Two creeks ran through the Booker brothers' land and they gave the ranch its name, the Double Divide. They flowed from adjacent folds of the mountain front and in their first half mile they looked like twins. The ridge that ran between them here was low, at one point almost low enough for them to meet, but then it rose sharply in a rugged chain of interlocking bluffs, shouldering the creeks apart. Forced thus to seek their separate ways, they now became quite different.
The northern one ran, swift and shallow, down a wide, uncluttered valley. Its banks, though sometimes steep, gave easy access to the cattle. Brook trout hung with their heads upstream in its breaks and eddies, while herons stalked its shingled beaches. The route the southern creek was forced to take was lusher, full of obstacles and trees. It wove through tangled thickets of Bebbs willow and red-stem dogwood, then disappeared awhile in marsh. Lower down, meandering a meadow so flat that its loops linked back upon themselves, it formed a maze of still, dark pools and grassy islands whose geography was constantly arranged and rearranged by beavers.
Ellen Booker used to say the creeks were like her two boys, Frank the north and Tom the south. That was until Frank, who was seventeen at the time, remarked over supper one night that it wasn't fair because he liked beaver too. His father told him to go wash his mouth out and sent him to bed. Tom wasn't so sure his mother got the joke, but she must have because she never said it again.
The house they called the creek house, where first Tom and Rachel, then later Frank and Diane had lived and which now was empty, stood on a bluff above a bend in the northern creek. From it you could look down the valley, across the tops of cottonwood trees, to the ranch house half a mile away, surrounded by whitewashed barns, stables and corrals. The houses were linked by a dirt road that wound on up to the lower meadows where the cattle spent the winter. Now, in early April, most of the snow had gone from this lower part of the ranch. It lay only in shaded, rockstrewn gullies and among the pine and fir trees that dotted the north side of the ridge.
Tom looked up at the creek house from the passenger seat of the old Chevy and wondered, as he often did, about moving in. He and Joe were on their way back from feeding the cattle, the boy expertly negotiating the potholes. Joe was small for his age and had to sit like a ramrod to see over the front. During the week Frank did the feeding, but at weekends Joe liked to do it and Tom liked to help him. They'd unloaded the slabs of alfalfa and together enjoyed the sight and sound of the cows surging in with their calves to get it.
'Can we go see Bronty's foal?' Joe asked.
'Sure we can.'
'There's a kid at school says we should've imprint-trained him.'
'Uh-huh.'
'He says if you do it soon as they're born, it makes them real easy to handle later on.'
'Yep. That's what some folk say.'
'There was this thing on the TV about a guy who does it with geese too. He has this airplane and the baby geese all grow up thinking its their mom. He flies it and they just follow.'
'Yeah, I heard about that.'
'What do you think about all that stuff?'
'Well Joe, I don't know a whole lot about geese. Maybe it's okay for them to grow up thinking they're airplanes.' Joe laughed. 'But with a horse, I reckon first you have to let him learn to be a horse.'
They drove back down to the ranch and parked outside the long barn where Tom kept some of his horses. Joe's twin brothers, Scott and Craig, came running out of the house to meet them. Tom saw Joe's face fall. The twins were nine years old and because of their blond goodlooks and the fact that they did everything in a noisy unison, they always got more attention than their brother.
'You going to see the foal?' they yelled. 'Can we come?' Tom put a big hand like a crane-grab on each of their heads.
'So long as you keep quiet you can,' he said.
He led them into the barn and stood with the twins outside Bronty's stall while Joe went in. Bronty was a big ten-year-old quarter horse, a reddish bay. She pushed her muzzle toward Joe who put a hand on it while he gently rubbed her neck. Tom liked to watch the boy around horses, he had an easy, confident way with them. The foal, a little darker than his mother, had been lying in the corner and was now struggling to his feet. He tottered on comical, stilted legs to the sheltering side of the mare, peeping around her rear end at Joe. The twins laughed.
'He looks so funny,' Scott said.
'I've got a picture of you two at that age,' said Tom. 'And you know what?'
'They looked like bullfrogs,' Joe said.
The twins soon got bored and left. Tom and Joe turned the other horses out into the paddock behind the barn. After breakfast they were going to start working with some of the yearlings. As they walked back to the house, the dogs started barking and ran out past them. Tom turned and saw a silver Ford Lariat coming over the end of the ridge and heading down the driveway toward them. There was just the driver in it and as it got nearer he could see it was a woman.
'Your mom expecting company?' Tom asked. Joe shrugged. It wasn't until the car pulled up, with the dogs running around it still barking, that Tom recognized who it was. It was hard to believe. Joe saw his look.
'You know her?'
'I believe I do. But not what she's doing here.'
He told the dogs to hush and walked over. Annie got out of the car and came nervously toward him. She was wearing jeans and hiking boots and a huge, cream-colored sweater that came halfway down her thighs. The sun behind made her hair flare red and Tom realized how clearly he remembered those green eyes from the day at the stables. She nodded at him without quite smiling, a little sheepish.
'Mr Booker. Good morning.'
'Well, good morning.' They stood there for a moment. 'Joe, this is Mrs Graves. Joe here is my nephew.' Annie offered the boy her hand.
'Hello, Joe. How are you?'
'Good.'
She looked up the valley, toward the mountains, then looked back at Tom.
'What a beautiful place.'
'It is.'
He was wondering when she was going to get around to saying what on earth she was doing here, though he already had an idea. She took a deep breath.
'Mr Booker, you're going to think this is insane, but you can probably guess why I've come here.'
'Well. I kind of reckoned you didn't just happen to be passing through.' She almost smiled.
'I'm sorry just turning up like this, but I knew what you'd say if I phoned. It's about my daughter's horse.'
'Pilgrim.'
'Yes. I know you can help him and I came here to ask you, to beg you, to have another look at him.'
'Mrs Graves…'
'Please. Just a look. It wouldn't take long.'
Tom laughed. 'What, to fly to New York?' He nodded at the Lariat. 'Or were you counting on driving me there?'
'He's here. In Choteau.'
Tom stared at her for a moment in disbelief.
'You've hauled him all the way out here?' She nodded. Joe was looking from one of them to the other, trying to get the picture. Diane had stepped out onto the porch and stood there holding open the screen door, watching.
'All on your own?' Tom asked.
'With Grace, my daughter.'
'Just to have me take a look at him?'
'Yes.'
'You guys coming in to eat?' called Diane. Who's the woman, was what she really meant. Tom put his hand on Joe's shoulder.
'Tell your mom I'm coming,' he said and as the boy went off he turned back to Annie. They stood looking at each other for a moment. She gave a little shrug and, at last, smiled. He noticed how it made the corners of her mouth go down but left untouched the troubled look in her eyes. He was being railroaded and wondered why he didn't mind.
'Excuse me saying it, ma'am,' he said. 'But you sure as hell don't like taking no for an answer.'
'No,' Annie said simply. 'I suppose I don't.'
Grace lay on her back on the floor of the musty bedroom, doing her exercises and listening to the electronic bells of the Methodist church across the street. They didn't just chime the hour, they played whole tunes. She quite liked the sound, mainly because it was driving her mother crazy. Annie was down in the hall, on the phone to the real estate agent about it.
'Don't they know there are laws about this sort of thing?' she was saying. 'They're polluting the air.'
It was the fifth time she had called him in two days. The poor man had made the mistake of giving her his home number and Annie was ruining his weekend, bombarding him with complaints: the heating wasn't working, the bedrooms were damp, the extra phone line she'd asked for hadn't been installed, the heating still wasn't working. And now the bells.
'It wouldn't be so bad if they played something half decent,' she was saying. 'It's ridiculous, the Methodists have all the good tunes.'
Yesterday when Annie went out to the ranch, Grace had refused to go with her. After Annie left, she went out exploring. There wasn't much to explore. Choteau was basically one long main street with a railroad on one side and a grid of residential streets on the other. There was a dog parlor, a video store, a steak house and a cinema showing a movie Grace had seen over a year ago. The town's only claim to fame was a museum where you could see dinosaur eggs. She went into a couple of stores and the people were friendly but reserved. She was aware of others watching as she walked slowly back down the street with her cane. When she got back to the house she felt so depressed, she burst into tears.
Annie had come back elated and told Grace that Tom Booker had agreed to come and see Pilgrim the following morning. All Grace said was, 'How long have we got to stay in this dump?'
The house was a big, rambling place, faced with peeling pale-blue clapboard and carpeted throughout in a stained, yellow-brown shagpile. The sparse furniture looked as if it had been picked up in a yard sale. Annie was appalled when they first saw the place. Grace was delighted. Its glaring inadequacy was on her side, a perfect vindication.
Secretly, she wasn't as opposed to this mission of her mother's as she made out. It was a relief in fact to get away from school and the tiring business of putting on a brave face all the time. But her feelings for Pilgrim were confused. They frightened her. It was best to block him right out of her head. Her mother however made this impossible. Her every action seemed to force Grace to confront the issue. She'd taken this whole thing on as if Pilgrim was hers and he wasn't hers, he was Grace's. Of course Grace wanted him to get better, it was just that… It struck her then, for the first time, that maybe she didn't want him to get better. Maybe she blamed him for what had happened? No, that was stupid. Maybe she wanted him to be as she was, forever maimed? Why should he recover and not her? It wasn't fair. Stop it, stop it, she told herself. These whirling, crazy thoughts were her mother's fault and Grace wasn't going to let them get a hold in her head.
She redoubled the effort in her exercises, until she felt the sweat trickle down her neck. She lifted her stump high in the air, again and again, making the muscles ache in her right buttock and her thigh. She could look at this leg now and accept at last that it belonged to her. The scar was neat, no longer that angry, itching pink. Her muscles were coming back nicely, so much so that the sleeve of her prosthetic leg was starting to feel a little tight. She heard Annie hang up.
'Grace? Have you finished? He'll be here soon.'
Grace didn't reply, just let the words hang there.
'Grace?'
'Yeah. So what?'
She could feel Annie's reaction, picture the irked look on her face giving way to resignation. She heard her sigh and go back into the drab dining room which, as a first priority of course, Annie had transformed into her office.
All Tom had promised was that he would go and have another look at the horse. After she had come all that way, it was the least he could do. But he'd made it a condition that he would go alone. He didn't want her looking over his shoulder, putting pressure on him. She was pretty good at that, he already knew. She had made him promise to drop by afterward and give her his verdict.
He knew the Petersen place, just outside Choteau, where she had Pilgrim stabled. They were nice enough people, but if the horse was as bad as when Tom last saw him, they wouldn't put up with him for long.
Old man Petersen had the face of an outlaw, three days of grizzled beard and teeth as black as the tobacco he always chewed. He showed them in a mischievous grin when Tom pulled up in the Chevy.
'What's it they say? If you're looking for trouble, you've come to the right place. Damn near killed me getting him unloaded. Been kicking and hollering like a banshee ever since.'
He led Tom down a muddy track, past the rusting hulks of derelict cars, to an old barn, lined either side with stalls. The other horses had been turned out. Tom could hear Pilgrim long before they got there.
'Only fitted that door last summer,' Petersen said. 'He'd have had the old one down by now. Woman says you're gonna sort him out for her.'
'Oh she did?'
'Uh-huh. All I can say is, make sure you go see Bill Larson for a fitting first.' He roared with laughter and slapped Tom on the back. Bill Larson was the local undertaker.
The horse was in even sorrier shape than when Tom last saw him. His front leg was so badly wasted, Tom wondered how he even managed to stand, let alone keep up the kicking.
'Must have been a nice-lookin' horse once,' said Petersen.
'I reckon.' Tom turned away. He'd seen enough.
He drove back into Choteau and looked at the piece of paper on which Annie had written her address. When he pulled up outside the house and walked up to the front door, the church bells were playing a tune he hadn't heard since he was a kid in Sunday school. He rang the doorbell and waited.
The face he saw when the door opened startled him. It wasn't that he'd been expecting the mother, it was the open hostility in the girl's pale, freckled face. He remembered the face from the photograph Annie had sent him, a happy girl and her horse. The contrast was shocking. He smiled.
'You must be Grace.' She didn't smile back, just nodded and stepped aside for him to come in. He took off his hat and waited while she shut the door. He could hear Annie talking in a room off the hallway.
'She's on the phone. You can wait in here.'
She led the way into a bare, L-shaped living room. Tom looked down at her leg and the cane as he followed, making a mental note not to look again. The room was gloomy and smelled of damp. There were a couple of old armchairs, a sagging sofa and a TV playing an old black-and-white movie. Grace sat down and went on watching it.
Tom perched himself on an arm of one of the chairs. The door across the hallway was half open and he could see a fax machine, a computer screen and a tangle of wires. All he could see of Annie was a crossed leg and a boot that bobbed impatiently. She sounded pretty worked up about something.
'What! He said what? I don't believe it. Lucy… Lucy, I don't care. It's got nothing to do with Crawford, I'm the bloody editor and that's the cover we go with.'
Tom saw Grace raise her eyes to the ceiling and wondered if it was for his benefit. In the movie, an actress whose name he could never remember was on her knees, hanging on to James Cagney, begging him not to leave. They always did this and Tom could never understand why they bothered.
'Grace, will you get Mr Booker a coffee?' Annie shouted from the other room. 'I'd like one too.' She went back to her phone call. Grace flicked the TV off and got up, clearly irritated.
'It's okay, really,' said Tom.
'She just made it.' She stared at him as if he'd said something rude.
'Okay then, thank you. But you keep watching the movie and I'll get it.'
'I've seen it. It's boring.'
She picked up her cane and went off into the kitchen. Tom waited a moment then followed. She shot him a glance when he came in and made more noise than she needed to with the cups. He walked over to the window.
'What does your mother do?'
'What?'
'Your mother. I wondered what line of work she was in.'
'She edits a magazine.' She handed him a cup of coffee. 'Cream and sugar?'
'No thanks. Must be a pretty stressful kind of job.'
Grace laughed. Tom was surprised by how bitter it sounded.
'Yeah. I guess you could say that.'
There was an awkward silence. Grace turned away and was about to pour another cup but instead she stopped and looked at him. He could see the surface of the coffee in the glass pot trembling from the tension in her. It was plain to see she had something important to say.
'Just in case she hasn't told you, I don't want to know anything about this, okay?'
Tom nodded slowly and waited for her to go on. She'd good as spat the words at him and was a little thrown by the calm reaction. She abruptly poured the coffee but did it too fast so that she spilled some. She clunked the pot down on the table and picked up the cup, not looking at him as she went on.
'This whole thing was her idea. I think it's totally stupid. They should just get rid of him.'
She stomped past him and out of the room. Tom watched her go, then he turned and looked out into the forlorn little backyard. A cat was eating something sinewy by an upturned garbage can.
He had come here to tell this girl's mother, for the last time, that the horse was beyond help. It was going to be tough after they had come all this way. He had thought a lot about it since Annie's visit to the ranch. To be precise, he'd thought a lot about Annie and the sadness in those eyes of hers. It had occurred to him that if he took the horse on, he might be doing it not to help the horse but to help her. He never did that. It was the wrong reason.
'I'm sorry. It was important.'
He turned to see Annie coming in. She was wearing a big denim shirt and her hair was combed back, still wet from the shower. It made her look boyish.
'That's okay.'
She went to get the coffee and topped up her cup. Then she came over to him and did the same to his without asking.
'You've been to see him?'
She put the coffeepot down but stayed standing in front of him. She smelled of soap or shampoo, something expensive anyway.
'Yes. I just came from there.'
'And?'
Tom still didn't know how he was going to break it to her, even as he started to speak.
'Well, he's about as wretched as a horse can get.'
He paused a moment and saw something flicker in her eyes. Then over her shoulder he saw Grace in the doorway, trying to look as if she didn't care and failing miserably. Meeting this girl just now had been like seeing the last picture of a triptych. The whole had become clear. All three - mother, daughter and horse - were inextricably connected in pain. If he could help the horse, even a little, maybe he could help them all? What could be wrong with that? And truly, how could he walk away from such suffering?
He heard himself say, 'Maybe we could do something.'
He saw the relief surge into Annie's face.
'Now hold on, ma'am, please. That was only a maybe. Before I could even think about it, I need to know something. It's a question for Grace here.'
He saw the girl stiffen.
'You see, when I work with a horse, it's no good just me doing it. It doesn't work that way. The owner needs to be involved too. So, here's the deal. I'm not sure I can do anything with old Pilgrim, but if you'll help, I'm prepared to give it a go.'
Grace gave that bitter little laugh again and looked away as if she couldn't believe he could make such a dumb suggestion. Annie looked at the floor.
'You have a problem with that, Grace?' Tom said. She looked at him with what was no doubt meant as contempt but when she spoke, her voice quavered.
'Isn't it like, obvious?'
Tom considered this for a moment, then shook his head. 'Nope. I don't think it is. Anyway, that's the deal. Thanks for the coffee.' He put his cup down and walked toward the door. Annie looked at Grace who turned away into the living room. Then Annie came hurrying after him into the hall.
'What would she have to do?'
'Just be there, help out, be involved.'
Something told him he shouldn't mention riding. He put his hat on and opened the front door. He could see the desperation in Annie's eyes.
'It's cold in here,' he said. 'You ought to get the heating checked out.'
He was about to step out when Grace appeared in the living-room doorway. She didn't look at him. She said something but it was so low he couldn't catch it.
'I'm sorry Grace?'
She shifted uncomfortably, her eyes flicking sideways.
'I said okay. I'll do it.'
And she turned away and went back into the room.
Diane had cooked a turkey and was carving it as if it deserved it. One of the twins tried picking a piece and got his hand slapped. He was supposed to be ferrying the plates over from the sideboard to the table where everyone else was already seated.
'What about the yearlings?' she said. 'I thought that was the whole idea of not doing clinics, so you could work with your own horses for a change.'
'There'll be time for that,' said Tom. He couldn't understand why Diane seemed so riled.
'Who does she think she is, coming out here like that? Just assuming she can force you into it. I think she's got one hell of a nerve. Get off!' She tried to slap the boy again but this time he got away with the meat. Diane raised the carving knife. 'Next time you get this, okay? Frank, don't you think she's got a nerve?'
'Oh hell, I don't know. Seems to me it's up to Tom. Craig, will you pass the corn please?'
Diane made up the last plate for herself and came and sat down. They all went quiet for Frank to say grace.
'Anyway,' Tom went on after it was said, 'Joe here's going to be helping me with the yearlings. That right, Joe?'
'Sure.'
'Not while you're at school you're not,' Diane said. Tom and Joe exchanged a look. No one spoke for a while, everyone just getting on with helping themselves to vegetables and cranberry sauce. Tom hoped Diane would let the matter drop, but she was like a dog with a bone.
'I guess they'll want feeding and all, out here all day long.'
'I don't reckon they'll expect that,' Tom said.
'What, they'll go forty miles into Choteau every time they want a cup of coffee?'
'Tea,' Frank said. Diane shot him an unfriendly look.
'Huh?'
'Tea. She's English. They drink tea. Come on Diane, give the guy a break.'
'Does the girl's leg look funny?' Scott said, through a mouthful of turkey.
'Funny!' Joe shook his head. 'You are one weird kid.'
'No I mean, is it like, made of wood or what?'
'Just eat your food Scott, okay?' Frank said.
They ate in silence for a while. Tom could see Diane's mood hanging above her like a cloud. She was a tall, powerful woman, whose face and spirit had been hardened by the place she lived in. Increasingly as she moved into her mid-forties, she had about her an air of lost opportunity. She'd grown up on a farm near Great Falls and it was Tom who'd first met her. They dated a few times, but he made it clear he wasn't ready to settle down and was anyway so seldom around, that it just petered out. So Diane married the younger brother instead. Tom was fond of her, though sometimes, especially since his mother moved to Great Falls, he found her a touch over-protective. He worried now and again that she gave him more attention than she did Frank. Not that Frank ever seemed to notice.
'When you figuring on branding?' he asked his brother.
'Weekend after next. If the weather picks up.'
On a lot of ranches they left it until later, but Frank branded in April because the boys liked to help and the calves were still small enough for them to handle. They always made an event of it. Friends came over to help and Diane laid on a spread for everyone afterward. It was a tradition Tom's father had begun and one of many Frank kept going. Another was how they still used horses for much of the work other ranchers now used vehicles for. Rounding up cattle on motorcycles wasn't the same somehow.
Tom and Frank had always seen these things the same way. They never disagreed about the way the ranch was run, nor anything else for that matter. This was partly because Tom thought of the place as more Frank's than his. It was Frank who'd stayed here all these years while he traveled, doing his horse clinics. And Frank had always been the better businessman and knew more about cattle than he would ever know. The two of them were close and easy together and Frank was genuinely thrilled about Tom's plans to get more seriously into horse rearing because it meant he'd be around the place more. Though the cattle were mainly Frank's and the horses Tom's, they discussed things and helped each other out whenever they could. Last year, when Tom was off doing a chain of clinics, it was Frank who had supervised the building of an arena and exercise pool that Tom had designed for the horses.
Tom was aware suddenly that one of the twins had asked him a question.
'Sorry, what was that?'
'Is she famous?' It was Scott.
'Is who famous, for heavensakes?' Diane snapped.
'The woman from New York.'
Diane didn't give Tom the chance to answer.
'Have you heard of her?' she asked the boy. He shook his head. 'Well then, she isn't famous is she? Eat your food.'
The northern edge of Choteau was guarded by a thirteen-and-a-half-foot-tall dinosaur. Pedants knew it to be an Albertasaurus but to everyone else it looked pretty much like a regular T. Rex. It kept watch from the parking lot of the Old Trail Museum and you got to see it just after you passed the sign on Route 89 saying Welcome to Choteau - Nice People, Great Country. Conscious perhaps of the immediate damper this might put on such a welcome, the sculptor had shaped the creature's steak-knife teeth into a knowing grin. The effect was unsettling. You couldn't tell if it wanted to eat you or lick you to death.
Four times a day, for two weeks now, Annie had traversed this reptilian gaze as she drove to and from the Double Divide. They would go out at noon after Grace had done some schoolwork or spent a grueling morning at the physical therapist's. Annie would drop her off at the ranch, come back, hit the phones and the fax, then head out again at about six, as she was doing now, to collect her.
The trip took about forty minutes and she enjoyed it, especially, since the weather had turned, the evening ride. For five days the skies had been clear and they were bigger and bluer than she'd ever known skies could be. After the afternoon frenzy of phone calls to New York, driving out into this landscape was like plunging into an immense, calming pool.
The trip was a long L shape and for the first twenty miles, north along 89, Annie's was often the only car. The plains stretched endlessly away to her right and as the sun arced low, toward the Rockies on her left, the winter-worn grass around her turned to pale gold.
She turned west onto the unmarked gravel road that went in a straight line for another fifteen miles to the ranch and the mountain wall beyond. The Lariat left a cloud of dust behind it that drifted slowly away in the breeze. Curlews strutted on the road in front then glided away at the last moment into the pasture. Annie lowered the visor against the sun's dazzle and felt something inside her quicken.
In the last few days she had started coming out to the ranch a little earlier so that she could watch Tom Booker at work. Not that the real work with Pilgrim had started yet. So far it had been mostly physical therapy, building up the horse's wasted shoulder and leg muscles in the swimming pool. Round and round he swam, with a look in his eyes as if he were being chased by crocodiles. He was staying out on the ranch now, in a stall right by the pool, and the only close contact Tom had so far had with him was getting him in and out of the water. Even so it was dangerous enough.
Yesterday Annie had stood beside Grace and watched him get Pilgrim from the pool. The horse hadn't wanted to come out, fearing a trap, so Tom had walked down the ramp till he was up to his waist. Pilgrim had thrashed around and soaked him and even reared up over him. But Tom was totally unfazed. It seemed miraculous to Annie how the man could stand so calmly close to death. How could one calculate such margins? Pilgrim too had seemed baffled by this lack of fear and soon staggered out and let himself be ushered to his stall.
Tom came back to Grace and Annie and stood dripping before them. He took off his hat and poured the water from its brim. Grace started to laugh and he gave her a wry look that made her laugh even more. Then he turned to Annie and shook his head.
'She's a heartless woman this daughter of yours,' he said. 'What she doesn't know is next time she's the one going in.'
