Evelyn, shivering from the cold, couldn’t quite keep her eyes off the corpse, and was tempted to blame it for everything. Donald said he was uncomfortable having it lean up against the wall like cordwood and put it in a small wagon, towing it around the room looking for a better place. “I remember when the damn thing was jumping around barking orders,” he said. He looked through the room for a place to park the wagon. “My dreams change every day,” Donald was saying. “For years I’ve also had a great interest in going to Mars. It seems more and more possible. If I hang on to my share of Grandpa’s pension and invest it wisely, I could be on one of the first trips. When I heard they’d found evidence of water there, I thought, Whoa, I could have it alclass="underline" a hot tub on Mars! Here, this is good, I think….” He lifted the corpse out of the wagon and stood it in an upended metal stock tank, where it took on the aspect of a roadside shrine down in Mexico.
Evelyn tried to see the merits of hot tubbing on Mars, the plains of the Red Planet all around and the troubled, complicated Earth hanging on the far edge of the void. Donald had put her in a strange mood.
Donald, meanwhile, was gazing reflectively at his grandfather. “I’m sort of orchestrating the funeral tonight. There will be modest pageantry and some music. If only he could talk, eh? I can guarantee you he’d say we were doing everything all wrong.”
Viewed from the Red Planet, of course, casual wounding within families would seem trivial.
“What kind of music?”
“I have some bitchin’ tunes.” He reached deep into his beard in thought, his eyes moving slowly from side to side.
“So much snow,” said Evelyn. “If only you had a phone. Is he going to stay propped up okay? A few flowers would make a big difference.” She was losing her grip.
Evelyn sat at the kitchen table with a pile of old magazines, never quite taking her eyes off the weather. She had inquired about all the distances — to the county road, to town, across the fields, to the interstate highway — and finally Mrs. Aadfield, at the stove with a towel over her shoulder, told her she would just have to accept her predicament and that it was unlikely to last more than another night.
Evelyn was looking at the meat on a platter atop the stove.
“That’s not that moose, is it?”
“No, and I’d offer you some TV but Donald backed over the dish with the swather and the reception ain’t so good. Sometimes it skips off the stratosphere and we get Red Deer, Alberta. Dad watches it anyway, just for the movement. Says it helps his eyes.”
Evelyn said, “Can’t I make something?”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know, a pie?”
“What’re you gonna make it out of?”
“You got any apples?”
In fact, they had a cellar full, and once Evelyn had them piled on the table, she abandoned herself to peeling them while she tried to remember how to make pie crust. None of these people knew what a terrible cook she was, and she wanted to bask in their not finding out. At the critical moment, Esther removed a box from the freezer and handed it to her: a brown generic box that said PIE CRUST, and inside were perhaps thirty crusts in a stack. “Jeez,” said Evelyn, “how do you get them apart?”
Eventually, Torvald and Donald reappeared in the kitchen. Esther suggested that being indoors, which they obviously craved, was a luxury to which they were not yet entitled. Nevertheless, they stood shoulder to shoulder pounding their hands together, then pulled off their insulated coveralls, stamping up and down, and seeming to become smaller as clothes piled around their feet.
“Everybody fed,” said Donald, reminding Evelyn that a herd of cows was often referred to by ranchers as “everybody.” “That old brockle-faced, crooked-horned, prolapsed, swinging-bagged, broken-mouthed, spavined whore chased Dad and me up on the wagon again, one of us ever trips we’re gonna be toast.”
“She’s going to town,” said Aadfield sternly. “I’ve had enough.”
“Must be three foot out there,” said Donald to Evelyn, turning his palms up hopelessly.
“Can’t you go to the shop and build something?” asked Mrs. Aadfield in a tone of exasperation.
“No, Ma, we can’t. The propane line is froze, and we can’t get heat to it.”
Donald led Evelyn to the living room, which bore no intuitive relationship to the rest of the house insofar as it was necessary to pass through two obscure doors to reach it. A small fireplace with a Heat-O-Lator insert was surmounted by the inevitable bugling elk against an overwrought tangerine sunrise; and it had been a long time since Evelyn had spotted tassels on furniture. A badly stuffed and moth-eaten bobcat was poised midpounce over a thoroughly dilapidated grouse, a tableau that proved to be a centerpiece for the windowless wall where hung various family pictures, including several of Donald as a rodeo star in pre — cross-dresser days and Grandpa in the Norwegian Navy. There was also a rather glaring colored portrait of Diana, Princess of Wales.
Donald simply wanted to talk, and Evelyn found herself touched by surprising trustfulness. He wished to know where she lived. “Mostly in Bozeman,” she said, “but also on our ranch — well, sort of ours — helping out.”
There was a long and comfortable silence before Donald spoke.
“Well, uh—?”
“What was I doing out in your pasture in the middle of the night?”
“Yes,” he said solemnly, eyes seeming to drift for a moment, but then his face lit up. “Is it a fun answer?”
Evelyn looked vaguely at the ceiling, really thinking this over. Then she described the men getting out of the old sedan and her sense of foreboding, her instinct that she would have just one narrow opportunity to avoid the fate they held in their hands. “They were sort of uh, uh, looming.” But no, that wasn’t it so much as the differing speeds at which their faces were lit up by the headlights. As she went over this in her mind, it was suddenly very clear that she’d been right, that if she hadn’t run something very terrible might have happened.
Donald nodded. “Those might’ve been ordinary men,” he said, “believing all women in the world are just a bunch of Lorena Bobbitts. Probably just regular fellas leading decent lives, but when you get them together there’s always this one other fella — who you can’t see, you can’t even see, but he’s there all right and it’s no telling what he’s liable to do.” Evelyn sat very straight as he spoke.
A chinook wind began to blow in early afternoon, sowing panic among the Aadfields as the temperature steadily climbed and melted snow began to run from the gutters. The roads would soon be passable, and any mission of seeing Grandpa off would be subject to the interfering visits of neighbors. Thriving on this emergency, Donald announced, “We’ve got to make our move.”
Evelyn, reading a front-page story in the Livingston Enterprise about the advance of Africanized bees north from Texas estimated to arrive here in about thirty years, noted that his parents were immobilized.
Donald looked from one to the other in moderate disgust. “Let’s put an end to this,” he said to them. “That old man is gone. He ruined our lives. He—”
“Donald—”