The trail led to what appeared to be some vast and ancient quarry, carved into the limestone like a giant’s cauldron that had cracked and spilled its contents down the mountain. From this place now, above the hammering of Rimrock’s hooves, Tom heard again the scream of horses. Then he heard another and knew, with a sudden sickening, that it was Grace. It wasn’t until he pulled Rimrock up in the cauldron’s gaping mouth that he could see into it.
She was cowering at the back wall, trapped by a turmoil of shrieking mares. There were seven or eight of them and some colts and foals too, all running in circles and scaring each other more at every turn. Their clamor echoed back at them from the walls, only to redouble their fear. And the more they ran, the more dust they churned and the blindness only made them panic more. At the center, rearing and screaming and striking at each other with their hooves, were Pilgrim and the white stallion Tom had seen that day with Annie.
“Jesus Christ.” Frank had arrived alongside. His horse balked at the sight and he had to rein him hard and circle back beside Tom. Rimrock was troubled but stood his ground. Grace hadn’t seen them. Tom got down and handed Rimrock’s reins to Frank.
“Stay here in case I need you, but you’re gonna have to make way pretty quick when they come,” he said. Frank nodded.
Tom walked to his left with his back to the wall, never taking his eyes off the horses. They swirled in front of him like a crazed carousel. He could feel the bite of the dust in his throat. It was clouding so thick that beyond the mares Pilgrim was only a dark blur against the rearing white shape of the stallion.
Grace was now no more than twenty yards away. At last she saw him. Her face was very pale.
“You hurt?” he yelled.
Grace shook her, head and tried to call back to him that she was okay. But her voice was too frail to carry through the din and the dust. She’d bruised her shoulder and twisted her ankle when she fell, but that was all All that paralyzed her was fear—and fear more for Pilgrim than herself. She could see the bared pink of the stallion’s gums above his teeth as he hacked away at Pilgrim’s neck, where already there was the black glint of blood. Worst of all was the sound of their screams, a sound she’d heard only once before, on a snowy, sunlit morning in another place.
She saw Tom now take off his hat and step out among the circling mares, waving it high in front of them. They skidded and shied away from him, colliding with those behind them. Now they’d all turned and he moved in quickly behind them, driving them before him, away from Pilgrim and the stallion. One tried to break away to the right but Tom dodged and headed it off. Through the dust cloud Grace could see another man, Frank maybe, moving two horses clear of the gap. The mares, with the colts and foals at their tails, bolted past and made good their escape.
Now Tom turned and worked his way around the wall again, giving space to the fighting horses, Grace supposed, so as not to drive them nearer to her. He stopped more or less where he’d been before and again called out.
“Stay right there Grace. You’ll be okay.”
Then, without any sign of fear, he walked toward the fight. Grace could see his lips moving but couldn’t hear what he said over the horses’ screams. Perhaps he was speaking to himself or maybe not at all.
He didn’t stop until he was right up to them and only then did they seem to register his presence. She saw him reach for Pilgrim’s reins and take hold of them. Firmly, but without any violent jerking of his hand, he drew the horse down off his hind legs and turned him from the stallion. Then he slapped him hard on his rump and sent him away.
Thus thwarted, the stallion turned his wrath on Tom.
The picture of what followed would stay with Grace till the day she died. And never would she know for sure what happened. The horse wheeled in a tight circle, tossing his head and kicking up a spray of dust and rock shards with his hooves. With the other horses gone, his snorting fury had dominion of the air and seemed to grow with each resounding echo from the walls. For a moment he appeared not to know what to make of the man who stood undaunted before him.
What was certain was that Tom could have walked away. Two or three paces would have taken him out of the stallion’s reach and clear of all danger. The horse, so Grace believed, would simply have let him be and gone where the others had led. Instead, Tom stepped toward him.
