Chapter Twenty-three 10 page

That night she dreamed she was walking with her father along a snowy ridge, roped like mountaineers, though this was something they had never done. Below, on either side, sheer walls of rock and ice plunged to nothingness. They were on a cornice, a thin overhanging crust of snow which her father said was safe. He was in front of her and he turned to her and smiled the way he smiled in her favorite photograph, a smile which said with total confidence that he was with her and everything was alright. And as he did so, over his shoulder she saw a crack zigzagging toward them and the lip of the cornice start to split away and tumble down the mountainside. She wanted to cry out but couldn't and the moment before the crack reached them, her father turned and saw it. And then he was gone and Annie saw the rope between them snaking after him and she realized the only way to save them both was to jump the other way. So she launched herself into the air on the other side of the ridge. But instead of feeling the rope jolt and hold, she just kept on falling, free-falling into the void.

When she woke it was morning. They had slept late. Outside it was raining even harder. Mount Rushmore and its stone faces were hidden in swirling cloud that the woman in reception said wasn't going to clear. Not far away, she said, there was another mountain carving they could maybe get a glimpse of, a giant figure of Crazy Horse.

'Thanks,' said Annie. 'We've got our own.' They had breakfast, checked out and drove back up to the interstate. They crossed the state line into Wyoming and skirted south of Devil's Tower and Thunder Basin, then over the Powder River and up toward Sheridan where at last the rain stopped.

Increasingly the pickups and trucks they saw were driven by men in cowboy hats. Some touched their brims or lifted a hand in grave salute. As they went by, the sun made rainbows in the plumes of their tail-spray.

It was late afternoon when they crossed into Montana. But Annie felt neither relief nor any sense of achievement. She had tried so hard not to let Grace's silence beat her. All day she had hopped stations on the radio and listened to Bible-thumping preachers, livestock reports and more kinds of country music than she'd known existed. But it was no good. She felt herself compressed into an ever-shrinking space between the weight of her daughter's gloom and her own welling anger, At last it was too much to bear. Some forty miles into Montana, neither looking nor caring where it led, she took an exit off the interstate.

She wanted to park but nowhere seemed right. There was a massive casino standing on its own and as she looked, its neon sign flickered on, red and lurid in the fading light. She drove on up a hill, past a cafe and a low straggle of stores with a dirt parking strip in front. Two Indians with long black hair and feathers in their high-crowned cowboy hats stood beside a battered pickup, watching the Lariat and trailer approach. Something in their gaze unsettled her and she kept on up the hill, took a right turn and stopped. She switched off the ignition and for a while sat very still. She could sense Grace behind her, watching. The girl's voice, when at last she spoke, was cautious.

'What's going on?'

'What?' Annie said sharply.

'It's closed. Look.'

There was a sign along the road that said National Monument, Little Bighorn Battlefield . Grace was right. According to the opening hours it gave, the place had closed an hour ago. It made Annie even angrier that Grace should so misjudge her mood to think she had come here deliberately, like a tourist. She didn't trust herself to look at her. She just stared ahead and took a deep breath.

'How long is this going to go on, Grace?'

'What?'

'You know what I mean. How long is it going to go on?'

There was a long pause. Annie watched a ball of tumbleweed chase its own shadow down the road toward them. It brushed the side of the car as it went by. She turned to look at Grace and the girl looked away and shrugged.

'Hmm? I mean, is this it now?' Annie went on. 'We've come nearly two thousand miles and you've sat there and you haven't spoken a word. So I just thought I'd ask, just so I know. Is this the way you and I are going to be now?'

Grace was looking down, fiddling with her Walkman. She shrugged again.

'I dunno.'

'Do you want us to turn around and go back home?' Grace gave a bitter little laugh.

'Well, do you?'

Grace lifted her eyes and looked sideways out of the window, trying to seem nonchalant, but Annie could see she was fighting tears. There was a clumping sound as Pilgrim shifted in the trailer.

'Because if that's what you want—'

Suddenly Grace turned on her, her face savage and distorted. The tears were running now and the failure to stop them doubled her fury.

