The Jump-Off Creek

by Molly Gloss

  “They should’ve started by now.” Danny looked away irritably from the woman, along the dark ruts of mud that bisected the valley. Maybe the low, wet, fishbelly sky and the crying baby and the woman’s smoky fire had put him flat. He had gotten prone to low moods lately. Jack thought his humor might improve when he’d had a beer, and some folding money in his pocket where he could reach and touch it with his hand.

  The three of them unsaddled and turned their horses in the stock pen and hauled bundled hides on their shoulders as they crossed through the mud to the store. The clerk, Greevey, was alone. He raised from his penciling to study them in the oil-lamp dimness.

  “How-do,” he said. “Get you boys beers?”

  There was a long trestle table cramped among the trade goods in the little room. They dumped the hides down on the floor beside the table, sat along its benches and blew on their cold hands. Jack went over the four bits change in his pants, selected a nickel, put it out on the table with the others. Then he touched the beer glass lightly with his fingertips. It was cold. There was a cold frost on the glass.

  “Looks like she’s gonna rain again,” Greevey said. His mouth fashioned a careful, self-reproaching smile. He smelled faintly of dampness, and brewed coffee.

  Danny fingered out the list from an inside pocket. “We’ve got eleven wolf hides and nineteen pair of ear,” he said. “Also two fox and one wolverine. We’ll want these things to buy out of the money we got coming.”

  Jack set his emptied glass down. There was a white scum on the inside of the glass and a greasy mark on the rim where his mouth had touched. He wiped his wet mustache with the edge of his hand and put out a little more of his own money.

  “You got eggs?” he said. “It’s been a while since I’ve had an egg.”

  Greevey held the list between his thumb and forefinger, squinting at it and then squinting down at the pile of hides. Finally he put the list down flat on the trade-goods counter and went off to rummage the egg and crack it frying on the little cast iron stove. While he watched the egg, he put his index finger against a sideburn and smoothed the bristles carefully.

  “Them hides look pretty thin, pretty patchy,” he said.

  Harley made a sound as if he thought that was funny, but he didn’t smile. He had a habit of snorting like that, without ever letting it get to be a smile. Jack looked at Danny.

  “We been bringing the hides up here for half a year,” Danny said. Jack could hear the little wheeze that started whenever he was tired out or mad. “I guess we thought you’d be glad for the business.”

  There was red by now in Greevey’s neck. In a moment, without turning around to them, he said, “Well, I got some bad news for you boys, you see, and I was hoping if you had some good hides there, well it’d take the sting out of it. Because the state, they’ve dropped their bounty. These are hard times you know, boys, and they just ain’t able to pay out all that money no more and they’ve had some gripes anyway about beeves and sheep killed to make bait and little kids and dogs accidental eating the poison and whatnot, and they just dropped it altogether. Maybe next winter, they say, but for now there ain’t no more bounty. I was hoping them eleven hides you brought would be good winter prime stuff, because those sets of ears you’ve got are no damn bit of good to either one of us today, and I’m damn sorry about it too.”

  He ran out of impetus at the end, dribbling out the last few words gently, apologetically, and then busying himself through the silence by getting Jack’s egg out, sliding the plate across the gritty boards of the table, hunting up a fork, a saltcellar, a mason jar of red-pepper sauce.

  Danny lifted his head, looked at Jack. Jack looked away. He wiped his sleeve against his mouth and stared across the little room to the sooty corners, where crates were piled up against the walls.

  Harley made a coarse and bitter sound. “Well that’s just bejesus fine,” he said, in his low, muttery, mad way. “They cut the legs out from under us just like that and leave us setting in the mud on our goddamn butts. That’s just bejesus fine and dandy.” He ran the words together in a long complaint, his furious look fixed on Greevey.

