by Jim Harrison
Tristan had not more than a few hours of ease in the Montana June when he reached the ranch. Everyone seemed fine after a hard winter though it was obvious that Ludlow was failing somewhat and Isabel had come by mid-May with that thought in mind. Then at dinner Decker mentioned that two old friends of Tristan’s, Irishmen from California, had stopped by the day before but unfortunately he had told the friends that Tristan was already headed for Saratoga. Tristan felt a deathly cold flow up his spine, also anger knowing that all those he loved had been in grave danger.
By dawn the next morning Decker and One Stab had driven him to the train station in Great Falls. Decker was fearful and wanted to come along but Tristan said no that he must watch the ranch. Before they left late in the evening the Cree and Norwegian had been stationed on the porch and told to shoot strangers on sight. Tristan got on the train in an old suit of Samuel’s (he owned none) and a satchel full of money and underwear, a Beasley pistol owned by his grandfather and One Stab’s skinning knife.
When Tristan reached New York he hastily bought clothes and a car and drove north at top speed to Saratoga Springs. The racing season was in full tilt despite the Depression and he couldn’t find accommodations, so he settled on a tourist cabin near Glens Falls. He shaved his mustache and the next morning he bought some clothes from a groom and changed them under the stands with the roar of the crowd above him. Between the races he carried a pail of water and a currycomb and watched the stately parade of horses on the mowed grass behind the grandstand on show for the next race. He studied the crowd closely and picked out Alfred and his father-in-law, Susannah under parasol, standing with a group of fashionable horse owners, including a sprinkling of Whitneys, Vanderbilts, Guests and Wideners: then he spotted what had to be one of the Irishmen standing near an ornate flower bed, nattily dressed but still somehow obvious. Tristan walked to the paddock near the bam, passing a large florid man talking to a jockey. When he passed he recognized the voice of the third man who had beat him on North Beach. Tristan did not turn but walked into the stables where he was told to keep busy cleaning stalls. Then the man came into the barn and looked around diffidently. He walked into an empty stall to piss. Tristan followed and slammed his head to the wall catching his head with two tines of a heavy manure fork. Tristan buried him under straw and manure in the corner of the stable and went back to the grandstand toilets and changed his clothes. He located the second Irishman and followed him to a tourist home after the man had looked around for his companion until the racing grounds were nearly deserted. Tristan followed the man until late in the evening for want of an opportunity until the man walked home from dinner and drinks on a shady sidestreet near the tourist home. Tristan broke his neck, emptied a garbage barrel and stuffed the man into it, gently replacing the lid.
The next morning after a sound sleep helped along with whiskey, he drove back to Saratoga wearing an expensive suit bought in New York. He hoped to separate Susannah for a little while and somehow assure her of his love enough to keep her alive. His chance came after lunch when she stood alone staring at a bay stallion favored in the first race. He stood beside her until she noticed him but she showed no surprise, saying only that she knew he would come.
They quickly walked away from the racing grounds to a house a few blocks away her father kept for the racing season. Tristan was hesitant but she said that it would be at least an hour or more before she was missed. Unfortunately, Alfred had assigned one of his Senate aides to keep a continuous eye on Susannah because of her mental problems. After the aide watched Susannah enter the house with a strange man he rushed back to the track to notify Alfred.
Susannah led Tristan to the master bedroom to avoid any intrusion by the maids. At first she was cool and demanding, asking that Tristan meet her in Paris by the middle of October. He refused, saying that the time was not yet appropriate. She became hysterical and he offered the following spring as a compromise beyond which she could not go. Then there was a long unbearably painful silence at the end of which he recognized again the signs of her impending madness. He forestalled it by drawing her to him and assuring her that by the following May he would be ready. She shuddered in his arms and as he gazed over her shoulder Alfred walked into the room. Susannah felt Tristan’s hands tighten on her back and heard the door close. She guessed what had happened and her heart lightened thinking that at last it was all over and she could go with Tristan.
They were still as marble figures in a garden hearing their own breathing and the distant noises of the race grounds. Alfred said only to Tristan, “I want to kill you,” and Tristan released himself from Susannah and handed Alfred his pistol. Alfred stared at the pistol then pressed the muzzle to Tristan’s temple. They looked at each other and Susannah came to them as if sleepwalking. Alfred turned the pistol to his own head and Tristan knocked it from his hand. Alfred slumped to the floor weeping and Susannah stooped beside him and with cool and detached words said that it was a terrible misunderstanding, that she would stay with him always. Alfred stood then and he and Tristan exchanged a strange look that went beyond any comprehension they might have been able to voice, but Alfred’s look held not a little hate. Susannah followed Tristan into the hall, kissed him and laughed saying perhaps they would meet one day in hell, or perhaps heaven, wherever people go if they go anywhere.
