The Jump-Off Creek

by Molly Gloss

  “He was long gone,” Tim said.

  Blue picked at the knots. The carcass would probably still stink up the house from here, but it was out of sight, outside the fence. He took everything off the dun and lifted his arms once, twice, shying her back inside the big fenced field. Then he stood looking after her, letting the rope hang down from his hand. He didn’t say anything to Tim.

  “It’s between him and me,” Tim said, in a sorry, stubborn way, low-voiced.

  Blue looked at him. “Which one of them?”

  In a while Tim said, “That kid, Osgood.”

  Blue figured he knew some of it. “I guess it was him bumped into your eye when you were out chasing nickels.”

  Tim looked away.

  “Now we got another damn dead horse,” Blue said.

  Tim stared off past the dead horse into the trees. He shifted his weight. “It’s between him and me,” he said, sounding only stubborn this time.

  It was cold and dark. Blue coiled up the rope slowly in his hand. “Okay,” he said, and he walked off toward the house. Tim followed him in after a while and stood behind, watching, while he fiddled with the cold stove, getting a fire going.

  After a lengthy silence, Tim said, “I never thought he’d shoot the horse.” Blue didn’t answer him. It wasn’t his horse. He didn’t know why he was filled with bitter resentment. Tim looked down at his boots. In a while, unexpectedly, he said, “I was twenty years old, or twenty-one, when you and me worked for Joe Longanecker on the Rocker S.” Like he was picking up the end of something.

  Blue looked at him. Then he looked away. “That was a long time ago,” he said, sighing.

  Tim waited again. Finally he said, in a low voice, “Did you ever think about marrying?”

  Blue kept from looking around at him this time. “No,” he said. “I never did.” He heard the way it sounded, the stung surprise in it, and was embarrassed.

  Tim ducked his head. He didn’t say anything else.

  Blue shut the door on the firebox. Then he walked out of the house, across the dark yard to the shed. The sky was brilliantly clear, spangled with stars. He fumbled around getting an armload of stove wood. His back was tender. He was careful how he bent over. When one of the dogs came to see what he was doing, he said irritably, “Get out of the way.”

  Behind the wall of the shed, something bolted off through the brush noisily. The sound of his voice had started it. In a while it would come out again, or something else would, getting at the bay horse.

  After the bear was killed, while he had lain painfully in the darkness, in the rain, waiting on Tim, he had shot off his rifle once, into the black trees. He didn’t know why he had done that. Before very long he had heard them again, tearing at that big bear and his dead horse, Jay. They hadn’t been very close to him. He hadn’t been scared. He didn’t know why he had done it.

  26

  On the Fourth of July Lydia went down to Evelyn and Mike Walker’s. The weather was hot and windless. She wrapped the jars of milk round with wet rags before setting them down in the hamper packed with saw chips, and wet the saw chips as well, with the clear, cold water from the Jump-Off Creek.

  She had been months encountering people singly or by twos: her heart turned over when she saw there were already six men or seven standing about in the yard as she rode the mule slowly up the narrow track off the Oberfield Road. Gradually she saw among them Tim Whiteaker, Blue Odell, Mike Walker and his hired man. The others she did not know.

  It was Mr. Odell who came out to meet her. He held the mule and put a hand up for the hamper. “How are you, Mrs. Sanderson.”

  “Hello, Mr. Odell. This is heavy.”

  “I’ve got it.”

  She climbed off the mule and stiffly pulled down the skirt of her good blue dress without looking toward the several men watching her.

  “I don’t know if you’ve met all of us,” Mr. Odell said gently. He was watching her as if he might be appraising her in some way.

  She looked toward the others, stiffening her mouth in a deliberate smile. “No.”

  He pinched her elbow lightly in his hand and walked her over there. “Mrs. Sanderson,” he said, gesturing vaguely. “We have a few for you to meet. This is Carroll Oberfield. He raises cattle down at the end of this road.” She put her hand out and Mr. Oberfield shook it politely. He was a short man but thick-set, his hands thick from front to back and his head shaped quite round and placed solidly on the broad neck. She had it from Evelyn Walker that he was well-to-do, and that his wife lived in Maryland. They had met and married suddenly while Mr. Oberfield was on a tour East, calling on relatives. But she had been in delicate health, or of delicate constitution. She had lived with him briefly, in 1883 or ’84, and not since. He spoke his wife’s name occasionally. So far as anyone knew, they had never divorced.

