The Life to Come
Part I
1
He was up at first light. Earliest, frailest light of another day. Sitting on the edge of the bed hands to knees in bleak stillness, staring out the window as his life came back to him piece by piece. Finally, as always, there was only one piece, the missing piece, his little girl.
He crossed the narrow hall and looked into the other bedroom to see if his son had come home, but the bed sat neat and empty as before. The wood floor barren as before. In the bathroom the left-behind toothbrush stood bristles up in its enameled tin cup. He passed it under the faucet to wash off the dust, returned it to the cup, then made a bowl of his hands and lowered his face to the icy water.
On the porch he lit a cigarette and stood smoking. It was just September, the chill of autumn in the gray morning, but the sun would come up over the pines and burn that off. The old black Labrador crept out from her place under the porch, stretched, and sat at the foot of the stairs and waited. The ranch house had once been the only house on the property and was now a kind of guest house, or had become that when Grant moved in. You need a break from these mountains, the sheriff had said, and that old man of mine could use some help. The old man, Emmet, meeting them triple-legged in the drive: cowboy boot, cane, and cast. Toes like a little yellow family all bedded together in the plaster. Come down off a shedroof the fast way but I ain’t looking for no goddam babysitter, he’d said, his first words.
A full year ago, that meeting.
Grant backed the truck up to the machine shed and spent some time in there preparing the chainsaw, longer than he needed to, taking his time amid the shed’s oily plentitude of parts and tools and machinery. Breathing that air. Then he loaded the chainsaw and a bale of barbed wire and the wire-stretcher into the back of the truck and when he opened the truck door the Labrador came up and looked at him but he told her No, you stay here.
He drove the truck bouncing and squeaking to the far corner of the front pasture, near the county road where the big oak grew. A limb had come down in a storm a few days before, snapping the top line of wire, and it hung there still, its withered leaves chattering like the sound of winter. The rest of the tree was yet thick with summer’s leaves and the morning air was green with the smell of grass and alfalfa. The haze had burned off. The sky was intensely blue and empty. No cloud, no hawk, no helicopter. As he stood looking things over, the two mares came to snuffle at his hands, dewing up his palms with their velvet snouts. He pulled on his gloves and primed the saw and jerked the cord and the horses went cantering big-eyed across the pasture, ears pricked back at him.
He lopped off the smaller branches at a point just beyond the fence, then tumbled the remaining log onto the ground and sectioned it into cordwood lengths. He made a pyramid of the logs in the back of the truck and set to work mending the wire. Now and then a car or truck rolled by on the county road, and he would raise a hand to the ones he knew and only stare at the ones he didn’t, at the strange faces that turned to stare at him, this solitary working man in a pasture, this human face among the trees and the grasses and the mountains and the sky. There was such randomness in the world, the passing faces told him, such strange and meaningless intersections—this man could be him, or this man. He looked for some ordinary man in a certain kind of car, any kind of car or truck that said mountain, that said unmarked roads and mud, deeply rutted paths, and he would follow. It was madness, but it was all madness; if a man should randomly pick his daughter, then why shouldn’t that same man randomly cross his path? Wasn’t this the way of the world? Wasn’t this the way of the god of that world? He’d trail the man out of town, up into the mountains, his heart racing, his heart growing hot, until the truck he followed, the jeep, would turn at last into a driveway, an ordinary mountain house, smoke spilling from the chimney . . . a child’s dropped bicycle under the pines, a big dog bounding out and leaping at the man who looked back, who caught Grant’s eye and nodded and waved and turned to his house as the door opened, and there was a woman in jeans, in a loose white sweater, leaning for a kiss.
The time he followed one man to the end of a high road that turned out to be no road at all but the man’s driveway and no easy way to turn around, and the man was a ranger and knew him. Angela and Sean were back in Wisconsin by then and Grant was alone in the motel, alone in the resort town at nine thousand feet. A year by the calendar since she’d vanished, one hour by the heart. You need a break from these mountains, said the sheriff.
Now Grant shook his head like a man coming out of a dream and turned back to his hands, the clip they were fastening to a steel T-post, the pliers twisting and tightening.
Other times he would pause altogether to stare into the hills beyond the ranch, up into the climbing green mountains. The sunlit creases in the pines where some living thing might travel, bear or moose or hiker or daughter. One speck of difference in the far green sameness and he would stare so hard his vision would slur and his heart would surge and he would have to force himself to look away—Daddy, she’d said—and he would take his skull in his hands and clench his teeth until he felt the roots giving way and the world would pitch and he would groan like some aggrieved beast and believe he would retch up his guts, organs and entrails and heart and all, all of it wet and gray and steaming at his feet and go ahead, he would say into this blackness, go ahead god damn you.
A moment later, when a cigarette had been placed in his lips, a flame made to light its tip, the smoke drawn into his lungs and held there, and held there, and released at last into the sky, Grant would be calm again, and he would get back to work.