In the Shadows of the Sun

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"You sure about this?"

Ross nodded.

"She's got stubborn ears," Baylis said. "And a head like a coffin."

Ross spit in the dust, then braced his boot against the fence and pulled open the gate. "She's worth something," he said. "Legs don't come no straighter."

Baylis followed him into the corral. He carried a catchrope in his right hand, the noose brushing his leg.

"Mind she don't kick you," Baylis said.

Ross paused in the center of the corral, watching the mustang run alongside the fence. The mare's eyes were wide in their sockets. Ross and Baylis swiveled as the mare circled and it seemed not that she was hemmed in by the fence, but rather that she was drawn to the brothers in spite of herself, orbiting their bodies, her velocity only just preventing her from being pulled to them. Baylis leaned forward slightly, admiring the smooth rhythm of her legs. He felt overcome with a great languor and for a moment there was no movement. Spouts of dust hung suspended in the wake of the mare's hoofstrikes. The elliptic noose of the lariat hovered in mid-swing.

He threw.

The catchrope snaked out and snared the mare's foreleg. Baylis pulled and she fell heavily and Ross was on her, both blurred by roiling dust. The dust seemed to mufflethe noise of their struggle just as it obscured their figures, movement communicated only through the jerk of the rope in Baylis's hands.

He heard the rising sound of a car running too fast in a low gear and glanced left where a dustcloud rolled up the ranch road. Frank started baying. Ross lost the horse and she struggled to her feet and ripped the catchrope from Baylis's hand, rearing, her unshod hooves striking above Ross's ducked head. She turned a neat roll back and landed running, aimed at the far edge of the corral, rising toward the fence before catching a foreleg on the upper brace. She struck the ground on the far side of the fence and righted herself. Her right foreleg dangled loosely below the knee. She didn't make a sound, just tried to run, as if unaware of what had happened.

Ross was quick. He got over the fence and chased her, trying to grab the trailing rope. Baylis tried to cut her off by vaulting the fence and running at the edge of the arroyo that backed the corral. She stumbled past. His hand caught her mane but she jerked away. He fell on the rope and when it tautened the mare screamed and he realized it was looped around the broken leg. Then it was snatched out from under him.

He was already sprinting toward the house as the car-oddly topless-whined into view. He saw it was military and stopped dead. Ross stilled and all that mattered, all that they saw, was the soldier sitting at the wheel. Please, thought Baylis. No telegram. He glanced at the girls, perched like frightened birds.

The soldier stayed in the car. Frank barked and scrabbled at his left leg, as there were no doors on the vehicle. Ross stalked toward him. "Don't say it," he said. "Don't say it." He kicked Frank out of the way.

The soldier looked quizzical and nervous. He pushed Frank back with his boot. He pointed past Ross to the horse, which had just reached the trees near the house. "It's getting away," he said.

"Is it Jack?" Baylis asked.

The soldier looked at them blankly. "Who?"

"My son," Ross said. "He ain't dead."

"I don't know, sir."

Ross spun away as the horse screamed again. He set after it while Baylis got a pistol. The catchrope had tangled in the low branches of some juniper, the mare unable to pull free. Ross twisted her head back over her shoulder as she thrashed and half lifted him. Baylis kneeled and fired the .45. A gout of blood and tissue erupted from the underside of the mare's skull.

The soldier spoke through the silence, his young face pale, his mouth red against a dark band of stubble. "Damn shame." He looked from the horse to Ross.

Baylis felt sick. He looked up at the girls in their perch. "Get inside," he ordered.

Ross rose and spat. He was covered in dust and blood. He retrieved his hat from the bushes and squared it on his head.

Baylis glanced at the idling car. A rectangular, two-panel windshield angled back from the hood, but beyond this it looked like someone had sawed the top off, the whole of it like the armature of a car, something pulled prematurely from the assembly line. Its exhaust smoked whitely. "Your car," he said. His mouth was dry.

The soldier looked at it where it idled on the drive. They listened to the engine.

"The noise scared the horse," Baylis said. He knelt and loosened the plaited rope from the mare's foreleg and coiled it. His stomach twisted.

"Horses are skittish," the soldier said. His features were prominent and rounded, like something machined from a pale, burled wood. The skin of his nose and cheekbones was windburned and peeling.

"The wild ones are," Ross said.

The soldier looked down and pushed the toe of his boot against a tussock of grass. "Didn't look relaxed with what you were doing, either," he said. He walked the twenty yards to the olive drab car and cut the engine. The brothers followed.

