Let Him Go: A Novel Read Online Free

battered straw hat is pulled down to his eyebrows, George sees enough of his face to raise afinger in greeting. The young man waves back with a hammer that George also recognizes.
    I went to school with Franklin, Margaret says. As a matter of fact, he took me to a county dance or two.
    He mentioned at the time he was once one of your suitors.
    You remember that? After all these years?
    You’d be surprised what sticks, considering how much that doesn’t.
    Franklin was probably trying to appeal to your sentimental side.
    That worked a time or two.
    But not for Franklin.
    Not after I saw his wife.
    Yet with that between you two, Barlow hired you.
    That he did.
    Once the Hudson’s tires touch the highway’s asphalt, George stomps down hard on the accelerator. Now let’s see, George says, how long it takes to get the smell of horse-shit out of my nose.

4.
    E VENTUALLY THE HIGHWAY THE B LACKLEDGES TRAVEL will lead through the fiery eruptions of rock that are the Dakota Badlands—mile after mile of jagged, sheered-off red and orange buttes and sudden deep-shadowed gorges and ravines—but the first few miles out of Dalton are as easy as a pony ride. This is prairie, rolling gentle country where black seams of trees and brush stitch one grassy hill to another. Barbed wire lines the highway, but with so much emptiness on every side, what the wire is supposed to fence in or out isn’t clear. Here and there an unmarked dirt or gravel path branches off from the highway, leading no doubt to a ranch or farm, but these are far enough from the main road that it would take a soaring hawk’s eye to find them. At one of the breaks in the wire—was a gate here once?—a turnoff barely as wide as a car appears, and George shifts down to second and turns the car hard off the highway, swerving so suddenly it seems as though he must be trying to avoid a collision.
    A box on the backseat slides against the door, and cans and jars crash into each other. Margaret is pitched hard against her own door, but she rights herself quickly and reaches toward the steering wheel as if she means to take control of the car.
    Don’t, George! Don’t do this!
    But George pushes her hand away and concentrates on maneuvering the car up the narrow road, its soft dirt almost as difficult to negotiate as drifted snow. The dust the Hudson raises finds its way through George’s open window, and he risks taking a hand off the wheel for the time it takes to roll up the window.
    Margaret slumps back in her seat, powerless now to prevent her husband from taking them where he’s decided they’ll go.
    At the hill’s crest the road bends around a stand of bur oak before briefly widening and leveling out. Here George stops. If he didn’t, they’d drive a curving route down the other side of the hill. The road eventually stops at a ranch huddled in the valley below.
    I don’t need to see this again, says Margaret, swatting her hand in the direction of a white frame house, a windmill, a small corral, and a barn and stable, their wood weathered to the color of a sparrow’s feathers. Although the valley and a few cottonwoods shelter the ranch house and its outbuildings, every wall and fence post seems wind-worn and leaning, nothing quite plumb, square, or true, everything down there as temporary as a season.
    Because you remember it like this?
    What it is. What it was. Margaret looks at her husband. Did you think I could ever forget it?
    You’d be better off if you did.
    Might as well say I’d be better off not drawing breath.
    We’re talking about a place, Margaret. Boards. Nails. A few blades of grass and a hell of a lot of dirt in between. Eight hundred acres that never promised or delivered anything but hardship.
    She rolls her window all the way down and hangs her head out as if she’s going to be sick. When she draws back inside she says, Don’t tell me what it is.
    She’d protested coming here as urgently as if she’d been in mortal danger, but now