“I never went,” she said. “I got pregnant my senior year.”
Anthony bent to rescue a root from rolling off the tarp. “That’s the one thing I couldn’t do to disappoint my dad,” he joked. To his relief, Jenna smiled. “How are things around here?” he asked.
“Not too bad. Great-Grandma and the aunties are all worked up about the horses, though. You must have heard.”
He nodded. “What happened?” he asked. “What were the symptoms?”
“Weird stuff. Tremors and wobbling around, and then Old Ronnie especially, her heart and her breathing got real slow. Grandma thinks she knows what it is, but I don’t know the English word. It’s strong medicine. We’ve got some here, by the creek, but the horses never got into it before.”
“You’re not the only ones, you know. Other people have had sick animals this spring. I heard some of them ate hemlock.”
“Yeah, hemlock, that might be it.” Jenna tilted her head back and forth in a skeptical gesture. “Never had any problem before this year.”
She dropped to her knees to space the roots more carefully. Anthony knelt and imitated her. “What is this stuff?”
“Wild turnips.” She shifted closer to stare at his hand. “Hey,” she said, “isn’t that one of Paula’s rings? Did she give that to you?”
“Oh.” Anthony looked at his hand, stricken to see that he had forgotten to take it off. “Yeah, I let her use my horse for a while one summer and she gave me this as a trade. Don’t say anything to her, okay? It’s no big deal. I just always liked it, that’s all.”
“No, of course not,” Jenna said, in a way that made him sure she’d tell not only Paula but anyone else who remembered him. When it came to good gossip, there were no secrets here.
Anthony slid off the ring and hid it in his pocket. Now that he’d been busted with the ring he might as well ask the question. “You ever hear from her anymore?”
“Paula? Yeah, she’s living in Austin. She married this rich German guy who sells Native art at auctions in Europe. They adopted a bunch of Pima kids, I guess.”
“No kidding.” Anthony couldn’t help but note the sharp edge of irony—Paula making a commodity of her culture, too.
“Yeah. They’ve got a bunch of videos online in German. I can’t understand a word, but it’s really nice stuff. Paintings and weavings and beadwork, you know. She says they pay the artists a lot. She wants us to make stuff for them. Maybe I will.”
“Does she come back here?” Anthony asked.
“Nah. She just calls. She sends the kids presents.”
“How old are your kids?” Anthony set aside the reflections about Paula, a quick little mental storage activity.
“Three and one. Sonáa and Julio. I’m sure they’ll be out here in a minute. They’re just finishing their snack.”
Anthony tilted his head toward Wanda and Sheila, who’d glanced up as Jenna and Anthony began working. “Would you introduce me? I don’t know if they remember me.”
Jenna sat up and spoke a few words in Crow, including the clearly enunciated name Anthony Fry. The sisters leaned together and exchanged a few reminders.
Wanda straightened in her chair and said, “I remember you, Anthony Fry. You were plumb in love with Paula.” Both women filled and rocked with laughter, not unkind.
Jenna stretched for the far corners of the tarp, where cake-size blocks of granite weighted it against the wind, getting the roots lined up and flat. “We were digging all morning. Grandma’s a slave driver.” She laughed and Sheila’s shoulders rumbled with mirth, shaking the dirt clods from her flowered apron as she answered in a teasing tone in Crow.
“Coda? I did so,” Jenna said, then to Anthony: “There’s still things they won’t tell me.”
When Anthony met Sheila’s eyes, she was watching him like she could read his mind. There was another plant in a big bunch at the edge of the tarp. Anthony pointed. “How about that one?”
Sheila said, “Chibaapooshchishgota.”
“I beg your pardon?” Anthony bent over the plant. It had ferny little lower leaves and flat, white flower tops.
“Chipmunk tail,” Jenna said. “Or some people call it yarrow. It’s a healing plant. They use it for everything. Good inside and out, right, Grandma?”
“Ah, itchik,” Sheila answered and continued in Crow.
Jenna nodded. “Yeah, she needs it for the horses now.”
