Evan then stopped, and turned, and gauging Joe’s reaction, considered his next words.
“Joe, I don’t expect you to understand the magnitude of what we’ve accomplished, much less accept it, but whatever you’re here to say, there’s nothing I can tell you that you don’t already know.”
He lit a cigarette. Grandly wafted away its smoke.
“I would have liked to do it. . .to have done it. . .differently. . .transparently if I could have, but the constantly changing variables, it was all too complex. I know an opportunity when I see one, and I wasn’t about to jeopardize it by having to accede to too many people with such irrational attachment to that fucked up land. Fair enough?”
“Yeah, fair enough, I guess.”
Joe looked at Harlo. Harlo looked down at his feet, balancing on one of the track rails.
Evan exhaled. “The Meeks tribe. . .it’s like there’s genetic encoding in our roots to twine them into and around that rock-burdened waste land and, no matter what, make do with it above all else. Worthless as it may be. Fortunately there’s one of us enough in the real world who can see more tangibly. I know I sound arrogant, but so what. It’s obvious I know how. . .and why. . .to do the right thing here. And I did. How I did it, how it all came together, despite so many ways it almost didn’t. . . at this point? It’s irrelevant, it seems to me.”
Joe nodding but not meeting Evan’s gray eyes. “Yeah I s’pose then we should thank you. For deciding what’s right for us.”
“I wish you meant that, Joe. You should. And once I make the final disbursements, you will. Eventually.”
“I already do. Considerin how we’re all so irrational, it was the least you could do, right? Sell it right out from under us.” Joe wiped a drop of sunbaked sweat from his brow. “Who’d know better what was best for that place other than someone who it never meant anything to?”
“It’s been a long time, if ever, that it had any reason to mean anything to any of us. It’s dirt. Whether HRC builds a dam over it or InterPacific makes a cattle factory on it, it isn’t ours anymore, and in some ways, I believe it never really was. What’s ours—yours, mine, Harlo’s—is our future. So yeah, go right ahead and knock yourself out moralizing and rethinking every goddamn little thing; I get that it’s what you are compelled to do, but ask yourself, has it ever made things better? Ever?”
“Don’t see why I’d bother, Evan. You don’t deserve it. You got your hands full enough as it is, playin Santa Claus.”
Sunlight flared in Evan’s sunglasses. “As though that’s not why you’re here? To take your best shot at undoing anything good I’ve done? I’d be surprised if not. How could you ever resist such a golden opportunity to make a stinking mess of everything?”
Joe put his hands in his pockets.
“Yeah. Well. It seems pretty much done.”
“Yeah it is, it’s what we call a done deal. And InterPacific owns it all now, at least they will come this weekend, at the closing. So anything from here on out is just wasting time. For me, the only to-do left is write the rather healthy check I’ll be handing you. Feel free to include Harlo, or not, and Wade of course, or blow it however you want.”
Evan looked at Harlo. Harlo shrugged.
“If you’re interested; InterPacific will be here Fourth of July sponsoring a big closing celebration as part of the rodeo weekend. Drop by. Harass them all you want. But I’m out of here.”
Evan left, heading back to the Loomis’s. Joe stared down the other direction, down vanishing length of rust worn tracks. Harlo sat down on the sun-hot steel track.
He chuckled.
“What’s so funny?”
“Na, I was just imaginin, like one of them Sunday cartoons way back when, where the old timer’s got his ear pressed to the track, facing up to his horse, sayin he hears somethin comin, and right there behind him is the locomotive right about to run him over.”
Joe sat down next to him.
“It does actually kinda feel like there’s a long off tremor in the rail. Of somethin comin. Like how it would’ve felt back when them old ore trains were coming down one after another from up at the mines.”
“Uh huh, only today, it’s just the one, full of all the riches Evan has got comin for us.”
And they both laughed.
MORNING. JOE NOT up yet. Wade at the table with Frances.
She jerked suddenly.
“Another one?” Wade asked.
