The Long Road Home (5 page)

“I’ll go make you some tea,” said Esther in her husky voice. “Don’t fall asleep, now. You might have a concussion or something.”

“No, I won’t.”

Nora viewed the closing door with relief. Her triumphant return had turned into an embarrassing disaster. Instead of charging in and taking over, here she was, lying in bed with a goose egg on her head. Life just wasn’t fair. Tomorrow, she’d try again, Nora vowed, burrowing under the blankets. Tomorrow, she’d do better.

The mountain of blankets formed a barrier between herself and the rest of the world. She sank deeper into their warmth. Nora turned on her side and watched, transfixed, as a spider carefully spun its web in the dusty corner.

To each creature a home, she thought with hope.

IN THE LOWER BARN, C.W. was working up a sweat. He loved to throw hay. It was hard, backbreaking work that brought his muscles to the point of pure pain. C.W. threw at a steady pace, humming a soundless tune in his head, beating the rhythm of his pitches with grunts. Poke, lift, pitch. Down, up, and out. Down, up, and out. Over and over. Faster and faster. His biceps began to tremble, and sweat beaded his brow and pooled under his arms. He needed to work hard now. This was the one way he could blot out the questions that haunted him.

Today, however, the questions kept coming. Why was MacKenzie’s widow here now? He’d thought he found the perfect haven in which to hide while he redirected his life. Seth had confirmed that the MacKenzies never came here. What was she up to? And why was MacKenzie’s widow worried about old Seth’s house budget? He was right about her, he realized with distaste. She’d be cheap with good, honest people and end up using them, just like her husband did.

From the corner of his eye he saw a figure move near the
barn’s entry. C.W. groaned, threw a final forkful of hay, and stopped to catch his breath. Standing still now, his muscles throbbed so; he could hear the beat of it in his brain. After wiping his brow with his dusty shirtsleeve he looked over his shoulder toward the figure by the door.

Seth was rubbing his jaw as if he had a bad itch, and when he wasn’t rubbing, he was hitching his pants and clearing his throat. C.W. coughed, set down his pitchfork, and met Seth’s gaze. There was no delaying it. Seth wanted to talk.

“Hey, Seth,” he called, slipping easily into the vernacular. He walked directly over to the old man, his long legs crossing the barn quickly.

“Barn looks good,” Seth said. His smile was brief.

C.W. was always stunned to note how many of Seth’s teeth were missing. “Thanks.”

“Yeh-up. Can’t work a farm when the tools are rusted.”

“Nope,” C.W. replied. He enjoyed giving the short rejoinders as much as Seth did hearing them. Seth started at hitching his pants again.

“Something I can do for you, Seth?”

Seth looked off at the ewes awhile. “You were acting strange up there with the missus,” Seth said at last.

Here we go, thought C.W. “How so?”

“Like you knew her.”

C.W. skipped a beat. “Nope. I never met her.”

Seth screwed up his eyes.

Cagey old bird, thought C.W. with affection. He held his tongue, however, knowing his silence could outlast even Seth’s patience.

“Silence is a wonderful thing, son,” Seth said after a spell of watching three hens peck the corn. “But it’s a far cry from secrets.”

C.W. kicked the dirt and stared at his dusty boot. “I never met her,” he said quietly.

Seth nodded, knowing it was the truth.

C.W. ran his hand through his hair with a long sigh.

“Well, I guess I was hard on her for a while there. Skinny New York women have a way of getting on my nerves.” He was relieved to hear Seth chuckle. “From what I know of MacKenzie, she’s going to be a real pain.”

“What you know of MacKenzie?”

Clever man, mused C.W. “I know what I hear. Let’s see, from you I heard he was ornery as a mule and late to pay his bills. From the boys I heard he was short on charm and long on demands, and from Esther…” He paused. “I get mixed messages from Esther. I gather she both hates him and, dare I say, admires him?”

Seth rubbed his jaw again. C.W. sensed an untold story there. Seth looked away for a moment, but when he swung his head back, his face flattened to a deadpan.

C.W. went back to his hay. He hadn’t thrown more than three forkfuls before he heard Seth’s voice again.

“You workin’ up a frenzy today,” Seth said.

“Lot of delays,” he grunted between pitches. “Lot to get done before the sun sets.”

“Lot of thinkin’, seems to me.”

C.W. slowed, stopped, and peered over his shoulder once again. Seth was standing with his hands in his rear pockets and one foot slightly before the other. His eyes were boring into him.

