Lime Creek

by Joe Henry

  And then Bradley beginning to unbutton his coat says, As long as he’s with Lefty. Maybe there’s two or three Luke Davises somewheres out there in the world or their equivalent, although I shudder to think it, but there’s only one Lefty. Mrs. Bowman turns and slaps at her youngest son’s arm that’s still in its coat sleeve. You hush, she says, with that little mock scowl she has up between her eyebrows which is also just this side of a smile. You come back now Luke, she says. You hear me? And he turns at the door and says, If’n it’s too bad, Mrs. Bowman, I promise.

  When they got over to the other side of the ridge the wind was much worse, as if it hadn’t been all that interested in going all the way up and over the hill because it was so busy on the Davis side that it might as well leave the Bowmans for another time. And they could count on it. They all could. And so when he and Lefty started down he knew he was two and a half miles from Doris’s and then another three-quarters of a mile from the ranch road that went along the bluff on the far side of the creek for nearly another mile before it finally turned in where it crossed the culvert and headed up toward their barn, which was a little more than another half-mile beyond.

  He figured it must have been well past midnight when they crossed the creek which was no more than a depression in the smooth even surface of the snow between either banking. Lefty whinnied as they started up toward the indistinguishable shapes of the buildings made ghostly somehow by the nearly submerged glow of the light that shone down from the peak of the barn. He whinnied again either to proclaim how glad he was to finally be back home or perhaps just to let his stablemates know that he was on the way, although the heavy blanket of falling snow muffled his call so they seemed to step through and then beyond it even before it was lost in the wind.

  Luke dismounted outside the sliding-door, wheeling and stepping down out of the near stirrup. His legs were like wooden posts that he planted in the snow or like shadows of the limbs that he assumed were still there even if he couldn’t quite feel them. He dropped the reins and Lefty stood beside him with his head lowered. His mane was all knotted with ice and there was a scant line of it above each of his brows. Luke patted him against his chest. The door was frozen in its track. A long-handled shovel rested against the outer wall for just such an eventuality and he cleared away the drifted snow, baring the concrete footing and then wedging the shovel under the bottom of the door until it broke free. It was actually only frozen where the ice off the ridge of the roof melted down, the animal-heat inside making the rafters an immeasurable degree or two warmer and thus somehow aiding in the formation of the icicles that hung like an armament of great jagged daggers and swords glinting silver when there was moonlight and building drop by drop whenever the low winter sun managed to show itself.

  He slid the door back just wide enough for them to enter and turned on the light, stopping outside Lefty’s stall which was the second one in. The first stall was empty. He removed Lefty’s bridle and exchanged it for his halter which he fastened about his head and then dropped the leadrope over the tie-rail. He patted Lefty again and undid the breast-strap and both cinches, catching the far stirrup onto the horn and lifting the saddle off him. He held it against his hip with his left hand and brought it into the tackroom just beginning to feel his legs again although not as far down as his feet just yet as he clicked on the light inside. He positioned the saddle on its wall mount and then removing his hat he knocked it free of ice and snow and hung it on the doorknob.

  The wind blew snow in through the partly open sliding-door but he’d only be a few minutes and so he let it stay. He remembered the vat of cold spaghetti that had one more feeding left in it and he anticipated taking care of that bit of business before he finally went back to his own place to lie down. He lifted away Lefty’s saddle-blankets with the steam rising off the horse’s back and took them with his bridle into the tackroom and then turned off the light. He used the scraper to dissipate the moisture where the saddle-pads had set and then a hoofpick to clean the snow that was still balled up under Lefty’s feet. Then he went over him with his left hand fixed to a rubber currycomb and his right hand to a soft body-brush, each working in concert with the other, his left hand coming first followed closely by his right.

  He mucked out Lefty’s stall from earlier in the day using a wheelbarrow to take away the waste and then proceeded down the other runway where they kept fresh shavings in a great wooden bin. He wondered when Spencer might get back as he wheeled the clean bedding toward Lefty who stood with the open stall-door between them. He could see Lefty’s lowered head facing the bars of his stall as if he was beginning to doze off although he couldn’t see the horse’s eyes as he approached.

  Someone years ago had fashioned a hood out of sheet-metal with wedged supports on either side to more or less protect the opening to the barn, and it was always intended that some spring after the snow was gone such a makeshift structure be made a more sturdy and permanent part of the roof. But having always fulfilled its function every winter, when the time for maintenance and repairs came which was usually after calving and before the start of haying, it never seemed enough of a priority to actually get done. The chores and tasks were endless and something that worked and wasn’t broken could easily be forgotten from one year to the next.

  There was so much snow, and ice under the snow, that finally breaking away from higher up on the roof from its own growing weight and beginning to slide, when it all collided with the ice and snow that was already built up on the metal hood one of the supports that was anchored against the outer wall buckled at last after all those years and the whole thing came crashing down, exploding like a booming reverberant thunderclap against the concrete footing where the outside door ran.

  Lefty swung his head pulling the leadrope free and with the open stall-door barring his way further into the barn he leapt at the partially open sliding-door, hitting its leading edge with his right shoulder and knocking it up and back as he disappeared into the night. As if being blocked from fleeing away from danger, the only other possibility was to go towards it and hopefully get past.