Another one, another pain, out of nowhere, this one shooting from her hip down her right leg. But she didn’t acknowledge it. She pushed back her chair, straightened her leg out, rubbed her thigh.
“I hate the numbness far more than the sharp pains.”
Every day, losing more and more feeling, in more and more places. Sometimes, impossible to walk. Or even think. Like now, all of a sudden she realized she couldn’t recall why this young man was at her table, eating her food, asking her was she okay. She couldn’t remember his name or if she even knew him.
Wade turned. Then she heard it too, driveway gravel crunching under tires, somebody coming to visit. She was about to go to the window to see who, just as Joe came in from the bathroom, and just as suddenly as she forgot, she remembered things again.
She tamped her cane, irritated, hating these lapses.
“What the hell does Harlo want now?”
Joe walked to the window. “It’s Evan’s pickup, but no sign of him.”
“It’s probly Harlo. Evan don’t have no need to bring him beggin like Harlo does.”
Sure enough, the pickup door swung open and Harlo got out, and, like he’d never seen the place before, like he was in no hurry to come inside, he looked around, then circled the pickup, around and back, his limp worse, his whole body moving more like an assemblage of spare parts than a healthy man.
“He’s got a new hop to him, I see,” Frances said, joining Joe at the window.
Joe nodded. They watched Harlo step into the shade of the weeping willow, and its filtering leaves speckled him in morning sunlight, so that he looked to Joe like an apparition of. . .a man with no hope. The wall clock tolled eight. Frances prodded Joe with her cane.
“Better go see what’s up his sleeve.”
Joe sighed. He didn’t want to talk to Harlo. He looked at Wade. He was eating, of course; Frances had brought him another plate of pancakes. And, as if for the first time, in contrast to this motherly gesture, he thought of how little motherliness she had ever been able to allow inside her.
And he went out.
Harlo had left; Joe saw his path of trampled nettles leading to the tool shed, where Joe found him, inside, picking old dead wool from a currycomb with all its fine pointed teeth broken. The shed’s dark air reeked of dingy mortar and timber rot, its dirt floor like an archeological dig, all strewn with half-buried junk, rust caked screws, dull axe heads, broken mower blades, hay hooks, pitch forks, a crosscut saw. . .and mesmerized, they each stood a long time, just looking, examining it all.
“Kinda like we’re two ol grandmas in some bargain basement store lookin for good deals.”
“Yeah. All helpless without Evan here with all his acumen.”
Harlo tried to straddle a worn leather saddle set on a makeshift buck, but couldn’t lift his leg.
“Goddamn trick knee actin up again, ever since that truck wreck.”
He instead hoisted himself onto a castoff cast iron stove.
“There, that’s more like it. Back on the hot seat now.”
Joe nodded. He stepped out the back door and looked out onto what was really a graveyard, a final resting place for farm equipment junk—flatbed wagons, horse-drawn plows, a spoked hayrake, a baler, a depression era motorized tractor unused for so long its spiked steel wheels were sunk halfway into the earth.
All of it, all thick with the sienna red dust of oxidized iron.
Harlow standing next to him now.
“Though, you know, there could be life in this old place yet, Joe. Maybe get so
me of this equipment back workin.”
He walked to the baler, kicked at one of its flat tires, which shattered the old rubber and sent black flecks of it flying. He picked at the engine mounts, digging the gunk of hay dust and oil from the housing. He fashioned a loop of twine around the flywheel, pulled it taut.
Something about it, his manner, his rangy body, his loopy thinking, something about Harlo now beginning to agitate Joe.
“You lost that truckin job with Tyler?”
“Yeah I did.”
“So what’re you thinking you’ll do now?”
“Guess get another job.”
They nodded, nodding that they both knew that would never happen.
“Goddamn, how many bales of hay we threw usin this old piece a shit. It was old even then. Remember me teachin you to run it?”
“Yeah, so you wouldn’t have to.”
“Lotta good that did me. Probly one reason alone you run off when you did. Goddamn, I should of run off right along with you. Maybe made somethin of myself. But I been thinkin, I might still yet, make somethin of myself. A guy can always pick up where he left off, can’t he? All’s it might take is the right break.”
