“Let’s get the hell out of here,” I said.
We went and got drunk, the first time Bob and I had ever done that together, and it helped us forget, but only for that evening.
To this day, I have never understood why, while people were starving along the roads of Montana, and starving in their homes, and piecing together meals from scraps, meals of hard moldy bread smeared with lard, or the tough, stringy meat of an unfortunate prairie dog, the government bought hundreds of sheep people had mothered and loved and doctored for the purpose of feeding people, and they slaughtered them and let them rot. They did nothing with the meat.
Helen had a treasure hunt set up for the boys. There was a map, which she burned around the edges for authenticity. Little George and Teddy studied that map closely, and went searching for several buried treasures—some baseball cards, bags of hard candy, some colorful marbles, and a brand-new book for each boy—Treasure Island for Teddy and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer for George.
The boys were thrilled by the whole affair, laughing each time they unearthed the next surprise.
“I thought this was my birthday,” Bob complained.
“Bob!” Helen scolded, but they were both smiling.
We sat down to a birthday dinner of shark (actually catfish). The party had raised our spirits as high as they’d been in years. We laughed loud and often, sometimes just from looking at each other and our ridiculous costumes.
Bob sat at the head of the table lit up like a Halloween pumpkin. He said practically nothing, just smiling and absorbing the good feelings around him.
I sat watching Bob, grateful to have this diversion from the difficult realities we had just experienced days before. And as I scanned our little round dining room table, seeing the joy in those familiar faces, I struggled to find a way to measure the importance of this family.
There was, it seemed, only one certainty—that being the unwavering hold my family held as my most important source of strength. This would never change. What did seem vulnerable to so many things was my ability to remember this, and to keep it in focus. I realized how much I had been distracted lately, even before the trip to Belle Fourche. The years of drought, of falling prices and rising casualties, had quietly but steadily created a monster in my head—a monster that started as a small desire to stop the decay, but had grown into an obsession with figuring out a solution. I had somehow convinced myself that there was something that we were overlooking—some answer to our problems that, once we stumbled across it, we would all slap palms to our foreheads and say, “How could we have missed that?” It couldn’t be so simple, I thought. It couldn’t be that just because we weren’t getting any rain, so many around us were on the verge of death. The obsession had pushed me into a mental storm shelter, I realized, where I’d locked the door, trying to protect myself from the damage. The problem was that I was alone in there.
That day, looking at my family, I vowed to remind myself that everyone else in the room was facing the same hardship that I was, and despite that, here we were—laughing, happy, together. I needed to remember that the solution to my problems was right here in front of me—we were it.
“A toast,” I announced halfway through the meal. I stood and raised my glass. “To the toughest damn pirate on the high Montana seas. Barnacle Bob.”
Everyone laughed, glasses high, and Bob turned the color of the stripes in his shirt. As I sank back into my chair, a tinking of spoon against glass turned all eyes toward the head of the table again. Although Helen was standing, she was so small that it wasn’t immediately apparent. She cleared her throat, looking down for a moment. When she raised her face, her cheeks were shiny red. “I know that this is Bob’s day. I don’t want to steal any glory from old Barnacle Bob here…” She gestured toward him, laughing nervously. “But I do have an announcement to make.”
Helen dropped her head once more. “I do hate to bring up something…well, something less than happy…” She ran a knuckle under her nose.
“Sweetheart, don’t…” Bob reached for her arm, but she twisted her torso away from him, just out of his reach.
“It’s okay, Bob. I want to.”
“I don’t want you to,” Bob said quietly. “That’s just it. Not now. I don’t want you to.”
Helen ignored him, and Bob’s lips pursed as he watched her prepare to say what she was going to say. Helen lifted her chin.
“It seems that some of us don’t have soil that is as fertile as others,” she said, and she turned directly toward Rita, her blue eyes fixing on Rita with a brief, envious glare. I don’t know if anyone else even caught it, but it sent a current down my spine, and Rita looked at me with a puzzled frown.
“Bob and I lost our baby,” Helen said. “Just yesterday,” she added. “We lost our little baby boy.” And Helen put a hand to her eyes, squeezing them into a bundle of skin. Bob stood up and wrapped an arm around her waist, leading her from the room as her shoulders bounced against his chest.
The rest of us sat in a bewildered silence, staring at anything but each other. There were so many reasons to be uneasy about this turn of events, my mind swirled. First of all, this was not something our family usually did—announcing bad news in such a way, drawing such attention to misfortune. Especially something so personal and delicate. Something that most of us would hardly discuss privately among ourselves, and never in front of the kids. And for the very reason of the effect that this announcement had brought—the unease. But more than that, the timing of this was so hard to fathom—in the middle of such a joyous occasion, one of so few during that period. It was odd and unsettling, and finally, to add one more element—we had no idea that Helen was pregnant. She certainly wasn’t far enough along to be showing yet, which wouldn’t be far considering how small she was. So that was one more reason that her announcement seemed bizarre. Miscarriages, in early pregnancy, were pretty common in our country. In fact, they were common enough that they seldom rated very high in the realm of news or gossip unless there was some twist to it—if it was an unmarried teenager, for instance. But as difficult as they may have been for some of the women who experienced them, there were enough children under ten dying that it pretty much overwhelmed the dramatic effect of a miscarriage.
