Harold followed him across, his boots clumping. Standing in front of him, he blew out the lantern and reached across him and set it on the shelf behind the stove. Then he went back to the pegs by the door and stuffed his cap into the pocket of his mackinaw and took the mackinaw off and hung it up in the row of coats. He turned, trying to comb his hair back with his big hand, and came to the table and sat down in Arthur’s chair, across from Gwen. He leaned on the table, and locked his big hands in front of him and looked at Gwen, smiling a little, and when she smiled back at him, looked down at his hands.
The father spoke loudly and importantly. "What was all that Curt was talking about? Joe Sam been up to something with the horses?"
"Oh, nothi.ng," Harold said. "He was already out there when Curt got there, and the horses were kind of spooky, so Curt blamed him. He wasn’t doing anything."
"Was he in the corral?"
"Yes, he was, but he was just standing there by the fence. He wasn’t doing anything. It was the snow spooked the horses."
"The old fool’s going to get himself killed some time," the father said, "warndering around without the slightest notion where he is."
"I wouldn’t worry about it," the mother said. "He’ll look out for himself. Another cup of coffee, Harold?"
"Please."
The mother filled a mug and brought it over and set it down in front of him.
"Curt might be able to hunt at that," he told her. "It’s just about stopped snowing."
"It wouldn’t make no difference anyway," she said. "Curt would hunt anything, once he got started, if he had to make the tracks himself."
"And he’d get it too," the father declared. "Curt’s about the best hunter I’ve ever known," he told Gwen. "He has a gift for it. He knows right away, without giving it a thought, what other men can’t even figure out. He knows what a cat will do; he knows what a deer will do, better than they know it themselves. He’ll outguess them every time. He doesn’t need tracks. Just a start, and he knows what they’ll do. He’s a remarkable shot, too, remarkable, one in a thousand, one in ten thousand. Why, I remember once . . ."
"I dor1’t guess Gwendolyn cares about Curt’s fancy shooting enough to listen to all that," the mother said.
The father stared at her, the whisky slowness showing in his eyes already.
Before he could speak, Gwen smiled at him, and said "Harold told me about it. He must really be a wonderful shot," and looked back at her plate.
After a moment the father said, "He’s all of that, and I then some. I’ll tell you about a couple of the things I’ve seen him do, some time when it’s possible to have a little conversation without these constant interruptions?
Gwen smiled at him again, and nodded. He was encouraged.
“G0 ahead and eat, my dear,” he said expansively. "We should have waited for you, but sometimes it seems to me we’ve lost even the most ordinary consideration in this wilderness, all sense of the amenities of civilization. You have no idea the pleasure it is, if only for that reason, to have you under this roof. It may remind us of ourselves a little, and heaven knows we need to be reminded."
He leaned toward her and smiled at her and raised his glass. "A most left-handed compliment, I fear, but not intended as such. The true pleasure, of course, is your presence."
Gwen hushed and made the quick, little smile again, and looked back at her plate.
"Thank you," she said.
"N0, no; thank you," the father said, and flourished the glass at her, and drank from it, and sat back with it in his move or look at her.
Gwen picked up her fork, but then, to loosen the close hold of his attention, looked away and watched the mother set a plate of potato and bacon on the floor in front of Joe Sam, and a mug of coffee beside it. The old Indian, so upright, and with his eyes gleaming, appeared unnaturally alert, as if he saw and heard something none of the rest of them could, and had become their sentry against what was waiting outside the door he stared at.
This black panther they all joke about, she thought. He isn’t really seeing anything, though, she thought uneasily. Mrs. Bridges is right in front of him now, but he’s staring at her the same way he was at the door. He doesn’t even know she’s there.
“There’s your breakfast, Joe Sam," the mother said, raising her voice as if the old Indian were deaf. After a moment she said, "Joe Sam," still more loudly. Joe Sam didn’t move or look at her.
