The Home Place: A Novel Read online

  “No, he’s not, but the cops took him. Grandma wants me to stay out here for a while and get everything cleaned up.”

  “By yourself?”

  Alma shrugs. “Don’t worry, I can take care of myself.” Her words strike the wrong note. Chance turns away and moves to the front door.

  The warmth of the house has broken Maddie’s unusual silence outdoors. By the time Alma and Chance step inside, she and Jayne are back in the middle of a conversation that seems to have carried on for years. Jayne has risen from the table where she and Ed have been going over accounts near an ancient pot-belly woodstove. He is broad and well mustached, while she is small and neat, with hair in a tight perm and reading glasses on a chain. They welcome Alma with hugs and exclamations. Maddie is looking wonderful, far younger than her years, they insist, and Brittany is growing well, but Alma is too thin, looks tired, needs pie. Jayne moves more slowly than Alma remembers, favoring the hip she broke years ago barrel racing, but she bustles quickly enough as she puts on a kettle and starts extracting cookies from jars. She offers her guests chairs and covers the near end of the table with food in a few minutes. Alma recalls being a teenager in this house, the extravagant welcome, like the warm, cozy pot where the lobster luxuriates before the water starts to boil. They wanted her comfortable, at home, so that she’d settle in and stay.

  While Jayne and Maddie keep up a rapid exchange, Chance turns Alma toward the coat closet. She glances at his hands as the gloves come off. No ring.

  “I don’t know what to say about Vicky,” he offers with a headshake. “I’m sorry. Word travels fast. Mom’s trying not to say anything that will upset you, and she’s had a speech waiting for you for years. She’s liable to strain something.”

  Alma looks over to where Jayne is oversugaring Maddie’s coffee while tracking Chance and Alma in her peripheral vision. “I guess this was never going to be anything but awkward,” she says. “I had to come home. The police called early yesterday about Vicky. How did you know?”

  Chance jerks his head toward his father. “Cowboy telegraph. Dad has coffee with the boys in town every morning.”

  “Ah. Has Vicky been out here lately?”

  “Not much. Jesus.” Chance reaches up to rub his face with his hand. “She hasn’t looked good the last few times I’ve seen her. I wish—” Chance silences his wish. Alma knows why. There is too much to wish for and nothing to be done.

  Quiet settles, then Chance says, “When’s the funeral?”

  “Wednesday, one P.M., at First Church in Billings.”

  “You mind if the folks and I come? I know Mom and Dad will want to pay respects. She and Brittany stayed at your place up the road for a while, you know.”

  “No. No, I don’t mind, I mean. You should come. Everyone remembers you too.” The Murphys are old family friends, and how could the Terrebonnes not remember Chance? He was the love of her life senior year, starting the summer before. During so many summers, weekends, and holidays, Alma, Pete, and Vicky were out at the home place, wandering the land with neighbor kids like wild things. That last warm season of peace before her parents died, Chance got up the nerve to ask her to a June street dance in Hardin. After that their paths were like waters come together. They rode across the vast grazing lands, along cool creek bottoms, and onto buttes that lifted them up like demigods above the magnificence of a high plains universe. They groomed their horses outside the big Terrebonne barn, set the gleaming animals loose in the corral, made out behind sage-scented hay bales, then went inside for Maddie’s mint-flavored iced tea. It was the sort of paradise that people move through unconsciously before they understand that what you love can whiffle away like a dandelion bloom, beyond your reach in the length of a breath.

  Chance was moving into Billings to live with cousins that fall to take Advanced Placement classes. His parents wanted him to have opportunities he wouldn’t have in a small town. Even now, Alma notes, Jayne watches her son across the kitchen, concern moving over her face like a weather pattern at seeing him with Alma again. She saw the aftermath of their breakup—Alma never did.

  With his move to town, what would’ve been a short summer fling between them turned intense. When she shuts her eyes, Alma sees Chance’s face in every memory of that year—flashing glimpses of his hand loose and confident on the reins of some green horse, the back of his head in calculus, his flannel shirt under her cheek at some sweaty school dance, the shortness of breath she felt around him.

