Track of the Cat - Walter Van Tilburg Clark (26 page)

Half running, he followed the tracks around the
corner and  along the north side. At the northeast corner he
stopped and breathed easier, and even grinned a little. The tracks
didn’t go to the door at all. They went out straight across the
yard to the sheds and into the tunnel between them.

"What the hell is he up to now?" he asked
himself softly.

He went across the yard and into the tunnel, just
walking now. From the tunnel, he could see Joe Sam standing inside
the corral fence with his back turned. He was naked, all right, and
one of his braids had come unraveled at the end and hung in a loose
brush behind his shoulder. He had the bottle neck in his right hand,
but he wasn’t doing anything with it, just
holding
it as if he’d forgotten it. Harold came to the gate, where he could
see the whole corral. There were mounds of hay newly thrown out along
the wall of the shed, and allthe horses were lined up there eating.
The tiny feathers of snow clung on the tips of their velvety coats
like frost, and their breathing made small clouds in the cold air.
Joe Sam was just standing there watching the horses eat, for all
anybody could see. Harold spoke his name.

Joe Sam didn’t move, and Harold spoke again, more
loudly. The horses all raised their heads together and looked at him,
the hay working like big, false moustaches at the corners of their
mouths. Curt’s black stallion, Kentuck, was right in front of Joe
Sam. He raised his head with the others and looked at Harold, but
then, while the others kept watching him, their large, blue-glazed
eyes only faintly curious, Kentuck looked at Joe Sam. He reached down
and drew sideways at the hay, taking a new mouthful, but at once
raised his head again, rolling the hay between his jaws, and looked
at the old Indian.

Watching each other, Harold thought. Now what? and
stooped and crawled between the bars. He stopped just out of reach of
Joe Sam and spoke his name again. This time Joe Sam turned part way
toward him, and turned his head farther to look at him. He moved
slowly and calmly. "Give hay," he said, "Horse eat."

He was all ready with that, Harold thought. He knew I
was
here all along.

“
You’ll freeze, standing around with nothing on,"
he said. Here, give me that thing before you cut yourself."

He. held his hand out, but watched the old face
steadily. The life went out of it now. It aged greatly while he
looked at it, and became sad and confused. After a moment Joe Sam
lifted the bottle neck and looked at it.

"Bottle break," he said dully.

He held it out to Harold. When he had let go of it,
his jaw began to shake, and then the shaking spread until he was
jerking all over. He hunched his shoulders against the
jerking, and crossed his hands in front of his
crotch.

"Cold," he said.

Harold tossed the bottle neck out of the corral on
the far side, toward the haystacks. "Come on in the tack room,"
he said. "and we’ll find something for you to put on."

"Cold," the old Indian said again. "Whisky
good."

"No more whisky," Harold said, wondering if
it was a joke this time too. He took Joe Sam by the arm, and led him
in through the open door of the hay shed.

"Your breakfast’s up at the bunk-house. You
get up there and get dressed and put some wood in the fire and eat
your breakfast. You’ll feel better then." Like he just woke up
from a bad
dream, he thought. He doesn’t even
know what he’s been doing. Or is he still playing possum?

He found an old linen dust coat of the father’s in
the tack room, one he’d used to make a show in, years before, in
San Francisco. It was stained in big patches now, and most of the
buttons were gone. He took it off the nail, and held it for Joe Sam
to get into. The old man wouldn’t move, though, and he had to put
it on him as if he were dressing a young child who was thinking about
something else. Then he opened the door into the yard and said, "Now
go on up there before you freeze to death. I’ll be up as quick as I
finish the chores."

"Help," Joe Sam said.

"No. You go on up and get dressed and eat your
breakfast."

"Eat soon," Joe Sam said. "Help now."

Sucked enough blood to hold you? Harold thought and
after a moment shrugged his shoulders and said, "All right,
then. You feed the chickens. Better get something on your feet,
though. Here, take these."

