The Horse Whisperer

  From this ridge you could see right down the valley to the ranch and the corrals to which the cattle were now being led. And as Tom looked, he saw what he realized he had been looking out for all morning. Annie’s car was coming down the driveway, leaving a low, gray wake of dust. As it curved in front of the ranch house, the sun flashed on its windshield.

  More than a mile separated him from the two figures that got out of the car. They were small and quite featureless. But Tom could picture Annie’s face as if she were beside him. He saw her as she’d been last evening, as she watched the owl, before she sensed him watching her. She had looked so lost and beautiful that he’d wanted to take her in his arms. She’s another man’s wife, he’d told himself as the Lariat’s tail-lights went off up the driveway. But it hadn’t stopped him thinking about her. He nudged Rimrock forward and moved off down the hill to follow the cattle.

  The air over the corral hung heavy with dust and the smell of scorched flesh. Separated from their mothers, who kept up a constant calling, the calves were moved through a series of connecting pens until they found themselves in a narrow chute from which there was no return. Emerging from here, one by one, they were clamped and lowered sideways onto a table where four pairs of hands went immediately to work. Before they knew it, they’d been given a shot, a yellow insect tag in one ear, a growth pellet in the other, then a burn on the butt with a branding iron. Then the table went vertical again, off came the clamp and suddenly they were free. They tottered off in a daze toward the call of their mothers at whose udders, at last, they found comfort.

  All of this was witnessed, with a lazy, regal disinterest by their fathers, five enormous Hereford bulls, who lay chewing in an adjoining pen. It was witnessed by Annie with something approaching horror. She could see Grace felt the same. The calves squealed terribly and got what little revenge they could by spurting shit down their attackers’ boots or kicking any careless shin they found. Some of the neighbors who had come to help had brought children along and those big or bold enough were trying their hand at roping and wrestling the smaller calves. Annie saw Grace watching them and thought what a terrible mistake it was to have come. There was such an extreme physicality about it all. It only seemed to make her own child’s disability more blatant.

  Tom must have read this on Annie’s face because he came over and quickly found her a job. He put her to work in the feeder pen to the chute alongside a grinning giant with reflector sunglasses and a T-shirt that said CEREAL KILLER. He introduced himself as Hank and gave Annie a handshake that made her knuckles crack. He said he came from the next ranch down the valley.

  “Our friendly neighborhood psycho,” Tom said.

  “It’s okay, I already ate,” Hank confided to Annie.

  As she got to work, Annie saw Tom go over to Grace, put his arm around her shoulders and lead her off, though to where, Annie had no time to see because a calf trod on her foot then kicked her hard on the knee. She yelped and Hank laughed and showed her how to shove them into the chute without getting too bruised or that upon. It was hard work and she had to concentrate and soon, what with Hank’s jokes and the warm spring sunshine, she started to feel better.

  Later, when she had a moment to look, she saw Tom had taken Grace right to the front line and had her wielding the branding iron. To begin with she kept her eyes closed. But soon he got her thinking so hard about her technique that all squeamishness vanished.

  “Don’t press too hard,” Annie heard him say. He was standing behind Grace, with his hands resting gently on her upper arms. “Just let it drop down lightly.” Flames flared up as the red-hot head of the iron touched the calf’s hide. “That’s good, firm but gentle. It hurts, but he’ll get over it. Now let it roll a little. Good. Now lift. Grace, that’s a perfect brand. Best Double D of the day.”

  Everyone cheered. The girl’s face was flushed and her eyes were shining. She laughed and made a little bow. Tom saw Annie looking and grinned and pointed at her.

  “Your turn next, Annie.”

  By late afternoon all but the smallest calves were branded and Frank announced it was time to eat. Everyone started heading for the ranch house, the younger children running on ahead, whooping. Annie looked around for Grace. No one had said anything about them being invited and Annie felt it was time to leave. She saw Grace up ahead, walking to the house with Joe, the two of them chatting easily about something. Annie called her name and she turned.