  The accident threw everything off. It sped up and then annihilated their relationship. The weekend after her parents’ funeral, on an unseasonably bitter March night, Alma found herself out at the home place with the whole family in a sort of survivalist retreat, cooking and eating and watching television in silence, huddled together because nobody knew what else to do. Then Chance came by, and after the enthrallment of the summer and the excitement of the fall—homecoming, horse shows where he rode up smelling of horse and sweat and leaned over to kiss her in front of everyone, cold evenings in the warmth of his pickup where she girlishly pushed away his hands—her desire for him now was almost as strong as her desire to get the hell out of Montana. She didn’t tell herself that she loved him—she felt she had no more heart to give—but she needed the aliveness of him like she needed oxygen.

  As she looks at him now, that’s the moment her mind homes in on, mercilessly, them in his pickup out by the cemetery that night, Alma craving his touch as the only possible balm to her wound. Before, she’d been so skittish, so virginal, but that night she was demanding. He took some convincing under the circumstances, but he was male. He loved her. He caved. It felt as if they were deciding something permanent that night, but even after that, Alma’s desire to get out, leave Montana behind her, was an urgent biological need, stronger than her hunger for Chance or the tie to the home place.

  When Alma awakes from her reverie, Chance is looking at her like she’s a manuscript in some dead language that he must decipher. Jayne calls over that coffee is ready. Alma pushes her hair back from her face and tries to shake off all this unwelcome emotion. To orient herself, she thinks of Seattle, the quiet calm of her office, and Jean-Marc. The reason she agreed to date him in the first place was that out of the blue during a colleague’s networking cocktail party, he started to tell her about his family back in Québec. A farm family, with goats and big dogs, he said. The picture of Jean-Marc, the smooth investment banker, at the heart of such a family, warmed her. She began to be able to picture him, alone among his board-stiff peers, as possibly able to survive without an Armani suit on his back. Now she is startled to realize that the farm home she’d pictured for Jean-Marc is actually the Murphys’ house. She’s been remembering and longing for all this without realizing it. How extraordinary, she reflects, that she fooled herself that way.

  As their elders continue a long and caloric coffee that’s expanding into late lunch, spreading out photos from a trip Jayne and Ed took to Alaska a few years earlier, Chance rises. “I need to check on a few things, if you’d like to see the place,” he offers to Alma.

  Alma looks up the table at the expectant faces. “Sure,” she agrees with false energy. There’s too much to remember, too many unwelcome surprises from her unconscious mind. She must get away from here before her control slips and she starts telling Chance secrets he must never, ever know. Brittany makes no move to follow them back into the cold, so Alma leaves her.

  Chance, as always, sets off to display his land and animals with a quick step and a voice like a kid reading his Christmas list. He shows her his quarter horses—he always did treat them like his children, spoiled them really—and a few pregnant heifers he’s keeping a close eye on in the barn, Jayne’s chickens, a few greenhouse experiments he has going in darkest January, how he’s taken his prefab house off-grid with solar and a geothermal heat pump. He asks her legal advice about conservation easements, something she knows nothing about, and wonders about her work in Seattle. He’s proving something to h
er, she realizes. He’s fine, he’s moved on, she didn’t break him. As they walk back from Chance’s house toward Jayne and Ed’s, he clears his throat.

  “You know how I used to mess around with engines?”

  “I remember,” Alma says. It was the best way to get him talking, while he was buried to the torso in the engine compartment of his pickup, his face hidden and his hands occupied.

  “I got a little more serious out in California, in college, and after.”

  “California? I thought you went to MSU.” Alma is cold in the wind, shifting from one foot to the other.

  “I transferred to Stanford sophomore year. Played football. I’m surprised you never heard.” Chance stands a little straighter when he mentions Stanford.

  Alma shakes her head but keeps her eyes on him. She’s avoided hearing anything about Chance. She has too much to keep from him to risk knowing him again.

