The Home Place: A Novel Page 11

  “How’ve you been, Mrs. Terrebonne?” Marx’s gruff tone has changed to graciousness. Alma and Brittany trail after him down the steps, followed by Ray.

  “Oh fine, thanks. Alma was sweet enough to bring me back out. We’re going to stop by the cemetery.” Maddie gestures toward the hill. “I miss it all so.”

  “You would, wouldn’t you, a place like this?” Marx looks out over the yard, barns, and corrals, the double rows of sheltering pines and the icy bare country beyond. “I don’t know how folks can leave. This is God’s country right here.” This last comes aimed at Alma.

  Alma ignores it and asks, “Would you mind walking the barns with me too?” She looks from Marx to Ray for guidance. Ray moves toward his vehicle, showing clear deference for Marx’s jurisdiction now that he has his prisoner in custody. Marx doesn’t glance at Ray again, just leads the way to the nearest barn. Alma brings the shotgun and tows Brittany, not ready yet to leave her alone.

  In the near barn—the livestock barn—the debris of Murray’s meth operation is everywhere: empty Coleman fuel cans, soda bottles, plastic tubing, a few broken glass pipes. Marx scoffs. “Strictly small-time. I wouldn’t worry much about this guy. The ones with brains go big-time pretty fast. We’ve come across industrial-scale operations you wouldn’t believe. There was a guy last year managed to steal a whole trailer load of anhydrous from the co-op. He was supplying every meth head from here to Idaho before we busted him. Quite the entrepreneur.” Marx’s voice carries a note of admiration for a criminal mind clever enough to offer a challenge.

  Alma lines up and connects a booted toe with one of the soda bottles in a smooth punt that sails to the other end of the barn. “Son of a bitch,” she mutters under her breath. She’s picturing Murray out here, taking his chances with blowing bits of the barn across the county, but Vicky is there too, moving the home place around her childish game of Chutes and Ladders. Fall in a hole, use the family’s irreplaceable heritage to climb out, as if it’s hers alone. Being angry at Vicky is more familiar, less painful, than the waves of guilt and grief, but Alma doesn’t like it any better. She spins away from Marx, rubs at her eyes as the light hits them, and strides out of the barn with Brittany trailing after her.

  After confirming that the second barn is empty, doing a quick tour around the small bunkhouse and corrals, and poking his head into a pair of abandoned outbuildings and the museum-piece outhouse itself, Marx heads back to the first barn to collect and tag the evidence of Murray’s operation. By this time Ray is waving goodbye and turning around in the yard. Marx hands Alma a printed card with county emergency numbers and takes off too. As the dust vortices snaking behind their vehicles come to rest, peace descends. Alma and Brittany lean against the warm hood of the idling car, watching a jet contrail take shape.

  After several minutes, Alma stirs to check the gauge on the propane tank. It’s more than half full. She says a quick word to Maddie, snug in the car, and descends to the basement to check the furnace, which turns out to be clean and humming. Murray must have had his own crazy reasons for keeping the place so cold. Back upstairs, Alma ratchets up the thermostat and finds a few delinquent bills on the counter that she stacks and stores in the dish towel drawer. The store of firewood is almost untouched—Murray must not have known how to get a fire going. Alma drums her fingers on the cast-iron woodstove. Vicky sure found some winners. Brittany comes in the front door before Alma has finished building the fire and starts to stack newspapers in a corner.

  “Brittany, we’re going to be here a little while. Would you please help your great-grandma in and get her settled by the fire?” Alma asks. She pulls out her phone before remembering with an inhaled curse that it’s no use to her here. She drops it on the floor next to her purse and turns her back on it. Brittany is already moving toward the door, but she looks back with a small, sly smile when Alma’s phone hits the floor.

