The Jump-Off Creek

by Molly Gloss

  “The truth is, we’ve been tracking a cow shooter,” Tim said. “Probably he’s a wolfer. We wondered if you knew him.”

  Danny shook his head. He still looked solemn, unsmiling. “We haven’t seen anybody in quite a while. We’re pretty much out of the way up here.”

  The gray horse hadn’t quit squirming. Tim wished he had both hands to head her. He said, holding the mare hard, “He would be riding a buckskin horse like that short-legged one you’ve got over there. He’d be wearing a curly Montana-style coat.”

  Turnbow, holding his chin down, looking at them low like that, said, “A lot of men wear Montana coats. A lot of men have got buckskin horses.” His voice was easy, faintly sorrowful.

  Tim kept on stubbornly. “We were tracking him over behind Bear’s Camp,” he said. “Your tracks went through there too, so we thought maybe you saw him. It was your horses going through there that spoiled his sign for us.”

  Danny seemed to think about what he ought to say. He hunted for something in the middle distance. Then a boot moved below the scabby hide hung in the door opening of the shack. Tim got a quick heat in his chest. He put his thumb on the hammer of his carbine. Maybe Blue eared his all the way back, because he heard a faint clatching sound and Danny’s face jerked as if somebody had goosed him. “Don’t jump the gun now,” he said, but it wasn’t clear who he meant it for.

  A hand pushed the hide and then a boy came out to stand under the eave of the roof. They’d seen him once before with Turnbow, a kid named Harley Osgood. He was thin and tall, his pimply face set high above a very long neck, and above that a flat-brimmed hat as wide as a boarding house platter. Under the hat he showed sorrel red hair in a long shag, and skin that looked dead white around the pimples. He stood next to Danny, looking down at his boots. He had no curly coat, just a thin canvas jacket with stains on the cuffs and across the front. Danny didn’t say anything to him. He shifted his weight making room for him in a slight way, and gave Tim and Blue a look, maybe of embarrassment. The kid, Osgood, had a big-handled pistol sitting up high in a holster at his waist.

  The Adam’s apple in the boy’s long neck skated up and down once slowly. Then he looked over at Tim. Maybe he had been getting up his gumption. “I figured an Indian could track a mouse over a flat rock,” he said. His voice was low and hoarse, and his face grew suddenly blotchy and red. “What’s wrong with yours there? He lose his eye for it when he cut off his braids?”

  Blue had a pretty high boiling point. He made a short sound like a laugh, without saying anything. But there was a stiffness in the air. Even the dogs were standing up, with the hair lifted along their shoulders. Osgood kept looking at Tim in a sullen, wild way.

  Danny said slowly, “Why don’t you all come on in and set.” He touched the edge of the doorhide. “We got a pot heating up.”

  Blue began to smile. “I’ll bet you do,” he said, low, and Turnbow made a smile of his own, sliding his eyes sideways to Osgood.

  “Yeah, well.” He scratched the back of his neck with raggy black fingernails. “The truth is, the coffee’s pretty damn bitter. We been using them grounds since last week,” He eyed them again, from under his brows. “Times are hard. You know what I mean?”

  There was a waiting silence. Tim couldn’t tell what Blue might be wanting to do by now. “I thought there were three or four of you living here, last time we came by,” he said.

  Turnbow swung his hand vaguely, looking past Tim. “There’s three of us, that’s right. Jack’s in bed. Got ahold of a little strychnine maybe, off his hands. He’s sick as death. Been in bed four days now.”

  In a while Blue said, “Maybe it was the coffee made him sick.”

  Turnbow smiled slightly. “Might be it was.”

  Tim shifted his seat carefully, looking sidelong at Blue. Blue shrugged up both his shoulders, maybe not just easing the ache of his collarbone.

  “I guess not,” Blue said. Maybe he was answering Turnbow’s offer to come in and have a cup.

  Tim said, in a moment, “You keep an eye out for a guy in a curly coat, riding a buckskin horse.” He wanted to say something more, something about hanging him, but it sounded stupid or cocky, any way he could think of saying it.

