The Horse Whisperer (20 page)

She wanted to park but nowhere seemed right. There was a massive casino standing on its own and as she looked, its neon sign flickered on, red and lurid in the fading light. She drove on up a hill, past a cafe and a low straggle of stores with a dirt parking strip in front. Two Indians with long black hair and feathers in their high-crowned cowboy hats stood beside a battered pickup, watching the Lariat and trailer approach. Something in their gaze unsettled her and she kept on up the hill, took a right turn and stopped. She switched off the ignition and for a while sat very still. She could sense Grace behind her, watching. The girl’s voice, when at last she spoke, was cautious.

“What’s going on?”

“What?” Annie said sharply.

“It’s closed. Look.”

There was a sign along the road that said
NATIONAL MONUMENT, LITTLE BIGHORN BATTLEFIELD
. Grace was right. According to the opening hours it gave, the place had closed an hour ago. It made Annie even angrier that
Grace should so misjudge her mood to think she had come here deliberately, like a tourist. She didn’t trust herself to look at her. She just stared ahead and took a deep breath.

“How long is this going to go on, Grace?”

“What?”

“You know what I mean. How long is it going to go on?”

There was a long pause. Annie watched a ball of tumbleweed chase its own shadow down the road toward them. It brushed the side of the car as it went by. She turned to look at Grace and the girl looked away and shrugged.

“Hmm? I mean, is this it now?” Annie went on. “We’ve come nearly two thousand miles and you’ve sat there and you haven’t spoken a word. So I just thought I’d ask, just so I know. Is this the way you and I are going to be now?”

Grace was looking down, fiddling with her Walkman. She shrugged again.

“I dunno.”

“Do you want us to turn around and go back home?” Grace gave a bitter little laugh.

“Well, do you?”

Grace lifted her eyes and looked sideways out of the window, trying to seem nonchalant, but Annie could see she was fighting tears. There was a clumping sound as Pilgrim shifted in the trailer.

“Because if that’s what you want—”

Suddenly Grace turned on her, her face savage and distorted. The tears were running now and the failure to stop them doubled her fury.

“What the hell do you care!” she screamed. “You decide! You always do! You pretend you care what other people want but you don’t, it’s just bullshit!”

“Grace,” Annie said gently, putting a hand out. But Grace smacked it away.

“Don’t! Just leave me alone!”

Annie looked at her for a moment then opened the door and got out. She started walking, blindly, tilting her face to the wind. The road led up past a grove of pine trees to a parking lot and a low building, both deserted. She kept walking. She followed a path that curved up the hillside and found herself beside a cemetery enclosed by black iron railings. At the crest of the hill there was a simple stone monument and it was here that Annie stopped.

On this hillside, on a June day in 1876, George Armstrong Custer and more than two hundred soldiers were cut to pieces by those they had sought to slaughter. Their names were etched in the stone. Annie turned to look down the hill at the scattered white tombstones. They cast long shadows in the last pale reach of the sun. She stood there and looked out across the vast, rolling plains of wind-flattened grass that stretched away from this sorrowful place to a horizon where sorrow was infinite. And she started to weep.

It would later strike her as strange that she should have come here by chance. Whether some other random place would have brought forth the tears she’d stemmed for so long, she never would know. The monument was a kind of cruel anomaly, honoring as it did the agents of genocide while the countless graves of those they had butchered elsewhere lay forever unmarked. But the sense of suffering here and the presence of so many ghosts transcended all detail. It was simply a fitting place for tears. And Annie hung her head and wept them. She wept for Grace and for Pilgrim and for the lost souls of the children who’d died in her womb.
Above all, she wept for herself and what she had become.

All her life she had lived where she didn’t belong. America wasn’t her home. And nor, when she went there now, was England. In each country they treated her as if she came from the other. The truth was, she came from nowhere. She had no home. Not since her father died. She was rootless, tribeless, adrift.

Once this had seemed her greatest strength. She had a way of tapping into things. She could seamlessly adapt, insinuate herself into any group, any culture or situation. She knew instinctively what was required, who you needed to know, what you had to do to win. And in her work, which had so long obsessed her, this gift had helped her win all that was worth winning. Now, since Grace’s accident, it all seemed worthless.

