The Hour of Lead (14 page)

She left soon after the boy's third birthday. He and the boy had ridden out to check the stock and they found her absent upon their return, along with her hope chest and the clothes she favored most. Roland saw wagon tracks from a road with many neighbors. It was impossible to know which had colluded with her.

Between cows, the stranger turned and met Roland's gaze with a stone face.

“If you're working off a poker loss, you're free to go,” Roland said. “Most everybody knows Horace cheats.”

Matt shook his head. “He just said he had work.”

“Well, I can see your intent is honest. No one's risen before dawn in this house aside from me in years and even longer to put in a day's labor,” Roland said. “If you're in with Horace I have my reservations, however. Most of his friends are shirkers and so is he. He's my son, but he's no friend to sweat.”

“I don't know him well enough to say,” Matt said.

“We'll see,” Roland said. “Come on inside. I suppose I better feed you at least for the morning's milking.”

The kitchen window faced east and grew light with the day. Roland hacked two lengths from a rope of German sausage and fried six eggs in the grease. He watched Matt examine the room. The man studied each windowsill and doorjamb, the high cabinet tops and the simple wainscoting. Roland kept no knick-knacks and hung no photos. The walls were scrubbed clean. No bugs dotted the light basins and no cobwebs draped the corners. He was a fastidious man and he inspected Matt like he might a mess that required his attention.

Matt had not spoken, except when answering him. He'd made no attempt at small talk or to ingratiate himself. Most he'd known so scotch with words were sullen and bitter, overall poor company, their quiet as watchful as a deacon's with the same disdain. Scorn, though, didn't seem to be in the way the man carried himself, nor in the manner he sat, slightly bent as if his size were a card he didn't like to play. The whole way he'd put himself together seemed to Roland off center and unfinished.

The dog whined and pawed the screen door.

“That pup a stray?”

The pup glanced like it was inclined to pose a question. “Queenie,” Matt told her. “Mind the traps.” She disappeared for the barn and his saddle.

“How'd you come to tame her?”

Matt shrugged. “Found her and fed her till she could hunt. Doesn't need nothing from me any longer, guess she just likes company.”

“Till she doesn't,” Roland said.

Matt shrugged. “Not much different than the rest of us, then.”

“No.” Roland chuckled. “No I imagine not.”

Roland set some day-old biscuits on the table, along with the loaded plates.

“Go ahead,” Roland told him. Matt did. Roland fixed his own plate. In a bowl at the table's center was a ball and cup apparatus he'd worked from a stick of soft wood years ago when Horace was small. Matt eyed it through the meal and after and finally reached for the toy. Roland finished, studying the awkward hands flipping and catching. He sighed and shook his head. Here he was seventy and Horace had brought him another child to tend.

15

I
T WAS CLEAR
R
OLAND
J
ARMS
felt morning belonged to him; just as his son lay claim to night and carousing, the old man believed he owned first light and work. The first day Matt had shamed him, and the man woke ten minutes earlier each following until soon it was barely past night when they commenced their labors. Matt slept lightly, and the pup nipped his feet when it saw the house lights lit, then the horses nickered, expecting to be fed, which put Matt in the barn where Roland found him sharpening the scythe or retooling the harnesses. Roland filled two coffee cups from a tin pot. Neither said a word about the hour.

On the whole, this suited Matt fine, as did the man. A yellow notepad remained in Roland's breast pocket except when he paused to scratch a line through a chore, which he categorized on lists titled
dailies
, w
eeklies
, and
seasonals
. Once started, he was liberal with coffee and time to consider what next necessitated their attention. In Matt's experience foremen who headed most crews were little more than workers who'd stuck. Neither better hands
nor keener wits than those they bossed, they possessed a narrow view of labor, fixed toward working a man an hour without let-up rather than whether the job he was doing made any sense. It turned men to plodding animals and often left the most important chores incomplete or shoddy. Roland seemed to realize waiting on one end of a job meant not having to rush the other. He didn't speak without a purpose and Matt replied only with a nod unless the work required more detail.

Until noon, the old man accomplished more in an hour than most good hands in a day. He could lug remarkable weights, employing his legs for leverage instead of bulling a load with his back and arms. But after they broke for lunch, he lost steam. He didn't abandon Matt, and, for a time he battled to keep pace, but an hour or so past high sun, he wore down and conceded to supervise, which at first irked Matt—he wasn't accustomed to others inspecting his efforts—though he soon realized the old man was just hankering to participate.

Roland appeared content to live the same day over and over, and working the days with the old man, repeating his repeating, Matt recognized no sadness in his routine, no boredom. Work was praying the same prayer every day, and, as with true believers, it held the calm and certainty of ritual. Roland, though vulnerable to a melancholy spell occasionally, had reconciled those conflicts abundant in a man's conscience. He lingered sometimes several calm minutes over a cleared field or a herd of freshly branded steers, and those moments, Matt understood, were what divided father and son.

Roland never said a word about town and Matt had no interest. They sent a list with Horace, who might get what they needed if he remembered to stop before his card game and whiskey. Those days Jarms forgot, Roland and Matt just toiled at other chores. Jarms's toots typically lasted two days to a week. Matt would notice his horse, hungry and ridden down, before he saw any hint of its rider.
Returning, Jarms slept until afternoon. Evenings he'd wash and shave and deliver them cold beers and half a glass of homemade shine to share while they shelved their tools and hunted what they required the next day. Jarms never drank any himself, in fact did not imbibe at all in the house. He seemed to enjoy watching the old man, though. Roland informed him of the ranch's state: the chores they finished and those that needed their attention. Jarms encouraged him. He enjoyed the discussion of work well enough, as long as he wasn't required to participate.

