The Jump-Off Creek

by Molly Gloss

  “You shuffle,” Tim said, and got out the deck of cards. They played monte, not speaking of anything except the cards. Blue lay on his side of the bed, propped up on an elbow and a pillow, wincing when he leaned out to play his cards.

  “Christ, I can’t win,” he said, after the third hand, or the fourth. He pushed the cards together irritably. Tim looked away. He stood and rattled the stove until the fire caught. “I guess I’ll do a wash,” he said.

  He heated water and went around piling up dirty clothes. Blue watched him without speaking. Tim did the wash slowly, systematically, in hot water and soap suds, with the big kettle set on the low bench. He gave over the wet things one after the other for Blue to do the wringing out, his own hand too bruised to squeeze anything. Then he went out and put the clothes to hang on the fence where it ran close behind the shed. He did that slowly too, smoothing the shirts and the socks with his fingers. The sun was out. The wet clothes, smelling of soap and water, steamed a little when he lifted them out of the tub.

  He went inside again. The house was hot and damp. Blue slept on his belly with the blanket pushed off him so Tim could see the black tracks of the stitches in the yellow flesh. His face was slack, he breathed noisily through his nose.

  Tim went out. He sat in the shed, rebraiding a rope until his hand started to hurt. Then he came in again, limping on his sore feet, nursing a sore mood. He lay down on his own bed. His feet hurt, and his hand, his face. He lay a while without sleeping. Then he sat up and got his Miller off the rack and put a handful of shells in his pocket. Blue kept sleeping. Tim went softly out and dragged his saddle from the shed and caught up the bay horse. The dogs wanted to come. He left them standing in the yard, looking after him sorrowfully.

  He didn’t know what he meant to do. But he rode up toward Loeb’s place, carrying the Miller across his lap, resting his sore feet lightly in the stirrups. In the trees below the park he stopped and sat in the saddle looking up toward the little shack. There were a couple of horses there cropping the grass, one of them was the rib-thin pinto that belonged to Osgood. If he had meant to front the boy the intent went slowly out of him now, leaving a sour, peevish fretfulness.

  After a while he rode out of the trees into the high and windy sunlight and deliberately across the long slope to where the horses grazed at the ends of staked-down old ropes. No one came out of the house. Without planning it, he cut the rope from the pinto horse and softly drove it down the grade into the trees. It was a small horse with a short choppy-looking gait. There was mud on its butt and the coarse tangled tail. He pressed it into a trot down the long wooded mountain. His chest felt tight, airless. But gradually, driving the horse ahead of him, not thinking at all about where he was headed, the tightness passed out of him and he grew more or less happy.

  The pinto was not happy, being pressed. When the bay pushed him, he laid his ears back and bared his yellow teeth. But he went on where he was driven. Tim never let him stop to feed, only at the bottom of the long mountain he let the two horses stand and drink in a nameless stream that ran north. After that he kept them headed north along the creek bottom. The weather was bright and warm and when the wind fell off in the afternoon, it grew hot even under the trees near the water. The sweat under Tim’s clothes made him itch.

  Eventually, without deciding to, he brought the bay up next to the pinto, pulled one boot out of the stirrup, jabbed the pinto with the rowel of his spur, low and hard along the horse’s stifle. The horse made a quick piglike sound, a kind of squealing snort, and broke into a gallop, cranky and kicking. Tim kept the bay held in. He watched the pinto until it had run out of sight up the creek, toward the Umatilla River. Holding the Miller under his clamped-down elbow, he took off his hat and wiped out the sweatband with his handkerchief and rubbed his sleeve across his itching, sticky forehead. Then he resettled the hat and started back for the Half Moon. It wasn’t until then that the enjoyment began to go out of it slowly, and the thing that set in was a kind of discomfort, like embarrassment.

