The Hour of Lead (24 page)

           
Matt Lawson

Linda and Lucky departed the same day as the old woman, for where Wendy had no idea. It was clear Linda had tired of the close quarters and the boy had grown too depressed to argue, his great victory turned empty by Wendy's unwillingness to deliver what he must have thought appropriate tribute. The riders did not return. She knew they would not. There was iron in the boy, the kind criminals would recognize beyond ethics or any kind of law.

“Good-bye,” Lucky said to her.

“Good-bye,” Wendy told him.

“We are going to live in a cave now. Just like Mother planned.”

Wendy did not know how to reply.

“I hate her,” the boy said. “I hate you, too. I hate all the people I know.”

“I'm sorry,” Wendy said.

“I'm not,” Lucky said.

One evening, she spied the boy and his mother setting trout lines on the river. The salmon were a month off and the weather too hot for the fish to feed on anything but fly hatches. Linda sat on the hill and directed the boy, who hauled one string of empty hooks after another. Wendy was not close enough to see the boy's face; it was only his walk she recognized: each step chopped like he wore leg irons. Linda looked gaunt.

The neighbors' buildings had been vacated up to the proposed waterline in preparation for the reservoir. The Bureau of Reclamation bulldozed any tree shorter than twenty feet and hired foresters to fell the others. The lumbermen were not permitted to harvest the timber. The government did not want their project to compete
with the mills on the westside, lest a Congressman filibuster the next concrete pour or generator delivery Roosevelt was bent upon. Evenings, burning scrub piles and outbuildings scattered like a pox on the country, reflecting against the river and smoking the moon a bloody red. Shadows of people and loaded wagons often crossed in front of the light the flames shed. A few had trucks and she could trace the headlights lumbering along the dirt roads. Mornings, only the old rock foundations and the scorched earth remained. She could sometimes smell the diesel starting fluid, and imagined even the match's sulfur, and, when she couldn't, she retrieved a box from the kitchen and struck one and let it burn until it seared her fingers.

After the first snow skiff, she walked to Hawk Creek. The falls still rushed, the clear water suspended in the cold air before it turned black in the rock pool below. The standing water was deeper than she remembered. It flooded the swimming beach. She picked through the trail to the river. It, too, was overflowed in places. For a moment she wondered if the river was dammed already. A hundred yards farther was a fallen birch. The stump had been gnawed through. Branches lay askew in the thicket ahead. She separated the brambles. Trimmed limbs and fallen pine lay across the creek, and beavers labored in the backwater.

She couldn't remember a beaver in this country. She looked close in the trees and the brush. An osprey perched on a tamarack limb. It was at least what she recalled ospreys looking like. Her father had shown her one as a child.

When she returned to the ranch another calf was dead. She shoveled the guts into a heap and built a pyre. The cow's eye rolled as she dragged it onto the flame. The next day she rode to town, her first trip since spring. She bought a noisy billy goat and staked him to the front gate, then made a bed on the porch and waited under a pile of blankets. It was nearly a week before she woke to a clatter. The goat was kicking at the pie plate Wendy used to feed it,
bending the rim flat. It ran and the tether spun it. Dazed, it sat on its knees, shaking.

She raised her rifle quietly and rested her arm on the porch rail to keep it steady. The moon was clear. It lit the corral and the grassless yard between the house and the barn. She saw the shadow skulk until it was near the fence. It made no sound. The goat was so crazy with fear that it stood frozen at the end of its cord. The beast rose and she held her sight on it. Her finger trembled over the trigger. She stared at it, stuck there. There was a flash of silver, and the goat coughed its dying sounds. Blood covered its chest. The boy, in a bearskin, opened it up. The liver was in his mouth. Blood covered his chin. Wendy watched Lucky eat and returned the gun to its place on the floor.

26

J
ARMS AND MATT STOCKED THE
wagon and bundled Roland and drove him to the cemetery tree twice a month into November until the snow, when Roland permitted them to halt the exercise. The last trip Matt watched them disappear in the direction of the creek and the tree. The sky purpled like a wound. The stars dimmed and retired as sunlight slid a blinding line across the hill-creased horizon. The light climbed the sky and the same ground silhouetted black, then brown and mottled greys. As morning gave ground to afternoon, father and son remained absent. Matt felt alone and awkward, which struck him as even more out of kilter. Finally, he returned to the ranch. After the cattle were fed and watered, he settled on patching a coat. Little else required attending. Finally, he cooked an early supper of steak and beans and played with the ball and cup on the porch, biding their return.

Soon more snow fell. It arrived quietly, not a blizzard, which piled against windward trees and buildings and drifted. The snow-fall hushed even the dairy cattle lows. The country blued under
the moon and outbuilding lights. North, a planet perched over the girl's house. The rough road's parallel tracks dented the snow cover toward the creek and tree like a pair of seams that stitched one portion of the farm to the other.

He wondered why he had not yet departed and had no intention to. Matt's accrued salary in the house safe had become three, then four stacks of bills high enough rubber bands were necessary to bind them, money enough to make home a fresh start, enough to retire his mother to town if she preferred. Wendy had not replied to his mail and he had stopped expecting she might. He was disappointed but resigned, and the fact made his return less complicated in the manner that would likely trouble him most. Still, he remained.

He looked at the corral and the outbuildings and was pleased with how well he knew them. He rubbed his belly until he raised the old scar. His exit shamed him. For all his size and strength he was a coward. He'd left a mother alone, but moreover in his mind, a woman for which he felt love but could not face. The bullet was his dodge even from himself.

He should've welcomed this quiet like every other, but sitting on the porch alone left him uneasy. He lived in a house and slept in a bed. He listened to voices familiar to him as his own. Exiting would be like his exits previous. He remained because he required the lesson in it: through thick and thin.

