by Frank Hayes
“Thank you, Doctor.”
Sam Harris started to walk away, then stopped. “I’m real sorry about your mom. But I’d hold off as long as I could, telling Charlie. They were joined at the hip a long time. He’s going to take it hard.”
Marian nodded in response. Then she walked to her father’s room to sit with him for a little while. He was pretty much in a drug-induced coma. After a little while sitting there in the quiet, her eyelids started to feel heavy. She left the hospital a little before midnight. A cold breeze was waiting for her when she stepped into the parking lot. Manuel was waiting there. She had called him when she first got to the hospital to update him. It was his suggestion that he come to get her when she was ready to leave the hospital, otherwise she would have no way of getting back to High Lonesome ranch.
“How is Señor Charlie?”
“He seems to be resting comfortably, but he’s in and out of consciousness. I don’t know if he realizes what happened to him, where he is, or even if I was there.”
“He is a strong man,” Manuel said.
“Yes, I know, but he’s not a young man anymore. I just wish I could have been there more for him and Mom.”
“You are here now. That is good.”
Marian laid her head back against the headrest as she listened to the rhythm of the tires on the pavement. They drove through town without seeing another car or any evidence of life. She fought to stay awake. By the time they turned onto the ranch road, she had almost lost the fight, but the first few ruts jarred her back to wakefulness. Manuel drove her right up to the walkway, then hopped out of the truck while the engine was still running. By the time she opened the door he was standing there waiting. She swung her legs around, readily taking his extended hand for support.
“Thank you, Manuel.”
“De nada. A night’s sleep, you will feel better.”
“Sí,” Marian said as she let go of his hand. “Tomorrow will be a better day.” He smiled, then went around to the driver’s side, got in, then drove away. She stood looking at the darkened house, feeling for just an instant like the little girl she used to be.
* * *
Sunlight was streaming through the windows of her bedroom when she awoke. She glanced at the clock on the night table, blinked, then looked again. She couldn’t believe she had slept for almost twelve hours. It took her more than a few moments to shake off the coma she had been in since her head had first hit the pillow. At last she dragged herself to the bathroom. By the time she had washed off the last three days, she was beginning to think she was fit for company. The emptiness in the pit of her stomach was a reminder that she really had little or nothing to eat during the last twenty-four hours, so she went downstairs. As she expected, the pantry and refrigerator were stocked full. Her mother had lived a hardscrabble existence before she met her father. Fallout from that life was that there was always enough food on hand to feed a small army. Marian’s mother had told her that there were many nights when she had gone to bed hungry. Marian ate way more than a normal-sized breakfast. She was sitting over a second cup of coffee when she saw a car pull up to the fence outside that marked the perimeter of her mother’s garden. Even from a distance, she recognized the two men who got out of the car. Taking her cup she went out onto the front porch. She was sitting in her mother’s chair when they reached her.
“Hello, Marian.”
“Hello, Calvin, Vernon. I had wondered whether or not you were coming when I didn’t get a response from either one of you. But then, what’s it been, eight, ten years?”
“Yeah, well, we just kind of hooked up with one another and decided to come ahead, been busy.” Marian didn’t acknowledge the comment. “So, what are the arrangements?” Calvin asked.
“That’s still to be worked out. Mom is down at Simpson’s. She was just brought over yesterday, far as I know.”
Vernon, who had been standing on the path, stepped up alongside of Calvin.
“Don’t understand . . .” He started to frame a question, but Calvin interrupted.
“We thought we’d be too late to see Mom. It’s been what? Five, six days.”
“Well, it took so long because as it turns out Mom didn’t die a natural death.”
“What? You didn’t say. I mean in your message.”
“I didn’t know. It was a surprise to me, too.”
“So you’re saying, what?”
“I’m not saying. The coroner, the evidence, is saying Mom was murdered.”
The two men looked at each other before Calvin spoke.
“That’s crazy. Mom and Dad were old. These backwoods medical people are probably just covering up for the fact that they can’t come up with a real medical explanation.”
“Obviously, you haven’t been to Hayward Memorial. It’s a long way from backwoods, Calvin. But then you haven’t been around to visit or look in on Mom and Dad. But what about you, Vernon? I understand you stopped by a couple of times. Was that just to visit or maybe you wanted something.”
“What do you mean?” Vernon blinked his eyes in rapid succession.
“Still got that nervous habit, Vernon. Did I hit a nerve? I know you sure didn’t stop by to help Dad on the ranch. So my other thought is, maybe you wanted something. Maybe money. Wouldn’t that be about right?” Vernon stepped back. “What about you, Cal? What do you want? Since you thought Mom was buried already, you must have returned for some other reason. What do you want?”
Calvin glared at Marian. “Pretty full of yourself, aren’t you, Marian? I didn’t notice you hanging around here after you graduated from college.”
“That’s because Dad thought his boys were going to stay on, run this place with him. I never got that invitation.”
“Yeah, well, I guess with him gone, that’s as good an excuse as any.”
