Lonesome Animals

by Bruce Holbert

  A weather anomaly left this place warmer and wetter than most inland mountain ranges, and it was as likely to be blanketed by clouds, even in late fall, as snow. Evening, lacy mist collected in the fissures and dips of this strange world. The moon’s blue light cast a glowing pallor over the trees, leaving them luminous, as if lit by white fire. That night, a lupine moan broke the quiet and stirred Baal enough that Elijah blanketed his eyes to settle him.

  A day later and twenty miles farther north, evening arrived before the sun set, and Baal’s breath smoked in the clear and freezing purple night. Elijah was prepared to bed down and collect wood for a fire when he heard a coyote yip, followed by two twitters from a bobwhite. He whistled an answer and when it was acknowledged, he stepped out of the stirrup and led Baal a mile angled beneath the mountain’s shadow until he reached a rocky crag. There, he followed a shale slide over the other side. Baal’s hooves clacked the flat rock and the sound rattled the animal. He battled the reins. Elijah settled him, then led on. Soon the smell of meat cooking on a spit beckoned him.

  Off the rocks Baal stilled and Elijah rode him through the pines and yellowing tamaracks. The air sighed in the needles and their yellow pollen floated over man and horse. They jumped a pheasant and the pop of wings startled the horse. Elijah watched the bird light in a thicket where another stirred next to it. Soon he heard women’s voices, too, and children harassing the female pup Rutherford Hayes had given someone in the spring. It woofed and scared no one. Firelight careened in orange and golden streaks against the darkened trees and pinched shadows.

  Twenty heavy canvas military tents, staked and propped by poles cut from the surrounding woods, circled a common area. Eighteen were flapped down for families and privacy—eight for each of the pregnant widows and ten left for the families who volunteered to join them. The remaining two were open-walled to permit public meetings and religious services and meals when the weather required. Each family’s tent had a chimneyed Franklin stove for heat, while the public tents contained a pair on each end and another in the middle. In the worst weather, the makeshift village’s fifty inhabitants could gather their blankets and dogs and conserve fuel by crowding themselves together in one, as the Canadian tribes had done for centuries. Two other structures finished the circle. Both were metal and windowless and locked. One held food staples that would keep—gunnysacks filled with grain, flour, sugar, salt, canned fruits, baking powder, cornstarch, and some fodder for the animals; the other contained several thousand dollars in medical supplies and a small library instructing a layman how to use them. Together, the contents equaled half the proceeds from the ranch’s sale.

  At the center of the circle was a twenty-foot-long rock trough constructed for outdoor cooking. Atop the walls were metal grills and plates and cast-iron spits on which one could turn rabbits or game birds, and at the end was another, larger rod ample to roast half a deer or elk. Under both ends, Raymond’s family had constructed brick-reinforced ovens to slow-cook wild vegetables, breads, and stews. Four cows and their calves lolled in a crudely wired square on the east edge of the camp, along with a half dozen sheep and a goat, which accounted for more of the ranch proceeds.

  Stacked firewood six feet high formed three quarters of the compound’s boundary, yielding only for the livestock. A hundred yards into the woods, Marvin, along with his grandchildren, had cut a root cellar employing rock to support the walls and crossed lodgepoles as rafters.

  Marvin had determined Elijah’s approach through insects’ hush and the fluttering of birds. He tarried at the edge of the light to greet him with a strip of venison and a pipe of kinnikinnick. Elijah and he smoked, then Elijah ate the venison, stringy and coarse with muscle. It was gamier here than down below, where the deer browsed the wheat at night and tasted not unlike beef. Elijah sniffed, disappointed he preferred the other. He let Baal loose to feed on the clumped grasses that managed to grow despite the little light the trees permitted.

  “I am finished.”

  “I know,” Marvin said.

  “Do you think I am a sinner?”

  “Did you enjoy those things people would call sin?” Marvin asked him.

  “No.”

  “It cannot be a sin unless you enjoyed it,” Marvin said.

