The Hour of Lead

by Bruce Holbert

  “He knows the way,” Roland told him. Roland measured and marked the board for Matt to cut next.

  The sheriff was a bean of a man and barely a shadow in the cold winter sun. His badge had torn his pocket stitching and the silver dish faced the ground. He looked a man whose pay alone kept him employed. He eyed the nearly-finished crib. His hand brushed the loose shavings from the rail.

  “I come out to talk sense,” the sheriff said.

  “Well, talk it,” Roland told him.

  The sheriff sighed and looked toward the house. “I swear, at times I see where he gets it from.”

  “Surely his mother,” Roland said.

  “That’s what you’d have us believe, Rolly. But the truth roosts a lot closer to home.”

  Roland dusted his pants.

  “He’s behind in the card game,” the sheriff said.

  “You a gambling arbitrator?”

  “No,” the sheriff said. “I’m just saying what I heard.”

  Roland nodded.

  “They’re not fellows you want to owe.”

  “That all?” Roland asked.

  The sheriff nodded and turned for his car. They returned to the crib.

  “That pup.” Roland nodded at Queen beneath Matt’s feet. “She harasses the stock, she’ll have to go.”

  “All right,” Matt said.

  “I’m serious, dammit.”

  “She doesn’t chase animals except to herd.”

  Roland nodded and commenced to build himself a cigarette. “You think Horace is a slacker.”

  Matt shook his head.

  “He used to outwork me.”

  Roland lit his cigarette. Matt didn’t reply.

  “It turned dull to him,” Roland said. “He gets bored too easy. That’s his problem. Not the other. Cards, you get a new hand every couple minutes and money changes just as often. Good card player tolerates boredom, lets it saw on others. When the money’s right and the cards are right and the players are right, he gambles.”

  “Horace one of them.”

  “Nope,” Roland said. “Horace is what a good card player counts on. A fellow like him pays steadier than a month of wages.”

  The old man smoked a little longer, his weathered skin hanging from his face in the orange glow. He ground the butt into his boot heel. He beckoned Matt inside where they ate a meatloaf dinner and made the following day’s list.

  Finally, Matt returned to the barn. On the hayloft straw, he unrolled his bed. The pup whined and burrowed beneath his arm. It chewed the blanket and Matt batted her nose. The pup gazed at him, eyes flooded with animal figuring, then bedded near his feet, but instead of settling in for the night, it commenced to wrestle with his boot until he was compelled to rap the animal’s skull with a coffee cup, which sent it scurrying from the loft to the animals below. So it was an inconvenience to be awakened an hour past to lantern light spilling onto the barn’s walls and ceiling. A girl traipsed below him. Her skirt was tired plaid and her legs and bare arms looked sullied and in need of a bath.

  “Here’s good enough,” Jarms told her.

  She hiked her skirt and dropped herself on all fours in the dirt. Jarms unhitched his jeans. He hopped to her, his trousers trapped by his boots. She laughed at him. He bent in front to kiss her and she butted his nose with her forehead.

  “I told you. My mouth’s saved for my husband,” she said.

  “How do you know I won’t marry you?”

  “Rich men won’t marry me, and they don’t kiss me either.” She puckered her lips.

  “Well, what if I gave you all my money?”

  “I wouldn’t waste my time with you.”

  “Most would be thrifty at the other end, darling.”

  “Every animal in this world bumps uglies,” the girl said. “Kissing is the only thing that means something.”

  “That’s just girl wishing,” Jarms said, though his voice was quiet and tone tolerant, as if he didn’t want to rend the girl’s hopes from her.

  She took his hand from her face. “I’ll wish for what I want to,” she said.

  “So it’s going to be like this?” he asked. “Just one dog doing for another.”

  “Yes,” she told him, and Jarms lifted his leg and pissed on a hay bale.

  She laughed and he hopped behind her and plopped his ball sack on her backside, where he dragged his root until it was serviceable.

  She didn’t cry out with his taking her, just sucked in a lungful of air. Jarms seemed to pay attention to nothing at all, until he found Matt staring from the loft above. He grinned and played like he had a quirt in one hand and was whacking the girl’s haunches.

