The Work of Wolves (4 page)

"It's important to him, Charles," she said.

"He skipped school. Took the pickup and trailer without asking."

"I know."

"So you want me to tell him what a nice horse he got?"

She shrugged, tried to smile him out of his mood. He looked away from her, at the land uncoiling to the horizon, the gray shapes of the Badlands against the far sky.

"He did."

"Did what?"

"Get a nice horse."

She smiled at him again, and when he met her gaze he couldn't quite sustain his anger.

"Christ!" he said, trying to inoculate himself against her lightheartedness.

She put the pickup into gear. They bounced over the ruts of the field toward the road. A covey of quail leapt from the fence line grass, torpedoed away, disappeared into the ground. They might have burrowed right through it so sharply did they descend, so suddenly disappear.

"It's a waste of his money, Marie. He should be saving money. Thinking about college. He's not too young."

"I know. It's just..."

"Just what?"

She waited until she'd pulled onto the road, shifted into high.

"He's so proud of it," she said.

Charles watched a jet lay a contrail in the blue. He watched it for a long time, until it was directly above the pickup and he couldn't see it. Marie glanced over at him. She reached out her hand, touched him on the shirt sleeve, so lightly he didn't notice. Then she put her hand back on the steering wheel. When Charles looked back down, she was just driving.

"Proud of it," he said. "Well, fine."

Then, a half-mile later, he said: "I been going back and forth in that field all day. Neither one've 'em ever even thought've comin to relieve me."

AS IT TURNED OUT
, cigarettes did cause Ves Fielding's death, but not in any way that his daughter-in-law had imagined or warned against, their role in that death being so momentary that, to all but Carson, who had seen it, they seemed less cause than coincidence, and Marie would come to say, with humor and affection, that Ves Fielding had died of sheer orneriness. And that, too, would be true. Ves's death became a memory that pinned Carson to a moment, to a spot of time and land, to snowfall, to blue morning light strained and crystalline, so that for years afterwards, even in the heat of summer, just before he woke he would believe he was standing in a bluegray place streaked with lines of white, and when he woke he would find himself confused by the square and stationary edges of his room.

He and his grandfather took up training horses together. Carson would come to remember standing by the corral, waiting, and his grandfather coming out of the old house morning after morning, a stub of cigarette between his yellowed fingers, his breath in the winter indistinguishable from the smoke he exhaled, his words of greeting made of cloud, and he would saddle up a horse with creaking leather and swing a leg over. But he refused to accept his age—the ornery part—refused to cede to his grandson the raw horses, so that on a snowy November morning in his eighty-fifth year and Carson's sixteenth, the old man's leg didn't swing quite high enough, and the bump of his heel against the horse's haunch caused his snowcrusted boot in the stirrup to slip, which—like some perverse Rube Goldberg machine—caused his stub of smoldering cigarette to drop from his mouth onto the horse's withers, which caused the horse to startle and jump, which caused Ves's foot to slip clear out of the stirrup, and he fell down alongside the horse's flank.

Final cause was never officially determined. The coroner could not or would not say whether death came from the broken neck when Ves hit the ground with the back of his head or from the fractured skull where the horse's hoof connected as he fell past its flank in the descending snow.

But Carson, seeing the hoof flash up, knew beyond any need for autopsy or official statement that his grandfather was dead before his skull struck the ground. He was coming out of the barn with a rope in his hand when the accident happened. He saw it all. He saw the old man's head jerk sideways as he fell, the abrupt, strange, quick movement parallel to the ground, angling across the lines of snow. Carson heard the sound. The horse, freed, bucked away from the body. Carson did not run, and he did not raise his voice. Even if things could not be made better, they could be made worse, and a horse wild in the corral was worse. He opened the corral gate slowly, walked to the animal, speaking. Took the reins. Tied them to the fence. Only then did he go to his grandfather, the horse huffing behind him.

