The Hour of Lead (4 page)

He inquired at each house in Peach. Almost no one had escaped injury from the storm. Children lost pets, houses windows and roof portions. Several ranches saw thousands in cattle and horses disappear; farmer's barns collapsed against the wind or under the snow's weight. Windpump blades contorted their pistons beyond salvage. Some trying to limit their damage lost fingers and toes to the cold. None outside the Lawson ranch, though, lost people. So they listened politely and shook their heads and answered in the negative when he inquired if they might have run into his father. Soon he was a sad joke at coffee or breakfast for the locals. Some townsfolk refused to answer his knock at all, but lonely old-timers fed him and pressed him into conversations that went nowhere.

At the near end of the town lived the grocer, Worden. His oldest daughter, Wendy, was a grade behind Matt at the school. Matt often ended his search there, where she would inquire after his mother while her father would box day-old bread or rolls and other odds and ends he thought his mother might make use of.

After two such stops, the girl inquired if he desired company, and, when he could devise no polite protest, she joined him. Aboard the wagon, she arranged her bundlings. Settled, he could still hear her easy breathing. She rode the buckboard as simple as
a man. There was little proper about her, which was what generally set him off girls. The tip of her nose was red. She blinked her long lashes, recognizing his attention and batted a mittened hand at her breath cloud. It vanished and she laughed, trying to meet his eyes, then puffed a breath his way. He had been a long time without play, even if he was inclined, but he felt warm in his blood and smiled despite himself. She seemed satisfied to return it, and he clucked the horses forward.

She waited while he knocked on the doors of one block of houses after another. The horses trudged and halted from house to house. Matt listened to the hooves squeak the snow. They continued like that until sunset, when Matt returned her to the grocer. She asked that he wait while she hurried inside and returned with a warm honey-filled roll and a handful of carrots she split between the two horses. The animals nodded and snuffled appreciatively and she rocked her head as if in conversation with them.

The next Sunday, he made the rounds and Wendy joined him once more. The pair repeated the same route as the previous week. Wendy had prepared a basket beforehand, loaded with vegetables for the horses and cinnamon rolls for the two of them. Grey clouds filtered the warmth from the bleak sunlight. Since the blizzard and a week following of twenty below, dull, colorless skies had draped the country horizon to horizon in all directions and the temperature lingered in the mid-twenties. The snow had turned dingy with grime and ice. The whole of the place seemed the color of cigarette smoke. Matt labored from the buckboard, his mind in the same straits as if he'd breathed in ash. Wendy began to hum, to herself at first, as if to pass the time, then with enough heft, she knew he would hear. He didn't know the song's name and didn't ask but listened to the tune, taking pleasure from her husky feminine voice.

When she stopped he was disappointed, until she commenced upon another. He thought of the songs he knew; they were few and
incomplete and he only recognized words, pitch tone nor key, not music, and he considered the memory required, and the capacity to shape one's throat for a sound, and the diaphragm to funnel air, and the lungs to release it in time so that one sound began another like water climbing stairs.

He didn't tell her he enjoyed the song and she didn't ask one way or the other, yet she continued. His head lightened and he thought nothing, and soon he could not hear himself inquire at each door nor the answers from the houses. All that was left was the music in his head, and when he deposited Wendy at her door, he said, “Thank you,” and she smiled at him and waved. She turned in the doorway and waved again, her silhouette in the doorway's glow the only sharp lines he had seen all day.

Wendy joined Matt the next Sunday. She did not sing or hum. Instead, she perched on her seat bent and rocking slightly and impatiently sucked her lower lip in and out of her mouth through the first half dozen stops.

“Can I ask you a question?” she inquired.

Matt nodded.

“Do you miss your brother?”

Matt halted and knocked on a door. No one answered. He mounted the wagon seat and she handed him the reins. He recognized the subject hadn't been dropped.

“I was never without him.”

“Is it being twins that makes it hard?” she asked.

“I never been anything else,” Matt said. “I'm still twins. My brother is just gone.” He shrugged. “I've still got Mother.”

“Is that the same?”

Matt was quiet awhile. “No,” he said finally. “But it's not different, either.”

He banged at a new door and thanked a woman for a cup of warm cider, though she had no information. Matt clucked the
horses forward to the next house and stepped out. She watched him rap on the door until he was convinced no one would answer. “They go to Reardan some weekends,” she told him. “They got a grandma there they tend to.”

He hit two more houses. Someone offered him a piece of buttered bread. He split it with Wendy.

“My father says you're the best man in town,” she told him.

His face reddened and she smiled at that. “You want to know my feelings on the matter?” she asked.

Matt shrugged. “I suppose I'm going to.”

“I told him I thought you might be, but you got no imagination for the search.”

“That's true enough,” he told her.

She took the reins from his hands and stirred the team to walking. At the next house, she undid her blanket and labored down the high step. Matt watched her knock and speak to the young livery hand inside.

“I guess you aren't so quick either,” he told her upon her return.

She wrapped herself. He took the horses.

“They'd get word to you, you know,” she said. “If they'd seen him, I mean. It's not necessary to continue.”

He was still staring far off. She realized he hadn't looked at her the entire ride.

“My looking's what's stupid?”

“No,” she said. She saw she'd hurt him, and it wasn't her intent. “It's looking in the same place. Maybe someone in Creston or Lincoln might know more.”

He rattled the reins and the wagon began.

