Track of the Cat - Walter Van Tilburg Clark (4 page)

Curt stood up suddenly, pushing his chair back with a
loud, scraping noise, but keeping his fists on the table. Arthur
waved a hand at him slowly and shook his head in time to the waving,
like a man taking his side but saying it had gone far enough for now.
Curt turned his head to stare at him, and Arthur pointed at the
closed door at the foot of the stairs. Curt set his mouth, but
listened, and heard the murmur of women’s voices behind the door.
While he listened one voice made a quick, excited laugh. Then the
other voice laughed too, a lower sound, full of soft, easy amusement.
Curt flushed as if the women had seen through the door how he was
checked like a small boy and were laughing at him.

"To hell with ’em," he said, "If a
man. . ." but his voice was only a mutter, and he didn’t
finish. He straightened up slowly, and then stood there staring at
the other three, one at a time. None of them said anything, or even
looked at him. The mother, with her back turned, went on stirring the
sizzling potatoes in the pan. Slowly he made a small, angry smile,
and looked around at them again, but now as if they were enemies
already cowed, and not worth even that much attention. He picked up
the lantern and set it on the table and turned the flame a little
higher to stop the smoking.

"That’s not a bad idea at that," he said.
"At least, if horses have dreams, they don’t get up sour and
talk about them."

He picked up the lantern and went to the outside
door, but stopped there again, and said, "And when I get back,
we’re leavin' pronto. Get me?"

"I’ll have your breakfast on," the mother
said. "It’ll be an hour yet before there’s light enough to
see what you’re doing anyway."

“
We don’t need any light to get to the creek,"
Curt said, "and that’s where it come from."

He opened the door. The roaring of the pines deepened
and a gust of cold wind came in, driving a thin serpent of snow
across the iloor and nearly blowing the lamp out, so the shadow moths
fluttered wildly on the walls.

"When I get back," he yelled, to be heard
over the wind, and went out, slamming the door behind him. The flame
of the lamp steadied and rose again, and the moths danced small and
gentle in their places. Slowly the fine, white powder on the floor
vanished. The high woman’s voice spoke in the north bedroom again.

Arthur took a jack-knife and the unfinished mountain
lion out of his pants pocket. He opened the knife slowly, thinking of
something else, and felt along the edge of the blade with his thumb.
The blade was worn narrow as a dagger with long use and many
sharpenings. He began to cut slowly and carefully at the shoulder of
the lion, holding the knife in his left hand and pushing the back of
the blade with the thumb of his right hand, curling off small, neat
shavings.

Harold watched him, smiling a little. "No wonder
Joe Sam was in such a stew," he said.

Arthur nodded. "Behind in my whittling."

The mother set two plates on the lid of the water
tank on the end of the stove, and lifted two fried eggs onto each
plate and began to scrape the potato and bacon onto them. In the
bedroom the high voice said something quickly and gaily, and the
other made a short answer and then the soft, easy laughter. Harold
turned his head to listen and smiled. "They’re having a good
time in there," he said.

"Aren’t they," the mother said dryly. She
drew the boiling coffee pot off the fire, and poured coffee, still
hissing and bubbling, into two cups beside the plates.

"It’s good for Grace, having someone new to
talk to for a while," Arthur said.

"It’s precious little but talk I’ll get out
of her, too," the mother said. She brought the two filled plates
to the table and set them down in front of Arthur and Harold and laid
a knife, spoon and fork beside each plate. She stood there for a
moment, staring down at the plates, and then she looked at Harold and
said, "Harold, it’d be better if you’d go instead of Arthur,
the way Curt’s takin’ on this morning."

"No, Mother, it’s all right," Arthur
said. "He can’t very well go off with Gwen just come, and her
first visit, too."

"There’ll be time enough to see her," the
mother said.

She went to the stove and picked up the two heavy
coffee mugs and brought them back and set them down beside the
plates. "He wouldn’t be gone a lifetime," she said to
Arthur. "Either they’ll find something at the creek, or they
won’t. They’ll be back before noon."

Arthur looked up at her, holding the knife still, and
smiled and shook his head. "You know Curt better than that,
Mother," he said.

He looked across at Harold. Harold was staring at the
shadow in the middle of the table. His face was quiet, but set.
Arthur looked down, and began his careful whittling again.

"No, I’m going," he said. "Anyway,"
he added, smiling, "Curt needs me, in case the cat is black."

He held the little wooden lion up and away from him
and studied it, still smiling and then brought it back into his lap
again.

"That heathen nonsense," the mother said.

"I’m not so sure," Arthur said. "Joe
Sam just likes a god he can see."

"A god," the mother said. "Well, I’m
sure, if you’re not. Stupid, childish nonsense."

"And a black panther," Arthur went on, as
if she hadn’t spoken, "is as good a god as any to
mean
the end of things."

"You’re worse than Curt and his swearing,"
the mother said. "Your godless jokes. If you keep it up, you’l1
be believing them, next thing you know."

"Not godless," Arthur said. "Full of
gods, like Joe Sam."

“
Humph," the mother said, and went back to the
stove and took up the coffee pot again. The wind returned against the
house, and she stood with the coffee pot in her hand and listened to
it. The wind pressed briefly and without thunder, only making that
hollow beating of big wings under the eaves. Before it let the dry
snow off the little window over the sink, Grace and Gwen laughed
together again in the north bedroom, and Grace said something after
the laughter, with that same high gaiety in her voice.

"If I’d had my way," the mother said
angrily, "I’d of turned that no-good old Indian off the place
the day he come. Him and his creeping ways and his crazy notions. But
no, your father had to be smart. He had to get him a hired hand for
nothing but his keep. Hired hand," she said scornfully. "Less
use than nigger help, and dirtier too. I’d ruther have a fool
nigger around. They’re mostly cheerful anyway."

