Cool Water (3 page)

Until he stops suddenly. Stamps with his front feet, whinnies softly. He takes a few tentative steps and breaks into a trot, head and tail high, into a lope, floating in the moonlight. When another fence line blocks his way, he turns south until the fence ends and he can once again move west through a field of dry stubble, in the direction of Juliet.

When the horse reaches the edge of town, he turns north and jogs along the soft shoulder of the grid road. Ahead he sees the outline of a parked vehicle, and the movement of a man in the ditch. The horse slows, walks cautiously forward, keeping his eye on the dark shapes. As he comes parallel with the man, he turns his head toward him, snorting, both ears pricked forward. He swings his hip outward, still tracking north, almost past, when the man makes a drunken lunge for the dangling lead rope. The horse spins away and breaks into a gallop up the road while the man (who had stopped to piss on his way home from the bar in the Juliet Hotel) stumbles into a badger hole and, cursing loudly, rolls down into the ditch again.

The horse hears the shout behind him and his senses tell him to run, go faster, flee, until he's well away from danger. Then he slows once more. Stops. In the ditch beside him, thin grass that no one has bothered to cut and bale. Clumps of clover. The horse forgets about the danger behind him and steps down into the ditch to graze. A dog barks in a nearby farmyard but the horse ignores this sound, rips the clover with his teeth.

The barking dog belongs to Lee Torgeson, a black-and-white mutt he calls Cracker. He was a stray when Lee took him in, a dog dropped off in the country by city owners who didn't want him any more. When he first wandered into the yard he had no manners and expected to be invited into the house, but he turned out to be a good farm dog. Now Lee appreciates the job Cracker does standing guard against intruders.

The dog barks once again before giving up on whatever is out there. Lee listens from his bedroom in the two-storey farmhouse, still not used to the fact of the house being his, not used to the idea of Lester and Astrid being gone like their ancestors before them. Their deaths were not unexpected; they had both been well up in years when they passed on. But their deaths within four years of each other had left Lee alone sooner than expected, and responsible for eleven quarter-sections of mixed farm land: the original homestead, and the others that were acquired over the years, one quarter at a time, the way a wise investor slowly and steadily builds a portfolio.

At the age of twenty-six, Lee knows he is capable, in theory at least, of managing the land he's inherited. The knowledge of his legacy is one he grew up with, and Lester prepared him well. But as darkness falls each night and bedtime looms, uneasiness settles over him, grows stronger as he climbs the stairs to the second storey where the bedrooms are. Astrid and Lester's room across the hall from his, their clothing removed from the dresser drawers with the help of neighbour women but their possessions still ordered with care on the closet shelves. The photographs still on the walls. The bed neatly made as though Astrid herself had tucked the sheets. Their bedroom reminds him more than any other part of the house that he's alone.

He wonders if he will always be alone here. He can't imagine the person who might share his bed and help fill the rooms. He has no prospects, at least not at the moment, and the girls his age from Juliet are already married or long gone. His high school girlfriend went off to university without him, not happy that he turned down a scholarship to stay home and farm. Lee had argued that Lester was old and couldn't do it on his own, but she didn't want to be a farmer's wife. They'd drifted apart, and he hasn't had a serious girlfriend since.

Without Lester snoring in the room across the hall and Astrid puttering, always the last one to bed, the house is unnaturally quiet. So quiet that some nights Lee can hear sounds he knows aren't real, like the mysterious pounding of horses' hooves far off in the distance. Whenever he hears this sound he thinks of Rip and Tom, who were always called Young Rip and Old Tom, even though there weren't many years between them. Somewhere among all the family photographs, there's a picture of Lee as a baby, perhaps a year old, sitting on Old Tom's wide back with a grin on his face. There's an arm in the photograph, the hand not quite touching Lee, ready to grab him if he loses his balance or if Old Tom decides to walk off. The arm belongs to Lester. It's covered with a cotton sleeve— Lester never bared his arms, even on the hottest summer days, of which this is probably one because Lee is wearing only a light overall and a peaked cap. He's leaning forward with his hands buried in Old Tom's ample mane, and Lee swears he can remember the moment—the heat of the day, the warmth of Tom's back, the sureness he felt that the horse would look after him and that a quick response from Lester would not be needed to keep him from falling that long way to the ground. Of course, he can't really remember this. The memory is constructed from what he later came to know—that Old Tom
was
a kind horse (whatever falls Lee took from his back were in spite of Tom's best efforts to keep him there) and that Lester's strong arm was a constant, and never far away should it be needed.

