The Work of Wolves (43 page)

Carson and Charles finally understood each other in a way she had always understood them both and wanted them to understand each other. And their understanding might now tear them apart. Could misunderstanding be a glue that bound people to each other? And if understanding tore them apart, whose side should she take—Charles's, who had no chance, if this dream went, to build another, or Carson's, who hadn't yet learned, maybe, how hard dreams were? Or had he?

"Hear that?" Carson suddenly asked.

His face was lifted to the ceiling, a look of rapt wonderment on it. She didn't hear anything. He scraped his chair back and disappeared into the living room. She heard the outside door open, and coming through it then the burbling, piping calls of sandhill cranes up there in the darkness. When she reached the doorway, Carson was standing on the withered grass, a statue, his face to the sky, and the descending sound of the birds made the whole near earth sound as if it were underwater. A sound that rose and fell: thin, fluting, bubbling, as if the birds carried the voices of rivers within them. Marie followed Carson's gaze. Ambient light was reflecting off the scree of snow on the ground and back into the sky, and it turned the cranes purely white. They were ghost birds in ragged formation, flying overhead through faint lines of snow. Relentless birds, vulnerable and beautiful. Onward into darkness. Marie was weakened by beauty.

When they were finally gone, pulling their music into the night with them, and the world was only the sound of snow scraping out of the air, Carson brought his face down, and she saw a reverent wildness there. Something ecstatic and to be feared.

"You see them?" he asked.

She nodded.

"Cranes. Flying at night."

She didn't know how he'd heard them from inside the kitchen. Even talking to her, even absorbed in a conversation so hard and difficult, he'd heard the barest call of cranes and run to see them. She thought of this woman they'd just been talking about, Rebecca Yarborough, whom she'd never met. This woman who might have fallen in love with her son. This married woman.

Marie thought about this woman and Carson riding horses together across this land he knew so well and loved so much, land that included, for him, the sky and wind and snow and the transient sounds of migrating birds. And Marie thought it would be easy to fall in love with him. Terribly easy. And incredibly hard. What kind of woman, she wondered, could pierce his self-containment? And live with it? That self-containment, its paradox, that included the land around him, so that in the middle of a conversation about what had to be a crucial and painful thing in his life, he could still leap to his feet and go to the door and step outside to watch great birds pass overhead on their way to another part of the planet, having heard their signature calls through roof and ceiling. Would the woman he left behind in such a conversation follow him to the door to share what he heard and saw? Or would she in time grow tired? And what if it was a crucial point in her life they were discussing? Would she begin to feel as if her life with him was a series of small but constant leavings-behind, small but constant interruptions by the world? And if she felt left: behind, would he in any way at all be able to understand her feelings? And if he did, would he be able to do anything about it? Could you prevent yourself from hearing the sound of cranes? And even if you did not rise to see them, could you keep your mind on earth if your ears were open to the river of their calls?

Marie was standing in the doorway to the old house, leaning against it, watching her son. He took a last look at the dark sky into which the cranes had disappeared, then walked past her into the living room. She shifted to let him pass, and she felt again how close she was to him, and how far away. She felt a small pang of jealousy for the woman who might be closer. If that were possible. And she felt a small pang of fear, for Carson, that it might not be possible. Or that it might. Either way. She looked to the sky again. Empty. Silent. Snowing.

Back in the kitchen they sat again, each with their own thoughts for a while, and the cranes strung out far to the south already, passing whitely over sleeping land.

"Carson," Marie said. "I don't know if it matters, but there's something I want to tell you. What your father said this evening, about never wanting to run this place. He wanted to take flying lessons. Airplanes. That's what he really wanted to do."

"Dad? Dad wanted to fly planes?"

"When he was younger. Before we married. He probably wouldn't want me telling you."

"And he didn't because of this place?"

"He couldn't get your grandfather to hear him. There was a time, Carson, when Ves was a hard man. He wasn't with you. But there was a time. And there was always something unfinished here. Your father kept thinking he'd find a time when he could go. Some point when things got wrapped up enough for him to leave. But there's no such thing on a ranch. No matter when he decided to go, he'd be leaving in the middle of something. Between that and your grandfather."

