“There’s no devil, Ma,” Barclay said. His voice was tender. “Why haven’t you figured out those nuns were full of shit?”
“I thought she would help you.” Mother nodded toward Marian. “No. She pretends she’s the one who suffers, but she brings the suffering.”
“Ma. Leave it alone. I won’t drink anymore. I promise.”
“The devil makes you lie.”
“I need to rest, Ma. And, when you go, will you take the devil with you?”
“Only you can make him go,” she said, but she went, closing the door.
Barclay poured more tea and handed the cup to Marian, who said, “What did she mean?”
“Drink turns man to sin. She thinks I’m playing into the hands of bootleggers, who are agents of the devil.”
“She doesn’t know you are one?” The tea was too sweet. Mother had put sugar in the pot.
“Of course not.”
It was true his mother was cloistered on the ranch except for Sundays, when Sadler and Kate took her to church. If Barclay wished her fellow congregants to keep their mouths shut, Sadler’s presence was enough to ensure they did, and, anyway, what would they dare say to her face? But still Mother Macqueen must have noticed the signs. She knew, Marian decided, but she was pretending not to. They, the three women—herself, Kate, and Mother—were living in one house with three different men, all of whom happened to be Barclay Macqueen.
“But what did she mean about me?”
“Oh.” He pursed his lips, making a show of appearing reluctant to explain. “She thought a good woman would be what stopped me from drinking. Since you haven’t, and since you aren’t pregnant, she thinks you must not be a good woman after all. There are some holes in her logic—she could never stop my father from drinking. I’m not like him. I don’t do it often.” This somewhat plaintively. “But now you’ve dashed her hopes.”
“She really thinks you’re a cattle rancher?”
“But I am a cattle rancher,” said Barclay. “And you are the barren wife who has driven me to drink.”
Montana
Winter–Spring 1932
A week after he’d gone drinking, as though it were a perfectly ordinary request, Barclay told Marian he needed her to go pick up some cargo across the line.
Sadler drove her to Missoula to get the Stearman. From the backseat, she asked, “Has anyone else been flying my plane?”
He looked at her in the mirror. “You mean my plane?”
“Has anyone been flying your plane, then?”
“Not that I know of.”
She didn’t know whether to believe him, or if the truth mattered. She picked over the Stearman jealously, examining it for traces of another pilot. Once alone in the sky, though, she no longer cared. She turned a loop, tossing the mountains up over her head.
She made a few more trips over the line in the next week and then, when she entreated, was granted an afternoon flight with no stated purpose or destination. Barclay made her promise to be back in three hours, and she was, having flown a northeasterly route, though she told him she’d gone west, toward Coeur d’Alene. The lie warmed her like an ember.
A full tank could take her six hundred miles. She fantasized about those miles, that radius. She could refuel and fly on. And on. People had flown between continents in lesser planes. But if she ran away, she knew it would only make Barclay more determined to get her back and keep her. If she stayed, eventually he might come to understand they were badly matched. Having tethered her to him, hooded her like a tame falcon, he could still cut her loose, release her. If she stayed, he still might let her go.
But their truce, their wary tenderness, began to give way as winter thawed: the inevitable collapse of goodwill between two people with intertwined yet irreconcilable wishes. Some days, especially when he told her she could not fly, she turned away from him in bed, shook off his caresses. But when she relented, there was still fire between them. Maybe she’d never loved him, had only been tricked by the reflected flicker. Barclay pinned her arms while she glowered and glittered at him.
He went away on business for a week in March and instructed her not to fly while he was gone. On the third day, she drove a ranch truck into Kalispell, speeding on the muddy, winding roads just enough to scare herself, marveling again that Barclay could survive the route drunk. She looked in the shops without seeing anything she wanted to buy. She found a place to have a drink and had three. Drunk, as she’d lost her tolerance for booze, she parked under a tree on the edge of the airfield and waited for someone to land or take off, but no one did.
“Thought you might have gone for good,” Kate said when she returned after dark.
The next morning, she uncovered and untethered the Stearman, took off from Bannockburn’s rugged strip, mud clinging to the wheels. Only after she was in the air, idly angling the wings this way and that, admiring the mountains’ snowcaps, did she decide to fly down to Missoula and surprise Jamie.
One of the airfield boys gave her a lift up the Rattlesnake. The house was looking worse for wear. She’d thought Jamie, left to his own devices, might have spruced things up, but the paint was peeling; the roof shingles were sodden and buckled. Winter-brown weeds grew thickly around the foundation. She was about to let herself in the side door, but a pang of unease stopped her. For the first time she could remember, she went to the front door and knocked.
The sound set off a cacophony of barking that went on and on, seemingly an army of dogs on the other side of the door. She pressed her ear against the wood, listening for footsteps. She knocked again. The barking reached a new, frantic pitch, and finally she heard the creaking of the stairs, Jamie telling the dogs to quiet down. The door was yanked open, and her brother blinked out at her. “Hello,” he said as though to a stranger.
He had dark circles under his eyes, and a wispy blond beard clung to his cheeks like algae. His clothes were daubed in paint. “You look terrible,” she said. “What’s wrong with you?”
