High Country : A Novel (38 page)

“Lilly’s what Ty needs,” Angie would tell them when they complained. “It’s a cold country up there. It never could love him back.”
“You and Cody Jo just want him to love some old girl instead of his mountains,” Buck would answer. “Want your side to win.”
Angie would never take the bait. “All of us worried about him. But we never could see what he needed.”

It wasn’t long before Lilly signed a contract to make a record with all those tunes Ty loved. The recording people saw what a following she had and began sending her off to sing: San Francisco and Seattle, even St. Louis. Ty joined her when he could. He loved to hear her and needed her closeness in ways that surprised him.... And she was glad. She knew she was better when he was in the room.

When they booked her in Sun Valley for the holiday season, she got Ty to drive her there. They even decided to leave early so they could visit Jasper in the rest home in Missoula.

Lilly was as charmed by the stories about Jasper’s cooking sherry as she was by Jasper’s anxieties about bears. She liked the other stories about Montana too, stories about Spec and Fenton and the way Cody Jo taught Ty to dance up in the Swan, about how he came to take the Haslams on their honeymoon.

“I’m glad we’re going,” she’d said after her last set at the lodge. “It’s where you started. It’ll have things to tell you.”
“I might not like what it has to say.”
“That doesn’t matter.You are what it has to say.”
“You might not like that.”
“I will. That’s why you love me. I’m not afraid of your past.”
They talked and laughed their way through the high desert, stopping at a hotel in Elko with a huge stuffed bear in the lobby, laughing even more when Lilly played twenty-one for half the night and came away five dollars ahead. Everything seemed funny until they crossed Lost Trail Pass and dropped into the Bitterroot. Ty grew quiet then, watchful, though he almost drove past the Missouri Bar, a grocery store now with a “Special of the Week” sign and paved parking.
But he remembered the country, and when they came to the Hardins’ turnoff he drove out across the rutted road to look at the house. He was almost on the site before he realized it was gone, had been for so long that the foundation was hard to find. He tried to remember where the rooms had been, the kitchen and the porch and the cold bedrooms. But it was hard to tell. After awhile he led Lilly down the weed-choked path to the barn. The roof had caved in over the shed, all the shingles blown off by winter storms. The corrals were gone too, the rails collapsed and tangled in the same rusted baling wire that once held them up.
A solemn-looking boy came by on a tractor. Ty learned from him that they’d taken the old house, board by board, up to the big outfit’s headquarters, put it back together to use as a saddle shed.
“He says things changed a lot when they started dude ranching,” the boy said.
“Who says?”
“Granddad.” The boy studied them. “We keep a few cows. To look at.”
Missoula had changed too. The outfitters’ shops were fly-fishing stores now, with sign-up lists for float trips and llama trips and guided hikes in the Bitterroot. Ty saw hardly any old-timers along the streets or in the stores. Mostly he saw young people, boys in short pants riding bikes, ponytails flying out behind them. Girls in shorts too, or little skirts, coming out of the stores and hurrying along the street with day packs full of books.
Ty wanted to stay in the old Wilma Hotel, right on the river, but it was for students. A girl with her arms full of books sent them off to a motel on the outskirts of town. Ty put their things in and took Lilly to the cemetery. He wanted to show her where Willie was buried right away so it would fade behind whatever else they did. Willie’s death, the child’s death, might spiral Lilly down into one of her moods.
They put flowers on the grave, on his mother’s too, Will buried there with her now. He tried to picture them, but all he could remember was their talking about how to make it through one winter so they could get ready for the next. He even had a hard time picturing Willie, the tombstone blotting out all that energy she brought to life.
Ty was glad to have Lilly holding his arm, and glad to hurry off to find Jasper, both of them amused that the home was called “The Grizzly Den.”
Jasper seemed to take it right in stride. “Bout as likely to find a bear here as somethin’ to drink.” He examined the bottle of sherry Ty had bought him. “Like old times, Ty. Reminds me of when you stayed out in the woods most all night.” Jasper turned the bottle in his hands, the past moving in.
“Could have brought a little more.” Jasper’s eyes got watery. “Buck would of. Or visit more. It’s been almost a year.”
Jasper was well into his nineties, but confusion about the years— and being cold most of the time—were the only sure signs of it. It was more like fifteen years since Ty had seen him, and that was back in the Deerlodge when they had to get him drunk so he’d get on the bus for Missoula. Jasper unwrapped the scarf around his neck, wrapped it still tighter.
“Truth is it ain’t so bad, Ty.” He patted the scarf to get it settled. “She does right good for me. Pours me a glass or two each night.” He looked around his little room, only one chair there, pulled close to a tiny and silent television set where a host with perfectly combed hair talked with two earnest-looking teenagers. “Sometimes she even takes me down to the Elkhorn. Some of them boys still bend an elbow.” “Who’s she?”
“Her.” Jasper motioned at a round woman who’d suddenly appeared in the doorway. Ty thought she might actually be as wide as she was tall.
“Ty Hardin!” the woman exclaimed. “Ain’t you a sight.”
She was across the room in a moment, hugging him and making over him, the sweetness of her powder telling him what his eyes had not.
“Beth,” he said. “It’s you.”
“I’ve growed.” She laughed, her bracelets jangling.
“I sure didn’t expect to see you here.”
“Who else could run this place, honey?” She turned to Lilly, whose smile seemed frozen on her face, and gave her a hug. “And you’re Ty’s sweetie.” She patted Lilly, admired her. “You take care of him, hon. We been awful fond of him—since he was a boy.”

