CHAPTER 5
Beck
◆
The lane in hadn't changed, and that was what gutted him first.
Beck slowed the truck where the dirt track left the county road, eased it over the cattle guard so the pipe rails sang their old hollow note under the tires, and let the place come at him the way it always had — all at once, the whole valley unfolding under the red mesas like something he'd had no right to leave.
Late afternoon light lay long and gold across the bunchgrass.
The creek caught it down in the bottoms and threw it back.
For one stupid second his chest did the thing it used to do when he was a boy coming home from school, that lift, that here, before the rest of it caught up.
Then he got close enough to see the house, and the lift went out of him like air out of a cut tire.
It was dying by inches, and the inches were everywhere he looked — the porch paint peeled to grey curls, a gutter sagging loose at the corner, a shutter hanging by one hinge because nobody had the hour or the money to set it right.
The cottonwoods still stood. The mesas still glowed.
But the house his great-grandfather had raised out of homestead timber looked tired in a way that had nothing to do with light.
And the roses were dying.
Eleanor's roses. His mother's roses, the canes she'd planted along the foundation and fussed over for thirty years, the ones she'd made Jed haul water to in droughts when every drop counted.
They ran in a ragged line under the porch rail, and they were going.
Black-spotted leaves. Canes gone brittle and grey at the tips.
A few blooms hung on out of pure spite, the color bled out of them.
They'd gone unpruned, unwatered, left to stand there in the dirt doing the long slow work of giving up.
Beck shut the truck off and sat with both hands on the wheel and didn't get out for a while.
Ten years, he thought. A whole decade gone, and you couldn't even keep her roses alive.
He wasn't sure who the you was. Tucker, maybe.
The drought. Jed and his pride. Himself, most of all — the Calhoun who left, who'd been on a circuit somewhere chasing his name on a board while the place that made him quietly came apart.
He thumbed the medal through his shirt, Eleanor's St. Christopher warm from his skin.
Patron of travelers. Some patron. You got me everywhere but here.
He made himself get out.
---
The yard had the smell he'd carried in him for a decade without knowing it — dust and dry manure and creek water and the particular green of cut alfalfa somewhere, all of it baked together in the heat.
Roscoe came off the porch low and fast and barking, then stopped six feet out, ears working, because the border collie was younger than Beck's leaving and didn't know him.
Beck crouched and held out a hand and let the dog decide.
After a minute Roscoe's tail dropped its stiffness and he came in to be scratched, and something behind Beck's ribs loosened, absurd and dangerous, that one creature on this place would let him close.
He walked the operation because he couldn't make himself walk into the house yet.
He told himself it was reconnaissance. He told himself a lot of things.
But it was really just grief on two legs, going slow.
The corrals first — pipe-and-rail he'd helped his father weld up when he was sixteen, a section of it sprung and never mended, a gate dragging where the hinge had rusted through.
The big barn. The windmill out past the loafing shed turned in the breeze with a hitch in it, a blade gone subtly wrong, and even that small off-rhythm clatter felt like a thing nobody had the time to climb up and fix.
The herd told the truest story. He leaned on a corral rail and counted what he could see in the near pasture and counted it again and his gut went cold, because the number was wrong.
Thin. Half what it should be, maybe less.
They'd sold down. You sold down when you couldn't feed them or couldn't make the interim payments or both, and you told yourself it was just this once, just to get over the hump, and then the hump turned out to be a mountain.
He knew the math of a struggling outfit in his gut, the way a man raised on a place learns to total up trouble without writing a single figure down — a count that came up short, a hinge left to rust, a payment made smaller than it should be. The numbers all leaned the same direction. Downhill.
Everything he looked at wore the same expression.
Deferred. Held together with baling wire and somebody's exhaustion.
He'd grown up thinking Red Mesa was permanent as the mesas it sat under.
Standing in the long light now, reading the failing of it off every fence post and sagging wire, he understood for the first time that the place was mortal. It could go. It was already going.
He found himself at the tack room without deciding to.
