Real Life (15 page)

“He wasn’t as bad as old man Wickers,” Nick had pointed out to Louisa, as if that made Jug’s meanness all right. “He was so bad his boys tried to hang him. Would have too, if a neighbour hadn’t come along just when they’d thrown the rope over a barn rafter.”

She thinks of Pat stopping in for coffee, saying she’d fallen down the cellar stairs when Louisa exclaimed over a bruised cheek and a cut lip. And I never even suspected, she thinks, disgusted with herself. It never entered my head. She thinks
how Stephanie flinched every time her young husband spoke, or even raised a hand to scratch his ear.

She looks up from her reverie to see that the cattle and riders behind them are almost at the corner where they’ll stop. She gets into the truck, starts it, and drives at a good clip until she’s nearly reached them. Nick and Brody have already started slowly to push the cattle to one side of the road for her. When she’s opposite Raeanne, she calls out, “How’s it going?”

“Okay,” Raeanne tells her, not smiling—she’d rather be out somewhere with her friends, but her father has insisted she help the neighbours. No matter, Louisa is already gone, inching past the cattle, ready to brake should a calf dart out.

Raeanne is blonde, with a fifteen-year-old’s cute, perfect figure. Her skin is pink and satin-smooth, so that beside her, Louisa feels like a piece of old shoe leather. Nick is smitten, Louisa sees. He’s frequently smitten by very young, pretty women. Harmless, she knows, but still, it makes her angry as much because of the false idea it will give Raeanne about her power in the world as Nick never wastes any charm on her any more.

She pulls up on the grass judging which way the wind is blowing, thankfully lightly today, and positions the truck so that it acts as a buffer, parks, gets out, hauls out the big cooler, and begins to set out the food, paper plates, and plastic cutlery on the truck’s end-gate. She knows without looking that the riders have moved onto the grass where she is, leaving the cattle to stand or graze. They’re too tired to spread out much; these first few miles are pretty much all uphill and it’s a warm day for them, nearly fifty degrees Fahrenheit.

The riders have dismounted and are loosening their cinches. Brody takes his saddle off and tosses it onto the grass, and the boys, starving as teenage boys always are, are striding toward
the food, their spurs clinking. Nick is looking after Raeanne’s horse, and she watches Raeanne walk toward her, her gait a bit stiff-legged, which is nothing to what it’ll be by tonight, Louisa thinks.

“Hungry?” Louisa asks. She opens a thermos and fills mugs with coffee. When they’re all comfortably seated on the hay bales Nick has thrown out of the truck box, munching away on their roast beef sandwiches and sipping coffee into which Nick has poured a dollop of rye from the bottle he keeps under the truck seat, Louisa asks if anybody has seen Walt Woodhouse lately.

“Why?” Nick asks, a warning to her to shut up.

“Didn’t think he’d show his face,” Louisa says, straight to Nick’s. The two boys huddle close to each other and talk in undertones, their murmuring broken by a snicker.

Raeanne says hesitantly, “I saw him at the Credit Union on Tuesday.”

Louisa tells her, “He’s the one drove Pat crazy. They had to dope her and haul her away to Regina just last week.” Raeanne flushes and looks at the ground, mowing the stiff grass with one boot.

“Now, now,” Nick mutters, not looking at Louisa. To Brody he says, “Where’d you get that gelding? He’s a nice-looking horse.”

“He’s off that Walker place,” Brody answers. The two men continue talking and Louisa busies herself at the end gate, covering the sandwiches with a cloth, opening another thermos of coffee. She isn’t sure why she needed to tell Raeanne that—she probably knew it anyway—and it occurs to her that maybe she was using Raeanne as an excuse to let Nick know again how angry she is. Or something. She moves away from the men and then further, to the far side of the truck where she leans against the box with her back to them. After a moment
she sees Raeanne has followed her. Raeanne’s eyes are on Louisa’s face, there’s both a hesitancy and a determination in them.

“How did he … drive her crazy?” Raeanne asks. Louisa, about to be harsh, studying the girl, sees something fragile there that softens her tone.

“He hit her,” she says. “Broke her ribs, she had black eyes, that sort of thing.” Raeanne leans against the truck beside Louisa and the two of them gaze out over the hills to the west. Behind them, they hear the steady murmur of the men’s voices.

