Dead Folks

by Jon A. Jackson

  3

  Catch Your Death of Cold

  Sally McIntyre was bucking bales on the Garland Ranch, feeding cattle. It was a bitter cold day in Montana, but she was grinning into the stinging wind. It howled around the pickup, swirling snow and hurling chaff into her face. She wore a hood and liner made of some modern stuff that was very warm under her brown duck tin coat, with an oversized checked wool cap jammed on her head with the flaps down, but she could feel the brutality of the wind tearing at the edges, trying to strip away her protection. She was used to it. She didn't let it get to her.

  She jumped up onto the tailgate and hauled the heavy bales out, clipped the baler twine, and let them tumble to the frozen, shit-stained snow, there to fall apart for the cows that crowded about. She ducked back into the cab of the truck and drove another twenty feet to dump another bale or two, making a long trail of broken bales for the cattle to feed on. She was laughing about the spectacle of Mulheisen tumbling out of her bed, sprawling naked as she scrambled after her clothes.

  When she had broken the last bale she drove back to the gate, opened it, and drove through. She refastened the gate and climbed back into the blessed heat of the cab, out of the wind that threatened to flay her alive. Her face was nearly numb. She sat gratefully, drinking hot coffee from the steel vacuum bottle and munching a thick meat-loaf sandwich smeared with ketchup. She was still thinking about yesterday afternoon, the incredibly warm and delicious ecstasy of bedding a real man, a decent man, in the hothouse atmosphere of her little trailer house. After the brutality of her marriage she'd been to bed with a couple of men, including the Butte-Silver Bow sheriff's deputy, Jacky Lee, plus an amiable cowboy named Gary. They were both satisfying lovers, she had to concede (although they'd had the usual male tendency to try to control the action), but she'd never really supposed they were men she could live with. She hoped to hell that something would come of this, but she was realistic.

  Mulheisen was a city man. He lived in Detroit, nearly two thousand miles away. A rough woman, as she saw herself, with two young kids—how could she interest a man like that? He hadn't said anything about her hard hands, her blackened thumbnail where she'd smacked it with fencing pliers, her raw skin. When would she ever see him again? And how could anything really come of it? A single man his age—she figured he was about forty or so—and her with two kids; a poor woman with a high school education. She wasn't pretty, or at least she didn't think of herself that way, though she knew damn well that when she had a chance to show her body it was still sexy enough to interest a cowboy in the Tinstar Saloon. But she didn't have any nice clothes, nor anywhere to wear them, even if she found the time to go out. How could she hope to hold the attention of a man like Mulheisen? Especially if she heaved him out of bed at the moment of truth.

  She laughed, refusing to be depressed. She still had work to do. She drove back to the hay barn for another load. Later, having fed the last of the cattle, she paused on the access road above Grace Garland's ranch house. She hadn't seen Grace in a couple of days, although Grace's pickup truck was parked outside the white frame house, so she must be home. But now she noticed that the snow had drifted across the driveway and, in fact, had made a little bowl around the parked vehicle. Obviously, the truck hadn't moved recently. But there was a recently broken path, only partially drifted over, between the house and the barn and chicken coop, and smoke was streaming out of the chimney. Sally sat in her pickup, wondering if she should drive down to the house and see if Grace was doing all right. It would be a neighborly thing to do. It was coming on to Christmas and Grace was all alone.

  Grace was a widow in her sixties, very hardy (not to say tough as an old saddle) and certainly capable of taking care of herself. Her daughter Calla, a biologist over in Bozeman, would surely be coming to visit for Christmas. Sally knew Calla from school days. Calla was unmarried, as far as Sally knew. About the son, Cal Jr., Sally knew very little. He was at least five years older than the daughter. She'd heard he was an accountant in Seattle, also unmarried. The story was that he was gay, which had led to a falling out with his father.

  Sally decided not to go down. She'd have to get out of the warm pickup and open the gate. She was cold and tired and didn't feel like opening another gate. She was due to collect her wages at the end of the week. She'd see Grace then. Smoke was fairly whistling out of the chimney. Grace was surely all right. Sally decided to call her when she got home. She drove away.

