His muscles convulsed with cold while he pulled on clean clothes and threw his gear in a bag. He thought he’d get the truck started, the heater going, while he closed up the house. But the truck wouldn’t start because he hadn’t plugged in the block heater. He never thought it would get this cold.
He pushed the truck out where the sun would hit it, put a charge on the battery, and went back in the house. At least the storm had blown the road clear.
He walked through the house, turning the heat down, the lights off. He didn’t lock up, even though his mother had told him to. Nobody ever broke in. He left a check for the girl who came to clean and stood in the living room. He liked the house this way, dead quiet. He walked over to the piano and looked in at the strings. As a kid, he’d been fascinated by the strings, so taut and new. He’d once poured a glass of milk in there. Now he lowered the lid to keep the dust out.
On the road, he kept the heater and the radio off. The silence of the morning, the house, the field, the barn, not a sound anywhere, stuck with him. He wanted to keep it that way.
In town, the snowmen were still lighted, hanging pathetically from the lampposts, and everything was shut up tight except the hotel and café. It had been a big storm; the plough had scraped up shoulders of snow so high you couldn’t see the storefront windows.
If he drove straight through, he could make it to Denver while it was still Christmas. He thought he might stay through the stock show, then drive down into the backcountry through Arizona to L.A.
PART III
Spring
26
It wasn’t until March that the hardened drifts of snow began to melt. The sun shone hot on the fields, and in the daytime, pools of water stood in the hollows. They froze slick at night, in wide sheets of blue ice, and melted again the next day.
Lenna woke up early and brought inside split logs that left bark and sawdust all down the front of her bathrobe and skinned her palms. Kneeling, she built a fire over the coals. She wanted the house to be warm when Kenny came down.
She poured a cup of coffee and went to stand out on the porch. The day was damp, with gray clouds, like mist, hovering low. The brown grass around the back door looked shredded, as if mice had nested in it, and wet wood chips littered the frozen ground. The house and the trees and the fences looked raw and shabby.
It looks like a mining camp—in Alaska, she thought, but there wasn’t anything she could do to clean it up. Kenny spread woodstove ashes on the ice outside the back door, and when it honeycombed to slush, he shoveled it away. But the next melt-and-freeze brought the ice back. She’d fallen twice now, her arms filled with grocery bags.
Often now she found tears pooling but not spilling over. When it happened at work, she went into the bathroom and washed her face.
For weeks, she’d sat in the kitchen in the morning, the things that needed to be done swarming in on her. The washing machine was broken and the drains backed up. The car made disturbing sounds when she shifted gears. They were running out of wood.
She was covered by health insurance now, but she put off telling Kenny. In bed at night, she curled up and pretended that she was only sick, that the cold or flu would go away soon.
Then she would pick everything up, get organized. She saw she was only feeling sorry for herself. Kenny wasn’t home very much. He’d finally become involved in things at school, and she was glad for that. When he was home, he spent hours in his room, claiming to be reading and doing his homework. He asked her not to go up there, but she did. She had to put his clean socks away or find some lost thing in the attic.
That morning she heard Kenny moving upstairs. He always sounded as if he were reeling, stomping the floor and thumping into furniture. She could never figure out what he was doing that made so much noise, but she was always relieved to see him come down the stairs, still half-asleep but unharmed. She smiled thinking about his rumpled hair, his pajamas buttoned wrong.
He reminded her more now of his uncle Jack than of his father, and she felt for Kenneth’s parents, who had lost two sons. Though he was the older, Jack seemed like the younger one, diffident and clumsy. Just running into Jack used to make her happy, as if she were swimming in an icy lake and suddenly felt her bare legs find a hidden pool of warmer water. When Jack died in Vietnam, they all said, “He was just too good to live.” Even though she was an air force wife, his death had made her furious.