"Hard for me to see Dad as a pilot."

"I suppose it is."

You become who you are,
she thought,
and not who you wanted to be. And people see who you are. Especially your own children.

"You tellin me Dad still wants to fly planes?"

"No. I'm just saying this whole thing looks a lot different to him than to you. He sees opportunity. A chance to do something he's never done. To not do what his father told him to do. Or what this place demanded. Which are the same thing, really. That's one of the reasons your father tried not to ever force his opinion on you. He didn't want to make your decisions for you, like he felt his were made for him. But I think sometimes it just made it hard for you two to understand each other."

She wasn't sure she should be saying so much. But it was said now.

"The thing is, Ma," Carson said, "I get it. I do. I can see where Dad might not want a ranch. Always wondered why me an him had a hard time makin a go of it. So maybe I know now. But it don't matter. You can get me noddin my head over everything you say, an when it comes to sellin this place, I'll still say no. An no again."

"I know. I'm just telling you. Maybe I don't know why. Maybe I don't know what I'm saying."

But he did. Deep underneath, she was talking about herself. She was apologizing. She didn't need to put a sign on it. He heard. She was telling him she had chosen Charles first and would stand by him, even against her son. She didn't hear herself saying this, but Carson did. And didn't question it. He felt neither anger nor remorse, hearing it, though he knew she was saying she would agree to sell the ranch from under him, and she only wanted him to understand why.

There was one thing he might say to sway her. He might tell her of that mad chase across the prairie in Magnus Yarborough's pickup: the panicked cow's rising and falling haunches, its wooden-jointed run, the clot of manure swinging on the end of its tail, and the gray face of the man who had offered to pay twice-and-a-half market value for this land. Carson could tell his mother how the metal grill had neared the cow's rear end, of his own hands spread on the dashboard—as if they could stop anything. Of the jolt that ran through his shoulders. And the sound of breaking bones and tearing muscle. The tuft: of hair and skin that blew in the wind from the jagged end of a femur. And the words as the pickup backed away:
That bitch won't run away again.
And he could tell her how he'd stood alone, later, with the rifle, and heard the cow's labored breathing, its neck stretched on the ground and phlegm rattling in its lungs. And white clouds in its eye.

If his mother knew all that, she might change her mind. Might and might not. Carson realized he didn't know her well enough to know so subtle and fine a balance within her, and what might or might not tip it. Still, what had happened with the cow, that story, was the one thing he had to sway her.

"I should go back," she said. "We all need to think about this more."

He looked at her. He knew she would return to his father, and they would talk, and always in their talk there would be stated and unstated meanings binding them. If Charles told her the money was too good to pass up, he would mean partly he was sorry he'd never made enough to give her the comforts she might have said she wanted if she thought they were possible. And if she said she'd be happy to live somewhere else, in Rapid City or Sioux Falls, she would also mean she wanted to give him his chance to do something else. If he said he was sick of working so hard and not getting anywhere, he would also mean he was sick of seeing her drive a beat-up pickup into town for groceries, sick of seeing dust on the grocery bags by the time she got them home, sick of seeing her putting apples into the refrigerator while tiny points of silica shone in her hair. And if she said she would like a place where trees grew and shade was available, she would also mean she wouldn't mind sitting with him in that shade and seeing him cool on summer evenings instead of working late and entering the house in clothes soaked in sweat.

They would mean everything they said about themselves, but they would also mean another thing about each other. They were bound to each other as much by what they didn't say as by what they did, and it was a knot Carson could not unravel. And maybe did not care to.

They seemed to him a rich, green island split off from him, forested and thick with vegetation, an entire ecology grown from the soil of their love for each other. And they were talking to him across a strait of water, but the real talk was their own murmur to each other, like leaves in a mild breeze. He couldn't even name the trees that marched down to their shore or the birds that sang in their branches.

"Yeah," he said. "You better go. We'll all think some more."

