by Annie Proulx
Loyal felt the weight of settling rock above them, half a mile.
Cucumber mumbled. ‘Could be there. Maybe I think we don’t need today.’
In the darkness their eyes strained, unseeing, in the direction of the rail line and the tool box, buried now under the rock. The red motes and flashes that trace through total darkness skidded before them. The water rose slowly.
After a long rime, surely eight or ten hours, he thought. Loyal noticed that the pain in his feet and legs had eased to a cold numbness that crept up toward his groin. He leaned, half-fainting, against the wall because he could hardly stand. Berg was retching in the darkness, and between spasms shook so violently his voice jerked out of him ‘eh-eh-eh-eh-eh.’ Cucumber, on the other side of Berg, in the wet blackness, breathed hard and slow. A steady drip fell near him.
‘Berg. Switch on your light and tell us the time. It’ll help to keep some track of the hours.’
Berg fumbled with his crazy hands and got the switch on but couldn’t read the time on his dancing, leaping watch.
‘Christ,’ said Loyal, holding the jerking arm and seeing ten past two. Which two? Two in the morning after the cave-in or twenty-four hours later, the next afternoon?
‘Cucumber, you think it’s afternoon or 2 A.M.?’ And looked at Cucumber spraddled, arms pressed against the rock to take the weight off his feet, head down. Cucumber turned his head toward the light and Loyal saw the blood tracking from black nostrils, the wet shirt shining with blood, the water around Cucumber’s knees washed with blood. Cucumber opened his mouth and his pale tongue crept from between his bloody teeth.
‘It’s easier for you. You got no babies.’
Loyal turned the light off and there was nothing to do but stand and wait in a half swoon, listening to Cucumber bleed out drop by drop.
And now he knows: in her last flaring seconds of consciousness, her back arched in what he’d believed was the frenzy of passion but was her convulsive effort to throw off his killing body, in those long, long seconds Billy had focused every one of her dying atoms into cursing him. She would rot him down, misery by misery, dog him through the worst kind of life. She had already driven him from his home place, had set him among strangers in a strange situation, extinguished his chance for wife and children, caused him poverty, had set the Indian’s knife at him, and now rotted his legs away in the darkness. She would twist and wrench him to the limits of anatomy. ‘Billy, if you could come back it wouldn’t happen,’ he whispered.
He came awake with a shout, dipping into the water. He could not stand. His clubbed feet could not feel the ground. He knew he had to get the bursting shoes off, the leather that clamped the flesh, the tightening strings, if he had to cut them off. He crouched, gasping, in the water and felt his right shoe. The puffed leg bulged over the top of the shoe. He pulled at the laces underwater, worrying the wet knots, racked with shudders. After a long time, hours, he thought, he pulled the lace free of the eyelets and began to lever at the shoe. The pain was violent. His foot filled the shoe as tight as a piling rammed into earth. Christ, if he could see!
‘Berg. Berg, I got to put on my light. I got to get my shoes off. Berg. My feet’s swole up wicked.’
Berg said nothing. Loyal switched on his headlamp and saw Berg leaning against the wall, halfsagged into a tiny shelf where his knees rested, bearing some of his weight.
He could barely see his shoes under the cloudy water, eighteen inches deep now, and the shoe would have to be cut off. He stood up and switched the headlamp off while he fumbled for the knife in his pocket. It was hard to open it, and harder to sit back down in the water – fall down – and cut the tight leather open. He used the lamp as little as possible while he sawed and panted and moaned. At last the things were off and he threw them out into the blackness, the soft splashes, Berg to his left groaning. His feet were numb. He could feel nothing.
‘Berg. Cucumber. Get your shoes off. Had to cut mine off.’
‘Eh-eh-eh-eh-eh-too-eh-eh-eh cold,’ said Berg. ‘Fucking eh-eh-eh-eh freezing. Can’t.’
‘Cucumber. Shoes off’ Cucumber didn’t answer but they could hear the blood falling into the water.
blood bloodblood blood blood bloodblood
It became difficult to talk, to think. Loyal had long, sucking dreams that he struggled to leave. Several times he thought he was sitting in a rocking chair beside the kitchen stove, and that a child was leaning asleep against his heart, light hair stirring in the whistling wind from his nostrils. He ached with the sweetness of the child’s weight until his mother stirred the fire, and said in an offhand way that the child was not his, it was Berg’s daughter, that these things had been torn from his life like calendar pages and were lost to him forever.
