The Last Cowboy Read online

  TO MOM AND DAD, AND TO ALISON,

  FOR LOVING A BOY AND A MAN WHO GIVES

  SUCH UNFORTUNATE GIFTS.

  What sense am I trusting? Sight?

  There is nothing to see. Feeling?

  There is nothing but cold. Direction?

  There is no such sense.

  There’d better be, and a good one.

  There are 359 wrong directions to be going

  and no angel out here.

  Can this be death?

  Senses without value and value without sense?

  Death can’t be so completely boring—

  like hell it can’t.

  HOWARD GOWAN

  “WINTER RIDE”

  JUNE 25th, 2000: NEAR BROKEN HEAD, SASKATCHEWAN

  SAM MCMAHON FROZE, the steaming kettle in his hand poised over his stainless steel designer teapot. He didn’t pour. He was listening for something. Probably only the wind. Yes, the moaning of the wind sweeping across the valley and thrumming his corrugated metal roof. But there was no wind. The air was still and dry, the sun bleaching the whole world with angry light. Even the sparrows were too hot to sing. In the silence of the room he could hear his ears humming, his heart beating, a fly buzzing between the Venetian blinds and one of the sheets of glass that ran the length of the house on the southern exposure. And then there it was, the faint whispering of a faraway voice.

  “Hello?” he said, standing up straighter, focussing on that one sound.

  He’d noticed it as he lifted the kettle from the stove, interrupting the shrill whistle. On the stereo the last strains of Mozart’s Don Giovanni were fading away. For a moment, in the revealed silence, he heard the voice murmuring fitfully, mournfully, and he couldn’t stop himself from answering: “Hello?” Now he concentrated, and the faint whispering was still there, but he knew by the way it droned on that it was not a reply. He strained to decipher its source and meaning, until it was interrupted by the beat of some insipid pop song.

  He was talking to a voice on the radio. Michael had left the radio on in his room.

  He was alone. He might be alone for the rest of his life. All of the rooms of his beautiful home were empty. Except this one, the kitchen, where he still stood holding the kettle in mid-air—had held it for so long that the water had stopped boiling and the tea would be spoiled if he poured. He set the kettle back on the burner and turned on the gas.

  Yesterday was Saturday, and he’d spent it at the bank, catching up on the paperwork that had piled up all week. He loved the bank when it was empty—only the tubular chrome chairs with the gaudy green-striped upholstery in the waiting area, the reams of paper neatly in their files, the stacks of money in the sealed vault, and him. He’d planned to spend Sunday with the boys, but when he’d arrived home last night Gwen had ambushed him, pronouncing him the worst father in the history of the family. It seemed like something of an overstatement, and so he had fought back and ended up sleeping in the guest room. It had got so that the boys called the guest room “Daddy’s room.” He’d rolled around for most of the night, imagining accusations and apologies, and in the end slept for only two hours, awaking to see the light funnelling through the narrow window knocked in the concrete, Gwen’s framed needlepoint surrounding him. The master bedroom had a whole wall of glass looking out over the valley.

  When he walked into the kitchen and sat down for breakfast, Gwen announced that she was taking the boys to see their grandparents. Her parents. There was no question of Sam coming. Her father had not spoken to him in the eight years since the bank had foreclosed on his farm implements dealership.

  “I was going to spend the day with the boys.”

  “Well, I’m taking them to see their grandparents.”

  She pushed a lock of blonde hair behind her ear, a motion he knew so well it was almost part of him. Sam poured some corn flakes into his bowl.

  “Why don’t you go and see your parents and leave them with me?”

  He meant it as a concession, an apology, but somehow his voice emerged sounding not the least bit remorseful. Her eyes might have swallowed him whole.

  “I’m taking the boys with me.”

  And with that, she rose from her chair and strode out of the room.

  Last night, moments before she’d locked him out of the master bedroom, she’d told him she was leaving, and he’d better call a lawyer and start thinking about how they would organize living apart; start thinking about all of those terrible intricacies. It was a threat she’d made a hundred times in the last five years, and for that reason Sam tried not to take it seriously, though it still unnerved him by pointing out the essential fragility of his seemingly unshakeable position in the world. Bank manager. Excellent health. Married fourteen years. Two children, nine and three, both healthy boys.

