by Les Weil
Evans walked the little hall and went down the closed staircase. Outside, where the air was fresh, he stopped and lit his own cigar. The night was a little chill for comfort, but he stood quiet at the edge of the walk, puffing on his smoke and letting the tags of thought drift through his mind. Even if Hector kept his promise, it would be a dirty business, a dirty, bloody, necessary business. In imagination he could hear the suck of Joyce's breath, could see her look of blank disbelief. Hector? Whey Belly? Frog Face? What was his promise worth? Thieves were thieves, though, and other men already had had to make the rough choice. Rough on them, too, it had come about, especially if any wanted to go to the Senate. This time might be different. In any case his course was fixed.
Evans looked up and down and across the street. Here and there lamplight shafted from saloons, but elsewhere the town was buttoned up -shops closed, kids put to bed and honest folks asleep. Only a couple of teams stood at hitch racks. A tied-up saddle horse shifted position in front of the hotel bar. In the night quiet the creak of saddle leather sounded sharp. Out in the darkened street the snow was ground to dirty gray. A blanket Indian came padding down the walk. He passed by, noiseless in his moccasins, homeless in this white man's claim to hunting grounds. Homeless, but more at home with open land and wild, uneven weather than any paleface could be.
Little Runner, for example, Evans thought, Little Runner saying last fall, "Goose vamoose heap quick. Duck vamoose. Cayuse him hair like bear. Brother, keep plenty wood in lodge." And then the white owls came like shapes of snow, the Arctic owls unseen here before, and Little Runner drew his blanket close. "Ugh! Much cold! War, coldmaker say."
Evans heard the hotel door swing open. Rax came out and glanced around. From up the street, out of the new dance hall which inside was a few rough boards thrown together for floor and bar, there came the sudden whine and tinkle of a fiddle and piano and the thin laugh of some girl who got commissions on the drinks her partners bought, not to mention other earnings. Rax watched and listened and came on and passed close, barely nodding. He went to his team and untied them from the rack and pointed home. If it was day instead of night he'd see more than a few dead cows before he got there. Tally one for town: it smelled clean.
The cigar was dead. Though it wasn't half smoked yet, Evans pitched it in the street. He ought to go home. He wanted to go home, but, after tonight, he wanted a drink first. One drink. He was temperate. He walked to the door of the hotel saloon and opened it and saw Tom Ping at the bar. He was about to back out, but Ping's eyes found him, and he couldn't. He should have looked to see whose saddle horse was tied up at the rack.
He stepped to the bar and ordered whiskey. The bartender said, "Sure thing, Mr. Evans." He was a new man, seen before no doubt but not remembered.
Ping's eyes slid over, and Evans met them, and they slid away. Ping was whiskered and unclean, and he had a wife and two children who lived in a breed shack.
"You ever see a one-horse rancher, Herb?" Ping asked the bartender. Sugar, he meant, and a day and a race in Fort Benton. It wasn't the first time he'd put the question to third parties in Evans' presence.
Herb didn't answer. He put out out a bottle and glass. Evans poured his shot. Ping had a fresh one in front of him. For a minute no one spoke. Then, so suddenly as to spill most of it, Ping pushed his glass to the back of the bar. "Pour it in the swill bucket!" He turned and legged it to the door and slammed it behind him.
Joyce was still up. She raised her eyes from her mending as he came through the door. Smiling, she asked, "Guess what?"
"You're Pretty."
"Wrong. You just missed seeing him. Little Lat took three steps, not holding to anything." Her face sobered and softened. "He's really getting sturdy. And he's so bright!"
"Chip off the old block." He stooped to kiss her.
"Whew!" she said as his lips touched her forehead. "You smell like an old cigar soaked in whiskey."
"Half a cigar. One drink. Big day for the candidate." He let himself down in a chair.
"I'll have to talk to our minister." Her smile held a trace of reproach, not because of his smoking. "It's a bad example." She lowered her head and took a stitch. "Think of Whitey!"
"I promise to sober up before I go back to the ranch."
"He's been behaving?"
"Like a lamb. Now, Joyce, he's worth his salt."
