When she was younger, she’d had stern ideas about right and wrong, and about fairness. Though her memories of harm and betrayal would never fade entirely, she now thought she understood forgiveness. With each year, events had overtaken her. People simply wore her down. She had grown too tired to hate them. She couldn’t hate Earl Dustin; she knew what it would do to Cynthia if her father died. And it had been in the spring, when she’d first begun to hear birds again, ordinary robins and starlings, that she had finally stopped hating Roddy.
Suddenly Kenny was in the chute, and she jumped up when his horse lunged from the gate. She held her breath so long she saw dark spots and had to wrap her arms around the splintered post to keep from falling. She couldn’t help rooting for him, standing on the toes of her boots, watching the bronc hurl and flap the boy back and forth, the way a dog might fight a rag. He didn’t make his time. She saw him lose his balance early, lose his ride. He slipped off sideways and rolled.
When he stood, his blue shirt was smeared nearly black with mud and manure. He’d be mad and disappointed, but not hurt.
33
Earl remained in intensive care. One lung had collapsed, and they’d threaded a breathing tube down his throat. His eyes opened from time to time, but he couldn’t speak. Though he was monitored by machines, the nurse took his pulse every hour, and the doctor stopped in twice a day.
“He could still have another,” the doctor told Cynthia.
“Why?” she’d asked him. Her dad was a strong man. Why were things going so wrong?
“The body gets tired,” he said. “Things wear out, just like machinery. We’re not made to go on forever.”
When finally Earl could breathe on his own, they moved him to a double room with a second, empty bed. Cynthia pulled the visitor’s chair close to Earl’s head, where sunlight filtered through the only window. The minister had driven her mother home to rest.
A nurse tiptoed in, wearing white polyester pants and a homemade print smock. “You want something to eat?” she asked Cynthia.
“No, thanks.”
“You do, you come on down to the kitchen. We’ve got fresh pie.”
Cynthia nodded. Earl had been drifting in and out of consciousness and deep sleep all day. He looked so wrong in the hospital bed. His nose jutted from his face like an escarpment, and she saw the bruised, tunneling veins rising on the backs of his freckled hands. They didn’t shave him every day, and his fingernails were grimy. Her mother kept saying she would bring his razor and nail clippers from home. But each day she forgot. Cynthia would have to do it.
She listened to his rattled breathing, the hum of the machines. Slowly he opened his eyes and gazed at the light from the window.
“What time is it?” he tried to say, but his voice slurred, and he threw out an arm in frustration, glaring at Cynthia.
“After supper,” she said, although he was being fed through a tube.
He turned his head toward her, his pale eyes filled with a vague terror.
“Cissy?” she thought he tried to say. “Cissy.”
Tears came; she couldn’t help it. “Yes, Earl.” She leaned forward and lifted his heavy hand from the sheet. “It’s me, Daddy.”
He threw her hand off.
She felt tears roll down her cheeks. She wiped them with the edge of her hand so he wouldn’t see. But he was gone again, asleep.
She leaned back in the chair, one leg tucked beneath her. Nobody came or went, and the hospital was quiet. She listened to Earl’s labored breathing. She felt as if she could sit there forever, without moving. Just sit there. While she did, she didn’t have to think. She was doing something everybody thought was a good thing, an important thing to do. For the first time, she was the good girl. She would not be called upon for anything else.
When she heard Roddy Moyers coming down the hall, joking with another patient, she wondered if somebody new had come in, if there had been an accident. She didn’t think so. But time seemed to whiten and float in here; anything might have happened outside.
The door was open and Roddy walked right in. He nodded at her, but he didn’t speak. He pulled up another chair and sat down. Earl hadn’t had too many visitors. The doctor discouraged it. He told people just to wait a bit. When people did come, they either whispered or they yelled. She wondered what Roddy would do if Earl woke up.
“How is he?” Roddy asked her in a normal voice.
Earl opened his eyes and glared, as if to say, “I’m right here. Don’t talk like I was dead.”