  Elijah nodded and Marvin led him to a tipi outside the camp’s boundaries, close to the stream serving the makeshift village, yet far enough to permit him his thoughts. Inside were a lantern and some oil and a copy of his good book.

  twenty - two

  Strawl rested a full day under the peak of Copper Mountain, eating the last of his frybread and the remnants of a salami stick. Elijah had not varied his trek, riding as if nobody was interested, or more likely, as if he knew those following and saw no reason to discourage them. The camp before him was impressive—enough so, Strawl determined Elijah could not have managed the project alone. Evening, he watched the pickets exchange, and through his spyglass he made out groups of women laboring at the long pit and silhouetted men walking alone or in pairs across the firelit commons into or past the tents, yellow wraiths where the glow ebbed and ended. Strawl heard stones scrape from the stream bank as another contingent of women and young girls cleaned pots or beat clothes with broom handles soaked in lye.

  The encampment appeared comic. Even in this country no one built villages or towns to hide them. They wanted businesses and roads and railroads. They wanted to be found. A man like Rutherford Hayes might hermit himself. Even a family or two who believed in some smoky deity so strange and private that they could only believe in it themselves if no neighbors existed to argue could still be assured seclusion if they risked the most primitive corners of the region. Any group larger, though, necessitated not company—that would be the least of their concerns—but more than would be accessible within walking or riding distance. That meant restocking at stores and liveries, and those don’t occur without people, and if reduced to that, what was the point of going off?

  As it grew later, Strawl made for the camp. He avoided the pickets with no trouble, even with the horse in tow. At the creek bed were seven women, each heavy with child. They scoured a stack of pans and kettles with river gravel, chattering. He passed without nodding and a quarter mile later arrived at the clearing between canopies. Enormous trees had been pruned ten feet up from the ground, the long phallic trunks appeared sins from the uncharted country in people’s minds. Squares of brown tarp were tied fifteen feet high in the trees cinched tight with hemp rope to the sturdiest limbs some places and tethered to the ground with iron stakes in others. The group had scattered leaves and needles atop them to make the place appear nothing unusual. Underneath, the hardpan was swept clean as a floor. In the center, the firepit had high walls and a deep well to mute the light. Inez stirred what smelled like a broth of some kind. A bruise remained beneath her ear. Her grandchildren scrambled toward a tent upon seeing Strawl, and Marvin intercepted him, coming from the darkness.

  “You’re a party to this?” Strawl asked.

  “Yes,” Marvin said.

  “I thought you knew nothing of these doings.”

  “I lied.”

  Strawl smiled. “Well, the truth is overrated.”

  He decided to press no further. Marvin loaded a pipe with kinnikinnick and lit it.

  “I apologize for hurting Inez,” Strawl said.

  Marvin nodded. “No one can help who they are.”

  “You included?”

  “Yes,” Marvin answered.

  “There guns on me?”

  Marvin shrugged. “I can’t speak for everyone here. If you came to shoot us, some will shoot back.”

  “I’m accustomed to those I shoot at shooting back,” Strawl said. He sat on a flat boulder that looked like it was meant for the purpose. The camp had begun buttoning up. Mothers herded children to their canvas abodes, and several pregnant women tottered across the clearing, turning misshapen silhouettes as they left the fire’s glow. Strawl watched two tents glow as lanterns inside c
licked to life and flickered with their quaking oil feeds.

  “Are you looking for a truce?” Strawl asked.

  “Yes.”

  Strawl stared at the ground.

  “You know who I’m here for?”

  “He told me.”

  “You want this truce extended to him, too, I suppose?”

  Marvin nodded.

  “You know what he’s done and who he’s done it to?”

  “Yes,” Marvin said.

  “I can’t promise you anything on that.”

  “ Is that why you’re here? To shoot your son?”

  “He’s not blood to me.”

  Marvin said, “He is like you. He has no blood father. He is your son. You are his father. His deeds are yours. Blood is not necessary. He is why you are here.”

