The Ploughmen: A Novel Read online

  Without the analgesia that might have been offered by John Gload’s irresistible hands, she had made one for herself with a lariat rope and a six-foot ladder.

  For Glenda that same malevolent world of the outside had raised the latch and pushed open the door and had swarmed around her. Owls, snakes, coyotes. Insects leaked like sand through the door cracks to infest her hair. The wind came down from the trees to inhabit her. Did he want someday to find her, too, dangling from a collar tie or swimming in a tepid bath with her wrists blossoming gouts of red? He thought, once again, that somehow he’d become another stone in another wall.

  Sweat plastered his shirt to the seatback. He looked at his watch, consulted the sun nearing its zenith to assure himself it had not spun wildly ahead in some cruel rift of time. The dog would be waiting in his kennel. He sat for a moment longer. The grass in the borrow ditch lay flat to the ground under the wind and rose again and fell and the colossal cottonwood yawed and groaned, sending down onto the truck’s hood a clutch of tiny branches that clattered and skittered on the metal like juju bones.

  * * *

  As he rose finally to leave Gload that morning, taking his chair from the bars to the hallway, the old man had said, “Now you’re the best part of my day, Valentine. I’m the same as those pitiful old sonsofbitches looking out the window at a man going to get the paper. That was a terrible thing to see and now it’s me.”

  * * *

  Gload sat watching him. Wexler leaned against the bars. The lights shone on his polished belt, his spit-shined Wellingtons. When Gload stood from his bunk Wexler pushed himself away from the bars and stood back.

  “Hell, I don’t bite, Weldon.”

  “Never said you did.”

  “Val, he sits right up here close.”

  “That’s against policy. I could have him wrote up for that.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t do that,” Gload said. “As a personal favor. I kind of feel sorry for the kid.”

  “Any trouble he has he brings on himself. But I can let it go, sure.”

  “What sort of trouble?”

  “Maybe ‘trouble’ ain’t the right word. Laxadaisical is what he is. Off hiking in the woods with that dog and one thing and another. Dirty boots like a farmer, wrinkled slacks. Thinks he has the old man’s ear but he don’t.”

  “I see what you mean.”

  “Dirty fingernails.”

  “He has let himself go, yes indeed.”

  “Anyways, that’s what I want to talk to you about, John. I know you’ve got to like Millimaki but I want to say don’t waste your time on him. It’s time you don’t have. He don’t carry any whack around here. Seems like if you want to talk to somebody—for your own benefit—it ought to be me or one of the other ranking officers.”

  “Like Dobek maybe? He come in here with some pretty disturbing things to say, Weldon. Pretty gory stuff.”

  “He’s a fucking animal, John.”

  “Kind of put the fear of God into me, I’ll tell you that.”

  “A fucking caveman. Okay, forget Dobek.” He took an incremental pace forward to illustrate his earnestness. “I’ll be your man, John. If you can give me any information it might look good that you cooperated.”

  “I believe I have been cooperating, Weldon. What about the maps?”

  Wexler sighed theatrically. “Maps didn’t amount to shit, John. I think you know that.”

  “Them were good maps. I spent quite a little time on them.”

  “Didn’t amount to nothing. Zero or less.”

  “I’m an old man, Weldon. My memory’s not what it once was.”

  “You were fucking with me.”

  “Nosir.” Gload rose and protested, approaching the bars with his hands extended in supplication and wearing an expression of wounded pride. “I wouldn’t do any such thing.”

  Wexler took one step back.

  “But I think I need to go on out there, Weldon. Got to walk the ground again myself. It wasn’t exactly yesterday.” He gripped the bars then and assumed a contemplative pose, his red-rimmed eyes to the ceiling. “What would really be best is if you were to get me a topo map of the place.”

  Wexler assumed his practiced pose. His hands atop his pistol butt and baton were very white. Gload watched his face. “You could do it with a topo?”

  “I’m sure of it.”

  “A topo,” he said. “Leave me think about it.”

  “Then we can go on out there and I could pretty well show you exactly where you want.”

  “Take you out? I don’t believe I can do that,” Wexler said.

  “Right, right. The Old Man would probably want Val to take me out, if at all.”

  “I outrank Millimaki, time in grade.”

  “I’m just going by what I hear around here.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like he was going to let Val take me out there in a set of leg chains, that’s all.” Gload chuckled, held out his hands, now in a gesture of helplessness. “As if a old sonofabitch like me could leg it out anyways.”

  FOURTEEN

  He sat in his chair alone in the small garden reading the Great Falls Tribune. Francie that morning had gone to town as she had nearly every day for the past several days and after he’d read the single column about Sidney White, he laid aside the paper and sat looking at the crocuses she’d planted, unfurling their color around the base of a lilac tree. She’d planted tulip and daffodils there too and the crocus blooms stood among the deep green serpent’s tongues of their emerging leaves like drops of paint. White had been arrested for rape and a separate charge of assault and battery in Miles City, where little more than a week ago Gload had left him with his money and had driven away with an abscess of misgiving festering in his stomach. The girl had been fifteen years old and White had gotten her drunk and taken her to the room and the next day the girl’s father had come and White had beaten the man with a golf club from a set he’d apparently stolen from an unlocked car parked in the hotel lot. The article stated that he had also employed that implement in his assault on the girl, details withheld. He was awaiting trial in the Custer County jail.

