Crossers Page 39

  They waited an hour; then Elena warmed up leftovers, and they sat around the kitchen table, eating and telling stories about Sally. Monica spoke of the times her willfulness had worked to good effect. Years ago she led a campaign to force the power and phone companies to put their lines underground in the San Rafael. “That’s why you don’t see telephone poles and electrical towers up here. She didn’t want them breaking up the view. And then she tried to talk our neighbors into taking down their fences, but she didn’t win that one. She never was comfortable in the modern world. She wanted this valley to look like the place where she grew up.”

  “The Plains of Saint Augustine,” said Castle.

  “Yes, there. God, she could be pigheaded, but if it wasn’t for her, this ranch wouldn’t still be in the family. She kept it going after Jeff died, just her and two old cowboys who’d worked for the San Ignacio for years.”

  “Did she move here right after she lost her husband?” asked Tessa, shaking her head when Elena offered a second helping.

  “Not long after. I don’t know much about Frank. They were kind of an odd couple from what I heard. Frank had a degree in mine engineering, and Sally didn’t get past eighth grade, if she got that far.”

  After a silence—there was something obituary in these reminiscences—Castle said, “She must have loved him a helluva lot, she never remarried.” Then he glanced at Tessa, worried that she might think he was making an oblique reference to himself, which he wasn’t.

  Monica looked at him, pale eyes widening. “You didn’t know?”

  “What? She did?”

  “When she was sixty. She’d robbed the cradle—he was fifty-five. He ran the feed store in Sonoita. Two months after the wedding she booted him out of the house and filed for divorce. Blaine and I couldn’t figure it out. They seemed to get along. ‘He couldn’t do it no more, and he kept that from me,’ Sally told us. We were floored. I asked her, ‘You mean that makes a difference at your age?’ and she said, ‘Damn right it does. Don’t expect it frequently, but I like to know it’s possible, and he should of let me know anyway.’”

  They all laughed. The phone rang then, and for the next few minutes Monica paced the kitchen, wrapping and unwrapping the cord around her fingers, saying little beyond an occasional “All right … Yes … I see …”

  She hung up and slumped against the kitchen counter. “She’s in a coma. They took CAT scans of her head. She’s got a skull fracture and a brain hemorrhage, a subdural brain hemorrhage is what they told Blaine. They’re going to evacuate her to Tucson tonight for an operation to relieve the pressure. Her chances aren’t good.”

  She explained all this to Gerardo and Elena, who crossed herself. Monica was in tears. “I feel so responsible. I should have taken her car keys from her.”

  Castle told her not to blame herself; if he knew his obstinate aunt, she would have hot-wired her truck.

  The operation was performed the next morning at the University of Arizona hospital. Sally did not regain consciousness and died two days later, at ten-thirty in the evening.

  She was buried in Black Oak Pioneer Cemetery on a hot, still, overcast day in the middle of July. The cemetery was in the Canelo Hills, a short distance down a gravel road leading off a two-lane blacktop. At the entrance, a wrought-iron gate hung between massive stone pillars; her casket was transferred from the hearse to a wagon rented from a dude ranch, for Sally had asked in her will to be carried to her grave in that manner. The team pulled the wagon slowly through the gate, mourners shuffling behind. Many of Castle’s maternal ancestors were tenanted in Black Oak, and as the funeral procession wended past their graves, he read names and dates and sometimes a one- or two-word biography etched into simple stone markers: a great-grandfather,

  THOMAS ERSKINE—ARIZONA RANGER—1859-1901

  a great-great-uncle whose wife must have died in childbirth, all three lying together,

  JOSHUA PITTMAN 1861–1928

  and his wife,

  GABRIELA FLORES PITTMAN 1873–1894,

  and

  BABY PITTMAN JUNE 2, 1894—JUNE 2, 1894;

  his grandparents,

  BENJAMIN ERSKINE—LAWMAN-RANCHER 1890–1956

  and his wife,

  IDA BARNES ERSKINE 1899–1951

  and beside them,

  JEFFREY ERSKINE—CATTLEMAN 1888–1967

  and beside him,

  LILLY ERSKINE 1891–1969

  Like the name and date he’d found scratched into the adobe brick, the terse, stark memorials gave him a sense of connection to this land, to the history his mother had hidden from him.

