Meanwhile as Riley in his flummoxed state awaited some magical moment when Leona would welcome a defunct daughter-in-law back to her homey bosom, Mariah maintained a silence astonishing to me. I would have bet hard money this daughter of mine could not keep her lips hermetically sealed for this length of time under this amount of provocation.
By the time we had supped and pied and coffeed and been shooed into the living room by Leona, quite a number of moments passed but none of them were noticeably magical between Leona and Mariah. The closest came when Leona said with extreme neutrality, “I’ve been seeing your pictures in the paper. What was that one of the girl’s head in a beer glass?”
Oh, for the simple green jealousy of that Kimi night, hmm, Mariah? She stiffly informed her once and future mother-in-law, “That’s what’s called an interpretive shot.”
Leona looked as if she agreed that it needed interpretation, all right.
I was having to divide my attention between the living room contestants and outside, because through the big picture window toward the Crazy Mountains I could see a palomino mare frisking in a pasture next to the cattle lot. Beautiful lightish thing there in the dusk, its mane blowing like flax. Morgan Wright long since had excused himself from us by saying that as much as he hated to miss any further details of Riley’s future, he and his Mrs. had to go in to a centennial committee meeting tonight in Clyde Park. (I told him there was an awful epidemic of that going around.) Even if that ostensible master of this ranch had been on hand, Morgan was not the one I would have asked about that horse. Somehow I knew that lovely bright mare could only be Leona’s.
“So do you still ride?” I inquired, then wished I had the sentence back to makings, because that way of putting it also asked or has age caught up with you too much?
“Some,” Leona replied, her eyes following the path of mine to the palomino but no smile finding her face this time, just a considering look. “When we’re moving cattle I still help out. I tell Morgan that when I can’t ride any more he may as well haul me to the dump.”
The entire fifty years previous I would have thought, of course that is the case; Leona Tracy Wright was put into this world to enhance its saddle ponies with her golden—and later, silver—form, and when time ended that it indeed might as well conclude her, too. Life is temporary, after all, and the girl version of Leona had gone down its road at full gallop. But here on this ranch, on Leona’s earned earth, I was beginning to see what more there was to her than that. The perfection of fence-lines and thrifty pastures and leisurely cattle in the dusk, butterpat fat—she and the late Herb Wright must have worked like twin furies to build such an enterprise. And she had stayed on in evident working partnership with Morgan. And she had endured a decade or so of aloneness since her husband’s death, a sum I found enormous after my, what, eight or nine months since Marcella’s passing.
Still. Her icepick treatment of Alec, and all it led to. Would some version of our McCaskill civil war have happened anyway, between Alec and my parents, between Alec and me—a brother outgrowing the other or one staying with the logic of bloodline while the second felt the need to yank free—even if Leona had not been blondly there to precipitate it? Possibly, quite possibly. We are a family that can be kind of stiffbacked. But Leona was who precipitated it, and the best I have ever been able to do with that fact is to keep a silence about it. Plainly enough Leona, by lack of mention to Riley and Mariah when they first met, when it would have been the easiest chance ever to say Isn’t this funny, now? I used to go with a McCaskill myself, but we . . . , she herself wanted nothing said of that long-ago fling with Alec, of the McCaskill family mess it caused.
My pondering along these lines was interrupted by simultaneous blurts:
“Leona. Riley and I—”
“Mother. Mariah and I—”
The annunciatory duo also halted in the same breath, each tongue waiting for the other to do the deed.
“Maybe you want to take turns at it,” I suggested, “a syllable or so at a time.”
Riley scowled at me and huffed that that wouldn’t be necessary, and as if he was reciting from memory a manual on dismantling bombs, he apprised his mother that he and Mariah had nuptial intentions again.
Even Leona couldn’t come up with any kind of smile to cover her reaction to this.
“But then why ever did you—” she of course launched, causing Mariah and Riley to concurrently roll their total of three gray eyes and one blue one. I’d already done the route Leona was raking them along, so I gazed again at the outer world. The pup Manslaughter went tearing across the yard in pursuit of a magpie fifty feet above his head.