  As his family left, Sam ruffled Michael’s hair, received a sloppy kiss from Ben, and sent his regards to Gwen’s parents. She did not respond. He stood in the living room and waved through the wall of glass as her new Buick pulled away. He hated the ugly thing, which only made her love it all the more.

  Now he poured the boiling water over his tea bags, set down the kettle and walked out of the kitchen, across the living room and down the hallway towards Michael’s room. Clothes were strewn across the floor. He picked them up, threw them in the hamper and turned off the radio on the bedside table. Quiet. He sat down on the bed and ran his fingers through his thinning hair. Perhaps he should just shave it all off. That was the style now. The clients likely wouldn’t say much. Some of them kidded him about his fancy suits, but to most of them a suit was a suit. It was the guys back east who would never let him live down a haircut with too much attitude.

  A group of tough-looking young men sneered at him from a poster. Were these Michael’s heroes? Obviously. They were on his wall. He thought of the time Old Sam—his grandfather—had torn down a poster of the Rolling Stones from his older brother Vern’s bedroom wall. Vern was furious, and Old Sam’s only explanation was that he didn’t like the look in their eyes. Sam would not tear down Michael’s poster, even if he didn’t like the look in the men’s eyes. He was not given to the dramatic actions of his grandfather.

  What was that smell? Dirty laundry or some forgotten snack? His mother would never have allowed his room to get this messy. He felt tears in his eyes, took a deep breath, and rushed out of the room.

  In the living room, where he’d stood watching his family drive away that morning, the blinds were closed against the sun, the room in shadow, the floor cut by slivers of light. The kettle clicked as it cooled on the stove. His tea would be steeped. He was about to put on another CD, The Goldberg Variations, but he paused and walked to the glass wall, wound open one of the blinds and peered out across Gwen’s green yard and blooming delphiniums to the expanse of the yellow valley. Not a soul. He’d been careful to pick a spot where they couldn’t see anyone and no one could see them. His parents’ house was only a mile away, and his older brother Vern’s trailer only half a mile, but both were safely obscured by a small hill of aggregate deposited during the last ice age. A beautiful hill. One side of it had been cut away by the creek, but the rest had been dense enough to resist thousands of years of wind and water.

  He should close the blind and go back to his office with his tea and get some work done, but he knew it was pointless. His muscles ached. He couldn’t focus. He couldn’t escape the thought that his family might not be coming home. Though he tried to ignore it, the silence kept telling him. He loved Gwen and he loved his boys and he did not want to think of what would be left of his life if he lost them.

  He could no longer please her. He’d tried desperately, but nothing worked. Her resentment always showed, even when he caught a smile on her face like the smiles he t
hought he remembered. He really had no idea why she resented him so much. She told him it was because he left cereal in the bottom of his bowl every morning and it stuck there. He started rinsing out the bowl. She told him it was because he was always shedding his hair in the bath and the sink. He did his best to clean away the evidence. She told him it was because he always wore black suits. He bought a blue one. She told him it was because he did not do his share of the housework. He hired a cleaning service and offered her a day on the weekend without the boys and an evening or two a week. It didn’t make the slightest difference. She told him it was because he was too lazy and unmotivated to change his career, and so he arranged a transfer to Head Office in Toronto, and she told him she wouldn’t go to Toronto if she were in a pine box. She told him she couldn’t understand why he was satisfied with being a banker when everyone hated bankers. She wondered how he could help but hate himself if everyone hated him. And how could she possibly be expected to love him if he hated himself?

  Once she’d loved him. Maybe she still did. Sometimes, in remorse, after she’d said something particularly ugly—that she was living with a zombie or that his boys would grow up to hate him—and she had had time to begin to feel guilty, she would tell him she still loved him. But he wasn’t sure he believed her anymore. He suspected she was merely afraid to walk away from this home she hated so much. His home, she called it. Built by his architect. His parents a mile down the road. His whole life mapped out by the section lines.