“Nothing.” Five dogs streamed out, went to lift legs and squat in the dead grass and crumbly snow. He watched them pensively. “I must have lost track of time. They’ve been shut in all day. That was awful of me. What time is it?”
She looked at her wristwatch. “Just past noon.”
Suddenly he seemed to shake himself free of whatever strange state he was in. “Marian!” He lurched forward to embrace her. With a pang of revulsion, she inhaled the mingled smells of his unwashed body, turpentine, and booze. She’d had enough of drunk men for a lifetime. He said, “What are you doing here?”
“Visiting you.”
“Come inside.” He held the door open, waved her in.
The house was cold and dark, the curtains closed. Plates and bowls were scattered on the floor and furniture, some of the bowls partially filled with water for the dogs, some of the plates bearing traces of whatever he’d been feeding them. Two dogs circled around her legs, panting and peering up as though apologizing for the state of things.
It occurred to her for the first time that it was a Wednesday. “You aren’t at school.”
“No, I’ve stopped going,” he said airily. He padded toward the kitchen, barefoot despite the cold. “Do you want a drink? I’m going to have one.”
The kitchen was a worse mess than the other rooms, heaped with dishes and smelling of decay. A half-empty bottle of clear moonshine was on the table. Jamie picked up a dirty glass, rubbed the rim with his shirttail, poured in two inches and handed it to her. Three inches for himself went into a glass he didn’t bother to clean.
“That’s awful stuff,” she said, coughing after she’d sipped. “I’d forgotten.”
“It’s not so bad.” His eyes were shining. “I needed to fortify myself. I want to show you something, but I’m very nervous about it. Should I show you?”
“Show me what?”
> He went on as though she hadn’t spoken, his words coming out lopsided, smeared together. “I was just imagining showing you when you arrived, which seems like a sign, doesn’t it? Mostly I think about showing them to—” Turning, he hurried out of the kitchen.
She followed. “Show me what?”
“What I’ve been doing!” he called over his shoulder, racing up the stairs two steps at a time. The spindly shape of him, the looseness of his clothes, the manic pitch of his voice reminded her so much of Wallace. She forced herself to climb slowly, not to panic and grab him and shake him by the arms and order him to stop drinking, to bathe, to go to school. Was it the house that did this to people? Was there some curse that turned men into mad drunkards?
At the top of the stairs, she paused to compose herself before she walked the length of the dark hall toward the wedge of light spilling from Wallace’s old studio. When she looked inside, sunlight pouring in from the curve of windows momentarily dazzled her eyes. She saw Jamie’s dark shape darting around, and as her eyes adjusted, she saw the paintings.
* * *
—
They were oils, mostly landscapes, some with birds and animals unobtrusively in the scene, almost hidden. At first glance the paintings appeared rough, even primitive, with obvious brushstrokes and patches of solid color, but as she kept looking, she saw they were precise in what they represented, just in a way that was different from the delicate, glossy realism of Wallace’s work, more about mood. Charcoal and pencil sketches were piled everywhere. Jars of water and turpentine crowded the windowsills. Jamie was chattering nervously. “Oils are awfully expensive, but Wallace left some behind, and I hope it’s all right I spent some of your money on supplies. I’ll find a way to pay for more myself, but it just seemed important that I work. It’s the only thing I seem able to do right now.”
Propped in Wallace’s threadbare old armchair was a portrait of a girl with a long face and frank gaze. The same girl appeared on a canvas set sideways on the mantel. The remnants of a fire still smoldered in the grate, blackened scraps of torn paper among the ash. Another painting of the girl lay flat on the floor, grit and flecks of paint marring it. Marian stepped closer to a mountain scene on his easel.
“There’s wind in it,” she said. “I don’t know how there’s wind in a painting.”
Jamie was hovering behind her. “It’s not done. It’s not quite right. I’m so nervous my mouth’s dry.” He drank from the glass he was still clutching. “I haven’t shown anyone, not even Caleb.”
She touched his shoulder, trying to calm him. “You’re an artist,” she said. “A real one.”
His eyes filled. They looked away from each other. She said, “But even real artists need to bathe sometimes.”
* * *
—
In the evening, Caleb showed up. Jamie had been induced to wash and take a nap, and Marian was making headway on cleaning and airing the house. She’d fed the dogs and built a fire. Caleb came in the kitchen door with two trout in a creel. “Mrs. Macqueen,” he said. “To what do we owe this honor?”
She whispered in case Jamie had woken: “Have you seen him lately? Did you know?”
“Your majesty is upset—”
“Caleb.”
He set the basket on the table. “I’ve had enough already with Gilda. I’m not hiding bottles from anyone ever again.”
She put a skillet on the stove for the fish. “You should have told me. How long has he been like this?”
Caleb leaned back against the wall, folding his arms. “I’m not sure. Maybe a month? Before that he was moping around, hung up on that girl, but he was going to school and wasn’t drinking, or not as much. He insists he’s working on something important. I don’t think he’s really like Wallace or Gilda. I think he’s putting this on a little bit.”