Then he would rouse Berg for the time, but the headlamps were dim and it always seemed to be ten past two.
‘Stopped,’ said Berg. ‘Watch eh-eh-eh stopped.’
‘How long we been in here do you think?’ He only talked to Berg now. He stood close to Berg.
‘Days. Five or eh-eh-eh four days. If you hear them we got to tap, let them guys know we’re still alive down here. Pearlette. Hope they-eh-eh-eh-eh-ey taking care.’
‘Pearlette,’ said Loyal. ‘She your only kid?’
‘Three. Pearlette. James. Abernethy. Eh-eh call Bernie for short. Baby. Sick every winter.’ Berg directed his feeble light at the wall. The water had gone down two inches. ‘We got a-eh-eh-eh chance,’ said Berg. ‘Anyway we got a chance.’
The dying headlamps pointed in Cucumber’s direction showed nothing. They called, with clacking jaws, but he didn’t answer. Cucumber was beyond the circle of light, silent.
When at last the sound of faraway tapping came they struck wet rocks against the wall and wept. Away in the darkness Cucumber rolled in eight inches of mine water, his mouth kissing the stone floor again and again as if thankful to be home.
15
The Indian’s Book
HE carried the Indian’s book around with him for years before he started to write in it. It had a supple cover, narrow bands of snakeskin sewed with a long-armed featherstitch. The pages had rounded corners. The Indian’s hand was impossible; pitching letters with open tops and long, dangling descenders, words jumbled into one another, omissions stacked on top of the sentences. There were strange lists. On one page Loyal read:
sacrifices
lamenting
hungering
jail
dream & vision
journeys
In another place the crooked sentences said: ‘The dead live. Power comes from sacrifices. Give me good thoughts, calm my rough desire, strengthen my body, do not let me eat any wrong food. The sun and the moon will be my eyes. Let me see white metal, yellow stalks, red fire, black north. Rotate my arms 36 times.’
Would the sacrifices be scalps, Loyal wondered under his cowboy hat.
The part about the dead that kept on living made him think of Berg and his idea about miners’ ghosts, about Berg’s daughter the way he had imagined her, realer than anything Berg had said. Berg’s children, he thought, with the taste of snow in their mouths. And Berg himself, hobbling around somewhere now on aluminum feet. He’d heard that at the little hospital in Uphrates where they’d taken Berg a nurse had cut the laces on his shoes. She began to work the left shoe off. With a wet sound the shoe came away, and with it, adhering to the inner sole, the turgid, spongy bottom of his foot, baring the glistening bone. Loyal couldn’t remember if they had taken him to the same place. At least he could still walk well enough, at least he had not lost his feet or any of his toes, although the pain seemed locked permanently inside his leg bones.
There were drawings of birds in faded ink, a page much creased and dirtied as though the book had fallen open on the floor, trodden for days until someone picked it up. But most of the book was still empty, as if the Indian had recently started it to extend the paths of earlier volumes. Some of the page headings seemed useful enough.
Income
Expenses
Places I Been
Sights
Dreams
Birthdays & funerals
Tricks
Medicine Thoughts
Troubles
On the page for Birthdays the Indian had written: ‘My son Ralph born Aug 12 1938 died of diarrea Aug 11 1939.’ Under Sights he had noted only ‘bonfires beside the road’ and ‘little shining ones.’
Loyal crossed out the Indian’s notations. On the Birthday page he wrote his own name and birth date, then those of his family. He was thirty-six years old. Tentatively, barely pressing the pencil against the paper, he wrote ‘Billy,’ but erased it a minute later. Sitting in his underwear on the edge of his bed he wanted to write something about the watch, but on an empty page could manage only a stiff, insufficient sentence, ‘The watch I gave her.’