  Once Maddie is settled inside and the stove has started pumping heat, Alma heads out for a closer look at what kind of mess is left in the outbuildings. Brittany follows her back to the livestock barn and stands beside her, looking up into the templed space and dusty light. They both played in these stalls as children. Alma remembers driving cattle into the sturdy corrals beyond as a teenager, then hauling whatever was needed, voices shouting for her all day long as the loud, smelly business of castration and branding went on. The space is empty now, the livestock sold off. There was discussion after Grandpa Al died of renting out the home place, but there were no takers for a place with no modern bathroom. Instead Maddie has rented the grazing land and hired a neighbor to mow the hay meadows as a stopgap until the day when one of the grandchildren is ready to take over. She maintains an earnest faith in that day.

  Brittany walks from stall to stall, running her hands over the smooth wood. “I like it here,” she says, to the air rather than to Alma.

  “It’s not too bad in the house,” Alma answers. “Mostly a lot of trash to throw out. Do you want to stay out here with me for a few days and help get the place in shape?”

  “Yes!” Brittany answers, the first sign of positive emotion she’s shown since Alma’s arrival. “Burro will love it!”

  “Burro?” Alma suddenly remembers Brittany’s invisible animals, her elaborate imaginary-creature world. A few years ago, Brittany created and presented Alma with an invisible finned flying horse. He can fly along with you when you ride your bike, Brittany told her, and when you’re busy at work he’ll go down to the water and guide the ships in and out of port. The animal came with detailed care and feeding instructions. He was Alma’s to name. She never did.

  “My invisible Newfoundland. He likes the barns because they smell like animals,” Brittany says. Alma hasn’t heard Brittany mention the invisible animals in years. Their invocation is like a small bird alighting within arm’s reach, risking its delicate being to be near her.

  “I see.” Alma smiles as she turns fully to Brittany. The mention of Burro tracks her thoughts away from meth labs and prostitution, drawing them to higher ground, a place where her breath comes more easily. “You’ve had him for a while, haven’t you? How old is he?”

  “Almost four,” Brittany says without having to reflect. She turns to Alma. “I know what we should do. We should live here, you and me, on the home place. And I’ll have room for Burro and all my invisible animals.”

  “How many are there?” Alma asks, smiling. “These barns aren’t that big.”

  “Oh, not that many. And maybe I could get a real animal sometime.” Brittany gazes fondly at the place where Burro would be visible, if Alma could see him.

  Alma walks up to Brittany, shifts the heavy shotgun to the other shoulder, and puts an arm around her niece. “Honey,” she begins, preparing herself to tell Brittany that this is only for a few days, to get the place cleaned up in the optimistic expectation of new tenants, that there’s no way they can stay here, how impossible that is. But right here, in this moment, the words stage a sit-down protest and won’t come out. “We’re here today. And we’ll figure out tomorrow.”

  Brittany hears the evasion and turns to Alma with the skeptical gaze she’s recently acquired. “Mom and I lived out here for a few years. I know the kids. There’s lots of room for you to have an office.”

  Alma eyes the heavy rafters, looking for the deus ex machina that can get her out of this one. “We’ll talk about it later, babe.”

  Brittany isn’t quite done yet. “She likes to come out here,” she says, startling Alma.

  “Who? Your mom?”

  “Mm-hm. Out to the barns. She likes to sit at the back door and watch the clouds in the summertime. Over there.” Brittany points to the far end of the barn, where another great door is shut tightly against the invading winter. “She tells me about where the clouds are going.”

  “Where they’re going?”

  Brittany smiles—another of these simple, joyful smiles that illumine Alma’s heart—and takes a few steps toward the back door. “She
has different stories every time. Like she’ll point at one she says looks like a guitar and say, ‘It’s going to Chicago and on to Nashville, and there’ll be a singer who’ll look up and see it.’ And she tells me all about the singer, how she comes from a little town and writes all her own songs and one day somebody important heard her sing on the radio.”

  “Are all these stories about people she made up?” Alma traces Brittany’s steps, drawn into her story, letting Brittany’s galloping imagination carry away all that weighs on them.

  “Well, not always. Sometimes she tells me stories about you. You know, ‘Alma’s going to argue a big case’ or ‘Alma’s going to Japan to negotiate a deal.’ Just made-up stuff, like that.”

  “Really? But she was so angry with me the last time I saw her. I’m surprised she’d tell you stories about me.”

