High Country : A Novel
Page 29
“He told her he was going to clean it,” Ty said. “I got here just after.” Again they told him he shouldn’t have touched anything, made him sit while they checked, talked with Buck, went to the corner store where he’d bought the paper.
More of them came, some from the Forest Service. A doctor from the Catholic hospital gave something to Willie. Ty covered her, let her sleep as they turned to him again, asked more, verifying things all over again.
“Checks out,” the sheriff finally told him. “No thanks to you. And you aren’t foolin’ anyone.” Bernard’s body was under a sheet now. “The Forest Service boys want it that way too. No skin off my ass. You’re the ones got to live with it.”
“Don’t leave,” Willie said, waking. “Stay with me.”
“I will,” Ty said. “I will.”
He made her bacon and eggs, everything on end now. Ty cooking. A
breakfast ending their day, not starting it.
She wouldn’t go to bed, so he sat with her on the couch, held her through the night. Two days later he drove her out to the pack station, not wanting to leave her and having a horse to doctor. He gave her Fenton and Cody Jo’s room, but in the night she came to him.
“Hold me, Ty,” she said. “I . . . it keeps coming back.” She got in with him and he held her, thinking how different it had been with Cody Jo.
“Will you take care of me?” She sat up, looking at him. “Keep me from thinking this way?”
“Yes.You know I will.”
She didn’t feel safe to leave him until Bob Ring came back from San
Francisco. But by then everything was pretty much decided. Bob Ring took the news calmly enough, more surprised that Ty would go off to listen to a priest than he was that Ty was getting married. He was sure any man would be lucky to marry his Wilma. He still felt that way, fragile as she was after what Bernard did.
Ty left everything up to the priest—and Willie, acting on his own only to get Buck to stand up for him, Jasper and Gus to help people get settled in the little Catholic chapel on the last day of the year. The ceremony was somber, but everyone was taken by how lovely and serious the bride was, how acceptable the lean packer, wearing a suit Cody Jo had bought for Fenton years before.
There was a reception, that somber too until the gin Dan Murphy and Buck had put in the vestry punch began to take hold.
After he’d had some of it, Bob Ring took Ty aside.
“She’s as good a person as there is, Ty.” Bob Ring watched him. “And she was always the happiest. This thing will pass.” He looked across the room at Wilma as she said what she had to say to each guest, looking lovely and pale.
“I know.” Ty was not sure he knew at all, not sure of anything since that long day with the police. “It will.”
“Well,” Bob Ring held up his glass to Ty, “here’s to the two of you. I hope you’re married to her—not to those goddamned mountains.”
32
Marriage
If loving Ty and keeping busy could have driven away her demons, Willie would have shaken them in a few weeks. But they hung on. Ty would watch a cloud cross her face and know she needed touching, holding. Not that that was all she wanted. He was surprised by how naturally she took to lovemaking—from the start. Her church certainly hadn’t driven that from her.
They drove to Helena for their honeymoon, if four days in a blizzard can be called a honeymoon. Willie didn’t complain. She made the big room their own, discovering room service, exploring Ty’s long body— her fingers tracing his roped muscles, the deep wound high on his thigh.
On the third day he found her looking out at the swirling snow, hugging herself into her robe as that lost look came over her. He eased her away, out through the storm to visit the capital building, look at the Russell mural, explore the cavernous rooms. Later, with coffee, she was Willie again, teasing him, her eyes smoky.
“Shall we go upstairs?” she asked. “There’s this bed.” He felt her foot along his leg. “I could warm it for you. Warm you, for me.”
“Was I worth waiting for?” She smiled as Ty tried to recover himself. “My father told me I would be.” She moved a finger across his chest, studied his face. “Is this what he had in mind?”
“No.” Ty held her more closely. “Fathers don’t think that way.”
But in his heart Ty suspected he had Bob Ring to thank for Willie. That her father had somehow freed her for him, made her unafraid of the rough edges Ty couldn’t hide. Maybe it came from how comfortable Ring was with himself. Maybe it came from his giving her a world balanced and safe. And maybe it came from her having no mother to shade that world with darkness, the unknown. That had to count too. Willie hardly ever mentioned her mother, taken from her so long ago—the woman who might have warned her that someone like Bernard could turn her world on end.
But that mother might also have kept Willie from being so complete right here in his arms. And he was taken by how complete this Willie was. If at first he hadn’t loved her the way he’d loved Cody Jo, he found himself loving her even more as their winter days opened into spring. He loved her candor and optimism, the way she could bring light into the darkest corners. Which is why he would pale when he saw her thinking of Bernard: what she could have done to hold that off, what she might have done to bring it on.
That first year Bob Ring had a lot of traveling to do. Willie and Ty alternated between his house in town and the big house at the pack station. It gave Willie a chance to do what she did more easily than anyone Ty had ever known: provide order and clarity and a generous pace to life. She rehung pictures and moved furniture and organized drawers. She scoured the kitchens, checking things off one list as she added to the next. She straightened out Ty’s affairs too, paying the feed stores and suppliers and reviewing the packing accounts. A few more good seasons, she told him, and he would be sitting at a desk sending others out to pack. He enjoyed watching her so much it hardly troubled him. He couldn’t imagine owning the pack station anyway.
