Jarms lit a cigarette and started the car. He pinched the butt between his finger and thumb and took a deep pull and released a stream of smoke. Matt watched his hand shake, then still. Jarms stared into the cigarette ember. The car motor rumbled and Matt wished he’d turn it off so they could sit longer, but Jarms backed up and turned them toward home.
•
THE THREE OF THEM CELEBRATED the end of cutting with a spitted lamb, dining from it three nights, squandering the days in the porch’s shade, napping. Autumn, traditionally, was slow for farmers, leading to a winter of dormant country and keeping livestock from starvation and the other perils of snow and cold. The air cleared and Matt could see Steptoe Butte, which rose from the grain swells of Palouse like a random bicuspid in a golden and verdant gum. The county, Whitman, was named for missionaries local Indian tribes assassinated outside of Walla Walla—in what became another county entirely. Steptoe was an army colonel who managed to lose enough battles to the Palouse Indians, a tribe so poor they never merited a reservation and existed now only as Yakimas and Spokanes, that he was eventually martyred. The county had planted a dozen radio towers there and constructed a switchbacked road to a tiny park at the summit. The most remarkable aspect of the landmark was the lack of stone and trees. Scrub brush and dirt blanketed the peak to the apex, not unlike the country beneath it, which Lake Missoula, through a series of ice age floods, deposited the richest loam this side of the Mississippi. If a thresher could manage the thirty-degree grade, wheat and barley and canola would line the slopes until August cutting.
Farther east and south, Kamiak Butte sat the horizon, less prominent as it was an extension of the St. Joe Range, which was itself an arm of the Rockies. Kamiak, the chief rebel harassing Steptoe and George Wright, was summoned to the Latah country near what was then Spokane Falls to a peace conference where he was summarily hanged without a trial. Perhaps the butte was justice or at least an admission of something, not guilt, of course, but regret. The slopes of Kamiak were forested with white pine and broken with meadows so fragrant with wildflowers that one almost was sickened by the sweetness, as if the chief’s body still rotted somewhere beneath.
In October, Jarms sold a portion of the grain. Five years before, Garrett and his father had constructed two modern siloes with dial scales and grain pits from which wheat and barley could be augured and elevatored to separated storage vats. Jarms had been happy to store with him as it was a shorter distance than town and Garrett charged the same rent. He permitted Garrett to buy and sell the Jarms wheat because he studied the commodities market and could milk a dime more per bushel than Horace or Roland, who more often than not sold on whims or when they tired of fussing over it.
The enterprise had flourished. Grain nearly filled both silos, and Garrett pulled fourteen-hour days to manage the enterprise and harvest his own crop. As a result, Jarms agreed to meet Garrett at the silo to cut his check. Horace arrived with Roland and Matt. A five-man crew swung spouts toward combination truck containers and aligned them with the ports, then tugged a rope that unloosed several tons of grain. A tremendous rattle followed and a wind yellowed the air. Semi drivers idled, afraid to smoke as the grain dust was volatile as nitro.
Roland shook his head and grinned at the operation. Jarms excused himself and walked across the dirt lot for the check. Matt could see them through the office: Garrett’s mouth pinched like he was intent on working something from his teeth, Jarms circling his hands and later kicking a desk. Jarms slammed the door and marched to the Ford, Garrett trailing.
“What’s the mule in the road?” Roland asked through the opened window.
“The bastard won’t write the check,” Jarms said.
Roland looked past Jarms to Garrett. “The wheat there?”
Garrett nodded.
“Sales receipts?”
Garrett nodded once more.
“Bank holding the cash?”
“Yes,” Garrett said.
“I fail to see the rub,” Roland said.
“I hold twenty thousand dollars of your son’s IOUs.”
“Well, that’s not my concern.”
“But it’s mine,” Garrett said. “And I’m not releasing your grain until the note’s paid. I don’t want to see him wasted any longer.”
“Waste or not, the money’s due.”
“I won’t pay.”
“Will you write it to me, then.”
“You’ll pass it on to him.”
“That’s my business.”
“And this is mine. I will not make the check.”