Anthony squatted to examine the flowers. “They eat it? Isn’t it bitter?”
“You make a tea and give it to them with their water,” Jenna said. “They don’t mind.”
As Anthony watched the women work and interact it didn’t seem a bad thing at all for Jenna to have stayed here to learn from medicine women, part of a lineage that stretched out beyond all known time. “Do you miss basketball?” he asked abruptly.
Jenna picked up the yarrow and looked it over, broke off a small piece of leaf, and chewed it. “I still play pickup games. You never completely give up something you love. But I like what I’m doing. It’s more challenging than I expected.” Jenna put the yarrow back in its place and looked toward the pasture for a crisp change of subject. “Normally Grandma keeps a close eye on the horses. Treats them like her babies, and she loves Old Ronnie. She used her own medicine and it barely saved her. Then Rick showed up, talking about how it wouldn’t be healthy to stick around once they start to mine through. It’s the way he was saying it, she told me. She thinks he did something to Ronnie.”
Sheila rattled out several angry sentences in Crow, volume wavering up and down like she didn’t hear well, gesturing toward the horses and herself. Jenna listened carefully before turning back to Anthony.
“He threatened us, she says, but not in so many words. He uses weasel words. She cursed him, and he hasn’t been back. She says the curse will come back on her—that’s our belief—but she’s old and she does it to protect us.” Jenna’s voice tightened and she dropped her head away from Anthony.
“He came just the one time?”
Jenna nodded. “I expected to see him again by now, but he hasn’t been back. I’ve been staying close. He has a bad spirit, Grandma says. No respect.”
Anthony’s mind returned to the steak house and Rick’s smug declaration that Neal was keeping an eye on things for him—Neal who drove these roads and would see animals kept close to the house, showing signs of illness; Neal who had access across open range to any animal he wanted to reach around here and a good excuse to wander, looking after Fry cattle. As another split root fell, Anthony picked it up and arranged it with great care on the tarp.
“Do you mind telling me what Rick said?” he asked Sheila.
“Eh? What?” Sheila prompted and cupped a hand to her ear.
Anthony repeated the question and Sheila hesitated. When he looked closely at her, he saw how the lines around her eyes tracked into other lines, a whole map of local drainages on her round face.
“He made my horse sick. He’ll make the others sick, if we don’t sign. I told him to leave.” Her words were plain, but Anthony felt the force behind them, the power of the command issued to Rick. He would go in a hurry if ever Sheila spoke to him that way. This was what Chance meant when he spoke of the medicine pouch she’d given him.
“And did he?”
Sheila scratched her nose with the back of her hand and left a streak of dirt. “For now,” she answered. “The elders said there never used to be sickness here. Now we have to watch out.” She gave Jenna a weighted look and went back to her work.
Jenna beckoned Anthony with a small head movement. He rose and followed her toward the basketball hoop, out of earshot.
“Gran’s keeping us all close,” Jenna said, her voice a few notches below the whine of the wind. “The horses, too. She’s using all her medicine to keep Rick away. It isn’t good for her. She’s not sleeping.”
“She was the only one he talked to?”
“It was like he waited to catch her alone. Usually there’s
somebody else around. When I came back, he left right away. Not a word to me.”
Anthony rubbed his hands together to shed dirt as Chance’s stories about Harmony buzzed at him like swarming bees. “Did you tell the tribal police?”
“I called. Grandma didn’t want to, but I talked her around. It was Bertie Ferguson, you know. He’s okay. He took our statements and said he’d stop by when he could, keep an eye on things. But Burlington’s not a tribal member, so if he really did something, it’s not Bertie’s jurisdiction. Gran can’t go on like this. She’s been out walking the fence line, leaving medicine bundles to ward off evil. I’ve never seen her so worked up. I’ve got to find a way to make her feel safe again.”
Anthony took a surveying look around the yard and the pastures beyond. He imagined closed-circuit security cameras broadcasting to an indoor monitor, then counted the likely cost in his head and kept his mouth shut. “I know the FBI’s interested. They’re investigating. Burlington will think twice if he sees cops and feds around.”
