The Work of Wolves (35 page)

Earl's mother picked up the hem of her coat and laid it across her knees. She straightened her shoulders. "You'd better tell me, Earl," she said. "Did you have something to do with stealing horses?"

He nodded, still unable to find his voice.

Lorna stared at the floor. Her hands lay together in her lap, like someone else's hands she'd merely borrowed. "Oh, Earl," she finally said.

The words more sad than angry. Earl had the impression that, more than blaming him, his mother felt he'd given into something all around him, that what had happened was just too bad and too sad for words, but, in the end and ultimately and after all, not that surprising. As if she'd been expecting something like this all along and now here it was.

But Earl had given into nothing. He'd chosen what he'd done. There had been nothing passive about it. He hadn't been acted upon. He'd acted. And it bothered him that she could think otherwise.

"They were being starved," he said. He heard the edge in his own voice. From the corner of his eye, he saw his grandmother raise her head. He saw her needle suspended and stilled in the air, and the eight beads on their thread hanging in a small parabola, stilled, too. Never had he seen the beads stilled. Always, in the fluidity of his grandmother's movement, the beads were moving, too. But he didn't have time to think about this. It was just a fleeting moment of strangeness. Of something changed and different.

"Stealing horses," his mother said. "That's a crime." She seemed not to have heard what he'd said.

"So we took them, you know?" he said. He felt anger growing inside him, rising into his voice, and he was afraid he wouldn't be able to control it. "Because they were going to die, Mom."

"This place," she said. "Is there anyone it leaves alone?"

Earl had the feeling of being in a circling wind—of moving and moving but never going anywhere. Returning always to the same spot. Leaves in a tornado. A hollow center which he couldn't escape, circling around it forever. The only clear thought he had—clear and startling and unexpected—was that he was actually glad his mother knew about the horses but that she couldn't be allowed to think this way about what he'd done.

"It's not this place," he said. Voice of the wind. Hollow and distant: voice of the wind. "It's me."

But still his mother seemed not to hear him. "I'll just bet Norman had something to do with this, too," she said.

"Damnit, Mom!"

Norm had often told Earl there were no obscenities in Lakota, and in that respect Earl tried to speak his native language. Not once that he could remember had he ever sworn. To use such language now, against his mother—the entire room went silent. He was shocked. His mother was shocked. Hippos overturned a boat, and the dispassionate narrator noted that, though hippos look sleepy and lethargic, and even comical, they can be more dangerous than crocodiles if enraged. Leaves swirled outside on the gravel, making a soothing, chuckling sound. Earl and his mother stared at each other, eyes as wide as if they'd never seen each other before.

Then Earl raised his hands toward her. He didn't know whether he was holding them out to her for understanding or to keep her at bay: a gesture of suspension—that nothing, for a few moments, happen or change. He should apologize immediately, he thought. Try to erase the words, though words could never be erased. Only repented and forgiven. But he didn't want to apologize, and he realized he wasn't repentant. Shocked, yes, but not repentant. And he didn't need forgiveness. He needed understanding. This was not a time to say the right thing. It was a time to say the needed thing. He'd been spending too much time with Carson and Ted, that their language would come out of his mouth like that. But it had come out, and now it was Earl's language, too—his word, at least.

"You're not listening to me, Mom," he said, all anger gone from his voice now. Merely stating things. Merely saying what was true. "I chose to steal those horses, you know? Nobody forced me. It's not because I live here. It's not because you couldn't ever get me away from bad influences. It's because I decided to steal them. That's all."

His mother's stricken face went on staring at him, and for a desperate second Earl thought she still wasn't hearing him, and never would, thought that her eyes were looking past and through him to the old tragedy. Blinded by lights. Pupils hardened by them, unable to focus on anything else. Then there was the smallest dilation of her eyes, and Earl realized she was hearing him. Seeing him. That something had changed.

