Black River Part 5

He had to trade two shifts.

Didn't ask him to do that, either.

Wesley steps carefully around her and pushes Dennis against the wall. It's a controlled movement-the heel of one hand against Dennis's breastbone, just enough pressure to put him against the wall and keep him there-but Dennis grunts and the back of his head connects solidly with plaster. Claire can't decide if this is something she should object to, if this is violence she is seeing. Later, when she plays the moment back in her head, she still won't be able to decide.

You're going to stand here, Wesley says, until you apologize. Dennis tries to force his way off the wall, but Wesley leans into him-he only moves an inch or two-and Dennis stays where he is. He puts his hands around Wesley's wrist, and Claire sees fingernails digging into flesh, but Wesley doesn't flinch and doesn't move.

So Dennis stands against the wall. Wesley sits back down, inches of s.p.a.ce between his spine and the back of the chair. Thank you for dinner, Claire, he says, without looking away from Dennis. I'm finished.

They are still there when she has washed and dried the dishes. Wesley stares at Dennis; Dennis stares at the empty s.p.a.ce over Wesley's head. Dennis's hands are in fists against the wall, and there's a worrisome smudge of something on his wrist, mud or blood. Wesley's hands are resting on the tabletop, loose and open, the kind of casual that can only be dangerous. The skin over his knuckles is flushed, and Claire can imagine the heat of the pain he never mentions but is always etched on the periphery of his expressions, evident behind the careful modulation of his voice. She rests a hand at the place where his neck joins his shoulder, leans close to his ear. Maybe it would be best to deal with this tomorrow, she says. When you've both had- Good night, Claire. I'll be in as soon as I can.

She goes to bed. She does not sleep. She listens to the silence in the living room, to her husband not moving, to her son not speaking.

Dennis never does apologize. Sometime after three, Wesley will tell her, Dennis's eyes roll to the whites. It's not the standing. It's not; he'd skipped meals in the two days he'd been gone. Claire scrambles out of bed when she hears him begin to fall, but when she gets to the living room Wesley has already caught Dennis in his arms.

And we thank You, Lord, for the cert.i.tude that You are with us as we walk through this life . . .

Wesley is a good man.

Dennis is a good boy.

Why is this not enough?

. . . and for the knowledge that You will never abandon nor forsake us.

Her son is sixteen. He has been suspended from school four times this year-for fighting each time-but still has straight A's. He never plays his fiddle anymore (Wesley sold it last year, for two hundred dollars, and gave the cash to Dennis), but he spends weekends working at Arthur's. He's good with the horses, Arthur says. Has a natural affinity.

Her husband is forty-two, and for the first time in his life he is beginning to look old. He's working day watch again, and when he comes home now it is an hour before Claire dares talk to him. Not because she is afraid of him-he has never given her cause to fear-but because the sound of her voice, too soon, seems to pain him. He tries so hard to show her that he is fine. He hasn't sold his own fiddle, but he doesn't touch it, either.

That night-the last night-Wesley says grace, and Claire and Dennis watch each other while they listen. When Wesley is finished, Claire immediately starts talking. (During the day she plans what she will say, careful to choose topics neither of the boys in her life will care about: gardening, what Hallie Christiansen told her at Jameson's that morning, a story from the radio program she has taken to listening to while she cooks.) Dinner has become performance art, a one-woman show in which she must provide all the conversation while also consuming a meal and guarding against dangerous silences that might tempt Dennis or Wesley to fill them. It's going well until Wesley interrupts her.

What happened to your face?

There is a bruise at Dennis's hairline, faint enough that Claire had hoped Wesley wouldn't notice. (What doesn't he notice?) Nothing.

You been fighting again?

Wesley, let's- No.

No? Wesley catches Dennis's wrist, turns it so the light falls on the blackening scabs over his knuckles. If I call up the school tomorrow and talk to your princ.i.p.al, he gonna tell me "no," too?

Do whatever the f.u.c.k you want. See if I care.