“I guess I heard Mom say that,” Raeanne says. She swings her head quickly to Louisa again. “That can drive you crazy?” she asks. “I mean …”

Louisa says, “He was mean to her in lots of other ways too.” She hesitates, Raeanne is somebody else’s daughter, after all, and she isn’t sure if she should go on. “After years of that, last week he up and told her he had a younger woman—nobody knows if he really does or not—and Pat just—that was the last straw, I guess—she just started to babble.” She looks off into the distant sky where a flock of geese are honking their disorderly way south.

Raeanne says, “I’d
never
let anybody treat me like that. If my dad ever hit my mom, she’d kill him. I mean, she’d get the twenty-two and let him have it.” She laughs an embarrassed laugh, glancing sideways at Louisa as if she thinks maybe she shouldn’t have said this.

Louisa says, “You stick to that, girl, you’ll be okay.”

“But still,” Raeanne says suddenly, studying the dusty toes of her riding boots, “wasn’t she crazy to stay so long? I mean, crazy in the first place? Or … whatever.”

Louisa shrugs. “She seemed okay to me, except that she wouldn’t leave Walt. It was like she didn’t think anybody could hide her good enough from him. She didn’t believe the
Mounties could keep her safe. She got so scared of him, she plumb raised him up into some giant-size demon, when he’s just this dried-up, drunk, useless SOB.”

“Mom says Albert Miller went to jail for beating up Ida Nixon,” Raeanne tells her, but it sounds as if she’s asking a question. Louisa feels a bit sorry for her, she wonders if Evelyn, her mother, ever tells her a thing.

“He’s crazy,” Louisa explains. “Even the Mounties could see that. He was going to kill somebody.” She hesitates. “We all knew,” she tells the girl, hearing the strained sound in her own voice. “Everybody knew how Walt hurt Pat, but—I don’t know—it just seems like it’s a hard thing to do anything about. Pat doesn’t have no brothers around here any more and her father’s dead—not that he would have helped her.” Raeanne nods slowly, her eyes shifting away into the distant grassy slopes, where a half-dozen antelope have halted and watch them, heads up, tensed to run. “And he never did it when there was anybody around,” Louisa adds. “Pat told me he used to take all the keys out of the vehicles so she couldn’t get away.”

Louisa suddenly remembers how Stephanie’s husband hovered nearby the whole time Louisa tried to have a conversation with his wife. It’s a shock to realize that he wasn’t curious about her, as she’d thought, or being polite; he was making sure Stephanie didn’t tell Louisa anything, that she didn’t ask for help.

She pushes herself away from the truck, walks a few steps away from Raeanne, pretending to be studying the cattle. On the other side of the truck, Nick is doing the same. The cattle are moving around slowly now, instead of standing motionless or lying down. He turns back and calls to all of them, “Time to move.”

Brody and the two boys slowly rise, toss out leftover coffee from their mugs, gulp down the last bite of chocolate cake, find their gloves, resettle their hats, and head toward their
horses. Nick says, over the truck box, “You gonna ride, Raeanne? Or you gonna stay with Lou?” He smiles at her, his most charming, boyish smile that Louisa hasn’t seen for quite a while, and she thinks, A pretty girl comes along and men lose the few brains God gave them. Raeanne hesitates, looks from Nick to Louisa and back again.

“You go have fun,” Louisa tells her. She bends down, tears off a handful of grass, and wipes vigorously at a nonexistent smear of manure on her boot. She hears the swish of their boots in the grass as they walk away, but she hardly notices. Bending down, a picture has popped in front of her eyes, as clear as if she’s looking at a movie: Stephanie, her face bloodied and bruised almost to unrecognizability, her stare so blank that Louisa knows she is dead. She straightens so fast that for a second she’s dizzy.

Louisa and Nick are in town on business. While Nick stops in at the vet’s for some advice about a sick cow, she goes to the Coop to buy groceries. Coming out of an aisle, she almost runs her cart into a stranger’s, then realizes that it’s Marina Mcintosh, Stephanie’s mother.

“Hi, there, Lou,” Marina says. For a second, Louisa can’t think of a thing to say, she’s seeing Marina chattering away with the other women in the kitchen that night, as if the strained face of her own daughter was just because the girl was tired from giving birth. She occupies herself jockeying her cart out of the way, her lips already stretched into a smile she doesn’t mean, before she can look at Marina and say hello. There’s a pause and Louisa asks, “How is … Stephanie?” as if she’d momentarily forgotten her name.

Marina says, “Good, she’s really good. Baby’s growing like a weed.” Louisa studies her face, looking for some sign, but sees nothing.

