The Work of Wolves (17 page)

Then confusion and emptiness returned. "Reb?" he asked.

She stood looking into the room past his shoulder, mute.

"Those were just hawks," he said. "They're gone. Just hawks."

But she shook her head and turned away from the door, and he saw her as he remembered her the first day, walking away from him, her back erect, her hair moving up and down on her shoulders, shining in the sun, her boot heels hard on the gravel. But then he'd understood the anger and hurt on her face before she turned away. In his own clarity he understood her, though she was a stranger. Now, intimacy had only confused him. He'd been about to fall into that room with her, though it might be a spinning drum that would turn them both upside down and bruise them. He didn't know why they hadn't.

He called her name again, but she didn't waver. She walked to the horses, bent down, and picked her hat from the ground. He saw her hands move on it, brushing dust from inside and out. Then she placed it on her head. He saw dust she'd missed powder the back of her hair. She walked to Jesse and untied the reins and put her foot in the stirrup, and he watched her do what he'd taught her to do and swing into the saddle, a rider, and settle herself and look at him. Across the distance they looked at each other.

Then Carson looked back into the room. Before, his eyes trained for living things, he'd seen only the hawks, and they had reversed the movement of the world, so that the room had been a blur whirling downward, sucking itself away from the birds. Now he saw the stable and still world within the walls: an oak table covered in dust, with dusty magazines sitting on it, a piano along the wall, two chairs cocked at angles along the table, with cups along the table's edge, as if a conversation had been interrupted and the people having it had gone outside to investigate a noise and had never returned, and the coffee had dried to those faint brown stains in the bottoms of the cups, grayed with years of dust and with the mundane activities of wild things: mouse droppings scattered over the table top and in the cups and saucers, the tangled, twiggy confusion of the hawks' nest in a corner of the floor, a pile of coyote scat dried to a brown-white powder, tracks of comings and goings so numerous that all was obscured and lost, and nothing could be traced.

It was as if Helen Johannssen had simply walked away from her entire life and taken nothing of it with her, so that her life and her husband's life, so recently alive in the stories Carson had been telling, had crystallized and solidified into this brittle tableau. Dead. Gone. Desiccated. The rich and living play of relationship turned to powder dry as droppings. Bone-white.

Broke. Broke. Broke. All things broke. All used, and broken in their using and left now to his stupefied gazing, who could not comprehend how they had broken or how he and Reb, so fused for that moment, so much of one mind, had broken, too, so that now she sat Jesse while he gazed into this fargone room with its stilled imprint of fargone lives.
What are the chances
? Elmer Johannssen's voice in his grandfather's voice in Carson's voice, imitation upon imitation, seemed to say.
What are the chances?

Carson was tempted to walk across the mouse droppings scattered on the floor and touch a key on the piano, but he had the feeling that if he played a note it would be a music to shatter things. The more he looked, the more the whole house seemed made of nothing but dust, as if the dust had covered things and then the structures beneath the dust that had given the dust shape had decayed and turned to dust themselves, but the dust maintained their shapes, and everything now trembled on the border of illusion. A place suspended. If he touched a note on the piano, it would be a music suspended, too, a note that continued a song that, like the conversation over the dried-up coffee, had not ended—a song that someone else had been playing, a finger lifted that had never come down upon the key over which it hovered, so that the song was here yet, like the place itself neither real nor gone. And if Carson played that note it would be more than the place could bear—a music brought out of the past that would reveal to the house its own suspension, its own illusion. Carson imagined himself touching the piano and thought that even before the vibration from the wire reached his ear, the place would be gone, and he would find himself in the open prairie with his hand stretched before him.

He stepped back, pulled shut the door. He walked out of the shadow of the house and felt the sun strike his neck, walked to Surety, mounted.

"What the hell was that all about?" he asked. He wouldn't look at Rebecca, though they were sitting the horses side by side.

"I don't know," she said.

"You don' know? What do you mean, you don' know?"

"People lived there."

"I guess we knew that when we came here."

"Not that way."

"What's that mean? What way?"

