“Check the river,” Ruthie said. “Right out in the middle.”
Badger steadied himself against the railing. “Sometimes you make me want to set myself on fire.” His head was framed by the sun’s irradiant farewell. Stars began to appear over the Sapphires. One at a time in the advancing night. “I love you.”
“Don’t menace me again. Ever,” Ruthie said.
“Let me come inside.”
“No.”
Hurt and anger played in Badger’s eyes. She thought for a moment that he might reach for her but instead he stepped back down the stairs. He paused on the front walk and looked back. “You know I’ve always only done what you told me to.”
RUTHIE TOOK THE BOTTLE INSIDE, bolted the door, sat on her bed, and watched dark clouds pile up around the peaks through her window. Badger’s cruiser turned onto Miles Avenue and rolled away past Whipple’s store. She felt a nameless guilt. She wished she’d done something more for Nathan’s mother after his death. Ruthie’s walls were bare save for a painting of herself surrounded by wild horses. Her hair swirled along with their manes in a reckless cacophony of brushstrokes. A boy had painted it for her. Wild Woman with Tame Horses, he called it.
Moths beat the shit out of themselves against the screen door of the lit porch across the alley. They looked like smoke. Ruthie refilled her cup, saw her face above the sink, and wondered why it appeared different in every mirror she passed. She took a long, throat-stinging drink.
Trees swayed gently around the high school. Beyond it, the crucifix atop the church steeple was silhouetted against the foothills. Ruthie could see most of Darby from her window, including the diner where she spent her days, and the turn for Red Sun Road where she’d spent her childhood. It seemed terribly small.
23.
Ruthie sat between Terry and Billy French in Terry’s old pickup. Terry drove out of the valley, through Missoula, and over Evaro Hill onto the Flathead Reservation. Turns jostled Ruthie into the brothers’ shoulders. There were no seat belts on the bucket seat. The tobacco-and-sage smell in the cab was a comfort.
Nothing changed when they crossed the line onto the reservation. The few homes along dirt back roads were the same. The Bucksnort Saloon in Evaro looked like any other bar. Trees and mountains and fields were all brilliant green in the early summer. Only the highway signs revealed the difference, now in Salish as well as English. The Salish names were much longer, and Ruthie had never seen most of the characters. The Flathead Allotment Act had given much of the land back to white homesteaders at the turn of the twentieth century, so these signs were late and pitiful reparations.
Billy and Terry argued about whether Darby High’s basketball coach should be fired after another losing season, as the truck climbed through the hills of the National Bison Range. Ruthie searched the flowing grasslands for the herd. Settled on a single, distant shaggy head. The Mission Mountains appeared suddenly to the north. Snow-white against the blue sky. They were thicker than the Bitterroots, without the menace of hooked, craggy peaks, but somehow more demanding. As if in their breadth they required fealty from all who passed below.
A waterfall split the cliff face above St. Ignatius. The white adobe steeple of the mission rose above the smaller buildings. The highway dropped onto a long, swampy wetland, too marshy to farm—the reason the Salish had been forced to move to this land in the first place. The Bitterroot Valley had the longest growing season of anywhere in Montana. Egrets stood motionless between the reeds. Swallows darted overhead. An abandoned trading post marked a crossroads. FOUR WINDS read the sun-bleached sign.
The outskirts of Ronan reminded Ruthie of the little towns in the Bitterroot before wealthy people started moving in. Pawnshops, bars, a drive-in, Harvest Foods, and a motel. All faded and crumbling at the edges but well kept. Bright blue flower boxes were fixed beneath each of the motel’s windows. A ten-foot-tall plastic brave stood on the drive-in roof. Terry turned down one of the small side streets. It quickly became gravel. Dogs barked. Toys were scattered around dirt-and-grass yards. Hastily made additions sprang from the sides of houses, evidence of generations spreading outward. A rusted gate was wedged permanently open at the entrance of Big Springs Trailer Court. Graffiti covered the slumped remnant of a clubhouse. The trailers were crammed a dozen to a row. The little wooden porches nearly touched. Ruthie felt claustrophobic.
