down to him, and they looked at the red mud together. “It’s not cloven, Tobe. No matter what Josie’s been putting in your head.”
“She ain’t putting nothing.”
“Well she certainly isn’t helping your elocution.”
All the way back along the creekbed, the empty bucket clanked against his thigh. His free hand was stuffed in his pocket, out of her reach.
BACK AT THE TOP OF the gulch, Toby stopped. “Where’s the dogs, Mama?”
She was hot and out of breath, and she didn’t know. But his question had finally flushed out the strange sense of absence that had goaded her all morning. It wasn’t just that the boys had already fared off, or that Emmett’s ongoing delay had forced her to brace for yet another wretched, waterless day. No, there had been something else, too, something under or around it all, and now it struck her: the dogs. The dogs were gone—four of them, possibly five if that old amorous one had survived his latest dalliance with whatever coyote bitch had most recently turned his head. Their din—feral and ungovernable as they were, sounding off from every corner of the farm at every hour of the day, and driving Emmett to empty threats of execution—was her constant companion, and in its absence stretched a stillness so vast the small music of the grasses could not rise to fill it.
“The boys must have taken them,” Nora said.
“Where?”
She thought about it. “Hunting?”
For the first time all day, Toby laughed. “Mama,” he said. “How silly.”
He went on ahead of her toward the house. It sat against the bluff with the melted sun in its windows and a black cloud—the telltale sign of Josie’s fried eggs on the make—sieving through every crack around the door. Of late, Nora had found herself envisioning what might become of the place when the Larks, too, finally played out. When Rob, his patience overdrawn, finally joined some northbound cattle drive; and Dolan lucked into an apprenticeship—perhaps, with God’s mercy, under the benevolent hand of some patient judge; and Emmett inevitably got his way, abandoned the newspaper, and bundled Nora and Toby and his ancient mother into the wagon and set course for his next venture in some nameless camp, if there still existed such a thing in this world. The house would fall silent. Mice, having prospected every last crumb, would nest in the eaves. Rattlesnakes would follow. The scrub oaks, with their thirsty roots, would wander down the hill, creeping, by and by, over the jackfence and over Evelyn’s little headstone and down toward the outbuildings. The yard would go to seed, all those hard-fought grasses returning in their prickly mats to outman the descendants of Nora’s cabbages. Perhaps a late summer storm might blow the barn down. Perhaps a prickly pear, small and round, would begin its slow ascent through the floor in one of the downstairs rooms. Soon some quiet autumn evening would find the farm just another massif of slanted roofs, and the lightless windows would draw some desperate neighbor to probe their well, as she and Emmett had done when the Floreses—Rodrigo and Selma, and Toby’s little friend Valeria—had pulled up stakes last year without warning. Gone without goodbye, in the custom of surrender.
Watching Emmett stand in the Floreses’ dusty foreyard and guess how long their well had been dry had been bad enough—but then came the greater mistake of going into the house, where a host of small heartbreaks lay waiting. The beds all made up. Boxes of old cards and letters still in the drawers. Pictures left by the front door because they had obviously been considered, deemed too frivolous or heavy, and jettisoned on the porch. The silence that overwhelmed Nora and Emmett in that house had lasted through their evening chores and followed them to bed, where they had nevertheless set about each other with uncharacteristic vigor. Some hours later, sleepless despite her exhaustion, Nora had watched Emmett raise himself from their twisted blanket and balance on the windowsill to reach the ledge high above their headboard.
“What’s got into you?”
“You’ll see,” Emmett said. He was still unclothed and a little out of breath. He worked a nail loose and began scratching something into the wood.
“What are you writing?”
He surprised her with a smile that shed ten years from his eyes. “Emmett, Nora, and their boys lived and were happy here.”
“What about Evelyn?” she’d wanted to ask—for sure enough, Evelyn was already in her ear, muttering: Yes! What about me? She sounded