PART ONE:
BETWEEN THE CREEKS
Life is woven out of air by light.
—JACOB MOLESCHOTT
CHAPTER oNE
Naples, Texas
August 1972
Leni O’Hare
Her mother’s native tongue snaps and spews, skimming after her across the dry goatweed and brush.
"Madeleine O’Hare! Come back here. Reviens! A cet instant! Écoutes-moi! Arrêtes! Arrêtes!"
But she and Foggy are gone. Galloping beneath the dove-gray sky to the far rise in a frantic waltz—one-two-three, one-two-three, one-two-three. She imagines clods of dirt and grass from her dappled mare’s hooves, like one of Foy’s fastballs, lodging in their mother’s throat. That would shut her up. No more talk of selling Leni’s prized mare.
At the top of the rise, Leni glares back at the patchwork of paddocks circling their barn, like pieces of the stupid quilt Maman makes her work on week after week, scraps of their old clothes and dishtowels, nothing wasted, everything to be used and reused until it’s shreds.
Mad all over again, she gives Foggy more rein, urges her on. The mare stretches her neck and lengthens her stride. The saddlebags with grain for Foggy, and the few clothes and whatever else she could grab, jostle behind her. The tall switchgrass passes beneath them like rushing water. Faster and faster, over the crest of the small hill and down toward the river.
But even by the river, with the beating of Foggy’s hooves across the dry ground, her mother’s shouts seem still trapped between her ears. "Dieu te vois. Remember that! God sees you!" Leni tightens her legs around her mare as they jump ditches and dodge one hawthorn bush, then another, desperate to shed her mother’s curses, because she’ll be as wide and open as this Texas chaparral. Infinite, maybe. Not pockmarked and scarred by her mother’s curses, like Evan Holt’s face since he came back from Da Nang with shrapnel from his navel to the crown of his head, and now Marguerite—perfect, buxom Marguerite with their mother’s dark curls and her always starched blouses and smoothly pressed skirts—won’t marry him like she’d promised.
Beyond the bend, across the Old Tram Road, the river widens into a small marsh. Leni pulls Foggy up to a jog, then a walk. Sweat lathers the mare’s neck, runs down Leni’s neck and back, too. They are both puffing hard.
With the reins loose now, resting on Foggy’s neck, the mare picks her way lightly over the dry grasses. Leaves and twigs crunch beneath her hooves as they follow the river north.
Exciting to be on her own. And away—finally—from her foolish mother, in her homemade hats, lace-up shoes, and white socks, insisting Leni give up her horse and barrel racing as though she’d ever be prim and prissy and boy crazy like her sister.
The river winds calmly here, especially lazy now since there’s hardly been any rain since spring. Dry as a turkey’s gullet, her daddy says. The air, though, is moist and thick today. Foggy’s ears spin forward, watching a jackrabbit bounce and weave from a cluster of cottonwood trees into the tall grass.
Clumps of old hardwoods along the shore mark the river’s path. Cottonwood and oak mostly, some sumac and scraggly white pines. Leni scans the banks for a place to camp. Here between the creeks, the Sulphur River and the White Oak that dip into Texas at the bottom of the Ozarks, is like nowhere else. These creeks can be nearly dry as spit one day and rise ten feet the next. Along the bottomland, big old boar can spring out, fast and sudden as a pitch hit hard to the outfield. Eagles and osprey hunt over the watering holes. Blue heron and white egret pose, so proud and still, in the tall reeds. There’s quail and mourning doves. The white-tailed deer, almost as skittish and muscle-twitched quick as the squirrels. She likes that her daddy and Foy don’t hunt, even if some people think that’s crazy. There’re coyotes and bobcats, of course. Even an occasional, and especially sly, wolf. And she’d need ten minutes to list all the snakes. Most of them you just want to stay away from. The way they flow over the ground, like trickling water so easy and quiet, makes her wonder sometimes if this earth is where she belongs. Except when she’s on Foggy.
The day before, Leni was helping her daddy over at the Conyers’ big farm on the other side of the creeks. Her daddy’s the best vet from Texarkana to Decatur. Everybody says so. They were seeing to one of the Conyers’ ewes that had a real bad eye infection. Swollen and pus-filled. The Conyers moved recently from somewhere way over by the hill country. Austin. Or even further maybe. Leni hugged the ewe’s nose under her armpit, whispered into the twitching ear, and watched Mrs. Conyer, with her painted nails and twirly skirt, watch her daddy as he worked.
