The Home Place: A Novel Read online

  Chance, now a few feet away as Shep and Pete find their seats, notices her sway a little in her seat. He slips in to sit beside her and put his large hand over hers where her left hand grasps the edge of the pew for support. Alma looks up to see Jean-Marc moving toward her from the other end of the pew, looking at Chance, not her. She pulls her hand away. Jean-Marc sits and puts an arm around Alma’s shoulders, snugging her to him.

  “I don’t think we’ve met,” he says, leaning around her to look Chance in the eye. “Jean-Marc Lacasse.”

  “I told him about you,” Alma attempts, but it sounds weak even to her own ears.

  “Chance Murphy. Family friend.” Chance offers a hardened hand to Jean-Marc’s smooth palm and they hold the grip longer than necessary. Alma sits very still and wonders about the risk of a matter-antimatter reaction.

  Neither Alma nor Brittany has any spirit after the funeral for anything but heading back to the Murphys’, but here they are in the basement multipurpose room of the church, walking to a table with plates of pie in their hands. Maddie is surrounded by a phalanx of church women clucking over the tragedy. Helen sits at the same table as Maddie, with her but not with her, head down, poking her pie but not eating it. When Alma passes, she reaches out with a surprisingly strong grip on Alma’s wrist.

  “Have you heard anything from Walt?” she demands without preamble. “I haven’t seen him since he left Sunday night. I—I had to ask a friend to come over and help me get to the funeral,” she adds, dropping her voice as if the humiliation is too much to share with the table.

  “No, Helen, I’m sorry, I haven’t heard anything.” Alma rubs her shoulder. “If he doesn’t turn up by tomorrow, I’ll drive out to the cabin and see if I can get him to come back. What can I do? I need to take care of things out at the home place, but is there someone who could come stay with you for a few days, until Walt’s back? Would the ward secretary be able to arrange . . .” Alma trails off. The Saints will arrange everything, if only Helen asks, but Helen is too proud to ask.

  “I’ll be fine,” Helen whispers.

  Alma kneels beside her. “I’ll call that fellow who came the other night, what’s his name, Fred, Frank—”

  “Fred Winters.”

  “I’ll call him. He’ll be happy to help out.”

  Helen hesitates, gripping Alma’s hand, before nodding and turning away.

  Pete, Shep, and Jean-Marc are at the next table and Alma moves to join them. Mae runs up and down a pew pushed against the wall, playing airplane and giggling at her father’s admonitions to play more quietly. Even cousin Emma is there, looking heavier than when Alma last saw her, standing behind the table where pie is being served, putting slices on plates. She steps out from the table to give Alma a long, tender hug, leaving a small damp patch on Alma’s shoulder. There are a few other cousins here and there from both sides of the family, familiar faces much aged. They come over one by one, patting Alma’s and Brittany’s shoulders in an uninterrupted susurrus of condolences.

  “Vicky was such a pretty little girl,” cousin Edna from Laurel sighs, only the third or fourth person to make that observation. Alma smiles to be polite. Brittany shrinks from the stranger’s hand on her hair.

  “Don’t forget the casserole I dropped off with your grandma,” Maddie’s sister Bea urges as she squeezes Alma’s shoulder much too tightly—the Vulcan mourning grip—before attaching herself to her husband’s arm with the same claw and steering them both out of the room.

  Kirsten Kitchen trails not four but five children through the maze of tables to express her condolences. She offers to take Brittany to an indoor water park over the weekend. Alma thanks her without telling a single one of the outlandish stories she’d concocted for the occasion. All of the concern is sincere, the presence intended as comfort, the gestures genuinely helpful and kind. Alma can’t wait to get away from all of it.

  CHAPTER 16

  WEDNESDAY, 3:00 P.M. MOUNTAIN STANDARD TIME

  At last Alma and Brittany set off with Jean-Marc, who asks about the industrial neighborhood they’re passing through: the oil refinery, the sugar beet refinery, the women’s prison, the coal plant. As they pass out of the city, crossing the river in the lee of Sacrifice Cliff, moving out onto the high plains, he grows quieter. The dull sunlight shows no color but brown and white beyond the gray river of highway. At last he asks:

  “How far out here are we going?”

