Love and Country Read online

  He retrieved his schoolbooks and walked out to the blacktop, to the place where his mother had promised to pick him up after work, and looked down the empty road toward town. His mother was late. He wished she’d never made them move here. She was only a secretary. She could have been a secretary in Mountain Home. Where was she? He couldn’t remember his mother ever being late.

  He wished he’d ridden the damn bronc, just to show her. He swore to himself that he would never promise her anything again. He cursed through his teeth and threw his books down on the road. He drew back his foot and kicked one of the thick, gray-covered books so hard it cracked in the spine and scraped, the pages fluttering and flapping white, across the asphalt.

  His anger fell away, like the sudden dropping of a trapdoor in his guts. The men had tricked him, and he had hurt his mother. The way the men had talked about her felt to him dark and dirty. For the first time in his life, he saw his mother as someone, like him, who could be hurt or scared. He felt cold, and a dark space seemed to loom just outside his field of vision.

  Pages from the broken book had scattered up and down the road, white and luminescent in the dusk. He went after them, scraping his knuckles on the asphalt, and tried to fit them back together, but the covers wouldn’t close. The book seemed swollen with too many pages. He clamped it under his arm with the rest of his books and started walking down the road toward town.

  Bands of smoky clouds pushed over the peaks in the west, and a glow from behind the mountains, from beyond the round curve of the earth, washed the valley blue. The air itself was blue, the color of a shadow in a snowdrift, and it smelled like ice and wood smoke.

  When a loud heckling call, like the barking of small dogs, broke out somewhere above him, Kenny stopped and looked up. At first he saw nothing. Then, low over the river, he saw a ragged line of Canada geese, their long necks stretched out toward the south, their set-back wings pushing them through the air. In the near darkness, Kenny shivered. He wondered where the geese went at night. He was suddenly afraid of the geese, not that he might be like them, but that he might be them. That his skin was not strong enough to keep him separate.

  He shook the feeling off and began to walk again, searching in the distance for the headlights of his mother’s car.

  2

  The county courthouse stood on Main Street behind a lawn burned dry by drought and frost. Two spindly, ancient spruce trees flanked the door, mineral blue against the faded brick. Inside, heavy woodwork had darkened with age, and by late morning the rooms filled with a high golden light and the pinching smell of varnish heating in the sun.

  In the recorder’s office, Lenna Swanson bowed her head over a battered desk, inking numbers into a ledger bound in rusty-red cloth. She glanced up and saw a man blocking the dusty tunnel of sunlight in the doorway. He appeared to be near seventy, but he could have been much younger. He wore a fleece-lined denim jacket and work jeans buffed across the knees with powdered clay. As he crossed to the counter he lifted off a stiff, straw hat.

  Lenna scraped her chair back, rose, and approached the counter. “Can I help you?”

  “You can’t,” he said, “you better hunt for different work.”

  His eyes flashed blue, and Lenna stepped back. She suspected he was teasing, but she wasn’t sure. Bareheaded, he looked ashen and unfinished. His forehead was divided by a straight hat line, white above and red below, but his cheeks had faded to the gray that comes from age and too much sun. He stood at the counter curling the brim of the hat in both hands. The hat was sweat-stained around the band, the color of blackened, moldy hay, and when he set it on the counter, Lenna heard it rock, like a penny spinning to a stop. Beside the hat he placed a small, square leather wallet.

  “How are you this morning?” she said.

  “Oh, I get around. I take nourishment if I can find it.” He leveled his eyes at her, and she noticed the blue had faded milky at the edges. She raised an eyebrow, ready to take more teasing. But the skin around his eyes wrinkled, and he gave her a grin so unexpected that she felt herself smile back and nearly laugh, as if the room had filled with lighter air.

  “Came here to pay my taxes,” he said.

  “You have your notice?”

  “Wish I didn’t,” he said. He thumbed through the folded papers in his wallet, as if they were greasy-soft, familiar playing cards.

  Lenna took the notice from his hand, straightened the folds, and read his name. “Mr. Dustin?”

  “That’s one of the things they call me,” he said.

