Juliet in August (7 page)

Norval got out and had a look, and sure enough, there was Lila's couch, or one close enough to it that he couldn't tell the difference from the picture she'd given him. So he bought it for a third of the price and called the Regina store and told them to send the fancy one back. Even when he paid the shipping and took the deposit into account, the parking lot couch was still almost two thousand dollars cheaper than Lila's special order. There was a manufacturer's tag on the back—the wrong one, of course—but Norval figured if he could get the couch installed against the wall in the living room before Lila could look at the tag, he'd be home free. And he'd gotten away with it. Lila had never examined the couch closely enough to find the tag, and the manufacturer of the expensive couch had never phoned to ask why it had been returned. Norval had paid the credit card bill without Lila's seeing it, and he'd saved himself some money and proven that even Lila couldn't really tell the difference between haute interior décor and the local offerings.

Norval flips through a variety of infomercials—cooking appliances, home gyms, skin care products—and finally settles, as usual, on the weather channel. Its forecasts for the West are notoriously wrong, but he listens to the perky female announcer who tells him the day will be sunny, warm, and windy, with a slight chance of a thunderstorm later in the day. Well, he thinks, you could probably make that prediction for southern Saskatchewan on any day in the summer and stand a pretty good chance of being correct, although the thunderstorm part of the forecast has been unusually absent for the past few summers. He stares at the television, which makes the same prediction every ten minutes, until his eyelids begin to feel heavy.

He's just about to lie down on the couch when he hears a truck pull up in front of the house. A door slams and footsteps sound, coming up the walk. Loud footsteps, Kyle's boots. Norval makes it to the door before Kyle can ring the bell.

“Well,” Norval says to Kyle, who is teetering on the top step, one hand on the railing, trying hard to look sober for his future father-in-law but not succeeding. Norval notices that he's left his truck lights on.

“Good evening, Mr. Birch. Sir,” Kyle says. He's trying to stand steady, but gravity pulls him back down a step. It takes him a few seconds to regain his balance.

“It's hardly evening, Kyle,” Norval says. “It's more like, well, the middle of the night would be more accurate.”

“Sorry,” Kyle says.

“What can I do for you, Kyle?” Norval asks. Of course he knows Kyle is here for Rachelle, but he makes him say it anyway.

“Can I talk to Rachelle?”

“I would imagine she's asleep,” Norval says.

Kyle shifts from foot to foot, still holding the railing. A full minute passes. He seems to have forgotten where they are in their conversation, if it can be called that.

“I guess I should go,” he finally says.

“I think that would be best,” Norval says, feeling irresponsible for sending Kyle out on the road in the state he's in, but damned if he's going to let him into the house to climb the stairs and crawl into bed with his daughter. He has his limits.

He watches Kyle stumble down the walk, a cell phone in one back pocket of his Wranglers and a round tobacco tin in the other. Kyle's about to get in his truck—he's having trouble finding his keys—when Rachelle bounds down the stairs and pushes past Norval, now wearing some kind of gym pants and a very worn and almost transparent T-shirt. She and Kyle throw their arms around each other right on the street, and then Lila calls from upstairs, “What in the world is going on down there?”

“Nothing,” Norval calls back, and then he says to Rachelle, “Don't you dare get in that truck and drive anywhere.”

“I won't,” Rachelle says.

“I don't know how you can stay out late and then go to work in the morning. Don't you have to be alert? Wouldn't you say the state of being alert is an essential part of the job, Rachelle?”

“I don't have to work until eleven. Just go back in the house, Dad.”

Norval doesn't go back in the house, but instead finds himself staring at his lawn. Thanks to his careful watering it's the greenest lawn on the block, green as Ireland, he imagines. It needs mowing, yes, but it glistens in the light of the streetlamp, a fine-looking crop, thick and even and free of a single weed or blade of grass that was not planted by him.

“Dad,” Rachelle says impatiently. “Have you gone to sleep or what?”

Norval says, “Promise me you won't go anywhere in that truck.”

“I promise,” Rachelle says.

