Stony River (67 page)

The question startled her, that he would have such a thing in mind to suggest it. And unbelievably, for long seconds the unknown glittering skyscrapers and his worldly, debonair presence beside her wanting to entertain her in royal manner, attracted her. After all, she was on her own and free to do as she pleased. And perhaps her heart could find a measure of solace by forgetting everything else and turning to him. But then she thought of Joel’s repeated insistence that she take care, and even Jillian’s friendly warning—and knew if for no other reason, she couldn’t accept the lavish invitation. “Thank you, Willy, I’m sure it would be fun, but I’d like to go home,” she said as nicely as she could.

Willy acted as if it didn’t matter, and talked of trivial subjects on the drive home. Sevana joined in the chatter with an attempt at cheerfulness—but in her heart nothing had been resolved for her.

She couldn’t know that far to the north in another unending Yukon night, Joel was also facing matters unresolved and tormenting. He felt as one for whom events had avalanched, leaving him blindsided. He was torn by doubt and upheaval, and a great sense of bereavement. He had agreed to give up his land, the thing that had been the one invariable in his life. He had acted in haste, and now felt betrayed by his own actions. And the more he thought of his coming marriage to Chantal, the more he saw Sevana’s face before him. But it was a bit late to be seeing all this with starkly clarified vision. He stuffed another green stick into the fire amid the cloud of choking smoke that escaped the poorly crafted stove whenever he opened it, and with burning throat and eyes took his seat next to its feeble heat again, while his father slept on.

C
HAPTER 46

“Look, Willy,” said Sevana, bringing a new painting into the shop a week later. “Do you like it?”

“Like it?” He inspected the snowcapped rocks stained by the sunset’s fiery alpenglow, painted from a memory that could not be forgotten. “It’s incredible. When did you do this?”

“This is my ‘masterpiece’ for the art show. You told me to paint one, didn’t you? Well, here it is. I’ve been working on it all week.”

Willy continued to marvel over it until she asked him to help her pick out a frame for it. Then obligingly he found just the right one, and together they admired the finished effect. “Were you serious about putting on an art show?” she asked.

“Absolutely. We’ll invite all the artists in the surrounding area, host it here at the shop. Saturday, end of March—how’s that sound? That should cure our cabin fever.”

Cabin fever. Maybe that was what was wrong with her. She felt grounded, confined to a limited sphere. She’d been to several car lots, and in a kickback to a childhood liking of her father’s army jeep, had decided to buy one for herself. It would be rugged enough to take her into that fin of mountains she could see over there on the Divide—get away from the city now and then and explore some backroads, find some forests and whitewater streams, build a campfire and sit alone by it just as Joel had done all summer. She had talked to a dealer who assured her he could find a used jeep in her price range, if she just gave him a little time.

But for now she was still afoot, hindered from carrying out her idea of visiting the sheep ranch. She couldn’t ask Willy to take her, or he would tease her unmercifully and again accuse her of living in a dream. Which she wasn’t. These were real sheep who ate hay and had names she knew. There was nothing illusory about a flock of sheep. Finally, after a furtive study of the map in the telephone book, she decided to take the city bus as far as she could, then walk the rest of the way. Saturday would be a good time, for with the new year had come the proposed change of schedule: Willy deeming her worthy to work by herself on Mondays, while giving her Saturdays off.

On the appointed day she boarded a bus on a street far from
Calihan’s Classics
, after anxiously scanning the passerbys and seeing not a flash of Willy’s playful grin or lazy mocking eyes. Walking out a long country lane in a skiff of snow, she passed more than a few ranches before she found the one she was looking for—and all the while she kept expecting Willy to come speeding along in his car and discover her there, even though she knew he was running the shop today and her fears were wholly unjustified.

