by John Larison
He turned to me. The sun was warm against our cheeks. “Might be a night,” he said. “Not two.”
“I’ll have hot grub when you come over the ridge.”
He looked off toward them mountains. In the months after I wondered if maybe he suspected his end was near. “The war took me when I was your age and my brother a year younger. It took all the men from our valley.”
“Yessir. I remember. Sixty-one. You was in the field with a rake when word come of Sumter.”
“Good.” I saw he was about to quiz my knowledge. Pa had again taken up his histories of the war. He talked of it regular. I had genuine interest because I saw my father on every battlefield, and understood each fight to be a window onto this man I still could not decipher. He asked, “What started the war?”
“Sir, the first shots was really in Kansas in the fifties. And the war was all but certain when Lincoln took office.” These was his own words but I could see he wasn’t pleased.
“No. What started it? That’s what matters.”
I thought on that point. I could remember all manner of queer detail of that war fought in forests and pastures I would never see.
“Slaves? Who was going to make the rules? I guess I don’t reckon. . . .”
He wiped his leaky eye and I saw his hand was shaking.
“Pa?”
“Every one of us believed he’d come home bigger than when he left. The war was like the start of forever to us. A desert and all we had to do was cross it and all the green on the other side would be just for us, and forever. My brother and me stayed up nights in worry it’d be over before we got our chance. My brother and me.” Now he wiped at tears.
My hair stood. He was before me but a thousand miles gone. “What started the war, Pa?”
His eyes settled on me. “Stories, Jessilyn. We tell ourselves the wrong stories.”
* * *
—
He didn’t come home the next day. I started searching the day after but the tracks was smoothed by the hard winds of the previous night.
Took till day six. I found Ol’ Sis by vultures. Ingrid and me was moving through some sage when she got to throwing her head and trotting sidelong. “There, girl,” I patted, but she snorted and looked off into the timber and backed in that stiff way of hers. I swung down and walked into the smell and found Ol’ Sis a short distance in the timber, near devoured. The ravens come off and rest in the trees overhead and made a racket and the vultures rose from their perches into the winds above. A magpie saw the opening and swept down and landed on her ribs. I shooed him off and threw a stick at him and cursed his race.
There was sign from what you’d expect, coyote and bear, but I also saw a lion track. Lions ain’t prone to scavenging, so I reckoned her end was swift. There wasn’t no evidence of Pa.
I backtracked Ol’ Sis and found where the lion had got her and saw she had been dragging a broke leg before that.
I took to hollering his name. I took up running every which way like some manner of fool.
A mile back I come across what was left. The story was written out in the tracks.
They come down out of the timber at a trot and to the edge of a great expanse of broken rock, black and sharp and laid out like spilled glass. Couldn’t take a step anywhere on it without a rock rolling underfoot. It was raw earth, the last land the Lord made. Pa’s choice was to risk a crossing or trace its edge for some miles. He aimed for the narrowest stretch and made the wrong choice. That’s how it happens in this life, in a quiet moment.
I imagine it was getting on evening and he was tired and Ol’ Sis was smelling the creek on the far side. A rock probably rolled and her leg broke and he went down. His skull was broke. Maybe she rolled over him.
I had got to Pa too late. Animals don’t eat hair, about the only thing. They drug him off in all directions, it was on me to find him and put him back. It was on me to collect him. It was all on me.
I try to focus on the Sharps. The rock had left parallel lines and sharp gouges in the metal. Engraved on the barrel was “.54 caliber.” It had the peep sight installed by the Union army. I put Pa’s rifle to my cheek. The wood was polished smooth where his skin had held it for a lifetime.
There wasn’t nothing to do but bury him under stone. I know Pa would’ve liked being nearer to Ma.
My hands bled from the black glass that deepened over him. My blood was in smears and drips among his tattered clothing and gnawed bones. I buried Pa in rock.
I remember the first snows was falling when I finished, dry flakes from charcoal skies. The land had lost its water and was ten shades of dry.
Ingrid put her nose to my ear, and I rested against her. We was alone now, together.
* * *
—
Without my brother there, what choice did I have but to go to town to get myself married? I couldn’t run the land by myself. It was part a matter of hands. My two wasn’t enough. The cattle had spread far and we would be missing the market next week. Things was careening toward desperate.
I washed up proper and braided my hair. My first attempts was a touch loose for courting work so I done them again. When Pa had seen Ma he knew right out she was the one for him. He saw something in her form that stirred him deep, that’s how he talked of it. I looked over myself in my finery and with my hands clean of dust and wondered if a man might see something worth keeping in me.
I started at the sheriff’s office. Sheriff Younger, he was nothing of the sort. Grayed and old enough to remember when St. Louis was a frontier town. I didn’t go there to ask for his hand, I figured a sheriff would know every boy and man in the county and could steer a gal in the right direction. I told Sheriff Younger simple, Pa had sent me to inquire about marriage.
“Your pa wants you married off?” The sheriff sorted some papers before him. “What kind of suffering is you?”
