The Weight of an Infinite Sky

by Carrie La Seur

  “Yes,” Edith breathed. “It was Dwight, not me.” Edith clasped Anthony’s forearm below the level of the table, hard. “Dwight’s such a quiet man since the war, Anthony. Well, he was quiet before, but Vietnam nearly finished him. You know what he’s like. Won’t say boo to anybody. If he hadn’t asked me to marry him before he shipped out, I don’t think it ever would have happened. So he won’t say no to Rick, just turns his back on him, and Rick thinks it means he can keep coming around. Dwight got to where he couldn’t sleep he was so upset, being chased down like that. Talking in his sleep. Plumb beside himself. I tried to stay with him, but Rick caught him alone in the far pasture one day a few weeks ago.”

  “What did Rick say?”

  Edith sighed. “I don’t know how he could have known, but there was a calf, a sweet little thing I bottle-fed last winter. I called him Porter. You know, like porterhouse. We thought he was going to make it, then we found him dead one morning earlier this spring, not a mark on him. It didn’t make any sense until we opened him up and found his belly full of hemlock. And Burlington said—” Edith paused to see if anyone was listening, but the others were loudly engaged in enthusiastic conversation about county fair projects. “You can’t tell anyone this story, Anthony. If it gets around that we’re accusing him, I’m afraid what he might do. We’re getting on. We can’t ride herd twenty-four hours a day—and nobody would believe us anyway. We have no proof.”

  Anthony put his other hand on Edith’s where it gripped him. “Just tell me what happened. We’ll figure out what to do.”

  Edith slumped as if she’d grown suddenly much heavier. “Well, I’m sure I don’t have the whole story, but what I gather from Dwight is that Burlington started talking about that calf. So many things can happen to livestock out grazing. They’re so vulnerable. Sure, there’s hemlock on the place, but we never had animals get into it before. And Rick said something about horses. Well, I don’t have to tell you that if anything happened to Mr. Howdy, Dwight would just curl up and die. He loves that horse like a brother. Better than. Rick never said it outright, but I think he was telling Dwight he killed that calf. How else could he have known? I probably told a few people but it’s not like we advertised. It took Dwight three days to tell me as much as he did in fits and starts, and at the end he pulled out a copy of the lease and told me he’d signed.” Edith’s hand flew to her mouth and she smothered a little sob. A flutter of concern arose from the women around her and she waved them off. “No, no,” she said. “I’m okay. Anthony was just remembering his father to me. Such a loss.”

  Anthony swallowed as attention turned away from them. “I’m so sorry. We won’t let him get away with this.” They were the only words to say, but as soon as they came out he realized that he meant them.

  “You can’t let Dwight know I told you.” Edith fixed Anthony with moist eyes and a voice so soft he had to watch her lips to be sure of her words. “He’s mortified about it. I can tell. He’s such a strong man, Anthony. Such a good man. You know. And the neighbors—I know how disappointed they’ll be when they hear. They’ll say they understand, but they can’t hide how upset they get when someone makes up their mind to take the money. That’s what they’ll think we did, just got greedy. We always said we’d never sign. Dwight just didn’t know how to fight back against . . . that.”

  “I’ll talk to him,” Anthony said. “Chance says if we get enough affidavits from different landowners about the methods Rick’s using to get those signatures, we’ll have a case. My guess is we’re not the only ones Harmony is bullying this way. Chance is talking to the FBI. What if we ask Dwight if it’s okay to talk to you about what happened? Then you could fill in the details and all he’d have to do is sign.”

  Edith’s chin trembled but she nodded. “Hurry,” she said. “That mine’s getting awful close. If they get your place, they’ll come across ours first thing. That narrow strip you have to the east of us is the only thing stopping them. We’re too old to move. It’ll kill Dwight. I know it will.” She clutched her napkin and gave a determined smile to someone down the table.

