“Hello fellas,” Ryne said. “Looks like I wasn’t the only one feeling neighborly this evening.”
“Some more neighborly than others,” I said.
Griselda bustled over to the stove, put on a kettle.
“You can leave off with the coffee,” I said. “You know why we’re here.”
Griselda clanged down the kettle. I could see her hands shaking.
“We all got to look after one another,” said Ryne.
Sherrill spit on the floor.
“Cut the shit,” said Weizkowski.
“Hey now,” said Ryne. “There’s a lady here.”
“Ain’t no lady I can see,” I said.
The room got quiet.
“Now boys,” said Ryne, holding out his hands.
“You been fooling where you ain’t ought to of been fooling,” I said.
“We can’t have it,” said Weizkowski.
“Hell, boys,” said Ryne, “it ain’t what you think.”
“No, it’s worse,” I said. “Ain’t it, Griselda?”
Griselda looked at Ryne to say something else but he never did. He ran.
He crashed out of the back bedroom window, screeching like a little girl. We got turned around, banging into one another and back out the front door, Griselda’s china smashed to the floor.
Like I say, it was a year’s worth of weeds out there. Out back of the house they was tall as a man. That and we was half-cocked, in no kind of condition to go tracking in the dark. We might of gave up the whole business but for who stepped out of the weeds.
Cora.
“This way, Pa!” she said. “Come on!”
Wasn’t nothing for it but to do like she said. We followed her over the cracked alkali ground. She knew the lay of the land but good. Ran us right up the little draw where Ryne was trying to make a hidey hole out of a fox den.
Things might of gone different for him if he hadn’t run, so that a ten-year old girl had to smoke him out for us. Now our blood was up. We glugged down the rest of that whiskey and yanked his trousers down and took out a sharp knife. Held Griselda, made her watch, sobbing. After, I saw Harlan’s cur loping away into the night with Ryne’s manhood.
Cora, she hung tight to me the whole ride home. Six miles over the hills, cold wind cutting us all the way. First couple miles, didn’t neither of us say nothing.
“He going to live, Pa?” Cora finally asked.
“Not well. But he ain’t going to die, if that’s what you mean.” We rode on a ways. “You understand, don’t you?” I asked.
“You can’t go rutting someone you ain’t married to,” Cora said.
“That’s right.”
“I like this horse, Pa.”
“He’s a good one, all right.”
That Mustang was, too. He’d ride me right up into the mountains and carry the furs out. Keep me off the wages. Cora behind me patted the Mustang’s shanks.
“You going to take me up with you after the bears?” she asked.
“How’d you know about that?” I said.
She shrugged. “I know.”
Magpie by Hilary Davidson
The sheriff who called about my mother-in-law’s death sounded genuinely sad about it. “She looked like she was called up to the Lord all peaceful-like,” he said, in a deep voice that had a lingering drawl to it. “She went in her sleep, I reckon. I’m sure she didn’t feel no pain.”
He told me that she’d died of a heart attack, and that it had probably happened a couple of days earlier, given the state in which she was found. “Couple of her near neighbors hadn’t seen her about, so they went over, and then they called me. Poor Mrs. Carlow. Let me give you my number so your husband can call me.”
I dutifully wrote it down, then folded the paper and put it into my purse. It was just before noon, and Jake was probably with a patient, maybe even in surgery. Telling him the news about his mother over the phone seemed heartless. I could drive to his office and reveal all in person, but given that he hadn’t spoken to his mother in years, that seemed like overkill. The news could wait until evening, after he got home. There wasn’t anything either of us could do about it now. His mother had lived in the western edge of Ohio, close to the border with West Virginia. Jake and I were in Los Angeles, where we’d moved for his medical practice. We’d been there almost five years, and even though his roots were in hill country and mine were in Cleveland, the West Coast felt completely like home.
Jake surprised me an hour later, the tires of his Porsche squealing into the driveway. I met him at the door.
“My mother’s dead,” he said. We clung to each other for a while.
“I’m sorry, baby.”
“Ludy said they think she died in her sleep.”
“Ludy?” I pulled back. “You talked to your sister?”
“She called to tell me what happened.”
“She called your office?” My stomach suddenly clenched into knots. “How did she…”
“Never mind that now, Erica. I need to think.” He pushed me away and headed for his den, slamming the door behind him. I was too surprised to say anything, or to go after him. He didn’t seem sad so much as unsettled. That wasn’t a surprise: it was normal to mourn a parent, even one who was a mean, manipulative person. Jake had cut off contact with her years ago because of her abusiveness, and while he was right to do it, I suspected that his conscience wasn’t easy right now. Any sense of loss would be made worse if it was accompanied by guilt.
When I knocked on the door, he didn’t answer. I listened at it for a moment, but all was quiet. He had alcohol in there, I knew, but no food, so I went to the kitchen and made him a sandwich. I put it on a tray and wrote a little note on an index card-I love you, baby-and left it in front of the door, knocking to let him know it was there. An hour later, it was untouched, like a rejected peace offering at the altar of an angry god.
That was when I started to worry. My husband was a man with a tender heart; he found it hard to hold a grudge against anyone, no matter how deserving. It had been so painful for him to cut off contact with his mother, even though he’d done so for reasons any sane person would understand. You couldn’t put up with a toxic person just because you were related to her; you still had to draw a line somewhere. Mrs. Carlow had actually made it easier for Jake by ignoring him. Jake had sent her a birthday card once, after they cut off contact. I only knew about it because his mother had crossed out her name with a spidery X and wrote RETURN TO SENDER on the envelope, so the card boomeranged back. How did you mourn a mother like that?
I wandered aimlessly through our house, wondering what to do. Jake needed help, but I wasn’t sure how to give it to him. We’d been together for a dozen years, and yet sometimes I found it hard to understand him.
When I knocked again on the door of his study, he ignored me. But he hadn’t locked me out, and the knob turned under my hand. I stepped over the tray and went inside. The blinds were drawn, but I could see Jake’s silhouette at his desk. He seemed to be staring into space. I didn’t hear the music at first, it was turned so low. The lyrics came as a whisper: “Oh, Death, oh death, please spare me over till another year.”
“What is it, Erica?” Jake’s voice was just as quiet as the singer’s.
I’d prepared a speech in my mind, but it slipped away. “I’m sorry,” I blurted out. “I wish I knew what to do to help you, baby.”
Jake just looked at me with that hard, flat expression that came over him when he got lost inside his own thoughts. Normally, I could cajole him out of it, but I had a feeling that I wouldn’t be able to this time. He was too bitter and raw right now. He was dangerous at the moment, liable to do something rash if I didn’t pay very close attention to him.
“There’s nothing anyone can do now. What’s done is done.”
“It’s normal to have conflicted feelings in a situation like this. It’s…”