Thirty-four
HE HAD A BREAKFAST of cereal and skim milk. A breeze was coming through the window, and he sat listening to the notepaper snapping against the cabinet door. She always taped it up to the left of the sink, a printed-out reminder that she loved him, every day since they’d come back from the hospital. He thought he’d have a look at it later.
When he returned the milk carton to the refrigerator, he slid the meals she’d stacked up in casserole dishes to the side. Two plain, saltless lunches and dinners. Nothing fried. No sauces. He’d gotten used to them, but she was gone for the day and he’d made other arrangements.
She believed in reincarnation, and they’d agreed to come back as brother and sister again. He told her that if he got to pick, he sure wanted another run at it.
He drank two cups of coffee from the thermos she’d left on the counter, rinsed the dishes and positioned himself in the center of the kitchen. He swung his arms around him, cocking his hips left and right, and everything seemed to be working better than it had for some time. He felt an uncommon clarity and didn’t hurt anywhere, so decided not to take his pills. He wanted to see what would happen.
He dressed, sat down by the new phone she’d bought and called McEban, running a finger over the little strip of duct tape she’d stuck on the console next to a button that would dial her cell phone in case he had an emergency. He’d promised her he would, but that was a lie. He wasn’t about to ruin her one night away.
Then, when he’d made his plans with McEban, he called Curtis Hanson. “I’m ready,” he said, and hung up.
He picked up his cane, put on his hat and started down the drive. It was a fine, late-summer day. The sun warm, a light breeze. He could hear the grasses rustling alongside the road and whistled a few bars of his favorite birdsong, and a meadowlark sang back.
When he reached the turnout at the mailboxes he could hear the Cummins diesel idling, throaty and even, and Curtis helped him up into the cab.
“I didn’t make you wait too long, did I?” he asked.
“No. I just got here myself.”
They eased down through the borrow ditch and out across the pasture in four-wheel-drive, listening to the sage scraping against the undercarriage. They could smell it.
He dug the folded bills out of his pocket and held them up between them. “I need to give you something for gas.”
“I’m your neighbor, for Christ’s sake.”
He put the money away. He could feel the warm press of sunlight moving across his chest as Curtis turned them in a slow arc, then backed around.
“That level stretch there?” Curtis asked. “Just south of Mitchell?”
He nodded. “It’s where I pictured it.”
Curtis dragged a shovel off the truckbed, and Einar stood leaning into the fender, listening to him hacking away at the prairie grass. Then the squeal of the gin poles pivoting back, Curtis locking them in place.
Einar started back along the side, above him the cable groaning in its pulley, the electric winch whining. He laid his hand open against the steel edging of the flatbed and felt the truck squatting against the torque.
“You might want to take a step back,” Curtis said.
“Am I in your way?”
“You’re standing where you needn’t be if this cable snaps.”
He worked around to Curtis. “It’d be a funny way to die, wouldn’t it,” he said, “squashed by a gravestone?”
“It’d damn sure make a good story if a man could tell it right. Here, reach out to me.” Curtis guided his hand onto the winch lever. “Just ease her off a little when I say something.”
He stood waiting.
“Just a tad now.” Curtis grunted, shouldering the marble into the slot he’d dug, and then the chassis rose up off the leafsprings. “That’s got it,” he said.
He joined Curtis at the back of the truck. “Have you pulled the tarp off?”
“I just did.”
He knelt in front of the black marble, fingering the lettering and whispering: Alice Conners Clark, born March 2, 1927, died April 14, 2007, beloved & remembered. He sat back on his heels. “Thank you,” he said.
“You ready for your dinner now?”
“I’ve been thinking about it.”
Curtis got him settled in the shade on the old weathered chair, and sat with him, leaning back against the cottonwood, and they ate their corned-beef sandwiches and pickles, sipping cans of cold beer.
“Miss Clark there”—Curtis was talking with his mouth full and coughed—“I don’t believe I ever met her.”
“You never did. She was a friend of my sister’s.”
“I’m glad to hear it,” he said. “I was afraid she was somebody I’d forgot.” He carried their trash up to the cab. “You want me to run down and fetch Marin?”
“She’s up to Billings, her and Marlene Silas. For the aviation show.”
“How’s she know Marlene?”
