Matt’s chest ached. The blood slowed, but it soaked his shirt. He worried he’d lose consciousness. The baby was crying again. It would need fed soon.
“It’s more mine than yours. It was my idea.”
Matt said nothing.
Jarms said, “You’ll starve it.”
“I can boil milk,” Matt said.
“That’s not what I meant.”
Matt propped himself on the axe handle. He nearly toppled when Jarms pulled it from under him. With one blow, Jarms busted open his own knee. Two more and his leg was nearly off, blood emptying under him. He again took a swipe and caught his other leg mid-thigh. He hacked through the muscle, but the bone was too thick. He gave that up and whacked off his left hand. It skittered across the floor.
“Look at it go,” he said.
He was swamped in his own blood. His busted legs dangled. They both sat and listened to the baby cry. “I recall when I was a little guy,” Jarms said. “Just two or three. My mother pushing the hair out of my eyes to get me sleeping. After a while I used to fake bad dreams just for her to do that.” Jarms lifted his bad hand, then looked at the stump that was left. He shifted himself so he could use the other to imitate his mother’s kindness. Pretty soon, he died, hand upon his brow.
Later that day, Matt bandaged himself and built another coffin, one big enough for two grown men. He buried Roland and Horace Jarms together under the tree, all the while listening to the water running and the baby next to him, breathing. After he was finished he carved her name in the tree and his own, too.
•
WENDY STOOD ON THE PORCH as Matt approached and did not move, even when he dismounted. He climbed the steps and she realized he packed a child in his coat like a fresh wound. He looked to have that, too. Blood streaked his jacket and hands.
The baby had awakened. It turned at her approach. It was Matt’s, she could see. There was the same bewilderment in its eyes.
PART THREE
When Figures show their royal Front—
And Mists—are carved away,
Behold the Atom—I preferred—
To all the lists of Clay
—EMILY DICKINSON
from poem 664
28
LUCKY JEFFERSON, THE LINCOLN COUNTY sheriff, took his smoke break at half time on the high school gym’s back steps. Davenport was down five and hadn’t shot a free throw all night. Through the window, Lucky and a dozen or so locals listened to the coach swear and kick lockers. In the morning, they would gather for coffee and determine whether he needed to be fired. Opinion was offered and assayed at the café by twelve farmers with no standing other than land. Once figured, though, it was as sure as yesterday’s weather.
A new man silently joined the group. Lucky had sheriffed the county twenty years and it was his business to recognize anyone in it. The man stood in the smoke and waited, neither speaking or spoken to. Lucky finished his cigarette and lit another. This coach ended his harangue with a prayer. He lacked the gall to ask God for victory so they prayed in silence. The temperature had nose-dived to near zero, and, huddled in their flannel jackets and cardigan sweaters like children waiting for the school bus cold mornings, the farmers looked as weak and fragile as their years made them. Warm air washed over Lucky’s face as they stepped inside for the second half.
“Keep Old Dan off another day, boys,” Lucky told the farmers. They didn’t reply, but he knew each would recall his words before sleep when truths leak into your head you’d spent your waking hours holding back. They were going to die and sooner rather than later. Lucky pulled on his second cigarette and admired the orange ember cook paper and tobacco. The new man hadn’t moved. It was cold and clear and Lucky could make out the constellations. They were all that was left of his mother’s teachings, stars in the sky that a bunch of ancients thought made pictures. Inside, applause swelled and ebbed as the ball changed hands, punctured by a whistle blast or a yell conducted by the pretty girls who led cheers. The man remaining outside appeared unfazed. He had clout; it was clear the way he carried himself, all shoulders and chest and those slow, deliberate strides that make you hear each footfall.
“Goddammit, state your business,” Lucky told him.
Lucky watched a grin slowly stretch the stranger’s face. “I want to offer you some work. I want you to find a man. You have a reputation for such matters.”
