Lonesome Animals

by Bruce Holbert

  “You will make him stop?” Cloud asked Strawl.

  Some argued the Indians’ austere intellect, as elemental as hide and skeleton, was what kept this country country, and others declared it a dearth of intelligence at all. If the tribes had managed to equip themselves with concrete and trawlers, perhaps they too would dam a river and fish it into extinction. Strawl only knew that they had not. He had heard it said that when we declaw all nature’s monsters, we’ll be looking across the table at the genuine article. Whether the speaker meant God or each other, he didn’t recall, but now he was chasing the genuine article—and he had come through this ranch and slept in the same barn he himself had a few hours before.

  Strawl dumped his coffee dregs on the lawn.

  “Yes,” he said, finally. “I will make him stop.”

  eleven

  Throughout his adolescence, Elijah’s reputation swelled, though the locals on both sides of the river were more inclined to describe him as an eccentric than a seer. His makeshift family indulged his whim for wandering as they, themselves, were planets orbiting separate stars, Dot, her husband and first child; Ida, the house duties and her own silent universe; and Strawl, the ennui of ranching.

  Elijah soon graduated to predicting car accidents and hospital visits and the occasional arrest, though he still employed time as loosely as a listener would permit. Some would whistle when they discovered yet another prophecy bearing fruit, and others would shake their heads and laugh a little, and some hurrahed him as the Indian soothsayer, though none saw his life’s work as anything yet beyond a curiosity. Elijah himself pondered the possibility that he was just observing his surroundings with more vigor than others and that what he saw approaching amounted to a kind of calculation that anyone might exercise given the inclination. He determined to put his shoulder to the wheel. Twice, neighbors reported him for housebreaking, but when they could find nothing missing, Dice refused to press charges. Elijah had admitted to entering the houses; as for stealing, he had no interest. He claimed to simply want to see what living in other houses felt like. Strawl could think of no appropriate punishment, though Dot hid his Bible until he could recite “The Three Bears” to her satisfaction.

  Soon locals barely noticed his visits and often felt something close to blessed by his presence rather than victims of a prowling. Like the prophets of yore, however, he suffered from his own darkness. He had gathered enough sense to free himself of witnesses when black moods leaped upon him. He would walk into the woods and fish a creek neck too much trouble for others to frequent and permit his festering mind to race and rid himself of torment, half of himself speaking and the other listening. He’d often shout for hours at nothing but pine needles, sagebrush, or rock, his voice coursing like runoff under a cloudburst. Then the words would trickle to a tolerable quiet.

  A month after his seventeenth year, he awakened from an uneasy sleep with a twinge troubling his right arm. His pillow was damp with sweat. Elijah stretched his arm toward the window. His skin silvered in the moonlight. He clenched a fist, and the muscles extending toward it shifted with each finger’s shutting, yet the pain remained, not cramp, or rheumatism—which afflicted him when he forecast snow and rain—nor a twisted tendon, which should have slackened when he shifted positions. He located the source, his elbow, and a comparable sensation, a toothache. Nerves strung teeth together, and Elijah concluded that that was what vexed his slumber and, comforted with the knowledge, returned to it.

  Two days later on the road out of Nespelem, the malady reappeared as he passed the Catholic church. A week following, he used the road once more and, near the church, the pain nearly knocked him from Baal and his saddle. He stared down at his arm and wondered how it could ache so and remain attached.

  That night he retired early and lay in his bed and considered the pain, how it entered him slowly and gathered and then unwound as soon as the church moved from his sight and consciousness. It returned to him that evening when he thought the word “church” and left him when he cleared his mind of it. Another week, on a grocery errand, he saw the bell tower and the pain pressed him. He closed his eyes and let the horses drive themselves past the building. The pain eased, though it would flutter if he even imagined the churchyard’s mottled grass or the white pickets surrounding it or the tall double doors at the top of its concrete steps.