  Sally’s grave had been dug into a shady slope next to her husband’s—

  FRANK ERSKINE 1920–1952

  —both facing east across the oak-studded hills toward the Huachuca Mountains, the vista uncluttered by power lines and telephone poles, and not a fence in sight. Castle thought this fitting. Open range.

  She had been well known throughout Santa Cruz and Cochise counties, but with most of her friends gone before her or confined to beds and wheelchairs, the mourners were few, thirty or forty altogether, and nearly all of those were white-haired, craggy-faced cowboys and ranchmen and ranch women, people who belonged to a vanished time, the very last of their kind. Tessa and McIntyre and Rick Erskine, who’d broken off another tour to attend his grandmother’s funeral, were the only ones there under fifty.

  A country band played the old hymns and a minister spoke the old words as the casket was lowered into the raw hole in the ground. Blaine, wearing a suede sport jacket and a bolo tie over a starched white shirt, delivered a short eulogy, fighting to keep his composure.

  “Thanks for comin’. All of you who knew my ma know she liked to give orders, and I reckon she’s givin’ ’em now, wherever she is. She followed the wagons in New Mexico when she was young, and I hope this one has brought her to a place where she’s belly-deep in good green grass. She wouldn’t of wanted me to say more, so I won’t.”

  The band struck up “Shall We Gather by the River.” Their singers, a man and a woman, harmonized on the lyrics, the crowd following their lead—

  Shall we gather by the river,

  The beautiful, beautiful river,

  Gather with the saints by the river

  That flows by the throne of God.

  The voices and the high, breaking notes of a fiddle and mandolin rose into the quiet air, mingling with the thud of dirt falling on metal, as Blaine, Rick, and Castle took up shovels and covered Sally with the earth she loved.

  23

  THE INTERNAL REVENUE SERVICE, an agency not noted for sensitivity, left Blaine and Monica little time for grieving. They soon received an estate tax form by certified mail, and when they weren’t busy planning for the summer roundup and branding, they were meeting with their lawyer in Tucson. Castle saw little of them; then Monica stopped by one day to tell him that they had received a lovely condolence letter from his sister, whom he’d phoned with the news.

  The skin around Monica’s eyes looked taut; worry creased her forehead. Castle invited her in for coffee, pouring from the blackened enamel pot. Holding her mug in both hands, Monica sank into one of the new leather armchairs Tessa had picked out for him in Tucson. “Well, they’re all there now, Ben and Ida, Jeff and Lilly, Frank and Sally,” Monica said. “She drove me nuts sometimes, but damn if I don’t miss her.”

  Castle sat down and nodded. The absence that becomes a presence. Several times since the funeral, as he passed the main house, he looked at the corral, half expecting to see Sally in her bathrobe and rubber boots, calling “Come and get it or forget it” to the rickety longhorn, the swaybacked geldings with matted tails. Blaine had shipped the animals off the ranch but had kept the corrientes. “Ought to get rid of ’em but I can’t,” he’d said, and Castle knew what he meant. All those months he’d held on to Mandy’s belongings, unable to move even a hairbrush from where she’d left it.

  “You and Miguel have done quite a job on this
place,” Monica said, seeming to notice the new furniture, the freshly painted walls, and the varnished floors for the first time. “I don’t think it’s ever looked this good.”

  “Kitchen’s next.”

  She sipped her coffee and stared thoughtfully at her feet. “Before you put any more into it, there’s something you should know. It looks like we’re facing a humongous tax bill. Our lawyer is going to try to work something out with the IRS, but”—she hesitated and raised her glance—“we’re probably going to have to break up the ranch, sell Sally’s half. We’re putting it on the market, just in case.”

  Castle said nothing. Did he hear a note of reproof in that pronouncement? If he did, his own conscience had put it there. His aunt should have made provisions long ago, and he doubted a trust agreement could have been drawn up and been in force before she died, even if he’d said yes to her proposition right away. Still, he felt his delay was partly responsible for putting Blaine and Monica into this fix.

