by Larry Watson
Finally the Blackledges have enough evidence to reach a conclusion: life could not go better here than in their town. They’re certain of it.
22.
LATE IN THE AFTERNOON MARGARET SUGGESTS THEY return to Ressler’s for supper.
Was the food that good? asks George.
I can see Montgomery Ward from there, and I’d like to find out who picks Lorna up this evening.
What does it matter?
It doesn’t, all right? But I’d like to know.
Ressler’s is much less busy for the evening meal than it was at noontime, and George and Margaret are free to sit where they like. Once again they find themselves behind a plate glass window staring out at a street both strange and familiar. George turns the menu over in his hand as though he’s searching for something not printed there.
Nothing look good to you? asks Margaret.
I’ve eaten more restaurant food in the past couple days than I have in the last five years.
Oh, you miss my cooking—is that it?
It sits a little better with me.
High praise indeed from Mr. Blackledge. She reaches across and taps his menu. Go ahead. Order a steak.
You’re still buying, are you?
Call it a celebration.
She only said she’d think about it.
I’m optimistic.
Well, you were there. I wasn’t.
The same waitress who served them lunch approaches with her pad and pencil. What’ll it be? she asks. As she waits for their order the only sound is the grinding of her teeth.
Margaret asks, Does the split pea soup have ham in it?
Sizable chunks. And enough that you don’t have to go looking for ’em.
That’s what I’ll have. And coffee.
George asks for the hot roast beef sandwich, just what Lorna ordered earlier in the day.
You gonna stay and eat it this time? the waitress asks.
And coffee, he replies. Black.
I’ll bring it. It’s up to you how you drink it.
As she walks away Margaret shakes her head. She’ll have me grinding my own teeth before long.
Must be a hell of a life, waiting on folks.
I don’t give a damn how hard your life is. It’s no excuse for rudeness.
Maybe that plays here.
Maybe it does.
They fall then into the companionable silence of the long-married, content to wait for something new to enter their lives and the conversation to continue. Their coffee arrives, but still they stare out the window. Finally Margaret says, You’re better at this than I am. God, I hate to sit around and wait.
George wraps his fingers around his coffee cup. You remember Bill Henning?
The father or the son?
It’s the son I have in mind. Billy, I should have said.
I remember them both. And I went to school with Billy’s mother, Dora Henning. Dora Armsen she was then.
And do you remember that I arrested the son? He’d been breaking into people’s garages and sheds and stealing tools. He had a fellow up in Williston who was willing to buy anything and everything Billy could bring in. Anyway. When I think of waiting, I think of him. Once I found it was him doing the break-ins, I drove out to his folks’ place and parked in a stand of cottonwoods and just waited. A stakeout I guess they call it now, but then I was just waiting. I did that for a couple hours every day. A week went by, and Billy never showed. But I kept on waiting. Because I knew sooner or later I’d see him going in or coming out. After a while I damn near hoped he wouldn’t come back. Don’t do it, Billy, I thought. Don’t come back home. I don’t know why. I had no special liking for the kid. It was sort of like feeling sorry for the mouse you’ve set a trap for, I suppose. And sure enough. He came back. And when I had the cuffs on him and was transporting him to the jail, I asked him, Where you been? Turned out he’d been up in Canada. Out in Washington State. Traipsing all over the Northwest, spending the money he’d saved—saved, mind you—from selling all those stolen hammers and saws and wrenches. And why’d you come back? Damned if he could give an answer. Never gave it much thought. He’d ended up there all his life. This was just one more time. The wrong time, I thought. But I don’t believe I said that to him.
Such is the pull of home, says Margaret.
Is that what it is? I thought maybe it was the pull of needing to be punished for your crimes.
It might seem as though their silence has returned, because Margaret says nothing for a long moment. She looks at her husband and leans her trembling chin into her palm. You’re a patient man, George. That’s one of your strong points. It was what made you a good father.
Did it. And as a husband?
Patience is always a virtue.
Well, right now I’m getting damn tired of waiting for that roast beef.
Did the Henning boy do prison time for taking the tools?
Three years in Deer Lodge.
There’s a lesson in patience.
Is it patience when you’ve got no choice in the matter? I suppose.
Their order arrives, and George hunches over his food and eats like a man who’s had only a doughnut since breakfast. But Margaret’s attention is so focused on the double glass doors of Montgomery Ward that she can barely look at her soup long enough to bring a spoonful to her lips. George is scraping the final smear of gravy from the rim of his plate when Margaret says, There she is.
Lorna has just walked out of the store and stands on the sidewalk. She glances quickly in each direction, then leans back against the building. She reaches into her purse and takes out a pack of cigarettes. With the practiced efficiency of one who has lived in the wind all her life, she pivots, ducks her head, and, inside the sheltering cup of her hands, lights a cigarette.
For a few minutes she stands there, waiting tiredly, unaware that she’s being watched.
Long day of being on her feet, says George.
Are you feeling sorry for her?
I am not.
She’s not having an easy time of it. I know that.
Before Lorna’s cigarette is smoked down to its filter, her ride arrives. Bill Weboy pulls to the curb.
