The Jump-Off Creek

by Molly Gloss

  They looked at one another. “I only think there must be a deal of courage in you,” Mrs. Walker said slowly. “If Mike were to die I don’t know what I’d do except to go and try to find myself a new husband to take care of me and my children. I couldn’t ever stay here by myself, it’d be too lonely and too hard. How do you sleep without anybody against your back? The nights up here are so black and full of the sound of varmints you can’t see. And how will you ever get the man’s work done on that place? You are quite as thin as six o’clock.”

  Lydia smiled dimly. “I don’t like the nights,” she said. “But I’m not afraid of the work. I kept up the man’s work on my dad’s farm for fourteen years. He was sick from the time I was twelve, in bed most of the time and always calling my mother to tend after him so it fell to me to do his work. I was the only child of theirs that lived, there wasn’t anyone else to do it and keep us from starvation.”

  Mrs. Walker shook her head vaguely, seriously. Then she smiled. “Oh Mrs. Sanderson, you see I’m not bored yet!”

  She stood and got the coffee off the stove, holding the handle of the pot with a bunched-up corner of her apron. She poured it into china cups. Lydia brought a little milk out of the hamper and sweetened the coffee with it.

  “I don’t know what Mike will say about the milk,” Mrs. Walker said in a whispered way.

  Lydia looked into her coffee, stirring it. “I’m sure whatever he decides, I will think it’s fair,” she said, with slow, unavoidable embarrassment.

  They sat at the little table and drank coffee slowly in a tender silence. Eventually the boys scraped their heels restlessly against the floor under the bed, and one of them hunched out from below the edge of the Wedding Ring quilt. He sat up close to the bed, with his thin small body drawn up in a bundle and his face half hidden behind his arms. Lydia looked at him gently, slowly. After a while the other boy came out and crouched next to his brother.

  “Junior is three,” Mrs. Walker said, looking toward them without moving her head. “Charlie is two or will be in a month.”

  “They are pretty boys, both of them.”

  She flushed. “I think they are,” she said, pleased. She brought her chin down so that, like Junior, her face was half hidden behind her raised arms holding the coffee cup. “I had another one, a girl, born first,” she said in a lowered voice.

  Lydia looked away. After a while she said, without knowing she would say it, “I have carried two, but could not keep either of them past the third month.”

  Mrs. Walker gave a little clucking sound, soft and distressed. After a while she said, still low, flushing brighter pink, “I’m carrying another one right now.”

  They passed between them a brief, private look.

  Into the long silence afterward, Lydia said, “Your clean clothes will be dank and cold, laying there in that pile. I’ll help you hang them, we would be done in a minute.”

  They went out together, standing next to one another in the cold spring wind, pinning things by the shoulders, the waist, to the long sagging line.

  “I guess there are little blessings,” Mrs. Walker said. “There is only your own things to wash when you’re living alone.”

  “I don’t believe Mr. Angell had a place to hang his laundry at all. He cut down every tree around that house, there is no place to tie a line. I’ve been just laying things out on the twigs of bushes.”

  Evelyn Walker nodded. “When I came here, Mike didn’t have a line. I planted these trees, they’re wild things from the woods, and put a line up the first week I was here.” Then she said, looking sideward at Lydia, “That place of Mr. Angell’s is in a sorry way, I guess. I haven’t seen it, but that’s what Mike says.”

  The two boys had come slowly out from the house. They squatted next to the door, watching Lydia from behind their pulled-up knees. She looked back at them. Then she looked at Evelyn, and at the big man’s shirt she was snapping out in her hands. She felt a slow, surprising intention.

  She said, looking at the shirt, “My dad never said a good word to me all the time I was doing his work. I believe he was ashamed of what I was doing. He got Lars Sanderson to marry me, I heard that afterward from more than one person, and when I asked my dad, he wouldn’t deny it. He wanted a man to be working the farm, and Mr. Sanderson wanted a farm made over to him. I guess he didn’t mind me as a wife, as he knew I always had worked hard and without thanks for it.”