"The table. The plates. I felt like they were going to walk in. Like we owed them something. Their privacy. Or ours. I don't know, Carson. I'm sorry. I just couldn't. And those hawks. Did you see their eyes?"

He did turn and look at her now. "That's what hawks' eyes look like, Reb."

He laid the reins along Surety's neck and ticked his tongue so quietly only the horse could hear, and he turned it away from Rebecca and started back toward the hills, the empty ranch, the horse trailer parked far away on the section line road. But Surety hadn't gone more than five steps when Rebecca spoke again, without raising her voice.

"If you don't know what I mean, lie to me, Carson. Make it all different. Make it everything I want to believe. Make me believe you believe it."

He had not, at sixteen, been able to see his grandfather alive when he was dead. Even then he would not tell himself otherwise, would not wait for a professional to pronounce the truth before he would believe it. And he hadn't known how to tell his mother anything but the fact of it, and the only concession he had thought to make to her was to remove the box of Christmas ornaments from her hands so she wouldn't suffer the confusion of dropping them. He could think of no concession to make to Rebecca at all, and no way to start a lie. He rode. He looked once to the sky, but the hawks had gone so high into the blue they'd disappeared, or they'd already circled back to occupy what was theirs.

Then he remembered the piano, the story his grandfather had told about it. It was the only new thing, Ves said, that Elmer Johannssen had ever owned, and then only because his wife had gone to Plummer's Music in Rapid City one weekend and picked it out and brought it home in the back of a pickup. Elmer had a fit, Ves said, but she wouldn't let him return it. Ves had helped unload it. In the presence of this new thing, Elmer had been unable to find a single word.

"You play?" Ves asked Helen.

She shook her head, gazing at the piano.

"Elmer play?"

She shook her head again.

They were past having children. "Why'd you get it, then?"

She sighed. "Oh," she said, "doesn't it look good there? And just think: Neither of us play, so it'll always work."

If Carson had remembered this story, he would have told it to Rebecca before they arrived at the house. Would she have laughed at it or been saddened? He'd never know. He had no desire to tell it now.

He walked Surety, hearing Jesse's hooves behind him. He didn't turn, and Rebecca didn't catch up to him. In this way they rode up and down hills across the section to the trailer. Carson wanted to explain to Rebecca how he felt and what he needed, or have her explain to him in a way that would make them both understand, but he didn't see how it was possible, and he felt too weak to even think. He wanted to start over somewhere, find the point where all could be made well and begin again, but he didn't know what point that would be or how to get back to it. And he didn't know if he could live with things the way they were: this steady, maintained distance, this silence, and all else dust and trembling.

SUNDAY CARSON SAT IN THE OLD HOUSE
. He felt as if he'd vacated his life during that ride: talked it out and lived it out, and now there was nothing left. He wondered how it could be that only a few weeks ago, or days, things had felt sufficient to him, either in the present or in his hopes for the future. He looked at the bare walls around him and at the few pieces of furniture his grandfather had kept, and he thought how little it was. Everything seemed so little, and he couldn't stop remembering her lips, her body pressed against his, his hand in her hair, the small weight of her earring for a moment in his palm.

He thought of the hawk's eye. He'd felt pushed out of the room by that eye. Felt himself invasive. Felt, in the purity of that amber stare, that the hawks hadn't merely appropriated a human dwelling. They had changed it. Made it so much their own it had disappeared. In their flight through it, they had turned it to something only sinking away, a vain thing going or already gone, while those fierce eyes accused Carson—that he had brought his needs and wants to a place they were unwanted and surely unneeded. Rebecca had felt she was invading some human privacy. Carson had felt something different: He'd seen the hawks and felt himself not of them and what he carried in his heart not of them either.

Though it was, he thought. Fierce and wild. It was.

"Never shoulda happened," he told himself. But it didn't help. A bitterness he didn't understand worked within him: that she laughed as she laughed and had eyes so green; that she could startle him with the suddenness and ferocity of her grip on a bottle he was absently twirling; that she had walked with him to that doorway—and then stopped. And he was bitter against himself, too, that he'd made her laugh and imagined her before a mirror, matching stones to her eyes. But twined into these things was another and troubling bitterness, against his grandfather.

