The Legacy (33 page)

“Maybe you shouldn’t have,” she says shortly.

“Why not?”

“It’s . . . he’s . . . virtually a stranger, Erica! You can’t just go inviting in random people in the middle of the night!”

“Not random people. Dinny,” I say firmly. I hold her gaze, see that I have won this argument. She can’t explain her objection, not without explaining other things. She says nothing more, turns slowly and shuts the door.

I hurry to my room, pull one of the over-sized T-shirts I wear for pyjamas out of my case and drop it outside Meredith’s door. Steam leaks out from under it, and the mineral smell of hot water. I hasten away down the stairs, retreat into the study, knock back the last of my brandy.

I emerge when I hear Dinny jogging down the stairs. The hallway is sunk in shadows. He pauses when he sees me.

“Erica! You made me jump,” he says, sounding tired, putting one hand up to his hair, raking it roughly with his fingers. Water drips from the ends of it, soaking the shoulders of my Rolling Stones T-shirt.

“So much for the dry clothes,” I say.

“Dry-er, anyway,” he smiles. “I’ll be wet again as soon as I go outside, but thanks all the same. That, I have to admit, is a great shower.”

I can’t seem to answer him; I can’t seem to breathe right. I feel as if I’ve forgotten how, as if breathing in no longer follows breathing out, as if I have lost the logic of it. He reaches the bottom of the stairs, is by my side, and I feel as if I am standing too close to him. But he does not move and neither do I. He tips his head, gives me a bemused look. The same look from decades ago, when I told him I saw trolls in the hollow on the downs, and I am suddenly beset by memories of him: teaching me to duck dive, watching my countless failed attempts; showing me how to suck the nectar from the white flowers of the dead-nettles, plucking one and offering it to me. Gradually his expression changes, grows more serious. I could dissolve under his scrutiny, but I can’t seem to turn as I should, or move away. I watch a drop of water trickle down his arm; watch the faint scattering of goose pimples in its path. My hand moves without my bidding.

I touch the place where the droplet stops, trace my fingers along his forearm, wiping away its cold trail. The shape of the muscles over the bones. The warmth of his blood beneath the skin. My skin feels raw where it touches him, but I leave my hand on his arm; I am grounded, I cannot move. For a second he is still too, as still as I am, as if I have frozen us both with this uninvited touch. The vast hall, ceiling scattered with echoes, seems to shrink in around me. Then he moves away; just slightly, but enough.

“I should go,” he says quietly. “Thanks for . . . all your help this evening—really.” He sounds puzzled.

“No . . . no problem. Any time,” I say, blinking, startled.

“I’ll see you around.” He smiles awkwardly, lets himself out into the bleak early morning.

Lament

1904

C
aroline found herself outside, found herself soaked and shivering, without even realizing she had moved. Water ran into her eyes and through her hair and down the back of her cotton dress, and as the two horses trotted into the yard she splashed over to them from the house, caught the rank stink of hot, wet horse in her nostrils. She recognized Hutch and Joe, their hats pulled low over their faces, and as she drew breath to ask she saw the third rider, hanging bonelessly across the front of Hutch’s saddle; bare-headed, the rain streaming from bronze hair gone slick and dark.

“Corin?” she whispered, putting her hand out to shake him slightly. She could not see his face, could not make him look up at her. “Where’s his hat? He’ll get a chill!” she shouted at Hutch. She didn’t know her own voice; it was too high, too brittle.

“Mrs. Massey, come now, step aside. We have to get him inside the house. Quickly now!” Hutch told her sternly, trying to steer the horse around her.

“Where’s Strumpet? What happened to Corin—what’s wrong with him? Tell me!” she asked, frantic now. She knotted her fingers around the horse’s reins, pulled its head around, stopped it walking past with its precious cargo. Hutch said something terse, and Joe swung down from his horse, taking Caroline’s hands and freeing the reins. Joe shouted something, his voice loud and deep. Caroline paid no heed. More men arrived, to take the horses, to gather Corin up. Caroline stumbled behind them to the bottom step of the house; she fell, and could not rise again. She could not remember how to walk, how to make her legs bend or her feet rise or fall. Strong hands lifted her and even though they bore her in the direction she wanted to go, she fought them savagely, as if she could resist what was happening, and make it not so.

They laid Corin down on the bed. Caroline dried his hair carefully with a linen towel, peeled his wet shirt from his torso and pulled his sodden boots from his feet, splattering rainwater onto the floor. She fetched clean blankets and covered him thickly. His hands were like ice and she held them in her own, feeling the familiar calluses, trying to rub some warmth into them when she had none to give. She brought a bowl of the rabbit stew, steaming and fragrant, and set it by the bed.

“Won’t you have some? It will warm you,” she murmured to him.