  He did not pray. If God listened to each of His believers, the Lord would be nothing more than a lackey or at best a gun-for-hire, taking one side over another in exchange for a pile of Hail Marys or Our Fathers. For Elijah, reverence was discovering the sacred within the ordinary. He did, however, double his study of both testaments, adding proverbs and subtracting parables like a bookkeeper squaring his ledger, until he pieced together a sum that kept him out of the red.

  A month later, the new priest encountered Elijah at the bottom of the church steps, warning the arriving parishioners.

  “When?” a child asked.

  “Soon,” Elijah said.

  “What is this?” the priest asked.

  “Fire,” the little girl said. “In the church.”

  Elijah offered the man his prophecy. The priest listened, his clean-shaven, fair face brightening in the warmth of morning, and cocked his head.

  “Why would this church be burned?” the priest asked.

  A crowd had gathered, white merchants in tan jackets and Indians wearing thin pale shirts buttoned to their throats. The white women moved past into the church, but the Indian women remained. The priest was a polite man, shy except perhaps at the pulpit, where he could read scripture at the tops of the parish’s bowed heads and offer short sermons all would find agreeable.

  “The Lord sends fire when he wants cleansing. He tried the water, but it was a mess, if you recall.”

  “What here is unclean?” the priest asked.

  Elijah said that the reason belonged to God, and that they would have to take him at his word.

  “We can’t do that, I am afraid,” the priest told Elijah.

  “That is why it will burn, then.”

  The priest moved him off the property, but Elijah remained outside the church fence through both services, politely repeating his prophecy. It was early winter and fire was the least of the parishioners’ concerns, but each following Sunday, after taking his breakfast with Ida and Strawl at sunup, Elijah met them with the same warning, as devout in his way as the most pious of their flock. The children brought him gifts, hard candy, a biscuit with butter and honey, unfinished cigarettes they collected from ashtrays. Elijah took his gloves from his hands and blessed each of them by making a cross on their foreheads with his finger. This scandalized the members and they insisted the police expel Elijah from town, but the BIA had no interest in crossing Strawl or working Sundays.

  Winter relented, but spring delivered only dry, warm winds from cloudless skies. The snowmelt filled the creeks, then they ebbed to late summer’s trickle. Disced fields raised dust enough for the fire department to mistake it for smoke at least twice. The locals had heard of the Dust Bowl and successfully avoided that catastrophe, but soon the strands of grain whiskering the field ruts drooped and yellowed. Cattle turned unruly for lack of drink.

  Spring gave way to summer and the adults in the church’s flock began to ridicule the prophet. Their sarcasm and mockery combined to turn the children from him, as well. Instead of gifts, they pelted him with pebbles and chanted, “Fire, Fire, put him out.”

  Patience had become second nature to Elijah, but the public was another matter. It wasn’t the ridicule that troubled him; it was that his prophecy was turning the parishioners from the Word rather than delivering them to it. June continued hot and the forests caught fire in the dry lightning, putting all the able-bodied Indians on crews with a pick and an axe, and the lawns died and the alfalfa refused to sprout because the irrigation pipes could pump no water and the buildings dried like kindling. Elijah realized it was his prophecy at the root of this strangeness. God was bound b
y it and would withhold the rain until Elijah’s fire turned truth. Providence sweltered in the sun.

  The last week of the month, the parish came and went on Sunday, fanning themselves with bonnets and hymnals. The mercury climbed to 95 degrees, and later the priest harnessed the team the livery provided him to visit the shut-ins. Elijah struck a match to the woodpile stacked on the sanctuary wall. The sulfur flared yellow and smelled acrid until the wood above it caught and the seasoned pine crackled and wood smoke replaced it.

  “Lord, I release you from this promise,” Elijah said, and walked away while the flames climbed the porch railings.

  The police visited the ranch the next morning. Dice and a BIA Indian questioned Elijah at his kitchen table. Ida, too frightened to face the police, paced in front of the corral. The parishioners were strangers. He had no motive to wish them harm. The new priest had always been kind to him, and, if Elijah were a heathen, he’d not waste seven months on believers or risk an arson charge for a building they would replace with another within the year, anyhow. The experience would bind the flock rather than scatter them.

