Having seen nothing, frantic, she ran back to the house, got in the car, and bounced over the section line road to the field where Charles was working summer fallow. They hurried back, neither of them voicing their fears: the wideness of the country, the water Marie's voice had traveled over when she stood at the stock pond's shore.
Charles started the two ATVs they owned, and they searched, calling. But they were both too worried to think clearly, and they ended up circling, covering ground they had already covered. When they met back at the house, Marie was in tears, Charles tight-lipped. Carson's grandmother had called the CENEX in Twisted Tree and located her husband. Returning home, Ves found his son and daughter-in-law almost paralyzed, having looked, as they thought, everywhere. He listened to their story.
"Wonder what he was thinking?" he said.
He meant it literally. He went to the door of the old house, squatted down to get Carson's four-year-old perspective, and gazed at the country. A long time. He tapped a cigarette from a pack, stuck it in his mouth, lit it, and gazed as he smoked. Finally he rose, went to the barn, and saddled a horse, waving off his son's offer of an ATV. He rode to the stock pond. He saw what Marie had missed.
A few minutes later Carson looked up from where he had spent a long afternoon playing under the steep bank of the draw to find the old man sitting the horse and watching him. Smoking. Saying nothing. Carson went back to playing. The old man sat and watched. Unhurried, unexcited. Carson might have been a mule deer the old man had spotted. A pheasant or grouse. A cone flower. A badger or blade of grass.
After a time Carson climbed out of the draw and walked to the horse and waited for his grandfather to reach down and loft him, his feet leaving the ground, that long float up. The old man secured his grandson in the crook of his arm, clucked to the horse, and turned it without urgency toward the house. Carson dozed within the sharp and sweetish smell of his grandfather's embrace. When the horse stopped moving, he half-woke but kept his eyes closed. Marie came across the yard with upraised arms, her face tear-streaked.
"Give him to me, Ves."
Carson's eyes fluttered at the sound of her voice, but glimpsing her broken expression through the slits of his lashes, he knew he'd done something to hurt her. He didn't know what, but he quickly closed his eyes again.
"Boy's sleepin, Marie," his grandfather said. "I'll go on ridin with 'm. He was jus playin, but he's about wore out. I'll ride 'm around, let 'm sleep, and when he's awake I'll bring'm back."
Carson heard his mother's sob. He knew he should reveal himself as awake, leap down to her. But he couldn't. He let his grandfather turn the horse away. Through fluttering, narrow lids, he saw his mother floating backwards, and he could feel the horse's muscular, rocking body. It felt to him as if the horse were the one still thing in a moving world.
"He's not sleeping."
It was his father's voice. Carson had seen his father standing behind his mother, unmoving as she walked toward the horse. His father in the background, waiting, watching. How did he know the truth?
Ves let the horse continue walking.
"He's not sleeping, Dad," Charles said again.
But Ves didn't turn around, and Carson didn't open his eyes. If his father had told him to, he would have. But his father said nothing more. So, complicit, Carson let his grandfather take him away.
NOW, AS THEN, CARSON FELT A GULF
between himself and his mother. Not an estrangement—just a quiet gulf that he couldn't bridge. Nothing she said about the old house seemed to him an argument not to live in it. He didn't mind wind, or even cold, that much. When he'd wandered away at four years old, he'd not intended to hurt his mother. That had just happened. But he'd never been lost. She'd just thought he was, and her grief had confused him. And here again she seemed to be insisting he was lost when he wasn't.
He'd never told anyone what he'd seen or done the day his grandfather died. He thought of telling her now. But he didn't know how to say it: how he'd seen the horse's hoof connect with his grandfather's skull and that instead of it making him bitter toward the animal, he'd left the bedroom window where he'd watched the snow falling in slantwise lines and gone out to the animal and untied it and led it into the barn and removed the saddle and bridle and laid his ear against the large, calm ribs and heard the faraway, slow thump of the heart. He'd broken a hay bale and fed the animal and watched it eat, then gone back into the snowstorm, where near the corral the ambulance squatted, and men were bending down. He had watched them for a moment, then found a bucket, taken it to the mudroom of the house and drawn warm water, added detergent, returned to the barn through the snow. The ambulance had its back door open, and the men were carrying a stretcher. He had looked at the stretcher and what was on it but had not stopped—had gone back to the barn and with a rag ripped from a pair of his grandfather's old denims washed blood from the horse's hoof. The next day he'd ridden the Scooter horse out to the draw where his grandfather had found him when he was four and dug a hole in the frozen earth and buried the bloody rag. Wind had blown and snow had fallen, the world indifferent, going about its vast and austere business, beyond all human grieving.
