He had come downstairs from his room where he’d been reading, and at the bottom of the stairs his mother suddenly opened the door and spoke.
‘Peter, can’t you come in and talk a little?’ The shape of her mouth troubled him. He thought of a leaf in the wind.
In the pink room he stood looking into the rain that fell on the haying machinery brought home now from the fields, at smoke drifting out through the doors of the shop where Phil worked at the forge, at the derricks, huge gaunt structures of poles that reminded him of gibbets. He stood looking so long she spoke again, and her eyes followed his. ‘What do you see out there?’
‘Only the rain. What shall we talk about?’ He had long dreaded talks with his mother, for they now led inevitably to nostalgic references to the past, and whatever approached sentiment made him restive. He wanted to clench his fists.
‘We can talk about anything. I guess I was lonesome. George is out riding somewhere.’
‘You look cold,’ he said. ‘I’ll get your sweater.’
‘He was riding his bay horse,’ she said. ‘You’ve got to be quite friendly with Phil, haven’t you.’
‘He’s making a rope for me.’
‘Making a rope for you?’
‘He’s good with his hands. He’s making it out of rawhide.’
‘What is rawhide?’
He was patient. ‘Nothing much. Just dried strips of cowhide, and you soak them and — well, fashion them.’
‘Fashion them?’
‘Braid them.’
‘Peter, I wish you wouldn’t do that with your comb.’
He stopped dragging his thumb across the teeth. ‘I wasn’t aware.’
Fashion, she thought. Aware. He stood near the window, and the light from outside, pressing against her eyes, made her a little sick. He seemed always to be standing, never sitting, always ready to move, to listen, never to rest, never a part of any scene, any conversation, but simply patiently — patiently what? Waiting? He had brought into the room with him a curious odor, somehow familiar. ‘Little sounds like that. When I was little, I felt something in my spine when they’d begin to write on the blackboard. There was Miss Merchant.’
‘Miss Merchant?’
‘Yes, and she gave us stars after our names on the blackboard, I’ve forgot why, but for something we did right. I remember the stars, and how you could choose what color you liked, and Miss Merchant picked up the right chalk and made the star without once lifting the chalk from the board. Why, she didn’t draw the star, she wrote it. I wonder now why it was always stars we got, and why not diamonds or spades. Why not hearts? I wonder why it was stars.’
He spoke quietly, his face in profile, and like a ventriloquist he scarcely moved his lips. ‘Because they’re supposed to be unreachable.’
‘Yes, unreachable,’ she said, afraid she had slurred the word. She talked little these days, afraid of the slurring, the treacherous words like unreachable. She spoke slowly. ‘But now, they weren’t unreachable in the sixth grade. And Peter,’ she went on, ‘we used to have a valentine box, and they’d get this big box, somebody would bring it from home, and we’d cover it with white crepe paper and paste big red hearts on it, lopsided hearts, some of them, because all of us didn’t understand about folding the paper so both sides would match. Some drew them freehand.’ She wondered now if it was the cold light that pressed against her eyes that made her a little faint or the odor that surrounded him.
‘And you got a great many valentines,’ he said, his lips scarcely moving.
‘A great many?’
‘Because you were beautiful even then,’ he said.
How could he have said that, she wondered. How have so misunderstood her, for she tried only to convince him and herself that she had once had identity, a desk of her own, a numbered hook in the cloakroom for her coat, a place on the class roll, a view out the window of swings and a board fence beyond. Or was he right in sensing that she boasted of stars earned and valentines received because she was — beautiful? How awful to lead a conversation around so that another was bound to say, because you were beautiful!
He had spoken with such unusual intensity that she stared at him, and noted the rare flush that suffused his clear skin. ‘You must have known,’ she said, ‘some sound that made you shiver.’
‘I don’t remember,’ he said. He did, of course — remembered the panic that pressed up like a lump in his throat when someone shouted sissy; he’d feared the bloody nose, the loss of breath if someone pinned him down. Once he’d been afraid to enter a room, or to leave it. ‘I’ve got to go upstairs now,’ he said. ‘I’ve got something to finish.’
