The house, of course, is dark. It is the one thing he cannot get used to, even after all these years. Wesley stops the half-ton just inside the caragana shelter and kills the engine. He keeps the lights on a moment, watching rain slice through the beams and disappear. When he’d left the farm that morning, he’d been surprised at the bit of snow, still hard and blue, sloped against the north side of the granaries, as if someone had hidden it there, hopefully, packing it against the lower planks in tight drifts for some long afternoon in August. Everywhere else, the yard was wet with the thaw and the rain that would make seeding tomorrow, the next day, all week maybe, impossible. This rain, he thinks, this damned rain that’s so good to come, we need it, but even so it’s hateful. There’ll be no work now for a while.
He cuts the lights and steps out, planting his feet carefully against the muddy yard. Ahead, the farmhouse seems to tilt at an absurd angle, a trick of the rain slanting through the yardlight, setting the buildings, the trees, the old windmill frame, at odds with where he knows the flat line of the horizon would lie. Driving in sometimes at night, he can’t believe this is his home at all, that he has ever lived here—that anyone has. It seems unlikely that light has ever shone from those windows, unlikely the screen door has creaked open and clattered shut a dozen times a day, more.
It seems impossible.
By the time he reaches the porch, he is soaked through. He peels off his coat in the entrance and then his shirt, too, and his socks, stiffly, rubs his neck and chest with an old wool sweater of his father’s from a peg by the door, then pulls it on over his head. It is short in the sleeves, and he thinks that maybe it wasn’t his father’s after all, but his mother’s. Was it? For a moment, he feels that fleeting sense of disorientation, like stepping out into a windless snowfall, watching those flakes and thinking they are not falling, it is your own body rising, through them. But the feeling lasts only a moment, and then the unwelcome surprise of cold in the kitchen rouses him. He takes a matchbook from the tobacco tin over the stove and goes barefoot down to the empty cellar. He comes here only rarely now, to relight the furnace or in summer to store food that would quickly turn in the close heat of the rooms above. But once, the walls had been lined with jars, shining neatly by the light of the bare bulb overhead, pickles and beets and rhubarb. Sometimes the soft white flesh of trout from the river, smoked and packed in pint sealers. Jellies, clear amber and purple. Tomatoes. Could there have been so many? All those jars, is it possible? He remembers his mother in the kitchen, dipping from enormous paper bags with the tin measuring cup he still uses, salt for the pickles, sugar for the fruit. He remembers her scrubbing and blanching and straining pulp through a piece of old window screen, her face red with the steam, her lips moving almost soundlessly to a song he never could figure out, though he held his breath to listen. He remembers helping his father to cut the screen, stretching it taut against his own knees, Hold on tight there, Wes, winking and setting the blade against the screen. You don’t want to lose a limb now, eh? What would your mother say? And Wesley gripped the edge of the screen so fiercely, it bit into the palms of his hands.
He remembers that. And he should. He should remember it all. He should remember his mother calling from the porch, Don’t torment the child. You want to give him nightmares? And his father looking up at him from under his brows. You won’t go and have nightmares on your mother, will you now? If you swear it, I’ll tell you a tale that’ll curl your nosehairs. And he’d nodded his head emphatically. Yes, yes, I promise. And he meant it. His father’s stories were not frightening, not in that way. They would sit at the kitchen table, the three of them round the yellow lamp, his mother mending, his father fiddling with a harness or a broken axle or a watch. And Wesley quiet, hands under his knees, waiting for his father to begin.