  Grace watched her go, from the living room window, looking through the dusty white muslin curtains. She needed to wash these curtains, she thought. Since Cal had died she had neglected that sort of thing. She would do it after Christmas, after New Year's. She would take down all the curtains and wash them and then set up her old wooden curtain stretchers with their pin-lined frames in the dining room and the upstairs hallway. The house would look very bleak and naked for a day, a look that she had always hated as a child, the very image of January, but one that was inevitable after Christmas and New Year's, anyway, what with the tree and the other decorations coming down. Not that she had a tree or decorations this year. She just hadn't found time, and anyway, there were no kids here to enjoy them. She had already sent a present, a sweater, to Cal Jr. (a name she pronounced as a single word), and she expected Calla to come by for her present (a sweater) on Christmas Day.

  It was funny, she thought, how nothing ever worked out the way you thought it would. You figured you worked hard when you were young to kind of make things easier for when you were old, but it didn't seem to work out. When you were old your husband died—well, you had to expect that, more or less—and your kids moved away and one of them tells you in a single sentence on the long-distance line that he's gay and he's got AIDS. It was a stunning blow. The first statement would have been a blow all by itself. She was glad that Cal hadn't been alive to hear the second.

  You got old and found that you hadn't made things easier. Your daughter, a fine young woman, a professor at State, a research scientist, never got married and brought grandkids around. In fact, she hardly ever called. Once a month, if you were lucky. And if your old friends hadn't died, they moved away to Arizona. So despite all the hardship of early days, building up the ranch, you had to look back on them as the golden days. But you weren't even aware of it at the time, so you hadn't really enjoyed it the way you should have.

  But she wasn't bitter. You just never knew how things were going to turn out. In a good year with lots of rain you might get hit by wheat blight, or beef prices might drop out of sight. Then in a drought year, when you thought you were going to lose it all, beef prices would skyrocket and it would turn out that the XOX was the only outfit in the valley that had any cattle to sell. And here she was, thinking that she'd be alone for Christmas, and along comes a young woman in need.

  “Well, she's gone on,” Grace said to the woman tucked up on the couch. “I kinda thought she'd stop in, but she's got plenty to do, I expect.”

  “Who?” said the woman hoarsely, alarmed. “Who's out there?”

  “Just Sally, the ditch rider. She's feeding cattle for me, up on the butte meadow. Looked like she was thinking of stopping by, but she went on. Honey, how you doing? Did you drink that tea? Let me get you some more.”

  “No, no, I'm all right,” the woman said. “I think I'll sleep. I'm feeling a lot better, though.”

  “Well, you just go ahead and sleep, honey. It'll do you a world of good. After a while I'll look at that . . . “ Grace hesitated, unsure whether to call the woman's affliction a wound or a sore, or what. “That gash. Change the dressing. It looks clean, no infection, and seems to be healing. You lost aplenty of blood, though. Sure you don't want me to take you on into Butte, to the hospital? Them doctors ain't like to do you no better, but I expect them nurses could tell you whether it's all right or not.”

  “I'm fine, really,” the woman said. “You've been so kind. Anyway, I'm tough.” She forced a smile. She was a handsome woman (that was the right word, G
race thought) and obviously strong. She looked worlds better than when she'd come stumbling up to the back door, three days earlier. Fallen and hurt herself, gashed herself with a ski pole, cross-country skiing, she'd said. Grace didn't know a thing about skiing. An accident like that could happen, she thought. She supposed one could strap skis onto those winter boots. No skis, though. The gal had left them out in the snow, she'd said.

  “Well, you look so much better,” Grace said. “I'm surprised you didn't catch your death of cold.”

  The woman had come along about dark, the day after poor Mr. Humann's cabin had burned down. Grace was not ordinarily a garrulous woman, but now that her husband was gone, why she didn't often get to set and talk much, so she was happy the woman was up and alert, finally, her first day out of the downstairs bedroom, which had been Calla's room. Grace had been telling the woman about her neighbor's fire. It had been a lucky thing for Mr. Humann that he hadn't been to home, Grace had told her, otherwise he might've got burned up. She couldn't hardly think of nothing worse than a house fire in the middle of winter.

