“You don’t have to go,” his mother said. “She will not leave you. It’s only the grief. It will pass.”
Randall rose from his chair and walked to the stove and opened the door. He crouched down and poked at the fire with a long, sharp rod and stared at the wood as it became overwhelmed by flame, and the hound raised its head and grunted. Randall watched the fire until too much of the smoke was escaping and he shut the door to the stove.
He rose, and so too the dog, and both walked past his mother onto the porch and there took stock of the night and its sounds. More than one thousand head of cattle had once belonged to this land, and wild horses roamed the hills above the ranch. He had land and mineral rights, timber too. When he returned from Pennsylvania those many years past there were oil men and miners, cowboys and grifters, all vying for his father’s claim.
He was classically trained in piano and had a deep appreciation for the arts. He studied philosophy, could not hold his whiskey, and still felt uncomfortable atop a horse. His build was slight, his features small, and he knew nothing of cattle or horses or working the land. Such things he left to his hired men, who took advantage of his ignorance and drank and gambled and told false tales to their curious employer.
His father was the smooth talker that Randall was not. Edmund Dawson would have convinced the hired men to work harder, tell no lies, and be loyal to his family. He would have achieved this feat through a modest conversation that held such a warmth and air of sincerity the men would have worked against gravity itself to not let him down. Whereas Randall much preferred the written word, seeing as it gave him time to think and sort out his thoughts, his father needed no tools save his tongue. Though it was not his tongue which was cut off after he was shot in the back by the husband of one of his many lovers. A true statesman, his father once wrote, is willing to please as many people as possible.
So it was that Randall returned to the territory, seeing himself as a prodigal son come back to conquer, and with him his new bride and a hope eternal.
But the West, as it turned out, was indeed wild and the weather ranged from drought to flood and back again. With unreliable men and a lack of the resources made plenty in the East, Randall found this place to be a much harsher reality than the visions in his head. Having never failed before, Randall ignored his wife’s pleas to return to Philadelphia and instead began trying to reshape the world as he wished it to be. It is this curse of irrational confidence that leads a few men to great achievements in history while leading most to the sorrowful understanding that the world cannot be remade by men, as the world is of men.
Nevertheless, Randall made his attempt to modernize Longpine. In the end he succeeded only in replacing the local sheriff, a drunkard, and his inexperienced young deputy who had shot the town dentist by accident while cleaning his gun.
As he and Joanna failed to produce a living child, Randall turned more to his library and spent even less time on the ranch. The estate was losing money, and the town was being overrun with gamblers and gunslingers and the like.
“And so it is to this end,” he spoke to the dog, and he was at once awash with anger at the murder of his son, the uncivilized nature of the land, and most of all his own failings as a man. The celebrated heroes of history were men of both thinking and action, and he found himself wanting greatly in the latter.
“There is a world removed from the one that birthed me. It is a world unlike the one in which I grew and was molded. It is the real world,” he told the dog, who twitched its ears. “And it is full only of ignorance and evil.”
His brandy gone, Randall felt himself drunk and he cursed his education and societal upbringing and he vowed to harden his heart against evil and become a man and not a dandy, which he knew they called him and he knew they were not wrong.
In a state unfamiliar Randall ascended the staircase clumsily and without manner. Through the darkness he moved to the bed and found Joanna’s sleeping figure and began to grope her and pull at her nightgown. She jerked away and he continued his pursuit and they began to struggle against one another without speaking, and finally Joanna pulled free an arm with which to slap him and she did so with the force of a wasted life and she wept as he pulled up his trousers.
“You think me not a man. I will prove otherwise,” he said and his words were slurred and his body swayed as he stood.
She screamed and laughed and said he knew nothing of life on the trail and would surely die, just as their son had, and leave her alone in this miserable and forsaken land. She heard him in the kitchen and in the stable and then he was gone. The hound followed for a time, but turned back panting and again Joanna wept. And without anyone to tend it, the fire began to die.
* * *
Randall rode a white Arabian called Mara and took with him five canteens of water, one pound of tobacco, a cherrywood pipe, enough dried meats and berries to last several weeks, and two gold-handled .41 caliber Colt Thunderers, neither of which had ever been fired by his hand. He left in charge a man name Roscoe who had once worked for his father and seemed the least likely to mutiny against the family.
He set out at midmorning and rode the length of the ranch. It was a crawling sky, the blue heavens outstretched and pulled thin over the forgotten world below. The clouds sat heavy and white like pale mountains in the distance, and the San Pedro flowed clear and steady, urged on by some unseen hand. Pronghorn deer moved into the river valley and took turns lifting their heads and watching for danger as the herd grazed. An exaltation of horned larks fluttered amid the twisting limbs of a lone cypress tree, streaks of yellow and black appearing and vanishing and appearing again.
Randall was a long time in the saddle as Mara climbed up above the valley, picking her way over the slip rock and gneiss. The vegetation thinned and what trees there were became shrunken, and by noon he’d reached the top of Wolf Mountain. Randall watered Mara from his hat and staked her to graze and when he put his hat back on the cool of the water dripped down his neck and made him shiver.
He walked to the far ridge and squatted and looked out across the hill country, the craters and cliffsides rising and falling and fading in the west to squinted-at lines upon dark horizons. His eyes strained to see further, yet still the land eventually gave out, blending into the gray and blue sky as if the earth itself ceased at such a point, and there was no one and nothing to tell him otherwise.
Horse and rider followed the ridgeline south until late afternoon when they came to the edge of the ranch. There they sat in the relative warmth of the autumn sun. Below them the San Pedro looked like a great river of rocks, the water navigating each boulder, flowing and unbroken despite the masses of granite and limestone and gneiss. To see it from the Wolf Mountain mesa, the river appeared snakelike, winding and bending through the cypress and mesquite as though its determination alone would always and forever outweigh the changing landscape and evolving world.
At the last planked bridge before the ranch gave way to the wild rimland of the territories Randall saw the boy sitting on a horse of muted orange, a rifle in his hand.