The Ploughmen: A Novel Read online

  Atop a small rise an hour later they came upon a low homestead cabin of notched and squared-off logs and the dog raised his nose and angled toward it. A flicker of hope invigorated Millimaki and he jogged up the bank on which the cabin stood, the black rectangle of its doorway promising the only substantial shade for miles in any direction. They had not seen where the man had spent the night and Millimaki prayed he might be resting his old bones in the cabin’s cool interior.

  But he was not. Tom whined and circled in the dusty dark and Millimaki could see in the pale dirt, among tracks of pack rats and skunk and badger, the man’s shoe prints trod in a circle no larger than a barrel lid. He had stood there turning and turning about for some time and had at last gone out into the bright alien world again.

  It was very quiet there. Tom lay in the dirt panting. The cabin door was stove in, hanging atilt from a hinge fashioned from a boot sole and Millimaki, dizzy and half-blind in the sudden twilight, stood looking back the way they’d come. It was a strangely resolute course for a man who’d had difficulty navigating the hallways of his daughter’s home, a track not at all like the zags and insensate back-loops of so many of the poor souls he’d pursued over the years who’d wandered crazed or hypothermic through deadfall or thigh-deep in freezing creeks or like maddened fugitives scaled sheer cliffs, leaving bloody fingernails wedged among the fissures. The frightened woman at the campsite had said her father had gone off in search of his dead wife and perhaps she was right. He seemed to be drawn by something, and as Millimaki stood atop prints of the old man’s cheap shoes, the word “quest” came into his bleary head. Quest, he thought. What the hell, I’m losing it.

  He had not slept in more than twenty hours, and fatigue crept down his bones in a slow paralysis. He imagined the old janitor himself standing there earlier, the adze scars on the logs transubstantiating into some long-ago wallpaper pattern his wife had chosen for their home. Where swallows flitted now among the bellied pine poles of the ceiling he heard the twitter of his children from their bedrooms. And then her voice again. It had brought him here but now moved on, a faint and musical rendering of his name on the wind and in the branches of the trees.

  * * *

  Shadows like viscous ink slid down the coulee sides and gave sinister shape to the sandstone totems and crags accoutered with high-water jetsam and there were shapes enough among them to populate any dream or nightmare, even in a sound mind. Box elder trees with their eveningtime shadows came to resemble groping mandrake creatures, and raptors planing high overhead gave voice to them, and the roots of the dark pines lay atop the rutted ground like vipers.

  The day was far advanced when Millimaki and the dog stood among the bones of the ill-starred Hereford. He stared at the bleached jumble about his feet as if it might be an augury he was meant to decipher but in his diminished state he could hardly unriddle the mystery of his own compass. He was astounded the man, eighty-six years old, could have come so far in such country, driven it seemed by a love that had endured fifty years to pursue glimpse and figment, the specter of his wife beckoning at each bend of the baking streambed. Or was it that, like Tom, he merely followed the scent on the breeze of lilac or rosewater or the redolence of the soap that for two thousand nights she’d used before she came to lie beside him in their bed. Such feelings for Millimaki were as cold and remote as an expired star and he was better able to conjure images of the old man’s wife than of his own, grown faceless and undefined in the mere weeks since she’d abandoned him.

  Millimaki rubbed at his afflicted eyes and consulted his watch. When he stared up and addressed the sky, gone lavender at the late hour, his tongue felt thick. “Where in the Christ are you, old man?”

  The dog Tom at that moment began to whine, circling near a ravelment of roots and deadfall piled up by a long-ago flood; it looked like the den of some Pleistocene rodent. The grandson’s cap lay in the dirt and the ground was scuffed and gouged by the man’s shoes as though he had struggled there with a phantom.

  The dog’s tail began to wag furiously and he bolted away, pink tongue hanging long from his mouth. He ran ahead and waited for Millimaki and ran again. After nearly a mile of this, the deputy saw a snatch of white far ahead—a color, save for bones, absent in all the dun and darkening landscape. He did not trust his eyes. He shambled the last short way on feet heavy as bricks.