They all went out for dinner at the Elkhorn. Jasper kept trying to tell them stories about bears but he had a hard time outtalking Beth, who seemed to have the history of Missoula tucked away in her head. Most of the history of the Swan as well. She talked about Bob Ring going off to Seattle and finally just disappearing. About Gus Wilson coming into town to pry his brothers free from The Bar of Justice and falling in love with Loretta, taking her off to Canada to open a government sawmill. She even talked about Bernard’s parents coming out to put flowers on his grave, how the Forest Service stuck with Ring’s story, always calling Bernard’s death an accident. She talked about Spec and Tommy Yellowtail too. And about how Horace and Etta left all their money to the church, making sure the church took care of Jasper first. She talked about other people too, most of them dead—just still alive to her.

In the morning Ty set out for the Swan, wanting to see Fenton’s big house before they started back for Sun Valley. Lilly, quiet during the long dinner, had decided to stay in Missoula. “Beth says the Catholic church is still the way it was. I’d like to see it. I’d like to be in church today.”

Ty drove out alone, surprised to find houses and little pastures where he remembered only lodgepole and aspen and bear grass. There were almost twice as many stores along the road at Seeley Lake. Even the pack station looked different, all the logs of the big house varnished and a lawn running out to the barn, everything manicured as though for a calendar picture.

“Bed and breakfast now,” the woman cleaning up inside told him. “They do a nice business. Hire some boys to take folks for rides up to the lake and back. The owners go south in the winter.Works out all right.”

The Murphys had left too. A young couple was running the store. They weren’t even sure the Murphys were still alive.
“What do you do with the cabins?” Ty saw that a few new ones had been built. “I knew the people who lived in that old one.”
“Rent them to the writers.” The young woman looked at Ty. “Not many like you around anymore. But there’s always a writer or two. They like a cabin in the woods.”

They started back early the next day, hardly talking as they drove along the Bitterroot and crossed the pass to drop down along the Salmon toward Ketchum.

“They say they got hunting camps all through the mountains now. “Even down in Lost Bird Canyon.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Lilly said. “You should have told me about Bernard and Willie. About what happened. What that did to her.” That edge was coming into her voice, as though something were threatening her.
“Hard to think I got myself lost up there.” Ty spoke softly, reaching over with his free hand and massaging Lilly’s neck, her shoulders.
“Don’t even try that.You’ve never been lost in your life.”
“In that snowstorm I was. If Spec hadn’t put the lodgepole up in that tree, I believe I’d still be wandering around back there.”
“What do you mean in a tree?”
“Like a signpost.” Ty eased her head onto his shoulder. “Saved me.” They were widening the road that wound down from the mountains. Ty had to slow to get by all the equipment.
“ Yo u’ve been kind of like that, Lilly. Outside the mountains. Kept me from getting lost.”
“You learned something back there.” Lilly looked at him. “That country told you something. Didn’t it?”
“It did.” Ty picked up speed as the construction dropped away behind them. “I learned it’s gone.”
“What’s gone?”
“Where I grew up. It isn’t there anymore.”

