Dreams and Murmurs

Everything in the dream feels at once so familiar and yet so strange; maybe it’s not surprising that I take a moment to recognize where I am and with whom. It takes me a second to place the song on the radio, since I haven’t heard it in years; the Spinners’ “Could It Be I’m Falling in Love” probably came out in ’71 or ’72. Likewise, it’s been years since I’ve been horizontal with a girl on the bench seat of a Chevy pickup truck on a cool, rainy night.

And of course it’s been years since that girl was Samantha Mathis.

But it’s just as beautiful as I remembered it: the rain tapping at the roof, the far-off splash of lightning and rumble of thunder, the fog on the windows becoming droplets, rivulets of water, the faint green light from the radio dial illuminating the territory I’ve already explored. Sam whimpers as my lips flit across her skin, as my fingers cup her curves. Way back—at the farthest reaches of conscious thought—I recognize the insistent low stomach tension of fear. I suppose it’s the fear that we’re going to get stuck in the mud if it keeps raining, because we once did and it was a hard thing to explain to her father, but memory or fear, it is shouted down by the desire to stay right where we are, the desire to touch Sam’s pale, thin body, the desire to feel her lips on mine again.

Her eyes look up at me, wide and dark, and I see the glint of her teeth, her lips drawn back in a smile, or pleasure, or both. The rain picks up, a patter becoming a pounding that duplicates the sound of my heart.

In a flash of lightning, we are revealed in our nakedness, and with that flash and the following boom of thunder, foreboding again rumbles through my gut. What if someone sees us this way? If someone comes along and catches us: my folks, her dad, Michelle?

Michelle.

I can’t be doing this.

I shouldn’t even be dreaming this.

I’m married. Married to Michelle.

That life is over and gone.

And so I forced myself awake, swam up to consciousness, to a chilly bedroom and the light patter of early-morning rain against the windows—woke, bathed in sadness and shame, woke to a gnawing in the pit of my stomach that I knew was not hunger but guilt, big-time, capital “G” guilt, like it must feel to get caught doing the babysitter.

“It wouldn’t have hurt to sleep just a little longer,” I muttered to myself as I rolled out of bed—hung for the goose, hung for the gander. Behind me Michelle stirred and murmured, “Wha’s that, honey?”

“Go back to sleep,” I said. “Nothing.” Guilt or love—or both—impelled me to pull the comforter back up over her shoulders and gently adjust it at her throat to protect her from the farmhouse draft we never quite succeeded in preventing. She was instantly asleep again—oh, to be so at peace with the world and with myself—and I stood watching her snore as she lay on her back, mouth open, face pointed toward heaven.

I dressed quietly and went into the kitchen to start a pot of coffee, meditate on my night, and contemplate the coming day.

Some fun. And it got better as the day wore on.

“So how are things going?” was what Bill Cobb asked when Michelle called me in to the phone hours later. I had been out doing early chores and cracking a thin layer of ice from a light freeze on the stock tanks. The calves had been jostling me thankfully. I bet trying to break ice with a warm moist nose is no fun.

I came stamping into the house, took off my boots carefully on the back porch, and deeply inhaled the warm dry air of the kitchen once before picking up the phone—and inhaled once again after hearing Bill’s question.

“Things,” I said, at last, “are going like you would not believe.”

“Good practice the other day?”

“There was a lot of action.”

“Who ran my spot? One of the kids?”

“You know there’s no one who could fill your shoes,” I said. I foresaw a future of communication with Bill in which he could fill in the blanks however he wanted; it was actually kind of liberating.

“When’s the next practice? This Sunday?”

“Probably,” I said. And maybe we would practice again. When I dropped Phillip off after dinner, he said he would think about coming back. I guess all that was needed now was to work on Bobby Ray, maybe with a lead pipe. “When are you coming up?”

“I might be able to get up for one practice before the game,” he said. “Lots going on here. It’s crunch time in the elections, you know, and I’ve got a good friend running for Texas governor.” A good friend, I recalled, whose father used to be the president of the United States. All this delivered in the I-don’t-want-to-brag tone that I always hated Bill for; maybe he didn’t want to brag, but somehow he always managed to.

“Uhm,” I said. “Well, we’ll try to manage without you somehow.” This delivered in my sweetest and most secretly ironic tone, a voice that has always worked on Bill.

People who take it as an article of faith that they are smarter than you never pick up on any clues that the exact opposite might be true.

