The Hour of Lead

by Bruce Holbert

  She walked the clapboard sidewalks, drawing a few stares. She welcomed them. In the gristmill, she ordered three barrels of treated wheat flour and paid, shucking bills from her stack. She found lead and powder and, on the hardware’s shelves, a pamphlet concerning loading. At the mercantile, she bought a pedaled sewing machine and flannel, gingham, and cotton bolts. She purchased several thread spools and an array of needles and a pin cushion shaped like a tomato, before adding yarn and knitting needles, sheets, and fresh wool blankets. The little she knew of clothes-making passed when her mother did, but she had a book and she would learn.

  The dime store window displayed a crib. She purchased it and some playthings she could tie above for the child right away, and others, including a kaleidoscope, wouldn’t be much use until the child could sit up and take notice of the world.

  She ended at the doctor’s, a stringy, middle-aged man, fit more for animals than people. His hands were cold and he had horrible gas, for which he never felt compelled to restrain or the courtesy to apologize.

  He put the stethoscope ends into her ears. She heard the baby’s heartbeat and offered him five dollars for the instrument, but he had none to spare. He pronounced her and the baby healthy.

  “Are you friendly with your neighbors?” the doctor asked.

  She didn’t answer. He wrote a note on his calendar. “When it’s your time, I’ll send someone around to check.”

  “That won’t be required.”

  He looked at her for a moment. His glasses shifted. They left sores on his nose and he rubbed them. “Birth is a very violent process, ma’am.”

  “So is living,” she told him.

  11

  “IT’S NOTHING I’M ACCUSTOMED TO, what’s going on,” her mother told her. Wendy unlatched the cabinet and unfolded a drying towel, then took her place at the dish rack. “It’s not normal.” Her mother huffed. Her agitated hands stirred the sink to a froth. Wendy passed her the meat platter and watched as she scraped the scraps into a soup kettle for stock.

  “It’s not love, it’s worship.”

  “Do you think I’m shallow, mother?” Wendy wiped clean a fork. “If I was, I’d keep a regular beau and the only worry you’d have was his pulling at my underthings before we got to the altar.”

  Her mother’s hands quit scouring. “Don’t you think they’d want to touch you honey? Don’t you want to touch them?” She peeked into the parlor to be certain her husband and the girls were occupied. Her mother emptied the sink and scooped clear the drain, rinsed and filled it once more. She insisted on the hottest of water for fear of botulism, which she contracted once as a child. Her hands went red under it. She sighed and bit her lip and stretched her fingers until they became accustomed.

  “Two things worry me,” she said. “First, I’m afraid this person who’s going to all this trouble will never be able to make himself come for you.” She offered another fork for Wendy to towel. “The second is that he will.”

  They finished in the quiet. Wendy had never brought herself to deliberate on either of her mother’s fears purposefully, because she saw them as faithless. But coming from outside her, their freshness stung. She longed for a meeting, but she treasured the anonymity of each gift as well. Maybe, it wasn’t the man she wanted but only the idea of one.

  Her sisters were prepared for bed, waiting for the family prayer. Wendy enjoyed them both, but felt more cousin to the girls than sister. It was her mother she matched in both temperament and aspect. Their straight-backed appearance and demeanor were derived from pride. They stared at the world and those in it with cold blue eyes, and in them was no patience for fools and silliness or laughter of any kind, which was their most genuine failing.

  •

  THE NEXT DAY SHE PURCHASED a ring from the backroom of the hardware, where they held a small collection of jewelry. It was simple silver. She had it inscribed: Love Wendy. It cost her savings and credit against next month’s pay.

  That night, she looped it in twine and dangled it a foot above the porch step. She ran the other end of the string through the upstairs hall and wrapped the loose end to her wrist. Morning, though, the string end hung over the porch where he’d snipped the ring loose, and the next day there was another, this one tied to the balcony beam, twirling in the morning’s breeze, a tiny diamond blinking in the sun. Her father scratched a pickle jar to be sure.

  Wendy seated herself on the porch step. Off, the ring was an empty hole and her finger one of four digits, and on, the hole was filled and she couldn’t imagine her hand had been so bare.

