Beck

by Mal Peet

  He wouldn’t.

  Around and around her thoughts spun. He would learn about sex just as he’d learned to handle horses; he would be just as serious and attentive. He might be slow to control himself. She sensed that he was not merely inexperienced, but afraid. Though she did not know why. He had lived many lives — that much was obvious. For a young man like him — no country, no family, no money — the world would have presented an infinity of cruelties. She could read that history in his eyes. But she would conquer him with a stubborn, ruthless gentleness. She would. He knew nothing about women or pleasure. Didn’t he love her, too? Or did he give in to her because he could only do what she wished him to do? Employed him to do.

  Her brain whirled. Stop thinking.

  She’d reached no resolution except that she needed to see him, find where he was working that afternoon and take him away, touch him, kiss him, demand to know if he wanted her the way she wanted him. She had to wait. He might come to her if she stayed very still. But if she chased him, would he bolt? As she cooked lunch, the thought of seeing him again made her cheeks flush; her hands trembled as she set out plates. So strange did she feel that Wawetseka, quiet, discreet Wawetseka, couldn’t help but watch from the corner of her eye.

  “Are you feeling all right, Grace?” she asked.

  Grace nodded the lie. She was not all right; she was churned up, dizzy ecstatic frightened insane. Not frightened, terrified. What if she loved him? What if he loved her? What if one but not the other? What if neither? Or both?

  What would they do?

  Her thoughts spun, taking her nowhere forward and nowhere back.

  Nah-ah came in for lunch and sat with Grace for longer than usual, smoking her pipe, clucking over her own thoughts, saying nothing. At last she spoke.

  “I need to see the boy.”

  “The boy?”

  “The boy?” Straight Speaking mimicked Grace. “Don’t sound so surprised. I got business with him. Alone. So if you could fetch him for me, I’d appreciate it greatly.” This last was said with mock formality.

  “Yes, Nah-ah.”

  Her grandmother ignored her as she went out.

  Grace ran to find him, tracked him down in the high paddock. It didn’t matter that he’d had sex with the owner; there was still a barn to muck out, dry hay to pitch up into the loft, leather to oil, the mares to feed, the youngsters to bring in, the fences to mend.

  “Beck.” She struggled to make her voice sound normal but Beck heard the anxiety in it as clear as if her tongue had stuttered and tripped. “Straight Speaking wants to talk to you. In her tipi.”

  “I’m working,” he said, stating the obvious. He spoke without inflection, but looked her straight in the eye. “And I’ll need to clean up.”

  “No need. She’ll take you as you come.”

  “Will she? Why?”

  Grace shook her head. “I have no idea.”

  Beck did not think this was true. Doubting her made him feel sick. He led down the mare he’d gone to fetch and Grace followed behind, jogging a bit to keep up. She could see that the mare was heavily pregnant; she’d be a midsummer birth with a new foal coming into winter, always a risk. The mare walked, stiffly, with a pregnant creature’s sway, her eye drooping, her back dipped. Beck talked to her as he went, telling her that the crazy old woman in the tipi needed a word with him in the middle of his workday and that’s what you got working with old women. It came out as a burble of sound, more nonsense than sense and, as she watched him with the mare, Grace’s heart caught in her throat. He ran his hands over the mare’s flanks and legs; she felt his hands on her own flanks, her own legs, and shivered.

  When he’d banked up the straw in the mare’s box and checked that she was safe, Beck tied the rope across the doorway and left her without looking back. Grace’s eyes were on him as he walked away and he knew it. He didn’t show his own turmoil, his own questions. What will happen now? he asked himself, over and over, like a mantra. What will happen now?

  Grace stayed in the barn, watching the mare, nearly still a youngster herself, could almost feel the straining, moving weight of her belly. She placed a hand without thinking on her own flat stomach, felt the powerful pull, strong as the moon’s tide, on a place deep within her.

  Recalled to herself, she thought, Is that what this is? Is that why I’ve fallen in love? At her age it was getting late. She grimaced. Nearly past it.