  Anthony sat back, calculating the next move toward Dwight Maclean’s signature on an affidavit. He was angry to see Edith and Dwight so upset, but he doubted that anyone had intentionally harmed an animal. It was more likely fear and paranoia on Dwight’s part, and Rick knowing how to play it. Anthony felt embarrassed now at the chill of fear he’d felt in Rick’s presence. There was no real menace there. He’d been drunk and wrong footed, worrying about theater funding. He should’ve learned better from his study of the darker side of human nature in New York and the dramas he consumed. What should have been evident in Rick from the outset was not so much a villain as a sad, small person who must have had potential once but lacked some essential ingredient to make a good man—a matterless vacuum where intellectual integrity or a moral compass should have been. Where a proper villain would have been ruthless, Rick sought only expediency. He used the landowners’ fears against them.

  Anthony raised his head at the sound of laughter. The men were digging in with exclamations of appreciation. Ranchers coming together around their noon meal had always moved him. There was—and the word was laughably inappropriate applied to most of these crusty grandpas with hair growing out of their ears—something sexy about the way they all survived out here. The men and women here today had the skills, all of them, to take whatever was at hand and mold it to the purpose of getting through each fresh crisis. This was the crowd to stick with for the zombie apocalypse. If everything fell apart, they’d have electricity back and water running within a few days, even if the wires weren’t insulated and the water was coming out of a standpipe in the living room floor. They would make a way.

  For all their flaws, Anthony thought, this was the great appeal of his people: their raw and fearsome competence, balanced as it was by an equally fearsome contempt for weakness and the hard conformity that had made his youth a torment. They operated by frontier values, some combination of Darwin and Ayn Rand, nothing pretty or sweet about it, but a cold nobility that was hard to deny. It was still within his set of options to take his rightful place among them. If he could learn to fake a sense of belonging, it would be half the battle won. One day he might genuinely feel it, instead of this uneasy outsider’s admiration.

  Chance was looking toward him from the other end of the table and Anthony nodded toward Edith to indicate that he’d gotten what they needed. Chance looked away and laughed at a joke about a posthole he’d nearly fallen into earlier, stumbling on his bum knee. The men looked to him, Anthony saw. They followed him and Chance accepted it as natural. It was a feeling Anthony had never known.

  When the food was nearly gone, under cover of an enthusiastic storyteller, Anthony joined Chance in the shade of an apple tree. Edith lingered over her iced tea while younger women cleared the table. Chance waved and mouthed his thanks to her then turned to Anthony.

  “What did Edith have to say?”

  “Dwight signed.”

  Chance froze. “Whoa. That’s bad. She say why?”

  Anthony summarized her story. “She doesn’t want Dwight to know she told us. We’ll have to go at him careful.”

  Chance clapped his shoulder. “You up for it?”

  “Up for it is putting it strongly, but yeah, I’ll give it a shot.”

  As the other men loaded pickups, collected wives, and dispersed to their own day’s worth of chores, Anthony lingered gathering napkins and hauling in the big tablecloths until Dwight Maclean sat alone at the far end of the table watching a thick, high bank of clouds jet from west to east, auguring rain for someone else. At Anthony’s approach, Maclean reached out to offer a long, firm handshake and a grateful nod. Anthony had hung on Maclean’s corral fence as a boy, trying to memorize every nuance of the immense, steady calm that this rough man could translate to the most skittish horse. Instead of horses seeing his six feet eight inches as a threat, somehow Maclean made them believe he was one of t
heir own: a tall, tense herd animal, faltering and watchful. There was a breathless magic to it every time.

  Now Dwight’s hair was pure white and sweaty where it poked from under his hat. His western shirt and jeans spoke of the morning wrestling dirt and posts and wire. The beginnings of a gut only made him look more impressively large. He gestured to the seat beside him and Anthony settled in, legs stretched out, hands in his lap. There was no point in attempting idle conversation.

  “I heard you signed with Harmony.” That much Burlington might have let drop.

  Maclean squinted at the horizon. His jaw shuttled a little from side to side, like a cow chewing, before he lowered his head. His hand passed across his eyes. He hesitated a long moment and nodded.

