The Hour of Lead

by Bruce Holbert

  Matt’s brother’s form darkened the barn rafters above the hayloft, and each instance he gathered tools and fed the stock, his brother’s blanketed shape hung over him, though his labors and weekly searches had seemed to lessen the heft of his brother’s and father’s absence. Of course that was not so. The loss appeared smaller, but so does a freight train in the distance, though up close its wheels will slice an automobile in half like a blade cuts warm butter.

  Matt attended school only in spotty fashion. On one of the days he arrived late, he walked into the room during a recess as Mrs. Jefferson sat at her desk alone next to her stacked papers. She glanced up at him and began to cry and so did he, and Mrs. Jefferson lifted her forefinger and touched his face where it was damp with tears for a moment, then retrieved her hand and put her wet fingers to her own cheek. Otherwise, she seemed to neither note nor miss him; his being at all stumped her.

  As for the children, once a schoolmate mocked him until Wendy gloved her hand and rubbed a fresh horse turd into his face, after, the others circled wide and let him alone. They seemed to be following some code to adulthood that he himself only had rumor of. Though he recognized the rituals required to participate and responded as fittingly as he could he did so with a wooden self-consciousness that kept him in fear of being found out. The one thing he possessed that equaled their knowledge was muscles stout as cottonwood root and a capacity for work that appeared bottomless.

  One evening, the dog curled himself into a comma at Matt’s feet. Matt scratched its ears and it sighed in a manner unfamiliar and melted into the wood floor, asleep, finally willing to trust the world a few hours. Matt wondered if he, himself, ever slept with such certainty. He envied the dog and patted his head half hoping to wake him, but instead the dog’s chin sunk between his paws farther and he breathed deep, regular breaths that seemed to Matt how a creature ought to breathe if things were right with it. It did not shift its weight with Matt’s mother’s footfalls when she retired or his own as he made his way to his bedroom, but Matt left the door ajar and some time after passing into sleep himself, the dog climbed next to him and traced his shape, and, when Matt woke, it stirred only a little and stared into Matt’s face, its tongue lolling over its jagged teeth.

  The first week in February, his mother decided she could bear Luke’s body in the rafters no longer. Matt stoked the barn furnace to white hot, then forged two spade faces into a single horse-faced blade. An inch under its skin, the earth turned bone, but Matt’s newly thick arms separated it like time itself.

  Matt climbed the ladder into the barn rafter and found the ends of the wires holding the blankets over his brother. He unwound each and lifted his brother. Years before when their parents left them alone, his mother ordered Luke to tend Matt and Matt to mind him. Matt was sixteen minutes older, but Luke read first in school and wrote in neat, tiny letters Mrs. Jefferson admired. When they fought, Luke wrestled him in new, unexpected ways, and Matt would have to give uncle. He had worried he’d misplaced something vital when they were babies and Luke had found it and learned whatever there was to learn before him. Now, Matt understood he’d lost a fine rival, and, over time, he determined that that was worse than losing a good friend. His chest rippled and his biceps and forearms bore Luke’s weight easily and Matt couldn’t help but believe half his size undeserved.

  He set Luke into the simple coffin his mother had asked the mill to cut. The box was too large. He thought a moment, then stood him on a hay bale inside it. The team was already harnessed. They gazed at his labors lazily. In the shed, Matt cut a rope in equal lengths and wound them around each end of the coffin and tied them off. He made a loop of the opposite rope ends around the horse’s neck and dragged Luke and the casket to the open pit. Two planks lay crosswise over the grave. He slid the casket across them. The planks whined and bent with the weight. He could smell nothing leave the dusty straw. He opened the lid. His brother’s face startled him.

  When the horses shifted and the boards under the casket creaked, Matt knew he’d tarried too long. He threw himself over the casket and gripped its edges. The board holding Luke’s feet popped. The rope jerked, held, then gave, as the surprised horses were yanked backward. The coffin’s foot slammed the graveside and clattered to the bottom. The end keeping Luke’s head slid from its plank to the top edge, putting the coffin upright. Above, the horses whinnied. Matt cursed himself. He looked at his brother. He could imagine his laughter. His memory rang with it, until Matt wondered if maybe dying was just another way for Luke to pull one over on him.