Both she and Kyle stare at him, waiting for him to leave. Norval goes back inside and closes the door.

“Norval?” Lila calls. “Is something wrong? Should I come down?”

“No, Lila. Go back to sleep. I'll be up soon.”

He goes to the fridge and finds a slice of leftover meat loaf. Lila would kill him, he thinks, if he were to carry it into the living room and eat it in front of the TV with no utensils and no plate to catch the bits he spills. He carries the cold slice to the couch that he secretly thinks of as
his
couch and sits down. It will be a great day on the Prairies, the perky TV weather lady says. She looks right at Norval when she says this, as though she is telling him to buck up and look on the bright side. Norval takes a reckless bite of meat loaf.

Horse Thief Moon

The horse jigs his way out of the yard with Lee holding him back until he can find a place where it's safe to lope him out. Cracker badly wants to come along, but Lee says, “Get to the house,” and the dog immediately hangs his tail and obeys.

Lee rides in the ditch for a quarter mile and then he sees in the darkness that the wire gate to Hank Trass's pasture is stretched out on the ground, which could mean kids from town have been drinking at the buffalo stone again, or it could just mean that Hank has moved his yearlings onto his north quarter. Lee heads for the opening in the fence and steers a course past the wire. He guides the horse toward the giant stone, amused once again by Hank's response to the Juliet high school grads' recent and much-discussed spray-painting exploits. The students had chosen the buffalo stone as the spot to record their year of graduation, and when the chair of the local historical committee got wind of the defacement, he'd printed a letter of protest in the paper and suggested that those responsible undertake a fund-raising effort in order to invite an art restorer from Regina to come give advice on how to remove the paint. Hank saw the letter in the paper and didn't want to have to deal with any so-called art restorer from the city, so he took a tin of paint remover and a wire brush and a half dozen rags out to his pasture after dark and did his own restoration, or at least that's what he told Lee. After he was done, the stone looked like the same old hunk of granite it had always been, Hank said, only cleaner, at least on the one side. When Hank was asked by the historical committee if he was responsible—apparently he'd done something wrong in removing the paint without the help of the art restorer—he denied any involvement. He let people think the graduates had had a change of heart.

The horse snorts when the stone's dark shadow looms in front of them, and Lee expects him to shy sideways like Young Rip used to do, but he doesn't. Lee encourages the horse to walk around the stone and the depression that surrounds it, a reminder of centuries of shedding animals, first buffalo and now cattle, and in the moonlight he sees that it's been painted with new fluorescent markings—pink and green and yellow handprints. Hank must be getting sick of all this activity in his pasture, Lee thinks. Maybe the fancy art restorer will get a chance to come out after all.

He walks a wide path around the stone, holding the horse in check as he scans the moonlit ground for holes, and when he's satisfied that the footing is safe, he looses up on the reins and lets the horse go. The horse snorts and crow-hops a few times, then charges forward like a racehorse out of the gate. There's a moment when Lee thinks the horse is going to get away on him, but then he gets him going in a good circle around the stone, allowing him to set his own pace as long as he stays in the circle.

As the horse moves under him, Lee feels himself waking up—not just coming out of a sleepy state because it's the middle of the night, but
truly
waking up, as though every dormant cell in his body is tingling. Here he is, out riding a mystery horse when he should be sleeping, in Hank's same old pasture with the same old buffalo stone, only they're not quite the same because of the darkness. He loves the way darkness removes time and place. He could be a boy again, with Astrid and Lester asleep in their bed in the house across the road. He feels almost giddy.

When the horse begins to soften, Lee slows him back to a trot and they change directions and move into a lope again, this time at a more controlled pace. When the horse has relaxed and seems willing to go forward easily, Lee guides him out of the circle and they move off at a trot to the north away from the stone, following the fence line in Hank's empty pasture.

