Whiskey When We're Dry

by John Larison

  I said without thinking, “Noah done hit a yote. Looked square to my eye. Five hundred yards easy.”

  Noah turned to me. He could’ve corrected my words.

  Pa studied the slope. “Where in particular?”

  I pointed to the place on the ridge where I took my shot. Pa pulled off his hat and wiped the sweat from his forehead. He spat. “You been shooting regular when I’m not around?”

  He was asking Noah. I thought about the lead I’d sent into this countryside.

  “Gonna do it again?”

  “No, sir.” Noah’s answer was but a whisper.

  Pa brushed clean his hat and put it back on his head. “Girl, you best get on laundry. Son, you go dig a hole.”

  “What do we need a hole for?”

  “We don’t. Once it’s as deep as your naval, put the dirt back. Think about your wrong while you’s at it.”

  From the open doorway I saw Pa riding along the ridge, up where I had missed the coyote. I was troubled by how easy I had lied to my pa. Seemed a lie should burn you on the way out.

  I set about boiling water for the laundry. I wasn’t done stoking up the stove when Pa come back holding that coyote by the hind legs, a bloody swath of hide at its middle and a string of maroon from its nose.

  “Boy!” he called, happy now.

  Noah come around the corner with the shovel and saw that dog. By then I was standing in the sun. Noah and I shared a look of bewilderment.

  Pa hit him on the back. “Nice work, son. That was an uphill three seventy-five. And this ain’t an easy wind neither. You done hit something for once! I’m still mad as hell, and you shouldn’t have done what you done, but that don’t mean . . . Well, maybe there’s still hope for you anyhow.”

  Noah could’ve said it was my shot but he didn’t. He didn’t say nothing. He just looked at that dog dangling at Pa’s side. It might’ve been the closest Pa ever come to saying he was proud of Noah. I’m glad he kept that one for himself.

  “Well, best get to skinning him down. And cut it small, girl. Remember yote got a chew to it.” He looked at the sun. “I best get on if I’m to catch that bastard dentist.”

  Pa rode off and I was left with the fact. I done hit my mark with the Sharps! Pure luck, but that didn’t matter. There comes a holy rightness after a bull’s-eye, and the first one is a downright revelation.

  * * *

  —

  I took that glee to Ingrid, my mare.

  Ingrid was broke about the time I was ready to ride. Noah joked we come up sharing a tit. We was like siblings in some manner, reckon. We was the only two girls out there minus the heifers and Ol’ Sis, Ingrid’s ma.

  She was a pinto, chestnut and white, but smaller than her mother, a stout thirteen hands. Her sire was an Indian pony and he blessed her with dark hooves, which are harder than light hooves and so less prone to cracking on rock. She was strong in the hindquarters and quick as a bear on the uphill. We didn’t always get along on account she was stubborn like me but we understood each other.

  When the work was done we roamed. We both liked the same places, the antelope meadows on the mountainside, the thin ridges where falcons perched, the hollow along a creek bend. In spring wildflowers spread their blankets across meadows and we could ride all day without hitting an end. It was a land between stories then and when Ingrid and me come together we wrote our own.

  I rarely had to rope Ingrid or hobble her, even on the trail in the years to follow. If I had me an apple or a handful of huckleberries I’d give her half. If she wanted to go someplace she’d invite me along. She wouldn’t leave me no sooner than I’d leave her. We knew each other’s minds, and she knew I carried feed if I was wearing a smile.

  The day I hit the yote, she whinnied when she saw me coming. I delivered carrots from the garden and told her the whole thing. She chewed and bent to lip fallen pieces from the dirt and then raised her head to look eye to eye with me. She half blinked. She put her nose to my cheek and drew a breath.

  That was the way between us. We could just stand together, without a chore.

  * * *

  —

  In time Noah and Pa quit talking but to fight. It grew through the winter. The next April I found my brother in the barn holding a bedroll thick with a winter’s coat. He was sixteen. “You can’t leave.”

