The Home Place: A Novel Page 16

  “Nobody from outside ever has had any idea what I come from,” Alma says, concentrating on how the zipper pull of Chance’s jacket reflects the white sunlight, shimmering above Mae’s head. “There’s no way I could explain.” It’s never occurred to her that it’s possible to communicate between those two worlds.

  “That’s just it. How can you show what our lives are without demeaning the struggle people go through every day to keep one of these old places together, keep food on the table? How do you show how hard it is—not romanticize it—without discounting the richness? Or are we just an anachronism, like the Amish? The most important thing to me was just to know that there are other people out there, thinking about rural art and culture along with agronomy and what the land will bear, reading guys like Wendell Berry and Wes Jackson. Those books saved my life the last few years.” He turns his head to look straight at Alma, his eyes lit with the sort of excitement he used to reserve for a great saddle bronc. Alma leads Lulabel in step beside him, drawn in by this person she never knew, grafted onto someone so familiar. She opens her mouth to answer, but the words form slowly.

  “What happened?” She can’t stop listening now. She wants this pain, needs to feel it at last.

  Chance has a very firm grip on Mae and the reins. “When Dad had the heart attack and I had to come back, she said she wanted to come too, try to puzzle it out for herself. It was supposed to be temporary. She came out here to paint and then all of a sudden she was pregnant. I got this crazy idea that we’d get married and raise the baby here, so we flew to Vegas.” His smile is less amused than rueful. “Mom’s still sore about that. Then after Mae came it was like Hilary never recovered. She could hardly get out of bed for months, couldn’t work, hardly talked. I understand about postpartum depression, but it was more than that. The isolation wore her down. Plus she was scared of the horses. She’s a city girl to the bone, and all this is . . .” Chance gestures with his head toward his land.

  “She had no idea what she was getting into,” Alma says without emphasis. It’s too obvious. City people come and go, fall in love with Montana like Steinbeck, then find the big sky oppressive, the reserved people and their closed-off culture too difficult, the winters too long, the great spaces perversely claustrophobic. They leave as precipitously as they came.

  “You know what it’s like,” Chance says. “You work your tail off twelve months a year and live or die by three hours at the livestock auction in February. Normal people can’t take it. Eventually she blamed me. So she went back to San Francisco, Mae splits her time between here and there, and life goes on. It’s been a couple years now. We visit. It’s a shame you won’t get to meet her. You’d like her, when she’s herself.”

  Alma hunches her shoulders. How little men understand about women. She needs to know about Hilary, but she’d like to meet her about as much as she’d like to put her tongue on the pump handle. It’s her own job to break Chance’s heart. Alma tries to conjure up a picture of a San Francisco installation artist living out here, miles from town, with right-wing talk radio on the only stations that come in and no cell phone coverage. She’s grateful to Hilary for taking over the top spot on Jayne’s list of people to push off a ledge, but that’s it.

  “How long does Mae stay with you?” she inquires, to distract Chance from the nervous energy of her own body—fingers twitching, toes wiggling in her stirrups. This will have to be a short ride, she thinks as the cold grows sharper.

  “We’re going month on, month off right now. She changes so quickly that if we make it any longer, we miss too much, but it’s a big expense taking her back and forth. And it’ll all have to change when she starts school.”

  Brittany looks back for directions and Chance waves her onto the trail that winds up to the top of the butte. “How about you? Man in your life?”

  Alma nods. “Jean-Marc. He’s an investment banker. Spends a lot of time doing deals in Asia.”

  “Is that what you went looking for?” Chance asks.

  “I didn’t go looking for anything.” Alma’s voice is so quiet now that she’s not sure he’ll hear her, and not sure she wants him to. “I just went.”

  The horses take off at a trot up the switchback trail, out of the quiet valley and up onto a windy ridge. Alma examines the sky, watching for the red-tailed hawks that swoop down the air currents to fall on whatever small creature ventures out. This is the landscape she longed for in Seattle. It gives her a winged feeling, like Vicky’s tattooed wings soaring on high, knowing the breadth and space and texture of air that is like the air of no other place on earth, leaning into it, uplifted and at peace. She turns to look back over the valley, past the Little m to the home place in the distance, almost hidden by a small hill but visible from this aerie. “Have you ever seen anything more beautiful?” she says.

