Lime Creek (3 page)

He sews a catheter into her jugular vein and then
hangs the first of the clear plastic bags from a hook he’s screwed into an overhead beam. Then he attaches a long transparent tube that goes from the bottom of the bag into the portal at the mare’s neck. And I watch with him for a few minutes as the liquid begins to drip and fall.

Elizabeth’s mixed up a batch of that milk-replacement, and she’s got a baby-bottle of it with a rubber nipple, and she’s setting in the next stall talking to the foal and rubbing its forehead and trying to get it interested in what she’s got to offer. I kneel down with her and tell her that I’ll get the baby started, and could she get Stony some dinner, which reminds me that we hadn’t had our own yet either. And she goes off.

Well the baby keeps nosing around the bottle in my hand with that wonderful soft skin of the newborn, and I’m setting up against her as Elizabeth had been and probably mumbling some of that same foolishness in the foal’s ear as I watch her eyes wide and new. And her eyelashes when she blinks somehow make me smile. She finally gets it in her mind to try what’s behind the nipple and begins drawing at it, with those lovely eyes of hers going back and forth and every now and again looking right at me.

Looks to me like she’s found her a daddy, Stony says. And I look up to see him standing against the opening to the stall with his arms crossed on his chest and a big
smile on that mug of his. The mare’s quiet, he says. We’ll keep the fluids to her as long as it takes. Will she eat anything? I ask him. And he says, Oh she’ll nibble at some grain every now and again but she’s not real interested. The baby takes another bottle of the milk substitute and then just puts its chin down on its knee and closes its eyes and goes to sleep. And I move away and close the stall door real quiet-like so’s it’ll take its rest.

We all eat in the runway between the stalls with Stony periodically checking on the mare. He’s got three of those fluid-bags strung together and hanging there so it gives us time to eat our dinner. But while we’re still at it, there’s a thrashing from the baby’s stall and we look in at her just beginning to get her legs. She gets her hind legs under her and nearly locked and pauses like that, quivering, but when she goes to rise up off her elbows she rocks back and falls over.

Stony’s gone back to the mare and Elizabeth goes in to the foal. She’ll do’er, I say, standing back and watching. For it’s always been a miracle to me, the birth, and then seeing them make themselves stand upright and soon after bouncing and jumping around like they’d been practicing their locomotion for months instead of just hours.

Elizabeth crouches in the corner beside the little thing as it somehow forces itself back into the same position. Pushing up its hind legs all aquiver, and with its little
tail sucked right flat against its butt. Elizabeth slides her open hands under its belly, not hardly touching it, and as it pushes up off its front and starts over again she supports underneath it so that all four legs are straight and locked. It hesitates for just a moment, still trembling with its new little muscles that only an hour or so ago had been what it only needed to paddle with in the warm safe waters of the womb. And then it extends one foreleg for its first step, but before getting it accomplished it pitches forward and dives woefully back onto its face.

Don’t take very much to learn to fall, Stony says quietly beside me. But the getting back up again, I say, the will to get back up. Aye, Stony says, for each and every one of us I reckon. And inside myself I say, Amen. And then again, A-men.

We get Stony all fixed up with a pillow and that ancient great-grandma’s quilt that must weigh fourteen or fifteen pounds at least. Elizabeth feeds her filly again which had been sleeping on its side weary from the hard journey it’d traveled that evening. All the way from that far inland sea which is all it’d ever known before being cast up on a rough and fearful shore. And then more wondrous than frightening amid the quiet hours of myriad discovery, it had found itself not seacreature at all but something apparently unsuited to its new environment.

A fragile tottering stick-legged thing, having known
its first hunger and then perhaps its first independent dream too of unimagined places where its legs once they worked more harmoniously might take it. For it had finally managed its first few precarious steps, and known warmth again after its startling discovery of the cold, and recovered the darkness too after its incomprehensible discovery of the light. And there appeared to be many mothers for its choosing. None that slept beside it just then but many kindly mothers nonetheless.