  Gload took up the paper once again and reread the article slowly and carefully and sat back against the chair shaking his head wearily. “Golf clubs,” he said.

  The countryside was still as a painting, the wind strangely becalmed and even the sky to the south where he gazed was without moving clouds and against the azure backdrop was not a starling, not a gull. Gload, undistracted before the motionlessness of his beloved view, in a very short time made his decision and as was his way, from that moment, he did not reconsider it or waver from its necessary course. He pushed himself up from his chair and laid aside the folded paper on the small table beside his cup and shambled through the dewy grass in his odd sailor’s gait to the tool bin behind the house. When he returned with the proper implements thrown over his shoulder he paused briefly at the lilac and stood looking down at Francie’s flowers and then continued on, past the chair and down the lane among the trees.

  * * *

  The evening before, he sat in the same chair at the same table. The dinner he had made for them warmed in the oven. A maelstrom of dust billowing redly in the sunset heralded her arrival and shortly the car pulled down the lane and stopped near the house. She came up the drive, slightly drunk and walking with great care as if negotiating a patch of ice. She smiled blearily at him. When she sat he could smell the smoke of the bar on her and she seemed to have applied more makeup since she’d left in the morning, more musky scent.

  “Home is the hunter, home from the hills,” she recited. “Home is the hunter, stoned to the gills.”

  “If you’re talking about me, I’m not the one stoned to the gills,” John Gload said. “At no six o’clock in the afternoon.”

  “Oh, Johnny. Be nice. I just had a nice afternoon.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Visiting. A nice afternoon of visiting.”

  “Visitin
g in the bar, that would be.”

  “Yes. That would be.”

  “It just isn’t dignified a woman your age in a bar.”

  “Oh, God,” she said. “Dignity.” She sat heavily, her legs thrust out. Her heels furrowed the dirt and in the rumpled hose the flesh of her legs seemed to sag from their bones.

  “Why can’t you just stay here? You got everything you need.”

  From the chair she gazed out vacantly, reached out without looking and patted the huge hand on the tabletop opposite her. “I care for you, Johnny, I do. But not everything. Not hardly.”

  “What do you need I haven’t brought here for you? You tell me what it is and I’ll try and get it.”

  “It’s not things. I don’t need things. You know that never meant nothing to me.”

  “What, then?”

  “People, Johnny. The company of people. I’m not like you. You who could sit here alone in that chair for a week.”

  “I was people last time I checked.”

  “But you’re your own world and I always have known that. You don’t really need me and it’s okay. I understand that and it’s okay, it really is. I know you care about me, but I just need to see myself in other people.”

  “I do need you. I wisht you wouldn’t say shit like that.”

  “Okay, you do.”

  “You say see yourself in other people. Good Christ, Francie. Let me tell you. People aren’t mirrors. If they were, what you seen looking back at you would make your hair stand up. You don’t want to see that.”

  Her hair had fallen in her eyes and she swept it back. Lipstick she had applied with a trembling hand earlier was blurred at the corner of her mouth.

  “Just real people,” she repeated.

  “Bar people. Christ. They’re not real people.”

  “They’re real enough, John. And not all of them are drunks. Some people just go there for the socializing. Just to sit and gab.”

  “And to drink.”

  “A little bit of wine. Just because it’s not something you do, because it’s not Johnny’s vice, doesn’t make it bad necessarily. It makes me feel good. How can you not want that for me?”

  “And who are they? A bunch of hayseeds and half-assed ranch hands. Dipshit farmers with their fat hands all over you.”

  “You used to be one. You told me so. You were a farmer yourself.”

  “I was a goddamn kid.”

  “And I don’t need to be touched, Johnny. That’s not it at all.” She looked at him then and reached to stroke his dure cheek. John Gload stared at the ground.

  “Yeah, well I’ll tell you what they see. See a set of breasts and a vagina.”

  She laughed out loud. “Oh, God, you kill me, John. Vagina. In your way you are such a prude.”

  Looking long out over the trees and the sage flats, amber as an August wheat field beneath the dust of her earlier passing, she began to hum, a near imperceptible evocation of wind or of an infant mewing in a distant room. Gload leaned his ear toward her across the weather-checked tabletop to discern what air it was that had so quickly taken her and in so doing beheld for the first time the minute nodding affirmations of a palsy. He was reminded suddenly of a nun who’d been kind to him at the orphanage and the name they had given her affliction, St. Vitus’ dance. Despite its name summoning images of whirling happiness, it was nonetheless for Gload ever after a sign of pitiful age. She had had a man’s name, Bernard he thought, and she’d died one day nodding at her desk in front of a classroom of children, all horrified but one.

  She hummed. Her eyes slowly closed as though by her own lullaby she slipped softly into sleep.