  Lenna smiled and asked him to wait just a minute. She carried the notice back through the long, high-ceilinged office, where two older women worked in a maze of metal filing cabinets. Below the tall windows and darkening honey-colored woodwork, six worn velvet ledgers were ranged along a shelf, collecting dust. She lifted the first one open and found his name, smoothing the printed notice flat on the page to check it against handwritten figures. She was tempted to read down the columns below his name, Earl Dustin. To see how many years he had been paying taxes, how large a place he ranched. But out of some kind of shyness, she didn’t allow herself to look.

  In a town so small, she’d thought she would know nearly everyone by now, but she didn’t. People in this high valley joked with her and seemed easy, but there was a point of demarcation, a place where each one turned back to his own. Though she knew they kept it secret, maybe even from themselves, the other two women resented an outsider taking the courthouse job. They wouldn’t hinder her, but they hoped that by some chance or accident she wouldn’t make it through her trial months. They had been murmuring all morning about a funeral, a service for a toddler. Lenna knew the woman whose baby had been run over, knew her by sight. But she hadn’t been expected to go.

  She walked back to the counter, laid the notice flat, and slid it across to Mr. Dustin. He lifted the paper to the light, reading slowly, as if he’d never seen the document before. His broad fingernails were opaque and yellowing, like chicken fat. Lenna wanted to say something to him, to engage him in some easy conversation. But nothing came to her, and he was silent, concentrating on his business.

  He slipped the notice in his wallet, licked his thumb, and drew out brand-new hundred-dollar bills. He creased them into a boat with two fingers and set them on the counter.

  He unnerved her, studying her hands as she made change from the cash box, but he took no notice while she counted his change back into his palm. He folded the bills and tucked them under the flap of his shirt pocket. Finally he lifted his hat with a palm curved over the crown, nodded at her, and turned to go. Lenna watched him walk away, his back rigid and slightly bent. Like so many ranchers, he walked as if his bones had ached for so long he never thought to mention it.

  At her desk, she fanned a thick stack of receipts and let it drop with a galloping sound on her desk before she tapped the edges flush against her palm. She had to sort the month’s receipts, but she went on thinking about the rancher. In spite of his age, something about him drew her. The fleece inside his jacket was worn flat, like a drab, overwashed stuffed animal. But someone had laundered his shirt and pressed it with an iron so hot the fabric shone like roofing tin. Lenna thought of his narrow build, how his shirt tucked straight into his belt. An engraved brass oval lay flush with his jeans. She felt a longing, a desire in the body she hadn’t felt since her divorce. She blushed, a tingling heat traveling up the back of her neck, resting at her throat. She looked up sharply, as if someone might have seen her. But the room was still. She forced her thoughts back to the papers on her desk.

  The women in the office talked in low voices about the funeral they had gone to earlier in the day. The burial of a toddler. Rich Lattimore had run over his own baby. He’d left the house to make a quick trip to the store, thinking the kids were inside with his wife. But the toddler had followed him out, and over the long bed of his truck he couldn’t see the little girl.

  When the sheriff had first announced the news, Lenna found
herself crying. The tragedy hurt her, like a deep bruise to the bone. She thought of Kenny as a toddler. A serious boy, he had stopped and stared in wonder at ordinary things, a pencil sharpener, a baby in a carriage on the street. “Mom,” he’d say, pronouncing each word distinctly, “the baby’s sleeping.” As if he weren’t still a baby himself.

  But the next day, her sense of the tragedy dulled. She was ashamed of the numbness she felt, and more ashamed of the anger that replaced it. She had been raised by her grandparents in a small farming town, and like her neighbors there, these people had too many accidents. They were always being crushed by tractors or turning over pickups on the highway. She wasn’t being fair, she knew, but now it made her sick to think about the Lattimore baby. She shut out the talk in the office to concentrate on sorting receipts. After a time, she lost herself in the quiet and the rhythm of the work. She was proud to have her job.

  When she raised her head again, another man stood in the doorway. A dark, unshaven man with glossy hair slicked back in short, wet quills. He wore an orange hunting vest, heavy with ammunition. He cleared his throat, and the other two women looked up from their desks.

