Juliet in August (2 page)

Henry let it go. He dearly would have loved to see Ivan and his fancy new chaps in the dirt, to at least have that bit of victory, but he was exhausted, and he thought maybe he
had
learned a lesson, although he didn't want to admit it. A hundred miles is a long way to ride in one day, even for a man who made his living on horseback, and he was feeling his age and wondering why he'd been so stupid as to rise to Ivan's challenge. Worst of all, he had pushed a good animal too hard and had risked losing him. Now here he was, walking as the last of the daylight disappeared, alone, his feet and his hip joints killing him, the insides of his calves raw as skinned rabbits, his savings fifty dollars leaner, and it served him right, or at least that is what he thought as he limped home, not knowing whether his horse would be dead or alive when he rode back to get him and his saddle, or maybe just his saddle, in the morning.

To add to the humiliation, when Henry went to strike a match and check the time on his pocket watch a half hour later, he found the watch was missing. He couldn't remember where he'd last looked at it, somewhere along the trail. Well, he'd just have to accept that loss, too, even though the watch had cost him a week's wages.

When he finally reached the Perry ranch yard, he headed straight for the barn and lay down in an empty box stall. He was thirsty but too tired to chance running into anyone, too mad at himself to tell the story of what happened, not wanting to see Ivan Dodge again until he'd had a good sleep. Ivan Dodge, who was bound to be lying in his bunk waiting with one more irritating remark. Tomorrow would be soon enough to hear it.

But even though he was bone-tired, Henry couldn't sleep. His throat was dry and he didn't feel right. His body felt heavy. He was lying in a deep bed of straw, but he could still feel the ground underneath him, like a hard clay pallet. And although the night was dark as pitch, he could see pictures drifting by in front of his eyes. The whole country was moving, as though he were watching it through the window of a slow-moving train. He could hear sounds in his head. A train whistle. The repetitive clacking of steel wheels on the railway tracks. And off in the distance another sound, the pounding of thousands upon thousands of hooves. The buffalo. He'd wished many times that he'd seen the buffalo. He'd witnessed the prairie before crops and barbed wire fences and towns like Juliet, before it was divided into townships and sections and quarter sections for men with walking plows and wives who tended vegetable gardens, but he'd been too late for the great woolly herds that migrated through the grassy expanse. He listened to the thundering of their hooves, and it turned the pictures in his head into rolling black clouds that seemed too big to fit within the contours of his skull. They pushed outward against the bone, colliding with one another and changing direction, rolling and bumping until they slowed and flattened out into blackness and, finally, the night was still. The sounds that emerged were quiet, comforting sounds. The breeze whispering through the sage and buckbrush; the rustle of poplar leaves; a fiddler's sad tune, barely audible; fine grains of sand spilling to the ground off the brim of a hat.

A cat descended from the hayloft above Henry, curled up beside him in the straw, and began to purr in his ear. The cat's domestic purring was the most comforting sound of all, and Henry considered something he had never considered before: that a prospect besides death might be out there waiting for him beyond the boundaries of his life as a ranch hand. There was talk that the Perry Land and Cattle Company would soon close its northern operation, give up on the harsh Canadian winters and let the government parcel off the grazing land for cultivation. Henry thought about the homesteaders who had congregated at the buffalo stone and the other three corners of the hundred-mile square. He'd hardly given them a glance twenty-four hours ago, but now he began to envy them their self-contained lives and the privacy of the homes they'd built to return to at the end of the day. He pictured one of the houses that now dotted the landscape, a simple, two-room wooden structure with a single-pitch roof, like a chicken shack. He saw his dusty boots on the doorstep, a white curtain blowing through an open window, a houseplant in a coffee can on the windowsill. A good deep well nearby, the first furrows of cultivation and planting. Although it was a travesty for a cowboy, he imagined himself stealing away from his ranch hand's life into a new one, on a piece of land with his name on the deed; not here, so close to the Perry ranch, but north maybe, or east along the rail line. He could leave the ranch quietly and just disappear. He liked the idea of that, disappearing without a nod to anyone.

As his departure became a certainty, his heart slowed and his body lightened, and the straw beneath him became as soft as a feather bed. In the hot barn, tomorrow was cool and clear, like water on his tongue.

