The Work of Wolves (42 page)

He could tell her.

And would have. Could and would have: how gray his grandfather's face had suddenly been, though the morning light was bleached by the falling snow, as pure as earthly light could be. But in spite of such light, that gray and dishrag face. He would have told her. In a future different from the one that had happened, he would have: how his grandfather's cheeks, suddenly flabby, swayed backwards like a delayed wave in water, then forward again, all liquid. How lying there completely stilled, he had smiled. And not.

His mother still waited. "You don't see how what?" she finally prompted him.

He expelled his breath. Saw the ridges in his knuckles, bent his hand to erase them.

"Magnus Yarborough," he said. "Christ! The way he's going, he'll buy the entire state. We'll all be working for him. And you want to sell to him?"

He stood. He couldn't talk any more. Or listen to them talk.

"I don't want another place," he said. "I'm sorry if you never wanted a ranch, Dad. But this is our place. Grampa's, too, even if you say it ain't. I just can't see sellin it. I just..."

If he couldn't say what he meant, why repeat what he'd said? He left the table, walked down the half-set of steps to the entry and out the door. The wind was blowing in the dark. As always. The wind was always blowing.

M
ARIE FIELDING WATCHED HER REFLECTION
in the kitchen window over the sink grow more and more distinct as dark thickened outside and the dishes piled up in the drain rack beside her. The sound of water in pipes filled the house. Charles was taking a shower, and Carson had gone back to the old house, and she was momentarily alone with her reflection—that sad-eyed woman, she thought, out there in the night, staring back through the window at her.

For a while her reflection put its hands into soapy water out near the old house where her son was sitting in his own silence, and when her reflection lifted a dish out of that water, it lifted it out of the earth and rinsed it in a stream that materialized in the air, and placed it down on the earth again. But the sinking sun sucked its strands of light under the curve of the earth, and gradually the old house disappeared, and the earth under it disappeared, and the sad-eyed woman continued her dish washing quietly within a slowly forming kitchen, with walls and lights and faucets—until that kitchen displaced any other world, even the darkness itself. Marie shut her eyes and washed dishes by feel alone, groping on the counter for them, listening to them clink against each other: the slick soap, the smooth contours of cups, the mild prick of forks, the detergent bubbles popping with the gentlest of sounds. With her eyes shut Marie was completely alone, not even her reflection watching her.

Water stopped running in the pipes. She kept her eyes shut until she heard Charles's steps on the living room carpet cross into the tiled kitchen. Then she opened them, and he appeared in the win
dow. She saw his eyes rest on the curve of her reflection's hips, the small of her reflection's back. She felt a twinge of despair and gratitude both, that he could still look at her that way. He hadn't combed his hair. There wasn't all that much, anymore, to comb. What there was stuck out at various angles.

Then Charles's eyes in the window met hers. He knew she'd seen where his eyes had been. Her reflection's lips turned up in a little smile, and some of the sadness in those eyes went away.

"Nice view?" she asked his reflection.

"Always is."

She thought he might step toward her then and push his body against hers and move his hand up her stomach, and she half-desired that he would and half that he wouldn't. She'd play-protest, of course. She'd leave her hands in the water and pretend to continue with the dishes, and she'd let his hands rove and watch it all happening in the window, knowing that just letting him would increase his desire, until she would have to turn to him and put her wet hands on the back of his clean, dry shirt.

But he didn't step toward her. He let the space between them remain.

"It's tough, isn't it?" she said then.

He nodded behind her. She saw it in the window.

She knew he was silent because he was thinking,
Damn tough,
but he didn't want to say that, so he let silence speak. It was one of those little two-way nonsecrets between them. She knew he swore around other people, and he knew she knew, but there was intimacy in pretending otherwise. She'd shocked Ves that long-ago time when she'd sworn at him, and sometimes she thought it would be fun to shock Charles by doing the same thing. Cussing a blue streak over some small thing that went wrong, just to watch his reaction. To laugh at it. But whenever she thought of doing it, the desire to preserve the fragile pretense overcame her. Charles didn't think she had virgin ears, but there was something close and near and sweet in his pretending that she did. In the special speech he reserved for her, marked by the absence of those words. A speech formed by what it wasn't. She remembered how just an hour earlier Charles had sworn at the supper table, then looked at her as if to say, "It's the only way I can say it, Marie. The only way I can get it across, what this means."

