Chapter 21
Holt
He'd been gone a week when I quit counting the days. I'd been doing it out loud in the barn without realizing it. I worked. That was the answer I had to everything and it was the answer I had to him.
I was up before the dark broke and out past the time it closed back down. I fed and I doctored and I forked silage and I split a winter's worth of wood I didn't need split. When there was nothing left on the place that honestly needed doing, I found something that didn't and did that too.
I could always carry a thing in my hands that I couldn't carry any other way. Most days. The trouble was the in-between minutes. The walk from the barn to the house with my hands empty. The second after I shut the truck door and before I turned the key.
The dark knew right where the seams were and it got in through every one of them. It always brought the same thing. The warm weight of him asleep against my side with his hand open on the quilt.
The last good thing I ever had, and I took it out behind the barn and shot it myself.
The note was due on the first. I knew the number to the dollar and I knew what was in the account against it, and I knew the distance between the two, and there was no working harder that closed it, because the problem with the ranch had never been the work.
The hospital bill was still on the kitchen table where I'd left it. Nobody had moved it.
The money that would have fixed it drove out of my yard in a rental car.
Six figures. More than enough to clear the note and the bill and leave a cushion. All I'd have had to do was let them point a camera at Gus's ranch and call it authentic Colorado.
I ran the numbers anyway. Every night. And so did everybody else in the county, because the article had the number in it. The valley knew. That was the part I hadn't braced for.
It had put Orion Valley and Three Saints in front of a hundred thousand strangers, and for the better part of a week we were the most interesting thing that had happened here since they put the highway in.
The phone rang off the wall. Mostly it was harmless.
Somebody's cousin wanting to know if he'd really been here and was he as handsome in person. I could grunt my way through those.
It was the other stuff I couldn't.
The Hendricks woman left a casserole on the porch like somebody had died. The man from the feed store waved me down on the county road and sat there in his truck with his arm out the window, not saying anything for a second longer than he needed to.
"Everything all right out at the place?"
"It's fine."
He nodded slow. "Well."
That was all he said. He put his truck in gear and went on down the road, and I sat there a minute before I did.
On the fifth day Hudson Kane drove his truck up my road, which he had never once done in the half year he'd owned the ground over the rise.
Kane kept to himself and didn't explain anything.
Flynn had an opinion. He came up to the barn where I was pretending a gate hinge needed me and he didn't waste either of us any words.
"Heard about your trouble."
"You heard wrong."
"Probably." He didn't look at me while he said it. He looked at the gate I was pretending to work on. "Came in here green last fall. Ran my own numbers about eleven times that first winter, trying to make them come out different."
"That right."
"They didn't." He put his hands in his pockets. "I know the face a man makes when his numbers have got him. You're making it."
I didn't say anything to that.
"I've got a tractor sitting up there with four hundred hours on it. I've got a line of credit I've barely touched. And I've got two hands this time of year with not enough to do, who'd be glad of the work and gladder of the gossip." He shrugged. "Any of it's yours. You'd have to ask, is all."
"We're fine."
He looked at me a while.
"All right," he said.
He didn't believe that one either but had the decency not to say so. He took a feed receipt out of his shirt pocket, wrote a number on the back of it, and put it under a rock on the rail. Then he drove back over the rise.
I stood there holding a hinge that didn't need me.
I never did call him.
Gus watched me do all of it.
He was up and around even if he was slow and small.
He'd started parking himself in the kitchen with a blanket over his knees he pretended he didn't need, and he didn't miss a thing.
He never had. He watched me go out before he was up and come back after he'd gone to bed.
He watched me not eat what Lane put in front of me.
He let it run for a week, which was longer than I'd have let anybody else do it.
Then one evening I came in off the last chore and he was sitting at the table with the lamp on and the hospital bill turned around to face my chair.
I knew I wasn't getting out of the room.
"Sit down," he said.
"I've got the heifers to—"
"The heifers'll keep. Sit."
I sat down.
He looked at me across the table he'd fed me at since I was eleven years old, and he was quiet for a long time. When he finally spoke his voice didn't have the bark in it anymore. The stent had taken the bark. What was under it was worse.
"You sent him off," he said.
"He sent himself off. He's the one put us in the paper."
"He did." Gus nodded. "He did a low thing and he did it scared. You'd have every right to be done with him for it if that was why you sent him packing."