Back in the days before the homestead rush, when there was still buffalo to be had and the land was yet unbroken, there came a surveyer named Robert John McCallum, an Englishman, not much to look at, but a hell of a shot from the saddle or the soil. He was here on a survey expedition, like I say, and shacked up with the rest of them fellas at Chesterfield House. But something got to him, the wind maybe, or the sun, the way it can here where a man might mistake his shadow stretching a mile long for his own self, if you know what I mean, and this McCallum just took up one day with his horse and pitched a skin-tent over there by that sorry alkali slough they call Ingebrigt Lake. Couple of the men went by one day, thinking they’d talk some sense into him, bring him on back. But they didn’t get within ten yards before they was staring down the barrel of his Winchester. “Come on now, McCallum,” they called. “We brought you some food is all.” And one of the men patted a haversack he carried slung behind his saddle. But McCallum didn’t move a muscle, just stood there pointing that rifle, his hair wild from the wind and his face brown as his boots. “This country knocked the English right out of you,” one of the men said, thinking to joke with him. But McCallum stood his ground, stood it so long the men finally turned tail and rid back to Chesterfield House, ready to give him up for a goner. But the Mounties here didn’t like to encourage that kind of behaviour, so when they got wind of what McCallum had done, two of them rid over from Montgomery’s Landing. They had their pistols ready, aiming to take McCallum by force if necessary. They rid up, and seeing his horse hobbled a few yards off, called, “Robert John McCallum, by order of the Queen we demand you to come out now with your hands up. We don’t want trouble. We just want you to come on back. There’s savages enough out here without losing one of our own.” Then they sat and waited, their horses snorting and stamping in the dust and the wind rattling the walls of that tent, skimming out over the surface of the lake in ridges. They waited, and when McCallum showed neither hide nor hair, they rushed the tent, fearing any minute to take a bullet from behind those skin walls rattling and snapping away in the wind. But it wasn’t Robert John McCallum of Worcestershire, England, they found sitting in that skin-tent. No, it wasn’t McCallum they found, nor no man, alive or dead. They found nothing but a few empty cans and his Winchester leaned up in the corner. That and McCallum’s horse outside. One of the Mounties looked out over the lake. “Is there enough water in that slough to drown a man?” he asked. “Not likely,” said the other. “Unless you’re trying awful hard.” So they took up McCallum’s horse, rolled up his tent with the rifle inside, then headed back to the landing. “He’ll turn up,” they said, “sooner or later.” Well, it wasn’t long before he did turn up, so to speak. One of W.D. Smith’s boys—he used to run his cattle over there—reported seeing a light on the shore of Ingebrigt Lake, like a campfire or something. When he rid over to check it out, thinking to scare off some half-breeds, the light disappeared. Sort of flickered slowly out the closer he got. When he reached the shore, there was no sign of a recent fire anywhere. Everybody thought he was crazy, of course. Then other folks started seeing it, too. For years, decades. Sometimes it burned red, like fire, sometimes it just kind of glowed, more of a faint blue, like a lantern. Some said it was the ghost of Robert John McCallum out looking for his horse. Maybe it’s true. I surely don’t know. If it is, he’s been looking for that horse a long time.
If it is, Wesley’s father said, leaning close to the yellow light, I’m awful sorry for the poor soul. He’s been looking a mighty long time.
But here in the cellar is this furnace that won’t light. Wesley strikes a third match; the flame catches, burning a small steady blue, and he pulls the length of red yarn attached to the bulb, feeling his way carefully back up the narrow stairs in darkness.
As he reaches the top, he thinks he hears a knock at the screen door. He stops, listens, hears it again. Yes. For a moment, he wonders whether he should pretend he is not home. But he has left the light burning in the kitchen, his truck parked in the yard. He lets the cellar door fall shut, peeks through the kitchen window, through the rain, but can see no vehicle other than his own. And he thinks, Maybe I have imagined it then, made something else of the rain, my own breathing. Maybe owls. They come now sometimes in bad weather.
“Hello?” a voice calls from outside. “Anybody home?”
He does not move to answer right away, afraid that if he opens the door, there will be no one, just the rain and the mud and the yardlight. His truck and the caraganas and beyond them only the night, nothing. He waits, deciding, and the door edges open, a head pokes in.
“Yes?” Wesley says, lurching forward. “What is it?”
He can see by the way the boy falls back into the rain that Wesley has scared him.
“We got—” the boy says. “Sorry to bother you—”
“What is it?” He does not want to frighten the boy. He flicks on the porch light and the boy flinches. He is young, a teenager; water runs in a stream from the peak of his cap.
“I got stuck,” he says, wiping the back of his hand across his nose, “out towards the Sand Hills.” He jerks vaguely with his thumb and Wesley looks past him, as if he might see across those dark fields. “I got stuck,” he says again. “It’s pretty bad.”
“Car?”
“Yeah.” He nods, and adds, “My mom’s.”
“Who’s your mom?”
“Koskey,” he says, “Theresa. Jim and Theresa Koskey.” And he shrugs the rain off his shoulders, shaking his whole body, like a dog.
“Come in,” Wesley says finally, and steps back a bit so the boy can wedge himself through the door.
“Thanks. Thanks a lot. I sure do appreciate it.”
The boy is panting a little, as if he had run part of the way. Wesley stares at him, trying to place him from around town, and the boy looks down, notices Wesley’s bare feet, looks away, up at the coloured squares of carpet Wesley has used to insulate the entrance, at the stacks of newspaper piled neatly to the ceiling, the mousetraps baited and ready. The boy shifts his feet, wipes his nose again.
“That Theresa Venner?” Wesley asks. “Is that her?”
“Yeah,” he says, running a hand across his wet chin. “That’s her.” The boy clears his throat.