  “Giddyup, there, Pony Express,” he shouted. “We gotta deliver the mail.”

  After, they dressed and he walked her to the barn’s door and fired a lantern to light her walk home. Its shadows ebbed and bobbed through the open loft window until it faded to just another part of the night.

  16

  ONE OF THE FEW THINGS Wendy Worden’s parents agreed upon was the amount of iron in their oldest daughter’s backbone. Her mother thought her impractical and judgmental and averse to any kind of reason once she set her mind. Her father saw her as strong and admired her unwillingness to compromise as much as he despised his own pliable nature. The courtship and its conclusion—the strange gifts from the Lawson boy—had given them both pause, but what followed confounded them completely.

  The morning following the shooting, she rapped at the Lawson door. Mrs. Lawson answered.

  Mrs. Lawson led her by the elbow inside to the sofa and perched on the cushion beside her.

  “Is Matt here?”

  “No, he is not.” Mrs. Lawson said. “Can I help you at all?”

  Wendy nodded. She lifted the ring from the table.

  “This came from Matt.”

  “And you’re bringing it back to him.” She sighed. “You don’t love him.”

  “He brought me the most wonderful presents. Every day for so long. He didn’t speak a word. He just wanted to give me things.”

  “He never spoke?”

  “I never saw him. He hid.”

  “And you’re here now because you’ve found out.”

  “Yes,” Wendy said. She recounted the rest of it.

  “Do you think he’s dead?” Mrs. Lawson asked.

  Wendy said. “It was a small gun. We found no blood.”

  “Well,” Mrs. Lawson told her. “He’s like an animal in a lot of ways. If he’s hurt he’ll run off.”

  “You don’t care he’s gone?” Wendy asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “I am just not surprised anymore by someone leaving.”

  “I would have guessed a child would earn his mother’s grief,” Wendy said.

  “And I would have thought a beau deserved better than being shot,” Mrs. Lawson said.

  Wendy stared at her shoes. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I am blunt. It is a failing.”

  “I have plenty of my own,” Mrs. Lawson said. “Thank you for coming. It must have been difficult.”

  “I’m afraid waiting for him will be just as trying,” Wendy said.

  “He won’t return. I am not that much to him anymore.”

  “I am.” Wendy said.

  The next week Wendy arrived in the grocer’s wagon, along with her boxed clothes and a tiny dresser drawers that she unpacked in Matt’s bedroom, where she settled in to wait. Guilt was behind it, certainly, and perhaps love, too, or as close as the girl could reckon that emotion, but mostly it was the steel arbiter inside her turning her own stern judgment upon herself. Mrs. Lawson recognized the fear in the girl and the misery, too that and the only method she’d conjured to quiet the caterwauling of her conscience was to square it somehow. Shooting him must have been a hard stone to strike upon. Mrs. Lawson had given up dividing the world that way, though, and she was too tired to hurt the girl in the only manner that would heal her. She was an old woman, with a son nearly grown, and faced years alone. Yet here
sat the girl. She could not send her away, and here Wendy remained thirteen years later, despite her parents’ pleas and her sister’s recent marriage, despite fifteen plantings and fifteen harvests, fifteen springs of calving and summers cultivating, and fifteen winters in the small house most waking hours across the room from her.

  •

  WENDY GAZED INTO AN OPAQUE glass pane that had once been backed with silver paper and served the house as a mirror. Time had undone the glue until only a few strips of herself remained. She appeared clawed, just the line of her lip, two teeth and, above, a sliver of forehead and hair that seemed the consistency of smoke. Last week her anniversary had passed and she entered her sixteenth year on the ranch. She was not sure how many more were left. Her patience had ebbed to a mute desolation, but she would labor here until the old woman passed and likely to her own demise. Despair was her only habit and, like a mill horse, she was trapped by her rut, but knew no other. Progress, however, drew her rein. The Grand Coulee Dam’s powerhouses were finished and the river was scheduled to rise for the next pour. The government had purchased any country that would go under and would soon burn the buildings and fell the trees, the Lawson ranch included. A legal-sized envelope arrived a week ago: the address typed and an official icon for a return address, legal documents and a check inside, the first mail in several years to reach the house.