“They grow fast,” she says and hesitates, wanting to say something, anything, to Marina about the danger she believes Stephanie to be in. But in the end she just can’t muster the courage, and after a second, Marina pushes her cart on down the next aisle. By the time Louisa has found everything on her list, Marina has finished checking out her groceries, loaded them into her truck, and driven away.

Louisa leaves her bags of groceries at the store to be picked up on her way out of town and goes to the café to meet Nick. She finds him sitting on a stool at the coffee bar among a row of his friends. He sees her come in and after a while he moves to the booth she’s taken.

“Get everything you wanted?” he asks. She nods, not speaking or looking at him. “Something the matter?”

“No.” She glances up at him. Under the wide brim of his Stetson his face has gone stiff, he’s expecting a complaint from her eventually. She smiles tentatively, reminding herself that, after all, none of this is Nick’s fault.

The outer door opens and Walt Woodhouse comes in. He sits down on the stool Nick has just vacated and says a loud “Hello.” Soon the conversation among the men starts up again. Louisa knows her face is reddening; she’s so angry the large plastic menu is quivering in her hands. Nick says nothing, but he clears his throat nervously, or else he’s warning her to calm down.

Louisa wants to leave, she wants to stare hard at Walt and then go out, banging the door behind her. She wonders what would happen if every woman in the café—there are four of them—pointedly got up and walked out when Walt came in, if they kept doing that, if it would do any good. Abruptly, she tosses down the menu, gets up, walks fast down the aisle between the rows of booths, her boots making a racket, and
goes into the bathroom, slamming the door. Behind her, she knows, Nick will be studying the menu very hard.

On the way home Nick says, “So what the hell’s bothering you.”

“You know,” she says, after a minute. He moves his hands on the steering wheel, as if he doesn’t know where to place them.

“You know I’m really sorry about that,” he says, meaning what has happened to Pat. Louisa wants to say,
If you and the other men would have stopped Walt—if you wouldn’t have anything to do with him now
—but she forbids herself. The men have their own code, not that she likes it, but she can’t expect Nick to change it all by himself. She says softly, “Nick?”

“What?” he asks, glancing at her, not sure whether he should smile.

“Stephanie Mcintosh—I mean Stephanie Degler now …” Nick waits. “I saw Marina at the Co-op. She doesn’t seem to even know—”

“Know what?” Nick asks, a touch of impatience entering his voice. Louisa throws caution to the winds.

“That she’s being abused by that Rory she married.” Nick doesn’t say anything for a minute, but his touch on the wheel seems to grow lighter, more careful.

“How do you know? Did she tell you? Stephanie, I mean.” Louisa shakes her head no. She tells him what she saw that night while he and the other men were chewing the fat on the soft chairs in the living room and the women sat together in the kitchen.

“He kept coming and going, you know?” Louisa says. “And I think he was keeping an eye on her to make sure she wouldn’t tell us about him.” Nick takes a hand off the steering wheel and
mops his face with it, a gesture he only makes when he’s tired or worried. He sets it back on the steering wheel.

“I don’t know what to do,” Louisa says.

“It’s none of our business,” he says, surprised.

“I could go to that new Mountie in town,” she says, as much to see what he’ll say as because she thinks she’ll be able to do this.

“What could he do?” Nick asks. “He couldn’t do nothing without some evidence or a complaint from her or her folks—”

“Warn him!” she says to Nick, her voice vibrating with emotion. “He could go check it out, maybe put some fear into that Rory, maybe slow him down some—”

“Hey,” Nick says, his voice softening. “Take it easy, Lou.”

“Nick,” she says, she’s begging now, “I can’t get her out of my mind, I can’t sleep for thinking about her—”

“No,” Nick says, his voice firm, “It’s up to her family, not us.”

Louisa has spent the day in the city visiting Pat in the halfway house she’s been moved to from the psychiatric ward. It’s nearly midnight by the time she gets home, and although Nick’s truck is parked by the door, the house is dark. When she enters the bedroom, he clicks on his bedside lamp.

“How was she?”

“Terrible,” Louisa says. “Drugged to the gills. Could hardly talk.” She sits down in the chair at the foot of the bed and kicks off one shoe. “I invited her to come and stay with us when she’s well enough.”

“That’ll bring Walt down on our heads,” Nick says. Louisa throws her other shoe against the closet door, leaving a dent in the wood.