The Jump-Off Creek

by Molly Gloss

  Lydia Sanderson came in the high-wheeled wagon with the Walkers, sitting up on the seat beside Mrs. Walker, holding one of the little boys on her lap. Tim let Carroll Oberfield and Blue go over there to hand the women and children down. He had not told her he would be finishing up his cooking job and she would have expected him last Sunday to come for the milk. He didn’t know why he hadn’t gone over there to tell her.

  Carroll lifted her hamper out of the back of Walker’s wagon and she followed him up to the house where Doris McAnally was already cooking. She didn’t look toward Tim at all. She held one of the little boys by the hand and bent down once to listen to something he said. She had on the blue dress and a little brown cape, the neat felt hat, and she looked more womanish than was usual, holding the hand of the child. It occurred to him suddenly to wonder if she might have children of her own. He had never heard one way or the other about it.

  The men spent the best part of the day standing around next to the tables, talking and smoking and waiting for the dinner to be brought on. The weather was windy and dry and bright-cold. Standing away from the shade of the buildings, in the clear mild sunlight, Tim felt a heat build up slowly under his coat and on the bare skin of his face. He stood with the other men but not listening very closely, only nodding once in a while and looking down at the ground. The larches were shedding their needles. In the wind, he heard them dropping like rain. The maples had been red for a while, but they hung on to their leaves, only letting go little handfuls when the wind gusted hard. He had given up trying to guess the weather by them, he had seen the trees surprised often enough, hunched up in full green leaf under shawls of snow.

  The dinner that was finally set out was beef and hopping john, new bread sliced and spread with butter and chokecherry jam, lettuce and peas and yellow crookneck squash out of the several gardens, squash pie and berries with Mrs. Sanderson’s yellow cream clabbered and poured over.

  Oberfield had already let go his cook and the summer hires. He had but two hands he kept year around so they sat down to table with the neighbors, making a crowd along the benches. Tim was stuck beside one of the McAnally children, a thin girl he took to be eleven or twelve, timid and silent. She kept her elbows close in against her sides and blushed furiously pink whenever she must hand along a dish to someone. Herman Rooney took the other side of him but he kept up a steady, soft-spoken talk with Mrs. McAnally across the boards, so Tim wound up saying little. There was a kind of softness about all of the talking that went on, he thought, maybe due to the dry wind, or to the dry showering of the larch trees.

  Afterward the men walked out to look at Oberfield’s haystacks. They stood around in the cold sun between the stacks, passing a flask of whiskey Carroll had brought out. In June, Tim had seen an old Sentinel. In the financial news it was rumored that Oberfield had taken a mortgage on the five thousand acres of his that stood nearest the rail line. Tim didn’t know if it was true, or if maybe he would have the money to pay it off after he shipped his steers. He might have. He looked relaxed and cheerful now, his face pink from the whiskey and the wind.

  Mike Walker stood next to Tim with both his hands stuck in his jeans. He watched the flask go around. “Are you finished cooking for those loggers?” he asked.

  Tim nodded. “They weren’t happy. The cook they had before is still in bed with a plaster cast.”

  Mike looked off across the stubble field. “Were they hiring on for the logging?”

  “No. I guess not. They had a full crew.” He looked sideways at Mike. “You never logged, did you?”

  “No.” He set his mouth. “I was just thinking about it.” He had about nine hundred acres, from a donation land claim and a timber claim. It was better land than they had on the Half Moon, more open and level, there was more wild grass hay on it. But he had a wife, and soon three babies, and wages he paid out in the summer when there was more work than he could do himself.

  He said, “I guess Evelyn wouldn’t stand for it.” He flushed and smiled thinly. He was not any younger than Tim. He had closed up his house and gone down to Alicel one fall and come back in the spring with a young girl bride. He knew what he had: he held her in a kind of tender, vigilant regard.

  “I guess not,” Tim said, smiling with him.

  The flask came around. Tim took a gingerly swallow and passed it to Blue. He thought his stomach would be all right with the food to settle it, but the whiskey burned going down. It spread heat out slowly in his chest.

