Eventually the stallion would run him out for good. That, or be run out himself. The mares would come into season and the males would tangle because the chemistry of their blood demanded they tangle. No way to avoid it. John H burned the red hue of the colt into his brain. This was the horse he would ride.
In the afternoon the herd went to water and he waited for them to vanish into the trees and returned to the mare. She nickered when she sensed him coming, craned her head against the flex of the tree. He checked the cinch, pulled the slipknot from the reins and mounted. She wanted water now herself.
He rode away from the river and off the plateau, turning down through the bowl. The mare pricked her ears to the herd’s lingering sign but he urged her on and rode up the slope on the far side. They passed through a belt of pines and topped the hill into the open again, back to sagebrush and soapweed, back to iron-colored stone.
He loped her a mile and turned her toward the river. The slope to the floor was less severe here and he kept to the saddle, wound down a shallow wash that funneled water in some long-past age but ran now dry as flaking bone.
He heard the cluck and rattle of throats and wings and looked up to see sharp-tailed grouse, a dozen at least, hurtling in formation down the bank of the river. Two or four at a time fixed their wings to glide for some spell, then propelled themselves forward again. They traveled on out of sight. Possibly something had spooked them, coyote or fox or lynx. Equally possible they flew for reasons known only to themselves.
He led the mare down and let her drink, the water roiling and discolored with runoff, too murky for human use outside dire necessity. He’d already drained his canteen and didn’t know of a spring nearby. He was out of food entirely.
With the mare watered he turned for home. He rode upriver toward a formation of flutes in a sheer stone wall, the mare moving at little more than a walk for nearly an hour through loose rock and broken footing. The flutes drew closer, the wide distance a deceit. He looked across the river and a flashpoint in his memory revived the gallows humor of all warfare everywhere.
A meat wagon, as he and his brothers-in-arms had christened the army ambulances. Only this one was painted red, and crippled in a ditch.
5
After an hour on foot she had a clearer sense of the ache in her arms. The track out of the canyon followed the contours of the land in an endless series of switchbacks, lap after lap after lap. On the way in she concentrated only on keeping from the edge and hadn’t metered the number of times she’d cranked the obstinate wheel of the Dodge in a buttonhook turn. At slow speed, no less.
Catherine still couldn’t understand how anything of substance could live out here. She could see an impossible distance yet nothing seemed to move. Even the plant life occurred in patches, clump here and sprig there. The supposition of millions of buffalo seemed the myth of a lost Eden. Every culture had one.
In childhood she’d fallen in love with the vanished past. The earth swallowed stories whole only to disgorge them later, in flakes of stone and shards of clay, sacked ruins and empty temples. But the stories remained, waiting for a voice. She was a girl seduced.
At nine she saw mummies and sarcophagi in the Penn Museum and contracted an instant obsession with Egypt. She struck out on her own long expedition, exhuming dusty old monographs by Flinders Petrie, the first modern Egyptologist. She went to lectures at the university, wrote letters to archaeologists in far-flung places. A few wrote back.
Her parents and her teachers encouraged her while she was still young enough to be precocious—she was certainly more original than the legion of boys who planned to become cowboys or G-men—but by her midteens sanction had waned. The cowboys and detectives realized they would actually become attorneys and businessmen. Catherine alone didn’t seem to quit.
She was pushed toward the piano early and she excelled, out of an eagerness to please as much as anything. At ten the fantasies of mounting an expedition to the Valley of the Kings seemed impish and cute but at seventeen, with college on the horizon, talk of forgoing music to study archaeology made her parents’ lives flash before their eyes. They pleaded and cajoled. They pressured.
And they won. They’d reared a polite, sensible girl. She applied to Juilliard’s conservatory program, and got in. Two years later she won a Fulbright to Cambridge, also her parents’ idea. They had toured Britain on their honeymoon and began in short order to style themselves as Anglophiles, with Wedgwood china and a half-timbered Tudor house in New Jersey full of extravagant furniture. Her father went to great expense to import a Morgan runabout, British racing green with a leather strap around the bonnet.
Given their own mania, England’s influence on their daughter was unfortunate indeed. Her first full day in London, Catherine discovered Rome.
She’d made her way in a misty drizzle to Fleet Street, groggy with travel but restless with excitement. Even the air around her had the tarnish of age. She wanted to see the Thames and the Tower and St. Paul’s and she had no idea where to begin. So she wandered aimlessly, rounded a corner and found the standing dead.
Two long rows of gutted buildings slouched down the street, roofs flayed to the rain. Rubble littered the pavement in mounds. She took a tentative step forward. Empty windows peered like masks and made her feel stared upon. She shrugged this off as exhaustion.
Most of the buildings had been three or four stories tall. Now only the facades and the random suggestion of an interior remained, a crumbling portion of an inside wall, a banister curving to nowhere. Up ahead the damage was heavier yet, entire buildings reduced to debris with here and there a lonely corner of dovetailed brick spiking forty feet in the air.
Nearly a decade after the last German bomb, this was her first real comprehension of the war. Centuries of provenance, undone in an instant.
