The Work of Wolves (41 page)

Carson came out of these thoughts to his father's voice. Only a few seconds had passed, for his father was still talking about Magnus Yarborough. But there was something tired, wasted, slightly bitter in his father's voice that Carson hadn't noticed before. "He ain't like us," Charles was saying. "Every year here it's nothin but survival. Can't wait for nothin. Just hope to break even."

But Carson had his own thoughts churning inside. "This is Grampa's place," he said.

The reddish tinge in his mother's neck leapt into her cheeks, and though her head remained tilted downward, her eyes lifted, wide, to Carson, a moment of surprise and understanding. But Charles was unfazed.

"No," he said. "It ain't. It was. But it's ours now."

"He worked his whole life for it. Jesus. He died out there. Right out there in that corral. I was there. How's twice-and-a-half market value make up for that?"

Potatoes, beans, roast sat on all their plates now in cold disarray. The solenoid in the refrigerator clicked, and the motor hummed, and liquid trickled inside its pipes. The overhead light caught the tines of Carson's fork. They gleamed in curving lines. Then, very softly, Marie said, "Everyone dies, Carson."

She spoke to her hands, then lifted her head.

"What's that mean?"

"Only what it means. People die in places all the time. In houses or fields all over the world, all the time. And most of those places get sold. Eventually. Or people die in places that don't belong to them. Hospital rooms. Motel rooms. And when they do, they're taken away. And someone else goes into the same room. Maybe to die in the same bed. You can't make a shrine of a place because someone died there. We have to live the lives we have."

Carson was quieted by how deeply his mother understood him, how she so easily knew what he meant. Yet she had taken that meaning someplace else entirely. He knew what she meant, too. But couldn't agree.

"But this ain't a motel room," he said. "It ain't a hospital. Grampa didn't die in any a those places. He died here. Where he belonged. If it's a shrine, it's his livin here makes it that. Not just his dyin. And as far as livin the lives we have, the one I got wouldn' be the same without this place."

Mother and son held each other's eyes, each saddened and made momentarily mute by their understanding and differences.

Then Charles spoke, from outside their conversation, with a tone still slightly weary and bitter, and without raising his voice, as if he were speaking to himself, saying things he'd never allowed himself to say aloud, "I been workin this ranch all my life. Been workin it since I was born. I ain't never been away from it. But I ain't like you an Dad. You ever notice that?"

It was a real question. Something was being spoken here that had never been spoken. Perhaps never been completely thought. It subdued Carson, and he turned to his father and answered the question asked of him. "Yeah," he said. "I guess I have."

His father nodded. "Half-obvious, ain't it? This place"—he moved his head backwards vaguely, indicating the window behind him—"I can't say I ever enjoyed workin it all that much. This business ain't never come natural to me. Just I got started with it and kept goin. Never got away from it."

He stopped and stared at the glossy surface of the table, the aimless reflection of the light in it. Carson had the impression he was looking at his whole life there. He'd never seen his father like this.

"I even quit thinkin about gettin away," Charles said. "Decided that was somethin best forgot." He looked at Marie, and a long history passed between them. "No point thinkin it or rememberin it. Then out a the blue."

Charles lifted his big right hand, turned it palm up in a gesture of helplessness and amazement, let it drop to the table again.

"All of a sudden," he said, "some things've gotten kinda clear to me. Your ma and me been talkin about it. All of a sudden I'm just pretty sure about some things. Pretty damn sure, Carson. Like pretty damn sure I never did like stickin my hand up inside a cow. Never did care for brandin calves. Or castratin 'em. I never did like gettin up in the middle of a blizzard to check livestock. Hell, I never liked drivin tractor much. Or ridin horse. None a that stuff. Just there wasn't no point in realizin all that. Just make me unhappy, realizin it would. Make your ma unhappy, too. So I went on. Not much else to do."