When he finished, Mrs. Conyer looked out across their field and asked, How can a person get accustomed to so much sameness?
If a pink sunset, stretched thin like taffy across the entire sky, is the same to a person as a twisting gray funnel cloud swirling through pine woods, then as far as Leni’s concerned there’s no help for her.
There used to be more people here between the creeks, back when most folks were farming. But the small farms with one or two dairy cows and a few pigs and laying hens gave way to ranches raising beef cattle for the feedlots in Midland or stockyards in St. Louis. The McGraths run the biggest ranch. Her daddy says Mr. McGrath’s been buying up land for more than thirty years to run his cattle on, and he’s got himself wells pumping out oil from here to Oklahoma, too. Leni sees him on occasion at a rodeo or the feed store. He’s built like a tree stump. His older son, Hank Junior, looks just like him—dark-haired and thick all over. Only he’ll smile on occasion. At girls, mostly. The younger son, Caleb, is in Foy’s grade at Pewitt High, a year ahead of Leni. They’ll be seniors this year. Caleb’s built like a sapling, tall and smooth. He keeps to himself mostly, from what Leni can tell. Like her.
Leni lets Foggy wade over the rocks into the shallow water. Their hearts beating steady now, calmed by the river and the solitude. The reins slide through Leni’s hand as the mare stretches her neck to drink. Leni listens to Foggy’s long pulls of water, and wonders what it’d be like to be on her own forever. To follow the sun across the chaparral, bathe in the river, catch a bass for supper, and go back to a shelter she made with her own hands under a grove of hardwoods.
Sometimes you can feel rain in the air and pray for it to fall, but the clouds just slide past, holding on to those precious drops of water until they get to the Gulf. This feels different. Very still. The sky gray and so close. Leni hadn’t thought, and hadn’t had time anyway, to fetch a mackinaw or tarp.
Foggy paws at the water. They splash back onto dry land. She was figuring on heading to Billy Drum’s place. He’s an old friend of her daddy’s and retired now. He’d take her in, she’s pretty sure. But his old sawmill and barn are another hour’s ride north and west. Leni eyes the reeds at the edge of this marsh. She could cut fistfuls of it with Foy’s old army knife that she snatched on her way out of the kitchen, find a spot beneath some hardwoods, and make some kind of lean-to. Something to at least keep her saddle and saddlebags dry.
Caleb McGrath
Cal had finished his chores and was waiting out the worst of the August heat in his room, tinkering with the miniature ham radio he kept tucked inside his desk drawer in case someone—namely his father—were to barge in. Hank Senior strictly forbade the radio enterprise. Cal figured it was more because he couldn’t understand it than because a ham radio was illegal to operate. Cal built a small one anyway. Using sardine tins for the transmitter and transceiver, hammering the tin lids into shape. Scouring ads in the back of Popular Mechanics, he sent away for the coils and tiny transponders, paying with money he earned giving roping lessons to the ranch hands’ kids and anyone else who’d ask. The radio operated at about two watts, enough to tune into Mexican operators at night and north into some of Oklahoma most days.
The back door off the kitchen slapped shut.
Molly!
his father’s shout ricocheted through the newly-remodeled kitchen and across the open dining room where the heels of his boots struck the stone floor like matches on flint.
Cal’s mother was tall and slender. She wore her hair, which was the pale brown color of winter wheat, in a short bob. Her fingers would often flutter up and smooth strands behind her ears. She was a native to Texas and ranching, but she would fit right in in the suburbs of Dallas or any southern city. There was an elegance about her, and grit. She stood eye to eye with her husband, and had a look—with those pale green eyes—that was about the only thing that could stop him, tightly coiled and ready to spring as he was, in his tracks.
Where’s that boy?
Cal heard his father growl, his ire up. Nothing new about that.
The one you named?
his mother replied, likely extracting a cigarette from the pocket of the small scalloped apron she wore, over her customary cigarette slacks.
