After a long time he went into the house and in the bathroom shoved a handful of kindling in the hot-water heater and poured kerosene on it and fired it up. He lay back in the hot water and listened to the wind. There was no sound of the tailpin shifting; it meant the wind was fixed. It’s going to bring more hard weather behind this front. He dried off and pulled on his jeans and walked barefoot and shirtless into the dining room and stood in front of the dying fire. Garish colors of magazines in the chair. Miriam’s book on cave art. Early humans, twenty thousand years of stalking aurochs and wild horses, painting the horses on cave walls in their beautiful calligraphy. I love you, I love you, I want to kill you. Events come about in chains. People die without warning. Droughts settle on the country and become fixed and will not move on. Without warning a boy starts turning into a man. Nothing you yourself did or failed to do. He stared into the design of the fire. The wind fluted at the edges of the roof and at the windowpanes in a wandering series of tones. In the stanzas of the wind’s singing he could hear voices from a past time, and they were hard voices, for this was a hard country and they were living in a hard time.
The people who had built the stone house were still here. Like the imprints of fish and shells he had seen in the tumbled blocks of fossil hash on the San Saba River. They were still here and had not gone away. In some other dimension their songs and words and passionate loves and hatred and violence and gestures of selflessness had not gone away. Made some permanent petrified record. Her father for instance. It was so easy to be cruel to people who trusted you. First they had to trust you.
He opened the drawer in the dining room table. He lifted out a ledger that had been used as a diary for decades, with weather records written in it from 1886. He wrote in the date and the fall of snow. He noted two hundred dollars paid out for a Joe Hancock stallion and a hundred dollars lost on a match race. He went to his room and stripped off his Levi’s and fell into bed under cold quilts, heavy with batts of compressed wool. He stared into the black-and-white night; into unbidden images of horses with the power of speech and the clock at his bedside paying out, with its light-boned hands, the hours in gold earrings one after another.
The moon was now dimmed by the cloud cover and the snow fell, glazing the hills and the pastures.
IN THE MORNING Jeanine sat up in her stiff pile of blankets. She threw them to one side quickly and pulled on the chilled socks and jeans and shirt and her tweed jacket. She hurried down the stairs and into the warm kitchen.
The boy and his father were already at their breakfast. They sat and ate and their movements and their low voices were very like one another. The boy took up a spoonful of oatmeal and, seeing her, plopped it down again. Remnants of what had once been a woman’s kitchen were still visible in the red and white checkered curtains, the clock with a sun face, a shelf of Spode china plates in the Italian Blue pattern, now with two empty holders. They were eating with the good silver. Wedding silver.
“I thought you left,” the boy said.
“Innis.” His father stood up out of his chair.
“What?”
“You’re on thin ice, son.”
Ross went to the stove and poured a cup of coffee and handed it to her.
“I don’t want any breakfast,” she said. Her hair was tousled and uncombed. “I better get going.”
“Good,” Innis said.
Ross reached across the table and took the boy by the collar and the belt and lifted him out of his chair. He turned him around and walked him toward the back kitchen door.
“Wait for the bus outside,” he said. “And if you are still in that mood when you come home, don’t bother coming in the house.” He turned to her. “Get your coat,” he said. “Say good-bye to your horse.”
“Oh, tell him to come back in,” she said. “Where’s his coat?”
“Let’s go.”
Jeanine pulled on her muffler and hat and hurried out the back door after him. The snow had brushed up the dusty world of corrals and bare trees like new paint. It was still coming down in winking columns of drift. She caught up to him and they both left black prints behind them in the snow that led backward into 1935 and even farther, to a vanished blacksmith shop in Mexia and the blind man who sends us all off on some journey through a night lit only by gas flares.
She said, “I’m sorry, Ross. I shouldn’t have stayed.”
“He doesn’t get to say who stays.”
They walked across the littered yard to the barn, and the gate open to the pasture beyond. The dead fire of the windmill crew was a pile of blackened stubs covered lightly with snow like some aboriginal tartan in whites and blacks.
“Don’t bawl,” he said.
“All right.”
Jeanine watched the dark brown stallion as he trotted among the cattle. Everett was holding some calves and their mothers in a fifty-acre trap and Smoky Joe was trotting among them very like a great landowner checking on his herds. He had a dashing little pouffe of snow on his forelock. He lifted his boxy head. His frizzy forelock stood out like a broom, spangled with snowflakes. He came to see what she had in her hand and then tried to take her hat from her head.
“Give that back,” she said in a quavering voice. She patted him. “Ain’t you a rocket?”
JEANINE DROVE OUT of Comanche County into headwinds and snow. When she pulled out of the drive she saw Everett’s son standing at the mailbox to wait for the bus, thrown out into the snow, his hands in his pockets and his feet shifting. As she came onto the gravel she heard a heavy chunk and realized the boy had hit the trailer fender with something, probably a slug of double O buck from his slingshot.
But she had two hundred dollars from Smoky and a hundred in winnings and so let him do whatever he wanted. She drove on. The trailer no longer lugged heavily at the scissors hitch, she could feel it bouncing along the uneven blacktop surface with no horse in it, no nothing. She had only sixty miles to go.
She crossed the spidery steel bridges over the Leon River and then Jim Ned Creek. The water ran between snowy banks, the flakes pouring onto the disturbed surfaces of the current. Just past the highway bridge over Jim Ned Creek, in a misted, snow-clouded pasture she saw four old horses. They were like ghosts, ancient and drawn, standing under a live oak, coated with white. Maybe it was Maisie and Jeff and Big Man and Little Man with their heads together, comforting one another in their old age. The last of the snow skittered in small waves down the black surface of the Bankhead highway.