'What the hell do you care!' she screamed. 'You decide! You always do! You pretend you care what other people want but you don't, it's just bullshit!'

'Grace,' Annie said gently, putting a hand out. But Grace smacked it away.

'Don't! Just leave me alone!'

Annie looked at her for a moment then opened the door and got out. She started walking, blindly, tilting her face to the wind. The road led up past a grove of pine trees to a parking lot and a low building, both deserted. She kept walking. She followed a path that curved up the hillside and found herself beside a cemetery enclosed by black iron railings. At the crest of the hill there was a simple stone monument and it was here that Annie stopped.

On this hillside, on a June day in 1876, George Armstrong Custer and more than two hundred soldiers were cut to pieces by those they had sought to slaughter. Their names were etched in the stone. Annie turned to look down the hill at the scattered white tombstones. They cast long shadows in the last pale reach of the sun. She stood there and looked out across the vast, rolling plains of wind-flattened grass that stretched away from this sorrowful place to a horizon where sorrow was infinite. And she started to weep.

It would later strike her as strange that she should have come here by chance. Whether some other random place would have brought forth the tears she'd stemmed for so long, she never would know. The monument was a kind of cruel anomaly, honoring as it did the agents of genocide while the countless graves of those they had butchered elsewhere lay forever unmarked. But the sense of suffering here and the presence of so many ghosts transcended all detail. It was simply a fitting place for tears. And Annie hung her head and wept them. She wept for Grace and for Pilgrim and for the lost souls of the children who'd died in her womb. Above all, she wept for herself and what she had become.

All her life she had lived where she didn't belong. America wasn't her home. And nor, when she went there now, was England. In each country they treated her as if she came from the other. The truth was, she came from nowhere. She had no home. Not since her father died. She was rootless, tribeless, adrift.

Once this had seemed her greatest strength. She had a way of tapping into things. She could seamlessly adapt, insinuate herself into any group, any culture or situation. She knew instinctively what was required, who you needed to know, what you had to do to win. And in her work, which had so long obsessed her, this gift had helped her win all that was worth winning. Now, since Grace's accident, it all seemed worthless.

In the past three months she had been the strong one, fooling herself that it was what Grace needed. The fact was, she knew no other way to react. Having lost all connection with herself, she had lost it too with her child and, for this, she was consumed with guilt. Action had become a substitute for feeling. Or at least for the expression of it. And this was why, she now saw, she had launched herself into this lunatic adventure with Pilgrim.

Annie sobbed until her shoulders ached, then she slid her back down the cold stone of the monument and sat with her head in her hands. And there she stayed until the sun dipped pale and liquid behind the distant snowy rim of the Bighorn Mountains and the cottonwoods down by the river melted together in a single black scar. When she looked up, it was night and the world was a lantern of sky.

'Ma'am?'

It was a park ranger. He had a flashlight, but kept its beam tactfully away from her face.

'You okay there ma'am?'

Annie wiped her face and swallowed.

'Yes. Thank you,' she said. 'I'm fine.' She got up.

'Your daughter was getting kind of worried down there.'

'Yes, I'm sorry. I'm going now.'

He tipped his hat as she went. 'Night ma'am. You go safely now.'

She walked back down to the car, aware he was watching. Grace was asleep, or perhaps she was only pretending to be. Annie started the engine, switched on the lights and made a turn at the top of the road. She looped back onto the interstate and drove through the night, all the way to Choteau.

Part Three

Chapter Fourteen

Two creeks ran through the Booker brothers' land and they gave the ranch its name, the Double Divide. They flowed from adjacent folds of the mountain front and in their first half mile they looked like twins. The ridge that ran between them here was low, at one point almost low enough for them to meet, but then it rose sharply in a rugged chain of interlocking bluffs, shouldering the creeks apart. Forced thus to seek their separate ways, they now became quite different.

The northern one ran, swift and shallow, down a wide, uncluttered valley. Its banks, though sometimes steep, gave easy access to the cattle. Brook trout hung with their heads upstream in its breaks and eddies, while herons stalked its shingled beaches. The route the southern creek was forced to take was lusher, full of obstacles and trees. It wove through tangled thickets of Bebbs willow and red-stem dogwood, then disappeared awhile in marsh. Lower down, meandering a meadow so flat that its loops linked back upon themselves, it formed a maze of still, dark pools and grassy islands whose geography was constantly arranged and rearranged by beavers.