  “This place would go with the sale,” she went on. “So we wouldn’t want you putting more of your time and money into it.” He must have looked like an apartment dweller whose landlord has just told him his lease was not to be renewed, because she quickly added, “Don’t worry. The chances that it would sell right away are pretty slim.”

  He pointed at her mug. “More coffee?”

  She shook her head. He went to the kitchen and refilled his, thinking of the brick with the inscription—J. B. Erskine, 1912—that he and Miguel had recently plastered over. Sadness overtook him, a melancholy awareness of the impermanence of all things. “All the same, I’d better start looking for a place of my own. I should have done that months ago.” He looked at Monica over the low partition dividing the kitchen from the living room. “It’s strange. I’ve gotten attached—to you and Blaine, to this ranch, this valley, Tessa. I never thought I’d be attached to anyone or anything again in my life.”

  “For what it’s worth, we’ve gotten attached to you. Blaine would never say so, but he feels it. It’s like our families have been reunited after all these years.” She rose, came over to him, and gave him a quick hug. “I’ve got to go. Our real estate agent is organizing a caravan. They’ll be here tomorrow. Thought I’d warn you.”

  “I’ll make sure there’s no dirty dishes in the sink,” he said.

  A van arrived in the late morning, carrying eight land brokers led by a woman with short iron-gray hair. The cabin was their last stop after they’d driven around the property, taking pictures with their digital cameras. Castle stood outside as they trooped through the door, vinyl-covered notebooks in hand. Their inspection took only a few minutes. The gray-haired woman thanked him for his trouble and marched her colleagues back to the van. Watching it leave, he felt a little violated by these strangers who’d invaded his solitude. What was the San Ignacio to them? Another piece of dirt to be bought and sold. They could not hear its heartbeat.

  A few days after it was put on the market, Monica invited him to dinner and a conference with their lawyer. Trusting in his financial experience, she said Blaine wanted his input. He parked in the yard, and, before going in, stood with his back against the car door, listening to the night music—a chorale of coyotes, the creak of the windmill, the rustle of cottonwoods. A drizzle had fallen in the afternoon, but the sky was clear now except for a few clouds drifting across the glittering stars. Craning his neck, he found Vega burning at the zenith, the Northern Cross, and the two other stars that formed the Summer Triangle, Deneb and Altair. In cosmological terms, these were next-door neighbors; and yet the distances between them and Earth were unimaginable. Such reflections of course humbled him—he was a transitory mote on the skin of a small blue planet in a minor solar system on an outer arm of a spiral galaxy that was itself a speck on the fabric of the universe—but he felt exalted at the same time. Thinking about his relationship to the heavens brought him to an awareness of his relationship to the Earth, specifically to the tiny piece of it he inhabited. Yesterday’s talk with Monica had awakened him to a fact: he did not want to leave the San Ignacio, nor to see it split in two. His coming here had been more than a family reunion; it had restored his severed bonds to the land of his ancestors. Their hearts, stilled in their bodies, were in it, beating on in the grasses greened by the summer rains, in the everlasting miracle of the resurrected flowers, and so was his.

  He went inside.

  Castle had imagined the lawyer would be a gray eminence with a furrowed western face. The dark-haired man he was introduced to, Will Lovelace, looked as if he had just graduated high school. He was in fact in his early thirties. Castle had reached that stage in life when everyone between eighteen and thirty-five appears to be the same age.

  They ate in the little-used dining room, which with its somber, heavy furniture and candles burning in wrought-iron holders looked like the dining hall of a Spanish monastery on the Day of the Dead. Felt like it, too. Monica was quiet, Blaine mourning his mother and also feeling an anticipatory sorrow for the San Ignacio’s probable fate. Castle and Lovelace did most of the talking. The lawyer had recently discovered fly-fishing, and upon learning that Castle was accomplished in the art, probed him for tips. Built like an overtrained tennis pro, he ate as if he’d just come off a three-day fast, taking a second helping of steak and potatoes. After the apple pie and ice cream, which Lovelace polished off as thoroughly as he had the main course, scooping up pie crumbs with his fingers, Blaine pushed back in his chair and said, “All right, let’s get this over with.”