She had a junky little watch that would not keep time. He’d got her a beaut – half the winter’s fur from his trapline for a Lady Longines with a tiny face no bigger than a dime set with diamond chips to mark the hours. Six fox furs to Mrs. Claunch who sewed her a fur jacket for a Christmas surprise – ‘a chubby,’ Billy called it. She’d come into a place wearing the jacket, letting the watch slip down her wrist to show it off. Looking like a million. So careful of her things, keeping them polished and fine.
Then helping Toot with his hay. The old cock still hung onto his horses, Rainy and Cloudy. The horses would draw the wagon along the windrows and he and Ronnie would pitch the hay up to Toot who built the load, the sweat pouring down, the field crackling with heat. Mernelle tailed along behind them, twisting her pitchfork to gather the lost wisps of hay. Toot had promised her fifty cents for a day’s work. Toot and Ronnie unharnessing the horses while he pitched the last load into the hayloft, struggling with the wads of hay Toot had knitted into a puzzle. Only the man who builds a hay load knows where each forkful lies. The suffocating perfume of grass, the air shot with chaff and dust until his skin was on fire with itch. Mernelle running in to say that Billy was there with her car and they were all going swimming at Bobcat Pond.
He sees Billy, bending, the hairless legs taut, sees the flash of her nails as she rolls her watch in a stocking and tucks it in the toe of her shoe, the shoes side by side, and over them her folded rayon dress and the thin towel from the soap flake box. And Mernelle, sloshing up out of the water, ‘Please, Billy, can I wear your watch while you go swimmin’? Please, Billy!’ The way she hesitated. But said yes. Mernelle cocking her arm at the sky while they swam out to the sunken rock shelf. The delicious water. He’d told her a pickerel almost five feet long hung around under the rock shelf. Her flesh, greenish under the water.
Later, Mernelle thrashing up to them and Billy’s low, clear voice, ‘Did you put my watch back in my shoe exactly like I had it?’ Mernelle like she’d been punched. Her arm coming up out of the water, the watch face already so fogged they couldn’t see the diamond chips.
Billy holding the watch loosely in her hand for a few seconds, while Loyal said never mind, that they could take it to a good jeweler, then Billy, looking straight at Mernelle and hurling it out into the pond. Never said a word.
Many nights that winter he wrote, sometimes only a few lines, sometimes until the wind shaking the window frame chilled his hands. Things he planned to do, song lyrics, distances traveled, what he ate and what he drank. When he turned the light out he saw the blue night fitted into the rectangles of window glass, the crumpled earth glowing with phosphorescent metals, the blurring wind and stars.
The Indian’s book. His book.
16
The Bigger They Are the Higher They Burn
1951 Fire Marshal’s Report.
Investigations Conducted by Earl L. Frank, Deputy Fire Marshal. Case 935 Minkton Blood, Cream Hill, Vt. fire occurred December II, 1951. Property destroyed – Farm barn and nine cows. After considerable investigation Marvin E. Blood, the son of the owner, was arrested on the charge of first degree arson, a confession obtained, and he was sentenced to serve one to three years in the State’s Prison at Windsor. In his confession, he implicated his father, Minkton Blood, as having counseled him to burn the barn in exchange for a share of the insurance. Minkton Blood was arrested, a confession obtained, and he was sentenced to State’s Prison for not less than two years nor more than four years. At the time of the fire, insurance of $2,000 was collected on the property. Recovery of the money is being attempted.
THE INSIDE OF THE BARN had never been darker. They were down to dregs of kerosene and the murky light from the lantern illuminated little in the dark chill of the morning. Cow piss gushed. There was nervous stamping, an atmosphere in the barn, worse than it had been the night before. Mink felt his way into the milk room, bending for the pails, pouring the hot water from the kettle into the wash pail for Dub. A column of steam boiled up. He fumbled for the rag. The barn stank of ammonia, sour milk, cloying hay and wet iron. He heard the door swing open. Dub. The light of the second lantern spilled sullenly out of his hand.
‘Colder’n a witch’s patootie. Christ, why is it so cold so early? Feels like January. Five more months of this I’ll be hangin’ from my tail and givin’ the monkey laugh, WAHOOHAHHOOHOO!’ Dub gave the monkey laugh.
‘You do that fuckin’ noise again I’ll take a piece of stovewood to you. I’m pushed near as far as I can go this mornin’.’ There was a deadly silence while their separate rages churned and mingled.