At least he couldn’t until Willie took him to the banker and he learned Cody Jo had already deeded half of it to him.
“You have equity now,” the banker said. He was not much older than Ty, but so careful and proper the two seemed from different worlds. “You could borrow against it or just discharge the debt.” He shuffled the papers. “I believe that’s what Mrs. Holliwell would prefer.”
That name jarred Ty back to life. “I ...I’d just like to make sure I help Cody Jo’s income.”
“Mrs. Holliwell understands that. Getting it free of debt is her priority too. Then we’ll discuss the distribution of profits.”
“She wants you to have it, Ty,” Willie said. “It makes sense. It could mean more money for her. In the long run.”
“If you have more years like this, it won’t be a very long wait. Twenty percent of the debt paid off.” The banker looked at Ty approvingly, his face so smooth he looked as if he’d shaved minutes before their meeting.
“Is it true that you are the best packer from here to Canada?” he asked suddenly, unsettling Ty.
“Oh, much farther than that,” Willie said, smiling. “I’d say on up into Alaska.” She seemed so delighted the banker had a hard time looking back at Ty.
“Could you take some of us into those mountains? I’ve heard stories about pack trips. We all ride. We wouldn’t be much trouble.”
“Well.” Ty tried to ignore the smile Willie was giving him. “That’s something to think about.”
“We’ll keep working on the debt.” Willie turned her warmth back on the banker. “We do want to pay it all off.”
“ Ye s.” The banker was a little undone by the awkward packer, how pleased the pretty wife seemed. “That’s the smart thing.”
It was a happy time for them. Ty surrendered to how well Willie did things: supper each night at dusk, town each Sunday for her church and a dinner with her father. She even scheduled a few minutes each morning, right after breakfast, for kissing.
Buck was around a lot that winter, Angie helping out at Murphy’s store or in town with the children, the last of them almost through high school now. Once Willie got blue so suddenly she went out to the saddle shop where Buck and Ty were working. Ty saw the look on her face and took her in his arms right there, talked to her until it went away and she began to smile, kidding Buck about staring at them.
“You can just turn your back. Perfectly normal for newlyweds.” She kissed Ty again and gave Buck a little hug. “Bet you were even worse with Angie.” She headed out the door but poked her head back in, wagging a finger at Buck. “Probably had no restraint at all.”
“Hell.” Buck sighed, watching the door close behind her. “Ever tell you about Pa givin’ me that sack of jelly beans when I married?”
“For the sugar?” Ty examined the leather he was about to cut.
“Nope. Just told me for that first year ever’ time we made some love I was to take one out and put it in a jar.”
“Did Angie know?”
“Nope. But I damn near emptied that sack.”
“Then what?” Ty saw Buck wanted to make a point.
“After a year I was to take a bean out of that jar after each time.” “Cause now you needed the sugar?”
“Not to eat. Just to take out. And I’m beginnin’ to think Pa’s right.” “About what?”
“About I might never empty that jar.” Ty saw how blue Buck was getting just thinking about it. He went to get two beers from the snowbank and gave one to Buck.
“How long you and Angie been married now?”
“Goin’ on twenty-three years.” Buck took a pull at his beer. “Lotta beans still in that jar.”
“Maybe you miscounted.You count that time during the quarantine?”
“Yes. And other times you might not know so damned much about.” Buck didn’t like how sweet Angie had been on Ty after that night.
“You know for a fact I been workin’ at it, Ty. It’s just that seein’ you and Willie made me think I ought to pick up the pace.”
He took another pull on his beer, thinking about it.
“We sure had some good times, me and Angie.” Buck watched as Ty turned back to his work.
“Hard not to have a good time with Angie.” Ty checked to make sure his cut was true. “She’s got so much life in her.”
Buck decided once again not to try to apologize for what happened to Bernard. Ty would only say it was an accident, that Bernard had just been cleaning his Colt. Buck guessed it was pretty important for Willie to think that. And he didn’t figure it was his business to make anyone think different. But he was sorry for his part. He had been from the minute he heard what happened. He was sorry even after Ty married and seemed happier than he’d ever been. Buck saw it as a sorrow he’d live with always.
And Ty was happy. He didn’t think he’d ever been so happy—happy with Willie’s schedules, happy with her planning, happy with the laughs she would have with Buck and Angie and Jasper, even happy with her ideas for how to pay off the debt.
But he was happiest of all with their times alone—at least when she wasn’t blue. Only now and then did he think of what they’d do if she found herself pregnant. And each time he mentioned it she shushed him. “I know exactly what I’m doing,” she would say, sometimes kissing him, sometimes putting a finger to his lips. “Don’t you worry your packer head.”
Ty wasn’t so sure she knew what she was doing. And he was sure her church didn’t, worrying that it might require things of her she wasn’t ready for. But he kept his mouth shut. Willie was so certain about how to go at things he felt awkward when he questioned her.