  Strawl shook his head. “I am not sure what’s put me here, but unless someone throws lead my direction, I don’t plan on shooting.”

  “Will you arrest us, then?”

  “Who here would allow it without guns? And I already told you I’m not inclined to do that. Elijah, however, is excluded on both counts.”

  Marvin nodded. He steered Strawl up a trail to a rock outcropping that overlooked the camp. They sat and smoked a long time.

  “One of those women wife to a Cloud boy?” Strawl asked.

  “Two,” Marvin answered. “One to each.”

  Beneath them, Inez organized the women into something resembling an apple-packing line at two split logs, which served as tables. There, some chopped roots and vegetables raised in a garden they’d passed climbing to where they now sat. Others gutted a stringer of trout, and two more plucked sage hens. They were preparing tomorrow’s meals.

  “Couldn’t help but notice she was with child. A good deal of others seem in the same state. I’m guessing you’re not building a home for wayward women out this far.”

  “No,” Marvin said.

  “No felony,” Strawl said. “Impolite and a sin, but law doesn’t reach that far.”

  “They are all pregnant with Elijah’s children.” Marvin tapped the pipe then struck a match and handed it to Strawl, who smoked then tried not to cough at the harsh mixture.

  “But those Cloud girls, their husbands are barely cold.”

  “He had made them pregnant before.”

  “That why he killed them?”

  Marvin shook his head. “He decided they would die before he made their wives pregnant, even.”

  Strawl handed the pipe back to him. The women below were separating the contents of their meal into pots to stew through the night. Inez ground some grain with a homemade pestle. Marvin studied their work. His hair was long and he wore it in a braid that he’d tied with a yellow handkerchief.

  “You didn’t stop him?”

  Marvin puffed on the pipe and watched the smoke break in the cold air. “He asked permission.”

  “Permission to kill someone? Who from, his good book?”

  “Me,” Marvin said. “Though the book he listened to, as well.”

  “You told him it was all right to kill those Cloud boys.”

  Marvin nodded. “After he asked, I told him to copulate with their women and then to kill the men.”

  “Those other boys, too?”

  Marvin nodded. “Except Jacob Chin. That was his own killing, though I am sure he thought it necessary.”

  “Marvin.”

  The old man raised his hand. “He did not kill without discrimination nor did we permit him to do so without caution and thought. When he asked about some, we told him no, and he did not go further. They are still living. They are sick, but they have life in them.”

  “All the years I have known you, you were a peaceful man. Why in hell would you grant him such a request?”

  “The men were dead already,” Marvin said. “Replacing them. It was the only way. If they lived longer, it would soon be as if they had not lived.”

  As Marvin told it, those boys were present a little less every day, senile in their thirties, but with no distant childhood to retreat into, their bodies and voices husks roused only by alcohol or blood for an hour or so, before sentience withdrew and they returned ghosts. Elijah couldn’t tolerate witnessing their disappearance. They were bent on being forgotten, even by themselves, and Elijah had resolved to deny them that.

  Strawl recalled Dot reading him from Shakespeare’s play about the murder of Caesar. Let us not be butchers, Brutus said, but instead carve him up like a dish for the gods. And so Caesar was remembered, and Anthony lived and Brutus was killed. If Caesar had managed twice the years, until his back bent and his eyes clouded and his mouth drooled, he would not be remembered a tenth as well.

  And Elijah had left them children, Marvin reminded him. Boys who would be fathered not by ghostmen, but by stories. And Elijah would be their great-uncle, breathing their fathers’ stories into them like a man puffs an ebbing coal to renew a fire, until each child became a conflagration of his father’s match-strike.

  These children would hear of their fathers’ strange deaths and consider them and retell them until they contained reason and God, and this would be the beginning of tales that would outlive all that was. They would be as resurrected as Lazarus recalled from the tomb.

  “It’s a generous idea,” Strawl said.

  “It is his.”

  “Do you believe it?”