Cal’s room and his brother’s were just past the living room in the long ranch house. Cal stashed the tray with the radio parts in the desk drawer and pulled toward him the book that lay on his desk, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. He’d read it all, and the parts on Sir Isaac Newton and his theories of light and color two or three times. Such a mystery, light. It marks the very beginning. All life depends on it. It has no mass no substance. It is intangible and perfect. Its particles immaterial and immortal, possessing infinity. The book opened to Niels Bohr, quantum mechanics. Particles and quarks, packets of energy that, in fact, led to the development of transistors, but he flipped back to Sir Isaac Newton. Laws of planetary motion.
Cal listened to the thwack, thwack of his father’s boots on the slate floor as he marched past the wet bar, toward the sunken living room with the wide stone hearth and the new shag carpet, the color of fresh copper, shipped all the way from Atlanta.
Newton’s father, an illiterate farmer, died before baby Isaac was born on Christmas Day, 1642, in Lincolnshire, England, and his mother abandoned him to marry again before he was two, returning when he was eleven to pull her son—one of the most brilliant minds the West has ever known—out of school and plop him on a farm to muck stalls and milk goats. Parents are not always one’s allies.
You set foot on my new carpet with those boots,
his mother’s warning, and you are sleeping in the shed. And what are you in such a fuss about?
The hay!
his father shouted.
Cal’s father was thick all over, with a short neck and barrel chest and thighs like full gallon jugs that brushed against each other when he walked. His work shirts pulled tight across his chest into tiny sharp folds at each button. The silver buckle on his belt, the size of a playing card, wedged just below his gut. His black hair was flecked with gray. But he was still a man one would think more than twice about getting into a fight with. Most men, to avoid saying the wrong thing, just got quiet around him. Except for Hank Junior. His brother liked a dare.
I’ll get Caleb,
his mother said. Her voice, made husky from cigarettes, was deeper than one might expect, looking at her.
We got to get up to the Lacey and get that damned hay in before this storm.
Where’s Hank Junior?
Cal heard the quick click click of his mother’s shoes on the stone floor, as she approached his room.
That I do not know.
We got to be easy on him yet,
his mother said.
Easy, my ass. Call George and Danny. Tell them to meet me at the Lacey.
Hon?
Cal’s mother tapped softly on his bedroom door. Your daddy and ’em need you to help bring in the hay that’s been cut.
Cal looked out his window, west across the driveway toward the horse barn. The house was built on a lot carved out of a sprawling pasture, set a good quarter mile back from the road. A year and a half earlier, Hank Senior had taken down the old two-story clapboard farmhouse with its low-slung eaves and a porch that stretched along two sides and built the one-story brick ranch house that looked like every other house built in east Texas since 1960, only bigger. And with central air and heat. Cal glanced out at a stretch of dusty sky, nothing too ominous.
You know where your brother’s at?
she asked.
No, ma’am. He doesn’t answer to me.
More than likely his brother was sitting at the Roadhouse, a couple of empties in front of him, or in town chain-smoking in front of the 7-Eleven with a couple of other vets recently returned from the war. They clung together like burrs.
Hurry now. Your daddy’s waiting on you.
To the east, through the spotless picture windows that ran along the living room and dining room, Cal could see clouds as black as barrels lining the horizon. A herd of white-faced Herefords beyond the fence circling the house grazed and flicked their tails, unaware or resigned.
By the back door, Cal pulled on his boots and grabbed an apple from the counter, his hat from the rack, and headed out to the driveway. But Hank Senior was already halfway to the County Road, dust jetting out behind his shiny red pickup and rippling across the dry grass. Cal had let Hank Junior take his truck earlier that afternoon, because his—so his brother said—was at a friend’s, with a flat tire.
On a rise past the driveway, a five-foot steel fence enclosed the horse barn and paddocks. Cal saw to the horses, up early each morning to feed and water them, home before supper each night to feed and water again.
Captain Flint, Cal’s big bay, swung his head over the fence and watched Cal approach. For his tenth birthday, Cal’s mother convinced their father to let him have the pick of the yearlings. Every day for two weeks, Cal went down to the yearling pen and to the broodmare pasture. His father grumbled, wondered when the boy
was going to make up his damned mind.
