The Horse Whisperer (19 page)

Connie’s daughter had married a dentist and moved to Michigan, but her old room looked as if she’d never left. There were books and swimming trophies and shelves herded with little crystal animals. Amid this abandoned clutter of a stranger’s childhood, Grace stood by the bed and rummaged in her bag for her wash things. She didn’t look up when Annie came in.

“Okay?”

Grace shrugged and still didn’t look up. Annie tried to look casual, feigning interest in the pictures on the wall. She stretched and groaned.

“God, I’m so stiff.”

“What are we doing here?”

The voice was cold and hostile and Annie turned and saw Grace staring at her with her hands on her hips.

“What do you mean?”

Grace took in the whole room with a contemptuous sweep of her arm.

“All this. I mean, what are we doing here!”

Annie sighed, but before she could say anything Grace said forget it, it didn’t matter. She snatched up her cane and her wash bag and headed for the door. Annie could see how furious it made the girl that she couldn’t storm out more effectively.

“Grace, please.”

“I said forget it, okay?” And she was gone.

Annie was talking with Connie in the kitchen when Elliott came in from the yard. He looked pale and had mud all down one side of him. He also seemed to be trying not to limp.

“I left him in the trailer,” he said.

At supper Grace toyed with her food and spoke only when spoken to. The three adults did their best to keep the conversation going but there were long spells when the only sound was the chink of cutlery. They talked about Harry Logan and Chatham and a new outbreak of Lyme disease that everyone was worrying about. Elliott said they knew a young girl about Grace’s age who’d caught it and her life had been completely wrecked. Connie darted a look at him and he flushed a little and quickly changed the subject.

As soon as the meal was over, Grace said she was tired and would they mind if she went to bed. Annie said she would come too but Grace wouldn’t let her. She said polite good-nights to Elliott and Connie. As she walked to the door, her cane clunked on the hollow floor and Annie caught the look in the couple’s eyes as they watched.

The next day, yesterday, they’d made an early start and driven with just a few short stops all the way across
Indiana and Illinois and on into Iowa. And all day long, as the vast continent opened up around them, Grace kept her silence.

Last night they’d stayed with a distant cousin of Liz Hammond’s who’d married a farmer and lived near Des Moines. The farm stood alone at the end of five straight miles of driveway, as if on its own brown planet, plowed in faultless furrows to every horizon.

They were quiet, religious folk—Baptists, Annie guessed—and as unlike Liz as she could imagine. The farmer said Liz had told them all about Pilgrim, but Annie could see he was still shocked by what he saw. He helped her feed and water the horse and then raked out and replaced as much of the wet, dung-soiled straw as he could from under Pilgrim’s thrashing hooves.

They ate supper at, a long wooden table with the couple’s six children. They all had their father’s blond hair and wide blue eyes and watched Annie and Grace with a kind of polite wonder. The food was plain and wholesome and there was only milk to drink, served creamy and still warm from the dairy in brimming glass jugs.

This morning, the wife had cooked them a breakfast of eggs, hash browns, and home-cured ham and just as they were leaving, with Grace already in the car, the farmer had handed something to Annie.

“We’d like you to have this,” he said.

It was an old book with a faded cloth cover. The man’s wife was standing beside him and they watched as Annie opened it. It was
The Pilgrim’s Progress
by John Bunyan. Annie could remember it being read to her at school when she was only seven or eight years old.

“It seemed appropriate,” the farmer said.

Annie swallowed and thanked him.

“We’ll be praying for you all,” the woman said.

The book still lay on the front passenger seat. And every time Annie caught sight of it she thought about the woman’s words.

Even though Annie had lived in this country for many years, such candid religious talk still jolted some deep-seated English reserve in her and made her feel uneasy. But what disturbed her more was that this total stranger had so clearly seen them all as needing her prayers. She’d seen them as victims. Not just Pilgrim and Grace—that was understandable—but Annie too. Nobody, nobody ever, had seen Annie Graves that way.