All of this together was enough to make everyone uncomfortable. But for me, the worst part of all was the look she gave Rita. The rest I could find a way to chalk up to the frustration of a woman who was distraught. But I could not forget that look, which was hard to describe as anything less than envious hatred. It left me with a very uncomfortable feeling that the Helen we had lived with for the past two years had been a calculated presentation of what the real Helen knew we wanted to see. But the real Helen was lurking. I was afraid that we’d just seen a glimpse of her.
10
winter 1937
“We should be back before dark.” Dad tucked both arms into his coat, buttoned it up, and pulled a scotch cap onto his head. He had a strip of cotton cloth tied around his head, covering his ears, as did I.
“All right,” Mom said. She shoved a fresh loaf of bread into the bag of food she had prepared for Art and Sam Walters. After the murder in Alzada, and Mom’s dramatic apprehension of the killer, Stan and Muriel had shipped a big console radio to the ranch, to make sure we had more up-to-date news. The radio had become an immediate fixture, droning in the background all the time—providing news, ball games, and entertainment. We especially enjoyed listening to Jack Benny and Fibber McGee and Molly. But the radio proved to be invaluable as a source of something everyone in our family was interested in—information—weather reports, news, and the latest statistics on the devastating decline of the economy. As we prepared for our departure, the current stock prices drifted from the living room in a steady voice.
“You guys stay warm out there,” Steve Glasser said. “Don’t let Art sell you anything.” He smiled. “And tell him to drop in sometime soon.”
“We’ll do that,” I said, trying to bel
ieve that Steve’s optimism was justified. No one had seen Art for about a month, which prompted this trip. Not that it was that unusual for him to be out of sight for that long, but he had continued to deteriorate, looking more skeletal each time we saw him. During each long absence, the concern grew a little stronger.
It was damn cold, and the walk from the house to the barn, with the snow crunching beneath our feet, worried me. Dad was also getting old, and these excursions, even our morning feedings in the winters, were not easy on him. The sky was gray, the snow gray, the trees gray, and our breath floated thick and gray from our mouths and nostrils. I felt the icy ground right through the soles of my boots, and the moisture inside my nose froze within minutes. My nose actually hurt from the cold. The wind was strong, directly into our faces, and I pulled my kerchief up to my lower eyelids.
“Feels like winter,” Dad said.
“Yeah, must be just around the corner.”
The barn wasn’t any warmer, but at least it provided some shelter from the wind. We saddled our horses with stiff fingers. The horses fought the frozen steel bits, shaking and raising their heads, keeping their teeth clamped shut so we had to dig our fingers into their jaws. We rode out into the weather, and the six feet of horse put us higher, where the wind was stronger and colder. My joints felt stiff, and the exposed skin immediately lost all feeling. The leather saddle was cold against my butt and thighs. And it never did warm up.
We had lost more stock, but this winter hadn’t been quite as bad as the previous few. For one thing, most of the sheep and cattle we had left were the strong ones, the ones that had made it this far. Unlike the men and women who tried to eke out a living on the land, the livestock had nothing to work with but bulk, muscle. Their smarts were limited to having enough sense to eat what they could find and drink when water was in front of them.
The ride to Art’s place took us through the river crossing, which was frozen over, the thick ice covered with two- or three-foot cliffs of powdery snow.
The previous summer, near the crossing, Dad, George, Teddy, and I had stripped to our underwear for a swim one searing afternoon. At first, because of the heat, and a general lack of energy, we just wallowed around in the shallow water, submerging our torsos beneath the surface. But as our bodies cooled, our slumbering energy stirred. George started splashing water on his brother’s head, and soon an all-out war broke out. Teddy endured his brother’s abuse for thirty seconds, then jumped to his feet and pounced on George, pushing his head underwater.
The next thing I knew, Dad was on his feet, swinging his arms, fists locked together, sending great arcs of water over his grandsons. At that point, I couldn’t just lie there and watch. I got up and grabbed my hat, and started scooping hatfuls, flinging them toward Dad. Soon we were soaked and laughing, in one of the few periods of pure joy we experienced during the thirties. It was a moment I had used to replace other memories of the river whenever I had occasion to maneuver the crossing.
We rode through the pasture where our cattle were wintering. They looked at us, in unison and forever, perhaps wondering why they were seeing us for the second time that day. The broken corpses of the dead lay off on their own, isolated and half covered with snow, like graves that had been uncovered by wind.
The trees that were still alive along the river looked thinner, more alone, because much of the brush at their feet had died during these hard, dry years. And of course the creeks, buried deep beneath the snow now, were dry, as they had been every season during the past fifteen years. The wind blew the dry, powdery snow just above the ground, making the sweeping air appear visible.