Claire puts her hands to her face.

What did you just say, boy?

f.u.c.k, Wes. I said f.u.c.k. F-u-c-k, f.u.c.k. Want me to say it again?

And Wesley is standing, and he is not Wesley her husband, he is Wesley the officer (abruptly, Claire realizes she has always thought of them as separate people; just as abruptly, she understands they are one and the same), and his voice is suddenly hard and sharp and much deeper than usual. Get up, he barks. Up!

(He is not his father, she has told Wesley.) Dennis doesn't answer, and he doesn't move, but Claire can see the bravado bleeding away. His hands are in his lap, his shoulders hunched. He is trembling, just slightly.

(He is not your father, she has told Dennis.) Get up, Wesley commands again, and he grabs the back of Dennis's shirt collar. And then-it is as though time jumps forward a few seconds, as though Claire doesn't see it happen at all-Dennis is on his feet and Wesley still has hold of his collar and there is a gun in her son's hand and a gun aimed at her husband's face.

Claire just has time to see that Dennis's eyes are black with fury, that he has both hands on the grip of the revolver and that it's shaking anyway. Just has time to see Wesley's features go blank, the anger that was there a moment ago gone, gone, gone, replaced with nothing at all. Then Wesley moves, so fast, and he grabs Dennis's wrist and hits him hard in the face, twice, and her son is on the floor and there is blood on his face and his clothes and the rug, and the revolver is in Wesley's hand now and his hand isn't shaking and she doesn't know if his finger has the strength to pull the trigger or not, but the gun is leveled and steady and ready to put a bullet in her child.

She stands up and screams, Stop! Or means to scream, but it comes out a whisper, and she says it again and again, trying to make the word louder, but it is still a whisper: stop stop stop stop stop. She sees Wesley hear her, sees the subtle change in the way he holds himself. But he keeps the gun aimed at Dennis a half second longer before he drops his arm and turns around and goes outside. She expects the door to slam but it doesn't.

Later, after she has brought Dennis back from the emergency clinic, his nose packed and splinted, but before Wesley has returned from wherever he has gone, she will clean up the dishes. One fork is on the floor, a smear of sauce there on the rug beside the blood, but otherwise everything is so ordinary. She will know, sc.r.a.ping the food into the trash and scrubbing the plates and drying the gla.s.ses, that she will not do these things here again. That there will be no more meals together. No more family. No more grace.

She will remember the way her son's rage made her see his father in him for the first time. She will remember the way Wesley hesitated before lowering the revolver, the way she knew, in that moment, that what he kept from his face was fear, and that fear was more dangerous than anger.

And the next day, when Wesley says to her, A person shouldn't have to share his home with someone who wants him dead, she will not disagree.

Amen.

On Monday, September gave way to October. Big cardboard crates of pumpkins appeared outside the doors of Henderson's Feed and Farm, displacing the weathered old bachelors who usually stood there, one boot sole against the wall, spitting into the gravel. The diner across the street painted cartoonish bats and ghosts on its windows. And the banner Wes had been half waiting to see went up across Main Street, down by the old prison. Looked to be the same one they'd hung when he lived here, faded and frayed. It was tied fast to two streetlamps, knot upon knot, and half-moon slices had been cut into the material so when the wind barreled through the canyon it wouldn't tear the banner down. BLACK RIVER HARVEST FESTIVAL, it said, and below, in smaller letters, THIS SAt.u.r.dAY.

"You going to stay for it?" Dennis had asked that morning. Wes pretended he'd forgotten. Pretended to think about it. Then he'd said yes, and let it go at that, because he still hadn't told Dennis about the parole hearing, and now he could put off telling him for another week.

He hadn't forgotten about Harvest, of course. Wes had first stepped onto the Harvest stage when he was six years old, a skinny kid with a -size fiddle. Folks had been prepared to listen politely, applaud dutifully. And then he'd played "Devil's Dream," a showoff of a tune most of them had heard before, but never so fast and never so good. Harvest was where he'd first played for an audience, where he'd met Claire, where he and Lane and Farmer were the headliners seventeen years running. Time was, no one left Harvest until Wes played his fiddle.