He went on, quietly. "And Norm. Yes, I talked to him. He knows about it. But you want to know how much he had to do with it? You really want to know, Mom? About as much as he had to do with Dad's dying. I would've done it whether I talked to him or not, you know? You can't go on blaming Norm. No more, Mom. He's my uncle.
Tiospaye.
He's what I've got. All my life you've wanted me to have Dad. But I don't have him. I have Norm. And Grandmother. And you. That's the way it is. I wish you'd let it be that way."

His mother didn't move, but everything had changed. She was transfixed, but not from shock. She was absorbing every word. Taking it all in. Almost overwhelmed by what Earl said. When Earl mentioned his grandmother, he half-turned to her and saw that she sat motionless, too, with the moccasin in her lap and both hands resting beside it, the beads on their thread curled like a tiny, brilliant, sleeping snake in her palm, and on her face a look of peace. A little smile. And he thought she nodded at him. As if to say,
Yes. This is how it is, and this is how to speak of it.

"I'm not on the Black Road, Mom," he said. "Maybe it's not the Red Road, either. Maybe I don't know what road I'm on. But I do know what one I'm not on. It's not all that out there"—he swayed his head in a circle—"that made me take those horses. It's inside me. I took them because it had to be done. You raised me, Mom. Why do you keep thinking it didn't take?"

When he stopped speaking, Earl noticed that the wind had come up again. He heard the trees his father and Norm had planted moving but staying put in it. His mother stared at him with a face like brown and brittle pottery, even the earring that before had quivered now hanging motionless. Absolutely stilled. As if sunlight on water could freeze. Or the beat of a heart could quit shaking the body. Earl knew that his mother was hurt, and he was sorry. And yet not. Sorry that she was hurt, but not that he was hurting her. They were different things. They were different things.

When his mother did speak, Earl realized that she was hurting for all the reasons he knew, but one he hadn't even considered. There was sorrow in her voice when she spoke, but no tears—sorrow without weeping, trees bending to the ground in rain, long prairie grass before the gray onslaught of storm.

"Oh, Earl," she said. "You sound just like your father. You sound like Cy."

For just a moment Earl was surprised and pleased, before he realized that his mother might be seeing and hearing a ghost. He had to be sure she was seeing and hearing him. Only then could he take what she said with pride.

"But I'm not," he said.

His mother's eyes narrowed. The silver earring quivered. She raised her hand to her shining hair and smoothed it back. Tucked it behind an ear.

"No," she said. "You're not."

"I'm sorry I swore."

"It woke me up," she said. She pursed her lips in a self-deprecating smile. "I just don't want..."

She didn't finish, but Earl knew what she didn't want. She didn't want loss. Didn't want grief. Didn't want needless holes appearing at random in her life. Didn't want the structure she'd managed to build crumbling around her. But preventing all that could not be his sole purpose in life. Or hers. He realized that he would go to college—take the Green Road, if that's what it was. But it was his road. He would go because it was his road, not because it was the road that would take him to safety or preserve him from the ravages he'd always felt his mother feared for him. And realizing this, he felt a new longing for the things he'd only faintly known here—the dancing and the traditional religions. They could be part of his road, too. Going away and staying did not have to be opposites. He'd never realized that.

He noticed a new silence in the room and turning saw that his grandmother had turned off the television. She was beading again, the needle rising and falling, dipping and diving in its three-dimensional dance. Earl didn't know if he'd ever seen his grandmother beading without the TV on. Lorna realized the silence at the same time Earl did.

"Mom," she said. "The TV."

Earl's grandmother shrugged. She looked at her daughter and grandson, her eyes bright through the lenses of her glasses. "Who cares about a bunch of crazy hippos?" She tightened the string of beads. Earl saw the pattern on the moccasin. It was somehow familiar, but he didn't recognize it as a traditional pattern. Before he could ask what it was, his grandmother said, "At least we have another horse thief in the family. Your great-grandfather, Earl, was one of the best."

Lorna had forgotten the horses and the fact that Earl had helped steal them. She turned to Earl. "Those horses. What's going to happen? What if they find out?"

"We hid them good," Earl said. "I don't think anyone will find them. And if they do, I don't think they could connect it to us. We were careful, you know? Like you always want."