  “Who says I’m leaving?” Noah took a plug and offered me one, so I knew I had him pegged. He was generous when trying to change the subject. Noah spat. “He is dim and mean and I’m afraid of what I might do the next time he gets stupid on that syrup. The Lord don’t intend a father to be dim.”

  “He ain’t dim.”

  “He is, and you’ll see it your own self. Dim and selfish and mean as hell. And a fool for his syrup.”

  I spat out the plug and swore off tobacco forever. “Don’t leave,” I said with heart, on account I knew this might be my one chance to keep us together. “Brother, don’t leave me.”

  “You’ll be fine. You always pick him anyhow.”

  I took hold his bedroll. He held it between us. “I pick you.”

  He looked on me and I could tell he hadn’t thought of it from my eyes. He crossed the barn to the tack wall.

  “I pick you, brother. Please.”

  I must’ve convinced him, or he was shy of hitting the trail alone, because come supper, Noah was still with us.

  Might’ve been better if he’d left, in truth.

  * * *

  —

  Over the next year they had some good days, but mostly their arguing turned to hollering. They took to moving about each other, one near the house, the other out on the range. At supper it would be me and Pa. Noah come around after to get his. Noah started going to town and staying overnight. When he come back, he hid his eyes from Pa. He didn’t look down at the man’s scoldings like he had as a boy. Now when Pa lectured him, my big brother looked off in the distance like he wasn’t even hearing.

  On the night of their last fight I was the one who said they had to sit together. It was supper time and Noah was fixing to go to town. There was heavy clouds toward the west. “It ain’t right for kin to eat apart. Ma would say so, so I’m saying so.”

  Pa come to the table first. Noah pulled out his bench without a word. He put his hat on his knee and took out his knife for cutting the meat. He checked its blade. Noah was a man now and about to leave his home for all time. He poured himself milk.

  I reckon Noah was intending to pick a fight, that’s why he brought up the fence. He said we needed barbed wire to police the boundary between us and the neighbors. The Mormons was doing well for themselves, and now they had more land and a bigger herd and their cattle kept wandering up our way and eating our graze and drinking from our lake. With the drought the lake was shrinking each year, and we got to worrying it might dry up entire. We wasn’t keen on sharing our family water with Mormon cattle.

  This would’ve been our first fence. We heard about them in town regular now. The merchants was always trying to sell you barbed wire. Great rolls of it sat under tarpaulins behind the store. Noah repeated what the salesman at the mercantile had said: “It ain’t yours if it ain’t fenced.”

  Pa let his spoon fall into his bowl.

  Noah waited. “Ain’t you gonna say nothing?”

  Pa looked on him. His voice was slow as syrup. “Words don’t do shit. That’s what you ain’t learned yet. You will. Trust me. World turns on blood. Just hope you learn that an easy way, since you working so hard not to learn it from me.”

  “I got more than words,” Noah said.

  “What you know about this business you learned your own damn self and wasn’t taught by me? Or in the fat-chewing at the mercantile? What fool believes the wisdom of a salesman, huh? You’s in a man’s britches, but that’s about all.”

  “You’s too dim to know that you dim.�
��

  “What’d you say?”

  Noah finished his milk. “Sheriff Younger is getting a fence.”

  “That ain’t what you said. Younger ain’t all he thinks he is. You ain’t neither.”

  “Younger got a spread three times the size of this one. Everybody got a spread bigger than this one. What do you think you is? From looking around, ain’t much of a cattleman.” Noah said it but he couldn’t look Pa in the eye when he done so.

  I knew Noah always believed Pa should be the big rancher in our valley. His heat rose from disappointment.

  Pa pushed back from the table. “Boy, you best—”

  “I ain’t a boy,” Noah said. “I’m seventeen. Maybe if you put that ‘medicine’ aside a time you might actually make something of this place, ever consider that?”

  Pa’s face dawned red. “Don’t talk about my medicine.”