  He thought the kid might make some kind of a sour answer, but he didn’t, he just stood next to Danny, looking down at the toes of his boots. You would think you could kick him around like a stone, he had that aspect now. But he had stood before, all dare and hot piss, giving them a straight look.

  “Sure,” Danny said, nodding, solemn. “We’ll watch.”

  In the silence afterward, Tim heard Blue shifting his weight on the saddle and then turning the roan. Tim didn’t want to turn his back on Osgood, or on the other, the Montana man, inside the shack, but he did, finally, giving Danny a look as he swung around. He jigged the mare when he saw Blue was doing the same, and they went pretty fast across the bench with the dogs running to keep up. When they got to the tree line they slowed down, and after a while let the horses walk. Blue took the made cigarette out of his inside pocket and smoked it.

  Tim remembered suddenly a sorrel horse Blue had owned once, that would buck like the devil every time he lit up a cigarette. It had been a good horse otherwise, but Blue never had been able to break him of that little peculiarity, and he’d wound up trading him for a big, strong-looking bay that proved later to have tender feet. Tim didn’t know why he thought of that now.

  “I guess there wasn’t any point in pushing it,” Blue said, not looking at him.

  Tim pulled his shoulders up. Finally he said, “I guess we can wait and see what they do.” He could hear his heart beating inside his ears.

  9

  Where the chinking had fallen out, the gaps between the logs began finally to show grayness. Lydia stood stiffly and went out in the muddy clothes she’d not taken off the day before. There was no rain, just the damp chill raising the flesh of her arms, and the clouds caught in the tops of the trees along the edges of the clearing.

  The back of the house stood up close against the high slope of a ridge. There were trees still standing there, where maybe Angell hadn’t wanted to log on the steep grade. She went up under the trees and squatted and then came down to the creek and washed in that cold water without soap or towel, no telling where those were in the heap of goods in the shack. She shook out her cold wet hands, blinked wet eyelashes. She made the best of the unstill water as a looking glass and with stiff fingers worked through the tangle of her hair, retrieving and rearranging the few hairpins she could find, shaping a small, unruly knot. She would have been satisfied with simple tidiness, but in a while gave up ever reaching it and went back through the brush fence to the animals.

  In the bare daylight, in the mud, she let down the goats, catching up a little in a chipped white coffee cup and drinking it down while standing there beside the goats, with her fingers lapped around the cup and her face held close over the little warmth of it.

  Across the rim of the cup she looked at Angell’s place. Another ridge rose up along the south, steep and high as the one behind the house. The Jump-Off Creek ran between them, along the flattish bottomland where Angell had cut his crossties. It was a narrow clearing, a hundred yards wide at most, running up and down the banks of the creek, maybe twenty acres altogether of weeds and grass and thin saplings and brush growing among the stumps. Where the brush pen was, and in front of the house, nothing grew, it was all mud and rocks and deep tracks of men’s boots, horses’ shod feet. There were slick muddy trails at the near edge of the creek, too, where they’d come for the water.

  Lydia stood and stared at all of it for quite a while. She had spent some of the night sleepless on the bare bunk, folded up in her mother’s Windmill quilt, fitting her bony hip and shoulder into a gap where two logs joined. And in the darkness, lying a long time awake, listening to the dripping roof and the rats chewing the garbage in the yard, she had begun finally, stubbornly, to tally the work. It was an old solace. Her mother ha
dn’t ever liked to have her list them like that, all the things needing doing ranked from worst to least, first to last. You’ll make the heart go right out of you. But Lydia always had liked to see the whole shape to her work. When there was time for it, and paper, she would write the jobs down and afterward mark a line through every one as it was finished. In the blackness last night, inside the cold stinking house, she’d made the list against her closed eyes, inside her head, going over it slowly and over it, getting the order right. Now in the gray daylight, standing looking at the mud and the high wet weeds, looking at the whole shape, all the things needing doing, she felt her heart tighten up like a fist.

  She cut brush all day, grubbing out thickets by the roots with a blunt mattock, leaving the tall skinny saplings and the bracken ferns for the goats. The weather stayed damp and cold, the sky coming down low so there was no seeing how high the ridges stood. But the rain held off and she got warm enough, working. For a while she wore Lars’s big gray coat but as soon as she’d worked up a sweat it came off and she was able to get by with just the green sweater buttoned all the way up over the navy waist she’d worn for traveling.

