When they pushed the yearlings back through the gap in the fence, the cattle quit running so hard and seemed to admit they knew they were back where they were supposed to be. Joe looked around. They were only a few thousand feet above the old homestead but it seemed like the roof of the world. He could look off not so far and see the granite verticals, the permanent snow. The world here seemed like a real planet and not just the physical excrescence of civilization.
When the youngster rode up, Joe said, “You break anything?”
“Naw.”
“What happened?”
“Sonofabitch lit in a anthill.”
Joe thanked them and everybody split up on their shortcuts home, the three horses quickly disappearing from each other in the back country. Joe returned to patch the hole in the fence and started back. The scent of ditch-burning was in the air, like burning leaves in small towns in the fall. The country just seemed to drop away from the horse in a pleasant way. Joe picked up the old wagon road for the last mile and a half, and jogged back down to the buildings, arriving at the moment the nighthawks swarmed into dusk.
At Lureen’s request, he stopped in to see her in the blue house that lost more of its power to haunt him the longer he was home. The ghosts of cellar and attic were eclipsed by the need for repairs, and the oversize kitchen stove only emphasized Lureen’s paltry cooking talents. As he drove up to the house, he saw Smitty’s face briefly in the window. He knocked and Lureen came to the door.
When Joe asked after Smitty, Lureen said he was in Wolf Point visiting Sioux and Assiniboine members of the Veterans of Foreign Wars. They sat down to tea. Lureen wasn’t saying much but she looked scared. On a table next to the dining room door was a substantial pile of new clothes, men’s and women’s, curious because they were strictly for tropical wear. “Sale items,” said Lureen, seeing Joe look. He had never seen such colors in this house. It was as if the coconuts of the space program had come back to haunt him.
“I have something for you,” Lureen said and left the room. While she was gone, Joe tried to guess what gruesome family memento would soon be his. He drank the tea he had never liked. He looked at walls which had first defined interior space to him, then had filled him with a lifetime’s claustrophobia. He looked out the high windows beside the kitchen door to the blue sky and felt all over again that freedom could very well be at hand.
Lureen came back in and placed a file folder on the table. He suddenly knew what it was. It was the deed. In her own way, Lureen was making every cent count. She knew Smitty was going to take the check for the yearlings. Joe was filled with nervous excitement. Smitty and Lureen were going to Hawaii with the check. Between that and the money lost on Smitty’s seafood venture, the place would be bankrupt. And he held the deed in his hands. “The transfer is in there, and it’s been notarized.”
“How can I thank you?” he asked. Slipping eye contact, a tremor crossing Lureen’s face, and the dissolute nephew receiving a family holding, in vacuity, with hands he hoped expressed as much sincerity as the praying hands on Christmas cards. All in their way were the last detectable tremors of the life of a family. Joe looked down at the empty document, thinking it might contain a single ounce of meaning or reality or possibility by way of naming or holding a place on earth, and he was suddenly and absurdly elated. He looked at Lureen, divested of the ranch, and he saw in her eyes a dream lighter and more ethereal than Hawaii itself. It was as if in this room where the hopes of generations had just collapsed, the roar of warm surf could be heard. He couldn’t keep the mad grin off his face, the goofy and vaguely celebratory grin that Lureen observed in astonishment.
30
It was just starting to get cold. The local weather forecasts were revised twice a day as the weathermen of three different channels strove against one another in explaining the Rorschach shapes of storms in the Gulf of Alaska. Joe concentrated on the fates of these storms as they threw themselves on the mountains of Washington and Idaho, and expired. One of these days soon, they were going to slide down through Alberta, catch the east side of the Rockies, and turn Joe’s world upside down.
He took this time to cut firewood and spent days on end in the cottonwood groves taking out the standing dead and transporting the wood to a pile next to the house. The growth of this pile fascinated him. He sensed it was in his power to make a pile bigger than the house. He moved along the creek and cut up the trees the beavers had felled. While he worked, he could see trout on the redds, swirling after one another and fanning nests into the gravel. The eagles had started coming in from the north and were standing high in the bare trees along the stream. Their rapine, white-tailed, dark and monkish shapes showed from a quarter of a mile away.
He sat down in the autumn forest, an old woodchopper with his hot orange chain saw. I am posing for eternity, he thought. He was desperate. He was desperate because the constant companionship of unanswered questions was affecting his nerves and suggesting that it was the absolute final and daily condition of living. He was no longer interested in remaining in the space program.
The irrigation water stopped running and the springs were down to a bare minimum. He moved the yearlings every few days, an activity that took him to remote pastures on horseback. He enjoyed his horse’s sure-footedness. He could travel on breathtaking sidehills you could barely negotiate on your own feet in a kind of skywalking perfection as the cattle flew forward in coveys. In this motion and vastness, he could actually think about life, beginning and end, with equanimity, with cheer. Joe thought he was vaguely bigger than everything he saw and therefore it would be tragic and for all nations to weep over, if anything happened to him. But here in the hills, he would feed the prettiest birds. As promised by all religions, he would go up into the sky where his folks were.
Joe felt the return of love and remorse, like a bubble of gas rising through crankcase residue. The slowness of the bubble’s traverse seemed to express the utter gallonage of his desire as well as the regret that made it something of a rich dish and gave this emotion its peculiar morning-after quality.
“I think we’re missing something,” he said.
After a moment, Astrid said, “I know what you mean.”
She bit her thumbnail in thought and looked off. Joe examined some carpet. The white hills, the departing dream, the impending embarkation for Hawaii only illumined the plight. He had heard nothing from Ellen and felt she didn’t want him to see Clara. When you’re young and think you’ll live forever, it’s easy to think life means nothing.
Astrid stood up and stretched, then stopped all motion to smile at Joe. She went to the door and opened it, letting in the clear, balsamic breath of foothills, of sage and juniper and prairie grass. She stood on tiptoes to stretch and inhale.
“Joe,” she said deliberately, “this isn’t for me.”
Joe didn’t hear her. He turned on the radio. First he got a semi-intellectual cornball on FM and then a wonderful song from 1944—what could that have been like! — about a cowboy going East to see the girl he loves best. “Graceful faceful” went the chorus, “such lovely hair! Oh, little choo-choo, please get me there!” It was sung in the kind of voice you’d use to call a dog in the dark when you really didn’t expect the dog to come. It disturbed Joe because it suggested that the Americans of the recent past were insane foreigners. Then an ad for a local car dealer filled with apparently living objects: “Cold weather is coming and your car doesn’t want to face it. You need a new one but your wallet says ‘No’!” Joe thought, Is anyone following this? Astrid was still in the doorway. What was it she’d said?