When he closed his eyes again, they retreated to the corridor, where Roddy asked, “How is he, really?”
“We begged him to get on the helicopter. Both Jeff and Dill told him they’d stay right by, go with him to Denver or Salt Lake, but he refused to go.” She felt tears coming again and looked away.
“Can I do anything? Take you out to eat? Have you eaten yet?”
“No. Dill’s bringing Mother back. Then I’ll go eat with him.”
Roddy grinned at her. “I could take you for a ride . . .”
She gazed at him a long time, studying his face as if for the first time before she spoke. “I don’t think so,” she said. “My aunt Helen will be here soon, and I’ll be going back with her.”
“Back east?”
“New York.”
“You got that scholarship?”
Cynthia nodded. “But I might not take it.”
“Why not?”
She nodded at her dad’s room, but she said, “I talked to my aunt Helen. There might be a way that I can go to music school, if I wait until next year. I can’t decide.”
“You’ll still be here for the Fourth?”
“I don’t think I’ll be in a party mood.”
“Well. Anything. Anything at all I could do to help out. You’ll let me know?”
She watched Roddy walk back down the hall, his boot heels loud on the linoleum. He grinned at the secretary at the desk and went on out. Suddenly she thought of something he could do. She ran down the corridor and caught him in the parking lot.
“There is a favor I would ask of you . . . ,” she said.
“Anything.”
Later that afternoon, she sat at the fold-down table in Dill’s trailer, watching him fry steaks. Burn ’em, as he said. The door and all the windows were cranked wide open to let out the smoke.
“Should of done this all outdoors,” he said.
“It’s okay,” she said. “Just don’t light a cigarette, we’ll have to crawl to safety on the floor.”
“Your dad used to cook steaks so rare I used to tell him, ‘Give this one a shot of penicillin, it’ll bawl and run off.’”
“It’s criminal,” she said, imitating her dad’s voice, “criminal—ruin a damn good piece of meat.”
After they had eaten, they sat out on the steps. The slow summer sun was still high.
“Your dad’s a strong man,” Dill said.
“He needs a shave.”
“I could take care of that.”
“Could you?”
“First thing. First thing in the mornin’.”
All winter, she’d been thinking ahead to how she would get away. Get out of the valley. How Earl would never hit her again. And now, he was just an ugly, sick old man. There wasn’t any reason she should leave. But her aunt was coming to get her.
As if he were reading her mind, Dill said, “We’ll take good care of him. He’ll make it.”
“You don’t think I should stay?”
“No.”
Dill struck a match on his boot heel and lit a cigarette. He coughed, a raw sound churning in his lungs. “Need to quit these things,” he said. He looked out into the sagebrush and the new green of the aspen trees. Late spring had been so unseasonably wet that saplings seemed to appear overnight.
“Why does he hate me so much?” Cynthia asked. “Do you know, Dill?”
Dill took his time, finishing his smoke.
“I suppose it won’t hurt now to
say,” he said. “You came along pretty late, you know. You were the apple of his eye. Earl carted you everywhere. Never saw him without you. Then—must have been the year you started school, never thought of it that way before—Earl changed. I don’t know quite what it was. I guess he knew right then you were bound to go your own way.”
Cynthia thought, This is it? This is all? It was like Earl wishing she were a boy. It explained, and yet it didn’t. How could he leave her just for going off to kindergarten?
“Doesn’t make sense,” she said. She fought to hold back tears. “I must have done something.”
Dill wrapped his arm around her, pulled her close. “Nothing, sweetheart. Not a thing.”
“Tell me.”
“Settle down. It’s okay now.”
She mashed her face into Dill’s shirt and cried.
“Quit now,” Dill said. “Quit now.”
He pushed her away and looked into her face. She felt her mouth contort and another wave of tears start to come. Then there was something. She saw it in Dill’s face, and suddenly she was alert. Angry.
“What? You tell me, Dill. You have to tell me now.”