  “I was surprised,” Anthony added. Maclean looked away. Anthony clinked the ice in his glass and took in the cloud front. “Rick’s been giving people trouble, coercing them into signing, I hear. Anything happen here?”

  Maclean kept his gaze steady on the horizon, but his next breath was heavier and longer than the one before. Eventually he turned his palms upward and examined their rough surface, rubbing one hand over the other in apparent meditation on the work they had done these many years. Finally, he raised one hand to the crown of his dented, sweat-stained felt hat. He brought the hat to his lap and studied the inner band. Anthony watched every move, drinking in the unspoken words. It was extraordinary, all that Maclean managed to communicate without ever speaking, the full weight of his integrity and regret in every considered gesture. Then Maclean’s glance came up, just an instant of affirmation, the tightening of neck muscles into a nod, and Anthony had his answer.

  The plate with the last brownie sat near them. Anthony reached for it just as Maclean’s hand snaked out for the treat. Anthony smiled and pushed the plate toward his elder, but Maclean broke the brownie in two and pushed half back to Anthony, who nodded and accepted.

  “Okay with you if I ask Edith about it?” Anthony asked. Maclean’s watery blue eyes came up, still clear, but with a shadow of cataracts that Anthony had not seen there before today. The sight saddened him. He hoped those city doctors knew how important these eyes were, what a soul they spoke for. Maclean’s eyes surprised him today as they had in the past—how much life was there, what a lively and present mind within the quiet. He wondered what it would be like to spend just one day inside that head, where so much worth knowing was locked up without means of passage.

  Maclean held Anthony with his gaze, asking and answering questions all in what passed between their eyes, then nodded firmly, put his hat back on, and stood up to move toward the machine shed.

  Act 4, Scene 2

  Sore from the morning’s labor but on a mission now, Anthony hit the back roads with an air conditioner low on Freon and a car that had baked through the day. The grinding force of the heat hit hard after the way he’d sheltered in the cool theater most of the summer. He rolled down the window and leaned his head out doglike to catch the breeze. Chance’s words about Harmony and Rick had been twisting and kicking in dark corners all morning, and both Sarah and Brittany had mentioned that the Tall Grasses had sick animals. After the conversations with the Macleans, Anthony needed to see. He wanted to know.

  Along the way, a road Anthony hadn’t driven since coming back, spots that used to be muddy or washboardlike were now graded and smoothed with red rock scoria to handle heavy traffic for the mine. No way had the county done that. It was more of the devil’s bargain: better roads, but shared with huge trucks, moving fast. Anthony pulled to the side to let a panel delivery truck roar by in the opposite direction but a rock still whipped into his windshield and left a fresh pock that would crack. There was another fifty bucks he didn’t have to fix it before it spidered.

  The turn into the Tall Grasses’ drive was reassuringly unchanged: a mailbox made from a sawed-off length of twelve-inch-diameter pipe, welded shut with a metal disk across the back end, another disk on a hinge for the front. The weld was smooth and expert, Anthony observed. He’d always admired this tidy little piece of metalwork, securely planted on a smaller pipe strong enough to withstand encounters with bad drivers and snowplows. No sign announced who lived here.

  It would be a pleasure to see the Tall Grasses, whoever was around these days. They were people who lived good stories and didn’t mind sharing them. Anthony proceeded up the meandering lane and encountered—as he’d known he would—such a stereotypical reservation land holding that he would have refused to give the particulars if asked by an outsider, out of protectiveness for his friends. A single-wide mobile home with faded siding and drooping sills sat on a sagging, uninsulated foundation, the corrugated steel apron pulled loose to let dogs and chickens shelter beneath. At an oblique angle to it was an almost square HUD house that faced the road, windows covered with sheets and a plush blanket with a sun-bleached U.S. Marine Corps crest that would’ve come from Jenna’s older brother, Marlon, who’d served his tour and gone to college. Behind was a boarded-up blue outhouse losing its shingles.

  “At least they don’t need the outhouse anymore,” Anthony told the steering wheel. “More than the Terrebonnes can say.”