That’s why he wasn’t so surprised when she told him she was going to have the baby. And he wasn’t surprised at all that that’s when her moments of sadness began disappearing.
She was taken with the whole thing from the first day, cheerful even when she found herself queasy. She got books from the library about pregnancy and child care; she looked up names for boys and for girls; her dinners became more and more elaborate.
“We must build our strength now,” she would say, lighting candles and feigning a deep seriousness. “You’ll need to be the hero—very soon.”
There was no slacking off in the kissing schedule. If anything she found ways for Ty to break the “just kissing” rule more often than ever.
Happy as she’d been before Bernard, Ty could see she was happier still planning for this baby. And he saw from the start that she’d known better than Ty or Bob Ring or anyone else that shaking the blues was her business—no one else’s.
He just hoped that having the baby was the right way to do it.
In December of 1949 in the delivery room of the Catholic hospital in Missoula, Wilma Hardin’s daughter drowned in her mother’s blood. The doctors could neither save the child nor halt the flow from the ruptured uterus, the mother dying moments after her child’s lungs filled. One life extinguishing the other as though fulfilling the terms of a larger plan.
At an age when most men use what they have learned to fashion their future, Ty Hardin found himself seeing no future at all. Everything became a blur. The mountains that had given him life no longer seemed the ones that had taught him about life, filling with people they didn’t need at the same time the people he needed left him.
It was a paradox impossible for him to digest.
Book Two:The Sierra (1950–1984)
The Sierra Nevada is five hundred miles of rock put right. Granite freed by glaciers and lifted through clouds where water, frozen and free, has scraped and washed it into a high country so brilliant it brings light into night. It lured Indians into its valleys even as it struck terror into the heart of a new world crowding west. It was higher than civilization could go.
Westering men found ways around it, skirted it north and south until they surrounded it. Only then did they creep back to see what had stopped them so completely. Some, probing higher, saw that what healed the glacier-torn range might heal their own wounds as well. A few found ways to be a part of it, to live with it, learn from it.
Ty Hardin became one of those men. Though he went to the Sierra to forget, the Sierra made him remember. It showed him once more that all is in motion, everything is flowing—animals and waters and rocks.That the ground we sleep on and the stars above us all are moving, never ending.
It made him see again that day follows night.
33
Cold Canyon
It was five years before Ty could tally it up. He was in the Sierra by then, the South Fork and Willie far behind. And it wasn’t until Thomas Haslam’s questions that he could say it aloud.
They were camped in Cold Canyon, a day out of Tuolumne Meadows, the trees edging the high meadow and the late afternoon warm, the wind soft, the Haslam children creeping out to the winding stream, looking for trout, exploring their world—alive with that fragile life that is the High Sierra.
Thomas Haslam had his bourbon out. He and Ty were testing it, Ty thinking back to how seldom Thomas Haslam had thought of a drink when Ty first met him, how comforting he found one now, liking to savor it, watch his children through its richness, think of the times he’d had; the times still ahead—for work, for Alice and their children. Even for the life Ty was leading.
“Do you like this country, Ty?” he asked. “You look as much at home in it as in your own.”
“Higher. Sunnier.” Ty looked at the clouds that had been gathering each morning, the puffs growing day by day, searching one another out until the white would deepen into gray, rain burst from them at last, spilling in sheets to clear again by night, th
e sky washed, the stars brisk and alive above the moon-splashed granite.
“Don’t have to set up tents every time you turn around.” Ty sipped his bourbon. “It’s a predictable country. At least this time of year.”
“And you don’t have to worry about grizzlies,” Haslam added.
“I never worried about them.” Ty looked at him. “I believe it’s their worryin’ about us that made everyone so nervous.”
But the death of the red bear should have warned him, a happening so sudden and violent he was numbed. The loss of Willie and the child was less numbing than final, bringing a heaviness that settled in like silt.
Thomas and Alice had read about it. It was in the papers all over the country. Two experienced hunters, exploring the little-known canyon. The huge red bear rising from the aspen grove, rising unbelievably high, watching them, scenting them until they fired on him together, firing again and then again until he was upon them, his charge breaking the arm of the one who lived—the one he flung away as he mauled and shook the other like some toy whose parts must never work again.
They’d read about the man with the dangling arm, blood dripping from his wounds, running and running until he’d come to the one packer who used the canyon, who on a whim had decided to take the season’s last party through the wild canyon he knew as no one else did. The wounded man collapsing there, unable to go back with the packer—unable and afraid beyond reason. The packer had left him to be nursed by an ancient cook and two bankers and their wives, couples on their first trip into a country they would never want to see again.
They’d read about the packer finding the broken man still alive but knowing he shouldn’t be, couldn’t be for long. The packer watching the bear circle before charging back, the packer shooting and shooting and shooting until the huge beast dropped, almost upon them—the life gone from him at last.
And later Ty told them himself, told them what he’d told the Forest Service and the reporters and biologists and naturalists who had called and written and come to him, come to hear him and to examine the vast tawny pelt. The pelt that would soon hang behind the desk of the Forest Service supervisor so the young men of the Forest Service could see it, know what they were protecting. Know what they had to fear.