The Home Place: A Novel Read online

  Alma knows the answer to that one. Her mother had said it enough times. Alma wants very much to borrow Anne’s muttered phrase and snap back at Walt “Because you keep her in it,” but she doesn’t say it. When Walt turns toward her, Alma realizes not only that he’s closer than she thought but also bigger than she remembered. Her mind has shrunk him in the years she’s been away, made him less terrifyingly like a force of nature, an avenging, red-bearded Norse god, hammer held high. He’s looking at her with a strange curiosity. Something in her eyes has given away her furious thoughts. Now he comes at her faster than she would have thought he could, twice her size, bearing down on her as she backs away. A hinge slams painfully into her shoulder blade as she miscalculates and steps hard into the overhead door. His eyes, close to hers, are dilated and anguished. She expects him to shout, but instead his voice drops into the lowest register his massive form can rumble out. She breaks the eye contact herself as Walt begins to speak.

  “You go back to Seattle and leave us the hell alone,” he spits out, backing off with an abrupt gesture of dismissal and contempt. Alma looks from side to side and chooses the door she came in through as the quickest exit. She bolts for the relative normality of the house with Helen and Brittany.

  After the shock of cold between the heated garage and the front door, the smell of Helen’s macrobiotic cooking permeates a humid atmosphere, filling Alma’s lungs with air too swampy to breathe. Walt’s overengineered woodworking projects cover every surface: bookcases, shelves, an elaborate oak entertainment center, even a bizarre hanging bridge for the cat from one side of the living room to the landing of the staircase. Cat hair upholsters every surface, and one corner of the living room couch is shredded down to the frame. Dominating every remaining vertical surface on the first floor are Walt’s glass-eyed hunting trophies: mounted heads of elk, moose, mountain goats, bighorn sheep, a black bear rug in full growl, even a perfect prancing fox in a glass case on the coffee table. A white cat sleeps on top of the moose head. The psychological effect is sensory overload, like being in the front aisle of a box store, confronted by end displays, neon, music, traffic, and fluorescence all at once. Alma shuts the door and leans against it.

  In a disproportionately small kitchen for the size of the house, Helen slides a pan out of the oven and strains to lift it to the stovetop. She was diagnosed with MS nearly four years ago. The disease has advanced, but Helen was able to carry on normally for so long after the initial diagnosis that it seemed like a false prophecy. Little things here and there went wrong, she has confessed to Alma over the phone: shaking, weakness. The symptoms came and went, then eventually came back to stay. Alma hasn’t seen Helen since Al’s funeral, and the shock of seeing all the change at once is severe. Alma hurries to take the tray of grilled vegetables.

  “Hello there, sweetheart!” Helen cries, throwing her arms around her niece. Her embrace is weak, her limbs like tree branches brushing up against Alma without human warmth or grip. Helen has a little of the off smell of the irrigation ditches in late summer, an aura of decay. Alma masters an instinct to pull away and hugs back. Her mind registers the roar of the GMC pulling away. Walt will be headed to the cabin. That figures. Any time somebody might need him, Walt retreats at highway speed. The flipside of frontiersmen who can survive any extremity of weather or personality: they don’t want anybody thinking they can be counted on.

  Alma lets Helen go and refocuses. “Hi, Helen. It’s good to see you again. I wish it were under better circumstances.”

  “This is how we see people these days. Funerals. Not many weddings to speak of.” Helen’s voice is resigned as she pulls her head back to look at Alma, who used to be shorter but now looks Helen in the eye, so bowed is the older woman with the weight of illness. Helen was the tallest girl in her high school class. She defied her Mormon parents to marry the only man who looked like a reasonable physical match for her: great lumbering Walt Terrebonne, whom the draft would shanghai to Vietnam before his young bride had figured out how he liked his coffee. What irony, Alma reflects, that marrying Walt was one of the last shows of defiance that life with Walt would allow her.

  Walt and Mike were older baby boomers, born in the early fifties after the first rutting of returned troops, as relief and normality went down like a tonic into the small towns and ranches of Montana. The teenage pictures show the brothers side by side in all things—sitting on fence rails, astride green horses, half hidden beneath cars, hulking Walt protective of smaller, wiry Mike. Then, after one poorly framed wedding day snapshot of Walt and Helen on the courthouse steps and a few pictures from the years immediately after the war, no photos at all, the rest of the album empty all those years.