"Took a chunk out of your corral with that jump," the soldier said. "Could help you fix it." He laughed shortly and motioned to his uniform. "Guess the Corps of Engineers is good for something." He was very young.

"We need predator control, not fencing," Ross said. He spit again.

"Ross," Baylis said.

The soldier's weak smile flattened. He patted his chest and drew out a square of paper and unfolded it. He scanned the page and when he looked up his expression was remote. "Lance corporal Parris, U.S. Corps of Engineers," he said. He began to recite: "I'm here to inform civilians in the area that the Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range is being expanded."

Ross removed his hat and ran a hand through his hair. "We said no to that."

"We got a national emergency."

"I know it."

"Well, sir, I guess you know every American is coming together for the war effort, doing their patriotic duty-"

"Reckon that's why my son's serving in the Army."

Parris forged ahead. "War Department's got to occupy this whole area," he pointed from one side of the windshield to the other, the arc of the gesture encompassing the whole of the Bar-X. "They mean to establish a military bombing range by February. You should have received a notice."

"It's private land," Ross said.

"We all got to give, sir."

"You give up your home?"

"I'm in uniform."

"What about your home?"

"There isn't a choice, sir. It's national security. The President, government, American people, they need you to evacuate." He pointed at the land again. "War Department's repossessed your federal grazing rights and Executive Order 9029 gives us the authority to use your private land. That's right from the President. There's others out here that have already done their patriotic duty."

"What others."

"Others," Parris said. He looked at his fingers curled around the steering wheel.

"You heard of Luzon? The Philippines?" Ross asked, his voice low and hard. "You heard about the fighting? My boy's there. We thought you came here to tell us he's dead. And you think I got to be reminded we all got to give? That I got to be patriotic?"

"Ross-" Baylis said.

Ross's face bunched, the lines around his mouth like fissures in rock, his jaw outthrust. "Your Executive Order ain't worth a goddamn. We owned this ranch since before you was born, since before this was a state with a damned gov-"

Baylis stepped between them. He put his hand to Ross's shoulder and slowly pushed him back. They stood and watched Parris drive away.

That night, after Sara and Alida had returned and the family had settled for sleep, Baylis woke to Frank's barking. Outside, a group of raucous coyotes had found the horse carcass. Ross's cursing quieted the dog. Baylis dressed in the dark. "Go stay with Loretta," he said to Alida. "And keep Frank from getting out." He'd sewed up Frank's ears enough not to want to do it again. He walked to the kitchen where he found his brother, a dim shape standing by the stove.

"I put your rifle on the table," Ross said.

Baylis pulled on his boots and pinched the sleep from his eyes. It was useless to try and shoot coyotes in the dark, but this seemed immaterial.

"Wink was better with his traps and maybe we wouldn't have to do this," Ross said.

"He was better with his traps and he'd have collected a bounty on me," Baylis said. He opened the door slowly and waited for Ross to step past and then eased it shut behind them. It was clear and windless and patches of snow glowed faintly against the dark ground. The coyotes growled and yapped as they pulled at the mare's carcass not a hundred feet away. Ross motioned to Baylis and they split and moved around the obstructing trees. Baylis walked slowly, his eyes tearing from the cold. He knelt and waited with his finger against the trigger. The shapes of the coyotes were dark blurs. Maybe four. Ross fired as Baylis squeezed the trigger, his shot lagging minutely behind. He fired a second bullet, this time without any clear target. Ross fired four, five, six times. The reverberation of the last shot faded. Light sparked from the front window. Sara stepped onto the porch holding a lantern.

Baylis met Ross at the carcass and though he could not see his face clearly he could hear Ross's breathing. The coyotes were gone.

"Let's get inside," Baylis said. He pulled Ross by the arm. Sara waited in her robe, hugging herself with her free arm. The others watched from indoors. Baylis felt he'd done something wrong.

The following morning they dug a shallow pit in the clearing behind the barn. They piled rail ties and a few worn tires in the pit before hauling the mare on top using the pickup and a rope. The mare's guts trailed from her abdomen, fuzzed with ice crystals and dirt. Ravens had pecked out her eyes, leaving the sockets rimmed with raw, dried tissue.

Baylis was tired. He'd woken early to the image of Alida and Loretta looking at him when he'd returned to the house with Ross. Alida hadn't spoken to him then or during breakfast. He poured kerosene on the pyre and watched it soak into the ties. The fumes shimmered. He backed away and Ross dropped a match on the timber. The kerosene ignited with an implosion, sucking in the surrounding air. Baylis wished they could do the same with their troubles; there was too much to think on. "We ought to have said more to that soldier," he said.