  The man who stood next to Carroll Oberfield put out his own hand abruptly. “I’m Jim Stallings, ma’am. I live over at the Goodman Station.” He had a big rough face, reddish-skinned, large-featured, a smile that showed big teeth.

  Beside him was an old thin bachelor, Herman Rooney. She remembered that he was the man who raised dogs. When Mr. Odell said his name, he nodded his head and took her hand lightly without shaking it. He was scrupulously clean, smelling of bath salts and shaving lotion, his mustache neatly waxed.

  “You know Mike Walker, and Tim,” Blue said. Neither of those two stepped up to shake her hand, they stood back and nodded. She had not seen Mr. Whiteaker since his proposal was made. She glanced toward him in stiff embarrassment. His own look was stiff too, his arm was stiff as he touched his hat.

  “Do you know Otto Eckert?” That was Mike Walker’s hired man. He was a bachelor, with a blond beard and pale eyes set deeply so that he seemed to peer out of the brush. He was excruciatingly shy, or he had taken a dislike of her, she could not tell which it was. She was always determinedly polite. “Hello, Mr. Eckert.” He took a step backward and folded his arms up on his chest. Maybe he bobbed his head.

  “Shall I bring this in the house now, ma’am?” Blue Odell lifted the hamper slightly.

  “Yes. Thank you, Mr. Odell.”

  She followed him in, striding forthrightly while the men watched her from behind. The house was stifling hot inside. Evelyn Walker’s face was scarlet and glossy.

  “Oh, Mrs. Sanderson! There you are.” Evelyn took hold of both her hands tightly. Her smile made a sweet bow in her wide face.

  Lydia smiled, herself. “I am here,” she said, sighing.

  The McAnallys came last, in the late morning, sitting up on a high wagon behind a pair of brown hinny mules. They lived almost to the Umatilla-Union county line. They had left there at six-forty by Avery McAnally’s watch, and come the long way without stopping except as the mules required water.

  Doris McAnally was fifty, her hair coarse and black, almost without gray, her face dark and creased as muslin. Three of her children were grown and married. Two were dead. Two were half-grown: a thin, shy girl, twelve; and a boy fourteen who rode Avery’s horse ahead of the wagon. Doris, when she came in the hot little house, shook Lydia’s hand strongly, as if she were a man, and then kissed her once firmly on a cheek. “There,” she said. “That is for getting Avery to drive us here. I haven’t seen Evelyn in a year, and we wouldn’t have come now, except he must get his look at the woman homesteader.”

  Lydia smiled briefly, sourly. “I am famous, then.”

  “Well, until they have all seen you once or twice, and made up their minds that you are bound to fail!” Doris McAnally’s smile was sour also. She squeezed Lydia’s hand in fierce, abrupt friendship.

  There was no shade at all near the house. The men carried the sawhorses and the planks down under the pine trees a hundred yards away, and the food was all brought down there by slow, hot procession. Evelyn’s shy boys were carried down on Mike Walker’s shoulders, but they afterward hid under the sawhorse table and would not be coaxed out.

  Lydia sat down too soon:
the stationman, Jim Stallings, came and took up the bench next to her, where she had hoped Doris McAnally or Evelyn Walker might sit.

  Mr. Stallings was talky company. Shortly she knew he was a widower twice, with eleven children farmed out to sisters-in-law in three different states. “I’ve lately been considering taking off the time and going round to see them all, see if they are growing up right,” he said, smiling in a slow, contrite way. “I wouldn’t mind marrying again,” he told her, and smiled ruefully, so it was a joke, or anyway only half serious. “But you know I’d have to take all those offspring back again if I did that, so I figure I had best stay a bachelor until they are grown. There’s no hope, anyway, of finding a woman who would marry a man with eleven offspring.” He looked at her sidelong, with his brows pinched up in his reddish forehead.

  She smiled slowly, stiffly. “Oh I’m afraid not, Mr. Stallings, no hope at all.”