  When he’d finished, Dice said, “I can’t argue with any of it.”

  The BIA cop rose with him, and Elijah watched them walk to the Studebaker patrol car and leave, dust rising in the already hot air. Strawl stood awhile, too, until the car broke over the coulee’s lip and its dust thinned to a haze.

  “Dodge a bullet?” Strawl asked.

  Elijah said nothing.

  “Well, how do you want your eggs?”

  Elijah chose scrambled and walked into the root cellar in the dirt bank behind the house for a rope of German sausage, and together they peeled potatoes and fried them in grease and boiled coffee and stirred up enough breakfast to treat Arlen and Dot and the girls, who had risen early and were presently teasing their yellow dog with a sock-covered pinecone to keep his mouth soft to retrieve birds.

  The next Sunday, Elijah put out a coffee table across from the church ruins, where he lined bread squares and several shot glasses he’d filled with grape juice.

  The Christ Elijah knew was an offering to redeem the sins of the Father, not those of Man. The Lord was a mean and selfish parent, and he was heartbroken over it. The crucifixion was a self-inflicted wound intended to square him with his flock. But He had not counted on the son’s travails and the sympathy others would attach to them, and resurrection became the only way to escape another instance of ogre-like behavior.

  The following Sunday, the churchless congregation had pitched a tent borrowed from the army. A low sky lay over them, bruised and drizzling. Tendrils of fog and mist clung in the draws and stretched in a patched and lacy streak above the river’s course. When the parishioners passed Elijah, the men nodded and a few tipped their hats, and the women averted their eyes, but the children stared at him with unabated awe. The priest glanced at his face a moment before he moved on. Elijah had expected worse, but he now found himself wishing for more, that they would understand that the fire was not the point, or what sparked it. Some Great Will was pressing at them, but they had abandoned their lives to circumstance, making miracles as mundane as weather, bearing each like animals scurrying for shelter from a sky full of rain or snow or heat and emerging afterwards as if nothing at all had occurred.

  Children surrounded his table, snacking on the bread and sipping the juice, trying to avoid wrecking their best clothes.

  “But this is not really your body,” a child said. “How do you make it your body?”

  Several children agreed and the parents smiled, amused at the stumped prophet. Elijah raised his hand. “You’re right,” he said. “This won’t do. Fortunately, there is the old way.”

  Elijah drew something that shined silver as water from his satchel—a hatchet honed hours upon a whetstone, they would later discover—which, after he placed his hand upon the table, he employed to amputate his left pinkie finger in a single blow.

  “Now,” he said, as it skipped across the dirt toward the children. “It is my body.”

  twelve

  Inchelium in the mid-thirties was little more than a scattering t of hovels and a post office at one end of Gifford Ferry, which still traverses the Columbia from dawn to midnight each night of the week. The side opposite the Colville Reservation belongs to the Spokanes. In the old days, a blonde-haired Indian named Barney Whitehead ran a honky-tonk with a dirt floor and a canvas roof just past the ferry site. The place sold bathtub gin for a nickel a throw and beer three times what it cost at the market.

  Once, when Strawl happened to travel by, the regulars had carted chairs into the parking lot where they sat, beer bottles between their knees and shotguns set to fire at any goose unlucky enough to pass.

  Strawl did not expect to find Jacob Chin in Inchelium any more than anyplace else on this side of the state, but for reasons as varied as their fortunes, many of his ex-wives, concubines, and conspirators resided in the town along with a sister, who most agreed was the most beautiful woman they had ever encountered. She never ventured from Inchelium, where it was rumored she rode horses through the forested trails in the nude. It appeared to Strawl as good a beginning point as any on the man.

  When Strawl had mounted to leave two evenings before, Elijah had Baal saddled, as well, and there was nothing more said. They approached I nchel i um from the Colvilles’ side after travel ing Sherman Pass through several thousand fire-strafed acres. The grasses and wildflowers had commandeered the flats, the ruined trees compost feeding them. The field parted and waved in the wind.