Ellen Booker used to say the creeks were like her two boys, Frank the north and Tom the south. That was until Frank, who was seventeen at the time, remarked over supper one night that it wasn't fair because he liked beaver too. His father told him to go wash his mouth out and sent him to bed. Tom wasn't so sure his mother got the joke, but she must have because she never said it again.

The house they called the creek house, where first Tom and Rachel, then later Frank and Diane had lived and which now was empty, stood on a bluff above a bend in the northern creek. From it you could look down the valley, across the tops of cottonwood trees, to the ranch house half a mile away, surrounded by whitewashed barns, stables and corrals. The houses were linked by a dirt road that wound on up to the lower meadows where the cattle spent the winter. Now, in early April, most of the snow had gone from this lower part of the ranch. It lay only in shaded, rockstrewn gullies and among the pine and fir trees that dotted the north side of the ridge.

Tom looked up at the creek house from the passenger seat of the old Chevy and wondered, as he often did, about moving in. He and Joe were on their way back from feeding the cattle, the boy expertly negotiating the potholes. Joe was small for his age and had to sit like a ramrod to see over the front. During the week Frank did the feeding, but at weekends Joe liked to do it and Tom liked to help him. They'd unloaded the slabs of alfalfa and together enjoyed the sight and sound of the cows surging in with their calves to get it.

'Can we go see Bronty's foal?' Joe asked.

'Sure we can.'

'There's a kid at school says we should've imprint-trained him.'

'Uh-huh.'

'He says if you do it soon as they're born, it makes them real easy to handle later on.'

'Yep. That's what some folk say.'

'There was this thing on the TV about a guy who does it with geese too. He has this airplane and the baby geese all grow up thinking its their mom. He flies it and they just follow.'

'Yeah, I heard about that.'

'What do you think about all that stuff?'

'Well Joe, I don't know a whole lot about geese. Maybe it's okay for them to grow up thinking they're airplanes.' Joe laughed. 'But with a horse, I reckon first you have to let him learn to be a horse.'

They drove back down to the ranch and parked outside the long barn where Tom kept some of his horses. Joe's twin brothers, Scott and Craig, came running out of the house to meet them. Tom saw Joe's face fall. The twins were nine years old and because of their blond goodlooks and the fact that they did everything in a noisy unison, they always got more attention than their brother.

'You going to see the foal?' they yelled. 'Can we come?' Tom put a big hand like a crane-grab on each of their heads.

'So long as you keep quiet you can,' he said.

He led them into the barn and stood with the twins outside Bronty's stall while Joe went in. Bronty was a big ten-year-old quarter horse, a reddish bay. She pushed her muzzle toward Joe who put a hand on it while he gently rubbed her neck. Tom liked to watch the boy around horses, he had an easy, confident way with them. The foal, a little darker than his mother, had been lying in the corner and was now struggling to his feet. He tottered on comical, stilted legs to the sheltering side of the mare, peeping around her rear end at Joe. The twins laughed.

'He looks so funny,' Scott said.

'I've got a picture of you two at that age,' said Tom. 'And you know what?'

'They looked like bullfrogs,' Joe said.

The twins soon got bored and left. Tom and Joe turned the other horses out into the paddock behind the barn. After breakfast they were going to start working with some of the yearlings. As they walked back to the house, the dogs started barking and ran out past them. Tom turned and saw a silver Ford Lariat coming over the end of the ridge and heading down the driveway toward them. There was just the driver in it and as it got nearer he could see it was a woman.

'Your mom expecting company?' Tom asked. Joe shrugged. It wasn't until the car pulled up, with the dogs running around it still barking, that Tom recognized who it was. It was hard to believe. Joe saw his look.

'You know her?'

'I believe I do. But not what she's doing here.'

