Winter in the Blood

by James Welch

  Suddenly her head collapsed against the pillow and her body went limp. My butt sank into her belly. She turned her head and sobbed, “If only I could get loose,” and I thought of the little girl of the night before, her frustration, her brother and his blank yet curious stare. And I was staring at the sobbing woman with the same lack of emotion, the same curiosity, as though I were watching a bug floating motionless down an irrigation ditch, not yet dead but having decided upon death.

  I slid off her. Everything had gone out of me, and I felt the kind of peace that comes over one when he is alone, when he no longer cares for warmth, or sunshine, or possessions, or even a woman’s body, so yielding and powerful.

  I began to put on my clothes. The sobbing stopped. I buttoned my pants, then sat on the edge of the bed to slip into my shoes. For the first time I noticed how old they looked, run-down and run-over, the cat holding his paw up barely eyeing me from the one which lay upside down under the bed.

  Marlene sat up, holding the pillow against her belly, one breast exposed and staring past the roundness of her middle. Her knees were raised beneath the sheet and together.

  “And you’re going to leave just like that,” she said.

  I tied my shoelaces.

  “Did you pay for this room?”

  I nodded.

  “Have you got some money for me?” She added shyly: “It’s okay if you don’t.”

  I pulled some loose bills out of my pocket and began to count them. I dropped them on the bed. “It’s all I have.”

  “You could come back.”

  I opened the door. “I might.”

  “You could stay and maybe we could talk for a while.”

  I turned. Her shirt had fallen off the chair. Her blue jeans lay on the floor by the nightstand, panties still in them. I looked at Marlene. The pillow covered her belly, her breast studied the sheet. She had drawn her legs up so that the nipple was only inches from its object. The face was the same face that had looked into mine when I sat with my back against the parking meter in front of Gable’s. I avoided her eyes because they too would be the same.

  31

  I had had enough of Havre, enough of town, of walking home, hung over, beaten up, or both. I had had enough of the people, the bartenders, the bars, the cars, the hotels, but mostly, I had had enough of myself. I wanted to lose myself, to ditch these clothes, to outrun this burning sun, to stand beneath the clouds and have my shadow erased, myself along with it.

  I traced the hump of my nose with a fingernail. It was very tender, and swollen, so that it was almost a straight plane from the bridge to the cheekbones. I walked down the street, out past the car lots, the slaughterhouse, away from Havre. There were no mirrors anywhere.

  PART THREE

  32

  The big smooth-riding Oldsmobile streaked down the highway, floating over bumps like a duck on the wind-whipped slough beside the corral. The man and his wife in the front seat spoke about the countryside as if it were dead, as if all life had become extinct. Occasionally she would point at something, a shack or a busted-down corral beside an irrigation ditch, and he would nod and roar excitedly. His great black beard and shaggy head made him look rugged, but behind the sideburns his ears stuck out, white and delicate. A black hat with a rounded crown and straight brim sat on his head. He looked like a Hutterite. His wife wore a beaded leather band around her neck.

  His questions entered my mind as part of the drone of the motor. Only the way he looked at the rearview mirror made me realize that he was talking to me. Sometimes I asked him to repeat the question; other times I said yes or no, never fully understanding what he wanted to know. My confusion, after a time, left him to his own thoughts and his wife’s magnetic finger.

  The daughter sat in the backseat with me, a case of peaches separating us. She was a frail girl with skin as white as the man’s ears. Her own ears were hidden beneath a flow of black frizzled hair contained by a blue-and-white beaded headband. She lolled back in the corner, sometimes looking at me, sometimes gazing blankly out the window at the unchanging country. At first, her grunts seemed to be in agreement with whatever her parents were talking about, but then she grunted twice during a lull in the conversation. She seemed to be in some kind of discomfort. Her eyes were dull, like those of a sick calf.

  The sudden slowing of the car jarred me awake. We pulled off the highway onto a dirt road and stopped. Before the man could shut the motor off, the girl was out and running. She disappeared behind a stand of chokecherry bushes.