  “We have to go now,” Annie said.

  “What? Why?”

  “Yeah, why? You’re not allowed to go.” It was Tom. He’d come up alongside her. They were beside the bull pen. The two of them had hardly spoken all day. Annie shrugged.

  “Well, you know. It’s getting late.”

  “Yeah, I know. And you’ve got to get back and feed the fax machine and make all those calls and things, right?”

  The sun was behind him and Annie put her head on one side and squinted at him, giving him a look. Men didn’t normally tease her like this. She liked it.

  “But you see, there’s kind of a tradition here,” he went on. “That whoever makes the best brand has to give a speech after dinner.”

  “What!” said Grace.

  “That’s right. Or drink ten jugs of beer. So, Grace, you better go on in and get yourself ready.” Grace looked at Joe to make sure it was a joke. Tom nodded toward the house, deadpan. “Joe, you better show her the way.” Joe led her off, doing his best not to grin.

  “If you’re sure we’re invited,” said Annie.

  “You’re invited.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  They smiled at each other and the silence between them was filled for a few moments by the lowing of cattle. Their calls were gentler now that the frenzy of the day had passed. It was Annie who first felt the need to speak. She looked at the bulls lazing in the last of the sunshine.

  “Who’d be a cow when you could lie around like these guys all day?” she said.

  Tom looked at them and nodded.

  “Yep. They spend all summer making love and winter just lying around and eating.” He paused, considering something as he watched them. “On the other hand, not too many of them get to do it. Get born as a bull and you’ve got a ninety-nine percent chance of getting castrated and served up as a hamburger. On balance, I reckon I’d choose being a cow.”

  They sat at a long table covered with a starched white cloth and laid with glazed hams, turkey, and steaming dishes of corn, beans, and sweet potato. The room it stood in was clearly the main living room but seemed to Annie more like a large hall that divided the two wings of the house. Its ceiling was high and its floor and walls were of dark, stained wood. There were paintings of Indians chasing buffalo and old sepia photographs of men with long moustaches and plainly dressed women with serious faces. On one side, an open staircase curved up to a wide, railed landing that overlooked the entire room.

  Annie had felt embarrassed when they came in. She realized that while she had been out branding, most of the other women had been inside preparing the meal. But no one seemed to mind. Diane, who till today had never seemed overly friendly, made her feel welcome and even offered her a change of clothes. As all the men were equally dusty and muckstained, Annie thanked her and declined.

  The children sat at one end of the table and the clamor they made was so loud that the adults at the other had to strain to hear themselves talk. Every so often Diane yelled at them to pipe down but it had little or no effect and soon, led by Frank and Hank who sat on either side of Annie, the uproar was general. Grace sat next to Joe. Annie could hear her telling him about New York and about a friend of hers who got mugged on the subway for his new Nike trainers. Joe listened with widening eyes.

  Tom sat across from Annie, between his sister Rosie and their mother. They’d driven up from Great Falls this afternoon with Rosie’s two daughters who were five and six years old. Ellen Booker was a gentle, fineboned woman with perfectl
y white hair and eyes the same vivid blue as Tom’s. She spoke little, just listened and smiled at what was going on around her. Annie noticed how Tom looked after her and talked quietly to her about the ranch and the horses. She could see from the way Ellen watched him that this was her favorite child.

  “So Annie, you gonna do a big piece about us all in your magazine?” said Hank.

  “That’s right, Hank. You’re the centerfold.”

  He gave a great bellow of laughter.

  Frank said, “Hey Hank, you better get yourself some of that—what do they call it? Lipsuction.”

  “Liposuction, you fool,” Diane said.

  “I’ll go for the lipsuction,” Hank said. “Though I guess it depends who’s doing the sucking.”

