absent little eavesdropping smile as Dusty and I got out of our boots in the entryway. I washed my hands at the sink beside her, then ripped open the two packages of hamburger she’d set out. Dusty had poured a cup of coffee and carried it around the open counter into the den, where I heard him say, ‘You must be the young lady from Boston.’
‘Yes, sir,’ Kat said, rising to walk over and shake his hand. ‘I’m Kat Dreyfus.’
‘Call me Dusty,’ he said. ‘You eat hamburgers?’
‘Quick as a mousetrap.’
‘Miss Dreyfus is on a journey of conscience,’ Gran Esther said, sipping her tea. ‘She’s helping the black people and the other poor folks.’
Something caused me to shiver slightly as I worked spices and chopped onion into the meat. When that was done I padded out to the patio in my socks to get the fire started. The air was cool, the sun low and red beyond the oaks. An owl hooted sadly somewhere behind the house. Dumping charcoal into the grate, I saturated it with starter fluid and rummaged around for matches. When I had the fire going, I walked back inside where Rachel had the hamburger fixings laid out on plates along the counter.
She said, ‘How’s it feel to be so far from home, Kat?’
‘It’s beautiful here,’ Kat had said. ‘Especially at night. I’ve never seen so many stars. Compared to the city, it seems so peaceful and safe – ’
As I tried to describe this part of the conversation to Max now, the words died in my throat. After a silence he said, ‘Y’know, Jim, you’re dealing with some pretty knotty abandonment and mortality issues here – could that be what all this is about?’
‘Sounds like something LA would ask.’
‘Mmm,’ said Max. ‘We’re lucky to have her.’
He was right. She’d gotten me in to see him after diagnosing my depression a couple of years ago, and the two of them had been a hell of a tag team, having me surrounded before I could think of an evasion strategy. But I’d liked and trusted Max immediately because he was a smart guy, obviously not a bit afraid of whatever was wrong with me, and entirely unimpressed by my suffering. The first thing he’d said to me after introducing himself was, ‘So, Jim, how’s it feel to piss on your own grave?’
Now: ‘Sounds like Kat and your folks really hit it off from the start – ’
I said, ‘That was then – ’
‘Humour me,’ he said. ‘Where did things go from there?’
Kat and I had been seeing each other every day since the District game, and I’d proudly introduced her to Johnny, the miserably envious Daz, and pretty much everybody else I knew. We rode the far places of the farm in Indian summer, past grazing Brangus and Charolais and sunning brood mares watching us with patient eyes, under windmills that creaked like cellar doors in their tireless turning, through woods as high and silent as cathedrals, across pasturelands where the wind ran through the grass in waves that chased and overran and re-crossed each other until they lost themselves in the hills.
On a golden Saturday afternoon we let the horses graze as we lay back under the old willows by the Far Pond listening to the goggle-eyes take insects from the smooth surface with little smacking sounds. Pale peach and ivory coloured clouds piled on themselves to the highest reaches of the sky, and the gently sloping bluegreen fields stretched away endlessly into the long afternoon. The heartbroken call of a dove drifted across the water from the cottonwoods along the opposite shore, and swallows dipped, climbed and turned in the cooling air.
Without opening her eyes Kat said, ‘It’s really sweet being out here. How far are we from the house?’
‘About three and a half miles.’
‘Wow. How much of it is the farm?’
‘Everything you can see from here. A little over nine thousand acres.’
‘Must be a lot of work.’
‘Sometimes.’
Pointing to the cupped brown nests in the dry cattail stalks fringing the shallow end of the pond, she said, ‘Did blackbirds build those?’
‘Yeah, redwings,’ I said. ‘Soldier-birds, some people call them, because of those little stripes on their shoulders.’
‘We have them back home,’ Kat said. ‘At least I think they’re the same. But I’ve never seen them up close like this – they’re beautiful.’
‘They say some of the Indians thought they called people away from life, like “Time’s up”, off to the Happy Hunting Ground or something.’
‘Then we better not listen.’
Kat played classical guitar, and sometimes brought her Ibañez along on our rides. She’d make up songs about things that caught her attention along the way, like the one she called ‘What Colour Is Time?’, about the green hills around us and how long they’d been there, waiting and watching for other colours to come.
Another time she told me about having a nanny named Estrella from Guadalajara when she was a little girl, and asked me in perfect Spanish how I learned the language.
‘Mainly just hanging around with the hands – a lot of them are from Mexico,’ I said. ‘Porque lo preguntas? ’
‘I’ve heard you and your family talking to them,’ she said. ‘Es una lengua hermosa. Es un mundo hermoso aqui.’
And she was right. I looked away across the fields and valleys, thinking about how beautiful it all was and wondering why I’d never seen it like this before.
She made a couple of tuning adjustments on the guitar, strummed and chorded randomly for a while, then found her key. ‘There’s about a thousand versions of this one,’ she said. ‘See if you’ve heard it like this – Estrella used to sing it to me sometimes, like a lullaby.’
Ay, ay, ay, ay Canta y no lloresPorque cantando se alegran,Cielito Lindo, los corazones.
Este Cielito Lindo Lindo Cielito que canto aquiViene de la huasteca cielito lindoSolo por ti
Que tu estas dentroTierra de las aztecasCielito Lindo, que Dios nos hizoSon esas tres huastecasCielito Lindo, un paraiso.
She laid the guitar beside her on the grass and said, ‘Do you think that’s really true?’
‘That God made us? I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Maybe just the good stuff.’
‘Do you hate black people? Or poor people?’
‘No, why would I?’
‘I thought I was supposed to be mad at the rich white people down here. I thought there was some kind of conspiracy or something, and everybody was in on it. It was like, here are the good guys and there are the bad guys over there, and you can tell the bad guys because they’re white and they have growly teeth.’
‘You’ve met a lot of people around here,’ I said. ‘What do you think now?’
She