  Chance comes alongside her to stare out at the bare, icy landscape. He lifts his chin slightly. “There’s nothing like it.”

  Chance strikes out to the east along a path Alma remembers, taking them toward another vista from which she knows the ranchland will unroll for many miles, unbroken to the brown horizon, heart-stopping at sunrise. The horses jog along, breathing steam like dragons. Mae chatters at her father about a fox that crossed their path on the last ride. Now Brittany lags behind, watchful.

  Alma and Lulabel gain the viewpoint first. Alma raises her eyes from her horse to the eastern horizon and cannot stifle a sharp shriek. “Chance!” she cries. “What is that?”

  In the middle distance, a black crater covers several square miles of the ranchland Alma remembers. Machinery moves across it so visibly at this great distance that it must be Brobdingnagian up close. Great clouds of black dust rise and float on a northwest wind, dark portents over spoil piles extending south along the valley in knobby, regular hills. Haul roads trace the land like new, dirty veins. The creek and trees that used to traverse the valley are entirely gone.

  “This is what’s been going on the last two years.” Chance turns his back into the wind to shelter Mae. “They’re trying to expand in our direction. Sometimes we can feel the blasts all the way over at our place.”

  “Whose land is this?”

  “Most of it that they’re on now is either BLM land or the Gingrich place, who got it from the railroad. It had all passed to the kids out of state, so they just sold off the mineral rights. Never even talked to the neighbors. And the feds don’t care what we think. Now the landmen are leaning hard on folks who own the next tracts they want, so they can mine straight across to tribal land. It costs them a fortune to dismantle those draglines and start up on a new site.”

  “The Crow are letting them mine?”

  Chance squints in the direction of the reservation, to the southwest, and nods with cold eyes. “Tribal government can’t sign the contracts fast enough. All they see is dollar signs, and the historic preservation office is as crooked as they come.”

  Alma is trembling. She turns her face away from the view and nudges Lulabel back down the trail, the others descending with her out of the wind. As they step down onto level ground again, she feels Lulabel straining at the reins, wanting to run, and Alma opens her arms and lets her. She knows how wrong, how rude it is to ride away from the others, but her whole soul is stretched out in flight like Lulabel’s, unharnessed, unhinged. Together they flee the horror behind them, stretched out, hearts pounding, Lulabel answering the tremors in Alma’s body with flight, with blessed escape, running flat out for both of them on the smooth old stock trail, light hooves skimming the frozen earth in a cadence like skin drums. They flee together as Alma weeps, back toward the Little m—Chance, Mae, and Brittany trailing far behind. A quarter mile or so short of the barn, Alma reins in Lulabel. It will never do to let her run all the way in. Alma glances over her shoulder at the others far off up the ridge and drops her head, mortified at her loss of control.

  When Alma arrives back at the barn, she brings Lulabel inside, out of the wind, carries the saddle to its st
and and braces herself against the wall. The sobs that wouldn’t come at the morgue, or as she and Brittany held each other in the kitchen at the home place, have arrived. Alma fights them hard, but it’s several minutes before she can raise her head, take a steady breath, and let go of the wall. At last, a little better composed, she stows Jayne’s clothes, reaches for grooming tools to carry back to Lulabel, then takes a big step back and nearly falls over Chance.

  “Steady there,” he says in the voice he uses with the horses, taking her elbow to turn her around. She looks up at him, her face icy with frozen tears. The girls have dismounted and run in for Jayne’s hot chocolate. Chance holds the horses’ heads and they observe from his shoulders like a pair of nosy aunties. His heavy wool cap with earflaps pulled down looks a little silly, but his brown eyes are bright in the dim barn as he leans down to brush her lips with a light, tender kiss. He moves away without a word to tend the horses.

