The Hour of Lead (25 page)

Jarms recalled the direction and led them to the trees despite snow covering the landmarks one might use for bearings. He smiled, pleased with himself. They broke the crest of the hill and surveyed the trees.

“Jesus, we'll never get these back,” Jarms said. The smallest of them was twenty feet tall.

“If we did, we'd wouldn't get one through the door,” Matt said.

Jarms drank from a flask and spat. “Goddamnit,” he said.

They sat a while. Jarms took the reins and began the team south and west. They left Roland's farm and passed others, each house issuing a stream of smoke from its chimney into the frigid sky. It was past lunchtime and Matt wished he'd packed for a longer trip. Still Jarms drove and coaxed the horses over the white hills.

Near mid-afternoon, they hit the Palouse River. It was black and sluggish. Jarms stopped and let the horses drink. Matt could see scrub brush and leafless cottonwoods, but none resembled a Christmas tree. Jarms's face was as blank as the country they were covering.

A mile later, they hit a rise, and on the other side was a farmhouse
and shops and barns spread across the river bottom. In the yard was a smattering of smallish spruce.

“Whose place is that?” Matt asked.

“Garrett's.”

Matt frowned.

Jarms stopped the horses in front of the house and knocked at the door. A grey-haired woman answered. She spoke to Jarms before she slipped on a coat and rubbers and walked across the yard toward the sled and the trees. She was weathered, but her eyes were blue and thoughtful. Matt took the coffee cup she offered and thanked her. She set the pot on the seat and disappeared to start another.

“Let's get to it or we'll be stumbling around in the dark,” Jarms said. His axe blasted the trunk of the smallest tree. Though the chore was not enough work for one man, they hacked at it together, then loaded the tree and laced the rope across the branches to secure it. The woman stood in the cold and nursed her own coffee cup, standing extra straight as if to prove the cold couldn't shrink her. Jarms returned the pot and clucked the horses up the grade. The woman raised her hand, but Jarms didn't return the gesture.

“Where's the family?” Matt asked.

“Old man's dead. Garrett lives down the road.”

“She here all alone?”

“As it should be,” he said.

“That your mother?” Matt asked him.

“Yep.”

“Garrett. He your brother?”

Jarms nodded.

Matt stared into the blankness of the snow. He watched the horses break the crust that had formed with the day's freezing and their backs glowing in the last of the sunlight. The runners sounded like water.

“Them trees at our place were hers,” Jarms said. “She loves them. Roland put in a few every year just so she could transplant them into the yard. When she left, he told me the story and when I was big enough to swing an axe I cut them down except those last few.” He laughed. “They were a long way and I was lazy even then. Anyway, we didn't have Christmas trees after and I was happy for it.”

A hawk circled and dove. It rose with a mouse in its talons. Matt wondered what it would be like to see the country from that high, to cover it on the wing and not see the lines where one ranch ends and the other starts. He wondered how far he'd see and what would look different and what would look the same.

“Roland don't know nothing, so don't you tell him,” Jarms said.

Matt stared ahead. The cold burned his face.

“You know, as mad as I was, if I'd known she was in this country when I was little I'd have hunted her until I found her. I'd have looked everywhere.”

“I don't doubt it,” Matt said.

“But she never inquired. Not once.”

He quieted and said nothing more. It was a moonless night and the whole of the land turned black, except the farmhouses that winked with yellow glows from their windows. Jarms steered them through it without fail. It was his country. Matt could not help but feel his friend knew more about it than a man ought to.

•

L
ATE THAT NIGHT
, M
ATT AND
Jarms propped the tree in Roland's makeshift stand. Roland watched them haul the tree into the room with enormous satisfaction. He had found an oak apple crate full of trinkets and, together, they hung the ornaments on the thawing branches and unraveled a string of dried cranberries and circled
the tree with them. In the kitchen, Roland boiled some beef hide for tallow and poured candles. He mounted each in tin saucers and drooped them over the branches strong enough to bear their weight. Matt watched as the old man lit one after another, then turned the house lights out. Jarms felt a melancholy come over him in that low flickering light, as if they might be the shadows the candles were licking at, and he didn't know if he feared their disappearing or their overwhelming him.

Roland constructed a pallet on the sofa and Matt brought a pillow and blanket from his room to join him. They drank cider and talked and played rummy until Roland began his nightly coughing spasms and eventually settled down to sleep, and Jarms excused himself and disappeared into the night. It was past midnight when he returned. The candles had burned half down and their wax dripped white across the green needles. “Shhh,” Jarms whispered.

“What you got there?” Matt asked.

Jarms's bent to show him. What Matt saw first were the child's eyes. The infant stirred a little and turned toward the warmth of Jarms' arm.

“She gave birth two nights ago,” Jarms said. “I thought it would be a week at least, but it took to milk right away.”

“You pay the girl?” Matt asked.

Jarms shrugged. “What I could. She didn't complain. It's a girl,” Jarms said. “I hadn't counted on that.”

Matt nodded. “Still a baby, though.”

“I suppose so.”

Matt fetched a coat from his room. They lay the child on the soft lining then wrapped it with both lapels. Jarms boiled some milk and poured it into a bottle he'd scrounged from town some time back. The baby fed without waking. Jarms set it between them. He patted Roland on the arm, but the old man just turned like he was having a dream, and Jarms decided to let him sleep.

He turned away from the child and fell asleep too. Matt, though, watched the baby's chest rise and fall, and its eyelids flutter. He realized it had no name, and it troubled him. One of the tree's decorations caught his eye.

“Angel,” he said to the girl.