  “It’s the water,” the man said. “She’s quite delicate.”

  “This is White Bear,” I said. “My house is five miles down the highway.”

  “She has pills but she neglects them,” said the wife.

  “She’s never been healthy.”

  “Good health is of prime importance,” I said. “Maybe I could walk from here.”

  “Nonsense. In this heat? Don’t be absurd.”

  The water in the reservoir was low, three feet below the lip of the dam. Cattails on either side were turning ragged.

  “Are there any fish in there?” asked the man.

  “Turtles,” I said.

  “Do you Indians eat them?”

  The girl came out from behind the chokecherry bushes. If she were any paler from vomiting you couldn’t tell. She seemed to be shivering and her hands were thrust into the pockets of her shorts. She smiled shyly as she got into the car. She was very pretty. A piece of red hung from the point of her chin.

  I smiled back at her and a sudden pain shot up through my swollen nose.

  “How do you feel, honey?” asked the wife, but before I could answer, the girl said fine, and the waters of White Bear whispered to the sun.

  The man let me off opposite the road into the ranch, saying to be sure and look them up if I ever got to Michigan, saying he really meant it, he was a professor. The daughter handed me a peach wrapped in crinkly purple paper. I thanked her, and him, and the wife, and waved, and walked down the incline.

  “Can I take your picture?”

  “Yes,” I said, and stood beside a gatepost. He pointed a small gadget at me; then he turned a couple of knobs on the camera, held it to his face and clicked.

  33

  I threw a clod of gumbo into the rosebush. Nothing happened. I picked up another and threw it. This time I heard something scurry to the other end. I began to pelt the rosebush until a hen pheasant lifted, whirring low over the gumbo flat to an alfalfa field, where she landed and entered the weeds of a ditch.

  A hundred yards further, where the ditch joined another, I saw the tall, old cottonwood. Its limbs were almost bare, just a few twigs where the leaves still hung. One of its branches had broken off and lay near the spot where the hawk had fallen. Even Mose had had to admit it was a good shot. Resting the .22 on the wheel of an old hay wagon, I squeezed the trigger the way First Raise had shown me, exhaling, a steady pressure and bang! the hawk tumbled down in an erratic spin. He gained his feet as soon as he hit the ground. Mose and I ran whooping and stumbling through the plowed field. We stopped a few feet short of the tree. The hawk squatted low to the ground, his wings spread for balance, the tips of them brushing the weeds, yellow eyes alert, flashing. He bent his head forward and opened his beak to reveal a small pale tongue. He seemed to be hissing at us although he made no sound. The feathers on his breast were red and matted.

  It must have been the tongue. We had not considered that a hawk might have a tongue. It seemed too personal, private, even human. The hawk opened his beak wider, the tongue moved slightly, then the head grew heavier and began to sink. We stood motionless, quiet, and watched him die. The weeds held him in the position he had taken up after falling, but his head lay limp on his breast, the feathers on his neck ruffled and jutting toward the sky. I ejected the spent shell and turned, but Mose had already walked away.

 
; I threw the purple paper in a clump of sagebrush and began to eat the peach. It tasted bitter, like metal on my tongue, but I ate it, partly because I hadn’t eaten anything that day, but, more, out of loyalty toward the sick girl.

  The sun was low over the slough by the time I walked into the yard. Although I had only been gone for a couple of days, a weariness had settled in my bones. I hadn’t even drunk much, except for the night with Malvina. Damn her, I might have stayed with her and avoided all the trouble later.

  The water in the drinking bucket was warm. The tin dipper floated on the surface. Lame Bull and Teresa were not around. The old lady was gone too. Her rocking chair stood empty and dark in the darkening living room. The seat where her thin butt had rested was shiny, the bar across the top of the back greasy where her head had lain. The movie magazines piled beside the other chair were gone. I rocked the old lady’s chair a couple of times. It didn’t squeak. I glanced around the room. For the first time in my life, I was able to look at the room without the feeling that I was invading my grandmother’s privacy. But now I saw that almost nothing in the room belonged to her, just the rocker and the cot next to the oil stove. The blankets were neatly folded and piled on top of each other. The star quilt was also folded. A pillow, without a pillowcase, rested on the blankets. The old lady must have died. That’s why the house was so quiet. I dropped down into the rocker, then stood again, quickly. I walked to the window and opened the shade. Perhaps it was the suggestion of death, but I smelled it, dark and musty, as surely as one smells the mother’s milk in the breath of a baby.

