By late summer, she was six weeks without menstruating. The last time Superintendent Harrison arrived, she greeted him on the porch, dressed. He remained aboard his horse. Her clothed body was unusual to him, and somehow more arousing than her nakedness. She recognized this and let his gaze float over her to remind him that what he had had wasn’t her at all, but only some unclothed cavity that feels for him no more than a breeding heifer does the neighbor’s bull.
•
WHAT REMAINED OF THE SUMMER, gardening consumed her. The perennials bordering the house required only an occasional trimming but the vegetable rows she nursed daily, shooing aphids and tomato worms from the new leaves and piling the stalks with a pungent mulch she’d prepared with spring grass clippings or steer manure wheel-barrowed from the neighboring pasture. Her aging dog followed her through the day, sulking like a jilted beau.
September, she bartered ten droppable acres for a pair of dairy cows and swapped a dated encyclopedia to a well-off rancher who filled her barn with fresh alfalfa. She downed three dead birches and split wood enough for two winters and, after felled a third living tree to season. Evenings, she canned the garden and filled the cellar shelves with mason jars and lined them on the floor beneath.
October, she locked the dog inside and set out a salt lick in the garden. Until midnight she kept motionless on the porch. Lanterns hung in the trees, but she heard the two mule-eared does that had robbed her garden all summer long before she saw them. They warily descended from the rocks into the stubble behind her house. One bent her neck and Linda heard its rough tongue on the salt. The other joined it. Linda lifted the Winchester and pressed it to her shoulder. The deer glowed like light itself in the sights. The first shot stopped the nearer of the two. She levered the bolt, ejected a shell, and refilled the chamber. The second doe hopped twice, then checked herself. Linda eased down the trigger. There was no sound, save her own ears ringing.
In the garden, amongst the autumn husks, she butchered both deer by lantern light. Her bloody clothes clung to her until she pulled them off. She puffed out the lanterns and started a fire. Morning, when the coals burned low enough, she lay green birch atop them, then strips of venison rolled in rock salt. At the pump, she filled a bucket and washed. Her scattered clothes lay about like a skin she’d shed. She set them in the fire. She was frightened at her happiness and tried to swallow it, to save it like good luck come too soon.
•
NEAR CHRISTMAS, SUPERINTENDENT HARRISON RETRACED his path down her lane. Grey snow and a grey sky kept the light ghostly. The muddy road had spattered his horse’s legs and worn suit clothes. She realized it was the only apparel she’d seen him in, and perhaps all he owned of fine wear.
“The school board has asked me to give you your notice,” he said.
She took the envelope he offered.
Superintendent Harrison shook his head. “Should I tell them the truth?” he asked finally.
“I would deny every breath of it,” she told him.
9
THE FIRST PRESENT WASN’T WRAPPED and no ribbon garnished it. The leather-bound cover had the writer’s name impressed upon the spine and her own in the right corner, both embossed gold. Wendy closed her eyes and rubbed the cool skin, tracing her finger on the letters of her name until she would have recognized it if she were without eyes.
The poems were untitled, kept apart only by numbers plain as those attached to the county prisoners. The poems startled her; cropped as a manx tail, many seemed scarcely thought at all. Like birds flitting from tree to tree, their purpose would alight in her mind and she’d know it, then she would not. Some were so dismembered by hyphens and misplaced capitals they appeared butchered as spring lambs. They compelled her as one’s own wounds demand exploring and finally led Wendy to realize that, without using the word, they were about love and the holes it thrust in you.
The next day, she woke to her sister Amy’s shouts. She approached the door. On the walk was her name again, spelled in polished river agates.
Wendy collected the stones. One was turquoise. The dawn had warmed it. She rubbed the smooth edges across her forehead and the bridge of her nose.
“Who was it?” asked Amy, who was thirteen and boy-crazy, but Wendy had no desire to discuss it. She only knew it was her name printed with the rocks and her name cut into the book’s leather. Someone was taking some trouble over her, and she was pleased.