“Meanin?”
“Meanin nothin; just how it’s funny. . .” Under the baler’s chute, a large anthill, which Harlo toed at, watching the inhabitants start rebuilding it even as he ruined it. “Funny how things twist around over time. Take how you run off, never to come back then years later you do an find yourself ownin the goddamn place.”
“Owning it but not a thing you can do with it, an all when you didn’t ever want it to begin with. Except sell it for whatever it’ll get.”
Harlo braced his legs against the baler chassis, pulled at his cord, testing it. Then for the first time he looked at Joe face to face.
“Joe? I know you’ll be more’n generous with me, once things get settled. . .but I gotta say, an maybe it’s just convict’s sense, but just listenin to Evan, I get the idea he ain’t got the shells in his clip he thinks he does. I been in court enough over the years, I suspect you an me, we could start up some kind of injunction or desist order. I may not know any particulars, but I do believe there’s other ways.”
“Why would I ever even want that?”
“Well, yeah, I’m with you on that, but on the other hand, you can’t tell me a person, the right person, couldn’t still suck out a livin out of this place. A normal person, no. Wouldn’t bring him much but trouble. . .but a person like me, y’know? With some years left in him? He might could tough it out. If it was his, of course.”
He yanked on the cord. The flywheel spun. The engine coughed.
“Yes sir! I think this baby might just start right up. Given some grease and TLC.”
“So Harlo? You’re askin me to give the place over to you.”
“Now there’s an idea. Maybe not actually ‘give’. . .but it was your idea too, y’know, a few weeks ago. Remember?”
“Yeah. I know.”
Harlo rewound the twine and pulled again. The flywheel spun from the might of his pull, the motor turned over twice, then clicked and died. Harlo full choked it and tried again. Fumes swirled around him, puffs of white smoke escaped the perforated exhaust pipe, but it still failed to start.
“Fuck it. This piece a shit? I give up.”
He leaned back on the chute, eyes tearing from the exhaust.
“The way I see it, as long as Emma was alive, this place was never owned by the people workin it. Like Frances. Like your dad. I know better’n to think you might wanna partner with me, I know you wouldn’t want to be in that position, and I do get it. Neither would I. But all’s I’m thinkin, is. . .”
“I know, Harlo. I see how maybe it makes sense. You sure deserve it, by rights, and by need, I know that. But. . .I don’t know. We can talk about it, but I have to think that’s pretty much out of reach by now.”
“Yeah, I know. Sure. It’s all right.”
They stood, looking off, not at one another, but away, in different directions. Both nodding absently, knowing it would never happen.
They walked back to the pickup.
“So you’re driving Evan’s rig now.”
“Yeah, he lent it to me, since I ain’t got nothin.”
Harlo got in.
“He ain’t a half bad guy at heart, really. Just that, he’s pretty much full of it, you know?”
Joe nodded.
“Well, see you around.”
Harlo turned the ignition. The pickup’s big engine roared with power.
WADE WITH ONE of Frances’s old legs across his lap, rubbing her feet.
“What’s the use? It ain’t gonna change nothin.”
“It feels better, doesn’t it?”
“How do I know if it feels better, I can’t feel anything anyway. I don’t know I even want it to. Most things in life, you’re better off to just get used to it.”
Frances jerked, another jolt of pain up her leg, knocking her cane to the floor. She clutched the table until it passed.
“Oh I sure never imagined I’d ever let myself go soft like this.”
Wade set down her thin leg; she eased back in her chair. Closed her eyes.
Outside, Joe and Harlo, Wade watched them, how they talked, then didn’t, then did.
“Frances? How come Harlo looks so much like Joe but not like you. Not like you’d think, for being your son.”
Frances opened her eyes, looked out the window. Kept looking out the window, a long time, something out there only she could see.
“Well obviously he don’t, ‘cause he ain’t.”
She sat up suddenly. “Well that’s funny, now I can feel clear to my toes. Everything’s all clear all of a sudden.”