Lucky lit another cigarette. At least it would warm his lungs. He inhaled and let out some smoke and watched it disappear in the cold air. The stranger unlatched a valise and removed a folder. “Name’s Lawson.”
“Local?”
“A long while back he was. He murdered my brother. Down around Colfax. Before the war. I don’t have any photographs, but there’s one in your papers from when he was young. Look up 1918.”
Lucky shook his head. It was an old, cold trail. Every county had two or three murders unsolved. One sat on his own desk. A boy hung from a roof beam. The father swore it was hoboes, but the boy’s pocket still held a walletful of money. There was nothing to lead him. No witnesses. No old grudges. Just grieving parents and a swinging body.
Lucky gazed at the man. He had pluck keeping in this weather with shirtsleeves. But pluck wasn’t what disturbed Lucky: it was that sickening feeling he was being steered.
“Why don’t you find him yourself?”
The man shifted to face him. “I’d enjoy the looking too much. You get my age you don’t want to enjoy anything much. Makes time go too fast.”
Lucky chuckled at that. The night was still as could be. “How much?” he asked.
“Twenty thousand,” he told him.
Lucky stayed quiet. Inside the feeling would return to his hands, as would the pain. He’d be up half the night with them. The man offered the folder to Lucky. Inside were some handwritten notes: general information, the kind anyone could acquire writing letters and knowing politicians. The man drummed his fingers against the cup rim, an irritating rhythm he repeated a full minute.
“You so close to this brother you let it sit twenty years before looking for justice?” Lucky shook his head. “You’re a devoted son of a bitch aren’t you.”
The man remained unrankled. “Justice has nothing to do with it.”
“Why not let sleeping dogs alone?”
The man was still staring off at the light, measuring the nothing out there. “You’ll do it. I knew it as soon as I saw you.”
•
THE BRAN IN LUCKY’S BREAKFAST the past fortnight made his bowels sluggish as a bear in January. His gut cramped and loosened, and gas swelled his colon while he sat the toilet and pressed his excrement into the bowl. It smelled rich. He reached for the pie tin on the counter and squeezed the last droppings onto it and cleaned himself up and ambled to the kitchenette with the plate. The cafe prepared a meat loaf and sliced it thin. Lucky employed his feces to bind two together, then set them on a bread slice. He covered the meat with ketchup, put another slice of bread on top, and started a second sandwich.
The jail had only six cells. The boy in the last one wore the county’s orange overalls. Lucky had assigned him to wash the squad cars in the cold afternoon. His long hair was tangled and his beard stubbled. Lately his skin had yellowed. The boy had immigrated to town with his girlfriend. They lived in the same house. Lucky had suggested alternative arrangements and the boy cursed him. Lucky brought him in for assault, and, though the charge wouldn’t stick, the judge only came through once a week and was a week behind on the docket when he did. Three weeks of shit for food and the punk would be in the hospital and Lucky would drop the charges. The other prisoners were a petty sort. Most had heisted groceries or written bad checks. One beat up his buddy with a frozen ham, which might have led to little consequence if the brawl had not occurred in the supermarket.
“I brought you some more of that restaurant food,” Lucky told the boy. “Maybe it’ll sit on your stomach better than our jailhouse slop.”
The Davenport Tim
es, a weekly, was a long walk, but he enjoyed the metal sky pressing over the white country. He was pleased to find just young Van Nostrand in the newspaper office. He’d lived in the county only a short time, but was good about making sure he published the names Lucky sent for the police blotter. Lucky sorted the bins for the year. He couldn’t recall the date, though he didn’t have to hunt long. A boy named Lawson appeared on the front page of the Christmas newspaper. “In Storm Boy, Father Missing Brother Survives” headlined the issue. It contained no pictures of the deceased, just one of a boy who’d survived and one of a young woman who was credited with his rescue. Her name appeared. He stared back at the woman in the photograph.