When his mother’s invocation of their breakup was completed, Riley in turn lodged the protest, “That’s neither here nor there.” Which when you think about it was a sappy remark even for Riley. The point exactly was the attempted union of him and Mariah there, in the none too distant past, and now here again; the two of them just would not let the goddamn notion go away.
“Okay, now everybody knows,” Mariah surprisingly broke her self-imposed silence to summarize. “Why don’t we talk about religion, sex, or baseball instead?”
“California,” Leona uttered, as if that fit the bill for an extreme topic. “I have trouble imagining you there, Mariah.”
“Maybe I’ll get used to it,” Mariah answered edgily.
“Neither one of you got used to your marriage the first time, though,” Leona essayed. “I’m curious. Aren’t you, Jick?” Downright purple with it, although I didn’t say anything because Leona was doing just fine. I could see where Riley got his knack for getting under the skin. Leona studied the uneasy pair of intendeds with boundless interest and concern as she asked, “What’s going to be different this time?”
“This time we’ll know better than to both get mad for more than a month at a time,” Riley floundered out.
“Leona,” Mariah decided she’d better try, “maybe Riley and I did go ape, a little bit, in that divorce. You’re welcome to blame me, if you want.” At least that would balance things across family lines, given my attitude toward Riley. “But that doesn’t change our getting back together,” Mariah went on at a rattling pace. “This centennial trip has made us feel we want to stay that way.” She snapped her head around to Riley so quick her earrings blurred. “Right?”
“Could scarcely have said it better myself,” the wordsmith corroborated.
All of a sudden, from somewhere rang out a little ding and then a man’s voice, as cultured as caviar, intoning: “Kahk vasheh eemya ee otchestvo?”
Riley, pretty much goosed up anyway even before this vocal development, catapulted out of his chair. “Who the f—?”
His mother flapped a hand at him and instructed, “Shush now, Riley, I’ve only got ten seconds to answer in.”
Now Leona could be seen to be concentrating with every mental fiber, her thumb and forefinger pinching together in an intent little o as if practicing to pluck from the air. Then she threw her head back and recited firmly: “Ya Leeona Meekhylovna.”
“The question in Russian was,” the celestial male voice resumed, “ ‘What is your first name and your patronymic?’ If you were not able to translate it and answer in the allotted ten seconds, please do so now.”
Leona smiled triumphantly and marched across the room to snap off a tape player and a gizmo plugged in beside it. “I set the lessons on a timer,” she explained, “to catch me by surprise. It seems more lifelike, that way.”
Riley gazed at her as if counting slowly to himself. After what maybe was an allotted ten seconds, he began: “Mother—”
“Mahts,” she promptly identified for him.
“Whatever. In plain English, in little words so I can try to get this—what are you doing studying Russian?”
“We’re Sisters of Peace,” Leona informed her son. He continued to look at her as if she’d declared she was Queen of the Williewisps. “Our women’s club here along the valley, it’s our c
entennial project,” Leona went on. “We’re a sister group to women like ourselves in Moscow. Muskvah.”
Kind of needlessly, it seemed to me, Riley did check: “I take it you don’t mean the one in Idaho.”
“Spoof if you want,” Leona responded in a style that suggested he’d be better off not to. “I just thought it would be nice. To know how they talk. We’re going to send them a videotape of the Clyde Park centennial day doings. Jeff is going to be our cameraman.” Leona looked over at Mariah as if just remembering her existence. “Cameraperson.” I was recalling that Jeff must be Morgan’s son, hard to think of anybody having Riley for an uncle. “I volunteered to learn enough to say a few things to them in Russian, on it,” Leona went on as if Cyrillic from Clyde Park made perfect sense. I confess, in spectating Riley’s reaction to his mother the sexagenarian rookie linguist and Mariah’s reaction to her and him, I’d lost track—maybe it did.