On the trip home Tristan stayed dulled by his thought and liquor, laughing once in Chicago when he changed trains and saw on the newsstand that the Volstead Act had been repealed, Prohibition ended. Back home he worked hard with the horses, amused his children and hunted with One Stab who owned the false and waning agility of the aged who refuse to accept age.
Near the end of September Tristan received a telegram from Asheville, North Carolina, from Alfred saying, “You have won her. I am sending her home . . .” He rode to Choteau and checked the return address by phone, and found out disturbingly that it was the address of a private asylum. He borrowed a Ford truck and drove over to Great Falls to meet the train, a little puzzled but somehow imagining that he would spend the rest of his troubled life caring for Susannah though he envisioned that she might finally get well at the ranch. He met the train feeling cold in his stomach but disregarding it. A politician friend of Alfred’s approached Tristan, led him to the baggage car, handed him a list of burial instructions as the porter unloaded the highly polished rosewood coffin.
There’s little more to tell. Susannah was buried next to Samuel and Two and the reader, if he or she were a naive believer, might threaten God saying leave him alone or some such frivolity. No one has figured out how accidental is the marriage of the blasphemy and fate. Only a rather old-fashioned theologian might speculate on Tristan damning God so many years before in France when he and Noel encased Samuel’s heart in the paraffin. The contemporary mind views such events properly as utterly wayward, owning all the design of water in the deepest and furthest reaches of the Pacific.
One warm Sunday morning in mid-October a few weeks after the burial Samuel and Three were playing on the porch swing with their ponies saddled and tethered to the railing. Isabel had brought breakfast upstairs to Ludlow who wasn’t feeling well. She was reading to him from Melville’s Pierre, or the Ambiguities. Ludlow loved Melville while Isabel found the author tiresome.
In the kitchen Pet packed lunches for Tristan and the children’s outing. She listened carefully to the talk of Decker and Tristan. They were trying to speculate themselves out of an impossible quandary: the fact that the Irish could very well return out of simple vengeance. Tristan stretched and walked over to Pet and asked her opinion. She said that they all cared most about the children and that the only important thing to her was that they were safe. Three came in and tugged at her father’s arm. Tristan kissed her and said ten more minutes and she ran through the parlor yelling ten minutes to Samuel.
Decker suggested Cuba where Tristan had a small finca he had bought years before and now managed by his two Cuban crew members who had shipped up two go
od mares the previous spring for breeding. Tristan worried aloud about the children’s schooling and Decker said their father’s life was more important than schooling. Pet went rigid, first hearing the car, but Samuel called out that the police were here and she relaxed. Decker followed Tristan out onto the porch and paused with his grandchildren as Tristan approached the two troopers standing by the Ford coupe.
Tristan was easeful and almost bored as he nodded to the troopers but then his heart jumped against his ribs when he saw that one was actually the elegant Irishman from San Francisco, and the other a thug looking ungainly in a uniform. They studied each other for a moment.
“I’ve lost my two brothers. We best settle this,” the man said.
Tristan glanced back at the porch where Decker stood next to Samuel and Three and One Stab. He knew he had come to the end and his heart ached for his children standing in the sunlight on the porch.
“Would you mind if I went with you, I don’t want the children to see,” Tristan said.
The Irishman nodded yes then was startled at Ludlow tottering across the dry brown grass barefoot in a nightshirt with the big buffalo robe wrapped around him. Tristan said politely that this was his father but Ludlow shook his white head holding his slate upon which he had written “What is the meaning of this?”
The Irishman began a quiet speech with an apology saying that he was sorry but Tristan must pay his debt to society by a long term in prison. Ludlow shook, his body jerking as if he were a hawk hooding its prey. He lifted the Purdey twelve-gauge shotgun along his leg up through the parting in the robe and blew the two Irishmen into eternity.
EPILOGUE
That October morning was the end of Tristan’s story for our purposes. In the stunned aftermath Ludlow collapsed but revived by dinner. Tristan embraced his children to whom Pet later explained that the evil men had come to murder their father. Isabel was quietly hysterical. Decker, the Cree and Norwegian buried the bodies and that night the Cree dumped the car in a deep pool in the upper Missouri. But it was One Stab who went mad before the full echo of the shots had faded. He danced and sang around the bodies, his body arched and prancing and his voice crooning, then he stooped and held the fainting Ludlow in his arms. Tristan knew if it were not Ludlow’s kill, One Stab in the excitement might have taken scalps.
Tristan took the children then to Cuba on the schooner and left only twenty-three years later during the beginning of the revolution for a ranch owned by Three and her husband up near McLeod in Alberta. If you are up near Choteau and drive down Ramshorn Road by the ranch, now owned by Alfred’s son by his second marriage, you won’t get permission to enter. It’s a modern efficient operation, but back there in the canyon there are graves that mean something to a few people left on earth: Samuel, Two, Susannah and a little apart Ludlow buried between his true friends, One Stab and Isabel; and a small distance away Decker and Pet. Always alone, apart, somehow solitary, Tristan is buried up in Alberta.
