"She’s going to lie down for a while," Harold said.
Gwen looked down at the fork, and said, "Your breakfast’s all ready."
"Could you keep it a couple of minutes?"
"Whenever you’re ready," Gwen said.
"Joe Sam," Harold said.
The old Indian stood up in his place by the wood-box and started toward the outside door. He still had his coat and hat on.
“Could you give me a hand in here?" Harold said.
He went back into the bedroom. Joe Sam came in after him, and stood at the foot of the bed, where he had stood the night before.
"We have to put him in the coffin, Joe Sam."
"Put Arthur in?”
He doesn’t like it, Harold thought. Doesn’t want to touch it, or maybe it’s the coffin that bothers him. Wants it done some other way, maybe. Right into the ground. Or even one of those crow’s-nest burials. He studied the old face, but couldn’t guess anything from it.
"That’s the way Mother wants it."
“Not like," Joe Sam said.
"Maybe not, but that’s the way we’ll do it."
"Arthur not like," Joe Sam said.
What the hell does it matter, coffin or crow-bait? Harold thought, staring at him. It’s not Arthur anyway, this bloated old man with a profit-counting face. When he didn’t answer, Joe Sam looked at him, and the retreat took place in his good eye, the way it did when Curt bullied him.
"Woman say so, I not care," he said.
The hell you don’t, Harold thought. He lifted the two branches of sage off the white blanket and laid them on the floor. He stood beside the bed for a moment then, holding his hands against his thighs again, but finally set his mouth straight and tight, and moving quicker and harder than the task needed, drew back the white blanket and let it fall over the foot of the bed. He held his eyes from looking at the face, and he was holding his breath too. Joe Sam, though, was looking down the length of the body at the face. He was seeing it, and he had thoughts about it.
"We’ll wrap him in the blue spread," Harold said. "He liked the blue spread. He liked the pictures on it. Even when he was a kid he used to look at them all the time. He’ll like that."
He spoke rapidly, almost chattering, while he kept his eyes nearly blind and made his hands quickly lift the head and draw the pillow from under it. He dropped the pillow on the floor and then lifted that side of the blue spread and laid it over the body as far as it would go. Then the face was covered again too.
"Good blanket," Joe Sam said. He touched the blue spread with his fingertips, where it was turned over the feet. Then he moved around to the other side of the bed, before Harold could, and lifted the other half of the spread and folded it over too. Harold waited at the foot of the bed, a little ashamed that the old man should be finishing the task for him, but relieved too. He watched the dark, gnarled hands fold the spread into itself all the way down, and then turn
the corners in again over the feet and at the throat, so it would hold.
Like he was alive still, Harold thought. Like wrapping a baby or a sick man. And gentle as a woman at it. It suits him better than the coffin.
He woke himself from the thoughts, and looked across at Joe Sam. The old Indian was just standing there beside the bed, waiting for what came next. Harold went around beside the coffin again, and pushed back the rocking chair, and picked up the pillow. He laid the pillow in the big end of the coffin and smoothed it and straightened up again. Then he made a little motion toward the feet of the blue-wrapped shape. When Joe Sam had moved down there and slid his hands under the feet, Harold made his mind blank and set himself to endure the touch and the stiff weight. He pulled the body over at an angle, so he could get hold under both shoulders, and then the two of them lifted it. It wasn’t as bad as he’d made himself ready for. The body sagged a little, but not enough to make trouble, and it wasn’t as heavy as he’d expected, either. He breathed hard and slowly, and was afraid the head would roll off the arm he had under it, but actually they lifted the body evenly between them and let it down slowly into the coilin, until it settled into the quilt and the pillow, and nothing went wrong.
Harold straightened up at the head of the coffin, and stood there steadying his breath and wiping his hands slow and hard on his jeans again. Joe Sam waited at the foot of the coffin. Both of them were still looking at the long, narrow mummy the blue spread made.
