Let Him Go: A Novel (13 page)

Then only the kerosene lamp’s flame wavers. The room and its occupants are as still as a photograph, Weboys and Blackledges caught in a pose of wary readiness.

A gust of wind doesn’t suddenly bang a door open. A clock doesn’t chime. The phone doesn’t ring. Yet in the next instant the stillness breaks as if it were made of crystal. Marvin drinks his milk. Elton spears himself another pork chop. Donnie’s shoulders slump. Bill Weboy unwraps another cigar and lights it. What has passed in this room cannot be named but passed it has. Margaret bends down slowly and sets Jimmy back on his feet. When she does, he looks up at her with incomprehension, a child who, like most children, seldom understands why adults want to pick him up or put him down.

As if he’s not been responsible for his own propulsion for a long time, Jimmy tests the floor under him,
shifting from side to side and lifting one foot and then the other.

There was mustard, he says.

On your hamburger? asks Margaret.

He nods.

And you don’t like mustard, do you?

He shakes his head.

The child has his grandmother’s blue eyes but none of her smiling energy. He looks instead as if he, like his grandfather, would prefer to make shapes with his fingers and stare into their darkness.

Blanche claps her hands twice, and Jimmy flinches at the sound. Off you go, she says. Up the stairs.

It’s been months, says Margaret, her voice strained, since we saw the boy.

More like weeks, Donnie says.

Well, says Blanche, now that you know how to find us, you’ll have to visit more often.

Donnie shoves Lorna, and she lurches from the force, and then reaches a hand down to her son. Come on, Jimmy.

He slips his hand into hers. Anyone can see he is a child who will take any offered hand, lacking the certainty or courage to refuse it. As he and his mother walk away he glances back only once. A four-year-old has so little past, and he remembers almost none of it, neither the father he once had nor the house where he once lived. But he can feel absences—and feel them as sensation, like a texture that was once at his fingers every day but now is gone and no matter how he gropes or reaches his hand he cannot touch what’s no longer there. His legs seem too thin for his body, and he can’t gauge how to match his steps to his mother’s.

Please, says Margaret.

When he hears the pleading tone in his wife’s voice, George moves quickly. That’s enough, he says, coming to her side and putting an arm across her shoulders. Enough.

Margaret keeps watching after her grandson, who has glanced back only once, his expression puzzled over this punishment he has done nothing to deserve.

Don’t beg, George whispers to his wife, then steers her toward the door. To the assembled Weboys he says, We thank you but we’ll be on our way.

Well, I guess we know who matters to you, Blanche says, standing and putting her hands on her hips. You’re rushing off before the pie. But if you have to go, you have to go. Drive safe.

George and Margaret hurry as best they can through the cluttered porch and out the back door. Their eyes are unaccustomed to the darkness, total as only a cloudy night on the prairie can be. They stumble in the direction of their car, for the moment nothing but a black shape distinguished from the surrounding dark by its vague suggestion of substance.

Behind them a screen door slams and a voice calls after them. Whoa, wait up there, Blackledges!

Margaret keeps walking, but George stops and turns toward a white shirt hurrying their way.

It’s Bill Weboy, who says, Just wanted to see if you needed to get pointed in the right direction. I’d lead you back to Gladstone but I’m spending the night here. Or maybe you’re heading for home, back to your own side of the Badlands?

I can find the way, George says.

You sure? If you left a trail of bread crumbs, the coyotes have eaten them by now.

I can find the way.

If you say so. Bill Weboy looks past George to Margaret opening her car door. Running off like this, Weboy says, you hurt Blanche’s feelings. She won’t say so but I can tell.

Her feelings!
Her
feelings! Margaret leaves her door open to charge back toward Bill Weboy. The feeble light from the car follows her. We come all this way to see our grandson—
our
grandson, not hers!—and then she gives us two minutes before banishing Jimmy like a dog who pissed on her precious floor!

Bill Weboy raises his hands. Easy there, missus. Let’s not forget our manners. I’m sure Blanche would be happy to play hostess to you again sometime. But she’s trying real hard to get Donnie and Lorna squared away. Them two don’t know much about raising a kid. Left up to them, he’d be up until all hours and eating ice cream for breakfast.

And are you out here now because she sent you to smooth my feathers?

Hah! If you think that, then you don’t know Blanche Weboy. She don’t give a damn whose feathers are ruffled.

Go back inside, Mr. Weboy, Margaret says. The night’s cold and you don’t want to catch a chill.

I sure as hell feel that. Bill Weboy pivots and walks away. Something in the night air, perhaps the vapor of breath, makes it seem as though that departing figure were puffing smoke, though Bill Weboy left his cigar in the house.

George, who has kept himself between his wife and Bill Weboy during their exchange, turns Margaret back toward the car.

They are inside the Hudson when Margaret says, His brother’s wife indeed!

George turns the key to start the engine but Margaret
thrusts out a restraining hand. Wait! Look. In the upstairs window.

Silhouetted there is the unmoving shape of what is almost certainly a mother holding a child.

Margaret waves.

I doubt she can see you, says George. He shifts the car into gear.

Wait. For just a moment.

She’s not locked up in the tower, you know. She married the man of her own free will.

But not his family.

No? A husband or a wife is usually a package deal. You know that.

Not you, George. You came unencumbered.

That I did. Then, without her permission, he drives away from the Weboy ranch.

Two miles will pass before the Blackledges will see anything rising higher from the prairie than the two stories of the Weboy house and its nearby elm tree, from which the auto engine hangs. Then the road will climb a rocky butte, its southern slope that hours before had been black with pines. When they descend they’ll bisect the pastureland where cattle are bedded down invisibly among the grasses they grazed earlier. In another mile will come the turn they cannot miss if they want to find their way back to the main highway. Soon the steel skeletons of power lines will come into view. These and other landmarks George Blackledge had noted, as a man will when finding his way back is more important to him than traveling into new territory.