  “You a drunkard for the stuff. Look at you.”

  Pa’s bowl slid across the table and into Noah’s lap. Golden stock I’d spent the day making. Noah was up and back from the table and wearing a stranger’s face. I knew enough to get out their way.

  Noah was full size by then, taller than Pa. His beard wasn’t in yet but he was strong in his shoulders. When the cattle had gone to sale that autumn Pa bought Noah a Colt of his very own with some of the money even though there wasn’t no money extra if you counted it. I know Pa wanted a pistol like that for his own self and he could’ve handed one of his down to Noah and taken the new one, but he didn’t.

  Noah had gotten himself into a fair number of rumbles on his trips to town. I had tended to his swollen knuckles and split brows and so I knew my brother was no stranger to fists. I had no doubt Pa would take him, it was only a matter of how much damage might be done before that certain outcome. I went for the aid supplies.

  Pa seized Noah by the collar and drug him across the table. They went down in a clatter of boots and wood and the table come down after them. The stew was lost to the dirt. A leg of the table broke clean off.

  Pa was on top and drove his fists into Noah’s chest. The chest is nowhere to wear down your fists, but he couldn’t hit his boy’s face. Noah rolled him quick.

  He clocked Pa with an elbow. There was fumbling of arms and grunts both ways and then Noah clocked him again with that elbow. It was a dirty trick, one he’d picked up in an alley. Brother got one hand pressing on Pa’s cheek, and the other coming back to hit. I saw the blow would be square to the temple.

  The punch come down on Pa’s head with a hollow crack, and then Pa went soft under Noah. It was done. A lesson in how quick this life can change.

  Noah stood. He tripped on Pa’s limp legs and fell hard onto the floor. He righted himself and looked back upon our old man who still had yet to move. He shook out the fist that done the damage.

  Noah’s eyes was full of water now and he wiped the tears before they could run. He stepped back until the wall caught him. Pa still hadn’t moved but he was breathing.

  I shook him. “Pa? Please. Pa, hear me. Pa?” I turned my heat on Noah. “What’d you do? What’d you go and hit him for?”

  Pa moaned and sat partway up. Then sank back. I could see his eyes wasn’t right. There wasn’t much blood but he was hurt all the same. I put my hand under his head to soften the ground. I took my apron and put it under his neck. He looked up at the ceiling and blinked. He looked at me but I don’t reckon he saw me.

  Noah turned away. He seemed to be taken by something then, taken somewhere else. “Help me,” I begged.

  Instead he seized his new Colt and belted on the holster. He set about grabbing things from the cabin, his sleeping things, his coat. He found his knife upon the floor and put it back to his belt. He did all this without looking at us. He went to great effort to avoid turning his eyes toward where his family lie on the floor.

  It was dark out and windy and not much in the way of moonlight, but he put on his hat and his riding jacket and pushed open the door. He had his saddlebags slung over his shoulder. That bedroll under an arm. He stopped there and turned and his eyes found mine. Noah said to me in a whisper, “I am sorry, sister.”

  When the door fell shut between us, I heard his feet on gravel outside, quick and away.

  He come out the barn at a full run. The last I seen of my brother for five and a half years was him in moonlight, leaning forward into the speed. Around the bend and only the sound of hooves disappearing.

  Pa’s eye was filling with blood when he got up and sat before the fire. With some shaky effort he packed a pipe. The table was still overturned and I saw then one of the bowls was broke. I set about cleaning up.

  Pa finally said, “Where’s my boy?”

  I brought a wet rag to his swollen temple. I put my hand to the center of his back and said, “Does it hurt?”

  “What happened?” Pa muttered. He asked it like a boy asks his mother a question.

  I sat beside him. I leaned my head on his shoulder. He didn’t put his arm around me like typical. He only looked into the guts of the fire. “It’ll be okay, Pa. I promise.”

