Chapter 14
The truck was a white Ford, twelve years old, with a hundred and sixty thousand miles on it and a dent in the passenger door.
It belonged to a widower in Pardee named Mr. Loftin who had quit driving, and Rae bought it from him on Monday.
He wanted six thousand dollars for it. Rae offered him five, and he took it, and threw in a set of new wiper blades.
She paid him out of her own account at the Pardee bank.
It was the account she had opened in August with her first check from Travis, in the name of Rae Dawson.
Dusty put the spinner knob on the wheel for her in the bunkhouse yard. He did it without being asked, like everything he did. When he was finished he stood back and looked at the truck and said, “She’ll go,” which was the most words in a row Rae had ever heard him say.
She drove it once around the headquarters yard with the whole bunkhouse watching from the porch. Then down the ranch road to the cattle guard and back. Her hand held the knob fine. Her foot knew the pedals. It was the first time she had been behind a wheel since the snake.
When she pulled back into the yard, Chuy was clapping. Beto whistled. Clem lifted his coffee cup.
She sat in the truck with the engine running and both hands on the wheel, and did not get out right away.
* * *
She found the house on Tuesday.
It was on the east edge of Pardee, on a dirt road past the cotton gin.
It was a little white frame house with a green roof and a porch, and a barn out back with three stalls and a small pipe pen.
There were five acres of grass going brown for winter.
It belonged to Pastor Mike’s sister, who had moved to Austin to be near her grandkids.
She rented it to Rae month to month, for less than it was worth, and said she was glad to have somebody who knew what a barn was for.
Rae stood in the empty living room with the keys in her hand. The floors were pine and creaked. The kitchen had a window over the sink that looked out at the barn. There was one bedroom and a bathroom with a claw-foot tub. It smelled like dust and old wallpaper and somebody else’s life.
It was hers. For as long as she wanted it.
She had not had anything that was only hers since she was twenty-eight.
* * *
She told Cole on Wednesday.
She waited for him at Kincaid’s in the evening, in the barn aisle, when he came to feed. She had not waited for him before. He came in with his hat in his hand and saw her standing there by Hondo’s stall. He stopped. She watched him read her face, the way she read a horse.
“I’m moving to town,” she said. “Saturday. I rented Pastor Mike’s sister’s place. Out past the gin.”
He stood still in the aisle.
“I bought a truck,” she said. “I can drive now. I’m going to live by myself for a while.”
“Okay,” he said.
She could see what it cost him to say only that. She could see everything he did not say, stacked up behind his teeth.
“I need you to understand why,” she said.
“It’s not because of anything you did this month.
It’s not to punish you. It’s not because of what I said at the pens.
” She took a breath. “Every day since June, I’ve been on that ranch because I couldn’t leave.
I couldn’t drive. I couldn’t be alone. Everything I’ve felt about you, every time I almost—it’s all been from inside that bunkhouse, three hundred yards from your door.
I don’t know what’s real. I don’t know if I want you, or if I’m just stuck next to you. ”
He nodded slowly.
“I have to be somewhere I could stay forever,” she said. “And then see if I still want to come back. If I come back from the bunkhouse, it’s not a choice. It’s just giving up.”
“I know,” Cole said.
“Do you?”
“Yes.” He looked at her. “I don’t like it. But I know.”
He went and fed the colts. He did not ask her anything else. When he walked out, he stopped at the end of the aisle. He looked back at her. Then he went.
* * *
On Saturday morning everyone had a voice.
She had not expected that. She had expected to load her boxes into the white truck, and drive away, and that would be all. Instead the whole ranch turned out in the bunkhouse yard in the cold bright morning, as if she were the fair.
The hands were carrying boxes. There were not many.
Her clothes and her boots, her father’s saddle, Dub’s hoof knife in its towel, the box fan from the cook’s room.
Clem wrapped the saddle in a moving blanket as carefully as if it were glass.
Chuy kept finding reasons to carry things back and forth that did not need carrying. Beto was quiet, which was not like him.
Cole came down the hill at eight. He was driving the big ranch truck with the Ashby stock trailer hitched behind it.
“The colts,” he said. “At Kincaid’s. You’ll need them hauled to your place. You can’t pull a trailer yet with that hand.”
She looked at him. She had been going to ask Jace.