  He nodded. “Well I thought so,” he said. “Here, Mrs. Sanderson, let’s get the coffee down to our end here. I do like having the little cream to sweeten it, eh? Owing to you. I said to myself I’d got used to coffee without cream but now that I’ve had it again I see I was lying to myself all along.” He flashed a cheerful grin.

  She smiled faintly also. “I could not live long without milk,” she agreed. “But I’m afraid it’s sugar I miss. It is too dear for me. I have gone without for months.”

  “Well, sugar has gotten high right now, that’s a fact. But I’ve heard they’re going to grow it down on the Grande Ronde, and I wonder if the price of it won’t come down on that account. Of course, not soon enough!”

  “I don’t suppose we could grow sugar beets up here.”

  “Oh no, ma’am, not a chance. They need those long hot summers, hot nights too. We’ve got but three seasons up in these mountains and that’s Winter, Thaw, and August.” He grinned again, enjoying what he had said. “But I guess you’d know about winters all right. It gets cold in the state of Pennsylvania, I hear.”

  “Yes, it’s cold. But they have gotten hot long since, I imagine, and likely to stay so until October.”

  He smiled wider, as if he took a perverse pride in harsh weather. “Well, there’s no telling here. We’ve had a hard frost in June and again by the end of August. Snowed once in June, I remember. There’s just no telling. Soil is thin too. I don’t believe it’ll grow much besides tamaracks and pines and rocks.”

  She shook her head but she kept smiling too. She was not sure how serious he was, though the peas had not come up at all, the turnips were still small as marbles. “Oh, Mr. Stallings, I hope you’re wrong. I’ve put so much work onto the garden.”

  He grinned and shook his head. “Well I shouldn’t have said it. The truth is, I’ve never tried to grow anything myself, except once I planted a squash and the seed rotted in the ground, but I haven’t got the hand for it, I know that, and you shouldn’t take me for a standard. Did you put in spuds? I believe they’ll grow in rocky ground well as anything only their shapes will come out crooked. They’ll stand some cold too.”

  “They are coming up for me.”

  “Well good. So you see I spoke too quick. You’ll be roasting spuds on the stove next winter and I’ll be eating rocks, and the needles off them tamaracks.”

  She laughed and sipped the sweet hot coffee. As a husband, or as a father, she would surely have found him wanting, but she discovered she did not mind his company on the Fourth of July. He had an easy sociability—maybe it was the result of two wives and eleven children.

  Beneath the table, one of Evelyn’s boys sat on the toes of her boots, staring up under the edge of the cloth. She had not quite looked down at him. But in a while she lowered a spoon of yellow rice pudding, and when he had thought it over, he took the spoon in his own hand and licked it clean.

  “Are you Junior or Charlie?” she asked him, whispering gravely.

  He whispered, “Junior.”

  She fed him slowly, by spoonfuls, reaching below the table.

  Afterward the three women walked back across the dry grass to the house, carrying up the platters and plates, and standing together in the stifling room doing up the dishes. Doris McAnally’s daughter Catherine stayed in the shade under the pine trees, watching over the two Walker children, silently tempting them to play in the grass and the brush away from the benches.

  Doris said in a low voice, looking out the window across the still, bright field to the trees, “Poor Catherine has got her friend already, she’s not thirteen yet. I don’t wonder she has turned as shy as those two little boys.”

  Lydia considered. Then she said, “I was twelve myself,” with something like Mr. Stallings’s perverse pride in bad weather.

  Doris McAnally shook her head, made an unhappy clucking sound. “Well, I am over it myself, anyway, and not sorry to see it behind me.”

  Evelyn, in a low way, looking down at her hands wiping out bowls, told them, “I have heard if you get it early, you won’t carry a baby well, but I don’t know if that’s true.” Her eyes jumped to Lydia.

  Doris shook her head again, thoughtfully. “My first girl, Muriel, was almost as early, she was thirteen, and she has two children already and never had any trouble carrying them.” She looked at Lydia in her steady, unreserved manner. “Did you have that trouble, then, carrying babies?”

