“I wished I’d gone,” Matt said.
“You did,” she told him. “You used to come get me right after.”
She worked her coffee and spoke nothing more. Matt listened to her breaths. He saw her lingering, owning the words to soothe him but not the sentiment. After nineteen years, Matt had encountered her once again on the porch of his mother’s house. The evening was soundless, not even cattle lowed in the pastures. Old Peach was silent, just foundations and burned wood. A deer herd explored the streets and browsed lawns. Matt peered toward the knoll where he’d buried Luke and his father.
“Them roses must be hardy.”
“I tended them,” she said. “I lived here.”
Here?”
“With your mother,” Wendy said.
This stopped Matt.
“My Lord,” he said. “You took care of her and the place.”
She nodded.
“I can’t leave this baby,” he said.
“I wouldn’t expect so,” Wendy replied.
The Justice of the Peace was an old deputy. In lieu of a pension, he earned fifty dollars a month to arrange the burials of those too poor for the trimmings and marrying folks too godless for church, he stared at the ruffian before him and the poor woman and child he would marry him to.
“You want to do this?” he asked the woman.
Wendy didn’t reply. The land was gone, but her father would invest in another business in a town on higher ground. Considering what the government offered on the ranches, a business would fetch enough to start clean, with inventory. In time, Wendy would likely manage the enterprise. Her father trusted her. But that path required a retreat, if not stated implied, and she did not yet have surrender in her. It was poor rationale for marrying a man but it was hers.
“The country is drowning but that don’t mean you got to marry the first deadbeat that asks, child or not. I can find you work and a bunk.”
“I do,” Wendy said.
“I haven’t asked yet.”
“Well, when you do, that’s my answer.”
The man delivered the vows and they repeated the parts meant for each and signed a certificate.
As for Matt, his mother had abandoned her land, which was only a memory anyway; the money for it was in her purse, where it should be, he figured. Like an animal, he reverted to instinct. He worked through the mountains the next three days. The snow was four feet high in places and travel slow. Queenie bounded gamely through the drifts for an hour but eventually abandoned them for better prospects. As they climbed, the tree shapes turned poorly drawn cones, abstractions of trees as if snow had commandeered the Earth’s contours, scooping and piling horizons with the wind before freezes until the thaws clotted them into new forms. Twice the horses stepped into deep hollows beneath the hoary cloak. The wish of the horses’ hooves punching through the snowpack and the creak of their saddles and possibles and the occasional clang of the bridles against their metal hoops were all that punctuated the silence. Matt remained on the glean for a sign he could recall or a site to weather night. She followed like a tired soldier. He couldn’t guess what she thought, so he made no attempt.
Camps, they rolled themselves together under heavy blankets in a snow cave, the child between them like a stove heating two rooms. That Wendy remained mornings when he woke and stoked the fire and boiled the coffee still confounded him. He guessed she’d set off any time and a thing in him welcomed her parting; her silence, agreeable at almost any other time in his life, served to remind him only now of the stilled voices in his head.
They discovered a Forest Service hut for the summer fire watch. Inside were a stove and a single bed frame. The child fussed and Wendy opened a leather satchel and offered her a frilly shirt. She fisted the lace and rubbed it in her hands and finally chewed it to a grey mush. Evening, Matt returned with an elk’s hindquarters. The rest he had lashed to a high tree bough to deny the coyotes a share. A half jug of milk remained, and Matt fed the baby while Wendy turned the elk steaks, substituting a tin plate for a skillet. Frying the meat evenly was impossible so what they ate was both seared and raw, and the black blood slid down their chins as if they were animals ten thousand years before when fire was as much a threat as a boon.
Wendy reclined on their pallet and gazed at a gap where the mud hadn’t stuck between the log walls. Matt stood and undressed himself. He bent himself and knelt at her side. She lifted her hands to fend him off, then stared at them there. She shook her head in surrender and undressed.
Matt saw her privates under him, just a hair-covered mouth swallowing his own makings. He felt like the air had thinned. Wendy’s eyes closed and her face clenched. She whimpered. After, Matt dressed and stood sentry outside, staring at the moon. He wondered if he could ever touch a person without busting them open.