Kenny stumbled down the stairs without glancing into the kitchen, and she heard water running in the bathroom, the faucet turned on full, splashing in the sink. She wanted to go to the door, remind him that the thawing snow was filling up the septic tank, the drains would be backed up all day. But all she did was nag at him now. She would just skip a shower herself. She finished her coffee and went into her room to dress for work.
When she came out, Kenny was at the table, spooning cereal out of a mixing bowl.
“I’m late,” she said. “Anything you want me to pick up after work?”
“Six pack of beer, some chew,” he said, his mouth full of food.
Lenna laughed. “What time will you be home?”
“Don’t know.”
“If it’s after five, I could pick you up?”
Kenny waved her away. “Go. You’re gonna be late.”
She’d been late to work several times in the last few weeks. She didn’t know what it was. She woke up early and was dressed and ready on time, but something always came up. She couldn’t find her purse or her checkbook. Or she found herself drifting around the house, looking for her lipstick or something she’d promised to bring to work. Or one morning the car refused to start.
“Don’t you be late,” she said to Kenny. “It’s almost eight o’clock.”
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m done.” To prove it, he stood up and carried his bowl to the sink.
Lenna pulled on her coat and went out the door. She stepped carefully on the ice and made her way out to the car.
After she was gone, Kenny sat back down. He wasn’t in any hurry. He wasn’t going to school.
He waited for Cynthia on the corner. When the big car pulled into sight, he jogged to meet it. Inside, the heat was thick, and he rolled down the window.
Cynthia drove without talking, up the highway, turning finally onto the ski hill road. They parked above the Moyers place on the Forest Service road and slipped down the path on wet fallen leaves.
Formations of geese, great squadrons of geese, passed overhead—some heading north, some flying south. Kenny and Cynthia stopped at the foot of the path and listened to the racket overhead.
“You know why,” Kenny asked, “geese fly in formation, one off the wing of the other?”
Cynthia looked at him, suspicious. “No, why?” she said.
“They’re drafting off each other, like race cars. The one in front makes a vacuum—makes it easier for the one behind. My dad explained it to me.”
“If you say so,” Cynthia said.
“You know why in a formation of geese, one side of the V is always longer than the other?”
“No,” she said, “why?”
“There’s more geese on that side.” Kenny let loose laughing. Cynthia boxed him on the arm, but she laughed, too. They walked on to the ranch house.
Inside, the living room was bigger than any place he’d ever been. On one side, there was a fireplace you could stand up in. At the other end, a black grand piano.
Cynthia threw her books down on the couch and tugged sheet music from a brown satchel. She set it up on the piano and turned back the cover from the keys, but she didn’t start to play.
Kenny sat behind her on the couch, watching how she stretched and flexed her shoulders, her shoulder blades pinching close together underneath her shirt.
“You look like a chicken,” he said.
She stuck out her elbows, flapped, and gave a “balk, balk, balk.” She swiveled around on the piano bench, and imitating an announcer on the radio, she said, “And now,
the chicken concerto . . . in D major, by Johann Sebastian Balk.”
Kenny liked to stretch out on the couch and listen to her play. At first, all the music had sounded pretty much alike to him. He never listened to this kind of music. When it came on the radio, it made him feel sleepy. Old and sleepy, and he switched to something else.
But the real piano had a different sound. The last time Cynthia brought him here, he sat beside her on the bench, and she taught him how to count the notes and measures, how to turn the music sheets for her.
It took him a while to get over being afraid someone would catch them inside the big house. But Cynthia had permission. Roddy had given her permission to come play his mother’s piano. His mother had arthritis now and couldn’t play. The foreman only showed up early every morning to feed.
It was hard for Kenny to stay inside and watch the weather turn, warming up. The air itself seemed to draw him. He sat as long as he could, listening to Cynthia play, but after a while his legs would start to twitch. A muscle in one leg would jump, and he would have to stand and walk around the room. The soft carpets were woven in strange designs that, if he stared at them too long, began to give him the creeps.