The father stirred uneasily in his chair and set his glass down. "The old fool," he said, laughing a little. "He’s seeing things again. The first snow always upsets him," he explained to Gwen. "Sometimes it puts him into a regular trance. He can’t sleep, and he forgets to eat unless we make him. But there’s no reason to be alarmed," he added quickly. "He’s perfectly harmless. When he’s himself," he went on, "he’s not at all bad help, either, as Indians go. We just have to put up with these little spells now and again. But he’s all right, really. Gentle as a lamb. There isn’t a mean streak in the old codger."
Gwen made the diilicult smile again, but clenched her left hand in her lap, and thought passionately, Oh, stop it, stop it. Stop talking about the poor old man as if he wasn’t even here.
The mother was prodding Joe Sam’s knee with her foot. At last he looked up at her slowly and asked, "What do?"
"He’s as old as the hills, to hear him tell it," the father said, laughing. "He can’t remember exactly how old, though. Too old to remember, even, I guess."
Gwen looked at Harold for help, but he was staring at his hands folded together on the table, and seemed to be thinking of something else.
"Eat," the mother told Joe Sam. "Drink your coffee. It’ll warm you."
"Not cold," he said.
His voice was deep, surprisingly deep out of such a small, fat, old man, and with a heavy, male resonance in it that was stirring. Yet he spoke small too, reluctant to make a sound, as if, being compelled to speak, he was robbed of a power he stored for greater uses, as if he were violated by the presence of another.
"Go on, drink it," the mother said. "You’re shaking like a leaf still."
"Coffee good," he said politely, although he hadn’t yet touched the mug.
The mother waited, looking down at him, bearing her presence down heavily upon him. Finally Joe Sam took up the mug in both hands and sipped at the coffee, holding the mug against his mouth between sips. He appeared to test the coffee in his mouth like an unfamiliar wine, and to be thinking about the way its warmth spread out in him. He didn’t look at the mother again, or speak to her.
"And eat something too, do you hear me?" the mother said. She turned, drawing the bathrobe closer about her, and came back to her place at the table and sat down.
"Him and his black painters," she said, to no one in particular. "Every winter we have to go through all this nonsense all over again."
Having said that, she put herself apart from the others. The separation could be felt as much as if she’d gone into another room. She closed her eyes and set one thumb against the edge of the Bible, and opened the Bible where her thumbnail went between the pages. She moved a finger down the page and stopped it, and opened her eyes, and began to read where her finger pointed. She moved her finger along under the words, and shaped each word slowly and distinctly with her lips.
"Oh, that I were as in the months of old, as in the days when God watched over me; when His lamp shined upon my head, and by His light I walked through darkness." She pointed out the words for herself with her left hand, and with her right hand she held the dressing gown closed tightly at her throat, as if she were threatened, or as if it were cold in the room.
"It’s really quite all right, my dear," the father’s voice was saying. "It happens to him every year, although, to be sure, he seems to be taken harder with it this time than most." He chuckled.
"This black painter Curt was teasing you about invariably arrives with the first snow, arrives in Joe Sam’s mind, that is, and apparently it requires strong medicine to g
et rid of it. That’s all he’s doing now, making his spells against the black painter. Actually a mountain lion, we gather. He took Mrs. Bridges’ word for it, calls it a painter. Mrs. Bridges’ family is Southern, you know. For a good many years now, Arthur has whittled him a little model of a lion each fall, so he could have it when the snow came. No idea what it really means to him, of course, but apparently it’s a comfort. He carries it around with him, in a little sack under his shirt, as a sort of charm against the real lion, I suppose. Only this year, with this unexpectedly early snow, Arthur doesn’t have his charm finished, which aggravates his condition, I suppose. Sometimes he recovers in an hour or so, but it looks as if we might be in for a long spell this time. He’s gone as much as two or three days, sometimes. But there’s nothing whatever to worry about. Only have to keep an eye on him to see he doesn’t wander off or sit down somewhere outside and freeze to death. He’s never violent; never known him to lift a hand against anyone."
Gwen looked across at Harold again, and this time he was watching her and understood.