  “About another hour,” Alma says.

  Jean-Marc exhales a low whistle. “I brought cowboy boots.”

  “You did not. You don’t own cowboy boots.”

  Jean-Marc smooths back his thin blond hair and beams his polished smile. “I do! A client gave them to me a few years ago. They’re pure ostrich. Gorgeous. The most politically incorrect footwear imaginable. I hate to wear them and scuff them, but the occasion calls for it.”

  Alma shakes her head and laughs. “This I’ve got to see.”

  Jean-Marc slips off his soft leather gloves and slaps them on one hand. “And what’s his name—Buffalo Bill—lives out here, punching cows and rescuing schoolmarms?”

  Alma keeps her tone neutral. “His name is Chance Murphy, and yes, they’re just up the road. Actually, he invited us all over tonight for dinner with his parents.”

  Jean-Marc makes a face. He dislikes social interactions with people too far outside his own cultivated world.

  “I always annoy parents.”

  Alma rolls her eyes. “You can charm anyone you decide to charm.”

  “And this Chance—is he an old friend or an old boyfriend?”

  “A little of both,” she says, careful not to show any emotion as she taps the radio tuning buttons. She is glad she’s driving and doesn’t have to make eye contact.

  Ahead of them on the black lanes of the interstate, a heavy snow has begun. The sun has disappeared and visibility is dropping fast. Alma takes a deep breath, turns down the radio, and settles her hands more firmly on the wheel. Jean-Marc is half-turned in his seat, watching Alma with an anxious expression as she takes the exit to the county highway.

  From one instant to the next, the road becomes snowswept black ice. At the same time, all three of them feel the car shimmy. Alma’s instinct takes over. The car has antilock brakes, so she slams the brake down and opens her fingers on the wheel. The only way to drive a sheet of ice is to give in to it, let it carry you forward, force nothing. Alma’s shoulders relax as the car flies down the off-ramp toward the stop sign. Together, all three listen to the brakes pump, eyes on the road, not a word spoken. The car shudders and stops just halfway through the empty intersection.

  “Well done,” Jean-Marc breathes.

  Alma turns right onto the county road. “Just keep it between the navigational beacons,” she says aloud, to remind herself more than Jean-Marc. Driving these icy roads comes from deep memory, a feeling of stepping into clothes older than her own, with ghosts riding shotgun. Roads like this killed her parents, mutilated her sister. Rather than anxiety, the loss of control brings her peace: if these roads want her, they will take her. Her breathing slows, her grip releases, her concentration becomes complete. They drive in silence over the long, treacherous roads to the home place.

  “Impressive,” Jean-Marc comments as he steps out and surveys the undisturbed horizon. “You may have located the actual geographic center of nowhere.”

  “Nowhere has a fine capital,” Alma declares, following his eyes.

  “I think I need a nap,” Brittany says when they enter the dark kitchen at last. She heads straight upstairs.

  Jean-Marc starts to assemble sandwiches out of groceries Alma picked up in Billings the day before, while she turns up the furnace and starts another fire in the stove. He’d carefully ignored the selection of Tater Tot casseroles and Jell-O salads at the funeral, and Alma had no appetite. Now they fall to their plates. After they’ve eaten, Alma checks on Brittany—sound asleep facedown, still wearing the woolly hat Maddie forced on her—then pul
ls out rubber gloves and attacks the fridge with a bucket of soapy water and a scrubbing sponge. She can think of nothing she needs so much in this moment, her sister’s funeral hymns still resonating in her, than to see that filthy appliance gleaming clean again. After several minutes she hears a low chuckle from Jean-Marc and realizes that she’s singing “Shotgun Down the Avalanche,” rather loudly and very badly.

  “I’m going to look around.” He smiles and walks out of the kitchen. She hears him knocking through the house, opening doors, turning lights on and off, poking around upstairs. Finally he reappears.

  “Where’s the toilet, Alma?”