  A netless basketball hoop he remembered well overlooked beaten earth to the left, flanked by two Pontiacs of different eras, both with four flat tires. Above them, staggered up the hillside like metal terraces, were a red Case tractor that looked like it belonged in a museum and a 1960s-era Ford pickup with very little left to it but the frame. As Anthony surveyed the automotive exhibit, three rez dogs of imprecise breed—wide heads like terriers and thick coats like shepherds with small eyes like coons—raced from their cool spots under the trailer house to surround what Anthony now recognized as his standard-issue rez car. Finally—a moment of effortless assimilation.

  He waited to get out until a voice from the midafternoon shade beside the house called the dogs back in Crow. They left off barking with half-swallowed yelps singing on the air and trotted toward the voice, tails high, transformed into obedience champions. As soon as they’d disappeared around the corner, Anthony got out and moved toward the voice in a sideways advance that left open the option of legging it fast back to the car if the dogs charged again.

  In the relative cool of the house’s shadow were two elderly women in housedresses and aprons on frayed lawn chairs. The dogs watched every inch of Anthony’s approach, tails thumping at their mistresses’ feet. The elders he recognized: Wanda Tall Grass and her sister, Sheila, both medicine women, secret carriers who loved a good pun more than anything. When he’d run into Wanda right after college, still looking for a job, she’d winked and said, “I have a few jokes about unemployed people, but it doesn’t matter; none of them work.”

  Anthony smiled at the sight of them. From a big plastic laundry basket between them the sisters were pulling long, furry plants with heavy, bulbous roots coated in a thick brown bark. To Anthony’s weed-trained eyes, the plants resembled lupine, with the occasional purple flower still clinging, but he hauled up a memory from the plant guides of some important distinction between lupine and this vaguely familiar root. Lupine was poisonous and caused birth defects in calves. This plant, although he couldn’t produce its name right then, was not. It was food but a tricky kind, like so many that grew wild in Montana. Heads you survive, tails you poison yourself.

  Wanda and Sheila continued to pick up plants, shake off clods of dirt, and run their fingers over the roots, feeling for something. They hardly had to look as they grasped small, branching growths and used them to pull off strips of bark toward the fat part of the root. Instead they kept fond expressions focused on the middle distance where four horses grazed next to a water trough made from a chipped fiberglass bathtub. When the bark was off, they took knives from their laps and expertly slivered the root bulge before tossing the whole plant onto a big blue tarp at their feet to dry. The whole operation took less than a minute for each plant.

  Anthony was at the edge of the parallelogram of shade, watch
ing the plant work, when the door of the trailer banged and someone descended steps beyond his field of vision. He was so transfixed by the movement of the women’s hands, how they handled the resistant bark and slit the bulb, the meditative rhythm of it broken by the well-aimed toss to an open spot on the tarp, that he didn’t even look up until a tall presence filled the space beside him.

  “I heard you were back. I wondered when we’d see you,” Jenna said.

  Jenna’s talent had lit the rez on fire back when she was draining free throws in the gyms of eastern Montana and owning makeshift dirt courts from here to Ashland. Anthony had been in Missoula but papers across the state had published pictures of her, flying for the basket at impossible trajectories, black braid straight out behind like the rudder on a kite. They’d played together a number of times, for fun they said—she was years younger—but there was nothing casual about it. Anthony was no match for rez kids who played basketball like they were settling a blood feud—which of course they were. As Anthony regarded her now, Jenna still had an athlete’s well-balanced body, heavier now in the hips and belly, but the same quick, attentive eyes and big hands. He felt an urgent curiosity to know everything that had happened to her since high school, but he’d had that conversation with other Native friends. It could turn dark fast and everyone got embarrassed.

  “I’m working in Billings. Came out today to help the Macleans,” Anthony said, glad for the breeze to dissipate the stink of sweat on him. He ventured the most optimistic remark he could think of: “Last I heard you were going to play ball for some college.”

  Follow-up questions hung on his lips, but something in the way she carried herself—the closed-in shoulders, the dirty off-brand sneaker she stubbed at the grass—told him that plan hadn’t worked out, and right away he felt bad for asking.