With the cat purring next to his head, Henry Merchant fell asleep.

By morning, he was gone.

Soon forgotten.

NIGHT TRAVEL

 

Ancestors

Just east of Juliet, there's a little campground known to the locals as Ghost Creek, even though there's never been a ghost sighting that anyone can recall. Perhaps it once had an Indian name that translates as Ghost Creek—the evidence of an encampment lies in the half-dozen teepee rings in a nearby pasture—but if the place was named by the Cree or the Blackfoot, that's not common knowledge.

The campground is usually a peaceful spot. The highway traffic sounds at night are muted, and the noisiest neighbors are the coyotes, whose eerie falsetto voices carry like sirens in the darkness. The town kids might drive through and rev their engines or spin their tires, but it's not a place they're much interested in. It's too quiet for them.

On this particular August night, though, there
is
one loud tenant in the campground: a horse making a racket inside a steel trailer while his owner sleeps soundly in a pup tent. Bored with standing around in the trailer, the gray horse plays with the dangling end of the lead rope that secures him, biting and tugging with his teeth, loosening the carelessly tied knot. When he backs up, the rope pulls free, and when he leans his weight against the trailer door, he's surprised that it swings wide, allowing him to make an escape. Moonlight glints off his almost white coat as he ambles around the side of the trailer, sniffing at the spot on the ground where he'd earlier had a good feed of hay. He picks with his lips at the bits he left behind, then walks over to the tent and gives it a good snort before heading toward a fence and the grass that grows tall beneath the strands of wire. He grazes his way west along the fence line, lifting his head periodically to listen to the night sounds.

Until he stops suddenly. Stamps with his front feet, whinnies softly. He takes a few tentative steps and breaks into a trot, head and tail high, into a lope, floating in the moonlight. When another fence line blocks his way, he turns south until the fence ends and he can once again move west through a field of dry stubble, in the direction of Juliet.

When the horse reaches the edge of town, he turns north and jogs along the soft shoulder of the grid road. Ahead he sees the outline of a parked vehicle and the movement of a man in the ditch. The horse slows, walks cautiously forward, keeping his eye on the dark shapes. As he comes parallel with the man, he turns his head toward him, snorting, both ears pricked forward. He swings his hip outward, still tracking north, almost past, when the man makes a drunken lunge for the dangling lead rope. The horse spins away and breaks into a gallop up the road while the man (who had stopped to piss on his way home from the bar in the Juliet Hotel) stumbles into a badger hole and, cursing loudly, rolls down into the ditch again.

The horse hears the shout behind him and his senses tell him to run, go faster, flee, until he's well away from danger. Then he slows once more. Stops. In the ditch beside him, thin grass that no one has bothered to cut and bale. Clumps of clover. The horse forgets about the danger behind him and steps down into the ditch to graze. A dog barks in a nearby farmyard, but the horse ignores the sound, rips the clover with his teeth.

The barking dog belongs to Lee Torgeson, a black-and-white mutt he calls Cracker. He was a stray when Lee took him in, a dog dropped off in the country by city owners who didn't want him anymore. When he first wandered into the yard, he had no manners and expected to be invited into the house, but he turned out to be a good farm dog. Now Lee appreciates the job Cracker does standing guard against intruders.

The dog barks once again before giving up on whatever is out there. Lee listens from his bedroom in the two-story farmhouse, still not used to the house being his, not used to the idea of Lester and Astrid being gone like their ancestors before them. Their deaths were not unexpected; they had both been well up in years when they passed on. But their deaths within four years of each other had left Lee alone sooner than expected, and responsible for eleven quarter sections of mixed farmland: the original homestead, and the others that were acquired over the years, one quarter at a time, the way a wise investor slowly and steadily builds a portfolio.

At the age of twenty-six, Lee knows he is capable, in theory at least, of managing the land he's inherited. The knowledge of his legacy is one he grew up with and Lester prepared him well. But as darkness falls each night and bedtime looms, uneasiness settles over him, grows stronger as he climbs the stairs to the second story, where the bedrooms are. Astrid and Lester's room across the hall from his, their clothing removed from the dresser drawers with the help of neighbor women, but their possessions still ordered with care on the closet shelves. The photographs still on the walls. The bed neatly made, as though Astrid herself had tucked the sheets. Their bedroom reminds him more than any other part of the house that he's alone.

