by Larry Watson
“I know this operation worked for Carole,” Marjorie says. “But sometimes things go wrong. Or they find something they didn’t expect . . .”
“Shhh. Don’t even think like that.”
“It’s not even for me I worry. Will needs a mother. Ann too. She might act grown up, but she’s still got a lot of little girl in her. I know what it could do to the kids.” She smiles sadly at Bill. “I know what it did to you, losing your mom.”
“I survived.” He smiles back at her. “But you can cut out that kind of talk. Ann and Will have a mother now, and they’ll have one for a good long time. You’ll be Grandma Sidey someday.”
“I know it’s wrong, but I tried to make a deal with God. Let me live until Ann and Will graduate. Just that long, and then I won’t care.”
Bill feels too much pity for his wife to argue with her, but a dissenting thought certainly comes to mind: Then what the hell is this operation for if you don’t even care if you live more than a few years? To fight his own thoughts as much as to console his wife, Bill kisses her on the forehead.
Marjorie pulls her hand out from under Bill’s, sits up straighter, and clears her throat. “So I’ve been thinking, if something should happen to me, maybe it would be best if Carole and Milo took the kids.”
“Took?”
“Ann could go to college here, and Will . . . Will would have Danny, someone his own age to play with, to go to school with . . .”
Bill steps to the window. Marjorie’s room is on the third floor, and Bill looks out, over rooftops to where the setting sun has left the foothills to the east half in light and half in shadow. With as much calm as he can summon, he asks, “Did you talk about this with Carole and Milo?”
“I brought it up. They said they were willing.”
He grips the window sill tightly, trying to hold back his anger until he can be certain it won’t explode and wound his wife—and perhaps himself—in ways that will never heal.
“And if they weren’t willing,” he says, his voice vibrating with held-back emotion, “then I suppose you wouldn’t have mentioned anything to me about how you don’t feel that our children belong with their father or in the town they’ve lived in all their lives. Maybe if Carole and Milo didn’t want our kids, then you’d just as soon they be made wards of the state.”
“Please, Bill. Don’t get mad. I didn’t mean it like that . . .”
She doesn’t finish her sentence, but she doesn’t have to. He knows what she believes: that under certain circumstances he will behave just as his father did. If Bill hadn’t brought his father back into their lives, would Marjorie have entertained such thoughts?
“I’m not my father, Marj. I’m not going to cut and run. No matter what. Will and Ann are as precious to me as my own life. Or yours.” The words are as tender as any he owns, yet they come out sounding as hard as an eviction notice.
He comes back to Marjorie’s bedside, and though he can’t bring himself to touch her again, he tries a little joke to convince her he isn’t angry. “Besides, where would I go? I don’t think either one of us can feature me hiring on as a ranch hand, can we?”
Marjorie pinches her lips tight and shakes her head.
“But the important thing here,” Bill continues, “is that you push these gloomy thoughts out of your mind. You’re in a good hospital. You’ve got a good doctor. You’ll come through this just fine. Tomorrow when you come out of surgery, we’ll call the kids.”
She tries to smile, but the mention of her children only brings the glisten back to her eyes.
“Buck up now,” he says. “You’ve been looking forward to this operation for a long time. You can’t let your spirits slide now, not at the last minute.” His words are costumed as a pep talk, but even a stranger can probably detect the scolding underneath. He tries again. “And once you’re back on your feet and we’re on our way out of town, I’ll find that street I was walking today. With its fancy old houses and iron fences and tall trees. I want you to see it. You won’t believe you’re in Montana.”
ELEVEN
Is this the same rocking chair that’s always been in the parlor? Calvin isn’t sure. Back when this house was his, he wasn’t much for rocking chairs. But now, with the way his back tightens up on him, if he doesn’t sit up straight, he’ll pay for it. So this high-backed rocker suits him fine. Old men and their rocking chairs—now he understands.
And this is where he liked to sit in the hot weather, right between the bay windows to take advantage of any cross-ventilation.