He didn't say anything else for a while. He just sat there, watching me. I didn't say anything back.
"But that's not why. You and me both know it, so let's not lie to each other with the time I've got left."
I still didn't say anything.
"You sent him off because he was leaving anyhow and you couldn't stand to be the one left in the yard. So you got out front of it. You did the leaving first, with your own two hands, so it'd be a thing you did instead of a thing that happened to you."
He leaned back.
"I watched you do it. I've watched you do it your whole life, son, with every soul that ever got close enough to have a chance to hurt you."
My jaw was tight enough to ache. "It's not the same."
"No," he agreed. "It's worse this time, because this time it wasn't a stray dog or a hand passing through.
This time it was the one that got all the way in.
" He leaned forward and he put his old hand flat on the table between us.
"I'm going to tell you a thing and you're not going to like it.
You'd rather lose him and be safe than keep him and be scared.
You'd rather know exactly how it ends, alone, on your own ground, than stand out there in the open not knowing and have it come out good. "
"That's not—"
"You call it protecting yourself. I called it that too, for about forty years."
His eyes went somewhere past me. Somewhere old.
"There was a man. A long time before you ever came to me. I let him go the same way you just did, got out front of it so the leaving would be mine."
I had known that old man twenty-five years and I had never once heard him say that.
"I've had this whole big country and this whole long life to be safe in," Gus said. "I'd trade every safe night of it for one more bad one with him. That's the truth and I'm too close to the end to tell you anything but."
The kitchen was dead quiet.
"Why didn't you call him?"
I looked up.
"The boy. He's got a telephone and so do you. It's been a week, and you've been out there splitting wood for six hours a day like a man working off a sentence." Gus tipped his chin at the table. "So call him."
"And say what?"
"Anything. Say it's raining."
"It's not raining."
"Holt Thomas." He waited until I looked at him. "Why didn't you call him?"
I sat there with my hands on my knees in my own kitchen and I could not produce one word. Not a reason. Not an excuse. I opened my mouth to give the old man something and there was nothing in me to give.
He watched me not answer for a while.
"That's what I thought," he said.
Somewhere out in the dark a cow called and another answered her. I sat there staring at my hands, useless on my own knees, and could not get a single word up past whatever was holding the door.
"He came here to use us," I said finally, and it came out rough, the last handhold I had. "That part's real."
"It is. And he was halfway changed out of it by the time he left.
You knew it too, or you wouldn't be sitting there looking like that.
" Gus sat back. The blanket slid down his legs and he let it.
"I'm not telling you he's a good bet. I'm telling you you didn't lose him because he was a bad one.
You lost him because you saw a thing worth keeping and you'd rather break it yourself than risk it breaking you.
And I'm not going to be here a whole lot longer to say it, so I'm saying it the once.
I raised you better than this. Even if I didn't always know how. "
I went outside after. I couldn't be in the house, so I went out into the cold without my coat, the same way I'd gone the night he kissed me in the barn.
I stood in the yard under the whole black sky with the peaks cut out of it.
Chapel and Steeple and Spire. The three I'd stood under my whole life and called home.
And I made myself do the thing I'd been outrunning with a splitting maul for a week. I let it catch up. It was plain as the bill on the table. I'd told myself I sent him off to keep this place from being his advertisement. That was true but underneath was what Gus had just dug up by the roots.
I sent him off because he was going to leave. Somewhere down in the deepest part of me I had decided I'd rather be the man who lost everything clean than the man who got caught hoping.
I had protected myself right out of the only thing in years I hadn't wanted protecting from.
It held. It did exactly what I built it to do. And standing there shaking in the cold I understood that after a lifetime of getting it right I had finally built the wall in the wrong place. The good thing was on the outside and I was alone inside.
I didn't know if it was too late. He was most of a thousand miles gone and I'd handed him his hat with both hands.
But I stood out there until I couldn't feel my fingers, and for the first time since he drove off I wasn't trying to outwork the thing in my chest. I was letting it be there, big and stupid and alive.
Somewhere in the middle of letting it, I caught myself doing a thing I had not done over another person in twenty-five years.
There was a phone number under a rock on my rail and a man in California who wasn't going to call me first, and I stood out there trying to work out how a man asked for either one.