But this was the most important decision Cal had yet faced, and he knew it. He’d go after school, before starting on his chores, sit on the fence, and watch the young horses play and graze. Walter, their steady, trustworthy foreman, went with him the first few days, talked with him about horses. Cal quickly narrowed it down to three: Flint, a strawberry roan, and a bay mare. The next week, he picked Flint because he was strong—he had good straight legs and a wide chest—and because he noticed everything, from a butterfly flying jaggedly through the paddock to a tractor engine starting up in the machine barn a good seventy yards away. Cal reasoned he’d be sensitive and smart. And he thought the horse was pretty with his shiny dark coat, white stockings on his front legs, and a blotch of white on his forehead.
Once he’d decided, Walter laid a sturdy hand on Cal’s shoulder. Good choice, young man,
he said, nodding, and went back to work. Cal felt proud. And Walter was right. It was a good choice. At eight years old, Flint had filled out beautifully. Thick round rump, that deep chest. He was tall for a quarter horse, but still agile and quick. Too quick sometimes. A little high-strung. But he and Cal were partners. They understood each other, trusted each other.
As Cal crawled between the lower bars of the fence, Captain Flint’s rubbery lips mussed his hair and shirt collar. Cal opened his palm and let Flint have what was left of the apple, one bite, then the last. Juice and seeds slid through his fingers.
The air was getting darker. Not the softness of dusk, but heavy, like metal dust was falling over the chaparral. Cal gave Flint a quick brushing—while the other horses looked on, smug and lazy—and slung the blankets and saddle across his back, cinched him up, and got on.
As he started toward the County Road, his mother hurried out of the house and called after him, the wind yanking her hair loose and flinging it about her face.
I don’t want you riding out with this weather coming,
she yelled. You know better ’an that.
Cal also knew they had to get the hay in before the rain spoiled it.
You take my car.
She held her hair off her face with one hand and pointed to the new blue Buick lurking in the carport with the other, cigarette smoke swirling above her head.
I’d get stuck soon as I turn off County Road,
Cal shouted over the wind, as Flint pranced sideways. I can make it in fifteen minutes on Flint.
She knew that was so. All right then,
she said as she ground her cigarette out with the toe of her shoe like it was a co*ckroach. All right …
She waved him on as though tired of the whole lot of them, stubborn men, and started back to the house.
When Hank Junior got drafted and shipped off to the other side of the world, their mother got more edgy. Smoked more. Drank more bourbon come sundown. She told Cal late one night when they were alone that if she had to send another son clear across the globe to some jungle swampland the size of a Texas county, she’d do something drastic. That she was sure of, she said, bourbon sloshing the sides of her glass as she stared him down, leaving Cal to wonder just what his mother was capable of in defense of her sons.
Flint and Cal jogged away from the barn. The branches of the old maple trees by the gate quivered, showing the undersides of their leaves as though asking for rain. Cal and Flint sidled up to the gate, let themselves through under the leery eyes of a couple dozen cows huddled together beneath the trees, their bellies already taut with next spring’s calves, and loped north toward the Lacey hay pasture.
CHAPTER TWo
Leni
Behind a grove of thick leafed yaupon hollies on the White Oak’s banks, Foggy grazes lazily, pausing now and again to run her nose against her foreleg or shake a stray fly from her face. Leni takes out her daddy’s old canteen. It’s dented and the stained canvas is fraying, but it doesn’t leak. From her saddlebags, she gets the bread and cheese she swiped from the kitchen counter before her mother could stop her, then lays out the blanket—her daddy’s from his war—brown and threadbare in places. She unwraps the cheese, pulls a slice of bread from the plastic wrap, and watches the skinny switchgrass and bluestem bend toward her in the wind sweeping over the pasture.
Maman. Damn her. Thinking Foggy was hers to sell. To some Mr. Royce from Tyler. Leni doesn’t care how much money he was willing to give. So his little girl can start racing barrels? Leni and Foggy race barrels (when she can earn the entrance fees). And ride the chaparral. And swim in the McPeels’ watering hole. Leni tends to her every day. Grooms her, feeds her, beds her stall thick with straw. No!
she said. Foggy is hers. As much as her arm is hers.
And Leni thought that was that.