When Claire told him she wanted to come back to Black River, he'd immediately calculated the time to Harvest. It hadn't seemed so many days. He'd imagined driving with her there in the truck, slowing to ease over the ruts when the asphalt gave way to oiled dirt a half mile outside town. He'd imagined parking at the end of a long ragged line of pickups, imagined taking Claire in his arms the way he had when he'd carried her, giggling, over the threshold of the house after their wedding. He imagined her wrists overlapping at the back of his neck, her head against his chest, the plain scent of her hair beneath his nose. He'd imagined carrying her to a seat midway back from the stage, on the side nearest the river, sitting there with her in the cool autumn sun and watching the musicians as they took their turns up on the stage, neither he nor Claire listening, both of them hearing the same long-gone music instead.

Harvest was held in a wide fallow field east of town. By late morning, when Wes arrived, parked cars and pickups lined both sides of the road and spilled into the dry lot opposite the field. It was the best day you could ask of October: sunny and cool, only a few clouds in the sky casting rounded shadows onto the mountain slopes. There was a hint of wildfire smoke in the air, a niggling sting at the back of the throat, and though it was from a distant blaze, it mingled uneasily with the scents of fried dough, beer, straw.

Wes walked alone along the shoulder of the road behind parents tightly clutching the hands of children, a group of teenagers laughing too loudly, a man he didn't recognize carrying a black guitar case. He let himself be funneled along with the rest of them through the entrance to the festival, marked with stakes and twine punctuated by triangular plastic flags. The field had been mowed, the stubble tamped down by dozens of boot soles. Along the periphery a couple of old pieces of farm machinery-a harrow, a rake wheel-sat rusted and folded up like the giant husks of dead insects. Down on the far end of the field was an oversized metal shed where the county kept three snowplows and a two-story load of coa.r.s.e sand. Tucked way off beneath the mountains was the river. Hard to see unless you walked straight to it, but if you got up on the stage it stared you right in the face.

Wes wandered slowly through the crowd, pushed his way along the corridor formed by the rows of food booths. Folks packed tight, lined up to wait for booze or ice cream or elephant ears, or, if they were really brave, for Rocky Mountain oysters. Signs tacked to every available surface reminded everyone that the profits went to the Corrections Officers' Welfare Fund. Wes stood in line at one booth and thought about the unpaid bills stacked on the kitchen table in Spokane, the unopened statements that must be scattered on the floor below the mail slot, the notices still making their way through the postal system. He thought about the fact that Claire had reached her annual maximum benefit cap in May, that he hadn't paid the mortgage since July, that all four of his credit cards were maxed out. He thought about his depleted bank account and the crushed manila envelope in his duffel back at Dennis's, not quite a thousand dollars in cash inside. Then he thought about the welfare fund and how they'd picked up what the insurance wouldn't after the riot. When he got to the head of the line, he bought a beer he didn't want, paid with a fifty and didn't wait for the change.

On the far side of the food corridor the festival forked apart: crafts in one direction, games in another, the stage straight ahead. Wes found a spot to stand near the back of the crowd, behind the rows of straw bales that served as seating. It was a good stage for a small-town event like this. Not real big, but high, and bound overhead by an upturned squared-off horseshoe of metal latticework, speakers on either side, lights above. A few more bells and whistles than he remembered. There was another banner across the front of the stage, as tired as the one on Main Street, and a few pumpkins and cornstalks arranged near the speakers. A bluegra.s.s band was playing now. Wes didn't recognize them, but they were young. A guitarist, a ba.s.s player, banjo and mandolin pickers. A fiddler.

