It was in America that horses first roamed. A million years before the birth of man, they grazed the vast plains of wiry grass and crossed to other continents over bridges of rock soon severed by retreating ice. They first knew man as the hunted knows the hunter, for long before he saw them as a means to killing other beasts, man killed them for their meat.
Paintings on the walls of caves showed how. Lions and bears would turn and fight and that was the moment men speared them. But the horse was a creature of flight not fight and, with a simple deadly logic, the hunter used flight to destroy it. Whole herds were driven hurtling headlong to their deaths from the tops of cliffs. Deposits of their broken bones bore testimony. And though later he came pretending friendship, the alliance with man would ever be but fragile, for the fear he'd struck into their hearts was too deep to be dislodged.
Since that neolithic moment when first a horse was haltered, there were those among men who understood this.
They could see into the creature's soul and soothe the wounds they found there. Often they were seen as witches and perhaps they were. Some wrought their magic with the bleached bones of toads, plucked from moonlit streams. Others, it was said, could with but a glance root the hooves of a working team to the earth they plowed. There were gypsies and showmen, shamans and charlatans. And those who truly had the gift were wont to guard it wisely, for it was said that he who drove the devil out, might also drive him in. The owner of a horse you calmed might shake your hand then dance around the flames while they burned you in the village square.
For secrets uttered softly into pricked and troubled ears, these men were known as Whisperers.
They were mainly men it seemed and this puzzled Annie as she read by hooded lamplight in the cavernous reading room of the public library. She had assumed that women would know more about such things than men. She sat for many hours at one of the long, gleaming mahogany tables, privately corralled by the books she had found, and she stayed until the place closed.
She read about an Irishman called Sullivan who lived two hundred years ago and whose taming of furious horses had been witnessed by many. He would lead the animals away into a darkened barn and no one knew for sure what happened when he closed the door. He claimed that all he used were the words of an Indian charm, bought for the price of a meal from a hungry traveler. No one ever knew if this was true, for his secret died with him. All the witnesses knew was that when Sullivan lead the horses out again, all fury had vanished. Some said they looked hypnotized by fear.
There was a man from Groveport, Ohio, called John Solomon Rarey who tamed his first horse at the age of twelve. Word of his gift spread and in 1858 he was summoned to Windsor Castle in England to calm a horse of Queen Victoria. The queen and her entourage watched astonished as Rarey put his hands on the animal and laid it down on the ground before them. Then he lay down beside it and rested his head on its hooves. The queen chuckled with delight and gave Rarey a hundred dollars. He was a modest, quiet man, but now he was famous and the press wanted more. The call went out to find the most ferocious horse in all England.
It was duly found.
He was a stallion by the name of Cruiser, once the fastest racehorse in the land. Now though, according to the account Annie read, he was a 'fiend incarnate' and wore an eight-pound iron muzzle to stop him killing too many stableboys. His owners only kept him alive because they wanted to breed from him and to make him safe enough to do this, they planned to blind him. Against all advice, Rarey let himself into the stable where no one else dared venture and shut the door. He emerged three hours later leading Crusier, without his muzzle and gentle as a lamb. The owners were so impressed they gave him the horse. Rarey brought him back to Ohio where Crusier died on 6 July 1875, outliving his new master by a full nine years.
Annie came out of the library and down between the massive lions that guarded the steps to the street. Traffic blared by and the wind funneled icily up the canyon of buildings. She still had three or four hours of work to do back at the office, but she didn't take a cab. She wanted to walk. The cold air might make sense of the stories swirling in her head. Whatever their names, no matter where or when they lived, the horses she had read about all had but one face. Pilgrim's. It was into Pilgrim's ears that the Irishman intoned and they were Pilgrim's eyes behind the iron muzzle.
Something was happening to Annie which she couldn't yet define. Something visceral. Over the past month she had watched her daughter walking the floors of the apartment, first with the frame, then with the cane. She had helped Grace, they all had, with the brutal, boring, daily slog of physical therapy, hour upon hour of it, till their limbs ached as much as hers. Physically, there was a steady accumulation of tiny triumphs. But Annie could see that, in almost equal measure, something inside the girl was dying.
Grace tried to mask it from them - her parents, Elsa, her friends, even the army of counselors and therapists who were paid well to see such things -with a kind of dogged cheerfulness. But Annie saw through it, saw the way Grace's face went when she thought no one was looking and saw silence, like a patient monster, enfold her daughter in its arms.
Quite why the life of a savage horse slammed up in a squalid, country stall should seem now so crucially linked with her daughter's decline, Annie had no idea. There was no logic to it. She respected Grace's decision not to ride again, indeed Annie didn't like the idea of her even trying. And when Harry Logan and Liz told her again and again that it would be kinder to destroy Pilgrim and that his prolonged existence was a misery to all concerned, she knew they were talking sense. Why then did she keep saying no? Why, when the magazine's circulation figures had started to level out, had she just taken two whole afternoons off to read about weirdos who whispered into animals' ears? Because she was a fool, she told herself.
Everyone was going home when she got back to the office. She settled at her desk and Anthony gave her a list of messages and reminded her about a breakfast meeting she had been trying to avoid. Then he said good-night and left her on her own. Annie made a couple of calls that he'd said couldn't wait, then called home.
Robert told her that Grace was doing her exercises. She was fine, he said. It was what he always said. Annie told him she would be late and to go ahead and eat without her.
'You sound tired,' he said. 'Heavy day?'
'No. I spent it reading about whisperers.'
'About what?'
'I'll tell you later.'
She started to go through the stack of papers Anthony had left for her but her thoughts kept sliding away into farfetched fantasies about what she'd read in the library. Maybe John Rarey had a great-great-grandson somewhere who'd inherited the gift and could use it on Pilgrim? Maybe she could place an ad in the Times to trace him? Whisperer wanted.
How long it was before she fell asleep she had no idea, but she woke with a start to see a security man standing at the door. He was doing a routine check of the offices and apologized for disturbing her. Annie asked him what time it was and was shocked to hear it was past eleven.
She called for a car and slouched dismally in the back as it took her all the way up Central Park West. The apartment building's green door-canopy looked colorless in the sodium glow of the streetlamps.
Robert and Grace had both gone to bed. Annie stood in the doorway of Grace's room and let her eyes get used to the dark. The false leg stood in the corner like a toy sentry. Grace shifted in her sleep and murmured something. And the thought suddenly occurred to Annie that perhaps this need she felt to keep Pilgrim alive, to find someone who could calm his troubled heart, wasn't about Grace at all. Perhaps it was about herself.
Annie softly pulled the covers up over Grace's shoulder and walked back along the corridor to the kitchen. Robert had left a note on the yellow pad on the table. Liz Hammond had called, it said. She had the name of someone who might be able to help.
Tom Booker woke at six and listened to the local news on the TV while he shaved. A guy from Oakland had parked in the middle of the Golden Gate Bridge, shot his wife and two kids and then jumped off. Traffic both ways was at a standstill. In the eastern suburbs a woman out jogging in the hills behind her home had been killed by a mountain lion.
The light above the mirror made his sunburnt face look green against the shaving foam. The bathroom was dingy and cramped and Tom had to stoop to stand under the shower rigged in the bathtub. It always seemed motels like this were built for some miniature race you never came across, people with tiny, nimble fingers who actually preferred soap the size of credit cards and wrapped for their convenience.
He dressed and sat on the bed to pull his boots on, looking out over the little parking lot that was crammed with the pickups and four-wheeler trucks of those coming to the clinic. As of last night there were going to be twenty in the colt class and about the same in the horsemanship class. It was too many but he never liked turning folk away. For their horses' sake more than theirs. He put on his green wool jacket, picked up his hat and let himself out into the narrow concrete corridor that led to reception.
The young Chinese manager was putting out a tray of evil-looking doughnuts by the coffee machine. He beamed at Tom.
'Morning Mr Booker! How you doing?'
'Good thanks,' Tom said. He put his key down on the desk. 'How are you?'
Fine. Complimentary doughnut?'
'No thanks.'
'All set for the clinic?'
'Oh, reckon we'll muddle through. See you later.'
'Bye Mr Booker.'
The dawn air felt damp and chilly as he walked toward his pickup, but the cloud was high and Tom knew it would burn off by midmorning. Back home in Montana the ranch was still under two foot of snow, but when they drove into Marin County here last night it felt like spring. California, he thought. They sure had it all worked out down here, even the weather. He couldn't wait to get home.
He pointed the red Chevy out onto the highway and looped back over 101. The riding center nestled in a gently sloping wooded valley a couple of miles out of town. He had brought the trailer up here last night before checking into the motel and turned Rimrock out into the meadow. Tom saw someone had already been out putting arrow signs up along the route saying BOOKER HORSE CLINIC and wished whoever it was hadn't. If the place was harder to find maybe some of the dumber ones wouldn't show up.
He drove through the gate and parked on the grass near the big arena where the sand had been watered and neatly combed. There was no one about. Rimrock saw him from the far side of the meadow and by the time Tom got over to the fence he was there waiting. He was an eight-year-old brown quarter horse with a white blaze on his face and four neat white socks that gave him the dapper look of someone dressed up for a tennis party. Tom had bred and reared him himself. He rubbed the horse's neck and let him nuzzle the side of his face.
'You got your work cut out today, old son,' Tom said. Normally he liked to have two horses at a clinic so they could share the load. But his mare, Bronty, was about to foal and he'd had to leave her back in Montana. That was another reason he wanted to get home.
Tom turned and leaned against the fence and the two of them silently surveyed the empty space that for the next five days would be buzzing with nervous horses and their more nervous owners. After he and Rimrock had worked with them, most would go home a little less nervous and that made it worth doing. But this was the fourth clinic in about as many weeks and seeing the same damn fool problems cropping up time and time again got kind of wearing.
For the first time in twenty years he was going to take the spring and summer off. No clinics, no traveling. Just stay put on the ranch, get some of his own colts going, help his brother some. That was it. Maybe he was getting too old. He was forty-five, hell, nearly forty-six. When he'd started out doing clinics he could do one a week all year round and love every minute. If only the people could be as smart as the horses.
Rona Williams, the woman who owned the center and hosted this clinic every year, had seen him and was coming down from the stables. She was a small, wiry woman with the eyes of a zealot and though pushing forty, wore her hair in two long plaits. The girlishness of this was contradicted by the manly way she walked. It was the walk of someone used to being obeyed. Tom liked her. She worked hard to make a success of the clinic. He touched his hat to her and she smiled then looked up at the sky.
'Gonna be a good one,' she said.
'I reckon.' Tom nodded toward the road. 'I see you got yourself some nice new signs out there. In case any of these forty crazy horses get themselves lost.'
'Thirty-nine.'
'Oh? Someone drop out?'
'Nope. Thirty-nine horses, one donkey.' She grinned. 'Guy who owns it's an actor or something. Coming up from L.A.'
He sighed and gave her a look.
'You're a ruthless woman, Rona. You'll have me wrestling grizzly bears before you're through.'
'It's an idea.'
They walked down to the arena together and talked the schedule through. He would kick off this morning with the colts, working with them one by one. With twenty of them, that was going to take pretty much the whole day. Tomorrow would be the horsemanship class, with some cattle work later, if there was time, for those who wanted it.
Tom had bought some new speakers and wanted to do a sound test, so Rona helped him get them out of the Chevy and they set them up near the bleachers where the spectators would sit. The speakers squealed with feedback when they were switched on, then settled into a menacing, anticipatory hum as Tom walked out across the virgin sand of the arena and spoke into the radio mike of his headset.