He recalled his mother teaching him to hunt, and the whole time him knowing it was wrong. There was a meanness in killing that made it pleasant, but she didn’t see that. To her it was just food for the table. He recalled worrying over the first rabbit he’d snared. But when he brought the animal back to his mother, she skinned it and put it in a pot to cook, the same as if he’d pulled a carrot from the garden.
He’d read a good deal before and since, but could recall nothing from his lessons about doing in a simple animal. He missed the significance, even now. Hunting season men and boys skinned deer in their driveways and sawed them to quarters for the butcher. Two or three others loitered, drinking coffee or an early beer, all pleased, none nearly as troubled. They had the luxury of eating without killing, and their kinship made him spiteful.
Someplace still in his memory, his mother hovered in the cave mouth. He’d set himself for town and escaped. On the way, he stole clothes from a line and convinced a trucker to share his boxed lunch and haul him to Canada, where he entered the military service.
In the war, Lucky tallied over fifty confirmed enemy killed, most in ordinary ways. One instance, however, found him alone in the Ardennes, looking to reattach. From a thicket, he heard snoring. He hoped he’d happened upon his comrades until he recognized their helmets. Later, they sang lullabies in German, tunes Lucky recognized. Lucky could have circled wide. Instead, he crept to their cold camp and butchered them. Steam rose from their opened necks, and, after he’d finished them, he warmed his hands over it. The day of his orders rotating him home, he donned gloves and put his fists under a tank track transport. The event pulverized the bones of his hands and delayed him in hospital long enough for his papers for the Pacific to process. But Truman sent the bomb and that was that.
Upon his return he discovered his mother had been committed to Eastern State Hospital for the insane. A speculator named Cross-field bargained for the land that included her cave, and, when he couldn’t force her to pull up stakes, called the authorities. Lucky put himself up for sheriff next election and, winning, wrote Cross-field so many tickets the man abandoned the county altogether. Lucky never called on his mother, however, and he never heard inquiry from her or the hospital.
For the most part, he’d pounded himself into a hard shape, but, in his infirm moments, he recalled Wendy’s fingers measuring and cutting his hair as if they were expert at touching him. She had worked from behind and her breasts listed into his back. His soaped hair wet his skin, and her breath, when she scrutinized her work, warmed it. In his room, tacked to the wood-paneled walls, were magazine photographs, a hundred different faces. The only thing they shared was some resemblance to her.
He had not thought of his mother’s name nor heard it in twenty years. Seeing the word in a forty-year-old newspaper rattled him. He hauled the issue to a desk with a light where he could see her better. The pages had yellowed and the pictures appeared transparent as ghosts. She was pretty, beautiful even, and the boy, well, he was just a boy.
He walked to city hall and opened the building with his master key and hunted Lawson’s paperwork. None appeared to exist, which in itself was not surprising. He had no trouble putting the woman who had taken him and his mother in to the name Lawson and recognized them as mother and son. And she had shared her house with Wendy Worden as well. Finally he found, years later in the records, a scrawled marriage certificate: Wendy Worden to Matthew L. Lawson. He lit a cigarette and chuckled. His visitor had wanted a hired hand, but this work he would have performed for free.
In his office, he called the counties in the eastern portion of the state. He spoke to deputies because at one time or another he’d antagonized each county’s sheriff with his unwillingness to extradite prisoners. Most saw law as something of a fraternity and expected assistance from their brethren. Lucky, though, wasn’t inclined toward brotherly love. Most every county knew a big man who had raised hell. Lawson’s features were plain: brown eyes, brown hair; there was little left for an edge aside from his size.
Lucky drove through town in his squad car. He pulled over a high school boy for chirping his tires. He got out of his car with his citation book, but the air was cool and crisp and the trees white with frost. The streets were small and lined with well-kept houses, lights splashed some windows, and smoke barreled from the chimneys. A black line of state highway cut through town. Cars eased over the slick road, and a yellow county truck had begun sanding. It was a nice place to live, more pleasant than most. He let the boy off with a warning, then went back and cleaned out his desk. It had been a good job, to his liking anyhow.