  The interior of Nah-ah’s tipi was a cone of warm amber pierced by a tilted column of sunlight from the open smoke flaps. The air was rich with the sweet autumnal smell of pipe smoke and bunches of herbs that hung, along with cloth and leather bags, from the support poles. Straight Speaking reclined on the fur coverlet of her bedroll, supported by a wooden backrest. Despite the warmth within, she was wrapped in a striped blanket from which her bare feet protruded like two narrow bundles of dried roots.

  “Sit,” she said.

  He sat, and crossed his legs, and waited. The lower part of the tipi was a circular curtain of painted hides: birds, animals, a bear walking like a man, the floor space crowded with objects he could not identify. The fireplace at its center was a circle of stones around a small heap of pinecones and sticks.

  “I had a dream about you,” Straight Speaking said. “Which was a goddamn nuisance because I had more important things to dream about. But it’s stayed with me, so maybe I’m wrong. Maybe you’re important after all.”

  “Seems unlikely.”

  Nah-ah grunted. “That’s what I thought.”

  They were silent for a moment. Beck fidgeted. He had work to do. “What sort of dream?”

  “Be no point telling you. You’d never understand. Words ain’t going to catch it, anyways. But you had many shapes. Some I knew; some I didn’t. There was a part of it where you held an eagle’s egg in your hands and it hatched and the eagle flew into the sun.” She shook her head. “It’s a powerful story. And it puzzled the hell out of me because you ain’t one of us. You’re not even what Old Sun would’ve considered a human being. On the other hand, you ain’t white, so that’s something. But on balance, who knows what you are?” Her hands busied themselves under the blanket and emerged holding her pipe, which she lit.

  Beck waited. In the beam of sunlight her smoke unfurled and dissolved like milk in water.

  “So this afternoon, ’stead of thinking about what I should’ve been thinking about, I’ve been thinking about you. About Grace finding you standing naked next to a tree struck by lightning like you were a piece of the storm itself left behind for her to find.”

  Jesus, Beck thought. He said, “She told you that?”

  “Uh-huh. Other stuff too. About your life before you came here. Or got sent here. Seems to me you ’n’ her do a deal of talking.”

  He shrugged. “Some. When we’re gardening and such.”

  “And when you’re screwing?”

  He turned to ice.

  Straight Speaking held up a hand. “Don’t insult me by lying. I know what you’re thinking, but no, Grace didn’t tell me. She had no need to.” Nah-ah sighed. “And I’m guessing you feel pretty pleased with yourself, huh?”

  “No.” He stared at her, angry. “It ain’t like that.” His wild heart was a stray dog, chasing its tail. He thought about Grace’s face this morning at the lake and felt too churned up to speak.

  Nah-ah sighed. “I ain’t suggesting nothin’. If all this had happened yesterday, I’d have laughed out loud. But that damn dream came to me, and then there’s the burned tree, and now . . .” She was silent for a time then put her pipe aside. “You still planning on going to Vancouver?”

  That pang again. What was he planning to do? How could he even know what was possible in a life like his? “I don’t know.”

  “You told me you had people there. People who might be waiting for you.”

  Bone and Irma. Waiting for him. He felt a pressure behind his eyes. A sudden, overwhelming sense of all he’d lost. “Might be.” His voice fell to a
whisper; his words sank with despair. “I’ve no way of knowing. It’s been a long time.”

  “But?” She waited.

  He looked up at her. Her face was unreadable. He suddenly understood why Grace had been strange with him just now. A wave of nausea nearly knocked him down. “You telling me I got to be on my way? That I got to leave?”

  “I ain’t telling you nothing. I got no right to tell you what to do. I don’t run this place, or your life, or her life. I don’t know if Grace knows what she’s doing, but sure as hell she makes her own decisions. What I do know is that you can’t be starting something like this and think it’s gonna be simple. She ain’t a simple woman; she ain’t got simple needs. She ain’t asking a simple question and as answers go, you’re anything but.”

  Beck said nothing.

