Moontrap - Don Berry (26 page)

Monday rubbed his forehead, trying to understand. He
stood at the fireplace and took a locofoco from the little box on the
mantel. After striking it, he applied the bright flame to the
fuzz—stick. Suddenly there  was a little column of flame in
the center of the kindling.

"I'm just saying, be a little careful,"
Beth said. "She's going to be taking things very serious. She's
going to get low in the mind and want to hide in a corner. She's
going to feel like nothing's worth doing, you understand? And you
have to remember that she's not thinking the same as you're used to.
You want to be careful, and not upset her too much."

After a moment the kindling had caught, and Monday
began to pile larger wood around. "You know," he said, "the
baby's a bastard. A half-breed Shoshone bastard."

"Babies are babies," Beth said
indifferently.

"
Might could be," Monday said bitterly.
"The law don't think so."

"
Listen, Monday," Beth said. "Don't
blame the law for somethin' you should have thought of nine months
ago."

"
Sure. It's my fault. I know it. I'm just
sayin'."

"
Just feelin' sorry for yourself is what you're
doin'."

"
Might could be," Monday said. "Don't
matter what you name it."

"Listen, my friend," Beth said. "You
best forget about your own disappointments for a while. Seems to me
you best concentrate on making life a little bit pleasant for y'r
woman. You ever ask her what kind of life she wants?"

"She's my wife," Monday said. "She
wants what I want."

"You ever ask her?"

Monday stood. "Thanks for comin' by Beth."

"
All right, " she said, standing at the
table. "I'm pokin' my nose where it don't belong. But one thing
is my business, Monday. I'm just telling you that Mary is going to
be—scared and miserable for a while. You're going to have to
remember."

"I'll remember. "

"All right. That's all I ask. Be good to her.
Don't let her get too upset." She walked to the door and opened
it. She stopped in the doorframe and turned back. "And for
christ's sake," she said with exasperation, "quit feelin'
like the guilt of the world's on your back. You're just a man, Monday
you're not Jesus Christ. Everybody makes mistakes."

She went out, closing the door softly behind her.
Monday methodically fed the fire a little, and swung the coffee pot
in on its long hook.

2

He brought Mary and Little Webb home a few days
later, borrowing Swensen's wagon for the trip. It was something new
when they came into the cabin, as though it had never happened
before. In a way, Monday felt that he would think of his life in the
valley as beginning this day. Mary stood in the doorway. holding the
tiny figure of the child. Silently she looked all around the room:
the fireplace. the bed. the cupboard at the back and the little
window beside it. She seemed to Monday more like a bride than a
mother, silently considering the house to which her man had led her,
where she would live her life from now on.

There was a clumsily arranged spray of flowers on the
bed, gathered hastily just before Monday had left for Oregon City.
Mary saw them, and smiled gently. She went over to the bed and
carefully put the tiny, bundled baby down. Picking up the flowers,
she turned to Monday.

"
Well," he said, embarrassed. "You're
home again, Mary."

"Yes," she said.

Monday took her shoulders gently in his hands and
leaned forward to kiss her on the forehead. "You best sit down,"
he said. "Don't get too tired."

She sat at the edge of the bed, and the movement
partially wakened Little Webb. He squalled, and Mary picked him up,
holding him against her breast and rocking gently. Over the child's
head her eyes continued to rove about the room, taking in each
detail, as though she had not lived with them all for seven years.
She said nothing, and Monday could not tell what was passing through
her mind.

Suddenly, for no apparent reason, he saw her eyes
fill with tears, and she bent her head, resting her cheek on Little
Webb's downy head.

"Mary," he said softly. "Mary, what's
the matter?"

"Is nothing," she said. "Just—just
happy to be—home again." She gestured to the room.

Monday sat down beside her and put his arm around her
shoulder. It was strange, he thought, how a woman would cry when she
was happy—

"
Mary," he said, "this is the
beginning for us. Right now."

Mary rocked back and forth with tiny. slow movements,
soothing the child.

"
Do you remember what I said, Mary? About having
roots now?"

"
Yes," she said. She was humming to the
child, a song without melody, like the flight of a bee.

"I've thought a lot about it," he said.
"I've thought about the last years, and all the trouble we'ye
had getting—I don't know, getting settled. Being a part of all
this. And I know what's wrong, I know what's been wrong."

Mary lifted her head, her eyes seeming almost
luminous in the dusky interior. She waited calmly for her husband to
continue, but Monday saw the hope that flickered behind her silent
gaze. Her tear-fillled regard disconcerted him, and he looked down at
the tiny round head of Little Webb, now silent again. Absently he
reached out with his free hand to touch the fuzzy skull of the baby
gently with his fingertips.

"It's been—me. I guess, all the time. I never
really put my back into it. I never really tried hard enough."

She looked at him for a moment in silence. Then the
tears welled up again, and she looked back down at the child in her
arms. "You work very hard," she said softly.

"
It ain't that so much, it's—I don't know, I
just wasn't willing to do a lot of things you got to do to get along.
I figured to just work my land, an' let it go at that. But you can't
do it that way. A settlement ain't just land, there's people, too.
And I guess I never really got it straight that I had to work at
getting along with the people, too. I never really tried.

"
But—from now on, Mary, I'm really going to
try. From now on we're going to be part of this country, Mary. Not
just squatting here on the river, but real part of it. Do you—can
you see what it'll mean?"

"Yes," Mary said. "Yes, I can see."