  Greevey spread his hands apologetically. “I know, boys, I know, but I got nothing to do with it, nothing at all. Listen, I’ll tell you what, I’ll give you the best price I can on them hides there, and then I’ll cook up some more eggs, they’re on the house, plate of eggs for each and every one of you, on the house. You know you boys ain’t the only ones left holding an empty sack over this. There’s been half a dozen cowboys in here the last couple three weeks expecting a payday on their ears. I tell you, it’s been hard as hell on me to break the news, hard as hell. I could’ve just put up a sign outside, you know, done it that way cold as a witch’s tit, but I felt you boys deserved to hear it from me. We been doing business a good long while, like you said, and shit, you deserved better than a sign nailed on the wall, that’s the way I felt.”

  Jack left the egg. He pushed back his end of the bench and went out through the stacks of goods, away from Greevey’s endless wheedling speech, out to the porch where it was raining now on a slanting wind. He sat on the edge of the porch and chafed his hands together. He could hear Harley’s voice again, not the words through the log walls, but a hissing sound of bitterness.

  They had reason to bitch: a whole damn season’s work gone for nothing. Eleven no-good hides. When Greevey got a good look, they’d be lucky to get a gold piece for the lot.

  In a while the other two came out. They stood near him on the porch and stared out to where the clouds pushed down against the tips of the trees.

  “Shit,” Danny said, low.

  They stood silently together and finally Harley cleared his throat. “I don’t ride the grub line,” he said. His face was red in blotches. “I’d sooner steal than beg.” As long as Jack had known him, he had had a strong dislike of riding the grub line. Maybe he had been made to eat humble pie once, or maybe he was just holding on to some conceit.

  Danny looked at him. Then he came down off the porch. He stood in the mud with his hands in his coat, and his hat brim dribbling rain. He looked at Jack. “I guess I’ll go over along the Snake and look for a job. You coming?”

  Jack bunched his shoulders coldly under his sheep-hide coat. He didn’t know what kind of an answer he could make. “Greevey pay you for the hides?”

  Harley blew air through his mouth in that humorless sound of bitterness. “He stole those hides is what he did.”

  Danny never looked at him. He dug out a coin and sailed it across to Jack.

  Harley said, “You can live high on that for half an hour.”

  Danny looked toward him but didn’t say anything. Then he looked at Jack and pulled his hat and went heel-sucking through the mud to the horses. He slid the saddle over on the horse’s back and rocked it gently and reached under the belly for the cinch strap. Jack watched him unhappily. Finally he left Harley standing alone on the porch and he crossed to the pen. The rain was thin and cold, blowing up from behind him, wetting his neck. He stood next to Danny, watching him.

  The two of them had lately talked: when they got their money this time they’d go down along the Snake, where there were still some outfits that didn’t fence up much, were still working the old way, with a full spring roundup and a fall drive taking steers to railhead. The wolves had been pretty much cleaned out, and if they could get on for the summer somewhere, and put a little away with the wolfing money, they could maybe put up in a town the next winter. Maybe at Nyssa. When Jack had been a kid he’d got on tight with an outfit on the upper Snake, spent four or five years on that spread. Got deflowered down there too, by the only whore in Nyssa, a lady he remembered even now for her long white legs and long hair colored pale as straw. Jack had begun to think a lot, the last few weeks, about the Snake country and those old times and that whore he had loved once. But now the ears had come to nothing and the hides would hardly buy newspaper to line his leaking boots. He knew, with a sudden certainty, t
hat he’d get down there and there’d be no jobs and too many ahead of them on the grub line and the Nyssa whore dead or deadly, and in a while the memory of that old time would get sucked dry. But that wasn’t anything he could say to Danny.

  “We’re flat busted broke and no prospects in sight,” he said finally. “Cowboys out of work all over the state. You want to ride the grub line? We never done it up to now.”

  Danny looked off across the basin. Maybe he was remembering something, himself, something to do with better times. “I guess I’ll try a few places before I go to the grub line,” he said. Then he put his boot in the stirrup and swung up on the horse.

  Jack hunched his shoulders, squinting up through the rain at him. “We got a roof where we are,” he said. “We can keep on there like we been, if we got meat. I don’t figure it’s stealing if a man shoots a cow when he’s hungry.”

  Danny looked annoyed. “I guess if the cows was ours,” he said, wheezing, “we’d think otherwise.”