"How's Mike?"
"Carmichael? Drunk again."
Her eyes lifted, knowing better, and she bit off a thread. "You're so funny. How is he really?"
"Just fine."
She said what she'd said before, "I like Mike."
In memory Evans saw Carmichael. Carmichael, his chest mashed by a bronc, lay here in the house, a lean, not-big man of smiling words and tall tales -and pain that showed itself only when he thought no one would see. He had been apologetic and gentle and refined beyond all expectation. "Wolf bait is wolf bait, Lat," he had said. "You ought just to dump me out on the prairie." A small grin tried to cover his suffering. "Baby, you little bronc-stomper," he had said. "Mother," he had called Joyce after a week. "Please don't fret about me. You have your hands full with Little Lat." In less than two months he was ready, he swore, to go back to the ranch.
Now Evans answered, "Mike's one of the family." He wondered what Joyce would say if she knew the other side of Carmichael, the side that took him to a woman sometimes even yet and left him without regrets. No, he thought, he didn't wonder; he knew.
Joyce dropped a sock into the basket at her side and picked up another one and snugged her china egg into its toe. "How was your meeting?"
"All right. Fine. Nothing important." In Indiana men didn't go hunting men. In Indiana the law, impersonal and remote, took care of things, leaving people in peace, in the gentle peace that was almost like a mist around her. "I love to look at you," he said.
She gave him a quick smile. It faded as she went back to her work. When she spoke, it was as if a part of what he thought had reached her. "Lat, I hate to think of Little Lat growing up in this town. All saloons and gamblers and dirty Indians and, you know, vice."
"What's wrong with the ranch?"
"Not a thing," she said at once. "Not a thing for us. But he's born to be a doctor or a lawyer or maybe a professor. You can tell it by looking at his head."
"You mean his tail's not for the saddle?"
"Now, Lat!"
"I'm sorry. We'll give him all we can. But to me there are worse lives than a Montana rancher's." She didn't speak.
"Well, I'm tired," he said. "I'm going to bed." He watched her, waiting for her answer.
Her eyes kept on the work in her lap. "Why don't you go on, then? I'll mend a while."
It wasn't yes, and it wasn't no, neither one, because she was of gentle birth, out of Indiana, out of Earlham College, because she was herself. With her it never had been yes or no in words, nor, after one time, was his asking ever open. Better that way, too, he told himself, mostly better.
He got up and walked through the kitchen where a night light burned. Outside, the privy stood naked. Later the hopvines would gentle and shield it. Coming back, he saw that the water bucket was empty. He carried it out and pumped it full and brought it in. Joyce wasn't too strong. She wasn't meant to be strong like a squaw, like the squaws of the squawmen. He didn't want her to be the beast of burden that so many wives in the territory were.
He put the bucket on the kitchen stand and went into the parlor and made for the bedroom. In that curiously timbred voice that always stirred him she said, "Sleep tight, dear."
"Don't be too long."
"I'd like to finish."
The opened door to the parlor let light enough in the bedroom to show Little Lat, asleep on his stomach, his finely fuzzed head turned and his raised baby hands resting limp at each side. No troubles here. Just peace and trust and sleep and nature still unmolded. It was already late, Joyce said, for the christening.
Evans bent and touched his lips to the soft curve between he
ad and neck, holding his tainted out-breath. Breathing in, he smelled the good baby smell.
He undressed and put on his nightshirt and kissed Little Lat again and lay down. He didn't want to go to sleep yet. Neither did he want to lie awake and see rustlers swinging from trees.
The late knock startled Joyce, until she remembered that Lat was at home. She turned the knob and looked out and then swung the door wide. "Why, Uncle Marsh! Quiet! The two Lats are in bed."
He entered, explained he'd been working after hours at the store and had seen the light in her window.
She eased shut the door to the bedroom and asked him into the kitchen. "I can give you a piece of cake and a glass of milk? Or coffee?"
He chose milk and sat down at the table, waiting quietly for her to lay out the snack. When she had done so, he asked, "How did your visitor strike you? Did he get to see Lat?"
