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He shifts against his father's tombstone and wishes he'd thought to bring his grandfather's binoculars. They hang from a peg in the mudroom and weigh nearly as much as a hand sledge, but they bring the mountains up close in hazy circles.
McEban likes to scan the high meadows for the copper-colored smudges he knows to be his Hereford cows and calves grazing down their summer pasture. They are the evidence of his family's history. Red meat. Animals. New calves sprung from the semen of bulls that are themselves the big, rust-and-white-splotched children of bulls McEban's father had raised.
This is my place in the world, he thinks. Horse Creek. The hay meadows that it irrigates. Two sections of deeded wildgrass and sage and rock. Forest Service grazing leases. Timber and stone drawn up and fashioned into homestead, barn, springhouse: the dozen buildings it's taken for a family to winter and summer against the Wyoming sun, the seasonal choirs of wind.
He drops his head back and blinks into the blue wash of sky. He tries to imagine himself a different man. It is a game he played against the long days of his boyhood. As a boy he could imagine himself anywhere. McEban of Paris, London, Lima. McEban of the Outback, the pampas. But now the game serves to remind him that Wyoming is the only place he truly knows, that Wyoming is the place he didn't leave.
He rights his head and stares into the morning lightscape. He searches for the souls of his father, and grandfather, and brother, ready for work. He feels their hands held out to him. It is their grip that holds him steady on this land. That's what he thinks. He thinks there is a duty to the land, and he thinks he has not had a son, and that the land will lie naked at his passing. He wonders if a wife could have made a difference. He wonders about the difference Gretchen would have made.
He turns and presses the heels of his hands onto the top of his father's stone. He reads the name from the marker. Reads aloud, "John McEban." He looks at his grandfather's and grandmother's markers and reads aloud their names as well. "Angus and Cleva."
He looks to the east. There are pads of cloud, their edges windtorn to scallop, a handful of them thrown up before the sun. They blossom orange, purple, trail skirts of scarlet--a raft of lilies caught at the shore of sky.
The Romans feared us," his grandmother said. "Feared us like they feared their deaths."
He leaned into the sink skinning carrots and beets, trimming broccoli heads, snapping the ends from beans, shelling peas. His grandmother stood at the stove, over the tubs of boiling water, and lifted the jars from the tubs with tongs and stood them to cool. The countertops were lined with pint jars, quart jars; the condensation dripped from the walls.
The window sashes were propped open, but there was no breeze in the late-August heat.
"We are Picts," she announced. The pride shone on her face.
She turned to him, plump and sweat-soaked in her housecoat and apron.
"In the night our men stripped naked and rolled in the ashes of their fires," she said. She turned and bent at her waist. She held the steaming tongs in her hand. "They took up bits of charcoal," she said, "and drew pictures of the killing they'd do. They drew the pictures on their naked bodies."
His grandmother gripped the tongs more tightly and traced the outlines of the dead and dying Romans against her belly and her breasts.
"And they made the pictures of our gods," she added, and made those tracings too.
She filled the jars with blanched beans and beets and broccoli and peas, with scalded tomatoes, and screwed the lids down to seat. The lids popped, snug against their rubber gaskets, and his head swam in the heat.
"Are you faint, boyo?" his grandmother asked.
He nodded and she took him by a shoulder and steered him into a chair.
Copyright © 2002 by Mark Spragg. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without written permission from the publisher, Putnam.
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