Stony tells Elizabeth that he’ll feed the baby through the night as long as he’s right there, for she’ll no longer have such a luxury after he leaves. But, No, she says, she reckons where she’ll be in that baby’s stall every two hours for the next three days. And then she’ll proceed from there onward until the poor little thing is ready for weaning. And I can see right then and there that this whole event is about to provide an actual treasure of learning for someone, and as I walk back up to the house by myself I figure that I’m probably the one that’s about to be reeducated. For Elizabeth seems to know just precisely where this whole affair is headed. And I’ll be damned if she isn’t up and down all night long those first few days.

And when the filly can finally go for four whole hours between feedings, it almost seems like a vacation,
at least to me and our alarm-clock. Like when you get a spate of twenty- or thirty-below-zero weather, and it sets in real good and firm sometime after the new year. Why, a rise up to say five-below-zero is near to almost being downright tropical. And a day that actually makes it all the way back to zero, so you’re neither on the plus or the minus, why that’s practically shirtsleeve weather. Making you wonder as you leave the house if you really do need your coat or not. And although you’ve still got nearly five months to go, you know that spring is absolutely inevitable. And hellfire, why a man’s hopefulness can just about soar on rosy new wings unfettered.

I’ve already finished shaving and I’m nearly dressed when the alarm goes off for the six o’clock feeding. I tell Elizabeth that I’ll take care of that one, and I’ll see her by suppertime. I guess she’d fixed Stony some food at the four o’clock, and as I enter the barn all is quiet. I creep past the baby’s stall and see that she’s asleep with her legs stretched out straight as if she were dreaming of standing squarely upright. And then I look in at the mare and Stony and, I’ll be, I whisper to myself.

The lights over each of the stalls are off but the ones that are spaced further apart over the runway are still on. The last one is opposite the mare’s stall so that the baby
lies in near darkness, while a dim half-light spreads over most of Stony and the mama.

He’s got the fluid dripping at a slower rate and of the three bags that hang there she’s almost finished with the second one. A couple of empty plates are stacked on top of each other and pushed off to one side with a fork laid across them. And Stony is setting in the bedded shavings with his back leaning away from the wooden partition and his legs out before him. And with the mare’s face lying across his lap.

He’s still got the quilt wrapped about his shoulders but it’s nearly fallen off one side of him. His left arm is turned away from the horse, with the fingers of that hand almost touching a saucer that holds an empty teacup. As if he had just had time to set it down before sleep had finally overtaken him, in midstride so to speak. His other arm lies across the mare’s neck, and his face rests on her head. And they’re both sound asleep.

All God’s creatures, I think as I stand there watching them. And the beauty of it, of the oneness of all life, just about freezes me so that I am almost afraid that if I blink I might disturb them. All God’s creatures.

Behind the house and out the kitchen window with the mountains shimmering violet and white in the distance, all the summer’s bedlinen ballooned and flapped in the wind. Like the furling snapping sails of an imaginary old schooner that had somehow run aground in the tall green pasture before making it back to the level swaying ocean somewhere beyond. That none of the three boys had ever seen.

Luke and Whitney raced each other up the stairs but Whitney got there first, grabbing the compass that Lonny, their older brother, had given them and shown
them how to use. And that they both tried to watch at the same time as they came bumping back down. Until Whitney had to catch at the banister, so that Luke could snatch it away. But then Whitney grabbed it right back even before the little red needle had ceased turning. There was a tin with pie left in it on the kitchen counter that Whitney said was west of the stairs, but when Luke plucked the compass back out of his hands he corrected the heading as actually being west-northwest.

They took the pie tin to the table and stood there with each of the two pieces dripping through their fingers and crushed against their faces. Their father, Spencer, was off with the haying and Lonny was with him. They didn’t know where their mother, Elizabeth, was for the pickup was gone too. But surely not all the way into Lewiston because this was Saturday and she always went to town on Monday.