“There was an incident,” Dill said.
“What did I do?”
“You were just a little girl. You didn’t do a thing. We were playing cards up at the mill. Earl let you wander off. You know it’s dangerous, a mill. A kid can drown in grain. When he went lookin’, your dad found you with Harold Cray.”
“What was I doing?”
“No one is sure, to this day. Harold was a big boy, nearly grown. But your dad gave him a beating, right there on the loading dock.”
“Is that why Harold is slow?”
“No, there’s nothin’ wrong with Harold’s mind. He was a bright boy, even then. But that day he never had a chance to speak. He went into the service, to Vietnam I believe, not long after.
“It’s not that Earl wanted you to be a boy,” Dill said. “It’s just he didn’t want a girl.”
Cynthia drove to Harold’s shop. The antique glass and dark oak door was locked, the counter and the rows of saddles on their stands filmed with a layer of dust. It looked as if the shop had been closed for weeks.
She drove out to Harold’s house. It was a shack, really, built by Harold of scrap lumber over the years. Just one room and two glassed-in porches, front and back, constructed of mismatched windows. Weeds grew up the outside of the foundation, and two dung beetle-shaped old cars and a truck frame were rusting in the sagebrush yard.
She knocked on the door, then called Harold’s name. When nobody answered, she walked around to the back. Beyond Harold’s house, there was nothing but chewed-down grass, the fences past repair. Black TV sets had been set up along the fence line, on stumps and ammunition boxes.
Harold sat in a folding lawn chair, beside a wooden table made for spooling wire. Without a hat, his bald head shone, burning pink in the sun. He looked up at her and nodded at a second chair.
Cynthia sat down and looked out over the pasture. From a bare mound of dirt, chizzlers, fat ground squirrels, sat up and chattered. They popped in and out of burrows like puppets in a show.
Harold pointed just beyond the mound. Three young foxes watched the chizzlers. One leaned back on his haunches to scratch has neck with a back paw, lost his balance, and tumbled over backward. Cynthia laughed.
“The peaceable kingdom,” she said.
“Fat summer,” Harold said. “Plenty of food to go around.”
Harold squinted out at the row of TV sets. Before she could speak, he hoisted an ugly automatic rifle to his shoulder and fired, blowing out the glass in one screen after another.
The foxes and the ground squirrels vanished. Cynthia sat unable to move, staring at the gun, a flat, black machine gun. Her ears rang.
“What are you doing here?” Harold said. “What do you want?”
“Put the gun away,” she said.
Harold looked at it, cradled in his lap.
“All right,” he said. He stood and motioned her to follow. She went through the screen door into his back porch. There had to be two dozen guns there. Rifles and handguns. Harold laid the machine gun down in a row of other guns. The room smelled like gun cleaner and stale beer and cigarettes. Harold opened a refrigerator and took out one beer. He twisted off the top, but didn’t drink.
“Okay,” he said. “What do you want?”
“I want to know what happened when I was five. What happened at the mill.”
“Nothin’ happened.”
“Why did Earl give you a beating?”
“Lost his temper.”
“Why?”
“Why’d he beat on that boy Ken?”
Harold walked over to a wall he’d paneled with rough gray barn wood. On the wall, he’d pinned up photographs.
“Look here,” he said.
Cynthia stepped up, and he pointed at a blurred photograph of a skinny boy in jeans and a white cowboy shirt, leaning on a car.
“That’s Cal Haverford. He died, not ten miles from here. Shot himself in the head. His dad said it was a hunting accident. I grew up with Cal.”
He pointed to the next picture. “Walter Johnson, 1948-1972,” somebody, Harold, she guessed, had written underneath.
“OD’d,” Harold said. “Heroin.” He looked at her as if she might not know what that was.
There were more pictures on the wall. Narrow-chested men in T-shirts and fatigues, wearing dog tags and posed in front of jeeps. Some were shirtless, and she could see the outlines of their ribs.
