They all smiled at this simple truth, but when the silence fell, Rose found herself staring at the place at the table Phil was to have occupied, just occupy, and she looked away, and her eyes met George’s, and his were miserable. He coughed, and rose. ‘I’ll just take a quick look-see out back for my brother.’
‘Why, of course,’ the lady murmured, and sipped her drink, eyes pleasant over the rim of her glass. The Governor half rose, and subsided. ‘The funniest thing happened recently,’ his lady began. She told a story of how a pack rat had got into the Governor’s mansion, took spoons marked with the official crest from the State Dining Room and carried them up to the bedroom closet where it had built a nest to hide treasure. ‘I went in there one night,’ she recalled, ‘and there was this rat up on its hind legs, defying me, showing its teeth!’ She rose, and showed how the rat had looked, ‘Well, let me tell you, I didn’t laugh — then! I called my husband, here, and he came running in his pajamas! I think the rat would have attacked him — no respecter of persons — but our son had stored his skis there, and my husband took the skis and defended himself beautifully, and eventually killed the thing. Don’t you call them varmints in this country? I have been eternally grateful for winter sports …!’ Rose felt the story was worth more than a smile, that more than a smile was expected, but she could bring no warmth to her laugh; she listened for the sound that would mean George had lifted the steel latch of the bunkhouse door, had entered, had inquired, and left, lifting the latch again. George had had time, now, to do all that, had time enough to walk to the barn, into the long, dark barn where Phil sometimes sat thinking and doing things with his hands. And time now to walk back, and Rose raised her chin, listening for the opening of the back door. It opened, and as always a cold draft fled before George’s footsteps.
George cleared his throat. ‘I’m afraid there’s something my brother had to do. Rose — maybe you’d tell Mrs Lewis we can eat in a few minutes.’
‘Oh, that’s a shame!’ the Governor’s lady said. ‘I don’t mean the eating. I mean your brother. Nothing could have happened to him could it? I’ve heard so much about him. Isn’t he said to be brilliant?’
‘Oh, now,’ George said, ‘I expect there was just something he had to do.’
With what dignity remained to her, Rose walked through the dining room to the kitchen.
At the table, the Governor’s lady began again. ‘I was just telling your wife, when you were out back, Mr Burbank, about the oddest thing that happened. This rat …’
‘Yes, they’ll do that,’ George said seriously. ‘My mother lost several rings and a thimble. No respecter of persons, and I don’t suppose there’s any small animal that’s got such defiance.’
Now Lola brought in the coffee in the silver pot, and set it with the cups before Rose. Dear God, prayed Rose, don’t let my hands shake.
‘It’s a shame for your brother to have missed this good meal,’ the Governor said.
‘Well, on a ranch, you never know,’ George said. ‘Things are always coming up.’
‘Yes, I suppose that’s true. Not like other businesses, other professions.’
‘No,’ the Governor said, ‘on a ranch there couldn’t be any working hours, regular ones. And I dread the day when the ranch hands get mixed up with unions.’
‘Do you think it’s coming to that?’ the lady asked.
‘Well, you can’t tell,’ said the Governor. ‘These wobblies sit right up and defy you, like that rat.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Rose said. ‘You said you didn’t want sugar.’
‘Now, now, now, now, that’s perfectly all right. I like good coffee like this any old way.’
Her hands did not shake much until they had taken their second cup of coffee to the living room. Lola had not been told to remove Phil’s place, and from where Rose sat she could see it. Suppose something had happened to him? Suppose his scorn of her had driven him off to his death? Like air into a vacuum, tales crowded into her head, a horse stumbling into a badger hole, the rider’s neck broken, a rock slide covering a man with tons of crushing smothering shale; maybe Phil had crossed a creek and the ice, rotten with April, had given way, and he’d been sucked under the swift, silent water — all deaths common enough in that country, and the subject of more than one song sung by the men in the bunkhouse. Because of the ticking of cup against saucer, she set both aside and folded her hands, twisted her ring.
The Governor’s lady glanced quickly around the room, hoping to find some object that might spark speech, and fixed at last on the portrait over the mantel, the full bosom, the eyes, the pearls. ‘That’s your mother, Mr Burbank?’
