“The first part of our plan to come apart was where we’s gonna ease ’em on out of there because they plumb took off. In two jumps they was smokin’ across the flattop and our horses caught that gust off of them and liked to get out from under us. Leo had to pull his mount in some hard circles to keep him from buckin’ with him, and mine had his head in my lap to where I’d liked to broke something over it, but pretty quick I had the best of him and he’s looking straight through his bridle like a gentleman. Leo was foggin’ it about a mile off, a big cloud of dust driftin’ away like a grass fire.
“It was pretty clear there was no smart way to turn ’em down the road even if Robert had been prepared to do so, but he was nowhere in sight. So the best we could do was throw them off the slope ahead and scatter them out among those little ranches along the river, where they would just play hell with the alfalfa. Them farmers would just shoot ’em down.
“That’s where everything changed. Robert broke out of the brush on his horse way past that crack in the ground, his sorrel mare comin’ out in a flurry of sage and greasewood cracking off in the air around her. Them broncs froze at the sight of her. They could either leap that crack and fly past him, or Robert could jump the crack himself and turn ’em toward my house. It was my corrals or the alfalfa; it was that simple.
“Presently they came boilin’ back and we whooped and hollered. Leo took down his slicker and got them bunched up once more toward the trail where they did not want to go and Robert’s yellin’, ‘Drive ’em, boys!’ till they advanced his way like a bright-colored little cyclone tryin’ to break right around him. We almost lost ’em right there. Robert stretched up over his mare’s neck and she closed on that crack just burnin’ a hole in the wind, and when she reached it she soared up into the air, Robert easing back into the saddle with his stirrups pushed out in front toward the landing he hoped they would both make.”
At this, Bill stopped and went across the room to the fireplace, where he rapped the grate with a poker to make the cold ashes fall through.
“I can still see that black hole in the ground, which was really s’posed to be Robert’s grave, but that old man floating beyond its grasp, that smart old mare reaching her long beautiful legs for the far shore. Leo told me he thought she’d been in the air for an hour.
“Well, they make it. And she sits down into her stop in a cloud of dust and confounds them wild horses who was turned into lambs with their ears hangin’ ever which way. Robert leans up with both hands on the pommel, deep slack of reins hanging under the sorrel’s neck, and he takes time to count off them mares on his string. Then we resume a very orderly jog down the ranch road gazin’ over the packed, hurryin’ backs of them mares who recognized they was back in Mr. Robert Wood’s remuda and was very well behaved. You could see they liked it. They wanted to be there. It was okay.
“When they was corralled, Robert says in his singsong voice, ‘That sure is a relief. I have to be honest, I was worried they’d give us trouble.’ He rode over to where he left his bedroll. ‘Bill,’ he said, ‘I was gonna ask your Mexican to cheek this mare while I slide off, but I’m confusing her with her mother. She was bad to paw at you when you got down. And one other thing, Billy, when you ask a green horse like yours to stop and turn, you need to start his nose first and just let him pour through. You got him handlin’ like a plank.’”
Bill threw his head back and laughed. Evelyn would have joined him, but she was still thinking.
There were things about her treatment of her husband that Natalie regretted, but they did not include the endless pains she’d taken to protect him from her father and his conviction that Stuart would never go anywhere at all. It was remarkable that Sunny Jim would have settled all his hopes on Paul, who at the funeral owned the driest eye in the house, and completely pass over Stuart, who was loved by the workers at the bottling plant while Paul was loathed as a treacherous and authoritarian opportunist.
Natalie was less proud of the fact that she was so unwilling to join Stuart at the things he loved. It was just that she found him so very, very tiresome. She felt she needed to leave sticky notes for him everywhere just to keep him on course. And she regretted her fury at his remark that her father was “gone but not forgotten,” which, it’s true, was delivered in a singsong that suggested Stuart had a streak of independence. After the funeral, she tried to bend a little and agreed to sail with him for a day at Canyon Ferry, where he kept his sloop on a narrow wooden dock over green water. Miss Annie had been named for a pretty girl at the plant on whom Stuart had a harmless crush. Natalie had never been sufficiently interested to ask about the name, and Stuart liked having the secret that he thought might be expanded, perhaps to an exchange of small kindnesses, if ever he took the real Annie for a sail.
Winter was almost upon them and snatching this warm day from such a short autumn was exciting. Natalie dangled her legs over the water with her omnipresent fat paperback while Stuart prepared the boat. He sponged the rainwater out of the bilges, pulled the sail cover off the main and let the condensation evaporate; he scrubbed bird droppings from the painted canvas deck, then rinsed it down with buckets of cold, fresh lake water that ran around the coaming and out over the transom. He was eager to “take the old girl out for a gallop,” as his easygoing father used to say.
No one of his in-laws would have understood such a thought, except maybe Evelyn with her horses. He found these people rather twisted, but he was far too mild to make much of it. He presumed it to be part of the Western Way. Most of the Whitelaws failed to appreciate Stuart’s quiet self-knowledge and would have been surprised at how often his idlest daydreams featured detailed accounts of their complete humiliation. He still resented the fact that Natalie had long ago forbidden him to sing any of the sea chanties he’d so painstakingly memorized. Once the decks dried and everything was in order, Stuart said, “Shall we sail?” And without a word, Natalie turned down a corner of her potboiler, got to her feet and stretched. “This will be very pleasant,” she said fretfully.
Stuart helped her aboard, then ran his eye around the inside of the boat, making certain everything was in order, fingers reaching out to touch white oak ribs, curves of cedar. Natalie picked a quiet spot in the cockpit so as not to be in Stuart’s way, made herself comfortable with her hands up the sleeves of an old sailing sweater. Stuart untied all the lines, coiled and stowed them in the forepeak, then walked the sloop the length of the dock, gave her a shove toward open water and jumped aboard. He let the main sheet run free while he raised the sail, putting the halyard on the winch and hoisting it tight. The boat began slowly to forge toward Confederate Gulch, a steady chugging sound against the hull as they worked their way across the vanished riverbed, whiffs of pine and barbecue, farm trucks in the distance and a dust cloud following a tractor. Stuart raised the jib, sat back in the cockpit with his hand on the tiller, looked over at his wife and said, “There.”
Natalie seemed contemplative, certainly not desperate. Clearly the death of her father was always on her mind. But Whitelaw had never been close to his girls and at the end was quite senile, interested mostly in filling the birdfeeders around the house and keeping his wife constantly in sight. Yes, said the court to suggestions of senility, but of insufficient duration: the will was binding, its various booby traps ascribable to eccentricity not mental incompetence. Seeing him pottering around in his red watch cap, his family occasionally forgot what he had done to their lives. Natalie had even exclaimed that he was “adorable,” an epithet Evelyn could not quite go along with.