When Anthony stepped into the barn, a pool of moonlight in the aperture of the big rolling door mediated the blackness at the far end. He walked to the light. Neal’s outline was just visible at the edge of the illuminated space, resting on straw bales, sawed-off shotgun on his knees. Anthony wondered what had stopped him. For all his flaws Neal was a man of action. It wasn’t like him to languish in indecision. He was waiting for something, and the thought came to Anthony that his uncle was waiting for him just as Sarah had said.
A light wind was coming off the shadowed hills to the north. It stirred straw and dust on the barn floor and carried some of the spirit Anthony had felt at the Harmony gate—a fresh breath after so much grief and conflict. Anthony took the sweet air into his lungs, felt steadier, and turned to his uncle with the only question left to him.
“Tell me about what happened,” he said. “The day Dad died.”
Neal caressed the gunstock and after a long pause began to speak. “It’s exactly like I told Marx. Ponch spooked, he fell. All I could do was watch him bounce down the slope. I heard the crack when his neck broke.” He took a shuddering breath.
“But you were glad, weren’t you?”
Neal was as still as if he were in prayer. “He knew I loved her. I could have forgiven him for getting the ranch, but I couldn’t forgive him for that.”
“For marrying Mom?” Anthony was astonished to hear Neal say the words aloud, no matter how much Jayne and Sarah had drawn the picture for him. Gruff old Uncle Neal had been pining away over lost love?
Neal coughed. “He got everything else, and he had to have her, too. That was the way he saw things—the one who got the land got the girl. It was a transaction.”
“It was her choice, too, wasn’t it?” However much Sarah had loved Neal, she was a rancher’s daughter. She understood the dynastic nature of her decision. She’d married the ranch, and when it passed in part to Neal, she’d married it again. Her true love, Anthony thought, seemed obvious.
“I let her go. She deserved better than me. But it didn’t have to be him. He did it to spite me, just like Dad left him the ranch to spite me. I don’t know what I ever did to make them hate me so much.”
“His poison,” Anthony said under his breath, enveloped by another theatrical moment. I never saw my old man’s poison until I was much older than you. Neal had carried the burden of his father and brother’s rejection for longer than Anthony had carried Dean’s. He’d nearly lost his nephew to it, and his wife. Anthony saw tonight, as he’d never seen in all the moments this summer that nudged him toward this one, that if Dean’s death really was an accident, it was a hell of a thing for Neal to bear.
“What?” Neal asked in a baffled tone.
“A play. Sam Shepard. This character Weston talks about how he was carrying around his old man’s poison without knowing it. That’s us.”
Neal absorbed this for long enough that Anthony heard an owl hoot down by the creek. “They poisoned us all right,” he said at last. “I don’t reckon there’s any antidote.”
Anthony reached for the nearest straw bale and towed it by the twine out into the moonlight. He sat as the shakes grew more present. “That’s why you never liked me.”
“It’s not your fault, but I could hardly look at you.”
“And to Dad I was just a screwup.”
“You were what he negotiated for. He got the ranch, he got your mother, and he got the son to carry on his legacy. Except you threw all that in his face. He wasn’t a bad man and he wasn’t all that good, either. Just proud and set in his ways, like Dad.”
“You and I sure messed up their plans.”
Through the ethereal light, Anthony caught the glint of Neal’s eyes, struck through with the dark humor of it all. Sarah was right. There was far more depth there than he’d ever seen in Dean’s reflecting glance. How extraordinary that he’d never seen himself in Neal. But then he’d never seen Neal at all until today.
“We were both disappointments to them,” Neal said. “But you’ve got a life out there that’s nothing to do with what Dean wanted. I’m not saying so because I want the ranch or I want you gone. I’m saying it because you deserve better than a life you don’t want.”
Neal’s words rolled through Anthony’s brain like the tumblers of a lock finally falling into place. “Is that what happened to you?” he asked. “You got trapped in a life you didn’t want?”
Neal propped the gun beside him. “I should have asked your mother to marry me back then. I thought Dad and Dean took what was rightfully mine, but I pushed it away, didn’t I?”
“I wouldn’t let them off the hook that easy,” Anthony said.
Neal wasn’t listening. “I thought the mineral lease might be a way to move on. Get a new place, without all this bad blood on it. But your mother’s against it. She loves this old place in spite of it all.”