"It’s all right," he said. "Joe Sam doesn’t hear a word we’re saying when he’s like this. I don’t think he ever listens to us much anyway. He doesn’t know enough English to guess what we’re talking about usually, so he doesn’t pay any attention."
"You never told me very much about him," Gwen said, keeping her voice low.
"Well, now," said the father, "when a young man has to ride all that way to get in a little courting, you’d hardly expect him to spend many of his words on the hired help, would you, my dear? Especially when he has as few as Harold has. Or want him to, eh?"
"There’s not much to tell about him," Harold said slowly, and looking at his hands again. "We don’t any of us know much about him, except maybe Arthur."
"Arthur," the father said, and snorted. "I’d hesitate to put my faith in anything Arthur thinks he knows."
"Arthur knows quite a bit about him, I guess," Harold said to Gwen. "But he doesn’t talk much about it. That’s why Joe Sam trusts him, I guess. He talks to Arthur a lot."
After a moment, when Harold didn’t go on, Gwen said,
"He must be terribly old."
"Well, now, as to that," the father said, smiling at her, and then worked his lower lip up over his moustache and down again, smiling at the same time. "I wouldn’t believe all I see, my dear, if I were you. He’s no child, to be sure, but he’s nowhere near as old as he thinks he is, either. They have no real means of keeping track of their age, you know, and they grow old much faster than white men."
He left the statement in the air, as clearly only an introduction, and lighted his cigar again. When the smoke came full and easy, he blew a long, slow cloud of it up into the lamp, and went on.
"We had one once, did odd jobs for us in Virginia City. A woman. The men wouldn’t work at all, if they could help it. Beneath their dignity. They preferred to beg for food and whisky and cast-oif clothes. She was a sight, this one. Rose, we called her, in order that there should be something sweet about her."
He chuckled and looked at Gwen to be sure she understood the joke. Gwen made the little smile, and looked from the corners of her eyes at Harold. His face was expressionless and he was working one hand slowly back and forth over the other, which he had made into a fist on the table.
"And also," the father went on, "because we had to call her something. She was unbelievably fat and dirty, and had bad eyes, like most of them, and her hair down in bangs so long it half covered them. She wore a bedspread with huge red flowers on it for a shawl. That’s actually what suggested the name Rose to us. And an old pair of men’s shoes, three sizes too large for her, and never tied up. She was honest enough, as Indians go," he said, chuckling, and inviting Gwen, with a look, to enjoy this joke too. "Never stole anything unless we left it around in the open, or weren’t there to watch her.
"Well, to get to the point, I always took it for granted that Rose was forty-five or fifty at least. Her face was heavily lined, and she’d had something like twelve children, though there didn’t seem to be more than three or four of them left alive. They have no idea how to take care of a child, or any interest in doing so. Once they’re off those boards the women carry them around on, they either survive or they don’t, pretty much by accident, like any other little animals. But then I chanced to meet a man who’d known her before she came to Virginia City. He was a hunter or trapper or some such. At any rate, he was a squaw-man. He’d lived with Indians more than with whites, and wore his own hair clear down over his shoulders, like a buck. Joel Blaine, I believe his name was. Ever happen to meet him up there?"
Gwen shook her head.
"No, you wou1dn’t be likely to, I guess. Probably before your time, and a secretive cuss anyway. Got that from the Indians too, I suppose. At any rate, he’d known Rose when she was a kid, and guess how old he said she was?"
He asked the question happily, and sat back smiling widely at Gwen and waiting to astound her with the answer.
"I wouldn’t have any idea," Gwen said, trying to smile.
"Twenty-six or seven, not more," the old man announced triumphantly. "And it’s the same with Joe Sam here," he went on, after allowing her time to understand him fully.
"You cou1dn’t possibly guess his age by looking at him, and he himself hasn’t any real idea of it, either. He claims he’s over a hundred, but I’ll wager bourbon to sump water he’s not much over half that."
"He’s older than that," Harold said. "He was already a brave when Fremont camped at Pyramid Lake, and that was pretty near sixty years ago. Remember, he told Arthur about a brass cannon they had?"