  If Alma was unsteady before, now she’s legless. She reaches behind her for something to fall onto and comes down safely on an old wooden tack box just below knee height. The strain of the hard ride home is still in her arms and legs, her heart beating as fast as Lulabel’s.

  Chance’s kiss takes her places she can’t afford to go. She is back at the street dance in Hardin that was their first date, two-stepping awkwardly with a boy who’s between hay and grass, all long legs and broad cowboy hat, with such a big rodeo belt buckle that it might pull his pants down. Her parents are dancing together on the far side of the dance space, glancing over now and then, trying not to hover but not altogether hiding their anxiety about Alma and the Murphy boy. Anne in particular has no intention of letting anything distract her daughters from the goal of college, the security of an education. After the accident, Alma will adopt her mother’s ambitions for herself, but for now she ignores them and focuses instead on Chance’s hand at her waist, her hand on his shoulder, their sweaty palms together for the first time under yellow streetlights.

  The end of the song, and Chance doesn’t release her hand, but walks her toward the quiet south end of the street where the lights high above them at the top of the grain elevator are the only illumination. They sit on the curb. He asks if she’s thirsty, and when she looks up at him to say no, he takes off his hat, leans in, and kisses her, just like that, no warning. She’s a skinny sixteen-year-old who’s only just begun to notice the way Chance lays himself flat on the back of a good saddle bronc in flight, all unleashed muscle and sweat as the small-town crowd screams, or the way he lopes to retrieve his hat afterward, surreptitiously spitting in his palm and trying to make his cowlicked hair lie down. She doesn’t know what to do with his sweet little closemouthed kiss. She stares like she did the time he handed her a live tiger salamander. Chance laughs and stretches out his long legs.

  “Look,” he says. “Orion.”

  That at-sea feeling she had then, on the curb, hoping she wouldn’t have to stand up soon, wondering nervously if that brief encounter of lips really counted as a first kiss—it’s back full force as Alma sits on the tack box in the Murphys’ barn and tries to steady herself enough to stand. It is damned unfair that Chance should still have this effect on her. Did he teach her this reaction to him, back when she didn’t know any better? How does a person go about unlearning a thing like that?

  When Alma regains her feet and leaves the barn, Chance is still brushing the horses, fussing over something knotted in Lulabel’s tail.

  “So you know a little about what’s been going on with Vicky? Anything that might help figure out who did this?” Alma asks as she picks up a comb from the fence rail and starts on Lulabel’s tousled mane, trying to mask her compulsive eagerness to get at the truth and hoping Chance won’t say anything about the way she ran.

  Chance shakes his head. “I doubt it. I knew more when they lived out here. I’ve been checking on them now and then when I go into town. I’m teaching an agribusiness class at the college Thursday afternoons. One of those landmen I told you about, he’s been coming after Vicky, trying to get to your grandma through her.”

  “Brittany told me. I told you one of them stopped by yesterday—Rick Burlington?”

  Chance snorts in the general direction of Lulabel’s tail. “That’s his name. We usually just refer to him as ‘that asshole.’ Your grandma told them to go to hell, which was a lot more polite than what I told them. But Rick gave Vicky a copy of the lease and offered her some kind of deal to get Maddie to sign it. She’s been carrying that thing around, scribbling notes on the back of it. Last time I saw her we argued about it. I told her to burn the damn thing and she gave me some song and dance about how much the money would mean to Brittany and what a dilemma it was. Dilemma my ass. She owed money to everybody in town, including me, and she just needed time to work on Maddie.” Chance pauses in his brush work and stands up to look Alma in the eye. “You don’t know what she was like lately. She would’ve sold her soul for the next fifty bucks to get high.”

  Alma’s never heard Chance speak so harshly of someone. It’s wholly unlike the Chance she knows. A defensive instinct warms Alma against the creeping cold in her hands and feet. “She might’ve been having a hard time, but she would never have let them mine the home place. It means too much to all of us. Why are you so angry at her? What did she ever do to you?”