T
HEY DECIDE TO SPEND THE NIGHT IN
G
LADSTONE
,
AND
after driving up and down Main Avenue and the surrounding business district they eventually return to the western outskirts of the city and the Prairie View Motor Court, accommodations that look as though they’ll be cheaper than the Harrison House hotel or one of the three motels on the eastern edge of the city.

The night clerk, a bored-looking younger man who moves slowly and with the squeak of metal and leather because his shoes and lower legs are encased in braces, assigns them Cabin Number Eight, the farthest in a line of small, squat, whitewashed structures, though no other cars are parked in the lot. Cabin Eight, unlike Four, Five, and Six, has its own bathroom and its occupants don’t have to use the outhouse, though they can if they like, the clerk adds with a barely concealed, self-satisfied smirk.

The cabin’s interior has the same spare, tidy look as Bill Weboy’s living room, and its mismatched furnishings might have come from estate sales. A bed with an old iron frame and a threadbare white coverlet. A low dresser made of dark wood and a painted nightstand. A rocking chair that might have once graced a front porch. A rag rug and
a square of linoleum cover the warped wood floor, though not quite to the bare walls.

Tired as they are, the Blackledges unpack everything from the backseat of the car and bring into the cabin their pillows and blankets, boxes of groceries and other supplies. Since the experience with Alton Dragswolf, Margaret wants nothing visible in the car to tempt someone who might look in its windows.

As they unpack, Margaret talks about her grandson, explaining him to her husband as if George didn’t have eyes to witness the boy for himself. What I noticed, Margaret says, was how much more grown-up he is. He understands more. I could see it in his eyes. I mean, he’s always been a child who takes in everything, he’s like his father that way, but now he’s doing something with what he sees and hears. I can tell. He’s
thinking.
And God only knows what he thinks about that house and its people. It can’t be good for a child.

I didn’t see any bruises.

Oh don’t, George. You know what I mean. He’s a sensitive little boy. Things affect him in a way they don’t affect other children.

Those
people in that house? One of them is his mother.

I’m aware of that, George. I’m well aware.

Finally, they retire for the night, the bedsprings squeaking out a reminder that though they are not yet home, they are no longer in the world of compromised sleep on jail cots or hard ground.

The evening’s last words belong to Margaret. Do you need anything from Montgomery Ward? she asks. Because that’s where we’re going tomorrow.

.
   
.
   
.

Lorna Weboy works in Montgomery Ward’s men’s department, the store manager’s idea being that her pretty face and trim figure might induce a man who comes in to buy a suit to buy a shirt and tie as well, or a man who comes in to buy a handkerchief to buy a pair of pants to put the handkerchief in. That is where Lorna finds George Blackledge—looking at the handkerchiefs.

You’ll find them cheaper in the catalog, she says, a remark that might have gotten her fired had that store manager heard it.

George reaches into the back pocket of his jeans and pulls out a snot-pasted, wrinkled blue bandanna. I’m pretty well fixed, he says.

By this time Margaret has come up on Lorna’s flank. Hello, honey, she says to the woman who was once her daughter-in-law.

I didn’t think you’d just go home, says Lorna. I almost said something to Donnie. If you believe you’ve seen the last of Margaret Blackledge, you’d best think again.

Like a bad penny?

To this Lorna says nothing. She takes a step back and crosses her arms.

Who watches Jimmy while you’re working?

Who do you think? Donnie. His mom. Someone’s always at the house. Or maybe you think I just tie him to a tree like a dog until I get home.

You’re a good mother, Lorna. I know that. I was merely wondering how you’re working things out with this job.

It’s working out okay.

Did you drive in today? George asks.

Lorna straightens the stack of handkerchiefs that
George was examining. Uncle Bill gave me a ride. He and Donnie sort of take turns. Picking me up after work too.

Well, Margaret says, it sounds like you have a real system. Good for you. She pats the handkerchiefs that Lorna has rearranged. When do you have a break, Lorna? George and I would like to buy you lunch.

Lorna looks desperately around the store as if she’s seeking the assistance of a coworker, someone who can help her with these customers who will never be talked into a sale against their will.

At noon, Lorna says.

Noon straight up? All right. We’ll be out in front then. And we’ll eat anyplace you like.

.
   
.
   
.

Nothing, not a siren nor a church bell nor a chiming clock hovering over the town square, marks the arrival of noon for the residents of Gladstone, but at the appointed hour Lorna exits the department store, and there, on the sidewalk under the brittle sunlight of late September and pressed against the bricks to stay out of the chill wind, she finds the waiting Blackledges. Together they walk across the street to Ressler’s, where Jimmy was served his hamburger with mustard the night before.

Although the café is crowded with lunchtime diners, they’re able to find a booth in the back, and once Lorna sits down, Margaret immediately slides in beside her, hemming her in. Lorna has put her purse on her left side, against the wall, and Margaret her purse on the right, so nothing is on the bench between the two women. On the printed menu the prices for pie, both plain and a la mode,
have been inked out with a ballpoint pen and new prices written in. George points to these, shakes his head, and lights a cigarette. Soon a stout waitress arrives with her pad and pencil. She is scowling and grinding her teeth for a reason known only to her. George and Margaret both order egg salad sandwiches and coffee. Lorna asks for a hot roast beef sandwich and a 7
UP
.

Since I started working, Lorna explains, I’m hungry as a horse. Even though I don’t do much but stand around all day.