"Who?"
"Methuselah in the flesh."
"Oh, I forgot to tell Lat. You mean that old man with the dirt and the whiskers?"
"I forgot, too. Friend of the family from way back, he told me."
"I imagine!"
Uncle Marsh nibbled at his cake and sipped at his milk.It was a little while before he asked, with what seemed to her, somehow, more than usual concern, "How's the baby?"
"Wonderful. He's almost learned to walk."
He swallowed and wiped his mouth. "Fine boy. Fine man you've got, too, Joyce." She always liked his smile. "Fine wife he's got. Fine family."
"Did you come just to compliment us?"
"To remind you it never hurts to remember our blessings. Count yours if you're ever in doubt."
"I count them every day, Solomon."
"Solomon," he said after her. "Solomon on a low inventory." He ate more cake.
She asked, "Did Lat tell you we can go back to the ranch pretty soon?"
"Fine."
But there were the wind and the cold there and the punishing sun and the wind and the great loneliness and the wind, and Lat coming out of them and desiring her beyond her desire. She had tried to keep her crying to herself, to cry alone, and the wind would cry, and outside was desolation, not the friendly hills and trees and peopled acres that she knew but raw and aching distances, space that was a fear with nameless fears inside her, that crowded in and suffocated, that ran out and dispelled and took her soul and body and the body in her womb to nothing. To the bedroom and the slop jar that she threw up in. And she would splash her face with water and rub color in it and meet Lat at the door, chanting, "`Home is the sailor, home from the sea, and the hunter home from the hill.' " It was part of an otherwise sad little poem she had just learned, and he loved to hear her recite.
"Now that he's on his feet the ranch will be just the place for Little Lat," Uncle Marsh said.
"I hope so." It hadn't been, though, for Little Lat. He had been croupy and upset and wan, so much that their hearts were torn. The doctor's prescription of boiled cow's milk and oatmeal water had brought him around, but still she wished they'd leave the ranch sometime and leave this shabby town and give Little Lat his rightful chance. The weeks at Helena, rude as that city was, would be relief. There would be other senators there, representatives, men of affairs, the new governor -Leslie was his name- and with them their wives and families. After Helena? There was no harm in thinking maybe Washington, D.C. Lat would make his mark in any place.
Uncle Marsh pushed back his chair and stood up. "I must be going." At the door he kissed her on the forehead.
She listened to his footsteps on the porch and heard them crunch off. He had told her to count her blessings. As if she needed to be told!
She went into the bedroom then and, working very quietly, changed the baby's diaper, thinking, as she pinned a fresh one on, how soon the man-child showed his hard and ready sex.
A black shape flapped in the timber and by and by grew wings and climbed, and another joined it and another, springing up over the rim of the world, springing now by hundreds, by thousands. He perceived all at once that they were crows or ravens or buzzards, not many of them any more, the many swelling back into one with a wing span that crowded the sky. It hovered up, shadowing all the land underneath, and its great eyes fixed on him and the great beak swung his way.
He was dreaming, he told himself, and for an instant knew comfort; but the bird came on, flapping with a slow, sure eagerness, the grind of its beak sounding over the wind of its wings. He stumbled away, knocking Tom Ping aside. To the south the sky was still clear.
To the south then, of all things, he saw her, far off but still close and distinct as if through a glass. High on a hill she was smiling and waving, and the horse underneath her grew into Sugar as he sharpened the focus. With both hands he waved her his way, yelling, "All right! That's enough! Come on home!" for over the hill was the dreadful drop-off. "Come back, I said!"
She kept smiling and waving and riding on toward the lip, and Sugar came to a stop and let out a shrill peal and went on to her urging.
She was lost, most of her, in the blinding blue of the sky. It was her eyes that he saw, the dark, gentle eyes and the pale flicker of face and the mouth shaping, "Goodbye." He cried out, "No! No! Don't you know! Sugar, whoa!" But she had her back to him now and Sugar kept going.
He had to catch up with them. He had to run. He put his mind to running. He put his toes, his feet, his knees, his thighs to running. He put his straining will to it and fell down paralyzed and aching with his need. "Callie!" he called into the dirt. "Callie!"
