10. Andrew
Andrew
Andrew saddled the buckskin in the dark, before the kitchen light came on, and rode up after fourteen head two men could have brought down any day that week.
He told himself it was the weather. It was not the weather.
It was that the light was going to come on, and she was going to be under it and he had found out sometime in the last five days that he would rather spend three hours climbing a mountain than thirty seconds standing in his own house while a woman poured coffee.
The first hour had been cold. He had taken the long trail because he had ridden it a thousand times and could ride it blind, and because the short trail wanted a kind of attention he was not prepared to give that morning.
The aspens stood black against gray for the first mile.
The buckskin’s breath came in long white pulls and his own ran with it.
They had both held the pace a man holds when he is climbing toward a thing he has avoided for five days.
The timber opened. The country lifted around them.
The first sun off the eastern ridge had not yet reached the floor of the meadow they were riding into, but it was on the upper slopes already, and the snow up there ran a clean white that had nothing of the gray world below.
The sky above the snow was the blue this country could make once or twice a winter.
Andrew sat the buckskin in the open and let him blow.
He had not seen a sky like this in weeks. He sat in the saddle and tipped his face up and felt the warmth on his eyelids. The buckskin sighed under him.
“All right,” Andrew said. “We are going.”
The trail bent left at the top of the meadow and climbed another quarter-mile through stunted spruce before it broke out onto the long shoulder above Cathedral Creek.
That was where the sun finally came around onto his back.
He felt the warmth go through the canvas coat and find the place between his shoulder blades that had been clenched against the cold without his knowing it.
He let out the breath that had been there.
He unbuttoned the top two buttons of the coat.
He pressed his glove flat on the saddle horn to feel the heat through the leather, and he held it there a second too long, because he had not put his hand on anything warm in five days.
The buckskin blew. They climbed.
He had not sent two men up for them. Nor had he gone himself, not on any clear day this week.
The fourteen head had sat on the mountain since Tuesday like a debt he was not paying.
He had felt it for five days in the back of his teeth.
This morning he had finally been more afraid of staying than of going.
The buckskin’s ear came back, listening. The ear came forward again.
“I know,” Andrew said.
He had sat across from her yesterday for the better part of an hour and had not asked a single question. She had not answered any. The waitress topped them up twice. Mary Jo came over from her office at the end of it, read the table in four seconds, and asked nothing.
They drove home in the same silence. It stretched into the yard, the barn, supper neither of them ate, and the hallway Andrew walked past at nine.
He lay awake trying to work out what Mandy had heard.
There were too many possibilities. He had been a known weight in Marlow for thirty years, and a known weight collected stories. Most were wrong. Some were true stories told badly.
He knew only that her face had changed. For one bad second in the diner, he had wanted to ask what she thought she knew.
He had kept his hands flat on the table and let her not say it.
The buckskin reached the cut above the creek and turned without being asked.
The trail flattened along the shoulder for a half-mile of easy going, and the country fell away to the south on his right and rose to the north on his left.
The air thinned, small and steady, at this elevation. He let the buckskin pick the pace.
He had not spent all those years on this ranch to lose his footing across a diner table.
The thought came to him without permission. He let it stay.
He had built the life he had built for an exact reason and the reason had a name.
He had not said the name to himself in some time because leaving it unsaid had been one of the load-bearing pieces of the life.
He said it now, into the bright cold air, in the dry quiet voice he used on the buckskin when he was telling him what to do.
“Caroline.”
The buckskin’s ear came back.
“I know,” Andrew said.
He had met her in Chicago. He had been thirty and had three thousand head on borrowed paper and a plan to outrun the paper, and she had been a woman who walked into a hotel bar in a dress he had thought, then, was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.
She had let him buy her a drink, and it had felt like the first thing in his hard, ambitious year that had simply come to him without being chased.
He had been wrong about both things. The dress had not been the most beautiful thing he had ever seen, and the drink had not come to him.
She had been across the room watching him for an hour before she let herself be seen.
He had married her on a beach in Mexico on a leave he had borrowed from the bank, and he had brought her home to Stillwater, which had been one house and a barn then.
She had stood in the yard the first morning with her arms folded and looked at the place as a project.
He had taken it for a woman measuring her new life. He had taken many things they were not.
She had stayed two years. In those two years he had bought the second section, and the third, and the leases in Wyoming.
He had told her, in the kitchen of the house she had been redoing on the side, exactly what the numbers were, because they were the thing he was most proud of in his life, and a man tells his wife the thing he is most proud of.
He had watched her face change when he told her.
He had taken that for the look of a woman impressed and a little frightened by the size of what her husband had built. He had taken it for love.
A year after that, he found the file. It had been on a thumb drive in the back of a drawer in the office she had set up in the room that had been his father’s.
The file was a sixty-page document with his name on it and the names of every section he owned and every account and every lawyer, and a draft of the disclosure she would make to her own lawyer when the time came to file, and a worksheet in which she had estimated what the Colorado courts would give her under various scenarios.
The file was three months old. She had been writing it the whole time he had been telling her, in the kitchen of the house she was redoing, what the numbers were.
He had stood in the office that had been his father’s and read all sixty pages without sitting down.
He had not confronted her. He had taken three days.
He had ridden up to the line cabin at Elk Park alone and he had stayed three nights, and on the third night he had decided what he was going to do, and he had ridden back down and asked her to leave.
She had cried. She had been good at crying.