  Every little while she stood and filed an edge onto the mattock and then piled up the brush on a tarp and dragged it behind her across the rough ground to the house. She laid out the new fence starting at the back corner of the house and going up under the trees on the steep slope where the ground was not worn slick, tramped to mud. The hill was duffy with moss and old brown needles, and the trees would maybe keep off the rain.

  When the brush was laid in place, she dug a ditch along it for the dead-hedge, using the mattock and a spade, and pushing down the soil around the roots with the mattock and the heel of her boot. The ground was rocky on the hillside, under the shallow duff, and it was matted with root. The ditch was slow going. Often she stood up straight, pushing the ache out of her back and then plucking at the front of the sweater and the blue cotton waist, letting cold air in deliberately under her breasts, where she sweated. She had Lars’s big gloves. Her hands slid inside them so a blister was gradually rubbed on one hand, along the web at the base of the thumb. She wound a clean rag around that hand, inside the glove. She scraped the mattock along the ground stubbornly, huffing white breath on the still, cold air.

  At dusk, in a frosty cold, she drove the mules and the goats inside the stiff new fence and let the goats down and again drank a cupful, standing there. She remembered suddenly, tasting the sweet heat of the milk: she had not made a meal. And remembering it, her stomach clenched with hunger.

  It was black and cold inside the shack. She made a fire in the stove, coaxing it slow and smoking from the wet wood. She fried a patty of corn meal and bolted it down, standing over the stove. She drank hot water, having no patience, this late, to get at the coffee among her piled-up stores. Afterward she took the dead rats out of the traps and set the springs on them again and heated salt and soda water in a pail. In the high jumping shadow of candlelight, she pushed a stiff boar’s hair brush steadily back and forth along the peeling, mildewed walls, the bedframe, the teetery three-legged table, and then made up her bed for the second night, on the clean bare logs of the bunk. She shook the bedding out and went along the quilts cautiously, holding up a candle, looking for vermin.

  Sitting on the edge of the bed in the poor light, she wrote tiredly, crosswise over the printed vertical columns of the accounting ledger she had taken over for a journal.

  9 April Cut brush all day to make a Fence. I have not worked this hard in a while so I am tired but now I have a place for the beasts to stand out of mud anyway. If I’m to wear clean stockings in the morning must do up a little wash yet tonight. O I would trade all for a hot bath but too tired to lift the water myself. Believe I was up 3 times or 4 in the night to take dead Rats from traps and reset. Have killed 16 Rats so far. The rain has quit but it is still cold & the sky low.

  She sat on the edge of the bunk a while with the book closed in one hand, her eyes closed too. Then she undid her boots, lay down stiffly in stiff dirty stockings. The quilt had gone dank, clammy, all day in the leaky house, but there was still a little clean mothball smell in it. She pulled the edge up to her eyes.

  10

  Harley Osgood hated the leg-hold traps. He left them jangling on his saddle most of the day, until it was plain he wouldn’t have any luck with finding game. Then, to keep from Danny’s righteous yelling, he got down off his horse and set a couple of the damned things. He chained one to a tree, pried open the jaws and balanced a piece of meat gingerly on the trigger, then kicked a little duff over thejaws and the chain. He didn’t worry about his smell being on the iron because they wouldn’t catch any wolves in the things anyway; he knew better than that. And the truth was, he was afraid to touch a trap that was set. He had a stupid fear of the things, from breaking two fingers in a squirrel trap when he was a little kid, and a healthy fear, from seeing what a wolf’s leg looked like, caught in the sprung jaws.

  It started to rain as he was setting the last one. It was half dark by then, so after thinking about it, he rode down the Jump-Off Creek to that old shack. He was quite a bit closer to it than to the place on the high bench, and the last time he had gone by the Jump-Off shack there had been a couple of cowboys living there, they had been young as him. He figured he would get in under the roof with them and get dry, wait out the wet and the dark. Maybe they’d play cards. He had lately learned how to play euchre, he was anxious to play it whenever he could. It wasn’t like he had anything waiting for him up on the bench. Jack would have played cards with him, but he never could win when he played euchre with Jack.