“He was riding hard after a big dog coyote. It was the last one we were going after, since we’d seen the rain coming in. Strumpet—she always was the quickest. Fast on her feet too—and that’s not the same thing. She was nimble, that mare. Quick thinking. I never saw a horse and rider move so well together as Corin and that mare . . .” Hutch spoke in a low monotone; his eyes fixed on Corin and his hands working in circles, wringing and twisting and wringing again. Caroline hardly heard a word he said. “But then, with no warning she just went over. High in the air, heels right up over her head. Whatever she stepped in, and I think it was some sinking sand, she never saw it coming or she’d have avoided it for sure. Corin was thrown down hard and . . . and then Strumpet came down on top of him. It was so fast! Like God reached down and turned that poor horse over with a flick of his finger. Her two legs were broke in front. Joe shot her. He shot her and we had to leave her out there for the damned coyotes. That brave horse!” He broke off, tears coursing down his cheeks.

Caroline blinked. “Well,” she said eventually, slowly, like a drunken person. “You’ll have to go and fetch her back. Corin won’t have any horse but her.” Hutch looked at her in confusion. “Is the doctor here yet?” she asked, turning back to the bed. A dark water stain was ruining the silk squares of the quilt, seeping out around Corin. Patches of angry color bloomed beneath the skin of his chest and arms, like an ugly blush. His right shoulder sat at a wrong angle and his head lolled to the left, always to the left. Caroline slipped her hands beneath the blankets to see if he was warming up, but his flesh was cold and solid and wrong somehow. She lay her head close to his and refused to listen to the quiet, terrified corner of her mind that knew he was dead.

T
hey buried Corin on his own land, at the top of a green rise some hundred and fifty feet from the house and a good distance from the sweet-water well. The parson came out from Woodward and tried to persuade Caroline that it would be more seemly for the burial to be in the churchyard in town, but since Caroline was too numb to answer him Hutch had the final say, and he insisted that Corin had wanted to be buried on the prairie. Angie Fosset and Magpie were responsible for Caroline’s attendance that day, and for lacing her into a borrowed black dress that was too big and hung from her thin frame in folds. They also found her a veiled hat with two long, black ostrich feathers that swept out behind her.

“Have you written to his people, Caroline?” Angie asked, pulling a brush through Caroline’s matted hair. “Sweetheart, have you written to his mama?” But Caroline did not answer her. She had no will left to draw breath, to form words. Angie shot Magpie a dark look, and took the Ponca girl aside for a whispered consultation that Caroline did not attempt to overhear. They led her up the rise to stand by the graveside as the parson read the sermon to a crowd of ranchers, neighbors and a good portion of the population of Woodward. The sky was tarnished. A warm wind shook the wreath of white roses on the coffin and carried a few sprinkled raindrops onto the congregation.

When the proper prayers were said and done, Hutch walked a few steps to stand at the head of the coffin. The mourners waited, eyes turned respectfully downward, and when Hutch did not speak they waited some more, glancing up at him from time to time. Even Caroline, eventually, raised her shrouded eyes to see what was happening. Then, at last, Hutch pulled in a long breath and spoke in a deep voice, soft and steady.

“The minister here has made a pretty speech, and I know he meant for it to be a comfort. And it may well be a comfort to some, to think of Corin Massey gone ahead of us into the kingdom of heaven. I daresay that, in time, I might be able to draw some comfort from that same thought. I hope he likes it there. I hope there are fine horses, and wide green spaces for him to ride. I hope the sky there is the color of a spring dawn over the prairie. But today . . .” he paused, his voice cracking. “Today I hope that God will forgive me if I object to him taking Corin from us so soon. Just for today, I think we can feel hard done by that our great friend has gone. For we will miss him sorely. I will miss him sorely. More than I can say. He was the best of us, and a fairer or a kinder man you could not hope to meet.” Hutch swallowed, two tears sliding down his cheeks. He wiped them away roughly with the back of his hand, then, clearing his throat, he began to sing:

“Where the dewdrops fall and the butterfly rests,

The wild rose blooms on the prairie’s crest,

Where the coyotes howl and the wind sports free,

They laid him there on the lone prairie.”

His song was as mournful as the empty wind and it blew right through Caroline. She felt as insubstantial as air, as intangible as the clouds above. Her eyes returned to the pale wooden casket. Nothing about it spoke of Corin, nothing about it reminded her of him. It was as if he had been wiped from the earth, she thought, and it seemed an impossible thing to have happened. She had no photographs, no portraits of him. Already his scent was fading from his pillow, from his clothes. Hutch, Joe, Jacob Fosset and three other men stepped either side of the coffin, gathered the ropes into their weathered hands and took the strain. The parson spoke again but Caroline turned and stumbled away down the hill, the folds of the borrowed dress trailing her like a dark echo of her wedding gown. She could not bear to see the weight on those ropes, the tension in those hands. She could not bear to picture what was weighing that coffin down; and the blackness of the open grave awaiting it appalled her.

“Don’t you leave her alone for a second. Not for a second, Maggie. She was lonely enough when Corin was alive, God help her,” Angie whispered to Magpie as she got ready to depart after the funeral. Caroline was standing right next to them, but Angie guessed that she did not care. Angie turned to her, put firm hands on her shoulders. “I’ll be back on Tuesday, Caroline,” she said, sadly, but as she opened the door Caroline found her voice at last.

