They could be at the ocean in one day’s flying, she tells Trout.
All in good time, he says.
One day, somewhere between Kalispell and Whitefish, he points down at a roof in a valley. “That’s Bannockburn.”
“What’s Bannockburn?”
“I’d have thought you would know. It’s the Macqueen ranch.”
A big house with chimneys. Forest and mountains and grassy valleys all around it. “How far does the land go?” she asks.
“Oh, I don’t know. All this and then some.”
Bannockburn, Jamie tells her later, is the name of a poem about a battle the Scots won against the English. He’d read it in school. He finds it for her in a book. Robert Burns.
At Bannockburn the English lay,—
The Scots they were na far away
But waited for the break o’ day…
What happened after the battle? she asks Jamie. They were independent, he says. For a while.
Now’s the day, and now’s the hour is the line that lodges in her mind.
She stays aloft longer than planned one evening, solo, flies west toward the setting sun. Darkness comes up from behind her, spreads over the dome until only a band of deep rusty red is ahead of her. When she turns back, the stars have crowded in from behind. Trout gets some of the airfield guys to light up the runway with their headlights so she can land. He’s too relieved to be angry, too angry to be relieved. “If you got killed, who do you think he would blame?” he asks her.
October leans into November. The trees are tipped with gold, the cottonwoods bright as apricot flesh. The landscape flares and shimmers.
* * *
—
Some money goes missing from her nooks and crannies in the cottage. Wallace, of course. She puts the rest in the bank, though it feels strange to deposit her ill-gotten gains in so law-abiding a place. A few of her father’s older and more richly illustrated books disappear next, and some of the more obviously valuable knickknacks. A jade horse. A string of ivory beads carved to filigree.
“Where are they?” she demands of Wallace in his studio. “Who’d you sell them to?” She is certain the answer will be Barclay Macqueen. There are no canvases on the easels. He hasn’t been painting. As far as she can tell, he hasn’t been going to the U, either, but she doesn’t know if he’s been fired or has just stopped showing up. Dust coats the craggy patches of dried paint on his palettes.
Wallace is wearing his bathrobe over a collarless shirt, open at the neck, and he is barefoot and hungover and slumped sorrowfully in an armchair, his head resting between thumb and index finger on a propping arm. She stands over him. Jamie skulks in the doorway. “I sent them to a curiosity dealer in New York,” Wallace says, “someone I knew when I lived there. The horse was very valuable.”
“I’ll buy it back. How much did you get for it?”
He quotes an astronomical sum. She can’t buy it back.
“It wasn’t yours to sell.”
“Marian,” says Jamie. “It wasn’t really ours, either.”
She looms over Wallace. “Why don’t you make more paintings and sell those? You’re supposed to be a painter.”
Wallace shrivels into the chair. “I’ve lost the ability.”
“No,” says Jamie. “You just need to go out into the mountains like you used to.”
Wallace shakes his head. “I’ve tried. I try, and there’s nothing. It’s like my painting arm has been amputated.”
“That can’t be,” says Jamie. “It’s in your head.”
“Of course it’s in my head,” says Wallace. “You do it then if it’s so simple. I see your little sketches. Go ahead and make paintings people want to buy.”
“People do buy Jamie’s watercolors,” Marian says. “He sells them in town.”
Wallace, even in his shame and dishevelment, summons a dismissive grimace. Now that Jamie’s drawings and watercolors have become very good, at least to Marian’s eye, Wallace ignores them.
“At least I’m trying,” Jamie says. “At least Marian’s trying.”
“I’m trying, too,” Wallace says. “I’m sorry if my efforts don’t impress you. Did you have a use for that jade horse? Please tell me what it was.”
“Enough,” Marian says. “It’s done. What did you do with the money?”
“I needed to settle a few debts. Urgently.” Wallace’s cheek is mashed against his palm now as though his head is growing heavier and heavier.