Blind Your Ponies (30 page)

At the far side of the meadow they walked along a broad river bench that was sparsely wooded with cottonwood, juniper, and willow. A few of the giant cottonwood had given in to weather and time some years ago and their barkless bones had scattered. As though in her natural element, Diana blended with the environment, moving nimbly through brush, deadfall, leaves, and dried grass without a sound.

For Sam, the hike became a voyage of discovery in a landscape that, while jogging on this gravel road, he had paid little attention to and imagined it to be barren, void of all life and forsaken in winter’s grip. Diana pointed out nests, tracks, and animal tracks. She pulled Sam to his knees and then flattened herself. With a finger over her lips, she pointed upriver. Sam, lying beside her, couldn’t see anything.

She whispered, “River otter.”

Twenty feet out in the water, a dark, sleek-headed creature appeared, and then another. Sam was taken with surprise at the existence of these aquatic clowns so close to his daily routine.

Diana and Sam crept further down the shore to a grassy bank, where Diana again stretched flat on the ground. Sam lay beside her and the sun warmed his back. A raven glided above them, its solitary call reminding Sam, in hazy shadows, of a time when he was a boy in Wisconsin, catching frogs and fireflies and exploring the woods with a wonder he had misplaced with his childhood. He could not recall a time since then when he had sprawled on the ground in the woods in hiding. Diana rolled onto her back and told him to do the same. She had him look up at the partially clouded sky.

“Now relax, let yourself fall back into the arms of the earth.”

He let go, feeling his body mold to the shape of the ground under him.

“Take several deep breaths,” she said. “Slowly… in and out.”

He inhaled the clean moist air, held it within him for a moment, and then emptied his lungs. He repeated the ritual, hearing Diana doing the same beside him.

“Now imagine you’re becoming part of the earth, that there are grasses and flowers growing out of the ground and right through your body.”

He breathed deeply and visualized himself sinking further into the humus, sprouting grass and weeds and sage like a flower bed. As Diana suggested, he could feel the earth breathing under him, with him, sighing up the scents of its moist subsoil, molecules from its warm bedrock, fertilized and imprinted by its previous eons of life, energy rising from the deepest recesses of cooking creation.

The land had its rhythms, its music and motions, an ebb and flow that washed over him like surf, a vitality so essential and primary that it seemed eternal, a heartbeat, a pulse that he could reach out and touch, a soul he could feel. At that moment Sam would swear, cross his heart and hope to die, that he could hear Respighi’s “The Pines of the Appian Way” coming out of the ground around him.

“Now,” she said, “feel the earth rotating… slowly… turning east, moving away from the sun.”

After a minute he found himself leaning very slightly to the east, sensing a movement, knowing the planet under him was turning. His eyes teared, and he was overwhelmed with an engulfing sense of peace and oneness with the earth, an acceptance he’d never experienced, a centering that he had no idea existed.

“Feel it?” she asked.

“Yeah.”

He watched the clouds with watering vision, stretched out on the ground beside this mysterious woman, feeling the nebulous rotation as they rode this streaking earth ball through intergalactic space, its children at the molecular level. He wondered what it was he clung to after he saw Amy’s body. Was he clinging to the earth itself to keep from falling away into the nether-world force, some nihilistic black hole? Was he clinging to some fairy tale that would one day abolish the sadness, some hope in the eventual triumph of goodness and joy? Or was he hanging on in the faith that something or someone would save him, save him from the violence and madness?

“The clouds are telling stories,” she said so softly he barely heard.

“Do they have a name?”

“I hate to label them with technical names. It takes all of the mystery out of them.” Diana pointed. “Those are fair-weather cumulus.” She pointed another direction. “Those are stratus.”

From where they stretched out on the ground, Sam could see no sign of civilization: no power lines, no fence, no road, no sound of machinery, nothing but the unspoiled creation. He pointed out over the mountains.

“How about that one?”

“Oh… that’s a lenticular altocumulus.”

“A what?”

“Lenticular altocumulus. They form over the mountains when we’re in high pressure.”

She rolled up onto one elbow and he caught a poignant look in her eye. She gazed at the bright, saucerlike cloud.

“I used to think they were God’s skipping stones.”

“Used to?”