  The early afternoon sun lifted the dew from the ground and rock and trees’ needles, and the air was hazy and damp. Strawl tipped his hat back and wiped his brow. He drew rein and allowed Stick to drink at a public trough on the town’s edge. Elijah did the same with Baal.

  “You know your way around here?” Strawl asked him.

  “Does the Lord know his sheep?”

  “We’re about to find out,” Strawl said.

  They rode on until they reached a blue house with a tar paper roof. There was no lawn other than weeds, though someone had planted a thin rosebush next to the wooden steps.

  Strawl dismounted. He wound Stick’s reins to a wire fence that lined the property.

  “Have at it,” Strawl said.

  Elijah glanced at him, then swung his right leg over the back of Baal, rode a few steps, then walked to the door and knocked.

  “You seen Jake?” Elijah asked.

  The woman who’d answered the door was in her forties; she looked past Elijah to Strawl behind him.

  “Don’t know him,” she said.

  “Martha, you were married to him,” Elijah said.

  “Was,” she said. “Now I don’t know him so well.” She shut the door.

  Elijah put his hands on his hips, then lifted one arm. He spun his finger. Strawl tried to steal behind a shed to find the back door, but someone had stacked a cord of wood between the house and a high fence. Strawl stepped on the sticks, but the pile shifted. He lost his balance. A quartered round banged his bad knee and another clobbered him in the ear. In addition, the ruckus stirred a litter of woodpile cats. Following a chorus of yowling and hissing, three sprang upon him, each digging into his hide when he pulled it off. Next door, a dog barked.

  Strawl retreated to the street. Elijah surrendered without knocking again and was aboard Baal when Strawl returned. They rode two more blocks to a dwelling across from the cinderblock school and firehouse.

  “Better clean yourself up,” Elijah said.

  Strawl pulled his handkerchief from his shirt pocket and dabbed the blood from his forearms and the backs of his hands. Elijah had dismounted, and he watched Strawl from the ground, shaking his head.

  “You’d do well not to mock me,” Strawl said.

  “Big talk from a man that gets whipped by cats.” Elijah turned for the door while Strawl walked Stick to where they couldn’t be seen. He rolled a cigarette. A light wind from the river pressed at an o
ak’s green leaves, and a swing set chain creaked in the schoolyard. The grass surrounding the school shone where the kids had beat a path from the dirt street to the play toys.

  The house’s door shut, and Elijah walked dejectedly back to his horse. The muscles behind his jaw knotted. He rode to the next house and rapped on the door. When no one answered, he didn’t bother to get aboard Baal, and instead walked her the few feet to the next house and secured her rein to a tree limb. A wooly white man answered, his grey hair askew like a badly fitted halo.

  He shoved Elijah off the step. He wore no shirt,just suspenders, and his skin pinked in the doorway. Elijah stared at the man, who blinked. He eyed Strawl, then turned his attention back to Elijah.

  “I don’t know you,” he said.

  “That’s right,” Elijah said.

  The man closed the door.

  At the next house, an old Indian woman nodded and offered him a pastry, which he fed to Baal, but had no information on Jacob Chin. Elijah inquired at every house on the block, then crossed the street and repeated his work on the other side.

  “You know any of these people?” Strawl asked.

  Elijah shrugged. “Some.”

  “You don’t act it.”

  Elijah wagged his chin at a house up the street. “Warren there. I helped him and his brother butcher an elk this past winter.”

  “You didn’t attempt much conversation.”

  “I’m looking for a killer,” Elijah said.

  Strawl laughed. “What did you say to him?”

  “Told them I was hunting for Jake.”

  “Never said hello?”

  “No, just inquired about Jake.”

  “Another time, you’d have chewed the fat a little, wouldn’t you?”

  Strawl lit a cigarette and let Elijah lead him past the school toward the only cross street of notice, where a service station and a grocery took up two kitty corners. A shut tavern and the town livery were on the other two.