Madeleine walked ahead of Homer as the trail progressed along the river and up through a chokecherry thicket. He was fascinated at her forthright progress, given that she did not know the way. He slyly let her lead them down a false trail that ended at the bottom of an unscalable scree slope, fine black rock shining in mountain light. She smiled to acknowledge that he probably knew the route better. At length they reached the head gate, an old concrete structure with 1927 scratched into the cement. In the bend of the river, it diverted water to ranches in the area, and in its steel throat snowmelt gurgled off to the east to meet with crops and fertilizer. Homer’s place was not a ranch, but it still retained its small right to a share of water, just enough for a garden and a few trees. He seldom used it, but when he did he usually got a call from one of the neighbors who also used the ditch regularly and invariably addressed him as Old-Timer.
Downstream from the head gate, another ditch branched off, back toward Homer’s place; he pulled the metal slide that held back the water and a small stream headed for his house. “This will be nice for the trees and flower beds.”
“If it softens the ground, I can do something with it,” said Madeleine. “You’ve just let things go, Homer. It looks like a transient has been squatting there.”
“Madeleine, I’m doing something about it right now.”
“How long will it take for the water to get there?”
“Not long.” Actually, he didn’t know.
Homer went back to the head gate, followed by Madeleine, hurrying along the path. He thought of that awful word spry and wondered why he imagined he might be exempt. Spry was supposed to be positive. It was awful.
A truck stopped on the road above them, a blue-heeler dog in back and rolled fabric irrigation dams piled against the cab. By the sound of the truck door being slammed, Homer knew this would not be a friendly visit. But he continued his adjustments, meant to preserve the water level of the ditch even after he had extracted his small share for the garden. Madeleine was looking up at the truck as its driver wheeled around the tailgate and started toward them. This was Homer’s neighbor, Wayne Rafter, who raised cattle and alfalfa on the bench downstream. Wayne had a round red face, surmounted by a rust-brown cowboy hat with a ring of stain above its brim. He wore irrigating boots rolled down to the knee and carried a shovel over his shoulder.
He said, “What are you doing with the water?”
“We’re sending a little down to the garden.”
“You need to leave my head gate alone. You’ve got the whole valley screwed up.”
Madeleine said, “That little trickle?”
“Stay out of this,” said Wayne, without looking at her at first. When he did, he said, “What’s wrong with your face?”
Homer answered that she’d had a stroke and was immediately sorry he’d said anything at all. Wayne dismissed the explanation, saying that a lot of folks had had strokes. Homer felt a pressure he might not have if Madeleine had not been looking on.
“I do have a small water right attached to my property.”
“Very small.”
“But it is a right.”
“Not if you don’t use it. It reverts.”
“I’m using it now.”
“You’re in the goddam way.”
“I wonder if we should get a ditch rider.” A ditch rider was appointed by the court to supervise the allocation of water.
“Do you have any idea what that costs?”
“It might be necessary if you prevent me from taking my water. Shall I arrange it?”
“No, don’t ‘arrange it,’ Old-Timer. Just play with the water if that’s what turns you on.”
At this, Wayne marched off with his shovel over his shoulder and soon his truck was gone, a dog barking and running around in the bed.
Madeleine said, “Wow.”
“Yep.”
“Is that how they are?”
“Can be.” Homer’s insouciance concealed his humiliation.
Madeleine stared around herself into immediate space. Homer knew the remark about her face must have stung. Long ago, she’d been so careful about her looks, a little fashion-driven for Homer’s taste but always ready to be seen, always lovely. They started back toward the house quite depleted by the encounter.
“Harry was truculent,” said Madeleine. They found candles and Madeleine made their meal, a nice salad and cold cucumber soup good for a warm summer evening. “But I wouldn’t say abusive. Abusive is when they focus on you. He just raged around, and whatever he might have done to me he did equally to the furniture.”
In the sixties when, for whatever reason, CeeCee had started tying a scarf around her head, she acquired a reputation for heightened spirituality among acquaintances who didn’t realize she was drunk. For them, she never passed out but was “transported.” Part of this was abetted by CeeCee as an apparatus for her illness, and her conversation was increasingly ethereal as she discovered the allure of non sequiturs. Their neighbor, Dick Chalfonte, a thoracic surgeon, was enchanted, and Homer suspected that days spent out of town — some surreptitiously with Madeleine — allowed Chalfonte’s fascination to be transmuted into something more tangible. Homer didn’t like this thought at all but, because of Madeleine and his own fair-mindedness, found indignation unavailing; anyway there was some consolation if Dick Chalfonte was able to make contact with a soul drifting slowly to another world. It might have been that Homer wished he would take her away altogether, but of course this was unthinkable.
Madeleine rolled her napkin ring from side to side with her forefinger. “We used to think it was an affectation when you wore cowboy boots with your suit.”
“And my Turnbull and Asser shirts. Of course it was an affectation. What else does a young man have? I was trying to make a name for myself, and in that town there didn’t seem to be many possibilities left. Who’s ‘we,’ anyway?”
“Harry and me, I guess. Harry thought you were a phony.”
At night, they talked about poetry. Madeleine had a particular aversion to the poet H. D., whom she called “I. E.” for what she called a perverse inability to say anything plainly. Homer feebly recited Wordsworth, to which Madeleine remarked she greatly looked forward to getting, spending, and laying waste her powers. And when Homer remarked that General Wolfe would have preferred to have written “Elegy in a Country Churchyard” than to have conquered Quebec, she urged him to stop thinking of poetry in terms of its public currency.
“I just read the funnies,” said Homer.
They had twin beds with a reading lamp and nightstand between them, an easy distance for holding hands. The lamp could be adjusted so that Madeleine could read while Homer drifted off. She looked up from her book.
“Homer, are you afraid to die?”
“No.”
“The Day of Judgment?”
“Nope.”
“Homer, are you afraid of anything?”
“I’m afraid of rigor mortis.”
She chuckled—“But exactly”—and went back to her book. It soon dropped to her lap. He watched her until she fell asleep, then slipped his hand free of hers and turned off the lamp.
Homer’s daughter, Cecile — named for her mother, though unlike her in every way and never called CeeCee — phoned at about ten o’clock at night. Madeleine was asleep and Homer was setting out mousetraps, one for the cereal cupboard, one under the stove, and one in front of the refrigerator he hoped he would remember when he was barefoot in the morning. He didn’t like this, but the humane traps were too humane to catch mice. He rotated the geranium on the windowsill to equalize its sun exposure and watched the grosbeaks and juncos scouring the ground under the empty feeder. Hawks sometimes killed juncos at the feeder; while nature might be red in tooth and claw, Homer worried about being complicitous in the death of the juncos. In fact, he’d twice moved the feeder to give the songbirds better cover from overhead but underestimated the hawks’ capacity for swooping.