Carson put one knee on the ground, put his elbow on the other one. Blood, like fluid too bright from an engine, leaked out of the old man's head onto the snowy, hoofmarred ground. In later years, recalling it, trying to know what he'd seen, Carson would think that the old man's head and neck looked like a tennis racquet he'd once seen shattered and abandoned on a street—that kind of twisted, wrongful look that proclaims beyond all doubt that this particular kind of broke is final. The smell of the old man—cigarette smoke and Copenhagen and age, and the pungent smell of unwashed sheets slept in so many weeks that Marie would periodically give in from asking Ves to bring them to her and sneak into the old house, holding her breath, and peel the greasy things from the bed, laying clean ones beside it, and swear to never do it again, though always the old man's indifference to the sheets' dirt and smell outlasted her will—came up, mixed with the metallic smell of blood and the cold distillation of snow in the air.

Though the old man's head was twisted like an owl's or doll's, there was a smile on his face. But Carson knew that it was a mere betrayal of muscle, that the old man saw no humor or satisfaction in his own death other than, perhaps, the satisfaction of dying within his own activity, of being bested in fair competition by an animal he had many times bested and, by so dying, of leaving the world without giving money to the sonsabitches who made their livings herding old people from room to room. Other than that, the old man had no wish to die, took no pleasure in it, saw no humor in its finality. Carson, even at sixteen, standing in the corral with the horse blowing behind him and the rope he'd carried from the barn still in his hand and snow drifting out of the sky, knew, seeing the smile on the wreck of the old man's face, that the smile was not the old man's joke but instead a joke played upon him and that his grandfather would have preferred to spend eternity—if he could—stinking and farting and riding and cursing the things he hated in the world he loved.

Carson watched snowflakes melt on the old man's face. Then turned away, not wanting to see the first flakes that would not melt. He didn't hurry to the house, and when he entered he did not call out but walked from room to room until he found his mother. She was in the spare bedroom getting Christmas ornaments out of the closet a month early. She turned when Carson entered the room, holding a cardboard box of glass bulbs and porcelain figurines.

"You're quitting already?" she asked.

He removed his work gloves, put them in his back pocket, stepped to her, lifted the box from her hands, stepped back again, set the box on the carpet, stood again. He reached up, removed the wool Scotch-plaid cap from his head, held it down near his knee, flicked it in the direction of the box.

"Didn't want you to drop that," he said. "Somethin happened. Grampa's had 'n accident. Tryin a ride that Scooter horse an fell. It's bad, Mom. He's dead."

It wasn't the first or the last time his mother would wonder who this son of hers was. She stared at him, the way he stood before her, holding his cap, watching her.

"You said dead," she said.

He nodded.

"But ... Oh, my God!"

Only then did her hands fall, which all this time had been lifted as if she still held the box, and Carson saw that if he hadn't removed it she would indeed have dropped it.

She rushed toward the doorway, but he was in the way. She ran into him, was surprised to find him there. Her hair swung forward past her cheekbones as she rebounded, and then she was like a broken, motorized toy which, thrown off course, limps in circles. To Carson she was suddenly a stranger who had bumped into him and who stood flustered for a moment, giving him a brief second to observe her and wonder who she was. And perhaps because his grandfather lay dead only yards away in snow already covering him, near a horse that, having killed him, was already sleeping standing up in the slanting snowfall, Carson saw his mother as both beautiful and old. Perhaps she was both because she was so suddenly lost and fragile.

He dropped his cap on the floor and reached out with both hands and took her upper arms. He intended only to stop her shimmering, her circling within herself. He grasped her in the oddest way he'd ever used with her, as if he were grasping a railroad tie to set it firmly in place in a fence post hole he'd dug.

"Mom," he said. "What are you doing?"

"We've got to call an ambulance."

He'd reached out to her in gentleness, but the look on her face, the desperation there, and the hope, disturbed and angered him. With his arms fully extended, he gripped her triceps and pushed her downward. A week later he would notice black and blue and yellow marks of fingers on her upper arms as she washed her hair in the kitchen sink—a habit left: over from the time when she had lived in the old house without a shower—and he would almost ask her how the hell and who the hell. His mind would race, trying to think who might have done that to her, his father beyond possibility—and then he would realize the answer and stare at his thumb and finger on the handle of his coffee cup and scrape back his chair and go outside, where the sun had not yet risen, and wind was driving snow across the pastures, and Venus was alone in the eastern dark.