She rose carefully, and smiling reached over and passed her palm over his neatly combed hair. ‘It’s been a nice talk, hasn’t it,’ she murmured. ‘To each other,’ she said, and used the treacherous word, ‘we’re not unreachable.’
He lifted his eyes, and caught and held hers. ‘Mother,’ he said, ‘you don’t have to do this.’
She attempted to wrench her eyes from his, about to ask, don’t have to do what?
But she dare not ask, for he would say, ‘Don’t have to drink.’ And it would be out in the open.
His eyes still held her. ‘I’ll see that you don’t have to do it,’ he said.
She wanted to ask, how will you see to it? If she had spoken, perhaps their lives would have been much different, but God help her, she kept silent.
He left her then (no one could close a door more quietly than he) and she turned to watch the rain falling and falling and falling on the haying machinery. Of Peter there remained behind only the odor he had brought with him.
She whispered to herself, chloroform.
The rawhide rope was within six feet of completion; Phil might now have finished it off with a neat crown knot or a Turk’s head; but he continued working on it; he had come to look forward to the boy’s being near while he worked, braiding and molding, for Peter was a perfect audience, rapt as Phil told him of the early days, and so receptive and caught up in the gray web of the past that Phil had once laughed aloud, for Peter had let enchantment paralyze him. He was staring sightless, like one hypnotized, at the sagebrush hill out front. ‘What do you see out there, old-timer?’ Phil asked, amused to see the kid caught off guard. His hands were still.
Peter’s eyes moved slowly to Phil; they looked like a sleepwalker’s. ‘Phil, I was thinking about the old days.’
Phil watched the kid’s face, how it was caught in the sun that slanted in through the doors of the blacksmith shop. ‘I’ll bet you were, at that,’ Phil said slowly. ‘Don’t ever let your maw make a sissy of you. There were real men in those days.’ The kid nodded gravely. Phil told of a cliff he knew reared up lonely above the source of a spring, and there someone had carved initials and the date — 1805. ‘Must have been some fellow from the Lewis and Clark expedition,’ Phil said. ‘Fifty years went by before any whites settled here for good. And Pete, when I was a fellow about your age, I found piles of rock out behind that hill yonder that seemed to lead somewhere. Never found out where, exactly; didn’t follow ’em to the end. What say maybe sometime just you and me might look for ’em again? Follow ’em to the end?’
The sun — Old Sol, Phil called it — was retreating south: the nights grew cold, the morning frost was thick, and remained late, and its retreat was stubborn at the advance of the paling sun; storms in the mountains drove the cattle down to the fields, down to the brown stubble they would graze on until the snow flew. Almost any time you might raise your eyes and see a few cows, big spring calves at their sides trailing single file through well-worn paths in the sagebrush on the hill out front. Occasionally a cow had twins, but the extra calves were never enough to replace those left dead behind in the hills or on the flats — hamstrung, torn and eaten by wolves or bloated and dead from anthrax — blackleg, as they called it in that country. ‘Don’t worry, old-timer,’ Phil told Peter. ‘I’ll have your rope done before you go back to school.’<
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Phil had taught Peter to ride, had turned over to him a gentle bay horse, and together they rode down into the fields where Peter helped him build pole fences around the haystacks, and at noon they ate their lunches of deviled ham sandwiches and apples while Phil told stories of Bronco Henry. ‘We’ve had quite a time this fall, ain’t we, old-timer?’ Phil asked. And for a fact, Phil enjoyed himself.
‘I won’t forget it, Phil,’ Peter said soberly.
The rope, the bond between them, Phil kept coiled like a snake in a sack as he worked at the unfinished end, feeding it, as it grew, into the sack.