Carson stared at his father as if he'd never seen him before. And he hadn't. Not this man. Carson had always thought of Ves as the stoic one, taking all hardship as part of life: loss and gain, failure and success all met with the same appreciation, the same humor, and the same suspicion. Charles, on the other hand, took crop failure and low prices hard and could be depressed for days and even weeks over them, and he was apt to fly into quick, explosive rages over the smallest things gone wrong: a broken belt, a rock knocking out a sickle blade, a burst hydraulic hose. Carson had thought these things spoke of his father's excitability and moodiness, an instability about his character. He'd had no idea that underneath that moodiness was a strain of stoicism so deep and perhaps dark, so inherently a part of his life, that it defined everything he did, defined even his moodiness: a man who had looked at his fate when he was young and hadn't liked it but had decided it was his. Period. End of story. The way things were. So get on with it. And make sure you don't trouble others with it. Make sure you don't hurt those you love with your own dissatisfactions. So submerge not just your dreams but even your awareness of them. Do it for someone else. Do it so your wife isn't hurt. So she can stand to live with you.

It had never occurred to Carson that a person could live this life of ranching without loving it, could do it the way people did other jobs—because he'd fallen into it and could not see a way out. And it had surely never occurred to him that his father had within him such reserves of philosophy, such impartial, cool distance on his life.

"This ranch ain't nothin," Charles went on. "Scrub land. Kind a land you spend your life fighting. Which I done. I swear when God told Adam he was gonna work by the sweat of his brow, He didn't have land this hard in mind. You fight it hard enough, it'll let you live off it, but it grudges every second. One thing I wanted was you'd get some distance on this place. See it truer. Decide if you really wanted a stay here or not. You don't know what it's like to be older an lookin at what you got and seein it ain't much more 'n you had when you started. Some ways less."

He paused again. The refrigerator shut off with a clunk of machinery. In that new silence all three of them could hear each other's breathing. Charles looked down at his plate, considered the piece of meat there, then reached out absentmindedly and picked up the salt shaker. Tiny crystals rang against the porcelain. Charles set the shaker back down, picked up his knife and fork, set them back down, looked at his son.

"The one thing I managed," he said, "was to save up some money so you'd have a chance to go to college. Wasn't much. But it was some. You know where that money is now?"

Carson was too benumbed and dazzled by the man speaking to him to even guess, to even shake his head. Charles waited a moment, then jerked his head backwards toward the window.

"Out there," he said. "Place just ate it up. When you decided you didn't want a go to college an moved into the old house, hell, this place sucked that money back in so fast we didn't hardly know it happened. Like plantin bad seed. Just gone. And nothin to show for it. I ain't blamin you, Carson. Just tryin a tell you. But even that, I quit thinkin about it. What's the use? Just the way things are. You ain't me, and what you want for your life maybe ain't what I'd want for it. Or for my own. But so what? It's your life. No sense me sweatin up a lot of regret. Land was gonna get that money one way or the other, probably."

He shook his head, as if he couldn't quite believe he was saying the things he was saying. Couldn't believe he was hearing them from his own mouth and wondered how it was they were coming, and from where.

"I'm just tryin a say, twice and a half—it's got me realizin some things I ain't let myself realize maybe ever. You want a hold on a your grandpa out there. Could be I want a get rid've him. I ain't sayin that in a mean way, Carson. I don't mean him, himself. But..."

But he'd finally hit the point where the thing to be said was greater than the rush and torrent of words that might say it, and the words curled back into themselves, leaving the backwash of implication. His right hand was lying on the table, half-closed, and he opened it, a quick movement, as if he were casting seed or shaking off water.

"Twice and a half," he said. "It's gotta get you thinkin different. It ain't just money. It's a goddamn revelation, Carson. It's..."

He stopped again, stilled by his own thoughts, his inability to get them said. He picked up his utensils again and began to cut the piece of roast on his plate. His knife screeched against the porcelain.

Carson was overwhelmed. He wanted to say to his father, "Jesus, Dad. I never knew." Wanted to whisper it.