  “So what now? You come out and tell the world? How they gonna react to that? You thought about that any? I ain’t too happy about a future of the pair of you sneaking around, doing it on the sly. Ain’t no dignity in that. ’Cause if a blind old woman can see what’s going on, it won’t take long for others to get wind of it.”

  “It ain’t my place. . . .”

  “No. It ain’t. Ain’t anyone’s but hers. Hmm.” The old woman felt for her pipe.

  He said, “Are we done?”

  “Yeah, we’re done. For now, anyways. But you got some thinking to do. Thinking with your head, not what’s in your pants.”

  He left her, finished with the horses, swept the barn, and walked down to the lake. Grace was nowhere to be seen. Misery flowered and ripened within him. He would have to move on. The astonishing welcome of her body was just another event, a mirage, a gift to be snatched away. Happiness, home — states of being that other people took for granted — they were as strange and elusive to him now as they always had been. The road was his fate; he’d leave here just as he’d left everywhere else. Dance to the west.

  He felt like the blackened tree, lightning-struck, burning. Life would burn him until he was nothing but a pile of ash. Love would feed the flames.

  He was late to dinner.

  He was very late. Grace waited as long as was decent with a table full of hungry workers. At last they started without him. Her heart lost the desire to beat when it came time to serve the main course and there was still no sign of him. They finished eating and when he still had not arrived her soul turned to stone.

  He must come.

  She knew that he would not.

  THE ROAD UNFURLED before him the color of dull lead where it was paved, and dun where it was not. He could not leave her faintly, hoping she might catch up and beg him to stay, so he ran. With forty dollars in his pocket, in the direction of Vancouver with the wind against him and the trees hissing questions. He hitched a ride that took him north out of his way, which suited him in case she was of some mind to fetch him back, though in his heart he knew that she would not. Relief would be all she felt, relief to be rid of the problem she’d created. His mind refused to dwell on her.

  Poor Beck. He had no experience to compare and no way of knowing that the look in her eye was not a usual look, and the way she touched him was not the way all women touched all men. He asked himself if the way she touched him was so different from the way Brother Robert wanted to touch him. During the hours after they came together, when he worked with Jim and pretended to himself that he might stay on, he more than once thought of her and found himself retching against the side of the barn when Brother Robert’s rabbit face flashed up in place of hers. The only way he could stop it was to block it all, to banish her from his mind and know in any case that she had already done the same to him. He knew very little about life but he knew for certain that sex and misery went together.

  But he knew Irma and Bone, who had taught him about love.

  Beck shook his head. No love for him. He wondered with a touch of self-pity whether even his own mother had cared for him. He no longer remembered her face.

  And so he walked and he rode, in the backs of trucks filled with animals, on top of trucks filled with hay bales. The world felt deficient of love, care, warmth, and light. Sometimes he had to shout merely to fill his lungs with air.

  His body refused to forget her. No, he groaned silently, hating the awful living thing between his legs.

  He pressed onward, toward Vancouver, listening for her voice in the wind.

  Grace sat at the table long after everyone had gone. Nah-ah’s ears swiveled and her brow furrowed with a dawning knowledge. Where was the boy? She tilted her head to the sky and could feel clouds gathering. Ah, she thought, feeling the direction of the wind. Trouble ahead for the woman who does not need any man.

  She sucked on her pipe, thinking of her dream.

  All her years of living had led her to understand more than a few things about men and women. Which left an infinity that still caused her puzzlement.

  A MONTH PASSED. TWO.

  Harvest was coming, and then the Okan.

  Jim cursed the bastard boy who’d left him in the lurch when there was most need for good workers to cut and bale hay. Bad help was worse than none, so he handled the herd alone. Goddamned kid.

  Straight Speaking would fast for all eight days of the Okan sun dance ceremony and pray for her tribe, the men and women and children of the dwindling Siksika people. She would petition the gods for health and fine harvest, for freedom and independence and dignity, and she would pray also for her granddaughter and the strange twisted man-boy she loved, that he should come back to her at a time and in a state that would permit him to love her. Straight Speaking knew that her granddaughter was in the market for salvation, though Grace would have denied it with her last breath. Straight Speaking shook her head and cupped one hand around the bowl of her pipe to light it once more.

