Let Him Go: A Novel by Larry Watson

though she has a woman’s cinched-in curves. Her long untamed hair is as black as Alton Dragswolf’s, her pale cheeks are heavily rouged, and her wide slash of a mouth is brightly lined in scarlet. Her attire matches her complexion and her hair color—white blouse and black slacks. By the time George cuts the Hudson’s engine, Blanche Weboy has stepped off the porch and is strolling out to greet her guests.
    The house’s two stories are an incongruity. With all this empty prairie on every side, why build up instead of out? But up it went, and maybe fifty years ago from the look of its weathered wood and approximation of Victorian design. The roof droops where a porch post is missing. An upstairs window is cracked. The screens are off the windows but the storm windows are leaning in stacks against the house. The mingled fetid and chemical odors of the outhouse and its quicklime travel too easily on the evening air.
    Young Mr. Tucker was right: if anyone calls this place a ranch it’s a term left over from a past life. Automotive horsepower looks to be the occupation now. Cars and trucks, their rusted hulls, bald tires, and grease-blackened parts, litter the grounds. These are more plentiful near the open door of the barn, as if they had either spilled out from that sagging, decaying building or were waiting to get in. From the low branch of a towering elm, the only tree on the property, an engine block hangs from a chain, and an old Ford truck sits underneath, its hood yawning open, apparently waiting for the engine to be lowered into it.
    Blanche Weboy stops, puts her hands on her hips, and calls out, I hope you like pork chops!
    As if she were speaking to an old friend, Margaret says, My mouth is watering already.
    Bill Weboy makes the introductions, hands are shaken, and for a few moments the new acquaintances mill about and take turns looking up at the lowering sky and making comments about the weather—the human equivalent of dogs circling and sniffing about each other’s hindquarters. From a nearby fence post a meadowlark makes its piping cry, and the pigeons in the barn coo an answer. Time to go in for supper.
    They enter the house through the back door, and without apology Blanche Weboy leads them through a covered back porch so cluttered they have to step over and around shotguns, rifles, boxes of bullets and shells, snow shovels, coats, boots, bins of coal, cans of kerosene, haphazard piles of wood, stacks of newspapers and magazines, jars of nails, screws, nuts and bolts, and sagging cardboard boxes whose contents are kept from view. From behind a boxor under a log comes a scurrying sound that could be a mouse frightened by all these footsteps.
    In the large kitchen the guests seat themselves at a long wooden table on which the dishes and silverware have been stacked but not yet distributed to individual settings. Evening is coming on, and the only defense against its encroachment is a kerosene lamp on the kitchen wall. The kerosene burns with an oily odor, and its light wavers and struggles through a sooty chimney that has not been recently cleaned.
    We got strung for electricity a couple years ago, Blanche says, turning up the lamp’s wick, but I’ll be damned if I’ll pay their prices. Now, she says, who can I interest in a glass of elderberry wine?
    They all refuse, though Bill Weboy finally lights the cigar that he’s been chewing on.
    Well, I don’t mind drinking alone, Blanche says, and pours herself a generous glass. She pulls out a chair and sits down next to Bill. Then she lights a cigarette and without prompting proceeds with a history of herself and her family. Blanche Weboy was born Blanche Gannon, and her ancestors, originally from Illinois, filed homestead claims northeast of Gladstone before there was a Gladstone. The early days were hard. Blanche, one of eight children, lost an older sister to pneumonia, and a younger brother drowned in a neighbor’s cistern. Another brother was thrown