“Yes, Eileen.”
“Someone to see you, Mr. Copenhaver.”
“I believe this has happened before, Eileen. Any reason you can’t show him in?”
“It’s Mr. Jarrell, Mr. Copenhaver.”
This was the ranch, the unimproved heritage. “Have him come in,” he bayed. He looked at his papers without seeing them. For once, Eileen’s mugging amounted to something. Frank rested his hand on the phone. Boyd came through the door and closed it behind him on a glimpse of Eileen craning inward. Frank noticed that he was empty-handed. Boyd nodded. Frank nodded. For some reason he found himself saying, “Haven’t seen you since the night of the suds.”
“Yeah.”
“Skip a couple of showers after that, ay?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, today is another day, and what is it I can do for you?”
“I went out to the ranch yesterday and had a look around. It don’t look very good at all.”
“We haven’t found a new man. You kind of left us in midstream.”
“Alfalfa all burning up, deer gone through the fence —”
“I believe Mike has taken out an ad in the Agri-News.”
“— place where the RV boys shot off the lock on the east pasture, just riding around in there and flattening the grass.”
“Like I say, I’d have to check with Mike and see if we’ve had any responses.”
“But when I got to the troughs and the salt was completely gone, I realized —”
“What did you realize?” Frank asked because Boyd had paused.
“I realized we’d got our deal backwards. It don’t matter about you and me. Cows have got to have their salt.”
“So, what are you telling me?”
“I’m starting back in today.”
“And what about — what about our conflict, Boyd? Be honest.”
“We’re going to have to set that aside, Mr. Copenhaver. Like I been trying to tell you, the cows are out of salt.”
“One thing you should know. Mike and I have decided to sell the place.”
“You ain’t gonna do no such of a thing.”
Frank thought for a minute. Boyd was a perfect cowboy. All he cared about was cows, but he did care about cows. He could see a sore-footed one from almost two miles off, as Frank had one day found out. He was as kind to cows as he was unreasonable to people. Frank might well have been more assiduous in staying out of his way. Boyd once clobbered Mike with a frying pan, but Mike thought everyone was crazy anyway and didn’t take it personally, though his nurse complained that he staggered around the office for two and a half days and may well have suffered a concussion. Frank thought about the cows being by themselves, without Boyd tending to them. Big, easygoing, helpless creatures dragged onto this prairie by white folks, always pregnant and always out of something they needed. There had to be someone who tried to close that gap between cows and an environment not always friendly to them. He had to admit to himself that there was real satisfaction in seeing Boyd ride through a herd of cattle, knowing that when he got out the other side he’d have learned as much about them as the graduating class of the average veterinary school. If I knew that much about anything, Frank thought, I wouldn’t be nice to anyone. But I’m so ignorant I have to go on treating people decently.
“We took you off the rolls. You’ll have to stop and let Eileen know. You deal with it.”
“Yeah.”
“And I’m not kidding. Mike and I are thinking about selling the place.” Why? thought Frank. Boyd could hold it together as an heirloom.
“Check with me first,” said Boyd. “You don’t need to be selling good land like that. You’ll piss it away.”
“You think so?”
“Hell, I know so.”
27
He phoned Saturday to see if Holly had arrived safely in Missoula. A man answered. “Just say her father called.” Frank had a feeling he’d encountered this bird once, a transfer from Colgate, shoulder-length curls and a nose ring. He had made a sardonic remark at the time, something about Missoula, something about the West Slope. It fell on its face.
Frank went outside and looked around at the street, with its operatic ascent to the south through shafts of light crisscrossing the maples. Cars seemed to coast around town, their motors ticking placidly. Their shapes and array of colors jumped and disappeared in the front windows of the houses. Students appeared at the crown of the hill on bicycles and plummeted heedlessly past, then on into town. The sidewalk climbed the hill in an erratic line, its track interrupted here and there by lilacs and caragana bushes.
He enumerated his obligations with the feeling that they kept him from soaring into this vista as one of its colors. Holly, easy. And Gracie — what obligation? He did not know. He had let slide Holly’s notation that Gracie was doing less than well. Bad luck or stewing in her own juices, he didn’t know. But Holly was going to see Gracie and that was exciting. Maybe she could help finalize the divorce and they could start to get past the pain.
He walked on down the street. Something useless about Saturday, a day of loathing to the self-employed. Eileen would be home taking care of her older sister, a woman afflicted with multiple sclerosis and a lack of funds. He passed St. Anne’s, his family church at the corner of Shoshone, and saw its door ajar, a dark band at the lintel with the glimmer of yellow interior lights. He stopped and went in, the old pull; he paused and was swept in as by a current. And then the smell of stone and old burnt incense, of the varnished pine pews, was comforting. He walked halfway up the middle aisle, genuflected and took a seat, gazing at the empty altar. He wondered if it was any different than the tumuli of Druids, fairie rings, sun dance circles, or if that in fact suggested a reduction. Maybe it expressed a zone of the subconscious that produced the murdering popes and ayatollahs. What if there was nothing there but the belief of many that there was something there? That certainly added to the importance of matters. He walked up and lit candles to his mother and father. He returned to his pew. Anybody here? Release the white bird now, please. Let a beam of light pass overhead. The faint voice of a bell. You see, we are desperate. We are here to say stone and water and sacrifice; house, crops, fish. And to say them plainly. To say Gracie.
He was sorry he included “fish” because it started him thinking on a lower plateau. He left the church and went to his house and began gathering his tackle. Inside an hour’s time, he was standing waist deep in the Gallatin River. Swallows dove just above his head, catching mayflies. Trout moved among the current seams like phantoms. Darkness would overtake him only a few yards from here, deep in a mystery.
Frank stopped at Valley News and bought the paper. There was a young man in front with long dirty dreadlocks. The well-bred golden retriever he held beside him on a length of clothesline looked hopelessly out into traffic.
Lucy passed in front of Valley News just as Frank came out with his paper. He nodded slightly. She nodded slightly, passed, stopped and came back. She looked handsome in a blue cotton skirt and oversize gray sweater. She said, “Frank.”