The Wind Comes Sweeping

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At the house again, she loaded her art supplies into the truck. She’d intended to drive to town today, but that could wait. She still had a few days’ horse feed and calf pellets in the barn. Soon Red Ryder was jouncing over a flat field where wheat grew ankle high and shamrock green.

When she’d counted all fifty Herefords, Marik turned a wide circle in the field and rumbled back over the cattle guard at the gate. She checked on a herd of heifers, then drove to a fenced field where the airplane hangar hunkered in shaggy grass. J.B. would not approve of the neglected airstrip, but nobody used it now.

She parked beside the hangar, unloaded her gear and backpacked the folding easel, paint box and camp stool across the runway toward a flat spot near the river. Here the slow copper current made a bell-shaped turn around a rock outcropping and then flowed off to her right, reflecting the color of the sky.

Painting on location sounded romantic to nonartists, but in practice it wasn’t always productive: the light changed and the wind blew and bugs got stuck in the paint. Either that, or it was a serendipitous joy. Today held promise for the latter. The morning was warming up, with a diffuse light filtered by thin, high clouds.

Marik tramped through dried grass to a place where an opening in the trees framed the bend of the river in the foreground and a hazy profile of Silk Mountain in the distance. She had painted this scene many times from various angles but was never quite satisfied. Maybe this was the day. She set up her easel with a sense of exhilaration she hadn’t felt in a long time.

She described her composition with a few lines, memorizing the way the light looked on the mountain’s flat crown right this moment, and began to lay down her dark colors first. She painted fast, standing up, with the quiet flow of the river in her pulse and the tremolo of a mead-owlark like light on the grass. Time slipped away without notice.

When at last she stepped back to appraise her work, her shadow lay bunched beneath her feet. The field study was nearly finished and she liked it. She walked away, stretching her shoulders and painting hand, wishing she’d packed a lunch.

The monotone of a lightplane engine purred across the valley. She stood on the open runway and squinted toward the western sky. The airplane was flying the river line, sunshine glinting from its wings. For a disconnected instant she thought maybe it was her dad, and she couldn’t wait to see him when he landed. When the illusion dissolved, there was a lump in her throat.

The plane was a low-wing, probably a Piper. The pilot decreased altitude near the grass landing strip. The strip was still marked on aviation charts, but with no maintenance it would be dangerous to land there.

The plane dropped lower, and her heart rate increased. She stood in the landing path and waved both arms: Go away! The small plane buzzed over, then zoomed southward into the sun. She should notify the FAA that the airstrip was inactive. But that wouldn’t help if a pilot was using an old chart. She didn’t want any accidents here; she’d better mow the grass.

If she had a foreman, she could send him to do the job.

As if by some weird telepathy, her cell phone shimmied in her jacket pocket and when she answered, it was Jace Rainwater.

“Wanted to thank you for lunch and the tour yesterday,” he said. “I really enjoyed seeing the ranch.” Following up on the interview. “I talked to Ranger Ward,” he said. “They’re sending the eagle carcass to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for the necropsy.”

Marik frowned. “Good grief. How long will that take?”

“I know the regional director for the USFWS. If you like, I could phone him and explain the situation, see if he can speed things up.”

“I’d appreciate that. I hate to walk into that meeting without any information.”

He signed off with a promise to call if he learned anything. Rainwater was making himself valuable.

Back at her easel, she assessed the painting and with a fine brush added a dark arch in the sky—an eagle patrolling the river. Then she packed up her things and drove back to the real world.

That evening the wind turned sharp and the temperature dropped. One last night of winter. A charcoal sky descended, and in the morning fog lay thick around the outbuildings. The sky had just begun to clear at midmorning when the rural mail carrier drove his truck up to the house to deliver a carton of new canvases she’d ordered from an art-supply catalog.

She carried the carton to her studio. Hazy sunshine lit the north windows. Yesterday’s field study sat on the table beside her easel where she’d been laying out the same scene on a larger canvas. The message machine on the landline phone was blinking. She pushed the button and heard a pause and then the click of someone hanging up. Probably a wrong number, but it reminded her to phone Betty Jane Searcy, the mayor’s wife.

Marik had known Betty Jane since grade school, though Betty was ten years older. She taught piano students at her home for pocket money and she laughed a lot. Best of all, she didn’t take her husband’s position as mayor too seriously. When Betty Jane answered, Marik inquired about her family and then came to the point.

“Do I need to sign up in order to speak on behalf of the wind farm at the community meeting?”

“We’re really not that formal,” Betty Jane said in her leisurely drawl. “Anybody who wants to can talk. We just hope they don’t all talk at once.” Her laugh was contagious. “I’ll put your name down anyway, so you’ll be sure to get your turn. Personally I don’t understand why anybody would oppose the wind farm.”

“I appreciate that,” Marik said. “I hope Earl feels the same way.”

“He does,” Betty assured her. “Say, I’ve been meaning to call you. Jackson’s fiancée saw your painting of Silk Mountain down at the bank and had a fit over it. I’m wondering if you’d consider doing one like it, maybe a little smaller, that I could give them as wedding present. I’ll be glad to pay whatever you usually get for those.”

“I’d be happy to. When’s the wedding?”

Marik made some notes and hung up feeling encouraged.

Pilots have a definition for flying: hours and hours of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror. Marik thought the same description applied to life in general. For weeks nothing much had changed at the ranch, and then there was a dead eagle, Jace Rainwater and the threat of that town meeting. So she wasn’t surprised that afternoon when the construction contractor who’d erected the windmills called her on the phone.

“We want to get started on development of phase two,” he said. “Can I come out tomorrow morning and walk the site with you, get everything squared away?”

Two possibilities flared in her mind. Either word hadn’t trickled down through GPP&L that the town was considering a moratorium, or else the bigwigs did know and figured the opposition would have a tougher time stopping a project that was already under way—a sort of corollary to possession is nine-tenths of the law.

Either possibility was fine with her. “Come ahead,” she said. “Eight o’clock too early?”

From the white gravel road beneath the windmills, they walked down the south slope of the ridge toward the family cemetery. Lou Benson, the construction chief, had supplied Marik with a hard hat from the stash in his pickup. The protective hat was required attire for walking beneath the towers, and she put it on without mentioning that she came here every day without one.

She had first met Benson during the construction of phase one, the first forty-five windmills. Benson had a great face, weathered but clean-shaven, with distinctive bone structure. She seldom did portraits, but he would be an interesting subject, with his graying sideburns and a ponytail that trailed out beneath the hard hat and over his jacket collar. Benson allowed no profanity by his work crew and no littering. On a chain around his neck he wore the small silver outline of a fish.

He had brought along an engineer named Jim Blake who was armed with a map of the completed layout of the wind farm and a pocketful of stakes topped with blue streamers. “We’ll mark the preliminary boundaries this morning,” the engineer told her, “then survey it this afternoon.”

The new windmills would sit lower on the ridge than the others, catching the updraft of south wind on the slope. The dirt movers would arrive Monday morning, weather permitting, and start carving out the extension to the access road.

During phase-one construction last summer, Marik had done her daily chores with the grinding of the big machines in the background, modern dinosaurs chewing up the earth. She’d spent time on the ridge watching the spectacle, fascinated and unnerved by the gargantuan scale of it, the magnitude of the engineering.