  And now that Grace thought about it, here was another of those things that just hadn't worked out. When she sold Mr. Humann the springs property, after Cal died, it had seemed like a good thing all around. Mr. Humann seemed like a darn nice feller, for a flatlander. He wanted his privacy, but she'd still be able to graze cattle up on his meadow and he'd deferred the water rights on Tin-star Creek, so it wasn't even as if she'd lost land or water. Humann was often gone for days, even weeks at a time, but he'd stop in, now and then, and Grace had begun to think that she'd acquired a genuine neighbor. But then Humann had come back with a girlfriend and that was just about the beginning of everything going wrong.

  Just this morning Grace had seen on the news that Mr. Humann's girlfriend had been arrested for something, but Grace couldn't make out what it was all about.

  “Not that I ever cared much for the woman,” Grace told her guest, “though I shouldn't tell stories on the poor thing.”

  The girlfriend, Helen (Grace hadn't even known her last name until she saw it on the news), was a little, dark woman. “At first I thought she might be Mr. Humann's sister, they looked so much alike,” Grace said, “both of them small and athletic, but I soon enough saw that Helen wasn't Mr. Humann's sister, not by a long shot. Not that they were married—I could see that. People don't seem to get married, these days. She wasn't friendly, like Mr. Humann, didn't seem interested in the country. She asked me once if I didn't get awful lonely, living by myself way out here. ‘Way out here?’ Why the country is filling up, mostly with Californicators. It's nothing to what it used to be. At night to look out on the valley you can see lights in just about any direction, and not too darn far off.”

  Grace said she couldn't see why a friendly feller like Joseph, or Joe, as he asked to be called, “would drag a cat like that out of the city and set her up in a cabin in the mountains. Anyone could see she wasn't cut out for this country, and now look what's happened. But it's none of my business. You can't hardly believe the stuff they put out on the TV these days. Now look at me! Here I am settin’ here a-talking and I was going to make tea. You just lie back and get your rest and I'll have it out here in a jiffy.”

  From the kitchen window Grace could see a thin plume of smoke still swirling from over the ridge, from what used to be Joseph Humann's cabin. She filled the blue enameled kettle and set it on the electric range to boil. What an awful thing to get burned out in the dead of winter, she thought. Used to be you'd ride over and offer a hand, but there'd been aplenty of fire engines and sheriffs up there, and of course Mr. Humann wasn't there, anyway. He was in the hospital. Shot by a hitchhiker.

  Mr. Humann was such a nice feller, Grace thought, but then there was all that shooting going on. The man was a shootin’ fool. When he was home he was shooting every day, sometimes for hours. An awful lot of ammo, and ammo wasn't cheap. But Mr. Humann had plenty of money, that's for sure. She reckoned losing his cabin wouldn't be as hard on him as it would be on most others, although it was always hard to lose your stuff—photographs and suchlike. Hard to have sympathy for the rich, though, even in moments of tragedy.

  Gun crazy, she thought. And then he gets shot in the head. Picked up a hitchhiker. It was too bad, but he was asking for it, she supposed. Used to be, out in this country you didn't dare not pick up a person out on the road, leastaways in the winter. But nowadays, the best thing to do was call the sheriff. Don't stop. And now this fire. Sometimes bad luck just came in bunches. The deputy, Jacky Lee, had stopped by to tell her all about it, the morning after the fire. Some burglars had broken into Mr. Humann's cabin and set it on fire. What next? The country was getting like L.A. Well, you live long enough you see ever’ darn thing, she thought. She'd lived long enough, that was sure. She'd seen blizzards that went on for weeks with temperatures of forty below at night and never got over twenty below in the day; she'd seen cattle struck by lightning; earthquakes that dammed up the Madison River and flooded hundreds of people out; wind bursts that knocked down forty acres of trees in a second; whole summers of forest fires filling the valley with smoke so thick you couldn't see the mountains . . . why a burnt-out cabin or a handful of shootings wasn't nothing, come to look at it.