It was wrong. It was some enormous and ruinous mistake. Around him sprouted ears like cactus, tilted to his error. Her name! Her name! What was her name? His crazy mouth yelled, "Callie!"
Now she was gone from sight, and now he could run, now maybe catch hold of goodbye. Fast as the wind, to the hill, up the hill, to the crest and beyond! She wasn't there, nor the horse, but only the falling white tail of goodbye.
He lunged grasping for it, shouting, "Callie!", and the cactus lifted their ears, and just ahead suddenly, too close to escape, dropped the awful abyss.
He was falling, swift in the wind-shafts of nothing, falling to the sound of torn air, to the silence of the bottom rushing to meet him, falling in a sudden darkness cast by wings overhead.
Lat, you've been trembling and jumping all over the bed."
"Joyce," he said. "Joyce."
"You're still asleep."
"Last jump woke me up."
"Is something troubling you?"
"Just a dream."
Outside, the sky was growing gray. It was time for a onehorse rancher to get up.
28
THEY WERE to rendezvous at Rax's Bar O ranch, arriving separately and at different times so as not to risk suspicion.
The Bar 0 was closest to the breaks but yet a long night's ride removed.
Evans took it easy, letting old Sugar set his pace and saying little. Carmichael rode beside him, mostly silent, too, around his mouth and eyes the traces of some inner humor despite the work ahead.
It had snowed again, enough to coat all except the windswept ridges, and a chill breeze played under a cold though cloudless sky. Now, when it was almost time for ranges to be greening, only the white of winter met the eye, it and the hopeless gray of brush and graveled rises where by rights the carpet flowers should soon be spreading. Westward the mountains piled an iceberg shore against the sea-blue of the sky. A late spring and high water, Evans thought, but, with this moisture, good grass later on.
Carmichael said, "Be a little late, time we haul up."
"Early enough."
"When a man wants to get away, seems like someone always holds him up." It wasn't quite a question.
"Yeah."
"He sure looked hell for active for his age." Half smiling, Carmichael looked at Evans.
"Yeah."
One trouble after another, Evans reflected. Note one named Mr. Hank McBee. He had come walking to the ranch at noon, a lively fossil with moss whiskers, a
nd had drawn Evans aside. Apparently the exercise had warmed him, for the mangy fur coat that he wore was opened. His body through the unbuttoned gap looked spiderish. "'Y God, I been lookin' all over hell for you," he said. He put out his hand. It felt like a claw.
"What can I do for you?"
"'Y God, I got a surprise for you." The whiff of him was surprise enough. "I'm your grandpa."
"Sure. Sure."
"I ain't lost my wits, like it 'pears like you think."
"Then what's your game?"
"No game. I ain't jobbin' you. I come from your ma's side naturally. McBee's the name. Yes, sir, traveled with your folks to Oregon, except I slanted down to Californy 'fore I got there."
"What year?"
"'Forty-five, o' course. Seen your ma get hitched up on the way, her that was my daughter."
"Who?"
"Name's Mercy." One bony finger stabbed at Evans' chest. "Hell, you know it, if you own up to your name. It's Evans, ain't it?"
"Evans."
"My Mercy married George Brown Evans." The man's smile was a smooth, red cave in whiskers that soap might wash out white. "We called him Brownie. That's your father. It's just like yesterday."
There was no doubt. This was Grandpa McBee, come out of nowhere, broken big as life, or as small, through the curtain that the family had kept closed. This was his mother's father!
The red cave reopened, the tongue like a spit-slick clapper in it. "Tol'able glad to see you, boy, and I don't wonder you're struck dumb, never settin' eyes on me before and maybe thinkin' I'd done gone to my reward. You wouldn't want to guess the good luck that brought us two together?"
"No."
"When my woman died -typhoid it was, and a meaner damn sickness don't look to see. 'Worse'n broke-out syph. When I planted her, I went huntin' gold, bein' so low in my mind. By and by I got wind of the strike in the Sweet Grass Hills."