Lime Creek (12 page)

There was so much snow, and ice under the snow, that finally breaking away from higher up on the roof from its own growing weight and beginning to slide, when it all collided with the ice and snow that was already built up on the metal hood one of the supports that was anchored against the outer wall buckled at last after all those years and the whole thing came crashing down, exploding like a booming reverberant thunderclap against the concrete footing where the outside door ran.

Lefty swung his head pulling the leadrope free and
with the open stall-door barring his way further into the barn he leapt at the partially open sliding-door, hitting its leading edge with his right shoulder and knocking it up and back as he disappeared into the night. As if being blocked from fleeing away from danger, the only other possibility was to go towards it and hopefully get past.

Luke flung the wheelbarrow aside and flew through the door shouting, Ho! Ho! The wind stung his face and blinded him with frozen snow as he tried to run into the fresh evenly spaced holes where the snow on the ground had just been kicked apart. He tried to shield his eyes with one hand but the blowing snow was so fierce that his gesture did him no good. He pitched forward face-first and hands out when his boot struck something hard and fixed under the surface and then rose back up with his hands on his thighs while he gulped in great drafts of air. He was already wet and cold as the wind buffeted off his shoulders and drove into his chest, and when he tried to run again impeded by the depth of the snow he effected a kind of uneven lunging stride with his arms sawing out to either side.

He was nearly down to the culvert and across the creek where Lefty could either turn toward Doris’s and Lime Creek Road which would put him in the public way going west toward the Bowmans’ or east toward
Lewiston which was a considerable distance, or he could turn the other way where the road ran parallel to the creek and along the fenceline of the lower hay meadow for miles until it eventually climbed above the ranch and through the gate that separated the private from the government lands. Or he could go directly across the road where another track wound its way back to the base of a steep cliff that rose up and eventually fell back to form another humpbacked ridge.

In geologic time Lime Creek may have been what yet remained of the great prehistoric river that carved the valley after the mountains had risen up and cooled and begun to draw the snow. Or even before that perhaps just another inconsequential underwater rift in the floor of the ocean that once covered all the land. He and Whitney couldn’t find a way to visualize that even when they studied the artist’s renderings in their schoolbooks. But then one day they found a tiny white paper-thin mollusc shell in the grass up from the bank when the creek was at its highest and loudest in the early summer from the mountains’ runoff that filled up all the creeks in all that country. And eventually running downhill they all joined to make a river that ran into other rivers that finally flowing together too cut through whole territories until it reached the ocean at last. That they had never seen.

Other rivers. And the sea. And the Sea of Elizabeth that Spencer had told them about when he used to watch her sometimes coming up from his chores and seeing her sitting on the front steps with the soft summer wind of evening just lifting her hair as she waited for him. And with that faraway look on her face he said, as if she were listening. Listening to that inland sea washing up and falling back and washing up again with the muffled tide-like stroke of her own intimate pulse. Lapping at the edge of the meadow and washing up against the lowest step below the porch like a phantom sea that only she could hear for it lived inside her. And now they had a sign to validate her vision, spiral-shaped and hollow and where a tiny marine creature once lived. And when the world was a much younger place too.

He stood in the narrow open space that was the road across from where the bed of the creek was buried but he couldn’t find any disturbance in the flat unbroken surface of the snow. He turned and tried to look behind him where he had come realizing even without being able to see into the wind that he must have missed where Lefty had turned off somewhere between the last cattleguard and the culvert. When he looked up he could just barely perceive that subtle alteration in the far darkness that had to be the light above the facing of the barn. Then he
turned again and walked several steps up the road but the snow there was also undisturbed. He returned to where he’d been standing across from the culvert and walked several steps in the opposite direction toward Doris’s but the ground-snow was still unremarkable.

Finally he tried to see toward the wall of the cliff across the road but the heavy shroud of falling and blowing snow hid everything. One momentary flaw made him almost hesitate but the wind came back in his eyes and he had to look down again. But he knew even before he looked up that the shadow or whatever it was stood where the timber backed up to the base of the cliff and so it would probably be when he could see more clearly just the nearest tree standing like a ghost in the darkness before being swallowed up once again.