'Hi folks.' His voice boomed among the trees that stood unstirring in the still air of the valley. 'This is the Rona Williams show and I'm Tom Booker, donkey tamer to the stars.'
When they'd checked everything through, they drove down into town to the place they always had breakfast. Smoky and T.J., the two young guys Tom had brought from Montana to help with this run of four clinics, were already eating. Rona ordered granola and Tom some scrambled eggs, wheat toast and a large orange juice.
'You hear about that woman killed by a mountain lion out jogging?' said Smoky.
'The lion was jogging too?' Tom asked, all big blue-eyed innocence. Everyone laughed.
'Why not?' said Rona. 'Hey fellas, it's California.'
'That's right,' said T.J. 'They say he was all in Lycra and wearing these little earphones.'
'You mean one of them Sony Prowlmen?' said Tom. Smoky waited for them to finish, taking it well. Teasing him had become the morning game. Tom was fond of him. He wasn't a Nobel prizewinner, but when it came to horses he had something going for him. One day, if he worked at it, he'd be good. Tom reached out and ruffled his hair.
'You're okay Smoke,' he said.
A pair of buzzards circled lazily against the liquid blue of the afternoon sky. They floated ever upward on the thermals that rose from the valley, filling that middle space between tree and hilltop with an eerie, intermittent mewing. Five hundred feet below, in a cloud of dust, the latest of the day's twenty dramas was unfolding. The sun and maybe the signs along the road had lured as big a crowd as Tom had ever seen here. The bleachers were packed and people were still coming in, paying their ten bucks a head to one of Rona's helpers at the gate. The women running the refreshment stall were doing brisk business and the air was laced with the smell of barbecue.
In the middle of the arena stood a small corral some thirty feet across and it was here that Tom and Rimrock were working. The sweat was starting to streak the dust on Tom's face and he wiped it on the sleeve of his faded blue snap-button shirt. His legs felt hot under the old leather chaps he wore over his jeans. He'd done eleven colts already and this now was the twelfth, a beautiful black thoroughbred.
Tom always started by having a word with the owner to find out the horse's 'history', as he liked to call it. Had he been ridden yet? Were there any special problems? There always were, but more often than not it was the horse who told you what they were, not the owner.
This little thoroughbred was a case in point. The woman who owned him said he had a tendency to buck and was reluctant to move out. He was lazy, cranky even, she said. But now that Tom and Rimrock had him circling around them in the corral, the horse was saying something different. Tom always gave a running commentary into the radio mike so the crowd could follow what he was doing. He tried not to make the owner sound foolish. Too foolish anyway.
'There's another story coming through here,' he said. 'It's always kind of interesting to hear the horse's side of the story. Now if he was cranky or lazy, like you say, we'd be seeing the tail twitching there and his ears back maybe. But this isn't a cranky horse, it's a scared horse. You see how braced he is there?'
The woman was watching from outside the corral, leaning on the rail. She nodded. Tom had Rimrock turning on a dime, in deft little white-socked steps, so he was always facing the circling thoroughbred.
'And how he keeps pointing his hindquarters in at me? Well, I'd guess the reason he seems reluctant to move out is because when he does he gets into trouble for it.'
'He's not good at transitions,' the woman said. 'You know? When I want him to move from a trot to a lope, say?'
Tom had to bite his tongue when he heard this kind of talk.
'Uh-huh,' he said. 'That's not what I'm seeing. You may think you're asking for a lope but your body's saying something else. You're putting too many conditions on it. You're saying "Go, but hey, don't go!" Or maybe "Go, but not too fast!" He knows this from the way you feel. Your body can't lie. You ever give him a kick to make him move out?'
'He won't go unless I do.'
'And then he goes and you feel he's going too fast, so you yank him back?'
'Well, yes. Sometimes.'
'Sometimes. Uh-huh. And then he bucks.' She nodded.
He said nothing for a while. The woman had got the message and was starting to look defensive. She was clearly big on image, made up like Barbara Stanwyck, with all the right gear. The hat alone must have set her back three hundred bucks. God knows what the horse cost. Tom worked on getting the thoroughbred focused on him. He had sixty foot of coiled rope and he threw it so the coils slapped against the horse's flank, making it burst into a lope. He coiled the rope back in then did it again. Then again and again, making the animal go from a trot to a lope, letting it slow, then up to a lope again.
'I want him to get so as he can leave real soft,' he said. 'He's getting the idea now. He's not all braced up and tense like he was at the start. See the way his hindquarters are straightening out? And how his tail's not clamped in all tight like it was? He's finding out it's okay to go.' He threw the rope again and this time the transition to the lope was smooth.
'You see that? That's a change. He's getting better already. Pretty soon, if you work at it, you'll be able to make all these transitions easy on a loose rein.'
And pigs will fly, he thought. She'll take the poor animal home, ride him just as she always did and all this work will have been for nothing. The thought, as always, moved him up a gear. If he fixed the horse real good, maybe he could immunize the poor thing against her stupidity and fear. The thoroughbred was moving out nicely now but Tom had only worked on one side, so he turned him around to make him run the other way and did the whole thing over again.
It took almost an hour. By the time he finished, the thoroughbred was sweating hard. But when Tom let him ease up and come to a standstill, the horse looked kind of disappointed.
'He could go on playing all day,' said Tom. 'Hey mister, can I have my ball back?' The crowd laughed. 'He's going to be okay - so long as you don't go yanking on him.' He looked at the woman. She nodded and tried to smile but Tom could see she was crestfallen and he suddenly felt sorry for her. He walked Rimrock over to where she stood and switched off the radio mike so only she could hear when he spoke.
'It's all about self-preservation,' he said gently. 'You see, these animals have got such big hearts; there's nothing they want more than to do what you want them to. But when the messages get confused, all they can do is try and save themselves.'
He smiled down at her for a moment, then said: 'Now why don't you go saddle him up and see?'
The woman was close to tears. She climbed over the rail and walked over to her horse. The little thoroughbred watched her all the way. He let her come right up and stroke his neck. Tom watched.
'He's not going to look back if you don't,' he said. 'They're the most forgiving creatures God ever made.'
She led the horse out and Tom brought Rimrock slowly back to the middle of the corral, letting the silence hold for a while. He took off his hat, squinting at the sky as he wiped the sweat from his brow. The two buzzards were still hanging there. Tom thought how mournful their mewing sounded. He put his hat back on and flicked the switch of the radio mike.
'Okay folks. Who's next?'
It was the guy with the donkey.
It was more than a hundred years since Joseph and Alice Booker, Tom's great-grandparents, made their long journey west to Montana, lured like thousands of others by the promise of land. The passage cost them the lives of two children, one from scarlet fever and the other drowned, but they made it as far as the Clark's Fork River and there staked a claim to a hundred and sixty fertile acres.
By the time Tom was born, the ranch they started had grown to twenty thousand acres. That it had so prospered, let alone endured the ruthless round of drought, flood and felony, was mainly due to Tom's grandfather John. It was at least logical therefore that it should be he who destroyed it.
John Booker, a man of great physical strength and even greater gentleness, had two sons. Above the ranch house that had long since replaced the tarred homesteaders' shack, stood a rocky bluff where the boys played hiding games and looked for arrowheads. From its crest you could see the river curving around like a castle moat and in the distance the snowy peaks of the Pryor and Beartooth Mountains. Sometimes the boys would sit there side by side without talking and look out across their father's land. What the younger boy saw was his entire world. Daniel, Tom's father, loved the ranch with all his heart and if ever his thoughts strayed beyond its boundaries, it was only to reinforce the feeling that all he wanted lay within them. To him the distant mountains were like comforting walls, protecting all he held dear from the turbulence beyond. To Ned, three years his senior, they were the walls of a prison. He couldn't wait to escape and when he was sixteen he duly did. He went to California to seek his fortune and lost a gullible succession of business partners theirs instead.
Daniel stayed and ran the ranch with his father. He married a girl called Ellen Hooper from Bridger and they had three children, Tom, Rosie and Frank. Much of the land John had added to those original riverside acres was poorer pasture, rough sage-strewn hills of red gumbo gashed with black volcanic rock. The cattle work was done on horseback and Tom could ride almost before he could walk. His mother used to like telling how, at two years old, they'd found him in the barn, curled up in the straw asleep, between the massive hooves of a percheron stallion. It was as though the horse was guarding him, she said.
They used to halter-break their colts as yearlings in the spring and the boy would sit on the top rail of the corral and watch. Both his father and his grandfather had a gentle way with the horses and he didn't discover till later that there was any other way.
'It's like asking a woman to dance,' the old man used to say. 'If you've got no confidence and you're scared she's gonna turn you down and you sidle up, looking at your boots, sure as eggs'll break she will turn you down. Of course, then you can try grabbing her and forcing her around the floor, but neither one of you's gonna end up enjoying it a whole lot.'
His grandfather was a great dancer. Tom could remember him gliding with his grandmother under the strings of colored lights at the Fourth of July dance. Their feet seemed to be on air. It was the same when he rode a horse.
'Dancing and riding, it's the same damn thing,' he would say. 'It's about trust and consent. You've gotten hold of one another. The man's leading but he's not dragging her, he's offering a feel and she feels it and goes with him. You're in harmony and moving to each other's rhythm, just following the feel.'
These things Tom knew already, though knew not how he came to know them. He understood the language of horses in the same way he understood the difference between colors or smells. At any moment he could tell what was going on in their heads and he knew it was mutual. He started his first colt (he never used the word break) when he was just seven.
Tom's grandparents died the same winter, one swiftly following the other, when Tom was twelve. John left the ranch in its entirety to Tom's father. Ned flew up from Los Angeles to hear the will read out. He had been back rarely and Tom only remembered him for his fancy two-tone shoes and the hunted look he had in his eyes. He always called him 'bud' and brought some useless gift, a piece of frippery that was the current craze of city kids. This time he left without saying a word. Instead, they heard from his lawyers.
The litigation dragged on for three years. Tom would hear his mother crying in the night and the kitchen always seemed full of lawyers and real estate people and neighbors who smelled money. Tom turned away from all this and lost himself in the horses. He would cut school to be with them and his parents were too preoccupied either to notice or to care.
The only time he remembered his father happy during this time was in the spring when for three days they drove the cattle up to the summer pastures. His mother, Frank and Rosie came too and the five of them would ride all day and sleep out under the stars.
'If only you could make now last forever,' Frank said on one of those nights while they lay on their backs watching a huge half-moon roar up out of the dark shoulders of the mountain. Frank was eleven and not by nature a philosopher. They had all lain still, thinking about this for a while. Somewhere, a long way off, a coyote called.
'I guess that's all forever is,' his father replied. 'Just one long trail of nows. And I guess all you can do is try and live one now at a time without getting too worked up about the last now or the next now.'
It seemed to Tom as good a recipe for life as he'd yet heard.
Three years of lawsuits left his father a broken man. The ranch ended up sold to an oil company and the money that remained, after the lawyers and the taxman had taken their cut, was split in half. Ned was never seen or heard of again. Daniel and Ellen took Tom, Rosie and Frank and moved away west. They bought seven thousand acres and an old sprawl of a ranch house on the Rocky Mountain Front. It was where the high plains ran smack into a hundred-million-year-old wall of limestone, a place of harsh, towering beauty, which later Tom would come to love. But he wasn't ready for it. His real home had been sold from under him and he wanted to be off on his own. Once he had helped his parents get the new ranch going, he upped and left.
