The Home Place: A Novel Read online

  The sound of Brittany jogging up the stairs shakes Alma into movement. She turns around with a smile as Brittany enters the room. “How does it look?” she asks.

  “Nice.” Brittany smiles back and comes a few steps closer. “I haven’t had my own room since we lived out here,” she admits.

  “Well, this is all yours.” Alma squeezes her shoulder, leaving alone the temporary nature of the arrangement.

  Brittany’s fingers fall to the tiny stitches on the quilt. “Mom is here, you know,” she tells Alma in a softer voice.

  Alma snaps around to look at her. “Oh?” Her forced calm makes the question come out like a half gulp.

  “She’s trying to make me feel better. She’s glad you and Great-Grandma are here. Burro saw her first, but he didn’t want to tell me.” Brittany looks down with sympathy at Burro, stroking his invisible head, which hits nearly at her elbow.

  “Why not?”

  Brittany shrugs and moves away from Alma toward the east-facing window, overlooking the outbuildings. She fingers the disintegrating curtains. “He was afraid it would hurt me. But it doesn’t. I’m glad she’s here.”

  “I know she loved you very much.” Alma swallows. If there are ghosts anywhere, there ought to be ghosts here. The home place would hold a potluck and dance for ghosts if any were out there to attend. And whether Alma believes or not, what harm can it do to let Brittany believe that her mother is present to comfort her? Alma backs out of the room, leaving Brittany to watch a few antelope cross in front of the barns as she whispers occasionally to Burro.

  When the locksmith arrives, he scares off the antelope. Alma comes out to greet him as he hops out of his pickup and approaches at an energetic pace.

  “You’re Al’s granddaughter, ain’t you?” The man pulls the leather work glove from his hand and grips hers. Even in this cold, there are proprieties. He will not shake a woman’s hand with his glove on. She introduces herself. “Hank Olson. Al and I were in the Masons together. When I got the sheriff’s message I came first thing.” Hank is a bustling little Swede, the runt of some robust litter, several inches shorter than Alma, with a walleye that gazes distractingly to the left behind thick glasses. He looks in the direction of the retreating antelope. “It never lets go of you, does it, no matter how far you go? When your family goes back as far as yours and mine do, this land is like your mother. My friend Ed up the road says he don’t know if that’s a blessing or a curse.” Hank gestures in the direction of the Murphy place, just out of sight.

  “So about these locks—” Alma attempts, but Hank is far from done talking.

  “How long you been gone then, Alma?” Hank asks, hands on hips, getting to the important information first.

  “About five years, this last time. Since Grandpa’s funeral.” She says these last three words slowly, trying to draw his attention back to the house.

  “Oh right, right. It was a shame to lose him. He knew his way around an engine better than any man I’ve ever met.”

  Alma stands quite still. Hank’s supportive hand squeezes her elbow.

  “I’m sorry,” he says. “I didn’t mean to upset you.”

  Abruptly, Alma shakes his hand off. “I’d like to change the door locks,” she says in a loud voice, turning away from him. “Come on, I’ll show you.”

  As he works, Hank obligingly fills her in on all the local news without her asking: weddings; divorces; babies; deaths by old age, suicide, and accident; and of course the occasional and richly cherished victories of the local high school teams. The new mine going in. The fiasco with the unused jail. He’s midway through the story of Chance Murphy’s big-city wife and how any fool could have seen that wasn’t going to work when Brittany steps out on the porch where Hank is fitting a dead bolt. Alma doesn’t see her at first, fixated as she is on the horizon in an effort not to react to Chance Murphy’s name in a way that will restart local gossip.

  “Well hello there, young lady,” Hank greets Brittany with a nod over his busy hands. “Are you Alma’s daughter?”

  Brittany pauses for a long moment, gives Hank a considered nod, and hurries back inside.

  By the time Hank has changed all the exterior locks, told all his stories, tried unsuccessfully to pitch Alma an alarm system his nephew sells, and completed a long and friendly goodbye, Alma can barely feel her fingers and toes, and the noonday sun has passed them. Like on one of her long days at the office, she’s lost track of the last time she ate, drank, went to the toilet. She braves the outhouse and hurries back inside. Hank has hardly been gone long enough for Alma to start to warm up near the stove when the gravel drive alerts again.

