Something to Be Desired

6

Lucien slept, and during the night he dreamed or overheard — he’d never know — incessant activity, activity which must have gone on long into the night: the dragging of objects over the wood floors, the random opening and closing of doors, the shunting about of vehicles in the dark, the long cry of a horse left in the wrong corral, then silence. When Lucien woke up, he found Emily awaiting him with breakfast on a tray. He was not warmed by this treatment and just leaned up on one elbow waiting for her to speak.

“It’s all yours,” she said, “but I’ll always be able to come back, now, won’t I?”

Lucien didn’t speak. He guessed his accepting the knowledge she was leaving made him an accomplice. “I’d like a picture of you,” Lucien said. “Portrait-style, with a good frame.”

He watched the light and clouds make changes in his window; he saw the revolving shadows in the peaks of the Crazies, and night arriving not simultaneously but in different places and at different times. He began to wonder what screwballs lived here in other days who had hidden whiskey bottles under the porch or made the dog graves by the creek. Then having rested most of the day, he lay awake through the night and looked out the window at the cold moonlight on neglected meadows. He was just wondering how you’d care for a piece of ground like that. All that grass; all that timothy and brome and foxtail and oat and fescue and rye and orchard grass and bluegrass and panic grass and river grass and six-weeks grass and brook grass! All those rocks! All that running water!

That night, aircraft lights wheeled around the flat across the creek and Emily was gone, a fading drone behind the clouds. Lucien wept at his loss. In these tears flowed the venom of a jilted schoolboy facing magic that wouldn’t die at the right time and be good remembered magic.

The day broke on Lucien’s ranch. He fed all the saddle horses because there seemed to be no sign of W. T. Austinberry. He found himself unconsciously counting bales in the shed, dividing rations into the number of winter months. He stared at the shallow creek streaming through the corral and wondered where the best place to spud a hole in the ice would be. He also wondered if all those horses were indeed saddle horses or if there might not be a bronc mixed in there, disguising man-killer traits with good fellowship among the horses at the feed bunk. Then it came to him clearly: Austinberry had departed with Emily. For some reason it magnified Lucien’s humiliation.

In W.T. he thought he saw a ridiculous version of himself tottering off down the trail. And yet he peered with avaricious eyes at his own new land. He could only have seemed more preposterous to himself if he had been wearing a tie. He was spared that.

Well, Lucien thought, the sun goes down and the blues come around. He sat in the old chicken coop to get out of the wind and smoked and felt alone. He sat on a row of brooder boxes and watched the white and final streamers of cloud on the good sky. He had read somewhere that those are ice crystals, and at that time and place he felt they were. His whole past didn’t shoot by, but some of the big items, the big wins and losses, did. By the time the harvest moon crossed the chicken wire, Lucien had looked at his life and was ready for a new one.

Lucien went inside; he filled the tub with deep hot water and soaked and watched the morning light cross the old linoleum flowers on the kitchen floor. He had benign thoughts for the man, now doubtlessly gone, who had dreamed up those appalling flowers for the linoleum factory. Could he have known what a half century’s muddy boots and all that domestic abrasion would do to his bright flowers?

By the time early day in all its effulgence had penetrated to the bottom of the smallest gullies and sent the dullest prairie chicken into hiding with a departing hawk-warning cry, Lucien had climbed two thousand feet above his ranch in an attempt to find out where he was. He was beginning to understand what he had paid to be here alone.