Gwen is in the barn when the Toyota makes that U-turn. She knows that her father will be gone before she gets back to Fox Hill. Standing there. watching him, she feels like crying. Maybe she should have insisted on going on his errands with him; maybe she should have tried to talk her mother into leaving. Gwen now considers herself to be a guilty party. She didn’t say, I want to go back with you. She didn’t take his side. Difficult as it is to admit, she wants to be here, saddling Tarot, meeting Hank later in the day at the library, where’s he’s working on his senior thesis. Traitor that she is, she doesn’t run after her father. She lets Tarot eat sugar from her hand while waiting for Hollis to go back inside the house. That’s one thing she’ll do to honor her father-she’ll avoid Hollis at all costs. When Hollis has finally slammed the door shut behind him, Gwen leads the horse out of the barn. She’d planned to walk him to the sunniest pasture, where the ice has already melted, but seeing her father makes her want to go miles away.
The footing is too slippery for riding, but Gwen doesn’t care. She’s completely unschooled and does everything wrong, but it doesn’t matter with a horse like Tarot. He makes his way over the ice, then onto the packed dirt in the driveway. Gwen feels sure enough of him to give him his head, and let him take charge of matters. When he goes into the woods, right before the devil’s corner, Gwen doesn’t protest. Tarot walks quickly over brambles and fallen leaves; when they pass under low branches, Gwen ducks and rests her face against his neck. She can feel his blood, just beneath his skin; when he breathes, the air fills with smoke. He’s like a dragon, ancient and fearless. He doesn’t spook at anything, not when pheasants fly out of the bushes, not when they come upon a deer, drinking from an icy stream.
Gwen can only guess what they must have done to this horse to make him mean enough to kill two men. He was a machine, a winning machine. Hay in, shit out, and run like hell. Run so fast they can never catch you. She has seen marks in Tarot’s flesh. He’s been beaten, long ago, in another life that will always be a mystery. History is personal, Gwen understands that now. All you are seeing is what’s before you, the rest is guesswork. Still, she believes that he was beaten with a chain, at least once. There’s a circular indentation on his flank, and each time she runs her hand over that wound, Tarot throws his head back in a move so serious, so potentially killing, that Gwen’s respect for him is renewed.
Now, as he jumps a fallen tree, Gwen holds on for dear life. She tells herself riding Tarot isn’t any more dangerous than being on the back of Josh Krauss’s out-of-control Honda roaring down the El Camino at midnight. All the same, she closes her eyes when they come to the thickest part of the woods, and when she opens them again, the Marshes are before her, all gold and brown. Herons rise from the grass. Ice covers the inlets. They’re trotting through frozen mud now, over hermit crabs and minnows. Maybe it’s the old apple tree which calls to the horse, or maybe it’s the wild berries; either way, Tarot has come to graze in the Coward’s front yard.
“Not here,” Gwen tells the horse. “Let’s go.”
When Tarot refuses to move, Gwen kicks him, but she hasn’t the heart to do anything more than tap, and Tarot doesn’t even notice her boots against his flanks. He’s come upon a pile of frozen apples, and Gwen had better settle down, since he’s not leaving anytime soon.
The Coward sees the girl as she slips off the horse, and for a moment, he thinks it’s Belinda out there, who used to ride this same horse when she came to visit him. Other people brought food and clothes-Judith Dale, of course, and Louise Justice occasionally-but Belinda brought him what he truly yearned for. Photographs of his son. School papers. Spelling tests. Paintings of boats and of starry nights. The first tooth his boy lost, which the Coward still keeps in a saltshaker beneath his bed. Locks of pale hair, retrieved from the kitchen floor after a haircut.
Belinda used to sit on his porch and cry sometimes; once, she spent the night, curled up on a blanket on his floor. She had hair the color of roses, and on the night when she stayed with him her lip was split open; it hurt too much for her to drink the water the Coward offered her. Although he knows that Belinda died years ago, she seems to have reappeared beneath his apple tree. The Coward pulls on his boots and hurries outside. He’s ready to greet Belinda with a hug, but when she turns around he sees it’s only the girl who was here before, the one who left him the old compass he was given on his twelfth birthday, when there was still hope for him.
“I’m not trespassing,” Gwen says quickly. Maybe she’s been crying about her father and maybe she hasn’t been. This bright sunlight could bring tears to anyone’s eyes. “It’s this horse. He loves apples.”
“All right,” the Coward says in a surprisingly mild voice. Now he sees, there are indeed tears on this girl’s cheeks. “Let him eat.”
The Coward sits on the rickety front steps of his porch. The ice makes everything in the distance shine like diamonds. The Coward blinks in the light. He has always believed that if vodka looked like anything, it would look like ice. Gin, on the other hand, was pure, clean snow.
“You don’t know me.” the girl says.
She has come to sit beside him on the steps, which cannot be a pleasant experience, the Coward is certain, since he can’t remember the last time he bathed. But in fact, his odor is no more offensive than marsh grass or old apples, slightly vinegary.
“I’m Gwen,” the girl says. “My father is Richard Cooper. My mother is March.”
The Coward appraises her. His niece, if what she’s saying is true. Well, she does have the Cooper nose, straight and narrow, and those pale blue eyes.
“I don’t take after my mother, if that’s what you’re thinking. But you’re my uncle all the same.”
“For all the good it will do you,” the Coward says.
Gwen laughs. “Screwed-up family.”
“You have no idea,” the Coward tells her.
Gwen rests her chin on her hand and watches Tarot munch apples. It’s actually beautiful out here, if you don’t mind the isolation. If loneliness isn’t a factor. Before she can say another word, the Coward has risen from the steps and is already heading for his house. He can’t take too much of people. Five minutes is just about tops.
“Where are you going?” Gwen asks.
He doesn’t want to think about his family. That’s sorrow, plain and simple, and besides, he’s got better things to do.
“I’m going inside,” he tells the girl.
“To drink?” The horse has come near, so Gwen stands and reaches for the reins. “That’s what you do, right? It’s like your occupation or something, isn’t it? Being a drunk?”
“Drunkard,” the Coward corrects.
He squints against the glare of the diamonds in the Marshes. If he wants to, he can go inside and pretend there’s no one beneath his apple tree.
“In case you’re interested, your son doesn’t drink at all. He won’t even have a beer. Even if everyone else is completely wasted, he won’t touch the stuff.”
The Coward has reached his front door, but he doesn’t go inside.
“You’d be proud of him,” Gwen says.
Although the Coward’s back is toward her, she knows he’s listening.
“If you ever took the trouble to know him.”
When the Coward turns to face this girl, she has her hands on her hips. Clearly, she’s not the sort to back down from things. If she loves you, she’ll fight for you, and that’s what she appears to be doing right now.
“What makes you think I have a choice on that topic?” The Coward’s voice sounds harsh.
“Because you do,” Gwen says. “You just do.”
The Coward watches as she leads the horse out of his yard, around the garden gate, then into the Marshes, where the ice has begun to melt in the thin afternoon sunlight. There’s something hot in the center of the Coward’s chest, so he sits back down on his porch. The floorboards are loose; beneath them is a den of raccoons. When the Coward walks across these marshes, to Route 22, and the liquor store beyond, that is his choice. In all these years, he has not stopped to think other choices were his to make as well.