by Larry Watson
You want us to keep an eye on things? the young woman asks. Bring in your mail or your paper?
Won’t be necessary, Margaret says. If you’ll excuse me now . . .
The plump young woman remains in place, her hands kneading the interiors of her apron pockets. Can I ask you something?
Margaret stops but she’s one of those people whose body can convey impatience even in repose.
When my husband comes home, the young woman says, he’ll ask me what I did today. And I’ll tell him I talked to the lady next door. After all these years, Eddie will say, And she’s still the lady next door? What’s her name, Mary?
Margaret has to know what the woman wants but instead she says, Three years. Not all that many. And Margaret continues on her way. Before she reaches her back door, however, she turns back to her neighbor. Margaret Blackledge. Perhaps because she has pronounced that name so many times over the years, she can say it without her voice’s usual warble.
Mary Bremmer, the young woman says, then adds, Pleased to meet you, but Margaret’s door has already closed behind her.
Mary Bremmer has barely had time to shut her own door—to shut her door and bite off a few squares of a Hershey bar—when the front doorbell chimes. Mary hurries to answer it.
Standing on the porch is the woman who now has a name. Margaret Blackledge thrusts out her tanned, rough hand. In case some chocolate might be on her fingers, Mary Bremmer wipes her hand quickly on her apron before taking Margaret’s hand.
I want to do this proper, says Margaret. And that means walking right up to your front door and apologizing for my bad manners. For my years of bad manners.
That’s all right, Mary says, chocolate melting between her tongue and the roof of her mouth.
No. No, it’s not all right. I’ve been a poor excuse for a neighbor. And I don’t have a single good reason for my behavior. I just thought . . . I’m not sure what I thought. That we wouldn’t be here in Dalton all that long so it would be best not to form attachments.
But now, Mary says, you’re going, and she pulls her hand free from Margaret’s.
That I am, says Margaret. So this is the day I finally say pleased to meet you and good-bye.
Good-bye.
And as Margaret Blackledge backs away, Mary Bremmer gives her neighbor a tiny wave before closing her door. Her hand hovers in the air as if she’s about to throw the bolt, but then she stops. The middle of the day—why would anyone need to lock a door?
...
The bourbon’s fumes scald his nostrils but its burn is a comfort in his chest and belly. He could have used that heat as he walked to work this morning. He shudders and screws the cap back on. He says softly, Enough, a man more comfortable making promises to himself than to others. When he reaches under the front seat of the Hudson to hide the bottle, his hand lands on another package, something wrapped in one of the terry cloth towels that hung in the bathroom this morning. The shape and heft of this parcel, its location—what else could it be? But George brings it out and unwraps it anyway. Yes. What else could it be. The .45 automatic that the United States Army issued to George Blackledge during the First World War. He ejects the clip. Empty. He works the pistol’s action to make sure a round isn’t chambered. He wraps it up again and drops its unmistakable weight on the passenger seat.
He feels again under the seat and finds a box of cartridges.
...
Margaret replaces the lid on the garbage can, and at the sound of the Hudson’s tires on the gravel driveway she stops and waits for George, one hand on her hip and the other shading her eyes as though she’s watching him approach from a distance.
If she notices that he’s getting out of the car with her blue terry cloth towel wadded in his hand, she doesn’t mention it. She smiles and asks, Do you want those leftover potatoes or should I throw them out?
For answer George grabs her above the elbow, but he’s not just squeezing her arm, he’s pushing too, guiding her across the grass and toward the back door. It’s a day for firsts. The first frost of the season. The first drink he’s taken in eleven years. The first time he’s laid a hand on his wife in anger, much less touched her with a weapon in his other hand.
In the kitchen he lets her go as roughly as he grabbed her, then drops the towel-wrapped gun on the table. Its muffled thud is like nothing ever heard within these walls.
What the hell, Margaret. What the hell.
She has backed up across the kitchen. Her upper chest and throat are blotchy, and the blood keeps rising, up past the hard, sharp angle of her jaw to those sculpted cheekbones and across that high forehead. Because Margaret Blackledge doesn’t embarrass easily, that color can only be the color of anger, and soon her suntanned face is the shade of cinnamon.
That wasn’t for you to find, she says. I put that there before I knew you’d be coming with me.
But you thought you’d need it?
I didn’t want to find I did and then not have it.
Jesus, Margaret.
You’ve heard the stories about Donnie.
Talk. Just talk. And you know what that counts for. George flips back a corner of the towel, exposing an inch of blue-black barrel. Was this going to be part of your argument?
You don’t know me any better than to ask that?
And you bought a box of cartridges?
She says nothing but stares hard at her husband. She presses a palm to her jaw, though any attempt to stop the vibration is useless. Put it back, George. Put it back. And then you stay. You’ve got no heart for any of this, anyway.
He takes a deep breath, exhales, then tilts his head back and breathes again as though the oxygen he needs were at a height he can’t quite reach. Closed up like this the house can’t take in the sun’s heat, and whiskey won’t help with the chill of an empty house. George refolds the towel, then picks up the bundle.