Carson thought that if he could speak of these things his mother might understand why he wanted to live in the old house. But he couldn't even begin. He thought of horses. Of how they moved singly or in groups, of how their hoofbeats drummed the earth. He thought of how, when he trained them, he breathed their grainy breath and how, in arenas, their hooves cut into the earth and back out with so much power that spectators were dirtied high into the stands with flecks of mud. Of how, when horses turned around the barrels, their bodies leaned as if gravity could be suspended—and how he could train them to so suspend it.
But of this, too, he found he could not speak.
A MONTH AFTER VES DIED
, Charles had wanted to tear the old house down. "What use is it now?" he'd said. "Leave it stand, it's gonna be nothin but a mouse hotel. Or a temptation for lightning."
But Marie had stopped him. "We can't be that practical about it," she said. "It's hard enough for Carson, Ves being gone. If you tear that house down, too? Wait a few months."
But things had come up, the needs of the ranch, relentless and ongoing. They took Charles's attention and energy. Distracted him. Only once had he actually found time to start the demolition. "Tomorrow," he'd told her, "I'm goin a start takin it down. Try to save some've the lumber, maybe use it for something else." She'd agreed.
Enough time had passed. But the next morning, while Charles was doing chores, the Case had died, and he spent two days fuming and fixing it, and by the time he was done other things took over.
And then they just got used to it. Almost forgot it was there. Until now. Strange, Marie thought, how empty structures can become a part of your life. How you can simply not notice them. And then you quit imagining what you'd see if they weren't there. Quit imagining the space you'd see, the sky. Or the flower bed you might plant. The tree. Instead you just let the empty structure stand. Let it occupy the space you'd thought to use. You go about your business. Yet she wondered how much the empty structure made a difference. Its standing there. Its witness to what had been—how much did that matter, even though they'd quit noticing? She wished she'd let Charles tear it down when he'd first wanted to.
She had watched Carson and his father grow apart. It wasn't animosity but more a giving in. A sense of the inevitable. Carson had grown attached to Ves, and Charles had seen how they worked the horses together, how good Carson was at it. Charles had refused to fight it. He could see that Carson loved it. But at the supper table, when Ves bragged about Carson's instincts, Marie noticed how Charles nodded. She knew that he heard another thing, unsaid: that he himself had never been that good. And she knew that his own silence, his mere nod, sprang from his deep, unspoken sense that he should be the one bragging about his son. The one showing him the world and taking pride in how he grasped it.
Marie thought now that if Carson moved into the old house, it would be another instance, like when he'd gone to buy that horse without asking, of choosing Ves over Charles. Neither Carson nor his father would think of it that way. But she knew that Charles, whether he named it or not, would feel it.
Looking at her son, so confident, so sure what he wanted to do, she wondered if she should tell him how hard Ves had made Charles work when he was young, how single-minded Ves had been. The grandfather Carson knew, the patient, slow-moving teacher of how the world worked, had been a long time in the ripening. It had taken Marie years to warm to him, and she believed that warming—her warming—had been part of what had softened Ves. If he loved Carson, Marie suspected he'd loved her first because she had so steadfastly refused to be intimidated by him, until he'd finally laughed at himself. And loved her for allowing that laughter.
He'd come banging on the door of the old house one rainy night in the first years of Marie's marriage—this before Carson was born, before Lucy, Charles's mother, had insisted that Marie and Charles move with their new baby into the new house while she and Ves returned to the old. He'd come banging on the door and before Marie could answer had barged into the kitchen, dripping water on the floor.
"Marie," he'd exclaimed. "Goddamn. We got cows broke out up north. Get your clothes on and come out and help chase 'em."
She was dressed in a bathrobe, doing nothing but reading a book. He turned to go, assuming she'd do as he commanded.
"Goddamn no," she said to his back.