  “The peace and quiet of the country,” Alma mutters and stalks to the back door, where everyone seems to pull up. A new white Ram extended-cab pickup—clean like no Big Horn County vehicle ever is—hums just beyond the back porch. Out comes a tall, broad fellow in a shearling coat and a beautiful gray felt cowboy hat that doesn’t fit quite right. His smile matches the shiny white paint job.

  “Well hello there!” he booms, leaning across the hood of the pickup the way ranchers do, secure behind their 6.7-liter Cummins. On him the move looks practiced. “I heard in town that some of the family might be out here. I’m Rick Burlington. I don’t believe we’ve met.”

  “Alma Terrebonne. Just a second.” Alma goes inside, shuts the door, and sees Brittany standing in the doorway to the front room, watchful. “Do me a favor—go upstairs and turn on some lights, make some noise, okay, like there are more people here. It’s the mine guy outside and I don’t like the looks of him.”

  Without question, Brittany turns, and as Alma reopens the door she hears heavy footsteps pound up the stairs.

  Rick looks a little taken aback by Alma’s lockjawed welcome, but he wraps the smile back around his face and comes out from behind the pickup. “Sorry, don’t mean to interrupt anything. I just wanted to welcome you back to the neighborhood. You finding everything you need out here?”

  From upstairs, a noise drifts down like something heavy being dragged. Alma looks down to hide a smile. “We’re doing fine, thanks,” she tells Burlington as she shuts the door and steps out onto the porch. “You live around here?” She eyes his Colorado plates.

  “Billings, temporarily. I’m from Denver, but work has me up here in this neck of the woods. I just love it. God’s country for sure, as they say.” Burlington hikes up the steps without invitation to stand a little closer than Alma likes and thrust his gloved hand at her. She steps away to put herself directly in front of the doorknob.

  “What kind of work?”

  “I’m a landman for Harmony Coal. It’s a great company. I tell you, Alma, they do so much for the community. Just last year they contributed—”

  “What’s a landman for Harmony Coal doing on my porch, Mr. Burlington?” Alma interrupts the litany of Harmony’s service to humanity, putting on her most lawyerly tone of cross-examination, but Burlington doesn’t seem to be the sort of man who’s put off by a less-than-enthusiastic welcome. She’d almost say he expects it.

  “Like I say, just welcoming you back. We’re working on tying up some mineral leases in the area and I like to make sure I know all the landowners. Am I right that Maddie Terrebonne is still the landowner here?”

  Alma pulls her head back and looks at Burlington with even less warmth. Her first thought is to tell this glad-handing prick to do his job and look up the land records at the courthouse, but some vestige of Maddie’s hospitality, or professional prudence, restrains her. “That’s right,” she says.

  Rick pulls a folded document out of an inside pocket of his coat. “This is the mineral lease I need her to—”

  “No,” Alma snaps.

  “I beg your pardon?” Burlington feigns surprise, then continues in a wheedling tone. “I think you’ll find that it’s a very—”

  “No.” Alma takes a step forward to get into Burlington’s personal space. See how he likes it. “We’re not interested in any lease. Ge
t off our property.”

  Brittany chooses the perfect moment to clatter back down the stairs in what sounds like Al’s old steel-toe work boots. Burlington glances at the house, then out toward the barns, where Alma has parked the sedan out of sight. No telling how many people might be here. He knows it and she knows it. His face reflects a quick decision.

  “Well sure. I didn’t mean to cause any offense. Just doing my job, ma’am. But you know, in the next stage of mining, this place will be surrounded on all sides, blasting and hauling going on three hundred sixty degrees around you. Folks who hold out always regret it, and later the money won’t be so good. If you want my advice—”

  “I don’t. And I asked you to leave. I’ll post the place and call the sheriff if I see strangers on our land again.”