As quickly as I reasonably could I hung up, anxious to quit talking about Bill’s stupid basketball game and get back to the more important things I’d been thinking about. Things such as Michael, of whom we had neither seen nor heard a thing for weeks; things such as the mysterious call from Samantha some time back, still unexplained, although it began to take up more and more space in my head; things such as my varsity team, which still seemed woefully unprepared for the pending season, and, unless Jimmy Bad Heart Bull made a remarkable difference in our starting lineup, would spend this winter looking at the other team as bewildered as a cow at a new gate; things such as the upcoming Watonga homecoming game which marked Lauren’s first date (if you could call it that—said date consisting of she and her beau riding to the game with me and then riding with me and Michelle to the restaurant afterward).

In any case, enough things on my mind to make me want to go somewhere to think seriously, to think without interruption, down by the pond, which was what I did, although it was too cold for fish to be biting and I had to bundle up with my jacket collar upturned.

It was a gray day, intermittent drizzle, the sun occasionally threatening to break through. I sat staring at the lightly wind-rippled surface of the pond and the low clouds reflected in it, and I was so deeply lost in it—like you might lose yourself in the sight of the crackling gray static of a television set or the lulling tumble of clothes in a dryer—that I didn’t even hear the rustling of the wind high up in the cedar trees on the hillside.

I did hear a displaced stone bounce first with a hollow thunk on the red rock beside me and then with a hollow plunk into the pond, and I prepared to get up to shoo a cow away from the steep incline and back to safety. Then a pair of battered ropers descended, followed by black Wranglers, until gradually B. W. was revealed. He sat down next to me with a sigh and stared down into the water I had so recently sent my mind swimming in.

“How’d you find me?” I asked, and he glanced over at me and gave me a slender smile.

“Looked for you,” he said.

“There are times you’re too smart for your own good,” I said.

“Maybe.” He looked back out at the water. “Not many, I’d guess.”

The wind picked up a little bit and bent the treetops, riffled the water so we lost our reflections. He put his arms around his knees and hugged them close, and I could see that it was going to be up to me to do the talking, at least until I could guess what had brought him down here.

“You still feeling bad about Michael?” Because I was certainly feeling bad, and Michelle was pestering me to try and confront the issue more forcefully.

B. W. shook his head, then picked up a small, flat rock beside him, aimed it experimentally a few times, and skipped it across the pond with a flick of his wrist.

“I feel bad, I guess. And I miss him, even. But I need to talk to you about something else,” he said. “I’ve been thinking about this for a long time, only I don’t know how to say it, and I know you’re going to be upset, and so I haven’t said anything.”

“Okay,” I said.

“But it doesn’t go away. Not talking about it just makes it worse.”

Well, that was true enough. “So now you’re here to talk about it,” I said.

He nodded.

I waited. The last concentric circles of the rock he had skipped had disappeared.

“Okay,” I said at last. “Did you get somebody pregnant? Become a vegetarian? What?”

He didn’t laugh, just flashed another brief, mouth-only smile that died on his lips. Nah. “Dad, I’ve decided I don’t want to play college ball. I don’t want to play basketball, period. I’m not having fun anymore.” Then he looked back down and away.

“What are we going to do about college?” I hadn’t meant to say that out loud. But now that it was out, I starting thinking about the balance in our savings account, about the feed bills coming if we had a tough winter, about new parts for the combine, and my stomach knotted with something that felt very much like fear.

He held up a hand, perhaps to try to forestall that whole panicked line of thought. “I’m still going to college, Dad. I’ve been accepted into the forestry program at Montana.”

“Montana,” I repeated.

“I got the letter last week,” he said. “And I want to go. I’ll work to pay my way there if I have to.”

“If you have to,” I repeated. If he’d said, “When I get there, I’m going to become a moose,” I probably would have repeated that, too.

“So I guess I’m asking your permission,” he said. “To quit.”

Quit. I never did like the sound of that word, and I didn’t repeat it. Instead I turned to him, and there was an edge in my voice I couldn’t help. “B. W., don’t you know that basketball could be your ticket out of this town? More important, don’t you know what a gift you have?” I dropped my hand onto his knee and clamped on tight. “Don’t you know what some people would give to have the talent, the instincts you have? If I’d had what you’ve got, I would have ridden it as far as I could go. I would have left Watonga and never looked back.”

He looked at my hand for a second. I was probably hurting him, but he didn’t pull away.

“Dad,” he said. “I’m not you. And you can’t live my life.”

