Let Him Go: A Novel (28 page)

Thrown from a horse. Broke his neck.

The hell. New to the saddle, was he?

He could stay on a horse. And he could keep his shirt on.

The cowboy claps his hand on his bare chest. Ooh! You got me!

And as long as I’m talking to you like your mother . . . that home you’re putting behind you? You just might want to go back someday. No matter how far you go.

Is that your boy’s story?

The intervening silence lasts so long the cowboy could be forgiven for thinking that Margaret hasn’t heard him. Then, with the lights of Gladstone finally in view, she says, James? No, James always stayed close . . .

Apart from the directions Margaret provides once they enter the city limits, neither she nor the young cowboy says much more. When the truck and trailer stop in front of Homer and Adeline Witt’s house, Margaret thanks the young cowboy and quickly climbs out of the truck with her husband’s boots in hand. When her door slams, the horse nickers a quiet question:
Are we there?

But Margaret doesn’t walk away, not immediately. She
leans back in the open window to ask the young cowboy a question. You know where Dalton, North Dakota, is?

Yes, ma’am.

You ever find yourself in Dalton, you look the Blackledges up in the phone book and give us a call. I have some shirts I believe will fit you.

A
FTER THE CALL ABOUT THE FIRE AT THE
W
EBOY PLACE
wakens him, Sheriff Munson dresses and drives out to the ranch. When he arrives, the rural fire department is already there, though it’s too late for them to do anything but shake their heads at the devastation and make sure no sparks have found their way to the barn.

Anybody make it out of there? Sheriff Munson asks one of the volunteer firemen.

Just the young gal back in town.

Did Blanche . . ., the sheriff says but then stops short of the question to which he has already been given the answer.

He walks back to his car and uses his two-way radio to contact the deputy on duty at the jail. Go on over to the hospital, Sheriff Munson tells Clark Rohr. Hand over the news. It’s every last one of them.

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Margaret’s hammering on the Witts’ front door brings Homer on the run, and when he opens the door and sees her standing there with her husband’s boots held close to her chest, he says, You’ll want to talk to Adeline.

For the second time inside an hour, Margaret Blackledge climbs into a truck, this time with Homer Witt at the wheel. During the ride to the hospital, Homer says not a word to her, and she soon stops asking him questions. When a man in this part of the world finds a reason to tuck himself inside a silence, nothing is likely to coax him out until he’s good and ready.

The Hudson! It’s here! Parked in the hospital lot in a neat row with the other dusty cars that delivered their owners here in the middle of the night. Homer has barely stopped the truck when Margaret jumps out and heads for the hospital’s well-lit entrance.

As if the darkened corridors are marked with special directions for her to follow, Margaret Blackledge proceeds unerringly to the room where Adeline must be. Outside the door she hears the murmur of many voices, triply hushed by the hour, the place, and the occasion. And when she enters, even the murmuring stops. There are faces here she doesn’t recognize—Nurse Rollag’s, Carl Skeller’s, the doctor’s—as well as those familiar to Margaret—Lorna’s, Jimmy’s—but it is Adeline Witt’s eye that Margaret seeks. There will be time, too much time, really, for the explanation of all that has happened outside of Margaret’s ken, but for now Adeline merely shakes her head.

It’s enough. For the moment, it’s enough, and Margaret gasps as if someone had laid an icy hand on her bare flesh.

Although no commands to move have been given, the people in the room reposition themselves in a series of intricate steps that allows the two tall women to stand alone in their midst and for Adeline to convey to Margaret
Blackledge precisely the same message that the nurse delivered to Lorna within the hour: your husband has perished in the fire that burned the Weboy house to the ground.

Those who know Margaret Blackledge know that when her head nods at Mrs. Witt’s words, it’s due to her affliction. It’s not, as a stranger might believe, that she is nodding in assent—yes, yes, I knew where George was going—or in acquiescence to the inevitable—yes, yes, autumn will end and winter will follow, yes, yes, there’s nothing to be done . . . But of what she whispers there is no question. Oh, George. For me? For me, George? Then, as if by instinct, Margaret reaches for her grandson.