  21

  18 May Weather good finally with sun and a light wind, cold night and morning. I have cut poles and nailed them in between the logs of the House and when they have shrunk up I will cawk them with Cement and so have a sound House I hope when the Winter gets here. I wish there was a floor. If I could spare the $ to buy boards I would lay them in now. But no it will have to be a Punchin floor which will mean no end of work and a steady hand on the froe for which reasons I will put it off until other more pressing things are done. I am down 3FT nearly in the hole for the P. Everyday I dig a little more. I am ready for that to be finished. I have not as much need for Privacy as wish for a good clean Seat. There is a little flower blooming now, it looks very like an evening primrose only Blue, and blooming under the straight sunlite. What a cheering thing it is to look out and see the whole clring Blue as a rug, save only where I have dug up the ground for garden and there the little onions show green tips and I hope the rest will come up soon. Mr Walker came today w 2 loafs of bread frm his wife and took milk when I offered it tho nothing was said of a trade. I wished he could have brought Mrs Walker w him but know she should not come, as it is a long way & steep and no wagon rd to bring her. She sent a sweet note of friendship which Mr Walker handed over w seeming mistrust, I do not know what he objects to, his wife finding a Friend or myself in particular. I smiled and presented myself as ladylike as liable to be with a hammer in my hand & nails in my teeth! I know I will need to make a Friend of him if I am to keep Mrs Walker for a Friend. She wrote that she had made a paste of my buttermilk & cornstarch which her mother had told her was good for chapping & sunburn and the little boys cried when they saw her! Was called away yesternight to sew up Mr Odell who was badly mawled by a bear, by God’s mercy or luck not killed. So I am rather more tired than usual, if that is possible, and know that is why I am somewhat downcast tonight and maybe a little sorry for myself. Mrs Walker’s dear letter which I know should cheer me has had a contrary effect and I am quite feeling low. It is only tiredness that leaves me liable to these moods, I shall be in better spirits when I have slept, I know myself well enough for that, and try to take comfort from it.

  22

  When the woman returned, crossing the long clearing to Angell’s house, Tim left off the tree cutting. He let the axe down so he was holding it by its head and gave himself a moment before he started down toward her. She was watching for him, he could see that, but maybe not able to tell where the pealing of the axe had come from. He was down out of the trees, stepping carefully around the patchwork of garden, the stumps, wading the shallow creek, before she saw him. She wore a good blue dress and a woman’s hat with a short curled brim of soft felt and a gray feather stuck up in the grosgrain band. Her hair under it was tied back neatly in a tight knot so her face looked longer and thinner, bonier than he remembered. She looked not much like the woman who had helped out at the branding.

  “Mrs. Sanderson,” he said, when he was near enough. He saw she was looking at the place below his eye where the skin had closed in a thin bright-pink line. The bruise there had gone sickly green.

  “How do you do, Mr. Whiteaker.” She smiled slightly, in the way of a question.

  He made a gesture toward the timbered slope. “I’ve been cutting trees,” he said vaguely. He would not quite look up at her, still sitting on the tall mule. In a moment, stiffly, he laid the axe down, took hold of the mule’s cheek strap, reached up for the hamper she held across the front of the saddle. She let him take it. But when she had come down off the mule herself she said, “I don’t know why you would cut trees on my own property,” in a blunt way, and only afterward letting her short smile meeken it a little.

  He ducked his chin. “Since Blue’s laid up, I ran out of work I could do around there single-handed. I figured you could use a hand.”

  She gave him an odd look, stubborn or guarded. “You are not obliged to repay me, Mr. Whiteaker, for an act of neighborly kindness.” Her look made him w
ant to stand back, as if she had on a coat of long barbed spines. But stubbornly he said, beginning to look away, “I saw you were digging a hole so I dug it deeper. Then I cut some poles, which I figured you’d find a use for, building a fence or a shed or you can saw them up for stove wood.” He looked down at his hand holding the hamper. The swelling had gone mostly out of it, it was green-black like his cheek. Then he looked at her again. “I meant to chink the house but I saw you’d already done it.”

  She kept looking at him with her mouth drawn up small now in that frowning purse. But she did not this time fault his intentions. In a moment she let her mouth out flat again, nodding slowly. “Well yes,” she said. He was not able to tell what it meant. She reached out to take the hamper from him. “Come in, Mr. Whiteaker, please. I’ll make coffee.”

