The Boy from Spokane

Start with the father, Pearl said. Everyone else in it was made by him, even the ones who never met him.

Gerald Murrow ran Windrow the way weather runs — over everything, taking what it liked. He was a big man with a temper he treated as a feature of the landscape, a son, Vic, who took after him, and a daughter, Cass, who was six the summer he drove a stock truck to Spokane and came back with nothing he'd bid on and something nobody owned.

The boy was maybe eight. He was stowed in the horse compartment with the partitions, half-starved, wild enough to bite the man who reached for him, and when Gerald asked him whose he was, the boy said nobody's, which was the correct answer, because Gerald had never once in his life wanted a thing that belonged to somebody else. He asked the boy his name and got a shrug. So he named him after the county road the truck broke down on — Corso — and called him Dane, for no reason anyone ever learned.

Vic was twelve and understood immediately what had happened: his father had gone out for horses and come home with a replacement. Cass understood nothing of the kind. She was a small fierce girl with wheat-colored hair and a way of standing on the fence rail with her arms out into the wind, and she inspected Dane for two full days and then dragged him up the ridge by the wrist to show him the eagles' nest, which was the beginning of everything.

They were inseparable after that, and Pearl, who came to Windrow as a hired girl at fourteen, watched it happen the way you watch weather come in. They did their lessons wrong together. They got whipped together, mostly for being where they weren't, on the high ground, in the barn loft, out where the fence posts leaned and the county died out. Gerald beat the boy for carelessness and taught him cards for amusement, and if you had asked Gerald which of the two he loved he could not have told you, and it wouldn't have mattered, because what he gave the boy was neither love nor its opposite. It was the habit of taking.

When Dane was eleven the fever came through, and Gerald, dying too slow and too stubborn to say anything about it, made Vic promise to look after the place, looked at Cass a long time without managing a word, and put his hand on Dane's head for one second like a man unsure of the object. Then he was gone, and the house changed hands in every way that counted.

Vic was nineteen and had married a soft-voiced girl named Lenna that spring, and for a month it seemed like mercy might be available. Then Vic found Cass and Dane sitting on the kitchen floor over a diagram of the eagle nest Cass meant to build herself, and something in him that had waited seven years finally got its appointment. He stopped schooling Dane. He put him in the bunkhouse with the hired men and then below them, gave him the work of three men and the wages of none, took his books, and beat him with the regularity of a man winding a clock. Lenna tried to soften it and got the flat of Vic's temper for her trouble and learned to be quiet, and had a baby, Colt, and was quiet about that too.

Dane did not complain. That was the thing Pearl said you had to understand, because it was the seed of everything later. He took it the way the ridge takes the wind, with his head down and his eyes up, and he got harder and colder and more patient, and he kept the only thing he had left, which was the hours on the high ground with Cass, where the county's rules did not reach and the two of them were a country of two.

Cass was fifteen that year and already beautiful in a way that frightened people, tall and quick and loud, riding bareback and swearing like a hand and reading the Bible's dirty parts and Shakespeare's bloody ones. She loved the wind. She said once, in Pearl's hearing, standing on the ridge with her arms out, that the wind was the only thing around there that never pretended to be anything else.