  He climbed the graveside and tried to scrape the mud from his pants. The horses were out of whack. He coaxed the team until both ropes were tight and the casket level against the hole’s edge and backed them toward the grave.

  When his brother was again lying flat, Matt dropped himself to him. Above, the stars had commenced their shining, and though he couldn’t hunt up any of the constellations his father had taught them, he tipped Luke’s head so his eyes could get a look. The weight of Luke was, he knew, the weight of a child and the thought left Matt happy for his brother. His own new sinew and raw bone had all but swallowed him. He kissed Luke’s open mouth. His lips felt like cold wood rubbed smooth. They tasted of nothing, though the smell reminded Matt of butchered beef. He pushed himself backward and blew a cloud of breath into his brother’s face and watched it break up, then closed the casket and nailed it shut.

  He went inside and warmed himself. His mother sat crying silently, sorting through her bible for a passage she thought suitable. She could find none and rose with Matt when he opened the door, bracing herself against the cold with a shawl and a heavy sweater and Ed’s duster. She stood at the opened grave, the dirt mounds rich and black and fertile; a gas lantern dangled from one hand and rocked with the breeze and the trembling of her arm and cast shadows and yellow glare across the scene.

  “Ashes to ashes,” she read and Matt missed the rest, studying instead the casket’s construction and regretting the hickeys he’d left in one corner with an errant blow.

  •

  THE DOG SOUGHT HIS APPROVAL, and for a kind word and a pat between the ears he would herd the dairy cows into stalls and nip their hind quarters if they stirred while Matt relieved them of their milk. The dog attempted to organize the cats, as well, though they paid little attention, and upon discovering his benign nature, rubbed their backs under his belly and chest and purred, and when he bent his head, they met his nose as equals.

  The dog rode the wagon and learned to speak when Wendy coaxed him with a cookie. Occasionally, he leapt from the bed to pursue a badger or rabbit but always returned a few minutes later to perch on the seat between them.

  His mother ignored the animal, as she did Matt. Her day’s chores kept her inside and his labors out of doors. He rose before her and breakfasted on bread and butter and filled a lunch can with meat and more bread, then, outside, levered the pump until his water jug filled. Evenings in the house, each arranged their paths to avoid one another. They occupied opposite ends of the dinner table and in the parlor ignited separate reading lamps and hung them from hoops situated to leave them in separate, buttery universes.

  The dog hooked himself under Matt’s feet. It recognized Matt’s mother’s disapproval, though she never spoke to it and selected places to lie where it could watch her and exit the room if she appeared to anger.

  5

  ONE MORNING NOT LONG AFTER, Matt rose to the dog whining in distress. Half dressed, he stormed from his bedroom to find the animal cowered into a corner, his mother over him crying and swinging a mop handle.

  “Mother!” Matt shouted. She turned to him. The dog used the pause to bolt into the bedroom and under the bed.

  “The animal has no manners,” his mother said. “It stares at me.”

  She wiped her face with the back of her hand and replaced the mop in the mudroom. In the kitchen, she hacked at the chicken on the cutting board.

  “I’m not myself,” she said.
“You should not have brought that animal into this house when I’m not myself. It was unkind.” She spoke with her back to him. “You are hurting me,” she said. “Do you know that? Marching that poor girl here and there on this folly. Have you once considered my feelings?”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” Matt said.

  She wiped her hands on a towel and turned to him. “I loved your father, too,” she told him. “I want to see him at peace.”

  “Like Luke is at peace?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Then why don’t we feel better?” Matt asked.

  She returned to the chicken and her knife.

  Matt hunted the dog who growled and whimpered and would not leave its sanctuary until he began to dress, when the dog scrambled past him into the living room turning mad circles until Matt’s mother opened the door and the dog bee-lined into the yard, past the corral for the brush behind the barn.