“You know what Grandpa said. Women get awfully attached to a homestead.”
“That they do. I reckon we’ll make our way here. You can tell your friends to call off the war party.”
Anthony nodded. “Okay. You think you could check in on the Tall Grasses now and then? The old women are scared.”
Neal looked up. “Somebody tell you?”
“Tell me what?”
“I’ve been going over there every day since I heard. Think I’ve got Sheila off red alert.”
Anthony rose and offered a hand. Neal stood and shook it. Then the two men walked out under a nearly full moon and stood side by side in silence as stars blossomed in a fertile indigo sky.
Curtain Call
“I can’t believe I let you talk me into this,” Hilary said, arms crossed as the Buick merged into a deafening herd of eighteen-wheelers two weeks later. “Are you sure it’s a good idea to drive your black friend through Aryan Nation, Idaho?”
Anthony glanced over. She didn’t look anxious. Mae was sucking on her sippy cup in the backseat and Hilary was half smiling at the morning sun, leaning a little forward. Eager. Happy to be headed home. The sun lit up everything in him, too. The last couple of weeks—making peace with his uncle, reassuring his mother, watching the sheriff snap a padlock on Harmony’s big gate, wrapping up at Town Hall Theater, signing as a witness on Chance and Alma’s marriage license—had been the best and worst of his life. Certainty had congealed around the fact that his place was not here and that was not the tragedy he’d once convinced himself it was. Leaving was surreal and right and a fever dream he’d surely wake from any minute. The knowledge that he could be part of the community, that they could accept him as he was, had given him the self-confidence to make the definitive break.
“We’re just taking a little sliver off Idaho. We’ll be out before the devil knows we’re there. Then Nevada and the Golden State. Hold this.” He put Hilary’s hand on the wheel, pulled out a battered iPod, and unwound a black cable to plug into the cigarette lighter.
“Anthony!” Hilary leaned across to steer with both hands as he tapped at buttons connected to the cable. “What is that thing?”
“Just a second, let me find an open station. It’s Neal’s FM modulator. He gave it to me as a going-away present. He doesn’t need it driving around that sweet outfit with satellite radio.”
“You couldn’t have nabbed the pickup as a going-away present?”
Anthony gave a short, firm headshake. “It belongs to the ranch. I’m not taking anything away from there I didn’t earn.” He took the wheel and Hilary slid back into her seat with an exaggerated sigh of relief. “We left it in a good way, but I don’t think anyone’s too sorry to see the back of me.”
“Who’s that girl who stopped by as we were loading up? Jessica?”
“Yeah, Jessie. That was nice of her.”
“I think she’ll miss you. That was quite the parting embrace.” Hilary lifted an inquiring eyebrow.
Anthony laughed. “In another lifetime we’d dance at our diamond anniversary. She lucked out this time.”
&nbs
p; “Any girl would be lucky to have you,” Hilary countered in a mild, mothering tone.
“Just not you.”
“Not me, kid. But I’ll set you up with everyone once we get to San Francisco.”
He held up a hand. “My only relationship for the foreseeable future is with my sponsor. And in my spare time, I have to figure out a way to keep the camp going. Get back to me in a couple of years.”
A second later the car filled with familiar percussion and opening notes of Willie Nelson’s guitar. “On the Road Again” wasn’t Anthony’s usual musical style, but this particular song was necessary for the playlist out of long personal tradition. For the first time in months, music he had chosen vibrated the speakers. It was a good omen. His choices this time. His road, with the ties to home looser and stronger than ever.
After a few bars, Anthony joined Willie, full voiced and on key, tapping the beat with both thumbs. He’d gone to New York because he was out of ideas, towing a sea trunk of guilt and looking for someone to blame for everything that was bound to go wrong. Now he was under his own power. He’d put the ghosts if not to rest then into a place where they would not work at him. He wasn’t sure what would happen next, but unlike before when he’d seen only two opposed and impossible choices, now he saw possibilities—for himself and people he’d written off.
Hilary rested her arm on the window ledge and smiled more broadly with each verse. With the final chords, she applauded. “I haven’t heard you sing like that all summer.”
“I haven’t sung like that in years.”