She rose. He knew that if she walked out the door, his chance was gone. Too much of the world was going to men like Magnus—men to whom land was only acres and not a way to live. A man like Magnus should be revealed for what he was. The story of his violence should be told. He should not be given his way.

Marie reached the door. "Ma," Carson said.

She stopped and turned back to him. "Yes?"

She knew he had something more to say. Something important. She looked at him as she used to when he was young and came with news from school—all waiting, all attentive and expectant. Eager to hear him speak. She wanted something from him, hoped for something in his words—but he did not know what. And he saw beneath the expectancy an expression worn and tired, like the time the wind had come up in the night and broken every single one of the hackberry saplings she'd planted. Snapped them off. They'd tried to come back, but the effort seemed too much for them. Only a few of them had lived. That morning, that whole day, his mother's face had had the exhausted look that lay beneath the surface now. He saw that, and it subdued him, made him gentle.

"Good night," he said.

Disappointment flickered over her face. He didn't know why, or where it came from. She looked at the floor, pushed her hair back, looked back up, compressed her lips. Nodded.

"Good night," she said. She turned and left.

An island,
he thought. And if his mother walked the short distance back to the new house, to his father, that island would twine around itself tonight, and the decision would be made. He could still walk to the door. Could still call out to her. It had even seemed for a moment that she wanted him to—some hope on her face when he had spoken, some need. He could call her back, and speak, and with his words he could build a bridge across the strait to the island that was them.

But it was an ugly and misshapen bridge. He couldn't bear to speak it into existence. Couldn't bear to use Magnus Yarborough against his parents. Against their hopes.

But even more than that, he couldn't bear to use his parents against Magnus. Even if Magnus was using them against him. Even if that were so, Carson couldn't use them that way. He watched the door through which his mother had gone. Imagined her, head bent into the wind, arms wrapped around herself, going toward the new house. He let her go. He let his parents be. He put one foot, and then another, on the edge of the table. He thought of cranes, their beaks like needles stitching the hemispheres together, between the earth and moon.

E
ARL WAS LYING ON HIS BED
listening to music when he heard a knock on the front door. He rose and padded stocking-footed to the front room. His grandmother, without looking up from her beading, said, "It's a cowboy."

Through the front window Earl saw Carson's rockpitted pickup squatting at the edge of the driveway, frozen bug guts smearing the windshield in greasy half-circles. He opened the door.

"You got a minute?" Carson asked before Earl even greeted him.

"Yeah. You want to come in?"

Carson glanced past Earl's shoulder at his grandmother, then said in a lowered voice, "Maybe we can talk outside."

"OK. Let me get some shoes on. Come in a sec."

Earl went back to his bedroom and slipped on his Nikes and a nylon windbreaker. His grandmother and Carson were exchanging comments on the weather when he returned to the front room. Earl excused himself and Carson, and they stepped outside. Winter was hard in the air, though the calendar claimed it was still fall, and even with the windbreaker on Earl shivered. He shoved his hands in his pockets and hunched his shoulders.

"So, what's going on?" he asked.

"It ain't over."

Burt Ramsay had called Carson. Ignorance, he said, was a vital part of his job, but when he returned to work after a weekend and found the three horses gone from the corral where they'd been kept since being found along the highway, and Wagner Cecil acting more sniveling than usual, he'd gotten curious. He asked Wagner if he'd worked that weekend, and when Wagner replied that he had, Burt asked if maybe he knew where the horses had gotten to. Wagner said that no, he didn't. Whereupon Burt—who was asking these questions in the privacy of a machine shed—grabbed Wagner by his coat and knocked him so hard against the rubber lugs of a tractor tire that Wagner went white, and while he was trying to breathe, Burt suggested he might be lying, and if the horses were being mistreated and Burt found out later, Wagner might want to start living very carefully and fasten his seat belt if headlights came up behind him on a gravel road some night—a threat Wagner took seriously. He told Burt he'd moved the horses, under Magnus's orders, to a pasture west of Lostman's Lake, on a section of broken land out of sight of any road or dwelling.