“My mother the peacenik!” Riley gabbled to Mariah in some mix of being perplexed and resigned and wary and proud.
“Mmm,” Mariah responded ever so neutrally.
“I might as well be doing something with myself,” Leona concluded. “I have the time, after all.” She smiled around at the three of us in equal allotments, her blue eyes steady within the fine wrinkles reaching in at their corners, then soberly focused on Riley and Mariah again. “Where are you headed next?” Her inquiry could just as well have meant what next plateau of folly they aspired to after rematrimony and California, but that son of hers chose to answer in Bagonaut terms, that we’d wheel east from here, out into the big open of Montana away from the ranges of the Rockies. Both he and Mariah, I was sorry to see, were beginning to look like they might come out of this evening intact after all.
I let Riley finish with the travel orientation and start to make what he obviously hoped were evening-ending indications. Then I spoke what I hoped were going to be the magical seven words.
“Whyn’t you ride along with us, Leona?”
Leona looked pleasantly startled. Mariah looked as if I’d invited a Tartar into the tent. Riley looked as if I’d poleaxed him.
“I mean it,” I went on cheerfully. Did I ever. There was no forgiving Leona that hurtful yearling romance with Alec and the consequences it walloped the McCaskills with, but this was no time to be pouty about that. What needed priority was the situation here in the room with us. Riley already was plainly provoked; he was in for a lot more aggravation if I had anything to do with it. I’d had my say, such as it was, to Mariah and this secondhand swain of hers after their Chinook night of ecstacy, hadn’t I? A steady stout dose of Leona couldn’t hurt as the next remedy to try on them, could it? “Come see some country,” I spieled to her with enthusiasm. “I can guarantee you this about it, traveling with Riley and Mariah is the kind of experience you never even dreamed of before. Besides,” I couldn’t help giving Mariah an innocent look, “you can’t beat the price. The newspaper’s paying for it all.”
“What a kind offer, Jick. But I’d just be in the way,” Leona demurred with a dazzling thanks-anyway smile.
I assured her, “No more so than me.” Quite possibly more effectively so, though. “These offspring of ours keep awful busy with each other,” I sped on. “At what they’re doing, I mean. Majority of the time, Leona, the two of them more than likely won’t even notice you’re around.” Interesting that my tongue was capable of stretching itself so. The last person not to notice Leona must have been blind, deaf and on the other side of a lead door.
“You wouldn’t mind, really?” Leona swung like a turret to the newspaper pair.
“No, no, no,” Mariah managed with a swallow. “Not a bit.”
“Entirely up to you and the Bagomaster, Mother,” Riley got out, cutting me a now you’ve gone and done it glare from the corner of his blue eye.
“Jick?” Leona addressed me as if I was the next question. “This will teach you to make an offer like that.”
• • •
“Snoose Syvertsen,” Leona announced out of nowhere as the Bago purred past the Crazy Mountains and eastward along the Yellowstone River. “You remember him, don’t you, Riley?”
Directly behind me at his writing station in the dinette where his laptop output was sounding slim this morning, Riley grumpily confirmed he remembered.
McCaskills in the forward seats and Wrights amidship, we had embarked down the Shields River valley from Leona’s ranch an hour or so before. Outside, the day for once was rainless and fresh, the clawed-out peaks of the Crazies as clear as could be in dazzling first snow. Weather within the motorhome, though, was heavy and electrical, just as I’d hoped. In the passenger seat Mariah was noticeably squirmy and kept her eyes resolutely on the Yellowstone River as if seeking a spot deep enough to sink a mother-in-law in while Riley, as I say, was promisingly grumpy.
“Snoose was our choreboy a while, years back,” Leona not unnaturally chose me as audience, “until he started herding sheep for a Big Timber outfit out on these flats. He’d go in to Livingston a couple of times a year to drink up his wages and whenever anybody asked him where he herded, he’d point off in this direction past the mountains and say, ‘East of Crazy.’ ”
I chuckled and commentated, “At least the guy had his bearings,” as if there were others in our vicinity, such as directly behind me and immediately beside me, who did not.
