Track of the Cat - Walter Van Tilburg Clark (19 page)

"Sure," Harold said. "That’s right.
That’s good."

Curt’s out there without a horse, he thought. He
must be tracking, then. That’s more news for . . . but he let it go
unfinished, thinking, Well, that’s not getting this done. He went
over and stood at Arthur’s head and looked down at him. Finally he
took a deep breath, and let only part of it out.

"Give me a hand, Joe Sam," he said, but had
to say again, "Joe Sam."

The old man came slowly across then, and stood on the
other side of the body from him, looking down at it too.

"We have to carry him in the house," Harold
said. "You take the legs."

Joe Sam bent over and touched the body as he might,
in electrical weather, have touched some metal before taking hold of
it, and straightened up again.

"Dead now," he said.

Harold nodded. "We have to take him in, Joe
Sam."

"Know all time," Joe Sam said. "Know
all time, but not tell Arthur. Me tell other one. He go. No good."

"You told them," Harold said.

"Think me not know," the old Indian said,
almost triumphantly. Then he said again, slowly, sadly, "Not
tell Arthur."

"You couldn’t help it, Joe Sam," Harold
said. "He knew. He heard you tell Curt."

The old Indian stared through the tunnel at the
yellow light in the window of the kitchen, and seemed to be thinking
about that. While he was looking, the kitchen door opened, and the
mother’s figure appeared in the doorway, black in the rectangle of
light.

"Yes," Joe Sam said, but whether to prevent
the mother, or to agree with Harold, or to finish some argument with
himself, there was no way to guess.

The mother didn’t call, but stepped down out of the
doorway, and closed the door behind her, so the light was shut off
and she disappeared.

"We take him in now, Joe Sam."

"Arthur dead. Black painter no dead," Joe
Sam said, and bent to gather the stiff legs into his arms. Harold
could make nothing certain of these words either, and, after a
moment, raised Arthur by the shoulders, which were unbending as wood
in his hands, and hard to keep his hold on.

The mother met them as they came out into the yard,
and, without a word, turned and walked back ahead of them. She opened
the kitchen door and stood aside, holding it open for them.

"I fixed up the bed in the north room," she
said. "Lay him in there."

The father was alone in the kitchen, sitting in his
place at the table, with a glass of whisky in front of him, and a new
bottle beside his right hand. He didn’t look around, or even seem
to hear them, as they carried Arthur past him, and around the table
and into the north bedroom. The lamp on the dresser in there was
lighted, so their shadows came in behind them, and then beside them,
the two forward-bending figures, and the sagging one between them.
The eagle with his wings spread that perched on the false crest on
the head of the bed cast a greater shadow eagle up onto the
white-washed wall. The mother’s finest spread, a heavy, dark blue
one, covered with curving, interlaced figures of fabulous beasts and
long-tailed birds in a woven jungle of leaves and stems and flowers,
with a unicorn looking out of the center, was on the bed and pulled
up over the pillows. Harold had seen that spread only twice a year,
when it was taken out of the chest and hung on a line in the sun.
He’d never seen it used before. It gave to the room, and to the
big, walnut bed, and even to the crest and the eagle, a new and heavy
dignity.

Carefully, breathing hard, and not altogether from
the Weight of their burden, either, Harold and Joe Sam laid Arthur on
the bed on his side. Then they stood there, looking down at him. The
mother brought the lamp from the dresser and placed it on the small,
round table in front of the north window. For a moment, then, the
melted snow on Harold’s face, and Joe Sam’s, shone like sweat in
the lamplight, and the shadow of the eagle grew enormous and
stretched away toward the west wall. Then the mother straightened up
and stood there looking down at Arthur also, and her shadow reached
over Harold and Joe Sam, putting their faces in darkness. The light,
streaming toward the bed from beyond her, showed clearly the part of
the thin face there that wasn’t hidden by the encircling black
scarf.

After a moment the mother said, "I’ll set in
here with him tonight. You go along now. I have to lay him out
proper."