Lorna sees him and his blue Ford. There can be no doubt of that. But for a moment she doesn’t step forward. She remains in place as though some impossible comfort in the rough red bricks prevents her from pushing away from the building. But finally she moves, flicking her cigarette toward the gutter as she climbs into the car.
See that? Margaret says. She’s in no hurry to—
To what? Go back to her child? To her husband?
Or mother-in-law. Or that spooky old house.
She’s tired, Margaret. Or maybe she’s disappointed that Donnie didn’t show up to take her home. Donnie and Jimmy.
Margaret pushes her bowl away though a few spoonfuls of soup remain. We’ll have to repack the car, George. We’re going to have an extra passenger or two on the way back home. I’m sure of it. Extra passengers and their luggage.
23.
AFTER SPENDING SO MUCH OF THE DAY IN AIMLESS activity, the Blackledges relish having tasks to perform. They rearrange the tent and its poles, and they undo the neat piles and packets of towels and bedding and stuff them into corners of the Hudson’s trunk. George takes the dishes out of a box and puts them in his suitcase, layered between articles of clothing. Through this process of repackaging and disposing, they come up with a few empty boxes and cartons, and these they tear apart and put into the incinerator barrel behind the motel along with the food that can spoil or go stale. Margaret steps back from the Hudson and though most of their possessions are still in their cabin, she surveys the car as though it were fully packed.
If we have to, she says, we can put a suitcase or two on the front seat between us and Jimmy could ride there.
Hell, you can hold him on your lap all the way. It’s not that long a trip.
At this suggestion she smiles. Of course she could do that. Of course.
<
br /> Should we check out in the morning? George asks. Or wait until Lorna makes up her mind?
The clouds that have raced across the sky all day have turned invisible with the approach of night. A few stars wink high above the eastern horizon. Now that she’s stopped working, Margaret has to wrap her arms around herself against the evening’s dropping temperature. We’ll check out, she says.
...
George is sitting in their room’s only chair. He’s reading the day-old copy of the Billings Gazette he picked up in the motel office. Waiting on his tongue is the news about a man who died in a grain elevator in a small Montana town near Bozeman. Tongarden was the man’s name. Hadn’t there been a rancher south of Dalton named Tongarden? The dead man was forty-seven years old. Wouldn’t their Tongarden have been about that age?
But when Margaret comes out of the bathroom George’s question and his curiosity about Tongarden vanish. She’s wearing a white nightgown with a scoop neckline trimmed in floral lace interwoven with satin ribbon. It has a center placket with shell buttons, and Margaret has left the top two buttons undone. The bottom of the nightgown has pintuck pleats, and the hem is finished with ruffles. She bought the nightgown at DeLancey’s in Dickinson, North Dakota, one autumn over twenty years ago, after a particularly hot, dry summer on the ranch. She’d never spent that much on nightwear, and perhaps never that much on a single item of clothing, but at the time drastic action was in order. The money was well spent. The nightgown has never failed to have its intended effect.
George says, You brought that.
Hell, I brought damn near everything I own.
But that . . .
Oh, quit gawking, and let’s have that drink of whiskey.
It’s late September but when Margaret wears the nightgown you can see that her throat and a V extending down her chest are still red from the summer’s sun.
You want me to water yours down? asks George.
Don’t bother. Once I get the first swallow down, it’ll be fine.
...
Margaret Mann rose from the floor, naked, unashamed as only a long-legged, slim-hipped, high-breasted nineteen-year-old can be, sure of her body and its utility, worn to little more than muscle and bone from doing a man’s work on her father’s ranch. George started to get up too, but she pushed him back down. She walked first to the back door and then to the front, locking each in turn. The message was clear. Neither of her parents carried a key, so Margaret and her suitor would carry this act to its conclusion even if her parents returned early from their Sunday afternoon dinner at Mount Olivet Lutheran Church in Dalton and stood banging on the door, howling to be let in.
Only this could stop them: Margaret lay on her back, her thighs gripping George’s midsection, but before she allowed him to enter her, she grabbed his hair and lifted his head from where he was lapping at her breasts. She clasped her hands tightly to his face, looked directly into his eyes, and said, You’re not my first. Breathlessly he replied, As long as I’m the last. And who, after all, is the man who can turn back when he’s come that close to ecstasy? His answer was good enough for both of them.
When it came to the penchants and practices of women, George Blackledge was not completely without experience; he’d been in the Great War, and in the company of two other soldiers he’d paid for a woman in England and later had one all to himself in Belgium for nothing but gratitude. But those encounters did nothing to prepare him for Margaret Mann. He had no idea a woman could or would ride as hard in pursuit of her pleasure as Margaret did. In the midst of the act she reached overhead and with both hands gripped the carved wooden foot of her mother’s heavy horsehair couch, moving it an inch or two in her passion.
Neither was George ready for what happened when they were alone together the very next day. They were in the barn, where Margaret’s father or Sam Easley, the Manns’ other hired hand, might walk in at any moment, and within earshot of Mrs. Mann in the house.