He told the dogs to hush and walked over. Annie got out of the car and came nervously toward him. She was wearing jeans and hiking boots and a huge, cream-colored sweater that came halfway down her thighs. The sun behind made her hair flare red and Tom realized how clearly he remembered those green eyes from the day at the stables. She nodded at him without quite smiling, a little sheepish.

'Mr Booker. Good morning.'

'Well, good morning.' They stood there for a moment. 'Joe, this is Mrs Graves. Joe here is my nephew.' Annie offered the boy her hand.

'Hello, Joe. How are you?'

'Good.'

She looked up the valley, toward the mountains, then looked back at Tom.

'What a beautiful place.'

'It is.'

He was wondering when she was going to get around to saying what on earth she was doing here, though he already had an idea. She took a deep breath.

'Mr Booker, you're going to think this is insane, but you can probably guess why I've come here.'

'Well. I kind of reckoned you didn't just happen to be passing through.' She almost smiled.

'I'm sorry just turning up like this, but I knew what you'd say if I phoned. It's about my daughter's horse.'

'Pilgrim.'

'Yes. I know you can help him and I came here to ask you, to beg you, to have another look at him.'

'Mrs Graves…'

'Please. Just a look. It wouldn't take long.'

Tom laughed. 'What, to fly to New York?' He nodded at the Lariat. 'Or were you counting on driving me there?'

'He's here. In Choteau.'

Tom stared at her for a moment in disbelief.

'You've hauled him all the way out here?' She nodded. Joe was looking from one of them to the other, trying to get the picture. Diane had stepped out onto the porch and stood there holding open the screen door, watching.

'All on your own?' Tom asked.

'With Grace, my daughter.'

'Just to have me take a look at him?'

'Yes.'

'You guys coming in to eat?' called Diane. Who's the woman, was what she really meant. Tom put his hand on Joe's shoulder.

'Tell your mom I'm coming,' he said and as the boy went off he turned back to Annie. They stood looking at each other for a moment. She gave a little shrug and, at last, smiled. He noticed how it made the corners of her mouth go down but left untouched the troubled look in her eyes. He was being railroaded and wondered why he didn't mind.

'Excuse me saying it, ma'am,' he said. 'But you sure as hell don't like taking no for an answer.'

'No,' Annie said simply. 'I suppose I don't.'

Grace lay on her back on the floor of the musty bedroom, doing her exercises and listening to the electronic bells of the Methodist church across the street. They didn't just chime the hour, they played whole tunes. She quite liked the sound, mainly because it was driving her mother crazy. Annie was down in the hall, on the phone to the real estate agent about it.

'Don't they know there are laws about this sort of thing?' she was saying. 'They're polluting the air.'

It was the fifth time she had called him in two days. The poor man had made the mistake of giving her his home number and Annie was ruining his weekend, bombarding him with complaints: the heating wasn't working, the bedrooms were damp, the extra phone line she'd asked for hadn't been installed, the heating still wasn't working. And now the bells.

'It wouldn't be so bad if they played something half decent,' she was saying. 'It's ridiculous, the Methodists have all the good tunes.'

Yesterday when Annie went out to the ranch, Grace had refused to go with her. After Annie left, she went out exploring. There wasn't much to explore. Choteau was basically one long main street with a railroad on one side and a grid of residential streets on the other. There was a dog parlor, a video store, a steak house and a cinema showing a movie Grace had seen over a year ago. The town's only claim to fame was a museum where you could see dinosaur eggs. She went into a couple of stores and the people were friendly but reserved. She was aware of others watching as she walked slowly back down the street with her cane. When she got back to the house she felt so depressed, she burst into tears.

Annie had come back elated and told Grace that Tom Booker had agreed to come and see Pilgrim the following morning. All Grace said was, 'How long have we got to stay in this dump?'

The house was a big, rambling place, faced with peeling pale-blue clapboard and carpeted throughout in a stained, yellow-brown shagpile. The sparse furniture looked as if it had been picked up in a yard sale. Annie was appalled when they first saw the place. Grace was delighted. Its glaring inadequacy was on her side, a perfect vindication.