  “Anyway, I kept at the tinkering. Even make some money at it these days, but it’s mostly for fun. I have a workshop in the old barn, if you want to see.” He throws all this at her fast, with a casual gesture toward the shed, already turning his shoulders toward the house. His casualness betrays him. This is important.

  “Sure, I’d love to see.” Against her better judgment Alma wants to keep talking to Chance, so she prepares herself to say something encouraging about a few bizarre Rube Goldberg contraptions. The Chance she knew back then wasn’t an inventor. He took machines apart and put them back together the way a child plays with blocks, moving the parts through his fingers without looking, learning them, testing their secrets as he carried on a spirited debate about whether or not Hoosiers was the greatest movie ever.

  When he rolls back the heavy door to the old wooden barn, a long row of skylights illuminates a sea of projects piled on every surface and hanging on racks and hooks from the ceiling. Robots, model helicopters in forms she’s never seen full-size, several types of antiquated farm machinery merged Frankenstein-like with photovoltaic panels—is that a traction engine? Is that a still? Alma turns in a circle, trying to take in everything at once.

  “What the hell?” She starts to laugh. “Have you gone survivalist?”

  Chance chuckles and folds his arms. “Let me give you the tour.” He motions with one hand and starts to walk her around, starting up the repurposed water heater that is his biodiesel refinery, showing her how to use the remote to the hexacopter, drawing a quick schematic for the photovoltaics integrated into an old pump head for watering cattle remotely in cold weather. Alma can’t stop asking questions, picking up parts—answering Chance’s questions without reflection, until she realizes that he has her talking about Vicky. Did he do it on purpose, or is it the only thing she can talk about?

  “I’ll tell you one thing I’ve been thinking about the last few days,” Alma tells him as she climbs up to the high, wide steel seat of the traction engine and situates herself with a view of the whole operation, Chance below her, one foot resting on the great heavy wheel, watching her, she knows without looking. “She was always a daredevil. When we were little, Vicky was the first one to go off the high board or jump the horses over something too high. She’d be screaming at me over her shoulder to follow her and I didn’t know whether to save myself or try to stay with her. I could barely keep her in sight and I’d be shrieking at her to slow down, but she’d just go faster.”

  “I remember her running the horses. She loved speed. Though you liked it pretty well yourself, as I recall.” Chance turns his back and leans against the big wheel. “When you three used to stay out here I remember thinking Vicky was the definition of cocksure. I’d never met another girl like her. Boys, yes, but not girls. Things were either going to turn out very well or very badly for her.” His face is hidden, but Alma hears Chance’s little sigh, as if he’s back there for a moment with young Alma, little Vicky, all of them happy and whole. “But you only really see patterns looking back, after you’ve lived them. All I knew was what I saw—you and Vicky were a lot alike, but it was like you and I had known each other forever, and there was so much I never understood about her. She was all instinct, and eventually instinct isn’t enough.”

  Alma feels too high suddenly on the big tractor and slides down to lean against the solidity of its huge barrel. “I remember wishing I could be more daring, more of a smartass, like she was. She lit the place up. And I wished I had her hair.” Alma laughs, then swallows quickly.

  “You had the luck,” he says.

  Alma pauses and looks deliberately at Chance. There’s so much he doesn’t know, and still, he’s right. She moves to sit cross-legged on the dusty floor. Chance joins her. They sit side by side, leaning up against the incredible bulk of the tractor’s rear wheel, its immutable mass. Alma looks around the barn for a few minutes before she can begin again.

  “That summer, when she was learning to walk on the prosthetic, I prayed that it be me instead. I prayed so hard—God, take my leg and give Vicky’s back, or give me crooked teeth, or pimples, or mean girls at school, whatever she was going to suffer. Whatever it was, I knew I could take it, and I knew it would destroy her. I knew.” Alma takes a long, shuddering breath. “There was a night that summer when she went so high on the swings that the chain disconnected and she took this awful fall. I thought she must have broken something. I ran over, ready to carry her home. But she was just lying there on the grass, looking at the stars. I was so upset, and she just said to me, ‘Oh Alma, don’t you get it? Nothing can hurt me now.’ After that, it was like she believed it.”