He went down to Wyoming and worked as a hired hand. There he saw things he would never have believed. Cowboys who whipped and spurred their horses till they bled. At a ranch near Sheridan he saw for himself why they called it 'breaking' a horse. He watched a man tie a yearling tight by its neck to a fence, hobble a hind leg then beat it into submission with a length of zinc piping. Tom would never forget the fear in the animal's eyes nor the stupid triumph in the man's when, many hours later, it sought to save its life and submitted to the saddle. Tom told the man he was a fool, got into a fight and was fired on the spot.
He moved to Nevada and worked some of the big ranches there. Wherever he worked, he made a point of seeking out the most troubled horses and offering to ride them. Many of the men he rode with had been doing the job since long before he was born and, to begin with, they would snigger behind their hands at the sight of him mounting some crazy beast that had thrown the best of them a dozen times. They soon stopped though when they saw the way the boy handled himself and how the horse changed. Tom lost count of the horses he met who had been seriously screwed up by the stupidity or cruelty of humans, but he never met one he couldn't help.
For five years this was his life. He came home when he could and always tried to be there for the times his father most needed help. For Ellen, these visits were like a series of snapshots plotting her son's progression into manhood. He had grown lean and tall and of her three children by far the best looking. He wore his sunbleached hair longer than before and she chided him for it but secretly liked it. Even in winter his face was tanned and it made the clear, pale blue of his eyes all the more vivid.
The life he described seemed to his mother a lonely one. There were friends he mentioned, but none who were close. There were girls he dated, but none he was serious about. By his own account, most of the time that he wasn't working with horses, he spent reading and studying for a correspondence course he'd signed up for. Ellen noticed he'd grown quieter, how he spoke now only when he had something to say. Unlike his father however, there was nothing sad about this quietness. It was more a kind of focused stillness.
As time went by, people got to hear about the Booker boy and calls would come to wherever he happened to be working, asking if he would take a look at some horse or other they were having trouble with.
'How much you charge 'em for doing this?' his brother Frank asked him over supper one April when Tom had come home to help with the branding. Rosie was away at college and Frank, nineteen now, was working full time on the ranch. He had a keen commercial nose and in fact virtually ran the place as their father retreated ever deeper into the gloom created by the lawsuits.
'Oh, I don't charge them,' Tom said. Frank put his fork down and gave him a look.
'You don't charge them at all? Ever?'
'Nope.' He took another mouthful.
'Why the hell not? These people have money, don't they?'
Tom thought for a moment. His parents were looking at him too. It seemed this was a matter of some interest to all of them.
'Well. You see, I don't do it for the people. I do it for the horse.'
There was a silence. Frank smiled and shook his head. It was clear Tom's father thought him a little crazy too. Ellen stood up and started stacking plates defensively.
'Well, I think it's nice,' she said.
It got Tom thinking. But it took another couple of years for the idea of doing clinics to take shape. Meanwhile, he surprised them all by announcing he was going off to the University of Chicago.
It was a mixed humanities and social sciences course and he stuck it out for eighteen months. He only lasted that long because he fell in love with a beautiful girl from New Jersey who played the cello in a student string quartet. Tom went to five concerts before they even spoke. She had a mane of thick, glossy black hair which she swept back over her shoulders and she wore silver hoops in her ears like a folk singer. Tom watched the way she moved as she played, the music seeming to swim through her body. It was the sexiest thing he had ever seen.
At the sixth concert she looked at him all the way through and he waited for her afterward outside. She came up and took his arm without saying a word. Her name was Rachel Feinerman and later that night in her room, Tom thought he had died and gone to heaven. He watched her light candles and then turn to stare at him as she stepped out of her dress. He thought it strange how she kept her earrings on but was glad she had because the candlelight flashed in them as they made love. She never once closed her eyes and she arched herself into him, watching him watch his hands travel her body in wonder. Her nipples were large and the color of chocolate and the luxuriant triangle of hair on her belly glistened like the wing of a raven.
He brought her home for Thanksgiving and she said she had never been so cold in all her life. She got on well with everyone, even the horses, and said she thought it was the most beautiful place she had ever laid eyes on. Tom could tell what his mother was thinking just from the look on her face. That this young woman, with her inappropriate footwear and religion, was sure as hell no rancher's wife.
Not long after this, when Tom told Rachel he'd had enough of mixed humanities and Chicago and that he was going back to Montana, she got mad.
'You're going to go back and be a cowboy?' she said caustically. Tom said yes, matter of fact that was pretty much what he did have in mind. They were in his room and Rachel spun around, waving an exasperated arm at the books crammed into his shelves.
'What about all this?' she said. 'Don't you care about any of this?' He thought for a moment, then nodded.
'Sure I care,' he said. 'That's part of why I want to quit. When I was working as a hand, I just couldn't wait to get back in at night to whatever I was reading. Books had a kind of magic. But these teachers here, with all their talk, well… Seems to me if you talk about these things too much, the magic gets lost and pretty soon talk is all there is. Some things in life just… are.'
She looked at him for a moment, with her head tilted back, then slapped him hard across the face.
'You stupid bastard,' she said. 'Aren't you even going to ask me to many you?'
So he did. And they went to Nevada the following week and were married, both aware that it was probably a mistake. Her parents were furious. His were just dazed. Tom and Rachel lived with everyone else in the ranch house for the best part of a year, while they patched up the cottage, an old ramshackle place, overlooking the creek. There was a well up there with an old cast-iron pump and Tom got it working again and rebuilt the surround and wrote his and Rachel's initials in the wet concrete. They moved in just in time for Rachel to give birth to their son. They called him Hal.
Tom worked with his father and Frank on the ranch and watched his wife get more and more depressed. She would talk for hours on the phone to her mother, then cry all night long and tell him how lonely she felt and how stupid she was for feeling that way because she loved him and Hal so much it should be all she needed. She asked him again and again whether he loved her, even waking him sometimes in the dead of the night to ask him the same question and he would hold her in his arms and tell her he did.
Tom's mother said these things sometimes happened after a woman had a child and that maybe they should get away for a while, take a vacation somewhere. So they left Hal with her and flew to San Francisco and even though the city was hung with a cold fog for the whole week they -were there, Rachel started to smile again. They went to concerts and movies and fancy restaurants and did all the tourist things too. And when they got home it was even worse.
Winter came and it was the coldest anyone on the Front could remember. The snow drove down the valleys and made pygmies of the giant cottonwoods along the creek. In a blitz of polar air one night they lost thirty head of cattle and chipped them from the ice a week later like the fallen statues of an ancient creed.
Rachel's cello case stood gathering dust in a corner of the house and when he asked why she didn't play anymore she told him music didn't work here. It just got lost, she said, swallowed up by all the air. Some mornings later, clearing the fireplace, Tom came across a blackened metal string and sifting on among the ashes he found the charred tip of the cello's scroll. He looked in the case and there was only the bow.
When the snow melted, Rachel told him she was taking Hal and going back to New Jersey and Tom just nodded and kissed her and took her in his arms. She was from too different a world, she said, as they had always both known though never acknowledged. She could no more live here with all this windblown, aching space around her than live on the face of the moon. There was no acrimony, just a hollowing sadness. And no question but that the child should go with her. To Tom it only seemed fair.
It was the morning of the Thursday before Easter that he stacked their things in the back of the pickup to take them to the airport. The mountain front was draped in cloud and a cold drizzle was coming in from the plains. Tom held the son he hardly knew and would forever hardly know, bundled in a blanket, and watched Frank and his parents form an awkward line outside the ranch house to say their goodbyes. Rachel hugged each one of them in turn, his mother last. Both women were weeping.
'I'm sorry,' Rachel said. Ellen held her and patted the back of her head.
'No, sweetheart. I'm sorry. We all are.'
The first Tom Booker horse clinic was held in Elko, Nevada the following spring. It was, by common consent, a great success.
Annie called Liz Hammond from the office the morning after she got her message.
'I hear you've found me a whisperer,' she said.
'A what?'
Annie laughed. 'It's okay. I was just reading some stuff yesterday. That's what they used to call these people.'
'Whisperers. Mm, I like that. This one sounds more like a cowboy. Lives in Montana somewhere.'
She told Annie how she had heard of him. It was a long chain, a friend who knew someone who remembered someone saying something about a guy who'd had a troubled horse and had taken him to this other guy in Nevada… Liz had doggedly followed it through.
'Liz, this must have cost you a fortune! I'll pay for the calls.'
'Oh, that's okay. Apparently there are a few people out West doing this kind of thing, but I'm told he's the best. Anyway, I got his number for you.'
Annie took it down and thanked her.
'No problem. But if he turns out to be Clint Eastwood, he's mine okay?'
Annie thanked her again and hung up. She stared down at the number on the yellow legal pad in front of her. She didn't know why, but suddenly she felt apprehensive. Then she told herself not to be stupid, picked up the phone and dialed.
They always had a barbecue on the first night of Rona's clinic. It brought in some extra money and the food was good so Tom didn't mind staying on, though he was longing to get out of his dusty, sweaty shirt and into a hot tub.
They ate at long tables on the terrace outside Rona's low, white adobe ranch house and Tom found himself sitting next to the woman who owned the little thoroughbred. He knew it wasn't an accident because she'd been coming on strong all evening. She didn't have the hat on anymore and had untied her hair. She was in her early thirties maybe, a good-looking woman, he thought. And she knew it. She was fixing him with big black eyes but overdoing it a little, asking him all these questions and listening to him as if he was the most incredibly interesting guy she'd ever met. She had already told him that her name was Dale, that she was in real estate, that she had a house on the ocean near Santa Barbara. Oh yes, and that she was divorced.
'I just can't get over the way he felt under me after you'd finished with him,' she was saying, again. 'Everything had just, I don't know, freed up or something.'
Tom nodded and gave a little shrug.
'Well, that's what happened,' he said. 'He just needed to know it was okay and you just needed to get out of his way a little.'
There was a roar of laughter from the next table and they both turned to look. The donkey man was spinning some piece of Hollywood gossip about two movie stars Tom had never heard of, caught in a car doing something he couldn't quite picture.
'Where did you learn all this stuff, Tom?' he heard Dale ask. He turned back to her.
'What stuff?'
'You know, about horses. Did you have like, a guru or a teacher or something?'
He fixed her with a serious look, as if about to vouchsafe wisdom.
'Well Dale, you know, a lot of this is nuts and bolts stuff.' She frowned.
'What do you mean?'
'Well, if the rider's nuts, the horse bolts.'
She laughed, too enthusiastically, putting her hand on his arm. Hell, he thought, it wasn't that good a joke.
'No,' she pouted. 'Tell me, seriously.'
'A lot of these things you can't really teach. All you can do is create a situation where if people want to learn they can. The best teachers I ever met were the horses themselves. You find a lot of folk have opinions, but if it's facts you want you're better off going to the horse.'
She gave him a look he guessed was supposed to convey in equal measure a religious wonder at his great profundity and something rather more carnal. It was time for him to go.
He got up from the table making some lame excuse about having to check Rimrock, who'd long since been turned out. When he wished Dale good-night, she looked a little peeved at having wasted so much energy on him.
As he drove back to the motel, he thought it was no accident that California had always been the favored place for any cult that blended sex and religion. The people were a pushover. Maybe if that group in Oregon - the ones who used to wear orange pants and worship the guy with the ninety Rolls-Royces -had set up here instead, they'd still be going strong.