Secretly, she wasn't as opposed to this mission of her mother's as she made out. It was a relief in fact to get away from school and the tiring business of putting on a brave face all the time. But her feelings for Pilgrim were confused. They frightened her. It was best to block him right out of her head. Her mother however made this impossible. Her every action seemed to force Grace to confront the issue. She'd taken this whole thing on as if Pilgrim was hers and he wasn't hers, he was Grace's. Of course Grace wanted him to get better, it was just that… It struck her then, for the first time, that maybe she didn't want him to get better. Maybe she blamed him for what had happened? No, that was stupid. Maybe she wanted him to be as she was, forever maimed? Why should he recover and not her? It wasn't fair. Stop it, stop it, she told herself. These whirling, crazy thoughts were her mother's fault and Grace wasn't going to let them get a hold in her head.

She redoubled the effort in her exercises, until she felt the sweat trickle down her neck. She lifted her stump high in the air, again and again, making the muscles ache in her right buttock and her thigh. She could look at this leg now and accept at last that it belonged to her. The scar was neat, no longer that angry, itching pink. Her muscles were coming back nicely, so much so that the sleeve of her prosthetic leg was starting to feel a little tight. She heard Annie hang up.

'Grace? Have you finished? He'll be here soon.'

Grace didn't reply, just let the words hang there.

'Grace?'

'Yeah. So what?'

She could feel Annie's reaction, picture the irked look on her face giving way to resignation. She heard her sigh and go back into the drab dining room which, as a first priority of course, Annie had transformed into her office.

Chapter Fifteen

All Tom had promised was that he would go and have another look at the horse. After she had come all that way, it was the least he could do. But he'd made it a condition that he would go alone. He didn't want her looking over his shoulder, putting pressure on him. She was pretty good at that, he already knew. She had made him promise to drop by afterward and give her his verdict.

He knew the Petersen place, just outside Choteau, where she had Pilgrim stabled. They were nice enough people, but if the horse was as bad as when Tom last saw him, they wouldn't put up with him for long.

Old man Petersen had the face of an outlaw, three days of grizzled beard and teeth as black as the tobacco he always chewed. He showed them in a mischievous grin when Tom pulled up in the Chevy.

'What's it they say? If you're looking for trouble, you've come to the right place. Damn near killed me getting him unloaded. Been kicking and hollering like a banshee ever since.'

He led Tom down a muddy track, past the rusting hulks of derelict cars, to an old barn, lined either side with stalls. The other horses had been turned out. Tom could hear Pilgrim long before they got there.

'Only fitted that door last summer,' Petersen said. 'He'd have had the old one down by now. Woman says you're gonna sort him out for her.'

'Oh she did?'

'Uh-huh. All I can say is, make sure you go see Bill Larson for a fitting first.' He roared with laughter and slapped Tom on the back. Bill Larson was the local undertaker.

The horse was in even sorrier shape than when Tom last saw him. His front leg was so badly wasted, Tom wondered how he even managed to stand, let alone keep up the kicking.

'Must have been a nice-lookin' horse once,' said Petersen.

'I reckon.' Tom turned away. He'd seen enough.

He drove back into Choteau and looked at the piece of paper on which Annie had written her address. When he pulled up outside the house and walked up to the front door, the church bells were playing a tune he hadn't heard since he was a kid in Sunday school. He rang the doorbell and waited.

The face he saw when the door opened startled him. It wasn't that he'd been expecting the mother, it was the open hostility in the girl's pale, freckled face. He remembered the face from the photograph Annie had sent him, a happy girl and her horse. The contrast was shocking. He smiled.

'You must be Grace.' She didn't smile back, just nodded and stepped aside for him to come in. He took off his hat and waited while she shut the door. He could hear Annie talking in a room off the hallway.

'She's on the phone. You can wait in here.'

She led the way into a bare, L-shaped living room. Tom looked down at her leg and the cane as he followed, making a mental note not to look again. The room was gloomy and smelled of damp. There were a couple of old armchairs, a sagging sofa and a TV playing an old black-and-white movie. Grace sat down and went on watching it.

Tom perched himself on an arm of one of the chairs. The door across the hallway was half open and he could see a fax machine, a computer screen and a tangle of wires. All he could see of Annie was a crossed leg and a boot that bobbed impatiently. She sounded pretty worked up about something.

