Half an Inch of Water: Stories

A High Lake

Norma Snow still rode. She chose a shorter mount, almost a pony, and used a synthetic saddle; a leather roper was just too much to lift, but she still rode. Her horse was a fourteen-hand Arabian, twelve years old, a little loose in the back, with sturdy feet. She called the gelding Zed because of his lightning-bolt-shaped blaze. Norma lived alone in the house that she had built and shared with her husband. He was dead now. She hired a nurse to come by once every day to make sure she was still upright and not stretched out helpless on the kitchen floor. Norma wanted the nurse for no more than that.

Norma rode every morning. Her doctor told her that riding was perhaps not a good idea because of her brittle bones, her osteoporosis. She ignored him. Hell, at her age walking around wasn’t a good idea, she’d told him. Yes, she took the Fosamax, but she still saddled up every morning at six, rain, snow, or sunshine, dark or light, foggy or clear, and rode out through the land she now leased to neighboring ranchers. She kept no cattle of her own. She rode out through the dumb cows, across the expanse of meadow, up the hill, along the ridge, and then up to the high lake, a pond, really. If she ever took too long and the nurse arrived before her return, the poor man would have no idea what to do. That was how Norma wanted it. Dying in the saddle was a romantic way to go, she thought.

She made her way along the last steep stretch of trail to the lake. She had once, years ago, seen a cow moose up there with a yearling calf. She now approached every morning with the hope that she might see another pair. The stiff, cold breeze blew in from the northwest. Zed, knowing the drill, turned to put his left flank toward the hillside, where Norma easily dismounted. She fastened the top button on her field coat. The coming cold weather didn’t trouble her; it was not even unwelcome; it simply was a fact. Your horse steps in a puddle, his hoof gets wet. It’s not a good thing, it’s not a bad thing, it’s just a thing. She remembered her husband saying that from time to time. She watched Zed as she stepped away. He stood on a dropped rein better than most horses stood hitched to a post.

She approached the acre of water and observed the wind riffling the surface. She sat on her favorite flat rock, imagined that years of her visits had molded the stone to fit her wide bottom. The breeze was bothering the water, but not enough to hide the trout swimming near her. The trout up here, where there was so little pressure, were cagey, but they were accustomed to this figure perched by the bank every morning. Her husband had loved and cursed the difficult-to-catch fish. His voice used to come back to her more often, sharing his thoughts about horses and fishing. But now he did not speak that much. For nearly eight years she had been alone with her horse and her thoughts. She liked that they were her thoughts. They came like a glacier, moving slowly, and like any glacier they were a tsunami of ice, surging, unstoppable. She had completed a catalog of the bird life on her place, with notes of songs and seasonal habits. She had finally read Proust and decided she did not like him, had decided the same about Henry James, had decided that Eudora Welty would have been her friend, and had come to think that Hemingway was not all that bad. Recently she had painted an acrylic on canvas of the hind end of an elk. When her nurse, Braden, saw it, he said, “Why’d you paint a deer’s ass?”

Norma sipped her tea and leaned back in her chair. “First of all, it’s an elk. I painted his butt because that all I ever see of him.”

She hadn’t hired Braden because he was smart but because he was just what he was, a big wall of meat with a box of blond hair for a head, strong enough to lift her off the floor if need be and capable of stabbing 9-1-1 with one of those kielbasas he called fingers. Braden lived in a double-wide trailer on the southern edge of Laramie and not too far away from Norma’s place, so weather was never much of an issue for him getting there.

Norma watched the trout rise to take an ant that had fallen from a blade of grass. Her eyes came back to the bank and followed it to a place were animals would come to drink. The muddy ground there was a little more chewed up than usual. She walked over to look at the tracks. She found the cloven hoofprints of deer and elk and another set, a set of horse tracks. The tracks were clearly from a horse and an unshod horse at that. She kneeled down and traced the indentation with a finger. The tracks were the freshest of the sets, having fallen on top of the others. All the trails up here were steep and rocky, so even the horses with the sturdiest feet wore at least hind shoes. She hadn’t heard of anyone turning out horses in years. Even her husband had stopped. It seemed a little early to do it anyway. She tried to follow the tracks, lost them on the carpet of grass, then found them again on a deer path. She couldn’t read much into the tracks, but she imagined a horse about the size of her Zed.

