The Hour of Lead (13 page)

Jarms donned a fresh fedora and an expensive sheepskin coat and clothes not long past a tailor's needle. He wore glasses with wire frames, which made him look intelligent and thoughtful. It appeared he wouldn't know a worry from a snipe den, though his harassers had snubbed his wrists behind his back and tethered him to one of the cottonwoods.

“Can he tell him how much in China?” Jarms asked.

“Not there either.” Two others nodded. One smoked a cigarette and tapped his ash into the damp earth. Both were dressed in work clothes. Snow swirled in the orange torchlight like moths made crazy with lanterns.

“Chinese got a right to earn a dollar.”

“They can get their living on others, not Americans.”

“Jesus, you are a trying bastard,” Jarms said. “You know, you shouldn't try and think. It isn't kind. You get a thought in your head and it turns lonely rattling around all by itself. They're in America. That makes them Americans.”

“I got a right to think,” Pete said.

“Yea, but no talent for it.”

“Goddammit, Owen, you can shut up, too,” Jarms said to one of the pair listening.

“I never spoke a word,” the man replied.

“You think too loud,” Jarms told him.

“Ain't you particular,” Owen said. “I'll think nothing if that'll please you.”

“You got little choice in the matter I can see,” Jarms added.

“What makes you the genius?” another man asked. He stood beyond the torchlight and when he approached he held a bourbon
bottle in one hand, and in the other his own piece of haberdashery, a fine Texas Stetson that neither labor nor wind nor any other weather had put a mark on.

“Breeding,” Jarms said.

The man laughed and offered the bottle to the others. Tied, Jarms went without. He was not inclined to quit his argument, however. “Chinese are from China,” Pete said.

“And the Germans are from Germany as your grandpa would tell you when he emigrated this way with a bunch of others who knew no English but lots of work,” Jarms answered.

“Chink can't tell an American to do anything anywhere,” Pete said.

“Not even in a place they own?” Jarms asked.

“They'd never own it enough to boss white people,” Garrett replied.

“Ain't Chinamen eating in Chinese restaurants. It's white people,” Jarms said. “Your rules they would never make a dollar. So I bought in and you have to pay now.”

Garrett waved a hand in front of his face. “You talk too much. We didn't bring this silly bastard here to lawyer, goddamnit. Get his wallet.”

Jarms offered no fight and one of the group pulled a canvas square from his pocket and retrieved the bills. He offered them to Garrett who leafed through them.

“Forty-two dollars,” Garrett said.

Jarms nodded.

“Well, take comfort in the whiskey we will drink with it,” Garrett said.

“I don't believe so,” Matt said. He remained in the darkness.

“Who's that?” Petey asked.

“No one you're familiar with. Just give the man back his money and move on.”

Garrett laughed. “I'm not inclined to take orders.”

“And I'm not inclined to give them,” Matt said. “But you're stealing good money from a man I can't see done a thing wrong but best you in an argument.”

“Petey, get the car,” Garrett said. “Unless this interloper decides to draw a bead, I'm done with debate for the evening.”

“You'll find that a difficult prospect.” Matt had circled to their car and yanked the plug wires. He threw one into the light and followed on his horse, the yellow dog in the rear. He held the other wires in his hand.

Jarms laughed. “Sinners meet your reckoning.”

“The lord's got no quarrel with me. I'm as much believer as you're heathen.”

“You attend the Mass but you don't believe in nothing but your own good.”

“The two coincide,” Garrett said.

“They're not supposed to,” Jarms said. “That's the point. You got to be meek to inherit the earth.”

“I don't have to be anything of the kind. No brother this or that or the other thing is likely to tell me what to do. And if the Lord wanted it different it would be different.”

“All of that does not concern me,” Matt said. He had in the past years taught himself to speak in slow and careful syllables. His intent was to allow time to consider the next word while he was speaking the first, but the habit left him sounding detached and dangerous, which his size could not help but multiply. Matt pressed his back teeth together, until his pulse slowed. Snowflakes clung to his hair and black duster's shoulders. The torches alternated shadows and light over his face and mad, unkempt hair, and he was aware that he was opaque to those facing him and this would push them to add their own well-being to his argument.

“Return the money,” Matt told Garrett.

“We'll just rob him tomorrow for it,” Garrett said. The others nodded.

“And if I'm not here to witness it, I'll have no complaints. But I am here now.”

“You really think you can whip four?” Petey asked.

“I don't believe I will have to,” Matt said. “I will break two and the others will see reason. But if need be, we will find out if I can stop four.”

“If you knew him you'd take his money and his clothes,” Pete said.

“That may be so. But right now all I have is your word on it and that's not ample.”

Garrett said, “I will surrender the money to you. What you do with it after, that's not our concern.”

Matt nodded.

“You'll return us the wires?” Pete added.

“Yep.”

Garrett approached the horse and extended the money and Matt delivered him the plug wires. He watched the four skulk into the darkness and listened as they repaired the engine then started the car, though the motor sputtered as they had not managed the correct firing order.

He unsheathed his work knife and cut the ropes binding Jarms, who, free, built himself and Matt a cigarette each and lit them. They smoked a while in silence.

“They're right,” Jarms told him. “You get to know me, you might want to do me worse.”

“Well lucky for both of us that's not likely to occur.”

Matt tugged the horse in the direction of the car.

“You looking for work, I'm guessing.”

Matt halted the horse. One abandoned torch smoldered. A thin flame waned and diesel smoke rose from a blackened rag, which had been secured to an axe handle.