'What! He said what? I don't believe it. Lucy… Lucy, I don't care. It's got nothing to do with Crawford, I'm the bloody editor and that's the cover we go with.'

Tom saw Grace raise her eyes to the ceiling and wondered if it was for his benefit. In the movie, an actress whose name he could never remember was on her knees, hanging on to James Cagney, begging him not to leave. They always did this and Tom could never understand why they bothered.

'Grace, will you get Mr Booker a coffee?' Annie shouted from the other room. 'I'd like one too.' She went back to her phone call. Grace flicked the TV off and got up, clearly irritated.

'It's okay, really,' said Tom.

'She just made it.' She stared at him as if he'd said something rude.

'Okay then, thank you. But you keep watching the movie and I'll get it.'

'I've seen it. It's boring.'

She picked up her cane and went off into the kitchen. Tom waited a moment then followed. She shot him a glance when he came in and made more noise than she needed to with the cups. He walked over to the window.

'What does your mother do?'

'What?'

'Your mother. I wondered what line of work she was in.'

'She edits a magazine.' She handed him a cup of coffee. 'Cream and sugar?'

'No thanks. Must be a pretty stressful kind of job.'

Grace laughed. Tom was surprised by how bitter it sounded.

'Yeah. I guess you could say that.'

There was an awkward silence. Grace turned away and was about to pour another cup but instead she stopped and looked at him. He could see the surface of the coffee in the glass pot trembling from the tension in her. It was plain to see she had something important to say.

'Just in case she hasn't told you, I don't want to know anything about this, okay?'

Tom nodded slowly and waited for her to go on. She'd good as spat the words at him and was a little thrown by the calm reaction. She abruptly poured the coffee but did it too fast so that she spilled some. She clunked the pot down on the table and picked up the cup, not looking at him as she went on.

'This whole thing was her idea. I think it's totally stupid. They should just get rid of him.'

She stomped past him and out of the room. Tom watched her go, then he turned and looked out into the forlorn little backyard. A cat was eating something sinewy by an upturned garbage can.

He had come here to tell this girl's mother, for the last time, that the horse was beyond help. It was going to be tough after they had come all this way. He had thought a lot about it since Annie's visit to the ranch. To be precise, he'd thought a lot about Annie and the sadness in those eyes of hers. It had occurred to him that if he took the horse on, he might be doing it not to help the horse but to help her. He never did that. It was the wrong reason.

'I'm sorry. It was important.'

He turned to see Annie coming in. She was wearing a big denim shirt and her hair was combed back, still wet from the shower. It made her look boyish.

'That's okay.'

She went to get the coffee and topped up her cup. Then she came over to him and did the same to his without asking.

'You've been to see him?'

She put the coffeepot down but stayed standing in front of him. She smelled of soap or shampoo, something expensive anyway.

'Yes. I just came from there.'

'And?'

Tom still didn't know how he was going to break it to her, even as he started to speak.

'Well, he's about as wretched as a horse can get.'

He paused a moment and saw something flicker in her eyes. Then over her shoulder he saw Grace in the doorway, trying to look as if she didn't care and failing miserably. Meeting this girl just now had been like seeing the last picture of a triptych. The whole had become clear. All three - mother, daughter and horse - were inextricably connected in pain. If he could help the horse, even a little, maybe he could help them all? What could be wrong with that? And truly, how could he walk away from such suffering?

He heard himself say, 'Maybe we could do something.'

He saw the relief surge into Annie's face.

'Now hold on, ma'am, please. That was only a maybe. Before I could even think about it, I need to know something. It's a question for Grace here.'

He saw the girl stiffen.

'You see, when I work with a horse, it's no good just me doing it. It doesn't work that way. The owner needs to be involved too. So, here's the deal. I'm not sure I can do anything with old Pilgrim, but if you'll help, I'm prepared to give it a go.'

Grace gave that bitter little laugh again and looked away as if she couldn't believe he could make such a dumb suggestion. Annie looked at the floor.

Date: 2015-12-17; view: 598