  Avery McAnally let the whiskey go by him, looking sheepish and unwavering all at the same time. His wife was a prohibitionist. Doris had cut out and sewn a few hundred blue ribbon temperance badges at their kitchen table over the past years. Tim had heard that one of her brothers, in a drunken craziness, had killed his wife with a pair of scissors while their six little children looked on.

  “I don’t know,” Oberfield said in a general way. “I think things have leveled out now. Prices will come up in the spring, I expect.”

  Mike Walker turned his head and looked hard at Carroll as if he thought he could see in the old man’s face whether it was true or not. Some of the others looked toward him too. He had started out thirty years ago with as little as any of them, and he had held on to it through the last depression, 1873. In the more than twenty years since, he had built up to twelve thousand acres and in a good year he had a summer crew that ran to eight or nine men. They gave his views a little more weight than their own.

  Blue said in a soft way, not looking at Carroll, “I heard the Cattlemen’s Club was thinking of getting with the Sheepmen and offering a wolf bounty again.”

  Tim looked at him. He hadn’t heard that. Maybe Blue had got it from one of Oberfield’s hands. Oberfield was the only one of them who belonged to the Cattlemen’s. He nodded solemnly, shifting his weight inside his blanket coat. “We got to step forward, now that the state’s pulled back. And I believe it’s a sign of fair times around the corner, in as much as the money for it has got to come out of our own pockets. The vote would have gone the other way a year ago, I’m pretty sure of that, none of us could have spared the odd dollar.” He said a second time, nodding, “Things have leveled out now.”

  Tim had kept away from Loeb’s old shack since the bay horse was killed. He didn’t know if the wolfers were still squatting up there or not. When Blue looked at him, he made a narrow shrugging motion and looked away.

  It was cold enough so they finally trooped up to the house. The kitchen, where the women were, was hot and damp. Doris McAnally shooed them on through there into the parlor. All three of the women had their sleeves pushed past the elbows, doing up the last of the dishes. Mrs. Sanderson stood over a dishpan with her hands stuck down in the yellowish lees of the water. Her elbows were rough and reddish, she worked her arms in a short, jerky way, scrubbing.

  In the parlor the men stood around or sat on Oberfield’s upholstered furniture and talked about the dry weather and the fires they had had down on the Grande Ronde, and the wheat harvest around La Grande, and if there was any remedy for a spavined horse. When the women came into the parlor there was a general softening of voices, a falling off of talk. Tim gave his place to Evelyn Walker. He went across the room and stood between Blue and Avery McAnally. Lydia Sanderson had brought down her sleeves, but her narrow hands looked rough and red as her elbows. Her face was sunburnt and dry. She sat on the wide arm of the chesterfield sofa beside Mrs. Walker. Both of the little boys squirmed in there between them, burrowing back as far as they could get.

  Herman Rooney had brought his accordion and he played “The Dying Californian,” “Brennan on the Moor,” “Green Grow the Rushes-O.” Mrs. Walker had a sweet clear voice and she knew every word. With her eyes fixed on the floor somewhere in the center of the room, she sang out loud, without any of her usual girlish shyness. Blue knew those songs pretty well too, and he sang along with her in a loud steady voice, so that the other men began to come in when they knew a chorus or as they remembered words.
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  Tim couldn’t make out Lydia Sanderson’s voice among the others but she looked down at her clasped hands and mouthed the songs gravely. He only knew the chorus of “Brennan on the Moor” himself. The third time it came around he got the words out meekly, looking down at his boots.

  No one stayed late. The McAnallys left in the early afternoon, the boy riding Avery’s horse and driving the two steers they had got from Carroll’s gather. Doris McAnally stayed turned on the seat to regard the other women silently until the wagon took her on out of view. Once the McAnallys had gone, the gathering took on a damp quality, faintly mournful. Tim wasn’t sorry when the rest of them began to break off abruptly. He and Blue went out to catch up the gray mare and the dun. Mike came up behind them while they were saddling the horses.

  “You ought to ride back with us as far as the creek,” he said, standing with his hands pushed into his pockets. “We’ll be going along the same way.”

  Blue looked over at Tim. “I guess we could stand the company,” he said.

  Tim ducked his chin. “All right.”

