The Hour of Lead

by Bruce Holbert

  Matt nodded. “I have been warned.”

  14

  ROLAND JARMS WOKE TO MATT mucking the barn. It was near dawn and he thought the clatter was one of the dairy cows banging the barn latch, anxious to be relieved of her burden. He had to listen longer to recognize the sound as work. He collected his coffee and strolled from his house across the grey yard.

  The stranger had already restacked the failing bales that made up the winter-feed and was raking the remains and piling them into the feed bins. The older Jarms enjoyed a smoke and kept his silence. When the stranger finished the bins, he unlatched the barn and steered the milkers to their stalls. Roland tucked himself behind the tool wall as the man and cattle passed. He listened at the gathering of the buckets and the stool and the cisterns, then milk when it splattered the tin.

  It had been some time since he’d studied anyone’s work other than his own and he welcomed the occasion to. Roland didn’t consider himself a more diligent laborer than the next man, or even more efficient, he just supposed he enjoyed the work more. Though he met and married the only woman he’d likely love at Northwestern University in Chicago, not until he returned her to the ranch and resumed the duties that were in fact more rituals than labors did he feel he’d closed the circle.

  Helen saw it differently, he knew. He hoped at first that she would thicken like pine in his country and make her own shape, but came to recognize her form would be grafted to his, his taproot extended by xylem and phloem to her branches and their leaf or fruit or nut. Over time, however, even that metaphor blanched and it became apparent that her heart was hostage to some other life that he could not imagine, though he waited for its return like any seed he’d planted. However what she endured wasn’t a season, it was the country itself and like country, it was endless when stranded amidst it.

  He’d hoped family would make a difference. Roland had pulled calves most of his life and figured bringing forth his child would be just one more chore. He met Helen’s water breaking with little trepidation. He saw her pain as simple, like that of an animal’s.

  No doctor was near and even if there had been, snow left the roads impassable. There was not even the comfort of a neighbor woman for her. By the end of the first day, her cries shook him so, that he plugged candle wax in his ears while he saw to her. They didn’t speak those hours nor after. Looking back, it seemed to Roland talk between them had lost its consequence. The child would be their conversation, and he longed for it those two nights like he had never longed for anything, not even her in the days of her purity.

  When he finally took the baby from her and held her bloody stillness in his hands, he wept. He buried the child alone, on a high place above Rebel Flat Creek. The water ran year long; he vowed she would never hear silence. He chiseled the name Faith so deep into its bark that the tree bled sap from the wound for a year.

  Eighteen months later, he did the same, though the child was a boy and the name Elvin.

  When Helen told him of her third pregnancy, he bought some timber for a coffin. He’d used scrap to construct the first two and it had since weighed on his conscience. The child arrived easily and like the others was still as a stone. Roland spooned honey and bourbon into Helen until she slept. When her bleeding had slowed, he went to the barn and began the box for the child. He stoked a fire in the potbelly stove and set the baby near it. The air was quite cold and the fire was raging, which made it difficult to keep the baby close enough to warm without scorching it. He found himself breaking from his work continually to adjust the child, then badgering himself for taking the trouble when it would be no better for it.

  With the casket finished, he lifted the infant into it. Then, he noticed the child held the fire’s warmth even upon the frigid timbers. He watched the steam rise from it. He undid the blankets. The child’s ribs fluttered almost imperceptibly and Roland recognized the strings of a breath’s vapor over its open mouth.

  He touched the baby’s cold skin and it stirred. He lifted it from the casket. It was a boy he recalled, though he checked to make certain of the matter. Naming called for more audacity than he or Helen could muster. Still, now it seemed imperative. The only name he struck upon was his own, but he was a junior and had never been comfortable. He recalled an uncle, then spoke his name: Horace.

