Lime Creek (6 page)

And Elizabeth says, Not today boys. You mind that barn, Lonny, and be back before it’s dark. And Lonny says, Yes’m. And then we’re bumping and shoving each other along the frozen road that’s become the bottom of a topless tunnel between story-high snowbanks, eventually crossing both snowed-over cattleguards and then the culvert where the buried creek runs along that side of the ranch.

And then it would be dark and we’d finally leave the house to go down to the barn, and the sky behind the high country would just barely yet hold the very last of the light so that if you didn’t think to watch for it you’d miss it, the day’s end. There’d be four or five pickup trucks parked below the barn, and my remembrance is always of a crystal-clear moonless night with the temperature already below zero and the snow crunching so loud under our boots that you could even hear the steps of the other people and their kids walking up from where they’d left their vehicles.

And the stars by then, the stars seemed so big in the sky that you’d think you could almost hear them too like the burning of distant torches if you were to stop and really listen. There was this one huge one in the east in
the winter that shone with different colors, and it stayed there all through the cold. Whitney and I assumed it to be the same star that all the stories talked about, but Lonny told us sometime later that it was in the constellation of the Dog. And we liked knowing that because our lives down here on the ground were so intertwined with animals that it only seemed natural for the stars to have a similar frame of reference too.

You could hear Toebowman’s guitar from inside the barn when you were still a little ways off, Bradley Bowman’s uncle Tobin who everyone called Toebowman as if his two names first and last were really one name put together. The sound of the guitar in the delicate clarity of the newborn night made everybody quiet as we approached, the loveliness of it so achingly simple and pure from out of the whelming darkness like an earth-bred accompaniment to a universe cut from glass. With the crunching snow and that simple human refrain on this side of the cold, and the stars so familiar and yet so distant on the other side.

Whitney and I and Lonny would all have fallen into that hush as we walked, and Elizabeth would squeeze my hand in my mitten without saying anything. And I could see her face in my mind without having to look up at her. We’d all be still as we entered the barn as if it were really
a church of some kind, and as I remember how it always made me feel I really can’t imagine any difference.

In the far corner where the wall met the first stall was where Spencer would have set up the tree that late the day before he had cut and drug down from somewhere off the high ridge that looks over the lower part of the ranch. Lonny went with him on horseback, and watching from the parlor window we saw them walking their horses out of the growing dark with Lonny’s horse first and Spencer’s a step or two behind with the tree tied off at his saddlehorn and dragging over the surface of the snow.

And I remember the candles. The whole tree seemed full of lit candles. So many of them that their light seemed to push back the darkness when we’d come into the barn from out of the hard cold black night. And the shocking pristine vision of that candlelight would be like a miracle to me when I’d first see it. And then I’d see that all amongst the candles were hung apples and carrots and other fruits and vegetables wherever the broad boughs of the tree would support them.

Haybales would be positioned on the earthen floor for places to sit in front of the tree and also to separate the two or three horses, all groomed and with a tiny red or green knot of ribbon tied in their forelocks, who were
free to walk about on the other side where Spencer had placed hay and grain for them to eat. Several yearling calves would be settled in two of the stalls and a number of weanling lambs that Spencer had trucked over from Ollie Wheeler’s early that morning in two others.

Toebowman would be sitting on one of the bales and playing and humming along as he picked at the strings of his instrument with those gloves that leave the fingertips exposed. We thought he’d cut off the ends of his gloves so he’d be able to play his guitar in the cold, and I remember thinking about cutting the ends of my mittens too but seemed to forget before actually getting it done. There’d be platters of cookies and pitchers of juice for the kids and eggnog for the folks and glasses arranged on trays that were set on top of three bales that were piled one on the other against the near wall.

The kids’d break away from the folks and the folks’d cluster on either side of Toebowman with handshakes all around and all the good wishes spoken back and forth from out of that shared existence of people living close enough to the earth to be kin to the various other families of beings who lived there also in that harsh and generally unforgiving environment that made us all—the Bowmans the next ranch over and nearly four miles away, and Ollie Wheeler and his family and hands and
their families nearly fifteen miles off to the south—all neighbors. Folks who worked much longer hours than their work-animals, from dark to dark and most always beyond, day after day without heed of arbitrary divisions of time into weeks or months, and so telling the passage of it by the building and diminishing of the light and the waxing and waning of the moon and perhaps too by the awesome concentric circles of the fiery and yearning stars.

And closer to the heart, by the births and deaths of all the creatures given and taken from life around and about our high clear place on the earth that was rimmed by the near hills on one side and the far mountains on the other. Winged and two- and four-legged and silver swimmers and arrowlike flyers and runners horned and not with cloven feet and some with ten toes. The peach-fuzz turning to whiskers on the sons of man and coming up from the barn some warm Saturday evening seeing the gangly little girl you’d known right from seed suddenly appearing on the porch like her own lovely ghost waiting and then hugging you around your neck that had to still smell of the horse you’d been shoeing and saying, Your supper’ll be cold Daddy. And kissing her cheek, a woman, with her mother in her eyes and her own daughter there too if you were wise enough to see that far. And
time turning grey in your beard and your hands like limp old claws turned hard with callus and age and your fingers cracking in the deathlike cold and healing with the earth under the healed places and cracking open again like fissures in the frozen ground waiting for the renewal of spring to restore what is held in abeyance back to the tender and fecund flesh, another winter. For time here wasn’t generally referred to in years but rather in the winters we have lived through. The sun is low and the warmth is brief and the light lives on between the dark and the dark.