I’ll pack the tent, he says. Mildew smell and all.
3.
BEFORE GEORGE HAS EVEN TURNED OFF THE IGNITION, Barlow Ott has exited the trailer that serves as the temporary office for Ott’s Livestock Sales. The car’s engine shudders, clunks to silence, and George opens his door to greet Barlow as he lugs his heavy-gutted body toward the Hudson.
Margaret leans across the seat to advise her husband, Don’t let him shame you.
Peering into the back window, Barlow sees the boxes of supplies stacked in the backseat. Well, hell. Of course you’re not coming back to work this afternoon if you’re moving. Sell your house over the noon hour, did you?
George steps out of the car. We’ve got family business that needs attending to, Barlow.
Ott grooms the wings of his thick moustache with the knuckle of his index finger, bends down, then touches the brim of his hat. Howdy, Margaret. Running off with one of my best hands, are you?
Hello, Barlow. I’ll bring him back to you good as new.
Ott stands stiffly. At his nod, George follows him toward the trailer, its white aluminum siding glaring in the afternoon sunlight.
Barlow asks, Is this because you’re not working with the horses?
Family business. Like I said.
It’s no reflection, Ott says. I put a man where I need him.
George’s back is still knotted tight from spending the morning working on the new office building. He held the sheetrock in place while a man a third his age hammered the nails.
Because if it’s the difference between you staying or going, Ott says, I could maybe shift things around and have you working stock.
I hired on here for wages. Not because I need to pat a horse now and then.
Barlow Ott squints as if he were staring into the sun. But he’s only gazing up through the head-and-a-half distance between his eyes and George’s stone-blue ones.
Jesus, Ott says. Does it ever occur to you to do things the easy way? A man’s willing to do you a favor . . .
George glances back at his wife waiting in the Hudson. Speaking of paychecks.
Rig
ht. Barlow Ott starts up the stairs to the trailer office. He leans hard on the handrail as if he needs to haul his body up the steps. Before he goes inside, he turns back to George Blackledge. Friday was payday so it won’t be much.
I know what I’ve got coming. And if you’ve got it in cash, that would save me a trip back into town.
George turns his back on the trailer as if any business done there did not bear witnessing. Back in the car, Margaret is craning her head out the window and looking skyward. Overhead a hawk has found a thermal to ride, and its tilting, silent-winged body is the only moving thing between the bright sun and the shadowless dust below.
The trailer’s door rattles open. Barlow Ott stands at the top of the steps and holds a few bills down to George, who takes them without counting and puts them into a wallet whose black leather has worn and frayed to gray at the fold and corners.
Little extra there, Ott says, because it’s the last.
Appreciate it.
Because it’s the last.
You need a receipt because it’s cash?
The last. You understand what I’m saying? Like severance pay. You’re a damn good worker, George. You show up sober every day and on time. You do what you’re told and you don’t waste time leaning on your shovel. But I took you on as a favor. You don’t want the work, there’s plenty of strong young backs out there waiting to take your place. I can’t hold the job for you.
As George listens to Barlow Ott’s lecture, the knots of his jaw work so hard and fast it seems as though he’ll swallow anything he has to say. But he gets the words out. I understand, Barlow. Then George holds his wallet aloft. And like I say, I appreciate it.
He turns and starts toward the car, shoving his wallet back into his pocket where a faded rectangle in the denim has been waiting for the billfold’s return.
To George’s back Barlow says, But tell that wife of yours I can always use a little extra help with the books.
Over his shoulder George replies, She’d need to work with the horses, but enough wind blows between the two men that those words might not have arrived at their destination.
Once he’s back in the car George reports none of his conversation, so it’s left to Margaret to say, I couldn’t hear what the two of you were talking about, but it didn’t look all that cordial. Is there something between you and Barlow I don’t know about?
George turns the key in the ignition and pulls down hard on the shift lever. As if he’s trying not to raise any dust, he drives slowly away from the trailer. I once ran in Barlow’s kid brother.
Franklin? For good cause, I assume.
He was using his wife as a punching bag. So yes, I’d say.
What was Barlow’s position? Let me guess: she had it coming.
Something like that.
You never told me about that. Arresting Franklin, I mean.
Didn’t I.
But then I’m sure there were plenty of arrests you never told me about.
Not much to most. I guess I brought home those that had some excitement to them.
Or if I knew the principals?
Hell, you probably knew them all. I never had much in the way of out-of-town business.
They drive past a young man stripped down to his undershirt, and though his battered straw hat is pulled down to his eyebrows, George sees enough of his face to raise a finger in greeting. The young man waves back with a hammer that George also recognizes.
I went to school with Franklin, Margaret says. As a matter of fact, he took me to a county dance or two.
He mentioned at the time he was once one of your suitors.
You remember that? After all these years?
You’d be surprised what sticks, considering how much that doesn’t.
Franklin was probably trying to appeal to your sentimental side.
That worked a time or two.
But not for Franklin.
Not after I saw his wife.
Yet with that between you two, Barlow hired you.
That he did.