  He didn’t visit the next day or the one following. She understood as the ring had cost more even than hers for him. The spring stayed mild. Flowers were on the bud and trees fattened with their leaves for the year. Wendy clerked and, at home, assumed the gardening. She relished the lengthening evenings, digging, watering, and plucking weeds. Anytime she felt a jump of doubt, she’d pat the ring and its one diamond. The ring separated her from other young girls and she wanted to remain so. It was her license to ache, to raise the burdens of a life and load them in her heart and pack their weight.

  By the fall of a fortnight, though, those aches had grown heavy as lead. She didn’t even approach the door mornings, weary of her own expectations. It had been so long, she realized, anything short of he himself standing there would be a disappointment. She began to sleep on the bench below the front windowsill and finally took up a blanket and a pillow and pitched her camp on the porch swing.

  Often a breeze would press at the swing and squawk the chains, waking her, and she’d search for stars and planets emerging over the horizon of buildings. She felt she was floating on one great river while staring into another, the one he sailed each night. When Hawk Creek met the Columbia, it lost itself, water against water for a moment, then water with water, then just water.

  Approaching sleep, she allowed herself to imagine her anonymous lover’s first kiss. It was on the last of these nights that she had a dream. The air was cool, and she could hear forever into the darkness. She suspected every sound was his. Closing her eyes, she dreamed him over her, a simple shadow. She stretched for her bed light but a hand halted her. When she turned, his head was directly over hers, and she waited for her kiss, but none came. She reached to pull him close to her, but everywhere she touched he disappeared like smoke breaking.

  She woke bleary and afraid. Again there was no gift from him, no place on the lawn where he had stepped, nothing of him in the light. She rushed through the house, then back onto the porch.

  “Where is my present?”

  “Honey, there is none.”

  “You have hid them,” Wendy said.

  She hurried to the backyard where she’d hobbled the bay. The horse nickered at her. She found him a carrot and a bucket of grain and bent to nuzzle his broad nose with her hand. The horse had never been friendly, only dutiful. She neared him from the backside, thinking she’d spied a cinch sore. The horse’s cleaned hoof caught her mid-arm. The kick spun her. Her arm felt warm and she watched as blood hastened from it and spattered the grass. The second kick whacked her shoulder and ear and drove her to the ground. When she looked up, the horse had returned to the grain pail, banging it for the last of the oats.

  When her father called to Wendy a moment later, she didn’t answer. He worried she’d deserted them completely, abandoning herself to this strange courtship and leaving him a husk of a daughter. When he got closer he was relieved it was only blood, then was horrified at his relief. He lifted her. For a moment she thought it was her man come for her.

  •

  MATT WAS SHUFFLING THROUGH A saddlebag for jerked venison when the horse kicked her. He was unsure what he had seen and would have fought to believe it, if he hadn’t witnessed the second blow. He smacked at his legs and his thighs and got himself standing, but could press no farther. His hands were fists. He could see the black blood on her nightclothes, but he could not move. He found himself sobbing, his chest shuddering f
or air.

  He watched the grocer wagon her to the doctor and, later return with her in his arms. Matt remained and observed all day and into the next night. A lantern in her room winked on. Her father bent and kissed her. In the silhouettes upon the curtain, they looked like lovers.

  Very late, Matt skulked to the paddock where they’d left the bay. He carried a buck knife honed as sharp as a strapped razor. The horse nickered and bobbed his head in recognition. Matt patted it and let it eat an apple from his hands. He studied its healed wounds. “Poor boy,” he whispered. “Poor, poor boy. I am sorry, my friend.”

  •

  WENDY WOKE TO THE HORSE’S throat cut. The straw beneath its body was so thick with blood that it oozed with each of her steps. The next morning, when Matt approached the porch, he fastened the reins of a long-tamed grey to the railing, and stole away. Every gift he’d given her lay on the steps and railing. He touched the lace hair ribbon and the saddle. The slippers were crusted with blood.

  The second night, though she’d been generous enough to feed and water it, the horse’s lead remained fastened to the post, along with a note she’d nailed to the rail: You’re a horror, it read: Take this and go away.