  She heard the shake coming into her voice, but she kept on with what she had decided to say, only beginning to smile a little, helplessly, feeling it stiff and askew on her face. “When he dropped dead, I sold about everything he had brought to our marriage, even the ring he had married me with, and I came out here to Oregon. I don’t know who’s taking care of my dad’s place now, and I don’t give a damn either, except for my mother’s sake.”

  Her hands too were shaking by this time. She took a child’s shift out of the wet pile and snapped it twice. “The truth is,” she said,"I’d rather have my own house, sorry as it is, than the wedding ring of a dead man who couldn’t be roused from sleeping when his own child was slipping out of me unborn.”

  She hung the little shift silently, pinching the pins down hard with the fingers of both hands. Her face felt red and stiff. She had not ever told that much of it to anyone.

  After a while Evelyn Walker, from where she stood beside her at the clothesline, reached for her hand clumsily and squeezed it. When Lydia looked toward her in embarrassment, she saw that Evelyn’s eyes had filled with tears. “Oh, Mrs. Sanderson, I believe we will be wonderful friends. I’ve just been beside myself with loneliness, and here you are, lonely as me!” The girl made a wordless sound and took Lydia in a short, fierce embrace.

  It had been a while since Lydia had cried over anything. She was surprised when a few dry tears squeezed around the edges of her eyes. But it was the lost babies, she thought, and could not be loneliness, that made her feel this quick, keen need of Evelyn Walker’s friendship.

  17

  6 May Have got the soil dug up a little and on the dark Moon will put down on Mrs. Walker’s advise potato eyes, onions, beets, parsnips, turnips. Had hoped to grow corn at least and shell beans but her luck w them has been poor, the Summer too short to bring them on, so I will not try them or not this yr. It was slow tilling, the ground woven thru everywhere with roots of the trees A. had sawn down. Could not get the plow down in it much. Some other Spring I must burn out the stumps but for now make a crazy Quilt of small odd plots knowing the poor potatoes will take odd shapes as well. I am desperate in need of some green thing, beet tops or the young onion pulls, as I have had little besides corn mush and the goats cheese since coming to this place. O I have shot a Rabbit today and on the day before caught a Trout in the Jump-Off Creek with a worm in a mud ball! Planted a squash vine at the corner of the house which if it grows I will train up the roof edge, as I have no flower seeds & the squash will look pretty there and do double work. My Health is good, and my thumb which was sprained at Mr Whiteaker’s in the branding is healing at last, the swelling gone out of it so I can hold a hair brush now and get my hair done up decently as I have not for a week. I find I have the company every little while of a man or a boy who is Riding The Grub Line. (I have this from Mrs Walker.) I am so far off the road it is always a surprise to see them come into the yard but they know of the houses that are vacant, the word goes around among them. When they see this house is not empty any longer they generally stand hat in hand and ask a meal for a wood-chopping or “whatever needs done". If they will settle for milk and cheese of which I have plenty I do not turn them away Hungry, only one boy for a rude manner and a man who said he could not abide milk, it gave him red bumps. For the most part they are quiet company & soon gone, for which I am glad enough, and in any event glad to have wood cut by hands more idle than mine. I believe the white goat Rose will kid in the Summer tho the man who sold her swore she was just Fresh & not bred. O well she will be Fresh again by Winter and I s
uppose I cannot starve as Louise gives more than can use, every day without complaint.

  18

  Tim sat up in the darkness and reached for his pants.

  “What the hell.”

  “I don’t know. Something after the horses maybe. I heard one of them, right before the dogs started in.”

  They didn’t make a light. Tim went past Blue struggling in the dark to button his pants, reached high to the five-point rack above the lintel of the door, and brought down the first gun his hands touched, knowing it by the feel, passing the Marlin back to Blue who was standing now at his elbow. He reached up again for the Miller. In the darkness, sightlessly, they counted the loads.

  They went out to the porch, each taking hold of a dog, hauling scruff of neck back into the house, pulling the latchstring through to shut the dogs inside. The frenzied barking kept up, coming muffled a little from behind the door.