She heard muffled laughter rebound through the hull of a building, and a happy voice that seemed not a part of its surroundings. A second voice said something in reply. Workmen, she assumed, though it was hard to imagine what could be achieved here without a regular army of bulldozers and trucks. She moved toward the voices.
They were in the basement of a shell, three men with tall rubber boots and rain slickers and shovels. A wooden ladder went down from the doorway to the mud. Precise trenches bisected the basement floor and extended into the adjoining basement, the distinction between the two made pointless by bomb damage. Heavy stone footings stood up from the mud in the shape of a polygon, with connecting footings curving outward in two directions. Catherine recognized what she’d read about for so long. She’d stumbled onto a dig.
“Watch that step, eh miss?”
All three looked up at her, probably as curious as she was. “May I come down?”
“Up to you, but it’s a bit of a wallow.”
She climbed down the ladder wishing she hadn’t worn a skirt and heels. Her fingers slipped in the mud on the rungs. She cat-stepped as best she could around the standing water and stopped short of the polygon and stared.
“Have you some connection to the building then?”
“Gosh no. I’ve only been here a day.”
“An American girl, lads.” He said this as though he’d never been more delighted. “If I might borrow a line, what the devil is a girl like you doing in a place like this?”
They all laughed, and Catherine laughed too. “I didn’t realize there would still be damage from the war. So much of it, at least.”
The youngest of the three was at least ten years her senior, the other two ten years older than that. No doubt they experienced the blackouts and explosions firsthand.
“Amazing what was lost,” said the youngest. “This”—he gestured around—“was from a V-bomb. Late in the game.”
“The Blitz, that was doable,” said another. “You could still find a party during the Blitz. Life went on. Those Vs were something else entirely.”
If Catherine looked confused, nobody remarked.
“Not to say there was
n’t a silver lining, a small sample of which you see here.”
“What is it?”
“Part of the Roman fortification, what they called Cripplegate. Second century probably, though we haven’t got an exact date.”
Catherine crouched toward the cold stones of the polygon. A shiver shot through her spine the instant her fingers touched it, this product of slave labor and Gauls, chiseled and hewn and fitted into a holy geometry that for all she knew channeled the harmony of the spheres. She’d never felt anything like it.
“That humble pile was likely the base of a turret. There and there are the north- and east-running walls. Londinium was sacked by revolt in the first century, burned to the ground. The original Blitz, I suppose. This was the empire’s response. Set in stone.”
“It’s amazing.”
“It is, really. Lost for so long under Saxon huts and medieval trash pits. Victorian warehouses. One giant curiosity chest, really.”
She’d walked back to her hotel in the London gloom with a headful of whirling images, centurions and Roman baths and slave ships. The cobbled mosaic of buried walls. The piano didn’t enter her mind.
Now she was sure of it. Luck had withdrawn its fickle hand again. She’d resigned herself to the long walk out and had calmed considerably, no longer fearing so much for her safety but conscious entirely of looking like a fool.
Here on the canyonside in the high afternoon both the light and the land beneath the light had an alkaline whiteness, the bare ground in the distance powdered in chalk. She recalled not only damp London but the woods behind her parents’ Tudor in the spring, the high sycamores and squat blooming mayapples, daylight seeping through the canopy in a wan vegetable glow.
She craved something lush and she got it at the next switchback. The dirt track curved with the rounding surface of the world and opened another angle on the horizon. Farther up the hillside she saw a curious copse of trees, uniform and beautiful with pale bark and pendant-like leaves the color of tarnished green copper. The pendants fluttered in the breeze like waxwings around a berry bush, separate yet uniform, a mass of mesmerizing synchronous things. Catherine stepped off the track.
She had to sidehill her way up and across the grade, picking her way through clumps of spine-studded cactus plants—first cactus outside a pot!—and through a maze of low stone formations that appeared sculpted and shaped less by any random natural force than the industrious hands of elves.
A buck deer blasted out of the rocks, antlers stubby and blunt with spring velvet. He stopped and quartered many yards out, looking back. Catherine pushed on.
Apparently water existed beneath the ground because the trees did not have the features of the desert. They looked a bit like the silver birches in Maine where she had vacationed as a girl, only more massive. Trunks heavy as columns. From the edge of the copse she looked in and saw something else: script carved into the smooth surface of the bark.
She walked out of the sunlight and approached the letters, got distracted in midstep by a number on another tree, further writing on another. A carved picture on a fourth, a starlike assemblage of lines inside a circle. She turned back to the first tree. Gora Euzkadi. She wondered if it was some strange foreign name, perhaps a phonetic rendering of an Indian name. She walked farther into the shadows.
She had entered a living gallery of words and images, the trees covered like the tattooed arms of sailors. Pictographs of animals and unclear symbols, letters in a strange, strange tongue. Alo gazteak zer diozue. Ni nas arsain pobre bat.
Dates. 1901, 1909, 1924. Names in some offshoot of Spanish or French or both. Gilen Lafuente, Marc Laxague. Marcel Ithurralde.
None of the carvings appeared new. She saw no date as recent as the war, and the original cuttings had scarred darkly over. What on earth.