  * * *

  —

  When I woke in the morning the house was empty and the door was ajar. The dawn light was coming in orange. The Sharps was missing from its pegs on the wall. I rose and walked out and saw Pa on his horse as he rode the last yards over the horizon to the north, the opposite direction of Noah’s tracks.

  I hoped Pa had taken the day to check on the cattle and maybe hunt up some new meat. I hoped this meant he awoke well and intended to ride off his heat. Pa used to ride off his heat regular, sometimes twice in a day.

  Ingrid and me took a long roundabout that morning, an aimless and fast ride. Speed always set the two of us right. Ingrid wanted to ride to a marsh where the mud smelled like cheese and so we did. It was a place Noah liked to hunt for deer, he come often to sit on the hill in wait. I took off her saddle once there and she heaved over on her side and then her back and twisted, her feet bent toward the sky. She lay on her side breathing. I took a perch on a rock.

  Ingrid rolled and come to her feet. She walked near me and put her nose to my neck. Mud dripped from her mane and slid in gritty sheets down her legs.

  “You reckon he coming back?” My mind was on my brother.

  She nudged me and I put my arm up under her chin and knuckled right where she liked. She huffed, and then nipped at the nearby flowers.

  * * *

  —

  When Pa come home that evening he rode into the barn and turned his mare out, and when he come up to the step he didn’t ask nothing about his boy. There was a bulb of purple on his temple and his lip was so swollen he had trouble spatting. There was spittle down his shirt on account. The blood in his eye had turned brown.

  “Howdy, Pa.”

  “Dear.”

  He sat down beside me and patted my knee. The bottom lid of that hurt eye hung low. This wasn’t my pa’s face.

  “You feeling right?”

  “Found them bulls near the forks.”

  “Them critters do like to travel,” I said. It was his own words fed back. When he didn’t finish the thought, I did. “They was buffalo once, before men got their hands on them.”

  He shrugged.

  I asked him of the changing weather, when the rains might stop for summer. He didn’t offer much for answers. When I served up our supper, Pa said without looking, “Good grub.”

  “Thanks, Pa.”

  It was still light when he poured a mouthful of syrup and laid back in his bed. He still had on his riding clothes. I had never seen him in bed in his dusty old riding clothes.

  “Night, darling.”

  “Night, Pa.”

  Pa got to snoring in that particular manner brought on by the medicine. I put his quilt about him. I tidied up some and then put on a pot of water and bathed my face
in it.

  In the darkness after, I allow myself a few tears.

  * * *

  —

  Pa and me spent those summer evenings sitting on the porch after supper and watching down the road even when the thunderheads hid the stars and lightning sparked on the ridges. Neither of us said what we was waiting on or even that we was waiting. We didn’t speak his name. I was afraid to say it. “Want your medicine, Pa?”

  I took to helping him with it. I was helping him a lot now. Helping meant we shared something.

  * * *

  —

  One night like so many others I poured a tin cup of the black syrup. He took it and swallowed and sat back and shut his eyes to this world. I thought he was on his way to sleep. Then he said out the yonder, “We’ll get you married off.”

  I had just started bleeding. It had come on sudden as such things is wont to do. I awoke one morning to the shock of it and Pa told me to clean up and put a rag in my drawers and he saddled up Ol’ Sis and Ingrid and we rode on down to the Mormon’s house. The Mormon ma had answered and they exchanged some private words and she looked at me sidelong and nodded. She put an arm around me and took me in the house and led me to the wash bin so she could keep on working as we talked. Her children played in the field and her eyes flashed over them. She explained God’s purpose for my body and told me how to manage the flow. She had said, “This is your burden as a woman. This is your privilege. God entrusts us with His holiest work.” When I left, she put her hand to my shoulder and squeezed.

  Now I said to Pa, “What use do I got for a husband?”

  His eyes opened. The left one hung low as it always done after the blow. I could see the effect of the medicine on his gaze. “You’ve missed some womanly opportunities in this life. I done the best I knowed how but I’m failing you, girl. It’s time you move from me. I’ll just make you old.”