He is scared, Wesley thinks, he is scared of me. He pulls on his wet boots while the boy stands there not looking at him, then takes a halogen flashlight off the shelf. “I got some chains,” he says, and coughs. “In the barn.”
And the boy, Koskey, nods without looking up. “That’d be great,” he says, and stamps his muddy boots against the floor. “I surely would appreciate it,” he says.
The car, one of those small foreign ones, has slid sideways down the ditch and now sits at a strange angle, the headlights pointing up into the still leafless branches of the few trees and willow scrub that line this end of the road like bones. Those lights shooting up through the trees, and Wesley thinks for a moment of that other night, when he and his father were coming back late from the lease land across the 41, slow with weariness, Wesley half-asleep against the window. Suddenly his father said, Oh Jesus, a whisper almost, or a choke. And Wesley sat up to see all that metal—a car maybe, was it?—bent around the front of a semi turned on its side in the ditch. Oh, Jesus, Jesus, and Wesley followed his father out into that impossible silence, only the sound of that one wheel spinning, sh-sh-sh. His father’s face as he crossed the crazy bend of a headlight, that headlight across the—Stay in the truck, Wes—though he was in high school then, a man almost—Stay in the truck, Wesley, for Christ’s sake.
“There she is,” Koskey says now, pointing unnecessarily through the rain and the wipers.
Wesley gears down. “Should’ve cut the lights.”
“Engine’s running,” Koskey says, then adds, “I got some friends with me. They should’ve turned the lights off. When they couldn’t see me anymore. I guess they should’ve turned them off then. I don’t know why they didn’t.”
Wesley backs the truck up as near as he can get to the car, grabs the chains from the box and follows the boy, sliding more than walking down the slope. When the boy opens the door and leans inside, he sees three others. A girl wearing big gold hoops in her ears hunches against a red-haired boy in the back seat. The other one, a blonde girl, sits shivering in the front, arms wrapped around her waist, long bangs looping down over her eyes. He stares a moment, wondering why she looks so strange, before he realizes that she, too, is wet. He is not stupid; he doesn’t need to ask what they were doing here, out this close to the hills. But he wants to know, Why is the girl wet, did she walk, too? Did she walk part of the way and turn back?
“What’s he doing here?” he hears the red-haired boy say. “Didn’t you call no one?”
“He offered to pull us out.” The three kids, all except the blonde one, exchange a look Wesley pretends not to notice. The girl with the earrings giggles, ducks her head so the hoops jiggle against her face.
Wesley hooks the chains to the front axle, walks back to the truck for the straw bale. Koskey follows. “I can take that for you, sir,” he calls, and Wesley lets him. Pulls his jackknife out to cut the twine.
“That’s a good knife,” the boy says loudly, over the rain and the two engines, “that’s a beauty.”
Wesley snaps through the twine, folds the knife into his pants pocket, pulls away an end of the bale. “Front-wheel?” he asks.
“What?” The boy’s breath puffs out in the air.
“Front-wheel drive?”
“Yeah,” the boy says, “I think so. I’m pretty sure.”
Wesley kneels to jam straw under the front tires, looks through the windshield, past the wipers, at the blonde girl, the suggestion of her pale face, the rain now running in a cold stream down his neck.
“Shouldn’t o’ spun your tires,” he says to the boy. “Dug yourself deep.”
The boy crams a fistful of straw under the other tire, his face down close to the mud, runs the back of his hand across his nose. He stands before answering. “Yeah,” he says, “I know.”
Wesley straightens, rubs straw from his wet hands.
“Your buddy willing to push?”
The boy looks doubtfully back at the car.
“Need you both.”
“Yeah,” he says, “he’ll push.”
“Somebody steering?”
The boy shrugs. “Crystal, I guess,” he says. “Crystal can steer.”
“Come in,” Wesley says, holding the screen door. He is speaking to all of them, but it is the blonde girl he looks at, Crystal. The girl with the earrings pushes the red-haired boy in ahead of her, giggles again, but it sounds shrill and forced in the quiet house.
Wesley goes to the kitchen while they remove their shoes, fills the electric kettle with water, reaches for the jar of Nescafé. He knows they have not come in behind him; they are standing in the porch, hands jammed into the pockets of their jackets, the blonde girl farthest back.
“I guess we should call someone,” Koskey says to him. “We’ll need someone to come get us, I guess.”
Wesley nods. “Phone’s in the hall there.”
The kids shift their feet and look at each other. The girl with the hoops checks her watch. “It’s late,” she says in a low voice to the others.
“I’m not calling Herb,” the red-haired boy says. “He’ll have my balls.”
“You should call,” the girl with the hoops says to Koskey. “It’s your car.”
