Chapter 25
Holt
Three weeks later, the ranch didn't look any different and underneath it everything was.
Nobody had ever told me that about getting saved.
The fences still sagged where they'd always sagged.
The loader still needed coaxing in the cold.
We still got up in the dark, and we'd still get up in the dark when we were old men, because the cattle didn't care whose name was on the note.
But the note had a name on it that wasn't the bank's first claim anymore.
It had five years of room in it, and a man could do a lot of living in the space between drowning and a five-year window.
We came out of it alive, not comfortable.
The association bought Gus's herd off him and that money paid the hospital. The cattle never left the place, because they turned around and hired us to keep running them on our own grass. It was a decent thing to do for a neighbor and a thin way to make a living.
The note got five years on it and four other names besides mine. That was time, not victory.
We had five years to prove we could pay our own way, and some mornings the size of that still sat on my chest like a horse had laid down on it.
But it was a problem I could work with. That was the difference. It used to be a thing I could only lose to. But it weighed a good deal less when I wasn't the only one carrying it.
I wasn't by myself.
That was the part I was still learning the feel of. I'd catch myself bracing for a bill that wasn't coming.
Morgan had been on a set in California for two weeks and back for the other, on a break in the schedule they'd given him because a location fell through. I'd spent every one of those days trying not to count them.
He was up before me half the time now, which I would not have believed in April.
He was a fair hand and getting better. Still soft in the places a lifetime indoors makes a man soft, still apt to name a calf something stupid and get attached.
But he showed up and he didn't quit, doing the ugly jobs without being asked.
He'd pulled his first calf alone that week. It was two in the morning, in the cold, by himself. He came up to the house after with blood to his elbows and his face lit like a boy's and shook me awake to tell me every second of it. I'd never been so glad to be hauled up out of sleep in my life.
The boys had quit treating him like a guest and started treating him like a hand, which meant they rode him without mercy. Flynn called him Hollywood in a tone that had started out as a knife and had worn down into something closer to a brother's.
I watched Dez teach him to weld a gate latch one afternoon, the two of them with their heads together over the sparks, and I had to go around the side of the barn for a minute to breathe.
He'd moved what he had into the house, which turned out to be next to nothing. A man who owned a glass house over a whole city kept a couple of duffel bags at my place. The duffels held work clothes he'd bought off the rack at the Merritt co-op, a razor, and a phone charger.
He'd hung two shirts in my closet next to mine. He'd done it slow, and squared them up after, and then stood there a second looking at them.
I'd braced some for him to miss the other life, the size of what he'd stepped back from. I watched for it the same as I'd watch a fence I wasn't sure would hold.
The only time the old life ever crossed his face was relief.
We shipped cattle that week, loaded them out at first light in a cold that still had teeth. It was a good morning's work, all of us moving easy around each other the way a crew does when it's worked together long enough to quit talking. Morgan ran the gate and did it well.
When the last trailer pulled out, the dust settled, and the pens went quiet, he came and stood beside me at the rail, our shoulders touching, both of us watching the road.
I reached over without thinking about it and put my hand on the small of his back, in the open, in the yard, with Lane and Flynn ten feet off coiling rope.
Nobody said a word. Lane didn't even look up. Flynn asked if we were going to stand there all morning or get the gate shut, so we shut the gate.
Lane came past me after with a coil of rope over his shoulder and stopped.
"He staying?"
"He's coming back."
Lane thought about that a while. Lane thought about everything a while.
"That's better," he said, and went on to the tack room.
I didn't know what to do with that and I've never asked him what he meant by it. I have my ideas.
Gus watched it all from the porch. He spent his days on the porch now, in the good chair we'd moved out for him.
"Saw that," he said, not opening his eyes. "Out at the rail."
"Figured you did."
"Took you long enough." He cracked one eye at me, and there was the old devil in it, fainter than it used to be but not gone. "Your grandmother would've liked him. The mouth on him. She liked a man who couldn't shut up. Married one, didn't she."
He'd never once mentioned my grandmother, who died before I came to him. I knew better than to make a thing of it, so I lowered myself down onto the top step beside his chair and let him talk if he wanted to.
He wanted to.
"I'm going to tell you something and then I'm going to take my nap and I don't want it discussed.
I figured I'd done you wrong. All these years.
Taking in a hurt kid and raising him hard and close and never once teaching him how to need anybody, because I didn't know how myself, and I watched you grow up into exactly the kind of alone I am, and I thought, there's my sin. I made another one of me."
He reached over and got my shoulder, the grip weaker now but the meaning the same.
"And then I got to lie in a hospital bed and watch a whole valley come stand in our yard for you.
And watch you let them. And watch you go down that drive after that fool boy in front of everybody.
" His hand patted twice and dropped. "So maybe I didn't ruin you after all. Maybe I just slowed you down some."
"Gus."
"That's all. A man likes to know before he goes that he didn't ruin the thing he loved most. Now let me sleep."
He shut his eyes. Then, without opening them, "When's Emma home?"
