Beck

by Mal Peet

When Jim Calf Robe told Grace that her best mare was ready for the stallion, she came down to watch the proceedings. Beck brought the mare in from the field and was walking her up and down, one hand on her neck for calm, humoring her out of her nerves. She was a beautiful creature, short-backed, high-crested, and intelligent with wide-spaced eyes and an interest in everything that happened around her.

  “Get off your toes, Suki,” he chided. “You got nothing to fear from that show-off.”

  And when the big self-important paint trumpeted desire at her, Beck chuckled and kept a soft hold. “That’s just talk. Don’t even pay him no notice.”

  But she threw her head up and whistled to the stallion anyway.

  Grace wore a belted floral print dress and painted and beaded moccasin boots. Her hair was gathered at her nape and fastened by a bone comb. “How’s my Suki?” she asked, and he stopped to let her see for herself. The mare was small, hardly bigger than a pony, with a thick black mane like her owner, a speckled Appaloosa rump, and soft brown eyes. She had shed her rough winter coat and gleamed with condition. Grace ran a hand down one cleanly muscled leg, then straightened and nodded.

  “Good girl,” she murmured.

  It was near noon, hot and turning hotter. Beck’s work shirt hung open and sweat melted in the V of his collarbones. Grains of golden dust spangled his bare forearms. Grace noticed with a start how tall he’d grown lately, and how poised. One winter on good food and regular work and he was no longer a boy.

  “I hear working horses suits you, Beck.”

  He shrugged, his manner to her always deferent, a little detached. “No idea who’d be telling you that, Miss Grace.” And he turned away with Suki and headed to the small paddock.

  “Not Miss Grace, just Grace,” she muttered for the hundredth time, knowing he couldn’t hear her and even if he could, took no heed.

  Beck turned Suki loose in the paddock while Jim walked Sago up and down by the fence. The mare pissed extravagantly, swishing her tail at him coquettishly when she was done.

  “Nice, ain’t she,” Jim said to the stocky brown and white paint, who danced and called. “Let’s just see how well you remember your business.” He opened the gate and slipped off Sago’s halter. For a minute the stallion stood in a state of high arousal, his crest arched, tail high, muscles tensed. Then he stepped forward and lowered his head, snuffling the ground around Suki’s hind legs.

  “He’ll be wanting to make sure she’s ready,” Grace said to no one in particular as Suki backed up into him, flaunting herself and lifting her tail to the side. Sago sniffed underneath her and pricked his ears, rearing up and snorting with excitement. The three of them watched as at last he mounted her with a huge heave and a glazed look in his eye, humping himself over her back, gripping with his forelegs and nipping at her neck. She lowered her head in acquiescence, accepting three or four strong thrusts. When he was through, he slipped off her back with his long flaccid member dangling loose between his legs.

  Suki stood docile throughout the proceedings and, by the time he backed away, seemed to have forgotten all about him.

  Beck blushed, aware in the aftermath how uncomfortable he felt being party to this scene with a woman present.

  “No trouble there,” said Jim. “And no reason she shouldn’t take.”

  “What do we do with her now?” Beck asked.

  “She goes back in with the mares,” Grace said. “She won’t need special treatment for a long while.”

  Beck turned away. He wished Grace wasn’t here. That they weren’t here together. Ducking under the fence, he pulled a rope through Suki’s head collar and strode through the gate with her, out toward the field. Grace followed. Despite her long legs, she had to skip a little to keep up.

  “Slow down,” she said, breathing hard.

  Reluctantly he slowed. “I got lots to do,” he said by way of explanation, not adding that he didn’t have the luxury to idle away hours with the lady of the house, who often seemed to have nothing better to do than watch him work.

  “When are you going to learn to ride?” She stood staring at him, her arms crossed over her chest, knowing perfectly well he’d do everything necessary for a horse on the ground, with no intention of ever getting up on one’s back.

  He half shrugged his answer, wishing she’d get back to her job and let him get back to his. Her presence out here worried him. There was always the strange feeling that she wanted something from him, and her wanting clouded up his head. Was his work not good enough? Did she not need him anymore? Well, if she wanted him to go, she’d have to tell him straight. Week upon week he was saving money, sufficient, if he lasted long enough, to get him to Vancouver when the time came.