  Humann's house, or what was left of it—ashes, Grace reckoned—lay only a mile or so away, over the ridge. The night of the fire she had not heard a thing, not even the boom when the propane tank blew up. They'd had fire engines up there, cops, even helicopters, people coming and going all night, and she hadn't heard a darn thing. Well, she'd always slept sound. She worked hard was why. A body works hard, a body sleeps hard. If that Indin deputy, Jacky Lee, hadn't come by when he saw her out in the barnyard, she'd have had no idea about it. It hadn't made much sense to her. The burglars had started a fire that had blown up the darn propane tank, killing all but one of them. Well, it was too bad about Mr. Humann's house, but at least he wasn't caught in it. It was just too darn much for Grace to figure out: who could keep track of these new people, the way they lived?

  Then when everything had pretty much quietened down, the next day along about dusk the woman had appeared, though it wasn't clear exactly where she did come from, but she was on the back porch, knocking real slow but hard, and she was in awful shape, bleeding stopped but it'd been considerable, and near froze to death.

  Grace poured the boiling water into the teapot, onto a spoonful of Darjeeling. Calla had given her this tea. It was real English tea, from Jackson's of Piccadilly. She didn't ordinarily drink tea. She was a coffee drinker. But when you were sick tea was the thing. And soup. She had made a very earthy chicken soup that she'd fed to the young woman: a whole hen (one of the old nonlayers) in the big stockpot, along with root vegetables—a whole onion, an entire head of garlic, a couple of carrots, a small turnip, a parsnip, a couple stalks of celery with the leaves on, a potato. And when it had cooked enough she strained it and set the broth out in the snow until the fat set up. She skimmed most of the fat and reheated the broth and practically funneled it down the woman's throat. It would have made a dead man grin. And there was no doubt about it, the woman was better.

  She sat up when Grace brought her more soup and tea, this time with a little toast. The woman was looking worlds better, much more alert. She asked about the ditch rider again and Grace told her. Then she asked if anybody had been about, asking about her, but nobody had.

  “Who's your folks, dear?” Grace asked. This was the first chance they'd really had to talk.

  “No folks,” the woman said. She drank more soup and lay back on the couch. “I'm just an orphan, I guess.”

  “Well, even a orphan's got a name, I expect,” Grace said. She sat in the rocker a few feet away, next to the big black iron wood-stove that pumped out mind-swamping heat. In the house Grace wore long underwear under gray sweatpants and a gray sweatshirt that had “Montana State University Bobcats” printed on it, a gift from Calla, who was on the faculty there, although she s
pent most of her time in Yellowstone Park. On her feet were thick wool socks pulled up over the legs of the sweatpants so she could easily slip them into the shit-encrusted Sorel boots that sat by the kitchen door when she went out to do chores or fetch in more firewood. In the house she either went in stocking feet or sometimes, when she remembered, she would wear sheepskin-lined moccasins. She was not a big woman, but very angular, a square-built woman. She gave the impression of a cow, without looking in any specific way like a cow. She did have a long face, but her eyes weren't big and brown like a cow's, nor was she bosomy, but she had that angularity of the hips, a kind of awkward, bandy-legged hitch to her walk. She had stiff gray hair that still had a hint of its original red color, cut rather short.

  “Heather,” the convalescent woman said. “Heather Bloom.”

  “Why, what a lovely name, Heather. Now, must be someone bound to be worried about you. No one? Oh, that's too bad,” Grace said. And she introduced herself, stepping across to shake hands. “You wouldn't know it,” she said with a laugh, touching her gray hair, “but most ever'body calls me Red. But I prefer Grace.”

  To Heather's question in turn Grace replied that Yes, she was alone, pretty much, though she expected her daughter, Calla, to come by any day now. “But where'd you leave your car? Out on the highway?”

  Heather said no, she'd left it in town, in Tinstar, which was just a few miles down the highway, and she'd set off to do a little cross-country skiing, but she'd run into trouble, which she had already explained. She wasn't expected anywhere, there wasn't anybody fretting about her. She'd worked for a while in Butte, but she was just setting out to go south, look for work down in Arizona, maybe. She was a kind of troubleshooter, she said, for computer systems. She never had any trouble finding jobs. She'd work for a while somewhere, then move on. It was good work, she liked it. She liked moving around. She was sorry to be so much bother. She'd be out of here just as soon as she could. She had money, she could pay for her keep.