He wasn't bad, the fiddler. Kept a good chop going, played a fast break. But he was getting by on the speed of his fingers. That was enough for most folks in any given audience: a quick melody, a fast bow, fingering that was so far beyond anything they could imagine doing themselves they thought that made it good. But the thing about a fiddle was that it was more like the human voice than any other instrument in the world. You could make it sing. You could sustain a note for as long as a breath, longer. You could draw that bow across two strings at once, or slide it from one string to the other in a single downbow, and in doing that you could sound a piercing cry and a low sob at once, joy and sorrow made one.

There were open seats up ahead, but Wes stayed where he was. The band rounded off one song, launched into another. "Salt Creek." Wes knew it, of course; it'd been one of his band's standbys. His fingers tried to tap out the notes against his thigh, but they crossed and tripped over each other, and he pulled them into a painful fist. Forced himself to be still and listen. A strange thing to stand here and listen to a man who was a good fiddler but nowhere near as good as Wes had been. Wasn't sure if it was a rare pleasure or an especially exquisite torture. He liked hearing this familiar music played well, with familiar scents in the air and familiar ground beneath his feet. There was something right in that. But it also just about killed him to be so close to a stage he'd stood on so many times in his life, a stage he'd commanded, and know he'd never stand on it again.

Lane had changed the name of the band at least once a year. Lane Gregory and the Lockdown Lads, or Lane Gregory and the Prison Posse, or something equally ridiculous. A fluid series of names for a fluid band. Lane, Arthur and Wes had played together for nineteen years. Others drifted in and out: there had been a couple mandolin players, a second guitar for a while, a standup ba.s.s for a few short weeks. They played an even balance of bluegra.s.s and old-time, with a little straight-up country mixed in for good measure.

At Harvest they were always the final act, got an hour where the other bands had twenty minutes. They'd play their usual set: upbeat songs people knew, or that sounded close enough to ones they did; maybe a few of those old cowboy ballads Lane liked, the ones that showed off his voice but tested the audience's patience for pathos. And all those songs were good, but what they really did was give everyone time to wrap up whatever else they might be doing, to make their way over to the stage. Because Wes had played here every year since "Devil's Dream," and folks knew what was coming. Lane and Farmer would step back, and Wes would step forward. And that stage belonged to him alone.

He had a repertoire of tunes that numbered in the hundreds, all learned by ear, all held there in his head, ready to be brought forth by his fingers at a moment's notice. A nearly endless stable of notes and melodies at his command, and even that wasn't enough. He composed his own tunes sometimes, pieces that went beyond improvisation, beyond a hot lick or a fast break. He never set out to do it; the tunes came into being as he played alone, forming themselves from notes that joined together almost without his deciding to join them. One of those tunes, especially, Wes let himself be proud of. It was a slow piece, not what you'd think folks would want to hear at what was essentially a big party. Not quite a waltz. More an air.

Low notes first, building to a melody that rose into the highest register, then broke back down into the low notes again. Back and forth. Lingering on hope, never escaping melancholy. It was a piece that had evolved over the years, started as a simple thing with an A part and a B part, each repeated once. He'd built it into something more over time, found that he never played it precisely the same way twice. He added ornaments, took them away again. Experimented with double-stops, added new parts, shifted keys in the middle. To this day, he didn't know its final form, didn't know how it would sound if he could play it now-if he could have played it for Claire when she asked-and that, more than anything else, was why he would never forgive Williams.

Always there was a moment toward the end of the tune, a long single high note Wes could hold seamlessly for several bow strokes, the string pressing sharp against his fingertip, his wrist fluttering in the slightest of vibratos, when he knew that everyone at Harvest was listening to him. He'd look out across the field and see them watching, from the stage all the way to the glittering river. No talking. No laughing. No drinking. Hundreds of faces, all turned his way, all listening to the music he made, all knowing there was something true in that wistful note, that even in the midst of the festival there were things here, in this canyon, in these lives, that were always painful and sometimes beautiful.

The moment didn't last long. The note had to end-though sometimes Wes wondered if he might sustain it forever-and when it ended people drifted out of the collective pause. By the time Wes took his fiddle from beneath his chin and nodded his head in an awkward bow, all was back to the way it had been three minutes earlier.