Harold’s mind took hold again, and he thought, No damn line-up, like a church. No going around it, staring in. There’s no knowing what she’d think of to do. If we put the lid on now, she can’t.
He leaned over and picked up the two branches of sage and pushed them down into the cofiin beside the legs. Then he went around the coffin and Joe Sam and picked up the padded lid in both hands and came back with it. But then he had to stand there and hold it, because Joe Sam was kneeling beside the coffin, leaning over it so the hair of his loose braid hung inside. He was reaching in by the head with one hand. When he took the hand away, Harold saw that he’d left a little, buckskin pouch between the bulges made by the chin and the crossed hands. There was a pattern of black and white porcupine quills around the pouch, a line of little wedges, like birds dying in a row.
His medicine pouch, Harold thought. He looked at the shape of what was in the pouch, and thought, One of the black panthers Arthur made him.
Joe Sam took something out of his coat pocket and reached into the coflin again. He did this three times. Then there was a red tobacco tin lying on one side of the head, and on the other side there were five arrowheads in a line, like the flying quills on the pouch. One of the arrowheads was white quartz and one was a dull, hard red, like dried blood. The other three were shiny black obsidian. There. was a thin band of yellow buckskin stretched across the forehead of the shrouded figure too. It had a quill pattern on it, like the one on the pouch, and a row of small, iridescent, green and black feathers sewed along one edge of it. Two little rawhide tie-thongs, with beads on them, hung down from each end of the band.
I wonder how he makes a warrior out of Arthur? Harold thought, and then, But maybe the feathers can mean something else too. And then, looking at the feathers, he knew where they came from. They were from the neck and shoulders of the bantam cock.
Joe Sam was standing up, waiting for him to put the top on.
"That’s line, Joe Sam. He’ll like that," Harold said.
The old man looked at him, showing nothing in his face, only waiting, and he felt how bad his words had been. Get it over with, he thought. Anything anybody could say would be bad, and laid the lid down carefully, and set it so the nail points were in the holes they’d started. Only then, when he stood up and looked down, and there was only the black, flat-sided shape of the coffin, did he feel how final the act was. The loss and the love came together strongly in him, making a real prayer, although he didn’t bother with any words, only Arthur’s name repeating itself in his mind. He looked up, and Joe Sam was holding out the hammer to him. He took it. Then he thought of Grace and the father still sleeping, and said, "Close the door, will you, Joe Sam?"
The old man went over and closed the door softly, and stayed there against it. Even then the pounding seemed to make a terrible din in the small, white room. Harold screwed up his face against the sound, and struck the first nails awkwardly, needing extra blows. After that he did better, driving each nail in with just two blows, but even so, when he had driven in the last nail, and stood up again, he felt the hammering still going on in his head. There was a fine sweat on his forehead, and his hands were shaking a little. He laid the hammer carefully on the table, not making a sound with it, and then, more to steady himself than for any other reason, straightened the bed, moulding it with his hands to take the long shape of the body out of it, folded the white blanket and draped it over the footboard, and opened the north window a crack. The cold, clear air sucked in, breaking the powdery top layer off the snow that had piled up on the sill and blowing it over the tab
le. Then he turned back. Joe Sam opened the door, and he went out into the kitchen. Joe Sam followed him, and pulled the door closed.
Grace was standing by the stove, sipping at a mug of coffee. She had on a blue flannel dressing gown, pulled close around her throat, as if she were cold, and her hair was hanging loose down her back and in front of her shoulders. Gray hairs showed in it that were hidden when it was done up. Her face was very white, with great dark hollows under the eyes. She let the cup down, and Harold saw that her hand was shaking.
"That hammering," she said, and her mouth trembled too.
"I’m sorry," Harold said.
"It isn’t just now," Grace said. "She was hammering in there all night. She’d hammer, and you could hear it echoing all over, as if there wasn’t anything in the house."
"Everything’s ready," Gwen said, setting the first two plates on the table. "You’d better eat something too, Grace."
"No, I couldn’t," Grace said. "Is it going to be today?" she asked Harold.