“Herb has four-wheel,” Koskey says.
“It’s your car,” the red-haired boy says firmly. “You were driving.”
Koskey stands there a minute, deciding. He does not look at the blonde girl.
“Yeah,” he says, “I guess I should call.” He rubs a hand across the back of his neck and glances at Wesley. Then he goes down the hall, where they hear him pick up the phone, the slow whirr of the dial.
“Come in,” Wesley says to the others, motioning, “sit.”
The girl with the hoops perches herself on the red-haired boy’s knee, hooking one arm around his neck. He shifts her on his lap, puts an arm around her waist, drops it. Wesley knows they are pretending not to look around, not to be surprised at the scrubbed counters, the neat row of canisters, the dishcloth folded lengthwise across the faucet. The new radio on top the fridge is the only thing that has changed since his mother. It is still her kitchen.
The blonde girl sits at the far end of the table, running her toe in circles around one of the silvery flecks floating in the linoleum.
“Coffee’s coming,” he says, placing four mugs on the table with a dish of sugar cubes and some Coffee-mate. “Here’s towels. You can dry off there, in the bathroom.”
The red-haired boy and the girl with the hoops both look at the blonde girl, her long hair plastered down against her jacket in peaks, as though frozen. Wesley tries not to stare at her. He keeps thinking, There is something familiar.
They can hear Koskey’s voice coming low from the hallway, then the click of the receiver and he is back in the kitchen, standing in the doorway, unhappy.
“Well?” the red-haired boy asks.
“He’s coming.” His mouth set in a grim line. Then he adds, half-apologetically, “He’s calling Herb. For the four-wheel.”
“Shit,” says the red-haired boy.
They are all quiet a moment. The blonde girl looks across the table at Koskey, who stares back at her. She takes one of the towels from the table and waits.
“I know,” he says finally, quietly. He looks away, rubbing his hands on his knees. The girl hesitates, then disappears down the hall.
“We sure do appreciate it,” Koskey says to Wesley after she’s gone.
Wesley nods. So the blonde girl is with him, then; they are a couple. He notices the girl with the earrings is wearing a dress and stockings with rhinestones on the ankle.
“Social in town tonight?” he asks.
“Yeah,” Koskey says. “It was winding down.”
“Right,” the red-haired boy says, “winding down. You mean it was missing something.” And the girl with the earrings punches him in the shoulder.
“What?” Wesley says, in spite of himself. “What was it missing?”
“Preacher’s girl,” the girl with the earrings says. Then adds, “Saint Crystal.”
“Shut up, Janine,” Koskey says.
The girl with the earrings, Janine, and the red-haired boy laugh, but they shut up. The kettle whistles and Wesley pours out water into each of the mugs. So she’s a preacher’s kid. Which preacher? he wonders. From town?
He stands leaning against the counter, watching them pass around the dish of sugar cubes, stir their coffees, the spoons loud against the cups. Janine takes a sip, sets her cup down. Koskey looks up at Wesley as if to say something, then back down at his cup, stirs again. Wesley thinks, There must be something I could say. But nothing comes. Only foolishness, fragments. Rain’s been a long time coming. Hill road’s a real bugger in this weather. Stuck out there myself a time or two. Coffee okay? You know there was this surveyer once, Robert McCallum I think his name was, an Englishman—do you know this one?—he was a good shot and sat a horse like he was born riding one, but he wasn’t used to the land here, went a little touched, some said, and took up living in a skin-tent over by Ingebrigt Lake, not much of a lake really, couple miles south of here, until one day he just disappeared, left the tent and the horse and just disappeared, nobody knows where …
But he says nothing. Instead, he reaches to turn on the radio, and as he does the bathroom door opens. The blonde girl, Crystal, comes out, hair combed straight back from her face and the towel draped around her shoulders. With her face exposed like that, Wesley realizes with a twinge of surprise that he knows her, that thin, pale face, alert and birdlike, those eyes, not quite pretty. He stands with his hand on the radio dial, and in that moment he is back at the corner table of the Parrish Hotel years ago, a glass of ginger ale in its wet ring before him and all that light from a Thursday afternoon in August pouring in through the small, grimy windows. The door swings open luridly into sunlight, and a group of young people crowds in, chooses the big table next to him. Well, not that young, not too much younger than he is, probably early twenties, but not from town. He doesn’t recognize them. One of the girls elbows her friend, lifts her chin in his direction, and they both laugh. It’s nothing, really, just kids being silly. But he pulls out his wallet anyway, counts the change for his pop, carefully, until he feels someone standing at his elbow. It is the girl from the next table, grinning, her hair frizzed out, her teeth pointy, like a cat’s. She looks back once over her shoulder, giggles, and says, “So sorry to bother you, but someone over there thinks you’re really cute. Her, right there in the yellow blouse.” She points back to a blonde girl he does not recognize, sitting shrunk in her chair, miserable. He meets the girl’s eyes for just a second, sees she is humiliated, sorry for them both. Even from where he sits, he can see a small round scar on her chin—it is nothing, but he feels at that moment as if it is the saddest thing he’s ever seen. The girl looks down, letting her blonde hair swing over her eyes. He knows he should feel humiliated, too; the joke is on him, after all. But he wishes she would look up, wishes he could catch her eye again, let her know somehow this kind of thing doesn’t matter. He would smile and nod, hoping she knew that he realized it was a joke, knowing somehow she would understand. “She says she’d like to be your girlfriend,” says the girl with the pointy teeth. “Wouldn’t you, Clare?”
