Northward to the Moon (11 page)

Right now I see Satan going round and round the ring. His eye occasionally meets mine. There is something deep and eternal there. It is time itself in the horse’s eye.

Hershel and Max have made friends with Hank and Leeron, the other ranch hands, who are older than Ben and seem to really like the boys. Ben tends to ignore them. I think he is only interested in the horses.

I am watching Ben working a horse now and wondering how old he is. I tried to find this out by casually asking Dorothy if Ben was going to college but instead of giving me an indication of his age she just said, “Oh, he doesn’t care about college. He just wants to own a ranch.”

There was no way to find out anything after that without being too obvious.

Ned and my mom come out with trays of pie and hand it out to all of us.

“So,” says Ned, sitting down on the steps.

“Why are steps so much more fun to sit on than chairs?” I ask Ned.

“I don’t know, Bibles,” says Ned, stretching his long legs. “So, nice to see you all.” He points his fork at his sisters.

“It’s a surprise, I’ll give you that,” says Maureen, inhaling her pie.

“It’s a blessing,” says Nelda in her mousy little voice, and I can just feel Ned rolling his eyes.

“The first thing to do,” says Candace, attacking her pie with businesslike decisiveness and a lot of extra unnecessary movements, “is to get her to sell those horses.”

“I know,” says Ned.

“But she
loves
those horses,” I say.

“Loves them, schmoves them,” says Candace. “They’re a drain on her resources. Financial and everything else. And now they’re just plain impractical. She’ll never ride again. She’ll never even walk well again with the spinal injury. And she ought to move into town, where she can get around on one of those scooters. That would at least give her a little mobility.”

“Oh yes, a scooter,” says Maureen, getting up for a second piece of pie. “Anyone else want one?” she calls over her shoulder on her way into the kitchen.

“And she’s all isolated out here,” says Nelda in her whispery little voice.
“Anything
could happen.”

“Exactly. She told me she heard wolves the other day,” says Maureen, coming back onto the porch and snorting.

“She did,” I say. “We all did. That is, she and Maya and I.”

“I heard them too,” says my mother. “Calling over the desert.”

“Well, that’s it, then. She can’t live with wolves. I mean, honestly,” says Candace. “It’s good that
you called us, Neddie. Enough with the horses and wolves. Whole thing is just plain impractical. It’s like the time she moved us all up to Fort McMurray. Remember that? No job. No friends. No nothing.”

“Yes,” says Maureen, putting down her fork and looking at us all plaintively.
“Why
did she do that? Did you ever wonder?”

“All the time,” says Candace.

“It was
weird”
—Nelda stops and looks down into her lap as if she has frightened herself by using such an assertive word—“behavior.”

“Well, it wasn’t
normal,”
says Ned. “It wasn’t what normal people do.”

“Did you ever
ask
her?” asks my mother.

“Oh, you don’t ask people in my family questions like that, honey,” says Ned. Since when did he start to call her honey? He is drawing an invisible circle around himself and her with it, setting them apart from his birth family. “It’s bad form.”

“But you want to know,” insists my mother. “You all do.”

“She couldn’t tell you, anyhow, Felicity, trust us. She’s not an introspective sort,” says Candace. “And if she could she wouldn’t.”

“That’s right,” says Maureen.

“And incidentally, I
did
ask her not long after we moved there. I said, ‘What the heck are we doing here?’” says Candace.

“You didn’t!” says Maureen. “You never told us that. What did she say?”

“Nothing.”

“But that’s not really the same question, is it?” persists my mother. “ ‘Why did you do it?’ and ‘What are we doing here?’ are really different questions, aren’t they? She might have no more idea than you what you were suddenly doing there even though she knew why she did it.” But no one is paying attention to her. I don’t think they understand what she is trying to say and they don’t know her well enough to know it’s worth making the effort.

“It would be like her to say nothing,” says Maureen.

“So, so much for asking her,” says Candace, sighing.

“Well, anyway, we’re agreed about the horses,” says Ned.