The sound of Grace's laughter had stayed in Annie's head ever since. On the way back to Choteau, Grace had told her what they had been doing with Pilgrim and the questions Tom had asked about him. She had told her about Bronty's foal, about Frank and Diane and the boys, how the twins were a pain but Joe was alright. It was the first time she'd talked freely and happily since they'd left New York and Annie had to try hard not to overreact and to just let it happen as though it were nothing special. It hadn't lasted. Driving past the dinosaur, Grace fell silent, as if it reminded her how nowadays she behaved toward her mother. But at least it was a start, thought Annie.
The Lariat's tires scrunched now' on the gravel as she came around the ridge and curved down into the valley under the wooden double D sign that marked the start of the ranch's driveway. Annie could see horses running in the big open arena by the stables and as she got nearer she could see Tom riding among them. In one hand he had a long stick with an orange flag on the end and he was waving it at them, making them run away from him. There were maybe a dozen colts in there and mostly they kept close to each other. There was one among them though who was always alone and now Annie could see it was Pilgrim.
Grace was leaning on the rail next to Joe and the twins, all of them watching. Annie parked and walked over to them, ruffling the heads of the dogs who no longer barked when she arrived. Joe smiled at her and was the only one who said hello. 'What's going on?' Annie asked. 'Oh, he's just driving them around some.' Annie leaned on the rail beside him and watched. The colts bolted and swerved from one end of the arena to the other, making long shadows on the sand and kicking up amber clouds of it that trapped the slanting sun. Tom moved Rimrock effortlessly after them, sometimes stepping sideways or backward to block them or open up a gap. Annie hadn't seen him ride before. The horse's white-socked feet made intricate steps without any visible guidance, steered, so it seemed to Annie, by Tom's thoughts alone. It was as if he and the horse were one. She couldn't take her eyes off him. As he came past, he tipped his hat and smiled. 'Annie.'
It was the first time he hadn't called her ma'am or Mrs Graves and to hear him, unprompted, speak her name pleased her, made her feel accepted. She watched him move off toward Pilgrim who had stopped like all the others at the far end of the arena. The horse stood separate and was the only one sweating. The scars on his face and chest stood out in the sunlight and he was tossing his head and snorting. He seemed as troubled by the other horses as he was by Tom.
'What we're doing here Annie, is trying to get him to learn how to be a horse again. All the others already know, see? That's how they are in the wild, herd animals. When they've got a problem, like they have now with me and this flag, they look to each other. But old Pilgrim here has plum forgotten. I'm the rock and they're the hard place. He thinks he hasn't got a friend in the world. Turn 'em all loose in the mountains and these guys would be fine. Poor old Pilgrim though, he'd be bear bait. It's not that he doesn't want to make friends, he just doesn't know how.'
He moved Rimrock in on them and lifted the flag sharply, making it crack in the air. The colts all broke away to the right and this time, instead of breaking left like before, Pilgrim went after them. As soon as he was clear of Tom though, he separated and again came to a halt on his own. Tom grinned. 'He'll get there.'
The sun had long gone by the time they had Pilgrim back in his stall and it was getting cold. Diane called the boys in for their supper and Grace went in with them to pick up a coat she had left in the house. Tom and Annie walked slowly over to the Lariat. Annie felt suddenly very aware of their being alone together. For a while neither of them spoke. An owl flew low over their heads toward the creek and Annie watched it melt into the dark of the cottonwoods. She felt Tom's eyes on her and turned to look at him. He smiled calmly and quite without embarrassment and the look he gave her wasn't the look of a virtual stranger, but of someone who'd known her for a very long time. Annie managed to smile back and was relieved to see Grace coming toward them from the house.
'We're branding here tomorrow,' Tom said. 'If you two want to come and give a hand.'
Annie laughed. 'I think we'd just get in the way,' she said.
He shrugged. 'Maybe. But as long as you don't get in the way of the branding iron it doesn't matter too much. Even if you do, it's a nice-looking mark. Back in the city you might be proud of it.'
Annie turned to Grace and could see she was keen but trying not to look it. She turned back to Tom.
'Okay, why not?' she said.
He told her they'd be starting around nine the next morning but they could show up whenever they liked. Then they said good-night. As she pulled away up the driveway, Annie looked in the rearview mirror. He was still standing there, watching them go.
Tom rode up one side of the valley and Joe the other. The idea was to pick up stragglers but the cows needed little more inducement. They could see the old Chevy down in the meadow where it always parked at feeding time and they could hear Frank and the twins hollering and banging the bag of cow cake on its lowered rear end for them to come and get it. They streamed down from the hills, calling in reply while their calves scrambled after them, calling too, anxious not to be left behind.
Tom's father used to raise pure Herefords, but for some years now Frank had raised a Black Angus-Hereford cross. The Angus cows were good mothers and suited the climate better because their udders were black, not pink like the Herefords, so they didn't get burned by the sun bouncing off the snow. Tom watched for a while as they moved away from him down the hill, then he turned Rimrock to the left and dropped over into the shaded bed of the creek.
Steam rose off the water into the warming air and a dipper took off and flew straight upstream ahead of them fast and so low that its slate wings almost skimmed the surface. Down here the calling of the cattle was muted then lost in the soft splashing of the horse's feet as he moved up to the top of the meadow. Sometimes along here a calf would get tangled in the thick willow scrub. But today they found nothing and Tom eased Rimrock back onto the bank, then loped him up into the sun at the top of the ridge and stopped.
He could see Joe on his brown-and-white paint pony way over on the other side of the valley. The boy waved and Tom waved back. Below, the cattle were funneling down to the Chevy, flooding around it so that it looked from here like a boat on a seething pool of black. The twins were tossing out a few pellets of cake to keep the cows interested while Frank clambered back into the driver's seat and started to pull slowly away back down the meadow. Lured by the cake, the cattle surged after it.
From this ridge you could see right down the valley to the ranch and the corrals to which the cattle were now being led. And as Tom looked, he saw what he realized he had been looking out for all morning. Annie's car was coming down the driveway, leaving a low, gray wake of dust. As it curved in front of the ranch house, the sun flashed on its windshield.
More than a mile separated him from the two figures that got out of the car. They were small and quite featureless. But Tom could picture Annie's face as if she were beside him. He saw her as she'd been last evening, as she watched the owl, before she sensed him watching her. She had looked so lost and beautiful that he'd wanted to take her in his arms. She's another man's wife, he'd told himself as the Lariat's tail-lights went off up the driveway. But it hadn't stopped him thinking about her. He nudged Rimrock forward and moved off down the hill to follow the cattle.
The air over the corral hung heavy with dust and the smell of scorched flesh. Separated from their mothers, who kept up a constant calling, the calves were moved through a series of connecting pens until they found themselves in a narrow chute from which there was no return. Emerging from here, one by one, they were clamped and lowered sideways onto a table where four pairs of hands went immediately to work. Before they knew it, they'd been given a shot, a yellow insect tag in one ear, a growth pellet in the other, then a burn on the butt with a branding iron. Then the table went vertical again, off came the clamp and suddenly they were free. They tottered off in a daze toward the call of their mothers, at whose udders, at last, they found comfort.
All of this was witnessed, with a lazy, regal disinterest by their fathers, five enormous Hereford bulls, who lay chewing in an adjoining pen. It was witnessed by Annie with something approaching horror. She could see Grace felt the same. The calves squealed terribly and got what little revenge they could by spurting shit down their attackers' boots or kicking any careless shin they found. Some of the neighbors who had come to help had brought children along and those big or bold enough were trying their hand at roping and wrestling the smaller calves. Annie saw Grace watching them and thought what a terrible mistake it was to have come. There was such an extreme physicality about it all. It only seemed to make the girl's disability more blatant.
Tom must have read this on Annie's face because he came over and quickly found her a job. He put her to work in the feeder pen to the chute alongside a grinning giant with reflector sunglasses and a T-shirt that said Cereal Killer. He introduced himself as Hank and gave Annie a handshake that made her knuckles crack. He said he came from the next ranch down the valley.
'Our friendly neighborhood psycho,' Tom said.
'It's okay, I already ate,' Hank confided to Annie.
As she got to work, Annie saw Tom go over to Grace, put his arm around her shoulders and lead her off, though to where, Annie had no time to see because a calf trod on her foot then kicked her hard on the knee. She yelped and Hank laughed and showed her how to shove them into the chute without getting too bruised or shat upon. It was hard work and she had to concentrate and soon, what with Hank's jokes and the warm spring sunshine, she started to feel better.
Later, when she had a moment to look, she saw Tom had taken Grace right to the front line and had her wielding the branding iron. To begin with she kept her eyes closed. But soon he got her thinking so hard about her technique that all squeamishness vanished.
'Don't press too hard,' Annie heard him say. He was standing behind Grace, with his hands resting gently on her upper arms. 'Just let it drop down lightly.' Flames flared up as the red-hot head of the iron touched the calf's hide. 'That's good, firm but gentle. It hurts, but he'll get over it. Now let it roll a little. Good. Now lift. Grace, that's a perfect brand. Best Double D of the day.'
Everyone cheered. The girl's face was flushed and her eyes were shining. She laughed and made a little bow. Tom saw Annie looking and grinned and pointed at her.
'Your turn next, Annie.'
By late afternoon all but the smallest calves were branded and Frank announced it was time to eat. Everyone started heading for the ranch house, the younger children running on ahead, whooping. Annie looked around for Grace. No one had said anything about them being invited and Annie felt it was time to leave. She saw Grace up ahead, walking to the house with Joe, the two of them chatting easily about something. Annie called her name and she turned.
'We have to go now,' Annie said.
'What? Why?'
'Yeah, why? You're not allowed to go.' It was Tom. He'd come up alongside her. They were beside the bull pen. The two of them had hardly spoken all day. Annie shrugged.
'Well, you know. It's getting late.'
'Yeah, I know. And you've got to get back and feed the fax machine and make all those calls and things, right?'
The sun was behind him and Annie put her head on one side and squinted at him, giving him a look. Men didn't normally tease her like this. She liked it.
'But you see, there's kind of a tradition here,' he went on,'that whoever makes the best brand has to give a speech after dinner.'
'What!' said Grace.
'That's right. Or drink ten jugs of beer. So, Grace, you better go on in and get yourself ready.' Grace looked at Joe to make sure it was a joke. Tom nodded toward the house, deadpan. 'Joe, you better show her the way.' Joe led her off, doing his best not to grin.
'If you're sure we're invited,' said Annie.
'You're invited.'
'Thank you.'
'You're welcome.'
They smiled at each other and the silence between them was filled for a few moments by the lowing of cattle. Their calls were gentler now that the frenzy of the day had passed. It was Annie who first felt the need to speak. She looked at the bulls lazing in the last of the sunshine.
'Who'd be a cow when you could lie around like these guys all day?' she said.
Tom looked at them and nodded. 'Yep. They spend all summer making love and winter just lying around and eating.' He paused, considering something as he watched them. 'On the other hand, not too many of them get to do it. Get born as a bull and you've got a ninety-nine percent chance of getting castrated and served up as a hamburger. On balance, I reckon I'd choose being a cow.'
They sat at a long table covered with a starched white cloth and laid with glazed hams, turkey, and steaming dishes of corn, beans, and sweet potato. The room it stood in was clearly the main living room but seemed to Annie more like a large hall that divided the two wings of the house. Its ceiling was high and its floor and walls were of dark, stained wood. There were paintings of Indians chasing buffalo and old sepia photographs of men with long moustaches and plainly dressed women with serious faces. On one side, an open staircase curved up to a wide, railed landing that overlooked the entire room.
Annie had felt embarrassed when they came in. She realized that while she had been out branding, most of the other women had been inside preparing the meal. But no one seemed to mind. Diane, who till today had never seemed overly friendly, made her feel welcome and even offered her a change of clothes. As all the men were equally dusty and muckstained, Annie thanked her and declined.
The children sat at one end of the table and the clamor they made was so loud that the adults at the other had to strain to hear themselves talk. Every so often Diane yelled at them to pipe down but it had little or no effect and soon, led by Frank and Hank who sat on either side of Annie, the uproar was general. Grace sat next to Joe. Annie could hear her telling him about New York and about a friend of hers who got mugged on the subway for his new Nike trainers. Joe listened with widening eyes.
Tom sat across from Annie, between his sister Rosie and their mother. They'd driven up from Great Falls this afternoon with Rosie's two daughters who were five and six years old. Ellen Booker was a gentle, fine-boned woman with perfectly white hair and eyes the same vivid blue as Tom's. She spoke little, just listened and smiled at what was going on around her. Annie noticed how Tom looked after her and talked quietly to her about the ranch and the horses. She could see from the way Ellen watched him that this was her favorite child.
'So Annie, you gonna do a big piece about us all in your magazine?' said Hank.
'That's right, Hank. You're the centerfold.'
He gave a great bellow of laughter.
Frank said, 'Hey Hank, you better get yourself some of that - what do they call it? Lipsuction.' 'Liposuction, you fool,' Diane said. 'I'll go for the lipsuction,' Hank said. 'Though I guess it depends who's doing the sucking.'
Annie asked Frank about the ranch and he told her how they had moved here when he and Tom were boys. He took her over to look at the photographs and told her who all the people were. There was something about this gallery of solemn faces that Annie found moving. It was as though their mere survival in this daunting land were in itself some mighty triumph. While Frank was telling her about his grandfather, Annie happened to glance back at the table and saw Tom look up and see her and smile.
When she and Frank went back and sat down, Joe was telling Grace about a hippie woman who lived farther up on the mountains. She'd bought some Pryor Mountain mustangs a few years back, he said, and just let them run wild. They'd bred and now there was quite a herd of them up there.
'She's got all these kids too and they run around with nothing on. Dad calls her Granola Gay. Came here from L.A.'
'Californication!' Hank chanted. Everyone laughed. 'Hank, do you mind!' Diane said. Later, over a dessert of pumpkin pie and homemade cherry ice cream, Frank said, 'You know what, Tom? While you're working on that horse of theirs, Annie and Grace here ought to move into the creek house. Seems crazy them doing all that shuttling to and fro.' Annie just caught the sharp look Diane gave her husband. It was obviously something they hadn't discussed. Tom looked at Annie.
'Sure,' he said. 'It's a good idea.'
'Oh, that's very nice of you, but really…'
'Hell, I know that old house you're staying in down there in Choteau,' said Frank. 'It's good as falling down around your ears.'
'Frank, the creek house isn't exactly a palace, for heavensakes,' said Diane. 'Anyway, I'm sure Annie wants her privacy.'
Before Annie could speak, Frank leaned forward and looked down the table. 'Grace? What do you think?'
Grace looked at Annie, but her face gave her answer and it was all Frank needed.
'That's settled then.'
Diane got up.'Ill make some coffee,' she said.
A quarter moon the color of dappled bone still stood in the dawning sky when Tom stepped out through the screen door and onto the porch. He stopped there, pulling on his gloves, feeling the cold air on his face. The world was white and brittle with frost and no breeze ruffled the clouds made by his breath. The dogs came rushing up to greet him, their bodies wagging with their tails and he touched their heads and with no more than a nod sent them racing off toward the corrals, nipping and jostling each other, their feet scuffing tracks in the magnesium grass. Tom turned up the collar of his green wool jacket and stepped down off the porch to follow them.
The yellow blinds on the upstairs windows of the creek house were closed. Annie and Grace were probably still asleep. He'd helped them move in the previous afternoon after he and Diane had cleaned the place up a little. Diane had barely said a word all morning but he could tell how she felt by the jutting of her jaw and the methodically violent way she wielded the vacuum cleaner and made up the beds. Annie was to sleep in the main front bedroom, overlooking the creek. It was where Diane and Frank had slept and, before them, he and Rachel. Grace was to have Joe's old bedroom at the back of the house.
'How long are they planning on staying?' Diane said as she finished making Annie's bed. Tom was by the door, checking that a radiator worked. He turned but she wasn't looking at him.
'I don't know. Guess it depends how things go with the horse.'
Diane didn't say a thing, just shunted the bed back into position with her knees so that the headboard banged against the wall.
'If you have a problem with it, I'm sure—'
'Who said I had a problem? I don't have a problem.' She stomped past him out onto the landing and scooped up a pile of towels she'd left there. 'I just hope the woman knows how to cook, that's all.' And she went off down the stairs.
Diane wasn't around later when Annie and Grace arrived. Tom helped them unload the Lariat and took their bags upstairs for them. He was relieved to see they'd brought two big boxes of groceries. The sun was streaming in through the big front window in the living room and made the place seem light and airy. Annie said how pretty it was. She asked if it would be okay to move the long dining table over to the window so that she could use it as her desk and look out on the creek and the corrals while she worked. Tom took one end and she took the other and when they'd moved it he helped her bring in all her computers and fax machines and some other electronic gadgetry whose purpose he couldn't begin to guess.
It had struck him as odd that the first thing Annie should want to do in this new place, before unpacking, before even seeing where she was to sleep, was to set up somewhere to work. He could tell from the look on Grace's face as she watched that to her it wasn't odd at all. It had always been like this.
Last night before he turned in, he'd walked out, as he always did, to check on the horses and on the way back he'd looked up at the creek house and seen the lights on and wondered what they were doing, this woman and her child, and of what if anything they spoke. Seeing the house standing there against the clear night sky, he'd thought of Rachel and the pain those walls had encased so many years ago. Now pain was encased there again, pain of the highest order, finely wrought by mutual guilt and used by wounded souls to punish those they love the most.
Tom made his way past the corrals, the frosted grass scrunching under the soles of his boots. The branches of the cottonwoods along the creek were laced with silver and over their heads he could see the eastern sky starting to glow pink where soon the sun would show. The dogs were waiting for him outside the barn door, all eager. They knew he never let them go in with him but they always thought it worth a try. He shooed them away and went in to see to the horses.
An hour later, when the sun had melted black patches on the barn's frost-veneered roof, Tom led out one of the colts he'd started the previous week and swung himself up into the saddle. The horse, like all the others he'd raised, had a good soft feel and they rode an easy walk up the dirt road toward the meadows.
As they passed below the creek house, Tom saw the blinds of Annie's bedroom were now open. Farther on he found footprints in the frost beside the road and he followed them until they were lost among the willows where the road crossed the creek in a shallow ford. There were rocks you could use as stepping-stones and he could see from the wet criss-cross marks on them that whoever it was had done just that.
The colt saw her before he did and, prompted by the pricking of its ears, Tom looked up and saw Annie running back down from the meadow. She was wearing a pale gray sweatshirt, black leggings and a pair of those hundred-dollar shoes they advertised on TV. She hadn't yet seen him and he brought the colt to a stop at the water's edge and watched her come nearer. Through the low rush of the water, he could just make out the sound of her breathing. She had her hair tied back and her face was pink from the cold air and the effort of her running. She was looking down, concentrating so hard on where she was putting her feet that if the colt hadn't softly snorted she might have run right into them. But the sound made her look up and she stopped in her tracks, some ten yards away.
'Hi!'
Tom touched the brim of his hat.
'A jogger, huh?'
She made a mock haughty face. 'I don't jog, Mr Booker. I run.'
'That's lucky, the grizzlies around here only go for the joggers.'
Her eyes went wide. 'Grizzly bears? Are you serious?'
'Well, you know, we keep 'em pretty well fed and all.' He could see she was worried and grinned. 'I'm kidding. Oh, they're around but they like to stay higher. You're safe enough.' He thought about adding, except for the mountain lions, but if she'd heard about that woman in California she might not think it too funny.
She gave him a narrow-eyed look for teasing her, then grinned and came closer so that the sun fell full on her face and she had to shield her eyes with one hand to look up at him. Her breasts and shoulders rose and fell to the rhythm of her breathing and a slow steam curled off her and melted in the air.
'Did you sleep okay up there?' he said.
'I don't sleep okay anywhere.'
'Is the heating okay? It's been a while since—'
'It's fine. Everything's fine. It's really very kind of you to let us stay out here.'
'It's good to have the old place lived in.'
'Well, anyway. Thank you.'
For a moment, neither of them seemed to know what to say. Annie reached out to touch the horse, but did it a little too suddenly so that the animal tossed his head away and took a couple of steps back.
'I'm sorry,' Annie said. Tom reached down and rubbed the colt's neck.
'Just hold your hand out. A little lower, there, so he can get the smell of you.' The colt lowered his muzzle to Annie's hand and explored it with the tips of his whiskers, snuffling it now. Annie watched, a slow smile starting, and Tom noticed again how the corners of her mouth seemed to have some mysterious life of their own, qualifying each smile for its occasion.
'He's beautiful,' she said.
'Yeah, he's doing pretty good. Do you ride?'
'Oh. A long time ago. When I was Grace's age.'
Something in her face changed and at once he regretted asking the question. And he felt dumb because it was clear that in some way she blamed herself for what had happened to her daughter.
'I'd better get back, I'm getting cold.' She moved off, giving the horse space as she passed, squinting up at Tom. 'I thought it was supposed to be spring!'
'Oh well, you know what they say, if you don't like the weather in Montana, wait five minutes.'
He turned in the saddle and watched her make her way back across the stepping-stones of the ford. She slipped and cursed to herself as one shoe went briefly under the icy water.
'Need a lift?'
'No, I'm fine.'
'Ill come by around two o'clock and collect Grace,' he called.
'Okay!'
She reached the far side of the creek and turned to give him a little wave. He touched his hat and watched her turn away again and break into a run, still not looking at what lay around her or ahead of her, but only where she placed her feet.
Pilgrim burst into the arena as though fired from a cannon. He ran straight to the far end and stopped there, sending up a splash of red sand. His tail was clenched and it twitched and his ears moved back and forward. His eyes were wild and fixed on the open gate through which he'd come and through which he knew the man would now follow him.
Tom was on foot and had in his hands an orange flagstick and a coiled rope. He came in and shut the gate and walked to the middle of the arena.
The sky above him rushed with small white clouds so that the light shifted constantly from gloom to glare.
For almost a minute they stood there, quite still, the horse and the man, assessing each other. It was Pilgrim who moved first. He snorted and lowered his head and took some small steps back. Tom stayed like a statue, with the tip of his flag resting on the sand. Then at last he took a step toward Pilgrim and at the same time lifted the flag in his right hand and made it crack. Immediately the horse launched off to the left and ran.
Round and round the arena he went, kicking up the sand, snorting loudly and tossing his head. His cocked and tangled tail splayed out behind him, flicking and swishing in the wind. He ran with his rear skewed in and his head skewed out and every ounce of every muscle in his body was clenched and focused only on the man. Such was the angle of his head, he had to strain his left eye backward to see him. But it never strayed, held there by a line of fear so enthralling that, in his other eye, the world was but a circling blur of nothingness.
Soon his flanks began to shine with sweat and flecks of foam flew from the corners of his mouth. But still the man drove him ever on and every time he slowed, up the flag would go and crack, forcing him forward and forward again.
All this Grace watched from the bench Tom had set up for her outside the rails of the arena. It was the first time she'd seen him work like this on foot and there was an intensity about him today that she'd noticed right away when he came by in the Chevy on the stroke of two to drive her down to the barn. For today, they both knew, was when the real work with Pilgrim was to start.
The horse's leg muscles had grown strong again with all the swimming he'd been doing and the scars on his chest and face were looking better by the day. It was the scars inside his head that now needed seeing to. Tom had parked outside the barn and let Grace lead the way down the avenue of stalls to the big one at the end where Pilgrim now lived. There were bars on the top half of the door and they could see him watching them all the way. When they reached the door, he always backed away into the far corner, lowering his head and flattening his ears. But he no longer charged when they came in and lately Tom had let Grace take in his feed and water. His coat was matted and his mane and tail filthy and tangled and Grace longed to get a brush on him.
The far wall of the stall had a sliding door which opened onto a bare concrete lobby where there were doors both to the pool and the arena. Getting him to and from either one was a matter of opening the appropriate door and crowding him so that he bolted through. Today, as if sensing some new plot, he hadn't wanted to go and Tom had had to get in close and slap his hindquarters.
Now, as Pilgrim went by, for maybe the hundredth time, Grace saw him turn his head to look square at Tom, wondering why all of a sudden he was being allowed to slow without the flag being raised. Tom let him come right down to a walk and then stop. The horse stood there, looking about, blowing. Wondering what was going on. After a few moments Tom started to walk toward him. Pilgrim's ears went forward, then back, then forward again.
His muscles quivered in wavelike spasms down his sides.