  She liked Doris’s plain straightforwardness. It made her feel steady, herself. She said, “Yes,” and smiled firmly.

  Doris nodded. “Do you miss having them?”

  That surprised her. She looked away. “No!” Then she said slowly, stubbornly, “I am not inclined to loneliness.”

  “I guess I have been lonely, with five or six of my children in the same room with me,” Doris said ruefully. In the moment afterward, Lydia saw the look that went between Doris and Evelyn, an understanding of something, from which she was unavoidably shut out.

  Then Evelyn said suddenly, in a girlish way, impassioned, “I admire you so much, Lydia! You are brave as anyone!”

  Lydia made a surprised, disbelieving sound that was not quite a laugh. But she felt better afterward. She knew there was a small, keen truth in it.

  In the afternoon they lounged on the benches and on the grass in the stippled shade and listened drowsily while the men spoke of cattle prices and the progress of the depression, and the usefulness of putting up hay. Carroll Oberfield was the only one of them who had been doing it for long. He had no spring roundup to speak of. His cattle stayed all winter near the stackyards where the hay was doled out to them on the snow. Then it was a simple matter to watch over the calving, and afterward to separate out the calves for branding. Mike Walker had bought a mower and sweep himself. The hired man, Otto, was not a range hand but a skilled hayer. The two of them had just begun to cut the wild grass hay on the big field the house sat in.

  While they talked about cutting and raking and shocking hay, Tim Whiteaker sat on the grass glumly and stripped the stems of weeds with his fingers. “I guess we lost as many cows to wolfers, last winter, as to starving,” he said finally, but there was little quarrel in it; it had a slow, thoughtful sound.

  Carroll Oberfield scrubbed the top of his round, cropped head. “Tim,” he said gently, “I suppose if most of your cows were kept down on your stackyards where you could keep an eye on them, there wouldn’t be too many wolfers who would bother them.” He looked faintly sorrowful. “The cattle business is bound to change, Tim. There’s no stopping it, you know.”

  Mr. Whiteaker put his chin down. Then Blue Odell began to smile slowly without looking at Tim. “He knows it, Carroll. He just doesn’t like it yet.”

  Mr. Whiteaker shifted his place on the grass and gave Blue a ducking look and finally he smiled a little, or grimaced—it was a deepening of the long creases that framed his mouth. “You know what they say about old dogs,” he said unhappily.

  The McAnallys left early in the afternoon. Doris gave Evelyn and then Lydia a short, strong hug and a sorry smile and when her husband
drove her off in the wagon she looked back without smiling or waving. Herman Rooney left too, and after that the spirit was gone out of the party. The men broke down the tables and benches and carried the planks up to Mike Walker’s barn. Evelyn and Lydia waded in the creek with the two little boys, who were turning over rocks and undertaking to catch crawdads in a tin can. Blue Odell was the only one of the men who walked back down under the trees where they were.

  “If you want company, Mrs. Sanderson, I can wait and ride you home.”

  “No. Thank you, Mr. Odell.”

  “Well all right then. We’ll go on. Tim has got to be back up to the log camp tonight.” He had been squatting down along the muddy bank next to their shoes. He stood up and touched his hat. “Thanks, Mrs. Walker.”

  “You’re welcome.” Evelyn stood with the edge of her skirt floating out on the water, and the palms of her hands flat on her hips, smiling in a slightly shy way.

  They watched him walk away. Then Lydia began again, turning over stones in the slow, cold creek.

  “You know, Mr. Odell is Indian,” Evelyn said softly.

  In the evening, when the air cleared and became cool, Lydia walked out for Rollin and saddled him and led him back to the house. She was the last to leave. Mike Walker carried out the hamper and stood aside awkwardly while Evelyn came for a quick, rigid embrace. When Lydia had climbed up on the saddle, he set the box in front of her. He was a big man, he reminded her in that way of Lars. But his face was strong and bony. He had a habit of looking at his wife, following her with his eyes. When he stood back from Lydia, he looked at Evelyn and seemed to wait.

  Deliberately, Lydia said, “Thank you, Mr. Walker. I always enjoy our visits.”

  His big brows rose up into his forehead. “I do also, ma’am.” He patted the shoulder of the mule.