“Well. With luck we might all get a second chance with Dad.”
“How’s that?” Calvin asked.
“Well, I mean, when he gets out of the hospital. The doctor suggested I wait before telling him about Mom.”
Vernon stepped back alongside Calvin again. “Did you say he was in the hospital? I mean, now?”
“I thought you knew. I thought you both knew. Virgil Dalton, the sheriff, and I found him up on that plateau. You know, the High Lonesome country, as he always called it. The name of the ranch. He’d been shot. A helicopter brought him out. He’s in Hayward Memorial right now. Going to be there for a couple of weeks, but they say he’s going to walk out. You know, Dad is tough.”
Once again, Calvin and Vernon looked at each other.
“Always was, always was,” Cal said. “Is he conscious? I mean, should we go see him?”
“No,” Marian said. “The doctor said he’ll be in the twilight zone for a while. Probably doesn’t even know what happened. He wouldn’t even know if you were there, so you might as well hold off for a few days. Guess we’ll have to bury Mom without him.”
“Oh, yeah, guess we’d better,” Calvin said. “Vernon, maybe we could stop at Simpson’s, check on the arrangements. Give Marian a break. Sounds like she has had a rough couple of days.”
Vernon didn’t react to Cal’s suggestion.
“Vernon . . .” Calvin said in a louder voice.
“Oh, okay, whatever you think, Cal.”
“Boys, I’m sorry. Maybe I was a little harsh a few minutes ago.”
“It’s okay, Marian.” Cal gestured with his hand. “Guess we all got a bit of a shock.”
“Where are you staying? There’s plenty of room in the house.”
“No, we already took a place. A cabin on the other side of the river by a roadhouse called the Branding Iron. We’re fine. Don’t worry about us, we’ll make out. By the way, is the sheriff in town? Maybe we should stop by and thank him.”
“No. He’s still up in the high country. I expect h
e’ll be coming down much later today or first thing tomorrow. He had to bring Pop’s gear down and the horses. He insisted I go with Dad in the helicopter. I’m sure he’d like to meet you. He was asking about you. I’ll tell him what you said when he gets here.”
“That’ll be fine. Okay, Vernon, we better get going, take care of business. See you soon, Marian.” Calvin turned, then stepped off the porch. “C’mon, Vernon.”
Vernon followed him to the car. Marian watched them. Deep in conversation, they never looked back. When they were out of sight, she set her empty coffee cup on the table next to her mother’s rocker. She had a strange feeling, like an actor missing a cue. She lingered, looking out on the scene from the front porch that she had known all of her life, but which in a strange way she felt like she had never really seen until now. In a sense it had taken her absence to appreciate how much this place meant to her. Since her husband’s death and her children going off to college, she had been at sixes and sevens. There was no sense of direction, only the nagging feeling that for the last two years she had been basically treading water. Only now, brought back to the place of her youth, did she find a kind of peace. She didn’t fully understand why this was, especially when the instrument for her return was the death of her mother. But she felt good in this place for the first time in a long time, in a way, looking at her past through new eyes.
The landscape before her was timeless. The path bisecting her mother’s gardens held only the barest hint of the vibrant beauty they had displayed throughout the last months of her life. She noted the horse trough along with the two hitching posts beyond the white picket fence that her mother had insisted on, though her father thought it clashed with the Southwestern homestead. Beyond the area that had been pounded into hardpan by horse’s hooves and truck tires over decades, she saw the string of corrals, which fronted the huge barns that now showed age and neglect from lack of use. All of it framing a view into her past that had somehow renewed itself in her. She saw a shadowy figure against one of the barn walls, then saw it disappear through an opened door. Finally, she stood up, took a couple of deep breaths of the chilled morning air, stepped off the porch, and started walking to the barns to see if she could be of any help to Manuel.
23
By midday, Virgil and Ernesto were well off the mesa and on the semidesert flatland where bunch grass or any other graze was a much rarer commodity. It was the kind of rangeland where a cow-and-calf unit needed about ten acres. Typical of a huge area in the Southwest, it made Virgil appreciate the lush bottomland of his own ranch. Remembering the trek up to the High Lonesome, Virgil also appreciated how much easier it had been to return, although he knew the distance to the ranch was going to be more than they could accomplish in a day’s ride, particularly with Ernesto sitting atop two saddles lashed together. Even a gentle canter was a stretch to make up time. At least it was not a trip made in the one-hundred-degree heat of summer. Virgil was certain that journey had been done many times over the years. Cold, clear, late November worked for him. Looking over at the boy on Ringo, he smiled at the caricature of a nomad on a camel. Completing the image, Ernesto had wrapped a scarf across his face to protect against a windburn. Virgil knew a dilemma where the boy was concerned awaited him once he got down to High Lonesome ranch. He was conflicted because he knew as sheriff there was one way to go, but there was a history with this boy that would be hard to ignore.