From the other room, a brassy dance tune blared from Wallace’s gramophone. Jamie appeared in the doorway, a glass in hand. “Cold for fishing, isn’t it?”
“You wouldn’t eat anything else I could bring.”
“Where do you even find trout this time of year?”
“They go deep, but they’re there.” Caleb took a loaf of bread and a paper bag from his knapsack. “Compliments of Mr. Stanley.”
Looking inside the bag, Jamie said, “Hallelujah, he sent cream puffs.”
After they’d eaten, they settled around the gramophone, Jamie reclining on the floor beside Marian’s chair, Caleb lying on the settee.
“Marian,” Jamie said, breaking through some idle talk about Caleb’s hunting, “Sarah said she thought Wallace might not have liked that I was making drawings. Do you think that could be true?”
“Sarah?” Marian said.
“The girl in Seattle,” Caleb said.
“Because I always thought he was encouraging,” Jamie said, “but when I really think about it now, I wonder if he might have been the opposite.”
“I don’t know,” Marian said. She hadn’t paid much attention to the dynamic between Wallace and Jamie, had been too preoccupied with flying.
“Sarah’s father offered me a job,” Jamie said. “I could have gone to live in Seattle. I could have had a whole life there, but I said no. Do you know why?”
“Why?” She was afraid the answer would be that he hadn’t wanted to leave her alone in Missoula.
“Because his fortune came from meatpacking.” Jamie laughed, sagged sideways onto one elbow. “Of all things. What luck!” He grew solemn. “I must be a fool.”
In a garbled torrent, he told the story of meeting Sarah in the park, about her mother and sisters, the big house, the art, the topiaries, the seduction of being praised. When he’d reached the ignominious end, he dramatically drained his glass. Brightly, before Marian had gathered her thoughts to speak, he said, “Say, would you dance for me?” He tapped his knee in time with the record.
“What?” Marian said.
“You and Caleb. I’d like to sketch people dancing.”
“I’m a terrible dancer, Jamie.”
Caleb, though, stood and pulled her up from her chair, brought her firmly into his arms.
“You don’t have to give him his way on everything,” she whispered.
“What’s the harm in dancing?” He turned her.
Craning her neck, Marian glimpsed doodled lines in Jamie’s sketchbook that did not quite add up to pictures but still resembled dancers. She found herself responding to the feel of Caleb, his familiar smell: earthy and coniferous, so different from Barclay’s perfumed musk. Though her feet were clumsy and her body stiff, though Jamie was pouring more moon into his glass, she felt weepy from happiness.
When the record finally fizzed and went silent, she stepped away from Caleb, wiped her brow on her sleeve. Jamie had fallen asleep, his head flopped back against the chair, the sketch pad still in his lap. Caleb put on a different record, drew her onto the settee beside him. “Why didn’t you visit sooner?” he said.
She tried to make up an excuse, but she was too wrung out. “Barclay didn’t want me to go anywhere. He wasn’t letting me fly for a while. He was punishing me for not wanting a baby.”
“For not wanting one or not having one?”
“They’re the same thing, at least for now. He shouldn’t have been surprised. I always told him I didn’t want one, but he has this idea that he knows me better than I know myself, when really he’s obsessed with trying to make the real me match his imagined version of me.”
Caleb’s jaw was tight. “He’s a bastard,” he said.
“Marian.” Jamie was awake. He hadn’t moved but was gazing at her from the floor, his face haggard. “Will you take me somewhere?”
“What do you mean? Now?”
“Soon. I need to leave here.”
“Where do you want to go?”
“Just somewhere else.” He
drew his knees up to his chest. He’d gotten so thin. “You’re gone. Wallace is gone. Caleb’s always off hunting. It feels like Seattle is the only thing that’s ever going to happen to me.”
“Can’t you just finish high school?”
“You didn’t.”
She started to formulate some wry response about not everyone getting to marry Barclay Macqueen, but before she could speak, he said, plaintively, “Please, Marian. I can’t stay here.”
* * *
—
Her model planes still hung from the cottage’s ceiling, dusty, the glue showing yellow in places. Everything was as she’d left it. Jamie had confined his chaos to the house. It was nearly dawn, but she sat in the armchair and flipped through some books—Captain Cook in the South Pacific, Fridtjof Nansen in Greenland. She waited for them to fill her with an eager sense of nascent adventure, but they lay dead in her hands. Before, she’d been certain the world would fall open to her once she could fly. Now she knew she would never see any of those places.
“You’ll leave him eventually,” Caleb had said after Jamie had gone to bed, when they were saying goodbye in the kitchen.
“And then what?”
“Whatever you want.”
“It’s not that easy.”
“I could help. We could buy a plane and take hunters out in it.”
“We?”
“Why not?” He looked intently at her.
“We’re not like that.”
“We could be.”
She shook her head.
“He’ll swallow you up if you let him,” Caleb said.
“It’s not the end of the world, being swallowed up.” But she thought of the crevasse.
“Sometimes I want to grab you and shake you until you see sense.”
“Go ahead.”
He put on his hat and stalked off into the night.
* * *
Great Circle Page 33