“The Gardipes’ old place was out on Timberlane Road. Had three acres and a view of the mountains,” Billy said. The truck bounced to a stop before the second-to-last trailer in the row. The lower half was flaking brown paint, the upper half was white. Small attempts had been made to spruce up the exterior: white shutters, a flowerpot on the porch. “Dawn raised all her children there.” He paused. “I’d hang that judge upside down in the sun.”
Nervousness dampened Ruthie’s palms. Dawn. She wondered if Nathan had always caused his mother worry. If he’d had a wildness in him from the beginning, or if he’d been a happy child, laughing when he fell down. She wondered if it frightened Billy to think of his own daughter in a city to the west. Ruthie had asked for this meeting, but she was suddenly so anxious she wanted to tell Terry to turn the truck around and gun the engine back home.
DAWN GARDIPE OPENED the door in jeans and a white blouse. She was younger than Ruthie had expected, not yet fifty. She’d looked older at the funeral. A beaded clip held her hair in place. It was the only jewelry she wore. She was nearly as tall as the brothers, with broad shoulders and blunt, rounded features. Her feet, in old cowboy boots, were planted solidly on the entry mat. She seemed determined not to be blown over. She looked at Ruthie with hard brown eyes.
“Come in,” she said.
She spoke to Billy over her shoulder as she led them through the dim, carpeted living room to the kitchen. “Ronnie Twofeather is looking for you. Says he has more tools to sell.”
Billy looked at his brother. “Need any more broken saws?”
Terry shook his head. “Christ, no.”
“Lemonade?” Dawn asked, turning around to face them in front of the sink.
“Thank you,” Ruthie said softly. It took her an effort to find her voice. She felt cowed in the presence of this woman, a stranger whose suffering had occupied so much of her mind. Old photos covered the front of the refrigerator, including one of Nathan in a basketball jersey, holding the ball tightly in front of his chest. He was grinning at the camera and Ruthie tried to connect this expression with the face she’d held in her lap.
“Maybe a beer,” Billy said, winking.
Dawn shot him a look. “You know I don’t keep those here.” She gestured for Ruthie to sit at the small kitchen table, then set a glass of lemonade down in front of her. “How’s Delilah?”
“Real good,” Billy said. “She’s studying medicine.”
“Maybe someday she’ll be able to tell us where she got her brains.” Terry ribbed his brother and together they drifted out to the porch. When Ruthie looked up again, they were gone.
Dawn leaned back against the sink and studied Ruthie. Her belt was snugged tightly across the top of her hips, and her blouse was buttoned to the collar, as if each morning she made sure her clothing held her together.
“I’ve never been here before,” Ruthie said, feeling her cheeks redden. “And I’ve lived an hour away my whole life.”
“That’s how it goes,” Dawn said. “Unless you’re passing through on the way to Glacier.”
“I’ve never been there, either.” Ruthie touched the cool side of her lemonade. A hand-carved wolf stood on a small shelf by the sink. She wondered if Nathan had made it. “I’m sorry I didn’t come sooner,” she said. “I didn’t want to make your life harder.”
Dawn looked away through the window.
“But I thought you should know.” Ruthie stopped, trying to think of what to say, even though she’d rehearsed it many times the night before. “I was with him. At the end. He said your name. It was the last thing he said. He was in my arms and he said your nam
e.”
Tendons rose briefly on Dawn’s neck. Some of the color left her face. “How long was it?” she asked.
“What?”
“Before he died.”
“Not long. A minute or two.” But Ruthie wasn’t sure. It had felt like forever.
“You held him?”
Ruthie nodded. “I tried mouth-to-mouth, but I was scared to put pressure—” She gestured at her chest. Warmth rushed up to her eyes. “I didn’t know what to do.”
Dawn pushed herself off the sink. A steely pride held her shoulders erect. Her eyes were dry. “You did what you could.”
“I’d only learned CPR that summer. I don’t know if I did it right.”