After a hard rain, though, they required the seed drills straight away. Jarms was two days gone, leaving Matt, finally, to collect them. That night, Matt sat in front of the barn with a bucket of lye and water washing his shirts, when Jarms came to him in the barn.

“You take it easy on him. He tries to keep up by you.”

“We don't work past dark,” Matt said.

“I'm not talking time, I'm talking what you do in the time.”

“I'll keep it in mind.”

“Good then.” Jarms scuffed the dirt with his boot toe. “Sorry about them drills,” he said.

Matt nodded. “Isn't no way to undo it.”

“I don't want it undone,” Jarms told him. “I want it done with.”

Matt hung a wet shirt on a rope strung to dry them. “You find yourself a woman?” he asked.

“I did not,” Jarms said. “I ain't shopping, neither. I don't care for them.”

Matt said nothing.

“It ain't like that. I just want nothing to do with them otherwise. The boys that tied me up. That was over a woman. Well, it was over me paying the tab at the Chinese restaurant.”

“You welch?”

“Nope. Squared the bill in full. That's what made them so hot. They don't believe in paying Chinamen and won't until the law
calls and then they only offer half and the deputy tells the Chinese take it or leave it. Well, I got to gabbing with one of them boys and he went on about getting a grandmother and other kin this way from California and I figured our tab would just about foot train fare, so I cashed it out. Then I paid them a thousand dollars for a share in the place. I like their food. That damned Garrett.” Jarms shook his head. “He's got more money than the rest of us and is the maddest the Chinese got any at all.”

“So what's this got to do with women?” Matt asked.

“They born us, didn't they?” Jarms said.

Matt wasn't inclined to argue and extend the conversation. This did not deter Jarms, who, over the first month of Matt's stay, regaled him with a fog of information that, Matt eventually began to puzzle through. Jarms had come late to town. Roland's books were his studies most of growing up and he figured the ranch's ledgers and taxes for his numbers. For compositions, he penned irate memos to Sears and Roebuck demanding reimbursement for items he'd not purchased. The company sent intermittent checks anyway.

He knew nothing of school until the high grades. The place suited him. He told lies as honestly as most spoke truth and with a good deal more hoots. Teachers thought him backward and wouldn't bend him over for any kind of freshness, requiring only apologies for his ignorance and promises to mend his manners, which were heartfelt and unfelt at the same time. That he could manage both in one sitting was his charm.

Roland enrolled Jarms in the college in Pullman hoping studies would square him to level where he had failed. Horace drank with silver-spoon fraternity brothers and diddled their sisters under frilly sheets. He had no patience for them otherwise; though one, Virginia, a funny drunk, he dated for a semester. She wanted pinned, though, and forsook him for another who would do her the honor.
Being jilted irritated Jarms. He called upon her mother who lived in town and seduced her in the same room he had Virginia, which brought him back to even in his eyes.

Classes, he knew less than the professors and more than the students, who attended university to postpone something Jarms saw no reason to. They bored him enough that finally he purchased Shakespeare's collected, Sandburg's Lincoln, and Milne's Pooh and put his heels to the place.

The years following, he worked and idled and idled and worked and finally only idled. He couldn't say how he'd come to what he was, just that he had. He was not inclined to excuses and not one to crow about his indiscretions, either.

Garrett seemed a black raven circling Jarms's stories, swooping close to chatter before he disappeared, though he seemed to hover always. After his own graduation, Garrett returned to the ranch and, over the next few years, took on much of his father's duties, and, unlike Jarms, embraced the notion of being a rancher. He met a young woman who had traveled from Nebraska to keep house for the Methodist minister's family and, after the appropriate courtship, married her. He preferred traditions in a manner Jarms recognized but had no map to.

Garrett visited the ranch occasionally. His trimmed beard hairs glistened in the sun and softened his face's sharp lines and pointed chin, but his voice was loaded with more bitterness than Jarms's gibes. The two were sharp-tongued, and they cuffed each other with banter constantly. Jarms was quick, but Garrett bested him at swearing and name-calling, which left it close to a draw. Jarms had a lacking in him, whether it be a mother or just plain emptiness, and baiting Garrett answered it. When inclined, he'd wrench his neck and tuck his head into one of his shoulders like he was pointing with his chin, then lay a word trap for Garrett, which left him red and stammering.

The tavern gutter dogs, as Roland called them, were steady visitors as well, Petey and the two silent Swedes who turned out to be noted drunks. Petey was pledged to Garrett, but Jarms found Petey's loyalty so funny that he became a running joke. The Swedes remained shuffling hangers-on, enjoying the others like the first row of a circus does a clown nosediving ten feet into a pail.

Near sunset, the sheriff arrived in a Model T that looked to be in fair shape, though, on the rutted road, the frame jostled the cab until his door fell open and nearly spilled him under the wheels. He pulled the brake and hiked the last hundred yards. Roland and Matt patched a feed crib the bull shattered a fall ago. Roland glanced up, then returned to his hammer and nails. Matt stood.

“He knows the way,” Roland told him. Roland measured and marked the board for Matt to cut next.

The sheriff was a bean of a man and barely a shadow in the cold winter sun. His badge had torn his pocket stitching and the silver dish faced the ground. He looked a man whose pay alone kept him employed. He eyed the nearly-finished crib. His hand brushed the loose shavings from the rail.

“I come out to talk sense,” the sheriff said.

“Well, talk it,” Roland told him.

The sheriff sighed and looked toward the house. “I swear, at times I see where he gets it from.”

“Surely his mother,” Roland said.

“That's what you'd have us believe, Rolly. But the truth roosts a lot closer to home.”

Roland dusted his pants.

“He's behind in the card game,” the sheriff said.