“I’ve got a lawyer who says different.”
“I imagine so. He will argue with mine and they will both get paid, but you will not. Not for a long while, anyway.”
Garrett nodded to Matt. “I will pay him and only him.”
They were silent.
“All right,” Roland said. “Write the check.”
But Jarms was on Garrett. They rolled in the dirt. Each’s arms locked the other’s head. Jarms champed Garrett’s forearm and his blood spackled them both. Garrett’s hand tore Jarms’s throat. Matt, out of the car, kicked Garrett in the ribs. He heard one break and kicked him once more, then dragged him by the collar and drove his head into the car fender.
Roland fired the twelve gauge he stowed beneath the seat for an equalizer. Matt loomed over Garrett, who spat and blew blood through his nose.
“Matt,” Roland said. “Get in the car, please.”
He complied. Jarms eyed Garrett on the ground.
“You, too, Horace.”
Garrett remained on all fours. He gasped.
“Seems to me you misplaced your loyalties,” Roland told him. “Or thought some of us did.”
Garrett laughed finally. “Now how come he’s the only one I take serious?”
They remained quiet a long while in the car.
“I could kill him,” Matt said.
“So could I,” Jarms replied.
“We’d be rid of him,” Matt said.
Roland sipped his coffee. “No, we wouldn’t,” he said.
•
EVENINGS, THE THREE SAT OUTSIDE on the porch and took their meal if the weather permitted. After, they played rummy and constructed a list for the day that followed. Roland moved about without a crutch, swinging his ossified leg toward his intended course. He was too weak for labor, but too bored to idle, so he employed his energies toward the kitchen where he constructed, with the assistance of an old cookbook, elaborate and peculiar smelling stews and sauces that, despite Matt and Jarms’s misgivings, ended up better than restaurant fare. Jarms did not drink those days, even when Roland and Matt imbibed. Matt recognized color returning to Jarms’s face.
Owls hooted and nighthawks punctuated the night along with the cattle’s low or coyotes’ yips or the creak of the screen door. All would set Roland in the storytelling mood, evening. The tales contained dead ends and false starts as their plots unspooled, and he told them with trepidation, often reduced to retrieving the volume from his library to make certain of details he had once committed to memory.
Matt and Jarms visited the girl nearly every week. Neither of them said much to the other. They’d clean up and pack a snack and watch the house. Some nights all they’d get of her was a glimpse. Others she’d sit on the porch and allow them to contemplate her growing belly. She waddled when she walked. Her parents rarely spoke to her, though they didn’t seem angry as much as daunted, like the child was bad weather.
25
FALL, THE LIVESTOCK BEGAN TO disappear. At first, whatever killed the calves had decency enough to drag them away, and Wendy could allow herself the delusion of miscounting. Soon, though, it was taking its meal in the corral and the pasture and once it left a mauled heifer in the barn. She found them with their bellies split and organs spilled, a liver or heart missing, throats savaged and great chunks bitten from their flanks.
The cattle bellowed nights, smelling what was coming. By early winter, it visited
nearly once a week, and she was down to a half dozen heifers and a few yearling calves. Evenings, she stationed herself on her porch with a loaded 30.3D. She built great fires outside the yard and torches from rags and grease and tool handles, but the light they shed weighed little against the night’s gloom. Mrs. Lawson left for the coast at the behest of a sick cousin. The postman delivered a letter a month later. She opened it with a butter knife.
Wendy—
I believe I’m safe for people now.
Matt Lawson
Linda and Lucky departed the same day as the old woman, for where Wendy had no idea. It was clear Linda had tired of the close quarters and the boy had grown too depressed to argue, his great victory turned empty by Wendy’s unwillingness to deliver what he must have thought appropriate tribute. The riders did not return. She knew they would not. There was iron in the boy, the kind criminals would recognize beyond ethics or any kind of law.
“Good-bye,” Lucky said to her.
“Good-bye,” Wendy told him.
“We are going to live in a cave now. Just like Mother planned.”
Wendy did not know how to reply.
