The Home Place: A Novel Read online

  Fred’s face is already red from the cold. Now it tints toward purple. “That’s what’s always been wrong in this household. Your uncle has never taken a firm enough hand with the women, and from that seed he reaps this kind of contempt and disobedience. Victoria never would submit herself to her father’s rightful authority, and that’s why the Lord struck her down. I fear for your future, young lady. I fear for your soul!” Trembling in his Michelin Man outfit, Fred pivots and heads down the driveway to his diesel pickup, chugging at the curb.

  “I bet you piss off even God,” Alma says to herself and hurries inside.

  “Who was that?” Helen wants to know.

  “Mormons.”

  “Who? What did he want?” It’s always a him with Helen’s church, Alma remembers, always an overstuffed man in a tie.

  “To run our lives, as usual. I got rid of him.”

  “It’s a good thing your uncle’s not here.” Helen’s eyes meet Alma’s. It’s always a good thing if Walt isn’t here when Mormonism comes up. Helen drops her eyes and withdraws from Alma’s gaze.

  CHAPTER 6

  SUNDAY, 9 P.M. MOUNTAIN STANDARD TIME

  After leftovers are put away and Brittany is bowed over the second Harry Potter book, dug out of her ridiculously small bag of belongings, comes the last trip of the day, to Maddie’s. Brittany is quiet on the long drive to the other side of town. They speed along the rims with the dim, snow-laced city below, the refineries beyond twinkling like Christmas trees. Alma can just make out the dark line of the Yellowstone, where her parents let all three of them get as filthy and muddy as they wanted to, even as other parents pulled their children back from the river’s edge to warn about currents and ruining their shoes. In her childhood, there was never much worry about staining a shirt or breaking a plate. Those things had no real value. The family was what counted. And then there was no family.

  Alma looks up just in time to steer back across the center line. She shakes off the memory and starts to contemplate what she knows about the people who could have been near Vicky the night before, if this horror turns out to be murder instead of the perpetually cruel hand of God reaching out to take her sister. Vicky hardly seemed to need help to do herself in. The thought of murder—someone putting hands on Vicky to end her life—feels like a vulgar joke. Too much, from a universe that has already asked too much of this family.

  Brittany has fallen asleep in the passenger seat as Alma drives, taking Alma back to winter nights when her little sister crept into her bed in their shared room to cuddle close for warmth and ask for tales out of the well-stocked family larder of wildlife stories. “The one about the bear in the car,” she’d say, or “The one about the camp coyote,” or “The one about the bighorn sheep in the fog.” Alma almost smiles at the warmth the memory still holds. Vicky would fall asleep on Alma’s pillow every time. That image—not the cold, bruised body on the gurney—is what she will hold close.

  Maddie’s place is a double-wide trailer in a nicer trailer park on the west end, bought after her stroke but before Al died. She and Al moved into Billings off the ranch to be near family and medical care. She gets around with a cane, her left side weak but not useless, and from her flowered recliner watches her shows. Alma glances through the front windows into the living room and sees that the television is tuned to a new game show she doesn’t recognize. Off to Alma’s left, almost obscured by the darkness, are the raised garden beds that Walt built after his father died. Maddie had called Alma just to tell her. Now that death had ended Walt’s long feud with Al, Maddie could make coffee for her only surviving son in her own kitchen, pat his shoulder, send him home with bread or pie. He didn’t come around all that often—he was still Walt, after all—but he did little things for her, and Maddie was exultant.

  Alma opens the storm door and pecks at one of the three small rectangular windows in the door. Maddie startles and looks up fearfully, then smiles and reaches for the cane. “I’m comin’, honey!” she shouts. “Just give your old grandma a minute.”

  Alma tries the door, but it’s locked. This is new. Maddie and Al never used to lock their door. In fact, they had trouble finding the house keys to lock up when they went to Arizona to overwinter in the Airstream.