He walked across the road with the wind swirling in his face. When he looked up he could see that same tree and then not see it. The snow underfoot was deep and unscarred and the wind raced across its surface. And then for a moment the wind fell and he could see. The tree moved. But he couldn’t be sure. Like an apparition detaching itself from the dark shapes behind it and then rejoining them.

He fixed his eyes there, taking close careful steps so he wouldn’t lose his balance and having to catch himself
lose sight of where the thing seemed to appear and then disappear. But he knew what it was. He knew when it first made him look again even though he couldn’t know then what he was seeing. Before seeing.

It was coming towards him. Very slowly it seemed although he couldn’t really gauge its pace, for the distance between them seemed as constant as if they were both fixed in a tableau that afforded neither of them depth nor dimension. Like the black dot that doesn’t seem to move on the horizon where the pinnacle of railway track disappears until the train suddenly crashes past you, shaking the earth and all at once eclipsing the whole blue enormity of the sky.

Lefty walked toward him taking a step and seeming to hesitate before taking another as if he couldn’t yet be sure of what the stationary form was that stood before him upright and solitary and clothed too in that same chaotic cloak of blowing snow that alternately obscured the horse’s vision and then finally let him see. He stepped tentatively almost recognizing it for what it was and then losing it again. But he already knew too, and before seeing too, even before it emerged once more like a lone unbending tree not tall and with both its arms against its sides.

And whatever the mechanism of the will that propels
the beast—the heart, the adrenals, the old wolf fear, the old grandfather whose slashing hooves were its last defense—his knees began to come high up his chest and high under his belly, dancing like the grandfather like the wolf whose rage to live would keep it alive. And still advancing so he almost bounces on his feet, he draws a bead on the figure that stands before him caked up and down with snow and beyond whom is release and that instinctive myth of flight and freedom that is born in all living things. Then his high prancing knees began to rock him up and back cantering slowly at first when he still questioned what obstacle stood in his path and then knowing, loping and then actually running toward it, the ancient blood fury reborn fearless in his heart and all his grandfathers leaping under his throat and filling his chest so he suddenly cried out like a proclamation like a warning and then charged, driving with all his force off his hind legs and with his forefeet hardly touching the ground.

Luke didn’t move. He watched the horse beginning to lope and then gallop toward him and then when the animal was close enough to see his face and his eyes he heard his voice shout something a sound before words as he threw his arms out to either side. As if he would be the barrier to stop the horse’s flight. As if his pitiful
hands could reach across the canyon or restrain the wind or catch the curling wave before it hurled him back against the earth. There was nothing else for him to do. The horse would either know him and the blood bond that joined them or sundered and still exultant in the ancient blood heir to and driven by then ride him down. The dull quick concussion no more than if the animal were to pass through the grasping but powerless branches of a tree and then out again, spirit brother to the wind.

Lefty shrieked again as he charged with his eyes wide and glaring and at the last moment before he would run over Luke he slid on his hind legs so that as he slowed and then planted himself he reared up with his front hooves flailing the air. And as Luke finally broke his stance, flinging himself to one side, the horse’s near foreleg came down over his shoulder. Before thinking Luke spun and springing up from the snow with that same ancient blood rage he drove his shoulder into the horse’s front so the greater beast screamed again, backing and lifting off its forelegs once more. But this time the lesser beast locked its arms around the horse’s neck so when Lefty began to rise, Luke’s weight made him alter his intention and he suddenly just stopped as if the old blood had all at once been shut off and sent back like the stuff
of unremembered dreams. And so he just stood there resting equably on all four legs.