He gripped her hard and drove her down against the floor. Her knees almost collapsed.

"I didn't say hurt, Mom. I said dead. He's dead. He's laying out there dead."

Surprise and pain bubbled for a moment to her face, then went. Suddenly her eyes became clear and unclouded.

"You did," she whispered. "Yes. You did say dead."

She was back. Here. He needed her here. He relaxed his grip on her shoulders, his forearms trembling. She stumbled, caught herself. Steadied. Pushed back a strand of hair.

"But how do you know?" she asked.

He grunted. Now she'd turned sly. A riddler. Looking for the right answer to death's recognition, and if he got it wrong she would insist again that the old man lived.

But her eyes remained steady and clear. Carson saw the question was only what it was: a desire to know if he'd passed a hand over lips, felt the neck for a pulse. Carson was baffled. There were no such details to provide.

"I know dead, Mom," he said. "I've seen dead."

She pursed her lips, then nodded, the barest gesture of assent.

"I suppose you have."

It calmed her, this certitude of his, that he could look at death and know it and not require confirmation. Yet it disturbed her too. Such confidence, in such a thing. What kind of son would reason so? Her son: She didn't know him—didn't know what he'd seen to recognize death like this. A stranger beyond her perimeter, taught by experiences she'd never learn of. How had he leapt so far beyond her knowledge of him?

"I need to call the hospital. They'll send an ambulance."

"Mom! Jesus!"

To have her believe and then retract: It nearly broke him, nearly turned him back into a child. For the first time that day, his eyes burned.

She reached out and touched his cheek.

"Oh, sweetie," she said. "I believe you. But do you think anyone else will?"

She ran her fingers from his jawbone to the end of his chin, twice, then let her fingers drift into air. She stepped into him and wrapped him in her arms, and they held each other. Snow rattled on the window pane. She let him go, stepped around him and through the door. He heard her footsteps descend the stairs, heard the phone lifted below, her voice speaking, pausing, replying, the receiver being returned to the cradle. He picked his cap off the floor, pressed it for a moment to his eyes: wet wool, straw, horses. He lifted his face, stared about the room like a man lost, then stepped over the box of Christmas ornaments to the snow-struck window. With his foot above the box, he thought of stepping right into it: the explosion of the hollow ornaments, the grind of glass. He lost his balance and had to fall forward to keep from doing what he had imagined. He missed the box with his upraised foot, but his trailing boot caught its top edge and tipped it over as he stumbled to the window. There was a ruckus of glass. Several ornaments rolled past him, hit the baseboard under the window, rebounded off-kilter.

"Might as well a let her dropped it," he murmured.

He stood looking out the window at the cold, parched light. The wind drove snow in slanting lines, skewing the world. He could see the horse standing where he'd tied it, asleep, its saddle filled with snow. A cold rider.

"That's right," he whispered. His breath momentarily obscured the window. "Sleep. You won't be doin any more work today."

That quick, bright hoof. It had come up in a sudden contortion of the horse's flesh. Carson had seen his grandfather swing his leg up, had heard the bump of boot on flesh, heard the intake of his grandfather's breath and seen the cigarette glow bright, then drop. He couldn't see the cigarette butt against the snowy landscape. Could see only the flame. An orange spot of heat, floating down. Wavering. And his grandfather's face at peace, not yet having registered the way things had gone wrong. After eighty years of riding, there was not a right or a wrong way to mount a horse. There was only the way.

Yet it had gone wrong. Not because the old man had made a mistake. His body had. His old body. Time and age. Those old betrayers.

And then the fall, and the horse's back taut and arched, the rear hoof snaking forward, random and chaotic. It could have gone anywhere: intentionless, purposeless. Kicking just to kick. Yet it had met his grandfather's skull.

From the window Carson tried to make out the old man's body. Either the corral fence hid him or the snow had already so covered him that he'd become another lump on the ground. Carson felt no need to change that. Snow or cloth might cover the old man, and he would surely prefer snow, and would prefer the open corral to anywhere else they might now move him.