Thomas Mcguane - Gallatin Canyon

This one was here for vengeance. “She ever get out to see you?”

“Just on weekends.”

“But that’s tomorrow.”

“The horse sees more of her than I do.”

“Could be, now you got a hired man, there’ll be more time for the two of you to visit.”

“I’m available!”

It seemed like he spent half of Saturday, the set on mute, listening to her gallop up and down the place, wondering when she’d get the curiosity to come over and say howdy. Poor old Orval was doing the vigil thing in his rocker, Saturday beer in hand, but Neville could tell he wasn’t getting much in the way of contact either — on a day made for family, a light breeze in the cottonwoods, the Cheyenne sleeping it off up the road, and the rare lowing of distant cattle. Springtime!

She knocked on the door.

Neville had a loose, gangly act ready for this, head tipped to one side, wire lightly wrapped around his left hand as he turned to let her in. Blue light from the silent television jerked around a room that smelled like concrete and once stored an ocean of purest milk. Dulcie wore jeans and tennis shoes, a snap-button Western shirt with the sleeves cut off. She had on sunglasses. He liked her firm arms, the lariats and roses that decorated the pink shirt. She gazed at him and, crossing her arms behind her back, leaned against the door she’d just closed. She raised her forefinger to slide the sunglasses down enough to look over their top.

“I know who you are,” she said.

“That’s more than I can say!” Neville called out.

“May I turn that thing off?”

“No!”

“Well, I am. I’m turning it off.”

Dulcie went past him and bent over the set, reaching for the controls. Neville had the wire on her in nothing flat, called her a lowdown escort service. Though there was a spell of tumult— more like a rerun than anything new — it was the moment when movement stopped that finally produced surprise, and Neville was swept by desire at last. Everything in his life had led to this ravishing stillness. He knew who to dedicate this one to.

Orval went on sitting in his rocker, stubbing out his cigarettes in a tomato juice can. Sooner or later, Dulcie would have to put the horse up and come have a few words with him. At the same time, his new hired man wandered down the darkening road away from the little ranch, away from the Cheyenne and their old cars, weeping at the innocence now beyond his grasp, never to be a virgin again. It was great to feel something so strongly. He hoped to weep forever. If only his father could have been there to see him with tears streaming down his face. It would have been a beginning, something good. He could just hear his voice.

“Well, son, I’ll be damned. You feel pretty strongly about this, don’t you?”

We always went back to my mother’s hometown when someone was about to die. We missed Uncle Kevin because the doctors misdiagnosed his ruptured appendix, owing to referred pain in his shoulder. Septicemia killed him before they sorted it out with a victorious air we never forgave. The liverless baby was well before our time — it would have been older than my mother had it lived — but my grandfather’s departure arrived ideally for scheduling purposes in the late stages of diabetes; we drove instead of taking the train and en route were able to stay over for an extra day at the Algonquin Inn in western New York, taking advantage of Wienerschnitzel Night, and still make it in time for the various obsequies while reducing prolonged visits by priests. (My father was an agnostic and fought sponging clergy with vigor, remarking that he had “fronted his last snockered prelate” and adding, “Amazing how often it’s Crown Royal.”)

Before I relate the death of my grandmother, I have to summarize that of my grandfather, because that was where I acquired my short-lived reputation as a worker of household wonders. Ever since I have had great sympathy for those identified as seers or healers; my heart even goes out to those merely called lucky. Like someone drifting lazily down the Niagara River, the big fall is just a matter of time.

My grandfather, though a diabetic, went on occasional sweet binges, cherry pies at Al Mack’s diner, and he injected himself with insulin daily, to our agog fascination. He held in reserve giant sugar-filled jawbreakers in his pocket, and when I was too pressingly talkative a single one of those hunks would keep me silent for almost three hours. He was a quiet man, a volunteer fireman who played checkers in the open-fronted firehouse down whose brass pole I was sometimes allowed to slide. In his youth he had read in a newspaper that “Many people persist in making the cemetery a place of recreation, generally a foreign element prompted by ignorance,” and thereafter he was a tireless promoter of public parks.

On the Fourth of July, while most of the family was at the parade on North Main Street and after a midday meal of quahog chowder, swordfish, beet greens, and corn, he lay down on his big brown favorite couch and died. He’d never taken up more room than he needed, and in an essentially matriarchal household his death was mostly seen as foreshadowing my grandmother’s, though it was widely celebrated among “the foreign element.” This was not long after little boys were given dresses to wear, and my mother and aunts sent me off dressed as a hula girl for the Fourth of July parade, a debacle that ended in my breaking a white plastic ukulele with its Arthur Godfrey “automatic” chord changer during one of many clashes with Azorean native Joao Furtado — later known as Meatball — who called me, with sensible directness, “little girl.” When I got home from the parade, my grandfather was dead. I studied the adults for clues. They were studying my grandmother for clues. She took to her bed. Three days later, she was still there.

Her absence brought the household to a standstill. My mother and aunts seemed entirely helpless without her ordering them around. She did not even seem to acknowledge them when they visited her room, and a meeting was called where it was decided to send me in. Her idealization of children was counted upon to bring her around before the house and its contents sank into the earth, an eventuality I could imagine to include the opaque projector in the attic with its pictures of long-dead baseball players, the cabinet full of Belleek china in the priest parlor, all the wildly squeaky beds and creaking stairs, the bookless “library” reeking of cigars, and even the souvenir Hitler Youth knife my uncle Paul had given me. As it happened I was the only child available for idealizing, standing around with my mouth open. And so I headed to my grandmother’s bedroom, which was on the second floor, and there I acquired my reputation as a performer of miracles, setting myself up for a fall whose effects would never end. (When my father learned of my success, he began calling me Miracle Boy, later M.B.)

I let myself in without knocking, closing the door behind me. From her bed my grandmother followed me with her eyes. I started to say something in greeting but the impulse died, and instead I looked around for a place to sit. The ornate brass bed was to the right as I entered; to the left was a vanity with its silver brush and mirror carefully arranged. At the far end of the room was a door to a small porch over Brownell Street, access to which we were all denied, as it sagged dangerously with dry rot. I took the chair from in front of the dresser, pulled it up beside my grandmother’s bed, and sat down. I was perfectly comfortable. My grandmother had turned her head on the pillow to look directly at me, upon me, and I could tell that my presence was welcome. After a while, several formulaic remarks on the death of my grandfather passed through my mind, since even then I was capable of a modicum of glibness in the little-old-man style encouraged by my aunts. But those thoughts vanished and I gazed at my grandmother’s long hair, gathered around her face in silver braids. My mind wandered again, and then I spoke.