  Unless she had another motivation? The thought flapped noisily in his head and he shook it free. A woman like that, he thought, needs nothing from the likes of me. And he swore again to avoid her in case weakness should put him at a disadvantage.

  After supper that night, as he was returning to his quarters, she asked for his help in the kitchen garden. They entered through a gate in the honeysuckle fence where she’d set large beds out to different crops: corn, potatoes, squash, beans. Half a dozen young apple trees were spaced down one end, adorned with clusters of hard green early fruit. Beyond them, a wire-netted chicken run and a roosting shed on iron wheels. The vegetable beds were fertile and undisciplined, overrun with weeds.

  “It’s supposed to be Otter Moon’s job,” Grace was saying. “But her legs have swelled up now that her time is near, and it’s all going to ruin.” She leaned down and hauled out a tall fat weed from the pumpkins. Then looked at him. “You said you know a little something about gardening?”

  Paradise, eh, Chocolat?

  He nodded.

  “In Winnipeg, we had a French gardener who lived for his plants. I wish I’d paid him more attention. When we started out here I had to get it all from books.”

  They patrolled the beds slowly while she talked. It was a nuisance that the best soil was such a distance from the water. In dry spells they had to take the truck down to the stream, fill old oil drums, and haul them back up here. She said she was thinking of setting up a system of gasoline-powered pumps for irrigation. Or maybe drilling another well. The one that supplied the house wouldn’t do the garden as well.

  Beck was trying hard to pay attention but it was impossible not to think about the scene they’d witnessed earlier. Grace had watched the horses couple with arms folded and hardly an expression on her face. It had amazed him that a woman could stand and watch such a thing.

  Do you have sin on your mind, Chocolat? Do your thoughts dwell upon wickedness at all?

  She was squatting by a row of beans whose young leaves had been eaten to green lace.

  “We need to spray with lye solution for the bugs. Weeding, planting out. I don’t have the time. Just an hour or two a day.” She stood up. “You reckon you can do that?”

  “I guess.” He disliked the idea of anything that put him more in her orbit, but he knew his evenings were free and so did she.

  He thought they’d walk on, their business finished, but she took something from the pocket of her dress and held it out to him.

  “Oh,” she said, as if forgetting all along that she had it. “This is for you. Go on, take it. Straight Speaking beaded it for you.”

  It was a leather belt, coiled. Beck took it and opened it out. It had a brass buckle and elaborate patterns of beadwork that danced and wove along the length of it, intertwining in subtle shades of turquoise and green. It was a creation of great beauty.

  “Pretty good work,” Beck said, looking up at her. “For a blind woman.”

  Grace blushed, ignoring him. “That string you’re wearing won’t do forever.”

  Beck looked down at the beautiful belt draped over his palms. It’s only a belt, he thought. But it didn’t feel like only a belt. It felt like a lasso. Or a noose.

  “You like it?”

  “Yeah. It’s real nice. I�
�ll pay you for it.”

  She looked puzzled, and a little hurt. “It’s not something you buy.”

  He felt guilty then, and put it on, threading it through the belt loops of his jeans. The beadwork made it stick and he fumbled the loops at the back.

  “Here,” Grace said, “let me.” She moved behind him. “Hoist your shirt up a little.”

  He felt her tugging, the backs of her fingers brushing the bare skin at the base of his spine. The belt slid over his hip. She worked her way around to the other side, and then the top of her head was just below Beck’s face. He could feel the perfumed warmth rising from it. The smell of her.

  “I reckon I can manage the rest,” he said.

  She stepped a small pace away from him and brushed a stray lock of hair from her face. “It suits you,” she said, smiling a little. She looked older when she smiled.

  “I’ll need manure,” he said, shifting his gaze back to the garden. “Lots.”

  “The muck needs loading on the truck. Can you drive?”

  “No.”

  “It’s not difficult,” she said. “I’ll teach you.”