'You see that, Grace? See those muscles all knotted up there? You've got yourself one hell of a determined horse here. Gonna need a whole lot of cooking, old fella, ain't you?'
She knew what he meant. He'd told her the other day about an old man called Dorrance from Wallowa County, Oregon, the best horseman Tom had ever met, and how, when he was trying to get a horse to unwind, he'd poke his finger into its muscles and say he wanted to check if the potatoes were cooked yet. But Grace could see Pilgrim wasn't going to allow any such thing. He was moving his head to one side, assessing the man's approach with one fearful eye and when Tom was about five yards away, he broke away in the same direction as before. Only now Tom stepped in and blocked him with the flag. The horse braked hard in the sand and swerved to the right. He turned outward, away from Tom, and as his rear end swung past, Tom stepped smartly in and whacked it with the flag. Pilgrim lunged away forward. And now he was circling clockwise and the process began all over again.
'He wants to be alright,' Tom said. 'He just doesn't know what alright is.'
And if he ever gets to be alright, Grace thought, what then? Tom had said nothing about where all this was leading. He was taking each day as it came, not forcing things, just letting Pilgrim take his time and make his choices. But what then? If Pilgrim got better, was it she who was expected to ride him?
Grace knew quite well that people rode with worse disabilities than hers. Some even started from scratch that way. She'd seen them at events and once she'd even taken part in a sponsored show-jump where all the money went to the local Riding for the Disabled group. She'd thought how brave these people were and felt sorry for them. Now she couldn't bear the idea that people might feel the same about her. She wouldn't give them the chance. She'd said she would never ride again and that was that.
Some two hours later, after Joe and the twins had come back from school, Tom opened the arena gate and let Pilgrim run back into his stall. Grace had already cleaned the place out and put new shavings down and Tom stood guard and watched her bring in the bucket of feed and hang up a fresh net of hay.
As he drove her back up the valley to the creek house, the sun was low and the rocks and limber pine on the slopes above them cast long shadows on the pale grass. They didn't speak and Grace wondered why silence with this man she'd known so short a time never seemed uncomfortable. She could tell that he now had something on his mind. He circled the Chevy to the back of the house and pulled up by the back porch. Then he cut the engine off, sat back and turned to look her right in the eye.
'Grace, I've got a problem.'
He paused and she didn't know whether she was supposed to say something, but he went on.
'You see, when I'm working with a horse, I like to know the history. Now most times the horse can tell you pretty much the whole deal just by himself. In fact a sight better than his owner might tell it. But sometimes he can be so messed up in his head that you need more to go on. You need to know what went wrong. And often it's not the obvious thing but something that went wrong just before that, maybe even some little thing.'
Grace didn't understand and he saw her frown.
'It's like if I was driving this old Chevy and I hit a tree and someone asks me what happened, well, I wouldn't say, "Well, you know, I hit a tree." I'd say maybe I'd had too many beers or there was oil on the road or maybe the sun was in my eyes or something. See what I mean?'
She nodded.
'Well, I don't know how you feel about talking about it and I can sure understand you might not want to. But if I'm going to figure out what's going on in Pilgrim's head, it'd help me a whole lot if I knew something about the accident and what exactly happened that day.'
Grace heard herself take a breath. She looked away from him to the house and noticed you could see right through the kitchen to the living room. She could see the blue-gray glow of the computer screen and her mother sitting there, on the phone, framed in the fading light of the big front window.
She hadn't told anyone what she really remembered about that day. To the police, lawyers, doctors, even to her parents, she'd gone on pretending that much of what had happened was a blank. The problem was Judith. She still didn't know if she could handle talking about Judith. Or even about Gulliver. She looked back at Tom Booker and he smiled. In his eyes there was not a trace of pity and she knew in that instant that she was accepted, not judged. Perhaps it was because he only knew the person she now was, the disfigured, partial one, not the whole she once had been.
'I don't mean now,' he said gently. 'When you're ready. And only if you want to.' Something beyond her caught his eye and she followed his glance and saw her mother coming out onto the porch. Grace turned back to him and nodded.
'I'll think about it,' she said.
Robert propped his glasses up on the top of his forehead, leaned back in his chair and rubbed his eyes for a long time. He had his shirtsleeves rolled up and his tie lay crumpled among the layers of papers and law books that covered his desk. Along the corridor he could hear the cleaners moving systematically through the other offices, talking to each other now and then in Spanish. Everyone else had gone home four or five hours ago. Bill Sachs, one of the younger partners, had tried to persuade him to come with him and his wife to see some new Gerard Depardieu movie everyone was talking about. Robert said thanks but he had too much work to get through and anyway he always found something faintly disturbing about Depardieu's nose.
'It looks, you know, kind of penile,' he said.
Bill, who could have passed as a psychiatrist anyway, had peered at him over his hornrims and asked in a comic Freudian accent, why Robert should find such an association disturbing. Then he got Robert laughing about two women he'd heard talking the other day on the subway.
'One of them had been reading this book that tells you what your dreams mean and she was telling the other girl how it had said if you dreamed about snakes it meant you were really obsessed by penises and the other one said, phew, that was a relief, 'cause all she ever dreamed about was penises.'
Bill wasn't the only one who seemed to be making a special effort to cheer him up at the moment. Robert was touched but on the whole he wished they wouldn't. Being on your own for a few weeks didn't justify this level of sympathy and so he suspected his colleagues sensed in him some deeper loss. One had even offered to take over the Dunford Securities case. God, that was about the only thing that kept him going.
Every night for nearly three weeks now he'd been up till way past midnight working on it. The hard disk on his laptop was almost bursting with it. It was one of the most complicated cases he'd ever worked on, involving bonds worth billions of dollars being shuffled endlessly through a maze of companies across three continents. Today he'd had a two-hour conference call with lawyers and clients in Hong Kong, Geneva, London and Sydney. The time differences were a nightmare. But curiously it kept him sane and, more important, too busy to dwell too much on how he missed Grace and Annie.
He opened his sore eyes and leaned across to press the redial button on one of his phones. Then he settled back, staring out of the window at the illuminated coronets on the spire of the Chrysler Building. The number Annie had given him, for this new place they'd moved into, was still busy.
He'd walked to the corner of Fifth and Fifty-ninth before he flagged a cab. The cold night air felt good and he'd toyed with the idea of walking all the way home across the park. He'd done it before at night though only once did he make the mistake of telling Annie. She'd yelled at him for a full ten minutes and told him he was insane going in there at night, did he want to get himself disemboweled? He wondered if he'd missed something in the newspapers about this particular hazard, but it didn't seem the right time to ask.
From the name posted on the dashboard of the cab, he could tell the driver was Senegalese. There were quite a few of them nowadays and Robert always enjoyed blowing their minds by casually addressing them in Wolof or Jola. This young man was so amazed he almost drove smack into a bus. They talked about Dakar and places they both knew and the driving got so bad that Robert began to think the park might have been a safer bet after all. When they pulled up outside the apartment building, Ramon came down and opened the cab door and the driver said how grateful he was for the tip and that he would pray that Allah bless Robert with many strong sons.
After Ramon had given him an apparently white-hot piece of news about a star player just signed by the Mets, Robert took the elevator and let himself into the apartment. The place was dark and the clunk of the door as he shut it echoed through the lifeless labyrinth of rooms.
He walked through to the kitchen and found the supper Elsa had cooked for him and the usual note saying what it was and how long it needed in the microwave. He did what he always did and scooped it guiltily into the garbage. He'd left her notes thanking her but saying please not to bother cooking for him, he could get takeout or cook something himself. But there it still was every night, bless her.
The truth was, the aching emptiness of the apartment made him morose and he avoided being here as much as he could. He felt it most acutely at weekends. He'd tried going up to Chatham but the loneliness there had been even worse. It hadn't been helped by arriving to find that the thermostat on Grace's tropical fish tank had failed and all the fish had died of cold. The sight of their tiny, faded corpses floating in the tank had upset him profoundly. He hadn't told Grace, nor even Annie, but had pulled himself together, made careful notes and ordered identical impostors from the pet store.
Since Annie and Grace had left, talking to them on the phone had become the high point of Robert's day. And tonight, having tried for hours and failed to reach them, he felt a sharper need than ever for the sound of their voices.
He sealed the garbage bag so that Elsa wouldn't discover the shameful destiny of the supper she'd cooked. As he was dumping the bag outside the service door, he heard the phone and he ran back down the corridor as fast as he could. The answering machine had already clicked in by the time he got there and he had to speak loudly to compete with his own recorded voice.
'Hold on, I'm here.' He found the off-button. 'Hi. I just got in.'
'You're all out of breath. Where were you?'
'Oh, out partying. You know, doing the bars and clubs and things. God, it's tiring.'
'Don't tell me.'
'I wasn't going to. So how're things where the deer and the antelope play? I tried calling all day.'
'I'm sorry. There's just the one line here and the office has been trying to bury me in fax paper.'
She said Grace had tried calling him half an hour ago at the office, probably just after he'd left for home. She'd gone to bed now but sent him her love.
As Annie told him about her day, Robert walked through to the sitting room and, without turning the lights on, settled himself on the sofa by the window. Annie sounded weary and downcast and he tried, without much success, to cheer her up.
'And how's Gracie?'
There was a pause and he heard Annie sigh.
'Oh. I don't know.' Her voice was low now, presumably so that Grace wouldn't hear. 'I see how she is with Tom Booker and Joe, you know, the twelve-year-old? They get on really well. And with them, she seems fine. But when it's just the two of us, I don't know. It's gotten so bad she won't even look at me.' She sighed again. 'Anyway.'
They were silent for a while and in the distance he heard a wail of sirens out in the street, on their way to another nameless tragedy.
'I miss you, Annie.'
'I know,' she said. 'We miss you too.'
Annie dropped Grace at the clinic a little before nine and wove her way back to the gas station in Choteau center. She filled up alongside a little man with a face like leather and a hat brimmed wide enough to shelter a horse. He was checking the oil of a Dodge pickup which was hitched to a trailerload of cattle. They were Black Angus like the herd at the Double Divide and Annie had to fight the urge to confide some knowing remark about them based on the little she'd gleaned from Tom and Frank on branding day. She rehearsed it in her head. Good lookin' cattle. No, you wouldn't say cattle. Healthy-lookin' beasts? Fellas? She gave up. In all truth she had no idea if they were good, bad or flea-bitten, so she kept her mouth shut and just gave the man a nod and a smile instead.
As she came out from paying, someone called her name and she looked around and saw Diane getting out of her Toyota at the other row of pumps. Annie waved and walked over.
'So you do sometimes give yourself a break from that telephone after all,' Diane said. 'We were beginning to wonder.'
Annie smiled and told her she had to bring Grace into town three mornings a week for physical therapy. She was going back to the ranch now to do some work and would come back in at midday to pick her up.
'Heck, well I can do that for you,' Diane said. 'I've got a bunch of things to do in town. Is she up at the Bellview Medical Center?'
'Yes, but honestly, you don't want—' 'Don't be silly. It's crazy you driving all that way.' Annie demurred but Diane would have none of it, it was no problem she said, and in the end Annie gave way and thanked her. They chatted for a few more minutes about how things were going up at the creek house and whether Annie and Grace had everything they needed, then Diane said she'd better get going.
On her way back to the ranch Annie puzzled over the encounter. The substance of Diane's offer had been friendly enough, but the manner in which it had been made was something less. There had been just the faintest hint of accusation, almost as though she were saying that Annie was much too busy to bother herself with being a mother. Or maybe Annie was just being paranoid.
She traveled north and looked out over the plains to her right where the black shapes of the cattle stood out against the pale grass like the ghosts of buffalo from another age. Ahead on the blacktop, the sun was already making pools of mirage and she lowered the window and let the wind blow her hair back. It was the second week in May and at last it felt as if spring had really come and wasn't just kidding. When she swung left off 89, the Rocky Mountain Front loomed before her, topped with cloud that seemed squeezed from some galactic can of chantilly. All that was missing, she thought, was a cherry and one of those little paper umbrellas. Then she remembered all the faxes and phone messages that would be waiting for her when she got back to the ranch and realized a moment or two later that the thought had eased her foot on the gas pedal.
She'd already used up much of the month's leave she'd asked Crawford Gates to give her. She would have to ask him for more and she wasn't looking forward to it. For despite all his talk about how she should feel free to take off as much time as she needed, Annie was under no illusion. In the last few days there had been clear signs that Gates was getting restless. There had been a series of small interferences, not one of them on its own enough for her to make a real fuss about, but which, when viewed collectively, signaled danger.
He had criticized Lucy Friedman's lounge lizard piece which Annie considered quite brilliant; he'd queried the design team over two front covers -not in a heavy-handed way but enough to make an impression; and he'd sent Annie a long memo about how he thought their coverage of Wall Street was slipping behind the competition. That would have been okay, except that he'd copied it to four other directors before even speaking to her. But if the old bastard wanted a fight, so be it. She hadn't phoned him. Instead she wrote an immediate and robust reply, full of facts and figures, and copied it to the same people plus, for good measure, a couple of others she knew to be her allies. Touche. But God, it took such a lot of effort.
When she drove over the hill and down past the corrals, she saw Tom's yearlings running in the arena, but there was no sign of Tom and she felt disappointed, then amused that she should feel so. As she came around the back of the creek house she saw there was a phone company truck parked there and as she got out, a man in blue coveralls came out of the house onto the porch. He wished her good-day and said he'd fitted the new lines.
Inside, she found two new phones beside her computer. The answering machine showed four messages and there were three faxes, one of them from Lucy Friedman. As she began to read it, one of the new phones rang.
'Hi.' It was a man's voice and for a moment she didn't recognize it. 'Just wanted to see if it worked.'
'Who is this?' Annie said.
'I'm sorry. It's Tom, Tom Booker. I just saw the phone guy leaving and I wanted to see if the new lines worked.'
Annie laughed.
'I can hear they do, one of them anyway. I hope you don't mind him letting himself in.'
'Of course not. Thank you. You really needn't have.'
'It's no big deal. Grace said her dad sometimes had trouble getting through.'
'Well, it's very kind of you.'
There was a pause and then, just for something to say, Annie told him how she'd bumped into Diane in Choteau and how she'd kindly offered to bring Grace back.
'She could have taken her in too if we'd known.'
Annie thanked him again for the phones and offered to pay for them but he brushed it aside and said he'd leave her to get on with using them and hung up. She started to read Lucy's fax again but for some reason found it hard to concentrate and went off to the kitchen to make some coffee.
Twenty minutes later she was back at her table and had one of the new lines rigged up for the modem and the other exclusively for the fax. She was just about to call Lucy who was in a new fury about Gates, when she heard footsteps on the back porch and a light tapping on the screen door.
Through the haze of the screen she could see Tom Booker standing there and he started to smile as he caught sight of her. He stepped back when Annie opened the door and she saw he had with him two saddled horses, Rimrock and another of the colts. She folded her arms, leaned against the door frame and gave him a skeptical smile.
'The answer's no,' she said.
'You don't yet know what the question is.'
'I think I can guess.'
'You can?'
'I think so.'
'Well, I kind of reckoned seeing as you've just saved yourself forty minutes driving down to Choteau and then some forty more driving back and all, you might feel inclined to blow a little of it on taking some air.'
'On horseback.'
'Well. Yeah.'
They looked at each other for a moment, just smiling. He was wearing a faded pink shirt and over his jeans those old patched leather chaps he always rode in. Maybe it was just the light, but his eyes seemed as clear and blue as the sky behind him.
Truth is, you'd be doing me a favor. I got all these eager young colts to ride and poor old Rimrock here is feeling kind of left out. He'd be that grateful, he'd take real good care of you.'
'Is this how I get to pay for the phones?'
'No ma'am, I'm afraid that's extra.'
The physical therapist who looked after Grace was a tiny woman with a shock of streaked curls and gray eyes so large they made her seem permanently surprised. Terri Carlson was fifty-one and a Libra; both her parents were dead and she had three sons which her husband had given her in rapid succession some thirty years ago before running off with a Texan rodeo queen. He'd insisted the boys be called John, Paul and George and Terri thanked the Lord he'd gone before there was a fourth. All this Grace had found out on her very first visit here and on each subsequent visit Terri had taken up where she left off so that now, had Grace been asked, she could have filled several notebooks on the woman's life. Not that Grace minded in the least. She liked it. It meant she could simply lie on the workout bench, as she was doing now, and surrender herself entirely not just to the woman's hands but to her words as well.
Grace had protested when Annie told her she'd arranged for her to come here three mornings a week. She knew that after all these months it was more than she strictly needed. But the therapist in New York had told Annie that the harder you worked at it, the less likely it was you'd end up with a limp.
'Who cares if I have a limp?' Grace said.
'I do,' Annie said, so that was it.
In fact, Grace enjoyed the sessions here more than in New York. First they did the workout. Terri had her doing everything. On top of all the exercises, she strapped velcro weights on her stump, got her sweating on the arm bicycle, even had her disco dancing in front of the mirrors that lined the walls. That first day she'd seen Grace's expression when the tape came on.
'You don't like Tina Turner?'
Grace said Tina Turner was fine. Just kind of…
'Old? Get outta here! She's my age!'
Grace blushed and they laughed and from then on things were fine. Terri told her to bring in some of her own tapes and these had now become the source of much joking between them. Whenever Grace brought in a new one Terri would examine it, shake her head and sigh, 'More gloom from the tomb.'
After the workout, Grace would relax for a while and then get to work on her own in the pool. Then, for the last hour, it was back in front of the mirrors for some walk practice or 'gate training' as Terri called it. Grace had never felt fitter in her whole life.
Today Terri had pressed the pause button on her life story and was telling her about an Indian boy she visited each week up on the Blackfeet Reservation. He was twenty years old and proud and beautiful, she said, like something out of a Charlie Russell picture. That was, until last summer when he'd gone swimming in a pool with some friends and dived headfirst into a concealed shelf of rock. It had clean snapped his neck and now he was paralyzed from there on down.
'First time I visited with him, boy was he angry,' she said. She was working Grace's stump like a pump handle. 'He told me he didn't want anything to do with me and if I didn't go then he'd go, he wasn't sticking around to be humiliated. He didn't actually say "by a woman," but that's what he meant. I thought, what does he mean "go"? He wasn't going anywhere, all he could do was lie there. But you know what? He did go. I got to work on him and after a while I looked at his face and he was - gone.'
She saw Grace didn't understand.
'His mind, his spirit, whatever you care to call it. Just upped and gone. Like that. And he wasn't faking it, you could tell. He was away somewhere. And when I was through, he just kind of came back. Now he does it every time I visit him. Over you go now honey, let's do a few Jane Fondas.'
Grace turned on her left side and started doing scissor lifts. 'Does he say where he goes?' she asked. Terri laughed.
'You know, I asked him that and he said he wouldn't tell me 'cause I'd only come busybodying after him. That's what he calls me, Ol' Busybody. Makes out he doesn't like me, but I know he does. It's just his way of keeping his pride. I guess we all do that some way or other. That's good, honey. A little higher now? Good!'
Terri took her to the pool room and left her there. It was a peaceful place and today Grace had it to herself. The air was laced with the clean smell of chlorine. She changed into her swimsuit and settled herself to rest awhile in the small whirlpool. The sun was angling down from the skylight onto the surface of the swimming pool. Some bounced back to dance in shimmering reflection on the ceiling, while the rest slanted through to the bottom of the pool where it formed undulating patterns, like a colony of pale blue snakes that lived and died and were constantly reborn.
The swirling water felt good on her stump and she lay back and thought about the Indian boy.
How good to be able to do that, to leave your body whenever you wanted and go off somewhere. It made her wonder about when she was in the coma. Perhaps that's what had happened then. But where had she gone and what had she seen? She couldn't remember a thing about it, not even a dream, only the coming out of it, swimming through the tunnel of glue toward her mother's voice.
She had always been able to remember her dreams. It was easy, all you had to do was tell someone about them the moment you woke, even if it was only yourself. When she was younger, in the mornings, she used to climb into her parents' bed and snuggle under her father's arm and tell him. He'd ask her all ; sorts of detailed questions and sometimes she'd have to invent things to fill in the gaps. It was always only her father because by that hour Annie was already up and out running or in the shower yelling for Grace to get dressed and go do her piano practice. Robert used to tell her she should write all her dreams down because she'd have fun reading about them when she was grown up, but Grace could never be bothered.
She had expected to have terrible, bloody dreams about the accident. But she hadn't dreamed about it once. And the only one she'd had about Pilgrim was two nights ago. He was standing on the far side of a great brown river and it was odd because he was younger, little more than a foal, but it was definitely Pilgrim. She'd called him and he'd tested the water with his foot then walked right in and started to swim toward her. But he wasn't strong enough for the current and it started to sweep him away and she'd watched his head getting smaller and smaller and she felt so powerless and filled with anguish because all she could do was keep on calling his name. Then she was aware that someone was standing beside her and she turned and saw Tom Booker and he said she shouldn't worry, Pilgrim would be okay, because downstream the river wasn't so deep and he would be sure to find a place to cross.
Grace hadn't told Annie about Tom Booker asking if she'd talk about the accident. She feared Annie might make a fuss or resent it or try and make the decision for her. It was none of Annie's business. It was something private between her and Tom, about her and her horse and it was for her to decide. And she realized now that she had already decided. Although the prospect daunted her, she would talk to him. Maybe she would tell Annie later.
The door opened and Terri came back in and asked her how she was doing. She said Grace's mom had just called. Diane Booker would be there at midday to pick her up.
They rode up along the creek and crossed at the ford where they'd met the other morning. As they moved up into the lower meadow the cattle stepped lazily aside to let them pass. The cloud had broken away and scattered from the snow-covered tops of the mountains and the air smelled new, of roots uncoiling. There were pink crocus and shooting star already showing in the grass and a first hint of leaf hung like a green haze on the cotton woods.
He let her go before him for a while and watched the breeze in her hair. She'd never ridden western before and said the saddle felt like a boat. Back at the house she'd got him to shorten Rimrock's stirrups so they were now more the length you'd ride a cutting horse or if you were roping, but she said she felt more in control that way. He could see she was a rider from the way she held herself and from the easy way her body moved with the rhythm of the horse.
When it was clear she had the feel of it, he eased alongside and they rode together, neither one of them speaking except when she asked him the name of some tree or plant or bird. She'd fix him with those green eyes of hers while he told her and then nod, all serious, storing the information away. They rode past stands of aspen which he told her they called quakin' asp on account of the way the wind fluttered in their leaves and he showed her the black scars in their pale trunks where in the winter foraging elk had stripped away the bark.
They rode up a long, sloping ridge, strewn with pine and potentilla, and came to the rim of a high bluff from where you could look down the twin valleys that gave the ranch its name and there they stopped and sat the horses awhile.
'That's quite a view,' Annie said. He nodded.
'When my daddy moved us all out here, Frank and I would come up here sometimes and have ourselves a race back down to the corral for a dime or maybe a quarter if we were feeling rich. He'd take one creek and I'd take the other.'
'Who won?'
'Well, he was younger and mostly he went so darn fast he fell off and I'd have to hang around in the trees down there and time it just right so we finished neck and neck. It made him real happy to win, so most times that's what happened.'
She smiled at him.
'You ride pretty good,' he said. She made a face.
'This horse of yours would make anyone look good.'
She reached down and rubbed Rimrock's neck and for a moment the only sound was the soft frupping of the horses' nostrils. She sat back up and looked down the valley again. You could just see the tip of the creek house above the trees.
'Who's R.B.?' she said.
He frowned. 'R.B.?'
'On the well, by the house. There are some initials, T.B. - which I guessed was you - and R.B.' He laughed.
'Rachel. My wife.'
'You're married?'
'My ex-wife. We got divorced. A long time ago.'
'Do you have children?'
'Uh-huh, one. He's twenty years old. Lives with his mother and stepfather in New York City.'
'What's his name?'
She sure asked a whole lot of questions. That was her job, he guessed, and he didn't mind at all. In fact he liked the way she was so direct, just looked you right in the eye and came out with it. He smiled.
'Hal.'
'Hal Booker. That's nice.'
'Well, he's a nice guy. You look kind of surprised.'
Right away he felt bad for saying it for he could tell from the way she colored up that he'd embarrassed her.
'No, not at all. I just—'
'He was born right down there in the creek house.'
'Is that where you lived?'