“I didn’t get around to asking last night, Jick,” Leona’s words kept wafting distinctively to me as I drove. Hers was what I can only call a woodsmoke voice. It came as if tracing its way through the air to you, certain wisps more pungent than others. A voice, it had always seemed to me, that perfectly well knew it could embody as casually as it cared to because main attention would ever be on Leona’s fierier attractions. So in essence, the listening side of a conversation with Leona was a matter of catching her drift. “Sheep,” I heard loft from her now. “You’re still running them, are you?”
“Still am,” I admitted. “After about forty years they kind of get to be a habit.”
“Morgan has us running breeds of cattle I’ve hardly even heard of,” came her comparable report. “Red Angus, and some Simmentals. He figures we’ve got to try different kinds every so often to see how they’ll do.”
Yes, I thought savagely, that is the very thing a ranch needs: a Morgan Wright to dab around with new notions, to try out new fashions of livestock and crops. To put fresh muscle into the land. Which is exactly what my ranch has had no prospect of ever since Leona’s other son, the knotheaded one behind me at that moment, turned down my offer.
“I’m surprised Riley hasn’t brought you home some buffalo from Moiese to raise for hood ornaments,” I lobbed over my shoulder.
“Buffalo?” Leona asked, puzzled, looking back and forth from me to her determinedly utterly silent progeny.
“Riley can explain it to you sometime when he’s got his tongue along with him,” I said. “Rest area coming up,” I noted the announcing blue sign ahead by the side of the Interstate, “everybody get in the mood.”
Riley was so ticked off at me that he violated the first principle of freeway lavatories: don’t pass up any chance to go. I hummed off by myself to the men’s side and on into the stall while Mariah and Leona, as silent toward each other as nuns with a vow, betook themselves into their side of the pleasant bungalow-size brick convenience. So far, so good, on this Leona deal. Riley already was significantly twitching. Keep applying his mother to one end of him and his ex-wife fiancée to the other and maybe he’d bail out to California early just to rescue his nerves. My definite hunch was that nothing, no known force, could peel Mariah away from finishing the centennial series; so if Riley called it quits, while she refused to—second thoughts about mushing their lives together again might be seeded right there, mightn’t they? At least it gave me a somewhat promising prospect to mull while I had to be sat.
Walls in a public facility have their own topics they’re insistent on, though. I could not help bu
t notice, in fairly neat small penciling directly in front of me on the stall door, one lone unillustrated epistle. Leaning forward as much as was prudent, I just could read:
THE DEBRIS OF HUBRIS IS THE CHASSIS OF GENESIS.
I was contemplating my way through that when footsteps arrived.
“What’d we ever do before all these rest areas?” came a voice entering. “Just turn loose alongside the road? You know what they say, though. ‘Pee by the side of the road and you get a sty in your eye.’ But I don’t remember that many styes, do you?”
“What all I don’t remember would fill Hell’s phone book,” testified the other. As the duo zeroed in on the urinals, peeking under the stall wall as best I could I saw identical sets of streamline-striped jogging shoes—both pair of which, I would bet, were off the same sale table at the K Mart—blossoming out the bottom of very veteran bluejeans; by the sounds of their voices, these guys aged radically pore by pore upward from those zippy shoes.
“Hullo, what’ve we got here?” the first voice was saying. “Somebody left us a love note.”
“I hope like the dickens it don’t say, ‘Smile, you’re on Candid Camera.’ ”
“No. Huh. Huh. I’ll be damned.”
“Ain’t that something, though? How do you suppose people get theirselves into the fixes they manage to?”
Whatever they were reading above the waterworks had not caught my eye on my way in, but it seemed to be something fairly sensational, because now several other guys were arriving—they were all of a group, at least from the evidence of universal speedstreak jogging shoes—and the note was the immediate topic of roundhouse debate.