Open Fields

I'd been driving since noon and the SUV was wearing a coat of dust you could write your name in, so by the time the ranch gate came up out of the brown hills I was mostly just grateful to see anything that looked like a destination. The gate itself was nothing, a pipe frame with a faded sign that said the ranch name we'd put on the deed five years ago and never once visited, and beyond it a gravel road ran straight for what the listing had promised was two miles of open pasture. I called Edgar from the driveway end, idling, because the signal was fine here and might not be later, and he told me again to enjoy myself, that he'd hold down the house, that the gallery could survive a week without me hovering over the framers. He is thirty-eight, three years older than me, and he has never once made me feel guilty for wanting a break, which is maybe why I felt a little guilty about it anyway.

The pastures on that road were empty in a way that took some getting used to. I run a gallery, which means my days are full of other people's opinions delivered at close range, and out here there was nothing to react to at all, just grass going gold at the edges and a line of hills and one dark shape in the far distance that might have been a horse or might have been a fence post, I honestly could not tell. My phone dropped to one bar somewhere along the second mile and I stopped checking it. By the time the main house came into view, a long low roof and a cluster of outbuildings and a windmill turning slow against the dusk, the light had gone the color of the inside of a peach, and I realized I had not thought about the gallery in over an hour.

There was a man waiting by the porch, leaning on the rail like he had been standing there a while and was in no hurry about anything. He was tall and sun-browned and wearing a flannel shirt with the sleeves pushed up, and when I got out of the car he came down the steps instead of waiting for me to come to him, which I noticed, because a lot of people would have waited.

"You'd be Anita," he said, and stuck out his hand. "Mortimer. Ed hired me on back in spring, I run the place while he's away."

"Anita, yes, nice to meet you!" His hand was huge and warm and rough in the way that hands get from actual work, not the way my framers' hands get from sandpaper. "I have to admit I half expected the place to have fallen over. Edgar talks about you like you hold up the barn with one hand."

"He exaggerates." He grinned, and he had a crooked tooth in front that made the grin better somehow. "Barn holds itself up. I mostly chase cows around and fix the fence when they win." He nodded at the SUV. "You want to get your bags, or you want the tour first? Light's going."

I said bags first, because I had been on the road for six hours and my bag held the good coffee I'd brought, and he carried the heavy one without making a thing of it, just took it off the seat and walked, talking the whole time. He talked the way the land looked, easy and open, pointing things out as we went. The guest cottage was a small white clapboard place a hundred yards from the main house, and he said I'd have it to myself, that it had a real stove and the water ran hot if you gave it a minute, and that somebody had left firewood on the porch, which turned out to be him, stacked that afternoon when he heard I was coming. I said thank you and he shrugged like it was nothing, and I believed him.

The main house was bigger than I remembered from the paperwork, four bedrooms and a kitchen that Edgar had insisted on when he bought it, big enough to cook for a crew. Mortimer walked me through it without ceremony, flipping lights as we went, and the whole time I kept noticing things that had nothing to do with rooms. He moved differently than anyone I knew in the city. When a screen door stuck he hit the frame with the flat of his hand in exactly the right spot and it swung free, and he did it without breaking his sentence about the well pump. When the hall light buzzed he glanced up and said he'd swap the bulb, and I understood he had already added it to some internal list and would actually do it, which was a kind of competence I hadn't seen in a while. In my world things get reported and scheduled and nobody ever just fixes them.

"Fair warning," he said, standing in the kitchen doorway with his thumbs hooked in his belt, "the cookout's Thursday, few neighbors over, mostly cattle folk. You'll be bored stiff or fed too well, no middle ground."

"I'm a gallery owner from the city, Mortimer, I'm used to being bored stiff." He laughed at that, a real laugh, and I felt oddly pleased with myself for getting it out of him.

We walked the property while the last light went, and he gave me the tour in his own order, which was not the order a tour would have taken. The barn first, because his dog was in it, a gray-muzzled cattle dog named Pepper who inspected me thoroughly and then decided I was acceptable and leaned on my shin with her whole weight. Then the corrals, then the long field where the hay had been cut a week ago and lay in windrows, and he explained the whole operation of it, cutting and raking and baling, how you watched the sky the whole time because one rain could ruin a cutting, and I found myself listening harder than I'd listened to anything in months. It was physical, all of it, the whole conversation was about weather and muscles and machinery and the bodies of animals, and there was not one word of it that could come up at an opening night, and that was exactly what I had driven six hours for without knowing to say so.

"Edgar never did any of this, did he," I said, as we stood at the fence looking at the dark field.

"Not on the ground, no. He did it by phone, when he first bought it. Asked me about every gate and every water line. Good eye, actually, for an office guy." He said it without any judgment in it, just fact. "Place got to be more than a hobby, so he hired it out. That's most folks, I suppose. You can't love a thing and also be away from it."