  A magpie stood on the man’s very back, pulling at the fabric of his shirt almost as if it merely wanted to wake him from his sleep. It flew on their approach and from a juniper branch assailed the dog with splenetic speech so nearly human the dog stood and stared. The man lay on his face and seemed to have fallen headlong as though pushed from behind. Every inch of his exposed pale skin was terribly burned and shot with blisters and he lay in the dirt slowly baking.

  He had been bitten by a snake high in the groin, his left leg swollen horrifically so that the fabric of his trousers was stretched tight and discolored by the thin fluid seeping from the wound. The snake was a prairie rattler probably five feet long and thick as bridge cable and wound around the old man’s arm like strange Egyptian bijouterie. It seemed in his confusion and rage he had grabbed the snake behind the head and just hung on. The dog sniffed at him and warily sniffed the snake and finally merely sat. Val took out his small camera from the fanny pack he wore and circled, taking his pictures of the ground and the man in his repose and close pictures of the wound in the bloated leg. He snapped a frame of the snake locked in the man’s grip, an image he’d later think seemed strangely mild and as unthreatening as a sock puppet, with its extended tongue a thin filament dry as a strip of felt. At last he sat beside the dog, in the cup of his hand giving him long drinks of water from one of the canteens. He’d saved it for the old man but now he and the dog drank deeply. As the poison moved in his veins, the man with the snake in his grip plodded up the narrow watercourse for nearly a mile toward the timbered headland above, which now, as Millimaki sat regarding his rigid shape, sent down from its slopes on the breeze a perfumery of sage and juniper and pine. Millimaki was very tired and sat looking up at the bluff and at the trees silhouetted on a sudden pearl light. Presently he rose and moved to the corpse and turned it over. It was a wooden thing, a carving attired with a workman’s costume and a thespian’s mask of awe, of wonderment, eyes agape and painted the same heart-rending blue as his daughter’s.

  Shadows lay long across the ground and stars began to materialize and from the uplands stretching off toward the Judith River Millimaki heard the first tentative yawps of coyotes. He closed his eyes and rested his forehead on his knees. The dog slept. The old man slumbered rigidly near his feet.

  And then he saw her, standing young and fresh and a little impatiently on the bluff, the wind moving her hair. She waited and soon her knight, this haggard warrior—burner of trash, sweeper of floors—went to her. And there was nothing else but her, not the crushing sorrow, not the sun that baked his skin or the pain in his leg or the vile writhing thing around his arm. His steps were light and he gained the top of the hill with scarcely a breath and they stood together on that palisade gazing out over the green and perfect flowering prairielands of their life. In his dream Millimaki watched as Tom scrabbled up the rocky slope and circled whimpering and at last lost the scent he’d followed as it spiraled into the troposphere like a wisp of smoke.

  Millimaki woke and sat looking fondly at the dark terrible shape and then put his head on his knees once more as the blue dusk settled over him with the whisper of bees. Tom came to nuzzle him, staring into his face with sad moist eyes and finally lay down beside his feet. A three-quarter moon ascended above the hills and all was silvery light. Millimaki was reluctant to leave the old gentleman’s company.

  * * *

  He held the dog by the collar and stood for a long time in the dark. Driftwood in the fire snapped with the sound of breaking bones. When he approached, the man and his wife sat stupefied before the flames and they stared at Millimaki wide eyed and amazed as th
ough he were the conjurement of their bleak thoughts, a figure portioned out from the darkness itself. Beyond them the lake was a sheet of quicksilver, so flat and calm Millimaki could make out gulls or ducks arrayed on its surface hundreds of yards out and could as well have been a fleet of ships at anchor.

  “God almighty, you scared us, Deputy.”

  Millimaki stood in the circle of light. “Could I get a drink of water for Tom?”

  The family had drug up a cottonwood log from the lake that had been worn white and smooth as a great tusk and he stepped over it and sat. The dog disappeared into the dark and could be heard lapping endlessly at the lake edge. The man set the bowl down next to Millimaki.

