'How much you charge 'em for doing this?' his brother Frank asked him over supper one April when Tom had come home to help with the branding. Rosie was away at college and Frank, nineteen now, was working full time on the ranch. He had a keen commercial nose and in fact virtually ran the place as their father retreated ever deeper into the gloom created by the lawsuits.
'Oh, I don't charge them,' Tom said. Frank put his fork down and gave him a look.
'You don't charge them at all? Ever?'
'Nope.' He took another mouthful.
'Why the hell not? These people have money, don't they?'
Tom thought for a moment. His parents were looking at him too. It seemed this was a matter of some interest to all of them.
'Well. You see, I don't do it for the people. I do it for the horse.'
There was a silence. Frank smiled and shook his head. It was clear Tom's father thought him a little crazy too. Ellen stood up and started stacking plates defensively.
'Well, I think it's nice,' she said.
It got Tom thinking. But it took another couple of years for the idea of doing clinics to take shape. Meanwhile, he surprised them all by announcing he was going off to the University of Chicago.
It was a mixed humanities and social sciences course and he stuck it out for eighteen months. He only lasted that long because he fell in love with a beautiful girl from New Jersey who played the cello in a student string quartet. Tom went to five concerts before they even spoke. She had a mane of thick, glossy black hair which she swept back over her shoulders and she wore silver hoops in her ears like a folk singer. Tom watched the way she moved as she played, the music seeming to swim through her body. It was the sexiest thing he had ever seen.
At the sixth concert she looked at him all the way through and he waited for her afterward outside. She came up and took his arm without saying a word. Her name was Rachel Feinerman and later that night in her room, Tom thought he had died and gone to heaven. He watched her light candles and then turn to stare at him as she stepped out of her dress. He thought it strange how she kept her earrings on but was glad she had because the candlelight flashed in them as they made love. She never once closed her eyes and she arched herself into him, watching him watch his hands travel her body in wonder. Her nipples were large and the color of chocolate and the luxuriant triangle of hair on her belly glistened like the wing of a raven.
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.'