The Farmer's Daughter (7 page)

Marcia dragged her antelope up the hill to Sarah's juniper then laughed at herself for doing so because Lester was coming by with the pickup at noon. Marcia backed into the juniper and Sarah could feel the heat of her exertion off her body. Marcia splashed water from her canteen and washed the dry blood off her hands saying that the “girl” had only required a fifty-yard shot. They chatted for a while with Marcia talking comically about Terry and her losing their virginity at the hotel, then Marcia tapped her on the shoulder and pointed. There upwind about two hundred yards to the west a young male antelope was picking its way along a thicket of buck brush at the bottom of a butte. Marcia had Sarah use her shoulder as a rest and Sarah chose a neck shot. The antelope bucked straight up like a horse then landed on its side. “You blew that sucker out of his shoes,” Marcia said. Sarah immediately thought, I shot one mammal and I can shoot another. It was unpleasant when she gutted the animal and the steamy rank-smelling heat of the innards rose against her face in the cold air.

Chapter 10

Of course Lolly screamed in the morning when she discovered the antelope hanging in the pump shed off the back door of the house. When Sarah reached home in the middle of the night Frank got up and congratulated her and before going to bed Sarah moved the three empty suitcases Lolly had put in the corner of her room. Imagine that bitch using my room for storage, Sarah thought. At Frank's urging Sarah moved the carcass up to Tim's, adjusting the propane to forty degrees, a good hanging temperature for both beef and wild game. She'd wait a week before butchering and wrapping it for the freezer. Rover was enthused when she fried up the slices of heart and shared it.

They had taken an extra day getting home because Terry wanted to see the confluence of the Yellowstone and Missouri rivers up between Sydney and Williston, a beautiful and historically significant place. Sarah, however, was distracted by the idea that she would have to make a trial run into Karl's territory. She couldn't just go in cold and do the deed. There was also a nagging sense that she shouldn't have identified the idea of shooting Karl with having shot the antelope. She was a good student of history and knew that humans find it altogether too easy to shoot one another, but then sanity fled too easily and when they drove home on Route 2 across the top of Montana and stopped at a diner at Wolf Point there was a trace of Karl's odor of yogurt, breath mints, and cow shit and she again felt murderous. Only fifteen minutes later out in the parking lot she saw a group of local Anishinabe Indians getting out of an ancient car and thought that of all Americans along with the blacks they were the people with the right to shoot people. She stood there in the cold wind hoping that at some point soon her brain would stop being a shuddering elevator.

The winter started out difficult but resolved itself in purposeful physical exhaustion. One morning a week before Christmas Lolly had said to her, “If you hang out with horses and dogs you're going to smell like horses and dogs.” This was at breakfast and Sarah answered, “I like the smell of horses and dogs better than I like the smell of people.” Lolly huffed off into the bedroom and Frank gave Sarah a lecture on civility which she thought was unwarranted. She went on a hard ride in the snow on Lad and Rover caught and ate a whole jackrabbit leaving a big smear of blood on the snow. When she got back to the house she packed up essentials, including frozen packages of antelope, and moved up to Tim's where she played the piano for hours. She wept briefly then figured weeping wouldn't help one little bit. She thought of the damage people do to each other, sometimes incalculable, and then there was the damage you could do to yourself by toughening up. While she was playing the piano it occurred to her that the least tough woman in the world, Emily Dickinson, was one of her favorite poets. Despite this she felt she had no choice but to become prematurely older and austere. She would live in this cabin like a cloistered nun and then finally leave town and try to find another life.

When school started again she joined the volleyball team to spend more time with Marcia and being tall she quickly learned how to spike the ball with brutal speed and to feel the tranquillity of exhaustion. She joined the track team and ran the eight hundred meters or half mile. Beginning in February the track team worked out in a wealthy rancher's horse arena which was larger than the school gymnasium. The girls' team ran in circles on a mixture of sawdust and dirt for an hour each day. They ran as fast as possible to keep warm because the arena wasn't heated. Sarah liked it but not as much as running outdoors. The good part was that in the first ten minutes of running you would rehearse your mental problems and after the ten minutes all of the problems would drift away. She quit her Bible Club sham which anyway no longer fooled the older boys who badgered her. One day while she was talking with Marcia in the school hall the goofy son of the local Baptist minister passed her a note that read, “Can you take seven inches?” Sarah passed the note to Marcia who slugged the boy knocking him to the floor.