  The third night, at his footfalls a hound bayed and the grocer quick-fired a lantern and put himself to guarding the door with a shotgun.

  •

  THE DOG WAS WILD, CHOKING at his chain-end. It was trained to manhunt by the sheriff who had loaned it to her father. Its bay was a sound like a train passing. Downstairs in the sitting room, there were whispers and chairs scraping and the up and down of checking windows. In her bedroom, Wendy covered her head with a blanket. Rain clattered the roof, then eased. The eaves moaned, and the roof thunked again with a sound too heavy for water.

  Underneath her bed was a small bore rifle her father had supplied her. She leveled it at the window. A hand dropped onto the frame, then a head, then upside down, swinging, the top half of a man. He aimed a hammer and tore away the lock and tugged the window until it gave.

  “You killed my horse,” she hissed.

  “I couldn’t abide him hurting you,” he said. “He was a bad one. I should’ve never brung him. He was so pretty was all.”

  She peeked over the bed top. “You’re not mad?”

  “No,” he said. “I’d grown fond of the animal.”

  “Wendy?” she heard her mother call.

  “I’ll not bother you again.” Matt let the hammer go. It thumped on the lawn below. “I was hoping you would keep the other gifts, though.”

  Wendy’s door banged open. A wedge of light filled the room. Her mother peered in, then screamed and retreated to the stairwell. Wendy rose from her bed and so did the barrel of the rifle. In her hands, it frightened her. She hated even holding it, and it tensed her body to think she’d been pointing it toward someone who had tried to bless her so, and the tension tightened her finger across the trigger. A powder flash lit the room.

  As he tumbled from the rooftop, both hands clutching his side, she recognized her lover and then he disappeared.

  12

  LINDA JEFFERSON’S FIRST LABOR PAINS arrived on a full stomach. She studied the applesauce she’d been nibbling for dark spots or spoil. The jar hadn’t bubbled nor was the glass cracked. The paraffin smelled sweet enough. The date was October, a late batch, but apples rarely went wrong, and she’d peeled and cleaned each, hunting any sign of worm or bad meat.

  Her bowels pressed her to the privy outside. She’d shoveled a fresh pit fall, but spring had thawed the excrement and urine below to a stenchy mush. She vomited before she reached the building and shat herself. The sky was broken with clouds. It still held a veil of light. The days were lengthening she could see, and it disappointed her. She liked them short. Darkness was a solace she could retreat to. Inside it was reading and sleep. Daylight turned another matter. One could only guess what it contained, and guessing was a distraction she no longer had patience for.

  The old dog sniffed her dress and licked her leavings. She wiped the vomit from her chin with a clump of cheat grass. The cramping bound her again, but there was nothing to empty in her, and she only shuddered as the pain coursed through her. She had entertained a notion that the baby might remain within and spend its childhood and adolescence—those awkward, horrible times that reduced children to mere people—maturing until, like Pallas Athena, it would burst from her full born, ready for war.

  She felt her legs dampen and warm. She stared at the pink fluid staining her dress and began to weep. The child shifted. She crawled to the house and through it into the bedroom. There, she propped herself on the floor with her wardrobe mirror between her ankles. She couldn’t see. She lit great candles made with what was left of the canning wax. By dawn, if she peeled her labia mid-contraction, the child’s blood-matted hair crowned between her legs. Once it nearly cleared a shoulder, but then surrendered and disappeared inside. Treachery, she decided, was a slow process, and she felt like Othello giving birth to her own Iago. She would suffer as the Moor had. Each pain, she faced with clenched teeth and hands and a contraction of her own to counter the child’s thrust. But the child battered her like his father’s loins nine months before, only from the other side.

  Her light-headedness was close to godly. Death could make people happy; it was guarantee the world was working in their favor. Over coffee in their kitchens and their card clubs, women would determine it was a just as well. They would inter her in a grassy place and mark it with a small stone, her name inlaid. There she’d remain, the child impacted in her womb like a bad tooth rotting a gum.

  But the child had no interest in death. It wriggled and pressed at her for hours. She marveled at its strength and, at last, she crawled to the barn. There, she undid a harness and wound a rawhide strap loose. Bailing twine littered the floor. She cobbled eight feet of it together and made a loop, then lassoed an end of a loft beam.