She climbed back into the saddle and followed the trail. She followed the sign off the worn path and south down toward a narrow arroyo that she rarely visited. The tracks were easy to see, clear and clean. She even noted that the animal dragged its left forefoot slightly and that it had a sizable chunk missing from the outside wall of the hind foot on the same side. As she reached the bottom of the drainage she realized that she had seen no droppings. She’d followed the sign for at least four miles and had not seen one apple of horseshit.

She looked at her watch. It was nine thirty. Braden would be at her house about now, pacing and worried more about what to do than about her. She headed back in a slow canter that felt good. She slowed Zed to a walk at the edge of the clearing and then dismounted, loosening the girth, to lead him the last hundred yards.

She came up to the stable across the yard from her back door. Braden was in fact there. He came out of the kitchen waving his arms like a fool.

“I was worried,” he said in an admonishing tone.

“Thought you might be. That’s why I didn’t rush back.”

“What happened?”

“I was riding.”

“You okay?”

Norma nodded.

“Next time could you leave a note?”

Norma released the cinch and put the stirrup up over the horn. “Let’s try this: you learn not to worry?”

“Yes ma’am.”

“You can see I’m still standing, so you might as well go on home.”

She watched as he walked back to his Nissan Sentra with the unpainted quarter panel. His big blond head hung.

“Braden,” she called.

He stopped and turned to face her.

“Thanks for worrying.”

“Yes ma’am.”

A couple of hours later, Norma sat down at her table to have lunch. Egg salad. Pat Hilton, from a neighboring ranch, knocked as she entered through the kitchen’s Dutch door. The large woman did that a couple of times a week and Norma didn’t much mind. She was a plump fifty-year-old with blond hair that resisted graying. As an attempt at humor, the woman would point out not infrequently that her husband was not a hotel Hilton.

“Hey, lady,” Pat said.

“Sit down and have some egg salad with me.” Norma nodded to the chair across from her.

“Don’t mind if I do. Don’t mind if I do.” The woman made herself a plate and sat. “So, where’s Braden?”

“Sent him home.”

“You pay that man to come up here every day, for what? Forty minutes? Twenty minutes?”

“Less than that, if possible. Hell, if he sees me standing in the yard and waves, he can keep on going as far as I’m concerned.”

“That’s crazy.”

“He does what I pay him to do. He’s only knitting with one needle, but he does what I ask him to do.”

“I still say it’s crazy.”

“It would be crazy having to make conversation with him for hours, having him traipse around here trying to help and getting in the way.”

“I could use some help.”

“I take help when I need it,” Norma said. Norma took a bite, looked out the window. “You folks missing a horse? Turn any out early?”

Pat shook her head, her big mouth full. “We had a mare colic last week. She almost died. Dan had to get up all through the night to make sure she didn’t lay down and get all twisted up.”

Lie down, Norma corrected the woman in her head.

“I see your step is fixed. Braden do that?”

“I can measure and cut a board and drive nails as well as anybody.” Norma took a deep breath and again peered out the window at the ridge far off. “So, how’s your daughter?”

“She hates me. At least, this week. Because I won’t drive her down to Denver and I won’t let her go with her friends. Fort Collins isn’t good enough. Has to be Denver.”

“What’s in Denver?”

“Shopping. Movies, I guess. The fact that it’s not here.”

Norma nodded. “It’s tough being a ranch kid.”

“Being a ranch mom ain’t no picnic either.”

Norma gave up a solidarity nod that wasn’t completely sincere. Norma had loved the ranch and the ranch life. She’d loved it when her husband had been alive and after. They’d lost their twelve-year-old daughter to leukemia. And she still loved the place. They almost lost the ranch when they lost most of their cattle to a blizzard. That was after their daughter’s death and they refused to give up. They couldn’t leave it. Both her daughter and her husband were buried on the ranch. She would be as well, but she had no idea who would be there to watch the weeds grow over their graves. She had no family left to whom to leave the land.

“You would think she’d be happy to go to Fort Collins,” Pat said about her daughter.

“She’ll be off to college soon,” Norma offered as a salve.