“That’s enough.”
“It doesn’t feel like it.” Ruthie looked back at her. She was suddenly desperate, as if this conversation were her only hope of understanding what Nathan’s death had been for. “I saw him when he died, like a vision. He was standing alone on a plain with mountains and trees all around, like the last person on earth.”
In the pictures surrounding the one of Nathan on the fridge, his sisters held babies of their own. Swaddled in their arms, gazing back at the camera. Dawn brushed something invisible from her shirt. She sighed. “He would’ve hated that. He never wanted to be alone in the woods, or hike or fish. Just play basketball and go to the mall with his friends. He was always with his friends. That’s why he did it, you know. He wanted new sneakers. I couldn’t afford them.” She pulled back a chair and sat down heavily.
“Maybe I said it wrong,” Ruthie said. “It wasn’t bad. He wasn’t alone. There just weren’t any other people.”
“Isn’t that what alone is?” Dawn smiled wearily. “You white people love to think about the end of the world. I just want to go home, to my house, with all my children.”
Sunlight divided the tabletop before them. The refrigerator began to hum. Ruthie hadn’t meant to burden Dawn with her own pain. She’d worn long sleeves to hide her scars. Now she realized she was asking for something instead of giving it. “I see his face all the time,” she said. “In the store, on the street. I have dreams about it.”
“I see him, too,” Dawn said. “Sometimes I’m sure he’ll walk through the door. He’ll just reappear. That it was a mistake somehow.” She paused. “When they told me he was dead, I wanted to die, too. Now I get dressed every morning. I make breakfast. I go visit my grandchildren. I know what I want is impossible, but I keep doing things anyway.” She knit her hands together. “All the stories I grew up with tell me he’s in the trees, the rocks, the animals—that his spirit is still here with us, along with all our ancestors. And maybe he is. But I have to keep going on my own.”
Out the window, an old Buick bumped past and turned at the end of the row. Dawn’s voice went soft.
“I have to remind myself to notice things: The way my grandchildren smell, the feel of them in my arms. The children I have left.” Her shoulders softened and she looked down at her hands. “I sometimes feel like a blind woman in a light-filled room.”
Ruthie felt time slow in the air around her. She turned from Dawn’s face to the carved fur of the wolf. She thought of how her mind had flown above the mountains when she was a little girl. How she’d looked down over the valley and seen all the way back to the People of the Flood. “I’ve felt that, too.”
Dawn cleared her throat. She straightened, emerging from her reverie, and unclasped her hands. She looked sharply at Ruthie. “How many guns do you own?”
Ruthie was too startled to answer.
“I’ve heard about your dad, I know you have at least one.”
“Seven,” she said, reluctantly.
Dawn nodded. “Seven.” She laid her hands flat on the table. “Do you think those hunters are still out there, killing things they don’t have to see?”
Ruthie was silent. She knew they were. She’d seen one of them in the parking lot of Super 1, carrying groceries to his truck. His hunting rifle racked in the cab behind him as he drove away.
“Get rid of your guns. All of them,” Dawn said. “It might save your life.”
IV
24.
When Wiley King died, it set everyone in the valley on edge until they learned that an ex-NFL star was buying his property. Before the player’s identity was known, rumors swirled: Joe Montana, Brett Favre, Terry Bradshaw . . . all the white heroes of days gone by. Howie Long had a place on Flathead Lake and people were sure this name would be even bigger. Rutherford was more excited than most, convinced that a football player, with his sporting disposition, would be reasonable when it came to the hunting rights to his pond—from which he’d been banned for almost twenty years.
“We’ve got to lay a groundwork,” he said to Ruthie over beers in the Sawmill Bar. “Can’t leave it to chance like last time.” He finished three Busch Lights laying out a number of scenarios on how to win over the big man, whoever he was. Most of which involved her delivering a large quantity of fresh meat to his door as the first salvo.
“Are you trying to get me to seduce him?”