"He’s like any other child," the father said. "He don’t know the difference now between what he saw and what somebody told him, maybe thirty years later."
"I don’t know," Harold said. "He remembers a lot of little things, too, like about the kind of buttons Fremont had on his coat. And he was a war chief of some sort, when they had that fight on the Truckee. He spoke in the last council they had before the fight. He had four children too, and one of them, the oldest girl, was in her teens already. And they were all by his second wife. His first children were already grown up and had families of their own. He says two of the boys were killed in the battle. And that was in sixty.”
Before the father could speak, he went on to Gwen, "It was right after that the black painter got started. The Indians took an awful lickin’ in the second battle, when they had troops from California and everything in against them, and they scattered all over the country north of the lake. When the reservation was laid out, their chief, Winnemucca, called ’em all back, but there was quite a few wouldn’t come. Thought it was a trap, I guess, or just didn’t like the idea of being fenced in when they’d had the whole country to themselves."
"About the way the jack-rabbits had it," the father said.
"Maybe," Harold said. "Anyway, they’d been getting along on it for a sight longer than there’d been white men anywhere in America, and the country was still as fit to live
in as it ever had been. Our kind wrecked it worse in ten years than they had in lord knows how many hundreds, maybe thousands."
"Ignorance and poor tools," the father said.
"We got a long ways to go in some things then, before we catch up with their ignorance."
"You sound like Arthur," the father said. "Arthur and that sour-faced newspaper friend of his in Virginia City that got him started reading all that useless trash; what was his name? Bates. Jim Bates. Back to nature, and it’s a sin to make an honest dollar, and so on."
"Not an honest one," Harold said, and looked quickly at Gwen again.
"Anyway, Joe Sam was one of them that wouldn’t come back. He took his family and traveled clear up into the mountains somewhere northwest of us here, up around Shasta somewhere, near as we can make out. Arthur thinks the black cat got started up there, in some extra bad winter. He thinks it’s kind of Joe Sam’s personal evil spirit, not a regular on
e for the Piutes. Either way, it’s got so, in his mind, it kind of stands for the whole business of being run out by the white man, the end of things, you might say. Like the ghost dance was for the ones that stayed together."
"Wasn’t there a real one?" Gwen asked.
"I don’t know," Harold said. "I never saw a black one myself, or heard of anybody that did, for that matter. But there might have been one—a freak, dark enough to call black. There was something, that’s sure.”
"A dream," the father said. “The old fool can’t tell dreams and facts apart any more."
"No," Harold said, shaking his head. "It comes out too often. Little things about it. Whatever he’d added to it since, he remembers something."
"He can’t remember anything," the father said. "He couldn’t even remember his own name. ‘Sam’ he said, when we asked him," he told Gwen. "He’d heard it somewhere, and that was all he could think of. So we called him Joe Sam, because Curt was already calling him Joe."
"He knows his real name, all right," Harold said. "He won’t tell us, that’s all. Indians keep them secret. They think it gives anybody a power over them to know their real names."
"Rubbish," the father said, "pure, romantic rubbish. The notions Arthur digs up," he said to Gwen, "are enough to make a reasonable man weary. It’s all this useless stuff he reads." He waved a hand loosely at the bookshelves in the corner behind him. "Novels and poetry and fairy stories about the ancient Greeks and the Chinese and the Lord only knows what. Not a dependable fact or a piece of usable information in the whole lot. Now it has him manufacturing the same sort of nonsense. He’s as completely a dreamer as Joe Sam himself, only it isn’t just by spells."
"He does a little thinking of his own," Harold said, as softly as Arthur might have said it.
The father snorted. “Precious little I’d call thinking."
"About all that’s done around here, though."
"If somebody around here wasn’t doing more thinking than Arthur," the father began loudly, but then stopped, pounding a fist softly on the table and muttering, "When a man can’t even finish a sentence in his own house," because the door of the north bedroom had opened, and Grace was coming in. The rims of her eyes were red from crying, and she didn’t look toward the table.
The Track of the Cat Page 6