When the breeze died away, she could hear Clyde in the sheepfold, talking to the ewes as he sheared them. She couldn’t make out her son’s words, but the sound of his voice was gentle. That was not the way Substance had ever gone about shearing. He had thought it a great foolishness to speak to animals as if they understood words. They knew nothing of words, Substance had told Clyde once, when he’d caught the boy murmuring to his buckskin horse, pulling tangles from its mane. They know nothing of words, and speech is wasted on the dumb. Kindness is wasted. The way to run a farm is to move with authority; see how that damn horse shies away from me when it sees me coming? That’s all you need to know, son: how to walk with purpose, how to hold yourself and move as if you mean to be obeyed. That’s what a man does. He doesn’t fawn over his horse like he’s in love with it, nor coddle his sheep in the fold.
And what of Clyde, the only one of Substance’s seeds that had never withered? Had the boy already taken up his father’s poison? Was Substance, gone as he was, still contorting Clyde’s limbs, still bending the arc of his life? Gripped by a desire to see her boy, to watch him for any sign of a sinister twist, Nettie Mae climbed back down to the grass and let her skirts fall free. The apples would keep on the trees for a while yet to come.
Nettie Mae returned to her garden and began pulling up weeds, but only in time to watch Clyde release the last ewe from the pen. The animal skipped toward the flock as lightly as its full belly would allow, and Clyde followed the animal across the yard, fleeces piled high in his arms. He disappeared into the long shed, but when he emerged some minutes later, it was with Substance’s good scythe propped across his shoulder. The boy headed over the pasture toward the Bemis place, as Nettie Mae had known all along he would do. Clyde had a better heart than his mother, thank God. Neither heat nor pressure had ever driven the boy forward. Whatever powered the engine of his soul, it wasn’t hatred. Perhaps that was sign enough that Clyde had evaded his father’s foulness. Perhaps Nettie Mae could rest assured that her son would be nothing like his father when he came into his own.
When Clyde reached the Bemis farm, Nettie Mae went to the edge of the pasture and stood watching the sheep. The ram had called the newly shorn ewes to his side; he nosed at their swollen flanks, exploring the novel shortness of their wool, the paleness of their bodies. When the flock settled in to graze, the ram caught sight of Nettie Mae and wandered closer. He turned his attention to some cropped, dry grass. Whenever his great coiled horns brushed against sage, the small gray leaves scraped and hissed and released their warm, intoxicating late-summer scent into the air.
Nettie Mae had always felt a strange affinity for the ram, a respect—or perhaps an affection—she could neither understand nor explain. While Substance had lived, she had felt rather embarrassed by how strongly she had taken to that animal. It was foolish, she knew, to make pets of one’s stock. But at least Nettie Mae had never been fool enough to tell Substance how she felt. Substance would certainly have mocked her. If a good breeding ram weren’t so valuable and so hard to find, he probably would have shot the creature dead, just to teach Nettie Mae a lesson.
But here you are, she said silently. Her favorite moved at his ease in the sagebrush, calm in her presence. Here you are, alive, and where is Substance? Rotting in his grave. Leaching into the river. Drunk up by the roots of thirsty plants and breathed out like a curse into the air.
As she stood quietly in the ram’s company, his many wives came toward him and settled in a circle of peace. Cicadas chirred in the pasture. Substance, Nettie Mae thought, had wrung fear from the sheep the same way he’d wrung it from people. And from horses and chickens and apple trees. The deer that crossed the fields at dusk, the coyotes slipping silent and blue between shadows, all had feared him, all shied away from his presence. It had always been hard to watch Substance work the sheep—gentle animals, giving as the trees gave, without much fight. But worst of all was Substance among the flock at culling time. Twice a year, the day came when the older lambs had to be slaughtered, and on those days, Nettie Mae went to the sheepfold and stood beside her ram. The high stone walls hid from her sight what went on in the small corral down by the smokehouse. But nothing could disguise the sound of the yearling lambs crying for their mothers or their last thrash as life drained hot from their throats. Nothing could quiet the grunts from Substance, his hard shouts, the way he spat his resentment at the young sheep even while they died in his hands.