I lifted my hand. “Right,” I said. “You’re right.”

He looked away from me, his mouth drawn in a grim line. “I’m sorry,” he said, finally, looking up. “I didn’t mean to make you worry. It’s okay. We’ll make it work somehow. I can take out loans. Maybe get some grants.”

I mentally calculated our savings again, the possible income from the winter calves, from next summer’s harvest; the numbers did not lend themselves to much optimism. But I looked at B. W., my obedient boy, the boy who had always done what we asked.

The boy who had never been anything but decent and honorable.

Didn’t such a boy deserve every chance at the life he wanted?

So I looked at him and I nodded, and what I said was, “We’ll find a way, I guess.” But my limited optimism didn’t get too far down the road before some other things sidetracked it. I wasn’t just a father here, although maybe I should have tried to be; I was also a coach from whom people expected great things and in a very short time. Which meant I had another problem.

“If you quit now,” I said, “you’ll be leaving me and the team in a real fix.”

He nodded.

I brought my hands together as if I were praying, brought them to my face, thought for a moment. “What if we compromise? I won’t bug you about college ball. But play for me. Finish the season. It’s not like we’ll be going to regionals, be playing playoff games into the spring. It’ll be a short season.”

He smiled sadly. “I think you’re right about that,” he said. His shoulders relaxed. He had decided. “Okay, Dad, I can do that. For you.”

“And if it starts being fun again, well—”

“Dad,” he cautioned, and raised that warning hand.

Okay,” I said. “Okay.”

He pushed himself to his feet. “I got to get on to school.” He brushed off his butt, then held out his hand.

“I think I’ll stay,” I said. “For a bit.”

“I’m not trying to help you up,” he said. “I’m trying to shake your hand.”

I reached my hand up, and he took it in a firm grip. “Thanks for talking to me.”

“Likewise,” I said. We shook once and he turned to climb up the hill.

“See you at practice,” he called from the top. “Don’t forget you wanted to try Todd Daugherty at guard today.”

“I won’t forget,” I called after him.

I waited a moment to make sure Lauren wasn’t in line behind him, then I turned back to look at the water.

I had known B. W. was unhappy, but I misjudged the cause of his unhappiness. I was reminded what I had said in my letter to my folks; if I misunderstood even B. W. so completely, how had I misunderstood the others in my life, the other people I should know best?

I didn’t want to think about that any further. It didn’t seem productive for anything except paranoia.

It was cold, and the day was growing grayer, with clouds blowing in from the north. I decided I didn’t want to stay, so I got up, dusted myself off, and walked to the truck.

When I got back to the house, I made my early-morning phone call to Gloria’s place—a new habit I’d developed since Michael had left—and Michael, if he was there, was exercising his new early-morning habit of not answering the phone. After that, unless I lingered for hours over coffee with my farming buddies up at McBee’s, my calendar was depressingly clear until basketball practice.

Come November, I’d just as soon be anything besides a farmer. November can bore the life right out of you, make you want to sleep forever or run screaming through the fields.

Come November, I start to feel the life I lost, a life somewhere out there in the big world, trying to break out of my very bones.

I couldn’t do it—sit around reading, or worse, thinking, until practice.

I got cleaned up and went on into town. For a moment, when I got to the Four Corners, I thought about going to McBee’s, sitting with all the other bored farmers, listening to their tired jokes and laughing like I was in a good place.

I turned left instead, turned left again on 2nd Street, Gloria’s street, and, heart pounding, parked in front of her house, the engine still idling, the heater blowing.

It was a beat-up frame house, covered with what I guessed was old green asbestos siding. After a bit, I saw a flicker of movement from the bedroom window—the shades drawn open for a moment, then falling back into place.

“All right,” I said. The movement didn’t come again, but it seemed like a sign of some kind. Anyway, someone knew I was here, and if I just sat there, I’d look like an idiot, or worse—stalker Dad.

I turned the engine off.

I got out.

I walked to the front door.

I knocked on the wooden frame of the screen door. It echoed into the house.

And then I just stood there on the doorstep, the cold wind whipping around me, whispering up my sleeves.

I knocked again. I thought I heard movement. My heart still pounded.

Then the deadbolt was drawn, and the front door cracked open ever so slightly.

“He doesn’t want to talk to you,” a sleepy voice said. “I’m sorry.”

“Hey, Gloria,” I said. She waved, yawned. “I’m sorry I woke you.”

She yawned again. “He doesn’t want to talk to you,” she repeated. “I’m sorry too.”