“Now I know they are hearts that have been betrayed, sailing off to a land where those you love are never wrenched from your bloody arms.”

Sam felt a shudder of sorrow as though he were watching her tattered heart making sail for another world. He had an instinctual urge to take her in his arms and comfort her, wishing he had an epoxy for her heart, or an anodyne that would enable it to overlook its fractures. In his moment of hesitation, she was up and ready to move on.

On the circular passage back to the cars they spooked two white-tail deer out of the dense underbrush. Soon After, they caught a fleeting glimpse of a red fox streaking across the meadow, one, she assured him, they had undoubtedly disturbed. Sam came out of the field with a fresh perspective of the living miracles drenching him. He came out with a sense of the fullness of the land and the incredible web of life on it, a vision through Diana’s eyes of this earth and cosmos, a universe that he was part and parcel of, mingled with its sinew, blood cells, and bone marrow.

When he saw the cars he realized that she had led him less than two miles from the gym. She had taken him to a world altogether oblivious to basketball games, winning and losing. It was a much more profound awareness of just being alive, and all of this right in his backyard.

“That was really something,” he said as they scrambled out of the barrow pit and onto the road.

“You ought to see it come spring. Things are popping alive so fast you have to duck.”

When she drove away, saying she was off to visit Randolph and Ellie Butterworth, he lingered a while longer and looked off to the mountains to watch the distant passage of the lenticular altocumulus gliding over the Spanish Peaks.

O
N
S
UNDAY
, O
LAF
worked in the barn with Mervin, who hammered away with a grim but unflagging resolve. Claire made several sorties with food and liquids during the day, but the two would not come to the house for their traditional Sunday dinner.

That evening, a carload of kids stopped to pick Olaf up. Outside the barn Olaf told them, in confidential tones, that he had to stay and help Mr. Painter work in the barn.

“Come on, please,” Carter said.

“C’mon, you turkey,” Tom called from the backseat of Louella’s four-door Mercury.

“Building we are… a-a-ah… to hammer he is teaching me.”

His puzzled friends drove off for Bozeman without him, and Olaf turned for the barn.

Monday morning, gray and mild, Mervin Painter nudged his 1990 4×4
Ford pickup toward Manhattan, recalling his long personal history of defeat. When he was young, his big brother Carl used to win at everything because of his size and age. And then as Mervin began catching up and would nearly beat him at something, Carl would cheat and do anything to win. When Mervin would call him on it, Carl would punch him in the stomach, hard, or in the ribs, and then, as they both got older, in the head, several times knocking Mervin out cold. One time he woke up and found himself lying on the ground in the apple orchard and the last thing he could remember was confronting Carl for stealing his money. He had always felt it dishonorable to tattle to his father about his big brother’s down-home sibling brutality, as though any son worth his salt should be able to take care of himself.

Nearing Manhattan, Mervin muddled over how the same damn thing continued in his adult life, over bad luck or the unfairness that Willow Creek, the town nearest the family farm, should have the basketball team that could never win, and that Manhattan Christian, the school closest to his big brother’s spread, should have the abundance of boys and the excellent program for a winning basketball tradition. Mervin attempted to disguise how deeply it incensed him with an aw-shucks, good-old-boy exterior. He turned off the interstate and approached the café as one would approach hemorrhoid surgery.

Mervin took a deep breath as he hesitated in front of the Garden Café. Then, he shoved the door open and strode in with the intent of keeping cool and taking the ribbing good-naturedly. Mervin slid heavily into the booth.

“Well, I guess you’ll never learn, little brother. You wouldn’t have been within twenty points if our boys hadn’t been a little overconfident,” Carl said.

He wore his oil-stained John Deere cap and was fortified in his customary booth with his two cronies. Lute Jackson and Sandy Hill jauntily echoed his ridicule and added some of their own.

“What was the score?” Mervin said, sitting next to Sandy and directly across the table from his big brother.

“Willow Croak lost again,” Carl said, loud enough that the cook in the kitchen could hear.

With a restrained calm in his voice Mervin said, “What was the score?”

“Christian beat Willow Croak, so what else is new,” Carl said.

“By
one point.
And you were damn lucky.”

“We don’t need luck to beat Willow Croak, never have, never will. You were lucky to even be in the game,” Carl said.