“I got it if you're inclined.”

The dog nosed the torch handle. The flame doused against the wet grass. A thread of smoke rose then vanished. Matt turned the horse toward the man.

“Just so you agree. You've been warned,” Jarms said.

Matt nodded. “I have been warned.”

14

R
OLAND
J
ARMS WOKE TO
M
ATT
mucking the barn. It was near dawn and he thought the clatter was one of the dairy cows banging the barn latch, anxious to be relieved of her burden. He had to listen longer to recognize the sound as work. He collected his coffee and strolled from his house across the grey yard.

The stranger had already restacked the failing bales that made up the winter-feed and was raking the remains and piling them into the feed bins. The older Jarms enjoyed a smoke and kept his silence. When the stranger finished the bins, he unlatched the barn and steered the milkers to their stalls. Roland tucked himself behind the tool wall as the man and cattle passed. He listened at the gathering of the buckets and the stool and the cisterns, then milk when it splattered the tin.

It had been some time since he'd studied anyone's work other than his own and he welcomed the occasion to. Roland didn't consider himself a more diligent laborer than the next man, or even more efficient, he just supposed he enjoyed the work more. Though
he met and married the only woman he'd likely love at Northwestern University in Chicago, not until he returned her to the ranch and resumed the duties that were in fact more rituals than labors did he feel he'd closed the circle.

Helen saw it differently, he knew. He hoped at first that she would thicken like pine in his country and make her own shape, but came to recognize her form would be grafted to his, his taproot extended by xylem and phloem to her branches and their leaf or fruit or nut. Over time, however, even that metaphor blanched and it became apparent that her heart was hostage to some other life that he could not imagine, though he waited for its return like any seed he'd planted. However what she endured wasn't a season, it was the country itself and like country, it was endless when stranded amidst it.

He'd hoped family would make a difference. Roland had pulled calves most of his life and figured bringing forth his child would be just one more chore. He met Helen's water breaking with little trepidation. He saw her pain as simple, like that of an animal's.

No doctor was near and even if there had been, snow left the roads impassable. There was not even the comfort of a neighbor woman for her. By the end of the first day, her cries shook him so, that he plugged candle wax in his ears while he saw to her. They didn't speak those hours nor after. Looking back, it seemed to Roland talk between them had lost its consequence. The child would be their conversation, and he longed for it those two nights like he had never longed for anything, not even her in the days of her purity.

When he finally took the baby from her and held her bloody stillness in his hands, he wept. He buried the child alone, on a high place above Rebel Flat Creek. The water ran year long; he vowed she would never hear silence. He chiseled the name Faith so deep into its bark that the tree bled sap from the wound for a year.

Eighteen months later, he did the same, though the child was a boy and the name Elvin.

When Helen told him of her third pregnancy, he bought some timber for a coffin. He'd used scrap to construct the first two and it had since weighed on his conscience. The child arrived easily and like the others was still as a stone. Roland spooned honey and bourbon into Helen until she slept. When her bleeding had slowed, he went to the barn and began the box for the child. He stoked a fire in the potbelly stove and set the baby near it. The air was quite cold and the fire was raging, which made it difficult to keep the baby close enough to warm without scorching it. He found himself breaking from his work continually to adjust the child, then badgering himself for taking the trouble when it would be no better for it.

With the casket finished, he lifted the infant into it. Then, he noticed the child held the fire's warmth even upon the frigid timbers. He watched the steam rise from it. He undid the blankets. The child's ribs fluttered almost imperceptibly and Roland recognized the strings of a breath's vapor over its open mouth.

He touched the baby's cold skin and it stirred. He lifted it from the casket. It was a boy he recalled, though he checked to make certain of the matter. Naming called for more audacity than he or Helen could muster. Still, now it seemed imperative. The only name he struck upon was his own, but he was a junior and had never been comfortable. He recalled an uncle, then spoke his name: Horace.

As soon as the weather was suitable, he bundled the boy into his coat, and together they rode to the cottonwood. Roland thought to begin his formal education that day, and, as they trotted, he expounded on the virtues of summer fallow and putting seed in the ground before the first leaf's turning. But he grew bored with that line of chatter and, instead, took on a story. It turned into Hercules and the twelve labors. Roland was careful to point out that the tale wasn't only concerning a man's muscles. It would wind up the bent
all his teaching would follow. He told of the Greeks and the Romans and later, when the boy had memorized those, he traded a winter's worth of straw to a neighbor widow for Malory and Shakespeare's collected plays. It was a mistake, he knew now, filling a child with so many yarns. Horace believed that life itself was only one story following another. It left him no time for working or learning much other than how to spin every day into a yarn.

Roland might have done it differently if he could have. But it had not been in him to. He had recounted the birth in his head daily. At first, he was the hero of the tale, but soon, another version alarmed him. He wondered in his hurry to plant his grief if he'd buried his previous children alive. He'd only found Horace on the boy's own casket floor. His stillness was not unlike the others'; it was in fact like theirs enough for him to take to wood and nails. He summoned from memory as much as he could from each birth but could not recall anything beyond the babies' still bodies. He tried to argue the impossibility of his not recognizing life was in them, but he would remain in his heart unconvinced.

Roland spent so much time with the boy that he and Helen ceased to know one another, and he realized, too, she had ceased to know Horace. He had hogged the boy, taking on the fathering and the mothering, leaving her with something worse than a dead child, one that didn't have much use for her.