“It won’t be too soon, I can tell you that,” Pat said. She shook her head, perhaps recognizing her own lie. “Listen to me railing on so.” She stopped talking and ate her lunch.

Norma thought about the tracks out there. She had a notion to saddle up and ride Zed back out and search for more sign. But she wouldn’t do that. Her bones didn’t want her to do it. Besides, the farrier was coming that afternoon.

She said good-bye to Pat and cleaned the dishes. She then went into the den and sat in her good chair, put up her feet, and let her body rest. She thumbed through a regional bird guide and drifted into a nap.

Norma awoke to the sound of tires on the gravel of her drive. She pushed herself to standing and heard herself groan. It was a complaint she was certain she issued frequently, but this time she heard it. The driver outside tapped a beep on the horn. Norma grabbed her glasses and stepped outside.

The little round farrier was out of his truck and waddling toward the barn. He turned at the sound of the door.

“Afternoon, Norma.”

“Bob.”

Bob was still wearing the black rodeo rib protector he wore when driving. “I was going to grab your beast.”

“I’ll get him for you.”

“I’ll get my tools.”

Norma went into the barn and grabbed Zed’s halter from the nail outside his stall. The horse was munching the last of his hay. She collected him and led him out into the yard. She stroked his muzzle and rubbed his ears while the farrier worked. He’d taken off his rib protector.

“Tell me,” Norma said, “why do you wear that vest?”

“I like the weight of it,” he said. “Also, if I’m ever in a crash that vest will protect me from my own damn air bag. Did you know that those things open at around two hundred miles per hour? The blink of an eye. And I’m short. Maybe you’ve noticed that I’m a short man. I’m sitting pretty damn close to that steering wheel. The blink of an eye.”

Norma nodded.

Bob liked to talk and she’d opened the door. That was okay with Norma. It meant she didn’t have to make conversation. He’d follow one scent for a while and then pick up another.

“Yessiree Bobby,” he said. “They’re going to save us to death. Of course you know that the propellant that shoots the bag open with nitrogen gas is toxic and explosive.”

Norma said nothing.

“Yep. Sodium azide. Just a couple of grams ingested could kill you. Yep. It’s a big problem. All them cars in the junkyards are eventually going to leak that stuff into the environment. When the bag deploys it becomes nitrogen and sodium, harmless. The problem is when they don’t deploy. Yep.”

And so it went. Through the taking off of the old shoes, the cutting, the clipping, the rasping, the hammering, and the nailing. He snipped off the tip of the last nail while yakking about how some folks consider tomatoes to be poisonous because they are of the nightshade family. Bob stood and arched his back in a stretch.

“All done?” Norma asked.

“We’re all done.” Bob looked at the sunset just starting. “What do you think? Snow soon?”

“I reckon.” Norma took the horse back to his stall while Bob picked up his tools. When she came back he was slipping into his vest. She pulled some bills from her pocket and paid him.

“Exact as always,” he said.

That night Norma awoke with pains in her back and hip. She took a couple of the pills that seldom seemed to abate the pain, but did usually put her to sleep. Tonight, though, she just lay there on her back, staring at the ceiling, imagining that what she was thinking was a dream. She thought of the tracks and the horse that made them. In her mind it was a young mare, an overo Paint, brown and white. She could see her drinking from the pond. She could see her raising her head at the sound of something in the brush. She was moderately stout with a big rump. She walked away from the water and disappeared into the trees.

The morning was much colder. Norma felt it in her bones even before she pushed herself out of the covers. It was mornings like this, when her bare feet hit the cold wood of the floor, that she remembered her last dog, Zach. The German shepherd had lived for fourteen years. At the end, he’d been unable to climb onto the bed and so would push himself as close to her bedside as he could. She would swing her feet down in the morning and find his warm body beneath her. She recalled pausing there and feeling the dog’s chest rise and fall through the soles of her feet. She loved him and she’d let him live too long. He’d been blind, deaf, and barely able to walk, and she’d let one more day go by, then another, not able to bear the thought of putting him down. Now she cursed herself, wondering how she could have let him suffer so.

She was up a good hour earlier than usual. It was still dark. After a small breakfast, yogurt and a banana, and a brief listen to the radio weather, a mere confirmation of what she already knew, that it was cold, she packed a thermos of coffee, some bread and cheese.

