by Alyson Hagy
He opened the barn door and slipped into the cocoon of snow and darkness. Hobbs was cleaning up after their meal. Adams could see his jerky, deliberate movements through the yellow square of the kitchen window. He looked like he was swatting flies. Hobbs’s dishwashing was generally all puddles and chipped plates, but it got the job done. He had enjoyed the dinner with Buren. He would, Adams knew, enjoy the news about the sheep even more. So why wasn’t he hustling into the house to share their good fortune? Why did he feel more comfortable in his silence and isolation? The machine shed, large and white-capped and dented, suddenly seemed more inviting.
He pried at the shed’s roll doors with trembling fingers. He’d come outside with Buren without putting on gloves or a coat, but he hadn’t felt the arrows of winter until now. The chill spiked into his kidneys. The shed did not feel deserted, even though he knew Hobbs was still in the house. The air he eased into his lungs was dense and strangely dry, the kind of air he associated with packed linens. Slowly, cautiously, he worked his way from the shed door to Hobbs’s workbench in nearly total darkness. He smelled the clumped grease and mud of his tractors. He tasted the sour hone of iron and steel. He moved in silence, believing the silence was in honor of Hobbs and the work he did in that place. Yet he didn’t hesitate to take the thing he wanted. He made his claim. She was in a lidless green coffee can, one he’d seen Hobbs wash and polish with a torn clump of bath towel. Charlotte in miniature—alone in a dry cistern of memory. He grasped her gently with his thumb and finger; she was the size of a three-inch bolt. The rim of the coffee can was decorated with small shreds of cloth he recognized all too well. He’d seen them on the plundered hills near Chosin. Flags for the dead. Prayers for the spirits of the lost. He swaddled the tiny Charlotte with his right hand. Hobbs might not even miss her. The workbench currently imprisoned a dozen more exactly like her.
The ranch yard was an estuary of snow. He churned across its quiet surface, bisecting the ribbons left by Buren’s spinning car tires. He saw no sign of Hobbs or the dogs. The house, which was warm with the scents of beef fat and detergent, seemed empty. He called for Hobbs once, then walked through the kitchen and parlor, flipping off light switches before he ascended the steep cordon of stairs, which creaked as they had creaked for sixty-four years. He went down the hall to the door of Charlotte’s room and opened it.
The room was cold because he kept it closed off to save money. A sliver of him expected to see Hobbs there, curled on the mattress with his dogs, though he couldn’t say why he expected that. Winter kept the room smelling fresh, the way the root cellar under the house smelled fresh when it was empty. He turned on the light. The space was still entirely Charlotte’s. The ivory-colored bureau. The clover-pink walls that matched the dust ruffle on the bed. The dozens of faded 4-H ribbons—reds and purples and greens and yellows—that hung on a clothesline strung above the bed. There was the Viennese music box that had belonged to their mother’s mother. And the family pictures tucked along the edges of a mirror frame. Rows of porcelain horses, their legs cracked from rough play, stood on a pair of painted shelves mounted on one wall. The sateen comforter on the bed looked cheap and faded beneath the illumination of the single lightbulb screwed into the ceiling, but it was all hers, maintained as if she’d died as a child.
The figurine had grown warm in the clutch of his hand. It wasn’t easy to see her against his skin: Hobbs’s princess in a coffee-can tower. His sister as amulet. He thought of her walking the slushy spring streets of Denver, having an entire life he knew nothing about among the brick warehouses and glass towers of the city. He thought about how she wasn’t a schoolteacher anymore, and he wondered what her eyes looked like. Her sculpted shape was subtle and smooth, as easy to palm as a worn river stone. He touched her head once with the tip of his left thumb. Then he laid her on top of the ivory-painted bureau. There. Hobbs was wrong. They hadn’t lost all of Charlotte. Part of her was here and would always be here. He had never let that part go.
He wouldn’t try to call her again. Calling would do no good. He’d leave her to a kind of peace in Denver. You’re afraid of love, of everything that matters. He turned off the light and went to the north window that faced Bell Butte. He parted the heavy curtains and breathed the unsettling of their dust. A fine gauze of falling snow obscured his view of the butte, but he could see the heavy black scrawl of his fence lines running away from the house. Demarcation. That’s what he’d always been about, and it had cost him. You hate everything that’s different from you. He didn’t. Not really. He had tried to accept things that were awkward and different into his life. But he was cautious, and he’d too often been slow to act. The result was a man as taut and insubstantial as his fences.