Tom had met dozens, scores, of women like Dale at these clinics over the years. They were all searching for something. With many it seemed in some strange way to be connected with fear. They'd bought themselves these fiery, expensive horses and were terrified of them. They were looking for something to help conquer this fear or maybe just fear in general. They might equally have chosen hang gliding or mountaineering or wrestling killer sharks. They just happened to have chosen riding.
They came to his clinics longing for enlightenment and comfort. Tom didn't know how much enlightenment there had been, but there'd been comfort a fair few times and it had been mutual. Ten years ago, a look like the one Dale just gave him and they'd have been bowling back to the motel together and out of their clothes before you could even shut the door.
It wasn't that nowadays he always walked away from such opportunities. It just didn't seem worth the trouble quite so much anymore. For there was usually trouble of some kind. People seldom seemed to bring the same expectations to such encounters. It had taken him a while to learn this and to understand what his own expectations were, let alone those of any woman he might meet.
For some time after Rachel left, he'd blamed himself for what happened. He knew it wasn't just the place that was wrong. She had seemed to need something from him that he hadn't been able to give. When he'd told her that he loved her he'd meant it. And when she and Hal went, they left a space within him that, try as he might, he was never quite able to fill with his work.
He'd always liked the company of women and found that sex came his way without looking for it. And as the clinics took off and he traveled month after month around the country, he found some solace this way. Mostly they were brief affairs, though there were one or two women, as relaxed as he about these matters, who even to this day when he passed through welcomed him to their beds like an old friend.
The guilt about Rachel however had stayed with him. Until at last he realized that what she had needed from him was need itself. That he should need her as she needed him. And Tom knew that this was impossible. He could never feel such a need, for Rachel or anyone else. For without ever spelling it out to himself and without any sense of self-satisfaction, he already knew he had in his life a kind of innate balance, the kind that others seemed to spend most of their lives striving for. It didn't occur to him that this was anything special. He felt himself simply part of a pattern, a cohesion of things animate and inanimate, to which he was connected both by spirit and by blood.
Tom turned the Chevy into the motel parking lot and found a space right outside his room.
The bathtub was too short for a long soak. You had to decide whether to let your shoulders get cold or your knees. He got out and dried himself in front of the TV. The mountain lion story was still big news. They were going to hunt it down and kill it.
Men with rifles and fluorescent yellow jackets were combing a hillside. Tom found it kind of touching. A mountain lion would see those jackets from about a hundred miles. He got into bed, killed the TV and called home.
His nephew Joe, the oldest of Frank's three boys, answered the phone.
'Hi Joe, how're you doing?'
'Good. Where are you?'
'Oh, I'm in some godforsaken motel, in a bed that's about a yard too short. Reckon I may have to take my hat and boots off.'
Joe laughed. He was twelve years old and quiet, much like Tom had been at that age. He was also pretty good with the horses.
'How's old Brontosaurus doing?'
'She's good. She's getting real big. Dad thinks she'll foal by midweek.'
'You make sure you show your old man what to do.'
'I will. Want to speak to him?'
'Sure, if he's around.'
He could hear Joe calling his dad. The living-room TV was on and, as usual, Frank's wife Diane was hollering at one of the twins. It still seemed odd, them living in the big ranch house. Tom continued to think of it as his parents' house even though it was nearly three years since his father had died and his mother had gone to live with Rosie in Great Falls.
When Frank had married Diane, they'd taken over the creek house, the one Tom and Rachel had briefly occupied, and done some remodeling. But with three growing boys it was soon a squeeze and when his mother left, Tom insisted they move into the ranch house. He was away so much of the time, doing clinics, and when he was there, the place felt too big and too empty. He would have been happy to do a straight swap and move back out to the creek house himself but Diane said they'd only move if he stayed, there was room enough for all of them. So Tom had kept his old room and now they all lived together. Visitors, both family and friends, sometimes used the creek house, though mainly it stood empty.
Tom could hear Frank's footsteps coming to the phone.
'Hiya bro, how's it going down there?'
'It's going okay. Rona's going for a world record on the number of horses and the motel here's built for the seven dwarfs but aside from that, everything's dandy.'
They talked for a while about what was happening on the ranch. They were in the middle of calving, getting up all hours of the night and going up to the pasture to check the herd. It was a lot of hard work but they hadn't lost any calves yet and Frank sounded cheerful. He told Tom there had been a lot of calls asking if he would reconsider his decision not to do any clinics this summer.
'What did you tell 'em?'
'Oh, I just said you were getting too old and were all burned out.'
'Thanks pal.'
'And there was a call from some Englishwoman in New York. She wouldn't say what it was about, just that it was urgent. Gave me a real hard time when I wouldn't tell her your number down there. I said I'd ask you to call her.'
Tom picked up the little pad off the bedside table and wrote down Annie's name and the four phone numbers she had left, one of them a mobile.
'That it? Just the four? No number for the villa in the South of France?'
'Nope. That's it.'
They talked a little about Bronty then said goodbye. Tom looked at the pad. He didn't know too many people in New York, only Rachel and Hal. Maybe this was something to do with them, though surely this woman, whoever she was, would have said so. He looked at his watch. It was ten-thirty, which made it one-thirty in New York. He put the pad back on the table and switched off the light. He would call in the morning.
He didn't get the chance. It was still dark when the phone rang and woke him. He switched on the light before answering and saw it was only five-fifteen.
'Is that Tom Booker?' From the accent, he could tell immediately who it must be.
'I think so,' he said. 'It's kind of early to be sure.'
'I know, I'm sorry. I thought you'd probably be up early and didn't want to miss you. My name's Annie Graves. I called your brother yesterday, I don't know if he told you.'
'Sure. He told me. I was going to call you. He said he hadn't given you this number.'
'He didn't. I managed to get it from someone else. Anyway, the reason I'm calling is that I understand you help people who've got horse problems.'
'No ma'am, I don't.'
There was a silence at the other end. Tom could tell he had thrown her.
'Oh,' she said. 'I'm sorry, I—'
'It's kind of the other way around. I help horses who've got people problems.'
They hadn't gotten off to a great start and Tom regretted being a wiseguy. He asked her what the problem was and listened for a long time in silence as she told him what had happened to her daughter and the horse. It was shocking and made all the more so by the measured, almost dispassionate way she told it. He sensed there was emotion there, but that it was buried deep and firmly under control.
'That's terrible,' he said when Annie had finished. 'I'm real sorry.'
He could hear her take a deep breath.
'Yes, well. Will you come and see him?'
'What, to New York?'
'Yes.'
'Ma'am, I'm afraid—'
'Naturally I'll pay the fare.'
'What I was going to say was, I don't do that sort of thing. Even if it was somewhere nearer, that's not what I do. I give clinics. And I'm not even doing them for a while. This here's the last one I'm doing till the fall.'
'So you'd have time to come, if you wanted to.'
It wasn't a question. She was pretty pushy. Or maybe it was just the accent.
'When does your clinic finish?'
'On Wednesday. But—'
'Could you come on Thursday?'
It wasn't just the accent. She had picked up on a slight hesitation and was pushing hard at it. It was like what you did with a horse, pick the path of least resistance and work on it.
'I'm sorry ma'am,' he said firmly. 'And I'm real sorry about what happened. But I've got work to do back on the ranch and I can't help you.'
'Don't say that. Please, don't say that. Would you at least think about it.' Again it wasn't a question.
'Ma'am—'
I'd better go now. I'm sorry to have woken you.'
And without letting him speak or saying goodbye, she hung up.
When Tom walked into reception the following morning, the motel manager handed him a Federal Express package. It contained a photograph of a girl on a beautiful-looking Morgan horse and an open return airticket to New York.
Tom laid his arm along the back of the plastic-covered bench seat and watched his son cooking hamburgers behind the counter of the diner. The boy looked as if he'd been doing it all his life, the way he moved them around the grill and flipped them nonchalantly as he chatted and laughed with one of the waiters. It was, Hal had assured him, the hottest new lunch place in Greenwich Village.
The boy worked here for nothing three or four times a week in exchange for living rentfree in a loft apartment belonging to the owner, who was a friend of Rachel's. When he wasn't working here, Hal was at film school. Earlier he'd been telling Tom about a'short' he was shooting.
'It's about a man who eats his girlfriend's motorcycle piece by piece.'
'Sounds tough.'
'It is. It's kind of a road movie but all set in one place.' Tom was about ninety percent sure this was a joke. He really hoped so. Hal went on, 'When he's finished the motorcycle, he does the same with the girlfriend.'
Tom nodded, considering this. 'Boy meets girl, boy eats girl.'
Hal laughed. He had his mother's thick black hair and dark goodlooks, though his eyes were blue. Tom liked him very much. They didn't get to see each other too often, but they wrote and when they did meet, they were easy together. Hal had grown up a city kid but he came out to Montana now and again and when he did, he loved it. He even rode pretty good, considering.
It had been some years since Tom had seen the boy's mother, but they talked on the phone about Hal and how he was doing and that was never difficult either.
Rachel had married an art dealer called Leo and they'd had three other children who were now in their teens. Hal was twenty and seemed to have grown up happy. It was the chance of seeing him that had clinched the decision to fly east and look at the Englishwoman's horse. Tom was going up there this afternoon.
'Here you go. One cheeseburger with bacon.' Hal put it down in front of him and sat down opposite him with a grin. He was only having a coffee.
'You're not eating?' asked Tom.
I'll have something later. Try it.'
Tom took a bite and nodded his approval. 'It's good.'
'Some of the guys just leave them lying on the grill. You gotta work them, seal the juices.'
'Is it okay for you to take time out like this?' 'Oh sure. If it gets busy, I'll go help.' It wasn't yet noon and the place was still quiet. Tom normally didn't like to eat much at midday and he rarely ate meat nowadays, but Hal had been so keen to cook him a burger he'd pretended he was up for it. At the next table, four men in suits and a lot of wrist jewelry were talking loudly about a deal they'd done. Not the normal kind of clientele, Hal had discreetly informed him. But Tom had enjoyed watching them. He was always impressed by the energy of New York. He was just glad he didn't have to live here.
'How's your mother?' he asked.
'She's great. She's playing again. Leo's fixed for her to give a concert at a gallery just around the corner here on Sunday.'
That's good.'
'She was going to come along today and see you but last night there was this colossal row and the pianist walked out, so now it's all panic to find someone else. She said to give you her best.'
'Well you make sure to give her mine.'
They talked about Hal's course and his plans for the summer. He said he'd like to come out to Montana for a couple of weeks and it seemed to Tom that he meant it and wasn't just saying it to make him feel wanted. Tom told him how he was going to be working with the yearlings and some of the older colts he'd bred. Talking about it made him long to get started. His first summer for years with no clinics, no traveling, just being there by the mountains and seeing the country come to life again.
The diner was getting busy so Hal had to go back to work. He wouldn't let Tom pay and came out with him onto the sidewalk. Tom put his hat on and noticed the glance Hal gave it. He hoped it wasn't too embarrassing to be seen with a cowboy. It was always a little awkward when they said goodbye, with Tom thinking maybe he should give the boy a hug, but they'd kind of got into the habit of just shaking hands so today, as usual, that's all they did.
'Good luck with the horse,' Hal said.
'Thank you. And you with the movie.'
'Thanks. I'll send you a cassette.'
'I'd like that. Bye then Hal.'