29
COULEE DAM WAS TWO TOWNS. One, a row of flat single-floored houses that rimmed the river’s east side, was inhabited by the engineers who conjured the sorcery required to stop a million years of river and the contractors entrusted to fashion their witchery into steel and concrete. The other, a cluttered array of canvas tents, had been hurriedly erected to house those who performed the labor.
The dam itself was busy as a hive. On both sides of the river powder monkeys drilled and blasted. Their explosions shook the coulee all hours of a day, dust and rock scattering hundreds of feet every direction. Below, loaders filled twenty-ton belly dumpers with unnaturally sheared granite slabs, which they deposited upon the riprap lining both riverbanks. On the cleared cliffs, jackhammer operators dangled by ropes a hundred feet from the top to beat the rock smooth. Drillers in a similar apparatus followed, auguring rebar and conduit into the rock to secure the structure. In the river, another crew drove enormous squared pylons into the bottom until they had constructed a watertight circle a quarter acre or so. Pumps pulled the water clear and steam shovels clawed the mud to bedrock. Then more jackhammers and rebar, and then forms, then concrete.
The quartermaster offered Matt and Wendy a blanket and sheets and assigned Matt bucket duty on a cement crew. The job consisted of waiting for the crane to dip a bucket into wet cement; he then straddled the boom cable, his feet balanced upon the bucket lip until over the pour site. The crane operator could hydraulic the bucket shut with gears, but once filled, the pressure couldn’t manage the weight and a man was required. The bucket jockey kicked the latches until the concrete fell from under him. The chore required booting both the bucket sides free at once. If not, the bucket wobbled and the man hung on one foot, or worse, dangled by his hands on the boom cable. Or, the jockey could split and end up straddling both halves. Fighting for balance swung the cable, which caused the bucket to spin or buckle.
The hand opposite Matt was named Mills, a gaunt fellow with a weathered brow and a beard that saw a razor once a week at most. A ball cap hooded his eyes, and he would screw it to his ears before each pass. They didn’t speak; even their lunches had been staggered to keep one crane in operation.
•
HIS FIRST PAYDAY, MATT DID not have time enough to draw. He saw to it that Wendy and the child were fed and down, then toted a cut log in front of the tent for a stool and started a fire. A few campfires glowed: lead men; the lines of lackeys, like Matt himself, climbed the beaten trails to Grand Coulee’s B Street. Dawn, they returned. A lantern or flashlight occasionally bobbed, leading their way, the men shadows and laughter. Some wretched. The night was like so much water, a few feet in front or behind and the rest was a mystery. It
was not unlike day in that regard.
Each man fought to his bunk, shackled to his lot. Matt had no call to lord it over them. They would wake in pain, but so would he. Alcohol wouldn’t be the source, but drinking didn’t form drunks either. Matt remained sentinel at his self-assigned post all day Saturday and through the night once more, ceasing only to fetch meals or retrieve firewood. Sunday morning, the low fog socked itself inside the coulee then burned off. Most of the men lingered in the tents even after the breakfast call. Matt listened as they groused through late morning until they emptied their whiskey jugs and resorted to concocting cocktails of gasoline and milk called Heat.
The only consistency was the river. Its hum continued despite the plans and toiling of the hundreds on its banks. Behind Matt, inside the tent, were a wife and a child. He wanted to be filled with them like the drunks with their bottle, like the channel with its river, but he was too leaky a vessel. They might fill him and fill him until they were empty and still he would be, as well. Wendy saw that and, as the months passed, kept Angel with her nights. Children loved so hard they inherited their parents’ wounds, and Wendy hoped to suture the child before she bled out.
For a while, he and Wendy sipped the hot, bitter coffee. Church bells clanged, and motors started throughout the town. Matt watched cars back from their driveways and cross the bridge downriver in procession.
“You ever go to church?” he asked Wendy.
She nodded. “For a while. I didn’t care for it and I was stubborn.”
The Hour of Lead Page 19