The Jump-Off Creek

by Molly Gloss

  Blue had never got to feel comfortable with cutting the sex out of a calf while a woman watched. He turned and came at it a little backward so the woman might not see around him to what he was doing. From there, with his hindside to Mrs. Sanderson, he gave Tim a look. Tim kept his head down.

  “It works easier, sometime, if you take hold of the ears with one hand and the behind leg with the other,” Blue said gently, without looking at the woman. “They don’t fall quite so hard.”

  She nodded her head without speaking. Her face was set and pink, holding the calf flat.

  When she went out to the next one, she took it by the ears and the behind leg and dropped it neatly. Her mouth was straight. But she rubbed her cheek against her shoulder and Blue saw her hiding the little flash of satisfaction.

  When they started, fog was standing up like a cockscomb on the roof of the house and lying along the ground under the trees and in the hollows. But gradually the sun began to burn a hole in the overcast, showing pale at first behind the thin cloud and then growing slowly harder and yellower. The wind shifting blew the black soot and sting of the branding fire. When the woman got hot and put off her big old coat, Blue could see the outing flannel dress was resewn from another size—there were pale lines of wear and picked-out stitches showing in the bodice and the long narrow sleeves. Shortly there was blood on it and mud and short hairs and little burnt holes. While they waited for Tim to bring a calf up, she would stand with her arms down and sometimes rub her palms against that filthy skirt. She kept from picking at the little spoiled marks on it. Blue got hot too. Dust and hair were in his nose and mouth, itching inside his shirt. His back and his collarbone ached.

  Every little while a cow would charge the dogs and come mad and bellowing down the slope after her calf. The first time it happened, Blue was squatting, pulling at the calf’s sac. Tim yelled and jumped for it, and Blue, jumping too, had a glimpse of the woman’s face, cutting a look to the side, making sure before she ran that they were both running too, and only then letting go the calf, bolting behind the piled-up firewood with her dirty skirt belling out around her boots.

  When they had got all the CrossTie calves doctored, Blue watched Tim for a Quit look, but he kept on silently, doggedly, bringing up Half Moon calves after that, glancing at the woman from under his hat when he thought he wasn’t caught at it. He didn’t say anything to her about fairness.

  Finally Blue said, “I could eat.” He looked at Tim as they stood away from doctoring an ugly brindle bull calf. The woman straightened slowly with both hands pressing against her back. Tim was still bent over, working his hand under his chaps to finger his bad knee. In a bit he stood and kicked a stump piece of fir wood in the fire.

  “We’ve got those corn dodgers,” he said, looking at Blue. “And we’ve got beef.”

  Blue knew what he was getting at. They had been saving the testicles up. Tim would strip the sinew out of them and fry them up in lard. Mountain oysters. But he didn’t want to cook them for Mrs. Sanderson, there was no telling how she would feel about eating them.

  Tim looked at the woman finally. “The dodgers are getting pretty old by now, I expect you’ll need to wash them down.”

  She made a small movement with one hand and smiled in a funny flat way, widening her mouth out a little. “I’m hungry enough, I don’t believe I’d complain.” She looked from one of them to the other.

  Tim nodded. He rubbed the palms of his hands across his shirtfront. “Okay,” he said, and he went off toward the house. Blue stood awkwardly next to the woman. Finally he made a gesture with one bloody hand. “I’ll heat some wash water,” he said. He went after Tim into the house, leaving the woman standing alone in the yard with the dogs.

  He stirred up a little fire in the stove, started a kettle of water to heat, rummaged around to find a thin slip of soap, a towel that might have been clean, a basin they generally used for shaving their whiskers off. He laid it all out neatly on the bench. He and Tim didn’t speak at all. Tim was straightening up the mess in the house with jerky nervous movements, pulling blankets up on the narrow beds, scraping old food off a stack of dirty plates, kicking litter up in a drift in the corner. Then he went to the door.

  “Come on in if you want,” he said, sounding not like himself, soft and timid.