'Bye.'
Tom decided to walk a few blocks before looking for a cab. It was cold and gray and the steam rose in drifting clouds from manholes in the street. There was a young guy, standing on a corner, begging. His hair was a matted tangle of rat's tails and his skin the color of bruised parchment. His fingers spilled through frayed woolen mitts and with no coat he was hopping from one foot to the other to keep warm. Tom gave him a five-dollar bill.
They were expecting him at the stables at about four, but when he got to Penn Station he found there was an earlier train and decided to take it. The more daylight there was when he saw the horse, he thought, the better. Also, this way maybe he could get a little look at the animal on his own first. It was always easier when the owners weren't breathing down your neck. When they were, the horses always picked up on the tension. He was sure the woman wouldn't mind.
Annie had wondered whether to tell Grace about Tom Booker. Pilgrim's name had barely been mentioned since the day she saw him at the stables. Once Annie and Robert had tried talking to her about him, believing it better to confront the issue of what they should do with him. But Grace had become very agitated and cut Annie off.
'I don't want to hear,' she said. 'I've told you what I want. I want him to go back to Kentucky. But you always know better, so it's up to you.'
Robert had put a calming hand on her shoulder and started to say something, but she shrugged him off violently and yelled 'No Daddy!' They left it at that.
In the end, they did however decide to tell her about the man from Montana. All Grace said was that she didn't want to be up in Chatham when he came. It was decided therefore that Annie would go alone. She'd come up by train the previous night and spent the morning at the farmhouse, making calls and trying to concentrate on the copy wired by modem to her computer screen from the office.
It was impossible. The slow tick of the hall clock, which normally she found comforting, was today almost unbearable. And with every long hour that limped by she became more nervous. She puzzled over why this should be and came up with no answer that satisfied her. The nearest she could get was a feeling, as acute as it was irrational, that in some inexorable way it wasn't only Pilgrim's fate that was to be determined today by this stranger, it was the fate of all of them. Grace's, Robert's and her own.
There were no cabs at Hudson station when the train got in. It was starting to drizzle and Tom had to wait for five minutes under the dripping iron-pillared canopy over the platform till one arrived. When it did he climbed into the back with his bag and gave the driver the address of the stables.
Hudson looked as though it might once have been pretty, but now it seemed a sorry sort of place. Once grand old buildings were rotting away. Many of the shops along what Tom supposed was its main street were boarded up and those that weren't seemed mostly to be selling junk. People tramped the sidewalks with their shoulders hunched against the rain.
It was just after three when the cab turned into Mrs Dyer's driveway and headed up the hill toward the stables. Tom looked out at the horses standing in the rain across the muddy fields. They pricked their ears and watched the cab go by. The entrance into the stable yard was blocked by a trailer. Tom asked the cabdriver to wait and got out.
As he edged through the gap between the wall and the trailer he could hear voices from the yard and the clatter of hooves.
'Git in! Git in there, damn you!'
Joan Dyer's sons were trying to load two frightened colts into the open back of the trailer. Tim stood on the ramp and was trying to drag the first colt inside by its halter rope. It was a tug-of-war he would easily have lost had Eric not been at the other end of the animal, driving it forward with a whip and dodging its hooves. In his other hand he held the rope of the second colt who was by now as scared as the first. All this Tom saw in one glance as he stepped around the side of the trailer into the yard.
'Whoa now boys, what's happening here?' he said. Both the boys turned and looked at him for a moment and neither answered. Then, as if he didn't exist, they looked away again and went on with what they were doing.
'It's no fucking good,' Tim said. 'Try the other one first.' He yanked the first colt away from the trailer so that Tom had to step quickly back against the wall as they went by. At last Eric looked at him again.
'Can I help you?' There was such conten in the voice and the way the boy eyed hin. down that Tom could only smile.
Thank you. I'm looking for a horse called Pilgrim. Belongs to a Mrs Annie Graves?'
'Who are you?'
'My name's Booker.'
Eric jerked his head toward the barn. 'Better go see my mom.'
Tom thanked him and walked away to the barn. He heard one of them snigger and say something about Wyatt Earp but he didn't look back. Mrs Dyer came out of the barn door just as he got there. He introduced himself and they shook hands after she'd wiped hers on her jacket. She looked over his shoulder at the boys by the trailer and shook her head.
'There are better ways to do that,' Tom said.
'I know,' she said, wearily. But she clearly didn't want to pursue it. 'You're early. Annie's not here yet.'
'I'm sorry. I got the early train. I should have called. Would it be okay if I had a look at him before she gets here?'
She hesitated. He gave her a conspirator's smile that stopped just short of a wink, meaning that she, knowing about horses, would understand what he was about to say.
'You know how sometimes it's, well, kind of easier to get a fix on these things when the owner's not around.'
She took the bait and nodded.
'He's back here.'
Tom followed her around the back of the barn to the row of old stalls. When she got to Pilgrim's door,
she turned to face him. She looked agitated suddenly.
'I have to tell you, this has been a disaster from the beginning. I don't know how much she's told you, but the truth is, in everybody's opinion except hers, this horse should have been put out of its misery long ago. Why the vets have gone along with her I don't know. Frankly, I think keeping it alive is cruel and stupid.'
The intensity took Tom by surprise. He nodded slowly and then looked at the bolted door. He'd already seen the yellowy-brown liquid oozing from under it and could smell the filth beyond.
'He's in here?'
'Yes. Be careful.'
Tom slid the top bolt and heard an immediate scuffle. The stench was nauseating.
'God, doesn't anyone clean him out?'
'We're all too scared,' Mrs Dyer said quietly.
Tom gently opened the top part of the door and leaned in. He saw Pilgrim through the darkness, looking back at him with his ears flattened and his yellow teeth bared. Suddenly the horse lunged and reared, striking at him with his hooves. Tom moved swiftly back and the hooves missed him by inches and smashed against the bottom door. Tom closed the top and rammed the bolt shut.
'If an inspector saw this, he'd close the whole damn place down,' he said. The quiet, controlled fury in his voice made Mrs Dyer look at the ground.
'I know, I've tried to tell—' He cut her off.
'You ought to be ashamed.'
He turned away and walked back toward the yard. He could hear an engine revving and now the frightened call of a horse as a car horn started blaring.
When he came around the end of the barn he saw one of the colts was already tied up in the trailer. There was blood on one of its hind legs. Eric was trying to drag the other colt in, lashing with the whip while his brother, in an old pickup, shunted it from behind, honking the horn. Tom went up to the car, flung the door open and dragged the boy out by the scruff of his neck.
'Who the fuck do you think you are?' the boy said, but the end of it came out falsetto as Tom swung him sideways and threw him to the ground.
'Wyatt Earp,' Tom said and walked right on past toward Eric who backed away.
'Hey listen cowboy…' he said. Tom grabbed him by the throat, freed the colt and took the whip out of the boy's other hand with a twist that made him yelp. The colt ran off across the yard, saving itself. Tom had the whip in one hand and the other still clamped on Eric's throat so that the boy's frightened eyes bulged. He held him there in front of him, their faces not a foot apart.
'If I thought you were worth the effort,' Tom said, 'I'd whip your no-good hide from hell to breakfast.'
He shoved him away and the boy's back thumped against the wall, knocking the wind clean out of him. Tom looked back and saw Mrs Dyer coming into the yard. He turned and stepped around the side of the trailer.
As he came through the gap, a woman was getting out of a silver Ford Lariat parked beside the waiting taxi. For a moment he and Annie Graves were face to face.
'Mr Booker?' she said. Tom was breathing hard. All he really registered was the auburn hair and the troubled green eyes. He nodded. 'I'm Annie Graves. You got here early.'
'No ma'am. I got here too damn late.' He got into the cab, shut the door and told the driver to go. When they reached the bottom of the driveway he realized he was still holding the whip. He wound down the window and threw it in the ditch.
It was Robert who finally suggested going to Lester's for breakfast. It was a decision he'd worried about for two weeks. They hadn't gone there since Grace started school again and that unspoken fact was starting to weigh heavily. The reason it hadn't been mentioned was that Lester's excellent breakfast was only part of the routine. The other part, just as important, was taking the crosstown bus to get there.
It was one of those silly things that had started when Grace was much younger. Sometimes Annie came too but usually it was just Robert and Grace. They used to pretend it was some grand adventure and would sit at the back and play a whispered game in which they took turns elaborating fantasies about the other passengers. The driver was really an android hitman and those little old ladies rock stars in disguise. More recently they would just gossip but until the accident it had never occurred to either of them not to take the bus. Now neither was sure if Grace would be able to climb onto it.
So far she had been going to school two and then three days a week, mornings only. Robert took her there by cab and Elsa collected her by cab at noon. He and Annie tried to seem casual when they asked her how it was going. Great, she said. Everything was great. And how were Becky and Cathy and r
Mrs Shaw? They were all great too. He suspected that she knew full well what they wanted to ask but couldn't. Did people stare at her leg? Did they ask her about it? Did she see them talking about her?
'Breakfast at Lester's?' Robert said that morning, in as matter-of-fact a voice as he could muster. Annie had already left for an early meeting. Grace shrugged and said, 'Sure. If you want to.'
They took the elevator down and said good morning to Ramon, the doorman.
'Get you a taxi?' he said.
Robert hesitated, but only for a beat.
'No. We're getting the bus.'
As they walked the two blocks to the bus stop, Robert chattered away and tried to look as if it was natural to be walking this slowly. He knew Grace wasn't listening to him. Her eyes were locked on the sidewalk ahead, surveying its surface for traps, concentrating hard on placing the rubber tip of the cane and swinging her leg through behind it. By the time they got to the stop, despite the cold, she was sweating.
When the bus came, she climbed in as though she had been doing it for years. It was crowded and for a while they stood near the front. An old man saw Grace's cane and offered her his seat. She thanked him and tried to decline but he wouldn't hear of it. Robert wanted to scream at him to let her be but didn't and, blushing, Grace relented and sat down. She looked up at Robert and gave him a little humiliated smile that smote his heart.
When they walked into the coffee shop, Robert had a sudden panic that he should have called and warned Lester so that no one would make a fuss or ask embarrassing questions. He needn't have worried. Perhaps someone from the school had already told them, but Lester and the waiters were their normal brisk and cheerful selves.
They sat at their usual table by the window and ordered what they always ordered, bagels with cream cheese and lox. While they waited, Robert tried hard to keep the conversation going. It was new to him, this need to fill the silences between them. Talking with Grace had always been so easy. He noticed how her eyes kept drifting off to the people walking past outside, on their way to work. Lester, a dapper little man with a toothbrush moustache, had the radio on behind the counter and for once Robert felt grateful for the constant, inane babble of traffic news and jingles. When the bagels arrived Grace barely touched hers.
'Like to go to Europe this summer?' he said.
'What, a vacation you mean?'
'Yes. I thought we could go to Italy. Rent a house in Tuscany or somewhere. What do you think?'
She shrugged. 'Okay.'
'We don't have to.'
'No. It'd be nice.'
'If you're good, we might even go on to England and visit your grandmother.' Grace grimaced on cue. The threat of dispatching her to see Annie's mother was an old family joke. Grace glanced out of the window then back at Robert.
'Dad, I think I'll go in now.'
'Not hungry?'
She shook her head. He understood. She wanted to get into school early, before the lobby was crowded with gawking girls. He knocked back his coffee and paid the check.