•
A MONTH LATER, MID-MARCH, MATT allowed himself to dally past the sun’s rise and watch Wendy discover an embroidered hair band he’d laid upon the porch rail. She lifted the heavy cast hex nut he’d cleaned to anchor it, then rushed to her room and twisted her hair until it met her liking. He remained while her family ate, listening to silver clack the porcelain and later studied her and her shadow and reflection gliding through the rooms in a routine he’d committed to memory. When she left the house, she battled the mud-thick roads to the grocery, her skirt-bottoms bunched into her fists, but the goop still spattered them, and at the store she was forced to find a flat rock to scrape the bottoms of her laced boots. For a moment, she stared in frustration at her sullied clothes and hands.
That afternoon, Matt rode to the Fort and bartered an old single-shot 30.30 to an Indian for a two-year-old gelding. The Indian guaranteed the animal saddle broken, but simply leading the horse turned contentious, and Matt worried he’d been bested in the bargain. Home, he took two hours washing and currying the animal’s tangled mane and dirty coat. The gelding darkened under the water and soap, but came up red. Matt stopped and admired the color like rich earth with the sun on the wane.
The next morning, he bridled the horse and trooped him around the corral. The gelding reared after one pass and Matt fought him down. The horse snorted and made a step for his toes. Matt hopped clear. He jerked the lead rope and the horse settled. Two rounds later, they repeated the contest. Five hours every morning, it remained their routine. The gelding kicked slats from the fence and blew snot at him. He crow-hopped so viciously, Matt had to cut a longer lead to keep it from jerking his shoulder from its socket.
At the end of that second week, the gelding kicked him. The lead was long enough and Matt had let himself drift behind it. He dusted himself and tested his leg to see if it was broken. When he found it wasn’t, he snubbed the lead rope to a post. In the barn, he found a shovel. He carried it to the corral and there, beat the horse senseless. Each swing the horse screamed and Matt leaped clear of its flashing hooves, crying out, too.
He left the horse panting and shivering in the livery. It had long ceased being a shadow in the corral, but he could hear it step and paw the roughed ground. The night was cold and steam rose from its wounds. He had nothing for his ride this night. It would be a mean trick to leave off Wendy now, but a meaner one to stick her with himself, even if she was inclined to accept him.
His mother stood behind him. It was her breaths he heard now, burdened with another winter of pneumonia. He remembered nights she would sit and read him and Luke to sleep with the King James. Luke could quote scripture when he was five. Matt just liked the sound of its poetry. Like the river and the creek, it would still him. His mother had tried to read to him alone afterward, but without Luke holding down the words, he felt compelled to double-duty. He found little sense in most of the stories, and in yielding to reason’s call, lost the poetry, too. Finally, after a month, he sat below her chair to listen, and she set the book aside and stroked his forehead and the tiny lines the storm had left. Her hands were rough from kitchen work and worry, but through the calluses, as she brushed his scalp, he felt her hunting that old wordless hum he loved, trying to offer it back to him.
“You are not the kind of man who beats an animal.”
Matt glanced about. The dog had barked and bit the horse’s bouncing hooves when Matt began their struggle, but had retreated outside the corral fence where he paced staring, eyes flashing in the glow from the lantern his mother held.
“Wil
l that horse mind better hurt like it is?”
Matt did not reply.
“If I beat you would you be right?”
“I am not right,” Matt said.
“Nor me,” she said. She glanced toward the dog. “But he had nothing to do with it and he never did a thing to me. I was wrong. So are you.”
Matt nodded.
“Now come in and eat a meal with me and let that horse be.”
He followed and she fed him and spoke to him, and he managed to attend to her words but they meant less than her voice itself, going on in a way he recalled and did not, maybe the same as you recall breathing without the need to remind your mouth and lungs and diaphragm to do their duty.
Late that evening, he walked to the barn and loaded the trough with oats. He opened the corral’s gate and barn’s swinging door. The horse stirred and skittered at the sound.