He wonders if he will always be alone here. He can't imagine the person who might share his bed and help fill the rooms. He has no prospects, at least not at the moment, and the girls his age from Juliet are already married or long gone. His high school girlfriend went off to university without him, not happy that he turned down a scholarship to stay home and farm. Lee had argued that Lester was old and couldn't do it on his own, but she didn't want to be a farmer's wife. They'd drifted apart, and he hasn't had a serious girlfriend since.

Without Lester snoring in the room across the hall and Astrid puttering, always the last one to bed, the house is unnaturally quiet. So quiet that some nights Lee can hear sounds he knows aren't real, like the mysterious pounding of horses' hooves far off in the distance. Whenever he hears this sound he thinks of Rip and Tom, who were always called Young Rip and Old Tom, even though there weren't many years between them. Somewhere among all the family photographs, there's a picture of Lee as a baby, perhaps a year old, sitting on Old Tom's wide back with a grin on his face. There's an arm in the photograph, the hand not quite touching Lee, ready to grab him if he loses his balance or if Old Tom decides to walk off. The arm belongs to Lester. It's covered with a cotton sleeve—Lester never bared his arms, even on the hottest summer days, of which this is probably one because Lee is wearing only a light overall and a peaked cap. He's leaning forward with his hands buried in Old Tom's ample mane, and Lee swears he can remember the moment: the heat of the day, the warmth of Tom's back, the sureness he felt that the horse would look after him and that a quick response from Lester would not be needed to keep him from falling that long way to the ground. Of course, he can't really remember this. The memory is constructed from what he later came to know—that Old Tom
was
a kind horse (whatever falls Lee took from his back were in spite of Tom's best efforts to keep him there) and that Lester's strong arm was a constant, never far away should it be needed.

Astrid was, as always, behind the camera. When Lee looks at the photo, he imagines that he sat like that on Tom's back for a long time, but whenever Astrid came across the picture she shook her head and said that she'd snapped it as quickly as she could and then lifted Lee down, even though Lester wanted her to take another in case the first didn't turn out. She said this as though she were apologizing for cooperating with Lester in putting the baby in harm's way. Still, the photograph is clear, no shaky finger on the trigger, but then Astrid did everything with sureness or she didn't do it at all. The old-timers used to tell Lee that Lester had found a wife just like his mother, Sigurd, who was as formidable as she was kindhearted. They used to tease Lee that, although he might
think
he was the apple of Astrid's eye, he'd better do exactly what she said because if he ever crossed her, boy oh boy, watch out. Lee remembers (again, impossible) the feel of Astrid's hands as she lifted him down and then held him so he could run his own baby hands over the patient Tom's face.

Old Tom was a good honest horse, Lee thinks. He had learned to ride on Tom—bareback, since no saddle Lester owned would fit—and Tom taught him balance and kept him safe until he had the skills to handle Rip, who was more playful and liked to jump sideways and out from under an inexperienced rider. Rip was cagey and hard to catch, too—you had to halter Tom and pretend you didn't care if Rip came along, and then he'd follow, believing that it was his own idea. The two of them were descended from generations of working horses that pulled plows and hay wagons and stoneboats. They were not graceful, and not in possession of any special equine beauty or athleticism, but when something unusual was in the air—an uneasy wind, perhaps—they'd race around the pasture guided by an instinctive fear, galloping side by side with Old Tom ahead by a nose, running straight for a fence and then stopping just in time, spinning and starting up again, the sound of their hooves carrying into the growing darkness. Although normally calm and content with their state of domestication, the two old horses on such evenings ran with the wildness of mustangs, and after they died, Young Rip first at the age of twenty-four and Old Tom not long after, Lee missed the sound of their hooves at dusk transforming the Torgesons' ordinary farm into a strange and primal place.