'Yup. Rachel didn't take to it out here. The winters can get kind of hard if you're not used to it.'
A shadow passed over the heads of the horses and he looked up at the sky and so did she. It was a pair of golden eagles and he told her how you could know this from their size and the shape and color of their wings. And together, in silence, they watched them soar slowly up the valley until they were lost beneath the massive gray wall of mountain beyond.
'Been there yet?' Diane said, as the Albertasaurus watched them go by the museum on their way out of town. Grace said she hadn't. Diane drove brusquely, handling the car as though it needed to be taught a lesson.
'Joe loves it. The twins prefer Nintendo.'
Grace laughed. She liked Diane. She was sort of spiky but she'd been nice to her right from the start. Well, they all had, but there was something special about the way Diane talked with her, something confiding, almost sisterly. It occurred to Grace that it might be to do with her having only had sons.
'They say dinosaurs used this whole area as a breeding ground,' she went on. 'And you know what, Grace? They're still around. You just meet some of the men hereabouts.'
They talked about school and Grace told her how, on the mornings she didn't have to come in to the clinic, Annie made her do schoolwork. Diane agreed that was tough.
'How does your dad feel about you both being out here?'
'He gets a little lonely.'
'I bet he does.'
'But he's got some big important case on at the moment so I maybe wouldn't see too much of him anyway.'
'They're a real glitzy pair your mom and dad, huh? These big careers and all.'
'Oh, Dad's not like that.' It came right out and the silence that followed made it sound worse. Grace hadn't meant to imply any criticism of her mother but she knew from the way Diane looked at her that this was how it had sounded.
'Does she ever get to take a vacation?'
The tone was knowing, sympathetic and it made Grace feel like a traitor, that she'd handed Diane some kind of weapon and she wanted to say no, you've got it wrong, it's not like that at all. But instead she just shrugged and said, 'Oh yes, sometimes.'
She looked away and for some miles neither of them spoke. There were some things other people could never understand, she thought. It always had to be one way or the other and it was more complicated than that. She was proud of her mother, for heaven's sake. Although she'd never dream of letting her know, Annie was how she herself wanted to be when she grew up. Not exactly maybe, but it seemed natural and right that women should have such careers. She liked the way all her friends knew about her mother, how successful she was and everything. She wouldn't want it any other way and though she sometimes gave Annie a hard time for not being around as much as other people's moms, if she was honest, she never felt she was missing out. It was often just her and her dad, but that was okay. It was more than okay, sometimes she even preferred it that way. It was just that Annie was, well, so sure about everything. So extreme and purposeful. It made you want to fight her even when you agreed.
'Pretty, isn't it?' Diane said.
'Yes.' Grace had been staring out at the plains but she hadn't taken anything in and, now that she did, pretty didn't seem the right word at all. It seemed a desolate kind of place.
'You wouldn't dream there's enough nuclear weapons buried out there to blow up the entire planet, would you?'
Grace looked at her. 'Really?'
'You betcha.' She grinned. 'Missile silos all over the place. We may not have too many people out here but bombs and beef, oh boy, we're second to none.'
Annie had the phone tucked into her neck and was half-listening to Don Farlow while she played around on the keyboard with a sentence she'd just typed. She was trying to write an editorial, the only writing she got to do nowadays. Today she was rubbishing a new street crime initiative just announced by the mayor of New York City but she was having trouble finding the old mix of wit and vitriol that used to characterize Annie Graves at her best.
Farlow was getting her up to speed on assorted things he and his legal hitmen had been working on, none of which interested Annie remotely. She gave up on the sentence and looked out of the window. The sun was getting low and down at the big arena she could see Tom leaning on the rail talking with Grace and Joe. She saw him throw his head back and laugh at something. Behind him the barn threw a long wedge of shadow on the red sand.
They'd been working all afternoon with Pilgrim, who now stood watching from the other end of the arena, the sweat shining on his back. Joe had only just got back from school and had as usual gone right out to join them. Every now and then, over the past few hours, Annie had looked down there at Tom and Grace and felt just an inkling of something that, if she didn't know herself better, she might have mistaken for jealousy.
Her thighs ached from the morning's ride. Muscles she hadn't used for thirty years were making their complaints known and Annie relished the pain like a keepsake. It was years since she'd felt the exhilaration that had been there this morning. It was like someone had let her out of a cage. Still excited, she'd told Grace all about it as soon as Diane dropped her home. The girl's face had fallen a little before clicking on the disinterest with which lately she greeted all her mother's news and Annie cursed herself for blurting it out. It had been insensitive, she thought; although later, on reflection, she wasn't quite sure why.
'And he said to call a halt,' Farlow was saying.
'What? Sorry Don, could you say that again?'
'He said to drop the lawsuit.'
'Who did?'
'Annie! Are you feeling okay?'
'I'm sorry Don, I'm just fiddling around with something here.'
'Gates told me to drop the Fiske case. Remember? Fenimore Fiske? "And who, pray, is Martin Scorsese?'"
It was one of Fiske's many immortal gaffes. He'd dug himself in even deeper some years later by calling Taxi Driver a squalid little film from a trifling talent.
'Thanks Don, I remember him well. Gates really said to drop it?'
'Yes. He said it was costing too much and it would do you and the magazine more harm than good.'
'That son of a bitch! How dare he do that without talking to me? Jesus!'
'For Godsake don't tell him I told you.'
'Jesus.'
Annie swung around in her chair and her elbow knocked a cup of coffee off the desk.
'Shit!'
'You alright?'
'Yeah. Listen Don, I've got to think about this. I'll call you back, okay?'
'Okay.'
She hung up and for a long moment stared down at the broken cup and the spreading stain of coffee.
'Shit.'
And she went off to the kitchen to get a cloth.
'I thought it was the snowplow, you see. I heard it a long, long way off. We had all the time in the world. If we'd known what it was, we could have taken the horses right off the road, out into the field or somewhere. I should have said something about it to Judith but I just didn't think. Any case, when we were out with the horses, she was always the boss, you know? Like if there was a decision to be made, she'd be the one who got to make it. And it was like that with Gulliver and Pilgrim too. Gully was the boss, the sensible one.'
She bit her lip and looked away to one side so that the light on the back of the barn caught the side of her face. It was getting dark and a cool breeze was coming in off the creek. The three of them had put Pilgrim away for the night and then Joe, with no more than a look from Tom, had made himself scarce, saying he had homework to do. Tom and Grace had strolled over to the back pen where he kept the yearlings. Once she'd caught the foot of her false leg in a rut and stumbled a little and Tom had nearly reached out to stop her from falling, but she'd righted herself and he was glad he hadn't. Now the two of them were leaning on the fence of the pen watching the horses.
She'd taken him step by snowy step through the morning of the accident. How they'd gone up through the woods and how funny Pilgrim had been, playing with the snow and how they'd lost the trail and had to make that steep descent beside the stream. She talked without looking at him, keeping her eyes on the horses, but he knew all she saw was what she'd seen that day, another horse and a friend both now dead. And Tom watched her talk and felt for her with the whole of his heart.
'Then we found the place we'd been looking for. It was like this steep bank leading up to the railroad bridge. We'd been up there before, so we knew where the path was. Anyway, Judith went first and you know, it was weird, it was like Gully knew something was wrong because he didn't want to go and Gully isn't like that.'
She heard her own words and how she'd got the tense wrong and she looked at him briefly and he gave her a smile.
'So up he went and I asked her if it was okay and she said it was but to be careful, so I started up after her.'
'Did you have to make Pilgrim go?'
'No, not at all. It wasn't like with Gully. He was happy to go.'
She looked down and for a moment stayed silent. One of the yearlings nickered softly at the far end of the pen. Tom put a hand on her shoulder.
'You okay?'
She nodded. "Then Gully started to slip.' She looked at him, earnest suddenly. 'You know, they found out later that the ice was only on that one side of the path? If he'd been like, a few inches to the left, it wouldn't have happened. But he must have just put one foot on it and that was it.'
She looked away again and he could tell from the way her shoulders moved that she was fighting to calm her breathing.
'So he started to slide. He was trying so hard, you could see, jabbing his feet to try and make them hold but the more he did it the worse it got, they just wouldn't hold. They were coming right at us and Judith yelled for us to get out of the way. She was like clinging on to Gully's neck and I tried to get Pilgrim to turn and I know I did it too hard, you know, really yanked on him? If only I'd kept my head and done it more gently, he'd have gone. But I guess I scared him even worse than he was already and he wouldn't… he just wouldn't move!'
She stopped for a moment and swallowed.
'Then they hit us. How I stayed on I don't know.' She gave a little laugh. 'Would've been a whole lot smarter not to. Unless I'd got hooked up like Judith. When she came off it was like, you know, somebody was waving a flag or something, like she was all flimsy and made of nothing. She kind of flipped as she fell, anyway her leg got caught in the stirrup and down we all went, together, sliding on down. It seemed like it took forever. And you know? The weirdest thing, as we went down I remember thinking, with all this blue sky above us and the sun shining and the snow on the trees and everything and I'm thinking, my, what a beautiful day it is.' She turned to look at him. 'Isn't that the weirdest thing you ever heard?'
Tom didn't think it was weird at all. There were such moments, he knew, when the world chose thus to reveal itself not, as it might seem, to mock our plight or our irrelevance but simply to affirm, for us and for all life, the very act of being. He smiled at her and nodded.
'I don't know if Judith saw it right away, the truck I mean. She must have hit her head really hard and Gully had totally freaked and was just, you know, thrashing her all over the place. But as soon as I saw it, coming through that place where the bridge used to be I thought, there's no way this guy's going to stop and I thought if I could just get hold of Gully I can get everybody out the way. I was so stupid. God I was stupid!'
She clamped her head in her hands, screwing her eyes shut, but only for a few moments. 'What I should have done was got off. It would have been a lot easier to get hold of him. I mean, he was freaked alright, but he'd hurt his leg and he wasn't going anywhere in a hurry. I could have given Pilgrim a whack on the butt and sent him off and then led Gully off the road. But I didn't.' She sniffed, regathered herself. 'Pilgrim was incredible. I mean, he was pretty freaked too, but he got it back together right away. It was like he knew what I wanted. I mean, he could have stepped on Judith or anything, God, but he didn't. He knew. And if the guy hadn't blown his horn, we'd have done it, we were so close. My fingers were that far away, that far…'
Grace looked at him and her face was all distorted with the pain of knowing what might have been and at last the tears came. Tom put his arms around her and held her and she placed the side of her face against his chest and sobbed.
'I saw her face looking up at me, down by Gully's feet, just before the horn sounded. She looked so little, so scared. I could have saved her. I could have saved us all.'
He didn't speak, for he knew the futility of words to change such things and that even the passing of years might leave her certainty undimmed. For a long time they stood that way, with the night folding around them and he cupped his hand on the back of her head and smelled the fresh young smell of her hair. And when her crying was done and he felt her body slacken, he asked her gently if she wanted to go on. She nodded and sniffed and took a breath.
'Once the horn sounded, that was it. And Pilgrim, he kind of turned to face the truck. It was crazy, but it was like he wasn't going to allow it. He wasn't going to let this great monster come and hurt us all, he was going to fight. Fight a forty-ton truck for heaven's sake! Isn't that something? But he was going to, I could feel it. And when it was right in front of us he reared up at it. And I fell and hit my head. That's all I remember.'
The rest Tom knew, at least in outline. Annie had given him Harry Logan's number and a couple of days ago he'd called and listened to the man's account of what had happened next. Logan told him how it had ended for Judith and Gulliver and how Pilgrim had run off and how they'd found him down in the creek with that great hole in his chest. Tom had asked him a lot of detailed questions, some of which he could tell Logan found baffling. But the man sounded bighearted and patiently catalogued the horse's injuries and what he'd done to treat them. He told Tom of how they'd taken Pilgrim to Cornell, whose fine reputation Tom knew of, and all they'd done for him there.
When Tom said, in all truth, that he'd never heard of a vet being able to save a horse so sorely injured, Logan laughed and said he dearly wished he hadn't. He said things had gone all wrong later at the Dyer place and the Lord only knew what those two boys had done to the poor creature. He said he even blamed himself for going along with some of it, like trapping the animal's head in the door to give him those shots.
Grace was getting cold. It was late and her mother would be wondering where she was. They walked slowly back to the barn and passed through its dark, echoing emptiness and out the other end to the car. The beam of the Chevy's headlights tilted and dipped as they bumped along the track toward the creek house. For a while the dogs ran ahead, throwing pointed shadows before them and when they turned their heads to look back at the car, their eyes flashed ghostly and green.
Grace asked him if what he now knew would help him make Pilgrim better and he said he'd have to do some thinking but that he hoped so. When they pulled up he was glad to see she no longer looked like she'd been crying and when she got out she smiled at him and he could tell she wanted to thank him but was too shy to say it. He looked beyond her to the house, hoping he might see Annie but there was no sign of her. He gave Grace a smile and touched his hat.
'I'll see you tomorrow.'
'Okay,' she said and swung the door shut.
By the time he got in the others had already eaten. Frank was helping Joe with some math problem at the big table in the living room and telling the twins for the last time to turn down the sound on some comedy show they were watching or he'd come and switch it off. Without a word, Diane took the supper she'd saved him and put it in the microwave while Tom went through to the downstairs bathroom to clean up.
'Did she like her new phones then?' Through the open door he could see her settling herself back at the kitchen table with her needlework.
'Yeah, she was real grateful.'
He dried his hands and came back in. The microwave was pinging and he took his supper out and went to the table. It was chicken potpie, with green beans and a vast baked potato. Diane always thought it was his favorite meal and he never had the heart to disabuse her. He wasn't at all hungry but didn't want to upset her so he sat down and ate.
'What I can't work out is what she's going to do with the third one,' Diane said, not looking up.
'How do you mean?'
'Well, she's only got two ears.'
'Oh, she's got a fax machine and other things that use lines of their own and with people calling her all the time, that's what she needs. She offered to pay for the lines being put in.'
'And you said no, I'll bet.'
He didn't deny it and saw Diane smile to herself. He knew better than to argue when she was in this kind of mood. She'd made it plain from the start that she wasn't crazy about Annie being here and Tom thought it best just to let her have her say. He got on with his meal and for a while neither one of them spoke. Frank and Joe were arguing about whether some figure should be divided or multiplied.
'Frank says you took her out on Rimrock this morning,' Diane said.
'That's right. First time since she was a kid. She rides good.'
'That little girl. What a thing to happen.'
'Yeah.'
'She seems so lonely. Be better off in school, I reckon.'
'Oh, I don't know. She's okay.'
After he'd eaten and gone out to check the horses, he told Diane and Frank he had some reading to do and bade them and the boys good-night.
Tom's room took up the whole north-west corner of the house and from its side window you could look right up the valley. The room was large and seemed more so because there was so little in it. The bed was the one his parents had slept in, high and narrow with a scrolled maple headboard. There was a logcabin quilt on it that his grandmother had made. It had once been red and white but the red had faded a pale pink and in places the fabric had worn so thin that the lining showed through. There was a small pine table with one simple chair, a chest of drawers and an old hidecovered armchair that stood under a lamp by the black iron woodstove.
On the floor were some Mexican rugs Tom had picked up some years back in Santa Fe, but they were too small to make the place seem cozy and had more the opposite effect, stranded like lost islands on a darkstained sea of floorboard. Set into the back wall were two doors, one to the closet where he kept his clothes and the other leading to a small bathroom.
On the top of the chest of drawers stood a few modestly framed photographs of his family. There was one of Rachel holding Hal as a baby, its colors now grown saturate and dark. There was a more recent one of Hal beside it, his smile uncannily like Rachel's in the first. But for these and the books and back-issues of horse magazines that lined the walls, a stranger might have wondered how a man could live so long yet own so little.
Tom sat at the table going through a stack of old Quarter Horse Journals, looking for a piece he remembered reading a couple of years back. It was by a Californian horse trainer he'd once met and was about a young mare who'd been in a bad wreck. They'd been shipping her over from Kentucky along with six other horses and somewhere in Arizona the guy towing the trailer had fallen asleep, driven off the road and the whole rig had flipped clean over. The trailer ended up lying on the side where the door was so the rescue folk had to get chainsaws and cut their way in. When they did they found the horses had been tied into their boxes and were hanging in the air by their necks from what was now the roof, all but the mare dead.
This trainer, Tom knew, had a pet theory that you could use a horse's natural response to pain to help it. It was complicated and Tom wasn't sure he fully grasped it. It seemed to be based on the notion that though a horse's first instinct was to flee, when it actually felt pain, it would turn and face it.
The man backed this up with stories of how horses in the wild would run from a pack of wolves but when they felt teeth touch their flanks they would'turn in' and confront the pain. He said it was like a baby teething; he doesn't avoid the pain, but bites on it. And he claimed this theory had helped him sort out the traumatized mare who'd survived the wreck.
Tom found the right issue and read the piece again, hoping it might shed some light on what to do with Pilgrim. It was kind of short on detail but it seemed all the guy had really done was take the mare back to basics as if he were starting her afresh, helping her find herself, making the right thing easy and wrong thing difficult. It was fine, but there was nothing new there for Tom. He was doing that already. As for the turning-into-pain thing, he still couldn't make a lot of sense of it. But what was he doing? Looking for a new trick? There were no tricks, he should know that by now. It was just you and the horse and understanding what was going on in both your heads. He pushed the magazine away, sat back and sighed.
Listening to Grace this evening and earlier to Logan, he'd searched every corner of what they said for something to latch on to, some key, some lever he could use. But there was none. And now at last he understood what he'd been seeing all this time in Pilgrim's eyes. It was a total breakdown. The animal's confidence, in himself and all around him, had been shattered. Those he had loved and trusted had betrayed him. Grace, Gulliver, everyone. They'd led him up that slope, pretended it was safe and then screamed at him and hurt him when it turned out not to be.
Maybe Pilgrim even blamed himself for what happened. For why should humans think they had a monopoly on guilt? So often Tom had seen horses protect their riders, children especially, from the dangers that inexperience led them into. Pilgrim had let Grace down. And when he'd tried to protect her from the truck, all he'd gotten in return was pain and punishment. Then all those strangers, who'd tricked him and caught him and hurt him and jabbed their needles in his neck and locked him up in the dark and the filth and the stench.
Later, as he lay sleepless with the light out and the house long fallen quiet, Tom felt something float heavily within him and settle on his heart. He now had the picture he'd wanted or as much of it as he was likely to get and it was a picture as dark and devoid of hope as he'd ever known.
There was no delusion, nothing foolish or fanciful about the way Pilgrim had assessed the horrors that had befallen him. It was simply logical and it was this that made helping him so hard. And Tom wanted so very much to help him. He wanted it for the horse itself and for the girl. But he knew too - and knew at the same time that it was wrong - that above all he wanted it for the woman he'd ridden with that morning and whose eyes and mouth he could see as clearly as if she were lying there beside him.
The night Matthew Graves died, Annie and her brother were staying with friends in the Blue Mountains of Jamaica. It was the end of the Christmas holiday and her parents had gone back down to Kingston and left them up there for a few more days because they were having such fun. Annie and George, her brother, were sharing a double bed, tented by a vast mosquito net into which, in the middle of the night, their friends' mother came in her nightgown to wake them. She turned on the bedside light and sat on the end of the bed waiting for Annie and George to rub the sleep from their eyes. Dimly through the gauze of the mosquito net, Annie could see the woman's husband, hovering in his striped pajamas, his face in shadow.
Annie would always remember the strange smile on the woman's face. Later she understood it was a smile born of fear at what she had to say, but in that moment when sleep and consciousness elide her expression seemed humorous, so when the woman said she had bad news and that their father was dead, Annie thought it was a joke. Not a very funny one, but still a joke.
Many years later, when Annie thought she should do something about her insomnia (an urge that came upon her every four or five years and led only to large amounts of money being paid to hear things she already knew), she had been to see a hypnotherapist. The woman's technique was 'event oriented'. This apparently meant that she liked her clients to come up with some incident that marked the onset of whatever particular mess they were in. She would then pop you into a trance, take you back and resolve it.
After the first hundred-dollar session the poor woman was clearly disappointed that Annie couldn't come up with an appropriate incident, so for a week Annie had racked her brain to find one. She'd talked it over with Robert and it was he who came up with it: Annie being woken at the age of ten to be told her father was dead.
The therapist nearly fell off her chair with excitement. Annie felt pretty pleased too, like one of those girls she'd always hated at school who sat in the front row with their hands in the air. Don't go to sleep because someone you love might die. It didn't come much neater. The fact that for the next twenty years Annie had slept each night like a log didn't seem to bother the woman.
She asked Annie what she felt about her father and then what she felt about her mother and after Annie had told her, she asked how she felt about doing 'a little separation exercise'. Annie said that would be fine. The woman then tried to hypnotize her but was so excited she did it too fast and there wasn't a hope in hell it would work. Not to disappoint her, Annie did her best to fake a trance but had a lot of trouble keeping a straight face when the woman stood her parents on spinning silver discs and dispatched them one by one, waving serene farewells, into outer space.
But if her father's death, as Annie actually believed, had no connection with her inability to sleep, its effect on almost everything else in her life was immeasurable.
Within a month of his funeral, her mother had packed up the house in Kingston and disposed of things around which her children had felt their lives revolved. She sold the small boat in which their father had taught them to sail and had taken them to deserted islands to dive among the coral for lobsters and run naked on the palmed white sand. And their dog, a black Labrador cross called Bella, she gave to a neighbor they hardly knew. They saw the dog watching from the gate as the taxi took them to the airport.
They flew to England, a strange, wet, cold place where nobody smiled and their mother left them in Devon with her parents while she went up to London to sort out, she said, her husband's affairs. She lost no time in sorting one out for herself too, for within six months she was to marry again.
Annie's grandfather was a gentle, ineffectual soul who smoked a pipe, did crossword puzzles and whose main concern in life was avoiding the wrath or even mild displeasure of his wife. Annie's grandmother was a small, malicious woman with a tight white perm through which the pink of her scalp glowed like a warning. Her dislike of children was neither greater nor less than her dislike of almost everything else in life. But whereas most of these things were abstract or inanimate or simply unaware of her dislike, from these, her only grandchildren, she derived a much more gratifying return and set about making their stay, over the ensuing months, as miserable as possible.
She favored George, not because she disliked him less but in order to divide them and thus make Annie, in whose eye she was quick to spot defiance, all the more unhappy. She told Annie her life in 'The Colonies' had given her vulgar, slovenly ways which she set about curing by sending her to bed with no supper and smacking her legs, for the most trivial of crimes, with a long-handled wooden spoon. Their mother, who traveled down by train to see them each weekend, listened impartially to what her children told her. Inquests of stunning objectivity were held and Annie learned for the first time how facts could be so subtly rearranged to render different truths.
'The child has such a vivid imagination,' her grandmother said.
Reduced to mute contempt and acts of petty vengeance, Annie stole cigarettes from the witch's purse and smoked them behind dripping rhododendrons, greenly contemplating how unwise it was to love, for those you loved would only die and leave you.
Her father had been a bounding, joyous man. The only one who ever thought she was of value. And since his death, her life had been a ceaseless quest to prove him right. Through school and through her student days and on through her career, she'd been driven by that single purpose: to show the bastards.
For a while, after having Grace, she'd thought the point proven. In that pinched pink face, hungering so blind and needy at her nipple, came calm, as if the journey were complete. It had been a time for definitions. Now, she told herself, now I can be what I am, not what I do. Then came the miscarriage. Then another and another and another, failure compounding failure and soon Annie was again that pale, angry girl behind the rhododendrons. She'd shown them before and she'd show them again.
But it wasn't like before. Since her early days at Rolling Stone, those parts of the news media that followed such matters had dubbed her 'brilliant and fiery'. Now, reincarnated as boss of her own magazine - the kind of job she'd vowed never to take - the first of these epithets stuck. But, as if in recognition of the colder fuel that drove her, 'fiery' transmuted to 'ruthless'. In fact, Annie had surprised even herself with the casual brutality she'd brought to her latest post.
Last fall she'd met an old friend from England, a woman who'd been at the same boarding school and when Annie told her about all the bloodletting at the magazine she'd laughed and said did Annie remember playing Lady Macbeth in the school play? Annie did. In fact, though she didn't say this, she remembered being rather good.