He hooked the lantern then hid in the shadows. The gelding crossed the barn and ate. Matt watched his throat tremble. Welts mottled his ribs, and the bleeding wounds were matted with straw and hair. He found ointment and eased himself to the gelding’s side. The horse bolted and Matt let him, returning to doctoring only when the gelding bent his neck again to eat. Before Matt could clean the first wound, the animal retreated once more. The horse’s sweat and his own made an odor gamey as venison in the skillet. Matt found an apple and salved every cut, then added sugar cubes to his bribe and applied liniment to each swollen place.
•
WENDY WATCHED THE EARLY THAW stretch into a long springtime. Morning glory and dandelion weeds pocked the untilled garden plot and the lawn’s grass was yellowing toward green. Overhead, geese and ducks sliced through the warming sky, headed for the river or potholes in the basin.
Nearly every day a gift arrived. Tiny things much of the time: a scarf, fruit preserves, or jujubes. One morning, she rose to breakfast enough for the entire family, sliced bacon, large boiled eggs, and sweet bread; another she lifted the blanket from a basket containing a tabby kitten with a full milk jug and two fresh trout.
Once Wendy woke to her sisters’ squealing. They’d discovered a pair of muddy boot tracks. A few more were in the yard, but they vanished in the rutted street.
“He’s ugly,” Amy said.
Wendy sighed, impatiently.
“If he wasn’t ugly, he’d let you see him.”
“You are both insufferable,” Wendy said. She led the girls to the house and handed one a straw broom and the other the dusting rag. “This will keep your imaginations occupied,” she told them. They complained and she ignored them, preparing herself for the walk to the store, where she had assumed the clerking duties at her mother’s insistence. Her mother was at first pleased a young romantic had imagination enough to woo her daughter in such a courtly manner. She had become exasperated by the mystery, lately, though, and pressed Wendy to examine anyone coming into the store for evidence. Each day, she surveyed grocery lists and hunted for indications of it in the gifts she received. But she was left without clues. She’d considered Matt Lawson, speculating that perhaps their history kept with him. He’d stopped into the grocery once, but seeing her had turned him around so swiftly he nearly caught himself in the door’s shutting. She’d met his eyes for a moment and recognized only fear. It saddened her until the next morning when a pair of narrow store-bought slippers lay on the porch, red ribbon binding them, and she ceased entirely to think of him.
•
MATT TROTTED THE HORSE RIDERLESS around the corral for a full two weeks, only a blanket on its back. He spoke to it of the girl: what he remembered of her smell, her kindness with the graves, her voice he’d been so long without hearing. The horse grew to cooperate, more or less. There was still the crow-hopping, but Matt, reversing his methods, closed the line slack, allowing the gelding no room, save carrying him into the air. It took more attention, but he’d recognized the chore required it. Afterwards, he fed the gelding well and allowed it to frolic loose in the pasture each evening when he rode to the butte. He ordered a fresh leather saddle from the town livery and paid a middle-aged lady near Lincoln who had some standing in the county in leather crafts to cut Wendy’s name in it along with painted roses.
The gelding tolerated the saddle in a few weeks, but threw him six days straight until he snubbed its neck to the sturdy fence post and its hindquarters to another, giving him no choice but to bear him. He repeated this five times a day for a week, though it put him behind in the spring work. To his surprise, the gelding allowed him to ride the eighth day without incident.
Matt saddled and worked the gelding daily, easing his gait and acquainting the horse with the bit and bridle. When he’d tired sufficiently, Matt allowed the gelding to make its own trail back, giving him his head to chew at spring grass or new tree leaves. Fenceposts and low limbs, the horse tried to rub him from the saddle, but any animal with good sense will test a rider; it was more an act of character than revolt.
He mounted the gelding every trip to Peach now and hobbled it close by, where it could watch the house. He’d direct it to Wendy and speak her name like a charm. Late, he’d offer whatever the next gift was for the horse to study. Then, one warm night, he delivered the gelding himself to the porch and tied him to the sturdiest rail.
•
THE GELDING NIBBLED THE GRASS beneath the porch. He lifted his head when Wendy clucked. She patted his warm silky neck. He eyed her, but she was fresh to it. She stroked the reins and the horse chattered the bridle.