Why, in the heart of this hot day, is Calvin being overpowered by the memory of a winter night? And why, since Pauline is at the heart of the memory, does it come wrapped in rage?
They were going to attend an elaborate dinner that night, a banquet sponsored by the chamber of commerce, and local construction company owners, bankers, and realtors would be present. Were awards going to be handed out? Speeches made? Is that why Calvin Sidey was angry? Because they needed to be there on time, and Pauline was, as usual, running late? Was it snowing that night? Yes . . . and coming down so heavily that even driving the few blocks to the Gladstone Hotel would take longer than usual. And most aggravating of all, Pauline would be unable to understand his impatience. And then there she was, coming down the stairs at last and looking lovely—didn’t he appreciate the time she took to make herself beautiful for him? Was he doubly angry because he knew he couldn’t hold on to his anger in her presence?
Now something enters the memory that acts as a corrective, as if he’s been tuned to the wrong frequency, and now the signal comes clear. It wasn’t the night of the banquet. It was the night Pauline told him she wanted to return to France. Just for a visit. Her mother was ill, and Pauline was worried that she might not see her again. That had already happened with her father, the news of his death arriving a full week after the fact. What was so troubling to Pauline, as she told it, was that she had gone about her day-to-day life thinking of her father as alive . . . Calvin hadn’t spoken his thought: What difference was there in how you thought of him? And it was a good thing he held his tongue because it wasn’t long before he experienced something similar to what Pauline went through; Calvin believed his wife was still alive. Somehow that made him feel not only bereft but foolish, as if he had been walking blithely through a world that had changed, changed utterly, but he’d been insensible to its fundamental alteration.
But then the memory undergoes another transformation. God damn, is he turning into one of those old men who holds on to his memory but can’t keep one day, one year, one decade from sliding into another? It wasn’t a winter night when she told him she needed to go back to France for a visit. It was spring. It was a mild night in May, and that wasn’t snow falling outside the windows but blossoms from their crab apple tree. “Calveen,” she said, “I must go away for a short while.”
His mind, however, has not misgiven him entirely. He did sit here in this very room and watch the stairs for Pauline to descend. And his memory of rage is not wrong. Calvin Sidey raged and grieved, grieved and raged, winter and spring, snowfall and petal fall, over the woman who never came back to him.
WILL ISN’T SURE IF he should ask his question just now. Grandpa isn’t doing anything but staring out the window, but he does that so intently—has he moved at all in the last five minutes? —that Will wonders if his grandfather has seen something dangerous out there.
Will cautiously steps to his grandfather’s side. No gophers are visibly digging in the yard. No crows bounce in the branches of the crab apple tree. No bums are loitering in the alley. No thunderheads are building in the summer sky.
“Grandpa?” His grandfather gives no sign that he knows Will is in the room, much less that he’s heard the boy’s voice.
Will tries again. “Can I ask you something?”
The rocking chair suddenly lurches into motion, and with that his grandfather comes to attention. “Ask away.”
“Would you teach me to be
a cowboy? Please, I mean.”
“Be a cowboy—what does that mean?”
“You know. Like you.”
“Like me. Now that’s a howler.” His grandfather finally looks at Will. “Tell me. Do you like to dig?”
“Dig?”
“That’s right. With a shovel. Dig.”
Will shrugs. “I don’t know. Not really.”
His grandfather reaches out a long leg and with his boot hooks the little footstool and pulls it close to his rocking chair. “Sit if you like,” he says.
Will lowers himself to the footstool.
“You make the mistake a lot of folks make,” his grandfather says. “You think a cowboy is something when the fact is a cowboy does something. And the something he does is likely to be about as far from what most people think of as the cowboy life as pigs from horses. That’s why I asked you about digging. Believe me when I say I’ve sunk a hell of a lot more fence posts than I’ve roped cattle. I’ve never busted a bronc, but I’ve broke my collarbone and my arm and a few ribs because I couldn’t stay on a horse or two. And now I’ve got a saddle but no horse, but that’s all right because I’ve chased more cattle on foot or in a truck than I have on horseback. Now you tell me—does that sound like the kind of life you’re looking for?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t? Pah!” His grandfather waves his hand at Will as if his grandson could not have uttered a response more disgusting. “Trust me: You don’t. Study hard. Go to college. Get a good job behind a desk where the sun won’t fry your hide and the cold won’t freeze your ass. Be like your father. Then you can sell land instead of roam all over it.”