That night, Matt fell asleep on the sofa, awaiting Roland and Jarms. He woke to Roland sitting at the foot of it patting his ankle.

“You can't die,” Matt said.

“I can,” Roland said. “It's going to be easy.”

Matt blinked. “Where's Jarms?”

“Town,” Roland said. He rose for the kitchen. Matt listened to the rattle of the coffeepot and the water in the basin, then Roland's steps return. Together, they sat and listened to the coffee on the burner plink and boil.

“You'll keep on with Horace? I doubt he'll get through it so easy.”

Matt nodded.

“I got your word on that?”

He nodded again.

“He's a good man isn't he?” Roland asked. “I mean despite the evidence.”

“He is,” Matt said.

“I wish his mother could see him,” Roland said.

“You miss her?” Matt asked.

“No,” Roland said, “but Horace does.”

Roland rose and poured two cups. Matt sipped the coffee. It was brown as axle grease and strong, how Roland always brewed it.

“You know what the shame of it is?” Roland asked. “He thinks she doesn't count, just because she wasn't here.”

Roland drank his cup down and went to the kitchen for the pot. Matt set his hand over his cup.

“How can you sleep at all, with so much of that in you?” he asked.

Roland winked. “Guess sleep don't have the charm it once did,” he told him.

•

D
ECEMBER DUSTED THE COUNTRY WHITE
. Little was left for Matt but the cattle and they barely filled his mornings. Roland bundled himself on the porch, and Matt filled him with hot coffee and donuts Roland had taught him to fry and glaze with corn syrup. He idled the remaining time in old storybooks Roland loaned him, in which he underlined words in pencil and waited for the old man to rouse from his naps to inquire their meaning. Roland had Jarms deliver a dictionary from town, but Matt had no patience for that kind of search.

Roland began coughing up his insides not too much later. All
night, he'd be racked with jags and spit into an old chamber pot he kept under his bed. The metal clanged. In the morning, he emptied the green and yellow contents behind the house. Matt had offered to perform the chore but Roland would have none of it.

He had lost his weight and his color. Occasionally, he opened his pocketknife and shaved a fingernail to occupy himself. Matt stayed quiet while he'd finished off the one hand and started the other. The old man barely had the wind to walk to the barn, and he had surrendered chores. He accepted the worsening of his condition well, retiring to the porch, breathing the cold, clean air. Even days, he fought coughing. Matt had seen him swoon, when it hit him bad, but afterward he'd seem better for it. Sometimes Matt would glance from his book to see the old man asleep with frost in his hair.

Together, they would tarry on the porch for the few times the headlights bounced over the country and turned at the mailbox when Jarms had tired of town and gambling. The trips to the girl's place were fewer, then ceased for good. His debts mounted, growing rumor and substantiated by Garrett, who visited to attempt to bend them to his reason. He still refused to part with the grain money and Roland didn't argue.

“I'm having my lawyer come out next week,” Roland said one night. “I'm changing my will. The ranch is going to you.”

Matt took a pull from his cooling coffee. The old man watched him, then looked back across the yard. Matt set the cup down and stared at the black liquid inside.

“I'm a hired hand.”

“You're more than that, and you don't have Garrett holding a lien on you.”

“He don't have to pay,” Matt said.

“But he will.”

Matt nodded at the truth of it. The cards and the debt would wear him down; something about Jarms invited it.

Jarms rose before either of them to cook their breakfast and left the meals in the oven. He took his alone before the sun rose. All they knew of him in the weeks leading to the Christmas holiday were his footsteps. In those early morning hours, Jarms paced the living room like something in a box.

Finally, Matt rose before first light and found him in the kitchen.

“Roland ain't getting no better.”

Jarms stirred some eggs he'd scrambled with bologna. “You expect him to?”

Matt shrugged. “I ain't never watched anyone die. Not so slow, at least. I don't like it much.”

Matt went to the cupboard and found the coffee. He unloaded some into the percolator and filled the pot with water and set it to boil. Jarms turned another burner down and sampled his cooking. It was enough to his liking that he emptied the pan onto his plate. Jarms wolfed down another bite. It was hot and he coughed.

“I've took care of him,” Jarms said. “I brought him you.”

Matt got up to test the coffee, but it hadn't begun to perk. Jarms scooped a forkload of egg into his mouth. He got up and poured a cup full of coffee even though it was only lukewarm. A few loose grounds stuck between his teeth. Jarms let his breakfast lie and looked up at Matt. The skin around his mouth had gone slack and pink. His eyes were watery and red, like someone who'd worked all night and still had the next shift.

Matt lifted a Christmas candle from the middle of the kitchen table.

“You sentimental over the holiday?” Jarms asked.

“I believe Roland is,” Matt said. Roland had begun to decorate the house with wreaths and a set of tiny nativity statues Matt had never seen. “We need a Christmas tree.”

“There's some nice ones north of here,” Jarms said. “Spruce seven feet or so.”

“I didn't think any spruce grew in this country,” Matt said.

“Roland planted them.”

Jarms got up and set his plate in the sink. Matt watched him cross the lot outside and disappear into the barn. Fifteen minutes after, he emerged with a team harnessed to the sled. He'd loaded the axe and fifty feet of rope. He beckoned at the window and Matt shucked on his coat.

Jarms let Matt drive the team. Roland had planted the trees near the west end of the ranch, an hour's ride at least. Matt watched the sun spill over the country and the sky go blue and clear, promising another cold day. He wrapped his buffalo coat tighter and worked his fingers into his gloves. Only his face was exposed and the cold wind of their traveling was just enough to keep him from dozing.