But what were words, any words, going to do? Words said or unsaid: What were they going to do? Even if they got it across? Even if they said it? And she didn't know whether they had.

"I'll talk to him," she said. "I'll go out when I'm done here and try."

"All right."

It was so dark outside now that she could see the color of his eyes in the window.

"You think you can get anywhere with him?"

She let him see her lift her shoulders, drop them. She didn't tell him what she was thinking. She'd thought it before but never told him. Odd—all the things they'd talked about in their life together, but this thing she wouldn't tell. She would ask Carson, maybe, tonight, finally, but she wouldn't mention it to Charles.

"Probably not," she said.

"It's tough."

She saw his eyes linger for a moment on her hips. Then he turned and went back to the living room.

Not a time for hands,
she thought to her reflection. But the expression on her reflection's face seemed to disagree.

SNOW WAS FALLING
. She hadn't seen it through the window or heard it on the roof. She knew it first when she felt it striking her face—needle-fine, hard, running down the wind. Her eyes watered, and she lifted her hand to clear the tears. She had no coat on—she was only going to the old house—and was surprised at how the snow and wind together cut right into her. She felt completely exposed, even looked down to be sure she was clothed. She halted on the steps, thinking of the jacket on a hook inside the door, then wrapped her arms around herself and bowed her head and hurried.

At her knock she heard Carson's voice. She turned the knob, entered, shut the door, found herself in a thicker darkness than that outside. A pungent darkness: How long, she wondered, before the smell of Ves's cigarettes and body would leave this place? Sometimes she felt it was more than smell—that Ves still hung around, just around corners, unable or unwilling to leave. She'd once seen a television show about haunted places. She'd let it spook her and the next day had asked Carson if he ever felt anything strange in the old house.

"Like what?"

"I don't know—a feeling of someone there."

"You saw that show, too, huh?"

"You saw it?"

"Yeah. I know what you mean. I think it, too, sometimes. But he's gone. Took off for good. Least as far as I can tell."

"I suppose." But then she thought,
How would you know? How would you be able to tell yourself from
Ves? Carson was so like him in some ways, it would be like turning around fast enough to see his own nose.

"Carson?" she called.

"Inhere."

His voice came from the kitchen.

"Can I turn on a light?"

"Sure."

She fumbled along the wall, found a switch. The overhead light, a bulb missing from the fixture, wanly showed the familiar rooms she'd lived in when she and Charles were first married, before Lucy had come over one day and proposed that Marie and Charles move with the baby into the new house and Lucy and Ves return to the old.

"Oh, no," Marie had protested. "Ves had that house built for you."

"There's three of you now. You need the room."

"There's enough room here, Lucy. I'm not going to take your house."

"I'm not asking, Marie."

Marie was startled. She stared at her mother-in-law. Lucy, embarrassed at her own forcefulness, giggled like a girl, then grew serious again.

"Ves doesn't like the new house," she said. "He says he's afraid to put his feet on the furniture. And you and Charles would be happier in the new house. You know you would."

"But what do you want?"

Lucy reached out and covered Marie's hand with her own. Marie was young then, a young mother, and Lucy wasn't that old, but Marie remembered her hand as having that silky, dry feeling of very old hands. Warm at the palm, cool in the fingers.

"Oh," she said, "the less grumpy Ves is, the happier I'll be. And you know what? There are fewer rooms here. Less to get messed up. I'll be happy being a grandma, no matter where."

So Marie had agreed. For a long time she thought she wanted to be like her mother-in-law some day: an old woman content, satisfied with her life. After Lucy died, however, Marie had come to wonder about that conversation, whether it had expressed contentment or resignation, a lack of want or a subordination of her wants to other people's until she'd lost her wants altogether. Had even forgotten she'd ever had them. But depending on how you looked at it, maybe that was all right, too. Maybe that was how life worked, how aging worked—you learned to mold your desires into the desires of people you cared about, until caring about them defined what you wanted. But Marie didn't know. It seemed a fine line between losing yourself completely and finding yourself completed in other people. Especially if memory grew chancy and you forgot what it was you'd once hoped for. Lucy had never seemed the least bit unhappy about moving back into the old house, but Marie wished she'd known her mother-in-law better, enough to discern the roots of her calm.

