Legends of the Fall (21 page)

I counted twenty-five one morning on what I judged to be an average square foot of ground. A brief calculation at that rate over a million to the acre . . . exceedingly rapacious, their capacity for destruction to living vegetation may be imagined. Their powers of sustained flight, too, are wonderful. . . they appear able to keep on the wing of a whole day, always moving with the wind, and filling the air to a vast height . . . the wings reflecting the light make them appear like tufts of cotton floating lazily in the wind . . . in descending through the slanting rays of the sun, they resemble a fall of huge snowflakes.

Ludlow remembered Custer making an erratic speech to the troops with his long blond locks punctuated with clinging grasshoppers. He read on, fixing only on the portions Tristan had underlined, including a passage on a blood-red moon that fired the beige landscape, to which Tristan had added "I seen this phenom. once with Stab who would not talk at campfire." The most haunting paragraph, though, was a description of buffalo skulls which Ludlow recognized foresaw One Stab's Ghost Dance superstitions and Tristan's boyish passion, "A man who shoots a buffalo and not eat the entire body and make a tent or bed of the skin should himself be shot, including the bone marrow which Stab says restores all health to the human body." Ludlow recalled the skulls and the light on the feathers of a peregrine falcon that had flown under his horse in pursuit of a doomed passenger pigeon: "It is but a few years since the country through which we passed was the favorite feeding ground of the buffalo, and their white skulls dot the prairie in all directions. Sometimes these are collected by the Indians, and arranged on the ground in fantastic patterns. In one of these collections which I noticed, the skulls had been painted red and blue in stripes and circles, and were arranged in five parallel rows of twelve each, all the skulls facing the East."

He finished his drink and dozed, not extinguishing the lamp because he was afraid the dream would return with its fatal questions, the wildly colored and operatic doom. Ludlow was not fool enough to try to order a life already lived, but he was rawly conscious that his secondary life lived through his sons had been mismanaged, not so much with Alfred and Samuel who merely were what they were, but with Tristan. Ludlow would entertain, at least temporarily, any scientific notion touched by the bizarre and there was an idea current that character often skipped a generation. Ludlow's own father had been a schooner captain, in fact at eighty-four still was, of unremitting fierceness and charm whom they tended to see in off years while growing up. His own tamer wanderings had been engendered by his father's tales of seeing giant squid fighting in the moonlight in the Humboldt swells off Peru, and how a man is never the same after rounding the Horn in a seventy-knot gale. One year Ludlow's Christmas present would be a shrunken head from Java and the next a small gold Buddha from Siam and a constant flow of mineral specimens came from throughout the world. So perhaps Tristan in a genetic lapse had become his own father and would like Cain never take an order from anyone but would build his own fate with gestures so personal that no one in the family ever knew what was on his seemingly thankless mind. At fourteen Tristan had quit school and trapped enough lynx to buy anything but had the pelts made into a coat and sent off to Boston to his astounded mother. Then he borrowed Ludlow's Purdey shotgun and disappeared, arriving back at the ranch three months later with a sack of money he won at competitive trap and skeet shoots at sporting clubs. That money had gone to buy One Stab a new saddle and rifle, Samuel a microscope, and Alfred a trip to San Francisco. The whole family was sheltered with perhaps too much money, but Tristan had his own golden touch. The sheriff in Helena had written that Tristan had been seen in the company of prostitutes at age fifteen and his mother had had a nervous fit and Ludlow had given an obligatory lecture that degenerated into his curiosity over whether the whores had been attractive. Ludlow's own bimonthly trips to Helena always included a few nights spent with a schoolteacher he furtively had courted for a decade. To his old cronies at the Cattleman's Club he liked to quote Teddy Roosevelt's "I like to drink the wine of life with brandy in it" and felt foolish afterward, considering as he did all politicians to be knaves. But now Tristan was beyond his sphere of influence and he knew that there was small chance of hearing from him, just as they had never heard from his own father. A few years back his father had gone aground in the Orkneys and Ludlow had arranged the purchase of another ship to which he got small thanks, only a note: "Dear Son. I trust your family is well. Send the boys over for seasoning. Goddamn your money. You'll get back every cent." And the small amounts arrived periodically at his bank in Helena from places as varied as Cyprus and Dakar. As his eyes dimmed with sleep he knew he would have to write Susannah, Tristan's betrothed, to get any news. She was a frail, lovely girl of surpassing intelligence.