Lorna smiled. "Yes. Like I always want."

Then she asked, "Why didn't you tell me?"

Earl didn't know what to say. Before he could try to answer, she said, "No. You're right. I would have stopped you. But Norm. You told him?"

"I made up my own mind, Mom. He just let me make it up, you know?"

Lorna considered this.

"I ought to invite him over for a meal sometime," she said. "Do you think he'd come?"

"It's about time," Earl's grandmother said.

She lifted her needle, caught more beads, swung them into the air. When she turned the moccasin to attach them, Earl saw the pattern, partially finished, that he couldn't make out before: blue water, a red horse, running.

C
ARSON SWUNG THE CASE'S
steering wheel around, and the tractor circled ponderously, and there was Rebecca walking across the stubble toward him, wind blowing her hair across her face so that she looked as if she were walking slantwise, coming with careful steps over the stiff stems of the cut wheat straw. So unexpected and familiar. His heart tumbled. He knocked the tractor out of gear and shut it off. The diesel engine trembled and died, the cast metal shuddered. He didn't know whether to leave the cab or stay inside it. She was obscured for a moment by a streak of grease on the windshield, and he moved his head to keep her in view.

He rose, opened the door, stepped onto the ladder, stood on the ground. On the abandoned section line road at the edge of the field, he saw her car. She must have driven there, pushed down the rusted wire of the fence and straddled it while he was turned the other way. And then come toward him. He waited. When she was about ten yards away, she reached up and brushed her hair off her face and held it in her fist long enough to meet his eyes. She didn't smile—just held his eyes and continued walking toward him, and he couldn't tell if she was troubled or glad to see him. Then she unclenched her fist and let the wind have her hair again and came the last few steps to where he stood near the rock box on the front of the tractor, feeling the heat of the radiator against his back.

She was so near and still coming. For a moment too much memory returned, and he thought she would walk right into him as she had in the abandonment of Elmer Johannssen's place. His muscles tensed to step toward her, and his arms began to lift, but before the motion could leave his shoulders, she stopped with three feet of stubble between them. He didn't know whether she stopped because she saw him about to lift his arms, or if she stopped because he hadn't.

"Hi, Carson," she said.

It struck him as a strange greeting—too simple and familiar, inadequate to the task of breaking silence between them or of touching upon who they were to each other. She had driven here and crossed a fence and walked through wind to stop before him while a tractor's engine cooled, and his heart had missed a beat when he saw her, yet she said "Hi, Carson" as if they were merely old friends who had met in an expected setting, on a street in town or in the aisle of a store.

"Rebecca," he said, restraining his voice to match hers.

Yet he was stretched wire. The slightest wind could make it groan.

"It's good to see you," she said.

"Good to see you, too."

He wanted to say, "It's good to hear your voice." He didn't, yet thinking it, he realized how much more it would mean to say it than to merely say, "Good to see you." He thought of the other senses. "It's good to smell you," he might say: perfume and sweat and the shampoo she used. "It would be good to touch you. Taste you." Intimacy could be marked by such gradations, and he might, without embarrassment, say any of those things to her. But other things restrained him.

"I should have kept going," she said. "But I had to see you."

"Going where?"

"I'm leaving. Like you told me."

It was what he had told her. But that didn't mean he could actually imagine her gone.

She took her hair in her fist again. "I did what you said. I got in the car and left. I'm on my way to Rapid City."

"Just like that? He know?"

Her eyes clouded. "He left. I saw my chance."

"What do you mean, left?"

She looked to the ground, still holding her hair in her fist. There was something small about the way she held it. Small and endearing. That clenching. That restraining the wind's wildness. He wanted to reach out and enclose the hand that enclosed her hair.

When she looked back up at him, her eyes were swimming. "The sheriff came over," she said. "He went with him again. To show him where the horses were again. You took them, didn't you, Carson? You've got them somewhere safe."

He lifted his arm, rested his elbow on the rock box behind him. He wanted to reach out and touch her eyelids. Squeeze the tears from them, then put his hand behind her head and pull her into him.