Lee's plan is to ride the perimeter of the pasture, but it's hard to see the gopher holes, so when he comes to the north gate, he decides to dismount and open it so he can get into his own field of fresh summer fallow. He and the horse have an agreement now, that Lee is the boss and navigator. The horse stands quietly enough as Lee undoes the gate, and goes through obediently as Lee stands between the horse and the wire. Even though the pasture appears to be empty, he does the gate up again before he steps back into the saddle: leave closed what you find closed.

There's a trail to the west along the fence line leading to a sandy section of Hank's pasture lease. Lee remembers—he
always
remembers when he looks down this road—the time he pedaled furiously on his bike with the evidence of a crime in his pocket, a broken pocket watch that he'd taken from Lester's drawer and that is now forever buried in sand. To this day he feels bad about taking the watch because he never confessed and, worse, he lied when confronted. He wonders, if Astrid were here to ask him about the watch now, whether he'd have the courage to tell her the truth—the truth that she already knew, he's sure of that, which would make coming clean all the harder. What had he been thinking when he threw the watch in the sand? He'd panicked because the crime of going into Lester's private things had seemed huge. Privacy was sacrosanct to Lester.

Lee looks down the sandy trail with its two tracks disappearing into the night, and then continues on to the north. He admires his clean black field in the moonlight, even though the practice of summer fallowing is no longer recommended by the agriculturalists because of the resulting moisture loss. But what are you going to do, Lester used to say, when you see the weeds coming up and don't want to pump more money into herbicides? Lee hadn't known what to do with the field, either, so he'd done what Lester always had: turned the weeds under before they went to seed.

When he reaches the northern edge of the black field, he crosses into a field of stubble—a poor crop harvested early for feed. The horse moves under him, content enough now to be going somewhere. He settles into an easy jog and Lee gets the impression they could go forever like this. He's surprised at how smooth the horse is—he's heard that Arab horses are rough to ride.

North of the stubble field is a standing crop, so Lee rides the strip between the field and the ditch. Another crop, another quarter of old summer fallow, this one full of rocks and weeds and gopher holes. He lets the horse pick his way through and admires his ability to do so, the way he can place his feet so carefully and at the same time stay tuned in to any sound or movement around him, a perfectly adapted prey animal.

When they're through the summer fallow, they come to another standing crop, oats this time, ready for harvest from the look of it, and Lee is forced into the ditch. It's clean, with the grass cut and baled, and he rides there for another mile. With every new field ahead he considers turning around and going home, but only briefly because the tug is away from home and sleep and the next day waiting. When they reach the southern edge of the Swan Valley community pasture, Lee almost turns back knowing that the pasture stretches for miles, but beyond it is the cemetery where Astrid and Lester are buried. He makes the decision to keep going that far, to the graveyard, and the ground passes beneath him until he can see it up ahead, first the trees in the distance, and when he gets close enough, the dark outlines of the headstones, most of them old and no longer perfectly upright. He slows the horse and they enter the cemetery under a wrought-iron archway, crafted years ago by a local blacksmith.

Not many people get buried here anymore. The preference now is for the town cemetery where the lawn is watered and manicured, but Lee is glad Lester and Astrid chose this as their resting place. There's no church to clutter the landscape, no plastic flowers to fade and turn into refuse, just the tumbleweed blown up against the fence to catch on the barbed wire, and the remains of virgin prairie, blue grama and spear grass. He likes the wildness, the grass fighting against the threat of drifting sand.

Lee hasn't been to visit the graveyard since Astrid's funeral. He dismounts and leads the horse around the grave markers until he finds himself looking at the double headstone with both Astrid's and Lester's names carved in the marble. The stone—with its dates of death just four years apart—is one of only a few recent markers, and the mound of earth over Astrid's grave has not yet completely settled. Eventually, a concrete pad will cover her, a partner to the one that covers Lester. Even in the moonlight Lee can't quite read the inscriptions, but he knows what they say:
LOVING WIFE AND MOTHER
for Astrid to mirror the
LOVING HUSBAND AND FATHER
that she had selected for Lester. Lee had never called Lester “Father.” Always Uncle Lester. Astrid had asked Lee if that would be all right, Loving Father, and he'd said of course, and understood immediately what Astrid wanted for herself.