Read Online The Final Country by James Crumley - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: James Crumley
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on the front porch pointlessly whittling, turning cedar posts into cookstove shavings.
Until it went bad, I’d never been closer to a woman than Betty. She had healing hands; I’d seen her work, seen the undeniable hope in an animal’s eyes when she put those hands on them. A look, I suspected, I had when she first put her hands on me. So I tried really hard. For the first time in my life I studied how to be home, studied every angle and plane of Betty’s face, every freckle, every stray wisp of red hair, the faint trace of the bullet scar across her right cheek, the dark leaden dimple on her left jawline where she’d fallen on a pencil in the third grade, which only showed when she occasionally laughed, wild and free.
And I studied Texas, too, because it seemed important to Betty, important in some way I didn’t understand, but extremely important nonetheless. “Texans are proud people,” her Travis Lee explained to me, “and Betty is a Texan.” As if that explained everything. So during the mornings while she slept, I wandered the ranch with books. Hell, I knew more about flora and fauna on her ranch than I knew about my grandfather’s land, which I had finally managed to give back to the Benewah tribe, one of the few places in Montana I had ever called home. Not the moldering mansion where I was raised, not the log cabin the garbage company goons had burned down. Those places weren’t home. Except sometimes in the log cabin back home when I’d be sitting on the porch watching the first snow, and my big black tomcat, Eldridge Carver, would curl in my lap. That was home, sometimes. But that was easy. Making myself at home on Betty’s ranch was work.
Month after month I wandered the ranch on foot in all kinds of weather. I sometimes thought I knew it better than Betty did. She’d torn out all the pasture and cross fences except for a small plot down the hill from the house where she kept a couple of saddle horses and occasionally ran a calf or two. On the back side of the ranch, I discovered a tiny outcropping of flint, no bigger than a freight car, and at the base of it, covered with limestone dust, a midden of arrowhead flakes, probably Comanche, since it seemed they had owned everything from there to southern Colorado for two hundred years. And I studied the Indians, too, nothing but ghosts now.
On other afternoons I’d gather up one of Betty’s saddle horses, then drift easily for a couple of hours over to Tom Ben’s place, where we’d sit on the veranda sipping iced tea and watching the sun soften the cedar breaks as it settled over the Hill Country while he shucked dried corn and doled it out cob by cob to the small herd of Spanish goats he kept for the occasional barbecue. During the Korean War Tom Ben had been a twenty-eight-year-old captain in the Marine reserves who had been called to active duty when I was a sixteen-year-old Army private on falsified enlistment papers, and on those occasional afternoons we sometimes touched on those times, talking without talking too much. But he never talked about WW II, except to wonder about what might have happened if we had to invade Japan. And about Korea, Tom Ben mostly complained about the cold and bitched about his feet. Never married, he was as fond of his niece as if she were his child, and he extended that fondness to me. His place was a home place in a way Betty’s never quite managed, but I didn’t go over there often enough.
At Betty’s place I read all the books I’d always meant to read, watched endless hours of movies on the battery-run portable television with a built-in VCR, which Betty allowed me to keep in the old smokehouse. She wouldn’t watch them with me but sometimes she’d come in to lean on my back, briefly, her nose snuffling out the old smoke and salt smells. Then she’d leave me to the present and drift back to the nineteenth-century British novels she was addicted to.
Also, for the first time in my life, I had long
Until it went bad, I’d never been closer to a woman than Betty. She had healing hands; I’d seen her work, seen the undeniable hope in an animal’s eyes when she put those hands on them. A look, I suspected, I had when she first put her hands on me. So I tried really hard. For the first time in my life I studied how to be home, studied every angle and plane of Betty’s face, every freckle, every stray wisp of red hair, the faint trace of the bullet scar across her right cheek, the dark leaden dimple on her left jawline where she’d fallen on a pencil in the third grade, which only showed when she occasionally laughed, wild and free.
And I studied Texas, too, because it seemed important to Betty, important in some way I didn’t understand, but extremely important nonetheless. “Texans are proud people,” her Travis Lee explained to me, “and Betty is a Texan.” As if that explained everything. So during the mornings while she slept, I wandered the ranch with books. Hell, I knew more about flora and fauna on her ranch than I knew about my grandfather’s land, which I had finally managed to give back to the Benewah tribe, one of the few places in Montana I had ever called home. Not the moldering mansion where I was raised, not the log cabin the garbage company goons had burned down. Those places weren’t home. Except sometimes in the log cabin back home when I’d be sitting on the porch watching the first snow, and my big black tomcat, Eldridge Carver, would curl in my lap. That was home, sometimes. But that was easy. Making myself at home on Betty’s ranch was work.
Month after month I wandered the ranch on foot in all kinds of weather. I sometimes thought I knew it better than Betty did. She’d torn out all the pasture and cross fences except for a small plot down the hill from the house where she kept a couple of saddle horses and occasionally ran a calf or two. On the back side of the ranch, I discovered a tiny outcropping of flint, no bigger than a freight car, and at the base of it, covered with limestone dust, a midden of arrowhead flakes, probably Comanche, since it seemed they had owned everything from there to southern Colorado for two hundred years. And I studied the Indians, too, nothing but ghosts now.
On other afternoons I’d gather up one of Betty’s saddle horses, then drift easily for a couple of hours over to Tom Ben’s place, where we’d sit on the veranda sipping iced tea and watching the sun soften the cedar breaks as it settled over the Hill Country while he shucked dried corn and doled it out cob by cob to the small herd of Spanish goats he kept for the occasional barbecue. During the Korean War Tom Ben had been a twenty-eight-year-old captain in the Marine reserves who had been called to active duty when I was a sixteen-year-old Army private on falsified enlistment papers, and on those occasional afternoons we sometimes touched on those times, talking without talking too much. But he never talked about WW II, except to wonder about what might have happened if we had to invade Japan. And about Korea, Tom Ben mostly complained about the cold and bitched about his feet. Never married, he was as fond of his niece as if she were his child, and he extended that fondness to me. His place was a home place in a way Betty’s never quite managed, but I didn’t go over there often enough.
At Betty’s place I read all the books I’d always meant to read, watched endless hours of movies on the battery-run portable television with a built-in VCR, which Betty allowed me to keep in the old smokehouse. She wouldn’t watch them with me but sometimes she’d come in to lean on my back, briefly, her nose snuffling out the old smoke and salt smells. Then she’d leave me to the present and drift back to the nineteenth-century British novels she was addicted to.
Also, for the first time in my life, I had long
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