Astrid was, as always, behind the camera. When Lee looks at the photo he imagines that he sat like that on Tom's back for a long time, but whenever Astrid came across the picture she shook her head and said that she'd snapped it as quickly as she could and then lifted Lee down, even though Lester wanted her to take another in case the first didn't turn out. She said this as though she were apologizing for co-operating with Lester in putting the baby in harm's way. Still, the photograph is clear—no shaky finger on the trigger—but then Astrid did everything with sureness or she didn't do it at all. The old-timers used to tell Lee that Lester had found a wife just like his mother, Sigurd, who was as formidable as she was kind-hearted. They used to tease Lee that, although he might
think
he was the apple of Astrid's eye, he'd better do exactly what she said because if he ever crossed her, boy oh boy, watch out. Lee remembers (again, impossible) the feel of Astrid's hands as she lifted him down and then held him so he could run his own baby hands over the patient Tom's face.

Old Tom was a good honest horse, Lee thinks. He had learned to ride on Tom—bareback, since no saddle Lester owned would fit—and Tom taught him balance and kept him safe until he had the skills to handle Rip, who was more playful and liked to jump sideways and out from under an inexperienced rider. Rip was cagey and hard to catch, too—you had to halter Tom and pretend you didn't care if Rip came along, and then he'd follow, believing that it was his own idea. The two of them were descended from generations of working horses that pulled plows and hay wagons and stoneboats. They were not graceful, and not in possession of any special equine beauty or athleticism, but when something unusual was in the air—an uneasy wind, perhaps—they'd race around the pasture guided by an instinctive fear, galloping side by side with Old Tom ahead by a nose, running straight for a fence and then stopping just in time, spinning and starting up again, their hoof beats carrying into the growing darkness. Although normally calm and content with their state of domestication, the two old horses on such evenings ran with the wildness of mustangs, and after they died, Young Rip first at the age of twenty-four and Old Tom not long after, Lee missed the sound of their hooves at dusk transforming the Torgesons' ordinary farm into a strange and primal place.

There are no longer horses in the pasture. Now, when Lee hears the sound of hoof beats he knows he is hearing spirit horses. He knows also that the spirit voices of Astrid and Lester will follow. Astrid will say,
When company comes,
Lee, use the silver tea service.
He's always tempted to ask why, just so he can prod Astrid into telling the story of his arrival once again, but he knows there is no conversation in these voices. When Lester says,
Get yourself a good map,
Lee recognizes this too from the story, but there's definitely no point asking Lester for an explanation. When he was alive he was a man of few words and not even Astrid knew why he attributed such importance to a map when he hardly ever went anywhere, except to town, and he could have driven that distance blindfolded. Lester's advice hangs there unexplained, just as it was in the story.

Lee can't help but wish he still had Lester's wise counsel, not about maps but on the more important matter of running a farm business. As Lee lies awake at night, he feels like the two old horses did when the wind was coming from the wrong direction: uneasy, fearful. But what is he afraid of? Disappointing Lester and Astrid? They're not here to notice. Still, worry keeps him awake, listening to the sound of phantom hooves and cryptic bits of advice about tea services and navigation. His head is a reverberating drum.

He rolls onto his stomach, and closes his eyes and tries to change his heart's rhythm to match the hoof beats. Some nights, this works to put him to sleep, but tonight it doesn't. He is too aware of the blood pumping through his veins. Even without the sheet covering him, he's too hot. Perhaps he has a fever. He flops onto his back again and puts his hand on his forehead the way Astrid used to. Nothing unusual. For some reason, he remembers a song he sang at the Co-op camp he went to one summer, at Astrid's insistence:
fire's
burning, fire's burning, draw nearer, draw nearer.
He can remember only those words, and they begin to circle in an endless loop in his head, making sleep even more impossible although it's now well after midnight.