“I hate her,” the boy said. “I hate you, too. I hate all the people I know.”
“I’m sorry,” Wendy said.
“I’m not,” Lucky said.
One evening, she spied the boy and his mother setting trout lines on the river. The salmon were a month off and the weather too hot for the fish to feed on anything but fly hatches. Linda sat on the hill and directed the boy, who hauled one string of empty hooks after another. Wendy was not close enough to see the boy’s face; it was only his walk she recognized: each step chopped like he wore leg irons. Linda looked gaunt.
The neighbors’ buildings had been vacated up to the proposed waterline in preparation for the reservoir. The Bureau of Reclamation bulldozed any tree shorter than twenty feet and hired foresters to fell the others. The lumbermen were not permitted to harvest the timber. The government did not want their project to compete with the mills on the westside, lest a Congressman filibuster the next concrete pour or generator delivery Roosevelt was bent upon. Evenings, burning scrub piles and outbuildings scattered like a pox on the country, reflecting against the river and smoking the moon a bloody red. Shadows of people and loaded wagons often crossed in front of the light the flames shed. A few had trucks and she could trace the headlights lumbering along the dirt roads. Mornings, only the old rock foundations and the scorched earth remained. She could sometimes smell the diesel starting fluid, and imagined even the match’s sulfur, and, when she couldn’t, she retrieved a box from the kitchen and struck one and let it burn until it seared her fingers.
After the first snow skiff, she walked to Hawk Creek. The falls still rushed, the clear water suspended in the cold air before it turned black in the rock pool below. The standing water was deeper than she remembered. It flooded the swimming beach. She picked through the trail to the river. It, too, was overflowed in places. For a moment she wondered if the river was dammed already. A hundred yards farther was a fallen birch. The stump had been gnawed through. Branches lay askew in the thicket ahead. She separated the brambles. Trimmed limbs and fallen pine lay across the creek, and beavers labored in the backwater.
She couldn’t remember a beaver in this country. She looked close in the trees and the brush. An osprey perched on a tamarack limb. It was at least what she recalled ospreys looking like. Her father had shown her one as a child.
When she returned to the ranch another calf was dead. She shoveled the guts into a heap and built a pyre. The cow’s eye rolled as she dragged it onto the flame. The next day she rode to town, her first trip since spring. She bought a noisy billy goat and staked him to the front gate, then made a bed on the porch and waited under a pile of blankets. It was nearly a week before she woke to a clatter. The goat was kicking at the pie plate Wendy used to feed it, bending the rim flat. It ran and the tether spun it. Dazed, it sat on its knees, shaking.
She raised her rifle quietly and rested her arm on the porch rail to keep it steady. The moon was clear. It lit the corral and the grassless yard between the house and the barn. She saw the shadow skulk until it was near the fence. It made no sound. The goat was so crazy with fear that it stood frozen at the end of its cord. The beast rose and she held her sight on it. Her finger trembled over the trigger. She stared at it, stuck there. There was a flash of silver, and the goat coughed its dying sounds. Blood covered its chest. The boy, in a bearskin, opened it up. The liver was in his mouth. Blood covered his chin. Wendy watched Lucky eat and returned the gun to its place on the floor.
26
JARMS AND MATT STOCKED THE wagon and bundled Roland and drove him to the cemetery tree twice a month into November until the snow, when Roland permitted them to halt the exercise. The last trip Matt watched them disappear in the direction of the creek and the tree. The sky purpled like a wound. The stars dimmed and retired as sunlight slid a blinding line across the hill-creased horizon. The light climbed the sky and the same ground silhouetted black, then brown and mottled greys. As morning gave ground to afternoon, father and son remained absent. Matt felt alone and awkward, which struck him as even more out of kilter. Finally, he returned to the ranch. After the cattle were fed and watered, he settled on patching a coat. Little else required attending. Finally, he cooked an early supper of steak and beans and played with the ball and cup on the porch, biding their return.