  Alma reaches back into her memory. “Emma got married a few years back. That’s a wedding for you.”

  “That wasn’t a real wedding,” Helen huffs. “That was a couple of people at a courthouse. Emma deserved better. We sure don’t see them much anymore, now that they’ve moved to Roundup.”

  “I thought Emma was still working here in town.”

  “No, she quit that job. Said the drive was too dangerous in winter, and she never did have a reliable car. Lou says he can fix things, but he sure can’t keep that Ford working. I don’t like her up there without any way to get out if she needs it. Lou gets wild sometimes.” Helen hands these quiet words to Alma alone as Brittany carries a plate to the table.

  “Gets wild how?” Alma shifts around the kitchen, trying to help without hovering or condescending. Nothing in the house seems to be modified to compensate for Helen’s disintegration—Alma moves to open a can of olives after watching Helen fight to clamp a manual can opener onto the lid.

  “Oh, he’s like all those good old boys up there. Drinks, parties, gets in fights.” Helen pauses at Alma’s glare. “Now don’t look like that. I know what you’re thinking, but they seem happy. No relationship is perfect.”

  “At least in mine nobody goes to the emergency room,” Alma mutters. This isn’t the first time Helen has mentioned their cousin’s volatile relationship. Domestic violence is almost the default around here. The story is more familiar than shocking, but it has the same effect on Alma every time. Helen turns away.

  When Alma uses the bathroom, she notices the metal folding chair sitting next to the toilet as a makeshift grab bar. Walt has every power tool known to mankind out in the garage, but nobody has mounted grab bars in the bathroom or a second bar along the stairs up to the bedrooms, or acquired any appliances or tools to compensate for Helen’s weakness and pain. Alma sits on the toilet and sifts through magazines in the handmade rack mounted on the end of the vanity. Woodworking, hunting, Reader’s Digest, a few old Better Homes and Gardens. All the props speak of a traditional home, where everyone takes care not to mention or notice that someone is dying.

  Brittany is taking a salad bowl from Helen and carrying it to the table as Alma comes back into the room. Alma hangs back for a moment to watch as Brittany carries everything to the table without being asked, helps Helen walk and sit, then serves out the meal.

  As they all begin to eat, Helen says, “I’d invite you to stay here, but I can’t take very good care of the house these days. I think you’d be more comfortable with Maddie.”

  Brittany looks up expectantly at Alma.

  “Oh, that’s no problem,” Alma affirms, nodding back at Brittany. “Grandma expects me to stay there. I spoke to her earlier.”

  “But Brittany can stay here for now,” Helen says firmly. Brittany’s eyes, fixed on Alma, widen in dismay. While Helen carefully sips from her water glass, Brittany directs a tiny, fervent headshake toward Alma, eyebrows high. Alma’s eyes move briefly to Helen, who is now trying to cut a piece of steamed broccoli with the edge of her fork. Finally she spears the entire chunk so that she can gnaw on one end.

  “I’d like to take Brittany with me,” Alma tells Helen. “I need to get out and check on the home place tomorrow. Besides, I don’t want to put her back in school right awa
y. I want to spend some time with her,” Alma says as she reaches over to squeeze Brittany’s hand, then turns back to Helen. “Is Dennis still in the picture?”

  “Dennis.” Helen scoffs at the name of Brittany’s father. “The way I hear it, he almost got kicked out of his apartment last time he got fired. And you know, Maddie can’t drive anymore. She’s got cataracts. She won’t be able to run Brittany anywhere after you go back. I still have my license.”

  Alma lets a forkful of quinoa fall at the image of Helen operating a motor vehicle, then takes hold of herself. “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. I’d like to spend as much time with Brittany as I can while I’m here.” Under the table, Brittany’s fingers find Alma’s and squeeze them in a fleeting touch.