“Yep,” says Candace. “The horses have to go.”

“What about the ranch? Think you could sell it, Candace?”

“Oh, probably if I had time to hang around, which I don’t, but I’ll find a good realtor in town. And I’ll do some research and make sure we set a good price. Anyhow, I’m sure she’ll see it’s for the best since she knows she can’t walk properly again. I don’t know what her choices are except to hire a round-the-clock nurse and live here and that would cost the earth and wipe out any savings she has and it would come to a move back into town eventually anyway. Might as well do it now.”

“Well,” says Ned, and he scuffs his shoe around on the porch. “I don’t think she really knows about not walking.”

“What do you mean?” snaps Candace.

“Well, the doctor thought it would be better if she got that information introduced kind of gentle-like from, um, family. He said it’s always a hard pill to swallow.”

“And you didn’t want to be the one to give her the pill,” says Maureen.

“Hey, you can any of you volunteer right now. No reason it has to be me,” says Ned.

“Thanks,” says Candace. “This is just great. So now we have to tell her she won’t walk the same way ever again and she needs to sell the ranch?”

“Looks like,” says Ned.

“You do it, Neddie,” says Nelda.

“Why me?” asks Ned.

“Because you got here first,” says Candace. Nelda and Maureen nod.

“But where will she go?” asks Nelda.

“Why don’t you go into town and look for someplace, Nelda? Someplace sort of nice to tempt her,” says Candace.

“Have you
seen
the town? It’s not exactly a flourishing metropolis. If you can find a home of
any
sort,
pounce
on it, I say,” says Maureen. “And after all, she can’t be too picky, she’s lived in Fort McMurray She made
us
live in Fort McMurray. It’s not like she’s been living in Paris all her life. She knows small desperate towns. She should be very comfortable in one.”

“All right, that’s Nelda’s job, then,” says Candace. “We ought to split up the arrangements to be made evenly. There’s enough to go around. And Ned, you and your family can hang out for the summer until she gets the place sold, right?”

“Now, wait one cotton-pickin’ minute,” says Ned, and it degenerates into a lot of boring talk about who can and can’t do what and they look to be going at it all night so I sneak off the porch.

No one even notices me go and I hang over the ring and watch Ben. I am hoping he will offer to teach me to ride or to come into the ring with him but he doesn’t even seem to notice that I am here. Maureen says she would make a play for him but how does she mean she would do this? I can’t even get him to look at me. Hi, Ben, I think, trying to send thought waves into his head, Hi, Ben, look at me, Ben.

I like Ned’s sisters and I like having them around. They are all so different and it is interesting to have a house full of women. I think it must be nice for my mother as well. She gets along with all of them. But as much as I enjoy this, strategically it might be better if they left so that I could be more visibly helpful. I have visions of myself spending the summer with Dorothy on the porch. I would bring her glasses of iced tea and read to her in a ministering angel way and I would be the one to find a spectacular new living arrangement for her. But, of course, I would be too modest to accept
any credit for this, although Ned and my mother and Dorothy would all praise me loudly on the porch where Ben could hear and he would find out what a quiet unassuming but spectacularly saint-like and efficient person I am. It would be the kind of thing he would appreciate. I think he’s a stand-up, go-to, quietly-get-things-done kind of guy. I can imagine this is what he would admire in a girl too.

Then over the sound of the horse’s hooves thundering round the ring comes the clear call of the wolves. I hear all talk stop on the porch.

“Darn it, someone’s going to have to do something about those wolves. Hank, Leeron, let’s go check fences!” Ben yells.

Ben puts down the lunge whip and vaults over the ring. He is covered in sweat and dust. He is so close to me I can smell him. But he still doesn’t look at me. He disappears into the barn and Hank comes out, attaches the lead to Satan and takes him back to his stall. Then they saddle up three horses and head across the fields. I think Ben is maybe a little bashful when it comes to girls. But I think he probably thinks about me when he is
alone. After all, if he didn’t think about me at all, then he would acknowledge my presence the way he does Hershel’s and Max’s. The fact that he so studiously pretends not to see me must mean he doesn’t want to betray the depth of his feeling. Just as I don’t want yet to betray mine.