The baby began a wet hack the second week. Matt hooked his little finger into her tiny throat and dragged green phlegm from her. When she went feverish, Wendy employed cold rags and steamed water, but it did little good.
“Are you going to let us die?” Wendy asked. She needed him like food. She’d taken his name and his watery seed not for what she felt or even what she remembered of him, but for his presence. He could find food and keep a fire. He could frighten others. It wasn’t desire blocking her way to Matt, but it did not move her his direction either. The mistake of the boy embarrassed her and it had worn a track into her memory.
“Would you like it better if I did?”
She smiled. He had returned her faithlessness with his own. He commenced to prepare the horses and after a time, she disappeared into the cabin to wrap the baby. They rode that night into the village of Kettle Falls. The ferry was closed and they forded a narrow place below the kettles the Indians scaffolded for the salmon run. Their wet clothes froze to them as soon as they left the river. Matt had tied Angel into a bundle and strapped her to his back, which kept her dry. The doctor’s wife answered the door. The doctor put a plastic tent over the child and a machine pumped treated steam into it. Three days later, Angel was well enough for travel and they headed to the coulee and work.
And now he had work, but little more. Wendy offered him the baby, now four months old. He took her and dropped his face close and allowed her tiny hand to tap it. Her eyes blinked at him like he was the sky. She rarely cried; Wendy often cited her worth on such matters. Matt figured it differently. Crying did no good; it was wasted time. The child was only being smart.
“I don’t know what to do,” Matt said. “I got no idea.”
“Me neither,” she told him.
The next night, straying rounders insulted each other with bawdy language outside his tent. Matt tolerated it until a tall fellow with legs thin as a kildeer’s pissed on the canvas. Two steps and Matt tore the tent flap open and two more and he was on the man before he buttoned his trousers. The rounder’s cheekbone broke with the first blow and the blood warmed Matt’s hands. A second cost the man an eye socket and a third a half-dozen teeth. The man’s companions pinned Matt’s arms, but he wrestled loose, throwing two into a ragged locust. Half a dozen more were required to end the beating. The rounder lay on the cold ground, pants still undone, walleyed as a pike. Matt had split two other lips and broken a nose. No one spoke. Together, his cohorts carried their man off. Matt returned to his pallet. Angel cried and Wendy tended her.
An hour later a Bureau security officer opened the tent flap. He held a notebook.
“What’d he do to instigate this?” the man asked.
Matt shrugged. “He’s got no manners,” he told the man. The man wrote the answer on his pad and nodded to himself.
“Nothing else?”
Matt shook his head.
“Well, it’s a dangerous world for the discourteous,” the man replied.
30
NO HOUSES WERE TO BE had in town. A weedy field beyond B Street sat unused, though, and Matt pilfered pallets and gleaned salvageable plywood sheets from the scrapped forms. When he had eno
ugh, he began a wooden foundation and, after, framed, quilted the plywood scraps into a square floor. He hijacked the sheets he found nearly whole for walls and sawed one hole in the front and stapled it over with clear plastic. Nothing anywhere was sturdy enough for a roof beam, so he settled on draping tent canvas over a two-by-four frame. A scrapped Franklin stove from a dump kept heat after he welded the back plate and strung new pipe.
He presented the lodge to Wendy hoping she would be relieved to escape the community tents, but her response was unenthusiastic even when he unveiled the washbasin he’d pilfered from the Bureau surplus. Each day, Matt rose early and carried the day’s water from a pump a half-mile away. He repeated the tasks daily. Some mornings, when the early hour turned particularly bright with frost or pungent with bloom or the coulee flattened the dawn to a hard red line and the liquid light arced and sprayed from it over the shabby town and the vacant lot in which he and his family resided, he ruminated upon the progress of lives. His own appeared a thrown stone; he had no idea the arm that directed it. Its path remained invisible to those without his history. And rather than concluding on some dirt road or resting beneath a crag’s shadow with several hundred similar stones—the former constant, and the latter at least among companions—he was, instead, in a lake or river, descending invisibly, the only evidence of his passage ripples wrinkling the water. A similar description might apply to his wife: the sweep and innocence of it, her muffled fall and slow descent at the mercy of the current and gravity. Some moments the notion threatened to turn philosophy or a resigned sort of religion. He was content to be at the will of a greater force, whether it be nature or fate or providence or gravity.