The fire glimmered in the sunlight, the translucent flames tinged with orange. "We're heading to Charlie and Ellen's," Ross said. "You sure you ain't coming?"

"Yes," Baylis said. The Tuckers were the first to move, though there were plenty of others preparing for the same, no matter how grudgingly. Baylis didn't blame them. He couldn't bring himself to say goodbye, though. Not with everything else. He ignored Ross's expectant silence. In a minute Ross left. The burning timbers shifted beneath the mare's carcass. The smell made Baylis's eyes water. He closed them. The heat of the fire was like the breath of something frighteningly large and vital.

Alida came up and put her arm around his shoulders and pecked him on the cheek. She'd been watching from the living room. The sight of him standing so still and alone had caused a powerful swell of pity to dilute her anger, the two swirling like hot and cold currents. It was like this much of the time. Baylis didn't know how forlorn he looked, how distracted and sad he appeared. It made her want to kiss him and strike him, both. She knew he was afraid to leave, that unlike her he had never known another life. But he could change, couldn't he? Hadn't she changed for him? Given up her teaching in Cornucopia to live in this dusty patch of remoteness? She thought of her life in town, her relief at being able to live there with the girls, to socialize and read the paper and listen to the news; it was like emerging from a deadening silence to a world of sound. It was what she'd always wanted and the thought of staying here or on another ranch filled her with desperation. She had never changed, she admitted, but at least she now knew herself better. The sound of the desert wind still made her feel hopeless and empty and resentful of the younger self that had made the decision to come here and blithely saddled her with the consequences.

Maybe change was too much to ask of Baylis, but compromise wasn't. She knew the cost of this, had felt the precious weight of each coin paid over the course of fourteen years on the Bar-X.

"You've been out here a long time," she said.

He was grateful for her affection. He gestured. "Don't want this to catch."

"On what?" she said. There wasn't much but dirt nearby. He looked aged, the exhaustion in his posture an augury of his older self. She rubbed his back. His shoulders were tight, his face creased by his habitual frown. "You should come in," she said, "Have a rest."

Baylis shoved his hands in his pockets. She was still angry. He could feel the edge of it in her voice.

The wind twisted and a whorl of embers rose and fell back into the body of the fire.

"Well?" she asked.

He wanted to cup her jaw and kiss her and have it feel the way it had when they first met. But something hard and impermeable had slipped between them.

"Talk to me," Alida said.

"I don't know what to tell you," Baylis said.

Alida dropped her arm to her side. "You don't have to tell me anything," she said.

"Has this life been bad for us? For you and me?"

"The Cattle Growers' Association and the lawyers haven't done a thing but use money," she stated. "They're not slowing the Army. And Senator Hatch-"

"What about what I asked."

"It doesn't matter now," she said softly.

The door of the outhouse clapped against its frame as Loretta came out. She and Cybill had been quiet all day, hiding in their bedroom with the cats.

"We have to move," she said, hearing the violence in her words. Pity would only get her stuck on another ranch, a smaller, meaner one. It was to make a break.

He said nothing, listening to the crackle of the fire and the sound of her receding footsteps, then a little later to the truck as the family drove to a last visit with the Tuckers. He tapped the toe of his boot against a stone, absently noting the deep scar the trap had gouged in the leather. The rushing sound of the flames peaked, the mare's carcass steadily diminishing at the fire's center, the scaffolding of bones emerging in its place.

Later he fed the horses. He emerged from the barn and slapped his pantlegs to rid them of hay. The sun, which lay beyond the plain of the Jornada del Muerto, beyond the San Mateo Mountains, was a distant, cooling red, the hues of the evening settling above its disappearing rim in a sediment of stained light.

Ross waited on the porch, backlit by the lighted windows. Dishes clashed in the kitchen, accompanied by the faint, musical voices of their wives and daughters. Baylis inhaled the rich scent of cooking chile. Baylis wondered what his brother needed to say that had to be discussed in private. A breeze rustled through the piñon branches and played over them. He raised his face to the wind, watching anvilled clouds pile over the ridge of the Sierra Oscuras to spread west over the night sky. Snow had come twice in the past weeks, the nightly temperature dipping below freezing, the wind gathering flakes into windblown drifts that evaporated quickly into the dry air. The temperature was falling and he thought it would snow again. Before the advancing edge of the clouds the stars showed very clear in the cooling air.