In the past three months she had been the strong one, fooling herself that it was what Grace needed. The fact was, she knew no other way to react. Having lost all connection with herself, she had lost it too with her child and, for this, she was consumed with guilt. Action had become a substitute for feeling. Or at least for the expression of it. And this was why, she now saw, she had launched herself into this lunatic adventure with Pilgrim.

Annie sobbed until her shoulders ached, then she slid her back down the cold stone of the monument and sat with her head in her hands. And there she stayed until the sun dipped pale and liquid behind the distant snowy rim of the Bighorn Mountains and the cottonwoods down by the river melted together in a single black scar. When she looked up, it was night and the world was a lantern of sky.

“Ma’am?”

It was a park ranger. He had a flashlight, but kept its beam tactfully away from her face.

“You okay there ma’am?”

Annie wiped her face and swallowed.

“Yes. Thank you,” she said. “I’m fine.” She got up.

“Your daughter was getting kind of worried down there.”

“Yes, I’m sorry. I’m going now.”

He tipped his hat as she went. “Night ma’am. You go safely now.”

She walked back down to the car, aware he was watching. Grace was asleep, or perhaps she was only pretending to be. Annie started the engine, switched on the lights and made a turn at the top of the road. She looped back onto the interstate and drove through the night, all the way to Choteau.

T
WO CREEKS RAN THROUGH THE BOOKER BROTHERS
’ and and they gave the ranch its name, the Double Divide. They flowed from adjacent folds of the mountain front and in their first half mile they looked like twins. The ridge that ran between them here was low, at one point almost low enough for them to meet, but then it rose sharply in a rugged chain of interlocking bluffs, shouldering the creeks apart. Forced thus to seek their separate ways, they now became quite different.

The northern one ran, swift and shallow, down a wide, uncluttered valley. Its banks, though sometimes steep, gave easy access to the cattle. Brook trout hung with their heads upstream in its breaks and eddies, while herons stalked its shingled beaches. The route the southern creek was forced to take was lusher, full of obstacles and trees. It wove through tangled thickets of Bebbs willow and red-stem dogwood, then disappeared awhile in marsh. Lower down, meandering a meadow so flat that its loops linked back upon themselves, it formed a maze of still, dark pools and grassy islands
whose geography was constantly arranged and rearranged by beavers.

Ellen Booker used to say the creeks were like her two boys, Frank the north and Tom the south. That was until Frank, who was seventeen at the time, remarked over supper one night that it wasn’t fair because he liked beaver too. His father told him to go wash his mouth out and sent him to bed. Tom wasn’t so sure his mother got the joke, but she must have because she never said it again.

The house they called the creek house, where first Tom and Rachel, then later Frank and Diane had lived and which now was empty, stood on a bluff above a bend in the northern creek. From it you could look down the valley, across the tops of cottonwood trees, to the ranch house half a mile away, surrounded by whitewashed barns, stables and corrals. The houses were linked by a dirt road that wound on up to the lower meadows where the cattle spent the winter. Now, in early April, most of the snow had gone from this lower part of the ranch. It lay only in shaded, rockstrewn gullies and among the pine and fir trees that dotted the north side of the ridge.

Tom looked up at the creek house from the passenger seat of the old Chevy and wondered, as he often did, about moving in. He and Joe were on their way back from feeding the cattle, the boy expertly negotiating the potholes. Joe was small for his age and had to sit like a ramrod to see over the front. During the week Frank did the feeding, but at weekends Joe liked to do it and Tom liked to help him. They’d unloaded the slabs of alfalfa and together enjoyed the sight and sound of the cows surging in with their calves to get it.

“Can we go see Bronty’s foal?” Joe asked.

“Sure we can.”

“There’s a kid at school says we should’ve imprinttrained him.”

“Uh-huh.”

“He says if you do it soon as they’re born, it makes them real easy to handle later on.”

“Yep. That’s what some folk say.”

“There was this thing on the TV about a guy who does it with geese too. He has this airplane and the baby geese all grow up thinking it’s their mom. He flies it and they just follow.”

“Yeah, I heard about that.”

“What do you think about all that stuff?”