  The woman came inside. Blue saw her look, taking it all in without seeming to. He couldn’t tell by her face what she thought. Tim nodded to her once and went right out. Blue, after a moment, said, “Take your time, ma’am,” and then he went out too, leaving her alone for a private toilet.

  They went down to the pond, walking slowly, holding sore bloody hands out from their sides. They didn’t say anything. At the edge of the bank, Blue squatted and rolled up his shirt sleeves one turn and stuck his hands in the cold water. He got his hair wet too, combing it back with his fingers. He rinsed the short itchy hairs and dust out of his mouth. Tim had taken his shirt all the way off, was washing himself with slow care. His upper body looked dead white, with a sunburn line at the neck and around his wrists. Blue stood behind him, rolling his damp sleeves down, looking at the pink puckered scar on his back where the horn of a cow had taken him a couple of years ago.

  “She’s the one who took Claud’s place at the Jump-Off Creek,” Blue said, without the need to make it a question—it was plain enough. Tim didn’t say anything. “She holds down her end pretty good,” Blue said after a while. Tim kept washing. Finally he made a low grunting sound that might have meant yes.

  They went back slowly to the house. “Maybe we better give her a little more time,” Tim said, not looking at him. They stood around in the yard and Blue smoked a cigarette. He watched Tim sideways, but he couldn’t tell what was wrong with him. The dogs lay on their bellies in the shade of the house, watching both of them.

  Then they went cautiously in. She was pulling her skirt down, maybe, with her back turned to them. She stood quickly straight and came around facing them, smoothing her palms against the folds of dirty flannel. She had drawn her hair in a little, repinning it, and her face was clean, the skin of it looking tight and shiny. Maybe some of the dust and cow hair had been shaken out of the plaid dress. She had washed her hands but there was still black around the nails and in the lines of her fingers and palms.

  Tim nodded and went past her silently, back into the cool room half-dug into the ridge behind the house. Blue, left alone with her again, looked around the room.

  “Sit down, ma’am,” he said, when he thought of it.

  The woman sat in the rocking chair they had got out of old Loeb’s place when he died. She didn’t rock in it. She sat still with her rough hands loose in her lap, her face solemn, tired. Blue made the coffee, dumping out the old grounds and starting over. He cast around for something to say. “You’re doing fine, ma’am,” he said.

  He could see he had surprised her. She gave him a wide look. “Thank you, Mr. Odell. It’s hard work.”

  “It’s hard, ma’am. And we’ve got too few of us. It gets a little better when there’s a full crew and a decent set of corrals.”

  She nodded gravely. “I can see a use for five or six of us anyway.”

  “At least that. I’ve been on ten-man crews and we stayed busy. We were branding two hundred calves a day, though.”

  Tim came in again with a big flat piece of meat he’d sawn off the carcass of the cow hanging up in the cool room. He went to the stove and banged things around. No one said anything. When Blue looked at the woman, she wasn’t watching either of them. She was staring out the window at the trees, her face slack, unguarded.

  They ate quietly, looking down at the food. The dodgers were cold and stale, but Tim had split them and spread the grainy tops with the little honey they had, and that helped them down. The shoulder meat was tough, but he had dragged it in meal or crumbs, salted it pretty good, fried it in fat. The woman didn’t seem to mind chewing it. Blue watched her face when she drank her coffee. She drank it slowly, looking down into
the cup.

  In the afternoon they switched off. Tim let the bay horse out and Blue saddled the roan and did the roping. He found he was nervous, making the first cast of the rope with the woman watching him. He was afraid of catching the rope under the roan’s tail, or around his neck, like a clumsy kid. But he made the catch all right and after the first one he didn’t think about her anymore. He thought about how many calves they had left. He kept looking over at them while he was holding one down, to see how many they had to go.