There are no longer horses in the pasture. Now when Lee hears the sound of hoofbeats, he knows he is hearing spirit horses. He knows also that the spirit voices of Astrid and Lester will follow. Astrid will say,
When company comes, Lee, use the silver tea service.
He's always tempted to ask why, just so he can prod Astrid into telling the story of his arrival once again, but he knows there is no conversation in these voices. When Lester says,
Get yourself a good map,
Lee recognizes this, too, from the story, but there's definitely no point in asking Lester for an explanation. When he was alive he was a man of few words, and not even Astrid knew why he attributed such importance to a map when he hardly ever went anywhere, except to town, and he could have driven that distance blindfolded. Lester's advice hangs there unexplained, just as it was in the story.

Lee can't help but wish he still had Lester's wise counsel, not about maps but on the more important matter of running a farm business. As Lee lies awake at night, he feels like the two old horses did when the wind was coming from the wrong direction: uneasy, fearful. But what is he afraid of? Disappointing Lester and Astrid? They're not here to notice. Still, worry keeps him awake, listening to the sound of phantom hooves and cryptic bits of advice about tea services and navigation. His head in the darkness is a reverberating drum.

He rolls onto his stomach, closes his eyes, and tries to change his heart's rhythm to match the hoofbeats. Some nights, this works to put him to sleep, but tonight it doesn't. He is too aware of the blood pumping through his veins. Even without the sheet covering him, he's too hot. Perhaps he has a fever. He flops onto his back again and puts his hand on his forehead the way Astrid used to. Nothing unusual. For some reason, he remembers a song he sang at the summer camp he went to one year at Astrid's insistence:
Fire's burning, fire's burning, draw nearer, draw nearer.
He can remember only those words, and they begin to circle in an endless loop in his head, making sleep even more impossible even though it's now well after midnight.

He gets out of bed and stands at the wide-open window, trying to catch a bit of breeze. He can hear mosquitoes humming on the other side of the screen. The air is close, almost humid, although this country hasn't seen rain in months. There's a full moon, and in its light Lee surveys the yard—the dark shapes of bins and machinery, the Quonset and the shop, and the barn, built by Lester and Lee when Lee was thirteen, after the old one burned down in a spectacular fire. Who says horses won't leave a burning barn? Old Tom and Young Rip were saved thanks to Lester's quick response to the dog's barking, and the two horses had bolted for the door as soon as they were loosed from their tie stalls. Shortly after that the whole barn went up, and a cow and her new calf, the first one of the season, brought inside away from the heavy spring snow, were lost, along with a litter of kittens. (Lee hadn't known where the kittens were hidden, but he knew they were gone because of the frantic mewing of the mother cat for days after.) It took less than an hour for the fire to level the barn, but it was almost morning before Lester was sure the fire wasn't going to spread to other buildings or ignite one of the nearby stacks. The yard was full of neighbors who had spent the night throwing water on the roofs of outbuildings, slapping at spot fires with blankets and wet gunnysacks.

After the neighbors left, Lester had turned his attention to Lee. How, he wanted to know, had the fire started? He looked at Lee as though he should have the answer, like he must somehow have been the cause because he was the only one there of an age to be irresponsible enough to start a fire, even though it was Lester who had earlier rigged up a heat lamp for the shivering newborn calf. Lee could not think how he had started the fire and he said so, and then went into the pasture to search for the two panicked old horses. He found them pacing along the fence line in the snow, but he couldn't get near them so he left them there to calm themselves down.

When Lee got back to the yard, Lester asked him again how the fire started. Again, Lee said he didn't know, and then he said, because he was wet and cold and upset about the cow and the new calf, “If you don't want me here, say so. I know I'm just some relative you got stuck with.” He'd never said, or even thought, anything remotely like that before. He'd never imagined himself saying words out loud that sounded so ungrateful, and he gave them, as did Lester, much more weight than they deserved.

They turned away from each other after Lee's childish reply to Lester's childish accusation. They went to the house and sat at the table with Astrid and drank tea and ate toast, and then they all went back to bed for a few hours. Lester said nothing to Astrid (who could have provided relief with her common sense) for fear of worrying her, and Lee lay awake wondering why he'd said what he had, convincing himself that there was something wrong with him, that he was not deserving, and worrying that maybe he'd inherited a mean streak from someone in a line of unknown relatives instead of seeing that his little outburst was exactly like Lester's.