  The tobacco pouch hung by a thong from the rocker arm. I untied it and brought it to the window. It was as soft as old Bird’s muzzle. I squeezed it and felt the arrowhead inside. Besides the two pieces of furniture, this pouch and the clothes on her back, I had never seen any of the old lady’s possessions, but she must have had other things, things that would have been buried with her in the old days. Now, almost a hundred years later, she would be buried the way she was born, with nothing.

  I walked into the kitchen and turned on the white plastic radio on top of the refrigerator. The room, with its two windows on the sun side, was still bright and hot. I tuned in Great Falls, then turned on the electric stove. I got the galvanized tub from the shed, poured the water from the drinking bucket into it and set it on the burner. Teresa never used the wood stove anymore, but I thought of First Raise cooking breakfast on it, frying eggs and bread. He would have been surprised to see the electric stove next to it. I filled another bucket from the cistern, then began to undress. I hadn’t noticed the bloodstains on my shirt before—there were five of them, one after another, down the front. I opened a burner plate on the wood stove and stuffed it in.

  With a hot pad on each handle, I lifted the tub from the electric stove to the floor. Steam rolled from the surface of the shallow water. Sunday nights Mose and I used to bathe in the tub on the kitchen floor, in the same water, until it turned the gray of the metal tub. That was a different kind of dirt—dust from the roads, chaff from the hayfields—not the invisible kind that coats a man who has been to town. I poured from the drinking bucket into the tub until the water became lukewarm to my hand. Because of my bad leg I could not squat, so I hunched over from the waist and began to scrub myself. Music filled the kitchen as I ran the soapy washrag over my body. It was good to be home. The weariness I had felt earlier vanished from my bones.

  I lifted the drinking bucket above my head and tilted it. I caught my breath as the water poured over my body into the tub and onto the floor. I almost lost my balance, rocking the tub on its battered bottom. I pulled a chair over from the kitchen table and sat down, my feet still in the dirty water. I had forgotten the towel, but the sun was low enough so that its rays spread across the kitchen. I listened to the music, and, at six o’clock, the stock report out of Chicago. Then I went into Teresa’s bedroom and searched through her ironing until I found a clean shirt, underwear and pants.

  After emptying the tub and mopping the floor, I walked down to the corral to feed the calf. Bird and the red horse were in the small pasture behind the corral with the calf’s mother. They all watched me with interest.

  34

  “She passed away,” Teresa said, setting down the sack of groceries.

  “What did you do to your nose?” Lame Bull said.

  Teresa looked at him. “It was a merciful death.”

  “No, seriously, what did you do to your nose?”

  “Where is she now?” I said.

  “We took her to Harlem.” Teresa began to put the canned goods in the cupboard.

  “Somebody busted me one,” I said to Lame Bull. “How come? Why don’t we just bury her here, where the rest of them are?”

  “She was a fine woman,” Lame Bull said.

  “Because they have to fix her up. They’ll make her look nice. And Father Kittredge will want to say a few words over her.”

  “But it would have been easier to bury her here,” I said. “She didn’t even go to church.”

  “Can’t you get it through your head that we are going to bury her here?” The voice was calm. “As for looking nice—it’s the least we can do.”

  “Standard procedure,” Lame Bull said.

  “Will the priest come down to bury her?”

  Teresa turned. She had been putting the milk in the icebox. “I don’t know, if he can get away.”

  “Like he did when we stuck First Raise in the ground?”

  She looked away. “He’s very busy. They’re sending him to another parish … Idaho.”