"There's nothin here," he said aloud to himself, staring at the barren walls.

After Carson's grandmother, Lucy, died, Ves had moved all the furniture out of the old house. Piece by piece, two or three pieces a day, he carried tables and chairs and settees, extra mattresses and bed frames, lamps, cushions, nightstands, out of the house and put them in the back of the Quonset shed, covering them with a blue polyethylene tarp. Charles said nothing for several days, then finally asked his father what he was doing.

"Just takes up room in the house," Ves said. "I don't need a be stumblin over a goddamn flowered chair every time I turn around."

"I suppose it takes up room in the Quonset, too," Charles observed, gazing over the irregular expanse of tarp, with the outlines of ladder-back chairs and the flat surfaces of tables discernible underneath it.

Ves had reduced himself to a small pine table, an old leather recliner, a twin bed, and three kitchen chairs. One evening Marie and Charles were sitting at supper, talking about it.

"He's getting strange," Charles said. "When Ma was alive, she kept him half-sane. What am I supposed to do with the machinery with all that stuff in the Quonset?"

"I looked at that house today," Marie said. "It feels like the barren end of memory."

The phrase surprised them all, including Marie. She and Charles and Carson all looked at each other, as if they'd heard a foreign sound, like bagpipe music on the road, or the call of swans, and they were wondering if the others had heard it, too.

"The barren end a memory?" Charles asked.

Marie shrugged. "I guess that's what it feels like to me. It's not space he's trying to gain, it's memory he's trying to lose."

"Memory a what?"

"Her. Lucy."

"Doesn't make sense. They got along."

"Got along? He's realizing he's still in love with her."

"So why'd he want a get rid've her memory?"

Marie shook her head. She wondered how her husband could sometimes be so obtuse. Or was it simply that he couldn't ever understand his father?

That had been when Carson was ten. Lucy had died of melanoma. She had come home one day from visiting the doctor in Pierre and pronounced that word with its watery syllables. For several days Carson went around pronouncing it to himself, and when he finally understood that it named the thing that kept his grandmother in bed and weakened her, he couldn't fit the loveliness of the word to what it signified, and he felt betrayed, angry at having said the word so often, angry that it was so tempting to say, and he feared his saying it had given it power.

Now he sat in the old house made barren by his grandfather's hands, and he recalled his mother's phrase and thought that he, too, had arrived there. "The barren end a memory," he murmured. It was another phrase unmatched in sound and ease of speaking with what it meant.

He looked around the room. So little. So spare. What would he do if he had the chance to show Rebecca this place? As if there were something to show. Walls and old furniture.

"You coulda left me more than this," he murmured.

But the moment he said it, he knew: He was bitter not because his grandfather had left him so little, but because he'd thought it was enough.

And it had been. His grandfather had given him more than this house. He'd given him a way to see the world. And yesterday, on that ride, Carson had seen that world with Rebecca. She had taken it gladly and rightly, and it had been a sure, good thing. But now it seemed that in taking it she'd left him nothing.

Carson remembered sitting at the truck stop in Twisted Tree a couple of years before when a sad-looking woman, a stranger, had passed his booth and he had nodded to her. That one friendly thing, and before he knew it she was sitting in his booth, telling him first that she was going to the powwow on the reservation—and from there he heard about her husband's affairs, and her affairs, and their divorce and her loneliness and troubles: all the sad, self-pitying, private things that she could unburden precisely because telling stories to a stranger implied no promise or relationship.

But if you told private stories to someone not a stranger, they became a journey taken together, steps cut into a hillside. He'd let himself believe that journey had a destination, though he'd never recognized that believing. Now, nothing had come of it. After all these years, he had finally spoken of his grandfather, and the speaking had turned out to have no power. Rebecca was as far away from him as that woman who had trapped him in the truck stop booth. Maybe further.