  You would think it was Grace who was fasting, Nah-ah thought. When she’d taken the younger woman’s arm last night, it seemed to her noticeably thinner than earlier in the summer, the elbow sharp beneath her hand.

  “You planning on starving yourself so when he comes back you’ll look like a dried-up old scarecrow?”

  “When who comes back?”

  Nah-ah snorted and shook her old head. “All the decent sensible men who’ve fallen in love with you — and not one of ’em good enough. That’ll be on account of saving your heart for an ignorant penniless boy with five words and a shady past. Don’t know who brought you up but it sure as hell wasn’t me.”

  “Good night, Nah-ah,” Grace said.

  Her grandmother grunted.

  Beck hitched rides, picked up casual work when he could. He asked anyone who might know, how much farther it was to Vancouver. Harvesttime made getting work easier: that was the good news, but hard labor for near nothing was the bad, and the thinner and wilder he became out on the road, from bad food and not enough of it, the less anyone wanted to give him work, and certainly not work with horses — not a nigger boy with those unsettling eyes and no people, no history.

  He knew that as he traveled farther to the west, the work would disappear along with drivers who might give him a lift. The last man he’d worked for had laughed and shaken his head when he said he was headed for Vancouver.

  In this way, time moved forward and he moved closer to his goal with infinite slowness, by inches and feet rather than miles.

  Beck finished a week of farmwork and had been walking for three days on roads that no sane person traveled, not that anyone who traveled them — sane or not — was likely to stop for him. A thick layer of gray dust covered him head to toe and made his eyes burn with grit. He’d run out of food. The road seemed to snake out in front of him, featureless, more or less forever.

  He hated Canada. He hated the road. He hated the memory of Grace. But most of all, he hated himself. He was nothing, nobody, alone in this godforsaken place. He’d found peace with Bone and Irma, and something like happiness for an instant with Grace, but nothing would last for him. He was a shadow, a sketch, thin as a blade of grass. Turn
sideways and he disappeared.

  He rode for two days with a man named Lester Floyd, who transported big rolls of asbestos for the building trade. Beck hesitated a second after the truck stopped for the driver to change his mind, but he didn’t, so Beck pulled himself up into the cab, hauled the door shut, and slumped exhausted against it.

  The wind drove rain with some force into the massive windshield of the truck, and the wipers failed to help much with what the driver could see. Lester mostly kept his eyes straight ahead, squinting into a darkness full of wet. He coughed a rough heavy cough at regular intervals but managed to talk through it.

  “Where you from, kid?”

  Beck thought before replying. “Nowhere in particular,” he said at last.

  Lester risked a quick sideways glance. “Everyone’s from somewhere.”

  Beck shrugged.

  “Have it your way,” the driver said with a cheerful shake of his head. “I ain’t from nowhere much worth bragging about myself.” He chanced another glance at his passenger. “You’ll excuse me for guessing by the look of you that you seen better days.”

  “Yeah,” Beck said after a minute. “Some better. Lots worse.”

  Lester chuckled. “Well, that’s what you get for being born a nigger in times like these. Next time, you be smart and get yourself born to a rich white lady.”

  The wipers swooshed. Back and forth, back and forth. Lester coughed so violently, it pained Beck to hear it. “You headed for Vancouver?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You got friends there?”

  “I think so.”

  “You think so?” Lester laughed again. “Well, I ain’t going that way, but I can take you far as Medicine Hat.”

  “That nearby?”

  Lester chuckled. “Give or take a thousand miles. Across the daddy of all mountains, not something I’d advise you or anyone else to try this time of year. Wet weather looks set to last a good while. Your best bet be to settle down somewhere till spring so’s you don’t freeze to death on the side of the road waiting for a ride that ain’t coming.”