‘Painted some years ago,’ George admitted.
‘I’d say she has the face of a woman of many accomplishments,’ said the lady, thinking privately that a woman with such pearls need not be much concerned with accomplishments.
‘She reads a lot,’ George said, ‘and she writes a lot of letters.’
‘Letter writing is a great art,’ the Governor said.
‘Or it can be,’ said his lady, modifying the remark.
‘There’s a book called the World’s Greatest Letters,’ the Governor revealed. ‘Very instructive.’
His lady laughed. ‘You’ve used it more than once,’ she said roguishly, ‘in your speeches.’
‘State secrets!’ he laughed, and waved a hand at her.
George was about to remark that single-handed, his mother had raised the entire sum for the hospital in Herndon, but thought better of it just as the lady spoke again.
‘Did she also play the piano?’
‘No, no,’ George said. ‘Not a note! I imagine I’ve heard her say a thousand times how she wished she could.’
‘Just you, then, Mrs Burbank?’
‘You can scarcely call it playing,’ Rose said, her lips stiff. ‘Before my first marriage, I played the piano in a pit in a moving picture house.’ She smiled. ‘And I’m terribly out of practice.’
‘Why, Rose,’ George objected. ‘You’ve been playing a lot. You know you have.’
‘I expect you’re much too modest,’ the lady said. ‘Do play something.’
‘Indeed a pleasure,’ urged the Governor, seeing in the piano a reasonable end to an uncomfortable evening, knowing that when the last note sounded they could rise and make their excuses. Often, he had found, it was a last cup of coffee, sometimes the last trick taken at whist, sometimes the insistent ring of a telephone.
Rose glanced at George, but he was smiling with pride, and she rose and walked to the piano that had, perhaps, broken a young man’s back, whose chords had provoked Phil’s vicious mimicry. Placed as the dining table was, bare except for Phil’s setting, she looked directly at it, and felt with temporary madness that Phil had arranged things just so, and was smiling wherever he was. His implacable malice pursued and confused her. Her palms were wet, her throat dry. ‘Very well. I’ll try,’ and she smiled.
Somehow she got through an easy Strauss waltz, not daring to do more than play it mechanically as a child might repeat ABC’s, mindlessly.
The three behind her clapped, and waited.
George spoke. ‘Play that one I like, won’t you, Rose?’
‘What one is that?’ she asked, to gain time, time to think, time to will away the strange creeping numbness that now started in her shoulders and crept into her hands and fingers.
‘Why, the gypsy one. The one about the gypsy.’
‘Oh, yes. “Just Like a Gypsy.”’ She blushed, knowing he knew she knew what he meant. It was a simple enough piece, but sentimental, and after each phrase she had always made a little coda, a little cascade of notes that lifted the piece somewhat above the notes written on the sheet. It was a thoughtful little tune and sent one’s spirit singing and winging away into an ephemeral land of sweet longing. It was curious that George, George the prosaic, George the tongue-tied, had seen in it perhaps what she had, and it might have been that his affection for the tune had been the b
eginning of her affection for him in those first days, when she played for him at the inn, on the old mechanical piano.
In professional fashion she rubbed her hands a few moments, took a breath, touched the keys, appalled that her fingers had no feeling whatever, no knowledge. She folded her hands in her lap, and looked at them. Behind her the clock whirred, fixing to strike, and she sat waiting for the chime that might somehow release her from this dark spell. But the clock struck, and her mind was as blank as before, her fingers as dead. She turned on the bench, and smiled. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘but I can’t remember it.’
George parted his lips, amazed, but he kept silent. It was the first time she’d seen disappointment in his face, and his first disappointment with her she could not repair.
‘Oh, my,’ the Governor said. ‘Don’t worry about it.’
‘Goodness,’ the Governor’s lady said. ‘Time and again, I forget things.’
‘Speeches,’ the Governor said in a tone that rose almost to a laugh. ‘I’ve forgotten speeches.’
‘Once in boarding school,’ his lady said, ‘I was in a play, and I opened my mouth, and nothing came out, nothing at all.’
