The Complete Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, Love; Committed; The Last American Man; Stern Men & Pilgrims (150 page)

She kicked him, not a nudging kick this time, but a serious one, and he took off from the kick and in two more kicks was running wide open. We were too drunk for it, and it was too dark for it, and there were too many things in that meadow for a horse to trip over, but we were running wide open. His bell and hooves were loud, and they were a surprise to the other horses, who scattered behind us. I heard a few of them follow us, belled and fast.

Martha Knox had reins, but she wasn’t using them, and my hat was gone, and so was hers, blown off. Handy might have
stumbled or he might have kicked funny the way horses who love to run sometimes kick, or we might have been settled wrong, but we fell. With my arms still around her, we went over together, so who could say who fell first, or whose fault? That meadow was the best place for horses on long trips, but by this hunt it was spent. The next spring it would be different, with new grass wet from runoff, but that night it was packed dirt and frozen, and we hit it hard. We took the same fall, both of us. We took the fall in our hips and our shoulders. I knew I wasn’t hurt and guessed she wasn’t, but before I could ask, she was laughing.

“Oh, man,” she said. “Goddamn.”

I pulled my arm out from under her and rolled off my hip onto my back, and she rolled onto her back, too. We were far from any lantern, but the moon was big and lit. I turned my head to see Martha Knox’s face by my face. Her hat was gone, and she was rubbing her arm, but she wasn’t looking anywhere but right up at the sky, the kind of sky we don’t see too much of, because of trees or bad weather, or because we sleep or stare at fires instead.

Handy came back—first his bell, then his huge face over our faces, hot and close. He smelled at us like we were plants or maybe something he would want.

“You’re a good horse, Handy,” Martha Knox said, not with the voice we always use for horses, but with her normal voice, and she meant it. I didn’t think she wanted me to kiss her, although it was true that I wanted to kiss her then. She looked great. On that frozen dead ground, she looked as good and important as new grass or berries.

“You’re a good horse,” she told Handy again, and she sounded very sure of that. He smelled her again, carefully.

I looked up, too, at the sky, and the stars were no stars I hadn’t seen before, but they seemed closer and unfamiliar. I watched
long enough to see one of them drop above us, long and low. That’s common to see in a good sky out here. This one star, though, left a slow thin arc, like a cigarette still burning flung over our heads. If Martha Knox saw this, it was only as she was reaching up already with one hand for her horse’s reins, and it wasn’t something she mentioned.

B
ENNY
had been living with Ed and Jean for over a year. His mother was Jean’s sister, and she was still in a hospital bed in Cheyenne, comatose, because she had driven her car into a snowplow on her way home from an art class one night. Jean had offered to take in her eight-year-old nephew as soon as she’d been told about the accident, and the whole family had agreed that such an arrangement would be best for Benny. When people asked Jean where Benny’s father was, she said simply, “He’s not available at this time,” as if he were a businessman unable to come to the telephone.

Ed and Jean had a daughter of their own, married and living in Ohio, and when they moved from town into the mountain cabin, they were not expecting to share it someday with a child. Yet Benny was there now, and every morning Jean drove five miles down the dirt road so that he could meet his school bus. Every afternoon she met him at the same place. It was more difficult in the winter, on account of the heavy, inevitable snow, but they’d managed.

Ed worked for the Fish and Game Department, and had a large green truck with the state emblem on its doors. He was semiretired, and in recent months had developed something
of a belly, round and firm as a pregnant teenager’s. When he was home, he cut and stacked firewood or worked on the cabin. They were always insulating it more, always discovering and fixing flaws to make themselves more resistant to winter. Jean canned and froze vegetables from her garden in July and August, and when she went for walks she picked up small dry sticks along the path to bring home and save for kindling. The cabin was only a small place, with a short back porch facing the woods. Jean had converted the living room into a bedroom for Benny, and he slept on the couch under a down quilt.

It was the end of October, and Ed was gone for the weekend, giving a speech about poaching at some convention in Jackson. Jean was driving to pick up Benny at the bus stop when a station wagon approached her, speeding, pulling behind it a large camper. She swerved quickly, barely avoiding an accident, wincing as the side of her car scraped the underbrush to her right. Safely past, she glanced in the rearview mirror and tried to make out the receding tail end of the camper through the thick dust just lifted.

She couldn’t remember the last time she’d met a car on that road. Ed and Jean had the only house for miles, and traffic consisted of the occasional truckload of hunters, or perhaps a teenage couple looking for a secluded parking spot. There was no reason for a station wagon with a camper to come out here. She imagined that it was a vacationing family, lost on their way to Yellowstone, miserable children in the back and a father driving, refusing to stop for directions. At such a speed, he would kill them all.

Benny’s bus was early that day, and when Jean reached the highway, he was waiting for her, holding his lunch box close to his chest, standing scarcely taller than the mailbox beside him.

“I changed my mind,” he said when he got into the car. “I want to be a karate man.”

“But we already have your costume ready, Benny.”

“It’s not a real costume. It’s just my Little League uniform, that’s all.”

“Ben. You wanted to wear it. That’s what you told me you wanted to be for Halloween.”

“I want to be a karate man,” he repeated. He didn’t whine, but spoke slowly and loudly, the way he always did, as if everyone in his life was hard of hearing or a beginning student of the English language.

“Well, I’m sorry. You can’t be one,” Jean said. “It’s too late to make a new costume now.”

Benny looked out the window and crossed his arms. After a few minutes, he said, “I sure wish I could be a karate man.”

“Help me out, Ben? Don’t make things so hard, okay?”