A glass pane seemed to descend invisibly from the ceiling, and Ves ran into it. He stopped so fast he appeared to rebound. His hat spun water off its brim as he turned back to her.
"No?"
"You're a crazy old fart," she said. "You don't come barging into someone else's house until they answer the door or call you in, even if you did build the damn thing. You don't dribble all over their floor. And you don't go chasing cattle at night in the rain when your neighbors will help you chase them tomorrow when the sun's shining. Where do you think they're going to go? There's no highway up north they're going to get out on. So no. Goddamn no."
She turned back to the paragraph she'd looked up from. Ves stared at her through the water still dripping off his hat brim.
"I'm a crazy old fart?" he asked. "Is that what you said?"
"At least you're not a deaf one, too."
"Jesus! I ain't that goddamn
old!
"
He'd gone from the house, laughing a storm. She heard him call into the darkness: "Chuck, goddamn, come in outta the rain. Marie says it's crazy to be chasing cattle right now. She says I'm a crazy old fart!"
His laughter was louder than the rain. The next day he was still laughing. It got so he couldn't see Marie without smiling, and the more she teased and insulted him the more he laughed and returned it. Marie would come to believe that night was the first time anyone had claimed a thing that Ves considered his by right of effort and will. He'd had the new house built for Lucy but had never relinquished his claim on the old, not even when his son and daughter-in-law moved in. But that rainy night he'd been confronted with a woman calm and unmoved within walls she'd decorated, space she'd created, even if he'd first formed it. He'd felt himself an intruder. In his laughter he'd admitted the old house was hers. He'd let it go—perhaps the first thing in his life he'd ever relinquished completely and without stipulation. He'd never again entered her home without knocking. He would stand on the steps until she opened the door, even if she called him in, and not out of irony but because he knew no other way to change. There were no subtleties, no gradations, to his giving in.
And because he'd learned to relinquish his claim to a thing he considered his, he was prepared, when Carson was born, to be a grandfather, to accept what others had labored over, the fruit of others' dreams and wills—to accept those things as gifts. He held his newborn grandson, when Lucy handed him over, as gently as he'd hold a newborn calf dropped in a snowstorm, and with far more wonder.
Who would have thought—Marie didn't at the time—that anything of sad consequence could come of that? The one person who couldn't benefit from Ves's change of heart was Charles. No matter what the Bible said, Marie thought, prodigality—and there could be a prodigality of control—would have its consequences. You can't just change your life and expect everyone to be happy with it. Expect everyone to forgive. To eat the fatted calf, drink the wine. To glory in the fact that you can now relent, love, live your life, without demanding that everyone live theirs the way you want them to. Ves had demanded so much of Charles. And maybe because of that, Charles had never managed to claim the land as she had the house, to take it from his father, put his own stamp on it. He worked endlessly but like tires slipping in gumbo mud, unable to imprint himself fully upon his work.
And then, when Charles had a son, with visions of raising that son in a different image than he'd been raised himself, Ves changed. He had lived a life of hardness against others, and then a life of gentleness—and had managed to claim, maybe, more than his share of each. Charles was still Carson's father—but in some ways Ves had stolen the boy from Charles. Stolen him by patience. By laughter. By horses. By affections Charles had intended to show his son, as he'd not been shown them.
Marie knew that Charles wanted nothing so much for Carson as that he get away. Go somewhere other than this ranch. But Charles, though he would not choose the things Carson chose, could not demand Carson be anything but what he was. In this way he was, after all, the father he had always intended to be. But in letting Carson choose his own path, choose his grandfather, Charles became aloof from them both. Without realizing it, he made that sacrifice.
Maybe if Charles had gotten the old house torn down, Carson would have less reason to stay. Marie looked at her son, so confident and sure of himself, and she had an odd and disconcerting thought: She wished she could plant in him a seed of discontent. Wished she could make him more needy. She used to buy him toys when he was young, and he would play with them for a while but would soon go outside, and she'd see him throwing stones or walking toward the stock pond to fish or watch for birds. She felt now some of the same sadness she'd felt when she would eventually put away the toy she'd bought, knowing he would never play with it again—a sense that she could not reach him and a guilty desire to make him need what he did not want. To make him less secure. Less content.