Gwen put two more plates onto the table, and began to pour coffee into the mugs.
"I guess so," Harold said. "If this snow’ll let up.”
Grace sat down at the table and went on sipping her coffee, not looking at anybody, but only into the center of the table, where the light from the window made a faint shining.
Joe Sam sat down in his place without anybody speaking to him. He watched Gwen and Harold sit down, and glance at each other, and then quickly down at their plates. He kept on watching them from under the brim of the black sombrero, and again his presence grew until they could not speak or move easily before him. He seemed to till the room, and to be the only real thing in it.
19
All morning, while the falling snow thinned out and the air grew colder and brighter around them, Harold and Joe Sam shoveled paths and did the chores, forking hay out of the shed for the horses and off the stacks for the cattle, and feeding the hogs and the chickens. Joe Sam worked slowly and dreamily, and often Harold, looking back in the trench they were cutting through the drifts, would see him just standing there, leaning on his shovel and staring out over the piled snow at the mountain or across the valley. He’d have to speak to him two or three times to wake him. Only while they were clearing the chicken run, and the space behind the bunk-house to feed the birds on, did he work steadily. He scattered the grain on both clearings too, but even the ritual of feeding the chickens wasn’t quite the same as usual. His face remained expressionless and his vision turned inward even at the very end, while he held the grain down in his hands for the bantams to pick at. Harold stopped work for a few minutes to watch him, though, and was cheered a little because the vain bantam cock was still there with his hen.
He must have been saving up the feathers for a long time, he thought. There were fifteen or twenty of them on that bonnet, anyway.
When the chores were done, they dug a path up the hill behind the house to the woodpile, and then on up to the open grave under the pines. The wind was beginning to move on the mountain by then, and they were showered repeatedly by long, glittering veils falling away from the boughs above them. When Harold stopped to rest, and looked out over the house at the valley, he could see faint shadows racing across the open under the surface-scud, and even the solid, white shapes of the hills on the other side beginning to show here and there. By the time Gwen came out to the corner of the house and called up to them that lunch was ready, a great, formless shifting of half-light and faint shadow was going on everywhere beyond her. Harold was almost ashamed, when he thought of what they were doing now, and of Curt out there somewhere in the white sea of mountains, to feel how life and meaning came back into everything when he heard her voice calling his name, and looked, and saw her down there. The sound of that life was in his voice answering her, too, but before it was quiet, even, she had disappeared behind the house again, without replying. The world darkened and emptied again, and he set his jaw, thinking, Am I to blame for my whole damn family too? But he cou1dn’t keep up the temper while he was swinging the shovel, and after it came the familiar despair, and he thought, Well, aren’t I, as far as she’s concerned? He and Joe Sam finished clearing the grave, and a path around it, and stood their snow shovels up in the mound on the north side of the grave, with the shovels that had dug the earth, and went down to the house.
Gwen was still quiet and apart, and Joe Sam didn’t eat, or even drink his coffee this time, but only sat there, straight and motionless, with his hat and coat and the blue bandana on. There were only the three of them in the kitchen, and nobody spoke. Harold and Gwen tried to eat, but mostly they poked at their food or just sat studying their plates. It was only when Harold stood up that Gwen finally broke the silence.
"Your mother said to tell you it wouldn’t be till later, not till about sundown."
"Changed her mind again?”
"I don’t know. She just told me to tell you.”
"She’s still hoping Curt will get back," Harold said finally.
"Maybe. She didn’t say."
Harold felt the little anger against her rise in him once more. He waited until it sank back, and said, "I’ll take the drag down on the meadows, then. The stock’s coming in from everywhere now. Can’t get anything through the snow. If you need me for something, just come down by the stacks and wave. I’ll keep an eye out for you."
Even before he finished speaking, he was ashamed that he was saying so much, making it a kind of begging for her attention.
"We’re getting along all right," Gwen said.
"Well, when she’s ready, if I’m not back by then."