He left the curtains parted, allowing the phosphorus light of winter to probe his sister’s room, then he closed the door and crossed the hall to the cluttered, carpeted square where he slept when sleep could find him. Rain was there for the first time in weeks, stretched across the pad of yellow foam that was his bed. Hobbs must have carried him up the stairs. The dog raised his head blindly, his nose working to take in Adams’s scent before he lowered his jaw onto his forelegs and closed his eyes once again. Adams said a word for the dog, but he didn’t lean over to caress him. He waited, instead, for the sounds of the house to settle over them. How often had he stood in that chipped doorway waiting for his sister to hustle her ass out of the bathroom while they were both getting ready for school? Charlotte had taken plenty of his time in those days, hadn’t she? And plenty of his space. He could almost hear it now, the rustle of her importance, her haste, as she passed him in that narrow pioneer hall. Her presence came back to him in a sweet, rising cloud of girl soap and the twin intake of their breaths. They had slipped by each other often in those days, brother and sister. Quickly. Passing familiarly and without touch.
He slept later than he should have, grinding a long dream about Charlotte and her horse, Redrock, between his teeth. Redrock had finally died of old age in the early 1980s. But in his dream the horse had crippled himself while racing at full gallop under the prick of Charlotte’s spurs. Redrock jammed a foreleg into a gopher hole, broke it, and fell. But Charlotte did not fall with him, not in the dream. Charlotte rose upward on the pink carpet of her own dust, still spurring, as if she were a thick-husked seed in the wind.
Hobbs was not in the kitchen. There was no breakfast, no coffee, only a greasy plate of leftover mushrooms from the night before. Seven o’clock. Adams could not remember the last time he’d stayed in bed so late. And the sleep hadn’t come from whisky, either. It had come from an exhaustion beyond his bones.
He found Hobbs in the shed. But Hobbs wasn’t adding new members to his circus; he was hammering at some freshly sawn lengths of 2 × 4, instead. His boots were sprinkled with wood shavings. They resembled a pair of decorated rye cakes.
“What you’re making there looks like a piece of feeder gate.” Adams rubbed his eyes with the back of a hand. Sawdust always made him itchy.
“S-smart,” Hobbs said. “I thought it’s what y-you’d want. We need to spruce up them corrals.”
“We do, do we?” Adams felt a drill bit of apprehension bore into his ribs.
“Y-yes. For the sheep. The new ones. I was guessing you’d go for yearlings, but I wasn’t sure how many. Buren d-didn’t say nothing to me. I just….” Hobbs paused, the hammer dangling from his good hand, a pleased dimple to his smile. “I just knew how it should go, Fremont. You’ve always been a good boss, e-easy to figure, easy to read.”
“That so? You enjoy Buren’s visit that much?”
Hobbs hung the hammer from his belt. “Buren is like a single note of music to m-m-me. I don’t … I’d rather not explain how it works when it comes to Buren. He was nice last night. It’s nicer that you’re buying sheep.”
Adams rubbed at his eyes again. He wished he was able to keep himself prepared for Hobbs’s surprises. “And how can you tell that without talking to me or looking in a cryst
al ball, one or the other?”
Hobbs rubbed a fond thumb along the red welt of his recent injury. “It’s wrote like a book on your f-face, Fremont. And it’s pretty much made a kind of light all around you, just the thoughts you been h-having. It’s a thing I learned to see, th-that kind of light.”
“Jesus.” Adams held back an onrushing sneeze. “You got me, C.D. You’re way ahead of me again. You’re always ahead of me.” He told himself that Hobbs’s strangeness was only as strange as he allowed it be. “I reckon I better retire and give up right now.”
“N-no,” Hobbs said, pulling a handful of nails from somewhere inside his jeans. “That can’t be said about you on good days or bad, Fremont. It’s what there is to like about you. You’re one who never gives up.”