The ram understood what was happening down at the corral. Somehow, Nettie Mae had always known that the ram understood. She could read acceptance in his calm, dark, saddened eye. His children were dying, but he kept his peace and comforted Nettie Mae with his nearness. What was the place of the sheep in this world if not to fall, to die? To give and give—their wool, their milk, their children, their lives—so that others might go on living. The ram let his offspring go to the slaughter without any fight. And even he would die someday, like his children before him. There were times when the ram’s complacency, his very air of wisdom, had made Nettie Mae so angry that she wanted to hurt the dumb beast—kick him, throw stones. More often, she wanted to wrap her arms around his neck and weep into his burr-studded coat, as she had sometimes seen Clyde do with that tall yellow horse he loved.
Now, without the sound of Substance to fracture the still air, Nettie Mae stood and allowed the flock to come nearer. Sheep surrounded her. They filled the afternoon with their scent of dung and dust, with the quiet tread of their small hard feet, the rhythm of tearing grass.
My children are dead, too, she told the ram, but without words, for no animal understood words; no animal cared.
The ram went on grazing, unconcerned by Nettie Mae’s pain.
She lurched toward him, reaching with hard hands, fingers hooked like claws. The way Substance did it, grabbing because he had a right, because he was human, and they were only sheep.
The flock scattered, darting away across the pasture, leaving Nettie Mae alone among the sage.
CORA
What needs doing can’t be stopped. The children were dusty from their play, and hungry now, too, as afternoon faded to a hot evening, dense and muggy with the feel of distant storms. She must make their supper before the hour grew late. Cora had managed to sweep out the hen coop and scatter fresh straw across the floor. She had also taken down and folded the wash that Beulah had hung, for it had dried quickly in the late-summer glare, the hard, unforgiving heat. But there was still the garden to tend, with its crops waiting to be brought in and preserved for the winter ahead. There was still the chicken flock to cull, meat to smoke, drafts in the house that must be found and stopped up with rags. Winter was not far off.
That thought made Cora pause on the porch step as the children ran inside, clamoring for jam and bread. Winter. The snows that piled up against the house, drifts taller than the windows. Cold so brutal, breath burned inside your chest, and even the running river turned sluggish and lost itself under a hand’s breadth of gray ice. It was the kind of cold that brought months of deprivation, months of long white nothingness glaring under a weak and distant sun. Winter killed in this place—cattle and horses, wild animals. It could kill a person, too. Every spring, when the roads finally thawed to red mud and Cora made the journey up to Paintrock with Ernest and the children, they learned which lives the winter had claimed. How many men and women had frozen or starved out there on the prairie, imprisoned by the drifts, isolated in a sea of white. Women and children, dead every season. Cora didn’t mean to hear her children’s names added to the annual litany.
She glanced at the shed beside the hen coop. The pile of firewood was half as wide as it had been that spring, when Ernest had gone up into the foothills with his hatchet to replenish the store. The pile stood waist high now; Ernest had cut enough wood in April to fill the shed from ground to eaves. How much longer would the present supply last? Cora ran the grim calculation in her head. Three weeks, perhaps four, if God was merciful and the mild weather h
eld out a little longer.
There was nothing for it; someone had to go up into the foothills and cut wood—enough to see the family through the deep snows until April or May, when the mornings would be warm enough that Cora need no longer shiver under her blankets, fearful that if she stirred and rose from her bed, the ice-teeth of winter would take her and she would be swallowed down into the gullet of the prairie. But who?
It must be me, she realized, and shivered. If I don’t go up into the hills and find the pine forests myself, the cold will take us—all of us. The cold would take the youngest first. Little Miranda, the bright and sunny child, the greatest joy of Cora’s life. Miranda first, but the others would follow. By spring, she would have no children left.
