Let Him Go: A Novel Read Online Free Page B

bathroom. That meant that the twins didn’t go off to school, and George didn’t drive into town or ride off to mend a fence or feed stock. She didn’t have to worry about any or all of them finding their way home through the storm. She and George had installed indoor plumbing two years before, so that problem was solved. The wind could howl and the snow drift high: Margaret Blackledge had her children and her husband safe—sick but safe—in rooms she could oversee. She’d have been a fool to ask for more from this life.
    Margaret extends her arm out the car window and marks an X in the air. It’s close to the gesture a priest makes, but if she were to speak, her benediction might be nothing but her father’s original homestead claim. The southeast quarter of section 14, township 132, range 99, Dalton County,North Dakota. In Margaret’s memory those numbers are as fixed as any dates drilled into the minds of schoolchildren.
    She brings her hand back in and touches it to her long, slender throat. She continues to look outward but now it’s to her husband she speaks. I’ve had enough loss, George.
    You know that’s what life is. Loss, fast or slow. Jesus, if the years teach us anything—
    That doesn’t mean I have to sit back and take it. Not while I have strength or will to do something.
    Accept it or not. Nothing lasts. He slaps his hand against the Hudson’s dashboard. Not flesh or steel. Not walls or possessions. Not friends or family. Hell, look around. This is the country of all that isn’t anymore. You don’t need me to make a list.
    You’re right, George. Her eyes flash like sunlight on window glass. I don’t need a goddamn list. And I didn’t need a trip out here as a goddamn reminder of anything.
    But a list like that, once its enumeration has begun, has its own momentum. Comfort, but pain too. Certainty, but doubt too. Strength. Beauty. Desire. Love. And one day only the memory of all those . . . and then not even memory.
    George wrestles the gearshift into reverse and executes the turn that will take them back to the highway. It’s a road they’ve driven thousands of times before but which they both believed they’d never travel again.

5.
    D RIVING WEST AND NORTH OUT OF D ALTON , G EORGE and Margaret listen to the quiz show Winner Take All on the Dickinson radio station, though neither of them is able to answer a single question. When they lose this program to static, Margaret twists the dial back and forth until she finds a program out of Glasgow, a swap shop that comes in as clear as a meadowlark’s call. They shake their heads over the caller who has a pair of salt and pepper shakers for sale—fully loaded, he says—and they smile at the caller who wants to buy a scythe because his grass got away from him over the summer. Then those voices fade and are replaced by a crackle and hiss that sounds as though someone recorded blowing sand.
    In the absence of other voices, Margaret says, Maybe you’re worried he’d grow up spoiled if he lived with us.
    A straight, level stretch of highway. No other cars on the road. But George Blackledge says nothing and stares out the windshield as if the world out there were asking for all his attention.
    Maybe you think, Margaret continues, I couldn’t bring myself to discipline him. And we know you wouldn’t. That’s something I could never figure out about you, George. You could stand up to a mad-dog drunk and haul him off to thehoosegow but you couldn’t speak a cross word to your children. But come to me about it—oh, that was easy enough for you. James has to break the ice on the horse tank first thing, not when it suits him. Janie’s dawdling when she’s gathering eggs again. So then it was my job to get after them. I used to wonder if that’s when the tremors started, when I had to hand out my own scoldings and yours too. I’d be mad as hell at you for giving me that duty but I had to turn it around on the twins. Not fair, George. It