  It was Tim who called Quit in the afternoon. He just stood up from a calf and said, “It’s getting dark.” There was a lot of light left and calves too, but Mrs. Sanderson had a ways to go to get home. She sighed, not arguing, straightening her back slowly. Blue was sore too. He pulled the brands out of the heat and stood looking down at the fire, shrugging his shoulders gently.

  “I make a pretty good onion pie,” Tim said to the woman. He said it as if he thought she might argue. “If you want to stay and eat again.” He wasn’t looking at her.

  She made one of those odd quick smiles, turning it on each of them. Blue saw why it looked flat: it didn’t show at all around her eyes, it was just a movement she made with her mouth. “Thank you. I believe I’ll start home while there is light.”

  In a moment she nodded as if they had said something else. “Thank you,” she said a second time. Then she started across the grass after her mule, walking slowly, rubbing the heels of both hands against her skirt.

  Tim watched her and then he turned and went back toward the house. Blue picked up the woman’s coat where she had left it dropped on the ground and he carried it out to her. Maybe she had remembered the coat herself. She rode the mule at a walk down the slope toward Blue, smiling slightly in a gentler way.

  “Thank you, Mr. Odell.”

  He handed the coat up to her. “Sure,” he said. Then he said, “If you want to stay and eat, one of us would see you home.”

  She made a small pulling-up motion with her shoulders. “The fact is, I am more tired than hungry.” She said it tiredly, plainly, so that he felt no need to answer. She put her hand down suddenly for him to take. “It was good to meet you, Mr. Odell.”

  He shook her hand. It felt narrow and hot. “Thanks for helping out,” he said in a moment.

  She nodded seriously.

  “I guess you ought to take that brand home,” he said. He went back and got it for her. He cooled it in the dirt, wrapped it up and handed it to her. She held it across the saddle.

  “Thank you,” she said and smiled again and turned the mule out. Blue watched her ride off slowly through the bunches of cows. When he turned to start down again to the house, he saw Tim had come back out in the yard after the can that had the mountain oysters saved up in it. He looked once toward Blue, or toward the woman who was letting down the fence at the top of the hill.

  14

  The mules sounded the warning with silly plaintive brays. Lydia’s body had made the bed warm. She waited, lying rigidly where she was. Then the goats took up bleating and there was another sound, perhaps one of the mules, an indistinct grumble like a complaint. She surrendered the quilts and got the shotgun from under the bed, found the paper box of shells, sat on the edge of the bed in the darkness fumbling a shell into the breech of the gun. The air was cold. Her fingers were stiff and swollen.

  She came out of the house and around the corner of it to the edge of the brush fence, shaking in the cold dark wind. The goats never would be kept in by the brush fence when determined to get out, so she had lately kept them tied at night. They went jerkily back and forth on their ropes, crying pitifully. The mules had come down near the house. They kept away from the goats, standing high-headed and eyeing whitely across one another’s shoulders. Lydia stood watching them and then watching up the hill. There was a thin low moon but it was black under the trees and the wind made the long shadows shake. There was nothing to hear over the loud bawling fear of the goats.

  She went a little way along the edge of the line of brush, up the steep hill toward the trees. She held the gun in both hands, shaking, putting her bare feet down with care. She had had the gun from her mother’s brother when she was thirteen. She had killed a lot of things with it, snakes and sage hens and hares. Once a coyote. It had been a good gun once, a handmade L. B. Settlemeier with an engraving of pheasants on the breech. But it had been used badly before her uncle got it, the mahogany stock gouged in a couple of places and the finish worn off, the barrel pitted from poor storage. Sometimes now the hammer stuck. She doubted it could kill anything of size—almost certainly not all at once.

  She didn’t go very far up the hill. Her knees were shuddering, rubbery, they wouldn’t take her. She stood at the edge of the trees peering uphill into the blackness, clenching the old gun in both hands.

  “Hey!” Her yell came on an outbreath without her quite knowing that it would. The sound was high and short and hoarse, it got something to move ahead of her, a heaviness. She stood still, only her heart lurched. She was afraid to shoot the gun, then it would be empty. She stood still and waited, staring madly against the dark.