Soon more snow fell. It arrived quietly, not a blizzard, which piled against windward trees and buildings and drifted. The snow-fall hushed even the dairy cattle lows. The country blued under the moon and outbuilding lights. North, a planet perched over the girl’s house. The rough road’s parallel tracks dented the snow cover toward the creek and tree like a pair of seams that stitched one portion of the farm to the other.
He wondered why he had not yet departed and had no intention to. Matt’s accrued salary in the house safe had become three, then four stacks of bills high enough rubber bands were necessary to bind them, money enough to make home a fresh start, enough to retire his mother to town if she preferred. Wendy had not replied to his mail and he had stopped expecting she might. He was disappointed but resigned, and the fact made his return less complicated in the manner that would likely trouble him most. Still, he remained.
He looked at the corral and the outbuildings and was pleased with how well he knew them. He rubbed his belly until he raised the old scar. His exit shamed him. For all his size and strength he was a coward. He’d left a mother alone, but moreover in his mind, a woman for which he felt love but could not face. The bullet was his dodge even from himself.
He should’ve welcomed this quiet like every other, but sitting on the porch alone left him uneasy. He lived in a house and slept in a bed. He listened to voices familiar to him as his own. Exiting would be like his exits previous. He remained because he required the lesson in it: through thick and thin.
That night, Matt fell asleep on the sofa, awaiting Roland and Jarms. He woke to Roland sitting at the foot of it patting his ankle.
“You can’t die,” Matt said.
“I can,” Roland said. “It’s going to be easy.”
Matt blinked. “Where’s Jarms?”
“Town,” Roland said. He rose for the kitchen. Matt listened to the rattle of the coffeepot and the water in the basin, then Roland’s steps return. Together, they sat and listened to the coffee on the burner plink and boil.
“You’ll keep on with Horace? I doubt he’ll get through it so easy.”
Matt nodded.
“I got your word on that?”
He nodded again.
“He’s a good man isn’t he?” Roland asked. “I mean despite the evidence.”
“He is,” Matt said.
“I wish his mother could see him,” Roland said.
“You miss her?” Matt asked.
“No,” Roland said, “but Horace does.”
Roland rose and poured two cu
ps. Matt sipped the coffee. It was brown as axle grease and strong, how Roland always brewed it.
“You know what the shame of it is?” Roland asked. “He thinks she doesn’t count, just because she wasn’t here.”
Roland drank his cup down and went to the kitchen for the pot. Matt set his hand over his cup.
“How can you sleep at all, with so much of that in you?” he asked.
Roland winked. “Guess sleep don’t have the charm it once did,” he told him.
•
DECEMBER DUSTED THE COUNTRY WHITE. Little was left for Matt but the cattle and they barely filled his mornings. Roland bundled himself on the porch, and Matt filled him with hot coffee and donuts Roland had taught him to fry and glaze with corn syrup. He idled the remaining time in old storybooks Roland loaned him, in which he underlined words in pencil and waited for the old man to rouse from his naps to inquire their meaning. Roland had Jarms deliver a dictionary from town, but Matt had no patience for that kind of search.
Roland began coughing up his insides not too much later. All night, he’d be racked with jags and spit into an old chamber pot he kept under his bed. The metal clanged. In the morning, he emptied the green and yellow contents behind the house. Matt had offered to perform the chore but Roland would have none of it.
He had lost his weight and his color. Occasionally, he opened his pocketknife and shaved a fingernail to occupy himself. Matt stayed quiet while he’d finished off the one hand and started the other. The old man barely had the wind to walk to the barn, and he had surrendered chores. He accepted the worsening of his condition well, retiring to the porch, breathing the cold, clean air. Even days, he fought coughing. Matt had seen him swoon, when it hit him bad, but afterward he’d seem better for it. Sometimes Matt would glance from his book to see the old man asleep with frost in his hair.
Together, they would tarry on the porch for the few times the headlights bounced over the country and turned at the mailbox when Jarms had tired of town and gambling. The trips to the girl’s place were fewer, then ceased for good. His debts mounted, growing rumor and substantiated by Garrett, who visited to attempt to bend them to his reason. He still refused to part with the grain money and Roland didn’t argue.
The Hour of Lead Page 17