“If snow doesn’t stop us. And later camp right under Whitney. The country on the way there just as pretty as Whitney too. Only thing prettier is the Kaweahs. Under them there’s that high shelf. Lakes. Meadows. I want you to see it.”

“Will we go onto the shelf?”
“We can look. No way to get there. Except ropes.”
“No Ty Hardin route we can use?”
“Just cliffs. Can’t even sneak Sugar’s burros up there.”
She was looking back at him as she rode, her hat hanging behind

her, her hair moving in the wind, picking up light from the sun. “It’s a short list of people I’d take there, Lilly.You’d be at the top.” “Yes ...I think I know that,” she said.

The trip went so wonderfully Ty hardly missed Buck, who was helping Angie out in the valley. The camps good. The feed rich. The weather clear. The Haslams were so much help each camp seemed set up by magic. And he was taking Lilly along a route she’d never traveled, the country meaning all the more to him because she was in it. He liked the smell of her, the touch. He liked it that she was never edgy in the mountains, would lie on the warm rocks and talk with him after her baths. He loved the songs she sang around his fires, her visits in the night.

His one worry was the snow on Forester, and it was a worry he couldn’t shake. He and Buck had crossed snow there once, taking their whole party over a treacherous cornice. He had no stomach for trying that again. Lars hadn’t believed Jasper when Jasper told him what they’d done—not until Jasper brought in a photograph a guest had taken. Lars was so impressed he’d had it blown up, framed to hang behind his bar. Each time Ty looked at it he wondered why he’d ever tried to cross in the first place.

His worries grew as they closed on Forester. They wound down into Vidette Meadows and climbed again along the creek, riding late through upper meadows, up still higher to finally drop from the trail to the creek again, camping in the last timber just below the highest meadow. Sugar had shown him the spot, a huge rock dropped by glaciers and split by ice, half of it on its back, a giant table made by some god of housekeeping.

It was a fine place for a layover, which Ty needed to check the pass. He was on Nightmare and gone by first light, the camp shovel slung under his leg like a rifle. He rode under cirques and cliffs scooped so clear he wondered how old Josiah Whitney could think of anything but glaciers. At the high lake, before the trail moved onto the long moraine stretching down from the pass, he saw it—blinding white and rising almost to the pass itself. The pass looked open, blown free of everything by winter storms. But there was at least a mile of gleaming snow below it.

He rode on, knowing the snow would be firm, that the hard part was not the snowfield but getting his mules across the rocks and onto it, how steep it was when you got there, how much ice lurked under the surface, how to come down from the cornice left at the top.

Nightmare had become such a part of him, he let her make her own way. She scrambled onto the snow without hesitating, working hard to pull up the first pitch and then moving easily across the blanket of white—like a deer crossing a divide to find better feed. She found crude switchbacks left by shifting winds, worked her way along them, used deep sun pockets for purchase. He rode it out easily, thinking of that chaos of cliffs and tumbled boulders fifty feet below them, knowing he was riding across a country made safe—for now—by the leveling powers of winter.

“Use the cold to get to the warm,” Fenton had told him. “Old snow, packed snow,” Fenton’s voice seemed alive in the chill lifting from the snowfield, “can solve your problems. Don’t need to know where you are so much as where you want to go.”

And Ty knew where he wanted to go. He could see the pass; in his mind he could even see down into the Upper Kern. He wondered if it weren’t Fenton who was somehow getting him there, the past still alive in him getting him there. The place where he’d grown up might be gone, but there was still the past that place had given him.

The snow took him almost as high as the pass before he saw the trail. It was snaking out from under the snow thirty feet below him, the snowfield ending abruptly in a sheer face, just as smooth as though carved by the same god who had leveled the rock table back in camp. He felt a little sick by the finality of it. It seemed much higher than the one he and Buck had crossed. But he also saw it was south-facing, that the sun had been hitting it all morning. He pulled his shovel from under his leg and was off Nightmare and at work, the mare’s reins on the snow all she needed to hold her.

He shoveled for three hours before he had a trough Nightmare could start down, helped by four rough steps he’d hacked high in the passage. He eased her down them, slid her the last ten feet to come down safely on the trail, the pass just ahead. He led her up to the pass, the other side of it just dizzying granite cliffs, the trail a dropped thread winding down and down—a thousand feet into the basin below. But it was clear....It would do.