And then the door closed and the bolt turned behind her and I was left standing on the doorstep, listening as steps receded into the house and disappeared.

I stood there for awhile longer, not hoping for a change of heart, but not knowing what to do next.

And at last I understood that what I had to do next was climb back in my truck to get warm.

I started the truck, turned the heater on high, and raised a forlorn wave even though I was pretty sure nobody was watching.

Then I put the truck in gear and drove away.

That night we entered negotiations with Lauren for her homecoming date. It reminded me of those World War I armistice talks in railroad cars, with Lauren wanting to be French marshal Foch and us to be the poor bewildered Germans making concession after concession. Unfortunately for her, she was riding our railroad.

I don’t think it helped that we negotiated over cards, either, especially during a partners game of Spades, since our family takes cards seriously and responds angrily to distractions.

“Can I stay out ’til midnight?” was her opening volley. Her curfew was ten.

“Play,” B. W., to her left, said.

“No,” Michelle, her partner, said. “You may not.”

Lauren led with the ace of clubs and B. W. immediately trumped it with the two of spades.

“Uhn!” she protested, mouth open—she’d counted on taking that trick—and he shrugged.

“No clubs,” he said. “Sorry.”

He did not seem particularly sorry.

After we’d tossed out low clubs, B. W. gathered up the trick and laid down the ace of hearts. Michelle threw a six of hearts and I threw a two.

Lauren tapped her cards on the table. “Then can we ride to Pizza Hut with Martin’s brother?” Martin Amos, Lauren’s homecoming date, was okay—a junior high boyfriend is sure a lot less threatening than someone who shaves and listens to Nine Inch Nails—but Billy Amos, who had spent three days in basketball the year before as a sophomore, was not okay. That kid had a temper and a miniscule attention span, neither of which boded well for him as a driver.

“Play,” B. W. said.

“No,” Michelle said. “You may not.”

Lauren made a face and threw down the queen of hearts, and B. W. smiled and raked in another trick. He led next with the king of hearts, and Michelle and I again threw lesser hearts.

“Drop us off at the Pizza Hut then come back and get us?” Lauren looked up at us plaintively, her bottom lip tucked beneath her top one.

“Play, stupid,” B. W. said.

“Don’t call me stupid.”

Michelle looked at me. I looked at her.

“Don’t call your sister stupid,” I told B. W. “And you. Lauren. Yes. You don’t budge from the restaurant before we get back, on peril of death.”

Lauren nodded at me, then laid down a three of spades on B. W.’s king of hearts and brushed B. W.’s waiting hands aside to collect the trick.

“Yeah, don’t call your sister stupid, Bret Maverick,” Michelle said. “Did you think she played a queen last time because she didn’t know better than to waste a face card when you already had it won, or because it was the only heart she had left?”

“I plead the fifth,” B. W. said, and Lauren punched him in the shoulder.

Lauren ended up beating us all, and we retired to the bedroom grumbling. Before we went to bed, Michelle said, “I had a long talk with Gloria when I stopped off at the convenience store today. She says she thinks Michael is starting to miss us.”

“Sure he does,” I said, around my toothbrush. He hadn’t shown much sign of it that afternoon.

“What?” She poked her head around the corner into the bathroom, as if that would make me more intelligible. “Grape Nuts?”

I rolled my eyes, leaned over the sink, and spit. “Sure he does,” I said, enunciating each syllable carefully. “He’s stricken with remorse. He can’t wait to come home, hug us all, feed the calves, slop the hogs.”

“We don’t have hogs,” she said. “Really. I mean Gloria would know, wouldn’t she?”

Although Gloria was slowly growing on me, I still was a little unsettled by her Goth appearance. “I consider Gloria an authority in the fields of cult rituals and anorexia. Maybe personal hygiene, if you’d consider defining it by negation. When was the last time she washed her hair?”

“She’s not that bad,” Michelle said, sliding a nightshirt on over her head, her voice momentarily muffled by flannel. I rinsed, dried my face, sat on the edge of the bed. “You should give her a chance. After all,” and she stood, watching closely as she delivered this last, “she’s going to be the mother of your grandson.”

I blinked at her.

She quickly added, “Or granddaughter.”

I stood up, then sat back down again. “You mean, of course, that they’re going to have a baby eventually, like, after marriage or some other meaningful ritual.”

No reply.

“Or do you mean that they are in the process of having a baby even as we speak?”