  He got the hang of it easily. Unlike horses, the truck was predictable. The first time he tried, they jolted erratically down the track with Grace bracing herself on the dashboard, trying not to laugh. Then they went along the tar road to the bridge and across to where he could turn around, and back home. Grace got him to drive down to Cooper’s Creek and showed him how to pump gasoline into the tank and check the water and the oil. After the lesson, she nodded, pleased, and called him a natural.

  From the veranda, Straight Speaking whooped, “A natural what?”

  Beck stiffened and Grace laughed. “That old woman’s worse than a big-eared bat for hearing things that aren’t any of her business,” she said. And when Beck almost smiled, she looked away quickly so he wouldn’t see how pleased it made her.

  AROUND THE MIDDLE of each Saturday, Grace paid Beck his money, along with Jim and Tom and Jack and Wawetseka, and the old man whose name Beck still couldn’t pronounce. Grace wrote it out for him like this: Ksiistsikomiipi’kssiiwa. “It means Thunder Bird in Siksika,” she told him, but that didn’t help him much. He could say Thunder Bird but he couldn’t say Ksiistsikomiipi’kssiiwa.

  Beck kept his dollar bills under his mattress and the coins in a jar behind one of the boards by his bed.

  One afternoon Grace got him to take the truck down to Cooper’s to collect a shipment from the eastbound train. The goods weren’t aboard, but Beck took the opportunity to ask about the fare to Vancouver. When the train pulled away, he sat in the truck and divided the sums into weeks in his head.

  The truth was, he was starting to feel restless. He thought about Irma and Bone sometimes, and even though he thought about Grace McAllister more, thinking about her made him feel tied up in knots. He didn’t know how to think about her. As a woman? Employer? Savior? Friend? None of it was right and it had started to make his head hurt even to sit across from her at meals. Maybe she is beautiful, he thought, but she’s also rich and educated and old.And, in every instance, so far above anything having to do with him that even a pleasant dream now and again seemed wasted. Nothing he could dream, even in the privacy of his camp bed, ended except with him run out of town.

  You got no business thinking stupid thoughts, a voice in his head said. And for once, he listened to reason. And yet he woke from dreams of her in the early dawn and put on his shirt and forced himself into his jeans and went down barefoot to the lake where a bird scuttered angry from a bush. He turned, anxious, but there was nobody there. Then he waded out into the freezing water until he wasn’t hard anymore. He washed himself and waded back, returning to his room in the sleepout.

  Grace was angry with herself because she felt foolish and she’d never felt foolish before, not even as a schoolgirl. Her father had taught her pride and she’d learned that lesson perfectly. Now, she accused herself of . . . what? What was the opposite of pride? Weakness? Self-indulgence? Or maybe something worse. A psychological disorder? A mental imbalance brought on by aging and years of celibacy and loneliness? At night she’d stand at the mirror and stare herself into submission, hands bunched in fists, telling herself to stop being such a goddamned fool.

  She tried not to touch him or, at least, only to touch him when it seemed natural or accidental or appropriate. A hand on his shoulder or arm when he’d done well.

  She was slightly ashamed of the belt. All the work she’d put into it. He hadn’t known what to make of the gift. Nor had she.

  She wasn’t sleeping well. At dusk, Beck would leave the veranda when her grandmother went to her tipi. Lately Nah-ah had taken to needing his arm to help her there. Or did she? Was she taking him away because somehow she suspected? When they’d gone, Grace would quickly lock up and go to her bedroom. From there she could see the window of his cabin and would wait for the glow and hope for his shape to appear in it.

  On hot nights she lay sleepless, repeating words to neutralize his hold on her. Vagrant, hobo, orphan of the storm. Ignoramus, awkward, secretive, strange. And, sometimes, boy. Nigger. After a while these incantatory and abusive terms reversed themselves into a language of desire that made her hurl the sheet from the bed.

  One morning at first light she went to spy on him. She took a path that avoided the sleepout. It brought her to the lake thirty yards from the bath hut. She concealed herself and waited a long time but he didn’t appear. The following morning, she was about to give up when he came down. He stood on the little beach with his hands in his pockets and stared across the water for a minute or more. He removed his clothes and walked into the water, shivering at first. Grace thought that surely he must feel her gaze on him as he washed. She held her breath. Something inside of her folded, collapsed: a feeling like hopelessness or release from it.

