"Gwen’ll get you some supper pretty quick, Dad."
"No hurry," said the old man. "No hurry ’tall. Very ’tractive young woman, your Gwen. Lucky boy, get such a woman. Welsh, though," he added, shaking his head. "Father nothing but three-dollar-day mucker. Good man, but only mucker. No ambition, those Welsh."
Harold thought of Gwen’s father, the bent, wiry little man with the black moustache and the grizzled hair, sitting beside the stove in his kitchen, with his big, knuckly hands spread over his knees, like the claw-and-ball feet of an old chair, and the hurt, mystified look in his eyes that always came when he went into his own mind. As if they sat together, he thought of this big, flushed man being with him, talking loosely of success, and Mr. Williams not answering, but that look coming into his eyes to prove he wasn’t listening, or, if he was, the look of separateness, of distance, that came into Gwen’s eyes when Curt began to prod at her. The comparison made him angry and ashamed.
"He’s a rancher now," he said stiffly, and added, "Which is what we are, I think," and went to the bunk-room door and rapped on it gently.
"Yes? Come in," Gwen’s voice said, but very quietly, as if Grace were already asleep. He opened the door and poked his head in.
The fire the mother had laid in the stove was burning now, and already the room had warmed up a good deal. Gwen was sitting on a stool beside Arthur’s bunk, and Grace was lying on the bunk, with her face down on her arms, and a blanket over her. She was still weeping, but no longer with loud sobs, or with cries breaking out, but softly and more slowly. Gwen was keeping one hand on her shoulder. Her eyes were red from crying too, but she wasn’t crying now.
She smiled at Harold, and nodded to show that things were going better. Harold wanted to enter the room and go across to her and touch her. He was deeply moved by the signs of weeping that were on her face still, and by the gentle weariness that had come after the weeping. He was disturbed by the strength and warmness that came back into him, just from seeing her sitting there. He hadn’t realized before that he was feeling so cold and strained and apart by himself. He wanted to be filled by the strength and active warmth she had, to go in and take her in his arms as much to comfort himself as to change the look on her face.
She’s the only one really alive in the whole house now, he thought.
He couldn’t go through the door, though. It was impossible to enter against Gwen’s quiet and the privacy of Grace’s weeping. He only smiled back a little at Gwen, and nodded too, but then, because he couldn’t touch her, he was suddenly weakened by that small, silent exchange of their love. At once he felt that a great hollow had been eaten inside his strength because Arthur wasn’t there any more. It came to him for the first time as real, that Arthur wasn’t there any more, and wouldn’t ever be there again. He thought clearly, making it a picture in his mind, of waking up in the morning and looking across the bunk-room and seeing Arthur already awake, lying there with his fingers laced under his head and gazing up at the rafters with that silence and distance on his face that showed he’d been awake and thinking for a long time already. Arthur was always the first one awake, and he always lay like that, staring up at something between him and the rafters, and thinking. Then there came the little custom they had between them. Very slowly and carefully, so Arthur wouldn’t catch the movement out of the corner of his eye, Harold would reach down and get hold of one of his boots, and then he would rap softly with the boot against the plank side of his bunk. Arthur would turn his head slowly on his hands and look at him, and they would grin at each other, and make a silent greeting with their lips, just the shapes of the words, so as not to wake Curt.
Now he would still be waking up every morning in here, but Arthur wouldn’t be there across the room. There’d be only the empty bunk, and perhaps not even that, but only the logs of the wall where it had been. It might even be better not to have the bunk there. Just the same, it seemed to him that he would still see Arthur’s face when he looked across, the long nose and the up-jutting beard and the high-boned cheek, and the one big, deep-sunken eye staring up at whatever it was it watched there in the shadows above the rafters. He’d still see that, even if he saw the logs through it.
He felt the first tears coming up hot inside his lids, and nodded again quickly at Gwen, feeling starved because he had to turn away without touching her, and withdrew his head and closed the door.
"Where’s Curt? Where in hell is Curt?" the father asked suddenly. "It’s dark now, pitch dark. Why doesn’t the young fool come home?"
Harold was restored by the small, useful anger he felt against this question, after what he’d been remembering.
"I don’t know, Dad, but he’ll be all right. He wouldn’t try to come back after dark, not with it snowing. He’s probably holed up somewhere, and’l1 come in in the morning. Trust Curt to look out for himself," he couldn’t help adding. "He should’ve brought Arthur back," the old man argued, as if Harold had said he shouldn’t. "He should’ve come back with Arthur, not sent him alone. Would’ve made things easier for his mother. Now she’s gonna worry ’bout him too."
Harold felt the quarrelsome reply coming up in himself, but took his mind past it, and thought of saying the other horse was back, and Curt wouldn’t walk it after dark, and decided against that too. He looked away from the old man’s indignant, hushed face, into the north bedroom, and saw the mother standing in the middle of the room, holding up Arthur’s good black suit on its hanger, and brushing off the shoulders of the coat.
He looked back and said, "He’ll be all right, Dad. He knows all the tricks, and the snow can’t last long this time of year."