When that shiny silver horse trailer came bouncing down the drive, Leni knew. That was no one with a sick animal looking for her daddy. It was that Mr. Royce. Needles ran through her veins.
Leni flew up the stairs, four at a time. Grabbed her diary, sketchpad, pen, and ink.
Cradling them to her chest, she yanked her blue sweater from the drawer, boots from the floor. Ran out through the kitchen. Maman shrieking behind her. She snatched Foy’s pocketknife from the table, swept the bread and cheese and two apples (which fell out of her arms by the door) off the counter, and tore toward the barn, as the trailer, a big four-horse one, pulled by a matching double-cab pickup, rattled toward the house.
The goats scattered across the paddock, while Agnes, the milk cow, and Roger, Doc O’Hare’s old roan, always laconic, watched. Foggy, head high, jogged to the fence, following Leni to the barn. Kicking the tack room door open, Leni grabbed a saddlebag. She dumped the sweater, pocketknife, pads, pen, and ink into one side, and dashed to the feed room. She sloppily scooped oats into the other side of the saddlebags. Then back to the tack room where she rolled the canteen, halter and lead rope, and food into her father’s blanket. Tied the whole mess onto the back of her saddle tight. Flinging Foggy’s bridle over her shoulder, she jogged to the paddock and slid the barn door open. Foggy—sensing the emergency this was—was already there.
The trailer began its slow circle in front of the house. The kitchen door snapped shut. Her mother hurried out, waving to Mr. Royce.
Leni slipped the bridle over her mare’s head, led her into the barn. In front of the tack room, she smoothed the mare’s coat with her forearm—no time to brush—and hoisted the blanket, saddle, then the saddlebags onto her back.
Maman was calling. "Madeleine! Madeleine! Viens-ici!"
Leni grabbed the cinch and pulled it tight under Foggy’s belly.
"Madeleine! Her mother scurried toward the barn. Her small, plump frame, her quick, tight steps. Her large breasts bouncing.
Écoutes-moi, Madeleine!"
The fool Mr. Royce was trying to back the trailer up between the paddocks. But the damned thing was so big—maybe he was figuring on taking every one of their animals. He pulled forward, began all over again. Maman, trying to appear in control (always), waved to Mr. Royce, then dodging the trailer, hurried up between the paddocks toward the barn.
Leni couldn’t take Foggy out the front. Their only chance was to slip out through the stall for the goats at the end of the barn, where the eaves slope steeply and the Dutch door’s so low, Leni has to duck her head to get through.
Stay with me, Foggy girl. Stay with me. We can do it …
Leni willed herself to speak calmly and low.
"Madeleine!" Her mother was in the barn.
You got to do this, girl,
Leni murmured to the mare, and flicked her tongue, cluck, cluck, cluck.
Foggy raised her head again and, slinking onto her haunches, backed up. Leni snapped the ends of the reins against the mare’s rump hard as she could. Out Foggy bolted—the saddle scraping the stall door—Leni at her heels.
Mr. Royce’s pickup revving behind her, her mother screaming her name, Leni—reins in hand—ran to the gate, Foggy jogging beside her. She unclipped the chain from the gate. Foggy sidestepped, eyeing the barn, then jogged forward through the gate. Her mother’s yells had become shrieks. The goats bucked and mewed in the paddock behind her. Leni pulled the gate closed, leapt onto Foggy. And off they ran.
Away from the barn and the house, her mother’s shrieking, and up over the rise, into the deep grass and down to the river where Mr. Royce and his big new trailer could never follow.
Abite of cheese. A bite of bread. She can’t tell if she’s hungry or not. The sun begins to melt over the pine barrens toward Sugar Hill. To the east, thick clouds pulled by the wind from the north are sinking over the chaparral.
Leni watches a young willow tree bow with the wind toward the river. She sets down the bread and cheese and goes to the saddlebags for her sketchpad and pen. Not just any pen. The Rapidograph her daddy got her at a veterinary conference two years back in Galveston. He took Leni with him, thinking the sea air would clear up the bronchitis she’d been fighting for near a month. What did her good, though, was seeing the horizon over the water, so big she could make out the curve of the earth. Something she hadn’t known how to imagine before. Not really. Made her wonder about all the things that lay beyond her sight. It opened her mind to possibilities. Doc O’Hare wrapped the pen himself in thick brown paper with a gold ribbon almost as wide as the box.