Ludlow slept late and was embarrassed knowing that Decker had been ready to hunt for hours. He looked out the window and saw how his lemon-ticked setters sleeping on the lawn gave the effect of sunlight coming down through the leaves of birch trees. They were fine dogs, shipped straight from Devonshire by a friend who came every other year to shoot.

By noon they had shot seven brace of ruffed grouse and both dogs and men were fatigued from the rare late October heat though the northern horizon was dark and they knew that snow was possible by nightfall in the vagaries of Montana weather. While roasting two grouse Decker suggested they buy a thousand calves the next spring because the war would up the price of beef. Also he needed two new hands just to replace Tristan and Pet had cousins over near Fort Benton, one being half-black, if Ludlow didn't mind and they were fine cowboys. Ludlow fed his dogs the hearts and livers of the two grouse and agreed with everything Decker suggested, wondering idly what a half-black Cree would look like. Probably wonderfully ugly. He dozed in the sun smelling the grouse skin roasting on the coals. Decker noticed One Stab far up the hillside of the box canyon and knew he would not come down until after lunch out of etiquette because there were only two cooking grouse. It was One Stab who brought Decker back from Zortman and Ludlow took him on even though he knew he must be on the lam from some unnamed crime. Ludlow was prodded awake and ate with relish. He loved this box canyon and intended to be buried here near where a small spring seeped from the canyon wall. He had been able to buy the twenty thousand acres—not really very large for a ranch in the area—for a song because of his mining connections when it was determined that there was nothing of mineral value on the land. There was plenty of water, though, and the ranch could support cattle to a degree that equaled ranches three times its size though Ludlow limited the number sharply out of a lack of greed and not wanting the problems of too many hands. Also if cattle foraged on the ridges the game birds would leave. The dogs scented One Stab as he descended the hill and wagged their tails frantically. The old Indian took a drink from Decker's flask and spit it on the fire where it flamed upward. Decker was always amused that One Stab spoke with a strong trace of Ludlow's English accent.

Late that night winter came. And the next day brought an angry, imploring letter from his wife begging him to use his influence to free Samuel from the army. Her sleep was troubled though Alfred had written from Calgary that all was going well. But what in God's name did the boys have to do with defending an England they had never seen and Ludlow's own misbegotten sense of adventure had pushed them off with no thought of her feelings. These letters continued through the late fall into January with a menopausal hysteria becoming so extreme that Ludlow, who anyway was full of dull foreboding, no longer opened the letters. He had skipped a pre-Christmas trip to Helena and short of any impulse of romance he read and brooded except for the few hours each morning he had taken it upon himself to teach little Isabel to read and write. He sent Decker off to Helena to buy supplies and presents and the day after he left, a United States marshal had stopped by inquiring if he might know the whereabouts of a Jon Thronburg wanted for bank robbery some years ago in St. Cloud, Minnesota, and rumored to be in this area. Ludlow showed no surprise at the early photo of Decker and replied that the man in fact had passed through three years before on his way to San Francisco to catch a boat for Australia. The marshal nodded wearily, ate a big meal and rode off in the gathering dark for Choteau.

Ludlow waited an hour in case the marshal might be waiting then sent One Stab off to Helena to warn Decker to avoid all towns and main roads in his immediate return. Things seemed to be going badly. By an absentminded mistake he had caught Pet standing drying herself after her bath which conspired to leave him feeling weak, heavy and congested. He would have gladly given his ranch to have even one son back.