Dad and I spoke little, sensing each other’s need to look, and think about what we saw. Although Dad and I had never talked much, it seemed that we had less than ever to say. It wasn’t that we had little to discuss, either. There were plenty of things we should have been talking about. With Jack’s absence, I was the natural choice to take over the ranch when Dad couldn’t do it anymore. But aside from day-to-day operations, we seldom talked about the ranch. Dad kept his thoughts about the future to himself. And it bothered me. I couldn’t help but wonder why. Did he expect Jack to return? Or did he not want to think about the fact that he couldn’t go on forever? Was there something about my abilities that he questioned? As unpleasant as these possibilities were, there was one that was worse. It was hard to admit, but even harder to overlook the coincidence that this distance between us had started when Helen became part of our family.
In some respect, this behavior was consistent with my dad’s attitude. He had always been more interested in doing the work than in discussing it, or planning it out. But he had developed a certain degree of gruff impatience behind his usual indifference. And it was this that led me to an unpleasant theory. Although I hadn’t seen it happen, I could just imagine Helen turning her gift for inquisition toward Dad and his plans for the ranch. And it also wasn’t hard to imagine Dad jumping to the quick and probably accurate conclusion that Helen’s questions were pointed in a specific direction. From there, it was easy to see Dad move to a decision to ignore anybody and everybody’s questions.
I tried not to think about it too much, and I ignored Helen, and she me, a much easier task than one would expect for two people who live on the same ranch, often sharing the same table.
But there was one occasion when Helen and I found ourselves alone in the big house for most of an afternoon and evening, a day that Rita had asked me for some time alone with her boys. Mom, Dad, and Bob had gone into Belle for some reason. I spent part of the day outside working, but it was very cold, so that didn’t last long. So I sat in front of the radio for the rest of the afternoon, listening to a game between the Yankees and the Red Sox while Helen baked a cake and worked on a dress she was making. But we couldn’t eat dinner separately without being downright rude, so we sat down at the same table. It was the most extensive conversation I ever had with her alone. She had apparently decided to accept the fact that I would never trust her, which I respected somehow, and that evening it seemed that our mutual mistrust could be set aside while nobody else was around.
She sipped quietly at a spoonful of soup.
“It seems we don’t have much to say to each other,” she said.
I rubbed the back of my neck, then broke some crackers into my soup. “That would be true,” I said.
“I sometimes feel, Blake, that you didn’t give me much of a chance.”
I thought, gulping a spoonful of soup to delay my response. I crunched on the crackers, and swallowed. “That may also be true.”
She brightened a bit at this admission, shaking out her napkin, then folding it neatly back into her lap. “I don’t know if you realize it, Blake, but I had a very difficult childhood.”
I studied her, nodding. Although I knew this was true, I didn’t quite know how to respond to this information. It was not something people usually talked about in our world. I was also leery of her trying to use this to elicit some kind of sympathy from me, something I didn’t feel. So other than the small nod, I didn’t respond.
She didn’t seem offended. “Well, no matter,” she said. “The fact is this—to me, the most important thing in the world is having a good life for my husband and children.”
I raised my brow. I knew that Bob and Helen were still trying desperately to have children. It was something Helen talked about incessantly. I wondered if she was suggesting that they had been successful.
“When we have some,” she added.
I gulped the last of the soup from my bowl, then set it down in front of me. “Well, that sounds about like everyone else who lives out here, doesn’t it?”
“Exactly,” she said.
I eyed her, stopped short for a moment by this admission. It was the closest any of us had ever come to approaching the delicate topic of the future. And it was the closest she had ever come to admitting what she wanted.
“You figured it out, Blake,” she said. “You’re the smart one
, you know. You figured this all out a long time ago, didn’t you?” She smiled, and for a moment, I saw what Bob and so many others had fallen prey to. She really could be charming. And I couldn’t help but admire her willingness to put herself right out there like that.
But we didn’t talk that way again, ever.
Nearing Art’s place, there was no smoke coming from the chimney, and a pool of dread started to gather in my belly, like a cold liquid splashing up into my chest. I held my hand over my mouth and nose, trying to warm some air and inhale some of that warmth back inside. It didn’t help.
The rest of the house came into view, and it looked worse than the last time I’d seen it. The barn had given up, lying down on itself, and a big chunk of tin was gone from the roof of the house, leaving a section of the rafters naked. The inside of the house would be as cold as it was outside. Not a good sign.
“Uh-oh,” Dad muttered.
We dismounted and walked to the door, which was ajar. Dad kicked the snow away so we could swing the door open, and our dread was confirmed. Sam was in the same chair as always. His head tilted forward, as if he’d fallen asleep sitting up, except that his eyes were open. His hand rested on his thigh. The dusty bottle still sat on his armless side. He was blue-gray.
Art lay on the bed, curled up like a cat, his knees tucked against his chest, arms folded under his head. He looked surprised, scared, and most of all tired. And he must have been tired, trying to fight off the relentless decay around him.
Things were strewn everywhere: clothes, plates, pans, and bones with the meat picked off. It all lay in a strange sort of arrangement—not like someone had come in and ransacked the place, but as though it had all been laid out to form a message of some kind. A code. Mice were frozen to the dirt floor, everywhere, and the snow had formed a drift in the kitchen. I knew from the look of things that death had been a good way to end things for the Walters brothers.
In Open Spaces Page 22