Leni dips her hand into the saddlebags. Something’s damp and mushy. The bottom of her sweater wet as if with blood. She takes it out, opens it wide. A jagged black pattern across the bottom of the sweater. Her fingers now moist and black. The ink jar lost its top. Black has seeped across each page of her sketchpad, blotting out portraits of Foggy, the goats, and the rooster. Ink crept over sketches of the green and rusted tractor beside the well, smearing the pines and hardwoods that divide their house and barn from the river. Damn. And the composition notebook with its black-and-white mottled cover she uses as a diary? A smudge of ink, like a fat pig, all across the front.
A wind gust leaves the hair on her arms and head prickling like she’s been jolted. She stares upriver, into the wind. She has only the clothes on her back. A dollar twenty in her pocket. And a loaf of bread. Still, though, better to be out here, free, with Foggy than without her in that cramped house with Marguerite whimpering and Maman nagging, and Daddy reading in his office with the door closed. She didn’t want to think about how, if she were at home, she’d watch the storm with Foy. How they’d crouch by his bedroom window. Listen to the rain splatter the sides of their frail house and wait for lightning to streak across the sky. How they’d sneak down to the kitchen at night for peanut butter and crackers, then go back up to write on his ceiling with flashlights.
Waiting out a storm is a risky business. She knows this. Twisters can touch down and race across the chaparral with little warning. The charred stalks of trees smote by lightning stand barren and eerie in nearly every pasture. She considers again pushing on to Billy Drum’s place, but she knows she can’t get there before the storm hits.
Back to the blanket to think. Another bite of cheese. The soft white bread sticks to the roof of her mouth. They’ll be sitting down to supper in another hour. Marguerite will surely be ruffled, having to clear the table and tend the animals. No one looks after the animals as well as Leni does. Marguerite won’t wet down Roger’s hay, so he’ll likely get his cough back. And she won’t make sure the goats, Heidi and Scarlet and Clementine, get the proper table scraps—no meat or grease—if there are any scraps left, that is. Now that football practice has started, Foy’s eating like a pair of oxen. And Marguerite won’t look over the animals for cuts or scrapes or sadness in their eyes either. All that Leni’s learned from their daddy.
Two years ago, her mother sold the pigs, Troy and Sissy, when they were only four months old. That was sudden, but not so unexpected. This time last year, she sold Gracy, the donkey, to Mrs. Burton who wanted a donkey to pull a cart for her grandchildren. Crazy idea. Anybody but her mother knew you couldn’t get that donkey to do a damned thing. She was an inordinately lazy animal who could calm down other creatures like some kind of hypnotist—a nervous horse, sheep, or cow that might be there for her daddy’s tending. Too bad she couldn’t calm down her mother. Leni knew her daddy liked the donkey, too. Foy had broken his arm. Maman declared—not even looking up from shelling peas when Doc O’Hare asked where the donkey had gotten to—that she sold the animal to pay for Foy’s doctor’s bills. It didn’t make any sense to Leni. They’d never gone without doctor’s appointments. Or food. Or clothes on their backs, even if they weren’t as fancy as Marguerite would pine for. Were things really that hard? World War II’s over, she wants to shout, but doesn’t.
Foggy, though? Her Foggy? "You spend too much time with ‘zht hoss,’" was her mother’s refrain. So Leni had fallen behind on her chores around the house. Chores that Marguerite did until she graduated high school and started working at DeWitt’s Hardware and Feed. The way Leni sees it, if any little thing doesn’t go her mother’s way, she casts her disappointment about like a spell. Leni knew her mother thought she was marrying a medical doctor when she left the north of France and landed in forlorn Naples, Texas. Quite a surprise to discover he was an animal doctor. Leni, though, thinks her father’s profession—taking care of animals—is the noblest. He’s patient and caring. And he works harder than anyone else she knows.
Leni doesn’t want to keep thinking of her mother. But she can’t stop. What is Maman thinking now? After this, Leni’s declaration of independence. How’s Maman going to explain this to her daddy? Maybe—finally—Maman will see that she can’t just push and mold people into whatever