  “I want to believe it. I have nothing else to believe.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “Sleeping. He is done with killing. Seven pregnant women,” he said. “He’s got all the story he can tell.”

  “Blood gets in a man’s nature,” Strawl said.

  “It was not blood that killed them,” Marvin said. “It was not anger. It was mercy.”

  Strawl was quiet. The crickets sawed at the night.

  “You are not going to take him?”

  “You think he is done.”

  “I am certain,” Marvin said. “He is tired.”

  “The tired sleep and rise feeling froggy,” Strawl said.

  “Not those tired in this way. Sleep is not medicine for them.”

  Strawl nodded. “What would it change if I took him or didn’t?”

  Marvin didn’t reply and Strawl didn’t expect him to. They smoked a little longer in silence. Below, the mastiff announced herself to another yearling that belonged to the Birds. Five minutes later, the branches parted and Raymond Bird appeared. Strawl offered him the pipe and he smoked and smiled. They made room for him to sit. The bulk of the clan arrived half an hour later. They marched in four pairs, each packing a quartered elk strung to a pine pole. Strawl could smell the animal and the men and the blood and simple human residue from a day occupied with tasks enough to make a man feel useful.

  “Rutherford Hayes left to Canada,” Raymond said.

  Strawl nodded.

  “We asked him to stay with us,” Marvin said.

  “He’s done with people.” Raymond coughed and spat. “I put a deer’s hindquarters on his porch once and he tethered that dog to my house a year later. Or paid someone to. Shame he’s going.”

  Raymond unscrewed an army canteen and offered it to Marvin and Strawl, who drank deeply, then returned it to him.

  The aroma of the ovens rose to them. Marvin stood. Strawl and Raymond watched him negotiate the trail into the camp. At its foot, he took two pie plates and extended them as if a penitent waiting for a blessing. The women loaded the tins with food, then he hunted spoons and returned.

  Strawl thanked him for the plate. He and Raymond ate in silence and finished by cleaning the gravy and grease with a piece of flatbread. Marvin reloaded his pipe with kinnikinnick, but Raymond rolled cigarettes for himself and Strawl.

  “There’s law coming for him,” Raymond said.

  “A ways off yet,” Strawl said. “And they’re more likely hunting me. They don’t know what for on this issue, and I’ve put the red ass on the lot of them recently.”

  Raymond watched hi
s cigarette glow.

  “How do you know how far they are?”

  “Can’t hear them,” Strawl said.

  “Hearing distance, they’re already too close.”

  Strawl shook his head. “My ears are sharper than most.”

  “How good?”

  “How far are we from that wolf?”

  “What wolf?” Raymond asked.

  “The one I hear howling,” Strawl told him. He smoked his cigarette down.

  Raymond looked to Marvin. “That bragging?”

  Marvin shook his head. “They say it is so.”

  Raymond let that settle.

  “I thought dogs could only hear like that.”

  “Maybe I am a dogman,” Strawl said.

  Marvin and Raymond chuckled at that. The dogs beneath hurried back and forth past the fire like the shadows of bats swooping, hoping for scraps or a chipmunk to chase. The owls hooted at them and the dogs yapped back until someone from the tents hit one with a stone. He yelped and the rest quieted.

  “Someone is angry with your brothers,” Raymond said. He set his plate on the dirt and leaned back so he could see the stars filling the sky.

  “If you are dogman you should know the stories of Dog,” Raymond said.

  “There are a bookful of stories of Dog,” Strawl replied.

  “ Know about the one where Dog sniffs his brother’s ass because someone stole his salmon?” Raymond asked.

  Strawl shook his head.

  “He doesn’t know the difference between food ready to eat and food shit out. Dog is stupid. Did you know Dog once went to the people to ask for fire for his people?”

  “How did it turn out?”

  “They fed him.”

  It was quiet a moment. “That it?” Strawl asked.

  “If you know Dog, you know it is so,” Raymond said. “Dog has no purpose. That’s why he’s ruled by people. I just wonder if what rules men has the same opinion of us.”