She walked out to the barn and to Zed’s stall. She clumsily took the blanket off him and draped it over his gate. She led him out of the barn, brushed him out, and saddled him. She put her lunch in a saddlebag and strapped it on. She mounted with some difficulty, her hip complaining, and rode out.

The birds were just beginning to chatter, but when she hit the tree line, they stopped. The stillness held for a moment, then the birds started up again. A rabbit or a squirrel disturbed some leaves. Norma rode with her eyes pressed to the sides of the trail, looking up occasionally to reassure Zed that she was paying attention. She remembered her husband telling her that somebody had to steer the horse and it should probably be the rider. Some clouds hung like webbing in the trees ahead of her, but she felt warmer than she had at home. In fact, she felt light; her bones did not speak to her. She discovered what she thought might be tracks leading off from a patch of mossy ground. The trail stopped but they gave her a direction and it was up. She forgot the ground and paid attention to guiding Zed up the mountain. Some of the going was steep and rocky and the short horse stumbled more than once, but her confidence pushed him on. When she finally came to a place where she could see out of the trees she was astonished to find that she did not recognize what was below her. She looked back at the way she had come and that path seemed clear to her, so she did not become afraid. Still, she dismounted and set up a rock marker.

Norma was miles from home, much farther than she had meant to go. She admitted to herself that she was now lost. Clouds were gathering in the west and blowing her way. Snow was coming. She could feel it, but strangely not in her bones. She didn’t even feel tired or sore from the strenuous ride. She rode on, figuring that she would probably come up and over and see below her the river that ran between her place and the Hiltons’.

First she saw the animal trail, followed it, and then she found the tracks, clearly a horse’s, clearly those of the same animal she’d tracked the day before. She climbed down from the saddle and traced evidence of the damage to the rear hoof with her fingers. The indentation felt warm. She felt warm. She stood and climbed easily back onto Zed. She paused and observed the fact and then quickly chose to forget it. She looked at her watch and thought about poor Braden showing up, remaining patient for an hour or so and then panicking. He would walk the pasture and then call the sheriff. They would be out and looking for her by late afternoon. But she felt no urgency about getting back.

She followed the sign. Then she heard the falls. She was surprised, but at least she now knew where she was. The hoofprints followed the stream up to the pond at the base of the falls, then became hard to read, appearing to circle and slip into the water. And so that’s what Norma did.

Zed didn’t want to, but Norma pressed him and he complied. They stepped through the frigid, falling water, Zed breaking into an unrequested canter to get through quickly. Norma even let out a bit of a yelp. She slapped the horse’s neck and said, “That was bracing, wasn’t it, boy?” She looked up and there was what looked to be a cave, but it wasn’t a cave; there was light at the other side of it. It was a huge hole in the rock wall, big enough to ride through. Again Zed resisted, but she pushed on through the muddy floor and out into a different place altogether. The sky was blue, not slate gray. The air was warm and snow threatened, but no wind blew.

She rode through a meadow filled with fairy trumpets and purple lupines and newly bloomed chickweed. She could see fireweed crowding a slope in the distance. The flowers didn’t make sense altogether, and the chickweed should have been long gone. The meadow was thick with wheatgrass and brome. Zed had noticed the grass as well. Norma stopped and let him drop his head to graze while she surveyed the landscape and the cloudless sky. Then she spotted movement in the brush on a slope. She thought at first it was a mountain lion and then saw it was a dog, a young dog bounding, a German shepherd. The dog came closer, barking, playing. It could have been Zach, the way he looked, the way he crouched and leaped. She dismounted, rested on a knee, and called the dog.

The animal came to her. He couldn’t have been older than two years. She rubbed his ears and the feeling made her happy. He had no collar. “Whose boy are you?” she asked and looked around for the owner. “So, where the hell am I, eh, fella?” she asked the dog. She left Zed standing on his rein and walked with the dog toward a gentle slope. She felt strong, loose, and she gained the crest of the ridge without becoming winded. She looked down at a verdant and amazing valley, a valley she had never seen before, junipers and scrub on the hills, hardwood trees along and between two moderately fast-flowing rivers that became one slowly twisting body. There was a beaver dam on a creek and birds everywhere.

