In Open Spaces (46 page)

I took the paper and set it to the side. I sensed that he didn’t trust me, and this offended me. Benson thanked me for lunch, then headed for the door. I got up to see him out.

“Good luck, Mr. Benson,” I said.

“Pleasure to meet you. Don’t hesitate to contact me.”

He left and was halfway down the walk when a question occurred to me, and I called to him.

“Hey, Benson, what name did he use?”

He stopped and turned. “Westford. David Westford,” he said. “Guy in St. Louis. When I first saw this guy, I knew it wasn’t your brother. Nobody that fat could ever get into the army.” He looked down, as if considering whether he should go on; then he walked back toward me, stopping a few feet away. “This Westford fella, when we first found him, claimed he didn’t know any Jack Arbuckle, that the guy must have picked his name at random. We didn’t have any reason to doubt him, but of course we followed up on it. It turns out the two of them had a little scam going. Your brother was a supply officer, in charge of distributing parts and supplies to different units. He was smuggling stuff—nothing big, but a lot of it—parts and small equipment, out to this Westford fella, who has a heavy equipment and parts business out there in St. Louis.” Benson eyed me, gauging whether any of this information seemed to set anything off with me, probably looking for some sign of guilt.

“You never met this Westford character?” he asked.

I thought about telling him the truth, or telling him that I met Westford on the train to Omaha some twenty years back, but I finally decided I didn’t want this guy snooping around any more than he had to. I shook my head.

He nodded, pushing his lips up toward his nose.

“Well, I’ll be on my way.” He waved.

“So long.”

When he stepped out of the yard, Pup ran up to him, trying to get him to play. The dog raised up and kicked his front paws through the air, as if he was swimming. Benson danced backward, holding his hands out in front of him, holding Pup away, then moved toward his car.

Mutt was back out in a pasture somewhere, with her own kind. During feeding that previous winter, after we’d tried to get her to be a sheep, we’d find Mutt standing off to one side of the flock, as if she was guarding them. We tried to run her back into the flock, but she would charge them, just as Pup had taught her. It took a couple of months, but she must have gotten lonely enough to join them, probably thinking that she’d have to settle for their company, even though she was a dog.

Benson was almost to his car when he stopped one more time. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I just have to ask one more thing, out of curiosity.”

I walked into the yard, so he didn’t have to shout. “Okay.”

“Mrs. Arbuckle there…Rita…”

“Yeah? What about her?”

“I was very confused talking to her. I didn’t want to ask, though, didn’t want to offend her. Is she your wife, or Jack’s?”

I smiled. “Neither,” I said.

I
f I had sat down a few years ago and imagined how I wanted my life to look, it’s hard to imagine that it could have worked out any better than it has. And yet I planned none of it. Jack’s latest disappearance cemented what was already assumed—that I will take over the ranch. Jack’s absence also opened the door, finally, for the first tentative steps toward a romance with the only woman I have ever fallen in love with. It started early one evening, when I swallowed the lump in my throat and stood on Rita’s doorstep, asking her in a shaky voice whether she wanted to take a walk. She looked confused.

“Is something wrong?” she asked.

“No, no, nothing’s wrong,” I muttered. “Nothing’s wrong.”

Rita frowned, her eyes darting from side to side as she thought.

“It’s just such a beautiful night out,” I said, fully aware that there was little or nothing remarkable about it.

Rita studied me, then seemed to understand. A shy smile came to her face, and for the first time that I could ever remember, she blushed.

“Let me get my shawl,” she said.

You would never have guessed that the two people strolling along the dusty path that evening had known each other for almost twenty years. We were both as tongue-tied as a couple of pimply teenagers. We were able to laugh about it later, after a few more walks, and a couple of candlelight dinners. It has been an odd courtship, with the two of us knowing each other so well. For one thing, neither of us had much experience with this type of thing to begin with. Rita and Jack had only dated for a few weeks before she agreed to marry him, and he was her first beau. So it was awkward by nature, but made even more so by our history.

The interesting thing about these developments was that I had absolutely none of the sense of triumph, or even satisfaction, that I might have imagined as a younger man. What I might have once seen as an arrival felt much more like a departure, a beginning. The sense that filled me was one of responsibility, thinking of the people who relied on the ranch, and in turn on me.

When I realized how much pressure I felt from this responsibility, with conditions being as good as they were, and with fewer mouths to feed, my respect and admiration for my parents compounded. It had always been hard for me to understand why my father seemed to have so little interest in anything that was happening outside of work. I had often wondered whether he cared about his family. But for the first time, it occurred to me that perhaps after six days a week in the fields, he didn’t have energy to put into anything besides work. Perhaps he instinctively knew that the best thing he could do for all of us was to hold the ranch together. And seeing what that entailed now, I also saw how that put the responsibility for everything else on my mother. It was no wonder she was irritable, I decided. She had a lot to be irritated about.