The moment he moved, as he must have foreseen, the stallion reared up before him and screamed. And even now, Tom could have stepped aside. She had seen Pilgrim rear before him once and noted how deftly Tom could move to save himself. He knew where a horse’s feet would fall, which muscle it would move and why, before it even knew itself. Yet on this day, he neither dodged nor ducked nor even flinched and, once more, stepped in closer.
The settling dust was still too thick for Grace to be sure, but she thought she now saw Tom open his arms a little and, in a gesture so minimal that she may have imagined it, show the horse the palms of his hands. It was as though he were offering something and perhaps it was only what he’d always offered, the gift of kinship and peace. But although she would never from this day forth utter the thought to anyone, Grace had a sudden, vivid impression that it was otherwise and that Tom, quite without fear or despair, was somehow this time offering himself.
Then, with a terrible sound, sufficient alone to ratify the passing of his life, the hooves came down upon his head and struck him like a crumbled icon to the ground.
The stallion reared again but not so high and only now to find some safer surface for his feet than the man’s body. He seemed for a moment fazed by such prompt capitulation and pawed the dust uncertainly around Tom’s head. Then, tossing his mane, he cried out one last time, then swerved toward the gap and was gone.
FIVE
THIRTY-SIX
SPRING CAME LATE TO CHATHAM THE FOLLOWING YEAR. One night, in the closing days of April, there fell a full foot of snow. It was of that heavy, languid kind and gone within the day, but Annie feared it might have withered the buds already forming on Robert’s six small cherry trees. When however in May the world at last warmed, they seemed to reassert themselves and the blossom when it came was full and unblemished.
Now the show was past its best, the pink of the petals faded and delicately edged in brown. With each stir of the breeze another flurry would dislodge, littering the grass in wide circumference. Those that fell unbidden were mostly lost among the longer grass that grew around the roots. Some few however found a final brief reprieve on the white gauze netting of a cradle which, since the weather had grown mild, stood daily in the dappled shade.
The cradle was old and made of woven wicker. It had been handed down by an aunt of Robert’s when Grace was born and prior to her had sheltered the cranial formation of several more or less distinguished lawyers. The netting, across which Annie’s shadow now loomed, was new. She had noticed how the child liked to watch the petals settle on it and she left those already there untouched. She looked in and saw he was sleeping.
It was too early to tell whose looks he had. His skin was fair and his hair a light brown, though in the sun it seemed to have a reddish tinge that was surely Annie’s. From the day of his birth, now almost three months past, his eyes were never anything but blue.
Annie’s doctor had told her she should sue. The coil had only been in four years, a year less than its recommended life. When he examined it, the copper was worn right through. The manufacturers would be sure to settle, he said, for fear of bad publicity. Annie had simply laughed and the sensation was so alien it had shocked her. No, she said, she didn’t want to sue and neither, despite poor precedent and all his eloquent listing of the risks, did she want a termination.
Were it not for the steady configuration in her womb Annie doubted whether any of them, she or Robert or Grace, would have survived. It could, or should perhaps, have made things worse, become a bitter focus for their several sorrows. Instead, after the shock of its discovery, her pregnancy had, by slow degree, brought healing and a kind of clar
ifying calm.
Annie now felt a welling pressure in her breasts and for a moment thought of waking him to feed. He was so very different from Grace. She had rapidly grown restless at the breast as if it couldn’t meet her needs and by this age she was already on bottles. This one just latched on and drank as if he’d done it all before. When he’d had his fill, he simply fell asleep.
She looked at her watch. It was nearly four. In an hour Robert and Grace would be setting off from the city. Annie briefly considered going back inside to do a little more work but decided against it. She’d had a good day and the piece she was working on, though in style and content quite unlike anything she’d ever written, was going well. She decided instead to walk up past the pond to the field and have a look at the horses. When she got back, the baby would most likely be awake.
They’d buried Tom Booker beside his father. Annie knew this from Frank. He’d written her a letter. It was sent to Chatham and arrived on a Wednesday morning in late July when she was alone and had just found out she was pregnant.