Grace made him say goodbye on the corner rather than walk her down to the school entrance. He kissed her and walked away, fighting the urge to turn and watch her go in. He knew that if she saw him look, she might mistake concern for pity. He walked back to Third Avenue and turned downtown toward his office.
The sky had cleared while they had been inside. It was going to be one of those icy, clear blue New York days that Robert loved. It was perfect walking weather and he walked briskly, trying to drive away thoughts of that lonely figure limping into school by thinking of what he had to do once he got into work.
First, as usual, he would call the personal injury lawyer they'd hired to look after the convoluted legal farce Grace's accident seemed destined to become.
Only a sensible person would be fool enough to think the case might boil down to whether the girls were negligent in riding on the road that morning and whether the truck driver was negligent in hitting them. Instead of course, everybody was suing everybody: the girls' health insurance companies, the truck driver, his insurance company, the haulage company in Atlanta, their insurance company, the company that the driver had leased the truck from, their insurance company, the manufacturers of the truck, the manufacturers of the truck's tires, the county, the mill, the railroad. No one had yet filed suit against God for letting it snow, but it was still early days. It was pure plaintiff-attorney paradise and it felt odd to Robert to be looking at it from the other end.
At least, thank heaven, they'd managed to keep most of it away from Grace. Apart from the statement she'd given in the hospital, all she'd had to do was give a deposition under oath to their lawyer. Grace had met the woman socially a couple of times before and hadn't seemed troubled by again having to go over the accident. Again she had said that she could remember nothing after sliding down the bank.
Early in the new year the truck driver had written them a letter, saying he was sorry. Robert and Annie had discussed for a long time whether or not to show it to Grace and in the end decided it was her right. She'd read it, handed it back and said simply that it was nice of him. For Robert, just as important a decision was whether or not to show it to their attorney who naturally would seize upon it gleefully as an admission of guilt. The lawyer in Robert said show it. Something more human in him said don't. He'd hedged his bets and kept it on file.
In the distance now, he could see the sun glinting coldly on the towering glass of his office building.
A lost limb, he'd read recently in some learned legal journal, could nowadays be worth three million dollars in damages. He pictured his daughter's pale face, looking out of the coffee shop window. What fine experts they must be, he thought, to quantify the cost.
The school lobby was busier than usual. Grace did a quick scan of the faces, hoping she wouldn't see any of her classmates. Becky's mom was there, talking to Mrs Shaw, but neither of them looked her way and there was no sign of Becky. She was probably already in the library, on one of the computers. In the old days that's where Grace would have headed too. They would fool around, leaving funny messages on each other's E mail and would stay there till the bell rang. Then they'd all race up the stairs to the classroom, laughing and elbowing each other out of the way.
Now that Grace couldn't manage the stairs, they would all feel obliged to come with her in the elevator, a slow and ancient thing. To spare them the embarrassment, Grace now went straight up to the classroom on her own so that she could be sitting at her desk when they arrived.
She made her way over to the elevator and pressed the call button, keeping her eyes on it so that if any of her friends came by they'd have the chance to avoid her.
Everyone had been so nice to her since her return to school. That was the problem. She just wanted them to be normal. And other things had changed. While she'd been away, her friends seemed to have subtly regrouped. Becky and Cathy, her two best friends, had gotten closer. The three of them used to be inseparable. They would gossip and tease and moan about each other and console each other on the phone every evening. It had been a perfectly balanced threesome. But now, although they did their best to include her, it wasn't the same. But how could it be?
The elevator arrived and Grace went in, thankful that she was still the only one waiting and would have it to herself. But just as the doors were closing two younger girls came hurtling in, laughing and gabbling away to each other. As soon as they saw Grace they both went quiet.
Grace smiled and said, 'Hi.'
'Hi.' They said it together but said nothing more and the three of them stood awkwardly while the elevator made its laborious, cranking ascent. Grace noticed how the eyes of both girls examined the blank walls and ceiling, looking everywhere except at the one thing she knew they wanted to look at, her leg. It was always the same.
She'd mentioned it to the'trauma psychologist', yet another expert her parents made her visit every week. The woman meant well and was probably very good at her job, but Grace found the sessions a complete waste of time. How could this stranger - how could anyone - know what it was like?
Tell them it's okay to look,' the woman had said. 'Tell them it's okay to talk about it.'
But that wasn't the point. Grace didn't want them to look, she didn't want them to talk about it. Talk. These shrink people seemed to think that talk solved everything and it just wasn't true.
Yesterday the woman had tried to get her to talk about Judith and that was the last thing on earth Grace wanted to do.
'How do you feel about Judith?'
Grace had felt like screaming. Instead, she said coldly, 'She's dead, how do you think I feel?' Eventually the woman got the message and the subject was dropped.
It had been the same a few weeks ago when she'd tried to get Grace to talk about Pilgrim. He was maimed and useless, just like Grace, and every time she thought of him all she could see were those terrible eyes cowering in the corner of that stinking stall at Mrs Dyer's. How on earth could it help to think or talk about that?
The elevator stopped at the floor below Grace's and the two younger girls got out. She heard them immediately start talking again as they went off down the corridor.
When she got to her own classroom it was as she'd hoped, nobody else had yet come up. She got her books out of her bag, carefully concealed her cane on the floor under the desk, then lowered herself slowly onto the hard wooden seat. In fact it was so hard that by the end of the morning her stump would be throbbing with pain. But she could handle it. That kind of pain was easy.
It was three days before Annie was able to speak to Tom Booker. She already had a clear enough picture of what had happened at the stables that day. After watching the taxi go away down the driveway, she'd gone into the yard and got most of the story just from the faces of the two Dyer boys. Their mother had told Annie coldly that she wanted Pilgrim out of the place by Monday.
Annie called Liz Hammond and together they went to see Harry Logan. He had just finished a hysterectomy on a Chihuahua when they arrived. He came out with his surgical gown on and when he saw the two women he said 'Uh-oh' and pretended to hide. He had a couple of recovery stalls behind the clinic and, after a lot of sighing, he agreed to let Annie put Pilgrim in one of them.
'For one week only,' he wagged a finger at her.
Two,' Annie said.
He looked at Liz and gave a forlorn grin.
'She a friend of yours? Okay, two then. Absolute max. While you find somewhere else.'
'Harry, you're a sweetheart,' said Liz. He put up his hands.
'I'm an idiot. This horse. He bites me, he kicks me, he drags me through a freezing river and what do I do? I take him in as a house-guest.'
'Thanks Harry,' Annie said.
The three of them went up to the stables the next morning. The boys weren't about and only once did Annie see Joan Dyer, looking out from an upstairs window of her house. After two hours of bruising struggle and three times the amount of sedative Harry felt happy giving, they got Pilgrim into the trailer and drove him back to the clinic.
The day after Tom Booker's visit, Annie had tried calling him in Montana. The woman who answered the phone - Booker's wife, Annie assumed - told her that he was expected back the following evening. The woman's tone was none too friendly and Annie thought she must have heard what had happened. She said she would tell Tom that Annie had called. Annie waited two long days and heard nothing. On the second night, when Robert was in bed reading and she was sure Grace was asleep, she called again. Again, it was the woman who answered.
'He's having his supper right now,' she said.
Annie heard a man's voice asking who it was and the ruffling sound of a hand being put over the receiver. Through it she could hear her say, 'It's that Englishwoman again.' There was a long pause. Annie realized she was holding her breath and told herself to calm down.
'Mrs Graves, this is Tom Booker.'
'Mr Booker. I wanted to apologize for what happened at the stables.' There was silence at the other end so she went on. 'I should have known what was going on up there but I suppose I just closed my eyes to it.'
'I can understand that.' She expected him to go on but he didn't.
'Anyway. We've moved him to another place, a better place, and I wondered if you could…' She realized how futile, how stupid this was even before she said it. 'If you would consider coming back and seeing him.'
'I'm sorry. I can't do that. Even if I had the time, frankly I don't know how much use it'd be.'
'Couldn't you spare just a day or two? I don't care what it would cost.' She heard him give a little laugh and she regretted saying it.
'Ma'am, I hope you don't mind if I speak plainly with you, but you've got to understand. There's a limit to the amount of suffering these creatures can take. I believe this horse of yours has been living in the shadow for too long now.'
'So you think we should put him down? Like everyone else does?' There was a pause. 'If he was your horse Mr Booker, would you put him down?'
'Well ma'am. He's not my horse and I'm glad it's not my decision. But in your shoes, yes, that's what I'd do.'
She tried again to persuade him to come, but she could tell it was no use. He was courteous and calm and totally unmovable. She thanked him and hung up, then walked down the corridor and into the living room.
The lights had all been turned off and the top of the piano shone dimly in the darkness. She went slowly over to the window and stood there for a long time, looking out across the treetops of the park toward the towering apartment blocks of the East Side. It was like a stage backdrop, ten thousand tiny windows, pinpricks of light in a fake night sky. It was impossible to believe that inside every one of them was a different life with its own special pain and destiny. Robert had fallen asleep. She took his book from his hands, turned off his bedside light and undressed in the dark. For a long time she lay on her back beside him, listening to his breathing and watching the orange shapes made on the ceiling by the streetlamps spilling around the edges of the blinds. She already knew what she was going to do. But she wasn't going to tell Robert, or Grace, until she had it all arranged.
For his talent in nurturing young and ruthless recruits to run his mighty empire, Crawford Gates was known, among many names less flattering, as The Face That Launched a Thousand Shits. For this reason Annie always had somewhat mixed feelings about being seen with him.
He was sitting opposite her, eating his seared swordfish meticulously without taking his eyes off her. And as she talked, Annie was intrigued by how his fork kept finding the next piece, homing faultlessly in on it as if drawn there by a magnet. It was the same restaurant he had taken her to almost a year ago when he'd offered her the editorship, a vast soulless space with minimalist matt black decor and a floor of white marble that somehow always made Annie think of an abattoir.
She knew a month was a lot to ask but she felt she was owed it. Until the accident she had barely taken a day off and even since then she hadn't taken many.
I'll have the phone, fax, modem, everything,' she said. 'You won't even know I'm not here.'
She cursed to herself. She'd been talking for fifteen minutes and was getting the tone all wrong. It sounded like she was pleading. She should be doing it from strength, just telling him straight what she was going to do. There was nothing about his manner that so far suggested disapproval. He was just hearing her out while the damn swordfish autopiloted into his mouth. When she was nervous she had this stupid habit of feeling obliged to fill the silences of any conversation. She decided to stop and wait for a reaction. Crawford Gates finished chewing, nodded and took a slow sip of Perrier.
'Are you going to take Robert and Grace too?'
'Just Grace. Robert's got too much on. But Grace really needs to get away. Since she went back to school she's started to sink a little. The break'll do her good.'
What she didn't say was that even now neither Grace nor Robert had the faintest idea of what she was planning. Telling them was almost the only thing left to do. Everything else she had done, with Anthony's help, from the office.
The house she had found to rent was in Choteau, which was the nearest town of any size to Tom Booker's ranch. There hadn't been much choice, but the place was furnished and, from the details the real estate agent had sent, it seemed adequate. She had found a physical therapist nearby for Grace and some stables who were prepared to take Pilgrim, though Annie had been less than frank about what the horse was like. The worst part was going to be hauling the trailer across seven states to get there. But Liz Hammond and Harry Logan had made calls and fixed a chain of places they were welcome to stay on route.
Crawford Gates dabbed his lips clean.