She walked around in the shade and stumbled on a depiction of vastly superior execution. A nude woman with heavy breasts and slender waist and long, graceful legs. Her face was turned slightly to the side, her features finely scribed and wistful. The carver had actually captured this. Hair in curls to her shoulders. It could have been a portrait of an actual woman.
A nearby tree had another carving in what looked to be the same hand, another nude though any sense of the wistful now resided with the carver. This woman reclined on her back, legs wide and nipples standing in the air. A natural dimple in the tree formed the slit between her thighs. Eros in a glade. She realized then what some of the other symbols were, semicircles overlapping in the middle to form a narrow opening, similar to the cave scribings Paleolithic scholars politely called Venuses. Catherine studied the reclining woman and raised her canteen to her lips.
“Hello there.”
She jumped and water sloshed down her chin. She whirled and felt her face go scarlet, felt water wet the front of her shirt. She wished she stood before any carving other than this one.
The speaker rode a horse, winding through the trees and still not near enough to determine what she was looking at. She stepped away.
“Is that your truck with the flat?”
The man from the park in Miles City. Same blue shirt, same smudge of paint. He rode up and reined his horse sideways and gave the horse its head to crop grass. The horse chewed around the bit in its mouth. The man had a short-brimmed hat pushed back on his head and stubble on his cheeks but a general calm to his movements. Catherine felt no such calm herself but then here she was, encountering a stranger in some mountainside paean to sex.
“It is. I had a little trouble.”
He grinned. “I guess you did. Figure on walking?”
She shrugged. “I guess I have to.”
“I admire your spirit, but I think we can get you back on the road.” He swung to the ground and offered his hand. She noticed the buttstock of a rifle, sticking above the saddle on the offside of the horse.
She shook his hand, her own still begrimed from lug wrench and jack. He didn’t seem to notice. She saw that sweat and dust streaked the lines on his neck, the cuffs and collar of his shirt frayed to little more than threads. “I’m Catherine. Lemay.”
He led the horse and she walked down with him through the carved trunks. He said nothing about the inscriptions and she wasn’t sure why but she said nothing herself. But the trees themselves. The trees were a different matter.
“You’re probably wondering why I left the road.”
He gave her a sideways look. “Not the smartest move, if you don’t mind me leveling with you.”
Given her predicament she chose to ignore this. “Where I come from everything’s green. I wanted to see these trees. Can you tell me what they are?”
“Quaking aspens.” They ventured again into the sage, angling again toward the dirt track road. “Most common tree in the mountains and maybe the most beautiful too. Not often those two overlap.”
So far he’d made no mention of their first encounter, in the park in Miles City. Surely it must be in his mind too. Only a few days had passed and how unusual they should encounter each other again in all this vastness. The coincidence alone was worth noting.
But she had been frightened then and he knew it and perhaps he didn’t want to frighten her now. She stole a glance at his horse, the cause of all the trouble. The painted stripes and chevrons had mostly faded or washed away. The palm prints as well.
“Thing about aspens. All those trees up there? They’re one tree. One giant life. Aspens in a grove sprout off the root rather than the seed. Hundreds and hundreds of them, all connected underground.”
She looked back over her shoulder, at the long streak of foliage smeared up the side of the mountain. All one tree.
“I can’t get used to the plants here,” she admitted. “Or to the land itself even. It’s so. Spare.” She wanted to say desiccated but wasn’t sure he’d know the word. “You can see forever but mostly because there’s nothing growing anywhere.”
They walked down the mountain across the great incline of ground, half bowl and half cha
sm, and in the past few moments the light had changed with the crawl of the earth. A gauze of clouds in the west tempered the whiteness of the afternoon. Over her shoulder the backstays of the sun pierced the clouds in shafts and she realized she was wrong, or at least not entirely right. In this light the land had its austerity, but it didn’t seem barren.
She rambled on, too aware of herself inside her own skin and unsettled by silence. Later she wouldn’t remember what she said, only that she blathered clear to the ambulance. He walked his horse and let her talk.
The Dodge in the ditch looked even less dignified with help at hand. She thought back to the filling station attendant, his avuncular warnings.
John H dropped the reins of his horse and leaned into the ambulance, tried to rock it in place. The massive vehicle rested like a shoaled boat. Not even a sway.
He opened the passenger door and climbed inside. He shook the gearshift around in neutral and clutched it into reverse. He set the brake and climbed out.
“The frame’s on the ground. The flat happens to be your drive wheel. We’ll change it and see if you can’t back out again.” He retrieved the jack from where it lay beside the spare and she took this cue to collect the lug wrench from its random place in the sage.
He took the wrench from her hand and placed it at ten o’clock on the first nut. “You want to set the brake and always block a wheel when you lift one of these things. And leave it in gear.”
He put his foot on the wrench handle and stood in the air. The wrench held him and he gave a little bounce and the nut squealed and turned slowly down. He looked at her. “Why fight it when you can just persuade it.”
He worked quickly and without much ado and she began to feel at ease as she watched. “Are you a cowboy?” she asked.
Painted Horses Page 4