The dog pranced around her. Norma watched the shepherd, listened to his bark, observed the way he slightly favored his left front paw. Just like her Zach. She felt excited and frightened by this. She had watched Zach grow old and die and yet this animal was just like her young pet. She scratched his neck and turned him over and there was a scar on his belly, a scar from when he’d been cut by barbed wire when he was a young pup. Zach. This dog had the same scar. Norma felt dizzy, lost, then happy. She stood, turned, and looked down at Zed grazing.

Her mind didn’t exactly race, but it made many stops. She was lost, that much she accepted. The weather was so very different here. She understood that there were often microclimates that were observably different from adjacent ones, but this was so much more. The dog was remarkably similar to her Zach, but it couldn’t be him. But it was him. And if it was him, then where was she? If it was Zach, then what else was possible? She stared back at the rivers below. The jagged white of the fast water appeared to spell something, but of course it didn’t. Zach was dead. Zach was dead, she kept telling herself. But this dog had Zach’s scar. What else was here? She slipped out of her jacket, sat, and the dog lay down beside her.

She found herself searching the air for a familiar scent, any familiar scent. There was none. She stared. She listened. She imagined trout in the water below her. She imagined the whistling of her husband as he fished. She imagined the footfalls of her daughter coming up the hill behind her. She tried to smell her. Somehow she knew that if she smelled her child, she would be real. She put her face to the dog and sniffed. She couldn’t tell if he smelled like Zach.

Time was getting away from her. The sheriff had the helicopter up now. Neighbors were no doubt on horseback searching for her. Braden was pacing the yard, useless to do anything else. Then it occurred to her that the light was not changing, the sun was where it had been when she first rode into this place. She was frightened suddenly, but then the feeling was gone and she was empty, but not really, as she expected something, someone. She was ashamed to think it, so she said her daughter’s name. “Nathalie.” She said her husband’s name. “Howard.” No scents followed the breeze to her. No whistling, no singing, no whispering, no footfalls. But the dog was here. Zach was here.

Norma looked down at Zed and at the way they had come in. The horse whinnied and stepped nervously. Norma stood and the dog lay still and remained still while she walked down the slope to the meadow. The dog raised only his head as she peered up at him from Zed’s side. She checked the cinch and mounted. She sat there for a few minutes, then turned the horse and headed back.

She found the gap in the wall and rode through and came out under the falls, the water shockingly cold, to find it snowing, to find the air frigid, the sky a steel gray. From the falls she knew the general way home, though she still considered herself lost. She rode for nearly an hour, when above the trees she heard the distant chopping of a helicopter. The noise grew closer but there was no way she could be seen in the dense forest. The snow fell harder and her bones complained. What she realized was that she was disoriented, not simply because she was lost, but because she could not reasonably process where she had just found herself. In fact, the awareness of her feeling adrift made her feel more so.

She came to a clearing and someone called to her. A man’s voice, hoarse with the cold air and concern, found her and she held up.

“Norma!” It was Dan Hilton.

“Hey there, Dan,” she said. “I suppose I’ve gotten a lot of people worried. I’m a little cold.”

“Where’s your coat?” he asked. He had his parka quickly off and put around the old woman.

“I don’t know,” she said. She hadn’t realized she’d forgotten it at the lake. All of a sudden her disorientation was real and profound.

Dan spoke into his two-way radio, but Norma didn’t hear any of what he was saying. “Let’s get you home,” he said to her. “You okay to ride or you want me to lead him?”

“I’m okay. Let’s go.”

Norma followed the man down a familiar ravine, up over a ridge, and then she was looking down at her pastures. The snow was falling heavily. In the yard were parked a paramedic’s vehicle, a sheriff’s car, and Braden’s Nissan. Pat Hilton and her daughter were there also.

Braden ran out to meet her. “Mrs. Snow, are you all right?” He turned to Dan. “Mr. Hilton, is she okay?”

“I think so,” Dan said.

In the yard, the medic and the sheriff’s deputy helped her down from the saddle. “Easy does it,” the medic said.

Pat hovered close. “You’re going to be fine, dear,” she said. “Just fine. We’ll take good care of you.”