He leans eagerly into her embrace. Margaret walks a few paces off with her back to the small congregation, bouncing Jimmy in her arms all the while. She is carrying his thirty pounds, yet it is this little boy who has the real burden. He must now rescue two women from grief.

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The next day Homer Witt learns from a friend at the fire department that Sheriff Munson plans to conduct an investigation at the Weboy ranch. Homer drives out to the site himself and arrives just as Sheriff Munson is about to walk through the charred wreckage. Though there is so little house left even a good memory would have trouble putting it back together, the sheriff still enters where the front door once was. Much of his inspection will have to take place in the cellar of the Weboy house since everything aboveground burned and then fell into the hole dug for the foundation.

The sheriff asks, Come out here to help me, did you, Homer?

Just spectating. You know us old firehouse dogs can’t stay away from the smell of smoke.

Within minutes it becomes apparent the sheriff has lost whatever enthusiasm he might have had for this inquiry. Has he never before walked through a fire’s ruins? Homer, of course, has had experience with conflagrations and their aftermath. He can see, as any fireman could, that this was a fire that blazed fast and hot and either turned everything into its own fuel or twisted it into an unrecognizable shape in the attempt. But Homer Witt says nothing to help Sheriff Munson. Homer doesn’t, for example, caution the sheriff about how only a foot away from ash as cold as snow there can be embers waiting for a little air to blaze up again. Neither does Homer advise the sheriff that when he’s kicking through the cinders and the fire-blackened lumps, he might have to rely on sound to tell him what an object is. Metal rings dully even through its layers of soot and ash. Porcelain thuds. Glass pings. Bone on a bed of ash makes no sound at all. And Homer keeps quiet about what firefighters do when they’re in the presence of burned bodies. They smear Mentholatum under their noses as a defense against that odor that is a mix of sulfur, musk, seared meat, and melted copper, a smell that, once in your nostrils, will never leave.

The sheriff walks out of the ruins near where the back door was. His work is done, and why not? No matter what he might or might not find, the people who perished here won’t be any less dead. Did the Weboys die in their beds? Since their beds have burned along with the floors they rested on, it can’t be known. And even if he had cause to do so, Sheriff Munson has no desire to probe fire-withered corpses to see whether a charred skull or breastbone has a
hole in it that could have been made by a .44 caliber bullet. Could the coroner discover something among the ashes? Perhaps, but Sheriff Munson won’t call his colleague in on this one. Six people dead . . . why risk adding complication to heartbreak?

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Arrangements are made. That is the phrase. In the wake of calamity arrangements are made, though everyone knows these will be for lives that do not want to be set in order or brought into line.

Adeline loans Lorna a dress and though the garment is too big in the shoulders and hangs far below her knees, it’ll have to do until Lorna gets back to Dalton, where she and Margaret can try to put together a semblance of a wardrobe. For Jimmy there’s nothing to be done but purchase new clothes at Sears.

Homer accepts Margaret’s offer of George’s boots. They’re at least three sizes too large but they’re good boots, better than Homer’s, so he stuffs them with rags and wears them, adding a wobble to his bowlegged walk.

He’s wearing those boots when he drives out to Alton Dragswolf’s shack to retrieve George and Margaret’s suitcases and a few of the supplies that had been unloaded from the Hudson. The food Alton is welcome to, payment for his hospitality and the loss of the revolver that George carried off. Homer doesn’t bring George’s hat back, because Alton hid it. He’s already made it his own and he’s been wearing it every day, peering out from its wide brim as he watches the edge of the butte for the Hudson to appear and once again make its careful way down the trail to his home.

The coffin that will be shipped back to Dalton is plainly too short for a man of George Blackledge’s height, but that’s a matter that will pass without remark. No one wants to risk hearing mortician Dugan’s explanation that its length will suffice for what’s left to be buried.