  “All righty then. See you later, Miss Terrebonne.” Before heading back to the pickup, Burlington straightens to his full height, at least six two, and allows Alma to take in his size. The smile is gone. Then he jogs to the pickup and loses no time spinning snow and gravel down the drive.

  “Perfect,” Alma growls before going back to Brittany. This is all we need.

  “What did he want this time?” Brittany asks from the bottom of the staircase, stepping out of Al’s trashed old boots.

  “You know him?” Alma’s voice lifts in surprise. But of course Brittany must have seen Rick many times.

  “He always used to bother Mom. She was afraid of him.” Brittany grabs the worn newel-post with both hands and swings on it a little, nervously.

  “Why would she be afraid of him?”

  “She says he gets people alone and threatens them. She says that’s how he gets people to sign.” Brittany is talking to the newel-post now, refusing to meet Alma’s eyes, getting quieter and quieter.

  “Well, I was just alone with him and he didn’t threaten me. And why would he threaten your mom? She didn’t own this place.”

  Brittany casts her eyes around the living room, where Maddie is still watching rapt from the front window as if a Shakespeare company is playing on the lawn. Her hearing aid is off and she seems to have caught none of the conversation. “He wanted her to get Great-Grandma to sign. He offered her money if she could.”

  “What did she say?”

  “Mom?” Brittany knots her fingers together around the post and stares down. “She kept promising we’d move out, like, every day. So I thought maybe—” She jerks her head toward the back of the house where Burlington’s pickup had been.

  “Oh, sweetheart.” Alma crosses the remaining space between them and folds her arms around Brittany. “Your mom loved you and she loved this place. I’m sure she was trying to do the right thing.”

  “Alma?” Brittany’s voice is muffled in Alma’s sweater.

  “Yes, honey?”

  “Did somebody kill her?”

  Alma swallows. In her own tragedy at least she was spared this, but the news will be all over Billings with the morning paper. She can no more protect Brittany from this truth than she can stop the sun breaking immense across the eastern plains. “I don’t know, baby. We’ll find out.”

  Brittany is not a child given to tears or hysterics. Her arms tighten around Alma’s waist, but she gives no other sign of distress. Alma has a detached, clinical feeling that they both ought to be crying, and hard, but neither of them was raised on emotion. Their ability to endure lies in a steely core of reserve, handed down from Eliza and the ancestors.

  The home place is peaceful around them. A log snaps in the woodstove. Alma breathes in the strength gathered in the quiet. She holds Brittany as she remembers their elders’ embrace, still and calm, all of them in this room even now, the ancestors around them, maybe even Vicky, beyond words but not beyond reach.

  After a very long time, so long that Alma’s toes are beginning to feel warm again inside her boots, Brittany speaks in a still, small voice. “Can I sleep in your bed tonight?”

  Alma nods against the top of Brittany’s head. “Yes, sweetheart. Of course you can.”

  CHAPTER 9

  MONDAY, 2 P.M. MOUNTAIN STANDARD TIME

  Delivering Maddie back to Billings, Alma takes the road past the Murphys’ Little m Ranch, just to see how the place looks these days. She recalls old Ed Murphy lecturing at the table about how once you let the little things go, the whole place is on a quick slide to ruin. Sure enough, the property remains unchanged: no sagging fences, no broken siding, all the outbuildings in good repair, even a new prefabricated house set well back from the road, with a tidy apron and a small deck. All clean and well-maintained, from the outbuildings to the house to the cattle themselves, who still seem to stand a little straighter than the average black Angus, while the Terrebonne clan has packed up and let meth dealers and antelope move in. Alma blushes and drives by, feeling the full length of the fifteen years since she was last here trailing out behind her.

  The driver of a pickup coming the opposite direction down the two-lane dirt road spots her and slows down. Murphy’s Law rules in this valley: it has to be Chance, and it is. He stops the pickup even with her and rolls down the window. “Well, I’ll be damned,” he says.

  Looking up at him in his heavy Carhartt jacket and black wool Scotch cap, Alma grins involuntarily out of sheer discomfort. “Bad penny,” she smartasses back.

