“Stop,” she said. “You’re torturing him.”
Matt shrugged.
“The dog is fine,” Wendy told him.
Matt glanced at the dog, who stared back, then licked the hog shank.
“Okay,” he said. He retrieved the preacher from the water. The man sucked at the air and moaned. The other combatants gazed at Matt. After a long while, some turned and made for their wagons and automobiles; soon the rest followed. The dogs began again on the meat. Matt’s dog joined the feast, tussling for all he could gather.
Matt drove the wagon on the main road following the tire-worn grooves, as the evening temperature had not yet reached freezing. Miller and the Indian nodded, but Alfred refused to look his way. Wendy mopped Matt’s cheek with a handkerchief. When she drew it away the thin material was peppered with blood. She began on his jacket sleeve, but it smeared like oil and justed clotted the wool.
Matt shivered in his damp shirt. Wendy withdrew and huddled in a blanket at her end of the wagon seat. He wanted to say he had not heard; it wasn’t that he wouldn’t listen to her. He was not certain that was true; however, he only knew he had not enjoyed beating the preacher, unlike some who fought for pleasure or to win. The event had humiliated him worse than losing could have. He said none of this, of course, and drove the horses in silence until, finally, Wendy spoke, suggesting he hunt the open country for his father’s body, the same place his mother urged, but he only shook his head and clucked the horses.
“Don’t you want to put an end to it?” she asked.
“Sounds as though you do,” Matt replied.
He didn’t speak to her the rest of the trip, and she knew, bringing it up, she’d betrayed him, though she didn’t know to what extent. He dropped her at her door, and after she collected her things, she leaned toward him and set her cheek next to his own. Matt felt her tears warm his cold face but did not respond.
The next day, the dog reappeared and followed Matt from the house to the wagon. In his mouth was a human hand. The dog dropped his prize between his forefeet and ran northeast. Matt unharnessed the plow horse and followed the general direction to the east property line. He discovered his father two miles away minus skin and a hand and eyes and nose, yeasty in the thaw, decomposed beyond stink. Matt roped the corpse and dragged it to the house. He wheeled the body in a hay cart to the knoll where the grass stubble had already begun to grow over his brother. There, he started the second grave of spring. The ground split for his spade and he managed six feet deep and long in forty-five minutes.
His mother again brought out her bible and this time read from a line or two from Luke. Which of you fathers if your son asks for bread would give him a stone? How much more will your heavenly father offer those children who ask?
Wendy arrived the Sunday next, dressed in a long calico skirt and a sweater against the still chilly morning. Matt wore his work clothes, split at the knees and elbows, where he had grown most; a bandage patched his shoulder. She stood on the first porch step and he in the doorway. His eyes blinked at the rosy early morning.
“My father’s dead,” he told her.
“I reckoned that when you didn’t come to the house,” she said.
“He was right where you said, goddammit.”
“I didn’t put him there,” she told him.
“I didn’t either,” Matt said. “But there he was.”
She looked at her shoes.
“So I guess you’re shed of me,” Matt said.
She looked up.
“No need to look for someone planted in the backyard.”
The dog stood next to her and she patted its head.
“It’s what you wanted wasn’t it?” Matt asked. “To put an end to it. Well, it’s done, isn’t it?”
He stepped past her toward the barn and the dog followed. He sharpened the cultivator tongs and patched a hackamore until he was certain she had gone.
7
CHURCH GIRLS GENERALLY LOOKED AFTER the widows, so, later that spring, Wendy assisted Mrs. Lawson in opening the house. Matt made himself scarce. She visited into summer, as well, but cultivating occupied Matt from dawn to nightfall and he saw her only on their dirt road, arriving or departing. His mother, though, sorted closets for fabric enough to construct a quilt for her. She insisted Matt line it and he succeeded in trapping enough coyotes to make a thick padding. His mother presented it to Wendy in a dress box. She unfolded the tissue as carefully as inspecting a wound, and sat, wordless for a long time, stroking the tanned hides. When she turned it over to examine the stitching, she could see it was constructed from Matt’s brother’s shirts and trouser legs, along with a few things of his father’s.
Wendy didn’t remain long that day, just enough to thank Mrs. Lawson for the gift before she mounted the grocery wagon for the ride back to Peach. Two weeks after, Matt, leveling a frost slide above the barn, drew rein on the plower. He’d almost convinced himself it was only a funny wind that stopped him, until he looked toward the graves. Planted where he imagined the heads would be were two rose bushes in bloom, fertilized with steer leavings. Roses didn’t take easy in this country, and over the season he would glimpse Wendy pruning them off and on, or nursing them with water buckets until midsummer, when they were a thicket of color. Both were red, the color of blood, he knew, but the color of love, too, Mrs. Jefferson had declared in her poetry talks.