  Matt watched from behind. His mother turned.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m not myself.”

  “Me, too,” Matt said, though knew which not half of the statement he was agreeing to.

  The following days, the dog looped wide to keep clear. He studied Matt’s work from under a tree or in high grass, but refused lunch. Once, he managed to kill a rabbit and chose to remain in the yard with his prize rather than follow Matt inside at the day’s end for the nightly dinner scraps. When Matt opened the door later to offer him a roof, the dog remained in the darkness. Matt returned with a lantern and turned in a slow arc to reach the shadows, but saw no sign of the dog.

  The next day, the dog returned in the daylight, hulking in the hill brows, apparently grown hungry enough to resume house living. Matt finally resorted to scraping the dinner dregs into a tin pie plate and depositing it next to a water trough. Soon, the dog disappeared for days. The animal lost weight and his coat turned ragged. He tore part of an ear off in some sort of altercation.

  Matt considered him nights when the coyotes pitched their voices at the moon and owls hooted in reply. He didn’t sleep, though neither the owls nor the coyotes nor the dog was the reason. Work occupied his day, body and mind, and negotiating his mother’s illnesses or moods amply squandered the evenings, but after she retired and he had read as much of a book as he could and blown back the last lantern, his thoughts awoke and flew at him in the silence.

  The dog continued with Matt and Wendy on their Sunday outings though he had no interest in the wagon. They encountered the prophet Alfred several times and once he halted on the hill above Matt’s home to lead his congregation in a memorial prayer. The dog yipped with the rest of the canine choir. Another instance they discovered him at Miles Junction along with Harlan Miller and a transmission in a wagon driven by two haggard mules.

  “You’re acquainted with each other,” Wendy said.

  “This man broke my nose in grammar school,” Miller replied. “We’ve been friends ever since.”

  Alfred said, “Faith or not. We beat on each other in our youths and didn’t hold a grudge. That’s a blood bond.”

  Alfred’s dog following had increased by half. Matt recognized his own at the boundary of the pack, sniffing and being sniffed. His hackles tautened and so did a few others, but the animals arrived at some agreement that didn’t require submission or dominance and soon his dog sorted the group as if a member.

  The subject of the revival rose. Alfred seemed unimpressed.

  “It seems you would be pleased to see the country go toward Christ,” Wendy said.

  “This man has no credibility,” Alfred said.

  “Because he doesn’t preach to dogs?” Matt asked.

  “You’ve got to start simple. Dogs, they don’t have human sense, but they have dog sense and loyalty and they can be brave or cowardly, depending upon how they’re treated. They are simple but mighty.”

  Miller nodded. “A man that starts with people is in too big a hurry.”

  “Dogs don’t have money,” Alfred said. “Or heathens and atheists or pagans or machines to make gods.”

  “Good,” Miller said. “Because I’ll be damned if a god who let the automobile into the world gets my patronage.”

  “That’s excusable,” Alfred said.

  “I don’t need excused.”

  “I didn’t mean it like that.”

  “Doesn’t matter how you meant it. I’ll think what I want.”

  “It is America,” Wendy said.

  “Damned right, girly,” Miller replied.

  A terrier bit a collie mix and a tussle ensued until the collie found his adversary’s throat and pressed him to his back. The terrier rolled and the collie eyed him hard, but relented, and the melee went quiet.

  “Well you got the soldiers to give him what for,” Wendy said.

  Matt rustled the reins and the horses tugged the wagon forward. After a mile he wrestled in his pocket for a pipe and tobacco pouch. It had been his father’s. He had never smoked it, but enjoyed its fragrance and the weight and smoothness of the ebony bowl. Now, though, he hooked his finger into the pouch and tamped tobacco into the pipe, found a match in his possibles bag and struck it. Burning tobacco popped in the wind. Matt looked onto the land that was his father’s and his grandfather’s and before that no one’s. He gazed at the mottled grass in the few spots the thaw had uncovered, and at the sky so deep and blue he felt lost in it.