  But once she’d loved him. Here, in this house, a mile down the road from his parents. Once she had loved her garden, and only made silly jokes about how much she hated the institutional modernist box his architect had forced her to raise her children in. “We’re living in a work of art,” he’d told her, “and that makes us art. Or pests. We’re a patina.” Once he had known how to make her laugh. Now she told him she didn’t like his sense of humour. No matter how hard he tried he could no longer reach her. Touch her. Breasts. The freckle beside her navel. Her thighs.

  Across the creek, high over the world, a hawk circled, waiting for a gopher or a mouse to show itself.

  He knew what Gwen wanted. It was simple enough: she wanted him to give up his career and sell this house and take her and the boys away to some new life. And he would do it if he thought there was a chance it would satisfy her. But the only alternative future he could see for them was in the city. He’d arranged that transfer to Toronto four years ago, before Ben was born, but she would not go. She hated cities. Even Broken Head was too big for her. So what did she expect him to do? Move back to the tiny town of Meridian, where she’d grown up, and live up the street from her father, who would never forgive him no matter what he did?

  The problem, he’d begun to admit to himself, was that Gwen would never forgive him either, because no matter how hard he tried to please her he would still be Sam McMahon. That he could not change.

  He wound the blind closed and put on Bach.

  But when he tried to work, the numbers made no sense. Glenn Gould was no help either. Sam turned it up enough that he could hear Gould humming along with his playing; the house only seemed emptier. He needed to talk to somebody. He had to tell someone that his life was falling apart.

  He walked to the phone and called his mother.

  “Hellllo?”

  For a moment Sam considered hanging up, but he was not that much of a coward.

  “Hi, Dad.”

  “Who’s this? The banker? No, we don’t need any money, thank you very much. We’ve got enough hands in our pockets at the moment as it is, and you bankers’ve got the stickiest hands of them all, don’t you?”

  “Oh, I’m not so sure. There’s the government.”

  “That’s true. But it’s you guys who run the government, isn’t it?”

  “That’s right, Dad. I was just talking to the prime minister before I called you.”

  “You were? Funny thing. What would you need to talk to me for then?”

  “I don’t know. Talking to him left me feeling starved for intelligent conversation.”

  “Uh-huh. I guess it would do that. Did you want to talk to your mother?”

  “Sure.”

  “You could come and visit her every now and then. You only live a mile away.”

  “Thanks for the invitation.”

  “Here she is.”

  He heard the phone fumbled from one parent’s hand to the other’s.

  “Saaam?”

  “Hi, Mom.”

  “How are you?”

  “I’m okay. Just hadn’t talked to you for a while.”

  “No. I’m sorry, dear. I never seem to get you at home.”

  “No. Pretty busy, as usual.”

  “How’s Gwen?”

  “She’s fine. She took the boys down to her parents for the day.”

  “Oh? So you’re home alone? Did you want to come over for supper?”

  “Oh, no. That’s okay. They’ll likely be home for supper.”

  “Well, you could all come over.”

  “Thanks, Mom. That’s all right. School tomorrow and everything.”

  “Yes. Michael’s got a field trip, doesn’t he? They’re going to the Creamery.”

  “Is that so? I guess it’s that time of year. They’ll get a free ice cream.”

  He listened to her breathing, trying to think of something to say. She began to talk about the weather, how the heat would be hard on the crops. He agreed. She mentioned a relative who was ill, and Sam voiced his concern. At last they ran out of things to say. He heard her swallow.

  “I walked over to Vern’s yesterday and the boys were there helping him work on the tractor. Having a great time. I was thinking what a treat it would be if you took them into the bank with you one day. Do you ever do that?”

  “I’m not so sure the bank’s ready for them.”

  “Oh, there must be a way you could figure out to make it work, even for an hour or so. I think it would mean so much to Michael especially. Maybe Ben is too young.”

  “That’s probably a good idea. I’ll think about that.”

  “It would be nice.”

  “Yes. Well, I’d better go. I should get some work done.”