But he also wanted to shout at them both that they were being used. And claim the land as his birthright: an ancient privilege beyond decision making, beyond all notions of buying and selling, something passed necessarily into the future unless the future itself refused it. And he was the future. He wanted to say he understood his father's sorrow and regret and revelation—understood it like tunnels bored into his heart—but even so it did not matter. Hollowness of heart, his or his father's, or the heart's pulverization and crumbling into dust—they were meaningless as reasons or excuses or justifications for selling the land. When he was four years old, he'd gone alone into this land and, though not lost, had been found and brought home on a horse and, half-waking, half-sleeping, had ridden onward, wrapped in his grandfather's arms. And he was still riding. The land was his, he its. Set that down against anything his parents might feel, and it would outweigh those feelings. How could they not know this? How could they mistake Magnus Yarborough's money as a substitute for his, Carson's, inheritance?

His mother spoke. "You could buy another ranch. With that much money, if you wanted to ranch, you could buy another place. Probably a better one."

Carson looked at her. It all made so much sense. And so little. So reasonable and so completely crazy and surreal.

"I don't want another ranch," he said. "This is family land. I don't see how..."

And here he stopped, having encountered his own stone cliff, against which words broke and curled back and were abashed. For he had been about to speak of his grandfather's death in the corral out there, on a day colder and snowier than this one and yet much the same. He was about to speak of that death, but in forming the words in his mind, the image of it returned with such clarity and brightness that he saw it as if outside himself: snow falling against the kitchen walls in streaking lines and his grandfather upside down alongside the horse and the horse's hoof snaking up and the sound of the hoof striking bone, so loud it seemed to explode in the kitchen. He hadn't remembered until now that it had been so loud. It had been so loud. Loud as a shotgun, or a tire popping off a rim. And his grandfather's useless neck, unable to resist the force. A neck as loose as rope. The head like a weight on a string. Already dead, already empty. Blank as bleeding stone.

He'd never told anyone what he'd seen. At the table one evening a few days after the accident, Charles reported that he'd talked to the coroner, and the coroner could not determine whether Ves had died of a broken neck or a fractured skull, from hoof or earth. Carson, hearing this, bowed his head and felt muteness inside him like a crawling thing. He knew. It was hoof. Hoof, hoof, hoof.

But he'd never known anything could be so irrelevant. So absolutely and completely and deeply and inherently meaningless. Something only he knew—knew inward to his core and outward to his fingertips and maybe even beyond them to the air that moved when he moved. What a unique and useless knowledge. Yet when his mother had said, responding to the coroner's ignorance, "It doesn't really matter, does it?" Carson had jerked his head up and stared at her with blazing eyes, so that she'd paled and reached out to him, sixteen years old, and touched his forearm and said, "Oh, sweetie, I'm sorry. I didn't mean his dying doesn't matter."

But he hadn't misunderstood her. He just didn't know why what he knew mattered so much and didn't matter at all. Now here it all was again, visible in this kitchen with snow falling inside it and the horse kicking inside it and his grandfather falling inside it and the noise exploding inside it, and none of it able to be spoken.

Words: words might say,
He didn't just die on this place. He didn't die here like people die in hospital beds. He was getting on a horse, and he was smoking, and the cigarette fell, and he fell, and the horse kicked him when he was upside down. Upside down. The skin all hanging wrong. And his head came forward. Snapped forward. Like there was nothing inside it suddenly. Like life can weigh something. And it was just kicked away. And nothing was left. He didn't just die here. I know. I was there.

Words could say that. But even then.

The kitchen reasserted itself. Walls, ceiling, corners. The present firmed up its boundaries, and snow from that long-ago storm quit falling in the house, and Carson found himself looking at his mother with his mouth open and she waiting for him to finish speaking. Her face seemed to swell up out of nowhere, like an animal at night swelling up into moving headlights out of a wealth of darkness, and he didn't know where she'd come from or what she was waiting for. He dropped his eyes and saw his hand lying on the table. And seeing it there like something apart from himself, he realized that he had seen someone else within that interior snowfall, someone else woven in the mix of times and spaces: Rebecca, standing in the corral when Ves fell. Hair black and hair red within the light and shadow. Green eyes watching. Golden flecks. Emerald earrings. Riding boots. Standing against the corral fence. Watching. Not astonished. Not dismayed.