“I’ve got my own memorial,” Harold said.
“Earl’s all right,” he said. “I understand Earl. It’s generally the other ones you got to watch out for. The little old lady driving to the store. She’s the one who takes you out.”
“Why’d he beat you up?”
“We were up on the loading dock. You could sing, even then. You used to sing this little kid’s song, about a kitten and a pussy willow. . . . It was my fault. I started teasing you, singing along, and you got to laughing. Laughed so hard you peed your pants.
“Then you were ashamed and mad. You took your underpants off and threw them in the dirt. You followed me down to get ’em back. Just about that time, your dad showed up.
“Earl was scared. I guess he saw how something bad could happen to his kid, and not a damn thing he could do.”
“Why don’t you hate him?”
Harold looked at the pictures on the wall.
“I owe him,” he said. “He taught me the one thing. Watch out for yourself. Nobody else is goin’ to. It’s just like that.” He snapped his fingers. “Whether you’re alive or dead. You got to decide for yourself. You want to live? or you want to die?”
Harold moved so close she could smell the beer in the bottle in his hand. “Whatever you do,” he said, “don’t start feeling sorry for yourself. That trap will snap shut with you in it, just like that.”
“It doesn’t make sense to me,” she said. “It’s not enough to make Earl hate me.”
Harold squinted, as if he were coming to a decision. He started to speak, and stopped.
“You tell me,” she said. “Please.”
“Earl didn’t go after me,” he said. “He went after you. Hauled you up on the dock by an arm. I heard it pop out of the socket. You were screaming. You were so scared. Then I thought he was goin’ to kill you. He shook you like a dog shakes a rat, and slapped you so hard blood flew out of your mouth.
“I remember standing there thinking, I can’t interfere. A person doesn’t interfere in family.
“But you had blood smeared on your cheek, like you’d been picking cherries. I saw that. I couldn’t stand to see that. I had to stop him.”
Without warning, Harold’s face softened. He gave her a quick hug, as if she were a man. A pat on the back. And he stepped away.
“It’s not your worry,” he said. “You go on . . .” He almost pushed her toward the door. “You go on,” he sa
id. “You’re stronger than you think.”
Driving home Cynthia felt like she was made out of tears. The bones in her face began to ache from crying. She cried because all this time Earl had held it against her, something she’d been too little to understand. Something she didn’t remember. And because her dad would die. But not now, she thought, not right now.
34
On the Fourth of July, the hotel hired enough bands to keep the music pounding all day and most of the night. At some time during the day, the entire county showed up at the café or the bar. Roddy Moyers should have been out on the circuit. But he’d been working this rodeo since he was a kid. He couldn’t ride in an amateur show anymore, but he’d stick around and help out around the chutes.
He sat in the back of the café jammed in by six other bodies in a circular booth. Friends and acquaintances had been buying him beers all afternoon. The band in the bar started up again, so loud the whole place shook with every bass note and drumbeat, and the waitresses had to yell over everyone else yelling over the band.
“What’s that?” an old-timer bellowed from across the booth.
“Why don’t you get a hearing aid?” Dolly McReynolds demanded.
“Ain’t found one that’s worth a darn!”
“That’s why I don’t get one!” Dolly hollered back, getting a big laugh from the table.
Roddy wondered if his own ears were being damaged. He squeezed out of the booth and started for the door, turning sideways to get by the people standing in the aisles.
He walked down the center of the street, kicking at crushed paper cups and beer bottles left from the parade. Across the railroad tracks, a makeshift town of cars and trucks and horse trailers had grown overnight in the dusty pasture around the new arena.
Horses, most already saddled, stood tethered to trailers, and he felt the steady flow of movement, like an eddy in a river. People passed on horseback, going nowhere, just kicking up the dust. Barrel racers rode the periphery on thin-necked horses. A girl wearing gold shorts and a halter top rode by, her face and long brown arms painted up in war paint. Even the horse had ghost-white circles around his eyes.
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