He set the bottles down on the sideboard and put on his coat and cap and came back and reached the lantern down from behind the stove and lit it. He took the two bottles of whisky in his arm again, and went to the door and opened it. He stood there holding the door and looking at Joe Sam, and waited. When Joe Sam had gone out past him, he stepped down into the snow and closed the door, and they went around the corner of the house and up the slope toward the bunk-house. Joe Sam walked ahead, and both of them leaned a little against the slope and against the falling snow. The wind was moving more often and more strongly now, pouring the flakes in a white stream across the lantern light, and making a vast, muffled sighing in the pines on the mountain.
11
When Harold came in, the father was already eating, his heavy face bent down close to his food, his eyes red-rimmed and vacant. He was holding a whisky glass out in his left hand, and every once in a while he would straighten up and chew his food a little longer before he swallowed it, and then take a sip of the whisky.
"Grace got to sleep finally," Gwen said. "I couldn’t get her to eat a thing, though. Or your mother either," she added.
Harold nodded, set the lantern down by the table, and went to the door of the north bedroom.
Arthur’s still body still lay on its side in the clothes it had come back in. The black suit was hanging against the wall, and on the back of the chair under it was a clean, white shirt, with a black tie lying across the collar. There were clean, summer underclothes and a pair of black socks on the seat of the chair. Arthur’s black dress boots, with the silver thread leaves on them, stood together in front of the chair. They were newly polished, and gleamed in the lamp-light.
The mother was kneeling beside the bed, with her hands together on the edge of it and her forehead laid against her thumbs. The light showed Arthur’s face above her, lying very quiet on the pillow, with the mouth still a little open, as if he were asleep and about to speak out of his dreams.
"Mother,” Harold said softly.
The mother raised her head slowly, and turned it to look at him. She wasn’t crying, but her look made a much greater distance between them than the length of the room.
"Won’t you try and eat a little supper, Mother?"
The mother shook her head slowly, twice. "You might bring me a cup of coffee when you’re done eating, though,”
she said, and bent down to her praying again. After a moment, Harold turned and went back into the kitchen. Gwen was at the stove, filling his plate, and she looked at him, asking the question silently. He shook his head and went on past her to the pegs by the outside door, where he took off his cap and mackinaw and hung them up.
Then he came back to the table and sat down in Arthur’s place. He saw the lantern still burning on the floor beside him. He picked it up, and blew it out, and set it down again slowly. Gwen brought his plate, and he smiled at her.
She smiled back at him, the quick, far—away smile, and sat down in the mother’s place with her own plate.
She took one small mouthful, and then said, "Oh, I forgot the coffee," and stood up again. She poured coffee for them both, and brought it back.
They didn’t try to talk. Only the father spoke up once in a while. He took it personally that Curt hadn’t come back. He also took it personally that Arthur had let himself be killed. He remembered a great many earlier misfortunes too, and saw himself as the chief victim of them all. He wept a little because fate had picked him out for so much undeserved bad luck. With his mouth full of tears and whisky, he complained, "A man works hard all his life, and what does it get him? Does it all for his family; tries to give them the best there is, and what happens?" Neither Harold nor Gwen had to speak, because he answered all his own questions. He was by himself anyway, sitting there breathing hard through his big nose and staring down into his whisky glass.
Harold couldn’t even look at Gwen, and finally he stood up abruptly, leaving most of his supper on the plate, and took a mug from the corner shelf and filled it with coffee. Then he stood there holding the mug and looking down at Gwen. She was sitting with her hands in her lap, staring at nothing in the shadow of the lamp bowl. Most of her food was still on the plate too. Only the father’s plate had been cleaned up and pushed aside.
"Gwen," Harold said softly.
She looked up at him.
“Fix me a plate for Joe Sam, would you?"
She nodded and stood up slowly, using the table to help her, like an old person.
Harold went into the bedroom with the coffee. The mother was still on her knees by the bed, but this time she looked up when she heard him, and then labored to her feet. Harold drew the old straight-backed rocker from the corner to a place beside the table, and she let herself down into it. He gave her the mug of coffee. The room was still cold, and the hot coffee made a column of steam above the mug. The mother blew on the coffee long and slowly, staring over the mug at the depression in the edge of the bed where she had rested her hands and head. Finally she took a sip of the coffee, and a second sip, and then sat there with the mug between her hands, still staring at the edge of the bed.
"He was a good man, lots of ways, though," she said. "He had a good heart." All the masculine depth was gone from her voice now.
“Yes," Harold said. He glanced at the face on the pillow, and then closed his hand into a fist in front of him and looked down at it.
"I knowed it would be him," the mother said. "The mark was on him. You can most always tell the ones that’ll go early. They ain’t got the hold on things that most of us has."
What does she know about it? Harold thought. Just because they never spoke the same language. But it disturbed him to find her thinking that way about Arthur. He couldn’t think of anything to say that would help, though, so he only nodded, and stood there waiting.