3

T
HE NEXT
S
UNDAY, THEY INVESTIGATED
the southwest third of the county, encountering still only shrugs and warm coffee for their efforts. They passed farmers and their families traveling to or from Plum or Lincoln or Creston or Sherman. Fathers nodded; mothers and their blank-faced children stared. Others, fellow wanderers, appeared at odds and ends with reality, as well. Canadian war veterans aimed south to try and clear the shells and trenches from their minds, aimless Indians travoising a deer carcass and badger skins or hauling a wounded man to a Nez Perce healer rumored near Clarkston. Town ruffians leered at them like prey until Matt lifted a rifle from beneath the wagon seat and levered the bolt. Alfred of Coffee Pot Lake was dressed in ragged gingham trousers and a drab T-shirt and a long buttonless duster he closed with a knotted rope length. Seven dogs and two cats followed him, the cats at a leery distance, the dogs, tongues and tales awag, happy as full-bellied apostles in a land of Not.

The prophet lifted his pork pie hat, revealing a bald head and two storms of swirling hair above each temple. The horses fussed as Matt tautened the reins. The prophet smiled. He offered his name and explained a prophet's moniker is determined by his birthplace rather than a surname, as prophets spring not from the loins of man.

Wendy nodded at the animals. “Are these your pets?”

One dog cocked his head in question. The cats had scurried for the ditch grass.

“Apostles. The cats come and go. Agnostics, I believe.”

Wendy opened her basket and offered him a sugar cookie and the remaining buns. The man accepted, first offering a prayer about Coyote delivering fire, which seemed sensible as dogs would have no interest in a sermon that concerned something differing from them as much as humans. The dogs waited, silent. Alfred bent to one knee. He opened his hands, a portion of biscuit in each, careful to protect the bulk. The dogs rushed him and wrestled for their morsels. The prophet batted the more aggressive dogs' noses until each had a share, leaving the leaders the dregs. The cats remained uninterested, capable of fending for themselves.

Two hours later, they found a Model T in the road, a pair of legs splayed beneath. Metal clanged until a crowbar slipped causing the legs to flop like fish on a stringer and a litany of curses from underneath.

“Are you all right?” Wendy asked.

“I'm not,” he said. “Henry Ford put cars on this earth just to vex me, and every person buying one is an accomplice.”

“It's not your car?”

“I wouldn't want one. It'd be like marrying.”

He'd been in the war, he said and learned to fix most anything to avoid the trenches. Now he claimed it was all he was good for that paid.

“You killed others?” Wendy asked.

“You going to scold me over it?”

“No,” she said.

“I shot at them same as they did me. Wasn't much chance or reason to check the damage you did. No one had any idea what they were doing. Especially the generals.”

A bolt screeched, then gave. Matt heard a part drop. The man asked for a hand and Matt stepped from the wagon and joined him beneath the automobile. The man extended his hand and offered his name: Harlan Miller. Matt gave his and Miller asked him if he was the boy looking for his father. Matt nodded. Harlan directed Matt to manipulate a fuel pump so he could drive the bracket bolts and cinch a hose. Harlan whacked his hands together to knock the grease free. “Well, let's see if we can get these horses to travel another mile.”

They both pressed themselves from beneath the automobile. Miller handed Matt the crank and demonstrated how to engage it. Miller unclasped the winged hood and primed the carburetor with a gasoline-soaked rag. When Miller circled a finger, Matt spun the handle until the engine caught. Harlan hustled from the car's seat and whisked the rag, which was aflame, from the carburetor and stamped it into the damp dirt. He adjusted the choke until the idle settled and the pistons and plugs and crank fell into a rhythm they could maintain without sputtering on a mixture too rich or too lean.

Miller glanced to Wendy and the horses. “She your girl?” he asked. “She's her own self,” Matt replied.

“Most of them are,” Miller said.

Miller shook Matt's hand once more. “I am in Davenport and if I can be handy to you and you do not call I will be disappointed. Same to you, ma'am.”

Matt and Wendy thanked him and, after he puttered the automobile east over a hill, Matt offered the reins to Wendy. She enjoyed
driving and roused the horses the opposite direction. They spent the rest of the day in silence, aside from inquiring at the houses. Wendy realized this was true of most of their time spent together and was surprised to discover the quiet did not make her uneasy; quite the opposite, it quieted her on the inside, as well.

Upon their return that evening she hugged Matt and when she relented and he thought that was the end of it, she pulled him tighter for a moment. Her hair, which smelled something like her but like itself, too, brushed his face. Matt had never felt anything akin to it and wanted to again.

•

A
WEEK LATER
, W
ENDY CONVINCED
him to cross the river and search the San Poil portion of the reservation. They waited at Keller Ferry with two automobiles while a gasoline engine hummed and gears wheeled to drag the barge toward them along a thousand yards of cable. Arriving, the captain and his assistant secured the craft with chains and dropped a grated ramp. Cars and riders and horses exited and, after the assistant circled his hand, Matt encouraged the horses forward along with the others waiting. The animals rode the ferry nervously, enduring a headwind and were happy to bolt with the clank of the ramp. They barreled halfway up the grade like Pegasuses, before relenting into a pace they could hold.

Above the incline, Keller, back then, was a town of two thousand. The San Poil River bordered it, clotted with logs boomed to tow into the Columbia and its mills. Tenders poked and rolled the tree lengths to keep them soaking evenly. Matt and Wendy rode through a busy main road. The churches had let out, but the locals dawdled at a market with winter vegetables and salted meat and steer testicles on a spit. Wendy appeared ready to sample one, until Matt related its source.

They traded sitting with the horses and inquired at doors about Matt's father. The population was mostly San Poil and Nespelem Indians. The few white men managed the hardware and livery and a small sawmill. The Clouds, a San Poil family, had constructed a community grain silo the few Indian farmers employed for storage.

Most comprehended English well enough, but had not heard or seen a man lost in the November storm. Many offered fried bread or dried fruit to the travelers and one a hot coal in a tin can to warm them. Several inquired if he and Wendy were part of a tent-toting evangelist family rumor put descending from the north and east where the Republic and Curlew churches had hosted them.