Free The Work of Wolves by Kent Meyers Page A

Of how they moved singly or in groups, of how their hoofbeats drummed the earth. He thought of how, when he trained them, he breathed their grainy breath and how, in arenas, their hooves cut into the earth and back out with so much power that spectators were dirtied high into the stands with flecks of mud. Of how, when horses turned around the barrels, their bodies leaned as if gravity could be suspended—and how he could train them to so suspend it.
    But of this, too, he found he could not speak.

    A MONTH AFTER VES DIED , Charles had wanted to tear the old house down. "What use is it now?" he'd said. "Leave it stand, it's gonna be nothin but a mouse hotel. Or a temptation for lightning."
    But Marie had stopped him. "We can't be that practical about it," she said. "It's hard enough for Carson, Ves being gone. If you tear that house down, too? Wait a few months."
    But things had come up, the needs of the ranch, relentless and ongoing. They took Charles's attention and energy. Distracted him. Only once had he actually found time to start the demolition. "Tomorrow," he'd told her, "I'm goin a start takin it down. Try to save some've the lumber, maybe use it for something else." She'd agreed.
    Enough time had passed. But the next morning, while Charles was doing chores, the Case had died, and he spent two days fuming and fixing it, and by the time he was done other things took over.
    And then they just got used to it. Almost forgot it was there. Until now. Strange, Marie thought, how empty structures can become a part of your life. How you can simply not notice them. And then you quit imagining what you'd see if they weren't there. Quit imagining the space you'd see, the sky. Or the flower bed you might plant. The tree. Instead you just let the empty structure stand. Let it occupy the space you'd thought to use. You go about your business. Yet she wondered how much the empty structure made a difference. Its standing there. Its witness to what had been—how much did that matter, even though they'd quit noticing? She wished she'd let Charles tear it down when he'd first wanted to.
    She had watched Carson and his father grow apart. It wasn't animosity but more a giving in. A sense of the inevitable. Carson had grown attached to Ves, and Charles had seen how they worked the horses together, how good Carson was at it. Charles had refused to fight it. He could see that Carson loved it. But at the supper table, when Ves bragged about Carson's instincts, Marie noticed how Charles nodded. She knew that he heard another thing, unsaid: that he himself had never been that good. And she knew that his own silence, his mere nod, sprang from his deep, unspoken sense that he should be the one bragging about his son. The one showing him the world and taking pride in how he grasped it.
    Marie thought now that if Carson moved into the old house, it would be another instance, like when he'd gone to buy that horse without asking, of choosing Ves over Charles. Neither Carson nor his father would think of it that way. But she knew that Charles, whether he named it or not, would feel it.
    Looking at her son, so confident, so sure what he wanted to do, she wondered if she should tell him how hard Ves had made Charles work when he was young, how single-minded Ves had been. The grandfather Carson knew, the patient, slow-moving teacher of how the world worked, had been a long time in the ripening. It had taken Marie years to warm to him, and she believed that warming—her warming—had been part of what had softened Ves. If he loved Carson, Marie suspected he'd loved her first because she had so steadfastly refused to be intimidated by him, until he'd finally laughed at himself. And loved her for allowing that laughter.
    He'd come banging on the door of the old house one rainy night in the first years of Marie's marriage—this before Carson was born, before Lucy, Charles's mother, had insisted that Marie and Charles move with their new baby into the new