In Boston Isabel had taken up with an Italian basso profundo. He had no English so their affair was conducted with her minimal tourist Italian. They would lie back in a pretentious oriental chaise before the fire, his head on her breast, and talk about opera, Florence and the wild redskins he hoped to see on his concert trip to San Francisco and Los Angeles. She, in fact, had become bored with him: his brief, strenuous lovemaking did not suit her for she was far less spiritual than her lovers supposed. She had dreamed unpleasantly of her son Tristan and the singer's head against her breast reminded her how as a boy when he had pneumonia she cuddled and read to him in the same position, a closeness that was fatally rended in the fall of his twelfth year when she opted to return to Boston for the winter. And how the passionate boy had tortured her for her decision, writing in the winter that he had prayed daily for her return by Christmas and when she hadn't returned by Christmas he had cursed God and had become a steadfast nonbeliever. In the spring when she returned he was cool and so distant that she complained to Ludlow who couldn't get a word out of Tristan on the subject of his mother. Then she feigned illness and when the boys filed into her room to kiss her goodnight she detained Tristan and brought him to temporary heel by an onslaught of sentiment and weeping, using the total arsenal of her wiles. He told her that he would love her forever, but he could not believe in God because he had already cursed Him.

The first tentative blow reached the parents individually in late January when they received word that Alfred, never a very good rider, had shattered his knee and broken his back in a fall from his horse near Ypres. The prognosis from the field hospital however was good and they could expect him home by May. The major from Calgary sent a special note of condolence to Ludlow. Alfred had been a brilliant young officer and would be sorely missed. It was unfortunate that Tristan's recklessness diminished the effects of his bravery but the major assumed he would further mature in battle. Samuel had proven spectacularly useful and the major feared losing him to a general as he was such a golden boy all officers had taken note. Ludlow read through the lines to the extent that he understood the degree Tristan was chaffing under army discipline. He felt momentarily guilty when he found himself wishing that it was either Samuel or Tristan returning in the spring, rather than Alfred. In France the Canadians were camped between Neuve-Chapelle and St. Omer. Still in the early and optimistic stages of the war they were considered a bit haphazard and clumsy by their English counterparts, especially the curt and dashing officers from Sandhurst who rather typically saw the war as part of their own brilliant military careers. Such Teutonic nonsense had never been limited to the Huns. But no one faulted the Canadians on the matter of aggressiveness in battle—if anything, their courage was excessive.

Tristan was tented with the worst of the ruffians in his company. Alfred was embarrassed when Tristan visited him in the field hospital, swaggering and sloppily dressed with manure on his boots. Tristan had smuggled in a bottle of wine which Alfred had refused. One of Alfred's fellow officers came for a visit and Tristan had failed to salute, sitting there drinking the bottle of wine and leaving without saying good-bye except to have Alfred tell One Stab to take his favorite horse if he didn't return. Outside the hospital tent Tristan's companion, a huge French-Canadian named Noel, a trapper from British Columbia, waited with downcast eyes in the rain. The news that Samuel and the Major were dead had just reached camp. They had been on a reconnaissance up toward Calais with a group of scouts when they had been hit with mustard gas, then cut to ribbons by machine gun fire as they wandered numbed in a glade of a chestnut forest. A lone surviving scout had come back with the story and was now being debriefed. Tristan stood there dazed in the rain and mud with his friend embracing him in sorrow. The scout who was from their tent approached with an officer in tail. They raced to the paddock and quickly saddled three horses. The officer commanded them to stop and they knocked him aside in full gallop northward toward Calais reaching the forest by midnight. They sat still and fireless through the night and then at dawn in the fine sifting snow they crept forward in the snow and wiped it from the faces of the dozen or so dead until Tristan found Samuel, kissed him and bathed his icy face with his own tears: Samuel's face gray and unmarked but his belly rended from its cage of ribs. Tristan detached the heart with a skinning knife and they rode back to camp where Noel melted down candles and they encased Samuel's heart in paraffin in a small ammunition canister for burial back in Montana. An officer interrupted, but left wordlessly when it occurred to him he would be strangled if he interfered. When they finished, Tristan and Noel drank a liter of brandy from their booty from a farmhouse and Tristan then left the tent and howled Goddamn God until Noel subdued him and he slept.

In the morning Tristan awoke and heartlessly refused to commiserate with Alfred when a messenger came to bring him to the hospital tent. He wrote a note and taped it to the canister saying, "Dear Father, this is all I can send home of our beloved Samuel. My heart is broken in two as yours will be. Alfred will bring it back. You know that place he should be buried up near the spring in the canyon where we found the horns of the full curl ram. Your son Tristan."