Roddy. Sitting in the ranch kitchen, she knew the fluorescent lights showed her swollen eyes and every wrinkle on her face. She felt exposed and exhausted and gave in to the urge of laying her cheek on the table and burying her head in her arms.
In the truck, Roddy had told her about Cynthia Dustin as well as other women he knew. He kept repeating how he never meant to hurt her. To hurt anybody. As he talked, she began to feel as if she were his mother, not his lover, and though she wanted to believe him, she couldn’t find in herself any sympathy. Finally, she suspected that she’d never been in love with Roddy. She’d been in love with being in love.
In her own kitchen, she felt hungover, groggy as if from some kind of drug. The world seemed flat and dull. But she had Kenny. If he’d only come home, she promised herself, she’d never leave him again.
She had to call the sheriff’s office. She didn’t want Jeff to know, to know she’d left her son home alone on Christmas. It made her feel trashy and ashamed. But she had to do it. She went to the phone and dialed the numbers.
She reached the dispatcher and then, after a long wait, heard the buzzing, intermittent sound of Jeff’s voice on the radio. He was at the scene of a car crash, with urgent voices and sirens in the background. She told him what had happened, that Kenny was gone, though she couldn’t be sure he could hear her. The line crackled and his voice broke into fragments. Finally, she heard him say it would be an hour, maybe more, before he could get back to town.
She didn’t know anyone else who could help her. She couldn’t call Roddy. And she didn’t know anyone else very well.
She stood up suddenly, dizzy, unsteady for a moment, and pulled on her coat. She wrapped a wool scarf over her head and tied the ends behind. Then she pulled on her snow boots and grabbed her purse and gloves.
The least she could do was go look for Kenny herself. She struggled out through the snow to the car. It was buried up to the wheel wells, and the track behind it had filled with snow. She tossed her purse in the front seat and waded over to the shed to get the shovel.
She started behind the front wheels, lifting away shovelfuls of soft, flaky snow. But then the snow got harder. The wide shovel sliced away slabs of snow, and it took all her strength to bend and heave them back behind her. Sweat trickled down her sides underneath her sweater. She finished the wheels and started shoveling the track. But the snow was deeper than she’d thought. It was like shoveling a beach away. She saw that even if she could get the car out, the road was snowed in. She began to cry, in anger and frustration, but she went on shoveling, her arms and legs trembling, and the muscles low in her back burning like torn tendons.
She stood up and leaned on the shovel. She heard the slow thud of a horse’s hooves, the sound muffled by the snow. And the horse appeared, a dark gold horse, damp with sweat, its mane hanging thick in its eyes. It carried two people. Cynthia Dustin and Kenny.
The horse turned into the yard, taking jerking hops through the deep drift at the curb, and halted by the back door. Lenna waded up to the horse’s head. Cynthia looked at her without speaking, but there was a sadness in her face, a sense of resignation. Kenny slid off.
He looked up at Cynthia as if to say thank you, but he didn’t speak. She reined the horse around and followed her own posthole tracks through the snow.
Lenna took her son in her arms and held him tight.
“Oh, Kenny,” she said, “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
He stood very still, his arms hanging loose at his sides. There was dark, dried blood in his hair and on his face. “It’s okay,” he said. “I’m okay.”
His voice was tired and without anger or hurt, without accusation. He reached around her with both arms and hugged her back. But his chin cut into the ridge of her shoulder. Their bodies didn’t seem to fit together anymore.
25
Roddy swung his hay hook into a top bale on the stack, yanked, and pivoted aside while the heavy bale thudded onto the sled. He lifted it by a strand of twine and heaved it in the back. His next swing brought the whole top layer down, the bales frozen together. He threw up an arm, and tried to twist out of the way. But the bales knocked him sideways off the sled.
He picked himself up and brushed the snow from his chaps. He could feel a deep bruise swelling on his forearm. He stood staring out over the snow. He shook his head to clear it.
The sun had come up hours before, but the air was brittle with cold. His eyes watered and he wiped at his nose with the back of his glove. White with snow, the granite peaks in the west seemed smaller, dwarfed a
nd flattened by the smooth, white fields.
Chub and Dan stood quiet beside the stack. Chub shifted her weight and snorted, her breath thick and white in the cold. There was no wind, and aside from the horses and his own breathing there was no sound. He’d always liked that silence, so quiet he might as well be deaf. He should have gotten up and fed the cattle first thing in the morning.
He climbed back on the sled. The hay had been baled too loose, and the heavy bales bowed on the orange twine when he heaved them up on his thigh and stacked them. Sweat broke out on his forehead. It smelled like whiskey and stale cigarette smoke. He hooked the bales down and stacked them faster and higher, working the sweet, sour smell out of his skin. When he finished, he lifted the reins and drove out to the feed ground.
The team moved slowly on its own in a wide circle while he stood on the back cutting bales with his jackknife and kicking the split bales off into the snow.
The cows had sheltered down in the willows in the storm, but slowly they came, first one, then another, until a long line of white-faced cattle trailed toward the sled. Roddy swung the team back for another load.
By the time he drove into the darkness of the barn and fed the horses, it was noon. At the kitchen door, he kicked his heavy work boots in the corner. The cuffs of his wet jeans had filled with hay chaff. He skinned them off so he wouldn’t track hay through the house. In the kitchen, he put on the kettle for coffee and went, barefooted, through the house to the guest room. He hadn’t made it to the bunkhouse last night. He closed the drapes to shut out the light and looked at the rumpled bed. His bare thighs, pale with cold, felt clammy. Even his underwear was wet. He felt a strong pull to crawl back in the bed, as if the sheets might still be warm.
Instead, he picked up his town boots and carried them back to the kitchen. He drank a cup of black coffee, so hot it burned and numbed his tongue, and made a few calls. The foreman had gone out below for Christmas, but he could get Al to come up and feed. He took a long, scalding shower in his mother’s bathroom, put on a bathrobe he found folded in the closet. He pulled his boots on over his damp feet and walked out to the bunkhouse.
Love and Country Page 17