  In the kitchen was cake from two nights before. Wendy wet a saucer bottom with milk, and lay a piece on it to soften by the time Mrs. Lawson rose. She set the cake and a coffee cup on the counter, finding her way in the dark and uncorked some shine and half-filled the old woman’s cup and her own. Wendy took her eye-opener with cider, while Mrs. Lawson preferred coffee, though she’d been dry for two weeks, after Wendy returned from the field to discover the oven ablaze with a chicken in its own grease and Mrs. Lawson sleeping through it. Wendy stashed the jug in the coat closet, and twelve dry days hunting had sobered Mrs. Lawson mightily.

  Wendy lit a lantern in the living room where she alternated between a glass of buttermilk and her fortified cider with one hand and divided an apple with a paring knife with the other. The meal would hold her till supper if she put a few raisins in her pockets. She’d eaten as if it paid her first years on the place. Enormous cuts of beef, whole chickens, and vegetables raw from the garden. When her shirts burst, she began wearing Matt’s, which draped past her waist. By the end of that harvest, she could steer horses without jerking and plunge the plow deep enough to furrow and seed the next spring.

  After feeding the cattle, Wendy was clammy with perspiration, and she undid her shirt and fanned herself with it until she’d dried enough to tolerate loading the seed bags into the wagon and harnessing the pulling horses, Ebenezer and Uriah, whom she’d renamed on one of her whims. In the Original Eighty, she reined the team and filled the seed bin, then rotated each circular drill until it deposited a treated kernel in the dirt she’d turned two weeks previous. Once she was certain each drill operated properly, she set out. By nine, she rode the drill seat jacketless, lulled near to sleep by the steady turning. The wide coulee remained all shadow, but there was green above and on the water’s banks. She was loathe to admit it, but knowing this place, not like a resident or even her merchant father, but as someone who relied on its patterns and whims remained as much solace as she’d likely possess. The day passed quickly, as most had she realized, and evening, she remained lively enough to tighten the cinches that held a loose corral gate.

  •

  MRS. LAWSON WATCHED WENDY PATCH the gate, then rose from the chair near the window and rattled the moonshine jug from where Wendy had concealed it. She uncorked it and poured herself half a cup of the alcohol.

  No meal was in the oven and no sign of one coming, so Wendy found the cake pan in the icebox and carried two plates into the front room.

  “This is still my home,” Mrs. Lawson told her. “I was here first.”

  Wendy nodded. Mrs. Lawson lifted her cup. “I’ll drink what I like,” she said.

  Wendy finished her cake. Mrs. Lawson cut a piece from the tray and set it on a second plate. Her finger dabbed the frosting.

  “That’s just whipped sugar,” Wendy told her. “Eat the cake, too.” The coals in the stove had ebbed. She added a log. Mrs. Lawson hooked her finger and scooped the icing that remained. “I been swallowing cake all this time just for the little bit on top.”

  She went into the kitchen and fetched the shine. She filled Wendy’s cup, then her own.

  “You’re doing your contritions,” Mrs. Lawson told her.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The prayers a person’s obliged to say after confession. Hail Marys and Our Fathers.”

  “I haven’t prayed in years,” Wendy said.

  “Every breath you take is a prayer,” Mrs. Lawson said.

  Mrs. Lawson peeled the end of the cake frosting while Wendy pulled from her cup and felt the alcohol rise and cover her. She shared the old woman’s fondness for it. Drink cropped the edges from pictures and left what she wanted to see. She set her cup on the table and the old woman lifted the shine jar. The old woman filled it once more, her hand trembling not the slightest. She added nothing to cut the alcohol, and the fumes teared Wendy’s eyes, but she ducked her mouth to the cup.

  “We’re going to feel awful tomorrow,” Wendy said.