The door stuck the way it always had, swollen in the frame, and he put his shoulder to it the way he always had, and it gave with the same groan, and then he was standing in the doorway looking into a room that had been shut up so long the air inside had gone still and thick.
A west window let in one long bar of late sun.
It fell across the room in a solid gold shaft, and the dust motes hung in it, thousands of them, turning slow, suspended — disturbed by the door but in no hurry to settle, drifting through the shaft like the room had been holding its breath for a decade and had only now let it out.
His gear was still there.
That was what undid him. The whole corner sat untouched.
His saddle on its rack, the leather gone dry and pale where it should have been oiled dark.
His old ropes coiled on their pegs, stiff with disuse.
A bridle that had been his grandfather's before it was his.
All of it hung exactly where he'd left it the night he drove away, and the years of dust had sifted down over every inch of it, soft as ash, undisturbed, the light catching the motes he'd just stirred up so the whole still room seemed to swim.
They'd kept his place. That was the thing. However much they'd hated him for going, somebody — Hutch, probably, it would've been Hutch — had never once cleaned out his corner. Like the room itself had been waiting for him to come back and claim it. Like the dust was just keeping it for him.
He stood in the doorway with his hat in his hand and the dust turning gold around him and he was twenty-four again, gut-shot with shame, telling himself a clean leaving was a kindness. His thumb traced the seam of the scar over his right eyebrow, and he let it, too tired to pretend he wasn't.
“Figured you'd end up in here.”
---
Tucker's voice came flat off the barn aisle behind him.
Beck turned. His brother stood square in the wide doorway with the sun behind him, broad through the shoulders the way their father had been, work gloves shoved in his back pocket, a smear of grease up one sunburned forearm.
There was grey at his temples that hadn't been there when Beck left.
Tucker had been twenty-one. He looked older than Beck did now.
“Tucker.”
“Don't.” Tucker's jaw worked. “Don't do the warm thing. You did the warm thing at the hospital, with Charlie standing right there making it easy for you, and I let it slide because Dad was upstairs not talking. This isn't the hospital.”
“No,” Beck said. “It's not.”
He stepped out of the tack room into the aisle, and behind him the gold light kept its dust turning, and he pulled the swollen door most of the way shut on it like he was closing a drawer on something he wasn't ready to take out.
Tucker watched him do it. Something crossed his face — Beck couldn't read it, resentment and something underneath the resentment — and then it hid behind the flat. “You walked the place,” Tucker said. “I saw you. Counting cows on the rail like a buyer.”
“I wasn't.” It came out weaker than he meant it.
“You were. You always were good at the look.
Show up, take the measure of a thing in one glance, decide what it's worth.” Tucker's voice didn't rise.
That was the part that landed. It only got harder and flatter, the grievance pressed thin under years.
“You know what it's worth, Beck? You want me to tell you the number?
Because I've got it memorized. I dream the number.”
“Tucker.” It was all he got out.
“You don't get to come back and grieve the place.” Tucker took a step in, and his eyes were wet and furious and he didn't seem to know it.
“You don't get to stand in your old tack room with your hat off looking sorry.
You left it to me to keep. Ten years of it.
Mom's roses, the books, the note, Dad pretending it was fine.
You got the buckles and the open road and your face on a magazine, and I got the part where the gate doesn't close itself and the bills don't pay themselves and you do it alone because the brother who was supposed to help you carry it ran the second it got heavy.”
The words went into Beck clean and deep, no pain for a second, just the cold knowledge of having been opened up — the body's slow beat before it understands what's happened to it.
He could've said it wasn't like that. He could've claimed there'd been a reason, that there was a whole night on a bridge that Tucker didn't know about and never would, because telling it wouldn't give anybody back anything.
He could've reached for the joke, which is what he wanted to do, which is what he always wanted to do, hell, Tuck, tell me how you really feel, the deflection rising up his throat like a reflex.
For once in his sorry life he let it die there and just stood and took it.
“You're right,” he said.
Tucker blinked. Whatever he'd braced for, this caught him sideways.