  Luke flung the wheelbarrow aside and flew through the door shouting, Ho! Ho! The wind stung his face and blinded him with frozen snow as he tried to run into the fresh evenly spaced holes where the snow on the ground had just been kicked apart. He tried to shield his eyes with one hand but the blowing snow was so fierce that his gesture did him no good. He pitched forward face-first and hands out when his boot struck something hard and fixed under the surface and then rose back up with his hands on his thighs while he gulped in great drafts of air. He was already wet and cold as the wind buffeted off his shoulders and drove into his chest, and when he tried to run again impeded by the depth of the snow he effected a kind of uneven lunging stride with his arms sawing out to either side.

  He was nearly down to the culvert and across the creek where Lefty could either turn toward Doris’s and Lime Creek Road which would put him in the public way going west toward the Bowmans’ or east toward Lewiston which was a considerable distance, or he could turn the other way where the road ran parallel to the creek and along the fenceline of the lower hay meadow for miles until it eventually climbed above the ranch and through the gate that separated the private from the government lands. Or he could go directly across the road where another track wound its way back to the base of a steep cliff that rose up and eventually fell back to form another humpbacked ridge.

  In geologic time Lime Creek may have been what yet remained of the great prehistoric river that carved the valley after the mountains had risen up and cooled and begun to draw the snow. Or even before that perhaps just another inconsequential underwater rift in the floor of the ocean that once covered all the land. He and Whitney couldn’t find a way to visualize that even when they studied the artist’s renderings in their schoolbooks. But then one day they found a tiny white paper-thin mollusc shell in the grass up from the bank when the creek was at its highest and loudest in the early summe
r from the mountains’ runoff that filled up all the creeks in all that country. And eventually running downhill they all joined to make a river that ran into other rivers that finally flowing together too cut through whole territories until it reached the ocean at last. That they had never seen.

  Other rivers. And the sea. And the Sea of Elizabeth that Spencer had told them about when he used to watch her sometimes coming up from his chores and seeing her sitting on the front steps with the soft summer wind of evening just lifting her hair as she waited for him. And with that faraway look on her face he said, as if she were listening. Listening to that inland sea washing up and falling back and washing up again with the muffled tide-like stroke of her own intimate pulse. Lapping at the edge of the meadow and washing up against the lowest step below the porch like a phantom sea that only she could hear for it lived inside her. And now they had a sign to validate her vision, spiral-shaped and hollow and where a tiny marine creature once lived. And when the world was a much younger place too.

  He stood in the narrow open space that was the road across from where the bed of the creek was buried but he couldn’t find any disturbance in the flat unbroken surface of the snow. He turned and tried to look behind him where he had come realizing even without being able to see into the wind that he must have missed where Lefty had turned off somewhere between the last cattleguard and the culvert. When he looked up he could just barely perceive that subtle alteration in the far darkness that had to be the light above the facing of the barn. Then he turned again and walked several steps up the road but the snow there was also undisturbed. He returned to where he’d been standing across from the culvert and walked several steps in the opposite direction toward Doris’s but the ground-snow was still unremarkable.

  Finally he tried to see toward the wall of the cliff across the road but the heavy shroud of falling and blowing snow hid everything. One momentary flaw made him almost hesitate but the wind came back in his eyes and he had to look down again. But he knew even before he looked up that the shadow or whatever it was stood where the timber backed up to the base of the cliff and so it would probably be when he could see more clearly just the nearest tree standing like a ghost in the darkness before being swallowed up once again.

  He walked across the road with the wind swirling in his face. When he looked up he could see that same tree and then not see it. The snow underfoot was deep and unscarred and the wind raced across its surface. And then for a moment the wind fell and he could see. The tree moved. But he couldn’t be sure. Like an apparition detaching itself from the dark shapes behind it and then rejoining them.

  He fixed his eyes there, taking close careful steps so he wouldn’t lose his balance and having to catch himself lose sight of where the thing seemed to appear and then disappear. But he knew what it was. He knew when it first made him look again even though he couldn’t know then what he was seeing. Before seeing.

  It was coming towards him. Very slowly it seemed although he couldn’t really gauge its pace, for the distance between them seemed as constant as if they were both fixed in a tableau that afforded neither of them depth nor dimension. Like the black dot that doesn’t seem to move on the horizon where the pinnacle of railway track disappears until the train suddenly crashes past you, shaking the earth and all at once eclipsing the whole blue enormity of the sky.

  Lefty walked toward him taking a step and seeming to hesitate before taking another as if he couldn’t yet be sure of what the stationary form was that stood before him upright and solitary and clothed too in that same chaotic cloak of blowing snow that alternately obscured the horse’s vision and then finally let him see. He stepped tentatively almost recognizing it for what it was and then losing it again. But he already knew too, and before seeing too, even before it emerged once more like a lone unbending tree not tall and with both its arms against its sides.