“I hope so.” Jenna wrapped her arms around herself. “I don’t have that much faith in police. There’s a buffalo kill site they’re about to mine through. It should’ve been protected, but Harmony paid off the THPO.”
Anthony tucked his hair behind his ears against the insistent west wind. A skirmish with the tribal historic preservation officers was a nonstarter. They were all related to the chairman. Better to focus on something he could control. “I don’t mean to minimize what happened to Old Ronnie, but if it was a toxic plant, do you think maybe it’s a coincidence and Rick’s using it to play you?”
Jenna bit her lips from the inside so that her mouth tightened up in a flat line. “We talked about that. But how did he know? He’d have to have us under surveillance.”
Anthony shifted uncomfortably and studied Jenna’s solid frame in jeans and a faded university of louisville T-shirt. “Have you been to Louisville?” he asked, to lead the conversation away from who other than Rick might be keeping an eye out for sick animals. Whatever suspicions he had about Neal, until he found evidence one way or another, it was family business.
“Me? No. It’s for Shoni and Jude,” she answered in a tone that expressed what a blindingly obvious thing he missed. “The Schimmels?”
“Oh, right. Sorry.” He laughed. “The Umatilla Thrillas. How could I forget?”
“We need our champions,” Jenna said. Her attention shifted to a small girl and a boy in a diaper emerging from the house, the boy wearing what looked like freshly spilled Kool-Aid down the front of his T-shirt. He was crying.
“Mama!” the girl cried. “He wouldn’t listen! I told him he couldn’t use that cup!”
The boy wailed and held the wet stain away from his body.
“Thanks for coming by,” Jenna said, dismissing Anthony as she hurried to the children. From the small thumps just out of sight he could tell that turnip processing continued. Each twitch of the dogs’ tails and toss of a root released a tiny puff of dust that floated across the yard as Anthony walked back to the car.
As he rolled back down the rutted drive, Anthony remembered standing beside a sunbaked basketball court years ago with Jenna. She’d probably been in middle school and he was older, a college student who felt that noticing a kid like her was a benevolent gesture.
“Tell me one of those coyote stories,” he’d said. “I love those.” He’d heard her tell some his last winter in high school on a school bus packed with kids of all ages coming back from a game. There’d been a thrilling little chill to it that he wanted to feel again.
Jenna had shaken her head. “Great-Grandma wouldn’t like me telling those stories in summer,” she said. Now, as an adult, he couldn’t remember the words she’d used, but even so young, flattered by his attention, somehow she’d made him understand that the stories and the spirits that lived in them were too powerful to be exposed to the heat and light of summer. Anthony gunned the engine onto the highway and wished with his whole being for the winter day to come when all the powerful spirits loose in this season would be only another good yarn to tell.
Act 4, Scene 3
It was the following weekend before Anthony could bring himself to go see Sarah and Neal with the intent of talking through all that must be resolved. He parked near the barn. Sarah was already stepping onto the front steps at the sound of the car, hands raised in celebration of his coming. From this distance Anthony noticed how her pale skin had gone crepey and sunken beneath her cheekbones, leaving ghoulish hollows where her face used to be pleasantly round. Behind frames too large for this diminished face, the rims of her eyes were pink.
“How wonderful to see you!” she exclaimed. “So glad you could come out.” She dabbed at one eye with a tissue squeezed down tiny in her fist. “Allergies.” He didn’t believe her. She’d been crying.
Anthony forced up the edges of his mouth and returned her loose embrace. “I don’t think I ever really said congratulations. You took me by surprise. I hope you’ll be very happy together.” He cleared his throat. “Can I come in?”
Sarah looked behind her through the house toward the open door onto the deck. “I guess so,” she said, her face tight. “Neal’s out back taking a break,” she added in a lower voice that told him all he needed to know about the source of the tears. She’d used tears often to manipulate his father. Anthony wondered what she was trying to get Neal to do or not do—or if it could be the other way around, Neal pressuring her.