Carson was sitting at the same kitchen table where Lucy and Marie had sat that day, in one of those same ladder-back chairs. His feet were up on the corner of the table when Marie came into the kitchen. Like his grandfather. The pale rectangle of light from the living room lay on the kitchen floor. It reflected upward, a strange light casting reverse shadows, so that her son's face seemed unfamiliar, darkly foreign.

"Hi, Carson," she said.

He lifted his feet off the edge of the table, stood, pulled out another chair, offered it. He waited for her to sit down, then sat down again himself.

"You OK?" she asked.

"No, I'm not."

There was no accusation in his voice. He simply wouldn't pretend, for either of them, that nothing had happened. Yet his honesty and directness put him into his own and isolate world—not far from her, in fact very near, but somehow invulnerable. She almost wished he'd lie. Wished he'd be angry, sullen, hurt, withdrawn. Then there would be something for her to crack, to break through, and if she did, they'd truly touch. She remembered fleetingly the day Ves died. Then, too, Carson had looked at loss and named it, done nothing to hide it from himself or her. And then, too, she'd felt this awe. This love. And this distance: What could she possibly do for him?

They sat in silence for a while, sideways to the table.

"Do you always sit in the dark?" she asked.

"I was sittin when the dark came. Too lazy to get up and turn on a light."

"That's pretty lazy."

"It is."

"We haven't made a decision about this, Carson. We're just talking."

"I ain't so sure."

There again, that hard, difficult clarity. His refusal to see what wasn't there or to accept proffered hope. He sat there across the table, in those strange, upcast shadows.

"What went on over there, Carson? When you trained those horses? What happened?"

He didn't move. She had thought she might startle him, but he seemed unsurprised at the question, though he didn't answer right away. Finally he said, "I shoulda stuck to horses."

"Did you get involved?"

"Was it that obvious?"

"Not obvious. But there were signs."

"Signs. Yeah, I guess I got involved."

"I wondered."

"Don't think the worst, Ma."

"I heard she left."

"Not because a me. She left because a him."

"What happened?"

"I taught her to ride. You can't do that without talkin."

"Do you love her?"

"That ain't the point."

"It's not the point?"

For a moment she thought he was being evasive. It was so uncharacteristic she was startled, but also minutely and privately glad: a break in his self-containment and unflinching assessment of how things were. But when he continued, she saw that he understood what he said, and meant it.

"Point is, Yarborough thought there was somethin goin on."

"Why'dhethinkit?"

"He was inclined to."

"But do you love her?"

"It still ain't the point."

"I'm not asking because it's the point."

"I feel like I'm inside a spinning drum, Ma. That's just one more thing I can't quite catch and hold."

"She's married, Carson."

"I know. I ain't tellin you I feel good about any a this."

"And now this ranch thing, huh? It doesn't make things better."

"Christ!"

"Two and a half times, Carson. It's not something we can just ignore."

"I could. Would."

"Yes. You would. But your father and me."

"We're a lot different, ain't we? Me an him?"

"A lot."

"I never quite figured that out till tonight."

She felt caught between husband and son. Caught between their differences. Between their dreams and faults. And what were her own dreams? she wondered. Maybe she was like Lucy after all. Maybe she'd let the men she loved do the dreaming. And now found herself caught between their dreams, with no dreams of her own to counterbalance theirs and clarify them. Charles had stayed on the ranch while dreaming of leaving it, and because he had, he'd allowed Carson to build a dream of staying. And now, suddenly, it was too possible to leave. And here she was. What did she want? Nothing, it seemed, but for them to each have what they wanted. Then where had she gone, herself? Or was that the wrong question—to try to think of yourself as apart from anyone else, your dreams as separate?