The secret to cornbread is in the oil. I would have used lard if I thought I could get away with it, but like everybody else in the drugs-and-alcohol generation, Maurey’s gone health crazy. As it was, I spooned a couple glops of Crisco into the ten-inch Dutch oven and stuck the Dutch oven in the real oven set at 350 degrees. Oil started, I pried the lid off the ceramic crock of sourdough starter that according to legend was brought across the Missouri River in 1881 by Maurey’s great-grandmother on her father’s side. I’d be willing to bet the crock hadn’t been washed since 1881. A thumb’s-width of dry dough skin ringed the lip of the crock like the rubber seal on a gasket.
I measured two dippers of starter into a 1950s Art Deco bowl and broke in four eggs, double what the recipe called for. Then I went to the refrigerator for buttermilk, where I mused for about the eightieth time that no one drinks straight buttermilk these days and it seems more than a change of style but a degradation of American values. Wasn’t that long ago you knew you could trust a man who drank buttermilk.
Toinette’s viola music filtered comfortably in from the next room. At the kitchen table, Roger and Auburn played a silent game of Risk. Roger’s scream hadn’t been one of those painful breakthroughs where the victim flashes onto what was repressed and starts talking again. From outward appearances, he didn’t seem affected by his foray into the world of sound. He knelt in the chair on his knees, leaning forward toward the game board, concentrating on pushing blue armies back and forth across the continents.
Auburn also adopted the quiet method of warfare. Roger’s coming to the ranch had been nothing but good for Auburn. He stopped whining at chores and his picky eating habits disappeared practically overnight. Childishness no longer washes when you’re paired off with a true survivor.
Maurey’s friend Mary Beth dropped Roger off at the TM a few days before my own arrival. Mary Beth said two men showed up at her apartment in the middle of the night, and when they left the boy stayed, and she didn’t know what to do with him, so she brought him to Maurey. His father—who a long time ago was Mary Beth’s boyfriend—had been killed in Nicaragua running drugs or guns or something else horrible. Mary Beth mentioned slavery. She didn’t know how long Roger had been quiet. They thought he might be the half brother of Maurey’s artist friend who lives in Paris, but even that wasn’t certain. Maurey and Pud checked Roger over for scars and lice and no one had physically left marks on the boy, but one look in his soft brown eyes and it was clear he’d been through something that children shouldn’t go through.
I lowered the heat on the huge pot of chicken soup simmering on the stove. Mealtimes the next few days were bound to be off kilter, so it seemed a good idea to have something continuously ready. Freud could go to town on why I chose chicken soup, but for the first time in my life, I didn’t care what my motives were. I pulled the Dutch oven from the oven and carefully poured oil into the starter mix. This was the point where twice before I burned the bejesus out of myself. The rest was basically unskilled labor—mix in the whole wheat flour, cornmeal, salt, baking powder, baking soda. I had a box of sugar hidden in the pot-holder drawer. Maurey called sugar white death, but she made an exception for my cornbread.
Roger’s face jerked toward the dark window and his eyes widened and a moment later headlights flashed on the log gate out by the road. I opened the oven door with the toes of my left foot and fondled in the cornbread. In the yard, the Suburban engine coughed, doors slammed, boots knocked snow off against the porch.
Then Maurey was in the kitchen, hugging me. I felt her face on my neck. I patted the thick hair on the back of her head and smelled her jojoba shampoo. She cried a few seconds, less than a minute, as I looked across at Chet, standing inside the door with his hands at his side. Toinette’s music stopped and she appeared at the other door, bow in hand.
Maurey pulled away and looked at my face. We’re almost the same height.
She said, “Life is the shits.”
I said, “I’m sorry.”
“Me too. Thanks for being here.” She moved off to hug Toinette.
I stepped toward Chet, then stopped, raised a hand, lowered it. I smiled a weak I-mean-well smile, and he smiled back “I know. It’s okay.”
There was more boot kicking at the front door before Pud and Hank came in. They must have been in the bunkhouse, waiting. Hank certainly wasn’t shy about touching Chet. They bear-hugged like athletes. Pud held Maurey. Toinette looked sad and pregnant. Auburn carefully kept his eyes off the adults, but Roger was a camera. I got the definite feeling he could see right through emotions, that he knew every coloration of every relationship in the room—whose love was pure and whose tainted by self-interest—and I failed the test.
Chet hung his coat on the deer antler rack by the door. “I need to use the phone,” he said. “There’s friends in New York…”
Maurey broke from a muffled conversation with Pud. She said, “Use the one in our room,” meaning Hank’s old room, where she and Pud moved when Pete needed a bed. Maurey looked at me and said, “Come help me pick out Pete’s clothes.”
“I was fixing to make dumplings.”
“Dumplings can wait.”
I gave Toinette instructions on when to pull out the corn-bread, then I followed my friend into her dead brother’s room. I found her sitting on the dead brother’s bed, staring glumly into the dead brother’s open closet doors.
“Did you know it’s illegal to cremate a body naked?” she said.
“That’s not something I’ve thought about too often.”
“You have to buy a coffin, too.”
“I guess the funeral homes were afraid they’d lose money when burial went out of style.”
“Why didn’t you disagree with me when I said life is the shits?”
I almost had disagreed, but we were making such nice eye contact I couldn’t spoil it. “Didn’t seem like the time to argue,” I said.
Maurey pooched her lower lip the way Shannon does when she doesn’t get her way. “Life isn’t the shits,” she said. “Life is fun; it’s all this death that’s the shits.”
I sat on the bed beside her. “It’s not death either. It’s loving people who die.”
She doubled up her fists. “Death is boring. Boring, boring, boring. I hate death. It ruins everything.” She looked at me fiercely. “You better not die on me.”
“I won’t if I can help it.”
“Just don’t.” She started to cry again.
I took her hands and unclenched the fists, then held them. We sat silently, remembering other deaths.
“The doctors said he had another month,” I said.
“Doctors say whatever they think you want to hear. That’s why so many of them drink—they can’t stand themselves.”
“Roger screamed when he heard about Pete.”
Maurey looked at me. “Aloud?”
“You wouldn’t believe how loud. I was hoping he would talk after that, but he clammed right back up. I don’t think he even remembers screaming.”
Maurey extracted her hands from mine and looked down at her palms. She has extremely small hands. Twenty years of working outdoors had left them tough. “He’s been stealing food.”
“Roger?”
“He hides rolls and cheese in his box springs. I found half a chicken in the laundry bag.”
Maurey blinked quickly and her voice caught on a sob sound. “I can’t do anything for him, Sam. I say, ‘Bring me your dried-up drunks, your abused babies, all those lost souls,’ but I can’t do a damn thing for any of them. I let my own brother die.”
I waited a while and said, “You helped me.”
“You don’t need help. You need someone to convince you you’re not a jerk.”
So that was it. “You’re not a savior.”
“That makes us even.” She laughed, but it wasn’t the laugh of a person amused. “Now, if you were dead, what would you want to be cremated in?”
I thought. “My Los Angeles Dodgers boxer shorts.”
“You would, wouldn’t you? Pete doesn’t even own boxer shorts. Didn’t.”