Confound him, she thought suddenly, she shouldn’t let him tyrannize her. She had a perfect right to be on that road. And she shouldn’t let him pressure her into a relationship she wasn’t sure about, either. Oh, it wasn’t always outright compulsion, but it was there all the same. Whenever she looked into his eyes, she saw the expectation in them, and felt he was merely waiting for her to give into him—with every confidence she would. If she moved to Calgary, it would be more of the same subtle coercion. She didn’t think she could keep up her resistance indefinitely. It was either surrender to him, or remove herself far from his persuasive powers.

Her mind circled back to that thought. Maybe she
should
give in to him. She liked him well enough. If she had never met Joel, she probably would have said yes to Willy and his considerable charms long ago. But she did know Joel, and that posed an unsolvable dilemma in fostering more than a friendly regard for Willy or anyone else.

Proceeding toward the log arch she’d spied reading
Ownbeys’ Sheep Ranch
, she tried to think things through. The most logical plan would be to continue her education by getting a full-fledged art degree. Maybe she had learned all the basics, or maybe there was more—she didn’t know. But college was a place where she could continue to practice until she’d gained enough experience to launch out on her own.

As she turned up the dirt drive, she stopped plotting her long-range plans and started wondering what she was going to say in the next minute or two to the man in a denim jacket setting fenceposts along the lane up ahead.

She returned to the bus stop several hours later in a very conflicted state of high elation mixed with deep self-accusation. She had used all her Christmas money to buy Goldthread, Hawthorn, Thistle, Gyrfalcon, and Blazingstar. Once she had spent some time in the field with them and saw how they remembered her, running over with their ears pricked up and tails wagging to see if she had brought them any violets today, she knew she couldn’t let them be sold to strangers. Gyrfalcon in particular had stared up at her with such piercing awareness, he seemed to be pleading with her not to leave him in that strange place but to let him go home. So she’d paid the price Mr. Ownbey named, and arranged for him to continue to board them until some future time when she could keep them herself.

She knew it wasn’t even remotely excusable, but she couldn’t help the soft spot she had for those now-grown lambs. They were in that awkward yearling stage, but they were as adorable as ever to her, for she couldn’t see them without remembering how they’d looked when she’d first laid sight on them. And Mr. Ownbey, a leathery outdoor man with a twinkling gaze that nearly disappeared into the deep planes of his face when he smiled, had not questioned her, even though never before had an apartment dweller come to buy sheep they couldn’t keep. “I am a sheepman—you think I don’t understand?” he told her, when she’d apologized for the unusual request by explaining that she’d spent some time with them out in the pasture last summer. “They are like people; they become your friends.”

Well, she excused herself, if it became apparent that buying them was a mistake, she could always sell them. But it was worth it for now, just to know they were safely hers. The jeep would simply have to wait a little longer.

The next Saturday, Sevana was sufficiently delighted with her recent purchases to go back to the ranch and spend a whole afternoon grooming their thick winter coats with a brush she’d bought—again in mortal fear of being seen by Willy, this time in a pet store. But it brought her a measure of comfort to have some living, breathing part of the summer in her possession…to know that not everything from that time had evaporated into thin air. She tried to console Gyrfalcon by whispering in his ear that she’d do all she could to find a way to keep him. And she held her cheek against Goldthread’s little muzzle (he was still smaller than the others) and told him how much she’d missed him.

She even brushed the rest of the sheep who had been Joel’s. Only a few had been sold—one being Brook, which she supposed wouldn’t give Joel too many sleepless nights if he knew. But she would have bought them all, even Brook, if she had had the means.

When Mrs. Ownbey learned of the visitor at the barn, she instructed her husband to send her over to the house for a cup of hot tea. So Sevana finished the afternoon in the farm kitchen drinking tea and eating a freshly baked cinnamon roll almost as big as her plate. Liddy Ownbey needed little help to carry on a conversation, so Sevana mostly listened—but she was so motherly she liked her. This was the woman who had fed Joel such a plentiful dinner and packed an equally generous lunch for his travels. Sevana still felt envious of her, wishing she could have done those things for him.