Once the Hudson’s tires touch the highway’s asphalt, George stomps down hard on the accelerator. Now let’s see, George says, how long it takes to get the smell of horse-shit out of my nose.
4.
EVENTUALLY THE HIGHWAY THE BLACKLEDGES TRAVEL will lead through the fiery eruptions of rock that are the Dakota Badlands—mile after mile of jagged, sheered-off red and orange buttes and sudden deep-shadowed gorges and ravines—but the first few miles out of Dalton are as easy as a pony ride. This is prairie, rolling gentle country where black seams of trees and brush stitch one grassy hill to another. Barbed wire lines the highway, but with so much emptiness on every side, what the wire is supposed to fence in or out isn’t clear. Here and there an unmarked dirt or gravel path branches off from the highway, leading no doubt to a ranch or farm, but these are far enough from the main road that it would take a soaring hawk’s eye to find them. At one of the breaks in the wire—was a gate here once?—a turnoff barely as wide as a car appears, and George shifts down to second and turns the car hard off the highway, swerving so suddenly it seems as though he must be trying to avoid a collision.
A box on the backseat slides against the door, and cans and jars crash into each other. Margaret is pitched hard against her own door, but she rights herself quickly and reaches toward the steering wheel as if she means to take control of the car.
Don’t, George! Don’t do this!
But George pushes her hand away and concentrates on maneuvering the car up the narrow road, its soft dirt almost as difficult to negotiate as drifted snow. The dust the Hudson raises finds its way through George’s open window, and he risks taking a hand off the wheel for the time it takes to roll up the window.
Margaret slumps back in her seat, powerless now to prevent her husband from taking them where he’s decided they’ll go.
At the hill’s crest the road bends around a stand of bur oak before briefly widening and leveling out. Here George stops. If he didn’t, they’d drive a curving route down the other side of the hill. The road eventually stops at a ranch huddled in the valley below.
I don’t need to see this again, says Margaret, swatting her hand in the direction of a white frame house, a windmill, a small corral, and a barn and stable, their wood weathered to the color of a sparrow’s feathers. Although the valley and a few cottonwoods shelter the ranch house and its outbuildings, every wall and fence post seems wind-worn and leaning, nothing quite plumb, square, or true, everything down there as temporary as a season.
Because you remember it like this?
What it is. What it was. Margaret looks at her husband. Did you think I could ever forget it?
You’d be better off if you did.
Might as well say I’d be better off not drawing breath.
We’re talking about a place, Margaret. Boards. Nails. A few blades of grass and a hell of a lot of dirt in between. Eight hundred acres that never promised or delivered anything but hardship.
She rolls her window all the way down and hangs her head out as if she’s going to be sick. When she draws back inside she says, Don’t tell me what it is.
She’d protested coming here as urgently as if she’d been in mortal danger, but now Margaret Blackledge stares down into that valley so steadily her tremor seems to subside.
If he were not beside but behind her, George might be able to align his vision with hers, like sighting a rifle, and determine exactly the target of her gaze. The possibilities seem to be few. Give the mind the opportunity to work its memory magic, however, and absences can be as evocative as presences. And this man and woman have reached the age at which they are as likely to see what’s not there as what is . . . the circle where the horse tank once was, the grass blades still furled after decades of being matted down. The indentation in the earth where the homestead’s original sod house stood, but there the grass grows two shades greener for once having had the concentration of lives lived within its rectangle. The bare spa
ce beyond the back door where the lilacs grew and gave the twins shade for their play and Margaret her smell of spring when she needed it most.
George once woke in the night and stood at the kitchen window, water glass in hand, and looking out saw a face, someone standing among the lilacs and watching the house.
Without turning on a light, grabbing a weapon or a robe, or putting something on his feet, George burst from the house and ran like a man heedless of danger and certain of the identity of the person hiding in the shrubbery.
Well short of the confrontation he appeared eager for, George stopped.
Margaret had given the children a few old dishes, and under the bower of the lilacs they would dig holes and fill the cracked, chipped cups, bowls, and plates with what they scooped from the earth. But there must have been something besides digging to the children’s make-believe because they had balanced plates in the lilacs’ branches. It was one of those that had caught enough moonlight to look like a face, pale and yearning and turned toward the Blackledge home.
The night was cold and his bed was waiting, but George remained in place, staring into the mesh of interlaced bare branches, the season for blossom and fragrance long past. And when the ranch’s sale was final and the Blackledges were moving out, it was Margaret who insisted the lilacs be chopped down. We can’t do that, George argued. They’d bought those as sure as the house and the barn and the land they were built on. And burn the branches, was her answer.
Now no sign, no scorch or char, marks the place where George built the fire. Remarkable, earth’s strength to restore itself and erase human effort. But memory, stronger still, can send flames as high as the roof, and shift the wind and choke George and sting his eyes with smoke, lilac smoke, as though it could be differentiated from any other.
Margaret too is looking down less on a place than on a time . . . when everything—house, barn, corral, lilacs, good grass, and winding creek—was in its place yet none were visible.