‘You’re pushed? Did I hear right? You are PUSHED? You old son of a bee, you’re the one doin’ the pushin’. You raise a hand to me and I’ll part your hair from ear to ear.’ The lantern shook in Dub’s hand. He hung it on the nail near the dead radio. The battery had been flat for a long time. He took the bristle brush and the pail of hot water, cooled now to warm, and began to work down the row of impatient cows, sweeping at their dung-caked flanks with the brush, washing the udders stuck with bits of chaff and manure. The light gave a dim radiance to his balding head, his lips moved. He seized the cow’s tail. She liked nothing better than to slap her stinking tail onto the side of his neck. This morning she kicked as he squeezed in beside her, then shifted her weight, pressing him over against the next cow. She’d been licking at her sides as far back as she could reach, and the hair was rubbed away down to the bleeding skin.
‘What the hell is the matter with you this morning?’ he muttered. He got the bag balm and smeared it on the sore. As he did every morning and evening he thought about the electricity, what they could have done with it. The cow on the end was blatting. Mink didn’t bother with names now, but Dub gave them all movie star names, and this one, a table-topped hulk with rolling eyes, was Joan Bennett.
‘You’ll get your damn water in a minute.’ Now he moved into the tricky rhythm of lugging Mink’s foaming pail into the milk room, pouring it through the strainer into the milk can, picking up the full pail of water from under the trickling faucet in the stone sink, and, with his hook, seizing the empty milk pail. In the barn again, he set the full water bucket in front of a cow, hooked up an empty from the next one and, on his way back to the milk room, swapped the empty milk bucket for Mink’s full one. It almost never worked out. The faucet would run slow and he’d wait at the sink while Mink shouted for him to get a move on; or sometimes the cow would hold back her milk, probably at the feel of Mink’s leathery old hands, and Dub’d lean against the wall, waiting, listening to the shallow firping sound of the milk rising in the pail.
He’d think about a radio that worked with a plug and a wall socket, a radio that put out a good beat, and a light bulb to cheer the damn old brown dump up, the easiness of a milking machine and a water pump and the pipe running right along the wall in front of the stanchions, like Phelps’s place across the lake. The electricity was all around them. If only there’d been some little easy cheerfulness for him and Myrtle. He didn’t blame her for leaving. None of it, not a thing, had gone right. The power lines came within twenty miles south of them,
across the river on the east, up over the border, and west, well, thirty, thirty-five miles. He’d believed that crap Loyal used to give the old man, that stuff about the electricity coming in right after the War. ‘First priority to farms.’ He’d read it out of the paper. That was a laugh. First priority to towns, any town, to garages, stores, knickknack shops. Six years after the War and they still hadn’t made it here. Now a new War coming along. Korea, whatever the hell that was. And if stinking MacArthur had his way, they’d be fighting China. It could be another hundred years. The herd had gone down because Mink wouldn’t let the AI man on the place. Should have done what Uncle Ott did, getting rid of his farm right after the War, buying another one, a good one over in Wallings, a farm with power lines. He had electricity, he’d improved his herd, had got as bad as Loyal used to be talking bloodlines and production. But now he was milking fourteen cows that averaged out over a thousand pounds of 4 percent milk a month and he was making money. Sprayed the DDT, no flies in the barn. Had a new maroon Henry J. in addition to the pickup, a 47 Ford with less than fifteen thousand miles on it. Dub would not have bought the Henry J. himself. If he had Ott’s kind of money he’d of gotten a Buick Roadmaster, the big 152-horsepower Fireball engine and Dynaflow Drive. The AI man and a little electricity could of saved him and Myrt.
O, Myrt, I tried, he thought. He heard himself persuading her, persuading himself, after the piano-tuning school director turned him down, ‘Mr. Blood, we’re sure you understand that you need perfect pitch in this business, and that it’s, it’s a calling that requires considerable strength on the tuner’s part, that he be fully able,’ telling her that it was just for a few months until the old man could see they had to get out on their own, a couple of months to look around, find something else he could do. Dammit, he was as strong as an ox, could lift pianos with one hand, and had showed the son of a bitch, raising one end of the grand up eight inches and letting it drop with a tingling sound and the crack of the cover slamming.