'Remember how you stuck your arms in that bucket of fake blood for the "Out, damned spot" speech? You were red right up to the elbows!'
'Yep. Sure was one hell of a spot.'
Annie laughed along but went away and worried about the image for a whole afternoon, until she decided it wasn't even remotely relevant to her present situation because Lady Macbeth was doing it for husband's career not her own and in any case was clearly out of her tree. The following day, perhaps to prove a point, she had fired Fenimore Fiske.
Now, from the fatuous vantage of her office in exile, Annie reflected on such deeds and on the losses within her that had prompted them. Some of these things she had glimpsed that night at Little Bighorn when she'd slumped by the stone etched with the names of dead men and wept. Here, in this place of sky, she now came to see them more clearly, as if their secrets were unfurling with the season itself. And with a bereaved stillness born of this knowledge, as May slipped by, she watched the separate world outside grow warm and green.
Only when she was with him did she feel part of it. Three times more he had come to her door with the horses and they had ridden out together to other places he wanted to show her.
It had become routine that on Wednesdays Diane collected Grace from the clinic and sometimes on other days she or Frank might take her there too if they had to go to town. These mornings, Annie would catch herself waiting for Tom's call to ask if she wanted to ride and when it came she would try not to sound too eager.
The last time, she'd been in the middle of a conference call and she'd looked down toward the corrals and seen him leading Rimrock and a colt, both saddled, from the barn and she'd quite lost the drift of the conversation. She was suddenly aware that everyone in New York had gone silent.
'Annie?' one of the senior editors said.
'Yeah, sorry,' Annie said. 'I'm getting all this static this end. I lost that last bit.'
When Tom arrived, the conference was still going and she waved him in through the screen door. He took off his hat and came through and Annie mouthed to him that she was sorry and to help himself to coffee. He did and settled himself on the arm of the couch to wait.
There were a couple of recent issues of her magazine lying there and he'd picked one up and looked through it. He found her name at the top of the page where it listed everyone who worked there and he made an impressed face. Then she saw him grinning to himself over another style piece of Lucy Friedman's, called "The New Rednecks'. They'd taken a couple of models to some godforsaken place in Arkansas and shot them draped over the real thing, unsmiling men with beer guts, tattoos and guns slung in their pickup windows. Annie wondered how the photographer, a brilliant, outrageous man who wore mascara and liked to show everyone his pierced nipples, had escaped with his life.
It was ten minutes before the conference call finished and Annie, aware of Tom listening, became more and more self-conscious. She realized she was talking in a more dignified way than normal to impress him and immediately felt foolish. Gathered around the speaker phone in her office in New York, Lucy and the others must have wondered what she was on. When it was over she hung up and turned to him.
'I'm sorry.'
'It's okay, I liked hearing you work. And now I know what to wear next time I go down to Arkansas.' He tossed the magazine onto the couch. 'It's a lot of fun.'
'It's a lot of pain. Mostly in the ass.'
She was already in her riding clothes and they went right out to the horses. She said she'd try the stirrups a little longer and he came and showed her how to do it because the straps were different from those she was used to. She stepped in close to watch how he did it and for the first time she was aware of the smell of him, a warm clean smell of leather and some functional brand of soap. All the while, the tops of their arms touched lightly and neither of them moved away.
That morning they'd crossed over to the southern creek and made their way slowly up beside it to a place he said they might see beavers. But they saw none, only the two intricate new islands they'd built. They dismounted and sat on the gray bleached trunk of a fallen cottonwood while the horses drank their own reflections from the pool.
A fish or a frog broke the surface in front of the colt and he leapt back scared like some character in a cartoon. Rimrock gave him a weary look and went on drinking. Tom laughed. He got up and walked over and when he got there he put one hand on the colt's neck and another on his face. For a while he just stood there holding him. Annie couldn't hear if he spoke but she noticed that the horse seemed to be listening. And without any coaxing, he went back to the water and after a few wary sniffs, drank as if nothing had happened. Tom came back and saw her smile and shake her head.
'What's the matter?'
'How do you do that?'
'Do what?'
'Make him feel it was okay.'
'Oh, he knew it was okay.' She waited for him to go on. 'He gets a little melodramatic sometimes.'
'And how do you know that?'
He gave her the same amused look he'd given her that day when she'd asked him all those questions about his wife and son.
'You get to learn.' He stopped and something in her face must have told him she felt rebuked because he smiled and went on.
'It's only the difference between looking and seeing. Look long enough and if you're doing it right you get to see. Same with your job. You know what makes a good piece for your magazine because you've spent time making it your business to know.'
Annie laughed. 'Yeah, like designer rednecks?'
'Yeah, that's right. I wouldn't guess in a million years that's what people want to read about.'
'They don't.'
'Sure they do. It's funny.'
'It's dumb.'
It came out harsh and with a finality that left a silence hanging between them. He was watching her and she softened and gave him a self-deprecating smile.
'It's dumb and patronizing and phony.'
'There's some serious stuff there too.'
'Oh, yeah. But who needs it?'
He shrugged. Annie looked over at the horses. They'd drunk their fill and were browsing the new grass at the water's edge.
'What you do is real,' she said.
As they rode back, Annie told him about the books she'd found in the public library, about whisperers and witchcraft and so forth and he laughed and said sure, he'd read some of that stuff too and he'd sure wished a fair few times that he was a witch. He knew about Sullivan and J. S. Rarey.
'Some of those guys - not Rarey, he was a real horseman - but some of the others, they did things that looked like magic but were just downright cruel.
You know, things like pouring lead shot in a horse's ear, so the sound of it would paralyze him with fear and people would say wow, look, he's tamed that crazy horse! What they didn't know was that he'd probably killed it too.'
He said that many times a troubled horse would get worse before he got better and you had to let him do that, let him go beyond the brink, to hell and back even. And she didn't answer because she knew he wasn't just talking about Pilgrim but about something greater that involved them all.
She knew that Grace had talked to Tom about the accident, not from him but from overhearing Grace tell Robert on the phone a few days later. This had become one of Grace's favorite tricks, letting Annie learn things by proxy so she could gauge the precise extent of her exclusion. On the night in question, Annie had been taking a bath upstairs and lay there listening through the open door - as Grace knew she must be, for she made no attempt to lower her voice.
She hadn't gone into detail, simply told Robert she'd remembered more than she expected about what had happened and that she felt better for having talked about it. Later, Annie had waited to be told herself but knew it wasn't going to happen.
For a while she'd felt angry with Tom, as if somehow he'd invaded their lives. She'd been curt with him the next day.
'I hear Grace told you all about the accident?'
'Yes, she did,' he said, almost matter-of-fact. And that was all. It was clear he saw it as something between him and Grace and, when Annie got over her anger, she respected him for this and remembered that it wasn't he who'd invaded their lives but the other way around.
Tom rarely spoke to her about Grace and when he did it was about things that were safe and factual. But Annie knew he saw how it was between them, for who could not?
The calves huddled at the far end of the muddy corral, trying to hide behind each other and using their wet black noses to push each other forward. When one of them got shunted to the front you could see panic set in and when it got too much he'd break around to the back and the whole thing would start over again.
It was the Saturday morning before Memorial Day and the twins were showing Joe and Grace how good they'd gotten at roping. Scott, whose turn it was, had on a pair of brand-new chaps and a hat that was a size too big for him. He'd already knocked it off a couple of times swinging the loop. Each time Joe and Craig had whooped with laughter and Scott had got red and done his best to look as if he found it funny too. He'd been swinging the rope in the air so long that Grace was getting dizzy watching.
'Shall we come back next week?' Joe said.
'I'm picking, okay?'
They're over there. Black, with four legs and a tail?'
'Okay, smartass.'
'Well, jeez, just throw the damn thing.'
'Okay! Okay!'
Joe shook his head and gave Grace a grin. They were sitting side by side on the top rail and Grace still felt proud of herself for having climbed up there. She did it like it was nothing and though it hurt like hell where the bar now pressed into her stump she wasn't going to budge.
She had on a new pair of Wranglers she and Diane had spent a long time finding in Great Falls and she knew they looked good because she'd spent half an hour in front of the bathroom mirror this morning checking them out. Thanks to Terri, the muscles in her right butt filled them out well. It was funny, back in New York she wouldn't have been seen dead in anything other than Levi's, but out here everyone wore Wranglers. The guy in the store said it was because the seams on the inside leg were more comfy for riding.
'I'm better'n you are anyway,' Scott said.
'You sure swing a bigger loop.'
Joe jumped down into the corral and walked across the mud toward the calves.
'Joe! Get out the way, will ya?'
'Don't pee your pants. I'm gonna make it easier for you, break 'em up some.'
As he got nearer, the calves moved off till they were bunched in the corner. Their only escape now was to make a break and Grace could see the worry grow among them till it was set to erupt. Joe stopped. One more step and they'd go.
'Ready?' he called.
Scott bit on his bottom lip and swung the loop a little quicker so it made a whirring noise in the air. He nodded and Joe stepped forward. Right away the calves broke for the other corner. Scott gave a little unintended cry of effort as he threw it. The rope snaked through the air and landed with its loop clean over the head of the leading calf.
'Yeah!' he yelled and yanked it tight.
But the triumph lasted only a second, for as soon as the calf felt the loop tighten he was away and Scott went with him. He left his hat hanging in the air and slapped headfirst onto the mud like a diver in a swimming race.
'Let go! Let it go!' Joe kept hollering, but maybe Scott didn't hear or maybe his pride didn't let him because he hung on to the rope as if his hands were glued to it and off he went. What the calf lacked in size he made up for in spirit and he jumped and bucked and kicked like a steer in a rodeo show, sledging the boy behind him through the mud.
Grace put her hands to her face in alarm and nearly toppled back off the rail. But once they could see Scott was only hanging in there because he wanted to, Joe and Craig started to whoop and laugh. And still he didn't let go. The calf took him from one end of the corral to the other and back again while the other calves stood bemused.
The noise brought Diane running from the house but Tom and Frank, from the barn, beat her to it. They got to the rail beside Grace just as Scott let go.
He lay quite still, face down in the mud and everyone went quiet. Oh no, Grace thought, oh no. At the same moment Diane arrived and gave a frightened cry.
One hand slowly lifted itself from the mud, in a kind of comical salute. Then, theatrically, the boy lifted himself up and turned to face them, standing before them in the middle of the corral to let them have their laugh. And so they did. And when Grace saw Scott's teeth show white in an otherwise perfect coat of brown, she joined in. And together they laughed loud and long and Grace felt part of them and that life perhaps might yet be good.
A half-hour later everyone had dispersed. Diane had taken Scott back into the house to clean up and Frank, who wanted Tom's opinion on a calf he was worried about, had driven him and Craig up to the meadow. Annie had gone down to Great Falls to buy food for what she insisted on calling, to Grace's embarrassment,'the dinner party' to which she'd invited the Booker family that evening. So now it was just the two of them, Grace and Joe, and it was Joe who suggested they go down to see Pilgrim.
Pilgrim now had a corral to himself next to the colts Tom was starting and whose interest, over the double fence, he returned with a mix of suspicion and disdain. He saw Grace and Joe from a long way off and started snorting and nickering and trotting up and down the neurotic, muddy track he'd churned along the far side of the corral.
The rutted grass made walking a little tricky but Grace concentrated on swinging her leg through and although she knew Joe walked more slowly than he normally would, it didn't worry her. She felt as easy with him as she did with Tom. They reached the gate to Pilgrim's corral and leaned there to watch him.
'He was such a beautiful horse,' she said.
'He still is.'
Grace nodded. She told him about that day, almost a year ago, when they went down to Kentucky. And while she spoke, across the corral, Pilgrim seemed to be acting out some perverse parody of the events she described. He paced the rail in a mocking strut with his tail held high, but it was matted and twitched and was angled, Grace knew, by fear not pride.
Joe listened and she saw in his eyes the same contained calm that was in Tom's. It was startling sometimes how like his uncle he was, both in looks and manner. That easy smile and the way he took off his hat and pushed back his hair. Now and again Grace had caught herself wishing he was just a year or two older - not that he'd be interested in her, of course. Not in that way, not now, what with her leg. Anyway, it was fine as it was, just being friends.
She had learned a lot from watching Joe handle the younger horses, especially Bronty's foal. He never forced himself on them but instead let them come and offer themselves and then he would accept them with an ease that Grace could see made them feel both welcome and secure. He'd play with them, but if they ever got unsure he'd back off and leave them be.
'Tom says you gotta give them direction,' he'd told her one day when they were with the foal. 'But push too hard and they get real squirmy. You gotta let them kind of fill in. Tom says it's all about self-preservation.'
Pilgrim had stopped and stood watching them from as far away as he could get.
'So, you gonna ride him?' Joe said. Grace turned to him and frowned.
'What?'
'When Tom's got him straightened out.'
She gave a laugh that sounded hollow even to her.
'Oh, I'm not going to ride again.'
Joe shrugged and nodded. There was a thump of hooves from the neighboring corral and they both turned to watch the colts playing some equine version of tag. Joe bent and plucked a stem of grass and stood sucking it awhile.
'Pity,' he said.
'What?'
'Well, couple of weeks' time, Dad'll be driving the cattle up there to the summer pastures and we all go along. It's kinda fun, real pretty up there, you know?'
They went over to the colts and gave them some feed nuts Joe had in his pocket. As they walked back to the barn, Joe sucked his grass stem and Grace wondered why she went on pretending she didn't want to ride. Somehow she'd got herself trapped. And she felt, as with most things, that it probably had something to do with her mother.
Annie had surprised her by supporting the decision, so much so that Grace was suspicious. It was, of course, the stiff-upper-lip English way that when you fell off you climbed right back on so you didn't lose your nerve. And though what had happened was clearly more than a tumble, Grace had come to suspect Annie was playing some devious double-bluff, agreeing with Grace's decision only in order to prompt the opposite. The only thing that made her doubt this was Annie herself, after all these years, starting to ride again. Grace privately envied these morning rides with Tom Booker. But what was weird was that Annie must know it was almost guaranteed to put Grace off riding again herself.
Where though, Grace now wondered, did all this second-guessing get her? What was the point in denying her mother some maybe imaginary triumph, when it meant denying herself something she was now almost sure she wanted?
She knew she'd never ride Pilgrim again. Even if he got better, there would never be that trust between them again and he'd be sure to sense some lurking fear within her. But she could try riding some lesser horse maybe. If only she could do it without it all being a big deal, so that if she failed or looked stupid or something, it wouldn't matter.
They got to the barn and Joe opened the door and led the way in. All the horses were turned out now that the weather was warmer and Grace didn't know why he was bringing her in here. The click of her cane on the concrete floor echoed loudly. Joe took a left turn into the tack room and Grace stopped in the doorway, wondering what he was doing.
The room smelled of its new pine paneling and dressed leather. She watched him walk over to the rows of saddles that stood on their rests on the wall. When he spoke, it was over his shoulder, with the grass stem still in his teeth and his voice matter-of-fact, as if he were offering her a choice of sodas from the icebox.
'My horse or Rimrock?'
Annie regretted the invitation almost as soon as she'd issued it. The kitchen in the creek house wasn't exactly built for high cuisine, not that her cuisine was all that high anyway. Partly because she believed it more creative but mainly because she was too impatient, she cooked by instinct rather than recipe. And, apart from three or four stock dishes she could cook with her eyes shut, it was fifty-fifty whether something turned out brilliant or botched. This evening, she already felt, the odds were tilting more toward the latter.
She'd opted, safely she thought, for pasta. A dish they'd done to death last year. It was chic but easy. The kids would like it and there was even a chance Diane might be impressed. She'd also noticed Tom avoided eating too much meat and, more than she cared to admit to herself, she wanted to please him. There were no fancy ingredients. All she needed was penne regata, mozzarella and some fresh basil and sun-dried tomatoes, all of which she thought she'd be able to pick up in Choteau.
The guy in the store had looked at her as if she'd spoken in Urdu. She'd had to drive on down to the big supermarket in Great Falls and still couldn't find all she needed. It was hopeless. She'd had to rethink it on the spot and trudged the aisles, getting more and more annoyed, telling herself she'd be damned if she'd give in and serve them steak. Pasta she'd decided and pasta it would be. She ended up getting dried spaghetti, bottled bolognese sauce and a few trusty ingredients to spice it up so she could pretend it was her own. She checked out with two bottles of good Italian red and just sufficient pride intact.
By the time she'd got back to the Double Divide she felt better. She wanted to do this for them, it was the least she could do. The Bookers had all been so kind, even if Diane's kindness always seemed to have an edge to it. Whenever Annie had brought up the question of payment, for the rent and for the work he was doing with Pilgrim, Tom had brushed it aside. They'd settle up later, he said. She'd got the same response from Frank and Diane. So the dinner party tonight was Annie's interim way of thanking them.
She put the food away and carried the stack of newspapers and magazines she'd bought in Great Falls over to the table under which there was already a small mountain of them. She'd already checked her machines for messages. There had been only one, on E mail, from Robert.
He'd been hoping to fly out and spend the holiday weekend with them but at the last minute was summoned to a meeting on Monday in London. From there he had to go on to Geneva. He'd phoned last night and spent half an hour apologizing to Grace, promising he'd come out soon. The E mail note was just a joky one he'd sent as he was about to leave for JFK, written in some cryptic language he and Grace called cyberspeak which Annie only half understood. At the bottom he'd drawn a computer-generated picture of a horse with a big smile on its face. Annie printed it out without reading it.
When Robert had told her last night that he wouldn't be coming, her first reaction had been relief. Then it had worried her that she should feel this and ever since she'd busily avoided analyzing further.
She sat down and wondered idly where Grace was. There had been nobody about down at the ranch when she drove back in from Great Falls. She guessed they were all indoors or around by the back corrals. She'd go and look when she'd caught up with the weeklies, the Saturday ritual she persisted with here, though it seemed to require a lot more effort. She opened Time magazine and bit into an apple.
It took Grace about ten minutes to make her way down below the corrals and through the grove of cottonwoods to the place Joe had told her about. She hadn't been down here before but when she came through the trees she understood why he'd chosen it. Below her, at the foot of a curving bank, lay a perfect ellipse of meadow, moated beyond by an elbow of the creek. It was a natural arena, secluded from all but trees and sky. The grass stood deep, a lush blue-green, and wildflowers grew among it of a kind Grace had never seen.
She waited and listened for him. There was barely a breeze to worry the leaves of the cottonwoods that towered behind her and all she could hear was the hum of insects and the beating of her heart. No one was to know. That was the deal. They'd heard Annie's car and watched her go by through a crack in the barn door. Scott would be out again soon, so in case they were seen, Joe had told her to go on ahead. He'd saddle the horse, check the coast was clear and follow.
Joe said he knew Tom wouldn't mind if she rode Rimrock, but Grace wasn't happy about it so they settled on Gonzo, Joe's little paint. Like every other horse she'd met here, he was sweet and calm and Grace had already made friends with him. He was also a better size for her. She heard a branch snap and the soft blow of the horse and she turned and saw them coming through the trees.
'Anybody see you?' she said.
'Nope.'
He rode by her and steered Gonzo gently down the bank to the meadow. Grace followed but the slope was difficult and a yard or so from the bottom she caught her leg and fell. She finished in a tangle that looked worse than it was. Joe got down and came to her.
'You okay?'
'Shit!'
He helped her up. 'Are you hurt?'
'No. I'm okay. Shit, shit, shit!'
He let her curse and without a word dusted down her back for her. She saw there was a muddy mark all down one side of her new jeans.
'Your leg okay?'
'Yes. I'm sorry. It just makes me so angry sometimes.'
He nodded and for a moment or two said nothing, letting her sort herself out.
'Still want to try?'
'Yes.'
Joe led Gonzo and the three of them walked out into the meadow. Butterflies lifted before them, making way in the shin-high grass which smelled warm and sweet with the sun and the crushing of their boots. The creek here ran shallow over gravel and as they came nearer, Grace could hear the water. A heron lifted up and banked lazily away, adjusting his legs as he went.
They reached a low stump of cottonwood, gnarled and overgrown, and Joe stopped beside it and coaxed Gonzo around so that it formed a platform for Grace to mount.
'That any good?' he said.
'Uh-huh. If I can get up there.'
He stood at the horse's shoulder, holding him steady with one hand and Grace with the other. Gonzo shifted and Joe gave him a stroke on the neck and told him it was okay. Grace put a hand on Joe's shoulder and hoisted herself with her good leg up onto the tree stump.
'Okay?'
'Yes. I think so.'
'Are the stirrups too short?'
'No, they're fine.'
Her left hand was still on his shoulder. She wondered whether he could feel in it the banging of her blood.
'Okay. Keep hold of me and, when you're ready, put your right hand on the horn of the saddle.'
Grace took a deep breath and did as he said. Gonzo moved his head a little but his feet stayed rooted. When he was sure she was steady, Joe took his hand off her, reached down, and took hold of the stirrup.
This was going to be the difficult part. To put her left foot in the stirrup, all her weight would have to be on her prosthetic. She thought she might slip but she could feel Joe brace himself and take a lot of the weight and in no time she had her foot safely in the stirrup as if they'd done it many times before. All that happened was that Gonzo shifted a little again but Joe whoaed him, calm but firmer this time, so that he steadied on the instant.
All she had to do now was swing her prosthetic leg over, but it felt so strange having no feeling there and she suddenly remembered that the last time she'd done this was on the morning of the accident.
'Okay?' Joe said.
'Yes.'
'Go on then.'
She braced her left leg, letting the stirrup take her weight, then tried to lift her right leg over the horse's rear.
'I can't get it high enough.'
'Here, lean on me some more. Lean out, so you get more of an angle.'
She did and, summoning her strength as if her life depended on it, she lifted the leg and swung. And as she did so, she pivoted and hauled herself up with the saddle horn and she felt Joe hoist her too and she swung the leg high and sideways and over it went.
She settled herself into the saddle and was surprised it didn't feel more alien. Joe saw her looking for the other stirrup and so he went quickly around and helped her into it. She could feel the inside thigh of her stump on the saddle and, though tender, it was impossible to know precisely where feeling ended and nothingness began.
Joe stepped aside with his eyes fixed on her in case something happened, but she was too much in her own head to notice this. She gathered the reins and nudged Gonzo forward. He moved out without question and she walked him in a long curve along the rim of the creek and didn't look back. She could give more pressure with the leg than she'd imagined possible, though without calf muscles she had to generate it with her stump and measure its effect by the horse's response. He moved as if he knew all this and by the time they'd reached the end of the meadow and turned without a foot misplaced, the two of them were one.
Grace lifted her eyes for the first time and saw Joe standing there among the flowers waiting for her. She rode an easy S shape back to him and stopped and he grinned up at her with the sun in his eyes and the meadow spreading away behind him and Grace suddenly wanted to cry. But she bit hard on the inside of her lip and grinned back down at him instead.
'Easy as pie,' he said.
Grace nodded and as soon as she could trust her voice said yeah, it was easy as pie.
The creek house kitchen was a spartan affair, lit by cold fluorescent strips whose casing had become coffins for an assortment of insects. When Frank and Diane had moved to the ranch house, they'd taken all the best equipment with them. The pots and pans were all from broken families and the dishwasher needed a thump in the right place to click through its cycle. The only thing Annie hadn't quite yet mastered was the oven which seemed to have a mind of its own. The door seal was rotten and the heat dial loose so that cooking required a blend of guesswork, vigilance and luck.
Baking the French-style apple tart she was serving for dessert however, hadn't been half the task of working out how they all might get to eat it. Too late Annie had discovered there weren't enough plates, cutlery or even enough chairs. And, embarrassed -because it somehow seemed to defeat the whole object - she'd had to call Diane and drive down and borrow some. Then she'd realized that the only table big enough to use was the one she was using for her desk, so she'd had to clear it and now all her machinery was stacked on the floor with her papers and magazines.
The evening had started in panic. Annie was used to entertaining people who thought the later you arrived the cooler you were, so it hadn't occurred to her that they'd arrive on the dot. But at seven, when she hadn't even changed, there they were, all but Tom, walking up the hill. She yelled to Grace, flew upstairs and threw on a dress she now had no time to press. By the time she heard their voices down by the porch, she'd done her eyes and lips, brushed her hair, given herself a blast of perfume and was downstairs to greet them.