  Chance stares at her, then slowly leans over to turn off a radio crackling with the farm report, contemplating. Finally he says, “Come on up to the house. Mom and Dad will want to see you.”

  Alma is glad for her gloves so that Chance can’t see how badly she’s white-knuckling the steering wheel. She wants a nice chatty coffee with the Murphys about as much as she wants to see that asshole landman again, but there’s no civil way to say no. “Yeah, okay, just a quick visit. I’ve got Grandma with me.”

  “Who is it, honey?” Maddie tries to lean over far enough to see who’s at the high pickup window.

  “Chance Murphy, Grandma.”

  “That nice Murphy boy who used to take you out?” Maddie says at such volume that Chance must be able to hear.

  “Yes, Grandma.” Alma’s face grows warm even in the bitter cold of the open window.

  “Hello, Mrs. Terrebonne,” Chance shouts down, then pulls forward to lead the way on to the Little m headquarters.

  Alma spins the car to follow him. In front of the main house they get out and go through the motions of getting Maddie out of the car, Chance welcoming her and Brittany. They’ve both been at the home place much more recently than Alma. They greet Chance in a comfortable, neighborly way, while Alma stands back and observes, trying to keep her body language more relaxed than she feels. When last she saw him, he was a high school rodeo star bent on breaking as many bones as possible. He has the same lean, narrow frame, the same low-heeled roper’s boots and jeans, the same brown eyes. Intriguing. The misalignment of his nose was new then. Now it fits the maturity in his face. For once Maddie doesn’t stand around chatting for half an hour in the cold, but leads Brittany toward the house. Chance turns to Alma.

  “Al.” Chance doesn’t look at her as he shuts the car door. There it is, the endearment, the name only he has ever called her. “It’s a terrible thing,” he says. Alma bows her head: he knows. She blows out the breath she’s been holding.

  “I’m glad I don’t have to break that one to you. Exposure, they think. She was drunk.” No reason to advertise the homicide investigation. “It’s good to see you.” Alma smiles and feels the unaccustomed movement in her frozen, tense cheeks.

  Chance just looks at her, not unfriendly but not smiling either. Awkwardness overwhelms Alma and she looks away. Some kind of a tank with pipes sits behind the cab of the pickup. “What’s that?” Alma asks, just to have something to say.

  “Biodiesel, and a tank and fuel line warmer so it doesn’t jell in the cold. I brew it right here out of used cooking oil. Just got another batch in town.” As he explains, he adopts that slight, thoughtful stoop so many ranchers have as they discuss the
ir pet projects, she notices, hands in his pockets, making only the occasional economical gesture. When he’s done, he straightens. Unlike Burlington’s, Chance’s mannerisms are natural, unself-conscious.

  “Biodiesel?” She’s heard about biodiesel in Seattle, but of course it would have come first from the people who’ve spent a century cooking up every imaginable way to survive in a business that sometimes seems invented to destroy them.

  “Almost free fuel, and nobody has to drill my backyard for it.” Chance steps back and glances off to the east, frowning toward something beyond their line of sight.

  “I haven’t seen drilling rigs around here.”

  “Just wait. They’re coming, that or the mines.”

  “We just had a visit from Harmony Coal.” She gestures with her own head back toward the home place, unconsciously mimicking his economy of movement.

  “That’s them. Subbituminous coal.” Chance says the words like vulgarities.

  Alma nods at the snug prefab uphill a few hundred yards from the old place. “Is that new place yours?”

  “All mine,” Chance confirms. “We put it in when I came back after Dad got cancer, about four years ago, not long after your granddad passed.”

  “I was so sorry to hear about your dad. Is he doing better?”

  “According to him, never better.” Chance casts a dubious glance at his father’s low, sturdy ranch house. “Everything all right up at your place?”

  “We had a little trouble. There was a meth head up there we had to get rid of.”

  Chance rubs at his clean-shaven jaw. “I’ve noticed movement up around there, but I thought it could be one of you. Didn’t want to pry. If you want me to keep a closer eye on the place, I will. You be careful, though. That guy’s not gonna be nice people.”