"We'll see more people, get out more. I know
it's been awful lonely for you here, without anybody to talk to or
anything. But we'll change all that. We can do it, Mary. We've just
got to try. "

Monday got up and paced over to the bed, becoming
excited with his vision of the future. It was going to be all right,
he thought. The business at the courthouse, all the rest of it—it
was all part of a pattern, and he was only now coming to see it. It
had been his own reluctance to make the changes the new life required
that had been at the root of his troubles all the time.

"
I'm going to give Little Webb something to be
proud of," he said. "From now on, we're going to be part of
this territory. An' if it means doin' a few things I don't feel
like—well, that's too damn bad. I'm going to get along here. Mary,
do you see what I mean?"

"Yes," Mary said. "Yes, I see. It will
be better for you that way." A tear dropped from her cheek and
glistened on the child's head. Tenderly Monday touched it.

"Better for all of
us, Mary," he said gently. "It's going to be all right,
from now on." But he couldn't tell if she'd heard him or not.

***

In the next weeks he settled into it, working with a
sense of purpose he'd never known before. Enlisting the help of
Devaux and Peter Swensen, he got the wheat in in five days, working
from first light until it was too dark to see. The two men were, he
thought, indifferent workers, but it went all right. Peter had a
tendency to drift over to Rainy and engage him in a discussion about
the end of the world, but Monday finally put them on opposite sides
of the field, and it went faster after that.

Only Webb would have no part of it, and Monday was
obscurely disappointed. The old man had simply snorted contemptuously
at the idea of "helpin' some poor bastard dirt-clod," and
wandered off into the hills to see how things were there.

Monday knew where he was going now, and it was a good
sensation; it was what had been missing in his life before. He
finished each day aching in every muscle, tired with a different
fatigue from what he had known, a strained tightness from the
constant repetition of the same movements hour after hour. It was not
something he liked, but he figured he could get used to it. He could
get used to anything, now; he knew where he was going, he knew what
he was working toward.

Mary slept a great deal during these days, almost as
much as the baby. Monday had many hours alone, sitting before the
fire in the evening, thinking things out. In his mind he noted
different jobs to be done, new approaches, plotting out his plan of
attack as carefully as though it had been a horse-raid in the
mountains.

He put aside his own feelings bit by bit. What was
pleasant, what was enjoyable, ceased to be a matter of importance. He
began to test his endurance against the work, against the compromises
that had to be made, as he had tested his strength against the purely
physical problems of the mountains. Deliberately, he forced himself
to go to the Oregon City mill and make arrangements for the grinding
of the wheat in the fall. He was polite, refused to take offense at
the unfunny comments about mountain men farming. After the percentage
had been established he stayed at the mill, leaning back against a
rail and talking with the other farmers; weather, the prospect for
the crop, the hundred small variations of the same comment.

At first he was self-conscious about it, feeling as
though he were pretending to speak some foreign language and making a
fool of himself with his exaggerated casualness. But he found the
other farmers took it all for granted, thought nothing of it. It was
the way life was. At first they had regarded him with the suspicion
he had grown so used to in seven years, but after the first
encounters this too diminished. He found if he shook his head and
said, "Looks like a bad year," half a dozen times or so, it
was considered conversation.

In a fashion it was absurd, and he knew it. But he
told himself it was part of the big game—one of the rules, and he
would learn it as he would learn all the rest of them. He had set
himself to play the game, and he would play it to the bottom.

He made several trips into Oregon City that could
have been avoided, simply to talk, to make himself part of the
community that centered in the town by the falls. And the strange
thing was that he found the game was not as complicated as he had
expected. As long as he didn't say what he thought, but contented
himself with the ritual repetitions, he got along very well. There
was not, after all, much to talk about in this new world he was
entering. Weather and crops. That, and trouble. He quickly learned
that you didn't talk about what you enjoyed, but only about things
that gave you trouble. It was a funny contrast, he thought, with
Webb. The old man was constantly telling himself stories about the
times he'd had fun. the times he'd loved. Here it was not like that.
The well was dry, you thought the lettuce was going to rust (though
it hadn't rained now for nearly six weeks). that bastard Brown hadn't
returned the hoe he borrowed a year and a half ago. It was serious.
It was all serious, and as long as you didn't forget that, you got
along line. Life was one long series of problems to be solved, and
that was what was important. It was grim. But that was how it was,
life.

He was a little surprised by the ease of it, for he
had expected something that ran much deeper. But all you had to do
was float along with the surface, say the expected things, and there
was no trouble. You could remain your own man inside. As long as you
made a gesture for the sake of appearances, they left you alone.

So he talked the meaningless talk, and listened to
the sarcastic gibes at neighbors and friends, and occasionally
essayed one or two himself. It didn't matter what they were, as long
as they were critical. To himself he shrugged. Another unwritten
rule, and as easy to follow as any other. In a sense, all you had to
do was detach your mind from reality, and follow the lead of the
others.

Mary continued listless and depressed. Monday was
glad now that Dr. Beth had warned him what to expect, or he would
have been seriously worried. She was very silent, and very weak. She
moved about the house as slowly as when she had been big with child.
She spent as much of her waking time as possible outside the cabin.
Whenever it could be done, she took her work out to the porch. She
often stared out at the hills with her work forgotten in her lap, and
at those times she seemed very far away. She seldom smiled these
days, and he sometimes caught the glint of tears in her eyes as she
looked out over the ridges and hills of the valley.

Watching her, he was more than ever certain he had
made the right decision in trying to make himself a part of the
valley community. He could realize how terrible her life must have
been before, married to a man that was always somehow apart from the
others, always an outcast. The thing that was difficult was that it
was so hard to talk to her. She lacked interest in everything.