“What? No, Ruthie.” Her father huffed and looked at her intently. With the gray hairs in his beard, his lips firmly closed, and his pale eyes set even deeper into his face, he’d gained a certain gravitas in his mid-forties, like the hermit who comes stumbling back into town after many years. “That pond is the best I’ve ever found for goose. The very best. It’s your birthright.”
She smiled. “I remember.”
RUTHIE HAD BOUGHT HERSELF an old truck when she turned twenty-five, and thrown a used mattress from the thrift store in the back. On summer nights, she drove into the mountains and slept under the stars. She found peace in the woods, rarely thinking of Nathan or the encroaching development in the valley. Her favorite spot was the Lost Horse Lookout, beyond the Camas Lake Trailhead. The rocky precipice looked west up Lost Horse Canyon to Twin Lakes in the heart of the Bitterroot Mountains. Ruthie would lie on the mattress beneath the vault of stars—one occasionally shooting across in an unfathomable display of speed and light—and let her mind wander as it had when she was a child. She imagined living in a fire lookout on one of the distant peaks, her view sweeping into Idaho. A new Moses yapping as he greeted her at the door. Wood stacked to the ceiling to warm her through the winter. She observed blood moons and harvest moons and a full lunar eclipse, which sent a heat down her soul so deep that she didn’t sleep for the entire night, as if she, too, might flame through the firmament.
Terry had told her that the human soul grew more restless as it aged. Preparing for eternity when it would range over the earth in constant motion, with ocean tides, atmospheric currents, and the migrations of birds and animals. Never resting, never sleeping.
In the mornings, Ruthie built a fire in the blackened firepit and sat on a stump beside it, watching the stars disappear one by one. From this vantage in the first misty light, the wilderness looked endless. It was easy to envision herself alive a thousand years before. Camped with nothing but her satchel of tools—flint knives, spearheads, homemade traps—preparing for another day outside history. Surrounded by bear, elk, and wolf. Small before the outstretched hand of the universe. What did infinity mean to a speck of dust? Even the satellites passing overhead, blinking red, didn’t disturb her, for she was sure there had always been strange sights in the sky, and knew her ancestors had not neglected to look up and wonder.
ELEANOR LAW HAD DIED also, and Ruthie moved into her old house. Renting it from Whipple Jr., who gave her the same discounted rate Eleanor had paid. It was a small prefab unit with a huge handicap-accessible shower and walls all her own. She loved the space. The only problem was the neighbors: Kent Willis in the Whispering Pines Trailer Park across the street and the rest of the Laws a half mile down the road. Len was a constant presence, lurking around her yard, telling her what needed fixing, asking if she needed help with weeds (though his own yard was entirely overgrown), and peering in through the windows. Luckily, he was wary of
Pip and kept his distance when she came over in the evenings.
The two old friends sat on the porch drinking wine. “I hiked through Wiley’s ranch,” Pip said. “Not much has changed. The slough looks about the same as when we were little. The water’s all silted, though, since no one uses it for irrigation anymore.”
“The fence is off?” Ruthie asked.
Pip nodded. “No one’s paying the power.”
“I touched it once, just to see. It knocked me on my ass.”
“Ten thousand volts. I heard Lonny Jensen grabbed it on a dare and his brother had to hit him with a two-by-four to get him free.”
“Guess kids are going to have to think of another way to try and kill themselves.”
“They can still drink and drive.” Pip paused. Her eyes traveled up over the Sapphires. She wore a bulky sweatshirt over her short pants, and sat with her bare legs tucked underneath her. “It’s the strangest thing: I’ve been having dreams where I’m pregnant.”
Ruthie looked at her friend to make sure she was serious. The bottle of wine between them was half empty. Ice cubes melted in their glasses. She’d thought they stood apart from the other residents of the valley, who dreamt of marriage and children. “I still have nightmares about forgetting to have an abortion.”
Pip smiled. “I used to have those, too. I’d drive all the way to Hamilton for a morning-after pill. But now something’s changed. I don’t know, I wake up and it’s like a warmth inside me.”
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