From the corner under the work harnesses, he pulled
out an old pair of boots with rubber feet and felt tops that were
used for mucking out the corrals and the pig pen. Solemnly and
slowly, hindered by spasms of jerking, Joe Sam put them on. Then he
stood there, small and half asleep, lost in the huge duster, and with
the boots like a solid base under him, not anything his feet could
move. Harold smiled a little in his mind, remembering, already as if
it had happened a long time back, how he had made a mystery to be
afraid of out of this tired, little, old man, who was just holding
death off with whisky and legends. He rolled up the sleeves of the
dust coat, so Joe Sam could get his hands out.

"All right. You feed the chickens."

Joe Sam went out slowly, dragging the big boots.
Harold stood in the door and watched until he disappeared around the
end of the south shed, toward. the chicken run. Then he closed the
door and went out to start the other chores himself.

He finished by tossing out hay from the stacks for
the cattle that were waiting in the trampled snow outside the fences.
Then he went back up toward the sheds in the lane between the stacks
and the corral, and remembered that he’d thrown the bottle neck out
there somewhere. Might as well get it out of his reach for good, he
thought, but as soon as he started to look for it, saw the trenches
the big boots had made in the snow. He looked for the bottle neck out
where the tracks ended. He found the mark of it, but the bottle neck
was gone.

Still at it, he thought patiently, but then his
patience broke. But it’s the last time, by God, he thought
furiously, and imagined with pleasure how his hands would make the
old man pay attention this time. He went on up toward the sheds,
walking with stiff, quick strides.

When he came to the stake fence of the chicken run,
he saw Joe Sam already inside, standing
out in
the middle, with the wooden, half-peck measure in the circle of his
left arm. He was slowly scattering the grain for the chickens, making
a kind of ceremony of it, as he always did. Harold could not hold his
anger against the peaceful sight.

Don’t you get like Curt, he told himself, and
remembered how Curt had bullied the old man, pushing the stallion at
him until he was forced to retreat, and then many other times back of
that.

He stood holding two stakes of the fence in his
fists, and watched Joe Sam. He thought of Arthur watching Joe Sam
feed the chickens. It was like watching a kind of play, Arthur said,
a small play that had more meaning than you’d think at first. It
made you hunt for what it meant. If Arthur was working anywhere near,
he’d always stop and come to the fence to watch Joe Sam feed the
chickens, and he’d always go away afterwards slowly, and smiling to
himself. It made Arthur alive again to think of him standing at the
stake fence watching. It was at such times that the quiet, thinking
happiness, the peace as lively as hope, was in him, making a light
through his face. It was like making a prayer that worked inside to
put a hand on his shoulder then, and feel his thin body warm with
sun, through the blue work shirt. He always thought of Arthur as
watching Joe Sam in sunlight, in the spring, really, when the sun i
was just warm and full of promise, and the little movements of cool
wind came up from the green meadows, and the pines on the mountain
stood perfectly still and glistened softly in the new light. It made
the loss worse to remember what could never be dead, while you also
remembered the dead face on the pillow, that already could never have
been alive. It tore you in two directions; it made it impossible to
get across the space between.

Harold bowed his head a little and gripped the two
stakes fiercely. When the intolerable tearing was over, and the
ghosts of the two parts flowed together again, he drew a deep breath
and loosened his hold and looked up. In the half-aliveness that
remained, he was capable only of pity among the strong feelings, but
his vision was cleared like that of a man who has rid himself, for a
time, of prejudice and memory, so that what he sees is all new and
strange. Joe Sam had trampled the snow down in a wide circle with the
big boots. He was standing in the center of the circle, with the
grain measure in his arm, and the chickens were crowding around him.
They were all kinds, gray and red and black and crossed, and the
harder colors of their combs and wattles, their beaks and legs, made
bright flecks and spots upon the soft colors of the feathery mass.
The two fierce, painted little bantams darted back and forth on the
edge of the crowd, picking up the grains that fell outside. Arthur
had brought the bantams all the way from the Carson Valley. They were
his favorites, and they were Joe Sam’s favorites too. Curt always
snorted about the bantams. "No damn use at all," he’d
say. "One egg a week, as big as your thumb."