‘I’m terribly sorry,’ Rose said. ‘But everything is just gone.’
‘It doesn’t matter at all,’ the Governor said, ‘it really doesn’t.’
‘And we should be going,’ the lady said. ‘I had no idea it was so late. It gets dark so early, you lose track of time. But summer, the long, long summer is close upon us!’
They stood again beside the Governor’s automobile; the sun, gone down behind the mountains, had dragged spring down with it. Webs of ice already spanned the puddle of water beside the car.
‘Lovely, it was just lovely,’ the lady said. ‘We must see you again sometime.’
The men shook hands. George held the door for the Governor’s lady.
‘Please do come again,’ Rose said.
‘Why, we certainly shall,’ the Governor said, with a great grin.
George was staring at one of the new balloon tires. He smiled at the Governor, and kicked the tire. ‘Good luck with your tires,’ he said. ‘And it’s been a fine day.’
‘Thanks, George, thanks,’ said the Governor, and got in. Everybody waved.
‘I’ll be right in,’ Rose told George as he started for the bedroom. She waited a few minutes after the door had closed behind him, gave him time to remove his shirt and shoes — without them she knew he’d never venture back into the living room — and then she swiftly removed Phil’s plate, glass and cutlery, swiftly but silently, taking care not to let china tick as she replaced the plates in the cupboard, careful lest silver ring — not so much to hide from George what she was doing, should he be listening, but because the sound of Phil’s unused utensils would lend them a further dimension. She could not have faced them in the morning.
When she finished, George was already in bed, he had not turned off the light. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry I played so poorly.’
‘Ah,’ he said, ‘that’s all right. I expect anybody might get stage fright, if you’d never met a governor before. Maybe you felt the cocktails a little too much?’
She started to speak. It hadn’t been stage fright at all. Playing before a governor no more exposed oneself to criticism than playing before an audience in the pit of a motion picture palace or for a group of diners. Would he think it queer that she had simply been paralyzed by the eating utensils of someone not present? She thought of the skull Peter kept on his desk in Herndon. She had always hated the thing.
In the bathroom she undressed and lingered drinking a glass of water. Her head was splitting with pain; she could find no aspirin.
He was silent when she got into bed, and in a few minutes he turned away and began to breathe evenly. She began to breathe evenly as if she, too, were asleep. The whole shambles of a day swam in her mind, isolated and sharpened by the darkness. Why had she told the Governor’s lady that her piano-playing days had been at an upright in a pit in a motion picture palace — why, since she had wanted that woman to think George had married someone of worth? Certainly it had something to do with Johnny. What an age-old dilemma it was, that of the twice-married, such a dilemma that theologians, to soothe the conscience, insisted there were no marriages in heaven.
George cleared his throat, and she knew he was not asleep. She reached out and took his hand. One of the dogs out back began to bark, a sudden, hopeless barking; another dog joined in. She heard the latch of the bunkhouse clink, and one of the men shouted ‘Shut up!’ The dogs were abruptly silent, and she imagined them crawling back under the house.
George’s hand grew rigid.
In a moment she heard, too: hoof beats, distant hoof beats measured and deliberate as a dead march over the frozen earth; closer and closer, crescendo as they approached the house, diminuendo as they moved toward the barn, and ceased.
Now the dogs again. Another voice shouted an obscenity.
Phil.
She winced.
George coughed.
So much time to lead a horse into the dark of the barn, so much to loose the latigo and let the cinch swing free, so much to remove the saddle and blanket and hang up the saddle, so much to let the horse out to the hay pen.
They heard Phil let himself in the back door, and close it as firmly as if it had been noon. They heard his quick step. At the opening of the door the wind whipped down the hall and whistled under the farther door.
Phil’s door closed. Then through the locked door of the bathroom came the coughing and snuffling.
Then George rolled out from under the covers and sat on the edge of the bed.
‘What’s wrong …?’
‘I’d better go in and talk to him.’
‘Talk?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe I was too rough on him.’
‘Rough?’
‘Rose, you know — he hasn’t got very much. And he’s my brother.’