  “Anyways, in case he wants it,” he said. He handed Millimaki a long-necked beer, its sides pearled with dew. Millimaki felt something in his pocket and he fished out the boy’s cap and set it on the log beside him.

  The woman had not taken her eyes from him as he came up and sat and she said at last, “He’s dead out there, isn’t he?”

  Millimaki regarded the shifting coals. “Yes, he is,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  “I knew it, anyways,” she said. “It’s all right. It’s what he wanted.”

  “He was a strong man. You didn’t tell me that,” Millimaki said blearily. “He went a long ways.” The heat and lack of sleep and general unnamed sadness lay atop him like a succubus. He sat with his forearms on his knees and was surprised to find a bottle in his hand. He couldn’t bring himself to tell them about the snake and it seemed sufficient tonight that they picture their father intact and comfortably asleep under the cosseting sky. Almost to himself he said, “I can’t believe how far he went. In that heat.” He shook his head. “Might have been seven miles. More maybe. Eight or nine.”

  “He’s done that a couple of times back at home,” the husband said. “One time they found him out by the airport, better than twelve miles from the house.”

  “Anyways, it’s what he wanted.” The old man’s daughter wore a thin sweater thrown over her shoulders and she pulled it tighter around her. “He’s with Mother now.”

  The man sat sunk in a canvas camp chair, a beer bottle dangling from his hand while he stared back at the sputtering coals. “Why couldn’t he of just died in his chair at home,” he said. He shook his head. “To go out there in that.” He tipped his bottle vaguely toward the Breaks, the headlands and blunt pines rumored against a backdrop of outrageous starfields. “It’s awful. It’s undignified is what it is.”

  “I won’t hear that,” his wife said. “Lawrence, I won’t hear it.”

  “Well.”

  “It’s not true.” She was quiet for a long while. The fire welled brightly as a breeze rose up, collapsing wood sending up a rosary of brilliant embers. A luminous cloud lay across the moon.

  “He was on a search is what I believe.” The woman paused, her face in the firelight ruddled and exaggerated as a native mask. “A kind of search. I can’t think of the word.”

  Millimaki did not look up. He spoke almost as if from a dream. “A quest,” he said.

  “Well, yes.” She looked at him in surprise. “That’s exactly the word. A quest. He was. He’s been on a quest for Mother since she died. Far as he was concerned, she was somewheres just out of sight, just around the next corner. And don’t look at me like that. Do you have to look at me that way?”

  Her husband said, “I wasn’t looking any way.”

  “I know that look.” Her voice quavered. “I know that look, Lawrence.”

  The man stared at her for a long moment. The wind passed over them and Millimaki imagined it bringing the old man’s scent out across all the broken implacable country, to all the hunger that resided there and the wind blew the woman’s pale hair across her mouth and sent a chill down her frame. She was still, in middle age, as slender as a girl.

  The man cast his eyes sidelong to look at Millimaki. “Deputy,” he said, “don’t you have someone waiting on you? You must want to bust out of here and get home.”

  Enthralled by the pulsing coals and numb with fatigue, Millimaki registered the words slowly. Both of them watched him. The wind blew. Their shadows loomed and collapsed and loomed again on the ground beyond them.

  “My wife,” he said stupidly, “she—”

  “That’s right,” the man said. “Go on. You don’t need to wait on us. You go on and be with her.”

  With that he set his bottle down carefully next to his feet and stood up. Millimaki watched him. He circled out into the dark and reappeared behind his wife, his face red and demonic in the upflare of the fire and his hard hands aglow and he wrapped his arms around his wife’s shoulders as tenderly as if he were trying to contain a cloud. She reached up and held his forearms in her small hands and began to softly cry. “Oh, he was, Lawrence. He was.”

  The wind swept down and the old man’s daughter wept, repeating, like an affirmation of her father’s simple life, “Oh, he was, he was, he was.”