Clare. Of course. He’d forgotten all about her. Clare. He steals a glance at the blonde girl hunched over his table. How odd, he thinks, how odd to think that I knew her, as if time had collapsed for that second. This girl is maybe fifteen, sixteen. Clare would be, what? Forty now? Older?
He feels ashamed, then, as if he has spoken his error aloud, as if they all know. But they just sit at the table, sipping their coffee, waiting for their parents to collect them, parents he probably knew at school, though they would have been younger, maybe, parents he still sees sometimes on his infrequent visits to town, where they greet him in the feed store, slap him on the shoulder and bark, “Hey there, Wes, you still living the bachelor’s life out there? That’s the way, boy, that’s the way. You ain’t missing a thing, buddy. You got it all figured out, but what I want to know is why the hell didn’t you tell the rest of us sorry sonsabitches before it was too late?” And they all guffaw and he ducks his head good-naturedly and says, “Yeah, that’s for sure, eh? That’s right.”
“They’re here,” Koskey says now, and Wesley turns to see truck lights pull into the yard. None of the kids move. They sit there at his table, not looking at each other, not looking at him—except for the blonde girl who, for the first time, stares straight at him, her face blank with fear, and he remembers: preacher’s kid. She’s probably not supposed to be here at all. She stares at him, as if he could do something to fix things, as if willing an assurance from him, sits there small and shivering again under the damp towel. He sees she is even smaller than he thought. Here, in the light of the kitchen, with her hair combed back, she is a child. And he thinks, There is very little resemblance really.
Outside, the horn blows once, long and hard.
“Well,” Koskey says, rising first, “I guess this is it.”
Wesley watches them file out to the porch and pull on their shoes slowly. He wonders whether he should walk them out to the truck, but it is raining still. And he realizes then that he is wearing his wet shirt, realizes he is freezing. He shouldn’t go out again. It wouldn’t be smart, getting a chill. He is not as young as he used to be.
“Thanks again,” Koskey yells, as they run out the door into the rain. The blonde girl is the last to go. In the dimness of the porch, she is not Crystal, but Clare again. He almost asks, “Who’s your mother?” Almost. And then he thinks, What does it matter? Even if it was so, what would I say to her? “I knew your mother once, just for a second. I knew her.” No, he would only frighten the girl. But she turns to him then, hands him the towel from around her neck. “It’s not what you think,” she says. “Nothing happened.” As if it mattered, what he thought. Her face is wet, maybe from the rain. And then she is outside, walking straight into the headlights, the rain bouncing from the shoulders of her jacket.
He thinks he should follow her. Go out and say hello at least to the parents. But he doesn’t. He closes the door and steps back into the kitchen, lifts his coffee to his lips and gulps hugely, letting the hot liquid warm his throat, his chest. He wraps his hands around the cup the way his mother used to in the evenings at the kitchen table with his father, and for years after his father was gone, just the two of them, remembering him, until at last she was too old to remember. And then she was gone, too.
And he thinks, No, this is not right. I should go out there, step through those headlights and the rain. I should say hello at least. I could do that much. Though he really means, I could do that much for her, for the girl. I could say something. It’s not what you think, boys. Nothing happened. So he sets down his cup and pulls his boots on over his bare feet, ducks out onto the porch steps. But they have gone, the red brake lights blinking once and then turning out past the caraganas, the back end of the truck fish-tailing in the mud. He stands there with the rain piercing his bones, listening to the sound of the engine recede into the night, thinking he is not as young as he used to be. Thinking it wouldn’t have mattered anyway. And he thinks, There is this girl, Crystal, and there was another girl once, Clare. That is all. Clare. With blonde hair and a scar on her chin. There was that, at least. He could remember that kind of thing; he could remember that still.