Cora stared up at the great hill that towered above the homestead, its long flank sere and brown, dotted here and there with pockets of sage. Rainfall and runoff had sculpted smooth troughs into the hillside, and the shadowed tracks of those ravines fissured and fanned toward the hill’s crest. They seemed innocuous now—gentle lines and impressions. But when the rains came, the ravines filled with water, and the water gushed down the hill, impeded by nothing, until it met the plain below with a roar—a wall of brown water moving fast enough to overwhelm a grown man. Then the river would rise, rapid and indifferent, cavalier, as if it had all the right in the world to overflow its banks and come up over the fields, come up to where Cora or her children might be taken by the current and consumed.
Above the foothills, the sharp white peaks of the Bighorn Mountains cut into the sky, so near they seemed poised to stride out with great feet of stone, crushing whatever huddled helpless on the prairie below. That was where firewood could be found: beyond the first hostile range of foothills, in the mountain gorges sheltering unseen on the leeward side. How long was the trek to the forest? It took Ernest all day to gather wood in the spring, but he was well experienced; he knew where to go, how to split logs quickly. And he was far stronger than Cora.
I must plan for two days away, she told herself. I must sleep outside. Up there in the hills.
Cora tried to swallow down her fear. She gripped the porch rail and stared at the blue granite spires, willing herself to calm, struggling to puzzle out the most sensible course of action. She hadn’t hitched a wagon or driven one herself since before Beulah was born. But horse and harness were simple enough, surely. Ernest took the same trail every spring; she would follow the faint double-rutted track, driving where her husband had driven before, until she found the pine groves, the source of her salvation.
And the children—ought she to bring them along? Beulah would be a great help in the hills, for Cora had never wielded an ax in all her life. Nor did she know how much wood she must gather. Beulah would have some idea; the girl had an uncanny instinct, a way of knowing, which Cora had never understood and resolved never to question. But if she took Beulah into the hills, she must take the boys and Miranda, too, for there was no one else to mind them. Nettie Mae Webber would not take up the task; she had made that much clear to Cora already.
Tears stung Cora’s eyes and tightened her throat. There was nothing for it, no sensible option but to leave the children under Beulah’s care and venture up into the hills alone. She fetched up against her own helpless nature and clung to it, dug her fingers into an edifice of fear. The hills terrified her with their solitude, their muffled silence far from her children’s voices, far from the isolated yet familiar world of house and farm. But the thought of winter’s murderous cold frightened Cora even more. She would go and do what must be done, no matter how she quaked at the thought, for watching her children sicken and die was a torment she could never endure.
Beulah’s voice drifted from the barn behind the house—laughing, or singing one of her nonsense songs. Cora seldom could tell the difference between her daughter’s laughter and singing. Beulah and the boy, Clyde, had cut down all the corn in a matter of a few hours and had carried the sheaves to the shady barn. Now they were shelling the dry seed into bushels and casting the cobs out into the yard for the pigs to find.
Clyde Webber. The boy wasn’t much like his father—not that Cora had truly known Substance well. The man had been a distraction; a novelty, nothing more. Substance was a novelty Cora sorely regretted now, and casting her weary mind back, she couldn’t remember why she had given in to his attentions in the first place. She had spoken to Substance but little, even after their shameful carrying-on had begun. Now she wondered whether she had acquiesced for the sake of the act alone, not out of any affection or even familiarity. Indeed, Cora had wondered more than once why Substance had professed such a keen interest in her. He had never offered sweet words nor made any attempt to soothe her spirit. He had taken what he wanted simply because he’d had the strength to take it, and Cora had given—why? Something about their exchange must have excited her. She had made herself the prey, had reveled in the hunt, and even Substance’s flat, dark predatory stare had thrilled her, for it had seemed to Cora that when she surrendered to Substance’s passions, she could tame—for a short time, at least—that which was untamable. The wolves, the bears in the foothills. The flash floods and the river surging beyond its bank. Any of a hundred perils waited on the prairie or up among the hills; any of them might claim Cora or her children in an instant. Substance, at least, Cora could predict and control.