"It makes a body think," the mother went on at last. "I didn’t think too much about him when he was with us, I guess. He used to talk such foolishness. Hardly ever say right out what he meant, either. I guess I just got to takin’ it for granted he was makin’ light of whatever was spoke of, and sort of let his talk go in one ear and out the other. Like you have to Curt’s cussin’ all the time, knowin’ it don’t mean nothin’. But I guess he most always really meant somethin’, didn’t he? In his own way?"
"I guess he did,” Harold said finally.
"Deep down I knowed he did, of course. Only I wouldn’t give it no heed." She sipped at the coffee and lowered it into her lap again.
"He was always botherin’ himself with a lot of fool questions, though," she said.
Who doesn’t? Harold though defiantly. And if you look at it big enough, what question isn’t a fool question? At least he didn’t get all his answers out of some old book, and then take ’em for the word of God. "But it don’t seem like he really meant to mock," the mother said.
"No," Harold said.
"It was mostly just a way of talkin’ he got into," the mother said. "What with the rest of us thinkin’ different, mostly. Except maybe Grace."
"I guess it was."
Finally the mother said, "It’s a lonesome place, this valley, and sometimes I wonder now wasn’t he the lonesomest one of the lot of us."
She looked up at him, and her eyes made him afraid of the question she was going to ask. She was studying his face as if she’d never really seen it before, and now she wanted to figure out what kind of a man he was.
She’s takin’ it hard, he thought. She’s takin’ it all on herself, and looked down at his knuckles again.
"You was the only one he ever really talked to," the mother said. "Was he really so terrible lonesome, do you think?"
Harold wanted to give her a real answer, but with the question straight out like that, and the mother looking at him and waiting, it wouldn’t come together in his mind. He only felt how much older Arthur had been than he was himself, and couldn’t trust the things he remembered. It put him off just to feel how much older Arthur had been, for that matter. He’d never thought of Arthur as being any particular age before. He spoke carefully.
"I guess he would have been pretty much alone any place, Mother. It wasn’t anything about us."
The mother looked back at the edge of the bed. "I guess he would of," she said.
After a long time she said, "He was a queer son for your pa and me to have. Like there was somethin’ the Lord put in him that wasn’t in either of us. Or the devil," she added, almost whispering. "Sometimes I ain’t too sure which."
Harold set his jaw and closed his fist tighter. You and your devils, he thought. Less devil than any of us; that was his trouble. Why don’t you let him alone?
"Seems like he suffered in his mind so," the mother said.
Harold’s anger thinned away. "It wasn’t so bad for him, Mother."
Again the mother looked at him with her eyes awake and searching. "You don’t think it was?"
Harold shook his head. "He liked it here more than any of us, lots of ways."
The mother kept studying his face until he could feel her look as if she touched him. At last she looked away again, and said, "Maybe so. I’d like to think it was so." She took two sips of her coffee and lowered the mug once more.
"He give some real thought to the ways of God, though, didn’t he? Times he was so quiet?"
"Pretty near all the time, I’d say. One way or another."
"I’d like to think so," the mother said again. "And I guess it was so, pretty much."
For a minute both of them were as quiet as the figure on the bed. The flame of the lamp and the snow against the window made important sounds in the room.
Then the mother said, "There was times I used to think it wouldn’t make a heap of difference if Arthur was to go, it was so like he wasn’t here anyway. He’d set right there at the table in the kitchen, and I’d forget he was there. God forgive me," she said slowly. "There was even times, when he’d get on one of them heathen streaks of his, I’d think it might be better if he was to go. I could see his notions sproutin’ out in you, and comin’ out rank in Grace, she bein’ the next oldest to him, and so foolish fond of him too. Now I ain’t so sure. Seems like maybe he was the most here of any of us, even when he’d just set there whitt1in’ and never sayin’ a word."
"Yes," Harold said, thinking of the ghost in the bunk across from his.
"Still I can’
t seem to pray right for him, some way," the mother said. "Not from the heart. I start in to pray, and then I get to thinkin’ of somethin’ he said, near enough blasphemy to burn for, and I see how he could of meant different than I took it, maybe, and the next thing, there I am puzzlin’ my head about it, instead of askin’ the Lord to forgive him.
"Well," she said more strongly, "if I can see that much, the Lord can see a heap more, that’s certain sure." She drank the rest of the coffee without stopping, and gave the mug to Harold.
"You go along and keep Gwen company now," she said. "This is a lonesome business for her to get into, and none of it hers."
Harold started to put a hand out toward her shoulder, but then couldn’t touch her, and let the hand down.
"Why don’t you let me take over for a while, Mother? And you go get a little rest in the bunk-room?"
"It’s no good trying to rest the body till you can get some rest in the mind," the mother said. "Go along and leave me be now."
Harold still waited, though, trying to think of a good way to ask the question that was bothering him. He looked at Arthur’s body in the red coat with the black stripe around it.
"You’ll need some help changing his clothes, won’t you?”
"I can’t do it for a while yet, anyway," the mother said.
"If I need any help, I’ll call you."
So there was nothing to do but ask straight out.
"Was there anything to show how it happened?"
The mother closed her hands tightly over the arms of the chair, but she spoke quietly enough. "His neck’s broke," she said, "and there’s claw marks on his shoulder."
The Track of the Cat Page 14