The sunlight glared through the window and over the floor and up the table where they stood with their mouths full, chewing madly to see who could finish first with bright red cherry-fruit all over them like a paint. They both went to the sink at the same time. Luke dragged the stepstool up so they could stand and thrust their hands under the rushing water that bounded off both of them like they were puppies in a bath.

The bedsheets through the window were like gleaming bright banners sailing away from the lines that anchored them until the wind fell, and then they looked like big whitewashed walls lacking ornament or artifice. The mountains seemed to ripple in the sun almost purple and with a silver band of old snow that never melted completely outlining each peak and saddle as if they were the seldom exposed ramparts of the fortress of the world that you could only see glimpses of for a month or two in the middle of summer before the snows returned to cover them up all over again. And just then the mountains seemed to ride on top of the sheets, which were flapping again like massive white wings. And on the other side of the tomatoes.

Arranged in neat rows on the sash of the lower half of the window and crowded up against each other on the sill and the ledge above the sink where the bar of soap and the bottle of detergent and the sponge had all been moved aside so that as many tomatoes as could fit in that parallelogram of almost blinding brightness could bask and sun in safety. Already red and just about ripe and obviously set there to ripen even further, that Elizabeth must have brought back from the greenhouse in East Lewiston because there wasn’t ever enough time where they lived to grow tomatoes down on the ground. What
with how late spring arrived and then only that brief respite from the cold that they called summer squeezed in between the end of June and the end of August. And with that prescient suspicion of October already coloring the wind somehow like a precursor sometimes just after dusk.

And so there just wasn’t enough time. Whether in the high valley that protected the town of Lewiston nearly eighteen miles away or higher still amongst the vast ranchlands carved out of the government territory long ago that couldn’t be called a settlement with any manner of confederation except that one fortunate tributary ran through most of it. And too, with one of the original old homesteader’s cabins centrally situated where Doris Moore still lived, widowed and with her children long grown and gone, as postmaster of what had always been called as long as anyone could remember, Lime Creek.

And even called Lime Creek in each of their tongues by the Shoshone and the Cheyenne and the Crow and the Sioux who at one time or another had also used that land long before the Whiteman. And with all the other creatures that of course had always been there even before them, but that needed no names. Neither for themselves nor for that harsh and beautiful place on the earth that was their home too. Lime Creek.

And so there just wasn’t enough time to grow things like tomatoes. And if you were ever tempted to try when the ground got warm and it stayed warm at night which was above freezing, blooming an almost childish optimism that maybe even persisted until the first frost which was sometimes as early as the middle of September with the leaves in the high country already beginning to change in secret pockets until you could almost see it in the very quality of the light thickening somehow as the age of the year slowly declined, then you’d no longer be able to convince yourself that perhaps this time you might succeed. And having known it right from the start. And so all the bounty of your careful ministrations just those early rock-hard green tomatoes the size and consistency of golfballs that only needed the warm and enough time, which they could never get. At least not in that country.

Both little boys reached together to close the faucet, and then used opposite ends of the same dishtowel to more or less dry their hands. The mountains of course had always been there, but that sudden new perspective with all those bright red tomatoes and all of a perfect size and shape staring them right in the face—and just beyond, of those gleaming white sheets that for the moment hung limp again like empty flat canvases almost begging to be
used—transfixed both of them and at the same time moved their instincts down the same identical path.

Whitney puts his thumb on the biggest one just to see what it feels like, with Luke leaning over his shoulder. And then to their amazement Whitney’s thumbnail just disappears. They both look at each other with less than an instant of consternation that almost simultaneously bursts into peals of such rollicking laughter that they nearly fall off their stance. And then without another thought or even another word and imbued with that perfect knowledge of what must be done, Luke is standing down and Whitney is carefully piling each of the tomatoes in Luke’s arms which are cradled against his chest. Perhaps about a quarter-bushel of ripe tomatoes that reaches all the way up past his chin.