“But, Frances, what do you mean?”
Frances leaned on the table, bracing herself on her swollen blueish knuckles.
“What do I mean? About what?”
“What you just said.”
“What’d I just say?”
“You said Harlo wasn’t your son. Didn’t you?”
“Damn, Wade. Don’t Joe ever tell you nothin?”
She began smoothing the grip of her cane with the palm of her good hand, at the same time she began recounting, for Wade, the story of the Meeks family, from Peter and Mary Meeks, who weren’t her real parents, weren’t Lillian’s real parents either; only the one girl, the simple slow girl, Emma, was their own. Frances and Lillian were orphaned when their father, Peter Meek’s mining partner, was killed by a bandit who jumped his claim. And because there was nowhere else, Peter Meeks brought them both down to his wife and daughter on the homestead on the upper Hellwater. Frances remembered, so lucid to her even now, how he’d told his wife how he felt like, at last, he’d finally found pure gold up at Independence, no, it was better than silver, what he found was two more daughters, the prettiest ones in the world. And Frances admitted, she loved this new poppa far more and far better than she had the real one, who never had nice words like that. And though Frances feared that Mary Meeks would be angry about it, she wasn’t, she took both girls in and raised them as her own, even when, shortly thereafter, Peter Meeks himself died in a cave-in. She was a one hard-working determined woman, for Frances, the one person in life who you want to live up to. She sure did, anyways. When Mary Meeks went out to work the fields, Frances worked. When Mary Meeks was dying, Frances wanted to die. And swore to her, like to a real mother, to reassure her, that she’d do anything she could to keep the place going, to take care of Emma like her own sister, and Emma’s poor sons Leonard and Harlo.
“I swore to be a real Meeks, always, and goddamn if I didn’t always think I was.”
“Because you are, Frances.”
“Goddamn right, son.”
Frances smiled, the clarity of her past returning with such vividness. She reached for her wine jar though it was long empty and stained with grainy residues.
“Even after she willed the place to Emma so it’d stay with real Meeks
blood, I never wavered. She had to do that. . .though all those years, silly me, I did kinda keep thinkin one day the place’d go to me. That’s how much a Meeks I thought I was.” She put the jar to her mouth with both hands and drank. “But you can’t go and make yourself somethin you ain’t, can you? Now here I am. No ranch. No children. No nothin.”
FRANCES LIFTED HER legs; there was no pain.
“You know Wade, I feel so good, I think I could go for a nice long sleep.”
As she started to get up, Joe came in.
“So, here he is. Just look at him, Wade.”
“What about me?” Joe said.
“What about you?” She rose slowly. “Just how you’re a misfit Meeks if there ever was one. Like all Meekses. . .except you’d be the last. Seein how Wade’s the exception what proves the rule. Right, Wade?”
Wade nodded. He wondered if all families were this complicated.
She planted her cane and slowly hobbled to her room.
THEY—ANNE, WITH Wade tagging behind—found Joe sitting out back in the silver-green shadow of dew cast by the weeping willow. He looked up as, announced by the rustle of sunlit fallen leaves, they sat in the wild grass on his either side.
Anne pulled a long blade of grass and bit the tender stem.
“What’re you doin?”
“Watching that plane. Wonderin what it’s up to.”
Anne shielded her eyes. Far off, just above the cottonwood lining of the Hellwater, a bright white-silver flash, a small plane, swept across the canvas of valley wall, then disappeared into Bitterroot Gap.
“How’d it go with talkin to Evan?”
“About how you’d expect. What’s done is done; can’t change anything.”
Anne spit out the chewed stem. Neither with anything more to say.
Wade said, “Out riding yesterday, I came across these couple of cows. Their brand was Bar-Slash-Heart. That means they’re Frances’s, right?”
Joe um-hmmed.
“They got through some broken fence, right? Want me to ride up and bring them in? I don’t mind.”
“Oh I’m sure you don’t.”
“Yeah, Joe,” Anne said. “Let’s you and me get the Jeep an drive alongside.”