Ross set his foot atop the low porch wall and palmed the dust from his boot toe. "They were out at the Lazy B today," he said. "After we saw the Tuckers off I passed them on the way home. Left everybody here and went back to Charlie's. Soldiers already had the windmill chained." He exhaled a stream of smoke that vanished almost instantly. "This ain't no temporary deal. It don't feel like it, no matter what they say."

Baylis looked at the silhouette of the barn, trying to imagine ten or twenty years of disrepair, the stone splitting free of the mortar, strips of the corrugated roofing rusting amidst the weeds, a ruin like any other. The clouds blotted out the moon.

"If I got to wait out the war I'd as soon do it here as in some town where I don't belong." Ross shook his head. "You remember Daddy always running on about Victorio?"

Baylis nodded, surprised. "Was telling Loretta, but she wouldn't have none of it." He smiled.

"That old boy was someone to respect."

Baylis waited.

"Them Apaches wouldn't have nothing if they hadn't fought," Ross said. "You give over what you got," he said, "you let others make decisions for you and they ain't got no reason to treat you right."

"This ain't the same," Baylis said. "And Victorio didn't get nothing but shot in the end." He didn't want to leave either, but Ross's implication-armed resistance, that they were like the Apaches-was ridiculous.

Inside, after washing, Baylis lay on the thick, Jacob's-ladder patterned quilt his mother had sewn and listened to the shuffle of feet on floorboards as the girls moved to and from the kitchen. He thought of Jack and his smile and the creases that had settled into Ross's face since the boy departed. Jack's smile felt like all Baylis could remember, though he had tried to fix the image of the boy's face in his mind when he'd driven him to Fort Bliss. But the blond hair, the white teeth and brown eyes, refused to come together, blurred and disjointed before his mind's eye. He wondered if Jack had been writing Felix. He'd asked that Felix be allowed to ride his horse, Bean, in his absence but Ross refused. Baylis would have liked Felix's company and he was angered by Ross's meanness. He was sure Felix had enough of that from Wink and Napoleon.

Alida called. He lay there thinking. She appeared at the door, her arms folded. "The others are hoping you'll see fit to join them at the table." Her voice was brittle.

"Alida," he said, her name sounding like a question. He rose and stepped forward, reaching for her as she turned from him.

In a moment Baylis followed. The family was seated at the dining table. Alida watched Baylis impassively. When he sat she began grace, and all except Baylis closed their eyes. He studied her calm face and then Ross's profile, his slightly hollowed cheek and expression suggestive of the carved santos the Catholics in Cornucopia kept, whose patient and mournful faces were veined with fine cracks.

They began to eat. A moth wheeled about the two lamps, bumping against the fluted glass, and the family tracked its blind, looping flight. A draft swung the ornaments on the Christmas tree, the curved glass casting back the lamplight in flashes. Beneath the tree was the boxy pile of Jack's gifts.

"Me and Cybill was wondering if you was going to help with the dresses," Loretta said to Alida. Alida looked at the girls, seemingly surprised to find them at the table. In the quiet Cybill twisted her napkin in her hands; Loretta held her eyes steady on her mother.

Alida realized the others were watching. "What's wrong with what you have?"

"It's for the New Year's dance, Momma," Loretta said with a tone that implied no other explanation was possible. Loretta smiled at Cybill, who tried to stifle a grin. Her brownish front tooth appeared briefly before she thought to raise her hand.

"We found a design," Cybill added.

"Just don't break too many hearts, it being the holiday season and all," Baylis said. He smiled.

The girls began to talk of classmates and other dresses-in-the-making in a breathless rush, fearful the silence would close in before they could get out what they wished to say. Baylis was glad for the distraction, grateful for the girls' cheerful patter, but the fire had burned down. Though he was reluctant to break with the moment he rose to bring in more wood.

At the woodpile he paused. Through the window he saw his family in the lamplight. Sara laughed and Ross smiled, and even Alida's face was warm. Wide flakes of snow were falling even and thick and moving only slightly in the wind. They sparkled with the room's glow, settling soft and white where they blanketed the firewood. For a moment it was as if the comfortable mantle of their previous life were back to warm him, as if Jack were in another room or due back from town in a moment, as if the security of their lives here had not been torn free by Jack's departure or the Army or the war. He stood watching and his arms grew heavy and the snow brushed lightly against his face.