  She propped herself on the cart below the dangling twine and waited for the baby to surge forward. When it did, she shoved her hand into herself. Underneath its head, she found one shoulder then another and circled the twine around them until the apparatus resembled a harness. She bolened the leather and twine and took up slack until the contraption held the baby taut. Finally she shoved herself out of the wagon.

  The baby dangled above her, coughing. Rope burns bruised each shoulder and one arm. Its tiny penis shook like an accusing finger.

  PART TWO

  The Soul has Bandaged moments—

  When too appalled to stir—

  She feels some ghastly Fright come up

  And stop to look at her—

  Salute her—with long fingers—

  Caress her freezing hair—

  Sip, Goblin, From the very lips

  The Lover—hovered—o’er—

  Unworthy, that a thought so mean

  Accost a Theme—so—fair—

  —EMILY DICKINSON

  from poem #512

  13

  IT IS STRANGE COUNTRY WHERE a person’s behavior opposes his or her emotions. But this country is nothing if not strange. Angered, a man ceases speaking and listening. He is inclined to leave others for his own company whether they are inclined to stir his ire or quell it. Most work themselves to distraction or exhaustion and return to their homes and families or flophouses or work-camp tents, in their stead, and sleep as if stone or earth. Women cleans meticulously rooms otherwise ignored or reorders closets and drawers or hung and beat carpets on the clothesline. If circumstances requires another’s presence, both were liable to respond in terse though courteous terms until they have managed the rough water that was other people.

  It was perhaps the scattering of people that made them behave so. In the cities people flocked up like ducks in a pen and squawked at one other accordingly. It seemed all tumult, but noise can be as static as quiet and the opposite as disruptive. City boys, west for work, beat at the silence with talk until the locals threatened to hit them with a skil
let. And it was clear: the tumult they spat out with talk others just swallowed, and there was peace in neither.

  The paradox appeared to multiply in the case of Matt Lawson. He recognized he had passed the frontiers of ordinary when the .22 bullet creased his gut thirteen years before. The fall from the grocer’s roof broke Matt’s arm, though the bullet failed to damage anything necessary and burrowed into some muscled place within him. He ran like an injured animal, bent, favoring the wound in his side and a broken forearm. Mounting his horse was not as difficult as he anticipated as the wounds were both to his left side. Once aboard, though, he was unsure where to direct the animal. A broken-up fugitive was no way to return to his widowed mother, and Wendy had delivered her opinion. The horse trotted toward the river out of instinct. No one offered chase. He bled from the bullet wound and it lightened his head; his arm buzzed with pain. At Miles Junction he directed the horse north, away from Peach and the family ranch, and nodded into a doze that lasted off and on a day and a night. The horse possessed a shy nature and chose game trails bisecting the highways rather than encounter another rider.

  Once he’d ridden far enough into the mountains, he propped the wounded limb in a locust crook and walked his shoulder away until the bones separated. With his good hand, he squared his elbow to his wrist and then, just as slowly, let the bone rejoin.

  To lift the arm from the tree required all his strength. When he finally freed it, his wrist was pocked with sap and bark. The break beat pain, though he could feel only numb below it and feared he’d cramped the nerves. He made a fist with the fingers. They answered only when he forced them, which left them useless for even holding a rein. He collapsed against a tall pine. He’d sweat through his shirt. His haunches were too feeble to hold him and he slipped farther until his legs spread before him like clock hands.

  He drove a finger from his good hand into the bullet hole, which was raw and burning. The bullet hadn’t cleared him. A man often died from less. He’d wandered himself high into the Kettle Mountains; not even Indians traipsed this way until huckleberry season. The Indians believed stories had rules. Once begun, no tale could be uttered twice a season. No less than two could be present aside from the teller, as once a story is loose, though the teller tends it as best he can, like an animal, it owns itself and is not bound by intellect or ritual’s restraints and must be tracked to its finish, and the trail required a witness’s veracity or the teller could claim it led anywhere he chose. They contained truths past deeds, past civility, past the god preached in churches; they were truths so inarguable they required no faith at all.