The Cadence of Grass (6 page)

Natalie seemed contemplative, certainly not desperate. Clearly the death of her father was always on her mind. But Whitelaw had never been close to his girls and at the end was quite senile, interested mostly in filling the birdfeeders around the house and keeping his wife constantly in sight. Yes, said the court to suggestions of senility, but of insufficient duration: the will was binding, its various booby traps ascribable to eccentricity not mental incompetence. Seeing him pottering around in his red watch cap, his family occasionally forgot what he had done to their lives. Natalie had even exclaimed that he was “adorable,” an epithet Evelyn could not quite go along with.

From Confederate Gulch they tacked to the old brick grain silos on the west side of the lake, then east again toward the great bend north of the village of Winston, the lee rail just compressing against the swell and the rise and fall of the stem slicing forward into the water, quiet and thrilling. From time to time Natalie turned to watch the water race past. The sun was over the whole lake now, and the breeze carried the spray across the deck. Several other boats had set out, their sails vivid and white against the grain fields of the far shore. Stuart felt a lovely hum come up the rudder and through the tiller as the sloop began to sail itself. Later, he would keep going back to that picture: the sloop at its perfect angle, the flow of water along the rudder, the silver spray in the air, and Natalie taking it all in, curled up in her sweater, trying to picture how she might leave him.

A school of fish broke the surface off the bow, and they saw, beneath the hull, their small shapes hurrying away. They drew abreast of abandoned grassy hills where deer grazed in bright sun. Stuart sailed from cat’s paw to cat’s paw, working his way to an anchorage, a nice piece of work lost on Natalie, whose mind lingered on the handsome stranger in her book who had just turned up in the lives of the three young heiresses. At last the anchor was down, and the sloop swung close to the steep beach and its mantle of wild berries.

Natalie stretched and looked around as though awakening and discovering her surroundings. “Is it too early for a drink?” she asked.

“Yes, my dear, it is.”

“Stuart, you’re always looking out for me, aren’t you?” Her musing tone successfully concealed her loathing. “‘Put on your sweater. Get out of the wind. No drink till five. Try to see Dad’s good side. Be patient with your mother. . . .’” He glanced at her warily, but she really meant this.

“Those sound like club rules. I hope I’m not oppressing you.”

“Oh, not at all, it’s like being tucked in. Apart from the indication that I need help in performing these obvious things.” As a kind of internal joke, she was pretending to address all of her remarks to a cigar-store Indian.

“Nat—”

“But my worst trait—let’s go right to my
worst
trait—is the mistaken belief that I can influence events way more than I really can.” She could actually picture the Indian now, ruddy hand clutched around wooden cigars.

Stuart lifted a floorboard and looked down at the heads of the keel bolts. “Is this about Paul?” If the bolts pulled through neglected, rotten wood, the keel would plummet to the bottom and the force of the sail would capsize the boat, with the possibility of Natalie trailing bubbles from her lungs all the way to the bottom.

“Of course it is. I can see right away that Evelyn’s going to forgive him, and it’s just no good.”

“But you’re not Evelyn.”

“I don’t need to be. I’m the only one in this family who is consistently on to Paul. Not even you see him as he is.” This, given the liberties she still permitted Paul, gave her a special tingle.

“It’s not that, Nat. It’s just that we spend so much time thinking about him. I’m not fooled by Paul; I’m indifferent to him. You have to accept things about people you don’t like or there’d be no one to talk to.” Stuart had a bit of trouble understanding why he was delivering such a mendacious gloss on his actual dislike of Paul Crusoe. He’d have to go into that at a later date. Perhaps it was simply his instinct to hold large issues at bay while he enjoyed his small pleasures, like sailing and refinishing furniture. Besides, Natalie tired him with the acuteness of her observations. He once told her that she should be like a good skier and, instead of fighting every turn of the hill, give some time to gliding. But Natalie was not a skier and despised all figures of speech based on sport. “Have you ever actually seen a cigar-store Indian?” she inquired. He had no idea how to field this non sequitur.