•
HE SAW IN PASSING ALFRED, too, who recognized the new grave and paused with his animals to offer prayers. Miller, he met briefly on the town road, navigating a clanking Ford toward his shop, the Indian in the passenger seat beside. Each waved in the ocher dust the machine raised. Two weeks later, he encountered the men again, this time on horseback, and he assumed better humored. Matt had thought talk of him might have halted after word traveled that his mission was finished and a failure; however, the citizens in Peach and Plum and other nearby towns had not forgotten him. According to Miller, he remained news, though the balded preacher, who spoke only when necessary in light of his waylaid jaw, was now the subject of the tale. The preacher had tried to press the law for an arrest, but his public saw the charges as pathetic, seeing he had brandished the gun, and the authorities could discover no one impartial to witness, though they had not spent much time on the inquiry, Miller reported.
Autumn, girls at school were old enough to fill their dresses past skin and stuffing. Some girls flirted with him, mostly the ugly ones, with bad teeth or fathers poor enough to hope to draw easy land. Wendy he no longer spoke to, and soon he stopped attending altogether. At the farm, he cleared a brushy quarter, fresnoed the bowled edges and rodweeded and harrowed the ground for spring and seed.
He worked if there was light and sometimes beyond by lantern in the barn, when the equipment required attention. The dog remained his shadow out of doors, but in the barn or the house, he mirrored Matt’s restlessness. The dog would not eat indoors, rather preferring even to spoil a piece of meat and its gravy in the rain. He refused Matt’s bed and instead made a nest near the stove from the old blankets Matt’s mother deposited for him. In the barn, when a nut would frustrate Matt and he belted it with the wrench handle, the dog would race to the door to be put out or belly into the hay and remain there until Matt departed.
Winter, once he had sharpened the blades and replaced failing parts and organized his tools, little was left to occupy Matt’s time. His mother had improved mightily after interring his father and at meals attempted conversation, but when he tried to listen, his mind would leave his head and the room, though where it went, he was unsure.
He read some of his father’s books and the few magazines his mother had saved in a box and taught the dog to fetch sticks, though he learned so quickly Matt figured it had been in him all along. He had less luck with teaching him shake or roll over, and as the dog rarely made any sound, he didn’t attempt to make him speak as Wendy had. They walked hours each day despite the lengthening freezes, and his thoughts traveled in wide loop
s that encircled all he’d witnessed or forgotten or remembered or dreamt and bent them into smoky spirals without order and so thinned they broke apart before him. He did not attempt to make sense of them with thoughts or words; they were not of that nature, though if they were, and if he could add them like numbers in a book, he knew the sum would be different each time until the idea of addition and numbers turned ash.
On one of these excursions, he encountered Alfred again. His congregation was down to two spaniels, and neither he nor the dogs looked like they had eaten in a good while.
Alfred gazed at him. “Coyote names the thickets in creek bottoms Woods of Her Private Hairs because water is desirable, but to retrieve it without tearing yourself on the brambles, well, it is beyond Coyote.”
Matt nodded as if he understood, though he did not, and he wondered if Alfred, too, was perplexed by his own words, as if the tongue of this strange god had entered his mouth without the sense in his head to stand between. The long nights that followed, Matt considered his own mind, which seemed, opposed to Alfred’s, all thoughts and no words, though they did eventually move him, as he lumbered through December and January, idle as seed beneath the snow.
At the north edge of Peach a towering knoll rose out of an otherwise level alfalfa pasture belonging to the grocer. Wendy and her sisters swathed the field summers to fodder the delivery nags the grocer drove twice weekly to service the invalids and bachelors who’d quit on town for one reason or another. Straw and dirt had accumulated under the rocky promontory until it looked a part of the country, but Mrs. Jefferson had told the class a volcano near the ocean had spewed it across the state. February, when the Chinooks began to loosen winter, Matt ended a horse ride at the place. He tethered his mare to the spindly locust behind and hiked to the crest. There, he tucked himself behind the sharp-edged rock.
He let his mind unspool once more that evening, waiting for truths he suddenly felt he required. Swimming below him was the town, all light and motion. Horse hooves splashed the damp streets and children darted in and out of the house glows like birds in the dawn. Full dark, he heard a mother call and then another. An hour past, the lights slipped out. A couple spooning on a porch split the quiet with a laugh, but the night stitched it over like something he’d dreamt.
From his knoll, he saw the pendulum Wendy’s arm made when she swept a broom or the rock of one of her legs crossing the other while she read. He became almost giddy with her and, when the light of her window turned the lawn lemony and warm-looking after all the other lights had been blown dark, he crept to the edge of her window’s glow on the lawn and put one hand inside it, then one leg, and studied himself lit. Finally, he dared to get his whole body aglow and felt weightless and bold, like he might just walk to the door and knock, until he heard a chair shift inside and dove into the well of a raspberry thicket.
8
FOR YEARS, LINDA JEFFERSON HAD watched parents hunt themselves in their little ones. Pawing mothers and distant fathers both hunting some track that would lead them back to themselves. They would say to their children “You’ve become a little man,” or “the boys will be calling soon.” These were one-sided conversations. Children did not answer such silliness. Of course they would turn men; of course boys would call for the girls. It was inevitable as the next daybreak. The children recognized their awkward arms and high water pant legs and new hairy places were nothing except natural. Their parents, though, seemed shocked at such developments. Soon the children realized that when adults spoke about their growth in such a manner, it was in the same bewildered tone they saved for death, which, also, they did not understand.