  Brittany makes a gesture that might be a shrug but comes across as only a shift in her oversized coat. “I mean, I know she gets mad at you sometimes. But she wants to be like you. She says things like, ‘There, now Alma will be proud of us when she comes home.’ ”

  The sunlight razoring through the cracks in the barn walls goes blurry for a second and Alma blinks hard. “I never knew. I thought she hated me.”

  Brittany laughs. “But you’re sisters. You always love your sister.” Humming Patsy Cline to herself, Brittany turns and strides with her loose, little-girl walk out of the barn. Alma can almost see Burro at her side, the great, protective creature padding beside his small creator.

  Outside, Brittany breaks into a jog in the direction of the swing set south of the house. She brushes snow from the higher swing, kicks her legs out, and begins to pump the swing. Alma joins her and sits to dangle in the second swing. From the beginning she expected tears from Brittany, not the disturbing silence and now the even more disturbing hints that Brittany has repressed Vicky’s death entirely.

  It cannot last. Alma half expects Brittany to be crying when her face swings back into view, but the face that meets the horizon now, in violent motion, is dreamy, not weepy. Brittany moves higher and higher until the chains slacken for a long second at the apex of her swing. In an instant, they’re back in Billings, Alma and Vicky, on the night when Vicky fell from a swing. Alma jumps from her swing in a sudden panic to stop Brittany, bring her down to safety, but Brittany is far from her control. Her hair flies wildly, one direction then the other, a maelstrom around her face.

  “Stop! Stop, Brittany, come down!” Alma pleads. Brittany drops her feet to drag herself to a halt on the frozen dirt below, looking up at Alma in surprise. “We have work to do,” Alma says, to hide her embarrassment, and leads Brittany inside.

  As Alma searches for cleaning products, she peeks through the doorway into the wide front room that runs the width of the house, lit by big west-facing windows onto the front porch. Brittany and Maddie are together in the rocking chair, arms tight around each other, heads tucked close, almost exactly the same height. Their strong, high cheekbones and wide-set eyes are nearly identical. Brittany’s dark hair hangs limply down her back and Maddie’s is dyed lighter and styled, but other than that they could be two ends of a set of time-lapse photographs. Brittany has lost so much so early, and yet, still to have this—her great-grandmother, her home place—these are priceless. Alma shuts her eyes and allows herself to know, just for a moment, how much she’s missed these things, this place. Then she hangs up her coat, unfolds a rag, and gets to work.

  Tossing out the first bag of trash, Alma screws up her face in disgust when she realizes that the frozen two-liter soda bottles in a long row on the back porch are full of urine. “Oh, God help me,” she mutters as it occurs to her to wonder if Murray made it to the outhouse with the rest of his output. She takes out a long-handled broom and tackles the cobwebs hanging from drapes and moldings in the front room, cleaning up first for Maddie, who let out a small shriek when she stepped into the kitchen.

  “Give me a hand with the dusting?” she prompts Brittany with a rag and spray can of polish. Brittany pops up and begins to work earnestly at the hand-lathed rails of the banister. When they’ve cornered the worst of the dust, Alma and Brittany stop to take in the room. As carefully insulated, sided, roofed, and weather stripped as Alma’s father and grandfather left the house, the elements have made very few inroads all these years later. Within is a pine-scented serenity of stained wood and smooth, varnished edges. At the back, the big kitchen and pantry anchor the whole house. The wide staircase rises up the southern end of the front room to the three bedrooms, the steps worn but not bowed, the precious circular window a porthole in spring onto a greasy-grass sea. Alma looks out one of the front windows onto the long, deep porch and feels the same sense of time travel she’s always experienced here. This house was built to endure.

  “The house smells funny,” Brittany says, her first words since coming inside again, “but it still feels the same.”

  “Yes,” Alma answers with pride. She didn’t build it, she doesn’t technically own it, but it’s hers in every way that matters, right down to the feeling they all get coming inside—a shrug and a sigh, a lifting of burdens.