And afterward, one day, there had been Claire, shy; Dennis, a dark-haired four-year-old clutching her hand; and Farmer, a sure smile on his lips and in his eyes as he introduced them. You play beautifully, Claire had said, and though Wes had heard the words from many others, many times, they'd never before brought a flush to his cheeks. That song, she said. The one you played alone. What's it called?

Hasn't got a name.

She hadn't even had to think about it. You should call it "Black River," she told him.

Wes applauded with everyone else as the bluegra.s.s band took their bows and left the stage. There was a general exchange of people in the audience while cords and microphones were rearranged, as some folks drifted away and others came to find seats and settle in. A group of teenagers claimed the straw bales in front of Wes, and they folded their gangly limbs and leaned into each other as they sat. Eighteen years working security at a shopping mall had left Wes with an earned dislike of teenagers in packs, and he thought about moving, but then Farmer walked onto the stage, Scott trailing him. One of the girls on the straw bale giggled loudly and whispered something to the boy beside her. Up on the stage, Farmer settled onto a stool near the back, out of the way. He'd dressed up; his jeans had a crease down the front, and the pearl snaps on his shirt shone in the sun. Scott had made no such concession to the occasion. He wore skinny black jeans and a plain black T-shirt. Red sleeves reached from the base of his fingers to his elbows; they looked like socks with the feet cut off. Scott's eyebrow piercings glinted, and his dyed hair was in such disarray he might've just gotten out of bed, though Wes supposed he'd actually worked to make it look like that. He approached the microphone with his customary sulking shuffle. He didn't introduce himself, didn't speak at all, just looked back at Farmer once and sang his first note as Farmer played his first chord.

His voice was startling. It was the clearest of tenors, nothing like his shambling speaking voice, and he hit each note so roundly, with such ease, that it seemed his range might be limitless. Scott hadn't lied: he was a singer all right. The song he chose was just as surprising as his voice. "Mary Morgan." It was one of those old campfire ballads with a misleading tempo, so when the tragic twist came it was a surprise that seemed either improbable or inevitable, depending on one's mood and disposition. It told the tale of a rancher's daughter who falls in love with a young man who has joined a roving band of horse thieves. Her father forbids her to see the horse thief, but she steals away in the middle of the night to meet him. When she returns, long past midnight, the rancher hears her in the barn and, in the dim moonlight, mistakes her for the horse thief. He gets his rifle and fires, not realizing he has taken his own daughter's life.

Scott really sold it, made you think it'd happened here, and not so long ago. When he sang the chorus-Wait for me beneath the willow, my Mary Morgan-it might have been with the voice of the grief-stricken young horse thief. It was, Wes realized, the first time he'd seen the kid express emotion that went beyond sullenness and anger. His audience wasn't rapt, though. Wasn't even polite. The whispering had started soon as Scott stepped onto the stage, and it hadn't quit. Folks clearly knew who Scott was-and who his father was, or where he was, at least. In front of Wes, two of the teenage girls were sharing a pair of earphones, their heads touching; he could hear the thrum of the ba.s.s from where he stood. One of the girls had blond hair, blond as Claire's had been, and he wondered briefly if Scott knew her, if he thought she was pretty.

Onstage, Farmer played calmly, purposefully, keeping out of the way of Scott's voice. Scott grasped the microphone in both hands and kept his eyes cast down, never looking at his audience. Wes closed his own eyes and listened as Scott started the final chorus. Wait for me . . . His voice soared, and Wes felt it deep in his chest and recognized what had once been his, this thing for which music was such an inadequate word. This magic, this enchantment, this prayer. It went beyond talent, Wes decided. He believed in gifts, and this, what Scott had, this was a gift.

The applause was halfhearted, and Scott didn't wait to acknowledge it; he was off the stage before it died down, which was quickly enough. One of the boys on the straw bale laughed, a braying guffaw, and said, "G.o.d, what a f.u.c.king f.a.ggot."

