Thomas Mcguane - Gallatin Canyon

“He’s packing his bag.” She began to race through her pie. At the last mouthful, she grabbed my hand and stood me up. “We’d better see him off, or we’ll never hear the end of it.”

It was a moonless night, and the three of us gazed into the trunk of the sedan. My father slung his leather bag in and gave the Evinrude a comradely wiggle, looked at us, and smiled at the shabby building behind. “Goodbye,” he said.

I thought my mother really had no chance to absorb the death of her own mother as long as my father was around. His general disapproval of her family and the ongoing need to argue about it must have drawn a veil over her feelings. I noticed too that though she had fallen nearly silent after my father’s departure, she was also more efficient now in getting things done around the house, cooking and cleaning. She went to Mass every day, St. Joseph’s, a short walk, and she usually brought me some little treat on the way home. She even had a carpenter come in to see to the sagging second-floor porch. Whatever tension was brewing between her and my aunt Constance must have come to a head, because Constance stormed out on her familiar slogan—“This is the thanks I get!”—and was not seen again before we left for home. Silence was not my mother’s strong suit, but we spent a nearly wordless day where the Westport River opened onto the sea, wading in the salt mud for quahogs. “This is what I loved best when I was a girl” was nearly all she said. The clouds on the horizon made a band of light on the deep green Atlantic, and the breakers that lifted and fell with such gravity might have drowned our conversation, if there had been any. We must not have felt the need.

Homer Newland, a partner and franchise specialist at a Boston law firm, had had a distinguished career and a very long one before retiring at seventy-five, when he was certainly still useful but had become more aware of the frequent need, when meeting new clients, of demonstrating that he still had all his marbles. So he indulged a lifelong dream and returned to live in the West, where he’d grown up but which in his long absence had made the place of his nativity hard to grasp.

For decades he had nursed his dream of going home, but when he moved back his dismay was all-consuming; Montana seemed like a place he had once read about in a dentist’s office, and his daughter who lived there felt the pressure of his impending return. It reminded him of his early days in Boston, when he was always the only person anyone had met named Homer, and the name seemed to suggest risible rural origins. His internist, originally from Wisconsin, was named Elmer, and that seemed to help. Homer was a widower, after enjoying marriage for forty years to CeeCee, a pleasant alcoholic from Point Judith, Rhode Island. Their vacations were spent not in Montana, as he would have liked, but on the island madhouse of Nantucket, which he detested, as he did all seaside places. Too well-bred to cause the fuss that might have led to intervention, Homer’s wife had boozed her way right off the planet and was buried among kin in the Point Judith churchyard, and Homer was back home in Montana, not quite comfortable and blaming a scholarship to Harvard Law for turning his life upside down. His now-waning grief at CeeCee’s death had been marked from the beginning by ambivalence; it was possible that either she or both of them were better off now that she was gone.

Twenty years ago, Homer sent their only child, Cecile, to a dude ranch, hoping to find a kindred spirit in his Montana romance, and it worked. Cecile met a local football star and settled down to raise two children, very much a local, soon treating her own father with that ambiguous humor reserved for out-ofstaters. His grandchildren were precocious, in his opinion, and a bit crude, also his opinion. Cecile and her husband, Dean, were fairly crude themselves, always fighting and frequently separated. Homer had to make an effort to keep from finding everything somewhat crude in his old home place. Nevertheless, this further motivated him to retire there instead of visiting as he had been doing. He bought a nice place outside town with a view of the Absarokas, a long driveway, and a deep hundred-gallon-a-minute well. In his pleasantly interfering way, Homer could be quite forceful, causing more than a few unpleasant moments in his daughter’s household, an ill-run enterprise at the best of times. He was determined to find his solace in nature but not having much luck at it.

The new quarters became in just a few years quite lonely. But Boston was long behind him and he didn’t know what to do with himself. Nor could he account for the decades spent in Boston leaving so little trace. He couldn’t go back there, he didn’t have a wife, and he read himself into a hole. He brought himself excruciatingly up to speed on national and world affairs. In two years he would be eighty, and of all things he’d have liked a fresh start. He was remarkably fit for his years; maybe that was the problem. Considering his prospects without the alibi of decrepitude kept him on edge. He snapped at the propane man, not out of the blue — the lout had backed his big truck over a lilac — but a loss of composure uncharacteristic of Homer. He had generally been solicitous, especially of tradespeople on whom he’d come to rely, and of the key gossips around the post office. Next, he quit greeting the UPS man and just let him leave things on the porch. He felt that some birds were bullying others at the feeder and started to fret about stepping in, before recognizing that this might just be some geriatric absurdity. He had enough money to keep managed care at bay, and he was determined never to need it.

On his not infrequent trips back to the city, he felt the extraordinary energy that seemed to emanate from the streets — staying only in hotels with thriving, even booming, lobbies — and on returning home he’d feel dissatisfied with land where all life seemed to have belonged to absent Indians and the blank faces of the neighbors. Believing that the great beauty of the place would have a possibly sweeping impact on an out-of-towner, he began to think of inviting a lady friend for a visit, a benign calculation that enlivened him considerably. At his age, a smorgasbord of widows lay before him. Surprisingly hale, several had undergone a kind of spiritual tune-up with the departure of their husbands and had become wonderful, even creative, company. There were a few with whom he’d had flings as much as forty years before.

Madeleine Hall was particularly vivid in his memory. He might have been in love with that one. Well, he was and God knows he acted it out. Homer felt that, blessed by longevity, he could be in a position to take advantage of this sentiment, and he elaborated upon the idea without losing sight of the fact that it was really about avoiding loneliness. He dismissed any notion of answering isolation with some fellow sufferer, since the thought of a woman who was herself lonely put him off: needy females had repelled him even in his youth, when neediness was more in style. He married CeeCee for her toughness, but then the drink got her. His greatest disappointment at his wife’s dipsomania had been the decline of her contentiousness as she grew supine and content in addiction. And so he began to stray a bit, his handful of city flings thrilling him with their conflicts and rage. Married in Montana, Cecile had lost all contact with her mother and was strangely unsympathetic to her plight, viewing the addiction strictly as an extravagance not everyone could afford.

It was quiet at home, and then very quiet.

Homer and Madeleine’s wonderful fling back in the fifties included risk-filled lovemaking right under the windows of her husband, Harry, a fund manager and broad-bellied former Princeton football star, and once they’d done it in the very home of Homer’s passed-out CeeCee. Homer had wished Madeleine’s interest in him originated in distaste for Harry. Unfortunately, it was sex and sex only; she adored Harry but he was now too fat, preoccupied, and plastered to fulfill what she considered a tiny part of her life. Madeleine’s leggy tennis player’s body was full of wanton electricity, and this memory was not entirely absent as Homer greeted a nice-looking old lady as she got off the plane. Her smile was the first thing that caught his eye — it was drawn off center — causing her to remark lightly, “I’ve had a stroke. Is it still okay?”