  They helped Mike hitch up his wagon. Mrs. Walker came out of the Oberfield house while they were doing it. She carried one of the little boys up on her hip, his sweaty head slumped against her bosom. “Mike,” she said. “Would you lift him into the back. He’s gone off asleep.”

  Mike took the child gently from her, lifted him over the sideboard, set him down on a folded-up quilt. He pulled out the edge of the quilt and put it over the boy and patted him lightly on the shoulder.

  “Junior is sleeping too, and he’s getting about too heavy for me to carry,” Mrs. Walker said, watching her husband.

  “Well, I’d better go in and get him myself then.” He patted her on the hand in the way he had done the child and went up to the house. Tim stood back faintly embarrassed, as if he had been watching them secretly.

  Evelyn Walker hugged her own arms. She’d not put a coat on, and the wind kept on cold. She considered Tim and Blue in a half-shy way. “Will you keep Mike company, then?” she said. She was a big, heavy girl, but Tim thought her wide face was pretty, the skin smooth, fine-complected.

  “I guess we’ll ride along some of the way,” Blue said.

  Mike came out with the boy and laid him down next to the younger one, huddled up under the quilt. “What else have you got for me to carry?” he said to his wife.

  “There’s nothing as heavy as that,” she said, and went back toward the house. The wind blew her skirt out sideways.

  In a minute, Carroll Oberfield came out ahead of the two women. He toted Mrs. Sanderson’s hamper and an empty wicker creel that might have brought lettuces or peas. Mrs. Sanderson followed him out, carrying a pie tin flat in front of her, bundled up in newspaper. An uneaten pie, maybe. Blue let down the tailgate and Carroll put the hamper and the creel along the sideboard. Mrs. Sanderson kept hold of the pie.

  By then Mrs. Walker had come out. Mike looked at her. “Well, Mother, are you ready to start home?”

  She slid a girlish, fond look at him. “I guess I am.”

  Tim thought Mrs. Sanderson might offer her hand to Carroll but she didn’t. Only after she had climbed up in the wagon and Mike’s wife up to the high seat, she said in her usual serious way, inclining her head over the side of the wagon, “It was kind of you to have us all, Mr. Oberfield.”

  He nodded, seeming serious too. “Enjoyed your company, ma’am.”

  Oberfield stood there on the porch as Evelyn Walker drove the wagon off and it was Mrs. Sanderson who lifted her hand once and got a wave from him.

  “Thanks, Carroll,” Blue said, and stuck out his hand to shake. Tim shook the old man’s hand too, and Mike did. Then they rode their horses over and got their steers and Mike’s and two that were CrossTie-branded, and drove them slowly down the road after the wagon.

  It wasn’t much of a road, the ruts were cut deep and hardened. Tim could see Mike’s wife keeping the wheels up on the shoulder where she could, but the ride generally was rough. Mrs. Sanderson sat in the back, behind the high seat, holding the boys’ heads on her stretched-out lap after the first hard bump had woke them crying. Tim couldn’t hear if the two women were talking at all. Sometimes Mrs. Walker would turn around and she and Mrs. Sanderson would pass a soft look or a tired one between them, and she would run her eyes over the two boys and then swing around again.

  The sun fell behind the mountains, casting up a red stain that dimmed gradually to purple. The wind dropped off, but the darkness was sharp with cold. Tim buttoned his coat up and blew on his hands. By the moon there was enough light to see the road, but he got so he couldn’t make out Mrs. Sanderson’s narrow sunburnt face, just the solid shadow of her there, braced against the jounce of the wagon. He had begun to think of saying something to her about his not coming after the milk, but he didn’t know how he ought to bring it up, or if he would get the chance.

  Evelyn Walker pulled the wagon over, where Chimney Creek ran in a slippery sheet across the road. Tim heard Mike say gently, “Here is Chimney Creek, boys,” as if they might not know it. There was a trail that ran back along it to their place. It was the springs of the Chimney that they had dammed up into a pond.

  They sorted out the steers there in the road, in the cold moonlight. There were five Half Moon steers, four that were Mike’s and the two CrossTie.

  In the darkness, Tim got up a little courage. He rode over to the wagon. “I don’t know if Mike was planning to see you and those steers home in the dark,” he said to Mrs. Sanderson. “If he was, we could as well do it ourselves. It’s not out of the way.”

