Gibbon's Decline and Fall (5 page)

I
N THE BARN WHERE
C
AROLYN
Crespin Shepherd knelt, the muted grays of hay and sheep blended indistinguishably in shadow. Outside, the field and woods glistened in a day's-dessert of sunset, a sky like a split melon that oozed bright juice over every greening twig and unfolding leaf. Out there was a fete, a carnival, puddles from the departing thunderstorm throwing sun around like confetti, but here were more serious matters, a murmuring woolliness beneath the cob-webbed beams, the tidal smells of birthing.

Light and shadow. Brilliance and dark. Chiaroscuro.

The word popped out of nothing, a printed word, not an oral one, not one Carolyn could remember using. Still, there it was, stored away in her mental attic along with all the other pack-rat bits and pieces of mind-furniture: old affections, old fears, old games. Hide-and-seek in the summer dusk, shrubberies making monster-shadows amid polygons of lamplight from windows, clarity and mystery, reality and possibility,
Ready or not, here I come!
Well, now that the word had been dragged out, use could be made of it.

“Chiaroscuro,” she said to the watchful young ewe who stood pressed against the rough boards of the pen. “A good name for a black-and-white lamb, Mama. First lamb of the new century and first lamb for you. We'll call her Chiaro, for short.”

The ewe's amber eyes remained fixed, the oblong pupils glaring. She raised one forefoot and stamped, thrusting her body as far from Carolyn as the pen would permit. Pressed between her mother and the timbers, the lamb protested weakly. The ewe only pressed the harder as it stamped again.

Carolyn drew a deep breath, caught suddenly between laughter and tears. The ewe was threatening her, warning her away. Sixty pounds or so of fangless, hornless sheep, incapable of any real defense, and still she stamped, still she protected, still those yellow eyes glared a primordial defiance. Behind her the lamb complained once more, a fretful baa while the mother stamped: Live or die, this lamb is mine!

It was so uncomplicated for sheep! “All right, Mama,” Carolyn murmured. “That's all right. I'll look at your baby tomorrow.”

The lamb had been licked dry, it had nursed, it had crouched to pee as female sheep and goats did and as rams and bucks did not. So much sufficed to tell Carolyn that all parts were female and functioning. No need to take this one up to the nursery box in the kitchen; no need for bottle feeding. Except for the shawl of white around the bony little shoulders, it was inky black. Chiaroscuro. A fancy name for a wee ewe-sheep.

Clutching at the top rail of the pen, Carolyn rose, pulling herself slowly upright, waiting for bones and muscles to accept the change of position. Not as easy to get up as it had once been, not as easy to get down. Things changed. Bodies changed. People changed. Thank God for sheep, who seemed always the same. Hal had taught her to love the timelessness of them, and lately she had lost the count of years in the slow movement of sheep grazing; in the incurious but watchful gaze of yellow eyes; in this annual ritual of birth, she and Hal making a fuss over the first lamb while the ewes stared and munched, muttering among themselves, “Lambs. Lambs. Me, too.” They'd all have babies by the end of April, mostly twins: lambs to skip and race the pasture boundaries, black and gray, brown and white, playing lamb games. One could discover centuries in lamb games, so Hal said. One could discover aeons in the foolhardy and joyous, in life abundant and wasteful, running for the sake of life itself, no matter what fanged demons lurked beyond the fences.

There would be foolhardy life itself until there was no more grass, no more room for games. A year ago there had
been scant room. This year there was none. All these lambs would have to go—to someone else, or to the slaughterer. There was no more pasture here.

She left the pen laggingly, conscious of pain in her right arm where she'd bruised it over the weekend shifting hay. At their ages neither she nor Hal should be shifting hay! Hal kept urging her to hire someone to live on the place, but she couldn't bring herself to do it. When Carlos's family had got too big for the little house and moved away, the resultant tranquillity had been wonderful. She had heard birds she'd never heard before, seen little animals she hadn't known lived there. Having anyone else around night and day seemed an intrusion on the quiet she treasured. Carlos came five days a week. That was enough.