Anthony followed Sarah out onto the small deck where Neal overlooked the creek from a tilted-back chair, heels on the weathered porch rail, kingly in his tranquility. The black cottonwood grove both cast shade and held the blessed cool wafting off the creek as high-country snowmelt descended. For a moment Anthony luxuriated in the sound of quick-running water and the smell of trees and grass, a breath of pure serenity that softened his shoulders in spite of the tension. Sarah poured him a glass of iced tea from the pitcher on the table.
“Congratulations, Neal,” Anthony said. “If I didn’t say so before.” Of course he hadn’t and Neal knew it. Neal ignored him.
Sarah smiled a hint of apology and lowered herself into one of the wrought-iron chairs without any sign of difficulty. Her occasional weakness was gone today, Anthony observed. He wondered if the story Jayne had recently told him about Sarah’s heart condition was true. If so, why wouldn’t Sarah have told him? Had he been so dismissive that she didn’t think he’d believe her when she was really sick, or was this another exaggeration to draw help to her on the ranch—maybe even a defense against her sister? Jayne had a way of bustling Sarah along, urging her to get out and do things that came naturally to Jayne but were trials to her quieter sister. Anthony had always sympathized a little with his mother on this count. It was hard to say no to Jayne Murphy when she was advancing a plan. On impulse Anthony reached out and squeezed Sarah’s hand. Her face filled with pleasure as she squeezed back, then held his fingers to her lips to kiss them.
They sat quietly and sipped their tea. At last Sarah leaned forward and steepled her fingers as if preparing to speak, but Neal heard her movement and beat her to it.
“You’re here to talk about Harmony then,” he said. He kept his back to both Anthony and Sarah. “I suppose your mother put you up to it. Go on. Say your piece.”
“We thought you might have some ideas about how to handle things, Anthony.” Sarah nodded at Neal, although Anthony doubted this was a “we” inspiration. “We want you to be part of the ranch management again, bring you in on decisions. I know it’s hard for you to come back when things didn’t go the way you wanted in New York, but your life’s here. I’m just glad you finally see that.”
Neal took a long drink of tea. “You can start by apologizing to your mother for taking off like that last week,” he said. “And at the picnic. You got your manners from your dad, no doubt about that.”
“I’m sorry, Mom,” Anthony said. “It came as a shock. I wish you both well.” He rested o
ne booted foot on the other knee then shifted again, unable to find a restful pose. Neal or the hard chair or both were making him want to jump up, hop the deck rail, and walk off down the creek. “But you might have warned me. Or waited until Dad was cold.”
Neal started up out of his chair, but Sarah put a hand on his arm and soothed him back down in a way that stunned Anthony. He’d never seen Neal respond with meek submission to an attempt to control him—and then Anthony realized he had, when Sarah asked Neal to turn off the TV at that Sunday dinner weeks ago. Sarah had a hold on him she’d never had on Dean. It made the stories of their youthful romance suddenly easier to accept.
“It’s okay, it’s okay, Neal,” Sarah said with a massaging hand on his shoulder. Neal put his hand on hers. “It’s only normal he should be surprised. He didn’t have any idea what we were planning and he’s still missing his dad. It’s okay. He didn’t mean it.”
Neal tossed Anthony a glare, but he was quiet under Sarah’s hands. She flicked her eyes toward Anthony and down in a way that apologized for speaking, but she persisted.
“I wish you’d move out here, once your camp’s over. I get so worried about you in town, and I know it upsets you when I leave a lot of messages. They called me once from the theater when they couldn’t find you and I was just beside myself.”
“Yeah. Sorry about that. You were the emergency contact. I never thought they’d use it. I just slept twelve hours, right through the alarm. Guess I was exhausted from all the preparations.”
Sarah smiled. “I know it’s not like you. You’ve always been responsible. And it’s great what you’re doing with the kids. I’m proud of you. And I’m glad they called. What if something did happen, and you were all alone in that dangerous part of town?” She took her hands off Neal to clutch them together.
Anthony stroked his chin. “Well, me and a hundred thousand people,” he qualified. “Unlikely to be eaten by wolves.”
The Weight of an Infinite Sky Page 15