  He stuck his cold left hand inside his coat, between the snaps in the front, but that didn’t help the right hand holding the reins or his ears hanging out cold below the hat. Every little while rain ran off the front of his hat brim, dribbling on his wrists and the sleeve of his coat where he reached out holding the horse to a straight path. “Shit,” he said, in a flat way, every time it happened. He had a habit of swearing when he was alone, for the little bit of cold comfort in it.

  It wasn’t all the way dark yet when he came out of the trees into the long clearing. All the light left in the day seemed to lay in that open place. He could see from where he was, a woman walking down from the trees behind the house. She must have seen him too. She stood and looked a minute and then went on quicker and stood waiting in front, beside the door, with her arms folded up on the front of a big old coat.

  He hadn’t thought about those cowboys maybe moving on, and somebody else squatting in the house. Shit! He sat his horse under the skimpy cover at the edge of the trees and looked across at the woman, the rain falling straight down in the open clearing between them. But then he went ahead. He was hungry, and teeth-chattering cold, and hell, they were just squatters.

  When he came up in the yard, something started a sudden scared racket behind the house. He heard the brush fence cracking and when the woman heard it she made a desperate face and went around there quickly, flapping her muddy big skirt. But the goats had got out by then, two of them scooting off through the stumps, up the long clearing, bleating a silly alarm. The woman made a tired, helpless gesture, lifting one hand, as she stood there watching them run away. Harley sat up straighter, without smiling. He had got to like it a little, the way people and livestock pulled up short and their eyes rolled white when they smelled the wolf on him.

  He stopped his horse and waited. She was tall as a man, lean, and as old as Danny Turnbow. There were muddy fingerprints on the brim of her old man’s hat, as if she had taken it off or set it on with dirty hands. She stood stiffly along the hole the goats had made in the dead-hedge and looked back at him. He dropped his own look down to his cold hand clasping the reins.

  “Ma’am,” he said, without looking at her. He didn’t say anything about the goats. “The squatters’ rights been already taken up here,” he said in a low voice. “Me and two others have been living here all winter.” H
e had thought out how much of a lie to tell, and he delivered it as briefly as might be. “I don’t mind sharing the roof with your family tonight, though, since it’s raining.”

  The woman’s face set slowly, not quite as if he had provoked her, but as if she was getting hold of a stubbornness. She pushed her hands down in the pockets of her big coat. “I have bought the deed outright from Mr. Angell,” she said in a level voice, cold as clay. He could tell it was the truth just by the way she stood there, and a little heat began to come up in his neck. He felt stupid, all at once.

  Without his deciding to do it, he sat up higher in the saddle and looked at the woman recklessly. “You don’t say,” he said, letting the words out short so he knew they sounded disbelieving. He didn’t know what he expected out of that. It had come out without thinking, on his sudden, unexpected temper.

  She lifted her big chin slightly and drew her mouth up in small pleats. The look she gave him was pink, straight, bristly. “I’m sorry for it, but I must turn you away, as there isn’t room under the roof,” she said, without sounding sorry at all, only sharp and very well decided.

  He felt his own face going red and he tried to stop it from doing that. But for a while he could only sit there feeling that bright thing like embarrassment, and himself holding straight in the saddle. He wished wildly that he had come to her in the first place with his hat in his hand, she would maybe then have let him sleep on a shakedown bed next to the stove. But there was no going back to that now.

  She said, with her mouth still drawn up and stiff, “If you are hungry I can spare milk for you.” She was watching him. The rain felt cold as snow. Her look made him suddenly sorry for himself, and piteous.

  He pulled up his shoulders gloomily and looked down at his cold hands. “No,” he said, in a low, miserable way. “I’m not on the grub line yet.” Without any warning, his eyes sprang with tears. In desperate embarrassment he jerked his horse around and kicked it, kept kicking it until they had run into the dark under the trees. He was crying by then, stupidly, helplessly. Shit, he thought. Shit! He wiped his face on the sleeve of his cold, muddy coat.