It was as though this hearty, uncomplicated man (attributes Natalie associated with victims) was drawn only to her big dark eyes, her pretty, worried face, her slight figure devoid of muscle tone.

Stuart didn’t concern himself too much with the testiness of Natalie’s relations with Paul. It was his observation that often women who experienced fits of inexplicable resentment toward other men had actually been to bed with them. Paul was so extraordinarily swift to seduce or corrupt women that the whole process was rendered negligible. A friend of Stuart’s had seen Paul entering the Super 8 Motel with his cold-sober probation officer, if that could be believed, the very night of Whitelaw’s funeral. Furthermore, Evelyn had told Natalie that Paul had asked
her
to meet him there and she had declined. The very notion made both sisters indignant, for different reasons, but Stuart was astounded that his brother-in-law would go to such lengths to economize on a room deposit. In this, Stuart was obtuse.

The sun in the cockpit was so comfortable that what they intended to be a moment of sunbathing turned into a serious nap. The aspens in the draw that led to the lake, old stream courses that once fed a live river, were turning a yellow patchwork among the cedars and red bursts among the serviceberries, plum thickets and chokecherries. Natalie was first to awaken and was startled by the grass shore so close to them. Winter is coming, she thought. She touched Stuart to rouse him.

“We must’ve needed that,” he said as he looked first at the beach, then up the column of the mast to the windex pointing into the light breeze coming down the hills.

“What’s going to become of the bottling plant?”

“Oh, good God.” Stuart held the cap of her knee delicately between thumb and forefinger. “Let’s walk on the beach,” he said. Natalie took this suggestion in as though it contained a hidden catch.

“Will we need sunblock?”

He took out the plastic tube and gently applied sunblock to Natalie’s upturned face, then put some on his own. Natalie raised her eyes to an airliner high above them. She seemed suspicious of that too. “Where’s
that
thing going?”

Stuart said, “Are you hungry?”

“What’s in there?”

“Sandwiches and stuff.”

“What kind of sandwiches?”

“Are you okay?”

“I’m a little sad. But I’m fine.”

They took a walk. From the uplands, they could look back down at their boat rocking gently in the clear water, shelving steep over cold stones, the sun standing around the sleek shapes of the outlined deck. The next range of hills took them out of sight of the water, but the bowl of wild lupine, asters and phlox still surviving the late season seemed like a lake. They could sit on tussocks of bluestem and watch the wild deer grazing beyond the curve of sky. To the west were the Elkhorn Mountains, whose foothills sheltered ancient hunting parties returning from a broad valley that was now a lake. Natalie said, “He stole the best years of my sister’s life. There are people who just use others up. Life is short, and I can’t just stand by.”

“You’re going to have to,” said Stuart, getting an odd feeling in the pit of his stomach. There was something entirely too avid about Natalie’s concern.

She caught the shortness of his reply and fell silent, looking gloomily out upon the natural world. What use was it?

Stuart began to unpack their lunch. As he looked at the meal he had made, he felt hurt. He didn’t really know why. Natalie gave him a hug, then sat back and gazed at him.

“Well,” he said, “I hope you have an appetite.”

“What’s the matter?”

“I don’t know.”

“Tell me.”

He didn’t want it pulled out of him, but he couldn’t help himself. “Maybe . . . maybe it’s that we spend our whole time analyzing everyone else’s lives. It doesn’t leave much room for our own.” Natalie was not at all affected by this remark. It may have been that this wasn’t really what was bothering Stuart, but it kept them quiet. So they ate their lunches and watched the clouds build up toward Helena. Summer was gone.

They made love on an arrangement of their clothes. It was meant to happen in a slow, afternoonish way, but an unforeseen urgency arose from somewhere and they spent themselves abruptly. He wondered who on earth he was thinking of. But it had a good effect in restoring Natalie’s spirits. She said, “There’s no real reason for us to get dressed. We can keep walking without our clothes. It’s warm.”