  “Look here, boy.” Lame Bull pulled a bottle of wine from a paper sack.

  I couldn’t help myself. “I don’t think anybody I know is going to miss him.”

  Teresa reacted as though the words had no particular meaning for her. She took three glasses from the cupboard and set them on the table.

  “At least nobody on this reservation … maybe a few of his friends in Harlem.”

  Again, nothing. But there was something different about her face. She had always had a clear bitter look, not without humor, that made the others of us seem excessive, too eager to talk too much, drink too much, breathe too fast. Now, solemnity had darkened her eyes. As she bent over the table, I saw, perhaps because my grandmother was gone, how much she had come to resemble the old lady.

  “I know how it is,” Lame Bull said. “What we all need is a glass of wine. That’ll pick us right up.”

  Teresa sat at the other end of the table. I handed a glass to her. The kitchen was beginning to get dark. In the momentary silence, I could hear the high whine of the mosquitoes as they gathered outside the window screens.

  I picked up my glass and took a swallow of wine.

  “What do you think? I want your opinion.”

  “Okay.”

  “Ho! Okay he says.” He pulled the bottle closer. “V-i-n R-o-s-e. How do you say that?”

  “I don’t know. Vin Rose, I guess.”

  He lifted the bottle and sniffed. “I saw a guy drinking this once in Great Falls.” He screwed the cap down.

  Teresa hadn’t touched her wine. She seemed to be listening to the mosquitoes, or thinking about her mother, or the priest.

  “Oh, I know how it is—you’re young, you take things seriously, you get older, you buy a bottle of good wine, you drink to those who are still living.” He raised his glass. “Me, I’m still ticking, so I drink to all of us, all my loved ones.”

  In spite of myself, I raised my glass.

  Teresa stood and walked quickly into the bedroom. The door shut with a soft click.

  Lame Bull looked surprised. He still had his glass in his hand.

  The bedsprings groaned once and it was quiet.

  “I know what it is—that fool priest and then that bloodsucker down at the funeral parlor.” He sighed and opened a bag of Fritos. Th
en, as if he hadn’t the energy to eat them, he pushed the bag away.

  We sat silently in the darkening kitchen. The mosquitoes continued to whine. The yellow of the radio dial illuminated the refrigerator. There was no music, only the buzzing of electricity from the depths of the cabinet.

  “Have some Fritos, pal—we got us a grave to dig tomorrow.”

  35

  Digging the grave was easy. Lame Bull operated the spud bar and I the shovel. The bar sank easily into the brown earth, loosening great dry clods which I flung out of the hole. Although we had started early enough, by ten o’clock we were stripped to the waist and sweating. My handkerchief, which I had tied around my forehead, was soaked. But it was easy work, not like the winter we had planted First Raise. With two bars and a fifth of whiskey, we had struggled through three feet of frozen ground, chipping it like flakes off an arrowhead. By nightfall we still hadn’t worked our way through the frost. The snow around the hole was littered with chips of earth. Early the next morning, Lame Bull’s bar broke through. He struck with such fury that the bar sank half its length and we had to chip it out with the other one. An hour later we had the hole dug, squared off and the coffin in place. Instead of any feeling of sorrow for my dead father, I felt only relief that we had finally gotten the hole dug. The sorrow, what there was of it, came later.

  Lame Bull wanted to dig my grandmother’s grave five feet long because that was how long she was. He was willing to add a couple of inches at each end in case she had grown any in the funeral parlor. But I convinced him that her coffin would probably be as large as any, so we made it another foot longer. By way of compromise, we only dug it down to five feet. But it was a good five feet, squared off nicely, the base as level as a tabletop and the dirt piled neatly on the side.

  We sat on the pile to rest. Lame Bull rolled a smoke, which we passed back and forth. Across the hole I noticed that First Raise’s grave had sunk about a foot. Although surrounded by weeds, the grave itself was bare, except for a Styrofoam cross with two dirty plastic flowers tied to it. I couldn’t tell what they were supposed to represent. They were white with yellow feelers coming out of their centers.