“I’m no suffering at all, sir. I’m damn fast with supper and at churning and I hold my own with the ranch work. I keep our garden free of varmints and I jar venison with a touch. I never had no ma so I’ve been doing the woman things since I could walk. I’ll make a man a damn hardy wife.”
“You got quick words about you.”
I shrugged. “I like to read.”
“Is that so?” Younger was old but his eyes hunted me and his age did not diminish his size. I looked into him trying to decide if I could trust him.
“Some men like a woman who can read, some don’t.” He lit a cigar. He leaned back in his chair and looked out his big window. It was the biggest window in town. A sheriff needed a big window to see trouble riding by. He smoked and I glanced about his office looking for some sense of his person. “Why didn’t your old man come down here his own darn self? I never heard of such a thing.”
“It’s just the two of us and it’s market season. Ain’t time for him to meddle with my future.”
“Typical father wants a hand in choosing his heir, especially a father whose only son has run off into a short future.”
This was the first I’d heard of Noah. He didn’t know writing so we didn’t expect letters.
“Short future, sir?”
“You don’t know.”
“Know, sir?”
“Your brother has partnered with the devil.”
“I don’t know nothing about no devil, sir.” I had enough trying to figure the Lord.
“All men long for a rich life filled with easy days and hearty drink.”
This was news to me. I figured all men longed for what Pa did, land that turned a comfortable profit.
“But the good men know enough to temper their longings. That’s what the Lord has given us that He hasn’t given critters or injuns or niggers. But your brother is light on these faculties. Maybe it’s the Mexican in your line. You half wet, ain’t you?”
Two legs of the sheriff’s chair dro
pped back to the floor, and he pushed through some papers on his desk. He extracted a leaflet and held it for me to see. It was my brother’s face, sort of. “Can you read this?” I didn’t get past the word “dead.” A wanted poster with my brother’s likeness. It offered $350 for him or his corpse.
“Your brother is wanted for his crimes.”
Since burying Pa my hours in the book was spent hunting guidance. In a fit one night I carved two lessons into the wood of the kitchen table. I can’t explain why I done it but I’d seen them every day since and they was a comfort.
Put on the full armor of God.
I had been a daughter my whole life. I wasn’t one no more. Now they was trying to make me not a sister.
By standing firm you will gain life.
Sheriff Younger spat into his spittoon. “Your brother leads a lawless band of marauders and killers and thieves.”
“Killers?”
“This is the truth.” Younger’s cigar was burning crooked and he turned it against a fresh match. “Where’d you say your pa gone off to?”
“Ain’t gone off.”
“Maybe I’ll swing by and say my howdies.”
I looked toward the bright window. The noon sun was low. Winter was nearing. I said, “Keep an ear out anyhow about good boys or men on the prowl for a wife, would you?”
“I will. But if you hear from your brother, be sure and give me a report. If you lead me to him I’ll promise to bring him back alive. You have my word on that. Bounty hunters won’t be so generous.”
I stared at the sheriff. No doubt Younger wanted that reward for himself. I put on my hat and tipped my head and turned to leave.
“Miss Harney?”
“Yessir.”
“Tell me, what’s that there under your coat?”
The barrel was so long that its point come clear of my riding jacket. A girl with a front-loading Colt was something men tended to take stock of.
I turned back toward the sheriff and something about his expression made my heart pound. “Thank you for the help.”
“Who taught you to dress and such? Look at you. You don’t got no one, do you?” He sighed and puffed his cigar. “Fine then. I won’t say it twice, so listen. Old men will take anything young. They ain’t picky so long as it’s fresh. But you don’t want an old man. A young man, well, you must catch his eye. Flashy speaks to the young man. You got to,” he pointed his cigar toward my hair and hips and what lay between, “flare them parts up some, if you get me.”
“Yessir.”
“Don’t look crooked. I don’t know how women do it. I just know they do it, and you ain’t doing it. Get yourself a woman somewheres first. Have her school you on these matters. Them women got ways, and any fool can see you ain’t learned them.”
“Yessir.”
“I’ll be by to see your pa.”
I’d planned on checking in at the store and the hotel to inquire about sons that might be of marrying age, but my time with the sheriff had left me mindful of all I didn’t understand about the man business. I wanted back in the barn with the smell of hay and other matters I knew so well. So Ingrid and me turned north and rode out on the road we come in on.
I intended to ride out again in a day or two’s time, to the Mormon ma. Maybe she would show me the female arts. But each morning I woke I thought to myself, “Tomorrow. I’ll go tomorrow.” But then tomorrow would come and I’d still be at home turning over what the sheriff conveyed with his eyes.
I reckon I wasn’t keen on giving over nothing that was ours. I wanted a man on the spread but I didn’t want it to be his spread. Maybe I knew there wasn’t a man alive who could work land without calling it his own.
* * *
—
By the time the snows laid their first carpets I’d only retrieved half the cattle, and I knew the rest to be dying hard deaths in the headwaters. It pained me to think of them, and to think of Pa’s face when he learned how I’d let him down. Presently my efforts went to keeping the rest alive.