Norma looked past Pat at her daughter, standing near the medic’s truck with her arms folded across her chest.

“You gave us a scare, Mrs. Snow,” the deputy said.

“I’m sorry,” she said, absently.

“Well, let’s get you in the house,” the medic said.

Inside, the medic took off his gloves and gently felt Norma’s face and neck. He checked her pulse, took her temperature, and measured her blood pressure. Pat brought in a cup of tea.

“That’s good,” the medic said. “She’s cold. Suffered a bit of exposure out there. Another blanket, too.”

“I’ll get one,” Pat said.

“I need to ask you some questions, Mrs. Snow, okay?”

Norma nodded.

“Do you know who I am?”

Norma studied the man’s face for a long second. “Yes, you’re the boy who rode the goat.”

“What was that?”

“You’re the boy who fell off the goat,” she said.

Pat was back with the blanket. “What in the world is she talking about? Is she delirious?”

The medic laughed. “No, I rode in the goat race when I was a kid and I had a pretty good wreck. Broke my clavicle.”

“You didn’t have a beard then,” Norma said, smiled.

“No ma’am, I didn’t. I was eight.” He stood and began to put away his sphygmomanometer. “She’s all right. Pretty cold out there, Mrs. Snow? How’d you lose your coat?”

“Can’t tell you,” she said. “It’s out there somewhere.”

“Remember why you took it off?”

Norma shook her head.

“Well, the thing now is to keep covered up and stay warm. Keep drinking hot liquids.”

“I’ll see to it,” Pat said. “I’ll get a hot water bottle for her feet.”

“That’s good.”

Dan came into the house with some wood and went about making a fire in the stove insert. “We’ll get it toasty in here,” he said.

The medic put his hand on Norma’s shoulder. “I’ll swing by tomorrow morning and check on you.”

“Thank you,” Norma said.

“I’ll stay with her,” Pat said.

“No, you won’t,” Norma said.

“Norma.”

“You heard me. I’m nobody’s baby and I live alone and that’s how I will live tonight.”

“It might be advisable to have someone stay with you, ma’am,” the medic said. “Just to be on the safe side.”

“No.”

“Ma’am? You might be a little disoriented.”

“Do I seem disoriented now?”

“Braden, he can stay,” Dan said.

“Hell no,” Norma said. “Thank you all for everything, but I’m warming up now and I feel just fine. You’re Dan. You’re Pat. You’re the goat boy and that wall of beef out there is Braden. It’s Thursday and it’s snowing and I got lost. And though that might be stupid, it’s not a crime.”

“All right, Norma,” Dan said, putting his hand on Pat’s back and starting her toward the door. “Keep the phone beside you in case you need to call. You’ll do that for us?”

“Okay.”

“And I’m going to call and check on you,” Pat said. “So, answer.”

Norma nodded.

They left and Braden came into the house.

“I brushed out Zed and put him away,” he said. “I made sure he got him some extra grain.”

“You put his blanket on him?”

“Yes ma’am.”

“The blue one?”

“Yes ma’am.”

“Thank you, Braden. Thanks a lot. You can go on home now. Sorry I took up your day.”

“I told my wife. I told her I’m staying here tonight.”

“No, you go on home. I’m fine. The doc said I’m okay. Now go.”

“At least let me make you some food,” he said.

Norma looked at his face. It was a kind face. She nodded. “Scramble me a couple of eggs, that’ll be great.”

Braden smiled. “Bacon?”

“Sounds great.”

While Braden banged around in the kitchen, Norma stared at the fire behind the screen. She had fooled all of them. She was as disoriented as she had ever been in her life. She was swimming.

“I’m going to make you some biscuits, too,” Braden called. “Would you like that?”

“That would be nice.”

She could not remember the place she had visited well enough to describe it to herself. She only knew that she had been there. She remembered the dog. She remembered the warmth. She wished Zed could talk, could tell her something about where they’d been. She knew one thing. She would not saddle up in the morning and ride back to that place. She would not follow those tracks. She would not ride again.

Norma Snow felt warm inside. She watched the fire, the flames hovering over the alder log. She listened to the popping and the hissing. She imagined the snow falling on the cattle. She let the blankets slide down from her lap. She was warmer still. The fire grew cold.