Lute made a showy display of handing over the check and the crisp one-hundred-dollar bill to Mervin’s big brother, and most everyone in the Coffee-scented establishment, where decades ago wrestling exhibitions and boxing matches were held, clapped and hooted.

“If you had been man enough to have fathered a boy or two,” Carl said, having had two boys who had played for Manhattan Christian, “maybe Willow Croak would have won a game.”

That ripped it!

It was unacceptable for these ranchers and farmers to let on that they had accumulated much wealth, even though both Mervin and Carl had prospered at their inherited vocations. The hundred dollars had been straining the boundaries of this unspoken commandment; to bet anything larger in monetary sums would smack of arrogance and be a denial of their self-imposed, outwardly-frugal lifestyle.

“Let’s bet on the next game,” Mervin said, trembling with a controlled ferocity.

“Hell, that’s four weeks away,” Sandy said, tipping his cherished Northern Pacific engineer’s cap. “By the way you’re losing players, you better wait and see if you still have five boys standing by then.”

The three men generated waves of laughter that spread until even the eavesdroppers chuckled. After all these years, Mervin was still surprised at how quickly word spread across the valley; they already knew about the Strong boy’s defection.

“You giving me another hundred-dollar bill?” Carl asked.

“Something bigger,” Mervin said.

“Whoa,” Lute said, “the man has gone bananas.”

“Bigger?” Carl said.

“The John Deere ‘D’,” Mervin said calmly.

“My ‘D’!” Carl said. “My ‘D’?–

“What’s the matter? You afraid you might lose?”

“Wait a minute here,” Carl said. “You want me to bet my tractor on the
basketball game
?”

“That ‘D’ is a rare son-bitch,” Sandy said. “Wasn’t that made in twenty-nine?”

“Twenty-eight,” Carl said, “and only one hundred of ’em built.”

“Built in Waterloo, Iowa,” Mervin said. “An experimental model: two-cylinder, three-speed transmission, all steel wheels. They shipped ’em to Montana and Arizona, mainly.”

“And you want me to bet my ‘D’ on a basketball game?” Carl said, employing his favorite tactic of repeating something a dozen times in an effort to intimidate.

“Our father bought the twenty-second ‘D’ from Oliver Stout Implement Company in Bozeman,” Mervin said, “serial number X67522.”

“Can’t be many of them suckers left,” Lute said.

“Only eight that anyone knows of,” Carl said. “Rest gone to junk and rust, and you want me to bet the
‘D’
on a
basketball game
? You must be outta yer skull.”

Carl eyeballed him and Mervin felt like he was ten again. Their father used the “D” for years in the field. Took care of it like it was a living, breathing member of the family. He finally stuck it in a shed, never able to bring himself to trade it in on other equipment. Shortly before he died, their father gave the cherished “D” to the eldest son—deserving or not—the sacred symbol of family birthright. The pampered “D” still ran as good as it did the day it rolled off the assembly line in Waterloo.

Mervin stuck his thumbs in his armpits and moved his folded arms like chicken wings, mimicking his brother’s familiar gestures when Mervin balked at a bet.

Carl’s sandpaper face became florid, veins bulging.

“That tractor’s irreplaceable,” Carl said.

“Don’t you think your pansies can luck out again against poor little ol’ Willow Croak?” Mervin said.

“And what are you putting up?” Carl asked.

“My ninety Ford Lariat, only four thousand on it.”

“Yeah, and all beat to hell.”

“It’s in top-notch shape. Course if you’re afraid you’re going to
lose…”

Mervin knew his brother cherished the polished green heirloom far beyond any monetary value and he also knew he had his big brother by the balls.

“All right, by God, the ‘D’ against your pickup!” Carl said.

“Done!” Mervin said and the two brothers glared at each other across the table as Lute and Sandy—and most of the other occupants of the café, who turned on their swivel stools to watch—held their breath at the escalating confrontation.

Mervin struggled against an old but not forgotten instinct that kept shouting at him to duck, sure he could recognize in his brother’s eyes that impulse to slug his younger kin. A part of Mervin wished he would, giving Mervin an excuse to strike back with all the pent-up resentment he never got a chance to unload, using his work-hardened fist like a sledge against anvil, one thudding blow.