“When a boil starts to fester, it’s time to stop everything and clean it. Else it spreads and ruins you. Makes you mean and ugly and you hurt bad all the time.”

“Just what is it you think I need to clean out, Seth?”

Seth gummed a bit, holding back. “Reckon you know that
best, son. But I do know that you’ve been festering for months now and it looks like its comin’ to a head. Might be time to tend to it, that’s all I’m saying.”

A quiet pall settled in the barn. C.W. leaned on his fork while staring at the ewes. They stared right back at him, as though waiting for his response.

C.W. shook his head and dug his fork into the ground. Festering was the word for it. Perhaps it was time to purge. He trusted Seth, both his wisdom and his silence. Running his hand in his hair, he approached Seth.

“I never met Mrs. MacKenzie,” he began slowly. “But I knew Mike.”

Seth’s eyes widened.

“Everyone on Wall Street knew the ‘Big Mac.’ Mac, the big dealer. Mac, the big spender. There was this inside joke, spawned by jealousy: ‘Have you heard today’s Mac Deal?’”

He looked up at Seth. The old man wasn’t smiling.

“MacKenzie was this ruddy, handsome fellow with a loud, confident laugh and a firm handshake,” C.W. continued. “People enjoyed gathering around him and listening to the ribald stories that he told with professional skill. But his eyes were cold and calculating.

“At least he was honest about it,” added C.W., kicking the dirt. “Mike wanted to make money. And boy did he. Some called him a genius. Others called him a shark. He had an instinct for the kill and devoured businesses and swallowed profits in huge gulps. And that was business.” He shrugged. “I saw him as a highly leveraged con artist.”

“I guess I ain’t surprised you’re some kind of money man, the way you handle numbers. Still, it makes me wonder. I know how MacKenzie left. Why’d you leave?” Seth asked.

C.W. flinched, hearing in his mind the revolver’s retort, Mike’s blood blurring his vision again. His nose burned.
His breath choked. C.W. wiped a shaky hand across his face, squeezing his eyelids tight. Then, suddenly, the answer came to him. A burst of clarity, after so many months of confusion. C.W. took a great gulp of air before speaking, more to himself than to Seth.

“I don’t want a killer instinct.”

C.W. didn’t move; he stared out of the barn with his hands in his hip pockets, while a muscle twitched in his broad jaw. From across the barn the sound of bleating was a staccato against the quiet dusk. Seth waited, giving C.W. the time he needed to clean out the wound.

After a spell, C.W. blinked, absently stretched his shoulders, and turned toward Seth, a sheepish look on his face.

“I suspect the boil burst.”

“Yeh-up.” Seth shifted his weight. “Speakin’ on MacKenzie. The missus, she ain’t nothing like the mister.”

“Oh? How is she different?”

“She’s a sad one. Used to wonder what made her so. When they first came up here she laughed all the time. Sweet thing, always comin’ down to the house with a gift from town or to buy more syrup from us than she’d ever use. They didn’t always have that big house. Nope. Used to camp up there before the building set up…and during. Some of them nights was cold enough to freeze water in a pail.”

He shook his head and chuckled. “We used to credit it to love. And them being young, ’course. Heard he got pretty rich, real quick. Money can change a man.”

C.W. felt a chill. “So I hear.”

“Not her though. She was sweet as ever. But she started getting that sad look on her face, like a ewe what’s been left behind in the field.”

“Then they just stopped coming up?”

“Yeh-up. No word, no nothin’. Just stopped coming.” He
shrugged. “I guess that’s the way it is with rich folks. Maybe they just get bored. Still…” Seth scratched his belly then his head, ending the pause with a slap of his cap against his thigh.

“This still be her place and she’s a nice lady.”

“I understand, Seth.”

“Figured you would. Well, better get down to dinner before Esther starts to calling. Lord, how that woman can holler.”

C.W. walked over to the hay pile and resumed a steady rhythm of throwing hay.

Seth slipped his hat on, paused, then added, “If you feel like jawin’ a bit more, you know where to find me.”

C.W. stopped and faced the old man. His chest swelled.

“Thanks, Seth. I believe I will.”

Seth gummed a bit, then gave a brief wave. Before he left the barn, he threw a final sentence out. It seemed to reach C.W. after Seth had left the barn.

“You’re a good boy.”

The few words touched C.W. in a deep place that no words had reached in a very long time. It had been a very long time since anyone had called him a good boy. Or since he had thought that of himself.

C.W. sat on a bale of hay and rested his head in his hands.