  “All right. Nice to hear from you, dear. Are you sure you don’t want to come over for supper?”

  “Not tonight. Maybe next weekend. I’ll mention it to Gwen.”

  “That’d be nice. Okay, we’ll talk to you soon.”

  “Bye, Mom.”

  He placed the receiver in the cradle and put his hand on the wall to steady himself.

  The phone rang. He stared at it. He’d been so deeply lost that for an instant he wondered if he’d actually heard anything or only imagined it. It rang again. His mother. She was calling to ask if there was anything wrong.

  “Someone still loves me.”

  He’d spoken aloud before he knew it was out of his mouth. The phone kept ringing. Tears came to his eyes, and he struggled to get control so she would not be able to hear them in his voice. He would go over for supper. Or maybe it wasn’t her—maybe it was Gwen and her mood had broken and she was calling to tell him that she and the boys were on their way home and he should thaw something for the barbecue. He would tell her he was sorry. He would tell her he loved her.

  He picked up the receiver and said “Hello” in his practised banker’s professional tone.

  “Hi, is that Vern?”

  A woman’s voice.

  “No. You’ve got the wrong number.”

  “Really?” She giggled. “That is you, Vern.”

  It wasn’t a voice he recognized.

  “I can assure you I am not Vern. This is 3568. You want 3569.”

  “Oh?” He could hear her cheeks turning red. “I’m sorry.”

  “No trouble.”

  After listening to her lower the receiver into the cradle, he did the same.

  He walked to the window, cranked open the blind, and stood looking out across his valley, listeni
ng to the silence.

  NOVEMBER 5th, 1970: NEAR BROKEN HEAD

  I AM SAM MCMAHON.

  That’s clear enough, or nearly as clear as enough needs to be. I was once a cattleman. I’m not anymore. I was foolish enough to figure I was done with what I was and could become what I’m not: a man of leisure. I signed all of my land over to my son, John McMahon, a mistake I’ll spend the rest of my life regretting.

  I do not miss the cattle—they are still here, wandering the rolling hills of the creek valley, searching for nothing more than a mouthful of grass and a drink of cool water—but I miss them being mine. I miss the land being mine. I don’t miss the owning, I miss the meaning the owning gave me. It made it clear what I meant when I said any stupid thing such as, “Pick up your feet, ya lazy bastard,” or when, as was apt to happen, some spirit would appear to me from a blizzard or a fire and ask me to introduce myself and I would answer, “I am Sam McMahon.”

  No longer a cattleman, no longer anything. I have not been a husband for longer than I care to remember. My wife, Mary, died of a cancer of the breast in ′31, at the beginning of the dust bowl years. The boy John was only nine months old at the time. I hired a housekeeper, Molly, to look after him for the twenty-five years until he married. To avoid false sentimentalities I will frankly admit that I never missed my dearly departed very much. I do not blame this on Mary, who was ever the gentle and attentive wife. (I wouldn’t call her affectionate—not because she wasn’t, but because even if she was that wouldn’t be anyone’s business). I suppose I should think of her more often, but she was never much to think on. I was no good at husbanding. There was something in me that wouldn’t allow me to love her as much as she expected I should. I loved my freedom. I loved women. I loved my horse. I never in my life lost an hour’s sleep over Mary or any other woman. I don’t see that there’s much point blackening your soul over not being what you can’t be. After all, who would I be if I weren’t Sam McMahon?

  Which is exactly the kind of moronic question I find myself asking myself these long empty days, now that I am a man of too much leisure, sitting in my battered old La-Z-Boy in the living room I framed and plastered with these scarred old hands, looking out the picture window at a magpie eating the gruel from the dog dish. I suppose this “Who would I be …?” must be a modern sort of question, a 1970 sort of question. It’s in a different category of nonsense than I was given to asking myself in days gone by—back when the world was real, which is where I generally spend most of my time trying to get to these days. Back in those days I wouldn’t have got so far as, “Why am I not dead, instead of her?” And even if I got there I’d never have dug too deep into the question, thinking the answer was clear enough: I was stronger than Mary.