She had said it had not been like that, that she had been doing what any sensible woman did, that she had loved him and the file was just insurance, and he had sat at his own kitchen table and looked at her crying and had understood, with a clean, cold finality, that the woman he had loved had been a woman who could write the file and cry about getting caught with it in the same year, and that this was who she had been the whole time, and he had just not known how to see her.
She had left. He had paid her enough to leave quietly, and he had paid the lawyer in Denver to make sure she stayed gone, and he had not heard from her since.
The lesson had not left.
He had handed a woman the thing he was proudest of and watched it become a calculation made without him.
After that, he stopped offering the number.
He lived in the old house, drove the working truck, and let the valley believe what it wanted. If a woman saw him again, she would see the man first.
For twenty years, the arrangement held.
Then Mandy sat across from him in the Antler with a changed face, and the old fear woke before he knew what had disturbed it.
He thought she had heard something about him. Maybe the right story told wrong. Maybe a rumor about the land or money. He did not know.
Mandy looking at him should not have felt like Caroline reading sixty pages without him.
It did.
The buckskin’s ear came back. Forward.
“I do not know either,” Andrew said.
He turned the buckskin up the last rise toward Tin Cup.
The country here flattened into the long shallow bowl that gave the pasture its name.
The cattle were on the far side. Fourteen of them, the bunch he had left behind on Tuesday because there had not been time and there had not been weather, and they stood now in the small leeward draw where they had stood out the storm.
They were all alive, and the dog he had brought up at his heel went down on his belly behind a deadfall and waited to be told.
He sat the buckskin and counted. Fourteen. He had fourteen looking at him.
He found, sitting in the saddle in the bright sun he should not have been able to afford to sit in, that he was not in a hurry to send the dog.
He had come up here to bring them down. He had also come up here for the other thing, and the other thing had not finished doing its work in him yet, and he was the only one on the mountain to know it.
He let the buckskin stand.
He watched the fourteen head and thought about Mandy at the foot of the mountain, probably sitting at Mary Jo’s kitchen table with coffee.
He could not do this twice.
He could not let Caroline’s lesson decide what Mandy meant before Mandy had done anything to earn the judgment.
The lesson is twenty years old, and a man my age does not get to keep being taught the same thing.
She had come with nothing, asked for almost nothing, and worked harder than men he had paid good wages.
None of that guaranteed she would stay. It also did not make her Caroline.
The dog whined, very softly, under the deadfall.
“I know,” Andrew said. “All right.”
He sent the dog.
The fourteen head came up off the leeward grass with the small indignant slowness of cattle who had decided where they were and would have preferred to stay there, and the dog peeled them out of the draw and turned them at the gap.
Andrew and the buckskin set the line and the cattle took it.
They went down the long way because the long way did not ice as fast and because Andrew was not in a hurry to be off the mountain.
The sun stayed with them for the first descent and then went over the ridge.
The trail gave way to the cold he had ridden up out of three hours earlier, and the chill seemed personal now.
The buckskin took the bad patch above the second meadow in a small careful gather, and the cattle took it after him, and they went on down.
By midmorning the home pasture was in view below them. By half past eleven they were at the lower gate. Walt was at the corral.
Andrew had known he would be.
The cattle went through the gate. The dog took them in. Walt closed the gate behind them, latched it, and turned. He looked at Andrew on the buckskin and at the empty trail behind them as if he were counting something Andrew had not brought back.
Andrew swung down.
“Fourteen,” Andrew said. “All on.”
“I see them.”
“That is the last of it for Tin Cup.”
“It is.”
He stopped at the corner of the barn and watched her. The want came up hard and plain. He let it.
On the mountain, he had been afraid he would return to an empty room.
He had also hoped for this: Mandy in the morning sun, her hand on Lucky, still here.
The hope had been larger than the fear.
She held the questions back and let him decide what to give.
Andrew walked the last twenty feet to the rail.
With Lucky between them, he took off his hat and set it crown-down on the rail.
“I was married once,” Andrew said.
Mandy did not move.
“A long time ago. Her name was Caroline.”
Her right hand came off Lucky’s poll and settled on the rail.
“It ended badly. I have not talked about it since.”
Andrew looked at the hat between them.
“Yesterday at lunch, you looked at me as though you had heard something. I rode up the mountain trying to decide what it was.”
He met her eyes.
“I do not know what you heard. You do not have to tell me.”
Mandy waited.
“Caroline is why I live the way I do. She is why I keep parts of my life separate. She is the reason I have been careful with you.”
Lucky butted Mandy’s elbow for the empty bottle.
“She is gone. You will not meet her. It has been twenty years.”
Andrew put both hands on the rail.
“I should have told you before somebody else got the chance to tell it wrong.”
Neither of them moved.
“I am telling you because yesterday you had questions and let me keep them.”
Mandy did not say anything for a long time. Her hand stayed on the rail, hat brim down against the sun.
Andrew could not take the words back.
The regret had already started beneath them.
“All right,” she said.
“All right.”
Andrew picked up his hat and turned toward the house.
Behind him, Mandy said his name.
He stopped without turning.
“Thank you for telling me.”
Her voice was unsteady.
Andrew walked the rest of the way to the house.
At the kitchen window, he looked across the yard once. Mandy remained at Lucky’s rail, her hand between the calf’s ears.
He filled the kettle and set it on the stove.
He sat at the table where he had asked Caroline to leave and listened to the water begin to heat.
He had spoken her name aloud for the first time in twenty years.
He regretted it.
He meant it anyway.