“It’s a public place.”

“So, where’s the public?”

“They’re here in spirit.”

“I’m not bothered by the spirit of the public seeing my naked buns. It’s only the public in person that’s a problem.”

“Natalie, just get dressed.”

“I’m clogged.”

“Aw gee, Nat—”

“Stuart, Stuart.”

“Stuart who loves you.”

“Yes, I believe that. I always have, and shouldn’t that be enough? Shouldn’t it be plenty?”

“It should be all we ever need, Nat. But we just think too damn much.”

“You mean
I
think too damn much, and I disagree. You heap simple feller, Stuart.” The cigar-store Indian had reappeared; she would have to get a grip on herself.

Stuart knew that this was headed straight to some version of the one-thing-led-to-another speech, in which from the moment they fell in love, they’d followed their weaknesses until they lived under the oligarchy of the bottling plant; and in which they’d failed to find the strength to resist the temptations thrown their way by Whitelaw.

Natalie sprawled on her back. “What were we doing with all our energy, smart Stuart, when we should have been planning our lives?”

Stuart didn’t answer, because now in their weariness they could have the time-filled lovemaking they’d desired. He embraced Natalie again and with some difficulty she managed to bestir herself. “I’m enjoying you,” she said once he’d begun. “I’m enjoying you now.” When they were finished, they lay back on the deep grass, and Natalie found herself really watching the clouds, seeing their passage and imagining their destinies. It was with a rare lightness of spirit that she resolved to stop seeing Paul at least until she could dump Stuart. It would be like the release of the white doves at the opening of the Olympics.

When Evelyn wondered how she had befouled herself with so unsuitable a marriage, she imagined it was her abrupt immersion in a carnal world. The widely experienced Paul hardly thought of anything else. She might have been moved as well by her father’s enthusiasm for Paul welded in business talk, duck blinds and the national rodeo finals, an annual trip that left the two under the weather for a week after their return. Evelyn and her mother never inquired even when one of these trips resulted in an amateurish attempt at blackmail by a phone voice named “Nancy.” She also reminded herself that Paul was not always as he was now; he’d had surgery on one of these Las Vegas trips and had come back changed. Still, those were good times to stay out at the ranch, and often her mother went too. Evelyn was only slightly baffled by the friendship that had grown between her mother and Bill. And she was amused at the curiously sharp views her mother had about how Bill should be running things, which she expressed to him with what Evelyn considered unseemly familiarity.

Evelyn’s freedom from Paul was expensive, as she reminded herself regularly. Natalie and Stuart said less and less, despite being financially chained to Paul and a business that was already declining in value. According to Melvin Blaylock, the lawyer who’d attended the funeral, the day would come when the bottling plant was worth
nothing
. “You really should sell it yesterday,” he said, his tiny features remarkably without animation under the warlike crown of his peculiar hair.

“But that requires that Paul and I reconcile,” Evelyn told him. “And we dislike each other.”

At this, Melvin Blaylock raised a finger. “It’s your money,” he said.

“I don’t think so,” she beamed.

Actually, Natalie did remark, once, “God, we
would
have a lot of money.”

Evelyn cringed at the force of the remark, and it rarely came up again.

Evelyn drove past the grain elevator and pulled in by the old wool dock to the feed store. She bought some sacked oats, a hundred pounds of birdseed and a half ton of cattle minerals, and headed toward home, the truck lower on its springs, listening once again to Townes Van Zandt on her CD player, thinking as she heard about the
federales
once again how much she would have liked to figure in some terrific myth like “Pancho and Lefty.” She didn’t even know what had become of her dream to move off into an unbounded grassland—a veldt!—where human life would arise and expire in the general great sweep of things like a spark that glows then dies. Maybe holding the ranch together with Bill Champion could be enough.