The Hour of Lead (20 page)

The riders remained, silhouettes atop of the rocky breaks. The boy measured them as they reappeared. They paralleled the road. He said nothing, just tapped the sheathed knife in his belt. The dry weather left the air smelling dusty and full of something. Over the hill, Wendy heard him make water.

The boy killed a pheasant and an early duck, and Mrs. Lawson and his mother plucked and boiled them in a kettle and served the birds with a jar of pickled cabbage. The boy finished before them and left to check on the animals. Wendy was tempted to give him some company. She heard Linda offer her something. More tea or a stale cookie from a box, but she was suddenly too exhausted to jar herself to pay attention. Mrs. Jefferson took Wendy's hand. It was hot and clammy and Wendy would have guessed not very agreeable to the touch. She studied her palm against the woman's, both rough like two pieces of earth colliding.

“Would you like a child?” Mrs. Jefferson asked.

“I don't see much in the way of children in my future.”

“If you did, would you want it? Or would it be just another crop to plant?”

Wendy stared at her. “I'd want to want it,” she said finally.

Linda said. “I want my child. I always have. It's unfair, wanting your babies. They're much better off chores. I'll bet your parents loved you very much.”

“They did, I think.” Wendy said. She closed her eyes and felt sleep coming for her, like her father slipping into her room, standing, watching, a thing he had done every night of her life with him. She wondered if he lingered by her empty bed now and dreamed her in it. She worried she was splintering his heart.

“Yet you left them?”

“I am selfish,” she said. “My guilt trumped their affection.”

“Still?” Linda Jefferson asked.

“Still,” Wendy replied. She excused herself and found the boy in the horse corral. He sat a fence post, watching them eat. She could see his eyes shining in the house lights. The river and the house eaves gleamed, as well, like polished glass in the darkness. The full moon glowed and the stars. It reminded her of being drunk on the porch. Everything carrying its own light. She'd cloaked herself in an afghan but was still chilly. She'd counted herself good before, but a good that was only dry country, watching the river course past, going its one way. She shook her head at her thinking. It amused her being so high and mighty once. It saddened her, too.

According to all accounts the coming dam would make the river turn backward until it had filled the broad new reservoir like a washing tub, and no current remained, just flat water stirred only by the wind or a fish swimming through it.

Long ago, she'd daydreamed time backed up that same way. Evenings, she'd undo the rifle shot and watch Matt rise past her window glass and take each gift from her porch to his house like she was the one giving. There, he met her on the hill and put all
their awkwardness behind them, drinking from the jug until they were sober and enjoying a long walk. Later, he and Linda journeyed into a snowstorm and found his father and brother, held captive there so long, and delivered them home where they, like two halves, were joined, but she was alone. Feeling good turned as hard a prospect to manage backward as it did traveling ahead. The knowledge left her not wanting anything.

So she quit her daydreaming, stopped any thinking, except what was needed to run the ranch. Winters, she attempted Emily Dickinson a few times, but the cool leather binding felt like saying words behind someone's back and she shifted her attentions to dime westerns and histories, where the doing mattered more than the feeling.

The boy beside her knew none of this. To him she was just the woman who permitted him to watch her undress. She had nothing but rancor for their indiscretions, but it was what he wanted, to know what he hadn't before. She was not thinking of him for those mean purposes, however. It was herself she was readying. The dam would come and she would have to learn to stand in front of a man naked. It was only time that separated her from the boy.

•

W
ENDY AND THE BOY HAD
seen neither person nor beast in the fields for two days when the riders met them on the road. They raised their hands to hail them, and the boy halted the horses.

“Would you have any water?” one asked. He wore a ball cap and looked dirty, as he hadn't shaved. The other was clean-cut and short. Wendy rustled through their gear for a water jug and passed it to the men. They drank their fill though the day's heat was unremarkable.

The small one returned the jug. His face was wet and smooth.
Wendy had watched the boy studying the short man's throat as he drank; his Adam's apple bobbing was somehow obscene. Now the man met the boy's stare, glaring him into boyness.

“You strong enough to break earth with that?” the dirty-faced one nodded at the plow.

“He manages fine,” Wendy replied.

The man dismounted and inspected the tines. “Looks like it could use a whetstone.”

“Time permits we will get to it,” Wendy told the man.

“Man would make time.”

The boy fidgeted. He stared at the back of the horses, his ears red.

The man dismounted and took the reins from the boy. “Maybe we could bunk at your ranch. Look after things.”

Wendy unlooped the rifle from the seatpost.

“All right,” the man said. He returned the reins to the boy but slowly at his leisure. “So much for the Good Samaritan, eh?”

Wendy reported the details to the women upon her return. The boy ate in silence, then posted himself as sentry on the porch. That night, Linda didn't sleep. Instead she propped herself in the rocker and watched the boy outside. The others fell to slumber quickly and she was glad for that. It was cumbersome loving someone and an exercise that required privacy. In the darkness, she did what she imagined every mother did: she listened to the sound of the boy's breaths and watched his calm face. Perhaps it was because she was older and tired and in need of stillness or perhaps it was that she'd relinquished all people except the boy. He was dressed and groomed and productively laboring and looking at Wendy like she was a star fallen from the heavens. Linda recognized that moment in boys' lives. She once fanned it aglow for spelling, poems, or arithmetic. When she taught, she could never comprehend a mother's doting, but she understood that vigilance now. You steered a child through
the day safe, and it gave you permission to watch it sleep. It was the sleeping children that still loved you.