“Don’t go!” she croaked. She could not bear to be left, could not bear the emptiness. The spaces inside the house were as terrifying as those outside it now. “Please . . . don’t go, Angie,” she said. Angie turned, her face twisted up with pity.

“Oh, Caroline!” she sighed, embracing her neighbor. “My heart is breaking for you, it truly is,” she said, and Caroline wept, her body sagging helplessly against Angie’s.

“I . . . I can’t bear it . . .
I can’t bear it!
” she cried, and her anguish seemed fit to pull her slowly to pieces. Magpie dropped her face into her hands and bowed her head in sorrow.

But Angie had to leave at some point—she had a family of her own to look after. Magpie was around as much as she could be. She slept on a folded blanket in the main room, with William beside her. His cries in the night woke Caroline in a panic because they were so loud and unfamiliar. She thought coyotes were inside the house, or that Corin was back and crying in pain. But once fully awake a persistent, dull lassitude returned to her. One night she peeked at Magpie through a crack in the door and watched the dark-skinned girl nurse the baby by candlelight, singing so softly that the sound might have been the breeze, or the blood moving in Caroline’s own ears. She felt the darkness at her back like a threat, like a ghoul she was too afraid to turn and see. The darkness of the empty bedroom, as empty now as everything else. The ache of missing Corin, as she lay in that dark bed, was like a knife lodged in her heart, slowly twisting. So she stayed at the crack in the door for a long time, clinging to the candlelight like a moth; and eventually Magpie stopped singing and changed her posture subtly, just enough to show that she felt herself watched.

The heat of high summer was hardly worth fighting now. Caroline did as she was told, and ate as long as Magpie sat with her and forced her to. In the evening, Magpie spoke softly of unimportant things as she undressed Caroline and brushed out her hair, just as the maid Sara had once done. Caroline shut her eyes and thought back to that time, to the dark spell after her parents had died and how she had thought that she would never again feel as lost and sad as she did then. But this was worse; it was much, much worse.

“Do you remember the time my father took us to the circus, Sara?” she murmured, with the ghost of a smile.

“Who is Sara?” Magpie asked sharply. “I am Magpie, your friend, Mrs. Massey.”

Caroline opened her eyes and caught the Ponca girl’s gaze in the mirror.

“Yes, of course,” she said tonelessly, to hide the fact that for a moment she’d had no idea who or where she was.

As she went about the chores, Magpie took to putting William into Caroline’s lap. She did this particularly when Caroline had not spoken for several hours, or was not responding to questions, her face fixed and unchanging. The child, by then ten months old, soon began to wriggle and climb about her person, and she would be forced to take hold of him, steady him, and focus her attention on him.

“Sing to him, Mrs. Massey. Tell him the story of the Garden of Eda,” Magpie urged; and although Caroline could not find any stories or songs in her heart, she did find traces of a smile for the baby, and her hands woke up enough to tickle him, to hold and reposition him. She did not wince when her hair was pulled. William regarded her with his curious, velvet dark eyes and grinned wetly from time to time; and from time to time Caroline gathered him up and held him close, her eyes shut tight, as if drawing strength from his tiny body. Magpie hovered nearby when she did this, ready to take the child back when the embrace grew too much and made him cry.

Throughout the summer, Caroline spent long hours sitting out on the porch, tapping the runner of Corin’s rocking chair with her toe and then shutting her eyes, listening to the sound it made as it creaked to and fro, to and fro. She tried not to think. She tried to not wonder how things might have been if she had not blamed the coyotes for her fears in the night. She tried not to wonder how things might have been if she had not had that nightmare, if she had not been afraid of the wild, if she had been a stronger person; a better, more adaptable person. A braver one. Any other kind of person than the kind that sent a husband out to die chasing wild dogs. She wept without realizing it, and went about with her face encrusted with salt. And she had no child of his to keep and raise and speak to with quiet sorrow of how bronze and gold and glorious its father had been. Not even this trace of him was left to comfort her. She stared into the wide, far horizon and let herself be afraid of it. All day she sat, and was afraid. It was the only way she knew to punish herself, and she felt that abject misery was no worse than she deserved.

Some weeks later, Hutch came into the house with a respectful knock. Had Caroline not been so remote, so inward facing since Corin’s death, she would have noticed the man’s suffering, and that he avoided her, shouldering the blame for Corin’s accident upon himself. He was thinner because he could not bring himself to eat. The accident had cut him too deeply. The lines on his face seemed deeper, although he could not yet be thirty-five. Guilt weighed heavy upon him and grief was ageing him, stamping its mark on him, just as it was on Caroline, but she did not have it in her to offer comfort. Not even to Hutch. She made coffee for him and noticed, solemnly and without satisfaction, that she had finally brewed a good strong cup, not weak, not bitter, not burnt. She pictured Corin sipping it, pictured the smile that would have spread over his face, the way he would have complimented her on it—slipping an arm around her waist, planting a kiss on her face.
Sweetheart, that’s the best coffee I ever tasted!
Even her smallest triumphs had made him proud. Thoughts like this made her sway. Thoughts like this knocked her legs out from under her.