He wanted to go out and see the colts. Roddy raised roughstock. Bucking horses, just for fun. He never sold them to a stockbreeder or concession, not as far as Kenny knew. But he kept a dozen green colts just to see how they would go. See if he could teach them to buck.
At lunchtime, they walked out the back door and down the alley to the empty barn. They made nests in the hay and ate whatever they had packed to take to school. They talked. Kenny had never said so much in his whole life. He just opened his mouth, and words came out.
Cynthia told him how, after the night at the bar, Dill left Goldie in his shed and drove her home. On Christmas Day.
“We pulled into the yard,” she said, “and it felt like somebody else’s yard. The dog woke up and she went to Dill instead of me. Sat down on his boot and looked up at him. My dad came out on the porch.
“‘Brought your girl,’ Dill said.
“My dad didn’t say anything. I think he was ashamed to have Dill there. I didn’t tell Dill my father had hit me the night before. But Earl must have thought I did.
“My dad stepped off the porch and made room for me to go past him, inside. ‘Go on’—that’s all he said. I went up to my room and sat on the bed. I just sat there for a long time, thinking my mother would come up and ask me where I’d been. I kept thinking she’d be upset I tore the coat.
“Finally, I hung it up in the back of the closet. It’s still there. Then I just stayed in my room the rest of the day. It didn’t feel like Christmas. I used to get excited, wondering what I’d get. From my mother. From Aunt Helen. But I didn’t this year. Did Roddy give your mom a present?”
“No,” Kenny said. “Not that I could see.”
“I don’t know what happened to the presents,” Cynthia said. “The next day, the Christmas tree was gone and there weren’t any packages. Even the ones I got for my folks were gone. I think my dad took them all to church. It feels worse not to care than not to have presents.
“Sometimes,” she said, “I wish my dad was dead. I lie awake at night, and I want to shoot him, with a gun. I have a picture in my mind of a revolver. A silver, metal gun. But the picture always ends up with the gun pointed at me. Right at my head.”
When Cynthia talked like that, it scared him. He half believed her and half didn’t. Other times, she talked about how much she wanted to get out of there. How all her life she dreamed about going to New York to live with her aunt Helen. But now she didn’t want to live with anybody. She wanted to be on her own.
“Do you ever feel that way?” she asked him. “Like you want to get up in the night and walk around—go anywhere you want. I think there are places where everybody stays up late. They’re going dancing, or out to hear music.”
Kenny took in the damp green smell of the hay. He smelled Cynthia, a clean, sweaty smell. They sat in the hay, their backs against old milking stanchions, and looked out the wide door of the barn. Most of the time, he didn’t know what she was talking about. But he told her no. It didn’t feel good not to have a dad. He told her how once, after his parents divorced, one of the popular kids had befriended him. The boy and his dad had invited him to go out to a lake, to go out fishing. But he and the boy had ended up racing, swimming to a slippery raft out in the water. He remembered the deep mud at the shore, and how they dove in to get past it without sinking to their ankles in black sludge.
By lunch it was cold, and they stood shivering in their wet swim trunks while the dad made a fire and roasted hot dogs. The dad asked him, “How’s your mom?” Kenny didn’t know the man even knew his mom, and he felt embarrassed that he did.
“She’s fine,” he said.
“Don’t you have a dad?” the boy asked.
His father shut him up, angry, as if the boy had said something dirty. “Of course he does,” he said. “Everybody has a dad.”
Now he told Cynthia, “Not everybody has a dad. Don’t wish your dad was dead.”
He leaned back and thought about the weeks of spring and summer ahead. He thought he could talk her into coming to the ranch again and helping him catch one of Roddy’s horses. They wouldn’t even have to cut school. Next week the spring vacation would begin.
“My dad used to always say, ‘Call if you need anything.’ I don’t know how I knew, but I knew he didn’t mean it. It got to feel like a bad joke. But now, I wish I’d called him anyway.”