She shut the gate firmly, double-checking the latch, assuring the protection of wood and wire between the vulnerable ewes and the wild dogs that roamed the river bottom, onetime partners in the primordial covenant, betrayed and abandoned to their own history, now become creatures contemptuous of man and all his works.

Hal had been brought up on a farm; he believed in the covenants. The wild covenant that destroys no habitat and hunts only to live, as the wolf or the puma hunts. The farmer covenant among mankind and those he houses and feeds. Out of millennial history, each owed to each, though the animals kept their accounts better than man did. Milk and meat and wool on the animal side, food and care and a life kinder than that of the wild on man's side. In return for a place by the fire and the leavings of the table, stalking cats owed surveillance of the granary, and horn-throated hounds paid their way with keen ears and keener noses, assuring that no traveler, of whatever intent, should approach unheralded.

As now, from up the hill, a sudden ruckus of dogs!

She could distinguish Fancy's yap, Fandango's bay, Hector's deep roar; an annunciation, fervid but without rancor; a canine alarm signifying someone they knew. Thank heaven it was friend or relation, for she was sick to death of the strangers who'd been haunting the doorstep lately: millenarians, trumpeters of Armageddon, Bible-thumpers by the pairs and half dozens, all determined to share their message.

Presumably tonight's visitor knew enough about the place either to wait for her or to come looking. She moved toward the barn door, stopping momentarily to fill her pocket with
rolled grain. When she went out, a dark shape materialized against the fence across the lane. She fished in the grain pocket, held the rolled oats between the wires, felt them snuffled up by soft lips that went on nibbling after the oats were gone. Hermes. A wether. Orphaned at birth, hand reared, kept as a pet, both for his lovely fleece and for his peoplish habits.

She leaned over the fence and scratched his head between the horns, murmuring in her secret voice, sheep sheep—sheep sheep, peering across the shadowy form at the crouched blots near the watering tank. The rams: one pitchy black; one not so pitchy, the dark-coppery moorit; one light, the white one; and two intermediate shades that daylight would reveal as gray and a dark-faced tan. Five. All.

A voice from the top of the hill: “Mom? Are you down there?”

“Coming,” she called, brushing her hands together and turning her back on the sheep.…

 … the sheep, which became amorphous, like a cloud, like a rising pillar of mist, fading, tenuous, expiring on the air with a whisper of sound, like an echo of a door closing in some far-off place. Carolyn, unseeing, stopped suddenly, rubbing her brow fretfully, as though at some elusive but shocking thought, then shook her head and trudged up the hill toward her daughter.

Stace came toward her, huge glasses making an owl face in the last of the dusk, threw her arms around Carolyn, and squeezed. Carolyn carefully extricated herself, getting the sore arm out of reach.

“Lord, Mother, you look like a witch. Or a Norn, or something.”

“I just washed my hair,” Carolyn confessed, running a hand down the flowing gray tresses. “I didn't want to braid it while it was wet.”

“And you were drying it in the barn?”

“There's a lamb.…” Her voice trailed off as she turned, peering back down the hill. Something. One of those elusive ideas that disappears before one can grasp it. A minnow thought, glinting, then gone.

“Now your hair smells like sheep,” Stace said firmly, bringing Carolyn's attention back to the moment.

“It doesn't, really. It's my jeans.” She looked ruefully at the sodden knees. “Let's go in. I'll change.”

They went through the side door into the mudroom, where Carolyn shuffled off her sandals before leading the way past the kitchen and pantry into the small one-time maid's room she'd been using for a bedroom since Hal had attempted to scale the woodpile and broken his leg in the process. During the lengthy, complicated healing process he had slept restlessly, getting up and down several times in the night, tiptoeing ponderously, tripping over his feet or the crutches because he didn't want to waken her with the lights. She'd moved herself into the little room so he could get up and down all he liked without worrying about waking her. He had been sleeping better as a result, the healing was progressing, and she was looking forward to their reunion. The temporary room was merely utilitarian, though the bookshelves held a few of her favorite photographs: Stace as a baby, toddler, child, adolescent; Hal and his boys, her stepsons, at various times in their lives; her friends in the Decline and Fall Club, when they were young and when they weren't so young.