Look here, Margaret said to George. She walked over to a patch of sunlight flooding down from the hayloft. Then she unsnapped her shirt, dropped it to her waist, and turned around to reveal her bare back to him. On each shoulder blade she had a red spot about the size of a silver dollar, matching friction burns from lying with him on her mother’s rug. Saddle sores! she said and laughed. I got one on my butt too but I won’t show you that one. Not now anyway!
...
Forty years later Margaret Blackledge née Mann still has the passion and strength to set furniture moving. She reaches overhead and with both hands grabs on to one of the bed’s iron spindles. As George drives himself into her she lifts and arches her body to meet his thrusts. The bed frame bounces and bangs against the wall and the springs squeal like a small trapped animal. The chenille bedspread has slipped to the floor.
Finished, his weight off her, the draft that has found its way into the cabin cooling her sweat, Margaret says, My, my, Mr. Blackledge. I guess this Montana air agrees with you. All eight of the nightgown’s buttons are undone and its ruffled hem is bunched about Margaret’s waist.
If we have Jimmy and his mother living under our roof, we won’t have much in the way of privacy.
Margaret pulls the nightgown over her breasts and swings her legs off the bed. I wouldn’t worry about that. We’ve always found a way to tuck ourselves away from prying eyes, haven’t we? Maybe we’ll sneak out into the yard under the dark of the moon.
I’m not much for that sort of outdoor foolishness. I guess I never was.
Margaret sighs. I was making a joke, George. A little levity, that’s all. You certainly lost your mood, didn’t you.
She heads for the bathroom and George lies back, staring at the ceiling so hard it can’t be the ceiling he’s looking at. But whatever he sees there, he must eventually tire of scrutinizing it, because when Margaret returns he’s asleep. His arms and legs are splayed out in an attitude a little alarming in a man George’s age.
...
Is it the wind, which can never be calm for long in this part of the world and has now found something unlatched or untethered to set free and send banging its way across Montana? Or is it an hours-later echo of the bedpost that George and Margaret had thumping against the wall?
Knocking. Steady and insistent.
By the time they win their struggle against the undertow of the unconscious and sort out their dreaming impressions from more-likely sources of the sound, a voice accompanies the knocking. Mr. Blackledge? Mrs.? We have an emergency here!
The door, someone’s at the door. In the middle of the night.
George sits up, clicks on the lamp at the bedside, and then flinches at the sudden light. He stands and although he’s dressed only in pajama bottoms he walks quickly to the door and opens it without question.
24.
YES, THERE CAN BE NO DOUBT—GEORGE OPENED THE door. He opened it, and isn’t an open door—whether open three inches or three feet—as good as a spoken invitation to enter?
But if George’s assumption was that someone from the motel office would appear in the doorway, he was wrong, and before he can push the door closed—an effort that would have been futile anyway, considering what his pushing strength would have been matched against—four Weboys have shouldered and shoved their way into Cabin Number Eight of the Prairie View Motor Court.
First through the door are Marvin and Elton, the wooly-headed Weboy brothers, followed by their uncle Bill.
What the hell, George says. What the hell. He backs up a few paces, which is a mistake, since the Weboys immediately flow into the space he has vacated.
Blanche Weboy then enters, and slowly, as if she wants to be certain the way has been prepared for her. She looks around the cabin as casually as if she’s inspecting it for her own use. Then she closes the door and slips the locking chain into its track, something the Blackledges never bothered with.
Margaret is sitting up in bed now and about to get out, but when Bill Weboy looks at her and arches his eyebrows, s
he sits back, pulling the sheet up to cover herself. It has taken her an uncharacteristically long time to speak, but she finally says, You can’t come in here!
Too late for that, Grandma, says Bill. We’re in.
Blanche smiles and points to George. He opened the door to us.
What time is it? asks Margaret, but plainly she doesn’t care what the answer might be.
So many bodies, large, light-absorbing bodies, in this small cabin, and their wavering shadows make it seem as though the room were lit by firelight.
Out, says George. Get the hell out.
Blanche ignores him and instead sits down on the edge of the bed. She doesn’t even look at Margaret. See, you think you can gang up on Lorna, Blanche says, but then when it’s done to you, it’s a different story.
One of the Weboys—Elton? Is he the taller one?—moves to the door but only to stand with his back to it. The other brother remains in place. He’s holding a canvas satchel that bulges as though it might hold a load of tools.
Blanche unties her scarf, takes it off her head, and waves it in the air. Then she sighs and shakes loose her black hair as if it has pained her to have it covered and controlled.
What are you talking about? asks Margaret.
Is that what you’re going to do? says Blanche. Pretend like you don’t know what I’m talking about? Pretend like you didn’t jump Lorna at work? Two against one—
Nigger fun, her son adds.
—and the two of you badgering and bullying her to give up her boy. Shame on you. Trying to pry a baby loose from his mama. Blanche switches her scolding gaze to George. Shame on the both of you. You’re lucky Lorna doesn’t have a little mama bear in her. Come between that kind of mama and her baby, you’re liable to get your hand bit. And worse.
That’s not exactly what happened, says Margaret.
Somebody would have tried to come between me and any of my boys? Would have tried to talk me out of my own child? I tell you, it would have been hell to pay.