The new tires hummed, and Anthony’s mind turned to Neal and the emergence of a man, buried most of a lifetime, that he’d almost never known. At the ranch the last couple of weeks there’d been a shift in the family dynamic, an unbending. Anthony had watched Neal two-step Sarah around the kitchen when she played a favorite album. They’d eaten outside. Watching Neal loosen up felt like witnessing a resurrection. This other, better Neal had been there all along, like Anthony had been there, looking for a way to exist. Now they could look across the table at each other and raise glasses to the workaday miracle of being there at all, at peace. Anthony thought of Lorraine Hansberry: He finally come into his manhood today, didn’t he? Kind of like a rainbow after the rain . . .
It was a clean blue day, the world freshly washed even without rain. The plays and playwrights were running together as Anthony sped up and the dashes blurred down the center of the interstate, splashing wet ink across the right hemisphere of his brain, smearing words down the inside of his skull. They had filled him up and must come out. There was so much to write. How had he never seen it?
Acknowledgements
The pile of books I got through as research for this slim novel is a little embarrassing. I read about Asian gangs, Crow herbal medicine, what can kill a cow or horse, and strip-mine reclamation; gobbled novels on Shakespearean foundations like Hag-Seed and A Thousand Acres; and thumbed so much twentieth-century theater that I had to mourn Wendy Wasserstein all over again and took Sam Shepard’s death as a club to the solar plexus. I’m in debt to Alma Hogan Snell for A Taste of Heritage: Crow Indian Recipes and Herbal Medicines—and of course I love her name. Then I got on a Neal Stephenson jag—The Diamond Age, Seveneves, Reamde—and almost rewrote the whole thing as speculative fiction. Neal, if you’re out there, please can we hang?
For this book I also read poetry, which isn’t really my thing, and frequented poets, which definitely is. The onomatopoeia of poets (my plural noun for poets, feel free to use it) at the 2016 Sewanee Writers’ Conference, including the fantastically talented trio of Molly McCully Brown, Susannah Nevison, and Nancy Reddy, lifted me up where I belong. My notes say that Anne Sexton “baffles and doesn’t inspire until I reach the piercing word.” Ellis Avery’s daily haiku brought light and lightness. God bless you, every one.
Mitch Moe at the Federal Bureau of Investigation set me straight on a number of things but is not responsible for my ignorance on topics I forgot to ask about. There is no Harmony Coal, but I didn’t invent their tactics. The Billings Police Department let me go on an exciting ride-along that alas hit the edit bin. I’ve lifted quirks and clever phrases from too many people to remember, although my extended family is likely to recognize them and call me out. Thanks for keeping it real, folks. Xela Warmer won a Billings Public Library fund raiser to become the charismatic camp counselor in Act I, Scene 3. I thank her for a great name.
Thanks to Google for the indispensable search engine, the writing fellowship, and the FBI watch list. Shout-out to Wikipedia and Quora too—gifts to writers everywhere—for sparing me human contact and to my short-lived Brooklyn writers’ group for providing some that I enjoyed very much.
Documenting music involved in a literary effort is apparently now a thing. I’d like to thank Yo-Yo Ma for the cello suites, WQXR for drowning out years of construction next door, the New York Philharmonic for the new composers who flipped switches in my brain, and household gremlins for a steady background track of P!nk, ABBA, and string practice. Thelonious Monk, I love you but you make me too jumpy to write.
All praise and gratitude to my agent Michelle Brower at Aevitas Creative Management, without whom—let’s just say I’d run around in a lot more crazy circles; to Kate Nintzel at William Morrow, the incarnate blessing of the editorial gods; and the team at HarperCollins who make things look easy that would take the heart of me (yes you, Julie Paulauski).
Final billing goes always to my incredible family. We’ve got our rock moves.
About the Author
CARRIE LA SEUR is an energy and environmental lawyer in Billings, Montana; the founder of Plains Justice, a nonprofit law center; a founding member of This House of Books, a cooperative bookstore; and the author of The Home Place. She is a Rhodes Scholar and seventh-generation Montanan.
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Also by Carrie La Seur
The Home Place
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
the weight of an infinite sky. Copyright © 2018 by Carrie La Seur. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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Title page photo by Justin Ridgeway/Shutterstock
Digital Edition January 2018 ISBN: 978-0-06-232349-1
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-232347-7
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The Weight of an Infinite Sky Page 22