  After a slow progress from her chair, Maddie unfastens a chain and turns a dead bolt. “Well, look at you! Skinny as ever, I guess. Still workin’ too hard out there in the big city. And ain’t you pretty. You look just like me when I was your age!” As Maddie reaches up to hug Alma, who’s at least six inches taller, she gets a good grip on her ribs to measure the extent of the skinniness. “Good Lord, don’t you eat? Come on in—you too, Brittany, get out of the cold, girls—and have some brownies. I made a pan when you said you was comin’. You can tell me about your trip.” Alma exhales in relief. She should have known that there would be no emotional scene with Maddie, especially with Brittany present. At some point, they will talk about Vicky, but first there will be welcoming food and the calm of her grandmother’s house. They will reveal as little pain as possible, and in that way overcome it.

  Maddie is already moving at her deliberate pace to turn off the TV. The house smells of dust in unreachable places; meat and potatoes cooking; a little white cockapoo that has left behind its hyperactive days and now wanders in a senile daze, peeing occasionally on a potted fern in the front window; and the homemade lilac potpourri that Maddie has always used in overabundance, like incense. There’s something else that Alma doesn’t remember and takes a moment to place: not the decay she smelled on Helen, just age, perhaps, settling over her grandmother like a shroud.

  “There’s not much to tell, Grandma. It was an easy flight. Much better now that they’ve stopped crossing the mountains in turboprops. Listen, you don’t need to bother, I ate at Helen’s.”

  Maddie snorts. “Sprouts and organic carrots, that’s all you’ll get over there. Supposed to be purifying her system and all it does is make her crabby. You need something that’ll stick to your ribs. I’ll fry up a few pork chops.” Maddie ignores Alma’s protests and takes out plates and cups. “I sure am glad you came out right away. And Brittany, I’m so happy you’re here, hon. I would’ve brought you right over here if I still had my license. I don’t know that Helen’s in any better shape than I am, but the state of Montana thinks so and that’s what counts.”

  Maddie’s words flow together in the patterns Alma learned as a child—little grammatical glitches, dropped or added consonants, a twang and a drawl. The slow, John Wayne cadence affects her like the sweep of sky visible from the airport. Hearing it, Alma knows she’s home. Maddie’s voice speaks of place almost as much as the place itself, not the word but the land made flesh. Maddie herself is a child of Big Horn County, who grew up in town as the sheriff’s daughter, just a generation removed from ranch life. She dropped out of high school to get married, as you did back then when a landholding man like Al Terrebonne proposed. The transition to the Terrebonne home place held few surprises for her. It was a stretching out of what had been contracted in Hardin, relearning the deep textures of place, the intimacies of soul-mapped land, every rock named, every season a new geologic layer of meaning.

  Brittany cuts herself a large brownie and disappears into the guest room down the hall. Her watchful, withdrawn silence is starting to feel like a ghostly presence, almost—but Alma rejects the thought as soon as it crosses her mind—almost like Vicky with them, waiting to see what Alma will do.

  At the table with her hands on the worn vinyl tablecloth, Alma pushes her hair back and turns her face toward Maddie. If only it were as easy as dropping a decade of training to speak to her grandmother in the same dialect, the song of that soft western voice. She made such an effort to lose it in college out east, where they made fun of the way she talked and dressed, and laughed at her for being so proud of being from Montana. She wonders what kind of woman she would be if she still talked like that. Not the same person at all. Would it be someone she’d want to know? Someone
she’d like better?

  Alma tries to think of something positive to say about Helen’s condition and fails. “Helen doesn’t look good to me. I mean, I’m sure she’s reeling from the news, but physically she’s deteriorated a lot since I last saw her. Do you see her much?”

  Maddie pauses in slicing the rest of the brownies. “Well, I— You know I try to see her, but we’ve been distant so many years now, and Walt, my poor sweet boy—he was like a stranger since he and Al fought after the war, until he started to come around a little these last few years. They bought that house up in the Heights, you know. None of our family has ever lived out there. It’s so far.” With her infallible country girl’s sense of direction, Maddie stares at the northeast corner of the living room, facing the Heights, as her face slips momentarily into sadder lines than the ones imprinted on her face. Her resemblance to Walt is suddenly very strong. Her voice grows soft, barely a whisper. “Al was so harsh with them, you know. It’s the way he was raised. It just rolled off Mikey, but Walt—he always took everything to heart.”