"You’d better let me help you, Mother."

"Later on. You go along now.”

When they were at the door, she said, "The
girls’ll have to sleep in the bunk-room tonight. Gwen’s keeping
Grace company in there now, till she gets to sleep. Harold, you’ll
have to move out to the shack with Joe Sam."

"I’ll be in the kitchen, Mother, in case you
need me."

“
I’m all right," the mother said. "There’s
no need more’n one should set up, that I can see, and there’ll be
things to do tomorrow. You’ll have to make the coffin, for one
thing. You get your sleep. Gwen’ll put some supper on for you and
Pa, and you see to it that Joe Sam eats something this time, too."
Her words were clear and steady, but not full, as if her mind had
arranged them a long time before, and her mouth was only repeating
them now.

"And Harold," she added, as he turned away
again, "take the rest of that whisky in the sideboard out with
you when you go."

The mother bent over and began to untie the knot in
the black scarf.

She’s holding up all right, at that, Harold
thought. It won’t do any good; the old man always has plenty more
stowed away, one place and another. No matter how drunk he gets,
that’s the one thing he never forgets, where he put the rest of his
whisky. But if she can still play that game, she’s all right.

"We’ll get at the chores now, Joe Sam,"
he said.

The old Indian didn’t say anything, but turned and
went out into the kitchen ahead of him, and Harold looked once more
at the mother, busy over the bed, and then followed him.

In the kitchen he crossed to the sideboard and opened
the cabinet and took out the two bottles of whisky that were left.
When he turned back with them in his arm, the father was watching
him. The glaze of dull seeing was over his eyes already, but he saw
well enough to know what Harold was doing. He held his glass up at
Harold, as if making a toast, and laughed feebly, and put back his
head and drained off the whisky, and at once set the glass down and
half-filled it slowly and carefully. Then he looked at Harold again,
and grinned and winked. It wasn’t easy to grin back at him now. It
put the old man way apart from the others in the house, that he had
already forgotten what was lying in the north room. It made it so one
could almost feel with his hand the separate, dead world he built
around himself when he was drinking.

"Gwen’ll get you some supper pretty quick,
Dad."

"No hurry," said the old man. "No
hurry ’tall. Very ’tractive young woman, your Gwen. Lucky boy,
get such a woman. Welsh, though," he added, shaking his head.
"Father nothing but three-dollar-day mucker. Good man, but only
mucker. No ambition, those Welsh."

Harold thought of Gwen’s father, the bent, wiry
little man with the black moustache and the
grizzled
hair, sitting beside the stove in his kitchen, with his big, knuckly
hands spread over his knees, like the claw-and-ball feet of an old
chair, and the hurt, mystified look in his eyes that always came when
he went into his own mind. As if they sat together, he thought of
this big, flushed man being with him, talking loosely of success, and
Mr. Williams not answering, but that look coming into his eyes to
prove he wasn’t listening, or, if he was, the look of separateness,
of distance, that came into Gwen’s eyes when Curt began to prod at
her. The comparison made him angry and ashamed.

"He’s a rancher now," he said stiffly,
and added, "Which is what we are, I think," and went to the
bunk-room door and rapped on it gently.

"Yes? Come in," Gwen’s voice said, but
very quietly, as if Grace were already asleep. He opened the door and
poked his head in.

The fire the mother had laid in the stove was burning
now, and already the room had warmed up a good deal. Gwen was sitting
on a stool beside Arthur’s bunk, and Grace was lying on the bunk,
with her face down on her arms, and a blanket over her. She was still
weeping, but no longer with loud sobs, or with cries breaking out,
but softly and more slowly. Gwen was keeping one hand on her
shoulder. Her eyes were red from crying too, but she wasn’t crying
now.

She smiled at Harold, and nodded to show that things
were going better. Harold wanted to enter the room and go across to
her and touch her. He was deeply moved by the signs of weeping that
were on her face still, and by the gentle weariness that had come
after the weeping. He was disturbed by the strength and warmness that
came back into him, just from seeing her sitting there. He hadn’t
realized before that he was feeling so cold and strained and apart by
himself. He wanted to be filled by the strength and active warmth she
had, to go in and take her in his arms as much to comfort himself as
to change the look on her face.