  She knew this was coming. She points at the back door.

  “I told you. Outhouse. About twenty yards that way.”

  Jean-Marc turns his head toward the door by which they entered the house. He knows what’s out there. A smile sneaks across his face.

  “I thought you were joking.”

  She fixes him with an exhausted gaze and drops her sponge in the bucket.

  “Honey, I wouldn’t joke about indoor plumbing. We kick it old school out here. Baths in the tub in the pantry, and the outhouse. And be sure to latch the door tight when you come out.”

  He gives her an even more astonished look. “Why?”

  “Birds, bats, you never know. It’s not a place where you want surprises, if you know what I mean.” She ducks her head back into the fridge to hide how much she’s enjoying his consternation. To him, the home place is beyond quaint. It’s isolated, disconnected, abandoned—and she knows better than he does how many eccentricities it hides. Firearms and whiskey hidden in odd corners, violence and insanity just below the surface, the way that civilization can become nothing but a thin polish over the animal will to survive. Her belly clenches as Jean-Marc sighs, pulls his hat back on, and heads outside. He has no right to look into the family secrets. He’s an outsider. Until now, she’s never labeled him that way.

  As the sound of Jean-Marc’s footsteps on the back steps dies away, the realization simmers to consciousness that Chance shares the old desperation of the homesteads. His love of this place is as visceral as hers, maybe more so. For the first time, Alma considers how difficult Chance’s homecoming must have been for him, and how far he might go to protect the valley from Harmony Coal. She scrubs harder at the layer of dried meat drippings on the bottom of the fridge.

  Jean-Marc startles her when he comes back waving one gloved hand in the air. “So you weren’t kidding about the phone either?” The level of frustration in his voice has increased.

  “ ’Fraid not. But you’ve still got a calculator and a camera there.”

  Jean-Marc walks to the old black wall phone and picks up the receiver. Alma knows there’s nothing but silence on the line. Jean-Marc’s jaw juts out.

  “Satellite Internet? VoIP?” he offers the last vestige of hope. Alma withdraws from the depths of the fridge and grunts as she stands to face him.

  “No connectivity whatsoever, I’m afraid. The Murphys have a landline and a satellite dish if you need to reach somebody.”

  Jean-Marc shuts his mouth with effort before he shakes his head and hangs up the phone.

  “What do you do in an emergency? What if you needed to call the fire department?”

  Alma reflects. Québec, of course, would be a lot less rural than Montana. Even after her years of school there, she still has no instinctive grasp of East Coast geography, the closeness and connectedness of it all. Her default is Western vastness. “Aren’t there places like this where you come from? On the farm? You mean to tell me the entire province is perfectly modernized?”

  “No, of course not. The Nord-du-Québec is much rougher than anything here. But, Alma, the suburbs of Québec City surrounded our farm years ago. My parents’ biggest complaint is that Montréal has two Ikeas and they still don’t have one.”

  “But they keep goats.” Alma clings to her cherished image of the Lacasses’ rustic homestead. “It can’t be all that urban.”

  Jean-Marc puffs his lips in a classically Gallic expression. “Listen, we’re French, we value agriculture, le terroir. We like to think of ourselves that way, so we keep some animals in the suburbs and buy artisanal cheese. It doesn’t mean that anybody would go five minutes without modern plumbing, unless it was for some kind of hippie experiment. Seriously, what would you do if there was a fire? Flee into the snow?” Jean-Marc eyes the crisply burning woodstove through the door into the front room.

  “Well, let’s see. There’s a volunteer fire department based in Hardin, so odds are pretty good somebody within a few miles would see smoke, call it in, and come straight here with their gear. Or if not we’d drive to the Murphys’ or toward the interstate until we got reception. I bet the response would be faster than in Seattle.”

  Jean-Marc rubs his jaw. “Okay,” he says as he turns away, tension rising off him like steam in the chilly room. Alma stands and puts her hands on her hips, ready to challenge him, then shakes her head and drops back into her position in front of the open fridge. Jean-Marc’s silence is resigned but angry, like he’s being held hostage. The quiet of the home place absorbs the late afternoon as she finishes the fridge. Jean-Marc plugs in his laptop and taps at saved documents.