The intention, Frank said, had been to keep the funeral small, pretty much only for family. But on the day about three hundred people turned up, some from as far afield as Charleston and Santa Fe. There was room for only a few in the church, so they’d opened wide the doors and windows and everyone else stood outside in the sunshine.
Frank said he thought Annie would like to know this.
The main purpose of his writing, he went on to say, was that on the day before he died, Tom had apparently told Joe that he wanted to give Grace a present. The two of them had come up with the idea that she should have Bronty’s foal. Frank wanted to know how Annie felt about it. If she thought it was a good idea, they’d ship him over in Annie’s trailer along with Pilgrim.
It was Robert’s idea to build the stable. Annie could see it now as she walked up toward the field, framed at the end of the long avenue of hazel that curved up from the pond. The building stood stark and new against a steep bank of fresh-leafed poplar and birch. It still surprised Annie every time she saw it. Its wood had barely weathered, nor that of the new gate and fence abutting. The different greens of the trees and of the grass in the field were so vivid and new and intense they seemed almost to hum.
Both horses lifted their heads at her approach then went calmly back to their grazing. Bronty’s “foal” was now a boisterous yearling who in public was treated by Pilgrim with a kind of lofty disdain. It was mostly an act. Many times now, Annie had caught them playing. She folded her arms on the bar of the gate and leaned her chin to watch.
Grace worked with the colt every weekend. Watching her, it was so clear to Annie how much the girl had learned from Tom. You could see it in her movements, even in the way she talked to the horse. She never pushed too hard, just helped him find himself. He was coming on well. Already you could see in him that same soft feel that all the horses had at the Double Divide. Grace had named him Gully but had first asked Annie if she thought Judith’s mom and dad would mind. Annie said she was sure they wouldn’t.
She found it hard to think of Grace nowadays without a feeling of reverence and wonder. The girl, now nearly fifteen, was a constantly revealing miracle.
The week that followed Tom’s death was still a blur and it was probably best for both of them that it remained so. They’d left as soon as Grace was fit to travel and flown back to New York. For days the girl was almost catatonic.
It was the sight of the horses that August morning which seemed to bring about the change. It unlocked a sluice gate in her and for two weeks she wept and poured forth her agony. It might have swept them all away. But in the flooded calm of its aftermath, Grace seemed to take stock and decide, like Pilgrim, to survive.
In that moment Grace became an adult. But sometimes now, when she didn’t know she was being watched, you could catch a glimpse in her eyes of something that was more than merely adult. Twice gone to hell and twice returned. She had seen what she had seen and from it gleaned some sad and stilling wisdom that was as old as time itself.
In the fall Grace went back to school and the welcome she got there from her friends was worth a thousand sessions with her new therapist, whom nonetheless, even now, she still visited every week. When at last, with great trepidation, Annie had told her about the baby, Grace was overjoyed. She had never once, to this day, asked who the father was.
Neither had Robert. No test had established the fact, nor had he sought one. It seemed to Annie that he preferred the possibility of the child being his to the certainty that it wasn’t.
Annie had told him everything. And just as guilts of variant cause and intricacy were etched forever in her own and Grace’s hearts, so too was the hurt she had wrought in his.
For Grace’s sake, they had adjourned all decision on what future, if any, their marriage might have. Annie stayed in Chatham, Robert in New York. Grace commuted between them, like some healing shuttle, restoring strand by strand the torn fabric of their lives. Once school had started, she came up to Chatham every weekend, usually by train. Sometimes however, Robert would drive her.
At first he would drop her off, kiss her good-bye and after a few formal words with Annie, drive all the way back to the city. One rain-soaked Friday night in late October, Grace prevailed on him to stay over. The three of them ate supper together. With Grace, he was as funny and loving as ever. With Annie he was reserved, never less and never more than courteous. He slept in the guest room and left early the following morning.
