Let Him Go: A Novel (24 page)

He hurries around behind the Blackledges, his scurrying steps raising dust even upon the rain-dampened earth. He makes shooing gestures toward them. Let’s go, let’s go. Inside. I don’t want my guests standing out here getting older and colder!

For all the force and volume of George’s speech of a moment ago, he now walks with halting, short strides toward the shack. Margaret is careful to remain close at his side, the exact distance a parent keeps when a child takes his first steps. Alton Dragswolf rushes ahead and opens the door for them.

And then George and Margaret Blackledge, who have spent so few of their nights under a roof not their own, once again enter a stranger’s house.

The home of Alton Dragswolf is one wide room divided into three areas according to their function. They have entered at the middle, into a kitchen. A bedroom is at one end, a work and storage room at the other, and although the interior is full of boxes, cans, and jars of foodstuffs, all of it is neatly stacked and carefully arranged on shelves and cupboards. Next to the cookstove is a woodbox filled with small logs, even in length and circumference. Above a worktable at the far end of the room, tools hang from hooks on a pegboard. At the near end is a made bed. There are no dirty dishes, silverware, or cookware in the galvanized steel sink, just a dripping pump looming over the
sink’s depths. A dishrag hangs over the pump’s handle. The floors are bare and look recently swept. The shack’s interior smells of the food old people eat, the cabbage, carrots, rutabagas, and other roots that they boil into soups that can be eaten for days.

Can I get you something to eat? Alton asks.

It’s kind of you to offer, says Margaret, but we had a big lunch not long ago.

Should I put on the coffee?

Margaret glances at her husband.

Not for me, says George. He looks as though he needs to sit down, and not many choices are available—three mismatched wooden chairs pushed up against the kitchen table and, over by the bed, a high-backed rocking chair.

In spite of George’s worn-out, weary appearance, Alton Dragswolf reaches up to a shelf and brings down a deck of cards. Either of you play gin rummy?

If it’s all right with you, Mr. Dragswolf, I think my husband would like to lie down.

Oh, sure, sure. It’s not entertainment you need. It’s rest. Sure. He says this as though he’s recalling a book lesson. Sorry. Where are my manners?

Margaret says, Your manners, Mr. Dragswolf, are perfect. We’re the ones who should be apologizing. Barging in on you unannounced like this.

With his hopping little steps, the young man leads his guests toward one end of the shack. The day is overcast and Alton Dragswolf has lit none of his lamps, so the bedroom area is almost as dark as night, its single, small window covered by a towel hanging over a curtain rod.

Alton Dragswolf turns back a corner of the dark wool blanket covering the bed. When he does, he exposes sheets
so white they gleam in the dim light. He tries to fluff the pillow, but it’s so flattened by years of heavy-headed sleepers that the action is futile. Alton pats the sagging mattress. Here you go.

George sits on the edge of the bed. My boots, he says.

Margaret turns her back to her husband, bends over, and pulls his booted foot up between her legs. She pulls one boot off with her own strength and then as she reaches for the other foot she slaps her own ass and says, Go ahead. Push.

Reluctantly George puts his stocking foot on his wife’s backside and Margaret removes the other boot. She laughs as though they had been performing this routine for the delight of an audience. George collapses on the mattress, its springs squealing as if receiving weight for the first time. His eyes close immediately, and he carefully lays his injured hand across his chest.

Margaret and Alton Dragswolf stand over the bed, both of them looking solemnly down on George Blackledge.

Can you die from getting your fingers chopped off? asks Alton.

Jesus Christ, says George. I’m not deaf. His eyes remain closed.

Well? Can you?

No, Margaret says, gently laying a hand on Alton’s shoulder. You can’t.

George’s eyes open and he says, But it plays hell with getting your boots off and on.

I was just wondering, says Alton. Because I heard all about what the Weboys done to you. Except I didn’t know it was you.

George props himself up on his elbows. What did you hear? His eyes are open now.