He turned himself toward her and pressed his little finger into her fist, and felt for her grip in return.

Roland awoke in the darkness. The tallow had nearly burned down and soon after there was so little light in the room that he didn't make out the child at all. Later, as he rested, he discovered it through its exhalations, quicker than the rest. He rose again and gazed upon its tiny face between the sides of the coat. He looked at the two who had brought it, one his son of blood, the other a boy he'd constructed.

27

M
ATT WOKE WITH FIRST LIGHT
, his finger wrapped still in the baby's fist. Her chest thumped fast as a bird's. Jarms snored quietly. The candles had melted to waxy flowers. He touched each one to make certain it had cooled. Satisfied, Matt perked the morning coffee in the kitchen. He returned with two cups—Jarms would sleep till noon—and set one on the end table next to Roland's head. It was then he saw the old man's eyes half open and his mouth slack. Matt sat in the sofa crook and eased his hand to Roland's throat, but felt nothing other than his cooling skin.

Inside the heavy coat the baby began to mew. Matt lifted her, coat and all. She was warm and he set her to his chest. Fresh milk was in the kitchen. Matt boiled some in a pan, weakening it with water like he might a calf. When it cooled, he put the mixture into the bottle. The baby took it and he rocked her in a kitchen chair.

With her belly filled the child dropped off. Matt wrapped her in his coat once more and put her next to Jarms. Outside, the sky had gathered clouds enough to keep the worst of the cold back.
Breaking the bales soon had him in a light sweat. The cattle bustled for their fodder as he broke the thin ice covering the water trough. He listened to them work the hay. He built a fire in the barn stove. After the cattle had their fill, he shooed them aside and shut the door. Their tails switched and their eyes wept with cold. He added another log, and when it took, two more and shut the stove door. He milked the heifers, though his hands ached. Roland had said he'd get used to it, but he had not.

Outside, something puzzled him. At first, it was a low fog, but, as he studied it, he recognized the smell: smoke. He figured it might be a choked chimney spewing but it appeared too heavy. Back in the barn, he saddled his workhorse.

The snow had softened and he made poor time. Halfway, he knew where the fire was and he goaded his horse forward. The house was a blackened skeleton. No wall stood. From the hill where he and Jarms had parked the car, Matt could recognize nothing of the family or the girl. He rode in. Near the porch steps lay the old man and woman, scorched, but not so much that Matt couldn't make out bullet holes in their chests and blood clotting their clothing.

Matt searched through the house's ruins for the girl. He found only chair ribs and a couch frame and a metal bed so hot it blistered his hands, and scarred clothes and fractured plates. The girl's room had fallen into the kitchen. Her brush and hand mirror lay on the stovetop. A magpie squawked. Matt saw it disappear in the high grass behind the house and heard another cuss it. Matt walked their direction. The birds scattered to a nearby leafless elm. The girl was slit from breastbone to her sex. The sack the child had been torn from lay in the cavity, puddled with the liquid it had breathed. There was a placenta and the severed umbilical chord in a pile next to the girl. Matt wondered why the coyotes hadn't gotten off with her, but the fire must have worried them. Matt pondered what he'd
put inside her and the ruin it had come to. In the tree, the magpies waited. He waved his arms at them, but they only continued their vigil. He heard the footfalls of a horse and turned to see Garrett crossing the ground between him and the house.

Matt stared up at him. “Your doing?”

Garrett shook his head. “He didn't have any money for the girl. He'd been trying to gamble all week to raise it, but nobody'd even stake him enough to keep in a game.”

“You might have,” Matt said.

“It would come to no good. You could have done for him for a year and more. These dead are on your head. I've got money,” Garrett said. “I told you that. I even tried to help get you some of your own. I own half the place now, maybe more. Every debt he incurred I bought. It's all on paper. I told you I wasn't going to let him waste the place.”

“No, you said you didn't want to waste the man.”

“The man is temporary; the land is permanent.”

“He's your brother but you watched him flounder anyway.”

“Blood is thicker than water, but dirt trumps both.”

Matt glanced up. “I ought to beat you to death.”

“And you could. You'd be better off. But you won't.”

“There's been enough blood,” Matt said.

He was suddenly tired and argument wasn't going to alter what was. He walked away from Garrett toward the shed where he sorted through the tools for a shovel and interred the freshly dead.

•

H
E DISCOVERED
J
ARMS MAKING A
coffin in the barn. Hickeys of beat wood surrounded the places he'd tried to drive nails and two boards he'd split by leaving the ends short. The baby rested on Matt's open coat, wrapped in two towels from the bathroom.
Her hand swatted the air above her face. She stopped moving and turned her head and started to cry. Matt rearranged her in the coat, but she still simpered until he lifted her.

Matt watched Jarms set the lid on the plain box. He'd sawed an end off crookedly to fit it.

“Not much of a carpenter, am I?” Jarms said.

“Figure to bury him today while it's warming?” Matt asked.

“Probably best.” Jarms wiped some sawdust off his wrist, but was sweating enough for most of it to stick. He patted the box. “Left room,” he said.

“Gonna pack him some things?”

“Just that child.”

Jarms fiddled with the wooden lid. The barn was dark. Matt couldn't see Jarms's face clearly, just slivers of it in the light coming through. He was set on staring until he looked into it. The stove cackled with the fire taking the pitchy wood.

“You really need to do that?”

“The child is Roland's. Roland's dead. Child has no purpose now. It's a girl child to boot.”

“You hate them so much to kill a child.”

“My mother killed a child. Killed Roland, too. I don't see no reason to feed and clothe another one.”

“You think Roland would agree.”

“Tough to argue dead.”