Now, below the lightning on the horizon, something caught her eye. It started as little more than a flickering speck and grew slowly as she watched it, assembling itself into the liquid shape of a truck. Soon, beyond it, she could see the towers of grain elevators then other, lower buildings, a town, sprouting up around them. A flurry of small brown birds erupted from the side of the road and were buffeted away on the wind. The truck was nearly up to them now and Annie watched the glinting chrome of its grille get larger and larger until it passed them in a blast of wind that made the car and trailer shudder. Grace stirred behind her.

“What was that?”

“Nothing. Just a truck.”

Annie saw her in the mirror, rubbing sleep from her eyes.

“There’s a town coming up. We need gas. Are you hungry?”

“A little.”

The exit road traveled in a long loop around a white wooden church that stood on its own in a field of dead grass. In front of it a small boy with a bicycle watched them circle by and as they did, the church was suddenly
engulfed in sunshine. Annie half expected to see a finger pointing down through the clouds.

There was a diner next to the gas station and after filling up they ate egg-Salad sandwiches in silence, surrounded by men who wore baseball caps emblazoned with the names of farm products and who spoke in hushed tones of winter wheat and the price of soybeans. For all Annie understood, they might as well have been speaking some foreign tongue. She went to pay the check then came back to the table to tell Grace she was going to the rest room and would meet her back at the car.

“Would you see if Pilgrim wants some water?” she said. Grace didn’t answer.

“Grace? Did you hear me?”

Annie stood over her, aware suddenly that the farmers around them had stopped talking. The confrontation was deliberate but now she regretted the impulse to make it so public. Grace didn’t look up. She finished her Coke and the sound her glass made when she put it down punctuated the silence.

“Do it yourself,” she said.

   The first time Grace had thought about killing herself was in the cab coming home that day from the prosthetist’s. The socket of the false leg had dug into the underside of her thighbone, but she’d pretended it felt fine and had gone along with her father’s determined cheerfulness while wondering which would be the best way to do it.

Two years ago a girl in eighth grade had thrown herself under a downtown express on the subway. No one seemed able to come up with a reason for it and like everyone else Grace had been shocked. But she had also
been secretly impressed. What courage it must have taken, she thought, in that final, decisive moment. Grace remembered thinking she herself could never summon such courage and that even if she could, her muscles would somehow still refuse to make that last launching flex.

Now though, she saw it in an altogether different light and could contemplate the possibility, if not the particular method, with what amounted to dispassion. That her life was ruined was a simple fact, only reinforced by the way those around her sought so fervently to show it wasn’t. She wished with all her heart that she had died that day with Judith and Gulliver in the snow. But as the weeks went by she realized—and it came to her almost as a disappointment—that maybe she wasn’t the suicide type.

What held her back was the inability to see it only from her own point of view. It seemed so melodramatic, so extravagant, more the sort of extremist thing her mother might do. It didn’t occur to Grace that perhaps it was the Maclean in her, those cursed lawyer genes, that made her so objectify the issue of her own demise. For blame had ever flowed but one way in this family. Everything was always Annie’s fault.

Grace loved and resented her mother in almost equal measure and often for the same thing. For her certainty, for example, and for the way she was always so damn right. Above all for knowing Grace the way she did. Knowing how she would react to things, what her likes and dislikes were, what her opinion might be on any given subject. Maybe all mothers had such insight on their daughters and sometimes it was wonderful to be so understood. More often though, and especially of late, it felt like a monstrous invasion of her privacy.

For these, and a thousand less specific wrongs, Grace
now took revenge. For at last, with this great silence, she seemed to have a weapon that worked. She could see the effect it was having on her mother and found it gratifying. Annie’s acts of tyranny were normally executed without a hint of guilt or self-doubt. But now Grace sensed both. There seemed some tacit and exploitable acknowledgment that
it
was wrong to have forced Grace to join this escapade. Viewed from the backseat of the Lariat, her mother seemed like some gambler, staking life itself on one last desperate spin of the wheel.

   They drove due west to the Missouri then swung north with the river snaking broad and brown to their left. At Sioux City they crossed into South Dakota and headed west again on Route 90 which would take them all the way to Montana. They passed through the northern Badlands and saw the sun go down over the Black Hills in a strip of blood-orange sky. They traveled without speaking and the brooding sorrow between them seemed to spawn and spread until it mingled with the million other sorrows that haunted this vast, unforgiving landscape.