  A STRANGER ARRIVED. BECK was stringing young tomato plants onto supports. He was tired, having spent the morning with the yearlings and the afternoon in the garden. He hadn’t seen Grace all day and a dull vacancy had taken possession of him. The heavily pregnant Otter Moon sat in the shade of an apple tree shelling peas. It was a peaceful scene and Beck would have liked to join her. A light wind blew from the south and it brought into the valley the mournful sound of the evening train.

  Beck heard a car approach and park on the gravel in front of the house. He concentrated on the tomato plants. When he looked up, Grace was standing just inside the garden gate with a man wearing two parts of a city suit, the jacket slung over his shoulder hanging from his thumb. He was fair haired and handsome. He held a leather case. Grace said something, and the two retired to the house. Beck shuffled on his knees to the next tomato vine.

  When Beck went up to the house for supper, Grace and Straight Speaking and the stranger were already sitting at the table, upon which documents were spread.

  “Beck, this is Mr. Jerome Wilder, from Edmonton. He’s helping us with a lands rights case.”

  Wilder smiled and raised his hand in a kind of salute. “Good to meet you, son. You the new hired man? Looks to me like you’re doing a fine job.”

  Straight Speaking turned to them, her unseeing eyes uncannily clear. “He’s doing a fine job all right. The question is, at what?”

  “Garden’s coming on,” Beck said, ignoring her.

  Grace glared at her grandmother. “He’s good with the horses, Jerome.”

  Beck shrugged.

  “Well, we’re almost finished here,” Grace said. “I’m serving up dinner in a minute.”

  Beck fidgeted. “You want me to come back?”

  “No. Wait.”

  Wilder shuffled sheets of paper. “So,” he said, a touch impatient, “we’re agreed that . . .”

  Beck watched the lawyer speak without listening to what he said. He watched Grace listening. Her left breast was close to Wilder’s right arm. She was wearing a white blouse fastened at the base of her neck with a silver brooch. After a few minutes, Grace glanced acro
ss the table and felt a flicker of anxiety when she saw the direction Beck’s gaze was fixed and the sullen look on his face.

  She was right to feel disturbed. Beck’s sense of exclusion was in the process of turning ugly. It had struck him like a nauseous spasm that Wilder would stay the night. A lawyer, an educated man. Rich and powerful. In the house. You could tell by the way they looked at each other what they’d got in mind. He felt sick with his own inadequacy. He wanted to run from the room, or stay and poison things. His outrage put stumbles into his breathing.

  “Let’s call it a day,” Grace said, leaning back in her chair. “I guess we’re pretty much there. Besides, it’s late. We can finish this in the morning, Jerome.”

  Straight Speaking indicated Beck. “And old loudmouth over there mightn’t be hungry but my ribs are sticking together.”

  Wilder clicked the cap on his fountain pen. “You’re the boss, Grace.”

  “Thank you, Jerome. I reckon we’ve got a strong case.”

  “We won’t count our chickens.”

  She smiled. “Would a drink persuade you to look on the bright side?”

  “If you’re offering, I’m accepting,” Wilder said, with what Beck interpreted as a suggestive tone.

  Grace went to the kitchen and came back with a bottle of whiskey and a glass and set them down in front of the lawyer. She went to the door and looked back to where Beck stood fuming.

  “Would you please give me a hand, Beck.” It was not a question.

  He followed her. On the kitchen table there were two glasses with a shot in each. Grace went to the kettle on the stove. “I’m not much good with straight whiskey. I prefer it with a little hot water and honey, what my father used to call a toddy. How’s that sound to you?”

  “If you’re offering, I’m accepting,” Beck said with as close as he’d ever come to a sneer.

  She turned to him, surprised, but he would not look at her.

  “What am I doing here?”

  “Peel those potatoes. Please.” She stirred the drinks and handed one to him. “Try this first.”