  To Alma, this is a new window into Walt’s dark, surly character. Her dad never spoke much of his childhood, but his bond to the home place and his father was unquestioned. Alma remembers Grandpa Al as a benevolent patriarch, ever ready to pull a quarter out of her ear.

  “Did Vicky and Brittany spend much time with them?” she asks. “Walt and Helen, I mean.” This is history Alma doesn’t know well, beyond the time when Vicky cut her off. Their mother’s dislike for Walt was catechism, but to listen to Maddie is to hear another story altogether. Alma realizes with a sudden, disorienting shift in perspective that Maddie remembers only the gentle giant she raised, the sensitive boy who never came home from the war. She recalls for the first time in years how Maddie used to have a special place next to her good china for Walt’s Silver Star and Purple Heart, dug out of the burn barrel at the home place where Walt threw them years ago. Glancing over at the cabinet, Alma spots the boxes behind the glass.

  “Walt had a soft spot for Vicky, and now Brittany. He tried to look after them, I’m sure he did, but Helen took a dislike to Vicky early on, thought she was wild, didn’t want her around. I wanted to bring her out to live with us, but you know how things were between Al and Walt. They couldn’t even discuss it. I remember Helen talking about how Vicky lied before anybody else noticed it. Sometimes I think Vicky just fulfilled Helen’s prophecies about her. I never trusted Helen. I know she’s failing, but I think she milks it a little, trying to keep Walt close this way when nothing else ever worked.” She gestures with the knife, seeming unaware of its threatening flight as she talks about Helen, then slides a brownie onto a paper napkin decorated with red and green bells and hands it to Alma. She glances down the hall, where Brittany has shut herself in the guest room. “That poor, poor child. I—I just don’t know what to say about Vicky, honey.” Her tears come down quickly and copiously, as they always have. “It sure ain’t the world I grew up in. As much as I worry about you out in Seattle and it’s right here in Billings that . . .”

  The whistling teakettle saves Maddie from further words. She gets out the jar of Taster’s Choice and makes them each a weak cup, then remembers and opens the jar to add another heaping scoop of brown powder to Alma’s cup. “I wish I could have done more,” she says as they sit. “It never seemed like that girl got a fair shake.”

  Alma folds her hand around the thin porcelain coffee cup, feeling the heat leaching out in a vain attempt to take the chill from her hands. “Everyone was always trying to help Vicky. It never did any good. She was so angry all the time.” She wonders briefly where her own anger is hiding, in what tense body part it has taken up residence.

  Maddie lets her coffee sit, cooling, while she examines Alma, pausing on the diamond earrings, the bare ring finger, before going back to the subject of Vicky. “She was trying to get things together this last year or so, you know. She’s been helping me out, coming by to fix meals. She took me to the doctor a few times for checkups too, and she’d go out Sarpy once in a while to check on the house. Of course Pete’s always helped out a lot, but Vicky was trying, she really was.” Which means, Alma says to herself, that Vicky’s been doing her grocery shopping in Maddie’s kitchen and helping herself to Maddie’s prescriptions. God knows what’s going on out at the ranch. The house. The home place. The land. Even the Circle E—the brand Charles bought for Eliza as a wedding present, still owned by the family. Like the Inuit with their dozen words for snow, the Terrebonnes name and rename the most important thing.

  “I’m sure she was, Grandma,” she affirms as she sifts through the Sunday Gazette. If the paper is still as doggedly reliable on local crime as it used to be, the story on Vicky will show up tomorrow. Alma hopes they won’t say much. They’ll repeat the ugly verities the police have given out: unattended death, autopsy, automatic homicide investigation. It might not hurt to call the paper and ask for a little discretion, for the family.