Poplar trees on her property had grown twelve feet in her lifetime, and, in a field behind her house, the wind had flung pollen and seeds, and the bees hovered over them summers, and the deer and an occasional elk browsed the grasses and dropped pellets, and rain turned their leavings grit, and the grit fed the seeds, and the sun shone, and the clouds rained, until she had seen a patch become a meadow, and, finally, strained by the years and thinned with daily, mundane duties, her tragedies, too, seemed to turn natural.
She drew no comfort with seraphim and a heavenly patron. People who believed in such absurdity in her opinion lacked education and the fortitude to face a future of their own making. However, she fancied herself too possessed by the muses to heed Darwin, whom she found dull and brutal, as she did most science: an appropriate discipline for destructive little boys and men who took pleasure from spreading animals asunder to see how they functioned. The finest knowledge could not be gutted and cleaned like mule deer or river trout. Instead, she thought the world possessed its own order, without explanation, cruel or kind.
Watching the twinless survivor flounder through simple long division and sentence parsing children four years his junior had mastered, she worried his rescue from the storm did him no favor. He made his marks only through graceless effort, an inadequate boy in so many ways. She was concerned the children would tease him—despite his size, he was not intimidating—but few ventured a word one way or another. They admired his resolve and they were frightened by it.
She had joined him at that portal through which men must pass to be born and pass again to be men. The boy had cut the loop too abruptly, she realized, returning to nature so swiftly after leaving it, he’d not forgotten enough of the first to uncloud the second and her living body lay between them as if reason itself.
Over the years, she found herself assigning her classes whole books to read or an impossibly long series of problems from the primers then setting a teakettle on the stove. From her desk, she sipped her porcelain cup and made each child a study, shifting from one to the next wordlessly. If they met her eyes or shied and fidgeted, she would loosen her gaze a moment then return when the child had forgotten her. Often, as the children walked or rode horseback along the paths and roads leading them to their families, she found herself weeping, and those nights she’d lie on the schoolroom’s hard floor and stare into the beams until her eyes blurred and she could conjure and scrub clean the faces of the children, and search for any crumb of herself that might allow her a share in them.
Linda had thought it silly, any adult putting so much stock in something impermanent as a child. Such vanity begged the stars to differ. Occasionally, she believed she had not considered the twins and the storm in years, but realized, each time, in doing so, as with things truly tragic, she had recalled the event every day. She was no seer, but, in the images she found filling her thoughts, Linda recognized her own face rising. Like taming her reflection in a pond, the harder she looked, the stiller she became, until she felt steadied and almost right, then something she couldn’t say roughed the picture, like a wind or duck landing, the stirrings distorting her likeness until it went monstrous, and she marked that twisting as in herself, and understood, finally, the wanting of another past just company, if only to offer a face to stare into that belongs to you but is not your own. She bore this strangeness through the winter and spring following and, when school let out for summer, she visited the empty building anyhow, smelling for the children and leafing the primers for their grubby fingerprints and scratchy letters.
Mid-June, she was called upon at home by the new superintendent of county schools. The man dismounted and trudged the porch steps. His prominent stomach unfolded beneath his chest, and his shoulders stooped from decades of bearing the girth. He knocked a pipe against his pantleg, loaded it, and struck a match. His face, slack as a bulldog’s, pinked as he puffed and exhaled.
The man’s name was Superintendent Harrison, and he insisted on being addressed as such. She filled a bucket and watered his animal while politely allowing him to prattle his opinions on the keeping of schools. He inquired, finally, if she would be requesting textbooks or desks. The school board had replaced those lost in the storm a few months after. She told him they were holding up well.
“You are a relief,” he said to her. “Most of the others are clamoring for them.�
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“I am in need of your assistance,” she said.
She stood and began unbuttoning her blouse. His eyes flew to her face where she met them. Deflated of smoke and color, they sagged farther, and trembled with his breaths. She shrugged her undone shirt down her back.
“I would like a child,” she told him.
Historically, men courted with flowers or jewelry, but weekly Superintendent Harrison trekked the dusty road to her home carrying a new desk or box of colored chalk or lined manila tablets for handwriting exercises. By midsummer, the inventory of his largesse included a microscope she couldn’t operate and twenty-three plaster-of-Paris likenesses of the presidents.
Upon spying his poor horse clearing the bend, she would undress and wait. He’d deposit the most recent offering on the steps, and, inside, disrobe as well, folding his trousers and jacket to elude scandal. She placed herself on all fours before him, facing a side window from which she could see the yellow rose bush she favored. He would couple to her like a train car, and spit and wheeze like its great locomotive firing. From the little she’d discerned of such matters, he was unusual in size, and, occasionally, his girth would drive a cry from her. Mostly those minutes, though, she would gaze at her flowers past the glass pane. The petals, closed in fisted buds through spring, had unbound. In them, she could make out handsome profiles and she would imagine them inside her heart, blooming finally.
The Hour of Lead Page 6