Seeing them all standing there, Annie thought what a stupid idea this was, entertaining these people in their own house. Everyone seemed to feel awkward. Frank said Tom had been delayed by some problem with one of the yearlings but he was in the shower when they left and wouldn't be long. She asked them what they wanted to drink and remembered as she did so that she'd forgotten to get any beer.
'I'll have a beer,' Frank said.
It got better though. She opened a bottle of wine while Grace took Joe and the twins off and sat them on the floor in front of Annie's computer where soon she had them surfing spellbound on the Internet. Annie, Frank and Diane carried chairs out onto the porch and sat talking in a fading glow of evening light. They laughed over Scott's adventure with the calf, assuming Grace had told her all about it. Annie pretended she had. Then Frank told a long story about a disastrous high school rodeo where he'd humiliated himself in front of a girl he was trying to impress.
Annie listened with feigned attention, all the while waiting for the moment she would see Tom come around the end of the house. And when he did, his smile and the way he took off his hat and said he was sorry for being late were just as she'd imagined.
She led him into the house, apologizing before he even asked for one that there wasn't any beer. Tom said wine would be fine and he stood and watched her pour it. She handed him the glass and looked him full in the eyes for the first time and whatever she'd been going to say flew right out of her head. There was a beat of embarrassed silence before he came to the rescue.
'Something smells good.'
'Nothing spectacular, I'm afraid. Is your horse alright?'
'Oh yeah. Her temperature's running a little high but she'll be okay. Have you had a good day?'
Before she could answer, Craig ran in calling Tom's name and telling him he had to come and see something they had on the computer.
'Hey, I'm having a talk here with Grace's mom.'
Annie laughed and told them to go ahead, Grace's mom needed to see to the food anyway. Diane came in to help and the two of them chatted about the children while they got things ready. And every so often Annie would glance through into the living room and see Tom in his pale blue shirt, hunkered down among the kids, all of them vying for his attention.
The spaghetti was a hit. Diane even asked for the sauce recipe and Annie would have owned up if Grace hadn't beaten her to it and told them all it was out of a bottle. Annie had set the table in the middle of the living room and lit it with candles she'd bought in Great Falls. Grace had said this was overdoing it but Annie had persisted and now was glad she had because their light gave the room a warm glow and cast flickering shadows on the walls.
And she thought how good it was to hear the silence of this house filled with talk and laughter. The kids sat at one end and the four adults the other, she and Frank facing Tom and Diane. A stranger, it occurred to Annie, would have assumed them couples.
Grace was telling everyone about the things you could access on the Internet, like The Visible Man, a murderer in Texas who had been executed and donated his body to science.
'They froze him and sliced him up into two thousand little pieces and photographed each one of them,' she said.
'That's gross,' Scott said.
'Do we want to hear about this while we're eating?' Annie said. She'd meant it only lightly but Grace decided to take it as a rebuke. She gave Annie a withering look.
'It's the National Library of Medicine, Mom. It's education, for Godsake, not some stupid beat-'em-up game.'
'Slice 'em up, more like,' Craig said.
'Go on Grace,' Diane said. 'It's fascinating.'
'Well that's it really,' Grace said. She spoke without enthusiasm now, signaling to everyone that her mother had, as usual, deflated not just her but the topic too of both interest and fun. 'They just put him back together again and you can call it up on the screen and dissect him, like in three-D, you know.'
'You can do all that right here on that little screen?' Frank said.
'Yes.'
The word was so flat and final that only silence could follow it. It lasted but a moment, though it seemed to Annie an eternity, and Tom must have seen the desperation in her eyes, because he gave Frank a sardonic nod and said, 'Well, there you go little brother, your chance for immortality.'
'Lord have mercy,' Diane said. 'Frank Booker's body on view to the nation.'
'Oh, and what's wrong with my body may I ask?'
'Where d'you want us to start?' Joe said. Everyone laughed.
'Hell,' said Tom. 'With two thousand pieces, you could put them back in a different way and get a prettier result.'
The mood began to flow again and once she was sure of it Annie gave Tom a look of relief and thanks, which he acknowledged with just the smallest softening of his eyes. It struck her as uncanny that this man who'd never fully known a child of his own should so understand each wounding nuance that passed between her and Grace.
The apple tart wasn't so great. Annie had forgotten the cinnamon and she could tell as soon as she cut the first slice that it could have done with another fifteen minutes. But no one seemed to mind and the kids all had ice cream instead anyway and were soon off to the computer again while the adults sat and had coffee at the table.
Frank was complaining about the conservationists, the greenos as he called them, and how they didn't understand the first damn thing about ranching. He addressed himself to Annie because the others had clearly heard it a hundred times. These maniacs were letting wolves go, shipping the damn things in from Canada so they could come and help the grizzlies eat the cattle. A couple of weeks back, he said, a rancher down near Augusta had two heifers taken.
'And all these greenos flew up from Missoula with their choppers and consciences and all and said, sorry old buddy, we'll airlift him out for ya, but don't you go trapping or shooting him or we'll nail your hide in court. Damn thing's probably lazing by the pool now at some five-star hotel, you and me footing the bill.'
Tom was grinning at Annie and Frank saw and pointed a finger at him.
'This guy's one of 'em, Annie, I tell ya. Ranching in his blood and he's green as a seasick frog on a pool table. You wait till Mr Wolf takes one of his foals, oh boy. It'll be the three big Ss.'
Tom laughed and saw Annie's frown.
'Shoot, shovel and shut the hell up,' he confided. 'The caring rancher's response to nature.'
Annie laughed and was suddenly aware of Diane's eyes on her. And when Annie looked at her, Diane smiled in a way that only emphasized that she hadn't been smiling before.
'What do you think, Annie?' she asked.
'Oh, I don't have to live with it.'
'But you must have an opinion.'
'Not really.'
'Oh surely. You must cover this kind of thing all the time in your magazine.'
Annie was surprised to be so pursued. She shrugged.
'I suppose I think every creature has a right to live.'
'What, even plague rats and malarial mosquitoes?'
Diane was still smiling and the tone was light but there was something beneath it that made Annie cautious.
'You're right,' she said after a moment. 'I guess it depends who they bite.'
Frank gave a roar of laughter and Annie allowed herself a glance at Tom. He was smiling at her. So too, in a less fathomable way, was Diane who seemed at last prepared to let the subject drop. Whether that was so remained a mystery because suddenly there was a yell and Scott was behind her grabbing her shoulder, his cheeks hot with outrage.
'Joe won't let me use the computer!'
'It's not your turn,' Joe called from where the others were all still huddled around the screen.
'It is too!'
'It's not your turn Scott!'
Diane called Joe over and tried to mediate. But the yelling got worse and soon Frank was involved too and the fight shifted from the particular to the general.
'You never let me have a turn!' Scott said. He was near tears.
'Don't be such a baby,' Joe said.
'Boys, boys.' Frank had his hands on their shoulders.
'You think you're so great—'
'Oh shut up.'
'—giving Grace riding lessons and all.'
Everyone went quiet except for some cartoon bird squawking on oblivious on the computer screen. Annie looked at Grace who immediately looked away. No one seemed to know what to say. Scott was a little daunted by the effect his revelation had produced.
'I saw you!' His voice was more taunting but less certain. 'Her on Gonzo, down by the creek!'
'You little shit!' Joe said it through his teeth and at the same time made a lunge. Everyone erupted. Scott was knocked back against the table and coffee cups and glasses went flying. The two boys fell in a tangle to the floor, with Frank and Diane above them yelling and trying to lever them apart. Craig came running, feeling he should somehow be involved here too but Tom put out a hand and took gentle hold of him. Annie and Grace could only stand and watch.
The next moment Frank was marching the boys out of the house, Scott wailing, Craig crying in sympathy and Joe in a silent fury which spoke louder than both. Tom went with them as far as the kitchen door.
'Annie I'm so sorry,' Diane said.
They were standing by the wreckage of the table like dazed hurricane survivors. Grace stood pale and alone across the room. As Annie looked at her, something that was neither fear nor pain but a hybrid of both seemed to cross the girl's face. Tom saw it too when he came back from the kitchen and he went over to her and put a hand on her shoulder.
'You okay?'
She nodded without looking at him.
'I'm going upstairs.'
She picked up her cane and made her way with awkward haste across the room.
'Grace…' Annie said gently.
'No Mom!'
She went out and the three of them stood and listened to the sound of her uneven footsteps on the stairs. Annie saw the embarrassment on Diane's face. On Tom's there was a compassion that, if she'd let it, would have made her weep. She inhaled and tried to smile.
'Did you know about this?' she said. 'Did everyone know except me?'
Tom shook his head. 'I don't think any of us knew.'
'Maybe she wanted it to be a surprise,' Diane said.
Annie laughed.
'Yeah, well.'
She wanted them only to go, but Diane insisted on staying to clear the place up and so they stacked the dishwasher and cleared the broken glass from the table. Then Diane rolled up her sleeves and got going on the pots and pans. She clearly thought it best to be chirpy and chattered on at the sink about the barn dance Hank had invited them all to on Monday.
Tom said barely a word. He helped Annie haul the table back to the window and waited while she switched off the computer. Then, working side by side, they started to load all her work things back onto the table.
What prompted her, Annie didn't know, but suddenly she asked how Pilgrim was. He didn't answer right away, just went on sorting some cables, not looking at her, while he considered. His tone, when at last he spoke, was almost matter-of-fact.
'Oh, I reckon he'll make it.'
'You do?'
'Uh-huh.'
'Are you sure?'
'No. But you see Annie, where there's pain, there's still feeling and where there's feeling, there's hope.'
He fixed the last cable.
'There you go.' He turned to face her and they looked each other in the eye. 'Thanks,' Annie said quietly. 'Ma'am, it's my pleasure. Don't let her turn you away.'
When they came back to the kitchen, Diane had finished and all except the things she'd lent was put away in places she knew better than Annie. And when Diane had brushed aside Annie's thanks and apologized again for the boys, she and Tom said their good-nights and went.
Annie stood under the porch light and watched them walk away. And as their figures were swallowed by the darkness, she wanted to call after him to stay and hold her and keep her from the cold that fell again upon the house.
Tom said good-night to Diane outside the barn and went on in to check the sick filly. Walking down from the creek house, Diane had gone on about how dumb Joe was to take the girl riding like that without telling a soul. Tom said he didn't think it was dumb at all, he could understand why Grace might want to keep such a thing secret. Joe was being a friend to her, that was all. Diane said it was none of the boy's business and frankly she'd be glad when Annie packed up and took the poor girl back home to New York.
The filly hadn't gotten any worse, though she was still breathing a little fast. Her temperature was down to a hundred and two. Tom rubbed her neck and talked to her gently while with his other hand he felt her pulse behind the elbow. He counted the beats for twenty seconds, then multiplied by three. It was forty-two beats per minute, still above normal.
She was clearly running some kind of fever and maybe he'd have to get the vet up to see her in the morning if there was no change.
The lights of Annie's bedroom were on when he came out and they were still on when he finished reading and switched off his own bedroom light. It was a habit now, this last look up at the creek house where the illuminated yellow blinds of Annie's window stood out against the night. Sometimes he'd see her shadow pass across them as she went about her unknown bedtime rituals and once he'd seen her pause there, framed by the glow, undressing and he'd felt like a snooper and turned away.
Now though, the blinds were open and he knew it meant something had happened or was happening even as he looked. But he knew it was something only they could resolve and, though it was foolish, he told himself that maybe the blinds were open not to let darkness in but to let it out.
Never, since he first laid eyes on Rachel so many years ago, had he met a woman he wanted more.
Tonight was the first time he'd seen her in a dress. It was a simple, cotton print, black dotted with tiny pink flowers, and there were pearl buttons all down the front. It reached well below her knees and it had little cap sleeves that showed the tops of her arms. When he arrived and she'd told him to come into the kitchen to get a drink, he couldn't take his eyes off her. He'd followed her inside and breathed deep the waft of her perfume and while she poured the wine he'd watched her and noticed how she kept her tongue between her teeth to concentrate. He noticed too a glimpse of satin strap at her shoulder which he'd tried all evening not to look at and failed. And she'd handed him the glass and smiled at him, creasing the corners of that mouth in a way he wished was only for him.
Over supper he'd almost got to believe it was, because the smiles she gave Frank and Diane and the kids were nothing like it. And maybe he'd imagined it, but when she talked, no matter how generally, it always seemed somehow directed at him. He'd never seen her with her eyes made up before and he watched how they shone green and trapped the candle flame when she laughed.
When everything had exploded and Grace stormed out, it was only Diane being there that had stopped him from taking Annie in his arms and letting her cry as he could see she wanted to. He didn't fool himself that the urge was merely to console her. It was to hold her and know closely the feel and the shape and the smell of her.
But nor did Tom think this made it shameful, though he knew others might. This woman's pain and her child and the pain of that child were all part of her too, were they not? And what man was God enough to judge the fine divisions of feeling appropriate to each or all or any of these?
All things were one, and like a rider in harmony the best a man could do was recognize the feel and go with it and be as true to it as his soul let him.
She switched all the downstairs lights off and as she went up the stairs she saw Grace's door was closed and beneath it that her room was dark. Annie went to her own room and switched on the light. She paused in the doorway, knowing that crossing the threshold somehow had significance. How could she let this pass? Allow another layer to settle unquestioned with the night between them, as if there were some inexorable geology at work? It didn't have to be so.
Grace's door creaked when Annie opened it, pivoting light into the room from the landing. She thought she saw the bedclothes shift but couldn't be sure, for the bed was beyond the angle of light and Annie's eyes took time to adjust.
'Grace?'
Grace was facing the wall and there was a studied stillness to the shape of her shoulders beneath the sheet.
'Grace?'
'What?' She didn't move.
'Can we talk?'
'I want to go to sleep.'
'So do I, but I think it would be good if we talked.'
'What about?'
Annie walked over to the bed and sat down. The prosthetic leg was propped against the wall by the bedside table. Grace sighed and turned over on her back, staring at the ceiling. Annie took a deep breath. Get it right, she kept telling herself. Don't sound hurt, go easy, be nice.
'So you're riding again.'
'I tried.'
'How was it?'
Grace shrugged. 'Okay.' She was still looking at the ceiling, trying to look bored.
'That's terrific.'
'Is it?'
'Well isn't it?'
'I don't know, you tell me.'
Annie fought the beating of her heart and told herself, keep calm, keep going, just take it. But instead she heard herself say, 'Couldn't you have told me?'
Grace looked at her and the hate and hurt in her eyes almost took Annie's breath away.
'Why should I tell you?'
'Grace—'
'No why? Huh? Because you care? Or just because you have to know everything and control everything and not let anybody do anything unless you say so! Is that it?'
'Oh Grace.' Annie suddenly felt she needed light and she reached across to turn on the lamp on the bedside table but Grace lashed out.
'Don't! I don't want it on!'
The blow hit Annie's hand and sent the lamp crashing to the floor. The ceramic base broke into three clean pieces.
'You pretend you care but all you really care about is you and what people think of you. And your job and your big-shot friends.'
She propped herself up on her elbows as if to bolster a rage already made worse by the tears distorting her face.
'Anyway, you said you didn't want me to ride again so why the hell should I tell you? Why should I tell you anything? I hate you!'
Annie tried to take hold of her but Grace pushed her away.
'Get out! Just leave me alone! Get out!'
Annie stood up and felt herself sway so that for a moment she thought she might fall. Almost blindly, she made her way across the pool of light that she knew would take her to the door. She had no clear idea of what she would do when she got there. She merely knew that she was obeying some final separating command. As she reached the door she heard Grace say something and she turned and looked back toward the bed. She could see Grace was facing the wall again and that her shoulders were shaking.
'What?' Annie said.
She waited and whether it was her own grief or Grace's that shrouded the words a second time she didn't know, but there was something about the way they were spoken that made her go back. She walked to the bed and stood close enough to touch but didn't, for fear her hand might be struck away.
'Grace? I didn't hear what you said.'
'I said… I've started.'
It came amid sobs and for a moment Annie didn't understand.
'You've started?'
'My period.'
'What, tonight?'
Grace nodded.
'I felt it happen downstairs and when I came up there was blood in my panties. I washed them in the bathroom but it wouldn't come out.'
'Oh Gracie.'
Annie reached down and put a hand on Grace's shoulder and Grace turned. There was no anger in her face now, only pain and sorrow and Annie sat on the bed and took her daughter in her arms. Grace clung to her and Annie felt the child's sobs convulse them as if they were but one body.
'Who's going to want me?'
'What, honey?'
'Whoever's going to want me? Nobody will.'
'Oh Grade, that's not true…'
'Why should they?'
'Because you're you. You're incredible. You're beautiful and you're strong. And you're the bravest person I ever met in my whole life.'
They held each other and wept. And when they could speak again, Grace told her she hadn't meant the terrible things she'd said and Annie said she knew, but there was truth there too, and how as a mother she had got so many, many things wrong. They sat with their heads on each other's shoulder and let flow from their hearts words they'd barely dared utter to themselves.
'All those years you and Dad were trying for another baby? Every night I used to pray this time let it be okay. And it wasn't for your sake or because I wanted a brother or a sister or anything like that. But just so I wouldn't have to go on being so… oh I don't know.'
'Tell me.'
'So special. Because I was the only one, I felt you both expected me to be so good at everything, so perfect and I wasn't, I was just me. And now I've gone and spoiled it all anyway.'
Annie held her more tightly and stroked her hair and told her this wasn't so. And she thought, but didn't say, what a perilous commodity love was and that the proper calibration of its giving and taking was too precise by far for mere humans.
How long they sat there Annie couldn't tell. But it was long after their crying had ceased and the wetness of their tears had grown cold on her dress. Grace fell asleep in her arms and didn't wake even when Annie laid her down then laid herself beside her.
She listened to her daughter's breathing, even and trusting, and for a while watched the breeze stirring the pale drapes at the window. Then Annie slept too, a deep and dreamless sleep, while outside the earth rolled vast and silent under the sky.
Robert looked out through the rain-streaked window of the black cab at the woman on the billboard who'd been waving the same wave at him for the last ten minutes. It was one of those electronically animated jobs, where the arm actually moved. She was wearing Ray-Bans and a bright pink bathing suit and in her other hand had what was probably meant to be a pina colada. She was doing her best to persuade Robert and several hundred other traffic-snarled, rain-soaked travelers that they'd be better off buying an air ticket to Florida.
It was debatable. And a harder sell than it seemed, Robert knew, because the English newspapers had been going to town on stories about British tourists in Florida being mugged, raped, and shot. As the cab crawled forward, Robert could see some wag had scrawled by the woman's feet, Don't forget your Uzi.
He realized too late that he should have taken the Underground. Every time he'd been to London in the last ten years they'd been digging up some new section of the road out to the airport and he was pretty sure they didn't just save it up for when he came. The flight to Geneva was due to leave in thirty-five minutes and at this rate he'd miss it by about two years. The cabdriver had already informed him, with something suspiciously approaching relish, that out at the airport there was a 'right peasouper'.
There was. And he didn't miss his flight; it was canceled. He sat in the business-class lounge and for a couple of hours enjoyed the camaraderie of a growing band of harassed executives, each pursuing his or her own self-important path to a coronary. He tried calling Annie but got the answering machine and he wondered where they were. He'd forgotten to ask their plans for this first Memorial Day in years they hadn't spent together.
He left a message and sang a few bars of the 'Halls of Montezuma' for Grace, something he did over breakfast on this day as a cue for groans and missiles. Then he took a final look at the notes of today's meeting (which had gone well) and the paperwork for tomorrow's (which might also if he ever got there) and then he put it all away and went for another walk around the departure area.
As he was looking idly and for no good reason at a rack of cashmere golf sweaters that he wouldn't have wished upon his worst enemy, someone said hello and he looked up and saw a man who came as close to that category as anyone he knew.
Freddie Kane was something medium-to-small in publishing, one of those people you never questioned too closely about the exact nature of their business, for fear of embarrassing not them but yourself. He compensated for whatever deficiences might lie in that murky area by making it clear that he had a personal fortune and furthermore knew every piece of gossip there was to know about anyone who was anyone in New York. By forgetting Robert's name on each of the four or five occasions they'd been introduced, Freddie had made it equally clear that he didn't count Annie Graves's husband among this number. Annie, on the other hand, he very much did. 'Hi! I thought it was you! How're you doing!' He thumped one hand on Robert's shoulder and used the other to pump his hand in a way that somehow managed to be simultaneously both violent and flaccid. Robert smiled and noted that the man had on a pair of those glasses movie stars were all now wearing in the hope that it made them look more intellectual. He'd clearly forgotten Robert's name again.
They chatted for a while over the golf sweaters, swapping information on destinations, estimated arrivals and the properties of fog. Robert was oblique and guarded about why he was in Europe, not because it was secret but because he could see how frustrated it made Freddie. And so it was perhaps revenge for this that motivated the man's closing remarks.
'I hear Annie's got herself a Gates problem,' he said.
'I'm sorry?'
Freddie put a hand to his mouth and made a face like a guilty schoolboy.
'Oops. Maybe we're not supposed to know.'
'I'm sorry Freddie, you're way ahead of me.'
'Oh, it's just a little bird told me Crawford Gates is out headhunting again. Probably not a word of truth in it.'
'How do you mean, headhunting?'
'Oh, you know how it's always been at that place, musical chairs and shoot the pianist. I just heard he was giving Annie a hard time, that's all.'
'Well, it's the first I've—'
'Just gossip. Shouldn't have mentioned it.' He gave a satisfied grin and, having fulfilled what may indeed have been the sole purpose of the encounter, said he'd better get back to the airline desk to do some more complaining.
Back in the business lounge Robert helped himself to another beer and flipped through a copy of The Economist, mulling over what Freddie had said. Although he'd played ingenuous, he'd known right away what the man was getting at. It was the second time in a week that he'd heard it.
The previous Tuesday he'd been at a reception given by one of his firm's big clients. It was the kind of do he normally made excuses to avoid but which, with Annie and Grace away, he'd actually found himself looking forward to. It was held in several sumptuous acres of office near Rockefeller Center with mountains of caviar high enough to ski on.
Whatever the latest collective noun for a gathering of lawyers was (they came up with a new and more disparaging one each week), there was certainly one of them here. There were many faces from other law firms that Robert recognized and he guessed the host's motive for inviting them all was to keep his own firm on their toes. Among the other lawyers was Don Farlow. They'd only met once before but Robert liked him and knew Annie did too and that she rated him highly.
Farlow greeted him warmly and Robert was pleased to find as they chatted that they shared not just an appetite bordering on greed for caviar, but a wholesomely cynical attitude about those who'd provided it. They staked a claim beside the nursery slopes and Farlow listened sympathetically while Robert told him how the litigation over Grace's accident was progressing - or rather not progressing, for it was getting so complicated it seemed destined to drag on for years. Then the talk moved on. Farlow asked after Annie and how things were going out west.
'Annie's sensational,' said Farlow. 'The very best. The crazy thing is, that asshole Gates knows that.'
Robert asked him what he meant and Farlow looked surprised and then embarrassed. He quickly changed the subject and the only other thing he said, as he went, was that Robert should tell Annie to come back soon. Robert had gone straight home and called Annie. She'd made light of it.
'That place is Paranoia Palace,' she said. Oh sure, Gates had been giving her a hard time, but no more than usual. 'The old bastard knows he needs me more than I need him.'
Robert had let it drop, even though he felt that her bravado seemed intended more to convince herself than him. Now if Freddie Kane knew about it, it was a safe bet that most of New York knew too or soon would. And though this wasn't Robert's world, he'd seen enough of it to know which was more important: what was said or what was true.
Hank and Darlene normally held their barn dance on the Fourth of July. But this year Hank was scheduled to have his varicose veins fixed at the end of June and didn't fancy hobbling around so they'd hauled it back a month or so to Memorial Day.
There was risk involved. A few years back, two feet of snow had fallen this very weekend. And some Hank had invited felt a day set aside to honor those who'd died for their country wasn't a suitable day for a celebration at all. Hank said shit, come to that, celebrating independence was pretty dumb too when you'd been married as long as him and Darlene, and anyway, all those he knew who'd gone to Vietnam liked a damn good party, so what the hell?
Just to show him, it rained.