  Helen’s lips thin out and her hand tightens on her fork, but she stays quiet. Alma recognizes the look on her face as the exact one she wore in pictures from after the war, when Walt came back just about mute and took a job shepherding. It was a thankless, low-man-on-the-totem-pole job if ever there was one, babysitting sheep on isolated high-country grazing allotments through the mild summer months. A job for the artistic, the insane, and those who don’t know better than to follow them. Helen went into the mountains with Walt out of sheer bullheadedness, without invitation or backward glance by her husband. Alma has a few of those early-seventies square Brownie photos, colors all gone pastel, of Helen and Walt beside their sheepwagon, with their dog, Bobcat. Walt’s eyes are unfocused, wandering off toward an unseen horizon. His body is turned slightly away from Helen, not even acknowledging her there in the frame with him, and Helen is right up beside him, a fixture like the shotgun, immobile and immovable. Her determination to stick by Walt, no matter what it does to her, has been the transforming fact of her life. What took place between them up in those high ranges, where he wanted to forget the world or end it and she would not let him abandon her, is a secret for the ages, kept in Helen’s steel-gray eyes.

  “Where’s Walt?” Helen wants to change the subject. “Isn’t he coming in? He gets upset if I interrupt him, but he knows when suppertime is.”

  “He took off a few minutes ago. He . . .” Alma glances at Brittany and stops herself from saying what Walt’s words were. “We argued.”

  Helen inhales sharply. “Not here fifteen minutes and you’re causing trouble. Sometimes he disappears out there for days now that he’s semiretired. Now what will I do?”

  “If he doesn’t come back I’ll have to go after him,” Alma answers, “or he’ll miss the funeral.”

  “You know he doesn’t like public events. Besides, he and Vicky never got along very well,” Helen says in her resigned, inward way. “Maybe this is all a blessing in disguise, anyway. Vicky was an unfit mother. We want Brittany to live with us. It’s our duty to look after her soul.” Helen glances at Brittany, who withdraws into the oversized hoodie under her coat.

  “She was his niece, for heaven’s sake,” Alma says. “He helped raise her.” Alma looks back and forth between Helen and Brittany, the lost child still wearing her coat at the table and the frail woman inhabiting a body bigger than what’s left of her strength. It’s clear who would take care of whom. Is this Walt’s idea, to acquire a caretaker so that he can go off hunting more easily?

  “He didn’t come to Daddy’s funeral, and he knew how much that meant to me.” Helen’s gaze is absorbed in the quinoa she’s pushing around her old-fashioned Desert Rose plate, a wedding gift from Al and Maddie. “He won’t do anything just because somebody else wants him to. That’s the life lesson he took away from Vietnam.”

  Alma throws her head back in exasperation. “Vietnam! If that war caused half the problems that get blamed on it around here, it really would be the root of all evil.”

  Helen looks at her with narrowed eyes. “You weren’t there. You have no way of knowing. And you didn’t know him before.”

  “Grandpa always said he was the same way before the war.”

  Helen slams down her fork, or tries to. Her hand is curled awkwardly around the implement, so that her hand bangs the table instead and she must disengage her fingers deliberately, one at a time. “Don’t you quote my father-in-law at me,” Helen mutters, distracted by the fork and her noncompliant hand. “I know good and well what he always said. He wasn’t a saint either. I won’t have my husband talked about like that in my own home. Not by you or anybody.”

  With effort, Helen rises and carries her plate and glass to the counter separating the kitchen from the dining area. At the table, Alma and Brittany sit in silence, swallowing hard on their undercooked organic vegetables. Brittany’s shoulders slouch toward the table along with her head. Alma has a sudden Mary Poppins urge to make her march around the living room a few times with a book on her head. She pushes away her plate and Brittany quickly imitates her.

  Helen turns back to them, her face newly composed. “Just take things right to the dishwasher, girls.” She crosses the threshold into the kitchen and begins to drag pans across the counter from stove to dishwasher. Without hesitation, Brittany rises and starts stacking dishes.

  The doorbell rings. Helen is loading the dishwasher, very slowly, so Alma answers the door. A man stands before her in a knee-length parka, the fur hood pulled so far up that his face is barely visible in its recesses. He pushes the hood back just far enough to reveal his eyes. “Howdy. I’m here to speak to the man of the house.”