  Annie asked Frank about the ranch and he told her how they had moved here when he and Tom were boys. He took her over to look at the photographs and told her who all the people were. There was something about this gallery of solemn faces that Annie found moving. It was as though their mere survival in this daunting land were in itself some mighty triumph. While Frank was telling her about his grandfather, Annie happened to glance back at the table and saw Tom look up and see her and smile.

  When she and Frank went back and sat down, Joe was telling Grace about a hippie woman who lived farther up on the mountains. She’d bought some Pryor Mountain mustangs a few years back, he said, and just let them run wild. They’d bred and now there was quite a herd of them up there.

  “She’s got all these kids too and they run around with nothing on. Dad calls her Granola Gay. Came here from L.A.”

  “Californication!” Hank chanted. Everyone laughed.

  “Hank, do you mind!” Diane said.

  Later, over a dessert of pumpkin pie and homemade cherry ice cream, Frank said, “You know what, Tom? While you’re working on that horse of theirs, Annie and Grace here ought to move into the creek house. Seems crazy them doing all that shuttling to and fro.”

  Annie just caught the sharp look Diane gave her husband. It was obviously something they hadn’t discussed. Tom looked at Annie.

  “Sure,” he said. “It’s a good idea.”

  “Oh, that’s very nice of you, but really . . .”

  “Hell, I know that old house you’re staying in down there in Choteau,” said Frank. “It’s good as falling down around your ears.”

  “Frank, the creek house isn’t exactly a palace, for heavensakes,” said Diane. “Anyway, I’m sure Annie wants her privacy.”

  Before Annie could speak, Frank leaned forward and looked down the table. “Grace? What do you think?”

  Grace looked at Annie, but her face gave her answer and it was all Frank needed.

  “That’s settled then.”

  Diane got up. “I’ll make some coffee,” she said.

  EIGHTEEN

  A QUARTER MOON THE COLOR OF DAPPLED BONE STILL stood in the dawning sky when Tom stepped out through the screen door and onto the porch. He stopped there, pulling on his gloves, feeling the cold air on his face. The world was white and brittle with frost and no breeze ruffled the clouds made by his breath. The dogs came rushing up to greet him, their bodies wagging with their tails and he touched their heads and with no more than a nod sent them racing off toward the corrals, nipping and jostling each other, their feet scuffing tracks in the magnesium grass. Tom turned up the collar of his green wool jacket and stepped down off the porch to follow them.

  The yellow blinds on the upstairs windows of the creek house were closed. Annie and Grace were probably still asleep. He’d helped them move in the previous afternoon after he and Diane had cleaned the place up a little. Diane had barely said a word all morning but he could tell how she felt by the jutting of her jaw and the methodically violent way she wielded the vacuum cleaner and made up the beds. Annie was to sleep in the main front bedroom, overlooking the creek. It was where Diane and Frank had slept and, before them, he and Rachel. Grace was to have Joe’s old bedroom at the back of the house.

  “How long are they planning on staying?” Diane said as she finished making Annie’s bed. Tom was by the door, checking that a radiator worked. He turned but she wasn’t looking at him.

  “I don’t know. Guess it depends how things go with the horse.”

  Diane didn’t say a thing, just shunted the bed back into position with her knees so that the headboard banged against the wall.

  “If you have a problem with it, I’m sure—”

  “Who said I had a problem? I don’t have a problem.” She stomped past him out onto the landing and scooped up a pile of towels she’d left there. “I just hope the woman knows how to cook, that’s all.” And she went off down the stairs.

  Diane wasn’t around later when Annie and Grace arrived. Tom helped them unload the Lariat and took their bags upstairs for them. He was relieved to see they’d brought two big boxes of groceries. The sun was streaming through the big front window in the living room and made the place seem light and airy. Annie said how pretty it was. She asked if it would be okay to move the long dining table over to the window so that she could use it as her desk and look out on the creek and the corrals while she worked. Tom took one end and she took the other and when they’d moved it he helped her bring in all her computers and fax machines and some other electronic gadgetry whose purpose he couldn’t begin to guess.