  “Unh,” it said, and moved, she heard it move through the fence, pushing the brush down or out of the way. The blackness shuddered, there wasn’t any shape on it, just a spasm, and that sound of something going heavily through the fence. She stood still. After a long time, she backed away down the hill toward the house, sliding her feet along the ground. She went down along the fence to the corner of the house and put her back against the wall and stood there holding the gun and looking up into the blackness under the trees. The wind was cold. Her shoulders, her knees shook; presently her teeth rattled too. She stayed where she was, pressed against the hard log wall of the house.

  Brush broke again but it was not the fence, it was farther over on the hill. She stepped out from the house and held the gun up, but she couldn’t see where it was. Nothing came down out of the trees.

  Little by little the goats gave up bolting back and forth on the ropes. They stood as near the mules as they could reach and fell into an uneasy quiet. When they had been still a while, Lydia went into the house. Quick and shaking, she put on Lars’s big coat, stuck her bare cold feet in unlaced boots, got the box of shells and went out again. She stood there at the corner of the house where she could see the trees and the hedge and the goats. She held the shotgun in both hands in front of her, with the shells in the pocket of the coat.

  The mules and the goats gradually became unafraid. They may have slept, shifting their weight from foot to foot. She stayed where she was standing near them holding the gun, waiting for the slow, cold daylight. Nothing moved again under the trees except the wind. When the sky became colorless, limpid, she went carefully up the hill and found the big bear’s prints in the soft duff, so that what had seemed dreamlike hardened suddenly and became actual. She heated a little water and bathed her dirty feet before dressing slowly, standing close to the stove. Her eyes stung. She pushed her knuckles against them. Behind the lids she saw the black heavy thing moving in blackness going across the way in front of her—how close—ten feet? Her heart beat slowly, but she heard it inside her ears.

  She let down the goats and put the milk to cool and ate a little mush and afterward, slowly, went up the hill behind the house. She took the shotgun and carried the box of shells chinking lightly in the pocket of her coat. She followed the marks the bear had left in the soft ground going across the hillside. They were plain for a while and then not. She hunted for them patiently. The bear had started off north. She kept that way, only wigwagging a little east and west to catch the trail if it had veered. She found a track again, northwest, going down the hill. And then along the trail beside the Jump-Off Creek there was one plain print going off toward the North Fork. She stood and looked at it, holding the shotgun down in front of her with two hands. She went back and saddled the black mule and rode after the bear. She had no clear idea what she meant to do.

  After
a while, in the mud next to the trail, the bear’s tracks swung west, and following them she came down to the North Fork of the Meacham by a rough, straight way. The trail beside the creek was beaten flat and wide in hardened old mud; the only marks showing on it had set there after the last heavy rain. She looked for a little while without expectation, then gave it up.

  She thought of going over to Tim Whiteaker’s. I have had a bear after my goats. I wondered if you had had him around here at all. When she could not get it to sound unafraid, she rode the mule back along the Jump-Off Creek and home and afterward, for two or three days, slept poorly with the loaded shotgun on the little rug below the bed.

  15

  The trees left off at the bottom of the hillside where the rails cut a pair of straight lines beside the old toll road, and in the open basin the station buildings squatted behind the long rows of stacked-up fuel wood. There were half a score emigrant wagons parked along the slope above the creek, winter-overs, who’d more than likely soon be moving down to the gentler valleys of the Willamette. They looked mute and sodden and sightless behind their puckered-up storm flaps. All of the people in them were Johnny-come-latelies, trailing forty years behind the big emigrations, and maybe they knew they’d find opportunities poor now, two years into the depression.

  Below one of the tailgates, a woman crouched on her haunches. She was heavy, with lank earth-colored hair. She held a wailing child against her while she bellowsed a wet-wood fire.

  Danny said, “They should’ve started down to The Dalles by now.”

  In a moment, though he was indifferent, Jack answered, “Maybe the river’s too high.”