“You’re mad,” she said, and she leaned over and took my hands in hers. “I told Gloria you might need a little time to get used to the idea.”

“I’m not mad,” I said. “I’m upset.” Which I think was a proper interpretation of what I was feeling. And anyway, why hadn’t she told me, too? I mean, I was the one who woke her out of prenatal sleep. “What kind of a way is that to start a life together?”

Michelle dropped my hands and turned away from me. “Maybe they’re happy about it. Maybe he’s happy about it. Not everybody has to feel the same way you do. Or did.”

Ouch. “Okay,” I said, and tried to pull her to me, but she would not be pulled. “I’m sorry. But what kind of future do they have? He works at Pizza Hut, she works at a convenience store, they live in a house that’s falling down around their ears—”

“What kind of future did we have? We didn’t have any prospects. My parents helped with my college and we saved and slaved to get me through. I think we’ve done all right for ourselves. And for our kids.”

“Yes,” I said. “Agreed. We have epitomized the American dream.” But at least now she let me make an armful of her, and so I pulled her to me. “Gloria is no Michelle Hooks, though. If she were, I’d feel a hundred percent better about it.”

“She’s turned out better than the rest of those Glancys have. And anyway, she’s our best chance to get Michael back.”

“We’re never going to get Michael back,” I said as we both slid under the comforter. “I think the best we can hope for is some sort of relationship that isn’t characterized by exchanges of gunfire.”

“I know,” she said. “But wouldn’t it be great if he really were missing us? Wouldn’t that be nice?”

“Wouldn’t it be lovely to think so?” I muttered.

“The Sun Also Rises,” she said, correctly, nuzzling my neck, and then Michelle and I set aside our discussion of the merits and demerits of Gloria Glancy to speak the infinitely more interesting language of love.

The next morning I thought I would check in with Phillip, and after feeding and watering the calves I headed for town, coffee, and eventually, his place. The boys at McBee’s were in high spirits because of the moisture we’d gotten over the weekend and the sunny skies awaiting us now. It’s amazing how a change of weather can put a smile on a farmer’s face. After two cups of thick black coffee with them, I climbed into the truck and drove north. At Phillip’s, I opened the gap, drove through, closed it behind me, and bounced down the well-rutted track to the trailer.

“Phillip,” I called as I got out of the cab. No sense being shot as a trespasser when I came as a friend.

The door screeched open, and a tiny old lady shuffled out onto the top step. It was Ellen Smallfeet, Phillip’s grandmother, an ancient woman who seemed to be grandmother or great-grandmother to most of the Southern Cheyenne in the state of Oklahoma. It was through her that Phillip and my neighbor Michael Graywolf were cousins, and I had known her since I was a baby—or known about her was maybe more accurate. Years ago she was reputed to be about a hundred and fifty and to have supernatural powers, but I had never seen her do anything more dramatic than scramble eggs for Michael and his family.

“Phillip is catching dinner,” she said. “Down at the pond. I was just going to walk down and catch some with him.”

And then I saw that she was carrying a rod and reel in her other hand. “Let me help you with that,” I said.

“You’re that John Tilden lives next door to my Michael,” she said as I took the rod from her and gave her my other arm to hold onto as she stepped down slowly from step to step. “You married that teacher.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said. “Used to be Michelle Hooks.”

“Ah,” she said, nodding. “I remember now. Michael says you are a good neighbor.”

We followed a cow path into the cedars and I brushed a branch out of the way. “I didn’t expect to see you out here,” I said.

“I come out sometimes,” she said. “Someone has to see Phillip eats, and he won’t shoot at me. I’m his grandmother.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said. “Where is this pond, anyway?”

“Right there.”

We took a few more steps in the direction of her finger, and then through the cedars I could see the flickering of sunlight on water. A few more steps and we were past the encircling screen of trees and next to a small circular pond fed by a creek at the north end and drained on the south. Phillip was sitting with his back against a tree, and I recognized his level of comfort; that, I thought, was what I must look like when I fished at my favorite place.

He raised his free hand in silent greeting—noise scares the fish away—and inclined his head to indicate that we should sit next to him. I helped Mrs. Smallfeet to a sitting position and expected to bait her hook, but she simply reached out a hand to Phillip’s coffee can, took out a big juicy nightcrawler, and double-hooked it without a wasted motion.

“Howdy,” he said quietly. “Not much biting yet.”

“They’ll come,” his grandmother said. “I’ve got the frying pan on the stove.”