Frankly, Phil had never expected to make any use of the hides that one by one were flung flesh-side out over the top pole of the fence as cows were butchered. Wary magpies cleaned off the bits of flesh left sticking to the skin, for the men in the bunkhouse were clumsy at skinning, so anxious to get the job over and done with and back to the bunkhouse where they could shoot the breeze and blow away at their fool harmonicas. Most of the hides were badly punctured, useless for anything, but until Phil got started on the rope, there was no use for them anyway. In a year’s time there might be twenty hides hung there drying and shrinking in the sun and weather and then Phil would have the men pile them up, pour on the old kerosene, and burn them. What a stink they made!
Most Septembers before the burning, men would come around — in wagons in the old days, in rattletrap trucks these days — trying to buy the hides for a buck or a buck and a quarter, but Phil laughed right in their faces. The hides they bought here and there for that price they sold for twice, and made fortunes, some of them. Jews, all of them Jews after hides, Jews after junk, Jews with the eye for the quick buck, bargaining for rusty iron, mowing machine frames, rake frames, lengths of pipe and so forth that collects on a ranch; but rather than sell to these shysters, Phil let the junk collect and the hides dry and shrink on the fence until he got around to the burning. Phil had nothing against the right kind of Jews, Jews of intellect and talent, so long as he didn’t have to mix with them. But Lord, these others.
These others, these Wandering Jews, as he called them, made fortunes out of junk. How do you think the fellow with the big department store in Herndon got his start? Why, Phil could remember when he was sitting up in the seat of a crumby spring wagon haggling for the hides of dead animals. And now what? Now he had this house in town, big white house with pillars, biggest house in Herndon, green lawn and sprinklers playing on it. Pierce-Arrow out front in the graveled driveway — parties with Japanese lanterns and such stuff — all got out of hides and junk and the eye on the old dollar.
Greenberg.
Called himself Green, now, for a fact. Green! Had got himself into Herndon Sassiety and hobnobbed with What’s-his-name at the bank — George’s pal. Phil chuckled, remembering. On a rare visit to Herndon for a haircut, Phil was leaned back comfortable in Whitey Potter’s chair because he’d decided to go whole hog and get himself a tailor-made shave — much as anything because when Whitey shaved you he didn’t talk so much: Whitey was one of those barbers who thinks you pay for the gab. Well, there was Phil lying back, his long legs and cheap black town shoes sticking out from under, and it was a Saturday, and the other two barbers were snipping away at the hirsute appendages of the townspeople and the place was lively with jabber and some reading the Elks Magazine and whatever else Whitey had in there for the customers’ convenience and edification while they sniffed the old Lucky Tiger and so forth and so on.
A woman waited, too, all gussied up with a fur around her neck and a diamond rock big as a hen’s egg on one of her pinkies — the Catholic girl Green (Greenberg) had married up with to take the curse off his own origins. Together he and the Catholic girl had joined up with the church there in Hemdon-town the Old Lady herself had fooled around with, and Phil guessed a whole generation was growing up who knew Greenberg and his wife for something else than they were. Well, a generation of new Greenbergs was growing up, anyway who thought they were Greens, and one of the kids, a girl, was with the woman, waiting for papa.
So you see the place was full, bright that Saturday with sun and mirrors and bottles lined up, and the men talked and joshed and smoked and read the Elks Magazine and kids ran in and out from the hotel where the old men sat, and suddenly old Whitey pulled the lever that let Phil up and back into the world that lying back and being shaved puts you out of, the dreamworld of old Lucky Tiger.
‘That sufficient unto you?’ asked Whitey humorously, remembering the very words Phil had once used on handing him the six bits for the haircut and a two bit tip. Quite a guy, Whitey.
Phil regarded his thin, naked, shaven, foxlike face in the big mirror that with the one opposite it reflected all infinity. ‘Fine-O, me lad,’ said Phil. ‘That’ll do for a sufficiency,’ and then the man in the next chair spoke up to Phil.
‘How are you there, Mr Burbank,’ the fellow said in a big hearty Rotary voice.
A loud, beefy voice; a voice that loud, followed by the two or three seconds of Phil’s silence made people look up from their Elks Magazines.
Then Phil spoke. ‘Why, dashed if it ain’t Mr Greenberg!’