Nor had Mrs. Ownbey forgotten Joel, for when she learned that Sevana had not only bought his sheep but knew him personally, she was curious to learn how he’d fared on his trip. “Such a long way,” she clucked, wagging her ample knot of graying hair. “What a good man, to go up and help his father that way. And handsome—I don’t think I’ve ever seen a finer-looking man.” Here she paused meaningfully, and when Sevana weakly agreed, Mrs. Ownbey clucked again and said if she were Sevana, she would forget about Joel’s sheep and go after the man himself. He would make someone a fine husband; she shouldn’t let him get away. Sevana, surreptitiously tucking an arm around her ribs to hold in a sudden jab of pain, didn’t bother to tell her that while she was fully aware what she said was true, he had already gotten away. But despite this briefly traumatic interval in the conversation, Sevana walked back to the bus with a packet of sour-cream cookies tucked in her coat pocket and a warm feeling in her heart. It had been a most pleasant excursion.

Eating soup in her apartment that night, she reexamined her decisions for the future and arrived at the same conclusion. So that would be her course: she would choose a college as the next step after Willy’s class. A small college town would be ideal, where she could get a rural lot to keep the sheep.

But while she felt a burden lifted to know the direction she was taking, and a momentary brightness over her little flock of five, there was a basic dissatisfaction to it all that would not leave her. Life seemed flat, tasteless, as if she was only going through the motions because she had no other choice. She no longer lived each day tantalized by promise; she found no wonder in the fact that the sun rose and set. It blazed and fell dark mechanically, the same way she lived her life. Surely this couldn’t be all there was to life, was her disconsolate thought. She must be missing something, some key to the meaning of it all.

She listened to David’s sermon Sunday morning even more closely than of late, in her search to find a reason not to regard as pointless an existence that seemed nothing but lackluster to her now, to grasp something from what he said to pull her out of her lassitude. His words were always encouraging, but they did not reach her where she was. There seemed a chasm between his insights and her experience. Maybe she didn’t have the church background to connect to it the way others in the congregation did. Whatever the cause, the more she tried to form some conclusions about life’s relevance, the more she wrestled with the doubt she would ever know for sure what was true. She sat in the pew forgetting to close her eyes when David bowed his head to pray, for wishing all the wisdom he harbored in that dark-blond head of his could be hers.

That night she tossed in a confusion of dreams. Joel was standing on the sidewalk looking up at her. Snowflakes were drifting down, covering his hair and his overcoat, but he didn’t seem to notice. He just kept smiling up at her—the snowflakes falling more and more thickly, until she lost sight of him and all she could see was the snow coming down in a swirling, blinding mass. She leaned over the balcony calling his name into the eerily blanketing snow, and woke with a start, realizing she’d called his name out loud.

Her first thought was that he was in trouble and the dream had been a sign. It was still so real that she hurried out to the balcony, practically expecting to see him standing on the walk in the cold dawn. In her dream he hadn’t appeared to be in trouble—he hadn’t seemed to have a care in the world—but for some reason that made it the more alarming to her. All day at work it haunted her. She tried to dismiss the whole thing as a consequence of eating too many sour-cream cookies before bed, but in the background hung a sense of dread that was slow to dissipate, a feeling he was facing some kind of crisis.

Willy came late to the shop Tuesday morning with his weekend look about him. He didn’t have much to say for the first hour or so, but when he was sufficiently awake he looked up from paying bills to say: “Hey, I saw somebody you know out at Vandalier’s last night.”

“Who?” Sevana asked blankly.

“Your brother,” he said, a little smug over his news.

She stared at him in sudden, riveted focus. “
Fenn
was here?”

“He sure was.” Willy grinned. “And drunker than a sailor. He was talking pretty free, mentioned Cragmont in his ravings, and I remembered where I’d seen him before. He even has a slight family resemblance if you look for it—although he’s three times your size.”

“Is he still here?” she asked quickly.