They had ridden steadily into late afternoon, stopping only occasionally so Ernesto could adjust or reset the saddles, checking for any friction marks or saddle sores on Ringo. During their last stop at the base of a wash where a small pool had formed, they watered the horses and ate. As Virgil was replacing Jack’s saddle, he saw the rolling thunderheads on the horizon, felt the dampness in the wind. It made the decision to take shelter for the night much easier. He saw little sense in pushing the animals for the ranch in a cold, dark rain over ground that he had never ridden in daylight. They rode for another hour until Virgil spotted a rock overhang a little way up a slope. He explained to Ernesto his plan for the overnight, then together they climbed up toward the mesa, leading the horses on foot to the overhanging rock. By the time Virgil had built a pit fire with some dead cottonwood they had scavenged along with dry grass for tinder, the sky had filled with gunmetal-gray clouds broken only by streaks of lightning. From under the escarpment Virgil and Ernesto and the two horses watched while rolling thunder accompanied the bolts that lit up the panorama. At last the rains came with an intensity that Virgil knew would soon turn the almost-dry wash where they had not long before watered their horses into a raging torrent. These were the kind of gully washers that many times had caught unsuspecting animals and people, robbing them of their lives. Secure in the choice of shelter, they spread out the saddle blankets and ate what food they had while they watched the storm spend its fury over the land. At one point before they turned in for the night, Virgil prodded Ernesto for some of his history.
“Mi madre está muerta,” Ernesto said in response to Virgil’s inquiry. “No one, hermanos or hermanas, in Mexico. Todo en Estados Unidos,” he added.
“¿Dónde?” Virgil asked.
“¿Quién sabe?”
“You have no idea where?”
“Maybe California, maybe Florida,” the boy answered. “Me, the last. The youngest.”
Virgil listened to his words, realizing it was an immigrant story as old as time. When all familial ties are gone, the search for a new life begins. Ernesto was the latest in an unending line. Before long, while Virgil looked out on a landscape he could barely see, he could hear in the intermittent moments of silence Ernesto’s regular breathing and he knew he had drifted off.
As the storm released its energy he felt a kind of calm. The last couple of days had been therapeutic for him. He went looking for Charlie Thompson to displace an overload of anxiety and it had worked. It had always been that way for him—a step or two back so he could move forward again. When he got down to the Thompson ranch and Hayward, what he had left behind would still be there, waiting for him. He was ready.
24
Cesar picked up the phone on the third ring. He was relieved to hear Virgil’s voice. Virgil had never been an open book, but Cesar had the closeness born of their years together. He knew about the lost plane in the Superstitions along with the deepening mystery of High Lonesome. So the timbre of Virgil’s voice told him something he was anxious to hear.
“Hey, old-timer, if you can get off your rocking chair, you can come up to High Lonesome and get me and Jack.”
“Well, I was gonna take a nap, but I guess if I have to . . .”
A little more than a half an hour later, Virgil was standing outside the Thompson ranch house waiting for Cesar when Marian joined him.
“How are you, Virgil?” She had seen him stretching, then rubbing his lower back as she looked out the kitchen window.
“Stiffer then a fence post,” he answered. “Been riding that desk chair in my office a lot more than Jack lately. Three serious days in the saddle, I feel like my backbone is ready to pop through my skin.”
“You could come back in the house, strip down, then I could rub your lower back. We’re well past the formal stage in our relationship.”
They traded glances, each offering the other a hint of a smile.
“That’s a mighty tempting offer, Marian. Probably the best I’ll get today, but if I was to take you up on that, I might start to get achy in other parts and Cesar’s going to be pulling into the place soon. I do appreciate the offer though.”
“Well, if you don’t get any relief, I’ll be here. Looks like your ride is coming.”
Before Virgil could respond, he saw a cloud of dust on the ranch road. In another moment, he heard the sound of the pickup and the horse trailer.
“Yep. Looks like my Mexican father is coming.”
“Virgil, what about the boy?”
&nbs
p; “I been wrestling with that for two days,” Virgil said.
“Why couldn’t he just stay here?”
“What do you mean?”
“We owe him something, my family. The doctor told me Dad wouldn’t have made it without him. Let him stay. We could use the help. He needs a family.”
Virgil looked toward the barns. He saw Ernesto lugging a bale of hay toward the corral. “Okay, but what happens when you leave in another week or two? I’m only postponing the inevitable.”
“I don’t think I’m leaving. Oh, maybe for a brief time to take care of some loose ends, but I think my life is going to go in a different direction now. Since I’ve been here, I realize how much this place means to me. It’s my anchor point.”
“But what about San Francisco?”
“Well, my husband is gone, my kids are in college, like I told you. They’re going to start living their own lives. I’ve decided to start living mine, doing what I want to do. That’s here, this place. I belong here. If Dad will consider it, I’d like to see this ranch become a going concern again. Think I could do it. Bring it back. At least, I’d like to try. Maybe that young boy could find a future here.”
Virgil looked at Marian. A slight breeze tugged at a few loose strands of her uncombed hair. He saw a look of determination that he hadn’t seen before.
“You know, Marian, you really are a good-looking woman.”