The spring warmed and, for a while, the weather was pleasant, but no trees shaded the hovel, and when in May an early week of summer descended, the tenthouse was stifling. Matt bought ice by the block and set it whole in an army surplus footlocker to keep the food from spoiling. By summer, Wendy was soaking the child’s clothes in the cold pools. She herself went about in undergarments and doused her head with a water glass at regular intervals.
Evenings when Matt returned, he and Wendy undid the tent flaps for the breezes that proceeded up and down the coulee each night. The three of them perched upon shipping crates Matt fabricated into crude furniture and enjoyed the cooling evening. Matt’s white T-shirt glowed in the setting sun. He began to construct a hobbyhorse from the shelter scraps. Nothing to admire, but he curved it enough Angel could boot the stirrups and gallop. In the meantime, Wendy stitched army surplus blankets into pajamas and purchased discounted fabric bolts to cut shirts and blouses and trousers. Light flooded through the plastic into the room and warmed her and the girl during day. Angel turned circles in the glow as sunshine fell on her as lazily as rain.
Early in June, Wendy recognized she had become pregnant. She applied the early hours each day to washing and hanging clothes upon the rope Matt tied between the shack corner and a spindly birch. By nine, sweat dappled her blouse; the cheap fabric clung at her arms and chest and, when it was past tolerance, she would collect Angel from a cool place in the morning shade and drag her in a rusted wagon to the city park.
The willows cut the sun a little and she had discovered a grassy place under a piece of basalt that offered shade most of the afternoon. At the entrance, the county erected a cinder block lavatory, which included a shower. Wendy undressed the girl and together they showered two or three times a day. Angel danced and Wendy sang “The Ballad of Bonny and Clyde” or “The Old Gray Mare.”
Afterwards, they dressed again and ate sandwiches and traded lemonade in a thermos. Often other children joined them with mothers, some doting, some so distant they hardly noticed their charges. Angel remained content to entertain herself. Wendy had struck up conversations, but most withered into graceless silences. Maybe years could pass in the same way.
Angel drew circles in the dirt. Over and over, she followed the same track, trying to make it good. Wendy reclined in the shade with a book. She felt reading a secret luxury, one she kept so because it was a frivolity. She snuck books like Matt’s mother had drinks, hiding them all over the house, taking to their clean pages only when she’d put Angel down or when Matt worked the late shifts. It was over a novel she made her first acquaintance. The woman’s name was Ardith and the book Appointment at Samara. They talked of John O’Hara and Katherine Porter and Edna Ferber. An hour of talk passed without Wendy’s notice; to lose oneself was suddenly liberating. She gazed at Ardith, who was smiling—she most times seemed to be on the edge of laughter.
Angel kept in a large oak’s shade. Her mouth straightened. That was her father in her, or perhaps her mother. Her womb had never carried Angel and the girl seemed to know it in that animal certainty that children possess. The thought embittered her, but she couldn’t restrain herself as her baby approached. Wendy rubbed her belly and felt the child rising to meet her.
“I so enjoyed being pregnant,” Ardith said. Ardith’s sleeping infant lay between them. Wendy reached across him and took Ardith’s hand. She lifted it and set it over her tight stomach. Ardith rubbed it softly. They sat like that a long time in the quiet, until finally Ardith gathered her son to leave.
“Come with me,” Ardith said.
Wendy nodded. She and Angel followed Ardith across the park to her car in ragged line. Ardith opened the door and Angel piled in. Inside the car, the wind riffled Wendy’s blouse and blew her face dry. Ardith halted the car at a split-level house, with the grass neatly trimmed. Inside, a swamp cooler chilled the house. They put their faces in front of the vents. Angel giggled and spoke a broken word into the air whir. Ardith ran water into the bathroom tub. She offered Wendy a towel as thick as her pillow.