I didn't have an answer for that, so I said nothing, and he didn't fill the silence, which was its own kind of manners. Pepper lay down at our feet and sighed. Somewhere off in the dark a cow lowed once and went quiet. The stars were coming out in a way that made the sky look like someone had spilled salt across it, hundreds of them, more than I had seen since I was a girl, and Mortimer pointed out a couple and named them wrong on purpose, I think, to see if I'd correct him, and when I did he grinned again like I'd passed something.

By the time we got back to the cottage it was fully dark and the temperature had dropped the way it does out there, all at once, abruptly. He set my bag inside the door and lit the porch lamp for me and stood on the step with his hands in his pockets, and for a second neither of us seemed to know how a night like this one ends.

"Well," he said finally. "Breakfast is whenever you wake up, main house kitchen. I eat early but there'll be some left."

"Seven in the morning early?"

"More like five-thirty."

"Then there had better be some left," I said, and he laughed again, and told me goodnight, and walked off toward the main house with Pepper trotting at his knee like a small gray shadow. I stood on the porch a minute longer in the cold with my coffee bag under my arm, looking at all those stars, and then I went in and found the matches and lit the stove, because he had said the water ran hot if you gave it a minute, and it turned out he was right about that too.

The cottage was small and clean and it smelled faintly of woodsmoke, and I stood in the middle of it with my bag and my coffee and that warm lamp light on the clapboard walls, and I thought about how Edgar would have already made a list of repairs if he'd seen the place, a spreadsheet even, and how Mortimer had just swapped a bulb. I took a shower that was mostly hot with interruptions of cold, and I lay in the narrow bed under a quilt that somebody had made by hand, and I slept better than I had in a year, which seemed like an insult to my own bed at home and I tried not to read too much into it.

I did not make seven in the morning. I made eight-forty, and when I got to the main house kitchen Mortimer was long gone out to the fields somewhere, but there was a plate covered with a cloth on the counter and a note in pencil that said eggs are in the pan, coffee's in the tin by the stove, help yourself, and Pepper was asleep in a patch of sun by the door like she had been assigned to me. The eggs were good. The coffee, once I found his tin and discovered it was the supermarket pre-ground kind, was not, and I made a mental note to bring my good bag over from the cottage and offer it, which felt like an enormous social gesture out here and I laughed at myself for it.

I spent the day doing nothing in a way I hadn't managed in years. I walked the two miles of gravel to the gate and back just to see the faded sign up close, I sat on the fence rail by the corrals and watched Mortimer work a young horse in the far pen without him noticing me for the better part of an hour, and there was something in the way he moved around that animal, patient and unhurried and completely certain, that I found myself watching the way you watch anything beautiful, which is to say too long and then guiltily. At one point he saw me and raised a hand, and I raised one back, and that was the entire exchange, and it felt like more conversation than I'd had with Edgar over dinner in a month, which was a rotten thing to think and I thought it anyway.

* * *

By evening the cold came down again and he knocked on the cottage door at dusk and said he'd thrown steaks on in the barn, that the big stove in there kept the whole place warm and he ate out there most nights since it was closer to the corrals, and did I want to join him or would I rather eat alone, and he asked it so plainly that there was no way to say yes that felt like anything but yes.

The barn was warm and smelled of hay and leather and woodsmoke, and there was a table that was really two sawhorses and a door slab, and two chairs of different heights, and Pepper under the stove, and it was somehow the nicest room I had been in for months. We ate off tin plates and he told me about the neighbors I'd meet Thursday, the Hollis brothers who couldn't agree on anything except that everybody else was doing it wrong, and the widow Peters who brought a casserole and stayed four hours, and I laughed more than I had laughed at any gallery dinner in years.

"So I'll ask," he said, halfway through his steak, "because it's been eating at me a little. You and Edgar own this whole spread, deed signed five years back, and neither one of you ever set foot on it until today. That's a strange kind of owning."

I looked at my plate. I had driven six hours to get away from the question he was asking, and here it was in a barn, on a tin plate, asked kindly.

"I took this trip to get away from my life," I said, and then, because he waited and didn't fill the silence, "from my marriage, I guess, if I'm being plain about it. Not from Edgar. He's a good man. From the routine of him. Every week is the same week, Mortimer. We own a gallery, we own a farm, we own this ranch, and none of it is anywhere. I drive the same route, I hang the same shows, he reads the same reports, and we love each other, I think, the way you love a chair you've sat in for eleven years."

"Five," he said. "You said five, the marriage."

"Five married, eleven together. See, I have to be precise about my own life to feel anything about it." I heard myself and didn't like it much. "I'm sorry. You didn't sign up for this over a steak."

"Seems like you did," he said, not unkindly, and passed me the salt, and when he set it down his hand stayed next to mine on the door slab for a second longer than the salt required, and something went through me like current, up the arm and into the chest, a jolt so plain and so stupid and so physical that I actually pulled my hand back, and he saw me do it and said nothing and looked at the stove, and we finished eating in a silence that was not comfortable and not bad either, just full.

* * *