  Alma’s great-grandfather Charles Terrebonne married the only daughter of a struggling family of Yankee homesteaders who, upon losing the family matriarch, decided to give up on their gorgeous spread of harsh land and move to town. Together with the daughter, Eliza Stoddard, and some of his hardworking French-Canadian and Métis kin, Charles razed the leaning, drafty homesteaders’ cabin and from its strong foundations built, with traditional carpentry tools he’d carried from Québec, this house. He learned the cattle ranching business from Eliza and took a while to master it. Eliza was the hardheaded one, the cussed youngest child who refused to sell out and go to town, who knew with an unpopular certainty that she could make a go where her father and brothers had failed. Charles was in love with her as only a sentimental, superstitious Frenchman can be. He followed her willingly into the unknown. For her part, Eliza loved him all her life with the earnestness of a sweet, smitten young bride—but she loved her land more.

  The house has begun to have a museum feel, so disinclined has been every single Terrebonne generation to change anything about their surroundings. Although running water and electricity arrived at last on the home place, there is still no indoor bathroom, because the only obvious space for it was the kitchen pantry, with its elegantly executed bins and nooks, or the upstairs linen closet, with its glowing cedar cabinetry. The basement, from the original cabin, is no more than a low-ceilinged root cellar. Al and Maddie made do with an outhouse and chamber pots rather than remove a nail that Charles had hammered or mar the strong lines of the house with some abomination of an addition.

  More than a hundred years later, the double-hung windows move soundlessly and shut out the fiercest winds. The drawers roll effortlessly in built-in cabinets throughout the house. The floors don’t creak. There is art to each room, and a clarity of purpose that makes the very air a comfort to breathe.

  “Look at that.” Alma gestures to the soft pine floors where Murray has been extinguishing cigarettes. “I should’ve kicked his butt when I had the chance.”

  “You?” Brittany giggles.

  Alma gives her a sidelong grin. “I have moves you know nothing about.”

  They work in silence. Maddie sits where she has a view from the front window, looking across the porch to the small square of lawn and the much larger garden enclosure beyond. Alma and Brittany are in the kitchen when a scraping noise becomes audible out front, like clumsy footsteps, or something being dragged. Alma snatches up the shotgun and makes her way to the window next to the front door. Maddie is frozen in her chair and says nothing. When Alma peers out, the yard is full of antelope, scratching through the snow to what’s left of the grass. Alma waves Brittany over. Their muffled laugh is a relief.

  Pronghorns, she should say, but antelope is her father’s word for them. He had a gift for spotting wildlife from absurd distances—the sl
ightest movement on the landscape was enough to draw his eye, then he’d pull Alma to stand under his arm and look until she saw. Alma remembers vast fleets of pronghorns spread out over the high pastures in her childhood, before there were quite so many fences. Where deer jump like gazelles, pronghorns pull up their cheetah sprints to turn or even try to duck under the barbwire. Up close to the house like this they seem frail and goatlike, pawing through the snow cover at the tender grass, tossing black horns, flashing white-blaze necks. And there, hanging from the whitewashed porch rail, is Grandpa Al’s cane, the one he used the last dozen years of his life, a presence and a talisman, alive as the antelope.

  When at last the antelope move around the corner of the house, Alma turns, feeling lighter, and goes up to the bright southeast bedroom to make Brittany’s bed with flannel sheets, wool blankets, and a heavy quilt out of what’s left in the linen closet. They never really emptied the home place. No one could bear to do that. Alma smoothes the corners, arranging the scene with precision, fluffing up the pillow, thinking how the room will look to Brittany when she sees it again. Its shabbiness hurts her—the vertical tear in the handmade yellow curtains, a slight peel of paint where the morning sun hits the far wall. A maternal protectiveness steals over her: Brittany will have what she needs. She will be cared for and loved. She will not be hurt, not here. She is beginning to comprehend the oceanic nature of her feelings about Vicky’s death, sometimes a smooth surface Alma can easily cross over, then welling up like a tide, something that could take her altogether if she’s not careful. Alma’s hands fall still on the double wedding-ring quilt, paralyzed momentarily by the totality of grief, how bodily it is, and the accompanying terror that honoring her sense of duty to Brittany will end her own life as she knows it.