These were not the only areas where my perspective had shifted. Oddly enough, it was Jack’s last disappearance that convinced me that he didn’t kill George. It’s impossible to know for sure, of course. But the more I think about it, the more I believe that what drove Jack away
from the ranch, and from us, was much more simple. It was the loneliness. It was the open space. It was the silent hours of grueling labor with nothing but your thoughts to keep you company. Your thoughts and memories. In Jack’s case, difficult memories. Fishing his son from the reservoir he built. Finding George’s body. And the consequences of that evening. His inability to respond, and Katie’s death as a result. I’m sure that the talk behind his back didn’t help, either. Despite his demeanor, Jack did care what people thought.

Seeing Jack fold at the site of his son’s death helped convince me that he simply wasn’t equipped somehow to handle situations like that. It was this that was perhaps hardest for him to come to terms with while he was here.

And I think in his own strange way, Jack knew this. I think that the reason he stayed away may have been because he was trying to protect us from the worst of him. Maybe I’m giving him too much credit, but I’d like to believe that he knew he wasn’t good here.

All of which makes the other side of Jack’s personality more compelling to me. The side that brought him back. The side that really did care about Rita, and the rest of us, enough that he tried one last time to adapt. There is something about this place that sets up its own little corner in your heart and lives there, I think. And it was strong in Jack.

And what this says in the end is a surprise to me. Because as much as I would like to believe otherwise, I think my brother and I are a lot more alike than we are different.

Just the other day, at the Pioneer Days in Albion, I let some of my old friends talk me into pitching again. I hadn’t done it for a few years, for several reasons. For one thing, it hurt my arm if I threw for too long. It was also frustrating to go out there and try to do the same things I used to do and have my body not cooperate. But mainly I just wanted to give the young kids a chance. There were some pretty good pitchers around
the county, and of course all of them wanted to pitch the whole game on the rare occasions that we had a chance to play.

But for some reason, people got nostalgic that day, and talked me into taking the mound for a couple of innings. I got up there and took a few warm-up tosses, and I actually felt pretty good for the first couple of batters. I started to feel at home again. It was fun.

We were playing against Capitol, and one young kid hit a nice two-out triple off me that first inning, but I struck out the last guy, breaking off one of my old curveballs on the third strike, and as I trotted off the field, I caught Sophie Roberts Melvin Andrews Carroll smiling at me. I was taken back to the first time I’d seen her look at me this way. And it was a good memory. I had come to realize that things had worked out better than they would have if she had married me. And I had been able to be perfectly civil to her the last few times I’d seen her. I still couldn’t stand Albert, but that’s another story.

The second inning, the first batter hit a grounder to short, which was fielded cleanly. The shortstop threw the guy out by a step, and a big Norwegian guy settled into the batter’s box. His hair was whiter than the baseball, and his arms could have filled a good portion of my pant legs. He had that Norwegian manner, too, of appearing to be disinterested in what was happening. He didn’t look fierce, aside from his size, or mean. Just huge.

But when he swung at my first pitch, a curve that didn’t curve, he hit that thing a ton, and it came right back at me before I had a chance to finish my follow-through. I had been a pretty good fielder in my younger days. I was known for plucking a liner from the air just before it caught me flush in the mouth, or for reaching out and snagging a grounder that would have shot by most fellas. But this thing took me down, glancing off my forehead, just above my left eyebrow. Of course, I didn’t know any of this at the time, as I was out cold for several minutes.

When I woke up, I tasted dirt. My face was pressed against the ground, and in my semiconscious state, I went through one of those
frightening moments where I thought I had died. I thought I was dead, and that I’d been buried without a coffin, and that the dirt was directly on my face. But I heard a voice, then another, then a chorus of voices, surrounding me.

As I lay there, my face pressed against the earth, I thought what it must be like to be the land, and what you see every day when you are stuck there, lying immobilized, vulnerable to the winds and shifts in weather, and the inevitable comings and goings of clouds and hooves and wheels and teeth. And as people turned me over, then nursed and pampered and fussed over me, my mind wandered, thinking about how amazing it is that despite what the earth is subjected to, it still goes on. And how it responds to this abuse in remarkable, almost human ways.

I thought about how much we expect from it, and how it can be almost cruel in its stubborn insistence to withhold the things we ask from it. And how just about the time that we think we will never receive any of what we need from our beloved earth, she comes through, touching us with the smallest of gestures—a raindrop on the cheek, or a small sprout of alfalfa peeking through its hard surface. The land is loving, cruel, selfish, stubborn, and sometimes overly generous. It can be unbelievably kind. And incomprehensibly void of compassion.

I turned my face to the side, wanting to feel the earth against my cheek. And for as long as I was lying there, letting my head clear, and feeling the hands of my friends and family wiping the blood from my face, I held my head in that position, enjoying the rough, cool texture of the soil against my skin.