"End of the month."
"Get her home."
"I'll get her home."
That was the second thing he asked me for in one afternoon, after twenty-five years of never asking me for a thing. I sat on that step a long while after his breathing went slow and even.
Emma was Gus's, the way we were all Gus's.
Her mother came up his road twenty years back the same as I had and couldn't stay.
She left the girl, and the five of us raised her between us with Gus at the head of it telling everybody they were doing it wrong.
She was nineteen now and down at the college in Gunnison, first of any of us to go.
She called the house every Sunday and talked for an hour to whoever picked up.
He wanted her home. He'd started saying it out loud, which he never used to do about anything. That was a thing for later. And I found, sitting there in the sun, that I had room for a later.
That was the strangest gift in the whole pile of them. I had room.
***
On Morgan's last night we ate at the long table, the whole crew, Gus at the head of it where he'd sat my entire life, and there was more chair than there used to be.
Lane cooked. Morgan told some ridiculous story about a director and a horse with both hands going and had the boys roaring, even Flynn.
I sat at the foot with my plate going cold because I'd rather watch it than eat.
Morgan caught me not eating. He bumped his knee against mine under the table and gave me a look, half a question. I bumped him back and didn't answer it.
Then he landed the end of it and the whole table lost it, Gus loudest of all, his laugh gone thin but his eyes streaming. Dez pounded the boards and Flynn shook his head at his plate trying not to give them the satisfaction and losing.
I stole the last roll off Lane's plate just to start a fight I didn't need and got my hand slapped for it. I sat there in the middle of the warm racket of them and let it close over my head like water.
***
He left in the morning.
There was no fuss about it. He was up at four with me and did the feeding then got a shower and put his clothes back in the duffel bag.
"Don't let them make you ridiculous out there," Gus said.
"Too late."
"Don't let them make you more ridiculous."
Flynn shook his hand and said something into his ear that made Morgan laugh so hard he had to put a hand on the truck. I never found out what it was and Flynn would never tell me.
Dez hugged him hard enough to lift him off the floor.
Lane didn't say anything. He put a paper sack behind my seat while nobody was watching, and we found it somewhere past Kremmling. There were sandwiches in it and four of the good cookies.
Morgan's truck stayed in the yard where he'd parked it. Nobody discussed that. He left it sitting there and I drove him to Denver, which was three hours down and three hours back and a whole day of work I did not do. Flynn told me to go and wouldn't let me argue.
We didn't talk much on the way. He put his hand on my thigh at one point coming down out of the mountains and left it there most of the way. I drove one-handed, covering his fingers with mine.
Then we were at the curb with doors opening and people wheeling bags around us.
"Nine weeks," he said.
"Nine weeks."
"I'll call you. I'm going to call you a lot. You're going to get sick of it and I'm going to keep doing it."
"All right."
"And you're coming out. There's a weekend in July with nothing in it and I already looked at flights."
"I've got cattle."
"You've got four brothers and a valley full of people who like helping."
I didn't have an argument for that, which he took for a yes and moved on.
"Say it before you go quiet on me."
"I love you."
"I know it." He got his bag off the seat. "Say it again in nine weeks."
He was going to make it easy on me. I could see him deciding not to push me, instead getting ready to squeeze my arm and go. So I got a fistful of his jacket and pulled him in, kissing him at the departures curb at Denver International Airport with a man in a vest telling us to move the vehicle.
He made a small surprised noise into my mouth that I intended to remember for the rest of my life.
"Well," he said, when I let him go. Then, with his forehead against mine and his hand still on my jaw, "I love you. I'm going to keep saying it until you get used to hearing it."
"Go on. You'll miss it."
"I will. For sure. "
He grinned, then he went in through the doors and I lost him in the people.
I drove the three hours back up into the valley in the quiet cab, still able to smell him as if he was sitting next to me. It was its own kind of torture. I got in at dark and fed the bulls.
The house was too big that night and I noticed it, which was new. It had been too big for twenty-five years but I'd never once noticed before.
He called at eleven, which was ten out there, from a trailer with somebody hollering in the background.
"Are you asleep?"
"I was."
"I figured but I wanted to call anyway." A door shut on his end and the hollering stopped. "I don't have anything to tell you. I want that on the record. I just wanted to hear the house."
So, I held the phone out toward the kitchen for a while, and what he got was the refrigerator, a cow saying something to another cow way out in the dark, and the wind coming around the corner of a house that had never once been tight.
"Okay," he said, when I put it back to my ear. "Okay. Go to sleep."
"Morgan?"
"Yeah?"
"I miss you." I had never once said that to a living soul, and it came out of me like a post out of spring mud, all at once and dirty. "That's all."
He was quiet a second.
"Love you, Holt. I miss you too and I'm going to keep saying both of those things." His voice had gone rough on it.
He called Thursday. And the night after that, and the one after that. I quit counting somewhere in the second week because I stopped needing to.
He'd left one of his shirts hanging in my closet next to mine too. I left it there, knowing he'd be coming back for it.