She took another sip from the moonshine in her cup. She wondered why drinking did what it did, how the world became a place to get off from. She imagined men grunting over their fires cooking meat or just warming themselves, in fear, whispering a god's name for solace. Folks used liquor similarly, like prayer; the destination was all that differed. The boy was in one camp, hunting his orders from the stars while Linda remained in the other, taking hers from a quart jar.

Wendy rose and sat on the sofa across from her. Linda had switched to tea and offered Wendy a cup. “It's from tules. It's warm.” Wendy drank the strange mixture. It nearly scalded her tongue.

“Where is Lucky?” Wendy asked.

“Out there.” Linda nodded to the window. “Something's going to happen.”

“Seems quiet enough.”

“Quiet is what sets him off,” Linda said. “Even when he was a baby, he was a prophet. I remember once—he was four or so—he pointed at the sky. It was clear, like tonight, just constellations and planets and the moon. We were going to collect berries the next day. And he started bawling. He wailed and wailed. Finally, I got why out of him. He wanted to make jelly and it was going to rain. I told him there needed to be clouds for rain, but he just kept sobbing.”

“Did it rain?”

“No, it was the hottest day of the year.”

Wendy looked at her, puzzled.

“It was his first endeavor,” Linda said. “He's better at it, now.”

She sat quiet a minute. Wendy sipped her tea.

“What else has he predicted?”

“He anticipates the seasons.”

“Is he right?”

“Within a few weeks.”

“Anyone can come within a few weeks of predicting spring.”

“But few spend time trying. Prophecy is in the attempt.”

“Did he predict the fire?”

“I suppose so, as he started it.”

“He burned the house?”

Linda nodded.

“Why?”

“Because of what he predicted would happen afterwards.”

“Was he right?” Wendy asked.

Linda lifted the pot from the stove and refilled both their cups. “I don't think he's finished yet,” she said.

It was quiet.

“He really started the fire?”

“He's a determined child,” Linda said.

21

A
WEEK LATER
, W
ENDY AND
the boy broke from evening chores to see two horses strange to the place hitched to the corral. The smell of cooking met them before they reached the barn. Inside, Mrs. Lawson had roasted and stuffed two chickens. Linda perched on the edge of the living room sofa, and the two strangers who sandwiched her were the same that accosted Lucky and Wendy the week before. They passed a jug. The short one nodded. Wendy ignored him.

Mrs. Lawson disappeared into the kitchen and returned with two more glasses. Wendy and the boy sat along with Mrs. Lawson.

“These are my long-lost cousins,” Mrs. Lawson said. The two nodded at Wendy and the boy. The dirty one handed the jug to Mrs. Lawson, who filled all their glasses. They were union men hunting new work. Mrs. Lawson had offered them a meal and the tack room for the night and a pair of cots and a stove there.

They all sat for ten minutes in silence, tipping their drinks. The shine was strong and tasted of juniper. Lucky drank quickly and
poured more from the jar for himself. Hunched together drinking, they were just faces lit by the glass lanterns. Wendy stared through the window into the dark, until she saw the reflection of the boy, who was watching her in the glass. She gazed back, as if their eyes locking were some puzzle that she might think her way through. Linda looked on, too, a tall and helpless goddess pinned to the earth.

Mrs. Lawson set the food on the table and all but Wendy loaded their plates with a thigh and leg, potatoes, dressing, and canned green beans. The men reached across others' plates for whatever pleased them enough to double their helpings.

Linda watched her son. He'd always been cautious with food, as if eating, like handwriting, were graded for neatness. He was more so now that he wore fresh clothes. The habit infuriated her; he took double the time over a meal she did. But now she recognized his fastidiousness was to be admired. His mind had become circumspect as a hawk's; it left little to error.

The cousins abandoned silverware as soon as etiquette appeared past notice and lifted their meat to their mouths and tore it from the bone. Their lips popped and their tongues lapped the grease drippings that clung to them. They shoveled beans with their forks onto buttered bread. The spatters pocked the gravy and potatoes, lumps as ugly as cancers that they ate as if it were a king's meal. They devoured all the food before them.

Mrs. Lawson cleared her throat. “How come you boys left Seattle?”

“We used to work in the warehouses until companies hired scabs and their own cops who beat any man who wanted a living wage,” the shorter one replied. “We busted a few heads to square things and they got the regular law to put warrants on us. So we decided to seek work elsewhere.”

“You were communists?” Wendy asked.

“No more communist than you are a professor of literature. Politics don't feed anybody.”

“No offense,” Wendy said.

“I am offended,” the ball cap replied.

The room remained quiet a long while.

Wendy said, “I can't blame a man for making a living.”

The man nodded. “It's a mean world,” he said. “The politicians are the only ones that can afford a philosophy.” He touched his face below the whiskers. “I almost got killed in them places and it turned me owly. One man had an arm he hurt that mended straight and hard as a bat with no feeling in it. He beat me to a hump. Killed several. Suppose I was fortunate. One of the fisherman on the docks sewed me up or I'd've bled out.”

“I remember they had themselves a lion at the zoo there. Heard it roar for miles. Then the darkies ate him.”

He wiped his hands upon the napkin and so did the other. “We thank you for the meal,” the short one said. “Please excuse us while we build our bunks.”

Wendy watched them go, then retired to her room. She was dreaming more, or remembering them because she woke with each one. In some she was lifted full size by her father who had turned large as a church steeple. Another, Matt came to her and whispered a word she couldn't make out. “What?” she asked. But he wouldn't answer. It was his face, she knew.