“Take as long as you want,” Ardith told her and shut the door.
The water was fragrant with rose petals. Suds whorled near the spigot and lifted from the water. Wendy touched them. The temperature was cool and it surprised her until she considered the weather. It seemed a bath could be about more than getting clean. She undid her worn blouse and trousers, unrolled her stockings and stepped into the tub. On her knees in front of the spigot, she drank, then lay back. The water climbed past her ears, stopping sounds. She thought nothing and wondered at the relief it brought her.
Ardith dropped a drink for her on the tub’s edge. It was fortified cola, full enough of whiskey that her head lightened. She remained a long while. The window light had burned enough to know late afternoon had descended when she finally forced herself to rise and dry. She noticed a second drink and her clothes missing. She rifled the drawers and the hamper, but they were nowhere. A new outfit with tags lay on the counter. She sipped the drink and stood naked and dried with a plush towel. The clothes seemed of the same material. She touched them and realized they were a gift. Underneath, she saw fresh underwear and a brassiere and even stockings. She dressed slowly and with great care. Outside the door was a pair of new sandals.
The living room was still cool, like the bath. The mahogany buffet held china and the thin shelves tiny Hummels. A picture of a mountain hung upon one wall and a gramophone lined a cabinet. Wendy caught her reflection in a long foyer mirror. She appeared for a moment like this could be her house, save the stunned expression on her face and the raggedy little girl who had moved across the room to see what the woman she knew as her mother found so compelling.
31
LATE AUGUST OF 1942, IT rained a week entire. Each morning Wendy rose to a mist draped upon the river. The ground turned dark and rich like fresh wheat country, the weeds silver with dew. She regarded it with a pleasure rare in the bone-dry summer. The weight of the child stretched her abdomen and she made water nearly every hour in the tarped outbuilding Matt constructed. Once, upon seeing Wendy’s T-shirt rise, Matt inquired about touching it. She’d not allowed it. He said nothing, and she wondered again about the womb that had carried Angel before.
The girl slept fitfully, cutting molars. Her cries woke them two or three time
s before each dawn. Matt attempted to soothe her with a bottle, but she usually spat the nipple because it irritated her gums. He soaked a rag in cold water to help her gnaw tooth through gum, but it did little good. Wendy finally rose from their pallet and took the child from him. Matt watched as she whispered songs to her and Angel calmed. She rocked, and the baby cooed. He emptied the bottle and wrung the rag over a pail, then lay on their bed behind Wendy where he could see Angel’s face. Her eyes had closed and her hair dampened with sweat. Wendy hummed, tabbing it a little victory. She had wrested a bit of the child for herself.
Matt’s routine mornings commenced with building his lunch and arranging his family’s breakfast: for Angel, cereal and fruit, and a soft boiled egg for Wendy. Yet Wendy woke the following dawn to their makeshift kitchen clean but with no meal. Matt returned late that evening. The Bureau offered overtime and he was recruited first because he finished the pressing jobs in less time than others. He had transferred from the buckets when the ironworkers required his size to sledge tie rod. He was exhausted the first week, but cleaned out by the third. At the end of the fourth, no one could stay with him. The labors creased his arms and chest with muscle and sinew.
Late, Matt pieced together dinner in the dark house from what they had left him, and warmed a kettle and washed in the bathtub. Too big for the house, he’d put it outside. Through the plastic window, Wendy saw steam meet the cool air. He and Wendy had not been with one another since she announced her pregnancy. He perched at the tub’s edge a long while following, but she was asleep when he finally lay down and so was the child.
The next day he lingered for overtime again and the one following the same. He added weekend shifts, as they paid double. Weeks pushed the year into autumn; Wendy felt rent from him and all that was outside herself, and she realized the sensation was not all that different than when he was present. Each day, she and Angel sat and Wendy read aloud from a box of books she purchased at a library sale. Angel often as not hauled the book behind her while Wendy performed her chores. Seeing the child move toward her was satisfying. She had constructed an ally.
The Hour of Lead Page 20