  It had struck him as odd that the first thing Annie should want to do in this new place, before unpacking, before even seeing where she was to sleep, was to set up somewhere to work. He could tell from the look on Grace’s face as she watched that to her it wasn’t odd at all. It had always been like this.

  Last night before he turned in, he’d walked out, as he always did, to check on the horses and on the way back he’d looked up at the creek house and seen the lights on and wondered what they were doing, this woman and her child, and of what if anything they spoke. Seeing the house standing there against the clear night sky, he’d thought of Rachel and the pain those walls had encased so many years ago. Now pain was encased there again, pain of the highest order, finely wrought by mutual guilt and used by wounded souls to punish those they love the most.

  Tom made his way past the corrals, the frosted grass scrunching under the soles of his boots. The branches of the cottonwoods along the creek were laced with silver and over their heads he could see the eastern sky starting to glow pink where soon the sun would show. The dogs were waiting for him outside the barn door, all eager. They knew he never let them go in with him but they always thought it worth a try. He shooed them away and went in to see to the horses.

  An hour later, when the sun had melted black patches on the barn’s frost-veneered roof, Tom led out one of the colts he’d started the previous week and swung himself up into the saddle. The horse, like all the others he’d raised, had a good soft feel and they rode an easy walk up the dirt road toward the meadows.

  As they passed below the creek house, Tom saw the blinds of Annie’s bedroom were now open. Farther on he found footprints in the frost beside the road and he followed them until they were lost among the willows where the road crossed the creek in a shallow ford. There were rocks you could use as stepping-stones and he could see from the wet criss-cross marks on them that whoever it was had done just that.

  The colt saw her before he did and, prompted by the pricking of its ears, Tom looked up and saw Annie running back down from the meadow. She was wearing a pale gray sweatshirt, black leggings and a pair of those hundred-dollar shoes they advertised on TV. She hadn’t yet seen him and he brought the colt to a stop at the water’s edge and watched her come nearer. Through the low rush of the water, he could just make out the sound of her breathing. She had her hair tied back and her face was pink from the cold air and the effort of her running. She was looking down, concentrating so hard on where she was putting her feet that if the colt hadn’t softly snorted, she might have run right into them. But the sound made her look up and she stopped in her tracks, some ten yards away.


  “Hi!”

  Tom touched the brim of his hat.

  “A jogger, huh?”

  She made a mock haughty face. “I don’t jog, Mr. Booker. I run.”

  “That’s lucky, the grizzlies around here only go for the joggers.”

  Her eyes went wide. “Grizzly bears? Are you serious?”

  “Well, you know, we keep ’em pretty well fed and all.” He could see she was worried and grinned. “I’m kidding. Oh, they’re around but they like to stay higher. You’re safe enough.” He thought about adding, except for the mountain lions, but if she’d heard about that woman in California she might not think it too funny.

  She gave him a narrow-eyed look for teasing her, then grinned and came closer so that the sun fell full on her face and she had to shield her eyes with one hand to look up at him. Her breasts and shoulders rose and fell to the rhythm of her breathing and a slow steam curled off her and melted in the air.

  “Did you sleep okay up there?” he said.

  “I don’t sleep okay anywhere.”

  “Is the heating okay? It’s been a while since—”

  “It’s fine. Everything’s fine. It’s really very kind of you to let us stay out here.”

  “It’s good to have the old place lived in.”

  “Well, anyway. Thank you.”

  For a moment, neither of them seemed to know what to say. Annie reached out to touch the horse, but did it a little too suddenly so that the animal tossed his head away and took a couple of steps back.

  “I’m sorry,” Annie said. Tom reached down and rubbed the colt’s neck.

  “Just hold your hand out. A little lower, there, so he can get the smell of you.” The colt lowered his muzzle to Annie’s hand and explored it with the tips of his whiskers, snuffling it now. Annie watched, a slow smile starting, and Tom noticed again how the corners of her mouth seemed to have some mysterious life of their own, qualifying each smile for its occasion.