  He ducked his chin, flapped a hand back toward the trees. “I got a tree half cut. I’ll just go back and finish it first.” He picked up the axe and went off around the stumps and the drunken rows of potatoes. When he got to the edge of the trees he risked a look back. She had unsaddled the mule and turned it loose on the short blooming grass with the other mule and the goats and his bay horse. The door of the house was left open but he could not see inside where the woman was, maybe brushing out her dress, laying a fire in the stove.

  When he had finished the half-cut tree he went down again to the Jump-Off Creek. He washed his face and hands slowly in the cold water, combed his wet hair back along his scalp with his fingers. Then he put his hat on again so the high white brow might not show above the line of sunburn.

  When he tapped the edge of the door, she turned toward him, smoothing her palms along her apron and smiling slightly. “Come in, Mr. Whiteaker. I believe the coffee is about made.” She gestured at the room without any embarrassment. “I’m sorry I haven’t a chair yet, please just sit on the edge of the bed there. Will you take milk?”

  He sat gingerly, balancing on the log frame of the bunk with his hands resting on his knees. When she brought his coffee he held it carefully in front of him with both hands and avoided looking at her. They drank a little in silence. Mrs. Sanderson sat on the camelback of her small trunk. She had blacked her boots so they looked neat and narrow. He kept his eyes fixed somewhere near them.

  “I have been over visiting with the Walkers,” she said, as if he had asked her that.

  He nodded. There was another silence.

  “The weather has lately turned for the better,” she said, in that purposefully polite way of hers.

  He nodded again. “I guess it has.” Then, pulling his head down, plunging in, “I am from Nebraska myself, but that was a long time ago.”

  She gave him a startled look. Immediately, he knew he had bungled it stupidly. He sat staring down at the oily coffee in the cup.

  After quite a while she said, without any more point than his, “I came across Nebraska on the train.” Then she said, “Do you have family still there, Mr. Whiteaker?”

  He had made up his mind to say a couple of things about himself, as a way maybe to get her to do the same. But he had not, until just now, thought of what he might be asked to say. He cast a look along the wall behind her. “I don’t hear from them,” he said finally. “Maybe they’re still there. My dad is dead and my mother might be too by this time.” He spoke slowly, measuredly, with a small silence ahead of each thing he said. Still, it felt as if he was blurting things out, saying more than he should, not able to quit. “There were nine of us, it was a big brood. I heard one of my brothers was killed by a horse in the Dakota land rush, that’s about the last time I had any news. I been gone from there, cowboying mostly, since I was thirteen.”

  She sat looking at him silently. He had already said more than he’d meant to. He managed to wait. Then she suddenly gave a little ground. “I came west from Pennsylvania when my husband died,” she said. He had got that much from Mike Walker, but now he heard the offhandedness, no old grief in it nor expectation of any sympathy. He looked at her side-on. In a moment she said, “I had notions at the start, of going over to the Willamette country. But I was told by several people that it was very thickly settled and the price of the land very dear.” Another quality came in her voice, a flatness, or a resignedness. “My circumstances keep me from those high prices.”

  He thought about it. Then he said, “We’ve been up here six years. Everything is pretty well fenced-off everywhere else. And land was cheap up here. We had rode once for a high-woods outfit in the Montana Rockies, we figured we could make a living up here all right.” He thought she might understand they were allied. He and Blue had come up into the mountains chiefly for lack of money to go elsewhere, and she had said something like that herself. But she didn’t mention it. She said, “Then you and Mr. Odell have been together a long time.”

  He found he had to think a while to figure out when they had met. “We rode together for Joe Longanecker on the old Rocker S,” he said. “I suppose that was twenty years ago.” He looked at her again. “We were still raw kids, I guess.”

  They drank coffee for several minutes after that without speaking. He looked guardedly around the room. The space was dark and small as when Claud Angell had kept it. She had mended the rusted stove poorly with flattened tin cans, sewn a fresh mattress ticking out of bleached sack cloth, only those small betterments and the few womanly furnishings—the high-topped trunk and a couple of pieced quilts, a framed mirror, a hairbrush, a little rag rug laid down on the dirt. The floor was swept smooth, unlittered, things were put away neatly. He wondered if she wished for an oven-box, a board floor.