The sheep arrived in a welter of bleating and mud, whether they were ready for them or not. The driver of the tri-level stayed long enough to have a cigarette while Adams studied the invoices. Fifty ewes: all registered, all puny. Their shorn flanks heaved above their frail black legs, and their slit eyes—which looked goaty to Adams—were dull with exhaustion. The bucks, which he and Hobbs chuted into the horse pen for close inspection, were worse. There were only two of them. The ewes had already been bred, they didn’t even need the bucks, but here they were fat and slack and awkward in their long, untended bodies. The bucks’ curled horns were pitted from poor nutrition. “I hate to give them up, but my youngest son’s gone for the computers in Seattle.” That’s what the east Oregon farmer had said. He had made Adams sit through the story of his family’s rise and fall in the highlands above the Owyhee River. It was a good story, inflated by improbable luck and honest partnerships that never disappointed. Adams was familiar with it, chapter and verse. It was the ballad a man had to sing when he was left with nothing but overgrazed land and dogs.
Adams told the farmer he’d gotten moldy in retirement and wanted the company of some breeding stock. When the farmer responded with a diatribe against hippies and organic apple orchards in a voice that whistled through its consonants, Adams knew the farmer believed he had the kind of money and leisure time the farmer had only dreamed about. He tried, and failed, to cut off the farmer as the man recited, by tag number, exactly how each ewe liked to be handled before she dropped her lambs. Hearing the farmer evaporate his ranching history into a loose skein of words made Adams’s skin pucker.
The ewes were mostly quiet until Hobbs drove the tractor and a wagon filled with seed cake into the front field. Adams closed the gate behind Hobbs and hefted an axe onto his shoulder. As he trailed the tractor, the stunned ewes began to rally and trail it, too. At first, they moved alone or in small groups linked jaw to flank to jaw. They didn’t stop to nibble at the clumps of bunchgrass as the spring sun spread like water across their backs. They stumbled directly toward the feed troughs, the one destination they recognized. A few plaintive bleats gathered and harmonized above the shallow contours of the field, and Adams listened to the sound blend with the local uproar of his magpies. He saw the more vigorous ewes butt the submissive ones aside as Hobbs began to shovel feed. While Adams watched, a luscious, unreined panic lunged through him. There was so much for them to do: feed, doctor, tag, brand, record weights and births. He had spent Buren’s money as lavishly as a first-time bride. And now he had the chance to know the animals again. Which were boss and which were rogue and which too stupid to make good decisions on the open range. It felt so right, so deeply familiar. A new purpose was within his grasp, and its momentum came from the loud, begging, needful cries of these sheep. Those cries had once stapled his days to his nights as tightly as a saddle tree was stapled to its leathers.
He made his way to the troughs, loosening the scarf he’d wrapped around his throat and feeling his fingers warm to a sweat inside his gloves. Long, layered terraces of cloud marbled the field with shadows that swirled across the banks of Muddy Creek. He saw Rain circle a portion of the herd, the black mask of the dog’s face raised as he, too, memorized the possibilities before him. The small band of dark-legged ewes flowed around the feed wagon as balanced and heedless as a flood. Their underfed shanks were still blotched with the purple paint of their Owyhee River brands. The day those brands were replaced with the of the Trumpet Bell would be a fine day.
“They don’t look like m-much,” Hobbs said. He was smiling. He had been a smiler ever since they’d first talked about the sheep.
“They never do,” Adams said. “Cows make a man feel richer.”
Hobbs thrust his shovel into the dusty bank of seed cake and hauled. “Cows make their own kind of trouble. I’m glad you and Buren didn’t go for cows.”
“Should I ask what would’ve happened if we had?” Adams gripped the axe so he could lay into the thick ice that covered the watering trough.
“N-no lambs,” Hobbs said. “Calves ain’t the same, and I’m not ready to take you through a spring season without lambs.”
Adams laughed. Then he thought about what Hobbs had really said. “You think this wormy bunch can do the trick?”
He heard Hobbs and his shovel pause, so he raised the axe and broke through the ice in the trough with one swing. The blow soaked his arms and chest with water. After he pulled off his gloves, he began to fish sour chunks of ice from the trough and throw them to the ground.