Sarah got up at five
A.M.
and studied and read. She then fed Rover and Lad and took Rover for a short walk. Unlike at her home down the hill Rover would come into the cabin and he slept at the end of the bed which kept Sarah's feet warm. For protection against the unknown she kept Tim's pistol under her pillow. Frank had helped her build a shed for Lad next to Tim's porch. Hay was expensive but Terry would swipe it from his dad in pickup loads and haul it over with Marcia. Terry and Marcia were Sarah's only social life except for an occasional weekend visit to Terry's mother Tessa to borrow books. Tessa had Sarah reading George Eliot, Henry James, and Stendhal. She liked Stendhal but the others were too claustrophobic.

One Sunday afternoon while she was playing Schubert Frank came up to make peace and offer a compromise. He said that Lolly thought she had driven Sarah out of the house and Sarah said, “She did.” Frank asked if for his sake Sarah would have dinner with them at least twice a week and Sarah said yes mostly because she was tired of cooking all of her own meals. Then Frank entered an area that startled her. He had been talking to his sister Rebecca down in Tucson about their family problems and Rebecca had sent a ticket for Sarah to come down for a visit and see if she might like to attend the University of Arizona. At first Sarah said no because she had intended to use spring vacation to do a reconnaissance on Karl over in Meeteetse. She changed her mind and said she would visit her aunt because she wanted to ride on a plane and she could always skip school when the snow melted and it would be easier to investigate Karl's environs.

Part III

Chapter 11
1986

Frank and Lolly drove her all the way to Bozeman which was three hours because Lolly wanted to shop for things unavailable in Butte. At the airport Sarah's mind was a whirling dither and she seemed unable to take a full breath. Unlike in her home area the cars pulling up to the entry were new models and clean and shinier and inside many men wore suits and ties and had the general appearance of being rich though she knew that was unlikely to be true. These men were fresh-faced while the big ranchers back home might own thousands of acres of land and several thousand cows but were weathered and battered by their life in the elements.

Once in her window seat Sarah found herself humming a song taught to her by Frank's old father Antonio who had died when she was five. She remembered his wrinkled face next to hers on the piano stool as they sang together, “Off we go into the wild blue yonder, flying high into the sky . . .” She had loved this old man who always seemed to be laughing compared to her father Frank.

The takeoff is shocking indeed for one who has never been on a plane but then she was quickly enmeshed in the somewhat cryptic design of the landscape below remembering a line in a poem, “Where the water goes is how the earth is shaped.” The man in the trim suit next to her was reading the Wall Street Journal and the smell of his aftershave was so strong it was enough to gag a maggot. She idly wondered how anyone could sleep with a man who smelled like that. For inscrutable reasons the mountains below her called the Spanish Peaks reminded her of Terry's teasing to the effect that she was far too austere and prematurely old. She knew that this was also true before her attack and her consequent decision to kill Karl. Terry would mockingly say that she had “her lid screwed on too tight” and that she was a bit of an ideologue like her father. After that contretemps she wept on the way home in her pickup, lamely trying to excuse the obvious truth by the fact that Terry was drinking too much. She had gone down in their wine cellar when his mother was visiting Boston and she questioned why on earth anyone would want that much wine. There must have been thousands of bottles but then Terry said that Tessa averaged two bottles of wine a day.

The plane ride was causing other unexpected thoughts as it does to many people, a free-floating anecdotage. On the way back from antelope hunting on Route 2 they had turned south on Interstate 15 in Shelby, then stopped in Great Falls for something to eat. Terry had been drinking wine and insisted that they try to get into a strip club he'd noticed. Occasionally Terry had the snotty boldness and sense of entitlement of a rich kid. He sent Sarah and Marcia ahead of him through the door. They made it but the bouncer wouldn't let Terry in. In the brief moment she was in the club Sarah saw a pretty stripper rubbing a patron's face into her pubis while the patron's friend cheered. The sight so shocked her that it was a minute before she would flee. Outside Marcia laughingly told Terry what they had seen and he was angry having missed it. In the spring as a practical joke Terry had given Sarah a very naughty Erskine Caldwell novel which had itemized such behavior and once in Missoula when she and her dad were having lunch with other vegetable growers an old Italian at the table said that he wanted to kiss the waitress's pretty ass. Frank spoke sharply to him but he hadn't noticed Sarah and apologized. Sarah was reading Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy at lunch and pretended she hadn't heard him to save him from embarrassment. It was clear to her on the plane that Karl wasn't the only animalistic man and obviously there were women taking part. Suddenly she questioned whether shooting Karl would make things even but after a pause thought that it would.