  As soon as the weather was suitable, he bundled the boy into his coat, and together they rode to the cottonwood. Roland thought to begin his formal education that day, and, as they trotted, he expounded on the virtues of summer fallow and putting seed in the ground before the first leaf’s turning. But he grew bored with that line of chatter and, instead, took on a story. It turned into Hercules and the twelve labors. Roland was careful to point out that the tale wasn’t only concerning a man’s muscles. It would wind up the bent all his teaching would follow. He told of the Greeks and the Romans and later, when the boy had memorized those, he traded a winter’s worth of straw to a neighbor widow for Malory and Shakespeare’s collected plays. It was a mistake, he knew now, filling a child with so many yarns. Horace believed that life itself was only one story following another. It left him no time for working or learning much other than how to spin every day into a yarn.

  Roland might have done it differently if he could have. But it had not been in him to. He had recounted the birth in his head daily. At first, he was the hero of the tale, but soon, another version alarmed him. He wondered in his hurry to plant his grief if he’d buried his previous children alive. He’d only found Horace on the boy’s own casket floor. His stillness was not unlike the others’; it was in fact like theirs enough for him to take to wood and nails. He summoned from memory as much as he could from each birth but could not recall anything beyond the babies’ still bodies. He tried to argue the impossibility of his not recognizing life was in them, but he would remain in his heart unconvinced.

  Roland spent so much time with the boy that he and Helen ceased to know one another, and he realized, too, she had ceased to know Horace. He had hogged the boy, taking on the fathering and the mothering, leaving her with something worse than a dead child, one that didn’t have much use for her.

  She left soon after the boy’s third birthday. He and the boy had ridden out to check the stock and they found her absent upon their return, along with her hope chest and the clothes she favored most. Roland saw wagon tracks from a road with many neighbors. It was impossible to know which had colluded with her.

  Between cows, the stranger turned and met Roland’s gaze with a stone face.

  “If you’re working off a poker loss, you’re free to go,” Roland said. “Most everybody knows Horace cheats.”

  Matt shook his head. “He just said he had work.”

  “Well, I can see your intent is honest. No one’s risen before dawn in this house aside from me in years and even longer to put in a day’s labor,” Roland said. “If you’re in with Horace I have my reservations, however. Most of his friends are shirkers and so is he. He’s my son, but he’s no friend to sweat.”

  “I don’t know him well enough to say,” Matt said.

  “We’ll see,” Roland said. “Come on inside. I suppose I better feed you at least for the morning’s milking.”

  The kitchen window faced east and grew light with the day. Roland hacked two lengths from a rope of German sausage and fried six eggs in the grease. He watched Matt examine the room. The man studied each windowsill and doorjamb, the high cabinet tops and the simple wainscoting. Roland kept no knick-knacks and hung no photos. The walls were scrubbed clean. No bugs dotted the light basins and no cobwebs draped the corners. He was a fastidious man and he inspected Matt like he might a mess that required his attention.

  Matt had not spoken, except when answering him. He’d made no attempt at small talk or to ingratiate himself. Most he’d known so scotch with words were sullen and bitter, overall poor company, their quiet as watchful as a deacon’s with the same disdain. Scorn, though, didn’t seem to be in the way the man carried himself, nor in the
manner he sat, slightly bent as if his size were a card he didn’t like to play. The whole way he’d put himself together seemed to Roland off center and unfinished.

  The dog whined and pawed the screen door.

  “That pup a stray?”

  The pup glanced like it was inclined to pose a question. “Queenie,” Matt told her. “Mind the traps.” She disappeared for the barn and his saddle.

  “How’d you come to tame her?”

  Matt shrugged. “Found her and fed her till she could hunt. Doesn’t need nothing from me any longer, guess she just likes company.”

  “Till she doesn’t,” Roland said.

  Matt shrugged. “Not much different than the rest of us, then.”

  “No.” Roland chuckled. “No I imagine not.”

  Roland set some day-old biscuits on the table, along with the loaded plates.

  “Go ahead,” Roland told him. Matt did. Roland fixed his own plate. In a bowl at the table’s center was a ball and cup apparatus he’d worked from a stick of soft wood years ago when Horace was small. Matt eyed it through the meal and after and finally reached for the toy. Roland finished, studying the awkward hands flipping and catching. He sighed and shook his head. Here he was seventy and Horace had brought him another child to tend.

