In Open Spaces (21 page)

The first few times Bob brought Helen Stillwell around the house, I thought she was the friendliest person I’d met in a good long while. She was curious—asking question after question. She made me feel as if my life, my opinion, were interesting to her. And I watched the effect of this ability on other people, too. She had a gift—people’s guarded manner would melt away in a matter of minutes. Their arms would uncross. Their eyes stopped wandering to other parts of the room. And most significantly, their jaws loosened until it looked as if she’d have them talking all night.

And all the time Helen listened, intent, staring directly up at you. She was small, with short curly hair, schoolgirl cheeks, and soft blue eyes, all of which helped remove any sense of threat from her incessant questioning.

But her charm only worked on me for these first few meetings. I started to feel uneasy with her probing, and the long strings of compliments. There was an element of intrusion to her methods, and I began instinctively to slam the door when she started knocking. I was then faced with the problem of conversing with her without blatantly, rudely dodging her questions. I tried, but she was very aggressive, and I’ve never been a comfortable liar. It seemed the only way to avoid her questions was to avoid her. It wasn’t long before I’d gotten on her bad side. I became close to invisible when she was around. Conversations would bounce around the dinner table, under her deft hand, touching on the events of each person’s day except mine.

“You’re awfully quiet tonight, Blake,” Mom observed on one of these occasions.

“Oh, he’s the deep one,” Helen jumped in, smiling at me. “Still waters, they say. Right, Blake?”

And thus she shut me up before I could even respond. And at the same time charmed everyone else. But actually, I couldn’t have been happier about it. Because verbally she was an expert, and that made me nervous. And because I had so little experience at verbal sparring, I knew I was no match for her.

“Blake, are you going to dance with your mother?” Mom’s round face was shiny with sweat and pure joy. She stood in front of me, her hands clasped behind her back.

I grabbed her waist and swung her onto the floor. She squealed, then laughed, throwing her head back, her mouth wide open. We fell into a two-step, shifting and sliding our feet in unison, tilting from one
side to the other. The back of Mom’s dress was cool and moist, and I felt the moisture in my own shirt, under my suit jacket.

“So what do you think?” Mom asked, smiling up at me.

“I think I’m going to be the old maid in this family.”

She laughed and nodded. “You are the steady one, aren’t you?”

Mom, now in her fifties, still looked much the same as she had twenty years before, younger than her slender peers, who stooped from years of lugging kids, firewood, and buckets of milk and water. The creases in her face seemed to have always been there. She’d earned them, and they looked good and right on her brown, broad cheeks. Her hair was still the color of a muted sunset, and the color was striking set against the black cotton dress she had made for the occasion.

“Helen and Bob are going to need more space than he has in his room,” Mom said, looking earnestly at me.

I dipped a little as the music did, but my mind worked, and I saw what was coming. “Yeah. I suppose they will.” I looked down at her, but she wasn’t about to say anything more. It was up to me to make the offer. “They can have my room. We can switch.”

She nodded, but her distracted manner told me that this wasn’t the answer she was looking for. She waited a few more bars before readdressing the issue. “I’m wondering if maybe Rita and the boys shouldn’t move to the big house,” she said.

The song ended, and we stood in the middle of the floor, waiting for the next one. Mom was looking at me, but her eyes were focused more on my forehead than on my eyes. I did some figuring. Bob and Helen in one room. Rita in another. The boys in the third. Muriel in the fourth. And of course Mom and Dad. This left only one person, and no more rooms.

“You want me to move to the old house?”

Mom threw her arms around me, and for a second I thought she was doing it out of remorse for this request, but in fact the music had started again.

“Just for a while,” she said. “Until Jack comes back, or until Bob and Helen start having kids. Who knows? Muriel might even get married soon.”

This seemed unlikely. Muriel was busy with college in Spearfish, and she hadn’t mentioned any suitors. I was amazed to hear that Mom assumed that Jack would return.