“They met at that yoga class for seniors at the rec center.” He pushed up out of the chair. “I guess they started talking and found out they’re both off their rockers for airplanes.”
“So this here’s like a surprise?”
“That’s it, exactly.”
Curtis dropped him off at the house in the early afternoon and he napped for an hour, then woke thinking he’d heard Sammy wanting out. He was already standing in the hallway before he remembered Marin had taken the dog with her. He held his breath, listening harder, but whatever made the noise had now stopped.
He sat in the living room listening to a scratched 1955 recording of Her Majesty’s Regimental Band and Massed Pipers. It was a favorite of his and Mitch’s that they used to play on winter evenings when the wind howled under the eaves and the house groaned like a floundering ship. They’d turn the music up loud, sipping bourbon, smoking cigarettes and joking that bagpipes were the only way to fight back against the weight of the long, cold nights. There wasn’t a drop of Scots blood in either one of them.
In the late afternoon he wandered into Griff’s room eating the piece of chocolate cake Curtis had left, his free hand cupped under his chin to catch the crumbs. He licked his fingers clean and felt around in her closet, finding a hooded sweatshirt that smelled of her perspiration, of clay and horses, of the lightly scented perfume she wore. He sat on the corner of her bed holding the thing to his face, inhaling. He expected this would make him feel maudlin, but he didn’t. He felt simply loved, as though she were still there, whispering something comforting, saying something funny.
He put the sweatshirt back and sat out on the porch thinking he was experiencing a kind of breakthrough in his health, then pressed that speculation away, to the very edge of his mind, keeping it pushed up tightly there until it fell away altogether. He couldn’t see wasting whatever time he might have left on nonsense.
In the early evening when McEban and Kenneth arrived, he explained which horse he favored, and they stood together at the pickup, his hand on Kenneth’s shoulder, both of them relaxed and warm in the last shafts of sunlight.
He couldn’t make out much more than the glare of sunset over the darker rise of an uneven landscape, now and then a flash of paling color, but it was enough to mark the end of a good day. When he looked down, the boy was merely a smallish shadow. “You’re going to be just fine,” he told him.
They were listening to McEban in the corral, the horses circling. The boy didn’t respond.
“I’m saying you’ve turned out first-rate so far.” He squeezed the boy’s shoulder. “It ought to carry you through.”
“Yes, sir.”
They heard McEban come through the gate, the latch click, the hoofstrikes in the workyard.
“I just felt like I needed to tell you something,” he said. “Like I actually knew something.”
“Did you know a duck’s quack won’t echo?”
“I guess I hadn’t thought about it.”
“It’s something Rodney told me.”
“Well, thank you. That’s a good thing to know.”
McEban tied the leadrope to the bumper and they got in with Kenneth between them, then swung around and idled up the track behind the barn. The songbirds had grown louder, agitated by the coming rain.
“How’s that horse doing?” McEban asked, and the boy knelt on the seat and looked out the back window.
“He’s doing fine,” he said.
“It won’t rain for awhile yet,” Einar told them. “Not until after dark.”
“And then what?” McEban asked.
They parked in the pine and cottonwood and McEban picketed the horse at the edge of the meadow. Kenneth helped Einar to the bench and ran back into the timber, snapping off any dead branches he could reach. He made a dozen trips, carrying armloads of them back, working the dry limbs in at the bottom of the pile of antlers and bones, McEban circling behind him, sloshing kerosene up into the mess from a five-gallon can. When it was empty he sat down beside Einar and lit a cigarette.
“I didn’t know you gave up chewing,” Einar said.
“I’m doing them both now.”
He was watching the boy skirt the north edge of the bone heap, disappearing behind it, coming back toward them from the other side.
“Can I bum one from you?”
McEban handed him the cigarette he had going and lit another, staring at the figures where they stood away from the mound. “I could tip those creepy sons of bitches over,” he said. “Drag them in close enough to burn, if you wanted.”
“They’re better left where they are. I like the company.”
“I guess I’ve never known what to think about ’em.”
“I think they’re cool.” Kenneth was squatting to the side of the bench.
“If you just wanted to get out of the house we could’ve gone into town.” McEban turned to look toward the darkening sky in the west. “I don’t know why you’d want to be left out here.”
They could smell the dampness and ozone in the air, hear the rumble of the storm.