That you got your fingers chopped off. What else?

Who told you?

I got an uncle lives in Gladstone but he drives out here every couple days to see if I need anything. He was in Antler’s—that’s pretty much a cowboy bar, but it don’t bother him to go in there—and he heard you pulled a gun on the Weboy brothers and then got your fingers chopped off for your trouble.

Who’d your uncle hear this from?

Hell, everybody was talking about it. I told you about the Weboys before, didn’t I? How they’re sort of famous around here. Famous for being sonsabitches. What my uncle didn’t say but I was wondering about—was it like a quick draw or something? You went for your gun and he beat you to the draw with a tomahawk?

George lowers himself back down to the pillow. Not exactly.

My husband, says Margaret, her voice vibrating with indignation, was defending me.

Yeah? Against all them Weboys? I don’t know how smart that was. But you’d sure as hell need a gun for that job. A gun and then some.

Margaret puts her finger to her lips. Maybe he’ll nap if we get out of here, she says, backing away from the bed.

Go fishing, you mean? says Alton. Because that’s what I was going to do once the rain let up.

By all means. Don’t let us upset your plans.

Plans? Alton Dragswolf laughs. I don’t have plans. I just go fishing when I want to go fishing.

At this Margaret smiles. Then you should go fishing.

You want to come? I got another rod somewheres.

You go ahead. I’ll stay here and keep my husband company.

Well, don’t do nothing for supper. In case I catch something.

I’ll make a deal with you, Mr. Dragswolf. Any fish you catch I’ll clean and fry up for us.

He grabs his tackle box from beside the door and hurries out like a boy dismissed from school.

I
N
A
LTON
D
RAGSWOLF’S ABSENCE
, M
ARGARET WANDERS
back and forth from one end of the shack to the other, returning every few minutes to the bedside to check on her husband, who seems, after much stretching, folding, and rearranging of his body and its limbs, to have fallen asleep. His customary sleeping position, with his right hand curled at his head like a dog or cat’s paw, isn’t available to him. Every time he brings his bandaged hand near his face, he winces as though he can’t bear the smell of himself.

On Alton Dragswolf’s workbench Margaret finds tufts of fur and feathers, shining strips of metal, and hooks of various sizes. The young man makes his own fishing lures. And he marks time. Framed between claw and ball peen hammers on the pegboard is a Northern Pacific calendar, the days crossed out with precise
X
s and the ever-passing present thus consigned to the past. I’ll be damned, Margaret says softly. It’s October. The photograph for the month features a flock of geese arrowing their way across a morning sky, clear but for a few feathery, orange-tinted clouds. Or is that an evening sky?

Near the workbench is the shack’s only evidence of Alton Dragswolf’s Indian heritage. Hanging from a nail is a beautiful buckskin outfit, shirt and leggings, beaded,
beribboned, fringed, and its leather tanned and treated so it’s as soft as flannel. The garments could as easily be hanging in a museum. There’s no evidence that Alton Dragswolf has any use for them but this display.

In the kitchen Margaret inspects a large cast-iron skillet sitting on the cookstove. If she prepares supper tonight, she’ll use this pan and build a fire under it, exactly how she learned to cook in her mother’s kitchen. She wipes a finger across the surface of the skillet. Alton Dragswolf keeps his cookware as clean as everything else in his home.

The next time her circuit takes her to the far end of the shack, she finds George lying on his back with his eyes open.

How are you doing? she asks. Did that nap help?

Is the boy here?

I expect he’ll stay away as long as he can. That way he won’t have to worry about entertaining us.

George pushes himself up to a sitting position. She watches the process carefully. You know, she says, I was thinking earlier about all the smiling folks we’ve met since we crossed over into the state. And how you can’t trust a one of them. The sober-sided ones, on the other hand, like your friend Nevelsen, seem a pretty steady bunch. Adeline, certainly. That young doctor whose name I can never remember—

Wyatt.