'Annie my dear, I said it before and I say it again. You take all the time you need. These children of ours are precious, God-given creatures and when something goes wrong, we just have to stand right by them and do what's best.'
From someone who'd walked out on four marriages and twice that many children, Annie thought that was pretty rich. He sounded like Ronald Reagan at the end of a bad day and the Hollywood sincerity only served to sharpen the anger she already felt at her own miserable performance. The old bastard would probably be lunching at this same table tomorrow with her successor. She'd been half hoping he would just come right out with it and fire her.
Cruising back to the office in his absurdly long black Cadillac, Annie decided that tonight she would tell Robert and Grace. Grace would scream at her and Robert would tell her she was crazy. But they would go along with it because they always did.
The only other person she needed to inform was the one upon whom the whole plan hinged: Tom Booker. It would seem to others curious, she reflected, that this of all things worried her least. But Annie had done it many times before. As a journalist, she had specialized in people who said no. Once she'd traveled five thousand miles to a Pacific island and turned up on the doorstep of a famous writer who never gave interviews. She ended up living with him for two weeks and the piece she wrote won awards and was syndicated all over the world.
It was, she believed, a simple and unassailable fact of life that if a woman went to epic lengths to throw herself on the mercy of a man, the man would not, could not, refuse.
The highway stretched straight ahead of them between converging fences for miles too many to ponder toward the thunder-black dome of the horizon. At this most distant point, where the road seemed to climb into the sky, lightning flickered repeatedly, as if reatomizing blacktop into cloud. Beyond the fences, on either side, the ocean of Iowa prairie spread away flat and featureless to nowhere, lit fitfully through the rushing cloud by vivid, rolling shafts of sun, as though some giant were searching for his prey.
In such a landscape there was dislocation both of time and space and Annie felt the inkling of what could, if she were to let it, become panic. She scanned the skyline for something to latch on to, some sign of life, a grain silo, a tree, a solitary bird, anything. Finding none, she counted fence poles or the marker stripes on the road that streamed at her from the horizon as if blazed there by the lightning. She could picture the silver Lariat and its missile-shaped trailer from above, swallowing these stripes in steady gulps.
In two days they had traveled more than twelve hundred miles and in all that time Grace had hardly spoken. Much of the time she had slept, as she slept now, curled up on the back bench seat. When she woke she would stay there, listening to her Walkman or staring blankly out. Once, and only once, Annie looked in her rearview mirror and saw her daughter watching her. When their eyes met Annie smiled and Grace looked instantly away.
She had reacted to her mother's plan much as Annie had predicted. She had screamed and shouted and said she wasn't going, they couldn't make her and that was that. She got up from the dinner table, went to her room and slammed the door. Annie and Robert sat there for a while in silence. Annie had told him on his own earlier and bludgeoned every protest he made.
'She can't go on avoiding the issue,' she said. 'It's her horse for Godsake. She can't just wash her hands of it.'
'Annie, look at what the kid's been through.'
'But walking away from it isn't helping her, it's making it worse. You know how much she loved him. You saw how she was that day at the stables. Can't you imagine how the sight of him must haunt her?'
He didn't reply, just looked down and shook his head. Annie took his hand in hers.
'We can do something about this, Robert,' she said, gentle now. 'I know we can. Pilgrim can be alright again. This man can make him alright. And then Grace can be too.'
Robert looked at her. 'Does he really think he can do it?' Annie hesitated but not enough for him to notice.
'Yes,' she said. It was the first time she had actually lied about it. Robert naturally assumed Tom Booker had been consulted about Pilgrim's trip to Montana.
It was an illusion she'd also maintained with Grace.
Finding no ally in her father, Grace gave in, as Annie knew she would. But the resentful silence into which her anger evolved was lasting much longer than Annie had expected. In the old days, before the accident, Annie could normally subvert such moods by teasing or blithely ignoring them. This silence however was of a new order. It was as epic and immutable as the enterprise on which the girl had been forced to embark and, as the miles went by, Annie could only marvel at her stamina.
Robert had helped them pack, driven them to Chatham and gone with them to Harry Logan's on the morning they set off. In Grace's eyes this made him an accomplice. While they loaded Pilgrim into the trailer, she sat like stone in the Lariat with her earphones on, pretending to read a magazine. The horse's cries and the sound of his hooves smashing against the sides of the trailer reverberated around the yard but never once did Grace look up.
Harry gave Pilgrim a hefty shot of sedative and handed Annie a box of the stuff along with some needles in case of emergencies. He came to the window to say hello to Grace and started to tell her about feeding Pilgrim during the trip. Grace cut him short.
'You better talk to Mom,' she said.
When it was time to go, her response to Robert's farewell kiss was little more than perfunctory.
That first night they had stayed with some friends of Harry Logan who lived on the edge of a small town just south of Cleveland. The husband, Elliott, had been to veterinary school with Harry and was now a partner in a large local practice. It was dark when they arrived and Elliott insisted Annie and Grace go in and freshen up while he saw to the horse. He said they too used to keep horses and he'd prepared a stall in the barn.
'Harry said to leave him in the trailer,' Annie said.
'What, for the entire trip?'
That's what he said.'
He cocked an eyebrow and gave her a patronizing, professional kind of smile.
'You go on in. I'll take a look.'
It was starting to rain and Annie wasn't going to argue. The wife's name was Connie. She was a small, subdued woman with a brittle perm that looked as if it had been done that afternoon. She took them in and showed them to their rooms. The house was large and filled with the echoing silence of children grown up and gone. Their faces smiled from the walls in photographs of high school triumphs and sunny graduations.
Grace was put in their daughter's old room and Annie in the guest room along the corridor. Connie showed Annie where the bathroom was and left, saying supper was ready whenever they were. Annie thanked her and went back down the corridor to look in on Grace.
Connie's daughter had married a dentist and moved to Michigan, but her old room looked as if she'd never left. There were books and swimming trophies and shelves herded with little crystal animals. Amid this abandoned clutter of a stranger's childhood, Grace stood by the bed and rummaged in her bag for her wash things. She didn't look up when Annie came in.
'Okay?'
Grace shrugged and still didn't look up. Annie tried to look casual, feigning interest in the pictures on the wall. She stretched and groaned.
'God, I'm so stiff.'
'What are we doing here?'
The voice was cold and hostile and Annie turned and saw Grace staring at her with her hands on her hips.
'What do you mean?'
Grace took in the whole room with a contemptuous sweep of her arm.
'All this. I mean, what are we doing here!'
Annie sighed, but before she could say anything Grace said forget it, it didn't matter. She snatched up her cane and her wash bag and headed for the door. Annie could see how furious it made the girl that she couldn't storm out more effectively.
'Grace, please.'
'I said forget it, okay?' And she was gone.
Annie was talking with Connie in the kitchen when Elliott came in from the yard. He looked pale and had mud all down one side of him. He also seemed to be trying not to limp.
'I left him in the trailer,' he said.
At supper Grace toyed with her food and spoke only when spoken to. The three adults did their best to keep the conversation going but there were long spells when the only sound was the chink of cutlery. They talked about Harry Logan and Chatham and a new outbreak of Lyme disease that everyone was worrying about. Elliott said they knew a young girl about Grace's age who'd caught it and her life had been completely wrecked. Connie darted a look at him and he flushed a little and quickly changed the subject.
As soon as the meal was over, Grace said she was tired and would they mind if she went to bed. Annie said she would come too but Grace wouldn't let her. She said polite good-nights to Elliott and Connie. As she walked to the door, her cane clunked on the hollow floor and Annie caught the look in the couple's eyes as they watched.
The next day, yesterday, they'd made an early start and driven with just a few short stops all the way across Indiana and Illinois and on into Iowa. And all day long, as the vast continent opened up around them, Grace kept her silence.
Last night they'd stayed with a distant cousin of Liz Hammond who'd married a farmer and lived near Des Moines. The farm stood alone at the end of five straight miles of driveway, as if on its own brown planet, plowed in faultless furrows to every horizon.
They were quiet, religious folk - Baptists, Annie guessed - and as unlike Liz as she could imagine. The farmer said Liz had told them all about Pilgrim, but Annie could see he was still shocked by what he saw. He helped her feed and water the horse and then raked out and replaced as much of the wet, dung-soiled straw as he could from under Pilgrim's thrashing hooves.
They ate supper at a long wooden table with the couple's six children. They all had their father's blond hair and wide blue eyes and watched Annie and Grace with a kind of polite wonder. The food was plain and wholesome and there was only milk to drink, served creamy and still warm from the dairy in brimming glass jugs.
This morning, the wife had cooked them a breakfast of eggs, hash browns, and home-cured ham and just as they were leaving, with Grace already in the car, the farmer had handed something to Annie.
'We'd like you to have this,' he said.
It was an old book with a faded cloth cover. The man's wife was standing beside him and they watched as Annie opened it. It was The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan. Annie could remember it being read to her at school when she was only seven or eight years old.
'It seemed appropriate,' the farmer said.
Annie swallowed and thanked him.
'We'll be praying for you all,' the woman said.
The book still lay on the front passenger seat. And every time Annie caught sight of it she thought about the woman's words.
Even though Annie had lived in this country for many years, such candid religious talk still jolted some deep-seated English reserve in her and made her feel uneasy. But what disturbed her more was that this total stranger had so clearly seen them all as needing her prayers. She'd seen them as victims. Not just Pilgrim and Grace - that was understandable -but Annie too. Nobody, nobody ever, had seen Annie Graves that way.
Now, below the lightning on the horizon, something caught her eye. It started as little more than a flickering speck and grew slowly as she watched it, assembling itself into the liquid shape of a truck. Soon, beyond it, she could see the towers of grain elevators then other, lower buildings, a town, sprouting up around them. A flurry of small brown birds erupted from the side of the road and were buffeted away on the wind. The truck was nearly up to them now and Annie watched the glinting chrome of its grille get larger and larger until it passed them in a blast of wind that made the car and trailer shudder. Grace stirred behind her.
'What was that?'
'Nothing. Just a truck.'
Annie saw her in the mirror, rubbing sleep from her eyes.
'There's a town coming up. We need gas. Are you hungry?'
'A little.'
The exit road traveled in a long loop around a white wooden church that stood on its own in a field of dead grass. In front of it a small boy with a bicycle watched them circle by and as they did, the church was suddenly engulfed in sunshine. Annie half expected to see a finger pointing down through the clouds.
There was a diner next to the gas station and after filling up they ate egg-salad sandwiches in silence, surrounded by men who wore baseball caps emblazoned with the names of farm products and who spoke in hushed tones of winter wheat and the price of soybeans. For all Annie understood, they might as well have been speaking some foreign tongue. She went to pay the check then came back to the table to tell Grace she was going to the rest room and would meet her back at the car.
'Would you see if Pilgrim wants some water?' she said. Grace didn't answer.
'Grace? Did you hear me?'
Annie stood over her, aware suddenly that the farmers around them had stopped talking. The confrontation was deliberate but now she regretted the impulse to make it so public. Grace didn't look up.
She finished her Coke and the sound her glass made when she put it down punctuated the silence. 'Do it yourself,' she said.
The first time Grace had thought about killing herself was in the cab coming home that day from the prosthetist's. The socket of the false leg had dug into the underside of her thighbone, but she'd pretended it felt fine and had gone along with her father's determined cheerfulness while wondering which would be the best way to do it.