  Twenty minutes later, Brittany gets up and comes downstairs with an old rag doll cradled in one arm. The doll was old when Alma was a child. She’s surprised it’s still in one piece. “It was on a shelf in the closet in my room.” Brittany points above her head toward the southeast bedroom, which has traditionally been the girls’ room. “That was my room when we lived here too. Is it all right if I go look around in the barns?”

  “Sure,” Alma says. “Just come in and tell me if you see anything strange. There could be chemicals out there still. Be careful. And take the flashlight out of that drawer there.”

  Brittany’s smile still feels like a new thing. Alma has seen it so little in the past three days. The girl who pulls on her coat and mittens, grabs up her dusty new toy, and runs outside is something like the child Alma remembers herself being here.

  Alma goes to the window over the kitchen sink to watch Brittany jog across the yard and disappear into the horse barn, then lets her eyes relax on distant hills until a new sound distracts her. A pickup is coming in from the road, humming on the snow-covered gravel. Alma hesitates only a moment between going straight for the gun, then checking the window in the front room to see who it is. The Murphrod. She relaxes. “Get a grip,” she mumbles to herself, resting the gun on the wide molding above the window.

  Chance pulls around and is up at the back door before Alma gets there. When she enters the kitchen, Alma finds the two men staring at each other, square-shouldered, the door wide open. “What’s going on, Chance?” she interrupts, stepping in front of Jean-Marc to usher Chance in and get the door shut. “Not time for supper already, is it?” The sun is gone, it must be after five. At the home place, they read time based on the season and the position of the sun against the buttes. There has never been any need for clocks.

  “Your grandma called. She couldn’t get through to you so she called our place. She got a visit from Rick Burlington. Same day as the funeral, can you believe that?” Chance stands just inside the door. Although he looks at Alma as he speaks, his shoulders stay squared toward Jean-Marc, who has retreated only a few steps.

  “What does he want?”

  “Same thing as usual. The mineral lease.”

  “Did she sign?”

  “Your grandma? No,” Chance answers with the hint of a smile. “But she was upset. She says he threatened her. Threatened you, actually. Said a few things about you and Brittany out here by yourselves.” Chance rubs his fist with his gloved hand and glances dismissively at Jean-Marc, as if his presence on the home place doesn’t count as any sort of protection. “He said something about how she ought to sign so that ‘all this will be over.’ She thought he might be talking about what happened to Vicky.”

  Alma’s hands are s
till cold as the chill of the house wears off, but that doesn’t explain the shiver that trickles down her back. She stuffs her hands in her armpits and stares back at Chance. “You think she might have just misunderstood him?”

  “No, I don’t. I’ve heard things like this from landowners, and others just won’t talk at all, like they’re scared. But that’s how he works—he gets the old folks alone and says things they can’t prove. It’s all hearsay and he denies it. Once they sign, it’s all over.”

  Alma paces into the living room, toward the warmth of the woodstove. This is Chance, of course. She trusts him. But the diabolical landman is too much of a stock character. Her lawyer’s mind works at other explanations, other motivations. When he talks about Harmony, Chance’s voice vibrates with his desperation to prevent their advance across the valley. What stories might he tell to accomplish that? What might he be willing to do?

  She hears Jean-Marc in the kitchen. “Are you suggesting that this Burlington person would come out here and—what, try to kill Alma or Brittany?” His tone is incredulous. To Jean-Marc, this is one more note in a crazy tune that includes the outhouse and lack of phone and Internet. He’s a sentence or two away from telling Chance to calm down, which won’t go over well. In a flash, Alma remembers the speeding white pickup on the highway this morning.

  Chance ignores Jean-Marc and follows Alma into the front room. “Why don’t you just come with me now?” he says to Alma. “We’ve got satellite Internet. Brittany can play with Mae. We can talk this over while we get supper ready.” He doesn’t speak the subtext: under my roof, you’ll be safe.