  “Mr. Odell is on the mend I hope.”

  “He’s getting along all right,” he said.

  “I believe he ought to have the stitches out by now. Yours ought to be picked out as well.” She stood and got her embroidery scissors and wordlessly pulled the thread out of his cheek while he sat there on the edge of the bunk, holding the coffee cup on one knee, balanced. He looked carefully past her until she was done. Then he looked down at his coffee.

  When she sat again, she said suddenly, as if she were taking up old needlework and not dropping a stitch, “It was a poor place. We had some apple trees and a field we usually put to barley and a kitchen garden that was about an acre.” After a silence she said a second time, “It was a poor place,” and then, “The ground was rocky. We kept goats and sold the milk.” She looked at him straight, but not as if she was answering any question he had raised. “I did all the farm work there for more than fourteen years. I am not afraid of work and I’m used to getting by on little. I believe I can make a living up here all right.” She said it in a dry way, plainspoken, so that he believed her, and didn’t feel a need to say that he did.

  She stood and poured him more coffee, then sweet yellow cream, taking only the cream herself, without coffee. He didn’t know much about her means, just the little she had said and what he could see for himself, but he figured she would be up against it this first year, eating poor as Job’s turkey by way of making sure her money and her provisions held out to the next spring. He had seen enough of that kind of living, had lived that way himself more than once. She might be glad of an offer out, or it might be her heels were dug in, she was set and single-minded. He figured he knew which it was. He sat looking into his coffee.

  “I expect you wouldn’t want to try marrying again,” he said in a slow way, and feeling the heat come up slowly in his face.

  She looked at him. He kept his eyes on the cup of coffee held carefully level on one knee.

  “I don’t know if we could get along,” he said. He looked at her quickly and then away. For a moment the only clear thing he felt and recognized in himself was dread.

  “I don’t suppose we could,” she said after a silence.

  He nodded. He rubbed his forehead with the heel of one hand and frowned past her, out the open door across the flat to the wooded ridge. “Well,” he said, “I just wondered about it.”

  She made one of her peculi
ar brief smiles. But she said nothing else, only sat still holding her own cup tenderly with both hands. Her whole face was bright.

  He drank the coffee down in steady long swallows and stood. “I guess I’d better get back,” he said.

  She stood also, so that in the small room, for the first time, he became aware that she was tall as he was—taller.

  “Thank you for the work done, Mr. Whiteaker. Will you take home some milk and cheese.” She sounded staunchly polite.

  He hunched his shoulders. “No. Thanks. I had the time,” he said. “I didn’t mind doing it.” He went past her, out of the dim, hot little room into the clear bright heat outside. The bay horse sidled away from him, he caught at it impatiently, tightened the saddle, rose onto it. He remembered the axe left leaning against the wall of her house but he didn’t get down for it because the woman had come out into the yard by that time and stood with the sun behind her, looking up at him.

  “Good-by, Mr. Whiteaker.”

  He touched his hat. “So long, Mrs. Sanderson.”

  “You’ll tell Mr. Odell that I will come in a day or so to get out his stitches.”

  “All right.”

  Her face was pulled up in that frowning squeeze, there was bright pink along the shells of her ears and the thick straightness of her jaw.

  He turned the horse out. Nothing was holding still inside his head. He didn’t feel anything he could name, except that restlessness.

  He was most of the way across the clearing when she called his name. He looked back to see her walking quickly up behind him holding his heavy axe by the head. He thought about waiting where he was but then he started the horse back toward her.

  “You left this, Mr. Whiteaker,” she said, as if he might have some question about it.

  He took the axe from her. She seemed to wait for him to say something but he couldn’t get any words to come out. In a moment she smiled in a very stiff way, turned and started back, holding her good blue dress up out of the dirt with both hands. She looked brittle, he could see the wings of her shoulder blades pushing up rigidly under the dress.