  “Lenora?” he said, his voice echoing in the room.

  Lenna pushed back her chair, the sound scraping loud across the wooden floor, and the other women turned to stare. She could feel hot color rising again along her throat and flushing her cheek.

  She was so ashamed that she lifted her purse from the floor and stood with no explanation. Hardly breathing, she walked to the coatrack and tugged a navy wool coat from its hanger. The empty metal hangers clattered and rang. She took the time to slide her coat on before she walked past her ex-husband out the door.

  She walked quickly down the hall, past the long glass case of pioneer relics she looked at every day—cracked plates with dark blue Chinese trees and bridges bleeding into white porcelain; ornate, dusty flowers woven out of human hair—through the door, and down the short, wide set of steps.

  When she reached the curb, she stopped. A sharp wind funneled between the storefronts on Main Street, and the skin on the back of her arms pulled taut and crept with gooseflesh, as if she hadn’t worn a coat at all. She turned her back to the wind, to the courthouse, and waited. She heard the sound of Kenneth Swanson’s heavy boots behind her.

  “Hold on,” he said.

  Lenna pressed her lips together, her whole body going rigid.

  “Came to take Kenny hunting.” Ken’s voice was deep and casual.

  “No,” she said and turned around to face him. He blinked in surprise. Then his face closed against her. His eyes went hard, the eyelids wide and unmoving. A knot pumped in the muscle below his cheekbone.

  “Why not?”

  “Because . . .” she started to say, but at that moment, the sheriff and deputy jogged down the steps of the courthouse. They stared at Lenna, then suspiciously at Ken, but they went on across the street.

  “However you got here,” she said, “turn around and go back.”

  “I have a right to see Kenny,” he said.

  “Every two years?” The words burst out, and her eyes felt warm with tears.

  Ken spread his feet on the sidewalk, centered his weight, and gave her a look she hated. He looked at her the way he would at someone he suspected had had too much to drink.

  “Quit that,” she said. She shook her head to clear it. But she didn’t know what to do next. She glanced at the buildings up and down the street. She saw the squat fire station, the brick insurance office. On both sides of the street, muddy cars angled into the curb.

  “Come on,” Ken said. “I have a ride.” He walked down the line of cars to a rusted-out green pickup. The passenger door had been patched with smooth gray putty and pink primer. He stepped on the running board, stretched both arms over the roof of the cab, and waited. In the back of the truck, two mud-encrusted brown horses hunched under heavy saddles. They hung their heads over the bars of a peeling red metal stock rack, their eyes squeezed shut. Under their noses, Ken slapped his palm down on the roof of the truck. He began to drum out a flat, hollow rhythm, as if he were bored. At the first slap, the horses jerked back, but they lowered their heavy heads again.

  Lenna looked once more up the street before she approached the truck. When she pressed her thumb into the stiff chrome door latch, Ken lowered himself behind the wheel. She climbed onto the seat, the hem of her coat snagging on the muddy edge of the door. She jerked it loose and sat staring straight ahead, where the wipers had smeared a milky fan of mud and yellow bugs across the windshield. Ken Swanson started the engine and backed the truck in one swift motion. Gasoline sloshed in both tanks, and the horses lurched and shifted, rocking the whole truck from side to side like a half-swamped fishing boat. Lenna braced her hand against the dash.

  Ken straightened the wheel, and the truck lumbered forward. The dusty saddle blankets on the seats smelled of hay chaff and horses. In an instant, they brought back to Lenna the smell of a room shared with a man. Not the sharp smell of sweat, but a more private one. The smell of skin that rose from his shirt collars before she dropped them in the wash.

  “Where to?” Ken said.

  3

  On the same day, Cynthia Dustin cinched her bathrobe tight and sat down, the plastic cover on the kitchen chair crinkling underneath her. Across the room, her mother was wrapping a baked chicken to drop off at the Lattimores before the funeral, and the smell of roasted fat in the air made it seem like Sunday afternoon. Her mother swept a long sheet of foil from the roll, sheared it off, and crimped it over the pan. Under her apron, she wore a nubby dark blue dress, the limp hem riding higher in the back than the front. Rust-dark stockings squeezed the plumpness behind her knees.

