Free The Work of Wolves by Kent Meyers Page B

house while she and Ves returned to the old. He'd come banging on the door and before Marie could answer had barged into the kitchen, dripping water on the floor.
    "Marie," he'd exclaimed. "Goddamn. We got cows broke out up north. Get your clothes on and come out and help chase 'em."
    She was dressed in a bathrobe, doing nothing but reading a book. He turned to go, assuming she'd do as he commanded.
    "Goddamn no," she said to his back.
    A glass pane seemed to descend invisibly from the ceiling, and Ves ran into it. He stopped so fast he appeared to rebound. His hat spun water off its brim as he turned back to her.
    "No?"
    "You're a crazy old fart," she said. "You don't come barging into someone else's house until they answer the door or call you in, even if you did build the damn thing. You don't dribble all over their floor. And you don't go chasing cattle at night in the rain when your neighbors will help you chase them tomorrow when the sun's shining. Where do you think they're going to go? There's no highway up north they're going to get out on. So no. Goddamn no."
    She turned back to the paragraph she'd looked up from. Ves stared at her through the water still dripping off his hat brim.
    "I'm a crazy old fart?" he asked. "Is that what you said?"
    "At least you're not a deaf one, too."
    "Jesus! I ain't that goddamn
old!
"
    He'd gone from the house, laughing a storm. She heard him call into the darkness: "Chuck, goddamn, come in outta the rain. Marie says it's crazy to be chasing cattle right now. She says I'm a crazy old fart!"
    His laughter was louder than the rain. The next day he was still laughing. It got so he couldn't see Marie without smiling, and the more she teased and insulted him the more he laughed and returned it. Marie would come to believe that night was the first time anyone had claimed a thing that Ves considered his by right of effort and will. He'd had the new house built for Lucy but had never relinquished his claim on the old, not even when his son and daughter-in-law moved in. But that rainy night he'd been confronted with a woman calm and unmoved within walls she'd decorated, space she'd created, even if he'd first formed it. He'd felt himself an intruder. In his laughter he'd admitted the old house was hers. He'd let it go—perhaps the first thing in his life he'd ever relinquished completely and without stipulation. He'd never again entered her home without knocking. He would stand on the steps until she opened the door, even if she called him in, and not out of irony but because he knew no other way to change. There were no subtleties, no gradations, to his giving in.
    And because he'd learned to relinquish his claim to a thing he considered his, he was prepared, when Carson was born, to be a grandfather, to accept what others had labored over, the fruit of others' dreams and wills—to accept those things as gifts. He held his newborn grandson, when Lucy handed him over, as gently as he'd hold a newborn calf dropped in a snowstorm, and with far more wonder.
    Who would have thought—Marie didn't at the time—that anything of sad consequence could come of that? The one person who couldn't benefit from Ves's change of heart was Charles. No matter what the Bible said, Marie thought, prodigality—and there could be a prodigality of control—would have its consequences. You can't just change your life and expect everyone to be happy with it. Expect everyone to forgive. To eat the fatted calf, drink the wine. To glory in the fact that you can now relent, love, live your life, without demanding that everyone live theirs the way you want them to. Ves had demanded so much of Charles. And maybe because of that, Charles had never managed to claim the land as she had the house, to take it from his father, put his own stamp on it. He worked endlessly but like tires slipping in gumbo mud, unable to imprint himself fully upon his work.
    And then, when Charles had a son, with visions of raising that son in a