  And whatever the mechanism of the will that propels the beast—the heart, the adrenals, the old wolf fear, the old grandfather whose slashing hooves were its last defense—his knees began to come high up his chest and high under his belly, dancing like the grandfather like the wolf whose rage to live would keep it alive. And still advancing so he almost bounces on his feet, he draws a bead on the figure that stands before him caked up and down with snow and beyond whom is release and that instinctive myth of flight and freedom that is born in all living things. Then his high prancing knees began to rock him up and back cantering slowly at first when he still questioned what obstacle stood in his path and then knowing, loping and then actually running toward it, the ancient blood fury reborn fearless in his heart and all his grandfathers leaping under his throat and filling his chest so he suddenly cried out like a proclamation like a warning and then charged, driving with all his force off his hind legs and with his forefeet hardly touching the ground.

  Luke didn’t move. He watched the horse beginning to lope and then gallop toward him and then when the animal was close enough to see his face and his eyes he heard his voice shout something a sound before words as he threw his arms out to either side. As if he would be the barrier to stop the horse’s flight. As if his pitiful hands could reach across the canyon or restrain the wind or catch the curling wave before it hurled him back against the earth. There was nothing else for him to do. The horse would either know him and the blood bond that joined them or sundered and still exultant in the ancient blood heir to and driven by then ride him down. The dull quick concussion no more than if the animal were to pass through the grasping but powerless branches of a tree and then out again, spirit brother to the wind.

  Lefty shrieked again as he charged with his eyes wide and glaring and at the last moment before he would run over Luke he slid on his hind legs so that as he slowed and then planted himself he reared up with his front hooves flailing the air. And as Luke finally broke his stance, flinging himself to one side, the horse’s near foreleg came down over his shoulder. Before thinking Luke spun and springing up from the snow with that same ancient blood rage he drove his shoulder into the horse’s front so the greater beast screamed again, backing and lifting off its forelegs once more. But this time the lesser beast locked its arms around the horse’s neck so when Lefty began to rise, Luke’s weight made him alter his intention and he suddenly just stopped as if the old blood had all at once been shut off and sent back like the stuff of unremembered dreams. And so he just stood there resting equably on all four legs.

  Luke’s face was crushed against the animal’s shoulder so he could taste the salt and horse-reek in his mouth and feel the nicker in the horse’s neck without his actually hearing it. Then his arms released and he slumped down in the snow. The leadrope that was still attached to the halter had become wound over Lefty’s back but Luke didn’t reach to take it up. Nor did the animal step away. He just stood there with his face lifted while Luke sat in the snow with his shoulder leaning against the horse’s leg.

  Without looking up the numb fingers of Luke’s hand closed around the warmer skin above the animal’s hoof. Lefty’s full name was Left Hand Man. He was named for the sacred marking that spread over his left hip, a man’s left handprint, the tips of the four fingers and the thumb. Lefty’s great-grandfather some five generations back was Old Painter, one of the breeding stallions of the Nez Perce. When a mare was pregnant, the medicineman would pray over a special paint he had mixed and then immersing his fingers he would place his thumb on the mare’s hip bone with his fingers spread. If the foal was born with the five finger-spots on its hip it would be given to the chief, who in his wisdom would know that that animal was indeed the chief’s chief.

  Spencer had given him Lefty when both Luke and the horse were young, but almost from the first Luke had understood that if he could make himself worthy he belonged to the animal and not the other way around. He had traced Lefty’s lineage for a school project and then had kept reading about the Nez Perce and Chief Joseph and about the government policy that was intent on relocating the native peoples when t
heir lands became desirable and then of course necessary.

  The Nez Perce bred their horses for strength and stamina and for their temperament too. When the Whiteman came, they named that breed for the valley in the Northwest where those animals and those people lived. In peace. Until the Whiteman came. And then the Nez Perce had reason to give their animals a new name. Horse of the Iron Heart.

  Fleeing from the government’s four-hundred-troop cavalry of “manifest destiny” across Idaho and down the Bitterroot and back up through central Montana toward the Canadian border and sanctuary, with less than forty miles to go after being pursued for nearly four months and more than seventeen hundred miles and starving and freezing in an early October blizzard, with nothing left to sustain them they nicked the artery that was close to the surface of the skin inside their horses’ ankles and survived at the end on their animals’ blood until the tiny wounds closed over. And until their chief, Joseph, finally surrendered so that what was left of his people still might live.

  Luke and Lefty stayed as they were for what seemed a long time with the wind still keening and the snow still building on Lefty’s back and on Luke’s shoulders and arms. When he finally rose up he had begun to shake all over, his whole skin it seemed quivering inside his heavy wet clothing. Lefty stood to let him mount and then walked back to the drifted road and over the crossing where the buried creek still ran. Luke held on to both sides of the horse’s neck while the blowing snow filled in the spaces between his fingers.

  He didn’t know why he was crying but the shivering flesh of his chest down his arms and across his back was not simply from the cold but also from some depthless grief sourced not only in the confrontation they had just quit but somewhere else and in a different and lost time too. Unborn wings that never would fly. And yet he thought. Something. Some thing. But he didn’t know enough nor imagined he ever would to know what it could be. And all the while the wind still keened over the horse’s guileless face and keened over the crown of the man’s bowed head. And yet it said. And yet.