The air got colder than I could ever remember. Each morning Ingrid and me rode out to the lake where the winter was coldest and broke a hole in the ice big enough for the cattle to lap. If we skipped a day the ice might grow too thick for me to break through the next time and the cattle would perish.
The lake didn’t used to freeze so hard when it was bigger. But now it wasn’t much more than a pond surrounded by mud froze to stone.
I was just starting to find a pattern to the day when Ingrid and me took a cough around New Year’s. My dreams was haunted and I couldn’t hardly breathe. Ingrid had mucus running loose from her nose and eyes and she stayed in the barn with her head hung low. She didn’t eat what I give her. But still we rose early and made the haul to the lake, walking with our heads into the wind. We walked together onto the ice. Just so happened that the deepest cold come when we was sick, a stiff gale from the north that blew out the clouds and let all the earth’s heat go into the stars. On the morning I felt my sickest, the ice was too thick to smash with my regular rock. I rolled out a bigger one, but then I was too weak to lift it. I turned to Ingrid. She looked toward the barn. She knew I could get myself to the lake without her. She was there because I was lonesome.
I drew the Colt and give Ingrid warning and fired without really aiming. The bullet fractured the ice and a second widened the hole and my rock did the rest.
I knew then that a ranch requires two. If I had been any sicker, we would’ve lost the cattle.
* * *
—
In the evenings once we was well I kept on with the book and eventually come to its ending. “And let him that heareth say, Come. And let him that is athirst come. And whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely. For I testify unto every man that heareth the words of the prophecy of this book, If any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues.”
I found some comfort in them words. This book was the truth and the whole truth and all I had to do was decipher it. But I found cause for worry in them words too, and in the book in general. It give me the feeling the Lord don’t trust us much. It give me the feeling I shouldn’t trust myself.
* * *
—
Wasn’t until Ma’s birthday that I felt the full weight of Pa’s absence. Darkness brought the worst of it. The wind howled against the slats and the stable door banged in random. I lit a big fire for company and set out a stew upon the table as if it wasn’t just me eating. But then I couldn’t spoon a bite. Some of my tears was for him, some for her, but mostly they was for me. I ain’t never been the kind to pity myself, ain’t no profit in it, but on that night I made an exception.
I went to the bed and dug out Pa’s fiddle from beneath. I used a knife to pry the keeper nails and then looked down upon the red velvet cradling the instrument like some manner of holy infant. I stared into the red and felt him in the room with me and saw him too as he had been when I buried him. The black holes where his eyes had been, the tendons still holding the jaw.
I shivered as I brought the fiddle to my chin. The horsehairs was so limp they let the strings touch the wood of the bow, and it took me some moments to remember I was supposed to tighten those hairs. At once I remembered watching Pa tighten the same knob. I remembered him putting the fiddle to his chin, how he shut his eyes and his fingers knew right where to go. I had studied that man I could never decipher while his eyes was closed to all but music. Now my fingers began to hunt his same notes.
When drawn across the strings the bow brought Noah into the room with me. The air was again full of his breath. My sounds set Ingrid to whining and a pack of coyotes howling, but when you live in a world of wind and hooves even a wrong note carries an eerie magic.
My whole life music had been sacred and forbidden, and then one day song was mine without boundary but for my own ineptitude. It was a
s if a levee had broke and filled the whole desert from ridge to ridge with sparkling mountain water, and on the edge grew waist-high camas, and all I had to do to linger there was play.
* * *
—
Two of the Mormons found me practicing one warm April day, the oldest son and his kid brother. We was in the midst of the thaw. The creek was up and the sun was warm on our skin. Plenty more hardship was ahead but it was easy to let those worries go for the afternoon. “Howdy,” I called to them as they rode near.
Considering they was cattle people, the Mormon brothers was pale folks with soft hands. They come with fresh biscuits, which I devoured before I even thought to invite them in. Isaac, the oldest and only a year shy of me, was wearing a new hat so I knew they must’ve done well at last autumn’s market. Isaac was nearing the marrying age but still a child, I didn’t trust him to drive a wagon let alone run my spread.
“Ma wants you and your pa for supper,” Isaac said. His eyes wouldn’t look me straight, they kept wandering to the roof, the barn, his toes.
I ate through the biscuits, their airy white centers still warm against my fingers. I hadn’t bothered with baking since learning the fiddle. My mind was on them biscuits, more of them. “What’s your ma gonna make?”
The boys shrugged. Isaac added, “Pork, I reckon. She do enjoy baking that pork. Whole house smell on account.”
My mouth watered at the thought. “I do got a hard fancy for pork.” I’d lost the hog to coyotes while out burying Pa. I’d failed to can the garden vegetables before frost set in. Under this dress, my legs was going boney.
“Ma invited you for Friday,” Isaac said.
“Okay, then. I’ll come Friday. I’ll come any old day for pork.”
“You and your pa?”
“Yeah, me and Pa.” What else could I say?
Without looking me straight, Isaac said, “Is it true? What they say about your brother?”
I spoke with a full mouth. “You seen the posters?”