  It was Mike who answered, pulling up his shoulders and glancing at his wife. He said, “I guess she’s going to stay over and go home in the morning.” He didn’t say anything about the milch goats. Maybe she had brought them along to his place and left them in his barn all day.

  She said, “Thank you, Mr. Whiteaker,” in a tired voice, or keeping her voice low for the sake of the sleeping boys. After the one occasion, when he had brought her packages up from the post office, she had become, again, gently solemn, firmly polite.

  Tim ducked his chin. He took a breath. “When I finished that work for the log camp, I meant to get over to the Jump-Off to let you know about it. But we got busy and I didn’t make it.”

  There was a short silence. Then she said, as if it was an answer, “I don’t believe I ever thanked you, Mr. Whiteaker, for bringing that milk trade to me.”

  He thought about what he ought to say. “I guess we both got the benefit of it,” he said after a moment.

  He saw her nodding. “Yes.”

  Blue touched his hat, began to move his horse away. “We’ll be seeing you,” he said.

  Tim glanced toward him, but couldn’t see his look in the darkness. He touched his own hat and followed Blue and the steers up the steep rise of the trail. He heard Mike starting his and Mrs. Sanderson’s steers, and the wheels of the wagon making a crackly noise on the cold, rocky ground. The horses grunted, scrabbling up on the frosty mud. At the top of the ridge Blue let the dun stand a minute, letting the steers go on down the trail. When Tim came up alongside him, he never said anything to him. They both looked back after the wagon but it was gone by then. They couldn’t hear anything but the horses breathing and the creek falling downhill in the cold darkness.

  30

  The clearing along the Jump-Off Creek was unfenced, and the grass was patchy, eaten down over the summer by the mule and the two goats. Evelyn Walker’s husband let Lydia bring her steers down onto the Owl Meadow along the northeast of his property. There was an old fence there and the wreck of a cabin. He and Otto Eckert hadn’t mowed the field, they hadn’t been able to get the mower up there over the poor trail. So she patched the low places in the fence, wiring up the old pine poles, and in twenty days, riding the mule purposefully up every draw and gully, scouting the open timber and the burnt clearings and the shoulders of the ridges, she slowly brought fifteen steers down onto the mea
dow. She found them singly or in pairs—once a bunch of five that had come to a salt lick she had not known about, on the edge of Tim Whiteaker’s property.

  The mule was steady as he ever had been, dependable and tireless, and she knew enough to stay back from a steer, to come up to it gently and let it go ahead of her at its own slow gait. But if one took off unexpectedly, the mule would not jump quick to head it. While it bolted away startled into the brush, he was apt to flatten his ears and keep on at an unvarying jog-trot while she flailed his rump in a rage. It was wearying work and little reward in it. Her back ached from the long riding. She wished, for the first time in her life, for a willing and quick horse.

  But she liked the methodicalness, at least—maybe even the forced unhurriedness. There was no rain. The frost had brought up a glossy gold in the aspens and the brush willows. The maples were naked, their leaves filling up the gullies with a dry yellow duff that lifted and rattled softly when the wind blew. The timber felt open, light. There was a certain pleasure in riding out every day in the silent company of the mule, crossing the long, golden ridges slowly in a bright wind.

  There was a spring that made a reddish bog in a low corner of the Owl Meadow but no clear water in it. She had to bring water half a mile from another spring, hauling it in pails. By the time there were fifteen steers on the meadow, she was going down and back for the water six times a day, or seven. It was the worst of the work. There was a saucer formed among the stones of the old chimney where the cabin had fallen down, and she let the pails of water into it. But it leaked out slowly onto the ground, and often when she came onto the meadow in the afternoon the steers would be standing muddy-legged around the empty basin of the chimney, or snuffling the mud of the spring.

  On one of the last days, a steer was stuck up to its belly in the quickmud in that bog. From half a mile off, coming in tiredly after a second gainless day, she heard it lowing dully and steadily with an unpitiful sound of complaint. She rode to the edge of the drying-up pond and looked at the steer unhappily. She was loath to get out in the mud herself. But the stupid steer kept up its crying, and made no effort to get clear of the bog on its own. Its eyes were glazed, blank.