His grandfather has probably said all he has to say on the subject, but it’s so far from what Will needs to hear that he can’t get up from the footstool. It has taken too much of his courage to speak to his grandfather; he isn’t about to simply walk away.
He takes a deep breath and then lets it go. “Okay, then will you teach me to do what a cowboy does? What you do, I mean.”
His grandfather chuckles, but it’s not the kind of laugh that an adult humors a child with; this is the laugh one man uses to humiliate another. “You think you might have to ride into a neighbor’s hedge and jump a steer or string barbed wire up and down the alley? Or maybe you saw a horse hobbling up Fourth Street that needs shoeing? Jesus Christ, boy, you live in the middle of town. Why in hell would you need to learn any of that?”
“So I can get a job. I don’t want to live in town.”
His grandfather tilts back in his chair. “Oh, you don’t, eh? Looks like a damn good life to me.”
Will knows he’s being mocked, but he likes that his grandfather is willing to swear in his presence. “Maybe I could live with you,” Will says. “I could sort of be your helper.”
His grandfather reaches out and with the tip of his finger he swivels Will’s face toward the window. “See that garage out there? I live in a place smaller than that. Most of my meals I don’t bother sitting down to eat. And I eat them out of a can. I’ve barely got room for myself, much less a growing boy.”
Before Will can tell him that he has a tent he’s perfectly willing to live in if he can pitch it on his grandfather’s land—there’s a knock at the back door. He follows his grandfather through the kitchen.
Through the screen Will sees Mrs. Lodge, and she’s holding a covered plate. He hopes peanut butter cookies are under the napkin—Mrs. Lodge chops up peanuts and puts them in the cookie dough.
Will’s mother or father would simply shout for Mrs. Lodge to come in, but his grandfather talks to her through the screen. “Yes?” You would think the discussion he and Will were having was so important he resents this interruption.
But if Mrs. Lodge is offended, she doesn’t show it. She keeps smiling that pretty smile. “I brought the family a little something.” She raises the plate a little higher.
Will’s grandfather opens the door cautiously, and that’s all the invitation Mrs. Lodge needs. She’s in the kitchen and has her plate on the counter while his grandfather is still standing by the screen door.
She lifts the napkin. “Date bars,” she announces. Will can’t help making a face, and keen-eyed Mrs. Lodge notices. “Not your favorite, eh Will?”
He shakes his head.
“Suit yourself.” She turns back to Will’s grandfather. “I brought these as a little thank-you.”
Calvin Sidey raises his eyebrows quizzically.
“For speaking to the Neaveses about that dog of theirs. Maybe you solved the neighborhood’s problem. I notice that any time Queenie’s outside now she’s chained up. What did you say to them?”
Will’s grandfather stands by the door as if he’s waiting to escort Mrs. Lodge out.
“If you don’t mind my asking,” she says.
“I told them,” he says, then clears his throat. “I told them I’d shoot the dog if she came near the garbage again.”
Mrs. Lodge lets out a low whistle that slides down the scale. “Did you now? And I imagine you said it in such a way that they had no problem believing you’d do exactly that. I wish I could have seen June Neaves’s expression.”
“She didn’t have much to say on the subject.”
Will has always thought Mrs. Lodge is about as comfortable with herself as a person can be, but now her fingers fly to her blouse and fidget there as if she thinks a button might have come undone. “I almost forgot my other reason for coming over,” she says. “How would the Sideys like to come for supper tomorrow evening?”
His grandfather glances down at him, and Will has the strange feeling that his grandfather wants Will to accept or decline the invitation. He gives his grandfather a quick nod.
“I’ll have to check with the girl,” his grandfather says.