After a brief layover and changing planes to a bigger jet in Salt Lake City, Sarah was thinking that though there was a lot of anti-Mormon prejudice in the West they certainly lived in a grand place. One day in the future she hoped to ride Lad around in the Escalante area of southern Utah. After only a couple of hours of her trip everything seemed brand-new and she was forgetting where she was from. Montana might be huge but it was also confining. Now, finally, the world was opening its windows for her. She had memorized an Emily Dickinson sentence that was au point, “To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else.” When her family had come west five and a half years before and crossing South Dakota she had looked over her father's shoulder and had seen the dark, immense shapes of the Black Hills in the distance she had decided not to believe her eyes. To a flatlander from Ohio the first mountains are mentally not quite acceptable.

Now in the Tucson airport with her aunt Rebecca approaching she was back in a slow-motion dreamscape. Rebecca shook her hand and hugged her and looked down at Sarah's hands which were calloused and there was a raw spot from a rope burn she got from helping Marcia pull a calf.

“You've been working, I see,” Rebecca laughed.

“Well, I work in the garden, split wood, and the other day we pulled a difficult calf.” Sarah was embarrassed because Rebecca's hands were soft and smooth compared to her own which were the hands of a workingman. They'd had to pull hard or they would have lost both cow and calf and when the calf came out suddenly she and Marcia had fallen backward. It all reminded her of mouthy Terry saying that nearly everyone in their area except the big ranch owners were actually peasants in the old European sense. They weren't called peasants because it was a democracy but that was what most locals were.

Rebecca had a four-wheel drive with the same name as Sarah's dog and explained she needed it to get up the steep grade to Kitts Peak Observatory on the occasional icy nights. They drove nearly an hour to the southeast of Tucson to the crossroads village of Sonoita. When Rebecca stopped at a corner store to get cigarettes Sarah heard two dark men in ranchwear speaking Spanish outside their pickup and decided she was in a foreign country. She didn't know that there was a local saying that all of the territory south of Interstate 10 was mostly Mexico.

Rebecca had a pleasant, sprawling adobe house on ten acres. There were two large Labs she called Mutt and Jeff in a kennel that were drooling nitwits when released. It took Sarah a while to comprehend the house which was built to welcome the outside rather than to keep it at bay. There was an inside, roofless patio with a fair-sized cottonwood growing in it. Sarah wandered around, then unpacked her clothes while Rebecca started dinner. The Labs sniffed her luggage and asked with looks, “Where is the girl dog?” By looking outside her bedroom and through the patio she noticed a small grand piano in a sunroom which delighted her. On the wall by the door there was a small map on which Rebecca had scrawled “you are here” pinpointing Sonoita and the surrounding mountain ranges, the Rincons to the far north, the Whetstones and Mustangs to the east, the Patagonias and the Santa Ritas to the west. To the south forty miles was all of Mexico. What a place to ride a horse, she thought.

At dinner Rebecca made a proposal that at first angered Sarah because of her uncommunicative father. Frank and Rebecca had been talking and there was the idea that if Sarah would go to the University of Arizona Rebecca would finance it because Sarah could also house-sit. Rebecca was going to be spending a lot of time in Chile with a consortium of astronomers designing a new observatory facility. Sarah mellowed with a glass of wine and was startled when Rebecca said how much she disliked Lolly. “Lolly was always wicked and she and Frank were fooling with each other when they were only thirteen and now she's got him. With women my brother is lame. I don't see how you stand her.” Sarah told her that she had moved up the hill and was living alone with Rover and that she had rigged Lad's corral so he could look in the window. She asked if she could bring them and Rebecca said of course and that half the people in Sonoita had horses in their yards.