Luke’s face was crushed against the animal’s shoulder so he could taste the salt and horse-reek in his mouth and feel the nicker in the horse’s neck without his actually hearing it. Then his arms released and he slumped down in the snow. The leadrope that was still attached to the halter had become wound over Lefty’s back but Luke didn’t reach to take it up. Nor did the animal step away. He just stood there with his face lifted while Luke sat in the snow with his shoulder leaning against the horse’s leg.

Without looking up the numb fingers of Luke’s hand closed around the warmer skin above the animal’s hoof. Lefty’s full name was Left Hand Man. He was named for the sacred marking that spread over his left hip, a man’s left handprint, the tips of the four fingers and the thumb. Lefty’s great-grandfather some five generations back was Old Painter, one of the breeding stallions of the Nez Perce. When a mare was pregnant, the medicineman would pray over a special paint he had mixed and then immersing his fingers he would place his thumb on the mare’s hip bone with his fingers spread. If the foal was born with the five finger-spots on its hip it would be given to the chief, who in his wisdom would know that that animal was indeed the chief’s chief.

Spencer had given him Lefty when both Luke and the horse were young, but almost from the first Luke had understood that if he could make himself worthy he belonged to the animal and not the other way around. He had traced Lefty’s lineage for a school project and then had kept reading about the Nez Perce and Chief Joseph and about the government policy that was intent on relocating the native peoples when their lands became desirable and then of course necessary.

The Nez Perce bred their horses for strength and stamina and for their temperament too. When the Whiteman came, they named that breed for the valley in the Northwest where those animals and those people lived. In peace. Until the Whiteman came. And then the Nez Perce had reason to give their animals a new name. Horse of the Iron Heart.

Fleeing from the government’s four-hundred-troop cavalry of “manifest destiny” across Idaho and down the Bitterroot and back up through central Montana toward the Canadian border and sanctuary, with less than forty miles to go after being pursued for nearly four months and more than seventeen hundred miles and starving and freezing in an early October blizzard, with nothing left to sustain them they nicked the artery that was close to the surface of the skin inside their horses’ ankles and
survived at the end on their animals’ blood until the tiny wounds closed over. And until their chief, Joseph, finally surrendered so that what was left of his people still might live.

Luke and Lefty stayed as they were for what seemed a long time with the wind still keening and the snow still building on Lefty’s back and on Luke’s shoulders and arms. When he finally rose up he had begun to shake all over, his whole skin it seemed quivering inside his heavy wet clothing. Lefty stood to let him mount and then walked back to the drifted road and over the crossing where the buried creek still ran. Luke held on to both sides of the horse’s neck while the blowing snow filled in the spaces between his fingers.

He didn’t know why he was crying but the shivering flesh of his chest down his arms and across his back was not simply from the cold but also from some depthless grief sourced not only in the confrontation they had just quit but somewhere else and in a different and lost time too. Unborn wings that never would fly. And yet he thought. Something. Some thing. But he didn’t know enough nor imagined he ever would to know what it could be. And all the while the wind still keened over the horse’s guileless face and keened over the crown of the man’s bowed head. And yet it said. And yet.

Something had turned in him that he could not have identified even if he had been conscious of it, some change or shift that he wasn’t even aware of, some unnamed alteration that turned something in his soul so he was never again to see with the same eyes nor feel with the same hands. A shift of such infinitesimal subtlety and yet of such absolute thoroughness that he would bear its cast for as long as he took in the light, for as long as he processed the cold.

He was still a boy, in a man’s body perhaps, but still a boy when he promised Mrs. Bowman to return in the storm. But that instant of rage and grief when he knelt and sprang forward instead of back—to somehow save himself by leaping at the thing that could destroy him rather than trying to avoid it—then he became no longer the boy who said he would return if the storm got too bad but instead something even previous to the boy, something grown from the boy both forward in vision and back. Not back to what is lost to time because nothing is ever lost, but back toward the source, back to the very wellspring where earth and breath divide, this the clay and the stone and this the breath and the blood and no wiseman to determine that one or the other is more or less. And all of it, broken and whole, unspeakable sorrow. All of it, sundered and joined, unspeakable joy.