Wes found Scott out behind the craft booths, next to the river. The boy was sitting on the ground against a large rock, an untouched candy apple in one hand. He spun the stick and stared intently at the red candy gloss, as though it might show him visions.

"Hey," Wes said, and Scott looked up.

"I didn't know you were here," he said.

"I used to fiddle here," Wes told him. "When I was younger."

"This whole thing's pretty lame." He picked a shard of nut off the sticky surface of the apple.

Almost made Wes angry, but if he'd had the reception Scott did, maybe he'd have felt the same. "Don't think I've ever heard a kid your age sing so good," Wes told him. He didn't offer praise lightly, and maybe the kid sensed that, because the pale skin on his neck flushed.

"I told you I could."

"I guess you did."

"Mr. Farmer helped me pick the song. I'd never heard of it."

"It's a good one. You did it justice."

"He said he used to play with you." Scott glanced once at Wes's hands, then away again.

"That's right."

"You know he was a prison guard?"

"Yeah." Wes eased himself to the ground beside Scott, held a hand to his forehead to shield his eyes from the sun, already low over the mountains. This time of year it just skimmed the sky. "Lots of folks around here are."

"I was kind of surprised when Dennis told me." Scott turned, but his eyes were shadowed. The mountainside behind him, across the water, was covered in ponderosa pine and western larch. The needles of the larches had gone fiery yellow, and it looked like half the trees on the slope had started to burn from within. "I mean, he seems like a pretty decent guy."

"He is. I known him a long time." Behind them, in one of the craft booths, a woman laughed loudly, a shrill false sound. Tell him, Wes thought. Wouldn't be so hard. I was a CO, too.

"Most of those people are real a.s.sholes, though." Scott dropped the candy apple on the gra.s.s. "You should hear the stuff my dad says goes on in there."

The scent of fried food was starting to make Wes queasy, like it used to at the mall. Tell him. "Scott," he said, "did you mean what you said in the truck the other day? About wanting to learn to play the fiddle?"

Scott turned to look at him, and the breeze lifted his hair at the crown of his head. Looked a little like bird feathers. Delicate. "I guess so."

"'Cause I was thinking about that, and if you're interested-serious about it, I mean-I could teach you."

"For real?"

"Yeah."

"Wow. I mean, that would be awesome."

Wes stood, and Scott quickly followed suit, brushing dried gra.s.s from the seat of his jeans. "Don't waste my time if you ain't gonna stick with it," Wes said.

"I don't quit stuff."

"All right. You work with Dennis on Sat.u.r.days, right? Can you hang around an hour after he's done with you?"

"Sure." An anguished expression abruptly crossed his face. "I don't have one, though. A fiddle."

Wes gazed past him, toward the dark water. Moved so fast, but didn't look it from here. "I got one you can use to start."

Wes's father had loved the fiddle. The violin. The sounds made by four strings and hollow wood. He played old-time music mostly, but he also knew Irish tunes, and Scottish, even a few Cajun and Gypsy. He knew the history of each tune, the odd stories and anecdotes that clung to folk music like burrs. He read books about music, slowly, the strip of leather he used as a bookmark making its way through each volume just a few pages at a time: theory texts, biographies of Paganini and Heifetz, histories of cla.s.sical and folk music alike. On the third Sat.u.r.day of each month, he took Wes's mother into Elk Fork to hear the symphony. He believed the Chaconne from Bach's Part.i.ta No. 2 in D Minor for unaccompanied violin was the world's only perfect work of art, and he listened to it every morning, a daily devotional, the way other men studied Bible verses or snapped out two dozen pushups.

He'd had talent, his father, but mostly he'd had a well-matched combination of pa.s.sion and work ethic. Wes hadn't realized it until years after his father's death, but his father must have understood that his skills would never match his desires. He would never receive the praise of an audience of strangers. He would be shackled always to notes composed by others, and even then there would be strict limits; Bach's Chaconne would remain forever out of reach.

