Winter Moon

took only suitcases and a few boxes of personal effects, and shipped little more than books. Additional photographs sent by Paul Youngblood had.revealed that their new house was already furnished in a style to which they could easily adjust.
        They might have to replace a few upholstered pieces, but many items were antiques of high quality and considerable beauty. Departing the city on Interstate 5, they never looked back as they crested the Hollywood Hills and went north past Burbank, San Fernando, Valencia, Castaic far out of the suburbs, into the Angeles National Forest across Pyramid Lake, and up through the Tejon Pass between the Sierra Madre and the Tehachapi Mountains. Mile by mile, Jack felt himself rising out of an emotional and mental darkness. He was like a swimmer who had been weighed down with iron shackles and blocks, drowning in oceanic depths, now freed and soaring toward the surface, light, air. Toby was amazed by the vast farmlands flanking the highway, so Heather quoted figures from a travel book. The San Joaquin Valley was more than a hundred fifty miles long, defined by the Diablo Range on the west and Sierra foothills to the distant east. Those thousands of square miles were the most fertile in the world, producing eighty percent of the entire country's fresh vegetables and melons, half its fresh fruit and almonds, and much more.
        They stopped at a roadside produce stand and bought a one-pound bag of roasted almonds for a quarter of what the cost would have been in a supermarket. Jack stood beside the Explorer, eating a handful of nuts, staring at vistas of productive fields and orchards. The day was blessedly quiet, and the air was clean…- Residing in the city, it was easy to forget there were other ways to live, worlds beyond the teeming streets of the human hive. He was a sleeper waking to a real world more diverse and interesting than the dream he had mistaken for reality. In pursuit of their new life, they reached Reno that night, Salt Lake City the next, and Eagle's Roost, Montana, at three o'clock in the afternoon on the sixth of.. November.
        To Kill a Mockingbird was one of Jack's favorite novels, and Atticus Finch, the courageous lawyer of that book, would have been at home in Paul Youngblood's office on the top floor of the only three-story building in Eagle's Roost. The wooden blinds surely dated from mid-century. The mahogany wainscoting, bookshelves, and cabinets were glass-smooth from decades of hand polishing. The room had an air of gentility, a learned quietude, and the shelves held volumes of history and philosophy as well as lawbooks.
        The attorney actually greeted them with, "Howdy, neighbors! What a pleasure this is, a genuine pleasure." He had a firm handshake and a smile like soft sunshine on mountain crags.
        Paul Youngblood would never have been recognized as a lawyer in L.A. and he might have been removed discreetly but forcefully if he had ever visited the swanky offices of the powerhouse firms quartered in Century City. He was fifty, tall, lanky, with closecropped iron-gray hair.
        His face was creased and ruddy from years spent outdoors, and his big, leathery hands were scarred by physical labor. He wore scuffed boots, tan jeans, a white shirt, and a bolo tie with a silver clasp in the form of a bucking bronco.
        In L.A. people in similar outfits were dentists or accountants or.executives, costumed for an evening at a Country-Western bar, and could not disguise their true nature. But Youngblood looked as if he had been born in Western garb, birthed between a cactus and a campfire, and raised on horseback.
        Although he appeared to be rough enough to walk into a biker bar and take on a mob of machine wranglers, the attorney was soft-spoken and so polite that Jack was aware of how badly his own manners had deteriorated under the constant abrasion of daily life in the city.
        Youngblood won Toby's heart by calling him "Scout" and offering to teach him horseback riding "come spring, starting with a pony, of course… and assuming that's okay with your folks."
        When the lawyer put on a suede jacket and a cowboy hat before leading them out to Quartermass Ranch, Toby regarded him with wide-eyed awe.
        They followed Youngblood's white Bronco across sixteen miles of country more beautiful than it had appeared to be in photographs. Two stone columns, surmounted by a weathered wooden arch, marked