“Well Joe, I don’t know a whole lot about geese. Maybe it’s okay for them to grow up thinking they’re airplanes.” Joe laughed. “But with a horse, I reckon first you have to let him learn to be a horse.”

They drove back down to the ranch and parked outside the long barn where Tom kept some of his horses. Joe’s twin brothers, Scott and Craig, came running out of the house to meet them. Tom saw Joe’s face fall. The twins were nine years old and because of their blond good looks and the fact that they did everything in a noisy unison, they always got more attention than their brother.

“You going to see the foal?” they yelled. “Can we come?” Tom put a big hand like a crane-grab on each of their heads.

“So long as you keep quiet you can,” he said.

He led them into the barn and stood with the twins outside Bronty’s stall while Joe went in. Bronty was a big ten-year-old quarter horse, a reddish bay. She pushed her muzzle toward Joe, who put a hand on it while he gently rubbed her neck. Tom liked to watch the boy around horses, he had an easy, confident way with them. The foal, a little darker than his mother, had
been lying in the corner and was now struggling to his feet. He tottered on comical, stilted legs to the sheltering side of the mare, peeping around her rear end at Joe. The twins laughed.

“He looks so funny,” Scott said.

“I’ve got a picture of you two at that age,” said Tom. “And you know what?”

“They looked like bullfrogs,” Joe said.

The twins soon got bored and left. Tom and Joe turned the other horses out into the paddock behind the barn. After breakfast they were going to start working with some of the yearlings. As they walked back to the house, the dogs started barking and ran out past them. Tom turned and saw a silver Ford Lariat coming over the end of the ridge and heading down the driveway toward them. There was just the driver in it and as it got nearer he could see it was a woman.

“Your mom expecting company?” Tom asked. Joe shrugged. It wasn’t until the car pulled up, with the dogs running around it still barking, that Tom recognized who it was. It was hard to believe. Joe saw his look.

“You know her?”

“I believe I do. But not what she’s doing here.”

He told the dogs to hush and walked over. Annie got out of the car and came nervously toward him. She was wearing jeans and hiking boots and a huge, creamcolored sweater that came halfway down her thighs. The sun behind made her hair flare red and Tom realized how clearly he remembered those green eyes from the day at the stables. She nodded at him without quite smiling, a little sheepish.

“Mr. Booker. Good morning.”

“Well, good morning.” They stood there for a moment.
“Joe, this is Mrs. Graves. Joe here is my nephew.” Annie offered the boy her hand.

“Hello, Joe. How are you?”

“Good.”

She looked up the valley, toward the mountains, then looked back at Tom.

“What a beautiful place.”

“It
is.”

He was wondering when she was going to get around to saying what on earth she was doing here, though he already had an idea. She took a deep breath.

“Mr. Booker, you’re going to think this is insane, but you can probably guess why I’ve come here.”

“Well. I kind of reckoned you didn’t just happen to be passing through.” She almost smiled.

“I’m sorry just turning up like this, but I knew what you’d say if I phoned. It’s about my daughter’s horse.”

“Pilgrim.”

“Yes. I know you can help him and I came here to ask you, to beg you, to have another look at him.”

“Mrs. Graves . . .”

“Please. Just a look. It wouldn’t take long.”

Tom laughed. “What, to fly to New York?” He nodded at the Lariat. “Or were you counting on driving me there?”

“He’s here; In Choteau.”

Tom stared at her for a moment in disbelief.

“You’ve hauled him all the way out here?” She nodded. Joe was looking from one of them to the other, trying to get the picture. Diane had stepped out onto the porch and stood there holding open the screen door, watching.

“All on your own?” Tom asked.

“With Grace, my daughter.”

“Just to have me take a look at him?”

“Yes.”

“You guys coming in to eat?” called Diane. Who’s the woman, was what she really meant. Tom put his hand on Joe’s shoulder.

“Tell your mom I’m coming,” he said and as the boy went off he turned back to Annie. They stood looking at each other for a moment. She gave a little shrug and, at last, smiled. He noticed how it made the corners of her mouth go down but left untouched the troubled look in her eyes. He was being railroaded and wondered why he didn’t mind.