He turned back, still leading Nightmare, wanting to get across the snowfield before it got still softer. They had to make three runs at the chute before they made it up, Ty scrambling ahead on the last try without even looking back, hearing the mare struggle behind him, struggling himself until he was on the snowfield, moving without stopping to cross it, jogging when he could, sliding and slipping when he couldn’t jog, making his way down and down to the point where they’d left the trail that morning, a hard day’s work and a mile of softening snow behind them.

They were out of camp before dawn, across the broad snowfield only a few hours after the sun had begun its work.
“Are we riding into heaven?” Lilly had to squint to see, the snow dazzling under the early sun.
“Only one trail higher.” Ty had them leading their horses now, sliding them down the chute and leading them up onto the pass. He rode Nightmare down himself, rode her up onto the pass where Lilly waited. They looked back at Jug, the big mule all the others followed and the mule who needed Nightmare as a colt needs his mother. Jug picked his way down the chute, nose to it to make sure. “The highest is Trail Crest, over the Whitney ridge. Nearly fourteen thousand feet there. So many folks running up and down that trail, they’ve closed it to stock.”
“This one will do.” Lilly held her hat on her head with one hand, the wind whipping hair across her face. “Just us and the sky.” She laughed, looking out at the country ahead. “We
are
on our way to heaven.”
“We might be.” All Ty’s worries fell away as he watched his mules slide down the trough, each inching into it carefully before sitting back, sliding down, shaking off the snow and moving onto the pass. He was watching the mules but his mind was on Lilly.
“If you come visit tonight,” he looked at her, “I’ll know that’s where we are.”
“Told you an hour in the morning’s worth two at night,” Ty told Thomas Haslam. They had crossed the pass so efficiently that they were unpacking in Milestone Basin in time for a late lunch.
“You did,” Haslam said. “Told me it’s hard to beat a tight rope too, which must apply to a lot of things. I’d just rather not get up the night before to find out what.”
“We got started a little late.” Ty was coiling a lash cinch.
“That’s why it took me two years to recover from my honeymoon. I’m surprised you let us sleep till four.”
“I’ve softened.”
“Alice is right.You’re more like Fenton each day.”
“There’s worse things.” Ty wound the last loop around the coil, threaded it through the cinch ring, hung it on a snag. “If you think about it.”

The next day Ty put a lunch in a day pack and hiked with Lilly into the smaller basin where Sugar had camped, where Maria and Nina had fed him so many years ago, Sugar calling his burros in from the shelves above.

“I can’t imagine how he got those burros here,” Lilly said. They’d been out for almost an hour, following a faint game trail through woods and above willows and up the rocky drainage to the high lake. “It doesn’t look as if it’s been touched.” She stood on a rock by the lake, shooting stars and monkey flowers and Indian paintbrush rimming it. “Ever.”

“Sugar hardly leaves a track,” Ty said, thinking she looked pretty as a wildflower herself.
They bathed, Ty staying in the icy water longer than he thought he could just to be with Lilly. When they came out they needed sun, flattened themselves naked on the granite, let it warm them as they talked lazily about the lunch, happy to be with each other in this high country that embraced them completely.
“Sometimes you scare me, Lilly.” Ty wasn’t afraid to talk with her about anything here.
“You don’t scare at all, Ty Hardin.” Lilly held herself still, collecting the sun’s warmth.
“When you feel threatened, I scare.” He rolled onto his side, kissed the wet of her hair. “You don’t get that way here, do you?”
She turned her head toward him, found his hand. “No, I don’t ... up here you take care of everything.”
“You think it’s real up here?” Ty’s voice was such a part of them it seemed a breeze lifting from the lake.
“It makes me sure I love you, up here. It makes you . . . possible. Is that real?”
She sat up, wet hair falling over her shoulders in strands, beads of water drying on her arms, her breasts.
Ty sat up too, feeling whatever she was going to say was in him already, as though he were she, she were he. They had this thing to say to themselves, were sorting out how to make it count.
“I want in me . . .” She searched his face, wanting to touch him with her need, “...your child.”
She watched everything about him shift, as though a cloud had moved in.
“Shush.” She put a finger to his lips. “Not now. Just know I want to carry in me ...you.” And then she held him to her, let her hair fall across him, her wetness become his.