That’s right. Wyatt. But then we arrive here and young Mr. Dragswolf can’t seem to wipe that grin off his face. And I’d count him among the trustworthy ones, wouldn’t you?

Unless he’s out there right now plotting a way to do us in.

George pats his shirt pocket for his cigarettes.

I put them up here, says Margaret and takes the pack of Lucky Strikes from the top of Alton Dragswolf’s three-drawer dresser. When I look around this place, she says, though her eyes are fixed on the cigarette pack, and I see the life Mr. Dragswolf has made for himself, I can imagine James doing something like this. Living by himself on his own corner of the homestead, running a small string of horses—

Don’t.
He barks out that command like he’s training an animal. But then his voice lowers. The boy’s dead and buried. Do yourself some good and leave off that line of thinking.

Is that what you do, George? You don’t allow yourself to even think about your son?

That’d make about as much sense as poking at the holes where my fingers used to be.

You think love’s like a wound, George? You let it scab over, then forget about it?

I don’t believe in seeing our son where he can’t be. And I don’t see anything of him in Alton Dragswolf. Who strikes me as more than a little strange.

Oh, he means well. Finally she puts the cigarette between George’s lips and strikes a match for him. She looks around the shack, and when she sees a battered tin ashtray on the kitchen table she retrieves it and places it alongside her husband. He’s probably just lost track of things a bit, living out here. As near as I can tell, there isn’t a clock in the place.

Another one of your theories? George says. Could be.

We could drive off, you know. I could write him a note and tell him we headed for home. Maybe leave him a few
dollars for his trouble. And we could be back in Dalton in a few hours.

I’m not ready.

You’re not ready? What does that mean? You’re not ready . . .

I’m not ready to go home.

Oh, George. She presses her hands to her face. Please. You never wanted to leave in the first place. How can you not be ready to go back? When she brings her hands down, her eyes are glittering with unspilled tears. Please.

For an answer he turns his head away and blows a stream of smoke toward the towel-covered window.

Margaret Blackledge takes the cigarette from her husband. She crushes it out and puts the ashtray on top of the dresser. Move over, you old bag of bones. She climbs into the bed and presses the length of her body along George’s. She rests her chin on his chest and when she does, the tremor stops, though perhaps some of her trembling enters him. She slips her hand inside his shirt, popping open one of the snaps in the process. Do you want to go the other way? she asks. We could do that. The car is still packed with supplies. We could head west . . . just drive and see where we land. See an ocean, maybe. Or we could go north . . . see if your friend will let us bunk down in his jail again.

I told you. I’m done traveling.

You’re done traveling. What does that
mean,
George? Look where we are. We can’t stay here. We don’t
belong
here. Her hand moves around on his chest as if she’s probing for a heartbeat.

George keeps staring off in the direction of the window. The October sun sets early and today it hasn’t even
made an appearance. On the other side of the towel and the glass, the day is all but done.

George? You’re not planning to die on me, are you?

With that hand inside his shirt she grabs a tuft of his chest hair and pulls hard. He flinches.
Are you, George?

He turns slowly toward her and with the hand that has all its fingers he lifts her head tenderly toward his own. A man doesn’t die from losing a few fingers, he says. I heard you say so myself.

A
LTON
D
RAGSWOLF DID NOT CATCH ANY FISH
,
BUT
Margaret prepares supper anyway. She has brought groceries from the car—Spam, potatoes for frying, a can of creamed corn, a jar of applesauce—because, she insisted, it wouldn’t be right for them to eat Alton’s food.

While she works at the cookstove, Alton and George sit at the kitchen table, George sipping whiskey from a coffee cup and smoking. Since he has found a way to strike matches with one hand, he no longer asks his wife to light his cigarettes for him. He pins the matchbook to the table, folds a match in half, and rasps it into flame with his thumb. Alton, who neither drinks nor smokes, deals poker hands to himself from a limp, dog-eared deck of cards.