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He brought her home for Thanksgiving and she said she had never been so cold in all her life. She got on well with everyone, even the horses, and said she thought it was the most beautiful place she had ever laid eyes on. Tom could tell what his mother was thinking just from the look on her face. That this young woman, with her inappropriate footwear and religion, was sure as hell no rancher's wife.

Not long after this, when Tom told Rachel he'd had enough of mixed humanities and Chicago and that he was going back to Montana, she got mad.

'You're going to go back and be a cowboy?' she said caustically. Tom said yes, matter of fact that was pretty much what he did have in mind. They were in his room and Rachel spun around, waving an exasperated arm at the books crammed into his shelves.

'What about all this?' she said. 'Don't you care about any of this?' He thought for a moment, then nodded.

'Sure I care,' he said. 'That's part of why I want to quit. When I was working as a hand, I just couldn't wait to get back in at night to whatever I was reading. Books had a kind of magic. But these teachers here, with all their talk, well… Seems to me if you talk about these things too much, the magic gets lost and pretty soon talk is all there is. Some things in life just… are.'

She looked at him for a moment, with her head tilted back, then slapped him hard across the face.

'You stupid bastard,' she said. 'Aren't you even going to ask me to many you?'

So he did. And they went to Nevada the following week and were married, both aware that it was probably a mistake. Her parents were furious. His were just dazed. Tom and Rachel lived with everyone else in the ranch house for the best part of a year, while they patched up the cottage, an old ramshackle place, overlooking the creek. There was a well up there with an old cast-iron pump and Tom got it working again and rebuilt the surround and wrote his and Rachel's initials in the wet concrete. They moved in just in time for Rachel to give birth to their son. They called him Hal.

Tom worked with his father and Frank on the ranch and watched his wife get more and more depressed. She would talk for hours on the phone to her mother, then cry all night long and tell him how lonely she felt and how stupid she was for feeling that way because she loved him and Hal so much it should be all she needed. She asked him again and again whether he loved her, even waking him sometimes in the dead of the night to ask him the same question and he would hold her in his arms and tell her he did.

Tom's mother said these things sometimes happened after a woman had a child and that maybe they should get away for a while, take a vacation somewhere. So they left Hal with her and flew to San Francisco and even though the city was hung with a cold fog for the whole week they -were there, Rachel started to smile again. They went to concerts and movies and fancy restaurants and did all the tourist things too. And when they got home it was even worse.

Winter came and it was the coldest anyone on the Front could remember. The snow drove down the valleys and made pygmies of the giant cottonwoods along the creek. In a blitz of polar air one night they lost thirty head of cattle and chipped them from the ice a week later like the fallen statues of an ancient creed.

Rachel's cello case stood gathering dust in a corner of the house and when he asked why she didn't play anymore she told him music didn't work here. It just got lost, she said, swallowed up by all the air. Some mornings later, clearing the fireplace, Tom came across a blackened metal string and sifting on among the ashes he found the charred tip of the cello's scroll. He looked in the case and there was only the bow.

When the snow melted, Rachel told him she was taking Hal and going back to New Jersey and Tom just nodded and kissed her and took her in his arms. She was from too different a world, she said, as they had always both known though never acknowledged. She could no more live here with all this windblown, aching space around her than live on the face of the moon. There was no acrimony, just a hollowing sadness. And no question but that the child should go with her. To Tom it only seemed fair.

It was the morning of the Thursday before Easter that he stacked their things in the back of the pickup to take them to the airport. The mountain front was draped in cloud and a cold drizzle was coming in from the plains. Tom held the son he hardly knew and would forever hardly know, bundled in a blanket, and watched Frank and his parents form an awkward line outside the ranch house to say their goodbyes. Rachel hugged each one of them in turn, his mother last. Both women were weeping.

'I'm sorry,' Rachel said. Ellen held her and patted the back of her head.

'No, sweetheart. I'm sorry. We all are.'

The first Tom Booker horse clinic was held in Elko, Nevada the following spring. It was, by common consent, a great success.

Chapter Nine

Annie called Liz Hammond from the office the morning after she got her message.

'I hear you've found me a whisperer,' she said.

'A what?'

Annie laughed. 'It's okay. I was just reading some stuff yesterday. That's what they used to call these people.'

'Whisperers. Mm, I like that. This one sounds more like a cowboy. Lives in Montana somewhere.'

She told Annie how she had heard of him. It was a long chain, a friend who knew someone who remembered someone saying something about a guy who'd had a troubled horse and had taken him to this other guy in Nevada… Liz had doggedly followed it through.

'Liz, this must have cost you a fortune! I'll pay for the calls.'

'Oh, that's okay. Apparently there are a few people out West doing this kind of thing, but I'm told he's the best. Anyway, I got his number for you.'

Annie took it down and thanked her.

'No problem. But if he turns out to be Clint Eastwood, he's mine okay?'

Annie thanked her again and hung up. She stared down at the number on the yellow legal pad in front of her. She didn't know why, but suddenly she felt apprehensive. Then she told herself not to be stupid, picked up the phone and dialed.

They always had a barbecue on the first night of Rona's clinic. It brought in some extra money and the food was good so Tom didn't mind staying on, though he was longing to get out of his dusty, sweaty shirt and into a hot tub.

They ate at long tables on the terrace outside Rona's low, white adobe ranch house and Tom found himself sitting next to the woman who owned the little thoroughbred. He knew it wasn't an accident because she'd been coming on strong all evening. She didn't have the hat on anymore and had untied her hair. She was in her early thirties maybe, a good-looking woman, he thought. And she knew it. She was fixing him with big black eyes but overdoing it a little, asking him all these questions and listening to him as if he was the most incredibly interesting guy she'd ever met. She had already told him that her name was Dale, that she was in real estate, that she had a house on the ocean near Santa Barbara. Oh yes, and that she was divorced.

'I just can't get over the way he felt under me after you'd finished with him,' she was saying, again. 'Everything had just, I don't know, freed up or something.'

Tom nodded and gave a little shrug.

'Well, that's what happened,' he said. 'He just needed to know it was okay and you just needed to get out of his way a little.'

There was a roar of laughter from the next table and they both turned to look. The donkey man was spinning some piece of Hollywood gossip about two movie stars Tom had never heard of, caught in a car doing something he couldn't quite picture.