“Where's Dad?” Stace asked, seating herself in the wicker rocker.

Carolyn answered from the bathroom door. “Your uncle Tim picked him up and took him down to Albuquerque. He'll spend a night with his brother and have X rays in the morning. He'll be back tomorrow afternoon.”

“How's his leg doing?”

“For a man of his age, as well as can be expected. Actually, he is better. He's almost quit being grouchy.”

“Dad? I didn't know he was ever grouchy.”

Carolyn went into the bathroom and shut the door. Hal's grouchiness was unusual. Carolyn could remember his being so only twice in almost forty years. The first time had been her senior year in college, Christmas of sixty-two, when he'd called her, told her he had to tell her something important, and she'd agreed to meet him for supper.

The first thing he told her was that his wife had died. She still squirmed with discomfort when she remembered how hard it had been not to seem pleased at that news. She'd bitten her tongue in the effort. “I'm sorry,” she'd said at last, evoking a sympathetic image of Hal's wife, making herself mean it. She was sorry. She had liked Hal's wife. Envied, but liked.

It was he who had smiled, rather ruefully. “I loved her dearly, Carolyn. She wasn't sick, she wasn't weak, she had an
aneurysm no one knew about, it burst and she died. Just like that. And I got angry and yelled, and grieved, and did all the things people do, and when I got over it and started thinking about female company again, I remembered you.…”

“How did you know where to find me?”

“Well, I asked Albert.”

And that was when he'd become definitely grouchy, when he'd taken her hand firmly in his own, leaned across the table, and told her what vicious, unforgivable thing Albert had done. Yes, Hal had been grouchy, but no more so than Carolyn.

“Is he a total fool?” she had half screamed, making other diners look up and stare.

“Yes,” Hal had said softly, making a shushing gesture. “And I'm so glad you decided not to marry Albert.”

He could have been no gladder than she! She stripped off the dirty jeans and draped them across the laundry hamper, washed off the worst of the barn dirt, and wrapped herself in a soft, shabby old robe before returning to the bedroom to sit before the mirror. The robe was brown hopsacking, and her hair streamed across it in a gray mane, affirming Stace's opinion. She did look like a witch.

She reached for her comb. “What brought you out this way?”

Stace answered with an untypical silence, a diffident glance at her own reflection, as though to see whether her face was clean. Stace had inherited Hal's good looks and was always handsome so far as Carolyn was concerned, even when she was nose wriggling, lip twisting, eye slitting, as she was now. Stace flushed at Carolyn's scrutiny and turned away, running her fingers through her short bright hair, making it stand untidily on end.

“What?” Carolyn demanded, suddenly apprehensive.

Stace shuddered, drew in a breath, was suddenly awash with tears.

“Honey! Stace, love, what is it?”

“I think maybe Luce … maybe he's got somebody else, Mom.”

“No! Not Luciano! I don't believe it!”

It wasn't believable. If ever a man was set upon fidelity, it was Luciano Gabaldon—whether fidelity to his science, to his family, or to Stace. He was an honorable man, and if ever a man was in love with anyone, it was Luce with Stace. “I don't believe it,” Carolyn repeated.

“Mom, he's gotten so funny! We used to … used to work up a storm every so often, and he hasn't even made a move in weeks! Not weeks! And he won't talk about it. I hint about it, he just changes the subject. Honest to God, some days I just want to give up.”

Carolyn couldn't stop her smile or the chuckle that came with it. “Oh, for heaven's sake, Stace, even though all the romance novels would like you to believe that men exist in a state of constant tumescence, you know that's not true. Maybe he's having a setback with his project at Los Alamos. Men are just as distractible as females are, and God knows we're distractible.”

Stace sniffled, mopping at her face with the back of one hand. “Luce talks about the new containment project constantly. He goes around whistling. It's all he can think about! He's predicting unlimited energy from fusion within ten years!”

Carolyn remarked dryly, “That's what they said about fission! I hope he'll be satisfied with less, and in my humble opinion you've just answered your own question. He's preoccupied. Think of him as an artist, obsessed by a vision. He won't let up until he makes it real. Sex will just have to take a backseat! It does, sometimes. Don't worry about it.”