  He once again wondered at the hours that took his father and his brother and delivered Matt to an adult woman before his time—it loomed over him like the constant arctic night, though he could put words to none of it. Luke had always been calmer over the turning of the world. Even when Matt bowed his head and cried real tears over a scolding, Luke could let things be. The knowledge served him as well as it had his father. They had given into the cold and let it take them, while Matt had stayed too long alive, when dying made the most sense.

  “Where’s the dog?” Wendy asked.

  “He must have stayed,” Matt said.

  “We can retrieve him,” Wendy said. “Just turn the wagon back.”

  Matt shook his head. She took the reins and clucked to reverse the horses.

  Matt batted her hands and the rein. “No, goddammit.”

  Tears shined on his face in the twilight followed by deep sobs that frightened Wendy, as she was unsure he could manage a breath between them. His chest heaved and he could not speak. Wendy replaced her hands over his, perhaps because she had once seen or felt her mother do such a thing, perhaps for no reason other than the beauty of instinct, which even the fiercest animals will offer one another, or perhaps because a thing in him moved a similar thing in herself. She took his head between her hands and held it, then moved toward him until her face was all he could see.

  “I am tired of looking.”

  “Your father, he’s not returning,” Wendy said.

  “I know it,” Matt said.

  “I’m sorry if that’s cruel.”

  “Just the truth.”

  He watched her eyes blink and an emotion quiet the muscles in her face. “Sometimes the truth is just plain mean.” She put her forehead to his and released her hands from his chin.

  “We can return for the dog,” she said.

  Matt shook his head. “He’s got his reasons.”

  She blinked her eyes and feigned a pout for him. He stirred the horses forward toward the buildings and clustered light of Peach, but she demanded the reins and steered them another direction, eventually to his ranch. Matt was surprised at how well she maneuvered him through the rocky draws of his own land. From a bluff that overlooked the big river bend, he could see Hawk Creek, and the Columbia and where they met. Below was the house and barn and, above, Fort Spokane north and east, and farther, the reservation village, and south, Peach. Past that, the Okanogans, stripped of their snow, stood like a fence waiting on paint.

  Wendy spread a blanket in the well of a bull pine cleared of snow by the tree’s canopy and prevailing wind. He watched
her draw a long knife from her basket and divide a hoagie sandwich. Crickets rattled in the closing day and the sun skimmed the couleed horizon and purpled the rolling snowy fields beyond it. She patted for him to sit and he did and she bent to one knee with him and it was like wind shifting. Her shoes were within his reach. He wanted to clean them with his handkerchief. He turned his face to hers. She said nothing for more time than he thought a person other than himself could keep still.

  “You always brought me something to eat,” Matt said. “You always bring something to eat.”

  The night was mild, but he collected brush in a pile and ignited it with a matchstick from a box he was never without. Together they watched the fire crack and burn. She bent and kissed him and erased the sky. He kept himself as still as he could, not wanting the moment to pass him. Her skin was orange in the firelight. She closed her eyes and her face turned blank as a piece of paper waiting for his writing. He outlined her jaw and chin with his rough palms and felt the wispiness of her hair.

  She lolled in his fingers, and he held her there, pleased with the weight.

  “Can I kiss you?” he asked.

  He did, and their lips met awkwardly. He let off to stoke the fire. He coaxed it to a blaze. The heat made her face shine. The darkness past looked like a piece of overworked metal with dings and nicks of light. He wondered when it would wear out, when day would tear clear through. They kissed again. Her tongue dabbed his lips.

  “You’re better at this than me,” he told her.

  “I read a lot,” she said.

  She kissed him again and after let her face rest on his shoulder. He gazed down at the clear part in her hair and the white skin and her forehead and nose underneath. He’d never looked at anyone so close. She turned her head up to his. This time he set his lips to hers carefully. Matt leaned back to where he could see her better.

  “You learned this from books?” he asked.

  She rubbed his arm and watched the hair stand on end. Her eyes blinked hard and her face twitched. He looked at his belly. He half expected it to be bleeding. “I’m disappointing, I’m sure,” he said.