27
The foreman had turned the colts out in the south pasture to forage on their own. As the sun went down, the grass began to stiffen and freeze, but rivulets of water ran in streams underneath. The fence lines curved into a sharp corner, where a thicket of willows grew.
Kenny and Cynthia stepped apart, moving slowly, pushing the colts into the corner.
“Don’t spook ’em,” Cynthia said. “Go slow.”
She hated catching horses, and they hardly had a chance in hell of catching one of these. Kenny held a rope behind his back where the colts wouldn’t see it. Cynthia carried a bucket of grain, but she didn’t shake it. These colts wouldn’t come to grain. But at least her dad wasn’t there, waiting to see her mess up.
The layers of frozen swamp grass had a give and spring under her boots, as if she were walking on a floating island, but where the ground had thawed, her boots sank in watery black mud. She tried to move without making sounds, but she knew the colts were watching their approach.
Despite their winter coats, the colts glistened in the dirty golden light, the muscles in their chests rounded in curves above their long, straight legs.
She signaled Kenny and they moved up closer. One of the horses, a black two-year-old with white socks, lifted his head and turned to watch them. He arched his neck, pivoted on his back legs, and snorted. The other colts milled around each other. It made her uneasy, moving up on the horses in the dim light. She could see, but yet she couldn’t.
They were close now, but too far apart to stop the horses if they charged. She knew one would hit the corner, see the trap, and come galloping out past them. She and Kenny stopped at the same time, to let the horses settle down, go back to feeding. What they should have done was saddle up another horse and drive the colts into the corral. They resumed their slow steps forward.
The black colt spun out of the corner and made a break. He came straight at Cynthia, his head held high. Any second the other colts would shoot apart and run.
“Whoa!” She held her arms wide and shifted sideways to head off the first colt. “Whoa!” She ran at him, waving her arms to turn him back into the fence. But he kept on coming.
“Move!” she heard Kenny holler, but she knew the colt would cut aside if she stood her ground. She flapped her arms and yelled. Her hair fell in her eyes, and she could only hear the hooves thudding through mud. She whooped at the colt and ran right at him.
He pi
voted, turned, and galloped back up the field. “You shit,” she said. She bent over and braced her hands on her knees, breathing hard. She’d done just what her dad would have wanted—the right thing, the thing she hardly ever did when he was watching.
They wouldn’t ever catch the black colt now. Once one got started like that, he never quit. She motioned for Kenny to move up. Kenny held his loop down by his side, hefted it in his palm, and grasped the end of the rope in his other hand. They were close now, the horses almost in between them. She wanted to squeeze them a little closer toward Kenny, so if they bolted he could get out a loop.
A big gray colt jigged along the fence, first one way, then the other. He lifted his head and began to trot out between them. He would speed up suddenly, she knew. Even if Kenny got a loop out, he wouldn’t be able to hold him. But Kenny made his throw, and she heard the rope slap down. Kenny took a wrap on his end, and dug his heels into the mud, ready for the colt to take off. But the colt stopped dead, fear showing white in his eyes. Kenny didn’t wait. He closed in hand over hand, twisted a hackamore over the colt’s nose, and threw his leg over. He was up.
The horse didn’t buck. Instead, it ran at Cynthia. Terror hit her cold, and she felt the blow like a hundred-pound sack of grain. It hurt. Right away it hurt—all down her arm, and her hip, and her leg, a dull pain like she’d never felt before. She was on the ground, her elbow twisted in the mud. But she got up fast. She ran for the fence, climbed over, and sat down.
The colt was far down in the field, heading back, a glimmer of white in the dusk. She couldn’t see what Kenny was doing, but he was still on. Then his left arm was in the air and waving. He was spurring the damn thing, trying to get his ride. But the colt wouldn’t buck. It did every other thing—ran him into the willows, stopped, and reared and spun around. The next thing he’d do was go down, roll Kenny off, and break his leg, or his back.
Love and Country Page 18