W
HILE THE FINAL PROVISIONS ARE MADE FOR THIS LIFE
unforeseen, Margaret, Lorna, and Jimmy stay at the Witts’. Lorna and her son are given the spare bedroom and Margaret sleeps on the davenport. It’s only two nights but they are nights to be added to Margaret’s count of those spent in a bed not her own.

At two thirty in the morning of the day they are to depart, Jimmy wakes crying, and this is not a child’s sleepy whimper but a full-throated, terrified wail. A closet door has been left ajar in the room where he and his mother have been sleeping, and Jimmy points to the closet’s interior—a deeper darkness in the room’s dark.

Jimmy’s mother is right next to him but she’s slow to rouse to her son’s distress. She’s confused, as sleepers sometimes are when they wake in strange surroundings. She looks in the wrong direction, toward the bedroom door and not toward her crying child.

By the time Lorna orients herself and turns to Jimmy to comfort him, the silhouettes of two tall women are framed in the doorway.

Once his eyes adjust to the dark and he’s able to see what’s there—or what isn’t—Jimmy quiets.

Ssh, his mother says. Ssh. It’s all right.

Lorna turns to Adeline and Margaret and offers them the same reassurance. It’s all right, she says. He had a bad dream. It’s all right. I have him.

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The two women don’t return to their beds but go to the kitchen. They sit in the dark and Adeline lights a cigarette from the open pack left on the table.

Did he have nightmares before? asks Adeline.

A few nights back in his own bed and he’ll be fine, Margaret says. He needs to eat healthy and get some exercise and he’ll be fine.

Well. Don’t you be the one chasing after him. Let his mother do that with her young legs.

Margaret laughs softly. Lorna? I’m betting she won’t last a year. The first good-looking fellow passes through Dalton she’ll be flagging him down in the street, begging him to take her away. As long as it’s to someplace bigger than Dalton.

And leave her child behind?

That’s my guess.

Adeline shakes her head. That’ll make you mother and grandmother both to the boy. You ready to take that on?

Just what George asked me. Yes. I’m ready.

The smoke that Adeline exhales shows up as a gray stream in the kitchen darkness. And what’ll you tell the boy when he asks about his father and his grandfather?

I’ll say they were good men. Good men who never wanted anything but what was best for him.

Adeline Witt nods and crushes out her cigarette in the ashtray.

Just so you know, Margaret says. That call I made earlier?
That was collect. So you don’t have to worry about something mysterious showing up on your telephone bill.

Oh, hush. No one’s worried about that. That was your daughter, I take it.

Margaret nods vigorously. That was Janie.

And how did that go?

She’s not coming back.

Not even for—

She’s not coming. Not that I believed for a minute she would. And she had a few choice words for me that I won’t pass on.

Well, says Adeline, we raise them to live their own lives.

We do. We do indeed.

The women are silent for a long time and then Margaret stands up. I believe I’ll head back to bed, she says. I’d like to get an early start in the morning and I imagine I’ll have a hell of a time getting those two out of bed.

As Margaret walks past, Adeline reaches out an arm and pulls her close. Margaret bends over and rests her chin on top of Adeline’s head. Margaret’s vibration passes through her friend’s skull and for an instant it’s as if two women can think the same thoughts.

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Jimmy Blackledge sits up high in the backseat on the suitcase still packed tight with the clothing that would have kept his grandfather warm during the winter to come. In the front seat the two widows watch Montana diminish with each revolution of the Hudson’s wheels.

Soon they are among the first rocky rifts and ginger-red eruptions of the Badlands. When the lacerations in the landscape deepen into gorges, Jimmy climbs down from his roost
and settles on the floor below the backseat as though something in the land’s shadows reminds him of the darkness he saw in the closet the night before. On the floor he remains, moving the pegs in and out of the holes of the cribbage board Homer Witt gave him to amuse himself on his trip.