I thought, and knew the suggestion made some sense. I even liked the idea of living alone for a while. But what gnawed at me was who had hatched the plan. I was certain it had been Helen, and the fact that she wanted to submit me to this little exile made me wonder what other tricks she might have up her sleeve. I had a feeling that my new sister-in-law was about to liven things up at the Arbuckle Ranch, and soon.

We had heard nothing from Jack. Nor from anyone else. No sightings, no rumors, nothing.

The initial effect of this on Rita broke my damn heart. Jack’s behavior toward her when she fell off the horse had not gone unnoticed, of course. She had been moved by this rare show of tenderness and concern, and I’m sure it gave her brief hope of seeing more of the Jack she had fallen in love with. But when she woke up the next morning, and we told her he was gone, she rolled her head across her pillow, and tightened her lower lip against her teeth. We all crept from the bedroom except Mom, whose murmurings we heard from within.

As far as I know, no one told Rita what happened that night with Jenny. I don’t think it would have mattered, anyway. Because after several months, it was clear that something else was keeping Jack away—something we’d probably never understand. By now, I couldn’t help but wonder whether it was George, but I didn’t tell anyone else that.

When it became clear that Jack wouldn’t be back any time soon, we all expected Rita to pack up the kids and return to New Jersey, to her
family. Not that we suggested it. We didn’t want her to go. Especially me, of course. But we did discuss it briefly, and we all agreed that in the same situation, we would probably want to be with our family. So we waited for her to announce her departure. And because I was so sure she would leave, I gave little thought to the effect it would have on the dynamics of the ranch if she stayed.

One night when she and the boys came for supper, Rita was reluctant to leave, and it seemed the time had come. We muddled through lull after lull in the conversation, finally settling into a mutual silence that wouldn’t have been unusual except for Rita’s persistent fidgeting. She obviously had something she wanted to talk about. But she waited until the kids fell sleep.

After she had tucked Teddy into Muriel’s bed, she sat down, folding her hands in her lap, and looked around at each of us. “Mom, Dad,” she began, “I don’t know what’s going to happen with Jack. And I know things are difficult around here right now, that the boys and I are pretty much nothing but a burden. But if there’s any way I can do something to make it worth your while, I would really like to stay here…if that’s possible.”

Because none of us expected this, our silence lasted a good minute, which no doubt made Rita wonder.

“What about your family?” Mom finally asked.

Rita leaned forward, resting her elbows on her knees and staring down at her tan, callused hands. She held them out in front of her, spreading the fingers, studying the backs of them. “My family…” She stopped, inhaling deeply, covering her eyes. “I’ve never felt as strongly about my own family as I do about this one.” Her voice broke, and I felt a lump rise in my throat.

Again, our silence filled a long gap, and who wouldn’t have thought just as Rita did? “I’m sorry,” she said. “I shouldn’t have asked. This is awful,” she said. “I’ve put you all on the spot.”

“Oh no, no, no,” Dad said, bounding from his chair. He started
toward her, but that was too much for him, and he paced the room. “My god, Rita…” He tried to go on, struggling to find the words, but his head moved from side to side and his mouth hung half open, making no sound.

Mom rose, walked over and sat next to Rita on the sofa, putting an arm around her. “Please stay,” she said.

So Rita stayed, and it created an interesting scenario. As was common with most ranches of that generation, there were no written guidelines to determine who would take over our ranch, or how it would be split up among the survivors once my father and mother passed on. And because it was a source of potential conflict, it wasn’t a subject that was discussed openly.

So what usually happened was that the siblings forged ahead year after year, each of them drawing their own private conclusions about how much of the ranch they were entitled to, and measuring their case against the others. And when the time came, when the owner died, and decisions had to be made, they fought it out. After years of silently creating their justifications, the reasons were strongly felt, and it often got ugly.

There were three major determining factors. First, of course, was age. The oldest was the natural heir—usually the oldest boy, or if the oldest daughter married someone who was interested in running the place. But it was rare for a woman to run a ranch in those days.

Second was need, which came in the form of dependents. The more kids you had, the bigger share of the ranch you could expect. And the third was investment, which was measured in time spent devoted to the ranch.