And sure enough, within a few minutes Mrs. Smallfeet’s float bobbed under, she set the hook with a sure movement of the rod, and she began reeling in a good-sized green sunfish.

“Nice little sunny,” Phillip said, nodding.

Ellen Smallfeet nodded back. Then, as she brought the fish to shore, she said, “Thank you for the gift of yourself, Little Brother. Your sacrifice will make us strong.”

“She always thanks the fish,” he told me. “Thanks trees, too, when we cut them down. It’s more respectful, I guess.”

Mrs. Smallfeet was pulling the hook out and preparing to put the sunny onto a stringer.

“How does she know it’s a little brother?” I asked.

“It is because I say so,” she said, without looking up at me. “That’s why.”

After they had caught half a dozen sunnies, crappie, and bluegill, Ellen Smallfeet handed me her rod and got slowly and laboriously to her feet. “Enough to cook,” she said. “Come.”

We went up to the trailer, Mrs. Smallfeet going up the steps as slow as geological time, and Phillip held the door open as we filed in.

The inside was not what I’d expected, at least not from the broken-down fences, piles of trash, and junk cars outside. The little trailer was sparsely furnished but clean, the sort of spartan living quarters a prisoner might get used to. We sat at a Formica table in the kitchen while Ellen Smallfeet cleaned the fish, dipped them in cornmeal, and plopped them sizzling into the hot oil in her skillet.

“Can I help you, Mrs. Smallfeet?” I had asked when she took out a cleaning knife, but she didn’t answer and Phillip inclined his head to seat me at the table.

Lunch was fried fish, white bread, and some pear honey one of the cousins had made. We drank cold well water from plastic cups commemorating the Watonga Cheese Festival. Watonga had a cheese factory that made huge wheels of cheddar; people came from all across the state to buy them and came every fall to attend the Cheese Festival, complete with the requisite Cheese Festival Queen.

What’s more, local girls actually competed to be that queen; Lauren herself talked about entering the competition in a few years. Whenever we griped about running her to piano lessons, she’d say, “When I’m Queen of the Cheese Festival, you’ll be glad you did.”

“That will be our ticket to the good life,” Michelle would agree, tousling her hair. I thought I’d rather have her be town tramp than Cheese Queen, but there’s no accounting for taste.

We ate in silence. The food was good, and the pear honey was smooth and sweet, although Mrs. Smallfeet just smiled sadly when I commented on how good it was. “The old ways are vanishing,” she said. “Young people don’t learn to cook anymore. They all eat from those microwave ovens.”

“It’s a shame,” I said.

“You have a microwave oven, Grandmother,” Phillip said, and Ellen Smallfeet held a finger to her lips.

“You’re not supposed to tell people that,” she said. “It will spoil my—what do they call it?—mystique.”

“So I shouldn’t say anything about your CD player either?”

She took a swipe at him, but I don’t think it hurt much.

“I’m going to play basketball,” he told her. “Do you want to come watch me play?”

“It is good for you to get out of your trailer,” she said. “But why basketball? Why don’t you go to the powwow, dance with your own people?” She speared a morsel of fish, put it in her mouth, and chewed thoughtfully. “No offense,” she said, turning to me.

“None taken,” I said.

“I was good at it once,” he said. “Basketball. Haven’t been good at much else that wouldn’t land me in jail. You ought to be excited.”

“Excited,” she said and sniffed. “I don’t know. What is there to be excited about anymore?”

“Please come and see us play,” I said. “It would be an honor.”

“You were good once,” she said to Phillip, and to me as well, “when you were young men. Those days are gone.”

“We’re not dead yet.” He smiled to himself before saying, “While there is life, there is hope.”

“Yes,” she said, gesturing at him with her fork and nodding as vigorously as her neck would permit. “That is a good Cheyenne saying. You have heard me say it many times.”

“I have,” he said, and he shrugged. “Maybe there’s something to it after all.”

She sniffed, as if to say she didn’t think it necessary to affirm that with words.

“I can drop your grandma back in town,” I told Phillip after lunch. I didn’t think she could hear me, but she turned from the sink, where her rubber-gloved arms were elbow deep in hot sudsy dishwater. “Someone will come after me if I don’t show up tonight,” she said. “But it might take awhile for them to get up their courage. They think Phillip will shoot them if they come here unannounced.”

Phillip did not chuckle to show that this was a ridiculous idea. “Let John run you home, Grandmother,” he said, then turned to me. “She’ll walk it if I let her. She’s a tough old bird.”