This was to become their unacknowledged Friday routine. And though on principle he had never yet stayed more than the one night, his departure the next day had gradually got later.
On the Saturday before Thanksgiving, the three of them had gone for breakfast at the Bakery. It was the first time they had been there as a family since the accident. Outside they bumped into Harry Logan. He made a big fuss of Grace and made her blush by telling her how grown up and gorgeous she looked. It was true. He asked if he could stop by and say hi to Pilgrim sometime and they said sure he could.
As far as Annie knew, no one in Chatham had any idea what had happened in Montana other than that their horse had gotten better. Harry looked at Annie’s protruding belly and shook his head and smiled.
“You guys,” he said. “Just the sight of you—all four of you—makes me feel so good. I’m really, really happy for you.”
There was much marveling at how, after so many miscarriages, Annie had managed this time to go full term without trouble. The obstetrician said strange things often happened with elderly pregnancies. Annie said thanks very much.
The baby was born in early March by planned caesarean. They asked her if she wanted to have an epidural and watch and she said absolutely not, she wanted every kind of dope they had. She woke, as once she had before, to find the baby on the pillow beside her. Robert and Grace were there too and the three of them all wept and laughed together.
They named him Matthew, after Annie’s father.
On the breeze now, Annie could hear the baby crying. When she turned away from the gate and started to walk back down toward the cherry trees, the horses didn’t lift their heads.
She would feed him then take him inside and change him. Then she’d sit him in the corner of the kitchen so he could watch her with those clear blue eyes while she got the supper ready. Maybe she could persuade Robert to stay the whole weekend this time. As she came past the pond, some wild ducks took off, their wings clattering the water,
There was only one other thing Frank mentioned in the letter he had sent her last summer. Sorting out Tom’s room, he said, he’d come across an envelope on the table. It had Annie’s name on it and so he now enclosed it.
Annie looked at it a long time before she opened it. She thought how strange it was that never till now had she seen Tom’s handwriting. Inside, folded in a sheet of plain white paper, was the loop of cord he’d taken back from her on that last night they spent together in the creek house. On the paper, all
he’d written was, In case you forget.
Also look for
THE LOOP
by
NICHOLAS EVANS
Available from Delacorte Press
wherever books are sold
Turn the page for a special preview
of the new novel from
NICHOLAS EVANS
THE SMOKE JUMPER
available wherever
hardcover books are sold
August 21, 2001
IT WAS NIGH ON NOON WHEN THE SMOKE JUMPERS CAME. THEY plummeted in pairs on each pass of the plane, their bodies jolting as the parachutes cracked open and filled and left them floating like medusas in an ocean of sky. Now and then the chutes masked the sun that flared harsh and white and unforgiving behind them, making shadows of their downward drift on the veil of smoke that shrouded the mountainside.
They were a crew of six men and two women and every one of them landed safely in the jump spot, a narrow clearing not forty yards wide. They shed their parachutes and jumpsuits and stowed them, then unpacked their chainsaws and pulaskis and shovels from bags that were dropped separately and soon they were ready to start cutting a fire line.
The peak that watched over them while they worked was called Iron Mountain. Its western shoulder was thickly forested and had no ready access by road. The fire had been spotted by a ranger that morning and, fanned by a strengthening westerly, had already taken out more than a hundred acres. If it continued to head east or switched to the north there was little risk. But to the south and west there were ranches and cabins and if the wind shifted they would be in grave danger, which was why the call had come for the smoke jumpers.
They cut their line along a limestone ridge that ran along its southern flank. The line was a yard wide and half a mile long. They worked in waves, keeping a good ten feet apart, sawyers first, then the swampers to clear the felled trees and branches, then the diggers. They sawed and hacked and scraped and dug until the ground was cleared to the mineral earth so that when the fire arrived it would be starved of fuel. By the time it was done, they were soaked in sweat and their yellow flameproof shirts and green pants were blotched like camouflage with earth and ash and debris.
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