“It’s a celebration.”
“Burning this heap of shit up, you mean?”
“It was something Griff and I talked about.”
“You ought to wait for her, then. Till Thanksgiving or Christmas.”
“I’m not sure I can.”
“Well, damn.” McEban looked to where the boy was bent over digging in the ground with a stick, and then back. “You’re not thinking you can swing up on that horse when you’re done, are you?”
“I thought I’d turn him loose. Hold on to his tail and let him lead me back to the corrals.”
Kenneth was standing now. “I could stay and help,” he said.
“Maybe we all ought to stay.”
“You aren’t invited.”
“Why not?” McEban laughed, gesturing toward the boy. “I didn’t hear you invite him either.”
“We’ll have more fun without you.”
“You’re probably right about that.” McEban dropped his cigarette, grinding it out under a boot tip. “I’m going to leave a shovel here with the boy. In case that grass starts up. And a flashlight.”
“You’re a good neighbor, Barnum.”
“There’s something else you’re right about.”
They could feel the pressure of the storm gathering, turning back upon itself like a large, dark animal circling into its night bed.
“You’re going to get soaked. I hope you’re not kidding yourself about that.”
“That’ll be part of the fun. Won’t it, Kenneth?”
“It’ll be like an adventure,” the boy said.
McEban carried the empty kerosene can to the truck and returned with the shovel and flashlight. He slipped his cell phone out, then put it back in his pocket. “I didn’t think there’d be reception up here.” He knelt down by the boy. “You call me when you’re done,” he said, “when you two get back to the house. If I don’t hear from you in a couple hours, I’m driving out here to find you.”
“I promise,” Kenneth said.
McEban stood. “You want another cigarette, Einar?”
“No. I enjoyed the one I had.”
McEban took the flashlight from the boy, turning it on to check the batteries, and gave it back. It was nearly dark.
“Goddamnit, Einar, I wouldn’t be doing some screwball thing like this if I hadn’t known you my whole life.”
“I wouldn’t have asked.”
“You owe me at least a dollar,” Kenneth said.
“All right, then.”
McEban kissed the top of the boy’s head, and they heard him walking away, stopping to look back, and then the sound of the truck pulling out and the rolling approach of thunder.
“You want to light it up?”
“Can I?”
Einar drew a pill bottle of wooden matches from his shirt pocket, shaking them out into the boy’s hand, and he circled the pyre, lighting the kerosene around the perimeter, and came back. It was very still, and they sat listening to the fire gather and spread.
“I better check the other side.” Kenneth picked up the shovel and disappeared behind the pile.
Einar could feel the heat now against his face, and thought that maybe Marin was right and this was only one in a succession of lives, a thousand of them, and then the heat increased and he could distinguish the oranges and reds and yellows, labile and rising into the darkness. “How we doing?” he called to the boy.
“Great.”
He could hear the boy’s laughter.
Lives of deformity, there had to be those, the losing of limbs. He felt the first drops of rain. Lives of brutal commerce, lies, lying with neighbors’ wives. A chanter of hymns. The beater of slaves, his years marked by the chains of slavery. He glimpsed the boy weaving through the figures at the edge of the dark night, at times wildly lit, in and out of shadow, circling, thrusting the wooden shaft of the shovel ahead of him. Lives of hopelessness, beauty, decency, charity, body after body consumed by fire. Kenneth came back into view again, the figures on that side of the fire seeming to move along with him.
The rain hissed in the flames, the air alive with sparks, and he wondered how many times he’s been an old man sitting at a fire in the night, a horse looking on, in a dark rain. Good men and bad, through the grind of centuries, and then there was Ella, who he imagined he could see dancing in her girl’s body, their son holding her hand, Mitch Bradley and Ansel Magnuson. He heard the accretion of their laughter rising from the flames. The rain fell in sheets, the fire sizzling, snapping.
“Are you out there?” he called.
“I’m over here.”
The boy was passing in front of the wolf-headed figure.
“How about a rooster?” he asked. “Can you get an echo out of one of them?”
The boy sat down beside him. “I only know about ducks.” He smiled, his eyes shining with the last of the flames.
Water ran from their faces.
“You think you can get me and that old horse back to the house?”
“Yes, sir.” He stood and stabbed the shovel into the ground. “I know I can.”