But though his father had been a hard and frightening man, there was nothing malign in the Webber boy—not so far as Cora knew. True, once the sinful affair had begun, Cora hadn’t been able to bring herself to speak with Clyde. She still found herself silenced by his presence, hot faced and unable to meet his eye, though she had been moved by his aid with the corn patch and impressed with his vigor. What could she have said to the boy? How does one apologize after one has broken a marriage, destroyed a family, condemned a young man’s father to death? Cora could only stand at a distance and watch as Clyde cut the corn and Beulah moved along behind him, bundling up the sheaves as if she’d been born to the work. But in that watching, Cora had discerned a certain difference between father and son. Substance would never have called on his neighbors merely to offer help. Substance surely would never have walked onto their land and taken up whatever work needed doing without being asked. As if he had been hired—as if it was his own land. The boy was free of his father’s darkness. Cora hoped he might remain free for good.
She left Clyde and Beulah to their work and fixed the children’s supper: bread with jam, and a bowl each of the soup Cora had simmered since that morning, onions and carrots with an old smoked joint of elk’s leg to hearty up the broth. She had to chide Miranda and Charles to make them eat their soup; they always complained about onions.
With the children well into their meal, Cora cut several thick slices of bread, buttered them generously, and scraped the pot of blackberry jam to spread the last of it atop the butter.
“Who’s that for?” Benjamin asked.
“For young Mr. Webber. He was very kind to help us with the corn.” Without him, it surely would have rotted in the field.
“I gave him biscuits already.” Benjamin sounded rather sulky. He didn’t seem to like that the dregs of blackberry jam should go to young Mr. Webber.
“That was for lunch,” Cora said. “It’s supper time now.”
She carried the bread outside before the children could distract her further, or worse, clamor for more jam. Clyde and Beulah had finished the work by then; the girl drifted toward the house, brushing the tips of long grasses with her fingers, moving slowly in the golden light of evening. Clyde had couched the scythe on his shoulder once more, and was headed more briskly toward his home.
Cora watched him in frightened silence for a moment, uncertain what she ought to say. Then she surprised herself by calling out, “A moment, please.”
Clyde stopped and turned, waiting for her.
Quickly, Cora closed the distance between them. Better to get this over with. She still couldn’t meet the boy’s eye
, but she looked at the brim of his hat, the strap of his braces, his fist on the handle of the scythe.
“This is for you.” She held out the bread, stacked jam sides together.
Clyde took her offering with a solemn nod. “Thank you, ma’am. I did work up a hunger.”
“I . . . I would pay you if I could, but—”
He shook his head. “No need for payment. I’m glad to help a neighbor. And I think you’ve got plenty need for help, with Mr. Bemis off to jail.”
The frankness of those words seemed to strike the air, a mallet to a bell. The reverberation hung all around them, freezing Cora to her place.
“I . . . I’m sorry,” she said.
Clyde shifted uncomfortably. The hand that held the bread lowered to his side, and for a moment Cora thought he would drop the slices in the grass—throw them away. But he said only, “It was a tragedy, all that happened. Now it’s best if we move on. Nothing else to be done but move on.”
She nodded, watching the setting sun wink and slide along the curve of his sickle. After a pause, when it was clear to both of them that Cora would say nothing more, Clyde touched the brim of his hat with the crust of his bread—an attempt at a polite farewell—and turned back toward the sod-brick house.
Cora thought she might call to him again, might beg him to go into the foothills and cut her winter wood. She might pay him for the work somehow, though she had little money and few possessions of any real value. But she couldn’t make herself speak, let alone raise her voice. She had used up all her strength forcing out that pathetic apology. There were no words left to her now—not today—and after he had so kindly seen to her corn, Cora couldn’t presume to ask the boy for more labor.
One for the Blackbird, One for the Crow: A Novel Page 6