“There,” she said to it.
The leather of the saddle was whirled into roses, painted red and yellow and pink, her name above them. She patted it gently, then hoisted one leg into the stirrups and swung the other over the pommel. At the street, she coaxed the gelding to full gallop. She felt her eyes crying and the tears dry in her lashes and on her cheek. She reined for a road north that would meet the river. In her nightclothes, she raced and trotted and raced again the beautiful animal the miles toward Seven Bays. There she permitted the horse to drink its fill and, later, deliver her home. She settled on Amherst for his name. It was Emily Dickinson’s home.
10
LINDA JEFFERSON WAS NOT TAKEN aback when, after the shock of her dismissal ebbed, the children visited her home. Fall, she had arrived at the school to more fruit and wildflowers on her desk than any year before, and, as each left for the Thanksgiving holiday—some of the last days she would share with them—she caught herself kissing their cheeks. Even the older boys inclined their straight backs to offer themselves. They still cared for her, as children will for anyone who treats them generously, but her awkward condition hushed them. The boys feared it; the child was a bulk impossible for them to make. It frightened them to know she could conjure more than they could.
The girls were much less naive. They only hoped to determine who had left the seed. Girls were never as romantic as boys. That is where people were wrong. It was boys who pined for love, and girls who understood it, and therefore pursued not love, but boys.
The day she was dismissed from her school duties, Linda Jefferson opened an abandoned copy of Anna Karenina. It lay on her nightstand, her place marked with a rawhide strip. She read a few pages each night, preoccupied with Anna’s eventual end. Finished, she read it once more with the desperation one devours tragedy. She dog-eared the pages where Anna committed each transgression, as if Linda herself might be able to avoid them. But so many pages were marked finally that the book cover slanted nearly forty-five degrees, and Linda realized she’d marked each page Anna appeared and some where she hadn’t and couldn’t anticipate the calamity folding over her.
Her breasts were not yet milk-heavy, nevertheless their weight reassured her. She stroked her stomach and spoke to it not with her voice but with the tips of her fingers, where she rubbed her stretching hair follicles and the wrinkled skin line that her elastic undergarment cut and hunted the right place, until the baby, like a fish ascending from deep water, rose to her touch.
&n
bsp; When the year turned, Linda harnessed her one good horse and trotted her flatbed up the Peach road. She stopped at the cafe. It was the men’s place mornings—farmers drinking coffee by the potful and protesting the weather or the state of their machinery and a few merchants making themselves social like they would at Sunday church. The banker took breakfast every morning at the window table, studying the previous day’s market tape, joined by a high-hatted farmer or two.
Seeing her in the doorway halted their banter and gossip, a hush Linda thought nearly visible, all those words collapsing midair, then piling on the floor, quiet as snow. She shrunk until the baby cramped inside her. Small was not a choice afforded her. She nodded at the bank manager, a mustached fellow, whiskers dark where the coffee wet them.
“I’d like to see my money,” Linda said.
The man sighed and rose.
“I’m in no hurry,” she told him.
“I am,” he said.
“Your breakfast will cool.”
He looked at his eggs, bleeding yellow eyes where he’d dipped his biscuit. “I’ll order more.”
“I’ll not be a partner to waste,” Linda said.
Her baby-heavy belly pressed her distended skin. The banker gazed at it, then back to his plate. The men eyed him. She was in no way his fault, but it was his business that had brought her in the door.
He shoveled his food and chased it with more coffee. Linda surveyed the room, quietly delighted that she’d hoisted her discomfort upon them. The child shifted. She decided after this one, she’d have another.
Finished, she followed the banker across the street. He rotated the doorbolt, spun it the opposite direction, and stepped into the safe. She scribbled out a slip for her balance. It was over seven hundred dollars. He snapped the bills twice and shoved them across the transom toward her.
She recounted them. “I’m sorry,” she said when she was satisfied. “Checking others’ work is a habit.”
The Hour of Lead Page 7