Ty was still bewildered when they made camp two days later at Crabtree, the great hump of Whitney’s western flank lifting above them, the meadow alive with spring flowers that in the Sierra must wait for summer.

She hadn’t let him talk about it at all after she’d said it, not even as they came down from the lake. She had come to him in the night but again hadn’t let him say a word. And when he’d stopped his string as they made their way to Whitney, pointing out the high shelf below the Kaweahs, showing her the lakes and meadows, she had just looked at him, smiled at him.

“Ty’s dream,” Thomas Haslam had said to them both. “Guess it’s good to have a dream. Even a crazy one.”
“When I find a way onto that shelf, you may not get an invite.”
“Oh I’ll get one. And I’ll probably be fool enough to accept. Watch you fight the bogs and mosquitoes and deadfall to stay alive over there.”
Lilly had just laughed, loving Ty in his high country, Ty with his friends and his animals. His peace with himself.

After dinner Ty took her onto the ridge behind camp to watch the last light on the Kaweahs, far out across Kern Canyon. He leaned against a boulder, Lilly leaning against him, pulling his arms around her against the cool.

“I never expected,” he said, “after Willie and the baby, after Montana, that anyone could want such a thing. With me.”
“I do.” Lilly didn’t bother to turn her head, her voice low but the two of them so complete there was no need. “I never thought there’d be a ‘you’ in my life. Never thought there could be ...this.”
The last light slanted up from behind the Kaweahs, purple and pink shafts lifting into low clouds, the Kaweah shelf dropping into night.
“Be careful, Lilly. Up here you can forget about out there.” He kissed her hair. “That’s what the doc says.”
“Tell him not to worry.” Lilly turned and held him. “I
am
careful. I think about out there.”

Clouds had gathered by the time they got back to camp. Ty busied himself setting up shelters. But he didn’t move his things under one, helping the others move theirs but leaving his sleeping bag at the base of a big lodgepole.

“ Yo u’ve forgotten,” he told them, smiling. “It doesn’t rain at night up here.” Then he walked out into the meadow to listen for the bells. He took comfort in their sound at night.

Lilly came to him before dawn, slipping away from the shelter and with him in a moment, loving him, holding him, whispering nonsense until he wanted her completely, emptied himself in her completely, her hand over his mouth to silence his cry. Then she was gone, gone as silently as she’d come.

Emptied as he was, he lay there wanting her still, wanting her even more as he watched the clouds skitter by, liking the gaps between them—the cool blue of the stars when they broke through.

No rain, but clouds, low and solid, by morning; the new Crabtree ranger there too, filling his notebook with whatever Thomas Haslam was saying to him, turning to look at Ty anxiously when Ty came back from checking his horses.

“Ty Hardin.” The ranger, earnest and young, introduced himself. “They tell all of us about you.”
Ty looked at Haslam, who was looking up at the gray sky.
“There’s a pretty sick boy below Timberline Lake, Ty.” He was already getting his medical satchel from the pannier where Lilly stored it each night. “Sounds like edema.”
“No helicopters today.” Ty looked at the massive shoulder of Whitney, the cliffs lifting up into the gray ceiling, hiding the ridges and peaks.
He knew what was coming.
“The dispatcher told me you would help.” The ranger’s eyes followed Ty’s up toward the hidden crest. “Didn’t know you had a doctor. Said you could bring the patient out over Trail Crest.”
“If I could keep those hikers from spooking my mule I might. But he’s likely to be all right. I’ll get horses. Let Doc take a look.”

In half an hour Ty had them in. He saddled Lilly’s gelding so she could come with them, putting the ranger on Jug, as good a saddle mule as he was a pack animal. And just right if there were trouble. He would follow Nightmare into hell, if that’s where Nightmare decided to go.

They crossed the big meadow and rode up Whitney Creek, stopping at the ranger cabin for oxygen and then riding higher to the stand of whitebark where the boy was huddled in the ranger’s sleeping bags.

Ty knew: Pulmonary edema requires lower elevation. The fastest way out was over the Whitney crest to Lone Pine, to the hospital where the mountain-sickness doctors prowled the halls waiting for such cases. He knew who would have to take him, too. Knew even more surely than that that he didn’t want to do it. Not now. Not after wanting Lilly the way he had in the night, needing her to know that, understand that he was ready to face a new life with her.