‘He is. You must. I know.’
So George dressed and let himself into Phil’s bedroom, and stood there. After a while his eyes picked out the dull gleamings of the brass bed. ‘Phil?’
Phil’s voice was like daytime. ‘Yes?’
‘I thought I’d come in and …’
‘All right. You’re in. What you got to say?’
‘Phil? Hey? I shouldn’t have said what I did.’ He heard the small hiss of a cigarette paper. A match flared, died, dark.
When Phil drew on the cigarette the glow briefly flooded his face. He said, ‘You two can keep your apologies to yourself.’
Now the Governor and his lady approached Herndon where they had reservations at the hotel for the night. For some miles, the Governor was silent, considering the remarkable failure of people to enjoy each other, or even to communicate. He’d found it hard going — but to admit it, even to his lady, was to expose his own belief, that most people gathered only out of boredom, or for gain. To have your table graced by a Governor was no small thing, and he knew it. Was his visit supposed to launch the new Mrs Burbank? But he had his angle, too, wanting to insure the several thousand dollars that had always been the Burbank contribution to the campaign. And now — what did he feel? Defensiveness about Burbank’s wife. ‘Imagine George Burbank marrying such a pretty woman.’
‘Can you light this cigarette for me?’ his lady asked. ‘She’s not all that handsome. There’s such a lot of wind in the car. No, I suppose she is, but she’s frightened, and pretending she was used to cocktails. They affected her, too.’
‘I didn’t notice that.’
‘A woman would have to fall headlong. You didn’t want to notice.’
‘And speaking of noticing, did you notice that flower arrangement on the corner table?’
‘If you can call it that.’
‘Well, what did you think of it?’
‘I thought it was — clever. It cried out for some sort of comment.’
‘Well, you didn’t com
ment.’
‘You were supposed to. No woman wants to have another woman say she’s clever. You might as well say she’s predatory.’
‘I don’t think she meant to be clever at all.’
‘Don’t you now.’
They fell silent. Sometimes to the right or left they saw the lonely lights of ranches. Just as they pulled into Herndon, his lady said exactly what the Governor was afraid she would say. The painful thought he’d been entertaining she voiced.
‘… last very long,’ she was saying. An automobile that suddenly slowed in front gave him a chance to apply the brakes, to occupy himself and thus to pretend he hadn’t heard her. But there was no refuge in that, for he knew she knew he always listened and always heard. ‘What was that you said then?’
‘I said, I think she’s probably failed already.’
‘You’re always quick to see failure, aren’t you.’
‘And then just before we got into the machine, she said the oddest thing. Said, “You’ve been very kind.”’
‘Well, what the devil’s wrong in saying that?’
She turned and smiled at him. ‘Don’t be so edgy. And I’d like another cigarette.’
A dog ran out from the shadows and the Governor came close to hitting it. ‘God damn it,’ he said softly. ‘You smoke too much.’
9
Mild were the days, the sun moving ever north; few calves froze before they could get to their feet and nurse; few were born crooked that year, spines frozen into the letter S or hoofs so turned they walked on the sides of them; that spring few calves were born dead — slim pickings for the magpies who bright-eyed watched each birth with heads cocked to one side. Slim pickings, too, for the gaunt coyotes who prowled the fringe of the willows that blushed with spring.
The snow began retreating above the timberline, bluebells grew out of their velvet foliage among the sagebrush, small birds skimmed the ground searching out nesting places. Now branding began — three thousand calves. Phil had castrated fifteen hundred head, marveling that this knife he held in his hands, the castrating edge worn down from a hundred keenings, had desexed fifteen thousand bull calves. And there had been a knife before that and one before that. As the last calf struggled to its feet and loped, shocked and spraddle-legged with pain, to join the herd, Phil looked across at the sun that sank fast in the west; there was so much bawling in the corral a man couldn’t hear himself think, so much dust a man choked. Who wouldn’t be tired after a week of branding? He wiped the little blood off the blade on his pants leg and then snapped the blade back in. Somehow he nicked his thumb, and a little blood began to flow. He reached around to his pocket for his bandanna.
The Power of the Dog Page 14