She’s the only one really alive in the whole house
now, he thought.

He couldn’t go through the door, though. It was
impossible to enter against Gwen’s quiet and the privacy of Grace’s
weeping. He only smiled back a little at Gwen, and nodded too, but
then, because he couldn’t touch her, he was suddenly weakened by
that small, silent exchange of their love. At once he felt that a
great hollow had been eaten inside his strength because Arthur wasn’t
there any more. It came to him for the first time as real, that
Arthur wasn’t there any more, and wouldn’t ever be there again.
He thought clearly, making it a picture in his mind, of waking up in
the morning and looking across the bunk-room and seeing Arthur
already awake, lying there with his fingers laced under his head and
gazing up at the rafters with that silence and distance on his face
that showed he’d been awake and thinking for a long time already.
Arthur was always the first one awake, and he always lay like that,
staring up at something between him and the rafters, and thinking.
Then there came the little custom they had between them. Very slowly
and carefully, so Arthur wouldn’t catch the movement out of the
corner of his eye, Harold would reach down and get hold of one of his
boots, and then he would rap softly with the boot against the plank
side of his bunk. Arthur would turn his head slowly on his hands and
look at him, and they would grin at each other, and make a
silent
greeting with their lips, just the shapes of the words, so as not to
wake Curt.

Now he would still be waking up every morning in
here, but Arthur wouldn’t be there across the room. There’d be
only the empty bunk, and perhaps not even that, but only the logs of
the wall where it had been. It might even be better not to have the
bunk there. Just the same, it seemed to him that he would still see
Arthur’s face when he looked across, the long nose and the
up-jutting beard and the high-boned cheek, and the one big,
deep-sunken eye staring up at whatever it was it watched there in the
shadows above the rafters. He’d still see that, even if he saw the
logs through it.

He felt the first tears coming up hot inside his
lids, and nodded again quickly at Gwen, feeling starved because he
had to turn away without touching her, and withdrew his head and
closed the door.

"Where’s Curt? Where in hell is Curt?"
the father asked suddenly. "It’s dark now, pitch dark. Why
doesn’t the young fool come home?"

Harold was restored by the small, useful anger he
felt against this question, after what he’d been remembering.

"I don’t know, Dad, but he’ll be all right.
He wouldn’t try to come back after dark, not with it snowing. He’s
probably holed up somewhere, and’l1 come in in the morning. Trust
Curt to look out for himself," he couldn’t help adding. "He
should’ve brought Arthur back," the old man argued, as if
Harold had said he shouldn’t. "He should’ve come back with
Arthur, not sent him alone. Would’ve made things easier for his
mother. Now she’s gonna worry ’bout him too."

Harold felt the quarrelsome reply coming up in
himself, but took his mind past it, and thought of saying the other
horse was back, and Curt wouldn’t walk it after dark, and decided
against that too. He looked away from the old man’s indignant,
hushed face, into the north bedroom, and saw the mother standing in
the middle of the room, holding up Arthur’s good black suit on its
hanger, and brushing off the shoulders of the coat.

He looked back and said, "He’ll be all right,
Dad. He knows all the tricks, and the snow can’t last long this
time of year."

He set the bottles down on the sideboard and put on
his coat and cap and came back and reached the lantern down from
behind the stove and lit it. He took the two bottles of whisky in his
arm again, and went to the door and opened it. He stood there holding
the door and looking at Joe Sam, and waited. When Joe Sam had gone
out past him, he stepped down into the snow and closed the door, and
they went around the corner of the house and up the slope toward the
bunk-house. Joe Sam walked ahead, and both of them leaned a little
against the slope and against the falling snow. The wind was moving
more often and more strongly now, pouring the flakes in a white
stream across the lantern light, and making a vast, muffled sighing
in the pines on the mountain.