Harold looked across at Arthur, and then pulled his
chair in closer and began slowly to eat his breakfast. Arthur stopped
the knife again, and looked at the mother from under his eyebrows.
The mother took a deep breath and stood there for a moment, as if to
steady herself against her own anger, and then let the breath out and
poured coffee into a third mug. Arthur looked down and began to
whittle again.

“
Joe Sam has his own jokes," he said.

“
Jokes," the mother said, coming to the table.
"We’l1 be lucky if one of his jokes don’t wind up with us
all layin’ in our beds with our throats cut." She sat down and
set her coffee mug on the table in front of her.

"He’s planning it pretty carefully,"
Arthur said, holding the wooden lion out again to study it, and
smiling at what he was thinking. "It’s about eighteen years
he’s been here now, isn’t it?"

"Do you know what he’s thinking when he gets
this way?" the mother asked. "No more’n I do, for all
your gossipin’ with him. Or all your heathenish readin’ either."
She spoke quietly, but the little fury was dancing in her eyes the
way it did in Curt’s.

Arthur went on carefully whittling at the lion, and
didn’t answer. Finally the mother looked away from him, and sighed
and put her hands up to the sides of her face and pressed hard at her
temples with her fingertips.

"Was it a bad dream you had, Mother?"
Arthur asked.

"Never you mind my dreams," the mother
said, but not angrily. "I don’t take no stock in them either."
She took her hands down from her face and laid one in her lap,
limply, palm up, and
lifted her coffee mug with
the other. She blew slowly across the coffee twice, and then sipped
at it twice.

"If you’re going hunting painters," she
said to Arthur, "even black ones, you’d better get some
breakfast in you." Arthur made four more careful little cuts on
the shoulder of the lion, and then reached around back of him and
slipped it into the pocket of the cowhide parka, with the other two
carvings. He closed the knife and put it in his pants pocket and drew
his chair in. He picked up his fork, but then just held it while he
looked at the mother’s face. She was staring down across the mug
into the center of the shadow on the table.

"Only coffee again?" Arthur asked gently.

She turned her head finally, and looked at him and
smiled a little. "I have to get waked up some way," she
said. "You know how it is if you have a bad dream last thing
before you wake up."

Arthur nodded, and they were quiet for a time, Harold
eating and Arthur picking at his food with the fork and the mother
blowing on her coffee and sipping it. The quick, cheerful
conversation of the two voices went on in the north bedroom.

The mother put her coffee cup down finally, and
looked into it, and said, "Harold, have you thought any how
you’ll live when you get married?"

Harold glanced at her, but she kept studying her
coffee, and he looked back at his plate. "It hasn’t gone that
far,"

"It’s what you want, isn’t it?" the
mother asked. "It’s for sure what them Williams think you
want, all the time you’ve spent sittin’ in their kitchen, with
more’n twenty miles of ridin’ to get there."

Harold’s neck grew red, and the color rose slowly
into his cheeks. Without looking up, he got himself ready to say
something but then didn’t say it after all, but just closed his
mouth again.

"Isn’t it what you want?"

"I guess it is," Harold said slowly. "If
she does."

"You needn’t to worry too much about that,"
the mother said. "Not with the money this ranch can make, and
that gopher hole the Williams is livin’ in."

Harold lifted his head quickly and stared at her this
time. Arthur peered at her too, squinting as if he were trying to see
something a long way off, or through a blinding light. The mother
didn’t look up. Harold drew a short breath and worked the muscles
of his jaws three or four times, and then looked down again. "She’s
not that kind," he said.

"Maybe not," the mother said, "but
whether she is or not, it’s high time you thought what you’re
going to do. Was you expecting to bring her here, into this house?"

"No," Harold said, "I wouldn’t think
so."

"No, I wouldn’t think so either." She
looked at him for the first time, and studied him for a moment as he
sat bent over his plate but not eating. "What was you figurin’
on doin’ then?" she asked.

Arthur said softly, "It doesn’t have to be
settled right now, does it, Mother?"

"Now’s as good a time as any. I don’t see
there’s anything to be gained puttin’ it off."

"It’1l work out," Arthur said. "Just
give it time."

"Things won’t be any different a year from
now, or ten years from now, for that matter. Nothin works out by
itself, that I ever see."

"They do when they matter enough," Arthur
said.

"Even if they did, what’s to be hurt talkin’
them over sensible beforehand?"

"Some times are better than others," Arthur
said.

"It’s not me that’s hurryin’ things,"
the mother said. "It don’t seem likely to me that Gwen
Williams thinks she’s been asked over just to keep an old maid like
Grace company. I’d be glad enough to let it wait if it would.
Harold’s too young to be gettin’ married. Nineteen’s too young
to get married. And to an older woman at that."

"You talk as if she was fifty," Harold
said. "She’s not two years older’n I am."

"She’s a woman, the mother said, "and
that’s as good as ten years extra any time. You’re a child
comparin’ to Gwen Williams. And them Welsh minin’ people grows
old ahead of their time anyway. I know. I’ve seen a-plenty of ’em,
from Hangtown to Virginia City."

"That’s not the people; it’s the work,"
Arthur said. "And the Williams aren’t mining now. They’re
living the same way we do."

"I wouldn’t say so," the mother said. "In
that little black shack, and runnin’ a handful of half-starved
stock."

Arthur didn’t reply this time, and Harold began to
eat again.

"But the matter’s out of my hands now,"
the mother said. "If it was ever in ’em, which I didn’t
notice it was. All I’m askin’ is, do you have any sensible plan
made?"

"We’ll work it out," Harold said
stubbornly.

"Not without some notion how, you won’t. You
wasn’t plannin’ on movin’ in with the Williams, was you?"

"I can take care of myself, I’m no kid."