Painted Horses (14 page)

She drove beyond the last house and then along the river to the log bridge. She turned in, the planks thumping beneath the wheels. According to her map the river below was the Little Bighorn, namesake of the battle that claimed Custer not eighty years ago. A young and bloody country indeed.

She pulled into a dirt lot before a cinderblock house only slightly less ramshackle than the places in town. A covered front porch ran the length of the house, a mound of discarded blankets heaped to one side.

Chickens and a pair of enormous gray geese pecked in the yard. A flop-eared goat trained its eerie eyes as she climbed from the cab and pushed on the gate. Those horizontal, coin-slot pupils. The goat stood in the walkway to the porch and when Catherine tried to angle around, the goat stepped in the same direction.

Both halted. Catherine stepped left and the goat stepped with her. She heard the scream of an infant from inside. She wondered if the goat had a sort of game in mind.

She got up her nerve and determined to push right past and to her surprise the goat stood almost daintily aside to let her pass. She heard again the shriek of the infant, noted again the blankets beside the door.

She had one foot on the porch when her ear caught a rush at her back. The goat struck her in the rump and knocked her violently forward. She landed with her hands on the weathered boards, banging one knee against the sharp edge of the step. She yelped and spun to her feet. The goat watched from the pathway, ears swooning.

A cackle went up and Catherine whirled back to the house. The blankets by the doorway shivered, shaking with laughter. She saw for the first time that one fold owned a face, a visage not unlike the parchment of a windfallen apple.

A crone. Another cackle.

Catherine felt her color rise. She said, “I’m looking for a girl.”

“Blueshirt,” cracked the crone. A hand protruded from the blankets, a claw on a ridge of arthritic knuckles. The claw pointed toward Catherine. “Blueshirt.”

The woman seemed impossibly old, older than anyone Catherine had ever met and though her eyes had clouded Catherine could perceive that once they glittered black as obsidian, glittered in almond slits above narrow cheekbones. The teeth were absent from the front of her mouth, which rendered her diction less than precise. Catherine was not wearing a blue shirt. The baby continued to scream. The crooked hand continued to point. “Blueshirt,” she said. “You know.”

Catherine studied the woman and realized she was not gesturing at her but beyond her, at something in the yard or back toward the river. Catherine turned her head uncertainly. The goat stared. The Dodge gleamed like a fire engine.

The door to the house banged open and the shriek of the infant pierced the air, a pitch to smash glass. Catherine felt like screaming herself.

A younger woman stood in the door. She had the same high cheeks and almond eyes, the copper-colored skin. A wet stain darkened the breast of her dress.

“I’m looking for Miriam?”

“Who are you?”

“I’m Catherine. Lemay. I was told Miriam lived here? Is that right?”

“What you want with Miriam?”

“I need some advice. I’m an archaeologist. She was recommended to me.”

The woman gave her a look. Puzzlement or suspicion or both. “You with the government?”

“Blueshirt,” cried the crone.

“I’m not.”

“I see you met Grandmother. She’s what you call it—a rough customer.” The woman had a strange speaking style, her syntax rising and falling in a sort of singsong cadence. “Miriam, she’s my sister. She’s in the pasture with Grandfather, pulling a calf. You seen something born before?”

Catherine admitted she had not.

“Go down past the barn. Follow the racket.”

The racket in question consisted of anguished bellowing out of a prostrate black cow, also the labored huffing and yelling of the man she took to be Miriam’s grandfather, up to his biceps in the animal’s birth canal. Miriam herself pinned the cow’s head and neck with the weight of her body, her own slim brown arms straining to hold its forelegs. She took in Catherine with a myopic squint.

“Are you Miriam?”

“Depends.”

Catherine grinned in spite of herself. She said, “You come highly recommended.”

“Don’t step on my glasses.”

Catherine looked down. A pair of heavy black spectacles lay in the dust nearby, lenses in the dirt and one arm jutting in the air, clearly flung from Miriam’s head with some force. Catherine picked the glasses up and held them.

“Chain,” grunted Miriam’s grandfather.

Catherine looked at him. “Me?”

“Chain,” he said again, jerked his head toward the coil on the ground nearby. “Please.”

She felt weak in the knees but complied, lifted the heavy steel links and brought them. “Keep away from her legs,” he told her, and drew one arm out of the cow like drawing it from a vat of blood and bile. Catherine felt her gorge rise and choked it back down. She felt her head spin.

With the chain in his fist he put his arm back in the cow, the cow struggling and blubbering and Miriam pressing down, and he spoke gently to the cow and did something inside her and then both befouled arms were out and he was hauling on the slippery chain. The wet head of the calf popped through the swollen tissue beneath her tail.

Catherine held fainting spells in utter disdain, believed them to be a put-on, a sort of feminine wile. Now she fought one herself, shook her head hard against the blackness in her eyes.

Another tug on the chain and the calf shot free in a gush of fluid. Catherine shook her head again.

He looked at her. “Want to cut the cord?”

A little later Catherine followed Miriam to the barn. This was Miriam’s suggestion, her chosen place to hear Catherine out. In the pasture Catherine had made her case to the grandfather, and the grandfather said it was up to Miriam. He said he’d volunteer himself, in the event she had need of an old-timer.

Miriam was a bit taller than Catherine and though lanky the edges of her thin-girl’s frame were softened here and there with the final traces of baby fat. Her black-framed glasses dominated her face, like a coffee shop anarchist in Greenwich Village only without, Catherine decided, any aspect of meticulous pretense.

“This dam of yours is whipping up the bad blood in these parts. The River Crow want one thing, the Mountain Crow something else. A lot of the older people on both sides aren’t doing handstands over any of it.”