Wes always imagined this realization as an epiphany, and it is at this moment, in his constructed memory, that his father turns his attention to lutherie. He built the shed out beside the house, just beyond the first line of pines, and he furnished it slowly. Wes was ten, eleven. He remembered the room filling gradually: a workbench first, largely empty. Tools appearing one by one. Full-size color posters of revered Italian violins, with drawings and charts and measurements on the reverse. Paper-and-pencil sketches of scrolls, f-holes, corner blocks and purfling. Battered old violins from which his father stripped the varnish or pried the tops. And, eventually, pale, perfect blocks of white maple and spruce, narrow strips of ebony and pear. Curls of wood scattered like dry leaves across the floor.

The violin his father chose as his model was a Guarneri del Ges, not as sweet as most Stradivaris, but more powerful. One instrument. He built it slowly, over the course of a year. The scroll was rough, and the corners were sharper, the f-holes canted more steeply than in most fiddles. The varnish was light, more yellow than red, a color many people wouldn't-didn't-like, but that showed off the fine grain of the wood beneath. Plain ebony pegs, an ebony tailpiece with a mother-of-pearl Parisian eye set into the center, four silver fine tuners.

Wes hadn't found it until three weeks after his father's funeral. He'd gone into the shed intending to pack up the tools, because his mother wouldn't or couldn't, and the fiddle had been hanging from a wire above his father's neat, bare workbench. It was already set up, and when Wes took it down from the wire he found the strings still bright and unblemished by rosin, though they were flat in different intervals (three days would pa.s.s before Wes could bring himself to turn the pegs his father had last touched). There was a label inside, visible through the left f-hole. The year-1966-and, where another luthier would have inscribed his name, Jeremiah Carver had written only For my son.

Wes ate at Farmer's that night. The older man had corralled him into it at Harvest. Wes's first instinct had been to decline, but the thought of another meal alone with Dennis, at that d.a.m.ned table, persuaded him.

Farmer emerged from one of the barns when Wes arrived at half past six. "You'll have to forgive me," he said, gesturing at his oil-stained shirt. "My irrigation pump quit again. Third time in two months. Been trying to get it going."

"Place has grown," Wes noted.

Farmer grinned. "Yeah. I've got a good stud and some nice mares. I breed a few colts every year and sell 'em. Keeps me busy."

"Well, it sure looks good."

Farmer took the compliment with his usual grace, then said, "I'll get the grill going soon as I change. You want a beer?"

"Sure."

Wes sat on the yellow farmhouse's small porch and looked out at all Farmer had built here. The horses had been a hobby when he was working at the prison, but Wes saw it had become far more than that since. A h.e.l.l of a thing, especially considering Farmer was living on his pension from the prison. Did thirty-five years there. He had always been one of those COs who knew how to leave it at the gate. Back when they were both on the main cellblock, Wes would sometimes see Farmer at work and then see him at home the same day, and it was like talking to two different men. Farmer the CO was good at his job, serious and alert but able to walk the fine line between authority and rigidity. He kept his dignity no matter what the inmates threw at him-even when it was their own s.h.i.t-and as he moved up the ranks, he earned and retained the respect of everyone who worked with him or under him. Farmer the horseman and husband, on the other hand, changed in the locker room in a town where most COs wore their uniforms home. He had a gentle manner and sense of humor, believed that G.o.d heard prayers, and, Wes suspected, never stopped thinking about the wife he'd accidentally killed on a lonely highway all those years ago.

The sun was sinking toward the tops of the mountains to the west, and Wes let his gaze follow it down to the land that used to be his. The house was barely visible, just slices of white through the pine. As he watched, a horse and rider appeared on the other side of the far pasture fence. A black horse with white forelegs, a bareheaded rider who sat straight in the saddle. The pair stopped near the end of the fence, and the rider rested his hands on the horn of the saddle, let the horse lower his head to graze. When he made the effort, Wes could hear the clink of some piece of metal on the tack. He wondered if Dennis could recognize him from that distance.