Rivers of it slid off billowing tarpaulins to hiss among the burgers, ribs and steaks on the barbecue and a fuse box exploded with a flash and snuffed all the colored lights strung around the yard. No one seemed to mind too much. They all just packed into the barn. Someone gave Hank a T-shirt which he immediately put on; it had ,' Told You printed on the front in big black letters.
Tom was late arriving because the vet couldn't get out to the Double Divide till after six. He'd given the little filly another shot and thought that would do it. They were still busy with her when the others left for the party. Through the open doors of the barn he'd seen all the kids piling into the Lariat with Annie and Grace. Annie had waved to him and asked if he was coming. He told her he'd be along later. He was pleased to see she was wearing the dress she'd worn two nights before.
Neither she nor Grace had spoken a word about what had happened that night. On Sunday he'd risen before dawn and dressed in the dark and seen Annie's blinds still open and the lights still on. He'd wanted to go on up and see if everything was okay but thought he'd leave it awhile in case it seemed nosy. When he'd finished seeing to the horses and came in for breakfast, Diane said Annie had just called to ask if it would be alright if she and Grace came with them to church.
'Probably just wants to write it up in her magazine,' Diane said. Tom told her he thought that was unfair and that she should give Annie a break. Diane hadn't spoken to him for the rest of the day.
They'd all driven to church in two cars and it was clear at once, to Tom at least, that something had changed between Annie and Grace. There was a stillness there. He noticed how when Annie spoke Grace now looked her in the eyes and how, after they'd parked the cars, the two of them linked arms and walked together all the way to the church.
There wasn't room for them all in one row, so Annie and Grace had sat a row in front where a shaft of sun angled down from a window, trapping slow convections of dust. Tom could see the other churchfolk looking at the newcomers, the women as much as the men. And he found his own eyes kept returning to the nape of Annie's neck when she stood to sing or tilted her head in prayer.
Back at the Double Divide later, Grace had ridden Gonzo again, only this time in the big arena with everyone watching. She walked him awhile then, when Tom told her to, took him up to a trot. She was a little tight at the start, but once she relaxed and found the feel, Tom could see how sweetly she rode. He told her a couple of things about the way she was using her leg and when it all clicked, he said to go ahead and move on up to a lope.
'A lope!'
'Why not?'
So she did and it was fine and as she opened her hips and moved with the motion he saw the grin break out on her face.
'Shouldn't she be wearing a hat?' Annie had asked him quietly. She meant one of those safety helmets people wore in England and back east and he'd said well no, not unless she was planning on falling off. He knew he should have taken it more seriously, but Annie seemed to trust him and left it at that.
Grace slowed in perfect balance and brought Gonzo to an easy stop before them and everyone clapped and cheered. The little horse looked like he'd won the Kentucky Derby. And Grace's smile was wide and clear as a morning sky.
After the vet had left, Tom showered, put on a clean shirt and set off through the rain for Hank's place. It was coming down so thick, the old Chevy's wipers all but gave in and Tom had to peer with his nose to the glass to negotiate a way through the flooded craters of the old gravel road. There were so many cars when he got there that he had to park right out on the driveway and if he hadn't worn his slicker he'd have been soaked by the time he got to the barn.
As soon as he walked in, Hank saw him and came over with a beer. Tom laughed at the T-shirt and even as he took off his slicker, realized he was already scanning the faces for Annie. The barn was large but still too small for all the folk packed into it. There was country music playing, almost drowned by the sound of talk and laughter. People were still eating. Every now and then the wind would drive a cloud of smoke from the barbecue in through the open doors. Mostly people ate standing up because the tables hauled in from outside were still wet.
While he chatted with Hank and a couple of other guys, Tom let his eyes travel the room. One of the empty stalls on the far side had been turned into a bar and he could see Frank helping out behind it. Some of the older kids, including Grace and Joe, were gathered around the sound system, going through the box of tapes and groaning at the embarrassing prospect of their parents trying to dance to the Eagles and Fleetwood Mac. Nearby Diane was telling the twins for the last time to quit throwing food or she'd take them right home. There were many faces Tom knew and many who greeted him. But there was only one he was looking for and at last he saw her.
She stood in the far corner with an empty glass in her hand, talking with Smoky who'd come up from New Mexico where he'd been working since Tom's last clinic. It was Smoky who seemed to be doing most of the talking. Every so often Annie glanced around the room and Tom wondered if she was looking for anyone in particular and if so whether it might be him. Then he told himself not to be such a damn fool and went and got himself some food.
Smoky knew who Annie was as soon as they were introduced. 'You're the one done call him when we were doing the Marin County clinic!' he said. Annie smiled.
That's right.'
'Hell, I remember him calling me when he came back from New York saying there was no way he was going to work with that horse. Now here y'all are.'
'He changed his mind.'
'Ma'am, he sure must of. Ain't never seen Tom do something he didn't want.'
Annie asked him questions about his work with Tom and what went on at the clinics and it was clear from the way he spoke that Smoky worshiped the ground Tom walked. He said there were quite a few people now doing clinics and things but not one of them was in the same league, or even close. He told her about things he'd seen Tom do, horses he'd helped that most folk would have taken out and shot.
'When he lays his hands on them you can see all the trouble just kind of fall out of them.'
Annie said he hadn't done this yet with Pilgrim and Smoky said that must be because the horse wasn't yet ready.
'It sounds like magic,' she said.
'No ma'am. It's more than magic. Magic's just tricks.'
Whatever it was, Annie had felt it. She'd felt it when she watched Tom work, when she rode with him. In truth, she felt it almost every moment she was with him.
It was this that she had contemplated yesterday morning when she woke with Grace still sleeping beside her and saw the dawn spilling in through the faded drapes that now hung unmoving. For a long time she'd lain quite still, cradled in the calm of her daughter's breathing. Once, from a distant dream, Grace murmured something that Annie labored in vain to decipher.
It was then she'd noticed, among the pile of books and magazines beside the bed, the copy of Pilgrim's Progress Liz Hammond's cousins had given her. She hadn't opened it nor had she any idea that Grace had brought it in here. Annie slipped quietly from the bed and took it to the chair by the window where there was just enough light to read.
She remembered listening wide-eyed to the story as a child, captivated on a simple literal level by the story of little Christian's heroic journey to the Celestial City. Reading it now, the allegory seemed obvious and clumsy. But there was a passage near the end that made her pause.
Now I saw in my dream that by this time the pilgrims were got over the Enchanted Ground and entering into the country of Beulah, whose air was very sweet and pleasant; the way lying directly through it, they solaced themselves there for a season. Yea, here they heard continually the singing of birds and saw every day the flowers appear in the earth and heard the voice of the turtle in the land. In this country the sun shineth night and day; wherefore this was beyond the Valley of the Shadow of Death and also out of the reach of Giant Despair; neither could they from this place so much as see Doubting Castle. Here they were within sight of the City they were going to, also here met some of the inhabitants thereof. For in this land the Shining Ones commonly walked, because it was upon the borders of Heaven.
Annie read the passage three times and read no farther. It was this that had led her to call Diane to ask if she and Grace could come to church. However, the urge - so wildly out of character that it made even Annie laugh - had little, if anything, to do with religion. It had to do with Tom Booker.
Annie knew that somehow he had set the scene for what had happened. He had unlocked a door through which she and Grace had found each other. 'Don't let her turn you away,' he'd told her. And she hadn't. Now she simply wanted to give thanks, but in a ritualized way that wouldn't embarrass anyone. Grace had teased her when she told her, asking how many centuries it was since she'd last seen the inside of a church. But she said it with affection and was plainly happy to come along.
Annie's head refocused on the party. Smoky didn't seem to have noticed her drifting. He was in the middle of some long, involved story about the man who owned the ranch he was working at down in New Mexico. While Annie listened she went back to doing what she'd spent most of the evening doing, looking out for Tom. Maybe he wasn't coming after all.
Hank and the other men cleared the tables out into the rain again and the dancing began. The music was louder now and still country so that, led by the most streetwise among them, the kids could keep up their groaning, no doubt secretly relieved at not having to dance themselves. Laughing at your parents was a whole lot more fun than having them laugh at you. One or two of the older girls had broken ranks and were dancing and the sight suddenly had Annie worried. Stupidly, until now, it hadn't occurred to her that seeing others dance might upset Grace. She made an excuse to Smoky and went to find her.
Grace was sitting by the stalls with Joe. They saw Annie coming and Grace whispered something to him that made him grin. It was gone from his face by the time Annie got there. He stood up to greet her.
'Ma'am, would you like to dance?'
Grace burst out laughing and Annie gave her a suspicious glance.
'This is entirely unprompted of course,' she said.
'Of course ma'am.'
'And not, by any remote chance, a dare?'
'Mom! That's so rude!' Grace said. 'What a terrible thing to suggest!' Joe kept a perfect straight face.
'No ma'am. Absolutely not.'
Annie looked again at Grace who now read her mind.
'Mom, if you think I'm going to dance with him to this music, forget it.'
'Then thank you Joe. I'd be delighted.'
So they danced. And Joe danced well and even though the other kids hooted he didn't turn a hair. It was while they were dancing that she saw Tom. He was watching her from the bar and waved and the sight of him gave her such a teenage thrill that at once she felt embarrassed because maybe it showed.
When the music stopped Joe gave a courteous bow and escorted her back to Grace who hadn't stopped laughing. Annie felt a touch on her shoulder and turned. It was Hank. He wanted the next dance and wouldn't take no for an answer. By the time they'd finished he had Annie laughing so much her sides ached. But there was no respite. Frank was next, then Smoky.
As she danced, she looked over and saw Grace and Joe were now doing a jokey kind of dance with the twins and some other kids, jokey enough anyway to allow Grace and Joe the illusion that they weren't really dancing with each other.
She watched Tom dance with Darlene, then Diane, then more closely with some pretty, younger woman Annie didn't know and didn't much want to know. Perhaps it was some girlfriend she hadn't heard about. And every time the music stopped, Annie looked for him and wondered why he didn't come and ask her to dance.
He saw her making her way across to the bar after she'd danced with Smoky and as soon as he could do so politely he thanked his partner and followed. It was the third time he'd tried to reach her but someone always got there first.
He weaved his way behind her through the hot crowd and saw her wipe the sweat from her brow with both hands, back through her hair, just as she'd done when he met her out running. There was a dark patch on her back where the fabric of her dress had grown wet and clung to her skin. As he got near he could smell her perfume mixed with another more subtle and potent that was all her own.
Frank was back serving behind the bar and asked Annie over other people's heads what she wanted. She asked him for a glass of water. Frank said sorry there wasn't any, only Dr Peppers. He handed her one and she thanked him and turned and Tom was standing right there in front of her. 'Hi!' she said.
'Hi. So Annie Graves likes to dance.' 'As a matter of fact, I can't stand it. It's just that here no one gives you the choice.'
He laughed and decided therefore that he wouldn't ask her, though he'd looked forward to it all evening. Someone pushed between them, cutting them off from each other for a moment. The music had started up again so they had to shout to make each other hear.
'You obviously do,' she said.
'What?'
'Like to dance. I saw you.'
'I guess. But I saw you too and I reckon you like it more than you say.'
'Oh, you know, sometimes. When I'm in the mood.'
'You want some water?'
'I would die for water.'
Tom called to Frank for a clean glass and handed back the Dr Peppers. Then he put a hand lightly on Annie's back to steer her through the crowd and felt the warmth of her body through the damp dress.
'Come on.'
He found a path for them among all the people and all she could think of was the feel of his hand on her back, just below her shoulder blades and the clasp of her bra.
As they skirted the dance floor, she chided herself for telling him she didn't like to dance, for otherwise he'd surely have asked and there was nothing she wanted more.
The great barn doors stood open and the disco lights lit the rain outside like a bead curtain of ever-changing color. There was no longer any wind but the rain fell so hard it made a breeze of its own and others had gathered in the doorway for the cool Annie now felt on her face.
They stopped and stood together on the brink of shelter and peered out through the rain whose roar made distant the music behind them. No longer was there reason for his hand to be on her back and though she hoped he wouldn't, he took it away. Across the yard she could just make out the lights of the house like a lost ship where she assumed they were headed for her drink of water.
'We'll get drenched,' she said. 'I'm not that desperate.'
'I thought you said you'd die for water?'
'Yes, but not in it. Though they say drowning's the best way to go. I always thought, how on earth do they know that?'
He laughed. 'You sure do a lot of thinking, don't you?'
'Yep, always fizzing away up there. Can't stop it.'
'Kind of gets in the way sometimes, don't it?'
'Yep.'
'Like now.' He saw she didn't understand. He pointed toward the house. 'Here we are, looking out through the rain and you're thinking, too bad, no water.'
Annie gave him a wry look and took the glass from his hand. 'Kind of a forest-and-trees situation, you mean.'
He shrugged and smiled and she reached out into the night with the glass. The pricking of the rain on her bare arm was startling, almost painful. The roar of its falling excluded all but the two of them. And while the glass filled they held each other's eyes in a communion of which humor was only the surface. It took less time than it seemed or than either seemed to want.
Annie offered it first to him, but he just shook his head and kept watching her. She watched him back over the rim of the glass as she drank. And the water tasted cool and pure and so purely of nothing that it made her want to cry.
Grace could tell something was going on as soon as she climbed into the Chevy beside him. The smile gave it away, like a kid who'd hidden the candy jar. She swung the door shut and Tom pulled away from the back of the creek house and headed down toward the corrals. She'd only just got back from her morning session with Terri in Choteau and was still eating a sandwich.
'What is it?' she said.
'What's what?'
She narrowed her eyes at him but he was all innocence.
'Well, for a start, you're early.'
'I am?' He shook his wristwatch. 'Darn thing.'
She saw it was a lost cause and sat back to finish her sandwich. Tom gave her that funny smile again and kept driving.
The second clue was the rope he picked up from the barn before they went down to Pilgrim's corral. It was much shorter than the one he used as a lasso and of a narrower gauge, plied in an intricate criss-cross of purple and green.
'What's that?'
'It's a rope. Pretty, isn't it?'
'I meant. What is it for?'
'Well, Grace, there's no end of things a hand could do with a rope like this.'
'Like swing from trees, tie yourself up…'
'Yep, that kind of thing.'
When they got to the corral Grace leaned on the rail where she usually did and Tom went in with the rope. Away in the far corner, as usual too, Pilgrim started snorting and trotting to and fro as if marking out some futile last resort. His tail, ears and the muscles on his sides seemed wired to a convulsive current. He watched Tom every step of the way.
But Tom didn't look at him. As he walked, he was doing something with the rope, though what, because his back was to her, Grace couldn't tell. Whatever it was, he went on with it after he stopped in the center of the corral and still he didn't look up.
Grace could see Pilgrim was as intrigued as she was. He'd stopped his pacing and now stood watching. And though every so often he tossed his head and pawed the ground, his ears reached out at Tom as if pulled by elastic. Grace moved slowly along the rails to get a better angle on what Tom was doing. She didn't have to go far because Tom turned toward her so that his shoulder masked what he was doing from Pilgrim. But all Grace could see was that he seemed to be tying the rope into a series of knots. Briefly, he looked up and smiled at her from under the brim of his hat.
'Kinda curious, ain't he?'
Grace looked at Pilgrim. He was more than curious. And now that he couldn't see what Tom was doing, he did what Grace had done and took a few small steps to get a better look. Tom heard him and at the same time moved a couple of steps farther away, turning too, so that now he had his back to the horse. Pilgrim stood awhile and looked off to one side, taking stock. Then he looked at Tom again and took a few more tentative steps toward him. And Tom heard him again and moved off so the space between them stayed almost but not quite the same.
Grace could see he'd finished tying the knots, but he went on pulling them and working at them and suddenly she saw what it was he'd made. It was a simple halter. She couldn't believe it.
'Are you going to try and get that on him?'
Tom gave her a grin and said in a stage whisper, 'Only if he begs me.'
Grace was too involved to know how long it took. Ten, maybe fifteen minutes, but not a lot more. Every time Pilgrim came nearer, Tom would move off, denying him the secret and fueling his desire to know it. And then Tom would stop and with every stop reduce by a fraction the gap between them. By the time they'd twice circled the corral and Tom had worked his way back to the center, they were only some dozen paces apart.
Now Tom turned so that he stood at right angles, still calmly working away at the rope and though once he looked up at Grace and smiled, never did he look at the horse. Thus ignored, Pilgrim blew and looked to one side then the other. Then he took two or three more steps toward Tom. Grace could see he expected the man to move off again but this time he didn't. The change surprised him and he stopped and looked around again to see if anything else in the world, including Grace, could help him make sense of this. Finding no answer, he stepped closer. Then closer still, blowing and craning his nose to get a whiff of whatever danger this man might have up his sleeve and balancing the risk against a now overwhelming need to know what he had in his hands.
At last he was so close that his whiskers almost brushed the brim of Tom's hat and Tom must have felt the snuffling breath on the back of his neck.
Now Tom moved away a couple of steps and though the movement wasn't sudden, Pilgrim jumped like a startled cat and nickered. But he didn't go away. And when he saw Tom was now facing him, he calmed. Now he could see the rope. Tom was holding it in both hands for him to have a good look. But looking wasn't enough, as Grace knew. He'd have to get a smell of it too.
For the first time, Tom was now looking at him and he was saying something too, though what, Grace was too far off to hear. She bit her lip as she watched, willing the horse forward. Go on, he won't hurt you, go on. But he needed no urging other than his own curiosity. Hesitantly, but with a confidence that grew with every step, Pilgrim walked to Tom and put his nose to the rope. And once he'd sniffed the rope, he started sniffing Tom's hands and Tom just stood there and let him.
In that moment, in that quivering touch between horse and man, Grace felt many things connect. She couldn't have explained it, even to herself. She simply knew that some seal had been set on all that had happened in the days just passed. Finding her mother again, riding, the confidence she'd felt at the party, all this Grace hadn't quite dared trust, as though at any second someone might snatch it all away. There was such hope however, such a promise of light in this tentative act of trust by Pilgrim that she felt something shift and open within her and knew that it was permanent.
With what was plainly consent, Tom now slowly moved one hand to the horse's neck. There was a quiver and for a moment Pilgrim seemed to freeze. But it was only caution and when he felt the hand upon him and realized it brought no pain, he eased and let Tom rub him.
It went on a long time. Slowly Tom worked his way up until he'd covered the whole of his neck and Pilgrim let him. And then he let him do the same on the other side and even feel his mane. It was so matted it stood like spikes between Tom's fingers. Then, gently and still without hurry, Tom slipped the halter on. And Pilgrim did not balk nor even for a moment demur.
The only thing that bothered him about showing this to Grace was that she might make too much of it. It was always fragile when a horse took this step and with this horse it was more than fragile. Not the eggshell but the membrane within it. He could read in Pilgrim's eyes and in the quiver of his flanks how close he was to rejecting it. And if he rejected it, the next time - if there was one - would be worse.
For many days Tom had worked for this, in the mornings, without Grace knowing. He did different things when she was watching in the afternoons, mainly flagging and driving and getting the horse used to the feel of a thrown rope. But working toward the halter was something he wanted to do alone. And until this very morning he hadn't known whether it would ever happen, whether the spark of hope he'd told Annie about was truly there. Then he'd seen it and stopped, because he wanted Grace to be there when he blew on it and made it glow.
He didn't have to look at her to know how much it moved her. What she didn't know, and maybe he should have told her before instead of being such a smartass, was that it wasn't all now going to be sweetness and light. There was work to come that might make Pilgrim seem cloaked yet again in madness. But that could wait. Tom wasn't going to start now. This moment belonged to Grace and he didn't want to spoil it.
So he told her to come in, as he knew she must long to. He watched her prop her cane against the gatepost and come carefully with only the slightest sign of a limp across the corral. When she was nearly up to them, Tom told her to stop. It was better to let the horse come to her than her to him and with barely a nudge on the halter rope he did so.
He could see Grace biting her lip, trying not to tremble as she held her hands out below the horse's nose. There was fear on both sides and it was surely a greeting of a lesser kind than Grace must remember. But in the sniffing of her hands, then later of her face and hair, Tom thought he saw at least a glimpse of what they once had been together and yet might be again.
'Annie this is Lucy. Are you there?'
Annie let the question hang for a while. She was composing an important memo to all her key people on how they should handle interference from Crawford Gates. The basic message was tell him to go fuck himself. She'd switched the answering machine on to give herself peace so that she could find an only slightly more veiled way of saying it.
'Shit. You're probably out chopping off cow's balls or whatever the hell it is they do out there. Listen, I… Oh, just call me will you?'
There was a troubled note in her voice that made Annie pick up.
'Cows don't have balls.'
'Speak for yourself kiddo. So we were lurking there, were we?'
'Screening, Luce, it's called screening. What's up?'
'He fired me.'
'What?'
'The son of a bitch fired me.'
Annie had seen it coming for weeks. Lucy was the first person she'd hired, her closest ally. By firing her, Gates was sending the clearest possible signal. Annie listened with a dull sinking in her chest while Lucy told her how it happened.
The pretext had been a piece on women truck drivers. Annie had seen the copy and though predictably preoccupied with sex, it was a lot of fun. The pictures were terrific too. Lucy had wanted a big headline that said simply MOTHERTRUCKERS. Gates had vetoed it, saying Lucy was 'obsessed with sleaze'. They'd had a stand-up fight in front of the whole office during the course of which Lucy had told Gates bluntly to do what Annie was trying to find a euphemism for in her memo.
'I'm not going to let him do this,' Annie said.
'Kiddo, it's done. I'm gone.'
'No you're not. He can't do it.'
'He can Annie. You know he can and, shit, I'd had enough anyway. It's no fun anymore.'
There were a few seconds of silence while they both thought about that. Annie sighed.
'Annie?'
'What?'
'You better get back here, you know? And quick.'
Grace came home late, bubbling with all that had happened with Pilgrim. She helped Annie serve supper and told her while they ate how it had felt to touch him again, how he'd trembled. He hadn't let her stroke him as he'd let Tom and she'd felt a little upset at how briefly he tolerated her near him. But Tom said it would come, you just had to take it a step at a time.
'Pilgrim wouldn't look at me. It was weird. Like he was ashamed or something.'
'Of what happened?'
'No. I don't know. Maybe just of the way he is.'
She told Annie how, later, Tom had led him up to the barn and they'd washed him down. He'd allowed Tom to pick up his feet and clean some of the compacted filth out of them and though he wouldn't let his mane or tail be cleaned, they'd at least managed to get a brush to most of his coat. Grace suddenly stopped and gave Annie a look of concern.
'You okay?'
'I'm fine. Why?'
'I dunno. You looked sort of worried or something.'
'Just tired I guess, that's all.'
When they were almost through eating, Robert called and Grace went and sat at Annie's desk and told the same story all over again while Annie cleared the dishes.
She stood at the sink washing pans and listening to the frenzied clatter of a bug trapped among corpses he maybe recognized in one of the fluorescent lights. Lucy's call had cast a reflective shadow that even Grace's news had failed fully to dispel.
Her spirits had lifted briefly when she heard the scrunch of the Chevy's wheels outside bringing Grace back from the corrals. She and Tom hadn't spoken since the barn dance though he'd scarcely been out of her thoughts and she'd quickly checked her reflection in the glass door of the oven, thinking, hoping, that he'd come in. But he'd just waved and driven off.
Lucy's call had hauled her back - as in a different way Robert's did now - into what she knew with dulling acknowledgment to be her real life. Though what she meant by'real', Annie no longer knew. Nothing, in a sense, could be more real than the life they'd found here. So what was the difference between these two lives?
One, it seemed to Annie, was comprised of obligations and the other of possibilities. Hence, perhaps, the notion of reality. For obligations were palpable, soundly rooted in reciprocal deeds; possibilities on the other hand were chimeras, flimsy and worthless, dangerous even. And as you grew older and wiser, you realized this and closed them off. It was better that way. Of course it was.
The bug in the light was trying a new tactic, taking long rests then hurling himself at the plastic casing with doubled effort. Grace was telling Robert how, the day after tomorrow, she was going to help drive the cattle up to the summer pastures and how they'd all be sleeping rough. Yes, she said, of course she'd be riding, how else was she supposed to go?
'Dad, you don't have to worry, okay? Gonzo's fine.'
Annie finished in the kitchen and switched off the lights to give the bug a break. She walked slowly into the living room and stopped to stand behind Grace's chair, idly arranging the girl's hair on the back of her shoulders.