  Tim looked over at Blue and then out across the fenced field where the horses were standing in a nervous huddle away from the trees. It was dark under the trees, flat blackness. He had already made a pretty good guess what it was, from the noise the dogs were raising. They didn’t generally bark much, they’d been trained away from that. And they’d gone crazy but they hadn’t left the yard; they hadn’t gone that crazy. So he figured he knew. Blue would have made a guess too. But neither of them said anything.

  They went bare-soled across the wet grass, past the horses to the edge of the evergreens.

  “We ought to have brought a lantern.”

  “Yeah.”

  They stood listening a moment, and then Tim said, “We’d better let him know we’re coming.”

  “Hey!” Blue said, loud, quick. Tim felt the muscles jump in his arms.

  They went carefully into the blackness beneath the trees. In the darkness, barefoot, Tim stepped gingerly, holding his rifle in both hands. The bottoms of his feet itched with cold and the thorns of trailing blackberry vines. He couldn’t see a damn thing, could hardly even make out the dark bars of the tree trunks and the horizontal line of fence cutting across in front of them. His head felt light, trying to listen. He heard the slight draw of his own breath, the springing of the ground under his feet.

  At the fence they found where the bear had broken down a rail and gone over into the forest. It was too dark to see anything else.

  “Long gone,” Tim said, but for a while they stood waiting, looking up the little slope into the trees.

  “Well hell, I’d better go back for a light,” Blue said finally. He looked at Tim. Then he started back. Tim saw him break into a trot, going across the grass under the starlight.

  Tim waited alone, standing beside the fence line. He kept his back to the house, kept looking out under the trees. He listened but he could only hear the faint sounds of the dogs crying from inside the house, and the horses not settled down yet, blowing air. As he stood still, waiting, he began to shake a little with the cold. He hadn’t put on any shirt over the thin cotton undershirt. But his hands holding the rifle were warm, sweaty.

  Blue came back across the grass, walking long strided inside the swing of yellow lantern light. He carried the Marlin in his free hand, not resting it across his shoulder or in the crook of his elbow. He had let the dogs out, and they sprinted across the grass ahead of him, silent now, and stopping along the fence to anxiously smell and pee where the bear had been.

  In the light from the lantern Tim and Blue found the sign and squatted to peer at the bear’s prints there in the soft ground.

  “Shit,” Tim said. The hair had risen along the back of his neck.

  “Big grizzly. Pretty damn big grizzly,” Blue said.

  Tim touched one of the prints with the tips of his fingers. There was a little dark dribble in it, maybe it was blood. “He might have a bad foot.”

  “Leg-hold trap.”

  “I bet. Maybe he chewed out of it or muscled it open.”

  They fell silent, standing looking out at the trees. Blue slapped the front of his undershirt looking for tobacco. Not finding any, he leaned against the fence and then stood up straight again, finally bent and fiddled with the lantern, trimming the flame a little.

  They had had a couple of run-ins with grizzlies before this. Once along the Sprague River when they were with the Crazy W a bear had come through the roundup camp and killed a horse. A little man named Weedy, or Wiley, had lost half of his face—one eye and an ear, all the flesh off his cheek. Blue had been sitting right next to him before the bear came in there. He’d killed it with a shotgun at about six feet.

  In a moment Tim said, “Maybe we ought to run him down tomorrow.”

  Blue looked over at the dogs. Then he looked at Tim again, smiling slightly. “The dogs don’t look too happy with that idea.”

  In Montana they’d had a boss who raised dogs just for running bear, and ran bear just for the hell of it. They’d seen him bring in a big grizzly once. He was short three dogs when he came in, but happy as hell about that big hide. He had a bitch at home throwing new pups and he didn’t give a damn about those dogs he’d lost. Right after that, they had quit the outfit. Maybe Blue was remembering that.

  Tim shrugged. “Hell,” he said, looking away. “I’m not too happy about it myself.” But he was. When he looked at the prints, a prickly excitement crawled up the back of his neck and sang in his scalp.

  Tim said, “If he wasn’t gimped and mad, he’d probably go on over the Umatilla, maybe he’d go up to the hot springs and raise hell with those bathers who come east from Portland.”