“We’ll l-lose a few,” Hobbs said, finally, and Adams knew he was assessing the ewes as he stood on the wagon, looking at their eyes and bellies. He was good at that. He always had been. “Enough’ll make it. For what we want.”
“And what’s that?” Adams asked, his hips and back hot from working. He’d been making a list in his head of all the familiar things he and Hobbs would get to do once the sheep were fed. “I know you like good animals, but what, exactly, do you think we want? Since you’re talking about it.”
Hobbs peered down at him, then up into the sky that seemed too huge for the one small sun it held. He pushed his orange hunting cap off his sweat-slick head. They hadn’t spoken seriously about anything but sheep since Buren’s visit. “You remember that fellow B-big Mike from up around Billings, used to herd some for your uncle Gene?”
Adams thought he could conjure up an attitude, if not a face, to go with that name. The Trumpet Bell had seen dozens of men come and go. Big Mike, as he recalled, had been some sort of distant cousin to Old Etchepare. “I believe so. A little.”
“Big Mike weren’t no good with sheep, or horses n-neither, but he did tell me this story about a wolf that hunted this territory long ago. I believe he w-wanted to scare me. He thought I was the kind who could be scared.”
Adams plunged both hands into the slushy water of the trough. He scooped ice onto the ground as noisily as he could. Hobbs hadn’t tried to tell him a story of this kind in quite a while. The warning buzz in his head suggested he should pay attention to the details of this one.
“There was this wolf, see, a big lone male that come down from Montana before the ranchers were all in here. He ate all the b-buffalo he could get. He ate all the elk. It got so the Crow people and the Sioux was afraid of him and glad when he left their country. Big Mike said it was a giant wolf and bright as silver by the time it got to the Ferris Mountains because of all the miners it had swallowed for its meals. That wolf glowed with the glow of their riches. I don’t remember all the parts of how he told it. Big Mike was mean and unfriendly in his speaking, s-so if you don’t remember him, I’m glad you don’t. The ending had to do with a Indian girl who lived along a deep stretch of the Platte River. She somehow fooled that wolf into drowning himself in that water, she saved herself with some kind of special trick, and that’s why they say the Platte Canyon runs so pretty and silver in the spring.”
Adams wagged his head, wanting Hobbs to see he was amused. “I’m glad to say those damn dogs the government plans to restock in Yellowstone Park will never be allowed to get down this far again. Wolves won’t bother us. They are one thing us hard-working sheep men don’t have to worry about.”
“Th-that’s not why I’m saying what I’m saying, Fremont.”
Adams glanced upward again. Some of the bolder ewes were butting at his knees now, thirsty for a drink. There were sheep scratching their backs against the wagon axles and tires. He could smell the dispensing scent of their long, desperate journey from Oregon, the piss and shit of animals that have been trapped. “Then why’d you bring it up?”
“I don’t know for sure. They just come out of my mouth sometimes, the s-stories. They make these shapes in my m-mind. You’re the man who likes a goal he can see and touch.”
Adams shook his head. A strange, hard pressure in his skull made it seem as though his ears were about to pop. “What’s that mean? That mean you got a prediction, some kind of sensation, about a big wolf bearing down on us now that we got something to protect?”
“N-no,” said Hobbs, closing his eyes. “It ain’t that complicated. It’s not about seeing one danger, or even two. Danger’s always there. Y-you can’t get rid of it. She says it’s about living with what makes you happy until the day you die.”
Adams didn’t have to ask who she was. He felt a clutching at his spine, as if distant fingers were digging toward his heart. “Jesus, C.D. I don’t know how you manage to make all these connections, but you do. Is it all right if we don’t talk about my sister? I can’t do Charlotte right now, I really can’t. This is a big day for me—for us. I’d rather talk about wolves and these brand-new merinos. I might still have a chance to get things right with them.”
Hobbs drove his shovel into the load of seed cake. He lifted a bladeful and added it to the trough, careful not to dump it on the desperate heads of the ewes. “See, that’s your story, Fremont. And you tell it p-pretty good. I like it. These merino gals like it. You got c-confidence. The confidence has come back. You don’t give away no sense of how there might some day be a finish to things. Y-you don’t go for the end. That’s what you leave for everybody else, ain’t it? H-how it all ends.”