  Alma stiffens at the request. “I’m afraid I’ll have to do,” she says. What kind of crazy door-to-door guy would be out in this weather? But this is no salesman. He wears an aura of entitlement that is already prickling at being kept on the doorstep this long. This man is used to people being just a little afraid of him. “And you are?”

  “I’m the ward secretary. I came to bring condolences on behalf of the Saints and offer guidance on the funeral service.”

  Alma’s mind races. Saints? Catholic iconry, football . . . then she realizes: Latter-Day Saints. Mormons. Helen’s church. Christ. Can’t they leave people alone at a time like this?

  “Ah, thank you,” she manages. “I’ll tell Helen you stopped by.” She starts to shut the door. No way is she letting Mormon parka guy in to preach at them for the next hour.

  He sticks his foot in the door. “Actually, I got a call from a brother who saw Walt leaving town again just now. I know how difficult this must be for Helen. We want to be sure that Victoria has a proper service with the bishop presiding.”

  Alma smiles at him with only the edges of her mouth. No teeth. No eyes. “How did you find out about Vicky? The police only called me this morning.”

  “The bishop’s second assistant has a police scanner, to keep track of developments in the ward.”

  To fucking spy on us, you mean, Alma says to herself. There’s bad blood between the Terrebonnes and the Mormons dating to a stolen homestead claim a hundred fifty years ago, and then Walt had to go and marry one of them. “Vicky wasn’t a—uh—Saint, you know,” she answers instead. “We’ve already made the arrangements with my grandmother’s pastor at First Church.” White lie, but told to a Mormon at the door—probably a wash, sin-wise. “But thanks again for—”

  The ward secretary interrupts. “I don’t think you understand me, young lady. Victoria was baptized with her father’s permission in the Temple.”

  “Our father’s permission? That’s a lie. He would never have done that, and besides, he’s been dead fifteen years.”

  “Who’s that, Alma?” Helen calls. “Shut the door!” Alma steps outside and pulls it shut behind her, forcing the ward secretary to back up from his position on the welcome mat.

  “I see.” He licks his lips, which are chapped and raw. “You must be Victoria’s sister. Walter became her father in the eyes of the church when he became her guardian. At Helen’s insistence, he agreed to her baptism soon after your parents’ deaths. I performed the ordinance myself.”

  “He did what?” Alma wants to shove the ward secretary onto his roly-poly
back and watch him slide down the slope of the front yard. “But I was here for months after they died. Neither of them ever said anything. Vicky hated the church. Why would she do that?”

  The ward secretary’s Play-Doh face morphs into a squeamish look, as if some minor demon has taken corporeal form in front of him and started oozing slime on the mat. “Perhaps they did not share this special event with you because of your obvious . . . hostility toward the Saints. If Walter isn’t present, it is my duty to see that things are handled properly according to the dictates of the Church. You are . . . Alma?” He’s got her on file somewhere, the little weasel. He’s looked her up. Her hands, stuffed into her armpits, form into fists.

  Alma doesn’t bother fake-smiling again. “I don’t believe you’ve introduced yourself,” she says.

  “Fred Winters.” He offers a gloved hand.

  “Alma Terrebonne.” She puts out her hand to have it crushed in Fred’s grip.

  “We were worried after last night, the way Walt . . .” But Fred trails off, his mouth open, blowing clouds of warm air down onto the welcome mat.

  “Walt what?” Alma prompts. What did the Saints see that Fred wasn’t supposed to mention?

  “Oh, I— I misspoke. I meant the way he took off just now.”

  “Someone saw him last night? Where?” Alma takes a step sideways to get more squarely in front of Fred.

  “Just the pickup. He could have been mistaken. I shouldn’t have said anything.” Fred rubs at the freezing hairs in his nose with one hand and comes away with a slick of snot on the leather. He gamely changes topics. “Now, don’t worry about a thing. We’ll arrange the service and provide refreshments—”

  “No.” Alma shakes her head, lawyerlike. “You won’t. You won’t do anything. If Walt comes back and makes his wishes known, then we’ll talk about it, but otherwise we’ll do things the way I’ve arranged them, and if you and your ward want to come, that’s up to you. I’m the next of kin and I’m making the decisions.”