  Jack looked away, and then back. It had always irritated him, this business between Danny and Whiteaker and the Indian. “They wasn’t never no friends of yours. You said they weren’t. Stuck to themselves, you said.”

  Danny squirmed a little on the saddle as he looked off toward the line of trees against the overcast. “I guess they were just minding their own business.”

  Jack wiped his whiskers. “Well, I’m staying. You staying with me?” he asked finally, irritably.

  Danny tightened his hat down. “No,” he said. “I guess not.”

  He touched the horse with a spur and turned him along the ruts of the road. He went past Harley, standing on the porch under the eaves of the store. The kid looked at Danny, and then down at the boards under his feet.

  Jack heard Danny say a couple of words. “Snake,” he heard. The kid didn’t say anything. Jack didn’t either.

  And then Danny was gone on away from them, following the road. It went ahead of him, out of sight in the trees along the brim of the basin. Jack stood in the rain watching him leave. “Shit,” he said, but without moving his mouth much, and the kid probably didn’t hear it. There wasn’t any heat in it anyway.

  16

  There was a woman in the yard, pinning overalls and towels to a line strung between thin, leaning maple trees. She looked and saw Lydia and stood away from the laundry line, wiping her hands on her apron. There were two boys playing in the mud. When they saw where their mother was looking, they jumped up quick and went inside the house. From the far end of the wagon lane, Lydia could not tell how old they were. Under six?

  She came on slowly on the black mule lately named Rollin. It seemed to take a long while to get across the grass with the woman standing there watching her come, and then hard to tell at what point she ought to call out a hello, or stop the mule and wait to be asked in. She felt a little rigid smile fixing itself on her face.

  “Hello!”

  “Hello!” The woman’s face was flushed, or windburned. She had a pressed-thin smile she was holding too. “You are the woman at the Jump-Off Creek,” she said finally, so that it was not directly a question.

  “Yes.”

  She nodded. “Mike met Tim Whiteaker out on the trail lately and he said you would be coming.” The woman was big, her arms and neck thick through, her face wide and round. She was still very young, that wide face as smooth as a girl’s, and above it a mass of brownish hair shot through with streaks of fading girlish blond. She kept it braided and pinned up on the crown of her head in a big neat coil. If she had let the braids down she would have looked about sixteen. She was, maybe, twenty.

  Lydia sat on the mule, smiling stiffly. Finally she said, “I’m Lydia Sanderson.”

  The woman nodded again. “I’m Evelyn Walker.” Her hands twitched at her apron. “I’m real glad you’ve come. There’s no women up here hardly. Come in, won’t you, and I’ll get us some coffee.” She sounded formal, unpracticed.

  Lydia stood self-consciously off the mule, pulled her skirt loose, smoothed her hands against the bunched-up wrinkles. She had wrapped up the jars of milk in towels and set them in saw chips in a hamper carried across the front of the saddle. While Evelyn Walker watched, she took the hamper down. She left the mule saddled, only pulling out the bit so he could get at the green grass. “I have brought a little milk with me,” she said. “I am trying to find a few people to trade for it, if I can, as I often have more than I need.” She had made up her mind to say that much quickly, before politeness had got in the way of the business she had come on. She smiled determinedly.

  Evelyn Walker’s face became pink. She lifted her own hamper, piled up with the unhung wet clothes. “We had a fresh cow ourselves, once,” she said, as if she had been asked about it. “Mike bought it off a family going East on the La Grande Road. We were getting better prices for the cattle then and we had the money. But she has since died and we haven’t had the extra to buy another one.” She lowered her head suddenly and then raised it. “When Mike comes in I know he will want to get the milk. He’ll know what we can trade for it.”

  Lydia nodded, standing where she was holding the heavy hamper. She found she had not ever lost her narrow, rigid smile. She wanted to say something about the narrowness of her circumstances, but nothing came.