  “These last few months, though, there was something going on,” Maddie interrupts the reflection. “She was upset, didn’t want to talk about it. She used to talk to me when she was little, but lately she’d just get all cutesy and say, ‘Don’t you worry, Granny, I’m a big girl!’ Huh. She never was a big girl. You knew that. Never could take care of herself like you were born doing. It all would’ve been different if the kids hadn’t died like that. Terrible thing.” For a second, Alma is confused: The kids? But Grandma means Mom and Dad, of course, her lost son and daughter-in-law. Maddie grips her cup and stares into the dark liquid, looking for something that isn’t there but should be. With a grunt, she presses both hands on the table to force herself upright. She picks up her cane from the back of her chair and moves to the refrigerator. “And she’d talk about the home place. She had this idea maybe we ought to sell out, after all this time.”

  “Sell the home place?” Alma gasps. “How could she . . . Grandma, are you sure? Could you have misunderstood her?”

  Maddie doesn’t open the fridge, but puts a hand on it for support. “She didn’t make no sense sometimes. She’d say one thing, then another. There’s this fellow who wants our mineral rights, so they could mine right up near the place. I told him no way no how, but then Vicky, she thought since nobody’s out there now, maybe we oughta go ahead. She says they put it all back the way it was after.”

  “Grandma . . .” Alma’s voice is low, scandalized. Such a thing is beyond imagining. She’s terrified that next Maddie will say that she’s already signed.

  “But I just don’t see how that could be so,” Maddie continues, straightening up with the support of the fridge and the cane. “We lived out there so long. All you kids know every ridge and coulee. I just don’t see how they could come through and put things back like they was. And where do all the animals go while they’re at it? We’ve got winter range for elk out there, sage grouse leks, even those black-footed ferrets, they say. They can’t graze and nest and mate in a big hole full of dump trucks. So I told her that.”

  “What did she say?”

  “Well, she come back a few times with different ideas, how they could mine different parts of the place to move across to Crow land. That’s what they want, I guess. But then she started to talk about the other families out there, how she didn’t think it was right the way the land agent was pushing them around. She had all these notes of stories they told her, people I’ve known all my life getting threatened. She started saying she just wanted to get the company to leave us alone.”

  “Really?” A chill hangs on to Alma in spite of the hot cup in her hands. “So she changed her mind about signing?”

  “She was a good girl, Alma.” Maddie smiles, opening the fridge at last, as if the subject is settled. “I don’t want you to think bad of her. I just wanted to tell you about that business with the coal company in case—in case it turns out to matter somehow. I think she might’ve hatched some plan of getting them to pay her off to keep quiet about their methods of getting
folks to sign. She always had some kind of fool notion about getting rich, always playing at something. I’m afraid of what might’ve happened if she crossed the wrong person. I tried to look after her, Alma. I sure wish I knew what I should’ve done different.” Maddie’s eyes are very like Alma’s, clear and bright and green. Looking at her is like staring into the funhouse mirrors that show your eyes in a different face, Alma thinks. But when she speaks of Mike, or Walt, or Vicky, the undertow of sadness in those eyes is nearly too much to resist. Alma averts her gaze to take in the rest of her petite grandmother. Maddie’s carefully styled and colored hair is a late-blooming, endearing vanity in a woman who spent years many miles from the nearest salon, but her neat, matched outfit is vintage Maddie. At the home place she was always at breakfast in a tidy housedress, hair combed, even if she’d been up half the night pulling calves in Al’s bibs. The hand she stretches out toward Alma across the counter is knotted and spotted, but when Alma goes to her and takes it, the grip is powerful.

  “I don’t think there’s anything any of us could have done,” Alma says. “As hard as anybody ever tried to help Vicky, she just pushed us away harder. I don’t know how many times I’ve called her since Grandpa’s funeral. If she even picks up, everything is always fine fine fine. She’ll tell me about a concert she went to or some joke she heard but not that they’re about to cut off her phone, so I have to find out by getting the disconnect message.”

  “Oh, that was Vicky all over,” Maddie says with the beginning of a laugh that dies. “Never admitted anything was wrong, and always thought everyone was out to get her. She used to drive me plumb ’round the bend sometimes.” Maddie is pawing through the freezer now, tossing Tupperware and aluminum foil packets on the counter.

  “What are you doing, Grandma? Do you need help?” Alma asks, fielding frozen items that threaten to sled onto the floor.