  “What if I wasn’t here?” he said.

  She said dreamily, “Oh, let’s not talk about that. You’ll always be here to be my anchor.”

  “Dragging you down you mean.”

  “No, John. Holding me in place.”

  She turned in her chair and took his hand in both of hers atop the table. “We’re okay now because I’m home to you and we’ll have a nice dinner and we can sit and watch the sun go down if you want like two beautiful people in a movie. Can we do that, Johnny? I don’t want to fight with you.”

  “Yeah. We can do that.”

  “Don’t be mad at me. I can’t take that.”

  “All right. I ain’t mad at you.”

  “Did you make something? I smell something good.”

  “Just a roast. Nothing special.”

  “No, it sounds wonderful.”

  “And carrots and baby potatoes with the skin left on.”

  That night at her dressing table the woman John Gload would later call his wife sat massaging lotion onto her hands with a wringing motion and then with the backs of her hands patting the soft loose folds beneath her chin. All the while she stared at the image in the mirrors. From the bed Gload, feigning sleep, watched her. She tugged back the graying hair at her temples to dissolve for a moment the creases that swarmed about her eyes. Her hair was still thick as a horse’s mane and Gload loved to lock his thick fingers in it. She touched at the corners of her lips, the cleft beneath her nose and then as if her arms could no longer support their weight, her hands collapsed to rest among the jars and tubes of ointments and balms, and the trembling that had recently befallen her set the tiny fluted vials of her perfumes with their jewel-like glass stoppers chittering softly. From the vanity’s three mirrors three images stared out, each with red eyes brimming with the recognition of slow and irreversible decline.

  After a time Gload hazarded a look and found her still sitting, and he watched with one burning eye the three images there until she rose from her stool stately and a little unsteady and came one last time to share their bed.

  * * *

  When he was done he stood back and it was a quaint agrarian pose he struck, the man stropping his face and neck with a bandana and leaning on the spud bar and behind him the slender black boles of the apple trees etched against a sky of splendrous color. He’d dug many such holes but none so fine or so deep. The sod and thin rich topsoil were laid aside in one pile, the stones and gravel he struggled through in another, and with a square-nosed shovel he’d skived the hole’s edges sharp and plumb as though it might be entered in a county fair. It had taken him most of the day and at noon he’d walked back to the house to eat a pear and drink two glasses of water and then had returned to his work, clambering down into the hole with the leaned metal spud bar for support. He encountered rocks the size of men’s heads as he went down and the roots of the apple trees like cables as the hole took its shape and he was forced to chop them away with the short-handled ax he’d brought. In doing so he feared for the life of the trees but he had little choice and hoped finally that the roots would take hold anew when the hole was filled.

  He stopped frequently in the course of his endeavors, leaning on the polished shovel handle or on the long metal bar with its spaded end and shaking his head in amused resignation at the ravages of his advancing age. Still, he heaved obdurate stones from the hole that would have given trouble to much younger men and he drew satisfaction from that.

  The sun he had welcomed early for its warmth on his face and that had scalded his neck later now threw his long shadow across the hole. He saw a large red stone in a corner of the hole that might cause discomfort to whoever rested there, so he clambered back down and with the long-handled bar prized the intransigent stone from its place where it had lain for ten thousand years and threw it out. Once again at the hole’s edge he assessed it and checked its depth against the length of the bar and declared himself satisfied.

  * * *

  Had she been looking closely she might have seen the piles of fresh soil among the orchard trees but she wasn’t. She had tilted down the car’s rearview mirror as she drove down the lane and seemed to be studying herself in it. John Gload was once again in his chair. He had showered and changed out of his soaked and foul coveralls and shirt and his wet hair was plastered along his head. She swung open the door
and stepped out and stood unsteadily before him.

  “Now what’d you go and do?” he said.

  “I thought it might make your old hag look a little younger.”

  “It’s red.”

  “Auburn, Johnny.” She pulled a strand of hair in front of her face and looked at it. “You don’t like it,” she said.

  “I do like it. I like it quite a little bit.” The chair creaked as he stood up and he took her by the hand. Like a child she allowed herself to be led inside, as she walked woodenly still examining a strand of hair. He said, “You look like a million bucks.”

  There was a small short lamp on the table in the modest dining room and in its pool of wan light they ate their dinner wordlessly. Her juice glass held her favorite sweet wine, the color of gasoline. She watched John Gload eat, the fork in his fist like a fork from a child’s tea set. But he was neat and his manners were oddly courtly and she smiled at him over the rim of her glass. Afterward they sat in the chairs at the little table outside the door that Gload favored to read his newspaper. The river rolling in its primordial channel was invisible but clouds lay above it, a pale serpentine parody, kinetic and aswim with gulls. They spoke little and Francie seemed happy to listen to the conversations of small birds from the arbor, and from their cool holes the shrill piping of ground squirrels. The tops of the hills behind the house were softly aflame with scarlet sunset and they watched mule deer walk unalarmed through the conflagration like the prophets of Daniel.