He didn’t answer, but sighed resignedly, like somebody’s mother. Jean drove in silence, more slowly than usual, keeping the speeding station wagon in mind at each curve. About halfway home, she asked, “Did you have art class today, Benny?”

He shook his head.

“No? Did you have gym class, then?”

“No,” Benny said. “We had music.”

“Music? Did you learn any new songs?”

He shrugged.

“Why don’t you sing me what you learned today?”

Benny said nothing, and Jean repeated, “Why don’t you sing me what you learned today? I’d like to hear your new songs.”

After another silence, Benny pulled a blue-gray wad of chewing gum from his mouth and stuck it on the handle of his lunch box. Then, gazing solidly at the windshield, he recited in a low monotone, “There was a farmer had a dog and Bingo was
his name oh.
B
-
I
-
N
-
G
-
O
,” he spelled, carefully enunciating each letter. “
B
-
I
-
N
-
G
-
O
.
B
-
I
-
N
-
G
-
O
. And Bingo,” Benny said, “was his name. Oh.”

He peeled the gum off his lunch box and returned it to its place in his mouth.

That night after dinner, Jean helped Benny into his Little League uniform and cut strips of reflecting tape to lay over the numbers on the back of his jersey.

“Do you have to do that?” he asked.

“I want cars to see you as well as you see them,” she said.

He accepted this without further protest. Having won an earlier dispute about the wearing of a hat and gloves, he let her have this one. Jean found the old Polaroid camera in her desk drawer and brought it into the living room.

“We’ll take a picture to show Uncle Ed when he gets home,” she said. “You look so nice. He’ll want to see.”

She found him in the tiny square of the viewfinder, and backed up until he was completely framed.

“Smile,” she said. “Here we go.”

He did not blink, not even during the flash, but stood in place and smiled at the last moment, as a favor to her. They both watched as the camera slowly pushed out the cloudy, damp photograph.

“Hold this by the edges carefully,” Jean instructed, handing it to Benny, “and see what turns up.”

There was a knock at the door. Jean stood up quickly, startled. She glanced at Benny, who was holding the developing picture between his thumb and forefinger, looking at her in anxious surprise.

“Stay there,” she told him, and walked to the window at the back of the cabin. It was dark already, and she had to press her face close against the cold glass to see the vague figures on the
porch. There was another knock, and a high voice, muffled through the thick oak, called, “Trick or treat!”

Jean opened the door and saw two adults and a small child, all in brown snowsuits, all with long branches masking-taped to their stocking caps. The woman stepped forward and extended her hand. “We’re the Donaldsons,” she said. “We’re your neighbors.”

“We’re elks,” the child added, touching the two branches on her hat. “These are our horns.”

“They’re antlers, sweetie,” her mother corrected. “Bison and goats have horns. Elk have antlers.”

Jean looked from the girl to her mother to the man beside them, who was calmly taking off his gloves.

“You’re losing heat with the door open,” he said, in a voice that was not deep so much as low and even. “You should probably let us in.”

“Oh,” Jean said, and she stepped aside so that they could pass. Then she shut the door behind her and leaned her back flat against it, touching it with her palms.

“Well, what’s this?” the woman asked, kneeling next to Benny and picking up the photograph he’d dropped. “Is this a picture of you?”

“I’m sorry,” Jean interrupted. “I’m terribly sorry, but I don’t know who you are.” The family in her cabin turned as one and looked at her.

“We’re the Donaldsons,” the woman said, frowning slightly, as if Jean’s statement confused her. “We’re your neighbors.”

“We haven’t got any neighbors,” Jean said. “Not all the way out here.”

“We just moved here today.” The man spoke again in the odd low voice. The little girl was standing beside him, holding on to his leg, and he rested his hand on the top of her head, between her antlers.

“Moved where?” Jean asked.

“We bought an acre of land a half-mile from here.” His tone suggested that he found her rude for pursuing the issue. “We’re staying in our camper.”

“Your camper?” Jean repeated. “I saw you today, didn’t I? On the road?”

“Yes,” the man said.

“You were driving awfully fast, don’t you think?”

“Yes,” he said.

“We were in a hurry to get here before dark,” his wife added.

“You really have to be careful on these roads,” Jean said. “It was very dangerous of you to drive that way.”

There was no response; the three of them looked at Jean with politely empty faces, as if waiting for her to say something else, something perhaps more appropriate.

“I wasn’t aware that there was land for sale at the end of our road,” Jean said, and she was met with the same uniform expressions. Even Benny was watching her with a look of mild curiosity.

“We were not expecting to have neighbors,” Jean continued. “Not all the way out here.” Again, silence. There was nothing overtly unfriendly in their collective gaze, but it felt foreign to her, and she found it unsettling.

The little girl, who could not have been four years old, turned to Benny and asked, “What are you, anyway?”

He looked up quickly at Jean for an answer, and then back at the girl. Her mother smiled. “I think she wants to know what your costume is, dear.”

“I’m a baseball player,” Benny said.

“We’re elks,” the girl told him. “These are our antlers.” She pronounced it
antlows
.

The woman turned her smile on Jean. Her teeth were wide and even, set close to her gums, like the teeth of those old
Eskimo women who spend their lives chewing on leather. “My name is Audrey,” she said. “This is my husband, Lance, but he’d prefer it if you called him L.D. He doesn’t like his real name. He thinks it sounds like a medical procedure. This is our daughter, Sophia. We threw these costumes together at the last minute, but she’s very excited about them. She insisted that we trick-or-treat when she saw your cabin this afternoon.”

“We were just on our way out,” Jean said. “I’m taking Benny to his school’s Halloween party.”

“Isn’t that fun?” Audrey beamed. “Are the little ones allowed to go?”