Toebowman would be singing softly at first so that we hadn’t really been paying that much attention until one by one the grownups would join in as their kids seemed to gravitate back up against them with their young wild voices catching a word here and there and making up others as their folks sang along. And one or two of the ranchers droning with one fixed tone that probably sounded to them as if they were warbling away with everyone else. A joining of voices in that delicate light that somehow seemed to generate a warmth, a suspiration of living breath and a real warmth that was undeniable. As if each of the creatures that lay or stood or sat in that drafty close place made enough of a contribution to the engendered atmosphere to actually produce a
living heat from out of the barren cold that pressed against the outside walls.

Then Spencer would take out his spectacles and set them low on his nose and sit in front of the tree so that its light fell onto the children’s book that he held with both hands and always read from about the Baby and the animals, and how the animals were all given human speech on this one night. And as I listened I remembered that I planned to get up later so I could get dressed and get my boots on and come back down to the barn to hear what each of the horses and dogs and cats and the cattle and sheep would sound like when they spoke actual words. Wondering what they would say to each other, but especially what they would say to me when I spoke to them. And Whitney looks at me from the corner of his eye so I know he’s thinking the same thing.

But we wake up much later than we should have, and Whitney’s already dressing himself as I rush to catch up to him. And he whispers fiercely, Pa said they do it at midnight. And as I’m trying to get my flannel nightshirt tucked into my jeans I say, Maybe they’re still doing it because it’s still dark outside. And then we bump and shush each other down the stairs as we hold on to the railing.

The cold freezes the inside of my nose, it’s so cold, and I breathe into the collar of my jacket. The stars are like little white holes all across the black sky and Sirius, all aglimmer with red and blue and white light too, hangs just above the roof of the barn as we slide the door open just enough to squeeze through and then close it behind us. But we’re too late. Lemon comes up to me in the dark and noses into my fingers but he doesn’t say anything even when I rub his head against my chest and say, Hi Lemon. Hi Lemon. And I know how his mouth smiles when I scratch his ears but he still doesn’t speak. At least not with words anyway.

I turn the light on in the tackroom and leave the door open so the light spreads out across the dark runway. And then I hear Whitney over by Blue’s stall, standing on a haybale and speaking softly to him with Blue’s head lifted and his legs folded under him and his gentle eyes blinking against our intrusion. Hi Blue, Whitney says. Hi Blue. And I climb up behind him and watch the horse’s face as he continues to blink into wakefulness with his lovely pale eyelashes.

We can hear other animals in their stalls restive in the darkness and groaning with sleep, and one of them drinking while another one whinnies softly as if to itself, instantly reminding me then in memory as well as now
how I’ve loved the voice of horses for my entire life. It’s too late, I whisper to Whitney shaking my head. We got here too late. And Whitney whispers back, I know but next year we have to remember. And I whisper back at him, Yes we have to remember. Next year.

Toebowman always plays
Silent Night
last, maybe three or four times in a row, and everybody knows the words and sings it with him. And the seeming perfection of those simple sounds, with all the people huddled together warm out of the vast cold and safe somehow out of the vast dark, makes me feel as if the beauty that I didn’t then know the word for was nearly too big to hold all at once. And so for a moment I have to stop singing so I can swallow two or three times before I can make the song begin again.

I’m leaning against Elizabeth’s legs as she sets against Spencer sitting on a couple of haybales with Whitney leaning against his legs and against me, and Lonny on Spencer’s other side with Spencer’s arm around him and his other hand resting on Whitney’s shoulder, and Elizabeth’s arm around Spencer’s back and her other hand resting over my chest. And by the time we come to the Sleep-in-heavenly-peace line, her hand lifts off me and rises up and then settles back so that I can see her face again in my mind and even know the
water in her eyes slipping over her cheeks like quicksilver in the candlelight without having to turn and look up at her. And her hand goes off me again and then comes back, and I don’t have to look at it either because I know how it looks in my mind too just as I know her face.

And besides I can’t take my eyes off the candles, how wondrous a vision they are to me with their fragile light that for some reason makes me think of how aspen leaves tremble when the wind blows into them. And so perhaps if those leaves were to magically be transformed into something else, they’d become candlelight too because aspen leaves and candlelight both seem to tremble and quiver in just exactly the same way.

Sleep I think for all the massed days and clicking years of my tiny flickering life. Sleep I think of Spencer whose soul parties with the antelope smelling of sage and horselather and covered by the insubstantial globe of a great tumbleweed. Sleep I think of Elizabeth who glides over the sea with her long yellow hair trailing above the dim dark monument of the endless turning tide. Sleep I think of Lonny who bears his gentleness like a food to be offered to anyone who approaches him hungry for it or not.

And sleep I think to myself for all of us for all of
us beating fiercely against the wind or lying placidly beneath its cool touch with broken hands and wondrous wings and blinded eyes that see even beyond seeing the same wordless dream built of the same heartcrushing sorrow and the same unspeakable loveliness all at the same time how beautiful and sad it is all at the same time.

And sleep i think for all of us sleep i think at last

oh sleep in heavenly peace

sleep

We’d been feeding the cattle off horse-drawn sleds, which is how it’d always been done in our country, Luke says. Big wooden platforms on runners with a two-by-four frame front and back to pile the haybales against, and each sled pulled by one of our two teams of Belgian drafthorses. Massive two-thousand-pound animals with thick winter coats and huge shaggy feet and a manner as gentle as their bodies were strong.