  Alma shuts her eyes and sees, for just a moment, her own body lying on the gurney, zipped into the shroud. Hers is the unlikely life. The honors, the ambition, the fire for independence—none of that makes any sense in the context of her down-home upbringing. And Vicky’s life—the starfall of it, the rush of beauty and sudden darkness—that is what belongs here. She hears Chance’s voice now, far away, a round tenor that makes the air vibrate and brings her back.

  “When I won the scholarship to Stanford, Mom told the reporter who called, ‘Things like this don’t happen to people in our family,’ and that’s what he printed. You know my mom—she always worked like hell to give us kids every opportunity, but she didn’t quite believe she could change anything for us. She and Dad never got to college. There was just too much work back on the ranches. It’s easier to believe Vicky’s story than yours or mine.” Chance studies his hands. Just as he used to, he’s spoken her thoughts.

  “You know Mrs. Jordan at Senior High told me outright that I probably wouldn’t make it at Bryn Mawr and I should try a few years at Eastern or Bozeman?”

  “That old hack? I’m glad you didn’t listen to her.”

  “Yeah. Then a few years ago, my therapist told me I should cut off communication with my family, to give myself space to develop an ‘independent ego.’ ”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I don’t know. I stopped seeing her after that.” Alma pauses, then adds, “It’s always death that changes things in my family, isn’t it? That’s what it takes to get through to us. I’d like to tell death it can’t have any more of us. It’s too much.” This time, she takes herself deliberately to the accident fifteen years ago: the black ice on I-90, the terrifying trip across the median, the semi, the explosion of light, sound, and pressure, and the sudden silence, sitting stunned in the backseat and realizing there was no front seat anymore, wandering concussed and disoriented down the ditch, trying to remember where she was. That sequence of events was missing entirely for months after the accident, and she can still repress it successfully for long periods of time. When it returns, it’s involuntary and traumatic. The images come unwanted, disabling her power of speech, leaving her staggering like the first, fatal impact. To draw it up as an act of will is new to her. She has never believed that she can control this memory.

  Chance’s eyes are on her as all this passes across her face. “I remember the day,” he says. “It was a little
before St. Patrick’s Day.”

  “Yes.” Alma is up in the rafters somewhere, looking down at herself next to Chance. “I’ve never gotten over the feeling that everyone blamed me but wouldn’t say so.”

  “Nobody blamed you, Al.” Chance’s voice reverberates.

  Alma can’t halt the words that have to come. “I could see it in their eyes at the funeral. They blamed me for walking away while Mom and Dad lay there dying, Vicky mutilated. Not a single person ever asked me what happened, and the story was all over town. Even you never asked me. All of you figured I just walked away instead of trying to help them. And then I kept on walking.” There. The words are out. What a relief to have said them.

  Chance gives his head a rueful little shake, as if he’s heard this sort of grim alienation out of her before. “Do you think people might not have asked just so you wouldn’t have to talk about it?”

  “Some people, sure. But there were others, I knew what they were thinking. People are afraid that grief and death are contagious, and they wanted me to be something I couldn’t be. They blamed me even more for going ahead and leaving for college. I went and violated the greatest and oldest taboo around here—I struck out for myself.”

  “You think you were responsible for taking over for your parents, at the age of seventeen? What about Pete? He must have been, what, twenty? What about the rest of the family?” Chance objects. His words anchor Alma back on the ground. Yes, this is exactly what she thinks. Nobody else was fit to do it.

  “Chance, you know as well as I do that Pete was such a drunk back then it was a miracle he got out of the Marines with an honorable discharge. Walt’s been a wreck as long as I’ve known him. And you knew my parents. They had their flaws, for sure, but the only proof I need that the family couldn’t get by without them is probably on an autopsy table having her brain weighed as we speak.” The words come out guttural like they’re dipped in something dark and oily, offered up as cold and ugly as anything that lurks in Alma. She is sorry to say them but glad to have them outside her, away.