  15

  IT WAS CLEAR ROLAND JARMS felt morning belonged to him; just as his son lay claim to night and carousing, the old man believed he owned first light and work. The first day Matt had shamed him, and the man woke ten minutes earlier each following until soon it was barely past night when they commenced their labors. Matt slept lightly, and the pup nipped his feet when it saw the house lights lit, then the horses nickered, expecting to be fed, which put Matt in the barn where Roland found him sharpening the scythe or retooling the harnesses. Roland filled two coffee cups from a tin pot. Neither said a word about the hour.

  On the whole, this suited Matt fine, as did the man. A yellow notepad remained in Roland’s breast pocket except when he paused to scratch a line through a chore, which he categorized on lists titled dailies, weeklies, and seasonals. Once started, he was liberal with coffee and time to consider what next necessitated their attention. In Matt’s experience foremen who headed most crews were little more than workers who’d stuck. Neither better hands nor keener wits than those they bossed, they possessed a narrow view of labor, fixed toward working a man an hour without let-up rather than whether the job he was doing made any sense. It turned men to plodding animals and often left the most important chores incomplete or shoddy. Roland seemed to realize waiting on one end of a job meant not having to rush the other. He didn’t speak without a purpose and Matt replied only with a nod unless the work required more detail.

  Until noon, the old man accomplished more in an hour than most good hands in a day. He could lug remarkable weights, employing his legs for leverage instead of bulling a load with his back and arms. But after they broke for lunch, he lost steam. He didn’t abandon Matt, and, for a time he battled to keep pace, but an hour or so past high sun, he wore down and conceded to supervise, which at first irked Matt—he wasn’t accustomed to others inspecting his efforts—though he soon realized the old man was just hankering to participate.

  Roland appeared content to live the same day over and over, and working the days with the old man, repeating his repeating, Matt recognized no sadness in his routine, no boredom. Work was praying the same prayer every day, and, as with true believers, it held the calm and certainty of ritual. Roland, though vulnerable to a melancholy spell occasionally, had reconciled those conflicts abundant in a man’s conscience. He lingered sometimes several calm minutes over a cleared field or a herd of freshly branded steers, and those moments, Matt understood, were what divided father and son.

  Roland never said a word about town and Matt had no interest. They sent a list with Horace, who might get what they needed if he remembered to stop before his card game and whiskey. Those days Jarms forgot, Roland and Matt just toiled at other chores. Jarms’s toots typically lasted two days to a week. Matt would notice his horse, hungry and ridden down, before he saw any hint of its rider. Returning, Jarms slept until afternoon. Evenings he’d wash and shave and deliver them cold beers and half a glass of homemade shine to share while they shelved their tools and hunted what they required the next day. Jarms never drank any himself, in fact did not imbibe at all in the house. He seemed to enjoy watching the old man, though. Roland informed him of the ranch’s state: the chores they finished and those that needed their attention. Jarms encouraged him. He enjoyed the discussion of work well enough, as long as he wasn’t required to participate.

  After a hard rain, though, they required the seed drills straight away. Jarms was two days gone, leaving Matt, finally, to collect them. That night, Matt sat in front of the barn with a bucket of lye and water washing his shirts, when Jarms came to him in the barn.

  “You take it easy on him. He tries to keep up by you.”

  “We don’t work past dark,” Matt said.

  “I’m not talking time, I’m talking what you do in the time.”

  “I’ll keep it in mind.”

  “Good then.” Jarms scuffed the dirt with his boot toe. “Sorry about them drills,” he said.

  Matt nodded. “Isn’t no way to undo it.”

  “I don’t want it undone,” Jarms told him. “I want it done with.”

  Matt hung a wet shirt on a rope strung to dry them. “You find yourself a woman?” he asked.

  “I did not,” Jarms said. “I ain’t shopping, neither. I don’t care for them.”

  Matt said nothing.

  “It ain’t like that. I just want nothing to do with them otherwise. The boys that tied me up. That was over a woman. Well, it was over me paying the tab at the Chinese restaurant.”

  “You welch?”