  Monica snuffed the candle and turned on the lights, and the lawyer went to the guest room (he was staying the night) for his briefcase.

  “I think I can make a pretty good case to the IRS,” he declared, spreading papers on the table. “The ranch’s net profits have averaged eighty thousand a year, round figures, for the last five years. A decent family income but not so impressive for a small business.”

  “Meaning what?” asked Monica, forefingers making a triangle under her chin.

  “Meaning that the appraised value of Mrs. Erskine’s estate is somewhat artificial. Her estate consists almost exclusively of land, and the land is good only for raising cattle. To get the real value, you have to factor in the income the land generated, which isn’t all that much. So I’m confident I can convince the IRS that the estate is worth less than five million.”

  Blaine pushed his half-eaten pie around the plate. “How much less?”

  “Realistically, they’d probably accept three to three and half million. Let’s say three and half. Less the exemption, it’s two and half taxable. That would knock your tax burden down to one and a quarter million.”

  “What I’d call a distinction without a difference,” said Monica. “We haven’t got one and a quarter any more than we’ve got two point five.”

  “We’d better keep it on the market,” Blaine said, then studied the figures, twirling an unlit cigarette between his lips—Monica wouldn’t allow smoking in the house. “But I can’t tell you how much I hate the idea of sellin’ half this place. To me, it’s like cuttin’ one part of your leg off to save the rest of it.”

  “Assuming we can sell it,” Monica said with an undertone of desperation. “People aren’t going to be lining up to buy part of a cattle ranch smack dab on the Mexican border.”

  “You forgot to say twenty dirt-road miles from the nearest town,” Blaine added. He lit the cigarette, drawing a rebuking look from Monica, then pushed the paper with the table of figures toward Castle. “What do you think, Gil?”

  Castle looked at Lovelace’s proposal, noticing that he recommended paying off the taxes in five years rather than the fourteen allowed by the IRS—this to reduce the total interest payments. “That three and a half mil—how confident are you that you’ll get the IRS to agree?” he asked in a voice neither Blaine nor Monica had heard before. It sounded a little unfamiliar to Castle himself, the voice his clients and partners had heard: firm, crisp, demanding.

&nbs
p; The lawyer canted his head and affirmed that he was quite confident; he’d handled cases like this before.

  Castle borrowed Lovelace’s pen and scratch pad and, resting his head in one hand, made a few simple calculations. The result made no financial sense whatsoever, but the dollars and cents were only part of it. He knew, from all the families whose fortunes he’d managed, that when money and property intruded, the orbits of family relationships got knocked all to hell. Rivalries and conflicts arose, misunderstandings, friction. As he sat there multiplying and dividing and thinking, he was being his usual deliberate, temperate self, the same self that had demurred on his aunt’s proposal, that had been reluctant to grant Tessa’s simple wish to meet her daughter, a self he was getting tired of. After all, at the end of the five years, he would still have a lot of money in the bank, assuming a reasonable rate of growth in his investments. He could make it work. And after all this reflection and arithmetic, he came to a decision, or rather, his mind ratified a decision his heart had made earlier, when he was gazing at the stars.

  “I’ll pay the taxes,” he said, looking up from the scratch pad.

  The other three stared at him.

  “You do whatever you can to get them knocked down,” he said to Lovelace, “and I’ll pay them.”

  Stretching an arm across the table, Blaine grasped his shoulder. “Me and Monica never borrowed a dime from a friend or a relative, and we never took charity, and we’re too damn old to start now.”

  “It wouldn’t be a loan or a gift. It would be an investment in the ranch. A partnership. We’d run the place together, like Ben and Jeff did.”

  “Cuzzy, we appreciate the offer, we surely do, but if you was to write out what you know about the cattle business, you couldn’t fill up a postcard.”

  “But I do know something about the business part. As far as the cattle part goes, it isn’t nuclear physics. I could learn.”