T
hat night in my pantry room, reading from the light of one dangling bulb, I hear the wolf howls again. They come down like a waterfall, tumbling toward us, echoing in silvery space, as if they have been poured over the moon. They raise gooseflesh on my arms, although I am not frightened of them. We are in a safe house, after all. It is they who are out there in the darkness.

Then I startle as my doorknob turns but it is not the wolves with newfound opposable thumbs, which is my first wild thought. It is only Maya. She clutches a blanket in one hand.

“Maya,” I say, “did you drag the blanket off your bed all the way down here?”

She nods.

“Well, what’s the matter?”

“I heard them,” says Maya.

“The nonexistent wolves?” I ask.

She nods.

“Well, so? You know the whole ranch is fenced in, Maya. They can’t get onto the ranchland so they can’t get anywhere near the house.”

“Suppose they get one of the horses?”

“The horses are in the barn. In their stalls.” I say all this patiently because I am in a really good part of my book and I want her to go to bed.

“They could chew a hole in the fence,” she says.

“Oh, for God’s sake,” I say.

“I don’t want to sleep alone,” says Maya.

“You’re not sleeping alone. You’re in a room with Dorothy.”

“But her hip is broken,” says Maya. “I want to sleep in here.”

“My hip is broken too.”

“I’ve never slept in a room without you,” she persists.

This is true. I hadn’t considered this, although I
did think about how this pantry is the first bedroom I have ever had to myself. I have rather enjoyed it. I can keep the light on for hours if I like. “Listen, Maya, I’m reading and I’m not turning off the light for you.”

She has already climbed into my bed.

“That’s okay,” she says, and closes her eyes. I know she is going to pretend to be asleep. I go back to reading.

“This is ridiculous,” I say after a few minutes. “There’s no room in this bed. There’s barely room for me. Get out.”

“I can’t.”

“You can too. Dorothy is there and Mama and Ned are just down the hall. Go to bed.”

“No.”

“Maya, you’re eight years old. You’re old enough to sleep in a room all alone, let alone next to Dorothy. Now GO TO BED!”

“No.”

“What is the
matter
with you?”

“I saw wolf shadows on the wall in Dorothy’s room.”

“Oh, you did not.”

But Maya sits up in bed and suddenly her eyes are frightened and she says, while gripping my arm so hard she makes nail marks, “I DID. I hate it here. I want to go
home.”

“We are going to go home,” I say. “You heard Mama. They just have to find some solution for Dorothy’s living situation or something.”

“She can come with us,” says Maya.

“Listen,” I say, because it suddenly occurs to me that no one has suggested this obvious solution and if Maya gets this notion into her head, she could create all kinds of embarrassment for my mother and Ned, who maybe don’t want Dorothy to come with us. “I’m sure there’s a reason why that wouldn’t work and we shouldn’t even talk about it. Now let’s go to sleep.”

I lie down and reach up to pull the string to turn the light off but she grabs my hand.

“Don’t turn off the light,” she says.

She turns her back to me but I can tell from just the
feel
of her that she is crying now. I find this worrying. Suppose, I think, that she gets home and she still isn’t happy? Suppose there is something really
wrong
with her? My mother has said she thinks
Maya is fine, but maybe she is in denial. I don’t really know enough about these things to know whether I should be worried about Maya or not but I don’t
want
to be worried. So maybe I am in denial too. Maybe we should all look a little closer at her. But then I realize that if Maya is really in trouble we won’t be able to stay here all summer and then I can’t see Ben. That just makes me annoyed with her. I think that if Maya were really in trouble I wouldn’t be able to be annoyed with her. So I must not, deep down, think she’s in
real
trouble.

I forget about Maya’s sniffling as I remember the way Ben looks, legs apart and braced, muscles tensed and ready, as he stands in the middle of the ring. I fall asleep thinking about this and never do get around to asking Maya why she is crying.