  “Nope. Squared the bill in full. That’s what made them so hot. They don’t believe in paying Chinamen and won’t until the law calls and then they only offer half and the deputy tells the Chinese take it or leave it. Well, I got to gabbing with one of them boys and he went on about getting a grandmother and other kin this way from California and I figured our tab would just about foot train fare, so I cashed it out. Then I paid them a thousand dollars for a share in the place. I like their food. That damned Garrett.” Jarms shook his head. “He’s got more money than the rest of us and is the maddest the Chinese got any at all.”

  “So what’s this got to do with women?” Matt asked.

  “They born us, didn’t they?” Jarms said.

  Matt wasn’t inclined to argue and extend the conversation. This did not deter Jarms, who, over the first month of Matt’s stay, regaled him with a fog of information that, Matt eventually began to puzzle through. Jarms had come late to town. Roland’s books were his studies most of growing up and he figured the ranch’s ledgers and taxes for his numbers. For compositions, he penned irate memos to Sears and Roebuck demanding reimbursement for items he’d not purchased. The company sent intermittent checks anyway.

  He knew nothing of school until the high grades. The place suited him. He told lies as honestly as most spoke truth and with a good deal more hoots. Teachers thought him backward and wouldn’t bend him over for any kind of freshness, requiring only apologies for his ignorance and promises to mend his manners, which were heartfelt and unfelt at the same time. That he could manage both in one sitting was his charm.

  Roland enrolled Jarms in the college in Pullman hoping studies would square him to level where he had failed. Horace drank with silver-spoon fraternity brothers and diddled their sisters under frilly sheets. He had no patience for them otherwise; though one, Virginia, a funny drunk, he dated for a semester. She wanted pinned, though, and forsook him for another who would do her the honor. Being jilted irritated Jarms. He called upon her mother who lived in town and seduced her in the same room he had Virginia, which brought him back to even in his eyes.

  Classes, he knew less than the professors and more than the stud
ents, who attended university to postpone something Jarms saw no reason to. They bored him enough that finally he purchased Shakespeare’s collected, Sandburg’s Lincoln, and Milne’s Pooh and put his heels to the place.

  The years following, he worked and idled and idled and worked and finally only idled. He couldn’t say how he’d come to what he was, just that he had. He was not inclined to excuses and not one to crow about his indiscretions, either.

  Garrett seemed a black raven circling Jarms’s stories, swooping close to chatter before he disappeared, though he seemed to hover always. After his own graduation, Garrett returned to the ranch and, over the next few years, took on much of his father’s duties, and, unlike Jarms, embraced the notion of being a rancher. He met a young woman who had traveled from Nebraska to keep house for the Methodist minister’s family and, after the appropriate courtship, married her. He preferred traditions in a manner Jarms recognized but had no map to.

  Garrett visited the ranch occasionally. His trimmed beard hairs glistened in the sun and softened his face’s sharp lines and pointed chin, but his voice was loaded with more bitterness than Jarms’s gibes. The two were sharp-tongued, and they cuffed each other with banter constantly. Jarms was quick, but Garrett bested him at swearing and name-calling, which left it close to a draw. Jarms had a lacking in him, whether it be a mother or just plain emptiness, and baiting Garrett answered it. When inclined, he’d wrench his neck and tuck his head into one of his shoulders like he was pointing with his chin, then lay a word trap for Garrett, which left him red and stammering.

  The tavern gutter dogs, as Roland called them, were steady visitors as well, Petey and the two silent Swedes who turned out to be noted drunks. Petey was pledged to Garrett, but Jarms found Petey’s loyalty so funny that he became a running joke. The Swedes remained shuffling hangers-on, enjoying the others like the first row of a circus does a clown nosediving ten feet into a pail.

  Near sunset, the sheriff arrived in a Model T that looked to be in fair shape, though, on the rutted road, the frame jostled the cab until his door fell open and nearly spilled him under the wheels. He pulled the brake and hiked the last hundred yards. Roland and Matt patched a feed crib the bull shattered a fall ago. Roland glanced up, then returned to his hammer and nails. Matt stood.