  Blue looked toward him, not finding anything funny in it. For a while he didn’t say anything. Then he said, “Maybe he’s going up to the high ground. He might not be that stove up. He might go up into the Wenaha country.”

  Tim touched one of the dogs as it came and stood alongside his leg. He bent a little and ruffled its yellow coat. “Maybe,” he said.

  Blue held the lantern down again, close to the prints. “Shit, he’s big,” he said. His eyes shone in the light.

  In the morning they left the dogs behind and followed up his trail. He had gone away to the northwest, not fast. Probably he was lame, but in the daylight there weren’t any dribbles of blood in the prints.

  They trailed sign as far as the beaver marshes above Lick Spring. The way was bad there, sticky mud under a scum of green with a lot of old timberfall and close standing brush so they had to pull the horses long-necked behind them through the brake. The bear found the low way, on four feet, his puddled paw prints going along almost straight beside the muddy edge of the marsh.

  They didn’t follow him very far in.

  “I don’t know,” Tim said. He stood half under the neck of his horse in the close space and waited for Blue to come up behind him. “He’s bound to come out of it on the north or the west, that’s the way he’s been going all day. We could go around and pick him up there, it’d be quicker.”

  Blue made a wordless sound of agreement, but he said, “If we don’t pick up the sign along the other side, we’ll lose him.”

  Tim looked up briefly to the low overcast. “It’s about to rain. We’re liable to lose him anyway, then.”

  Blue shrugged. He didn’t say anything else. He backed the roan out slowly through the brushwood until it opened up enough to turn around.

  “I wondered how far you’d follow him in there,” he said. “Only a damn fool would follow a bear into that scrub.”

  Tim shook his head. “Shit. You followed me in.”

  The horses shied suddenly, bumping together. Tim heard the roan horse make a little sound, and then Tim could smell it too, or hear it, or just know it like the horses, and he tried to get the bay to come around, skittering, so he could grab for the rifle in the saddle boot. He got hold of it but then a horse’s heavy butt wheeled and knocked his teeth together and he was on the ground watching the bay taking off through the brush, kicking high sheets of mud. He scrambled around on his belly, half under the roan’s feet, Blue’s f
eet, laying his hands on the rifle again. Blue had hold of the roan’s forelock and one stirrup, dancing with him, pulling at him to come around. Tim on his knees saw the red stripes in the roan’s belly, the horse’s legs scrabbling rubbery, disjointed. Blue kept hold of the roan’s forelock, kept after his gun, his boots in a puddle of the horse’s blood, yanking to get the Marlin out from under the fender of the saddle. Tim found the bear in the notched sight, he knelt slippery in the wet with the muddy rifle up against his cheek misfiring twice, three times, while across the sight he followed the big flat face, open-jawed, grinning solemnly. He only saw from the edge of his eye the one arm swinging wide, brushing Blue off the ground and then letting him down like the roan horse, wobbly. The last two hit dry enough to fire. A sudden neat red hole appeared in the bear’s cheekbone below the right eye. The head ticked back slightly, briefly; when he opened his mouth, gouts of blood came out with the low sound, the sigh.

  Tim kept kneeling where he was, waiting, starting to shake.

  “Blue.”

  “Yeah. Christ.”

  Tim put the gun down in the mud and went, shaking, across the bloody wallow on his knees.

  “I don’t know,” he said stupidly, kneeling over Blue.

  “Christ, you blew half his head off.” Blue lay on his belly with his cheek against the mud. “It’s okay,” he said after a while. “I’m okay. He just clipped me. Those damn horses. Listen, Tim, I don’t think old Jay is dead.”

  Tim stood and walked wide around the bear to the long-legged roan horse. Jay’s tawny eye watched him come up. He took the Marlin off the saddle. The stock was cracked. He stood holding it, waiting a little bit, breathing through his mouth until his hands stopped shaking some. He shot the horse once behind the ear and then went back to Blue. He knelt on the soft ground, rocking back on his heels, putting his hands flat on his thighs. The horse, or Blue, had stepped on his hand. He sat looking down at the purply slow swelling.

  “Blue.”