  Mrs. Walker got the door of the house open and held it with her hip for Lydia carrying the milk in. There was just one long room inside, with a curtain that could be pulled across to screen one bed from the other, but the logs on the inside of the house had been planed so they lay flat as boards and then two walls papered and the last two painted clean with whitewash. The windows had been hung with bleached-out sacking embroidered finely along the hem, and there was a little table overspread with a red silk scarf, and on it two painted figurines and a blue figured bowl. Out from one of the papered walls stood a good small stove with a damper on the smokepipe, and an oven box. In the small clean house Lydia felt a vague melancholy, not like tears at all but like the emptied out tiredness afterward. She widened her smile against it.

  “Where have the children gone, Mrs. Walker?”

  Mrs. Walker set the laundry down, waved both hands vaguely, smiling. “Oh, they’re hiding under the bed. They don’t see anybody but us, usually, so they have got a fear of strange faces. Junior! Charlie! You boys come out from under there now. Come out.” But when they didn’t come, she let them stay where they were.

  There was a kettle still sitting on the stove from the washing just done. Mrs. Walker lifted it off and set it on the floor and then got out a coffeepot and a grinder. “Oh sit in this chair, Mrs. Sanderson, it’s got a better seat. Do you like toast and jam? I have a thimbleberry jam, you know the berries are very dull just to eat but they cook into a good jam.”

  “I’m sure I would like it.”

  “Please don’t notice the bread. I’ve never got this little stove to bake bread without burning it.”

  Lydia kept smiling purposefully. “I hope you won’t mind if I do notice the bread, or the smell of it anyway, as I do like that already.” She had a proneness to sound stilted, mannered, with other women, she knew it herself. Sometimes in other women’s faces she could see that she was taken for pompous and she glanced toward Mrs. Walker for sign of it. Mrs. Walker’s face was pink, both her hands were at her chest.

  “My mother used to say she liked a sharp-set guest, they will eat whatever you put out and praise it though it’s poor.” She kept the palms of her hands pressed against her bosom, not looking at Lydia and then looking at her with that flushed face. “I’m very glad you’ve come,” she said, quick and low.

  She dropped her hands, wiped them on the front of her apron. “Here, we won’t wait for the coffee, we’ll have toast right this minute, don’t you think, we can have the coffee after.”

  She set the toast out on good white plates, brought a small pot of blackish jam and sat opposite Lydia in the chair with the broken cane seat. She used the tips of two fingers to push the jam pot slightl
y toward Lydia. “Please do eat as much as you like.”

  They each spread jam on the toasted bread and ate a few bites in polite silence.

  “Mr. Whiteaker told Mike you were homesteading all alone.” Mrs. Walker lifted her flushed face. “I’m afraid I’m just full of questions about that. You must stop me if I begin to ask too much, or sound like an old Paul Pry.”

  Lydia shook her head, looking down at her hands. She felt a little heat come up in her own face. “The truth is, there is not much interesting about it. You’ll be soon bored.”

  Mrs. Walker’s face became intent. “Until I was sixteen and married, I lived in my father’s house in Alicel, down in the Grande Ronde, and since Mr. Walker and I have been married I’ve lived in this little house and I believe I’ve never once gone anywhere alone but berry picking or fishing and that within a loud yell of a man, so I daresay I wouldn’t be bored with hearing how your life has been different from that.”

  Lydia could not help a small laugh, or the way it sounded, sharp and sour.

  “The fact is, I have never lived anyplace before this but my father’s house. My husband just brought his things and moved into my room when we were married.”

  Mrs. Walker’s look became pinker. “Oh I’m sorry,” she said, in a flustered way.

  Lydia could think of no response. It was not clear to her what Mrs. Walker felt sorry about. She thought she wouldn’t say anything else, but then a little more came out into the silence. “When he died, I sold my husband’s clothes and his dog and horse and everything that belonged to him, to have the money to come West.” She heard the tone of her own voice, without any grief, heatless and stiff, and was surprised, herself, to feel a sudden itchy need for sympathy, or for forgiveness. “I suppose his mother is rolling over in her grave,” she said, in the same flat way. She picked up a slice of toast, bit it, chewed dryly.

  “Oh I’m sure not,” Mrs. Walker said finally, on a low let-out breath.