Miriam had a trace of her sister’s singsong. They were in the narrow red barn, its upper structure a precise crisscross of rafters and beams. Daylight streamed here and there through fallen knots but otherwise there seemed nary a gap. The sheep outside raised a racket at the gate.

“That’s what I was trying to explain. I don’t know a thing about the dam, don’t even have an opinion. Wow, this barn is”—
nicer than the houses
, she almost said—“really remarkable.”

Miriam was halfway up the ladder to the loft. Catherine observed the lean muscles in the calves below her rolled Levi’s, her skin as smooth and brown as the polished rungs she climbed. Catherine followed. In the loft the floorboards had cupped with age but even after years of boot soles and hay bales she could still make out the lands in the wood from the bite of a saw. She crossed the floor at the haymow door.

“My granddad built it, in 1918.”

Outside in the pasture beyond, the barnyard sheep were trotting up to join the others at the gate, black-faced ewes with barrel-shaped coats of winter wool and white lambs on doddering legs. Miriam dragged a hay bale to the door. She gave it a slow shove and let it tumble to the ground. It hit and bounced once.

Catherine did the math in her head. “He must only have been a kid.”

“No, he was my age. Seventeen. There was a plan on, to convert us savages into people who stay at home. But even he was too young to remember the buffalo.”

Miriam dragged another bale to the door and upended and shoved it as well and this second bale landed crosswise against the first and broke like a brick through the middle, the twine popping with a snap. The sheep hollered and milled at the gate.

“Those beams above you, where they lock together? Mortise joints. He learned them from a book. There was a shortage of nails so he built the frame without them, then made a froe from a broken scythe and split his own shingles. He added the siding a year later, with material he stripped off a half-burned boxcar. Lumber and nails both. All of this to mind sheep and goats provided by the government.” Miriam wore a weathered pair of saddle shoes and she stamped one now on the floorboards. “Still solid.”

“I see that,” said Catherine. “Why didn’t he become a carpenter?”

Miriam shrugged. “He did I guess. Farmers are their own carpenters. Their own mechanics, too.”

They went into the barnyard and into the racket of sheep and Miriam snapped the straps on the unbroken bale with a knife that had seen a wheel so many times only the merest sliver of blade remained. Catherine helped her spread the matted flakes across the lot. The sheep surged and thronged. The slats of the gate creaked, gray wood bowing inward. “Stand back,” said Miriam. She slid the wooden keeper and swung the gate wide.

The yard became a riot of dusty wool, milling and pushing and hollering. Catherine instinctively hopped to the second rail of the fence. Miriam watched the sheep subside into their feed. She glanced at Catherine on her perch.

“Look. I don’t give much of a hoot about this dam personally but there’s an awful lot of bickering about it. Plenty of people want to see it, want the jobs and whatever money it might bring. I mean look around. You can see why. I’m in a sort of awkward spot because I can see that side of it, but I also know how the old people feel, that to them that giant canyon is part of their original way, and most of that’s gone already.”

“I understand.” Catherine felt herself sagging, and only partly from her posture atop the fence. She knew she could climb down but felt better clinging to something.

“I don’t think you do. There’s another thing to consider. For me, I mean.” Miriam squinted through her glasses. “I’m sure you’ve never seen anything like this place and you’re probably wondering why on earth anyone stays here, and what sort of a future there could possibly be.

“I mean, the future, it’s an interesting problem. I think of the people who live in New York, or Chicago, and I think they must see us as characters in the movies, something for the cowboys to shoot at. To them—to you—we’re just a part of the past. No one thinks of us in the present, let alone the future.”

Miriam still held Catherine in her gaze. Catherine blinked and looked back.

“My future here will be sheep and most likely babies, and I’m part of here, part of the people here. But I’m afraid of my future.”

Catherine nodded. She stepped back to the ground but left one hand on the gate. “I know it seems like we’re talking about two different things, but we really aren’t. Yes, I’m driving a car that belongs to the dam contractor. I’m living in a company house, and by the nature of the assignment I guess I’m working toward the same ends. But there’s more to it. I’m very out of my element here, and the last thing I want is to insult you, but do you know what the Smithsonian is?”

“Yes I know what the Smithsonian is.”

“Ok, good, and forgive me because I’m literally that adrift. Dam or no dam, I’m working for the Smithsonian Institution. I’m twenty-three years old, and not a man, and I feel like I’m talking about somebody else’s life. A short time ago I was in a position not so unlike the one you’re in now. No, it’s true. People expected me—had expectations
for
me—to live a particular life, and that’s not what I’m doing after all.

“As I understand it the dam is a foregone conclusion. It’s not my concern for any reason other than the window of opportunity it demands. If history has taught me anything”—she felt that electric jolt, that Londinium shiver—“it’s that life is short. Alarmingly so. There’s not enough of it to waste. In a few hundred days I’ll be long gone from here, with any luck excavating in Europe or the Near East. My training is not in this part of the world and the archaeology here has frankly not been my area of interest.

“And yet—I’m here to do a job, and I believe in that job. Once the dam is built, there’s no going back. Even if we find nothing we’ll at least have that, in the record, to add to the bigger picture of what happened or didn’t happen in the past. And if we do find something worth knowing about, we’ll not have been too late at least to record it. You may well be right about the way people think of you in New York or Chicago. But to me the best way to understand the present, and to take some control over the future, is to know what happened in the past.”

Miriam chewed on her bottom lip and Catherine could tell she was trying to know how to feel about this, trying to know what to say and how to say it. Finally she defaulted to the slight sarcasm that Catherine already sensed as her typical hedge. “So I’m to be what, your assistant? Your, what’s that word? Your amanuensis?”

You’re hired
, thought Catherine.
Very very hired. Pretty pretty please
. “You’re to be my tutor. My guide as well.”