"I’m not helpless," Gwen said. "I’ll come for you if you’re wanted."
Harold stared at her, thinking, To hell with you too, then, but she wouldn’t look at him, after the angry glance thatwent with what she said.
Harold waited until the red dancing was out of his own eyes, and he could speak to Joe Sam quietly. Then he held the door and went out after the old Indian, and closed the door again, without once looking back.
All afternoon, though, while he walked beside the drag, or stood on its shallow deck astride the stones that were piled there, he kept looking back at the house. Joe Sam rode in the back of the drag, sitting down, with his arms spread along the tail-board, like a man riding in a rowboat, and every time Harold looked, he looked too, but there was nothing to see that wasn’t there all the time. The wind grew steadily colder and stronger, until Harold had to make Joe Sam get out and walk behind, on the bent grass of the wake, and beat his arms across his chest to warm himself. The snow mist broke open over them, and islands of light began to glide across the meadows to the southeast, and then the islands of light became islands of shadow that lied over the white expanse and diagonally up the eastern hills, to vanish in the blue, and still nothing moved up by the stacks except the cattle that were feeding there. The drag moved on steadily through the light snow, and the wind whipped the curling snow away from the prow like spray. A long line of cattle, far behind and moving slowly, followed in the wake, heads down to the discovered grass. In the north there were more of them coming in, singly and by twos and threes, only black dots on the dazzle of the drifted range. At last the drag was so far out that the stacks and the sheds and the house were only tiny toys, already in shadow at the foot of the home mountain. The whole length of the lower range showed from there, stippled black with timber the wind had cleaned, and the main range loomed above itlike a white wall, with the last dark clouds rising thinly out of it here and there.
It was Joe Sam who saw Gwen when she did come out. The wind had died down again, by then, and the white breath of the men and the big horses, laboring with arched necks, floated in slow white plumes in the frosty air.
"Woman say come," Joe Sam announced from the back of the drag, and Harold peered far across into the shadow over the ranch, and could just make out the tiny figure standing at the end of the shed. He raised his arm and waved it, to show that he saw her, and tur
ned the drag back in a wide curve. She stood there for a long time, watching while they moved in until the big range sank slowly out of sight behind the timbered one, and then until they had come into the reaching shadow themselves. Harold began to hope that there would be a difference now, but then, when the drag was moving upslope through the feeding herd, he saw her turn and go back without a sign or a sound. He hardened himself inside again, and his face was as expressionless as Joe Sam’s while they were putting the drag away, and letting the team back into the corral, and forking out the hay for them.
When they came into the house, the mother was sitting in the big chair, reading in a pocket Testament with a black leather cover. She was holding it close to her face, with her big fingers far up the back of it. The black shawl was folded the long way and draped over the chair behind her. Gwen was sitting sideways in one of the chairs by the table, with her hands in her lap, just waiting. She had on the dark skirt still, but a new blouse, a white one with puffy shoulders and a lace front and a narrow, black ribbon at the throat. Her hair was done up in the heavy braid again. The room was full of just waiting, and yet of not wanting the
waiting to be done, either.
The mother was reading with her fingers and her lips now. She finshed the passage she was reading and lowered the Testament into her lap and closed it.
"It’s pretty near dark already," she said.
"I’ll change as quick as I can," Harold told her.
"Never mind any changing n0w," she said. "I don’t reckon there’s anybody to care what you have on."
"I’ll get Grace up," Gwen said, and rose, and took Grace’s coat from its peg, and went into the bunk-room.
"You might light the lamp for us to come back by," the mother said, "and then go up and see is your pa fit to come with us."
Harold pulled the lamp down and lit it, and let it up again, and the little moths stirred on the white walls. Then he went up the stairs onto the landing and opened the door and looked in. The reflected light from the hills came in the east window and showed the father sprawled on the bed with the top quilt pulled half over him. A bottle with the cork out of it lay on its side under the edge of the bed. The old man’s hand was hanging limp over the edge, as if it had
The Track of the Cat Page 24