He gets out of bed and stands at the wide-open window, trying to catch a bit of breeze. He can hear mosquitoes humming on the other side of the screen. The air is close, almost humid, although this country hasn't seen rain in months. There's a full moon and in its light Lee surveys the yard—the dark shapes of bins and machinery, the Quonset and the shop, and the barn, built when Lee was thirteen, after the old one burned down in a spectacular fire. Who says horses won't leave a burning barn? Old Tom and Young Rip were saved thanks to Lester's quick response to the dog's barking, and the two horses had bolted for the door as soon as they were loosed from their tie stalls. Shortly after that the whole barn went up, and a cow and her new calf, the first one of the season, brought inside away from the heavy spring snow, were lost, along with a litter of kittens. (Lee hadn't known where the kittens were hidden, but he knew they were gone because of the frantic mewing of the mother cat for days after.) It took less than an hour for the fire to level the barn, but it was almost morning before Lester was sure the fire wasn't going to spread to other buildings or ignite one of the nearby stacks. The yard was full of neighbours who had spent the night throwing water on the roofs of outbuildings, slapping at spot fires with blankets and wet gunny sacks.

After the neighbours left, Lester had turned his attention to Lee. How, he wanted to know, had the fire started? He looked at Lee as if he should have the answer, as though he must somehow have been the cause because he was the only one there of an age to be irresponsible enough to start a fire, even though it was Lester who had earlier rigged up a heat lamp for the shivering newborn calf. Lee could not think how he had started the fire and he said so, and then went into the pasture to search for the two panicked old horses. He found them pacing along the fence line in the snow, but he couldn't get near them, so he left them there to calm themselves down.

When Lee got back to the yard, Lester asked him again how the fire started. Again, Lee said he didn't know, and then he said, because he was wet and cold and upset about the cow and the new calf, “If you don't want me here, say so. I know I'm just some relative you got stuck with.” He'd never said, or even thought, anything remotely like that before. He'd never imagined himself saying words out loud that sounded so ungrateful, and he gave them, as did Lester, much more weight than they deserved.

They turned away from each other after Lee's childish reply to Lester's childish accusation. They went to the house and sat at the table with Astrid and drank tea and ate toast, and then they all went back to bed for a few hours. Lester said nothing to Astrid (who could have provided relief with her common sense) for fear of worrying her, and Lee lay awake wondering why he'd said what he had, convincing himself that there was something wrong with him, that he was not deserving, and worrying that maybe he'd inherited a mean streak from someone in a line of unknown relatives, instead of seeing that his little outburst was exactly like Lester's.

In the weeks that followed, Lee and Lester rebuilt the barn. They took great pains with each other. Lester was on his best behaviour and said not one harsh word throughout the entire construction, even when the trusses fell like dominoes before they could get them anchored in place, and they had to untangle the mess and start again. And Lee worked like he'd never worked before to be Lester's hand, and he held his thirteen-year-old tongue even when he wanted to complain, even as he wondered why Lester couldn't just hire contractors like everyone else. The barn became known as the new barn, despite there being no other to distinguish it from.

As Lee stands in the bedroom window looking down on his holdings, the new barn among them, he hears a coyote yip and another answer from somewhere close by. Cracker joins in, not very successfully.

The hoof beats have stopped but Lee is still wide awake and now there's no point even trying to sleep. His jeans are lying on the floor where he left them the night before. In the dark, he grabs them and pulls them on, then reaches for a work shirt from the pile of clean clothes he has stacked on a wooden chair. The shirt is wrinkled; he doesn't need a light to know that. When Astrid was alive, he never wore a wrinkled shirt, even a work shirt, but ironing is something Lee can't generate much enthusiasm for, although he would make an effort on a special occasion, if one arose. In the bathroom, he studies his face in the mirror. Astrid was right when she said he had a baby face. On the rare occasion that he goes into a strange bar and orders a beer, he still half expects to be asked for proof of his age. He's reminded that Lester's father was only nineteen years old and knew barely a word of English when he came to Saskatchewan from Norway and staked his claim to the homestead.