Ellen Smallfeet cackled.

When she had dried the dishes and gathered her things, we all walked out to the porch. “Why don’t you come to homecoming?” I asked Phillip. “A lot of people you know will be in town.”

He shook his head. “More reason to stay here.” But he shook my hand and gave me a small smile and thanked me for coming by. “I owed you a dinner.”

“You didn’t owe me anything. It was great to have you out to the house. You’re welcome anytime.”

“Good-bye, Grandmother,” he said, turning to her. “You make sure John doesn’t take you off to Mexico.” She kissed his cheek, and then she stepped to my truck, opened the passenger door, and clambered up inside, refusing all offers of help.

“See you Sunday,” I called as I got in the truck. Phillip inclined his head slightly—half of a nod—and pulled the trailer door shut behind him with a screech.

Mrs. Smallfeet didn’t talk as we bounced across the rutted track taking us across the pasture or up to the road, nor did she talk until after I opened the gap, drove through, and closed it behind us. When I got back into the cab, she said, “Thank you for being a friend to Phillip. He has not always had good friends.”

“I know,” I said. “But I haven’t been a good friend. How can I claim to be a good friend now, when I haven’t been there when he really needed me?”

“Ah,” she said. “How do you know that now is not the time of his greatest need?”

I pursed my lips and mulled that over for a bit. “I guess I don’t.” I turned onto the highway headed for town.

She furrowed her brow, tapped it once or twice, as if retrieving something from a mental vault: “‘We should never be afraid to do right now what we should have done right a long time ago.’”

“Sounds like something I’ve been thinking about lately,” I said. “Is that a Cheyenne saying?” I slowed down for the right turn onto 2nd Street, where Mrs. Smallfeet lived in a tiny composition-shingled house two blocks from Gloria, a house with a swing set and lots of outdoor toys for her many grandchildren.

“Martin Luther King,” she said. We pulled up in front of her house and she opened the door to get out. “Indians cannot take credit for all wisdom, you know.” She cackled again before she shut the door.

I thought about that all the way home: It’s never too late to do the right thing, to make the right choice, to correct the mistakes of the past.

Or is it? Did this apply equally to the way I treated my children, to the job I performed, to the woman I married?

Or was she just a senile old parrot who could squawk historic phrases?

The phone rang as we were sitting down for dinner. I would have been happy to let the machine pick it up, but Lauren made a dash for it.

B. W. rolled his eyes. “It’s probably just a salesman,” he said.

“Hello,” she said, her voice vivacious. Then the smile left her face, she dropped the phone to her side, and she held it toward me.

“It’s a man,” she said.

“Bill Cobb,” the voice said.

“Bill,” I said.

“Ah,” he said. “John. Glad to find you at home.” There was a momentary pause, as though Bill was looking for his next words. “Just thought I might have a word with you.”

Then he sat silent again for a moment. “You can have several,” I said into the silence. “Words,” I explained helpfully when he made no reply.

“I have to go,” he said, and then he did, and I stood there holding the phone for a moment with what must have been a quizzical look on my face.

“What did he want?” Michelle asked.

“I don’t rightly know,” I said. I replaced the receiver on its cradle.

“At least he wasn’t selling something,” B. W. said.

“No,” I said. “He wasn’t.” I sat back down at the table. “Lauren, will you say grace?”

That night I dreamed I was at some kind of gathering on the farm; it was unquestionably our place, only it looked like it did back before my father added the extra bedrooms, a strange trip back to when this place had a screened-in side porch where I used to sleep covered with sweat on sweltering summer nights, a world remembered in the black and white of old photographs. A big get-together was taking place, lots of family—aunts, uncles, cousins—and friends talking, eating, laughing inside, but I was standing outside the big picture window looking in at them from the flowerbed.

There were Gloria and Michael, sitting together in my father’s big recliner. Gloria looked up, saw me, and waved, but when she nudged Michael, he just frowned and kept his eyes to the ground. Why should things be any different in dreams?

There was B. W., wearing rolled-up jeans, a flannel shirt, a watch cap, and carrying an ax. Hi Dad, he said silently, and he waved.

I couldn’t see Lauren. Maybe she was out on a date.

Into the living room shuffled my grandfather, sober and somber, a tall man I’d always thought made John Wayne look like a sissy. I never heard of him smiling, and now he simply looked sourly at me and waved me away from the window with one hand like a quarterback waving a receiver back farther. Maybe I was standing on something he had planted.