Neither Liz nor Harry knew anyone who lived in these parts, so Annie had booked a room at a small hotel near Mount Rushmore. She had never seen the monument and had looked forward to coming here with Grace. But when they pulled into the hotel’s deserted parking lot it was dark and raining and Annie thought the only good thing about being there was that she wouldn’t have to make polite conversation with hosts she’d never met and would never meet again.

The rooms were all named after different presidents. Theirs was Abraham Lincoln. His beard jutted at them
from laminated prints on every wall and an extract from the Gettysburg Address hung above the TV, partly obscured by a glossy cardboard sign advertising adult movies. There were two large beds, side by side, and Grace collapsed on the one farthest from the door while Annie went back out into the rain to see to Pilgrim.

The horse seemed to be getting used to the rituals of the journey. Confined in the narrow stall of the trailer, he no longer erupted when Annie stepped into the cramped, protected space in front of him. He just edged back into the darkness and watched. She could feel his eyes on her while she hung up a new net of hay and carefully pushed his buckets of feed and water within reach. He would never touch them until she had gone. She sensed his simmering hostility and was both scared and excited by it so that when she closed the door on him her heart was pounding.

When she got back to the room, Grace had undressed and was in bed. Her back was turned and whether she was asleep or just pretending, Annie couldn’t tell.

“Grace?” she said softly. “Don’t you want to eat?”

There was no reaction. Annie thought about going alone to the restaurant, but couldn’t face it. She took a long, hot bath, hoping the water would bring her comfort. All it brought her was doubt. It hung in the air with the steam, enfolding her. What on earth did she think she was doing, dragging these two wounded souls across a continent, in some gruesome reprise of pioneer madness? Grace’s silence and the remorseless emptiness of the spaces they had crossed made Annie feel suddenly, terribly alone. To obliterate these thoughts, she slid her hands between her legs and felt herself, worked at herself, refusing to concede to the initial stubborn numbness until at last her loins twitched and swam and she was lost.

That night she dreamed she was walking with her father along a snowy ridge, roped like mountaineers, though this was something they had never done. Below, on either side, sheer walls of rock and ice plunged to nothingness. They were on a cornice, a thin overhanging crust of snow which her father said was safe. He was in front of her and he turned to her and smiled the way he smiled in her favorite photograph, a smile which said with total confidence that he was with her and everything was alright. And as he did so, over his shoulder she saw a crack zigzagging toward them and the lip of the cornice start to split away and tumble down the mountainside. She wanted to cry out but couldn’t and the moment before the crack reached them, her father turned and saw it. And then he was gone and Annie saw the rope between them snaking after him and she realized the only way to save them both was to jump the other way. So she launched herself into the air on the other side of the ridge. But instead of feeling the rope jolt and hold, she just kept on falling, free-falling into the void.

When she woke it was morning. They had slept late. Outside it was raining even harder. Mount Rushmore and its stone faces were hidden in swirling cloud that the woman in reception said wasn’t going to clear. Not far away, she said, there was another mountain carving they could maybe get a glimpse of, a giant figure of Crazy Horse.

“Thanks,” said Annie. “We’ve got our own.”

They had breakfast, checked out and drove back up to the interstate. They crossed the state line into Wyoming and skirted south of Devil’s Tower and Thunder Basin, then over the Powder River and up toward Sheridan where at last the rain stopped.

Increasingly the pickups and trucks they saw were
driven by men in cowboy hats. Some touched their brims or lifted a hand in grave salute. As they went by, the sun made rainbows in the plumes of their tail-spray.

It was late afternoon when they crossed into Montana. But Annie felt neither relief nor any sense of achievement. She had tried so hard not to let Grace’s silence beat her. All day she had hopped stations on the radio and listened to Bible-thumping preachers, livestock reports and more kinds of country music than she’d known existed. But it was no good. She felt herself compressed into an ever-shrinking space between the weight of her daughter’s gloom and her own welling anger. At last it was too much to bear. Some forty miles into Montana, neither looking nor caring where it led, she took an exit off the interstate.