Joe Sam fanned the grain out slowly and thinly, a
handful at a time. It was the motion of a man sowing seed who likes
to do it, and has a feeling that the act is holy and should be
thought about. Only it was even slower than that, with long pauses
between sweeps when Joe Sam’s hand waited above the measure and he
solemnly watched the chickens turning and pecking about him. He
looked from one to another of them, considering each by itself. Only
when they began to move uneasily, hunting and not finding anything,
would he slowly fan out the next handful onto the snow. It took Joe
Sam a long time to feed the chickens this way.
He
was nearly done now, though. He was already holding the last handful
for the part of the ceremony he liked best. He squatted and set down
the measure on the snow beside him. Then he divided the last handful,
and holding half of it out in each hand, close to the snow, began to
make a soft, continuous sound through his teeth, now clucking, now
whistling. The bantams at once stopped hunting around on the edge of
the flock and came running to him, forcing their way boldly among the
big chickens that had shut them out before. The cock began to strike
quickly at the grain in his right hand and the hen at the grain in
his left. The other chickens knew better than to push into this final
rite. It was just for the bantams, and all the time it went on, Joe
Sam kept up the soft clucking and whistling, and at the same time
grinned with a faint, malicious pleasure to feel their tiny beaks
darting against his palms. When they had taken the last grains, he
stood up slowly, still grinning, and stopped the coaxing sounds, and
held out his hands, palms down, to show they were empty. The little
cock reared and beat the air before him with his wings and crowed
exultantly in his high, thin voice. Joe Sam laughed out loud. The
same happy malice was in the laugh that was in the grin, and a pride
like the bantam cock’s as well.

"Shoo," he said finally, and waved first
the bantams, and then all the rest of the flock, away from him. The
small magic of the ceremony dissolved, and it was hard to tell what
had made it in the first place. Joe Sam picked up the measure and
went slowly out of the chicken run, dragging the big boots so they
made channels in the snow. He closed the gate carefully, fastened it
with its wire loop, and plodded on up to the store room at the south
end of the shed.

Harold went up after him. Watching the feeding, and
remembering Arthur watching it, had cleaned the last anger out of
him. He had to remind himself, with an effort, that Joe Sam still had
the bottle neck somewhere, and of what he had already done with it.

The store room was shadowy and cold and full of the
smells of grain and of the new wood that was stacked up along the
east wall. Joe Sam was standing by the grain bins, holding up the big
lid that covered them all.

"We better take some boards up with us, to make
the coffin, Joe Sam," Harold said. "It’s too cold to work
down here."

Joe Sam looked at him without expression, and waited.

"Make box for Arthur," Harold explained.
"To bury him."

"Make box," Joe Sam said. He dropped the
measure into a bin, and let the lid down.

Harold chose five long boards that were still white
from the saw and plane. He drew them out of the pile and laid them
one on top of the other on the floor. He brought the tool tray from
the bench under the cobwebby front window and set it on top of the
boards. Then he signed to Joe Sam to take the other end. They carried
the boards out and set them down in the snow while Harold closed the
store room. Then they picked them up again, and went slowly, with
several stops to let Joe Sam rest or get a new hold, across the yard
and up the hill to the bunk-
house.

In the bunk-house, Harold built up the fire again.

"Better get your clothes on now, Joe Sam,"
he said, and waited until the old man had taken off the big dust coat
and the boots and begun to dress beside the stove. Then he hung up
the coat on the wall by the wash stand, and set the boots together
under it. He stood there for a moment, watching Joe Sam, but the old
Indian seemed to be away in his mind again, and not noticing anything
around him, so he went outside and up to the woodpile, and came back
with two sawhorses. He set the sawhorses up in the middle of the room
and laid the first board across them, and a saw, a folding rule, a
square and a blue pencil on the board. Then he looked at Joe Sam
again. He was sitting on the box beside the stove, slowly pulling on
a sock. He had set his breakfast down on the floor beside the box.