  Mrs. Lawson stretched in the light that was left in the room. She had squandered the afternoon considering the coming water. The sky weighed heavy with high clouds, and a person outside this country might see rain in them, but all she recognized was doom. She laughed.

  “I already feel awful,” she said.

  17

  THE NEXT AFTERNOON, WENDY RECOGNIZED smoke on the wind. She spotted a grey swell north and wondered if the federals had jumped the chute and started burning houses for the coming dam. She watched the plume double. The smoke blackened, not grain, but seasoned wood burning. Grain made good fuel. With a little wind, fire covered country faster than a horse and rider. You stayed keen for it like a miner watching his canary. She harnessed the team at the barn. Mrs. Lawson emerged from the doorway and perched herself on the bench seat until Wendy finished and pressed the team forward.

  They made two miles before the road dropped around a basalt outcropping skirted with shale. Below lay Linda Jefferson’s place aflame. After the teacher had grown heavy with child without a proper sire and was two-checked by the city fathers, her students continued to visit. She had been a favorite of the children, more than most realized, and sixteen years past the boys still tied lambs and calves to her porchposts or delivered game salted and cured into her root cellar. Wendy stopped more often than most, as her residence at the Lawson place left them neighbors. They traded novels and, when she noticed a need, Wendy delivered materials from the hardware to patch a roof or caulk a failing window frame. Linda Jefferson asked nothing from anyone and no one doubted she would have soldiered on without such kindnesses.

  The house was nearly to the ground by the time Wendy and Mrs. Lawson made the drive to her road. Linda stood near the pump arm, sooty and sweat-stained. She held an emptied bucket. The sixteen-year-old boy next to her looked flushed. The fire had left the house just joists and the door in its brick frame. Linda pushed the pump handle and filled the pail and drank, letting what was left spill and soak her blouse.

  From the house came a spitting. Timber jumped and the grass danced.

  “Bullets I made,” Linda said.

  Mrs. Lawson looked at her.

  “I learned from a book. There’s hundreds down there.”

  The boy unbuttoned his pants and urinated into a bush.

  “My,” Mrs. Lawson said. “His pecker is enormous.”

  “Lucky,” Linda said. “Cover yourself.”

  An explosion tossed three bricks across the yard. One struck the grey in the ribs and he neighed and crowhopped until Mrs. Lawson settled him.

  “Do people still live in caves?” Linda asked.
>
  “Not for a long time,” Mrs. Lawson said.

  The boy lumbered up the hill and sat down in Mrs. Lawson’s wagon. His hair was as long as a girl’s and his clothes split at the shin and shoulder where he’d grown past them. “Would it be so bad?” Linda asked him, but the boy refused to move.

  “Suit yourself,” Linda said. “You made this nest, not me.”

  “What nest?” Mrs. Lawson asked.

  “He knows,” Linda replied. She mounted the wagon, sat next to the boy and took his hand. He allowed it. Mrs. Lawson drove, breaking the grey into a trot and out of the canyon. When the fire found the bulk of the gunpowder, splintered timber, singed shingles, bricks, and the door whole rose up, then fluttered back to the ground. Ashes rained over them, and heat arrived again in gusts, like strange weather.

  •

  MRS. LAWSON FOUND THE JUG and uncorked it. She poured two cups and put four kettles on the range for bathing and filled a roasting pan with vegetables and a ham and let them bake. Mrs. Lawson cajoled Linda into the outside tub, a grain trough Wendy had sealed and glued one winter. In the water, Linda’s limbs winnowed to muscle and bone; her shoulders and back and ribs secured her to herself, except for her breasts, which were weighty and awkward. Her privates were a tangle, cloaking the cavity under, making it more like something omitted than a mystery. She’d washed her face and her hair and they shone in the sun’s setting.

  Linda slumped in the tub until her ears were stopped and only her nose was clear of the water. Mrs. Lawson listened to her breaths, then kicked the tub hard enough to make a wave. Linda came up coughing. Mrs. Lawson was already on her way to the house for a fresh jug.

  When she returned, Linda was staring at her. “I believe we’ll find another to place to stay. If you’ll hand me that towel.”