“Is that all right?” he said.
It was a question. He waited for the answer.
“Yes,” she said. “Thank you.”
Russ drove by at eight-thirty.
He did not get out. He pulled his white pickup up alongside the bunkhouse yard and rolled down the window and looked at the boxes in the back of her truck. Then he looked at his son, standing by the stock trailer.
“Well,” Russ said. “Let her go, son.” He said it loud enough for the whole yard. “It’s the best thing. For everybody. Maybe this family can have some peace.”
Cole did not answer him. He did not even look at him. He looked at Rae.
Russ waited. When no one answered, he rolled up his window and drove on to the barn.
Manny was loading the last box. He set it in the bed of her truck and straightened up slowly, with his hand on his back. He walked over to Cole by the stock trailer. He said something to him, low. Rae was close enough to hear it.
“Say something to her,” Manny said. “Mijo. Tell her not to go.”
Cole looked at Manny a long moment. Then he looked across the yard at Rae.
She knew what he was hearing. His father on one side, telling him to let her go.
Manny on the other, telling him to stop her.
The whole yard watching. And under all of it, his own voice, the one she knew better than any of them.
The one that wanted to fix it. The one that wanted to stand in front of her truck and say don’t, and make it his decision, and make her stay.
He walked across the yard to her. He stopped in front of her, a little way off.
“What do you want?” he said.
The yard was quiet. Clem had stopped with the saddle in his arms.
Rae looked at him. At his sunburned face and his scraped knuckles. The father behind him had told him to let her go. The foreman beside him had told him to stop her. He had not listened to either of them. He had come across the yard and asked her.
“I want to go,” she said.
He nodded once.
“Then I’ll haul the colts,” he said.
* * *
She drove off the ranch alone at nine o’clock.
She went down the ranch road in the white truck with her boxes in the back and her father’s saddle on the seat beside her, wrapped in Clem’s blanket.
The hands stood on the bunkhouse porch and watched her go.
She saw them in the mirror. Chuy lifted his hat.
Beto waved with both arms. Clem stood with his coffee cup and did not move.
She passed the burned ground of the west trap in the distance, black against the yellow grass. She passed the turnoff to the north tank. She did not look.
At the cattle guard she slowed. The big pipe gate stood open. The arch over it had ASHBY cut out of the steel, with the sky showing through the letters. The same way her name showed on the sign at Kincaid’s.
She drove under it and across the cattle guard. The tires rattled on the pipe. Then she was on the county road, and the ranch was behind her.
She had not left the Ashby place on her own since the fourth of June. Five and a half months. She had been driven everywhere. To therapy, to Kincaid’s, to Pardee, to the rodeo. Always in somebody else’s truck, with somebody else’s hands on the wheel.
She rolled down the window. The cold air came in. She put her foot down.
Nobody was driving her anywhere.
* * *
Cole brought the colts at eleven.
He backed the stock trailer up to the little pipe pen behind the white house, one try, perfectly.
He let the ramp down and led Hondo out first, then the sorrel filly.
The colt came down the ramp and stood with his head high, blowing at the new barn and the new grass and the new air.
Then he saw Rae at the fence and nickered at her.
Cole turned them loose in the pen. He checked the water and forked in hay from the bales she had bought at the feed store.
He looked at the barn. He checked the latch on the stall doors and the hinges on the pen gate.
Then he came out and closed the gate. He put the chain through twice, the way she always did.
He loaded the ramp and latched the trailer. He stood by the fender with his hands in his coat pockets.
Rae was standing at the corner of the barn. She did not know what to do with herself. Something was going to happen. She could feel it.
“Can I tell you something?” Cole said. “Before I go. You don’t have to answer. I’ll say it and leave.”
She nodded.
He looked at the ground a moment. Then he looked up at her.
“The four hours,” he said. “You told me yours, at the pens. I’ve never told you mine. Not all of it. Not straight.”
She went still.
“The call came at a quarter after two,” he said.
“I put my hand over the phone, and she told me what to do, and I said all right. I called Manny. It took a minute. Then I put the phone face down on the table and went back to the meeting. I stayed forty minutes. At five to three the men from Houston shook my hand, and I walked out. I called the hospital from the car. I didn’t call you. ”
Rae did not move.