The blue skies outside the great room were turning misty, signaling the end of her first day home in the mountains. Birds skittered in the sky, frantic at being away from home so close to dark. Nora went out on the deck to watch them arc, swoop, and bank turns, understanding how they felt. The warm day was becoming cool night. The sweet day songs had ceased; only the nighthawk, with its long pointed wings, kept up its nasal
peent, peent.
From the north, a wind was picking up and
carrying off the first of an army of leaves. In the air, Nora could taste sweet rain.

She wrapped her arms around her shoulders. She should go in, but the cloud mist on her face refreshed her. So she stood out on the deck awhile longer to stare out at the mountains, dark purple now under lowering clouds. The clouds would soon swallow the house. Thunder rumbled in the valley.

“I’m safe now,” she called back to the nighthawk. “I’m already home.”

Speak them she might, she didn’t feel the words in the red hush of dusk. As she stood alone in her large, unfinished, mountain home, she thought if this were a nest, she’d be wildly searching for twigs, twine, and mud to patch together a safe haven against the incoming storm. But she was a woman, with neither the practical skills nor the money needed to finish the endless projects she’d discovered today.

She had forgotten how much remained to be done. Miles and years had fogged her memory in a romantic vision of country life, leaving unremembered unpleasant details such as unfinished floors and ceilings. Memory was selective, she realized.

Esther, however, had reminded her all too clearly in her forthright manner earlier that afternoon.

They’d been walking up the short flight of stairs to the great room. On this first day, Nora had made overtures to a possible new ally. A friend, a woman friend, would be welcome. So she sought out Esther’s opinions on what she’d do in the house, even though she already had her own plan firmly set in her organized mind.

Esther was not easy to approach. She was definite about her opinions and did not couch them with “I think” or with questions. She could be intimidating.

“I don’t know what you’re going to do all by yourself in this big house,” Esther said bluntly.

“There’ll be no shortage of projects to keep me busy. Besides, I’m used to living alone.”

Esther raised her brows. “Well, it’s going to be pretty lonely up here when you get snowed in. All those windows will make it cold too.”

“I suppose,” Nora replied, scanning the high ceilings and huge plates of glass that surrounded the great room. She’d look into sewing some insulated shades right away.

“All these cement floors,” Esther said in the lower levels, “get icy, and there’s nothing you can do to warm them up till summer—and that don’t come till July.”

Nora’s gaze swept the pitted gray cement floors of the lower floor. This part of the house was low on her priority list of improvements.

“I’ll have to get wood floors put in, someday.” In the meantime, she thought to herself, a row of carpet samples might do.

“You’ll probably want the upstairs john done too, I suspect.”

“Not this year.”

“That means you’ll have to run down three flights of stairs just to pee? Long trip in the middle of the night.” Esther laughed, but at the sight of Nora’s face, she cut it short.

It went on like that as they toured the house, and Nora’s
to-do
list grew. Esther also pointed out all the fine features of the house, like the redwood beam and deck, the slate roof, the rosy brick, and more copper piping than anyone else in town could dream of putting in.

“Not another house like it in the county,” Esther reported.

Nora would have traded grandeur for economy. All she
saw was miles of unfinished floor and ceilings, rafters covered with thick sheets of clear plastic, and trapped under them, the carcasses of hordes of flies, ants, and wasps. There were no doors to the bedrooms, or closets for that matter, and all the walls, from the basement to the top-floor bedroom, were only roughed in. Electrical outlets hung from walls or frames where walls were supposed to be.

Nora’s critical eye took in and calculated what it would cost to complete the five-level six-bedroom house. It was enough to weaken her at the knees.

“I’m just hoping to get done what I need to survive during the winter. And at least a door on the bathroom,” she said, thinking of C.W.’s showers. “I can hold off for a while on the aesthetics.” She didn’t mention that once the house was finished, her taxes would also rise.

Esther stood in the center of the great room and craned her neck to view the vaulted ceilings. “Why don’t you just finish it all up?” she asked. “This house has been sitting up here untended for years. In fact, every year, right about February when we’re feeling pretty tight in our place, we can’t help but wonder what you started this big house for, just for you and Mike and no kids.”

Nora saw from Esther’s expression that she envied the room.

“Why be finicky now?” Esther asked, casting a testy glance Nora’s way. “Mike would finish the job in a hurry. First-class all the way.”

Nora’s back stiffened. “Frankly, I wish he had finished this house. But he didn’t.” Nora’s face was pink with indignation. “Mike left quite a few projects unfinished, and now it’s up to me to tidy up. I will get it done when I can, as I can.” She tightened her arms across her chest and her voice was more sharp than she had intended.