  Chance’s lips pull in tight and his eyebrows go up.

  “What?” Alma repeats.

  Chance sighs and leans on Lulabel’s smooth back. “For one thing, when they were living out here, she kept bumming money off me. Every time I saw her, some damn thing. Brittany needed lunch money. The car needed tires. She couldn’t pay the electric. She thought I was the First Bank of Murphy.”

  “You’re mad because she owed you money? How much was it? I’ll write you a check.” Alma claps the comb back onto the rail and stands facing him, hands on her hips in the same challenging stance Pete favors.

  “No, Alma, it’s not like that. I didn’t really care about the money.” Chance stops and chuckles. “Okay, I did care about the money. I wouldn’t be my father’s son if I didn’t worry night and day about the finances on this place. But it was more that she thought she was playing me. If I hesitated at all, she’d start talking about you, memories she had of you, or things your grandma told her about what you were doing out in Seattle, like she thought that would soften me up. And then . . .”

  Chance stops talking and wind fills the silence. Lulabel twitches at the tension and moves away.

  “Then?” Alma prompts.

  Chance moves to El Dorado, rests his hands on the horse’s back and speaks directly into it, his face turned slightly away from Alma. “I got back to the house after chores one night a few months ago and her car was out front. Mae was already asleep. Vicky was on my couch in a low-cut dress with a bottle of wine. Terrible wine, she must’ve stolen it from the C-store. She said she wanted to talk, but as soon as I set down my glass she reached over and grabbed me.”

  “Grabbed you?” Alma’s hands drop and she takes an involuntary step toward Chance. “What do you mean, grabbed you?”

  “Just what I say. One minute I was trying to choke down a swallow of that wine and the next she had her tongue in my mouth and her hand down my pants. I was so surprised it took me a second to push her off.” Chance glances at Alma as he speaks, gauging her reaction.

  Alma tries to force down the blinding wave of hot jealousy rising behind her eyes before Chance can see it. Vicky kissing Chance—suddenly Alma wants to kill her sister herself. “Why?” she manages.

  “That’s more or less what I said. She’s like a little sister to me. She started running her hand up my leg and said something about how she wanted me to know how much she appreciated me.” Chance’s face contorts in disgust. “I know a business transaction when I see one. I told her to get out before I threw her out.”

  Alma doesn’t know what to say. This new image is worse than Vicky’s sordid commerce with Kozinsky or Murray or Dennis. F
or her to go to Chance that way was abandoning old bonds of family and friendship. It was utterly debased—and particularly sinister in light of her pregnancy. Was that Vicky’s plan? To rope in Chance? “Thank you,” she offers at last.

  Chance’s head comes around quickly. “You think I did it for you?” He starts to laugh but catches himself. “Hell, maybe I did.” He moves past her, gathers the tools from the fence rail, opens the gate, and snorts. “Ain’t that a laugh. Just a pathetic cowboy who can’t get quit of you.” He strides off to the barn.

  Ten minutes later, Alma wonders if the kiss and the awkward conversation ever happened. Over Jayne’s hot chocolate and sandwiches, Chance chats easily about high school and makes Brittany laugh with funny stories of Vicky as a junior high kid, crashing parties and making a spectacle of herself screaming at basketball games, bouncing out of the seat between her parents, huge basketball fans themselves. Did Chance really pay that much attention to her family, watch out for her little sister too? Alma is touched. She’s deliberately forgotten a lot about Chance, but there’s even more she never knew. The idea of him pushing Vicky away fills her with gratitude. Finally, somebody in Vicky’s life who did what a man’s supposed to do.

  Jayne offers to keep Brittany with her and Mae for the day and Alma eagerly accepts. She needs to see the place where Vicky was living, the place where she died, and have some hard conversations with people like Kozinsky and Dennis. Brittany cannot be present for any of it. “That would really help,” she tells Jayne. “Pastor Kemp was wanting to talk to her when I called, something about reading a psalm in the service if she wants to. I said I didn’t think so, but could you give her a call?”