So in our case, if Jack had stayed, the decision would have been clear. He was the oldest, and he was also the only one with kids. But now that he was gone, each year that he stayed away would weaken his position, and shift it to me. Of course, I knew he wasn’t interested anyway,
but then I also knew that Jack was capable of changing his tune if it was to his advantage. But having Rita and the boys there complicated matters. How would they fit into the formula? We never discussed it.

The dance was crowded. And once everyone found out that there were newlyweds in the room, Bob and Helen were swamped with well-wishers, requests for the next dance, and invitations to step outside for a toast. Bob, who wasn’t used to all the attention, spent his evening whirling around with a goofy grin on his face. He blushed and laughed and even talked a little.

But he was clearly not the eye of this little hurricane. The whirlwind of activity and sound swirled through the small community hall, into the kitchen, out into the parking lot, and back, with Helen rotating squarely in the middle of the twirling fray. She wore the delicate white wedding dress she’d sewn herself, and its whiteness pulled the flow of browns and blacks and blues wherever she went. It was what everyone dreams their wedding day should be, and I was willing to put my feelings about Helen to one side long enough to grant her that. Especially for Bob’s sake.

“When do you take the fall, Blake?” I turned to find Steve Glasser at my elbow, chewing a sandwich.

“Well, Steve, I guess I ought to find someone who’s available before I start thinking about that.”

Steve smiled and started ticking off names of single women around the county. He counted the names on his fingers, gathering the digits on one hand, then the other, into a bunch.

“All right, all right,” I said, chuckling. “You made your point.” I looked out across the dance floor, pretending to be searching for someone. Steve kept his gaze fixed on me, the fingers in his left hand still gathered in the right. His good eye stared me down.

“So you done your calving yet?” I asked.

“Oh, ho,” he laughed. “So we’re changing the subject, are we?” He dropped his hands, then threw them in the air. “All right, if that’s the way it’s going to be. How about I buy you a drink?”

Steve and I wandered out to his pickup, where he reached under the seat. We handed the bottle back and forth a few times. I was hoping that Steve wouldn’t bring up the subject of women again. It was not a topic I enjoyed discussing. Mainly because I had so little to talk about. From the time I left school, I hadn’t been around women much outside of the occasional dance, card party, or rodeo. Between work and the years I had spent honing my pitching, I had found little time to even think about women, much less court them. And this lack of contact had made me much more bashful than I used to be. Each year, I thought that I would make an effort to get to know somebody in particular, or to talk to more girls at the next dance. But being alone got to be pretty comfortable after a while, to the point that the thought of making the effort was a lot more uncomfortable than being alone.

The one exception, of course, was Rita. She was the closest thing I’d found to someone near my age that I could talk to without stammering and feeling the heat in my face. But there was a slight barrier there, of course.

Steve’s whiskey bottle was cool against my lips, but the liquor warmed them up soon enough, along with the rest of my body. Prohibition was history, so the bottles had real labels, better flavor, and less kick, but a few shots had me feeling pretty good.

“So you got your eye on anyone?” Steve asked.

I cleared my throat. “Ah, hell, Steve, I got so many offers I haven’t been able to decide who to choose from.”

Steve chuckled, shaking his head. “Well, I can see this isn’t going anywhere.”

We each took a couple more nips, listening to the muted sounds of the five-piece band, the whooping and hollering and stomping of feet from inside.

“So how long you figure this dry spell to last?” Steve asked.

“If I knew that, I’d give Hoover a run at the big house,” I answered.

Steve nodded, tipping the bottle. His good eye was barely more focused than the other. “You never heard from Jack, have you?”

I shook my head. He shook his.

“That’s a goddam shame,” he said. “Runnin’ off and leaving a wife and two kids over a little thing like that.”

I nodded.

“Even Jenny knew he was too drunk to know what he was doing,” Steve continued. “She doesn’t hold it against him.”

“Well, I think there’s more to it than we’ll ever know.”