'She's not coming,' Grace said. 'She says she's got too much work to do. She's right here, do you want to talk to her? Okay. I love you too Daddy.'
She vacated the chair for Annie and went off upstairs to run a bath. Robert was still in Geneva. He said he would probably be flying back to New York the following Monday. He'd told Annie two nights ago what Freddie Kane had said and now, wearily, she told him about Gates firing Lucy. Robert listened in silence and then asked her what she was going to do about it. Annie sighed.
'I don't know. What do you think I should do?'
There was a pause and Annie sensed he was thinking carefully about what he was about to say.
'Well, from out there, I don't think there's a whole lot you can do.'
'You're saying we should come back?'
'No, I'm not saying that.'
'With everything going so well with Grace and Pilgrim?'
'No, Annie. I didn't say that.'
'That's what it sounded like.'
She could hear him inhale deeply and suddenly she felt guilty about twisting his words when she wasn't being honest about her own motives for staying. His voice, when he resumed, was measured.
'I'm sorry if that's how it sounded. It's wonderful about Grace and Pilgrim. It's important you all stay out there as long as you need to.'
'More important than my job, you mean?'
'Christ, Annie!'
'I'm sorry.'
They talked about other, less contentious things and by the time they said good-bye they were friends again, though he didn't tell her he loved her. Annie hung up and sat there. She hadn't meant to attack him like that. It was more that she was punishing herself for her own inability - or reluctance - to sort out the tangle of half-realized desires and denials that churned within her.
Grace had the radio on in the bathroom. An oldies station was doing what they kept calling a Major Monkees Retrospective. They'd just played 'Daydream Believer' and now it was 'Last Train to Clarksville'. Grace must have fallen asleep or have her ears underwater.
Suddenly, and with suicidal clarity, Annie knew what she was going to do. She would tell Gates that if he didn't reinstate Lucy Friedman she would resign. She would fax him the ultimatum tomorrow. If it was still okay with the Bookers, she would, after all, go on the damned cattle drive. And when she came back, she would either have a job or she wouldn't.
The herd curled up toward him around the shoulder of the ridge like a spilling black river in reverse. Here the contours of the land gave all the marshaling required, forcing the cattle upward on a curving trail which, though neither fenced nor marked, was yet their only option. Tom always liked to ride ahead here and stop high on the slope to watch them come.
The other riders were coming now, set strategically above and about the edge of the herd, Joe and Grace to the right, Frank and the twins on the left and appearing now at the rear, Diane and Annie. Beyond them, the plateau they had just crossed was a sea of wildflowers through which their passage had churned a wake of green and at whose distant shore they'd rested under a noon sun and watched the cattle drink.
From where Tom now stood his horse, you could see but the faintest shimmer of the pool and nothing at all of the valley beyond where the land fell away to the meadows and cottonwood creeks of the Double Divide. It was as if the plateau shelved seamless and straight to the vast plains and the eastern rim of the sky.
The calves looked dapper and strong, with a fine luster to their coats. Tom smiled to himself when he thought of the sorry beasts they'd driven that spring some thirty years ago when his father first brought them to live out here. Some had been so scrawny you could almost hear the rattle of their ribs.
Daniel Booker had ranched some serious winters back at Clark's Fork but nothing as harsh as he found on the Front. In that first winter he lost near as many calves as he saved and the cold and the worry etched marks yet deeper in a face already changed forever by the forced sale of his home. But on the ridge where Tom was now, his father had smiled at what he saw about him and known for the first time that his family could survive in this place and even might prosper.
Tom had told Annie about this while they rode across the plateau. During the morning and even when they stopped to eat, there'd been too much going on for them to speak. But now both cattle and riders had the hang of things and there was time. He'd ridden up alongside her and she'd asked him the names of the flowers. He'd shown her blue flax and cinquefoil and balsamroot and the ones they called rooster heads and Annie had listened in that serious way of hers, storing it all away as if one day she might be tested.
It had been one of the warmest springs Tom could remember. The grass was lush and made a wet slicking sound against the legs of their horses. Tom had pointed out the ridge ahead and told her how he'd ridden with his father to its crest that long ago day to see if they were on the right line for the high pastures.
Today Tom was riding one of his young mares, a pretty strawberry roan. Annie rode Rimrock. All day he'd thought how good she looked on him. She and Grace were wearing the hats and boots he'd helped them buy yesterday after Annie said she was coming. At the store they'd laughed side by side at the sight of themselves in the glass. Annie had asked did they get to wear guns too and he said that depended on who she was going to shoot. She said the only candidate was her boss back in New York so maybe a Tomahawk missile might be better.
Their crossing of the plateau was leisurely. But as the cattle reached the foot of the ridge they seemed to sense that from here on it was one long climb and they quickened the pace and called to each other as if to summon some collective effort. Tom had asked Annie to ride ahead with him but she'd smiled and said she'd better drop back to see if Diane needed help. So he'd come up here alone.
Now the herd was almost up to him. He turned his horse and rode over the crest of the ridge. A small crowd of mule deer vaulted away in front of him. At a safe distance they stopped to look back. The does were heavy-bellied with their fawns and assessed him with their great tilted ears before the buck moved them off again. Beyond their bobbing heads, Tom could see the first of the narrow pine-fringed passes that led to the high pastures and, leaning massively above them, the snowpatched peaks of the divide.
He'd wanted to be beside Annie and see her face when this view was revealed to her and he'd felt a loss when she declined and went back to Diane. Maybe she sensed in his offer an intimacy he hadn't meant, or rather one he yearned for but hadn't meant to convey.
By the time they reached it, the pass was already in the shadow of the mountains. And as they moved slowly up between the darkening banks of trees, they looked back and saw the shadow' spread east like a stain behind them until only the distant plains retained the sun. Above the trees on either side, sheer gray walls of rock encompassed them, making echoes of the children's calls and the murmur of the cattle.
Frank threw another bough on the fire and its impact sent a volcano of sparks into the night sky. The wood was from a fallen tree they'd found and so dry it seemed to thirst for the flames that beset it, tonguing high into the windless air.
Through the dodging of the flames, Annie watched the glow on the children's faces and noticed how their eyes and teeth flashed when they laughed. They were telling riddles and Grace had them all guessing feverishly at one of Robert's favorites. Grace had her new hat tipped rakishly forward and her hair, cascading from it to her shoulders, trapped the firelight in a spectrum of reds and ambers and golds. Never, Annie thought, had her daughter looked more lovely.
They'd finished eating, a simple meal cooked on the fire, of beans, chops and salty bacon with jacket potatoes baked in the embers. It had tasted wonderful. Now, while Frank saw to the fire, Tom went to get water from the stream across the meadow so they could make coffee. Diane was joining in the riddle game now. Everyone assumed Annie knew the answer and, though she'd forgotten it, she was happy to keep quiet, lean back against her saddle and observe.
They'd reached this place just before nine when the last of the sun was fading from the far-off plains. The final pass had been steep, with the mountains tilting over their heads like cathedral walls. At last they'd followed the cattle through an ancient gateway of rock and seen the pasture open up before them.
The grass was thick and dark in the evening light and because spring, Annie supposed, came later here, there were fewer flowers yet among it. Above, only the highest peak remained and its angle had rolled to give a glimpse of a western slope where a sliver of snow glowed golden pink in the long-gone sun.
The pasture was encircled by forest and on one side, where the ground was slightly raised, stood a small log cabin with a simple pen for the horses. The stream looped in and out of the trees along the other side and it was here first that they'd all gone to let the horses drink beside the jostling cattle. Tom had warned them that it could freeze up here at night and that they should bring warm clothes. But the air had stayed balmy.
'Howya doing there, Annie?' Frank had stacked the fire and was settling himself beside her. She could see Tom materializing from the darkness beyond where now and then the invisible cattle called.
'Frank, apart from my aching butt, I'm doing just great.'
He laughed. It wasn't just her butt. Her calves ached too and the insides of her thighs were so sore she winced every time she moved. Grace had lately ridden less even than she had, but when Annie had asked her earlier if she was sore too, she said she was fine and, no, the leg didn't hurt at all. Annie didn't believe a word of it but left it at that.
'Remember those Swiss folk last year, Tom?'
Tom was pouring water into the coffeepot. He laughed and said yeah, he did, then set the pot on the fire and sat back beside Diane to listen.
Frank said he and Tom had been driving through the Pryor Mountains and found their road blocked by a herd of cattle. Behind them came these cowboys, all dressed to the nines in fancy new gear.
'One of them had on a pair of hand-tooled chaps must have set him back a thousand bucks. Funny thing was, they weren't riding, they were all walking, leading their horses behind them and they looked real miserable. Anyway, me and Tom wind down the window and ask is everything okay and they don't understand a word we're saying.'
Annie watched Tom across the corner of the fire. He was watching his brother and smiling his easy smile. He seemed to sense her gaze, for his eyes moved from Frank to her and in them there was no surprise, only a calm so knowing it faltered her heart. She held his look for as long as she dared, then smiled and turned again to Frank.
'We don't understand a word they're saying neither, so we just wave and let them go by. Then up the road we find this old guy dozing behind the wheel of a brand-new Winnebago, top of the range. And he lifts his hat and I know the guy. It's Lonnie Harper, has a big spread over that way but never could run it to save his life. Anyway, we say howdy and ask is that his herd back there and he says, yeah, it sure is and the cowboys are from Switzerland, all over here on vacation.
'Said he'd set himself up as a dude ranch and these folks were paying him thousands of bucks to come and do what he used to have to pay hands to do. We said why're they walking? And he laughed and said that was the best part, 'cause after one day they all got too saddle-sore to ride, so there wasn't even no wear on the horses.'
'Way to go,' Diane said.
'Yep. These poor Swiss fellas get to sleep on the ground and cook their own beans on the fire while he sleeps in the Winnie, watches TV and eats like a king.'
When the water boiled, Tom made coffee. The twins were through with riddles and Craig asked Frank to show Grace his match trick.
'Oh no,' Diane groaned. 'Here we go.'
Frank took two matches from the box he kept in his vest pocket and placed one on the upturned palm of his right hand. Then, with a serious face, he leaned over and rubbed the head of the other match in Grace's hair. She laughed, a little uncertainly.
'You do physics and all that stuff at school, Grace, I guess.'
'Uh-huh.'
'Well then you'll know about static electricity and all. That's all this really is. I'm just kinda charging up here.'
'Oh yeah,' Scott said sarcastically. Joe promptly shushed him. Holding the charged match between finger and thumb with his left hand, Frank now drew it slowly up the palm of his right hand so that its head approached the head of the first match. As soon as they touched there was a loud snap and the first match jumped clean off his hand. Grace shrieked in surprise and everyone laughed.
She made him do it again and again and then had a go herself and, of course, it didn't work. Frank shook his head theatrically, as if baffled why it didn't. The kids were loving it. Diane, who must have seen it a hundred times, gave Annie a tired, indulgent smile.
The two women were getting on well, better than ever, Annie believed, though only yesterday she'd been aware of a coolness no doubt caused by Annie changing her mind at the last minute about coming on the cattle drive. Riding together today, they'd talked easily about all sorts of things. But still, somewhere beneath Diane's friendliness, Annie sensed a wariness that was less than dislike yet more than mistrust. More than anything, she noticed the way Diane watched her when she was around Tom. It was this that had led Annie, against all desire, to decline Tom's invitation this afternoon to ride with him to the top of the ridge.
'What d'you reckon, Tom?' Frank said. Try some water?'
'Reckon so, brother.' A dutiful conspirator, he passed Frank the can he'd filled from the stream and Frank told Grace to roll up her sleeves and immerse both arms up to the elbows. Grace was giggling so much she poured half of it down her shirt.
'Kind of gets the charge going, you know?'
Ten minutes later, none the wiser and much the wetter, Grace gave up. During that time both Tom and Joe successfully made the match jump and Annie had a go but couldn't make it move. The twins couldn't do it either. Diane confided to Annie that the first time Frank tried it on her, he'd got her sitting fully clothed in a cattle trough.
Then Scott asked Tom to do his rope trick.
'It ain't a trick,' Joe said.
'Is too.'
'It ain't, is it Tom?'
Tom smiled. 'Well, it kind of depends what you mean by trick.' He pulled something from the pocket of his jeans. It was a simple piece of gray cord about two feet long. He tied the ends together to make a loop. 'Okay,' he said. 'This one's for Annie.' He got up and came toward her.
'Not if it involves pain or death,' Annie said.
'Ma'am, you won't feel a thing.'
He knelt down beside her and asked her to hold up the first finger of her right hand. She did and he put the loop over it then told her to watch carefully. Holding the other end of the loop taut with his left hand, he drew one side of the cord over the other with the middle finger of his right hand. Then he rolled the hand over so it was under the loop, then back over it again and put the same finger tip to tip with Annie's.
It seemed now that the loop circled their touching fingertips and that it could only be removed if the touch were broken. Tom paused and she looked up at him. He smiled and the nearness of his clear blue eyes almost overwhelmed her. 'Look,' he said softly. And she looked down again at their touching fingers and gently he pulled the cord and it slipped away and was free, still knotted and without ever breaking their touch.
He showed her a few more times and then Annie tried and Grace tried and the twins tried and none of them could do it. Joe was the only one who could, though Annie could see from his grin that Frank also knew how. Whether Diane knew too it was hard to tell, for all she did was sip her coffee and watch with a sort of half-amused detachment.
When everyone was through trying, Tom stood up and wound the loop round his fingers to make a neat coil of it. He handed it to Annie.
'Is this a gift?' she said as she took it.
'Nope,' he said. 'Just till you get the hang of it.'
She woke and for a moment had no idea what she was looking at. Then she remembered where she was and realized she was staring at the moon. It seemed close enough for her to reach out and place her fingers in its craters. She turned her head and saw Grace's sleeping face beside her. Frank had offered them the cabin, which normally they only used if it was raining. Annie was tempted but Grace had insisted they sleep outside with the others. Annie could see them lying in their sleeping bags beside the dimming glow of the fire.
She felt thirsty and so alert it was hopeless to try again for sleep. She sat up and looked around. She couldn't see the water can and would be sure to wake the others in the search. Across the meadow the black shapes of the cattle cast shadows yet blacker on the pale moonlit grass. She slipped her legs quietly from the sleeping bag and felt again the havoc done to her muscles by the riding. They'd slept in their clothes, only taking off their boots and socks. Annie was wearing jeans and a white T-shirt. She stood up and set off barefoot toward the stream.
The dew-drenched grass felt cool and thrilling on her feet, though she took care where she placed them for fear of stepping in something less romantic. Somewhere high among the trees an owl was calling and she wondered if it was this or the moon or plain habit that had woken her. The cattle lifted their heads to look as she passed among them and she whispered a greeting then felt foolish for doing so.
The grass on the near bank of the stream was churned by the cattle's hooves. The water moved slow and silent, its glass surface reflecting only the black of the forest beyond. Annie walked upstream and found a place where the flow divided smoothly around an island tree. With two long steps she reached the far side and walked downstream again to a tapered overhang of bank where she could kneel to drink.
Viewed from here, the water now reflected only sky. And so perfect was the moon that Annie hesitated to disturb it. The shock of the water, when at last she did, made her gasp. It was colder than ice, as if it flowed from the ancient glacial heart of the mountain. Annie cupped it in ghost-pale hands and bathed her face. Then she cupped some more and drank.
She saw him first in the water when he loomed across the reflected moon that had so transfixed her gaze she'd lost all sense of time. It didn't startle her. Even before she looked up she knew it was him.
'Are you okay?' he said.
The other bank where he stood was higher and she had to squint up at him against the moon. She could read the concern on his face. She smiled.
'I'm fine.'
'I woke up and saw you weren't there.'
'I was just thirsty.'
'The bacon.'
'I suppose.'
'Does the water taste as good as that glass of rain the other night?'
'Almost. Try it.'
He looked down at the water and saw it would be easier to reach from where she was.
'Mind if I come over? I'm disturbing you.'
Annie almost laughed. 'Oh no you're not. Be my guest.'
He walked to the island tree and crossed and Annie watched and knew that more was being crossed than water. He smiled as he came close and when he reached her he knelt beside her and without a word cupped his hand to the water and drank. Some slipped between his fingers, quickening the moonlight in silver trickles.
It seemed to Annie, and would always seem, that in what followed there was no element of choice. Some things simply were and could not be rendered otherwise. She trembled now at its doing and would tremble later at the thought of it, though never once with regret.
He finished drinking and turned to her and as he was about to brush the water from his face she reached out and did it for him. She felt the cold of the water on the back of her fingers and might have taken it as rejection and removed her hand had she not then felt through it the confirming warmth of his flesh. And with this touch, the world went still.
His eyes had only the unifying pale of the moon. Clarified of color, they seemed to have some limitless depth into which she now traveled with wonder but quite without misgiving. He gently raised his hand to the hand she yet held to his cheek. And he took it and turned it and pressed her palm to his lips, as if sealing some long-awaited welcome.
Annie watched him and took a long quiver of breath. Then she reached out with her other hand and ran it across the side of his face, from his harsh unshaven cheek to the softness of his hair. She felt his hand brush the underside of her arm and stroke her face as she had stroked his. At his touch she closed her eyes and blindly let his fingers trace a delicate path from her temples to the corners of her mouth. When his fingers reached her lips she parted them and let him tenderly explore their rim.
She dared not open her eyes for fear she might see in his some reticence or doubt or even pity. But when she looked, she found only calm and certainty and a need as legible as her own. He put his hands to her elbows and smoothed them up inside the sleeves of her T-shirt to hold her upper arms. Annie felt her skin contract. She had both her hands in his hair now and she gently drew his head toward her and felt an equal pressure on her arms.
In the instant before their mouths touched, Annie had a sudden urge to say she was sorry, that he should please forgive her, this wasn't what she'd meant to do. He must have seen the thought take shape in her eyes, for before she could utter it he shushed her softly with but the smallest moving of his lips.
When they kissed, it seemed to Annie she was coming home. That somehow she had always known the taste and the feel of him. And though she almost quaked at the touch of his body against her, she could not tell at what precise point her own skin ended and his began.
How long they kissed, Tom could only guess from his own changed shadow on her face when they stopped and moved apart a little to look at each other. She gave him a sad smile then looked up at the moon in its new place and trapped pieces of it in her eyes. He could still taste the sweet wetness of her glistening mouth and feel the warmth of her breath on his face.
He ran his hands down her bare arms and felt her shiver.
'Are you cold?'
'No.'
'I've never known a June night so warm up here.'
She looked down then took one of his hands in both of hers and cradled it palm upward in her lap, tracing the callouses with her fingers.
'Your skin's so hard.'
'Uh-huh. It's a sorry hand for sure.'
'No it's not. Can you feel me touching it?'
'Oh yes.'
She didn't look up. Through the dark arch made by her falling hair he saw a tear run on her cheek.
'Annie?'
She shook her head and still didn't look at him. He took hold of her hands.
'Annie, it's okay. Really, it's okay.'
'I know it is. It's just that, it's so okay I don't know how to handle it.'
'We're just two people, that's all.'
She nodded. 'Who met too late.'
She looked at him at last and smiled and wiped her eyes. Tom smiled back but didn't answer. If what she said was true, he didn't want to endorse it. Instead, he told her what his brother had said on a night much the same yet under a thinner moon so many years ago. How Frank had wished that now could last forever and how their father had said forever was but a trail of nows and the best a man could do was live each one fully in its turn.
Her eyes never left him while he spoke and when he'd finished she stayed silent so that suddenly he worried she might have taken his words amiss and seen in them some self-serving incitement. Behind them in the pines, the owl began to call again and was answered now, far across the meadow, by another.
Annie leaned forward and found his mouth again and he felt in her an urgency that wasn't there before. He tasted the salt of her tears in the corner of her lips, that place he'd yearned so long to touch and never dreamed he'd kiss. And as he held her and moved his hands on her and felt the press of her breasts against him, he thought not that this was wrong but only concern that she might come to feel it so. But if this were wrong, then what in the whole of life was right?
At last she broke away and leaned back from him, breathing hard, as if daunted by her own hunger and where it would surely lead.
I'd better go back,' she said.
'You'd better.'
She kissed him gently once more, then laid her head on his shoulder so that he couldn't see her face. He brushed his lips on her neck and breathed the warm smell of her as if to store it, perhaps forever.
'Thank you,' she whispered.
'What for?'
'For what you've done for all of us.'
'I've done nothing.'
'Oh Tom, you know what you've done.'
She disengaged herself and stood in front of him with her hands resting lightly on his shoulders. She smiled down at him and stroked his hair and he took her hand and kissed it. Then she left him and walked to the island tree and crossed the stream.
Once only did she turn to look at him, though with the moon behind her, what look it was he could but guess. He watched her white shirt go back across the meadow, its shadow trailing footprints in the gray of the dew, while the cattle glided about her, black and silent as ships.
The last glow had gone from the fire by the time she got back. Diane stirred but only in sleep, Annie thought. She quietly slipped her wet feet back into her sleeping bag. The owls soon ceased their calling and the only sound was Frank's soft snoring. Later, when the moon had gone, she heard Tom come back and didn't dare look. She lay for a long time looking at the reasserted stars, thinking of him and what he must be thinking of her. It was that hour when routine doubt would settle heavily upon her and Annie waited to feel shame at what she'd just done. But it never came.
In the morning, when at last she found the courage to look at him, she saw no betraying trace of what had passed between them. No secret glance and, when he spoke, no layer laced beneath his words for her alone to understand. In fact his manner, like everyone else's, was so seamlessly and happily the same as before that Annie felt almost disappointed, so utter was the change she felt in herself.
As they ate breakfast, she looked across the meadow for the place where they had knelt, but daylight seemed to have altered its geography and she couldn't find it. Even the footprints they'd made had been scuffed by the cattle and soon were lost forever under the morning sun.
After they'd eaten, Tom and Frank went to check the adjoining pastures while the children played over by the stream and Annie and Diane washed up and packed. Diane told her about the surprise she and Frank had lined up for the kids. Next week they were all flying down to L.A.
'You know, Disneyland, Universal Studios, the works.'
'That's great. They don't have any idea?'
'Nope. Frank was trying to get Tom to come too, but he's promised to go down to Sheridan to sort some old guy's horse out.'
She said it was about the only time of year they could get away. Smoky was going to keep an eye on things for them. Otherwise the place would be empty.
The news came as a shock to Annie and not just because Tom had failed to mention it. Maybe he expected to have finished with Pilgrim by then. More shocking was the message implicit in what Diane had said. In kinder words, she was clearly telling Annie that it was time to take Grace and Pilgrim home. Annie realized how, for so long now, she had deliberately avoided confronting the issue, letting each day pass untallied in the hope that time might return the favor and ignore her too.
By midmorning they were already down below the lowest pass. The sky had clouded over. Without the cattle their progress was quicker, though in the steeper parts descent was harder than the climb and crueler by far to Annie's battered muscles. There was none of the exhilaration of the day before and in their concentration even the twins grew quiet. As she rode, Annie reflected long on what Diane had told her and longer still on what Tom had said last night. That they were just two people and that now was now and only now.
When they broke the skyline of the ridge up which Tom had wanted her to ride with him, Joe called and pointed and they all stopped to look. Far away to the south, across the plateau, there were horses. Tom told her they were the mustangs set free by the hippie woman, the one Frank called Granola Gay. It was almost the only thing he said to her all day.
It was evening and starting to rain when they reached the Double Divide. They were all too tired to talk as they unsaddled the horses.
Annie and Grace said their good-nights to the Bookers outside the barn and got into the Lariat. Tom said he'd go and check that Pilgrim was okay. His good-night to Annie seemed no more special than the one he gave to Grace.
On the way up to the creek house Grace said the sleeve of her prosthetic leg felt tight on her stump and they agreed to have Terri Carlson take a look tomorrow. While Grace went up for the first bath, Annie checked her messages.
The answering machine was full, the fax machine had spewed a whole new roll of paper over the floor and her E mail was humming. Mostly the messages expressed varying degrees of shock, outrage and commiseration. There were two others and these were the only ones Annie bothered to read in full, one with relief and the other with a mix of emotion she had yet to name.
The first, from Crawford Gates, said that with the greatest possible regret he must accept her resignation. The second was from Robert. He was flying out to Montana to spend the coming weekend with them. He said he loved them both very much.