Let me tell you, there was silence after that, and the woman’s face turned as red as her dyed red hair. Greenberg? Redberg was more like it.
No, far as Phil was concerned, the hides could rot there on the fence and the scrap iron powder to rust before Phil would fall for their wheedling arguments, before he would let them use him and profit as they did from another’s gullibility, carelessness or just pure out-and-out charity. It had got so that these jokers seldom stopped at the Burbank ranch, having heard through their grapevine that the Burbanks weren’t suckers — a grapevine just like the gypsies have.
‘Just Like a Gypsy,’ as Woozy-Rosie played at on her piano.
Anyway so much for the Jews. And now it turned out that Phil had most excellent use of the hides after all. Who’d a thunk it!
For all Phil’s patient instructions, Peter sat a saddle poorly, and Phil thought it pathetic and even engaging how the boy tried to hold his body straight, his hands easy on the reins, to rise posting at the trot.
‘All you got to do is practice, Pete.’
But more than practice took Peter behind the hill to other hills that rolled and stretched out there; out there in the secret land he did a lot of thinking, a lot of searching and something close to praying, a praying that took the form of a petition, in his father’s name.
He looked and looked, his gray eyes darting as swiftly as the tiny gray birds that darted from sagebrush to sagebrush. He found the skeleton of a horse with a bluebell growing up through the eye of the skull, and a lean coyote watched from a nearby rise; he found agate and flint of the sort the Indians used for arrowheads and whole patches of prickly pear, blankets of it, and a forty-four cartridge green with age and corrosion. He found a wedge of stone that looked like the work of a human hand and pocketing it he thought how it would flatter Phil when he asked him to identify it; but for a long time he didn’t find what he looked for.
Then one afternoon he drew up his horse before a low outcropping of pale pinkish rock; it might have been a sport of nature except that beyond it he found another outcropping and then another, each exactly twenty paces from the last according to some human plan, some ancient ceremony, each a beckoning sentinel. These must be the broken stone piles Phil had spoken of, some almost sunk in the earth, and Peter followed them but the sun sank, the mountain chill crept down and Peter turned back before he reached the end of them. That night he had ample opportunity to report his find to Phil, for Phil spent the evening in his room plucking on his banjo, and the sound Peter knew was an invitation to come in and talk. But he kept his find a secret.
Next day he rode out early, followed the stones farther and farther, and at noon ate his lunch and watched the last remnants of cattle straggle down from the hills, watched them follow ancient paths that snaked through the tall sagebrush, then he mounted his bay horse and fo
llowed the rocks again.
As he rode, the heaps of rocks grew smaller and smaller, and he hurried as if to find the end of them before they vanished; and they did vanish, vanished at the brink of a dry ravine, the throat choked by rubble and rubbish hurled down from the heights by flash-floods-rounded boulders, gray porous roots of sagebrush, weathered gray boards from some abandoned shack. And tumbleweeds — those ghostly briars brought alive by the faintest breeze, those frighteners of horses. In that ravine, along whose side ran one of the ancient cow paths, Peter found exactly the dead animal he’d been searching for; he thought it fitting that it was Phil, in a way, who had led him to it.
He looked around as calmly as coyotes looked at him, and he listened; then he reached into his pocket and drew out gloves and drew them on as a surgeon might, got down from his horse, felt God smile, and went to work.
It was unthinkable that a man on the ranch, except for Sundays, should be idle, and that may explain why even the Old Gent, caught up in his own beliefs and having nothing else to do, paced the floor in stiff military fashion and wore down the pile of the carpet with the same dogged purpose that another man might dig postholes or shoe a horse. It explained why George, who felt no man should be asked to do anything he wouldn’t himself do, cleaned out the cesspool; it was a job nobody else could be asked to do. Rose watched him out the dining room window (the high beauty of the Rockies behind him) dipping a bucket nailed to a long thin pole down into the stinking reaches of the pool, and she watched him turn gagging each time he emptied the bucket into the basin of an iron wheelbarrow. She, too, then turned away.
The Power of the Dog Page 21