Two years ago a girl in eighth grade had thrown herself under a downtown express on the subway. No one seemed able to come up with a reason for it and like everyone else Grace had been shocked. But she had also been secretly impressed. What courage it must have taken, she thought, in that final, decisive moment. Grace remembered thinking she herself could never summon such courage and that even if she could, her muscles would somehow still refuse to make that last launching flex.
Now though, she saw it in an altogether different light and could contemplate the possibility, if not the particular method, with what amounted to dispassion. That her life was ruined was a simple fact, only reinforced by the way those around her sought so fervently to show it wasn't. She wished with all her heart that she had died that day with Judith and Gulliver in the snow. But as the weeks went by she realized - and it came to her almost as a disappointment - that maybe she wasn't the suicide type.
What held her back was the inability to see it only from her own point of view. It seemed so melodramatic, so extravagant, more the sort of extremist thing her mother might do. It didn't occur to Grace that perhaps it was the Maclean in her, those cursed lawyer genes, that made her so objectify the issue of her own demise. For blame had ever flowed but one way in this family. Everything was always Annie's fault.
Grace loved and resented her mother in almost equal measure and often for the same thing. For her certainty, for example, and for the way she was always so damn right. Above all for knowing Grace the way she did. Knowing how she would react to things, what her likes and dislikes were, what her opinion might be on any given subject. Maybe all mothers had such insight on their daughters and sometimes it was wonderful to be so understood. More often though, and especially of late, it felt like a monstrous invasion of her privacy.
For these, and a thousand less specific wrongs, Grace now took revenge. For at last, with this great silence, she seemed to have a weapon that worked. She could see the effect it was having on her mother and found it gratifying. Annie's acts of tyranny were normally executed without a hint of guilt or self-doubt. But now Grace sensed both. There seemed some tacit and exploitable acknowledgment that it was wrong to have forced Grace to join this escapade. Viewed from the backseat of the Lariat, her mother seemed like some gambler, staking life itself on one last desperate spin of the wheel.
They drove due west to the Missouri then swung north with the river snaking broad and brown to their left. At Sioux City they crossed into South Dakota and headed west again on Route 90 which would take them all the way to Montana. They passed through the northern Badlands and saw the sun go down over the Black Hills in a strip of blood-orange sky. They traveled without speaking and the brooding sorrow between them seemed to spawn and spread until it mingled with the million other sorrows that haunted this vast, unforgiving landscape.
Neither Liz nor Harry knew anyone who lived in these parts, so Annie had booked a room at a small hotel near Mount Rushmore. She had never seen the monument and had looked forward to coming here with Grace. But when they pulled into the hotel's deserted parking lot it was dark and raining and Annie thought the only good thing about being there was that she wouldn't have to make polite conversation with hosts she'd never met and would never meet again.
The rooms were all named after different presidents. Theirs was Abraham Lincoln. His beard jutted at them from laminated prints on every wall and an extract from the Gettysburg Address hung above the TV, partly obscured by a glossy cardboard sign advertising adult movies. There were two large beds, side by side, and Grace collapsed on the one farthest from the door while Annie went back out into the rain to see to Pilgrim.
The horse seemed to be getting used to the rituals of the journey. Confined in the narrow stall of the trailer, he no longer erupted when Annie stepped into the cramped, protected space in front of him. He just edged back into the darkness and watched. She could feel his eyes on her while she hung up a new net of hay and carefully pushed his buckets of feed and water within reach. He would never touch them until she had gone. She sensed his simmering hostility and was both scared and excited by it so that when she closed the door on him her heart was pounding.
When she got back to the room, Grace had undressed and was in bed. Her back was turned and whether she was asleep or just pretending, Annie couldn't tell.
'Grace?' she said softly. 'Don't you want to eat?' There was no reaction. Annie thought about going alone to the restaurant, but couldn't face it. She took a long, hot bath, hoping the water would bring her comfort. All it brought her was doubt. It hung in the air with the steam, enfolding her. What on earth did she think she was doing, dragging these two wounded souls across a continent, in some gruesome reprise of pioneer madness? Grace's silence and the remorseless emptiness of the spaces they had crossed made Annie feel suddenly, terribly alone. To obliterate these thoughts, she slid her hands between her legs and felt herself, worked at herself, refusing to concede to the initial stubborn numbness until at last her loins twitched and swam and she was lost.
That night she dreamed she was walking with her father along a snowy ridge, roped like mountaineers, though this was something they had never done. Below, on either side, sheer walls of rock and ice plunged to nothingness. They were on a cornice, a thin overhanging crust of snow which her father said was safe. He was in front of her and he turned to her and smiled the way he smiled in her favorite photograph, a smile which said with total confidence that he was with her and everything was alright. And as he did so, over his shoulder she saw a crack zigzagging toward them and the lip of the cornice start to split away and tumble down the mountainside. She wanted to cry out but couldn't and the moment before the crack reached them, her father turned and saw it. And then he was gone and Annie saw the rope between them snaking after him and she realized the only way to save them both was to jump the other way. So she launched herself into the air on the other side of the ridge. But instead of feeling the rope jolt and hold, she just kept on falling, free-falling into the void.
When she woke it was morning. They had slept late. Outside it was raining even harder. Mount Rushmore and its stone faces were hidden in swirling cloud that the woman in reception said wasn't going to clear. Not far away, she said, there was another mountain carving they could maybe get a glimpse of, a giant figure of Crazy Horse.
'Thanks,' said Annie. 'We've got our own.' They had breakfast, checked out and drove back up to the interstate. They crossed the state line into Wyoming and skirted south of Devil's Tower and Thunder Basin, then over the Powder River and up toward Sheridan where at last the rain stopped.
Increasingly the pickups and trucks they saw were driven by men in cowboy hats. Some touched their brims or lifted a hand in grave salute. As they went by, the sun made rainbows in the plumes of their tail-spray.
It was late afternoon when they crossed into Montana. But Annie felt neither relief nor any sense of achievement. She had tried so hard not to let Grace's silence beat her. All day she had hopped stations on the radio and listened to Bible-thumping preachers, livestock reports and more kinds of country music than she'd known existed. But it was no good. She felt herself compressed into an ever-shrinking space between the weight of her daughter's gloom and her own welling anger, At last it was too much to bear. Some forty miles into Montana, neither looking nor caring where it led, she took an exit off the interstate.
She wanted to park but nowhere seemed right. There was a massive casino standing on its own and as she looked, its neon sign flickered on, red and lurid in the fading light. She drove on up a hill, past a cafe and a low straggle of stores with a dirt parking strip in front. Two Indians with long black hair and feathers in their high-crowned cowboy hats stood beside a battered pickup, watching the Lariat and trailer approach. Something in their gaze unsettled her and she kept on up the hill, took a right turn and stopped. She switched off the ignition and for a while sat very still. She could sense Grace behind her, watching. The girl's voice, when at last she spoke, was cautious.
'What's going on?'
'What?' Annie said sharply.
'It's closed. Look.'
There was a sign along the road that said National Monument, Little Bighorn Battlefield. Grace was right. According to the opening hours it gave, the place had closed an hour ago. It made Annie even angrier that Grace should so misjudge her mood to think she had come here deliberately, like a tourist. She didn't trust herself to look at her. She just stared ahead and took a deep breath.
'How long is this going to go on, Grace?'
'What?'
'You know what I mean. How long is it going to go on?'
There was a long pause. Annie watched a ball of tumbleweed chase its own shadow down the road toward them. It brushed the side of the car as it went by. She turned to look at Grace and the girl looked away and shrugged.
'Hmm? I mean, is this it now?' Annie went on. 'We've come nearly two thousand miles and you've sat there and you haven't spoken a word. So I just thought I'd ask, just so I know. Is this the way you and I are going to be now?'
Grace was looking down, fiddling with her Walkman. She shrugged again.
'I dunno.'
'Do you want us to turn around and go back home?' Grace gave a bitter little laugh.
'Well, do you?'
Grace lifted her eyes and looked sideways out of the window, trying to seem nonchalant, but Annie could see she was fighting tears. There was a clumping sound as Pilgrim shifted in the trailer.
'Because if that's what you want—'
Suddenly Grace turned on her, her face savage and distorted. The tears were running now and the failure to stop them doubled her fury.
'What the hell do you care!' she screamed. 'You decide! You always do! You pretend you care what other people want but you don't, it's just bullshit!'
'Grace,' Annie said gently, putting a hand out. But Grace smacked it away.
'Don't! Just leave me alone!'
Annie looked at her for a moment then opened the door and got out. She started walking, blindly, tilting her face to the wind. The road led up past a grove of pine trees to a parking lot and a low building, both deserted. She kept walking. She followed a path that curved up the hillside and found herself beside a cemetery enclosed by black iron railings. At the crest of the hill there was a simple stone monument and it was here that Annie stopped.
On this hillside, on a June day in 1876, George Armstrong Custer and more than two hundred soldiers were cut to pieces by those they had sought to slaughter. Their names were etched in the stone. Annie turned to look down the hill at the scattered white tombstones. They cast long shadows in the last pale reach of the sun. She stood there and looked out across the vast, rolling plains of wind-flattened grass that stretched away from this sorrowful place to a horizon where sorrow was infinite. And she started to weep.
It would later strike her as strange that she should have come here by chance. Whether some other random place would have brought forth the tears she'd stemmed for so long, she never would know. The monument was a kind of cruel anomaly, honoring as it did the agents of genocide while the countless graves of those they had butchered elsewhere lay forever unmarked. But the sense of suffering here and the presence of so many ghosts transcended all detail. It was simply a fitting place for tears. And Annie hung her head and wept them. She wept for Grace and for Pilgrim and for the lost souls of the children who'd died in her womb. Above all, she wept for herself and what she had become.
All her life she had lived where she didn't belong. America wasn't her home. And nor, when she went there now, was England. In each country they treated her as if she came from the other. The truth was, she came from nowhere. She had no home. Not since her father died. She was rootless, tribeless, adrift.
Once this had seemed her greatest strength. She had a way of tapping into things. She could seamlessly adapt, insinuate herself into any group, any culture or situation. She knew instinctively what was required, who you needed to know, what you had to do to win. And in her work, which had so long obsessed her, this gift had helped her win all that was worth winning. Now, since Grace's accident, it all seemed worthless.
In the past three months she had been the strong one, fooling herself that it was what Grace needed. The fact was, she knew no other way to react. Having lost all connection with herself, she had lost it too with her child and, for this, she was consumed with guilt. Action had become a substitute for feeling. Or at least for the expression of it. And this was why, she now saw, she had launched herself into this lunatic adventure with Pilgrim.
Annie sobbed until her shoulders ached, then she slid her back down the cold stone of the monument and sat with her head in her hands. And there she stayed until the sun dipped pale and liquid behind the distant snowy rim of the Bighorn Mountains and the cottonwoods down by the river melted together in a single black scar. When she looked up, it was night and the world was a lantern of sky.
'Ma'am?'
It was a park ranger. He had a flashlight, but kept its beam tactfully away from her face.
'You okay there ma'am?'
Annie wiped her face and swallowed.
'Yes. Thank you,' she said. 'I'm fine.' She got up.
'Your daughter was getting kind of worried down there.'
'Yes, I'm sorry. I'm going now.'
He tipped his hat as she went. 'Night ma'am. You go safely now.'
She walked back down to the car, aware he was watching. Grace was asleep, or perhaps she was only pretending to be. Annie started the engine, switched on the lights and made a turn at the top of the road. She looped back onto the interstate and drove through the night, all the way to Choteau.