“Ann doesn’t have to work tomorrow night,” Mrs. Lodge says, “if that’s what you’re wondering. But I’ll understand if she’s got better things to do. How about you, Will? Feel like sitting down to supper with a couple old fogies? Steak and baked potatoes are on the menu. Rhubarb pie for dessert.”
Will doesn’t care for baked potatoes or rhubarb pie, but he nods in assent.
“All right then. Supper will be at six, but come on over earlier if you want to tell me how you like your steak done.” Mrs. Lodge is halfway out the door when she pauses. “Oh, and if he decides to come out of the basement and grace us with his presence, my son, Adam, will join us.”
Mrs. Lodge departs, but his grandfather remains by the door, watching her walk back to her own home. “I didn’t know I said yes to her,” Will’s grandfather says.
“Dad says Mrs. Lodge is like a car with no reverse. She can only go in one direction.”
“Well, I guess we’re going out for supper.”
Will follows his grandfather back to the living room where he walks to a window with a view of Mrs. Lodge’s home. For a long moment he gazes intently at her house, as if there’s a message in those gray-painted boards that he’ll be able to decipher if he just stares long enough. Will looks out too, but once again he can’t understand what’s outside the walls of this house that’s so deserving of his grandfather’s attention.
Will gives up. “Can I turn on the TV?”
“What would your mother say?”
“She’d probably say okay.”
“Go ahead then.”
Will squats on the floor in front of the television but doesn’t turn it on. “Can I ask you something else?”
“As long as it’s not about coming to live with me.”
“Would you really shoot Queenie?”
“Queenie?”
“The dog? The Neaveses’ dog?”
“I don’t say I’ll do a thing if I’m not willing to follow through. Which is the way everyone should live, even ten-year-old boys—”
“Eleven,” Will says. “I’m eleven.”
“Eleven. Fine. My point is, if you say you’ll do something, then by God you better be ready to
do it. Otherwise, you’re just making empty threats. And no one’s going to respect that kind of man.”
“But Queenie? You’d shoot Queenie?”
His grandfather turns back to the window. A hot wind has risen, and the town is so dry that blowing grit and sand scratch at the glass and screen. “I don’t believe it will come to that. If you’re not going to watch the television, why don’t you scoot. Go play with your friends.”
“I don’t like my friends.”
“Then they’re not your friends. You run along anyhow.”
WILL DOESN’T GO FAR. He enters the bathroom and locks the door behind him. He stands before the mirror and tries to put on one of his grandfather’s expressions. He draws as tight and straight a line with his lips as he can; he narrows and deadens his gaze and scowls a vertical crease between his eyes.
“Look, Stuart,” he says to the mirror. He’ll have to speak louder if he wants the words to rumble out like his grandfather’s. So his rehearsal cannot be heard, Will turns the water on full force before he continues. “Look, Stuart, I know you and Bobby and Glen are fixing to spy on my sister, and I’m here to tell you I’m not going to allow that. The first one of you I catch even looking in the direction of Ann’s window will have to answer to me. And if you’re thinking I’m making”—Will has to search for that phrase, how did he put it?—“an empty threat, you’re mistaken.”
And there Will stops, not only because he can tell he’s no longer imitating his grandfather but instead a character in a western movie or television show, but also because he remembers the fight Stuart was in last fall. Stuart, Gary, and Will had been downtown on a Saturday afternoon, and on their way to Gary’s house, they cut across the playground of Horace Mann Elementary School. Four boys their age stopped them and said Lincoln kids weren’t allowed on Horace Mann property. Without a word of argument, Stuart flew at the biggest boy and in an instant Stuart had him down, straddled and held by the back of his shirt collar as if he were a miniature horse. “We go where we fucking want to go,” Stuart said, bending down to hit the boy in the back of the head with his fist, producing a sound like a door being knocked on with a rubber mallet. Stuart released the boy, and all the Horace Mann kids ran off. As Stuart, Gary, and Will continued on their way, Stuart shook out his hand. “That bastard’s head was hard as cinder block.” Will is smaller than the Horace Mann boy, and Will knows he’d fare no better in a fight with Stuart.