  TWELVE

  “I suppose I ought to mention this one other thing, though it don’t amount to any mystery or anything. When I was a young buck in Deer Lodge I had to get a guy who was after me. They never could prove who it was, though I had to do a two-week haul in Siberia East because they knew more or less what was going on and they figured it was me. There was a corner by the cellhouse, the only place the towers couldn’t see and I got this guy over there. There was a kind of outdoor urinal there that you maybe’ve seen if you’ve been there. A piss trough. Lot of shit went down there, guys trading dope and getting it on with one another and shit like that and I figured he’d come over when I was taking a piss just to have a look and of course he did, hissing terrible awful things to a boy. Yeah, that was the deal. You could find out easy enough I guess, if you cared. I don’t remember his name but he was a fat dago fairy from Butte, Montana, and he deserved what he got. It was that I didn’t have no choice is why I don’t mention it much and he come over and I put a shiv up under his fat gut and just pulled it upwards hard as I could and he fell down hard with his blue guts spilt out on the stones like a steer you’d butcher. And then I went and pissed the blood off my hands and walked away and that was that.

  “I’m tired now, Val. There wasn’t anything more to it than that. Good night.”

  THIRTEEN

  He held the crude map in his hands and surveyed the country below him. He looked at the page then turned it half around and looked again. It was like a child’s drawing. The old criminal had drawn horseshoes to approximate the upper and lower dams and inverted Us with strange diacritical marks to indicate hills with their sparse native vegetation. He had incised thick black lines apparently with the paper poised on his knee because in places the paper was torn through, these meant to represent coulees, which converged like veins into a river replete with tiny waves and gulls. To Wexler finally it looked like an idiot’s rendering of a storybook land. The old man had drawn in trees and a series of inverted Vs that might have been distant mountains by which to orient oneself, and finally in various places he had marked a number of bold Xs. Wexler stared all around. He turned the pages once more.

  By the time he returned to his car the sun was nearly down. He sat on the bumper, with a stick chiseling mud from the soles of his boots. When he was done he took the old man’s map and oriented it and sat looking up into the coulees he’d walked, which at that late hour lay in cool blue shadow. Beyond the bluff tops he could see the peaks of the Highwoods purple and insubstantial in the distance as a reef of summer storm cloud.

  With the folding entrenching tool he’d dug three holes that day that had yielded nothing but rocks and the ironlike roots of sagebrush and one ancient bone that may have been the pinbone of a cow or buffalo. Wexler had examined it for some time and had laid it alongside his own thighbone and finally had thrown it away in disgust. Now, sitting at his car, he studied the maps once more in the failing light and looked to the north again and finally balled up the pages and threw them into
the ditch weeds.

  “Goddamn you, old man,” he said. He seemed to address the papers now fluttering like wounded birds in a snarl of mullein and hemlock. “If you’re screwing me around I swear to God I’ll make your hayseed boyfriend wish he’d never left the farm.”

  * * *

  Walking in a daze, Millimaki followed the old man as he trundled slowly down the corridor, his shadow on the waxed concrete, giant and dwarf, as he passed beneath the buzzing overheads. From the cells some of the men called to him. Gload went along as if he were walking alone in his orchard and the voices of the inmates were to him less consequential than the trill of birds in the apple trees. They’d just returned from the infirmary after Gload had complained of chest pains and dizziness and the caged men behind the safety of their bars called him piker and scammer and goldbrick. Millimaki turned to one man whose narrow head nearly fit between the bars where he stood hissing a disjointed litany of obscenities.

  “One more word and it’s lights out, right now,” Millimaki said. “Get back to your cot or I’ll call for Dobek.”

  The man hissed a long “muthafucka.” Millimaki swung his baton viciously and hit the bars above the man’s head. “Get back to your goddamn cot, Murphy, or I swear to Christ I’ll come in there and crush your head myself.” He had raised the club again, his hand tingling and aflame and felt in that incandescent moment if the face appeared at the bars he could turn bone to gruel. But the man whined and slunk soundlessly into the shadows and could be heard for many minutes in conversation with himself there.

  Gload stood before his cell door and waited for Val to turn the key in the lock and he went in without a word, though in passing he eyed the younger man with a bemused expression that furrowed his immense forehead. Millimaki heard him sit in his chair, saw the match flame erupt in the gloom.