  Cynthia felt restless, as if she were coming down with something. In the dry fall air, her skin had pulled tight and her eyes seemed to ache behind the sockets. “I’m not going,” she said.

  Her mother turned, wiping her hands on a towel. Her hair, swept up and lacquered, gleamed with a dull film, like tarnished silver, but her face was round and smooth. “Let’s not have any words,” she said. “Go on upstairs and get dressed. Earl will be in pretty quick now.”

  As if Cynthia had called him up, they heard his footsteps in the mud room. In a minute he’d have his boots and coveralls off. The muscles in her neck tightened.

  “Cynthia,” her mother said, “don’t torment your father. Go on upstairs.” She glanced at the door.

  “I don’t feel good,” Cynthia said, just as her father appeared, slamming the hollow door shut. He tested the knob and slammed it again before he turned to Cynthia.

  “You don’t feel good,” he said. He wasn’t asking, only repeating what he’d overheard.

  “No.”

  The air seemed to thin in the room, but Cynthia met her father’s look. His wavy hair, flattened by years of wearing hats, had gone completely gray, and he looked tired.

  “Go on and dress,” he said. “It’s not a party. You’re not supposed to feel good.”

  He moved off toward the stairs, shuffling a little in his thick socks. She waited until she heard him in the bathroom before she climbed the stairs.

  After they delivered the foil-wrapped chicken, they joined the crowd at the cemetery, Cynthia standing halfway back, between her parents. The sunlight hurt her eyes. She let them rest, unfocused, on the dark shoulders of the suits in front of her. The suits were dull and chalky, as if dust and dandruff had recently been brushed away. She glanced around. Most of the men had raw new haircuts showing crescents of pink skin above their ears. The women wore winter coats, their hair protected by thin scarves.

  The families had walked up the hill between the polished gravestones and, as if they were in church, left an aisle down to the parking lot. They stood without speaking, facing the new grave and the arc of white folding chairs set up behind it.

  Across the aisle, Cynthia saw her science teacher and remembered a dance that night. She’d promised to bring music. Mr.
Everts turned as if he’d felt her looking at him, and mouthed a “don’t forget” at her. She nodded and he turned away.

  She looked at the flagpole at the crest of the hill. There was no flag, but the ropes and hardware chinked from time to time against the metal pole. Beyond, the mountains spread sideways in overlapping curves, dark with swaths of dull black evergreens. The growth of trees had the shaggy moth-eaten look of the hides of buffalo. But the clefts in the canyons overflowed with luminous gold and yellow aspen trees.

  All together the crowd turned sideways, as if they’d heard a swell of music and hoped to catch sight of the bride. In the parking lot below, two deacons opened the rear door of the hearse and lifted out a folded chrome table, springing it upright with the metallic slide and click of raising up an ironing board. They placed the small white coffin in the center and wheeled it to the curb.

  On the grass, Rich Lattimore and his brother grasped the handles on each side of the coffin and started up the hill. Rich looked straight ahead, his chest caved in as if he might cry, the skin around his mouth pulled tight. As they walked past her, their heads bowed low and their fingers blanching white around the knuckles, Cynthia looked down at their shoes disappearing in the short green grass. The shoes were blunt and black and very shiny.

  Her own shoes were black. Black pumps she never wore except to church. The sharp heels kept punching into the grass and tilting her off balance. She looked up again toward the flagpole.

  In the fall she liked to glance up at the cemetery when she drove past, a green patch against the fields of barley stubble. After hunting season, elk sometimes drifted down from the mountains to paw through the snow to the clipped grass. She’d seen them in the early winter standing among the headstones, as still and dignified as lawn ornaments.

  When the minister began to speak, she bowed her head, but she didn’t close her eyes. Her father gave her a grim “That’s what I’d expect” look. If he had his eyes closed, she thought, he wouldn’t have noticed me. When she closed her eyes, she felt surrounded by his aftershave, the packed-away smell of his suit.