I stepped up onto the front porch and looked through the screen door. Just inside, where Michael had been, I saw my brother, Trent, standing at ease in his Marine dress uniform, the one they buried him in, his hat in the crook of his left elbow. Next to him were Bill and Samantha Cobb, talking quietly about something.

“Hey, Johnny,” Trent said, turning to me with genuine surprise in his voice. “Long time no see.”

“Hey,” I said, and then something caught in my throat, and I could only raise a hand in acknowledgment. Even in my dream I realized that Trent was dead, as dead as my grandfather, but at that moment, I didn’t care; I just wanted to open the door and throw my arms around him. Twenty-five years is a long time to miss your big brother.

Samantha looked up at me as I pulled at the door, rattling it, then she looked back to Bill and they continued their conversation, something about polls and early voting.

“It’s locked, buddy,” Trent said. “Hang on and I’ll let you in.”

The door swung wide, and for a crazy second it was like the world had swayed sideways—I had a sense of essential imbalance, of the earth teetering beneath me—and then I stepped inside and felt Trent’s strong hand shaking mine, and I threw my left arm around his neck and felt the muscles bunched there beneath his collar and shoulder braid.

“Hey, buddy,” he said, and his voice was soft in my ear. “How many cattle you running?”

“I don’t want to talk about cattle,” I said, taking him by his shoulders. “That’s all you ever wrote about. Every letter home, you said everything was fine, you just wanted to know about things on the farm. Well, you weren’t fine. You weren’t!”

People turned to look in my direction, and hot tears burned at the corner of my eyes. “Hey, get a hold of yourself, Johnny,” he said, pushing me back a step and stiffening to attention. “You’re the man of the house now. You’re going to have to act that way.”

Then he saluted me, executed a crisp about-face, and disappeared into the dark interior of the house.

“Trent,” I called after him. “Trent! Hey, man. Come back. I’ll be strong. I’ll be a man.”

He was gone. My eyes were full of tears and my chest full of rocks, and I turned to Samantha and Bill, who were looking at me like I was an interesting species of insect. “I never got to say good-bye,” I said. “That’s all. I loved him and he died and I never got to say good-bye.”

But they turned away from me and continued talking percentage points and constituencies; in fact, everyone in the room showed me their backs. The world became unstable beneath my feet again, and I reeled out of the house and out to the gloomy barn, banging into hay bales like a man on the deck of a boat in rough water. Finally I caught hold of a rope hanging from the rafters, and I climbed up it thinking, Maybe I can see better from up here.

But all I could see when I got to the top were the rafters and the underside of the tin roof. So I climbed back down. When I came outside, the sky had grown as dark as the interior of the barn, and big drops of rain were beginning to fall. Across the way, I saw the windmill, and the same dream logic that had impelled me to climb the rope sent me up the windmill, only the rain was making the metal wet and slippery, and lightning was flashing uncomfortably close by, and all of a sudden, somehow, I was naked. This dream was starting to feel ridiculous even to me, and I started to think maybe I should climb down from the windmill, and then people started coming out the side porch, the door closest to me, and the world was shaking again.

And then I woke up to Michelle sobbing quietly beside me.

“Michelle,” I said. “Hey, sweetie,” and she slid into my arms, and I felt her face, warm and flushed, and the wetness of her tears on my shoulder.

“It’ll be okay,” I said. “Everything will be fine.” I didn’t ask what she was crying about; although I should have, there were just so many possibilities. She was always emotional just before her period; in days past I’d known her to wail for half an hour about a speeding ticket, a student failing an exam, or a cross word from one of the kids.

There were plenty of serious things for her to cry about, too, regardless of her hormonal state: Michael, our grandchild, me.

“I know I wasn’t your first choice,” she murmured. “But you do love me a little, don’t you, J. J.?”

So I guess that would be me.

No, she hadn’t been my first choice; I wasn’t even conscious that I had had a choice. Because really, if I’d had my choice—

I flashed to Samantha, our last dance at the reunion. Our last rainy night together, the pattering on the windows, her skin iridescent in the glow from the dashboard.

I thought that only a few seconds had passed since she asked—not enough to make a difference, I hoped.

I smiled at her, although I didn’t know if she could see it in the dark.

“More than a little,” I said. “You know I do, Shell.”

And I held her until she returned to a troubled sleep. I had no desire to join her. I lay there, her head on my shoulder, listening to the farm stir to life with first light.